George Cheyne: November 2023

SO there I am, like a rabbit in the headlights, standing out in front of my music class wishing I was somewhere else…anywhere else.

Ahead of me are 30 pairs of eyes piercing through me like lasers through soft butter.

Behind me on the blackboard are a jumble of musical notes which I have failed to identify.

To my left, sitting behind a battered piano, is my tormentor.

“It’s quite simple, really,” the teacher says, “All you have to do is show me where the key change comes in this piece.”

She might as well have asked me to build an atomic bomb out of all the instruments in the room.
Not. A. Scooby.

I turned towards the blackboard once again in the vain hope the hieroglyphics would suddenly come to life and swoosh away, Disney style, in some sort of musical dance formation to show me what I was looking for.

No big reveal, no all-singing, all-dancing animation sequence involving the musical notes and definitely no fairytale ending.

“Well?”…. Our teacher was a woman of few words.

A desperate glance towards my classmates in case someone could mouth the right answer, but all I see are the tops of 30 teenage heads.

The desks, the schoolbags plonked down at their feet, the wooden floor and even their shoes are suddenly more interesting than maintaining eye contact with the poor sap stood in front of them.

I was out of options. Time for a total guess, but as I uhmmed and aahed to try and buy myself a better chance of a punt at the right answer, the teacher’s patience eventually snapped.

“Forget it. You’ve wasted enough of our time,” she said, “Just get back to your seat. Prestissimo! Prestissimo!”

See what you did there, Miss.

But the smart-arse musical reference was wasted on me as I was already scuttling back to my desk as fast as my legs would carry me.

As I went to take my seat, there was a final barb for me from the teacher.

“Some people have an ear for music,” she said, “Some people have the ability to talk knowledgeably about music and some even have an eye for reading music…you, on the other hand, have nothing.”

Ouch. I’d just been likened to a deaf, dumb and blind kid minus the redeeming feature about being able to play a mean pinball.

Welcome to the warm and fuzzy Scottish education system of the 1970s. A system where teachers were free to dish out liberal helpings of humiliation, abuse and corporal punishment.

There were no pastoral care teachers back then, no woke mediation process, no right of appeal. You just had to sit there and suck it up.

And that’s literally what I did…sucked in deep breaths of air in an effort to dial down the pure beamer I had on my face.

As brutal as the put-down was, I knew – statistically speaking, at least – that my ordeal was likely over. There were 30 other targets for the teacher to zero in on as she tinkled away at the ivories, scanning the classroom for another victim.

It became a musical game of Russian roulette where the teacher would bang out some piano concerto or other, point a finger at someone in the class and fire off an indecipherable question.

If you were lucky, she would simply tut disapprovingly if you couldn’t answer correctly, roll her eyes and move on to the next classmate.

If you were unlucky, like I was, she would pull the trigger on her impatience and drag you out in front of the class for some ritual embarrassment.

I had some talented classmates who had an ear for music, who could talk about music and could read music – but where was the fun in asking them the tough questions.

Much better to pick on the deaf, dumb and blind kids to assert your authority and create the illusion that you are the fount of all knowledge when it comes to music.

Now I’d be the first to admit I don’t know my arias from my cello bow, but that’s never stopped me having an appreciation of music.

I know what I like and I like what I know. Still, there’s a certain amount of irony involved to realise this includes piano artists. I mean, who doesn’t like a bit of Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel or Elton John?

I’m happy to say the ignominy of those put-downs in music class didn’t affect me too much and, as Elton himself would say, I’m still standing.

I remember coming home from school many a time after those music lessons and popping on my well-worn copy of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album to act as some sort of antidote.

This was about as far removed as you could get from the sort of stuff the teacher used to batter out on her old piano, right? Err, not quite as it happens.

I somehow found myself regularly playing air piano to three of the songs on the album – the title track, Time and Lady Grinning Soul.

To say pianist Mike Garson’s avant-garde jazz style of play on those songs is catchy would be a gross understatement.

It grabs your attention from the first note to the last and goes a long way to giving iconic status to the Aladdin Sane album.

I can’t listen to any of those three Garson-inspired tracks without thinking back to those school music lessons and it’s heartening to know it hasn’t spoiled my enjoyment of piano pieces down the years.

I still couldn’t tell you where the key changes come in right enough….

Garson’s, Aladdin Sane holy trilogy……..