Listening notes

My first piano lesson is at somebody’s house. There are frangipani on the bush outside and one in the teacher’s hair, this is a crotchet, this is a quaver, here is middle C. Dad picks me up after an hour and the whole world is different. I go home and look anew at the scores on the bookshelf, pages of inanimate ink, but I swear, out of the corner of my eye, I see the notes move.

Mum loves Elvis Costello and David Bowie. Dad loves Ella Fitzgerald and Otis Redding. Mum loves k.d. lang. Dad loves Glen Campbell. Mum loves Revolver. Dad loves Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They both love Mahler. For my first concert, we go to hear Symphony No. 5. When the orchestra tunes, a second world behind the world is revealed.

I lie on the floor with my earphones in listening to A Night at the Opera. It’s the first album I have liked of my own accord, not because my parents listen to it. The music is weird, the electric guitars both zoomy and clunky, the lyrics oddball, and the voice – I learn the concept of camp before I learn the word, early proof of what lies beyond language. 

I listen to John Mayer singing Free Fallin’, I don’t know I’ll be embarrassed by this one day, I’m fourteen years old, I’m sad for no real reason, I still think that’s beautiful. I wanna write her name in the sky, he sings, and I’ve never heard a feeling truer, I trace the name of a boy I know in tiny pencil letters behind my bedroom door, where the wall meets the carpet.

In high school we study the Western musical canon. What does a piece of music sound like, what does that tell us about when it was written? Everything sounds better in the wooden music room with its circle of desks. Beyond the filmy windows the world goes on: sparrows, backpacks, maths homework. Our teacher plays Monteverdi through the speakers and we listen with our whole bodies. This act is practice for many other things.

Max is obsessed with Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city so Mum lets him play it in the car. We still have a car that plays CDs, not Bluetooth, so it loops over and over, an ouroboros of be back, fifteen minutes turning into Lord God, I come to you a sinner. Max’s favourite song this week is “Poetic Justice”; in the chorus Kendrick raps if I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room would you trust it? so quickly, with the emphasis on such unexpected syllables, that all the traffic slows around us.

From across the choir he sings to me, private even though we’re in public. Mendelssohn, we are doing a poor job of it, but in the parts where the sopranos aren’t singing, I close my eyes and listen for one voice. After the rehearsal he materialises at my side, eyes shy anemones, we go out into the stillness, linger under streetlights in our raincoats, rubato, rubato. He has two pianos in his bedroom, plays me something on the grand. I don’t recognise the music. In my mind many things have happened between us already; we don’t touch, but we will.

We’re at a funeral, somebody we didn’t know properly; when she listens eyes closed to the Alleluia, her eyebrows are raised like two commas, shape for the sentence of her face. I look at her and think I’ve never seen anybody’s face properly before. Afterwards, she drives me home and plays a late Beethoven sonata on my parents’ piano, theme and variations. I’m lying on the carpet, she’s above me like an angel, the ceiling above us is fifty years old, the sky is much older. One of the variations involves octave leaps. She plays the octaves so quietly the piano seems to be articulating some feeling I didn’t think anybody else had.

I start a singing degree, learn a frothy Italian aria by a composer lost to history, it’s good vocal training says my teacher, it trains the release of the breath in one even stream – but down the hall I hear a soprano rehearsing an aria so plangent I can’t bear not to be singing it, as if singing were possessing, as if all possession were not just a myth.

Listening to him cry in the shower, who kissed my eyelids and danced for me and always carried the heavier bag of groceries, I discover how short my tether. I put on my headphones and lie on the floor: every song in the world is written for heartbreak.

Someone in the flat upstairs practises the piano at 4pm each day. They make of the hour a drama, hammer and tongs, downstairs I listen as they fail, can they hear me down here too, in the kitchen, making a cake that doesn’t rise? To be witnessed failing is a small bravery, but the first day they manage the passage with all the runs, I’m also listening. I picture the pianist tall and furrow-browed, but outside the window one morning it emerges he’s only a schoolboy in an ill-fitting blazer, cheeks red with the cold.

At Lyall Bay the waves frill in even white lines; I am trying to live as evenly as the waves, headphones on while I walk the coast, planes lifting off overhead. At the end of the song, after everything, Sufjan wants to know are you writing from the heart? The wind blows fine white spray off the backs of the waves, the tide is coming in. I watch the waves until I think I am a wave too.

We sing in the chapel for a famed conductor of spirituals, hearts in our ears, I think perhaps I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as the conductor closing his eyes for the Amen, unless perhaps it is the tenor soloist offering his high note like a sail, tiniest smile, a note pure as salt, self-evident.

Texas is greener than expected, the heat lifts a perfume off the garden, walk before 9am or don’t walk at all. The streets are so wide. Men roll vowels so long they double. I comb the back streets with headphones on, every old thing turned cinema: the grass growing to King Princess, the sprinklers happening to Brahms.

We eat a bowlful of cherries on the roof of his building, the sun is still out, we have been singing Wham!, mouths full of words, it’s almost Christmas, it’s stupid as love. While we sing I know entire that we are last Christmas, not this, have I ever really heard this song before? but on the roof he lies back in my arms and I am the whole tuning orchestra.

In the middle of the summer all music becomes unbearable. I am lonely, so lonely, without it. I am lucky, so lucky, tell myself I will make use of this one day, listen to electronica, think of him, listen to silence, think of him, wish I could take off my skin.

I walk to town, go very slowly. I listen to Marlon Williams singing there’s nothing sweeter than you when you’re blind, singing high up above you, looking down with my bird’s eye, loving you, and I remember how it feels. Take off my coat, here’s the day on my shoulders.

At the rave my friends sip their drinks in sync, we’re surrounded by people wearing sunglasses in the dark, the music is too loud, it can be felt in every limb, animal, mineral, my friends are dancing together, they are dancing the microwave, they are dancing the deep sea diver, they are dancing the bread kneader, the supermarket shopper, the lawnmower. They are dancing the inflatable-waving-tube-man-seen-outside-car-dealerships, limbs of spaghetti, laughing with mouths open, now I know I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.

I lie in the middle of the park at the end of the street, the still point of the turning world, Spiegel im Spiegel. The piano measures time, the violin wonders, the light swivels over the field, the bell tolling change for autumn. I am not in love with anybody, it is a great lightness. I listen to music for itself.