Lumen Autumn 2025 - Flipbook - Page 16
Music
The music
between the
notes
It appears nobody has prepared a speech, my grandfather declared
as soon as the concert had finished and strode up to the stage to
deliver one. My parents rolled their eyes at each other; I sank into
my seat. But certain themes reappear within families, and forty
years later – a single oscillation of that metronome – I find myself
stepping onto that same stage every Friday during semester, to
introduce our Elder Hall lunchtime recitals.
By Anna Goldsworthy
My grandfather’s metronome has a slight lilt, a swing that has
become more pronounced over time, like a mutation amplified by
the generations. If you position the sliding weight to 60, it ticks
alongside the seconds of the clock for a while – anticipating every
other beat just a little – until it becomes funky and syncopated and
then peels away entirely.
I think of my grandfather often in my current role: his impact
as educator; his vitality and purpose; his equanimity under siege.
After he retired from the Education Department, he studied the
piano and pipe organ with the obsessive focus that characterised all
his endeavours. I would often return home from school to find him
monopolising my piano; when he completed his AMEB Associate
Diploma in the same year as me, I felt a mixture of sibling
resentment and astonished pride.
Sixty beats per minute: an easy Larghetto, a good resting tempo
for the human heart. When a tempo is much slower than this it is
difficult to feel each beat as a single unit. Instead, you start
subdividing, filling out the beats with the rhythm of your heart.
My grandfather was a serial graduate of the University of
Adelaide, collecting a Bachelor of Science in 1948 and a Bachelor
of Arts in 1962 alongside various diplomas in education. He was
a passionate educator: both at work, in his roles as a schoolteacher
and headmaster, and at home, where the dictionary and
encyclopaedia made reliable appearances at mealtimes. Later,
when he became a regional director of the Education Department,
he met the piano teacher who would change my life, Eleonora
Sivan, during a school visit. He was a true gentleman, she recalled
later, but with a natural authority.
“TIME IS SUPPOSED TO BE LINEAR,
BUT MORE AND MORE IT SEEMS TO
MOVE IN LOOPS. AND SOMETIMES
IT STANDS STILL, JUST FOR A
MOMENT.”
I imagine a metronome big enough to measure the larger
beats of life: an hour, a year, a decade. Four decades: a broad
Larghissimo. Four decades ago, I performed in Elder Hall for
the first time at Mrs Sivan’s annual student concert. At the dress
rehearsal, as she instructed me on Bach and Shostakovich, I
became overwhelmed and started to cry, and my mother took me
outside to the Goodman Lawns to recover. But the following night
the concert went well. After I had played, I joined my family at the
back of the auditorium, my heart still thumping in my chest.
Preparing for those exams, we gave each other aural tests. Tap
or clap this rhythm. Identify whether this excerpt is in duple or triple,
simple or compound time. Music is an art written on time: the beat,
the bar, the phrase. Its larger structures are predicated upon time
too, which is why it makes such demands of memory: the return
of incidents or landmarks, the transformation of themes. It can
also carry time in other, more personal ways, in the memories that
accrue around a particular piece. My grandfather performing a
Chopin waltz after Sunday lunch; my father playing through Clair
de lune in the study adjacent to my bedroom, as I slip off to sleep.
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