Chapter 18

    There were to be more rodeo adventures, this time more akin to my own size and prowess - and also including a further exhibition of the superior skill of the local natives - but the reader knows by now that I was born to ramble through the events of a book, as a writer, because the immeasurable value of my principal theme, the spiritual life, just as I was made to wander through my native land, as a youngster, by the vicissitudes of the war.
    So I need to speak of another of the great events of Falkland, my first real hearing of a riff by a country and western guitar player. There were radio stations in Vancouver, of course, and from them I had already learned some of the classics of the day: You Are My Sunshine, and Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town. I was learning these at the same time as I was learning the children's hymns and the anthems, one had at the very least a teacher who knew the song and more often than not, an accompanist whacking out a sturdy, supportive, four-voice harmony on the piano. There were no problems in meeting the goals of the group sessions: a good ear and a good voice was the heritage from both sides of the family.
    But with the popular tunes off the radio, I was on my own. There was a challenge, and I can recall being awfully proud of myself, or perhaps simply full of gratitude, when I was able to remember and re-render the lyrics and melody. Furthermore, I learned to purse my lips and whistle, and that was another great breakthrough, fraught with an enormous pall of failure and frustration if I had failed to do so. I remember getting You Are My Sunshine right as I hoofed the long six or eight blocks to school in grade one, and the whistling came about as I strolled up the lane to call on a friend on a Saturday morning. So far, so good. I was shown a continent: I conquered it, I was shown a second continent, I conquered that. I could learn to sing a tune and I could learn to whistle a tune.
    But ah, to play a tune! To take up an instrument other than my own human voice and make that sing: now there was a wonderful deed. Yet until I was eighteen years old, in spite of my sporadic bits of instruction in theory in the many, many, schools I attended prior to my high school days, I never found myself and an instrument compatible.
    It was not from lack of desire, although such desire was never constant, because most of the time, as I had not understanding of how music worked, I had no confidence in myself as a player. In the subjects which required understanding: maths, science, grammar, I was habitually a top student; but in music as I had learned it, there did not seem to be anything to understand in the same way as these other subjects. I did manage to learn something about notation in grade eight, my last year in any kind of music class, but nothing at all of the pure numbers - as I know and play and teach them now - of scales and harmonies. In this absence of the common sense approach to music theory, in our schools, I suspect we are much less intelligent than the often abused classrooms of the middle ages, so passionate about eights and fifths and fourths. Our composers since then have learned to make more use of the other intervals - thirds and sixths and so forth - but in how many recollections of our school days do we hear of learning the straightforward syntax of harmony as we learned the multiplication tables and the parsing of a sentence?
    There has been lots of rousing singing, of course. I had a wonderful few months in grade five in a Burnaby school, ringing out the British Isles favourites in company with twenty or thirty other lads and our music teacher and his piano. But the singing of the numbered parts can be just as rousing, and because of the peculiar nature of the intellect and its appetite for design as some point actually more satisfying. The Ash Grove is a particular melody, but the skills behind learning the tune and the harmony for it, in all its possible arrangements, are universal. And universals, despite the current state of philosophical studies, are, as the normal goals of thought, the most liberating and delightful of possessions.
    In the 'Forties, every household that I knew had a radio, and the good folks we lived with in Falkland were no exception. It would have been one morning before school, just as I was out of bed and getting dressed, that I heard - naturally speaking - the most wonderful bit of instrumental that had ever blessed my ears. I don't recall what song it was, probably some country and western classic emanating out of Kamloops or Vernon. It may have simply been an instrumental, or some fine old chestnut like The  Wabash Cannonball, with room for a guitar run between the verses. But I do remember the most nimble of passages on a steel-string flat-top, and from the top to the bottom of my little soul I knew that I had never heard anything like it before. I had no thoughts whatsoever for the composer, but I did think that the man who could play what I heard must possess the greatest gift known to man, and I also had the most firm conviction that I had not then, and possibly never would have, the means of doing the same thing myself.
    I should make it clear that I was not terribly wounded by this estimate of myself. I was probably more disturbed by knowing there was no means of making the radio station play the tune over again for me, and I do not recall that the house boasted a phonograph. I'm sure that had I been meant to be a professional musician I would have been moved to make a thorough racket about my interrupted delight, but my very favourite hobby for the entire next decade of my life was to be reading, not making music - aside from the singing, from which I was to get a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction - and when I wasn't reading I had such a passion for the usual outdoor activities of boyhood that I'm sure lessons and practise might not have been all that welcome, especially if I'd not been given the right sort of teaching. By this I mean that a thoroughly organic approach might have generated a constant motivation, but I suspect that such teachers were hard to find in those days and are not too much more available still.
    So what do I mean by organic? 
    Well, in the first place I suspect that I have been searching back to the middle ages, before the invention of printing, and especially before the employment of relatively cheap reproduction of music, especially music written out for students, because I have recognized that teaching music in those days would have been done with an absolute reliance on the instrument, and with very little reference to written scores, which were time consuming and expensive. And also much less relevant to a grounding in the basics, according to the medieval mindset, happily more realistic than the paper-rooted conceptualizations of our own times, especially when it comes to education.
    How hard it is to find a piano student, for example, who was not set right away to reading music. And, moreover, how impossible to find a piano student who, when directed to this reading, was advised to read by numbers rather than the letters C,F,G, and so forth.
    Yet music, like faith, comes by hearing.
    I do not mean to criticize the skill of reading music, of course. No one can deny the cultural value of such an ability, and I have always been in awe of any and all of those lovely youngsters who can whip off, at the age of eight or nine, a bit of Bach or Haydn. Half-a-century older than they, I still balk at the imposed arrangement, and remain incapable of learning the left hand precisely as the composer or subsequent re-arranger has set it down. The organic musician, with great respect for the melody, has forever felt the need to be able to do his own thing with the rest of it.
    Yet, oddly enough, I seem to have discovered a method of counterpoint, that is, a musical schedule of one note in each hand, that I teach with absolute rigidity, allowing no compromise, for beginners, on the intervals, and insisting on a similar firmness with the fingering. None of this, initially, has any resource whatsoever to a written score, yet it sounds infallibly like the explorations of Johann Sebastian himself, as he might have puttered speculatively along a given key on his composer's working Wednesday morning. Also, I might say for those who have yet to learn the universality of sound methods in music, the same paired scales work wonderfully with guitar and pairs of voices, with major keys, and intelligently bending the applications of the numbers, with all three sorts of minors. (I am also absolutely rigid, as an old folk-musician, in teaching the natural minor first.)
    I'll leave the brackets as they fit the context of the previous paragraph, but then I'll also leap to the reference to folk music as if the brackets had been stripped away, because I need to emphasize that the counterpoint pairs work so well because they were determined after a full exploration of the relevant chords, played melodically, and of course it was the discovery of chords, as I have indicated earlier, that had let me loose as a performing musician. Without the discipline of triads, my counterpoint scale would never have come to be, at least not as long as I was insistent on functioning as my own teacher. And even if I had taken on a teacher other than myself, I doubt that I could ever have listened to the advice unless it contained the automatic shuffle between the two-note statement and the three.
    This personal rule of thumb has worked wonderfully for the keyboard, leading me to discover a set of intervals by which one full octave of notes in the left hand pair very nicely with two-and-a-half octaves in the right. The left hand doubles back on itself, of course, and this happily leaves some bass timbre in the arrangement of the eighteen melody notes. None of the bass notes are in unison, with the melody, or treble notes, so they add a counterpoint harmony to the exercise, thus adding greatly to the student's sense of musicianship, and profoundly reducing the boredom inherent to the practise of scales in unison.
    Only the invention of cheap printing - and the profits to be derived therefrom - could have canonized the pseudo-discipline of volumes of piano notes following each other at apparently tidy octave intervals, especially when the fingering patterns for the right hand have so little to do with actually playing music on the piano. Hopefully, my little scheme, once it is a matter of course in those cottages "which have done more than symphony orchestras to preserve the tradition of Beethoven", that is, the homes of music teachers, will make life more interesting for students of the keyboard.
    As there is a time and place for everything, an appropriate season, as the Scriptures would have it, there is a place for two-handed scales in unison. Perhaps there is no better place to begin, especially for some students. But as variety is the spice of life, so it is also the sine non qua of music, and any child with talent - or adult with spirit - wants to understand as quickly as possible the key to the complexity of what he is capable of hearing: there is not reason not to teach him immediately the other two sets of notes which are not in unison but in harmony.
    Children - and we all have to become as children whenever we are setting out on the adventure of learning a new art, science, craft, or skill - love to work out puzzles, they have an instinct for analyzing how things work, so long as the working seems logical. And music can never get beyond the question - where harmonizing is concerned - of being a puzzle. What note - or notes - goes with the first degree of the scale? What note with the second? the third? and so forth. Compound this search, this hunting, with an uninhibited exploitation of rhythms, always at the discretion of the student, and there can be no possibility of drudgery, of the boredom, that is so often a complaint of students who have been forced to study with a lesser system.
    This is not to say that boredom is never a factor. No one is always excited; no one is continually motivated by the sublimest inspiration. But we are entitled to refuse to do anything that does not seem to us at least useful, intellectually speaking, and it is according to this law of satisfactory and non-dualistic learning that natural musical inclinations of the student should be allowed to unfold, always with the understanding that a method is sound because it conforms to the natures of hands, keyboards, ears, and rational thinking as expressed, in music, by the use of numbers. Just how does one apply five fingers to eight or more notes? Is there a natural fingering, which applies to every scale, major or minor, or does the student have to memorize the notated fingering for every piece he wishes - or is told - to play?
    Some finger notation is useful, of course. I have found it necessary myself, at certain levels of studentship, and, as well as that, from the hands of a great composer, it has helped me to discover some of the laws inherent in a universal scheme for fingering. But as a standard and exclusive method, I think it is to be condemned, and putting it in the wastebasket, and replacing it with what I have quite exhaustively proved to be a better, because natural, ways of going about the scales, would bring a lot of much needed joy to thousands, if not millions, of initially eager little fingers, hearts, and faces.