\u201cCan someone please play us a march?\u201d
\nMy hand shot up. \u201cI can!\u201d<\/p>\n
I was nine years old and had been learning my first piece of piano music. It said clearly at the top of the single sheet \u2018Little March\u201d. I had it mastered, memorised, and therefore could play a march. My response was accurate.<\/p>\n
The request was for a pianist for morning assembly at St. Dominic\u2019s Priory, Port Elizabeth – to accompany the filing in of pupils to the hall. Three lines of girls from outside through the single door, in single file.<\/p>\n
My piece needed both my left hand and the right, and there were at least eight bars in 2\/4 time contained in the two lines on the sheet. Without mistakes, it took approximately twelve seconds to play from start to finish. And there were almost two hundred girls, dressed in blue \u2013 all needing to get through that door.<\/p>\n
How many times did the \u2018Little March\u2019 ring out that day? And still they kept coming… one by one. Speeding up or slowing down the tempo didn\u2019t help at all.<\/p>\n
I experienced a range of feelings that cold morning – confidence and belief in my nine-year old self with her newly-acquired skills and knowledge, mixed with a certain pride that I did not make a single mistake in the playing… all those times!
\nThen aware of a wave of silent laughter beginning to ripple through the girls, bursting out when they could no longer contain themselves.<\/p>\n
Did I feel a sense of humiliation or failure? when Sister Columbanus asked clearly but gently, after the closing prayer,<\/p>\n
\u201cCan anyone else play us a march?\u201d<\/p>\n
I am not sure…<\/p>\n
But this experience might have had something to do with the ambiguity I later felt in relation to performance and the piano.<\/p>\n
And I did not play \u2018The Little March\u2019 ever again!<\/p>\n
With time, first the Rustle of Spring and then the Moonlight sonata took over. I loved the connection I felt to this music and no one seemed to tire of hearing these beautifully crafted pieces. Their fragments remained embedded in my fingers, to be called up at any time. Long after I stopped sitting at the piano.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An early musical memoir<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":88,"template":"","categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","episode_posts","type-episode_posts","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-part-1-threads-and-thresholds"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/episode_posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/episode_posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/episode_posts"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/88"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}