Open Writing

“There’s an orchestra in my cupboard,” declared the woman sitting next to me. “A flute, an oboe, a clarinet and a violin. Oh, and a piano standing around doing nothing. In the hallway, not in the cupboard, of course!”

“How on earth did they get there, and why aren’t they being used?” I asked, horrified at the waste of wonderful resources.
“Well, you know how children are. One of my daughters started learning the piano, so we had to have one for her to practise on. Then she lost interest, and the piano’s just stood there ever since,” she replied.

How many homes around the world, I mused, have sad, silent pianos standing in hallways, lounges or parlours, longing to be played but being used only as display tables for photographs and nick-nacks.

The dilly woman continued: “One of my other daughters learnt the flute for a while… At least they can still read music and may one day pick them up and play them again. Well, not pick up the piano exactly, it’s a bit heavy, but you know what I mean.”

“So, who played the oboe?” I asked.

“Oh, that was my father-in-law, he played in the Bulawayo orchestra for many years. So did my mother-in-law, she played the violin. She was first violin. She’s in Australia now, but she’s so critical, she hasn’t played in anything bigger than a quartet for years…”

“There’s nothing wrong with playing in a quartet,” I ventured, defending a form of music I’ve enjoyed for years, and a musician I didn’t know. “Chamber music can be great fun, and there’s some marvellous music for the combination!”

“Oh, she’s so used to playing first violin, she just alienates everyone else,” my companion dismissed both my comment and her mother-in-law with a wave of her hand. “Goodness, I think there’s a French horn in there, too! And I used to play the piano and the cornet, and I sang in the big choir in town, too. That was back in 1975. The best thing we sang was ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, in the City Hall.”

Leon spoke up for the first time in this odd conversation: “I was probably in the audience that day – I was here in Jo’burg in 1975.”

“Oh,” she was delighted, “Well, I was the one dressed in white, on the right of the stage,” along with three hundred other youngsters, I thought!

“That was you? Dressed in white, with the long blonde hair and the blue eyes?” encouraged my husband, a wicked twinkle in his own baby-blues.

“My eyes,” she said icily, “are green!”

And with that, the conversation, thankfully, moved on to other people and other topics.

*

That night though, I had great difficulty sleeping. My brain kept hearing that abandoned orchestra, arguing loudly in their cupboard.

“You winds,” said the violin, speaking with an unexpectedly rough sound: she hadn’t been played for years, and was rather out of practise. “You winds, all you can do is ‘poop, poop, poop.’ Hmph! We violins are the voice of the orchestra!” She stuck her bridge in the air and sniffed.

The oboe went red in the face, and spoke in a sweet, though rather nasal voice that penetrated the cacophonic protests of clarinet, flute, cornet, and the piano in the hall outside: “Huh! What do you know about making real music? We winds get all the good tunes and all the solos… You strings just sit in a – a – herd, all of you playing what every other violin plays, you saw away with your bows and ought to end up in puddles of sawdust! ‘Poop, poop, poop’ indeed!” He turned his back on the violin and nearly fell off the shelf in his annoyance.

There were nods and inharmonious muttering, until the flute spoke in her clear, silver voice: “Let’s stop this, everyone, and try to learn something about each other. I know from our Violin here, that playing a stringed instrument is really very difficult, and to play it well takes many, many years of tuition and practise. I mean – imagine the poor players, having to hold the instrument under the left side of their chin, their left arm up at a really uncomfortable angle, their hand twisted around the neck of the instrument, four fingers sliding up and down, pressing on the strings, moving sideways from string to string… Then, their right arm has to control the speed and pressure of the bow against the strings to actually make the Violin sing. And that’s just the beginning! It’s amazing anyone manages to learn the instrument at all, let alone make all the magical music that can come from it. Violin, when you’re being used frequently and regularly, you have such a lovely, smooth voice…

“But, Violin-dear, it seems you don’t know much about us wind players and the difficulties we have. For instance, take me, the flute. Getting a sound from my mouth-piece can take a student anything up to three months! Imagine the frustration that causes… Once they can make a sound, the student then has to learn the notes: to make each note takes a combination of breath, all ten fingers in different combinations; and we use our tongue to articulate the notes, the way you use your bow. Admittedly, it is possible in a year or two for a flute student to reach a level of music-making where they will be giving and receiving pleasure. But to reach the virtuoso level is just as difficult, and takes as much work, as becoming a virtuoso on the violin or any other instrument! And because of the angle we’re held at, we give our players the most incredible pain just below their left shoulder-blades, and awfully stiff necks. Their arms and shoulders get really tired and to avoid that shoulder-blade pain, they have to sit turned away from anyone on their left… almost as if they’re anti-social, which they definitely are not!”

“What about us?” quavered the oboe, “Oboists have all the tonguing and blowing and fingering difficulties of the flute – and have to make a new reed every few weeks! Our reeds are specially shaped, scraped and stapled, called a ‘double reed’. The raw materials cost our players a small fortune, and not every reed works, no matter how carefully it is made. They split, they turn soggy, or they’re too hard or too soft. Just as the player gets used to one reed, they have to start all over again. And the pressure that builds in our lungs is something awful, because the opening in the reed is so small. Watch an oboist and you’ll notice his face goes bright red, the veins in his neck stand out, and one or both feet continually twitch. He actually has to let out stale air before taking another breath. Many male oboists are bald; I’m convinced the pressure inside their heads just blows the hairs right out of their follicles! Rumour has it that oboists also suffer from haemorrhoids due to the pressures created.”

The clarinet nodded in sympathy. “Our players use a single piece of reed to vibrate against a solid mouthpiece to set the clarinet singing. Our reeds also give trouble, but not as often as the double reeds. And thank goodness, they aren’t as pricey as those for the oboe. As far as breath, tonguing and fingering is concerned, we have similar challenges to the other wind players. But, to complicate our players’ lives, we have a few ‘alternate’ keys, so our players’ fingers have to move around a bit, and reading music is different for clarinettists…”
Her speech petered out as the flute interrupted: “That’s getting far too complicated, Clarinet – you’re very clever to understand all that!” She turned back to the violin, and continued, “So, Violin-dear, you see that we all have our difficulties and complications. No musical instrument is easier than any other. The brass instruments – trumpets and cornets, trombones, French horns, tubas – they present their players with a different set of complications altogether… I can’t even begin to imagine their difficulties! And if we spoke to drums and xylophones and other percussion instruments, we’d find that their players, too, have their difficulties!”

“You’re forgetting me,” tinkled the piano from the hallway. “Can you imagine the difficulties pianists have? Getting each of their ten fingers to move in different directions and rhythms all at once, reading great clusters of notes at a glance…”

“I think,” said the flute, “that pianists are incredible. They frequently make music without the company of any other instruments at all.

“Making music is a marvellous form of communication, not only between musicians, but between musicians and their audiences. Each of us is able to ‘communicate’ with an audience on our own. Solo instruments can be beautiful in the right setting. But play us all together and you have wonderful chamber music, adding in all the instruments in greater numbers would produce an orchestra and we could play a grand symphony, or even better, a glorious piano concerto. Music is wonderful, it’s such fun, and makes each of us greater than we are as individuals… Why don’t we make music together now, instead of arguing?”

The cupboard and hallway came alive with glorious harmony.
Then the alarm-clock squawked, and I woke.

Until next time, ‘here comes Treble!’

By Isabel Bradley