Beyond Black And White

PART I

Worlds of Music

. . . once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back, Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid’s music? William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Act II, Scene I

CHAPTER 1

Scenes of Childhood

Mrs Kershaw tucked the tail plumes of a brightly painted cockerel under one arm, and art books of medieval tapestries under the other. On the front table she left behind three oranges, as our maths teacher entered Theory Room One of the Sydney Conservatorium High School to begin his allocated half-hour torture. Spotting the cockerel, he shook his head in disbelief: And what’s that for?, he snapped. Disarmingly, our art teacher replied: Something beautiful for the children to see, while Mr Beasley headed for the blackboard and began chalking up equations with Wesleyan fervor from a soul-destroying textbook. Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau wafted out into the Botanic Gardens and I was relieved I had chosen the desk at the back of the room almost directly below my piano teacher’s studio.

The gentle Debussyan soundscape and unadorned beauty of the oranges recalled our art lessons with paintings by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, August Renoir, as well as Sergei Prokofiev’s little March from his opera L’amour des trois oranges and the composer’s piano transcription that my piano teacher, Mr Sverjensky, had assigned me. End phrases sprang to mind for which I developed new fingering before the next lesson, using the desktop to reconfigure lateral hand positions. Every time I glanced at the three wondrous shapes, their orangeness seemed more vivid than before. Hedonistic delights and the sensual charm of citrus gardens woven into renaissance paintings transported me to enchanted Umbrian groves as Beasley began a menacing little tour of classroom desks with the results of a recent test. The portly figure was suddenly standing over me with inflamed cheeks bellowing.

So if one bag costs three and ninepence how much do seven cost?¹

Why seven when there were three? I barely caught the end of his question, but as I was about to tell him what he needed to know he strode off to the front of the room and began poking the board with a stick. Perhaps he meant well, but negative energy inured many of us to a dogmatic regime and it took years to climb out of his classroom hell to appreciate the beauty and freedom of logical functions, and their dynamic role alongside Quadrivium astronomy, philosophy, the eternal spheres and the uplifting power of music. I looked down at my test results and a single percentage figure stared back forlornly. It was an all-time low. What interested me more, however, was the fate of the Debussy upstairs in Sver’s studio and the unassuming but powerful presence of the still life beaming back at me from the front table.

Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau was probably the best piano piece of its kind composed since Chopin’s D flat Nocturne about eighty years before, but whoever was learning it had not yet captured the almost imperceptible flow of subtle Impressionist imagery and the gentle rise and fall of the cantilena. We waded through the maths lesson like a hideous tropical swamp, saved every now and then by Reflets. Minute differences between one tantalizing pause and another upstairs gradually resulted in an overall improvement that left me wondering what Sver might have advised during the intervening silences. Many attempts and imagined explanations finally produced a seamless whole in a persuasive liquidity of movement and tonal chiaroscuro that could only have ended the piano lesson on a high – not only for the student but for me too, since I had simultaneously memorized the same piece downstairs.

As I sat wondering why the catastrophe of equations extended onto the blackboard’s ridge and why at least a few could not have been erased, I was asked if I had written them down. I had not, was given detention and advised that if I studied hard maybe I could be an idiot in six months. But I did not care. I abandoned myself to my little orange universe which was already humming and about to take off. I hoped it might only be a matter of seconds until laws of logic might be turned on their head and the oranges levitated, but when I looked back the maths teacher had gone and our class was packing up for the lunch break.

Thirteen years earlier, on a hot summer morning, Sunday, 20 December 1942, I had been born in Sydney in the middle of the Second World War, the youngest of Gladys Alma Bracken and Francis William Wilson Woodward’s four children. My mother was thirty-eight and my father forty-one; Bonnie Lois was twelve, Maureen Caroline seven, and James Francis three. Our mother was the second child of Sarah Bennett and Robert Bracken’s seven daughters and one son: May, Gladys, Phyllis (Fissie), Eva, Jean, Thelma, Connie and Leslie, known to us as Uncle Brac. The early nineteenth-century Brackens of Killesher Parish, County Fermanagh, hail back to the seventh century in hilly countryside that is one of the most scenically beautiful and archaeologically mysterious parts of north-east Ireland. By the early fifteenth century the Brackens had long settled the area known as Killybracken (Wood of the Brackens) in the electoral division of Florencecourt. They married into the Cole family, headed by Earl William Cole, who founded the town of Enniskillen and was a descendant of King Edward II. For centuries the Brackens were buried in the old Killesher graveyard between Gortatole Cross and Blacklion. John Bracken of Tome (now Tuam, located south-west from Backlion in County Cavan) erected a monument in 1810 and along its sides are inscribed stones recalling other Brackens interred there.

In 1859 William Bracken married Eliza Mary Balfour in Enniskillen. They had one child, Samuel, who was born before they set sail for Australia in 1862 on the Rupert. The family settled in Rockvale in northern New South Wales and farmed a property they named "Sugarloaf", more than five thousand feet up in the Great Dividing Range and a short horse-and-buggy ride from Guyra, where the snow line merges into national parkland. They had eleven children, the fourth of whom was Robert Henry Bracken (my maternal grandfather). He married Sarah Caroline Bennett whose mother and father were Henry Bennett and Maria Lewis. The Bennetts claimed to be close relatives of Lord Cardigan who led the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimea, but such claims were possibly as reliable as those of the Brackens’ to being close relatives of the Balfours of Fermanagh and Earl Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930), who was the British Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905.

As for the Woodwards, they originally formed part of a small army of foresters who enlisted for the Norman Conquest of England, where they stayed in or near the King’s woods, frequently poaching under the pretext of protecting them. Eight hundred years later in Dublin, my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Woodward, met Sarah Dietz from a German schmatta family, and they married somewhere on the high seas before settling near the Gulgong goldfields in central New South Wales. As family folklore has it, their son, John Wilson Woodward, rode a stallion from Gulgong to Sydney, a distance of some three hundred kilometers, sleeping on ferns along the way, eventually settling with his wife in Wallace Street, Willoughby. Their son, Thomas William, married Jesse Elizabeth (Lilly) Wilson in 1898, and they also lived in Willoughby, where they had four children: my father Frank (the eldest), Uncle George (the youngest), Aunt Regina Jesse Ann and Aunt Emily. When my paternal grandmother (Jesse) lost her husband, she kept her house in Penshurst Street, Willoughby, until she was ninety-five. My father was recruited into the Australian Mutual Provident Society, where he worked for forty-seven years, traveling widely for the company.

My mother and father met in Armidale’s central park and married at St Stephen’s Church, Willoughby, in April 1928. By then Frank had already taken an AMP mortgage for a quarter-acre block in north-west Chatswood, where the family house was built for his twenty-four-year-old bride. A constant stream of my mother’s sisters visited together with cousins, and a few stayed with us from time to time. As intrusive as some of my aunts could be, they were also a lot of fun and enjoyed a few beers and a smoke together. Just about everybody smoked when I was little, including my father, until, as my sister Maureen told us, he was visited by an angel and gave up.

We lived just three blocks from Blue Gum Park, which formed part of the Lane Cove National Reserve where we regularly ran barefoot, climbed trees, caught cicadas and viewed the wider terrain. On weekends my brother, sisters and I worked in the garden alongside our mother and father who taught us the importance of planting a wide range of vegetables, which they encouraged us to tend with loving care. At the end of a day of pruning, clearing, planting and watering, we burnt off branches, dead leaves and sometimes made a little barbecue. Dessert, which was served indoors or out, was invariably homemade ice cream topped with passion fruit cream. Occasionally fairies wrote our names on the passion fruit. Maureen expressed her doubts about the veracity of their existence, so on one occasion Auntie Fiss, who lived on and off with us for many years, examined the ripened fruit more carefully and with an appropriate gravitas, declared she was convinced it must be true because of the squiggly writing.

I did not believe her for a second and soon after caught Auntie Fiss masquerading as the nocturnal tooth fairy after she had extracted a molar of mine hours earlier by slamming the kitchen door on what she said would be on the count of three, but was actually only one. To add insult to injury the tooth fairy left only threepence, and the following morning when I protested the miserly policy and suggested sixpence, I was told to forget it.

Auntie Fiss looked after us when our mother and father went away, and during their absence she sometimes played melodious pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin sufficiently well on the family upright piano to raise my curiosity in the repertoire. She played cautiously from sheet music and a little later on when it was my turn she occasionally checked whether I was observing the composer’s instructions faithfully. I was grateful she did not object when I improvised my own pieces and left me to my own explorations without asking what I was doing. She had no children of her own and when she accompanied Maureen on the violin or took her on hikes with her boyfriend (Uncle Arthur), it became apparent that she considered my sister her surrogate daughter. Both had strong, independent views and smoked like chimneys.

Soon after I was born, my maternal grandmother moved in for the best part of twenty years. I spent quite a bit of time with her. She taught me blackjack, euchre, canasta, and confided stories about the Little People – and their music – and how they sometimes enticed her away for an Irish jig, and it wouldn’t be long before she took out her squeezebox from its case, and nimble fingers would begin the tantalizing search for fragments of melody she would piece together in fits and starts, guided by the bottom corner of her good ear until she got going. From what my grandmother told me, her daughters loved their pet horses, kangaroos, cockatoos, parakeets and dogs at Sugarloaf, as much as my sisters, brother and I loved our cats, bantams and the various birds that built nests in an enormous red gum and various fruit and citrus trees that filled our Sydney garden.

When I was stuck at home after falling out of one of the trees, my grandmother would chat with my aunts while winding colorful skeins of merino wool around my plaster cast with signatures from school mates all over it, before knitting a variety of garments; fortunately, none of them for my brother or me. She spent innumerable hours playing Scrabble and pieced patchwork quilts and rugs together, one square at a time with considerable patience until she was one hundred and five. Towards the end of her life when memory or poor light impaired an otherwise impeccable end-game, Grandma sometimes mistakenly used an upturned tile as a blank. Throughout my childhood she checked discount prices and encouraged my mother and her sisters to make jam together. Jim or I were asked to pick bags of Seville oranges off the tree by the chook yard and bring them down to the kitchen where my Aunts made marmalade with Bonnie and Maureen. On other occasions Jim and I picked lemons or passion fruits to make curd.

To save on the cost of clothing a large family, my grandmother and mother shopped for fabrics to make blouses and dresses for my sisters and summer shirts for Jim and me. My grandmother, or one of my aunts or Maureen, would then clock up serious mileage on the family’s Singer sewing machine. It was a miracle the foot pedal did not wear out.

When I had to stay home from school I loved accompanying my mother on her inner city trips to fashionable department stores which were the closest visible palaces of my childhood. We walked or caught the bus to Chatswood station, and from there took the train to Wynyard before walking miles and examining dozens of bolts of material for her sisters and herself, from which she eventually selected two or three pieces. I grew to love fabrics, their design and texture, and loved riding in the various elevators between floors listening to the pitched resonances of different bells in our own and neighboring lift wells. Many lifts placed together made musical magic as one sped past another or arrived at its destination when the sound would completely change, depending on where the elevators were and the velocity with which they moved up and down their shafts. I developed a preference for the higher bell pitches with prolonged after-sounds created by more rapid travel.

When the various lengths of different material were brought back to the counter, the amount charged was invariably one pound twelve shillings and sixpence. The attendant would place my mother’s pound notes into a hand-size cylindrical capsule that sped along a hydraulic chute, although in some stores, payments were whizzed along an overhead wire to a central cashier who sat in an elevated box. From there the transaction was completed and the change and receipt sent back within minutes by the same means. I fantasized how one day I might travel in such a projectile if it were only big enough, little realizing that a half-century later such concepts would be on the drawing board for subterranean intercontinental travel. Hyperloop on the West Coast of America would then be planning one-thousand-miles-per-hour rocket trains for travel-like projectiles in tubes between Los Angeles and San Francisco with air-bearing suspension systems. When I was seven, my brother and I watched a film about a rocket landing on the moon that took place twenty years later. In 2014, six US astronauts are already in training for a one-way trip to the planet Mars in 2018 with every intention of settling there permanently. At seven it was not difficult to imagine such things would happen soon enough, even if they were dismissed as fantasy by those who thought themselves wiser.

Once the projectile returned with my mother’s receipt, her materials were wrapped in a little brown paper bundle and tied with string. She then took me to a shabby café reeking of excellent coffee and huge character, full of smokers, tucked away beyond a little bend halfway along an old Sydney arcade off the side of a convict-built sandstone corridor. Above the Georgian arcade walkway was a hideous industrial glass ceiling that leaked here and there so on rainy days my mother and I shared an umbrella even though we were indoors. The café was a proper dive with greasy cream walls and two large, round, metal urns manned by two Irish ladies who welcomed us as we stacked our umbrellas in the entrance rack. My mother invariably ordered an espresso for herself, a weak milk coffee for me and toasted ham sandwiches with English mustard for both of us. Once in a blue moon I was allowed a special treat of a steak and kidney pie with Rosella tomato sauce, but only occasionally since my mother was dubious about the quality of the meat filler.

After one of our material expeditions my mother and I visited a café not far from Sydney Town Hall near the corner of Park and Castlereagh Streets, managed by Hungarians. She ordered a Vienna coffee and a Danish pastry and as we sat waiting in our varnished wooden booth I was wondering what a coffee in the Viennese style might look like, when a huge lady who looked as though she was out of a Rubens painting arrived with a large, posh glass with a long silver spoon, holder and swirls of thick, heavy cream on top of a small black lake topped with grated chocolate. I had never seen anything quite like it. On another occasion I was allowed to have the real thing and it was served with infinitely more cream and even a cherry placed on top. To the amusement of those behind the counter, the same lady who brought the special coffee to our table assured me I could have one anywhere I wanted, pausing before she added, And also in Vienna of course, even though it is called something else there.

Once we arrived home my mother would share the department store booty with my grandmother and aunts. With both wooden leaves added to the middle of the dining room table, they laid out one piece of material after another on felt, followed by endless paper patterns against a summit of rattling bone china.

As there was no television in Australia until 1956, our family fashioned simple winter pleasures by the lounge room fire, listening to the ABC News and Concert Hour, reading, playing music and pursuing our hobbies. When Maureen was still living at home I sometimes accompanied her when she played the violin. She knocked out a decent Mendelssohn Violin Concerto that left me impressed by the quality of the bridge passage that searched for an ideal connection to the opening Allegro’s second subject. She studied the violin locally with Mr Davidson, and then at the Conservatorium with Hoogie – Professor Florent Hoogstoel from Flanders – who wore baggy clothes, had a ruddy complexion, reddish nose and reeked of garlic. When Maureen practiced the Bach E major Violin Concerto, she counted its patterns with a big toe that poked out from striped felt slippers. Over many pages the musical action impressed itself in a predictable pattern like the design of a magnificent Persian rug. Bach’s patterns were notated in separate beats of four semiquavers grouped together, and between reading the piano transcription of the orchestral part, checking the ups and down of her bowing and watching her big toe, I was kept busy. When Maur miscounted she blamed me, but apart from the occasional outburst, she looked out for her little brother, as did Bonnie and Jim. Decades later when she moved with her family to Springwood, she threw herself behind two centuries of domestic music-making in the bush with her family, friends and neighbors. Her husband Wes was a fine amateur cellist whose day job was pioneering asthma research for Professor Blackburn (who became chancellor) at the University of Sydney. Husband and wife built a semi-professional string quartet, and a larger ensemble in Katoomba, in which Maur performed as oboist or sometimes violinist or violist. Maur and Wes also helped with administration of a fledgling semi-professional orchestra in Penrith in which they also regularly performed.

When the four of us lived at home together our mother sometimes picked out a tune on the Beale upright piano, or pretended to resurrect neglected violin skills, hamming it up along the way. My father maintained a poker face then groaned before begging her to stop, until their vaudeville review had us in stitches. The mother of four, who loved her violin and played it whenever she could, took a job so that at least three of us could have music lessons, and we seized the opportunity.

As well as indoor activities our mother and father encouraged us to create our own outdoor interests. My dad taught me how to distinguish one bird from another, their names and calls, and encouraged me to smell the perfumes of the different flowers in our garden – magic for a little boy. He passed on his knowledge of plants and the love he had for the birds and animals that so happily lived there. He had pet names for most of them. He pointed to certain birds as they carried various twigs and sticks and explained how they built their nests and how carefully they had to protect themselves from roaming predators. There was a blackbird he loved that he was convinced visited him for many years and about whom he wrote beautiful poems that I read during my studies in Poland.

Apart from the wonder of birdsong, collecting hens’ eggs was one of the next most exciting pastimes of childhood. Sometimes blue-tongue lizards or red-bellied black snakes were curled up on them so I collected fresh eggs with a degree of care. Other childhood pursuits included marbles and acquiring empty cigarette packets off the streets on the way home from school. We flattened them out and then flicked them as far as we could towards a wall to outdo each other before swaggering around the playground with booty won from the vanquished. Maureen and I wept when the foxes devastated the hen house. My dad went quiet on us but bought more hens and strengthened their defenses with wire dug into the ground until the foxes burrowed in again. He kept replacing the hens and protected them as best he could.

One day he took me to a part of the garden where he had discovered a nest built by two brightly colored bantams. He told me to be very quiet in case they were there. They were not, but their eggs were. I eventually caught sight of their magnificent plumes, but the foxes eventually got them too. I wondered about the quality of the hens’ lives and how they must have lived in dread of the foxes, but at Sunday School animals were not credited as having the same emotions as humans. Apparently, animals did not even go to heaven, and this concerned me. It seemed deeply unfair. I certainly did not want to be in heaven without our Mog. Our minister Mr Amos and the church elders insisted that Jesus loved the little lambs and when he placed models of them on the Sunday School Velcro board I felt they must surely have a chance of going to heaven too. It meant a lot to me but Mr Pentelow, who presided over Sunday School, had his doubts even after telling us the story of Noah packing his boat with animals before the Great Flood. I was outnumbered, but came to the conclusion that God could not have given the angels wings for nothing.

I suppose I would have been two when I first heard music played somewhere beyond the chicken run and dilapidated palings at the top of the back garden. I entered our neighbor’s house through the back door to her kitchen and followed the sound to its source. I was most of the way along a dark hallway lined with glass cabinets full of china plates when a cuckoo suddenly flew out from its wooden door to alert the house to the presence of an intruder. The music continued, and when I reached the edge of the wall I saw an elegant old lady playing the black and white keys of a big wooden box in a spacious room furnished with a bookcase towards one end, near a large window facing a garden. She was as surprised as I when we spotted each other but was gentle, seated me at the black and white keys and coaxed me into having a turn while she made a few telephone calls. Soon after, I heard my father thanking her at her front door before he carried me home on his shoulders. Years later when Mrs Howe had passed away and her property had changed hands it was not until I was already taking piano lessons that I eventually returned to the very same room where other children my own age were learning to play on the same instrument.

Several years after my first encounter with a piano and not long before my parents bought our own family instrument, my mother took me on a train trip to Armidale. It was mid-afternoon when we finally arrived, and bitterly cold with a winter sky laden with menacing dark clouds tinged purple and green. Throughout the journey I sensed a struggle against consuming emotions going on inside her without knowing her father had died. From all accounts my grandfather loved his daughters, and they adored him. My mother was reluctant to impose her grief on her sisters and brother, and I remember the quiet dignity that emanated from them as they stood in the darkened hallway comforting each other as it became colder and colder and Auntie May lit the open wood fire. The smell of burning logs wafted out into the bedroom as the gentle country darkness embraced us and I could hear my mum, her sisters and brother talking quietly as I drifted off beneath one of my grandmother’s quilts.

When I woke up the next morning, the transformation that had taken place during the night was miraculous. Not a cloud could be seen, the sun was shining brightly, and massive amounts of sugar covered everything as far as I could see. My mother told me it was snow, tasted it and gave me a little to try as well. Her father’s spirit guided her towards the simple renewal that transforms sadness into joy and nature presented us a poetic moment that put a smile on her face. From then on we often shared special moments wherever they were to be found, whether it was hiking through the mountains or waiting for the southerly after a sweltering summer’s day.²

During the winter school holidays our family boarded the steam train at Central Station for the two-hour trip to Wentworth Falls or Katoomba³ in the Blue Mountains. It often rained and we would end up stuck indoors playing cards or board games, but after a while Maureen began teaching me basic chess moves: the Ruy Lopez, how to gain control of the center of the chessboard and the Sicilian Defense. Whenever my brother, sisters and I boarded the train for Leura or Blackheath for holidays, a visit to Echo Point with its superb views of the Jamieson Valley, Katoomba, was an obligatory part of the trip. Our mother and father were keen bushwalkers and the whole family went on long hikes, one of which ended at the Giant Stairway while another took us through the Megalong Valley. Such journeys invariably turned out to be on a bitterly cold, gray winter’s day and if it had not already snowed, then sleet was often blowing in our faces. Our parents would then take us to a cafeteria near a view of rock formations of great natural beauty well known to Australians as the Three Sisters. An Indigenous legend about their father freezing them into the rock to protect them from pursuers fascinated Maureen, but as a little boy I was more interested in the cafeteria’s slot machine. In a glass cabinet its mechanical arm would lift toys or confectionery packets towards an open chute for those who managed to manipulate its slow-moving metal claw successfully. The arm had a limited operating time and on my first go, the mechanism clutching a chocolate crumble bar stopped just short of the aperture. I was devastated but did not make a fuss. My parents were kind and gave me an extra threepence to continue, but to my dismay the arm swung straight back and I had to start from scratch. I did not trust it after that but was determined to win, and on a further try did so, but the stale confectionery was riddled with weevils and had to be thrown away.

Its loss, however, was more than compensated for by sounds of nature hundreds of feet below that rose from the valley floor nearby and could be heard through mists that enshrouded the far right-hand side of the lookout and eventually the entire area. On a clear day my family could never work out why I was in the wrong place while they were taking snapshots of the Three Sisters on the other side, but I wanted to keep my little discovery to myself without having it wrecked by needing to explain what I was doing there. This wondrous event of nature was a pure form of music to my musician’s inner ear that imprinted itself on my soul as one of the enrapturing revelations of childhood – distant sounds of falling water and wind from primordial rainforest, punctuated by random, ecstatic birdsong.

CHAPTER 2

Magic Kingdoms

When I was six I was sent to Turramurra¹ to stay with my father’s closest friends, the Lalcheres and their sons Max and Bruce, the latter of whom worked at the ABC. I was too little to operate their pianola’s pedals, so every day I sat at its bench playing sound games at the keyboard. Many years later I understood how crucially important it was to have been left alone dreaming at the instrument making whatever sounds I wanted, but at six, God was merciful to Auntie Dulcie and Uncle Arthur, as my parents returned earlier than expected. No sooner were explanations given about my playing for hours on end than I was left with neighbors several doors along from our house for a week and the same thing happened. It was at this point that my mother and father asked my brother and me if we would like to have piano lessons, and as soon as the school holidays finished, we were taken to meet Miss Winifred Pope at 1 Saywell Street, Chatswood. Jim and I shared John Williams’ First Term at the Piano, and for our music theory exercises we shared either end of the same manuscript book.

It was not long before I began trying to play parts of easier pieces by the great composers that my Auntie Phyllis read when she stayed with us. Spurred on by national broadcasts of performances heard on the ABC’s Concert Hour by visiting or recorded artists such as Yehudi Menuhin, Artur Schnabel, Walter Gieseking, Claudio Arrau, Solomon, Dinu Lipatti, Wanda Landowska, Fernando Germani, Helmut Walcha, Kirsten Flagstadt, Rita Streich and William Kapell, I was drawn into a musical orbit that demanded constant comparison of performances I aspired to emulate. Far from the great European and American centers of music-making, I poked about the piano and made up pieces of my own while grappling with more ambitious notated repertoire, and it was not long before I found myself able to play with confidence. Not a week went by that something was not performed for family or friends, and as time passed, perhaps without realizing it, I was on the journey of a lifetime.

When my mother and I first met Miss Pope, she was a slender woman perhaps thirty-three years old, with thin, wiry glasses that lent an air of detachment to an otherwise gentle demeanor. She lived modestly, looked after an aging mother and like most people we knew, walked to the shops, to church and traveled longer distances by tram, bus or train. She was kind and infinitely patient as all great teachers should be, and she held fun parties to which parents and friends were invited. She sat a little back from the end of the keyboard’s high notes with pencils and an eraser in reach, and on the top of the instrument had placed a metronome and a packet of jellybeans with only a few black ones left. On the wall to the immediate right of the piano was an elongated cardboard chart on which a colorful variety of gold, silver and bronze stars were placed against an alphabetical list of students’ names.

At my very first lesson Miss Pope asked me a series of questions with my back to the piano about whether one note sounded higher than another while she gradually narrowed the distance separating them until it might have been difficult to tell. But it was always obvious to me whether one was higher or lower than the other. She also asked if notes sounded the same or different. Once I knew the names of sounds, it was easy to name which ones she was playing and at the third and fourth lessons she played two notes at once and then three. I liked the games she played and she always seemed delighted with my answers and told me I had absolute pitch. Miss Pope insisted theory be tackled independently of performance and piano practice, so my mother and I did the exercises together at the kitchen table and as a consequence we ended up sharing a musical bond all our lives. At the age of eighty-two she booked her flight to New York with my sister Maureen so she could hear my performance of the premiere of Keqrops with the Philharmonic and meet Iannis Xenakis.²

On Thursday evenings when my father went to church choir, my mother polished off a few of Mr Harris’ dark-chocolate-coated ginger pieces while ironing baskets of clothes for her husband and children and frequently for her sister and mother as well. She sometimes sang quietly to herself as I did my homework, or we listened to live ABC concert broadcasts together. I felt peaceful and content just being in her presence and seeing her so happy. One of her favorite pieces at the time was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto performed by the celebrated Soviet violinist David Oistrakh. She adored his playing and also Ginette Neveu’s performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, which her granddaughter, Asmira (who, as a young mother, looks remarkably like her paternal grandmother), was destined to learn and eventually perform in Bloomington, Indiana, for the finals of her first major violin competition which she won. Of the ABC recordings and live concerts played over the radio in the late 1940s, I was more attracted to Bach and Beethoven and found Nathan Milstein and Jascha Heifetz’s violin performances compelling. I shared my mother’s love of Oistrakh and Menuhin’s interpretations of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and later on, Menuhin’s towering performances of Bartók.

When I was seven, my mother, father and sister arranged for me to stay at a Bondi Beach apartment with the Sydney architect Cliff Johnson, brother of my sister Bonnie’s fiancé Reg and colleague of the celebrated Austrian architect and refugee, Harry Seidler. Cliff’s wife Beulah was an elegant Burmese woman of striking classical beauty and their daughter, Karen, was just a little younger than me. One day Cliff drove to a house built according to one of Seidler’s butterfly-roof designs that became a highly sought-after post-war commission by those who could afford it. Seidler’s audacious roof design reminded me of a half-open concert grand piano lid but in the house Cliff was visiting, the roof leaked. He solved the problem but it stressed him out. On his return home he listened to his impressive collection of 78 rpm records³ built up over many years, one of which was entitled Dragnet, which was a spoof on a sinister crime-buster with a musical intro in C minor. I did not fully grasp the significance of the recording’s gangster monotone but out of politeness laughed at some of the wisecracks, not always in the appropriate places. I assumed Beulah had heard it before because she did not laugh at all, either in the right or the wrong places.

When Cliff played the flip side for the first time, I heard an E. Power Biggs performance of Bach’s early organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 that sent me soaring to another world. It certainly came as no surprise that Walt Disney had immortalized Bach’s early Weimar-period work in his own cinematic masterpiece Fantasia a few years before. Cliff found it difficult to accept that the main reason for my wanting to hear his favorite recording was for the other content that accompanied Dragnet, but I managed to hear side two many times without necessarily hearing side one. At one point during the stay I overheard Cliff telling Beulah, There’s something wrong with that kid; he’s just heard the same piece half a dozen times. And to her credit she replied, Well, why don’t you let him? before the truth came out. If I hear that thing again I’ll scream.

If only Cliff could have known what an earth-shattering event the Bach discovery was for a seven-year-old he might have relaxed. To preserve his sanity, he set a limit on the number of times I was allowed to hear the Bach on any one day for the remainder of my stay. I was warned not to try to use the machine by myself when he was at work, but did so, was apprehended and punished by not being permitted to hear music for the rest of the stay. I took it hard but since I was a guest was compelled to accept my host’s decision, and when it came time to leave I thanked Cliff and his family. It had not only been a nice stay but a momentous one.

After the Bach epiphany, I sped through the John Williams book and, in the rest of my seventh year, made my way through a second book of pieces in leaps and bounds. With increased confidence I even negotiated many pieces of a third book by myself. Miss Pope stayed in touch with my parents as she subtly broached concepts of time and artistic imagery by encouraging me to imagine where it might be I wanted to travel when playing a piece and how I might take the listener on a special journey. Her idea worked well with most character pieces by Schumann and the programmed images presented by Grieg and other Romantic-period composers. She used the extra-musical aspects as a suitable distraction while teaching me how to relax when performing. Her imaginative approach provided me with a little world of my own that eventually provided a conduit to stages of meditative awareness in developing wider performance skills.

Miss Pope knew about the importance of meditative relaxation in performance because I heard her discuss its spiritual implications with her elder colleague Dora Brown. As interviews from the late fifties and early sixties reveal, the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin practiced the very same ideas when he embraced the significance of ancient knowledge and transcendental states of being in his concerts with Ravi Shankar. In the late sixties Karlheinz Stockhausen explored the same performance areas through his intuitive music and larger works like Stimmung (1968) (for six vocalists and six microphones). Years later, Maureen and Fissie compared Menuhin’s performances with David Oistrakh and also with Stéphane Grappelli, but it seemed to me neither collaboration held the same musical impact of Menuhin’s performances with Ravi Shankar, which everybody loved so much. One exception was Menuhin and Oistrakh’s ecstatic account of the Bach D minor Concerto for two solo violins and string orchestra.

At seven, however, I developed an awareness of the easy manner in which Miss Pope’s students all seemed to play. I learned the same relaxed approach that in some ways helped the forces inside me that flowed from Bach’s music make more sense on the keyboard. Bach’s music possessed divine qualities, and I told Miss Pope so. She carefully explained how music was an art practiced for centuries in the service of God. She told me the name of the Baptist church she attended, which was not very far from our own Church of Christ, and she was kind enough to tell my parents of the spectacular progress I was making. She was supportive and I trusted her.

At around this time Miss Pope began introducing me to the various ways musical phrases were shaped. She pointed to the uses of musical commas, semi-colons, full stops, sentence lengths, paragraphs and chapters in our school story books and explained how the organization of speech was identical to an order of pitched sounds in hymns sung at church and led by a trained church choir that breathed at critical points of the musical phrasing. Her teaching of musical breathing and phrase lengths was orientated from the very same mid-sixteenth-century chorales that Buxtehude and Bach had inherited from Martin Luther, which we still sang at our church. Notions of momentum through tempo rubato, fermata and full and half-closes (cadences) were explained as various short or prolonged moments that defined expressive or accented notes, as one might pause in speech, or slow up in various ways as cars do when approaching a crossing, corner, red light or parking.

My parents were in tune with Miss Pope’s approach and liked the fact she was a devout, practicing Christian who sometimes explained particular musical moments through ripping or mysterious biblical yarns. A favorite was Daniel in the lion’s den and another was the story of Jacob’s Ladder, to which Miss Pope was as attracted as Arnold Schoenberg thirty years before. She described God’s wondrous creations, from the vast starry firmament to the rivers and mountains, and how the animals and birds built their homes in Grieg’s Norwegian forests or Schumann’s woodland domain. She explained musical textures in terms of gathering storm clouds in the four flats of F minor, or, in other pieces, of the sun’s golden hues that shone gently in the three sharps of A major. In such a way I survived musical thunderstorms, visited serene lakes, tropical rainforests, flew over waterfalls and boarded imaginary trains emulating locomotive effects.⁴

An elongated painting from a bygone era that adorned the left-hand side of her large, upright piano took on new meaning as we imagined how the landscape might sound as music. The pantheistic extension of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) offered an effective visual prop for Miss Pope’s sensitive, penetrating approach. Important aspects built confidence and physical co-ordination, not only in the way we held music in our minds and hearts but also in our basic comportment, facing the middle of the keyboard just as Maureen had taught me with chess – to dominate the game from the center. The way we sat and placed our hands on the keyboard as we focused, co-ordinated and expressed ourselves was the secret to relaxation in performance. Miss Pope spent considerable time on posture and the de-stressing of an older student who had her lesson before mine. She reminded her that music was a divine blessing and that through sharing its peace and happiness it brought love into the world.

The elongated painting to the left of her piano was a roebuck at sunset gazing beyond distant forests to snow-covered peaks. Even at the end of the 1940s it was a hopeless cliché but I was drawn to the presence of the wondrous creature every lesson and a magic that extended far beyond Sir Edwin Henry Landseer’s achievement.⁵ I wondered about its family and where it lived. Its huge eye was full of feeling and tenderness, and I suspected it probably lived in a place of pristine beauty, grazing beside crystal-clear streams, visiting deep gorges full of rainbows and bewitching forests that sang their own special tree music. As I went to sleep, I recalled aspects of the morning lesson when thoughts invariably returned to the giant stag. In my prayers I asked God if it might step out of the painting into my dreams and take me with it back into the forest.

When I arrived at Miss Pope’s, I usually left my school satchel in the small kitchen–dining area before entering the lounge room. It was there I often waited quietly in a floral covered armchair placed behind and to the side of Miss Pope until it was my turn. The lady who played before me was Miss Pope’s star student and as her lesson entered its closing phase, I was so engrossed in the painting I sometimes did not notice the student had already finished and left the room. Unaware of what it was I was looking for inside the painting I deliberately lost myself in the magic kingdom of the animals. Their presence enabled children my age to cross through an imagined portal to another place and time. My daydreams were interrupted by Miss Pope’s distant voice even though in reality she was only several feet away from me and asking: Where have you been? But how could I possibly have explained? I was reluctant to share such thoughts and feelings even though they did not seem all that far removed from adults who prayed and even wept before religious paintings and wooden crosses. With weekly sermons that emphasized love in terms of sacrifice and guilt accompanied by descriptions of barbaric cruelty, my own thoughts and hidden feelings with which I imbued my music teacher’s painting revealed a gateway to a parallel existence of which I became partly aware throughout the day and, at night opened up more fully as a stargate to other worlds. On a threshold of dreams I vanished into the painting’s wider dimension and lost all sense of time. On awakening I felt enriched and blessed, convinced I had been elsewhere, sometimes returning in the presence of a protective entity. As I grew out of short trousers, however, it became a little clearer that if it was impossible for the stag to have stepped out of the painting, it was possible I had stepped in.

As the school holidays approached, JA 3783 telephoned Miss Pope at JA 8170 to ensure everything was progressing as well as it seemed. My parents arranged to pay Miss Pope’s invoice for three guineas⁶ for a school term of piano lessons involving two visits a week of twenty minutes each.

From time to time Miss Pope entered some of her pupils in the City of Sydney Eisteddfod, where short pieces for specialized age groups were performed competitively by up to fifty or more entrants per section. With sections for oratory, public speaking and dance, including Scottish reels and Irish jigs, the Eisteddfod was an enormous affair that went on for weeks and involved thousands of young children from all over Sydney and the State, with teenagers and seniors (up to age twenty-one) competing on just about every imaginable instrument. In the early 1930s, such modest vocal competitions as the Sun Aria rapidly became Australia-wide events. In 1949 it was won by the Sydney soprano Joan Sutherland. Other young artists who were completing their music studies at this time were Geoffrey Parsons, Charles Mackerras and Barry Tuckwell.

During the Eisteddfod performances an examiner discreetly whispered critical observations to a professional stenographer whose job it was to write separate reports. A small hand-bell was sounded to indicate the next contestant should mount the steps onto the stage and commence at leisure. All contestants for the section played the same piece and three prize winners were announced. The examiner left and the stenographer would then read the first-prize winner’s report in full, while only salient points were read about the second winner. The name of the third-prize winner was announced and the report collected on stage but no comments were made. The audience consisted of wriggling children, supportive parents, friends and a sprinkling of teachers. We wore our Sunday best and were reminded to behave, but by the time we had all heard the same piece ad infinitum, lots of little legs could be seen swinging back and forth under the seats. It seemed to be a rule of thumb to keep everybody on tenterhooks for the decision but when the moment finally arrived and the successful candidates were called on stage to receive their reports, the hall became more attentive except for a few who had dozed off. With the applause over, everybody then got up and left, except those who wanted to purchase their report for one shilling and sixpence.

At one of the Eisteddfods I played my piece early in the proceedings before wandering off to see what might be happening elsewhere and stopped at a room in which the examiner’s remarks for a vocal section were being read out. It was as large a section as mine and had evidently been in progress for a considerable period. A weary stenographer stood reading the first prizewinner’s report that advised the contestant to pay more attention to cleaning her bowels. A stunned silence fell over the gathering as those who had stayed awake elbowed those next to them. Apparently oblivious to what she had just read, the fatigued assistant welcomed the winner on stage and warmly congratulated her as the remaining reports were prepared for distribution in alphabetical order. On the way back to my section, I passed another room in which the closing Rondo-Allegro of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto was rendered with a pianist rattling away in place of an orchestra. Back in the room where I had competed I was pleasantly surprised but delighted when my number was called out for winning my section, and so was Miss Pope, who was even happier her pupils had won several other sections as well. We caught the train from Town Hall together before disembarking at Chatswood. Miss Pope then caught the tram along Victoria Avenue to Willoughby where she did her shopping. It took me twelve minutes to walk home from the station. My parents were very happy that it had worked out so successfully and banked the modest prize money when it arrived.

Once every year, musical eminences from the Australian Music Examination Board (AMEB)⁷ visited Miss Pope and a multitude of other music teachers throughout the metropolitan area to hear each of us play a little selection of contrasting pieces representing different historical periods and performance styles (baroque, classical, romantic and modern), as well as the full gamut of technical exercises (major and minor scales and arpeggios, hands alone, together and in parallel, and contrary motion in different keys). The exam included sight reading, general knowledge questions about the composers and their pieces, theory, and a series of aural tests that required us to clap rhythms accurately, name time signatures and describe the technical names given to specific pitches, intervals and various types of chords and their inversions. It was the musical equivalent of a medical check-up that almost resembled a live public concert for a highly critical audience of one. Around Miss Pope’s kitchen table we would wait our turn to be called in while, in whispers approaching falsetto, she tried to put us at our ease. Every now and then we caught a tantalizing glimpse of the examiner seated at a card table diagonally facing the candidate, with a small hand-bell to signal when the door should be opened.

My earliest AMEB theory exam took place at the University of Sydney’s Great Hall, where the architecture alone was such a forbidding visual experience for a small boy that the exam paper itself provided mild relief. A portly beadle was seated in the center of an elevated platform of large, diagonal black and white marble tiles at the top of a long, sandstone hall. Paintings of distinguished academics in medieval gowns stared from the walls like owls, some wearing monocles or spectacles, beneath highly placed dark rafters almost hidden from view, while obedient invigilators paced up and down aisles contributing to the overwhelming gravitas. I asked Miss Pope why music theory exams were so serious and she took my hand and gently described the Quadrivium and study of music that accompanied the founding of the first European universities. I listened carefully to the profound respect she paid a seven-hundred-year tradition to which my exam in the Great Hall apparently belonged, but from which there was precious little comfort to be had. However, these childhood theory exams in the Great Hall paled into insignificance compared to the annual performance assessments that took place at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw in the mid-sixties, when the entire piano faculty would assemble to deliberate over a candidate’s work. Law courts might have seemed more humane.

My first AMEB examiner for Grade One (Performance) at Miss Pope’s place was Dr Edgar Bainton. He was Sir Eugene Goossens’ immediate predecessor as director of the Sydney Conservatorium from 1934 to 1947, although he remained an AMEB examiner after his term was completed. A tall, thin man with a serious demeanor, Dr Bainton resembled a boiled egg in an ill-fitting suit with a face like the back of a sandshoe verging on the color beetroot. When Miss Pope opened the door for me to walk into the death chamber, he glanced up from the lamp’s glow on the green baize felt of her card table where AMEB documents had been placed with geometric precision. With a wave of the hand he motioned me to sit as the lamp lit up half his face in such a way that I was reminded of the hellish gargoyles that protruded from the corners of some of the buildings I had passed on my way to the University Great Hall. But, before imagination ran riot, I sat at the piano and waited to be spoken to. I looked up at my friend with the antlers next to the piano, but he pretended to be part of the painting and did not even wink. Behind me Dr Bainton was already scratching away on the exam report and even from the sound of the pen nib it was clear no nonsense would be tolerated. Apart from my name, I wondered what on earth he could be writing so obsessively when I had not even played a note. I peered over and he caught me, so I turned back in the hope I had not lost any marks. In the adjoining room, I knew Miss Pope and the other students were listening behind the door.

The first piece went well. Miss Pope had told me that Bach had taught his students to always take more time on the very first note. I did and it worked so I knew that Bach and Miss Pope were agreed. The three other pieces went well too. When it came to the general knowledge section, contact suddenly became more personal and Dr Bainton smiled. I knew he meant well and was only smiling but he looked as though he might also be about to have a nervous breakdown and I remember trying to put him at his ease. Whether it was a miscalculation or not I decided that whenever Dr Bainton asked me a question I would turn my answers into a friendly chat, and left the examination room jubilant that such a miserable-looking individual had possibly been left in a better frame of mind than when I had first encountered him.

When Miss Pope asked me how I felt, I told her that Dr Bainton was a very nice man indeed and firmly maintained the belief until my Grade One report arrived, on which he had written I was a chatterbox. He also awarded me an obscenely high mark and a few days later Miss Pope placed a gold star opposite my name on her chart for the good and the great. I had kept my nerve and when I heard her speak favorably to my parents I felt proud and thanked her. Many years later I was reading about Arnold Schoenberg’s fascination with Pacific Islands, his relatives in New Zealand⁸ and his 1934 application for a teaching post in harmony at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music under its new English director, Dr Edgar Bainton. Schoenberg’s application was rejected although it seemed every other British musical institution on the planet had also rejected the great composer so Schoenberg accepted a teaching post in Boston before moving to Los Angeles. Seven years earlier Maurice Ravel had also applied for a position to teach at the Sydney Conservatorium and had been turned down by Dr Arundel Orchard.

My parents were pleased with my piano exam result, although my mother joined some of her sisters in wanting to know why I had not scored one hundred per cent. Two of my aunts warned me not to get a big head. It was customary for family to remind children who were even six or seven years old not to get tickets on themselves, and that occasion was no exception. Some of them decided to keep an eye on me just to be sure I did not become cocky. If it had been sport and not classical music, perhaps they might have felt more comfortable about my progress.

From about that time on, whatever the reason, the instant I heard any Bach my whole being soared to another time and place. With Bach I felt centered and a sense of belonging, and such exalted feelings only increased as I grew older. Although Bach’s music was rigorously structured, with counterpoints and ascending and descending sequences and suspensions notated in an entirely symmetrical order, I was surprised how such predictable compositional techniques swept me off my feet.

Seven years later, when I was studying with my second piano teacher, Alexander Sverjensky, at the Sydney Conservatorium, I once took the risk of sharing with him limited aspects of my Bach encounters with other galaxies. He listened carefully and then in his grave, reserved manner recounted the experience of the New Zealand pianist, Richard Farrell, who had studied with him from 1938 to 1943. Farrell was considered to be a genius by Olga Samaroff, Serge Koussevitzky, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Aaron Copland, Artur Rubinstein and William Kapell. At one stage during his studies with Sverjensky he confided his feelings about life and art, and was apparently advised to consult a clinical psychologist. During one of these consultations, Farrell, who had remained silent on the couch for an inordinately long time, was asked by the psychoanalyst what he could see, to which Farrell eventually replied, Your ceiling needs painting.

A Melbourne pianist from this same period, whose performances I was attracted to when I heard them over the wireless, was Noel Mewton-Wood. He performed a large repertoire of British works, including premiere performances of piano concertos by Sir Benjamin Britten and Sir Arthur Bliss. Encouraged by Britten, Mewton-Wood lived in England and sustained a successful career but, blaming himself for a friend’s death, ended his life tragically with prussic acid at the age of thirty-one. Everybody who knew him and heard his prodigious playing deeply regretted his death. As a little boy I loved his performances of the Schumann Piano Concerto