Penguins don't play piano

8/8/2019 Penguins don't play piano

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Penguins don't play piano

by Thomas Thurman

TEPHEN hated piano. After

four months of practice at

school, his playing was

stilted, his timing was

erratic, and he still suffered

from that beginner's habit of

occasionally pausing to scan

the keyboard, hunting for the

keys and then stabbing at

them with his finger. He felt

awkward, out of his element.

In his room, alone, without telling anyone, hiseffortless stories came naturally; piano, which

was very public, came nothing like as easily. But

his mother wanted her son to learn piano so,

that was that.

It all reminded Stephen of the penguins he had

seen at Whipsnade elegant in the water,waddling along on the land. The connection had,

indeed, been suggested to him months before in

the autumn, when he had first begun to study

piano; his enthusiasm, even then, had been

lacking, but compared to now it seemed

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abundant. The piano teacher, Mr Sibbes, a

middleaged man with a soft air of hopelessness

about him, had begun with a lesson on the basic

theory of music. Unlike others in his year, who

had at least learned the recorder in primary

school, Stephen was a complete beginner.

Can you tell me, said Mr Sibbes, as he began to

play a classical piece that Stephen had never

heard before, whether this is in four

four orthree-four time?

Fourfour, said Stephen. It surprised him that

they should spend so long on what seemed a

simple point, when all the rest was so difficult.

Time signatures in music were little different to

metre in poetry, after all.

Very good, said Mr Sibbes. This is the start of a

symphony written by Mozart... he was only about

your age at the time. This is his third. He smiled

wanly. How many symphonies have you

written?, and then looked down at his fingers,

and sighed. How many symphonies have Iwritten?

And after they'd studied the basic scale, there

was practise work to take home and play through

simple stuff, but it introduced the idea of

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chords. Specifically, Stephen had to learn by next

week to play the chord of C major on request. So,

that evening, back at home, Stephen sat in a

draught at the piano and practised.

I've already mentioned Stephen's approach to

finding piano keys. He could find C by looking for

the cluster of black keys beside it, and once there

it was no great matter to count two and four, and

spread his fingers to make the chord. With hisfingers thus splayed he pressed tentatively, and

when rewarded with a chord which sounded

about right he pressed repeatedly, harder and

more firmly. As he looked down at his fingers, a

smile crossed his face his hand had become a

penguin's three-toed foot. Penguins don't play

piano!, he grinned. Penguins don't have to...deal with piano lessons. Penguins don't have to

deal with bloody school at all. His face suddenly

screwed up in frustration; he made two penguin

feet and stomped them angrily about the

keyboard.

Stephen still resented the switch between hisfriendly primary and the large, impersonal

secondary school. The sex ed videos they had seen

at primary school had implied a link between

leaving for secondary school and becoming an

adult: it was an initiation, or a rite of passage.

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None of the initiation rituals Stephen had ever

read about kept on the ordeal for these two years;

he suspected that the ritual was far gone in the

past, and perhaps had been so momentary that

he had not even noticed it. Maybe, instead, this

was the other side: this was what it was like to be

an adult, and he had simply better get used to it.

Stephen had long ago decided that if this turned

out to be so, he was determined to resent puberty

in general just as much as his hated secondaryschool.

The lessons continued. They were no less dull

than ordinary schoolwork, and Stephen was no

less bored, but at least it was a change you

could tell yourself, however unconvincingly, that

tedium of another flavour was not tedium at all.Stephen's piano technique improved, although he

was not aware of it: he would have been surprised

to have discovered how quickly he was mastering

the basics. The piano teacher continued to stare

at the keyboard with despondent eyes, as if filled

with some private and lasting nightmare. One

evening, though, towards the end of the autumnterm, Stephen looked up at the completion of an

exercise since no comment was forthcoming. Mr

Sibbes was asleep.

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It was a cold December afternoon outside, and an

electric fire supplemented the school's ancient

heating system at the cost of making the room's

atmosphere heavy. Evidently Mr Sibbes had been

feeling as tired, or as bored, as Stephen; he,

however, aided by the stuffiness and warmth, had

given in.

Stephen paused to consider his options. Perhaps

he should just leave quietly and go to ground inthe library or should he wake the teacher, and

how? In the end, he began to play through the

previous week's exercise, a piece called Surprise

Symphony. It began softly, without any great

technical difficulty, like a lullaby. After this came

a sudden booming chord, made with both hands:

Stephen, whose method of reading music was asinexpert as that of his playing, had committed the

chord to memory. He carefully organised his

fingers into the (as he still considered it) almost

magic pattern that would produce the chord of C

major, and slammed them down on the keys.

Mr Sibbes, whose head had nodded onto his chest, jumped back into an ordinary sitting position.

"Very good, Stephen," he said, as though nothing

had happened. "Please make sure you have the

Fr Elise fluent by next time we meet. See you

then." And Stephen sighed, collected his books

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and bag, and walked out of the little rehearsal

room back towards his locker. Nobody would be in

the main hall at this hour, he knew, so he

attempted to save two and a half minutes by

taking his usual shortcut across the stage. As he

set foot outside the wings, the audience burst into

applause.

Stephen looked around quickly, eyes wide at the

hundreds of eyes on him, and after a moment's

consideration made a stiff bow too stiff: it made

him look down at himself and discover that hewas dressed in tight and starchy evening dress.

Black trousers with a shiny stripe down either

side, black jacket, black bow-tie and frilly white

shirt. Like a penguin! and suddenly he laughed.

The audience, however, made a small murmuring

sound to show how patiently they were waiting to

see him play. On the far side of the stage, Stephencould see his trademark white baby grand, the

one he played in all his concerts; he set out

towards the piano through the first falling flakes

of snow.

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The piano was much further away than he had

thought. By the time he reached it, he was

wading through snowdrifts almost up to his

elbows; often, he was tempted to lie down and

make snow angels, but (conscious of the

audience's eyes upon him) he tried to temper his

joy at the snow as he believed adults must all do.

As he climbed the last few feet up to the piano, he

thought for a second that the piano had melted

away, or vanished as in a dream, but it was onlyburied in the snow. He put out a flipper and

cleared away a thin layer of snow from the

keyboard.

Then he struck a note, the first note, a C; he felt,

rather than heard, the satisfaction rolling back in

echo from the audience. Indeed, the snow wasnow falling too thickly to see anyone or anything

clearly but himself and the piano. Gradually, as

the note died away, he realised that he would

need his feet to play the chords; he clambered up

a drift that had blown up against the piano's side,

and stepped down, tentatively, onto the chord of C

major.

His other foot sought around for somewhere to

stand, for the next chord, prompting the further

realisation that the white keys were now

invisible: all he could see were the black notes in

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the snow, like some weird road marking. And

roads, Stephen reasoned, are made to dance on:

walking or dancing is not about thinking hard

and getting it right eventually, but just about

getting it near enough, soon enough, that you

don't fall over. And the more you walk, and the

more you dance, the more you learn how to. It's

not about precision, it's about dancing. Now that

the universe could not possibly see him through

the snow, Stephen began to dance on thekeyboard, playing a tune of his own invention,

never stopping though his breath came short and

the snow stung his eyes. He was playing for the

joy of playing, or dancing for the joy of dancing.

When a penguin plays piano, it's hard to tell

which.

When Stephen woke up, aching and tired, he was

lying face down on the floor in an empty rehearsal

room in an empty school empty of pupils, not of

staff. He had a good hour or so while the doors

would still be unlocked. Before he left, he fetched

the compasses out of the geometry set in his bag

and carved the shallow prints of a penguin's feetamongst all the other marks and initials on the

side of the piano; then he set out home to explain

to his mother why he wanted to drop piano

lessons.

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Penguins don't play piano