Sound and fury

From: Guardian, UK (Fiction) - Mar 22, 2003

After a lifetime of frustration at her tone-deafness, Margaret Drabble has, thanks to Brahms, experienced a musical miracle

Saturday March 22, 2003
The Guardian

Music has long been torment to me. I have such a bad ear that I can barely recognise, let alone hold a tune. I used to describe myself as "tone deaf", as an excuse for my extreme insensitivity and ignorance, but I am now told that this condition is not officially recognised. There is no such thing as tone deafness. The clinical psychologist Oliver James in his recent work, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life (2002) claims that musical ability is not inherited, for "it seems that all of us are born with perfect pitch, the capacity to match notes perfectly": musical children who develop exceptional musical talent owe their later gifts more to nurture than to nature, according to James. Although I was in sympathy with so much of his optimistic book, belonging as I do to the generation that tended to believe in the "blank slate" theory of human nature and the importance of family life and social environment, this sentence gave me pause. All of us born with perfect pitch? How could that be? Where was mine? What had I done to it? What crimes had I committed against my musical self in infancy? What crimes had been committed against me?

A little reflection reassured me that his statement could not be true. Some are born with better pitch than others, just as some are born with better hearing or better vision than others. Some children are born tone deaf, and some are born stone deaf. Some are born with poor vision, and some are born blind, and some are born with no eyes at all. We are not born equal. I am not, as I now recognise and admit, totally tone deaf, and I can distinguish "God Save the Queen" from the opening chords of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, even out of context, though I cannot sing or hum either. (The only song I can sing in tune, I am told, is the song of the African Mourning Dove, which cries, plaintively, on a dying fall, "I lost my mother, I lost my father, and I am alone, alone, alone. . .") Could I have done better, had I been brought up in a musical environment? This is a question I often ask myself, and I know friends with a similar disability who also ask it. The Drabble family was not musical: my mother actively disliked most music, and although my father enjoyed classical music and played the piano a little, his humming to himself was as tuneless as it was despondent. The only music I ever heard in the home was imprisoned in the Gilbert and Sullivan gramophone records that my aunt occasionally used to play. I may once have been able to identify the theme tune of Dick Barton, Special Agent , but we didn't listen to the radio much either. Music lessons at school, though compulsory, were not helpful. By sheer force of repetition, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was at some stage drummed into my head, but it gave me no pleasure. I was dragooned into going to concerts while at boarding school in York, but they were a form of torture to me. I was terrified of coughing, of responding inappropriately, of clapping between movements, of wasting the privilege bestowed upon me. Unlike my mother, I was not proud of my lack of enjoyment. I wished I knew what it was that some of my friends enjoyed so intensely. I believed in their pleasure, but some of them seemed unable to believe in my failure to respond. I remember one bitter discussion with a musical friend, after hearing a string quartet in York Minster, when I tried to describe my frustration at not being able to hear what she seemed to hear. She was convinced I was being deliberately, willfully unmoved, and that I was pretending not to hear what all could and must hear.

My father wanted to introduce his children to music, and I was obliged to try to learn the flute. I hated it. I could never produce a satisfactory sound, and the teacher disliked me and understandably found me a waste of her time. Piano lessons, I now think, would have been more useful to me and less painful. I do remember trying to pick out the tune of "On Wings of Song I'll Bear Thee" from a score that for some reason lay neglected in our piano stool. I liked that tune. Yes, I liked it, therefore I must have heard it. Maybe Oliver James is right? Maybe, in me, a concert pianist was thwarted? I doubt it.

Both my first and second husbands have been lovers of and knowledgeable about music, and my three children have inherited musical interest and talent. This is a great relief to me. Hearing my grandson play his grandfather's trombone was a highlight of the Christmas season. And over the years, I have discovered musical works that have brought me true happiness. Even at school, I learned to love the St Matthew Passion , which was performed every Easter - I loved it for its drama and its tragedy, but I also loved the music, and still recognise it whenever I hear it, and play it to myself at the proper time of year. School friends of that era who, like me, were unmusical, and who were also told to shut up in singing lessons, remember these performances with affection and emotion. So all was not lost on me. I chose passages from the St Matthew Passion on each of the two occasions when I have been invited to choose my desert island discs. I also chose on both occasions the same final duet from Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppeia - again, a piece of music I believe I would recognise anywhere.

But I could not talk about it, or say why I like it. I have no musical vocabulary. I cannot tell a major from a minor key. I can still draw a treble clef, because I was taught to do so, but I don't know what it means. Desert Island Discs was within my range, as a programme, because during the interview one is meant to be talking autobiographically, not musically, but even if invited I could never take part in Michael Berkeley's more scholarly Private Passions, though I often listen to it with interest. I know my limitations. A recent guest on Private Passions chose the Monteverdi duet that I have liked so much for so long, and I listened to it happily, but then felt excluded and possibly even slightly humiliated by the appreciative technical discussion that followed.

I have noticed, of course, that the music I tend to prefer is vocal or choral - in other words, it has words. And I like words. Would I ever graduate, I used to wonder, to a purer form? Have I the capacity to learn? I learned to drive a car late in life, in my mid-40s, and this has considerably increased the amount of time I spend pleasurably listening to music, on Radio 3, on tape, on CD, as I drive along the motorways or sit in the traffic jams of England. So we can learn, we can extend our range.

And I sometimes think that there may be some virtues in some of our natural shortcomings. This is not just a Panglossian Pollyanna-style "looking on the bright side" attitude. It is useful, at times, to recognise that our inadequacies are human, and that we have them, and share them. When at times I am tempted towards impatience with those who find Shakespeare boring, or those who simply don't seem able to tell the difference between a great poem and a truly bad one, I remember my own musical failings. The teenage friend who berated me for not enjoying the string quartet had less than finely tuned literary tastes, which I was often tempted to find perverse. But they weren't. She genuinely liked some really second-rate stuff, and she genuinely couldn't believe that I admired the "Terrible Sonnets" of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which she found incomprehensible, and I still know by heart. She thought my liking for them was pretentious.

To have a great area of artistic blindness or deafness is humbling. I see that I used the word "humiliated" above, and wondered as I wrote it why I was using it, for I had no intention of issuing a challenge or a criticism. Michael Berkeley and his guest were talking well. They knew what they were talking about. They were enjoying an informed conversation. The fault was mine. Humiliation and humility have their uses. Insensitivity has its place. It can teach us about ourselves and others. It can teach us tolerance and self-doubt.

I end these thoughts with an account of a small and incomprehensible miracle. Maybe others will be able to interpret it for me. When I was in Venice for a month a year or two ago, living and working alone in a small, quiet, borrowed flat, it became clear to me that I needed some music to play on my friend Toni's newly purchased CD player, to keep me company. The apartment and the canal and the little campo called out for music. Venice is a musical city. It has music in its air and in its light and in its water and in its bridges and its palaces. It was constructed, as Palladio said, to the music of the spheres.

At first I played Toni's small selection of CDs, and then I thought I would venture upon buying one of my own - my first ever. As it happened, there was a small and very attractive classical music shop on the little street two doors along from the apartment, a magical little old-fashioned, low-ceilinged shop like a shop in a fairy story, so when my husband came to visit me for a weekend I asked him to choose from its stock something that he thought I might like. (Note that I do not know what I like. I know that I do not know.) So we went down together, and he selected for me a serenade by Brahms. It is Serenade No 1 in D-major, Op 11, played by the BRT Philharmonic Orchestra, Brussels, or so it says. I do not know why he chose this piece, or why he thought I might like it. I did not know who Brahms was. I knew that he was, but I did not know who he was, or what his music was. I still don't. But now I know that piece of music. I played it, again and again and again, and it filled me with an inexplicable delight. I still play it, though less incessantly, and find it still performs the same miracle. Why? Is this what music is? Is this what other people mean when they say they love a piece of music? What is it for? What does it mean? And why do I respond to it so much?

It doesn't seem to mean anything. And yet it exists, and it is beautiful, and it haunts me. I feel that I am unworthy of it. It is too good for me. I do not deserve it. Each time I play it, I cannot quite credit my good fortune. Am I really allowed to listen to the music of the spheres whenever I want? No, that cannot be right. I must ration myself. And can there be, I wonder, another piece of music as magical, as beautiful as this? And if there were, how would I ever find it?

© Margaret Drabble 2003