NoJo
Happily Marred
- Joined
- May 19, 2002
- Posts
- 15,398
Apropos of nothing, really:
This is one of six short pieces I wrote in celebration of my life with modal music.
At the time I wrote it I was in a year of mourning, and had stopped playing the piano, having played pretty much daily for the previous thirty-five years.
Miss Ely
Miss Ely came to my house pretty much every Wednesday for seven years to teach me piano.
She first appeared on a Winter morning, in 1966, when I was eight. She was very fat. She had a perfectly circular face, with nice half-moon spectacles. She wore a lilac coat. She had a maroon beret with cherries on top. Her white-stockinged feet were stuffed into sensible dark blue shoes that were too small for her. I guess she must have been in her early thirties. She had rosy cheeks and smiled a lot.
She sat on a kitchen chair next to my piano stool for half an hour a week for seven years, and farted. She suffered from severe flatulence. The farts were poorly disguised by a little scrape of the chair on the parquet floor, or a cough. They never, ever, smelled.
What could I play, she wanted to know. I played her “Chopsticks”. She produced a book with drawings of timeless children like the Start-Rite kids, and big, big musical notes. She showed me middle C. I played the first song, a series of middle C quarter notes, and played it, following the notation, the line of “flying saucers”, as I thought of them.
Over the years I would learn the standards: Czerny Studies, Moonlight Sonata, Solfegietto. Later she brought me Grieg, Chopin, Debussy. Then Liszt, Bartok. My left hand was lazy: She gave me Scriabin’s Nocturne, written for a one-handed musician.
My hands were, and still are, small and stubby. Her hands were tiny; they looked like little inflated rubber gloves. She told me that short, stubby fingers were an asset for a piano player. I compensated for my small hands by developing a good stretch. I can still stretch my little finger due West with my thumb due East, my hand flat. As a kid I grew my nails so I could increase my span by hooking the overhanging ivory of the piano keys with my little finger.
Every week she would be there: In winter in her lilac coat, in summer, farting beneath her rose-adorned cotton dress. Her first name was Rose.
Like my parents, she neither praised nor criticised my playing. I had no idea that I was musical until my first Associated Board grade piano. I scraped a distinction; maximum marks for interpretation and for ear training, poor sight-reading and scales. Each year for seven years I sat another grade, each year almost the same marks.
One day when I was about twelve, I showed her I’d written and notated a song; it had taken me days to notate. I played it for her. It was a blues piece called “Bad Mood”.
It was in the Dorian mode; a minor key, popular in English folk music. “Greensleeves” is Dorian. Scarborough Fair is in a Dorian scale. What makes them Dorian rather than Aeolian, the typical melodic minor, is the “-ove” in “Alas my lo-ove” and the “ry” in “Rosemary”: The sixth is a major sixth. Dorian is not quite as minor as Aeolian.
Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again”, is close to Dorian modal, as is a lot of blues. “Bad Mood” used all the white notes, with a pedalled D octave in the left hand, a series of triads around D minor and C major in the right. I’d drive my father crazy by playing it for hours and hours while he was trying to write in his office.
I wrote “Bad Mood” after hearing Savoy Brown’s “I’m Crying” from their “Raw Sienna” album. Another Dorian feel. They had a good name; they were a really brown band. Better than Free, better than Family. They were up there with Traffic and Cream.
The week after Miss Ely heard my “Bad Mood”, she brought me “The Little Negro” by Debussy.
“Negro” music doesn’t notate well: The best way of doing it is the way the jazz “fake books” do: notate it square, and let the musician provide the feel. The “Little Negro” was full of dotted notes and triplets, poor approximations that when played as written, produced that typical “white men can’t jump” parody of jazz. I don’t know if Debussy played it like that. Probably not.
At fifteen I decided to give up the piano lessons. After the last lesson, she shook my stubby hand with her stubby hand and wished me luck.
Miss Ely featured once in one of my wet dreams; this was a couple of years after she’d stopped coming: I was showing her to the front door as usual after our half-hour together, when I grabbed her great big arse and we snogged. We fucked right there in the doorway. She didn’t fart once.
This is one of six short pieces I wrote in celebration of my life with modal music.
At the time I wrote it I was in a year of mourning, and had stopped playing the piano, having played pretty much daily for the previous thirty-five years.
Miss Ely
Miss Ely came to my house pretty much every Wednesday for seven years to teach me piano.
She first appeared on a Winter morning, in 1966, when I was eight. She was very fat. She had a perfectly circular face, with nice half-moon spectacles. She wore a lilac coat. She had a maroon beret with cherries on top. Her white-stockinged feet were stuffed into sensible dark blue shoes that were too small for her. I guess she must have been in her early thirties. She had rosy cheeks and smiled a lot.
She sat on a kitchen chair next to my piano stool for half an hour a week for seven years, and farted. She suffered from severe flatulence. The farts were poorly disguised by a little scrape of the chair on the parquet floor, or a cough. They never, ever, smelled.
What could I play, she wanted to know. I played her “Chopsticks”. She produced a book with drawings of timeless children like the Start-Rite kids, and big, big musical notes. She showed me middle C. I played the first song, a series of middle C quarter notes, and played it, following the notation, the line of “flying saucers”, as I thought of them.
Over the years I would learn the standards: Czerny Studies, Moonlight Sonata, Solfegietto. Later she brought me Grieg, Chopin, Debussy. Then Liszt, Bartok. My left hand was lazy: She gave me Scriabin’s Nocturne, written for a one-handed musician.
My hands were, and still are, small and stubby. Her hands were tiny; they looked like little inflated rubber gloves. She told me that short, stubby fingers were an asset for a piano player. I compensated for my small hands by developing a good stretch. I can still stretch my little finger due West with my thumb due East, my hand flat. As a kid I grew my nails so I could increase my span by hooking the overhanging ivory of the piano keys with my little finger.
Every week she would be there: In winter in her lilac coat, in summer, farting beneath her rose-adorned cotton dress. Her first name was Rose.
Like my parents, she neither praised nor criticised my playing. I had no idea that I was musical until my first Associated Board grade piano. I scraped a distinction; maximum marks for interpretation and for ear training, poor sight-reading and scales. Each year for seven years I sat another grade, each year almost the same marks.
One day when I was about twelve, I showed her I’d written and notated a song; it had taken me days to notate. I played it for her. It was a blues piece called “Bad Mood”.
It was in the Dorian mode; a minor key, popular in English folk music. “Greensleeves” is Dorian. Scarborough Fair is in a Dorian scale. What makes them Dorian rather than Aeolian, the typical melodic minor, is the “-ove” in “Alas my lo-ove” and the “ry” in “Rosemary”: The sixth is a major sixth. Dorian is not quite as minor as Aeolian.
Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again”, is close to Dorian modal, as is a lot of blues. “Bad Mood” used all the white notes, with a pedalled D octave in the left hand, a series of triads around D minor and C major in the right. I’d drive my father crazy by playing it for hours and hours while he was trying to write in his office.
I wrote “Bad Mood” after hearing Savoy Brown’s “I’m Crying” from their “Raw Sienna” album. Another Dorian feel. They had a good name; they were a really brown band. Better than Free, better than Family. They were up there with Traffic and Cream.
The week after Miss Ely heard my “Bad Mood”, she brought me “The Little Negro” by Debussy.
“Negro” music doesn’t notate well: The best way of doing it is the way the jazz “fake books” do: notate it square, and let the musician provide the feel. The “Little Negro” was full of dotted notes and triplets, poor approximations that when played as written, produced that typical “white men can’t jump” parody of jazz. I don’t know if Debussy played it like that. Probably not.
At fifteen I decided to give up the piano lessons. After the last lesson, she shook my stubby hand with her stubby hand and wished me luck.
Miss Ely featured once in one of my wet dreams; this was a couple of years after she’d stopped coming: I was showing her to the front door as usual after our half-hour together, when I grabbed her great big arse and we snogged. We fucked right there in the doorway. She didn’t fart once.
