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Penguins don't play piano
by Thomas Thurman
TEPHEN hated piano. After
four months of practice at
school, his playing was
stilted, his timing was
erratic, and he still suffered
from that beginner's habit of
occasionally pausing to scan
the keyboard, hunting for the
keys and then stabbing at
them with his finger. He felt
awkward, out of his element.
In his room, alone, without telling anyone, hiseffortless stories came naturally; piano, which
was very public, came nothing like as easily. But
his mother wanted her son to learn piano so,
that was that.
It all reminded Stephen of the penguins he had
seen at Whipsnade elegant in the water,waddling along on the land. The connection had,
indeed, been suggested to him months before in
the autumn, when he had first begun to study
piano; his enthusiasm, even then, had been
lacking, but compared to now it seemed
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abundant. The piano teacher, Mr Sibbes, a
middleaged man with a soft air of hopelessness
about him, had begun with a lesson on the basic
theory of music. Unlike others in his year, who
had at least learned the recorder in primary
school, Stephen was a complete beginner.
Can you tell me, said Mr Sibbes, as he began to
play a classical piece that Stephen had never
heard before, whether this is in four
four orthree-four time?
Fourfour, said Stephen. It surprised him that
they should spend so long on what seemed a
simple point, when all the rest was so difficult.
Time signatures in music were little different to
metre in poetry, after all.
Very good, said Mr Sibbes. This is the start of a
symphony written by Mozart... he was only about
your age at the time. This is his third. He smiled
wanly. How many symphonies have you
written?, and then looked down at his fingers,
and sighed. How many symphonies have Iwritten?
And after they'd studied the basic scale, there
was practise work to take home and play through
simple stuff, but it introduced the idea of
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chords. Specifically, Stephen had to learn by next
week to play the chord of C major on request. So,
that evening, back at home, Stephen sat in a
draught at the piano and practised.
I've already mentioned Stephen's approach to
finding piano keys. He could find C by looking for
the cluster of black keys beside it, and once there
it was no great matter to count two and four, and
spread his fingers to make the chord. With hisfingers thus splayed he pressed tentatively, and
when rewarded with a chord which sounded
about right he pressed repeatedly, harder and
more firmly. As he looked down at his fingers, a
smile crossed his face his hand had become a
penguin's three-toed foot. Penguins don't play
piano!, he grinned. Penguins don't have to...deal with piano lessons. Penguins don't have to
deal with bloody school at all. His face suddenly
screwed up in frustration; he made two penguin
feet and stomped them angrily about the
keyboard.
Stephen still resented the switch between hisfriendly primary and the large, impersonal
secondary school. The sex ed videos they had seen
at primary school had implied a link between
leaving for secondary school and becoming an
adult: it was an initiation, or a rite of passage.
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None of the initiation rituals Stephen had ever
read about kept on the ordeal for these two years;
he suspected that the ritual was far gone in the
past, and perhaps had been so momentary that
he had not even noticed it. Maybe, instead, this
was the other side: this was what it was like to be
an adult, and he had simply better get used to it.
Stephen had long ago decided that if this turned
out to be so, he was determined to resent puberty
in general just as much as his hated secondaryschool.
The lessons continued. They were no less dull
than ordinary schoolwork, and Stephen was no
less bored, but at least it was a change you
could tell yourself, however unconvincingly, that
tedium of another flavour was not tedium at all.Stephen's piano technique improved, although he
was not aware of it: he would have been surprised
to have discovered how quickly he was mastering
the basics. The piano teacher continued to stare
at the keyboard with despondent eyes, as if filled
with some private and lasting nightmare. One
evening, though, towards the end of the autumnterm, Stephen looked up at the completion of an
exercise since no comment was forthcoming. Mr
Sibbes was asleep.
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It was a cold December afternoon outside, and an
electric fire supplemented the school's ancient
heating system at the cost of making the room's
atmosphere heavy. Evidently Mr Sibbes had been
feeling as tired, or as bored, as Stephen; he,
however, aided by the stuffiness and warmth, had
given in.
Stephen paused to consider his options. Perhaps
he should just leave quietly and go to ground inthe library or should he wake the teacher, and
how? In the end, he began to play through the
previous week's exercise, a piece called Surprise
Symphony. It began softly, without any great
technical difficulty, like a lullaby. After this came
a sudden booming chord, made with both hands:
Stephen, whose method of reading music was asinexpert as that of his playing, had committed the
chord to memory. He carefully organised his
fingers into the (as he still considered it) almost
magic pattern that would produce the chord of C
major, and slammed them down on the keys.
Mr Sibbes, whose head had nodded onto his chest, jumped back into an ordinary sitting position.
"Very good, Stephen," he said, as though nothing
had happened. "Please make sure you have the
Fr Elise fluent by next time we meet. See you
then." And Stephen sighed, collected his books
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and bag, and walked out of the little rehearsal
room back towards his locker. Nobody would be in
the main hall at this hour, he knew, so he
attempted to save two and a half minutes by
taking his usual shortcut across the stage. As he
set foot outside the wings, the audience burst into
applause.
Stephen looked around quickly, eyes wide at the
hundreds of eyes on him, and after a moment's
consideration made a stiff bow too stiff: it made
him look down at himself and discover that hewas dressed in tight and starchy evening dress.
Black trousers with a shiny stripe down either
side, black jacket, black bow-tie and frilly white
shirt. Like a penguin! and suddenly he laughed.
The audience, however, made a small murmuring
sound to show how patiently they were waiting to
see him play. On the far side of the stage, Stephencould see his trademark white baby grand, the
one he played in all his concerts; he set out
towards the piano through the first falling flakes
of snow.
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The piano was much further away than he had
thought. By the time he reached it, he was
wading through snowdrifts almost up to his
elbows; often, he was tempted to lie down and
make snow angels, but (conscious of the
audience's eyes upon him) he tried to temper his
joy at the snow as he believed adults must all do.
As he climbed the last few feet up to the piano, he
thought for a second that the piano had melted
away, or vanished as in a dream, but it was onlyburied in the snow. He put out a flipper and
cleared away a thin layer of snow from the
keyboard.
Then he struck a note, the first note, a C; he felt,
rather than heard, the satisfaction rolling back in
echo from the audience. Indeed, the snow wasnow falling too thickly to see anyone or anything
clearly but himself and the piano. Gradually, as
the note died away, he realised that he would
need his feet to play the chords; he clambered up
a drift that had blown up against the piano's side,
and stepped down, tentatively, onto the chord of C
major.
His other foot sought around for somewhere to
stand, for the next chord, prompting the further
realisation that the white keys were now
invisible: all he could see were the black notes in
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the snow, like some weird road marking. And
roads, Stephen reasoned, are made to dance on:
walking or dancing is not about thinking hard
and getting it right eventually, but just about
getting it near enough, soon enough, that you
don't fall over. And the more you walk, and the
more you dance, the more you learn how to. It's
not about precision, it's about dancing. Now that
the universe could not possibly see him through
the snow, Stephen began to dance on thekeyboard, playing a tune of his own invention,
never stopping though his breath came short and
the snow stung his eyes. He was playing for the
joy of playing, or dancing for the joy of dancing.
When a penguin plays piano, it's hard to tell
which.
When Stephen woke up, aching and tired, he was
lying face down on the floor in an empty rehearsal
room in an empty school empty of pupils, not of
staff. He had a good hour or so while the doors
would still be unlocked. Before he left, he fetched
the compasses out of the geometry set in his bag
and carved the shallow prints of a penguin's feetamongst all the other marks and initials on the
side of the piano; then he set out home to explain
to his mother why he wanted to drop piano
lessons.
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