Eddie Ayres - Whole Notes

ED AYRES is a writer, musician and broadcaster. He was born on the White Cliffs of Dover and began playing music when he was six years old. He studied music in Manchester, Berlin and London, played professionally in the UK and Hong Kong and moved to Australia in 2003. Ed is the presenter of ABC Classics Weekend Breakfast.

Ed has written three other books: Cadence, about his journey by bicycle from England to Hong Kong with only a violin for company; Danger Music, describing his year teaching music in Afghanistan; and Sonam and the Silence, a childrens book about the importance of music. Eds books have been shortlisted for several prestigious awards, including the Prime Ministers Literary Awards.

Ed was born Emma and transitioned just before his fiftieth birthday. Better late than never.

CONTENTS

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First published in Australia in 2021

by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

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Copyright Eadric Ayres 2021

The right of Eadric Ayres to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 0 7333 4103 8 (paperback)

ISBN 978 1 4607 1279 5 (ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

Cover design by Andy Warren, HarperCollins Design Studio

Cover image by Pixel Stories/Stocksy.com/2539059

Internal illustrations by Andy Warren, HarperCollins Design Studio

Author photograph by Greville Patterson

for Charlie

my lioness, my sun

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN

T HIS AFTERNOON AT THREE, something important is going to happen. A young girl is going to have her first music lesson.

The teacher in charge of this huge moment is profoundly nervous. I know, because I am that teacher. I have been teaching music for thirty years, but no matter how many lessons I give, I am always nervous before a first lesson, because it is the first lesson the student remembers most. This lesson will set the colour and mood of their music learning, possibly for years to come.

So Id better not stuff it up.

Ive heard from Rosies mum that Rosie is beyond excited. She has her cello, a notebook, her music book and an enthusiasm that will not fit in a cello case, or any case, for that matter. Rosie has been declaring for a while that she wants to play the cello, and now she is ready. Rosie has already shown bravery, commitment and patience.

You might ask, why am I nervous? After all, its only music, its only a first lesson, Rosie is only seven, and only and only and only.

Well, I suppose Im nervous because this isnt only a first lesson in music. I believe that learning music, more than any other field, helps us to truly understand ourselves.

Over the months and, I hope, years to come, Rosies learning is going to be led by the first sense to come in our lives, and the last sense to leave our lives hearing. She is going to learn that hearing is different from listening. She is going to learn that our bodies and minds are one, and what we think we can do is what we end up being able to do.

She is going to learn persistence. She is going to learn that tiny steps, taken each day, create a journey unimaginable in length and adventure. She is going to learn that it is alright not to be able to do something. But then, note by note, she will succeed.

She is going to learn to express emotions rather than keep them inside where they can twist and warp us.

She is going to learn the kindness of music, especially when we play music with and for others.

She is going to learn just how much you can do, even when you are seven years old.

Rosie is going to learn not only how to learn but why we learn.

And Rosie is going to learn that music will always be there. She will learn that from today, until the end of her life, she will never be alone. Because at some point in her life, Rosie is going to have best friends leave and family members die, have her faith disappointed and find life hopeless and overwhelming.

And in those moments, when Rosie thinks back to these lessons in music, she will realise they were really lessons in living.

Five years ago, I was reborn. And I was reborn through music.

I was born in a female body, given the sex marker of female, named Emma, and taken through the usual rituals of a girls life. And, since I was born in the late sixties when knowledge of transgender issues was barely in its infancy, I lived my life as it was laid out for me.

As a female.

I was told to put on a t-shirt around ten years old and from then on, nothing seemed to fit me, neither clothes, feelings, my mind nor my body. The only thing that did fit was music.

Mrs Turner, the music teacher at our primary school in Shrewsbury, was my first music prophet. Her perfect plump body was perpetually wrapped in a brown woollen dress, blossoming into a floral one in the tenuous summers of the 1970s. Mrs Turner had kind hands and made Ring a Ring o Rosie on the piano sound like a Schubert song cycle. She believed every child should have the gift of music, and boy was she committed. Over a term of lunchtimes, in the English drizzle by the swings, Mrs Turner harangued my mates and me until we came to her recorder class. Once there, she grabbed our tiny six-year-old hands, scrawled the note names E, G, B, D and F on our right fingers, and F, A, C, E on the palm between. A plastic recorder was stuffed into the other hand, a sheet of what looked like hieroglyphics laid in front of us and off we went.

Did anyone say shrill? Everyone at some point in their life, especially if they have an ear or artery that needs unblocking, should experience a classroom full of tiny children playing plastic recorders. Those little bodies were all lung and bellow. Their noise brought a certain clarity to life and the class brought a certain clarity to my brain, because through Mrs Turner and her music lessons I began to develop an inner imagination, an inner structure and a magnificent inner world: I began to think in music. Those lunchtime classes were my passport to the Promised Land and Mrs Turner was my Moses.