Ed Balls has passed grade four piano. Congratulations to him

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/19/ed-balls-has-passed-grade-four-piano

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Ed Balls has just passed grade four piano, aged 47. I bow down before him.

I decided to learn the piano at about the same age, and probably for the same reasons. That is, my daughters were starting to learn and I never had, and it seemed my life would be better if I repaired that omission.

Almost the most entrancing prospect I can imagine is the idea of being able to make music. To play an instrument is, in my dreams, like having the key to a universal language, to become a member of that enviable elite that is defined by its capacity to communicate eternal truths in a way that we can all understand. After all, that’s why Voyager 1 is taking Bach into interstellar space.

This is not at all like tackling grade one piano.

Music is the food of the intellect, curiosity, emotion and, obviously, love. But in a drearily prosaic way, if you start learning as an adult, it is also a language that has to be learned and then practised, and practised, and practised again.

The Jacqueline du Pré biopic, Hilary and Jackie, begins with the two small sisters tumbling around while their mother, at the piano, encourages them to listen and respond to the music that she’s playing.

If you have never learned to listen, you do not understand that – who’d have thought it – listening is the basic prerequisite of learning music. And of course, since most teachers of music start with children, and have never not known how to listen, they don’t realise that that is where they need to start to teach the odd elderly learner who strays on to the piano stool.

I was a terrible student, which was only partly to do with a lack of innate musicality. But how I loved it. I loved the patterns. The intervals. The spaces. It was captivating. It was as if the grammar of a language that I had always heard but never understood was finally being spelled out for me.

I realised that in time I might be able to deconstruct a piece of music in the most satisfying manner. It was a way of organising the world that had never occurred to me before. It was as if a great arc light had been switched on and I was living in a new and thrilling universe. The trouble was, it wasn’t music.

If only Yvonne, my dear and gifted neighbour who I persuaded to teach me, had realised that she should not show me a piece of sheet music for, say, about five years, I might still be persevering with the piano. Instead, I tried to master music rather as if it were a sort of crossword, where if I could only familiarise myself with all the different constructions and clues the puzzle would unlock itself for me.

It dawned on me that I had taken a wrong turn on the day I sat in a music centre in south London about to take grade one. While six-year-olds casually shimmied in and out, I shook with nerves in front of an examiner quite a few years younger than me. I had relatively recently been in Belfast’s Milltown cemetery, where the Ulster Defence Association volunteer Michael Stone had taken random pot shots, and frankly it seemed less scary.

He was a kindly man, my examiner, and allowed me to scrape a pass. Yvonne and I agreed that exams were really not relevant and I stuck at the piano for a while longer. Music has never lost its allure. I am eternally grateful that I can speak it to about key stage 2, and hey, who cares about exams?

But I am truly impressed that Ed Balls is still at it. Sincere congratulations on grade four. Although I do wonder if he, like me, is still determined to beat music into submission, rather than submitting himself to music. He really doesn’t strike me as the submitting kind.