Kindle Notes & Highlights
When they dropped down through the cloud at Aldergrove she saw how green the land was. And how small the fields. A mosaic of vivid greens and yellows and browns. Home. She wanted to cry again.
She saw her mother among them. In five years her hair had gone grey and she looked too old to be her mother. A changeling. Someone had taken her real mother and substituted this older, uglier version.
It was simpler to conform when she was at home. This was one of the reasons she’d left – if she’d stayed everything would have been done because it was the line of least resistance. It wasn’t so much that she’d left – she just failed to come back after her postgraduate year in Glasgow. One thing led to another. It was a gut reaction and she evolved reasons for it later. She became the prodigal daughter.
It is only when she plays one of her own pieces that she feels she can accept the applause. She made the work, she played it as it should be played. Something now exists which has never existed before. She remembers the childish awe of stepping on fresh snow, of marking it with her small foot.
‘Music hurts us in an allowable, almost palatable way,’ said Miss Bingham as she spooned coffee and poured water. ‘But nothing works so well as real life. It has no competitors whatsoever.’
She felt she could fly – she felt light with love. For her girl, for herself. For all the other women in the world who had ever given birth. Especially for her own mother – the feeling was totally unexpected, came from nowhere into her. She wanted to be with her mother, they had both shared an experience which should unite them in love. She wanted to tell her as another mother, as an equal about her girl child who would some day, maybe, give birth to her own girl.
Leave yourself alone. You’re worrying about worrying. I am thinking about what I do not want to think about.
How can I say what I go through writing an instrumental composition? The same as a poet except that he uses words. It is a kind of musical confession. Told from the head, full of musical ideas. Except that music is far richer, much more subtle than words. It can scourge the heart. Music comes from pre-hearing. You sit down to your desk and listen to what’s inside your head. Things appear suddenly and unexpectedly.
