Lying Down or Standing Up for Music: Hearing and Listening in Vernon Lee’s Music and its Lovers

Abstract

My childhood experience of learning musical instruments was characterized by severity. Formal, impersonal teachers and a limited repertoire were the norm in 1970s and ’80s music teaching, based, as it was, on passing the Associated Board exams. Frivolity was not encouraged, for I was meant to be producing what was then (and is now, to an extent) called ‘serious’ music.

            ‘Seriousness’ began with the body. When playing the piano one was told to sit upright, to be attentive to the music and to hold oneself throughout a performance with a posture that paid a certain homage. The standard manuals for learning the piano in those days, Dame Fanny Waterman and Marian Harewood’s three-volume series Piano Lessons, gave posture a moral imperative. An illustration at the beginning of the first book showed three different pianists. The first was hunched and looking at his fingers on the keyboard. ‘This is a bad pupil’, said a caption. The second sat erect. ‘This is a good pupil’, said another. The third, however, was said to be a ‘great pianist’. With an outwardly curved back and dramatically-held fingers as if submitting to but also commanding the music like a magician, this pianist was at one with his art. This practical but moral necessity was also applied to my other instruments, including the violin and the bassoon. Granted it is hard to hunch with the latter, but the bassoon’s almost comically prodigious appearance, which suggests far more than it ever seems to give, always had to be transcended through the seriousness with which one related to and clutched the instrument.