Listening for the intention

I started reading this pamphlet with the poem titled ‘Beethoven’s Apartment, 18A Pasqualati Haus, Vienna’. If you’re unfamiliar with the music of Beethoven, the words ‘This is the birthplace of four symphonies, the violin concerto, / a clutch of quartets, his only opera Fidelio’ may not start violins playing or a fat lady singing in your head.

On the other hand, if you are a Beethoven afficionado, it will.

And depending on your wider musical knowledge, learning that in Vienna Beethoven jostles ‘for focus with Schubert, Mozart, all those Strausses… / not to mention Freud, Wittgenstein, Schrodinger and his damned cat(s)’ might also leave you with silence (the possible miaowing cat(s) being a discussion for another day).

And ifyou don’t read music, you might struggle to understand (in ‘4:4’):

                 […] the maths of it
how four goes into four to make
a whole fraction of common time

But if, in primary school, you did music-and-movement and a teacher told you, ‘Crouch down! / Be a bud! / Unfurl! / Be a flower! / Dance!’ (as in ‘Set Up, 1970-Something’),you’ll have no trouble hearing Debussy’s L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune as you move with ‘fleshy awkwardness’ while wearing ‘canvas pull-on plimsolls / black and rubbery’.

I myself did attend just such classes, and the following week, as Carnival of the Animals played, I plodded (as in Liz Lefroy’s poem ‘Balance’) dutifully round the school hall just as the poem describes:

to the double basses of The Elephant,
shoal to the high strings and harmonica of Aquarium,
skip to the xylophone and piano of Fossils

To my horror, I showed so much potential the teacher persuaded my mother to send me to ballet lessons, and while I tried to be graceful at the barre, in the mirror I watched other children in another room doing judo.

I knew immediately I was more cut out for judo than ballet. Which, just for the record (obsolete-technology pun intended) did prove to be the case.

And when, as I progressed, my coach told me to listen for my opponent’s intention; hear their momentum; be alert for any motif, I knew I had found my music as truly and as memorably as the small boy in Liz Lefroy’s poems, her son, finds his.

Sue Butler