Performing numbers
Numbers defined me
I search YouTube for my mum’s name. I am remembering one of the worst days of my teenage life and it strikes me that it was, in fact, captured on film. 2013 I was in Birmingham to perform at an ABRSM high scorers concert. My Grade 8 cello exam had resulted in such an invitation. One that felt like the crux of everything for my 15-year-old self.
I was wearing a dress from Urban Outfitters and playing ‘Madrigal’ – a piece by Spanish composer Enrique Granados. As I discover the listing on YouTube, I see that from my own account I had issued it a past ‘dislike’. I quickly remove the dislike and feel sad.
The scratching of my cello playing ensues and it’s out of tune. But on my face is the worst sound. That of utter fear and self-deprecation. The day had begun like most days I was performing. With an argument. I was governed by complete fear and distress which clouded everything around me for days prior. My mum and I would argue about what I was going to wear. She would listen to my practice and make comments and it would freak me out so I’d shout at her.
Then on the day itself: ‘Weird question, but when I used to perform as a teenager, I seem to remember us often having an argument before’. I have to phone a friend [my mother] because I really can’t remember. Maybe I’d refused to eat, or been short with her or forgotten to bring my ‘black hole’ to put my spike in.
Listening back, the performance gets more assured and interesting as it goes on and I think my playing is cute. I even nail a ridiculously hard shift which comes out of no where. Definitely a shift beyond grade 8. And it’s still there on the B list of the ABRSM syllabus.
I remember being so impressed that the pianist sight read the Granados piece so well and I remember another girl messing up her piece and not being able to finish it. I also remember my teacher promising to be there and not turning up. I scanned the room to see her familiar shining face, full of kindness and enthusiasm, but she wasn’t there.
When it was over, my mum was quick to criticise. I played badly because I was stressed and felt immense pressure having to prove the ‘high score’ that I had achieved. That number. A number that my mum had etched into an iPod touch as a congratulations for my grade 8. ‘139! congratulations Hattie on a grade 8 distinction!’
She was always more concerned with me playing beautifully and to the best of my ability than the achievement of a number. But the number was everything to me.
Kirsty looks confused and yet utterly sympathetic as I wheeze through my tears, trying to explain why my life has come to an end. The striving and suffering and enduring have resulted in a mark at the end of my second year at RCM that feels utterly appalling. I’m embarrassed, ashamed and decide I can’t perform again until I have returned to the drawing board and understood exactly what went wrong.
Is it the mark? 66/100? Or is it that I know Findlay and Shizuku and practically all of Bess’s students will get marks over 75? I’m petrified to tell her.
Kirsty is so kind and reflects something about how much pressure it looks like I put on myself. I’ve been seeing her for three months at this stage and she has illuminated so much about the classical music world I’ve chosen to embed myself in. I see myself wheezing through her eyes and I glimpse that it might be a bit ridiculous. But how real it all feels.
‘Well, you couldn’t really have expected anything better than that,’ Bess is honest when I see her in Notting Hill a few days later. ‘That Paganini was too hard for you.’ Paganini’s variations had been a dream for me since watching Tortelier and his wife play them on a BBC documentary, and then Nazan Haknazaryan on YouTube waft through them like butter.
‘We need to sort out your right hand’. She’s been trying to sort out my right hand for two years and nothing seems to help. I look back on old videos of myself playing from Chets and my right hand looks much more fluid and in control. But Bess can’t see it. And she is always right.
‘Stop hitting the string!’ It feels like I’m playing the Haydn the same way I did last week but this week she is frustrated with me. ‘Gently darling.’ Bess comes over and manipulates my right arm in circles so I can feel the movement she wants. She smells like a mix of sweet tobacco and expensive linen. Her voice becomes quieter as she makes circles with my arm that it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. ‘There. See, do you feel it?’
When my arm is returned to me, I play again with the newfound freedom and Bess swoops in a semi circle, gesturing with her arm as the phrase develops.
‘You were warned, and you still wanted to go’ my mum says when I read her this piece.