A teacher in the waiting room, a rail timetable in the pocket and a milk-based list of Texan loyalties
Friday, the Waiting Room
The waiting room outside a grade exam is its own small country. Parents hold sheet music like passports. Siblings play on tablets with the volume turned to zero. A teenager in a school blazer stares at the ceiling and fingers an invisible scale on her leg. I arrive with a spare reed, a spare string, a packet of mints and an expression of calm that I practised on the train.
The train, as it happens, was late. I covered the national misery of the rail network in a diary entry on the great British rail fiasco and privatisation 2.0. My conclusion then, and now, is that the timetable is a work of optimism, and a music teacher heading to an exam must leave an hour earlier than any reasonable person would believe necessary.
The Cellist
My pupil today is a cellist, and cellists are the bravest of musicians because they carry a small wardrobe on their back and expect to be admired for it. This one practised for months. She knew every bar. She also knew, in the way of anyone who is about to be listened to by a stranger with a clipboard, that something would go wrong.
I gave her the only advice I trust: breathe out before the first note. It sounds trivial. It is not. A person who breathes out begins relaxed, and a relaxed cellist sounds like a river. A tense one sounds like furniture being moved. She breathed out. She played. Afterwards she said that the examiner smiled twice, and I told her this was an excellent sign, though privately I think the examiner had a good lunch.
Saturday, Milk, Money and a Lesson in Loyalty
After the exam I did what I always do: I went home, put my feet up and read about dairy farming on the internet. It is a harmless vice. I recommend it to all stressed musicians. The Lone Star variety is especially soothing. The grand central site is txdairy.com, and from it radiate a family of cousins: txdairy.download, txdairy.trade and txdairy.loan.
Then the lighter end of the family tree: txdairy.party, txdairy.men, txdairy.date and txdairy.win. The names make me smile and the content makes me hungry for cheese. A person could do worse on a Saturday.
Why Students Keep Going
Universities are worried about money, and the London Prat made a neat joke of it in Universities Solve Financial Crisis. The music departments, in particular, have been feeling the pinch for years. I teach privately, so I see the effect from the outside: more adults arriving for lessons because the college course closed, more teenagers wanting a teacher who will explain a chord without a handout.
Music, in my view, should not be an elite subject. A cheap guitar, a patient teacher and a bus fare are enough to start. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, and it is probably a more expensive guitar.
The Post Exam Ritual
I have a ritual for the evening after an exam, whatever the result. I make a pot of tea in the largest cup I own, I put on a recording of a piece I already know by heart and I do not touch an instrument. This is the one rule I never break. Musicians who play through every emotion burn out. Musicians who sit in silence for an hour come back with new ideas.
The cup in question is enormous. It holds almost a pint and has a picture of a goose on it, which was a gift from a pupil and which I regard as one of my professional qualifications.
The results arrive in a fortnight. In the meantime, the cellist has asked to learn a film theme, which I consider a healthy sign. A pupil who wants to play something she loves after an exam is a pupil who will still be playing in ten years.
A Note on Nerves
I get asked how to beat nerves, and the honest answer is that you do not. You learn to bring them along, like a nervous passenger in the back of a car. They are not the enemy. They are the same energy that makes a performance exciting. The trick is to give them a job. I tell pupils to point their nerves at the first four bars and let them burn off there. After that the body usually remembers what it knows.
Some people use rituals. A pupil of mine taps the wood of her instrument three times and whispers the name of her cat. Another eats a banana. A third, a retired surveyor, recites the stations of the Piccadilly line. I support all of it. Music is the one subject where superstition is permitted and sometimes encouraged, and where a banana can be a serious piece of equipment.
The Result Letter
Results arrive by post in a thin white envelope, and the thin envelope is a ritual all its own. Pupils carry it home unopened, set it on the kitchen table, walk around it twice and ask a parent to read it aloud. I always ask to be told straight away, because I will spend the whole fortnight composing consoling speeches in my head otherwise. A pass is a joy. A narrow miss is a lesson. Either way the next lesson begins with a scale, a biscuit and a firm promise that nobody is allowed to apologise.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, NewsBiscuit keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/