Montreal poet Robyn Sarah’s memoir recounts a life with the piano

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“I thought he was writing a little book about a year of piano lessons and a little recital,” said Robyn Sarah. “I had to frame it in a way that didn’t sound whimsical. But really, I think I just wanted to take piano lessons again. “

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Sarah is talking about Music, late and early: a memory (Biblioasis, 354 pages, $ 24.95) and how it grew and transformed during the seven years it took to write it. The book is a multi-layered account of her lifelong relationship with the piano, chronicling the lessons taken in childhood and adolescence and which she took up, with the same teacher, when she was 59 years old and he was 80 years old, after a 35-year interregnum. involving parenting, teaching, writing, publishing, and editing, not to mention 10 years as a professional track clarinetist.

The title of the book is inspired by William Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnet “The world is too much for us; Sooner and later ”, a work that has become, among other things, a lament for how the individual creative spirit can be wasted by the demands of everyday life.

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“I always liked the phrase ‘late and early’ in that poem,” Sarah said in her spacious Outremont apartment. “It’s like ‘sooner or later’, but the investment makes it poetic and a bit mysterious.”

As hinted at in the previous answer, Sarah is a poet, one of Canada’s most important – her 2015 collection My Shoes Are Killing Me won a Governor General’s Literary Award, and was shortlisted for QWF’s AM Klein Prize for Poetry. for a day of grace: Poems 1997-2002.

Of course, there is a mystique about the music, especially in its performance, that makes it legendarily difficult to write. By its very nature as an experience that bypasses the intellect, it is difficult to put into words. Sarah’s accomplishment is even more remarkable, then: she brings the sensitivity of a poet to the task at hand, as in an account of an emotionally tense early session in which she found herself “impressed by the power of (her) anger to encourage music, and the power of music to absorb (his) anger and transform it into something wonderful. “

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So let’s be clear: you don’t need to be a musician, nor do you need to have aspired to be a musician, to appreciate Music, Late and Soon. Anyone who has ever felt a calling for something, pursued it, lost it, and then tried to summon it again is likely to identify with Sarah’s story.

“I wanted people who had not studied music but who were curious about it to have an idea of ​​that world, to open a window for them by sharing my experiences as I experienced them,” he said.

Those experiences and the emotions they bring: frustration, doubt, occasional euphoria, stage fright, self-acceptance (“Part of being a musician is learning to listen to what you are really delivering and not what you have in your head,” Sarah said.) – in fact they are shared, with an immediacy that makes the reader feel aware of the artistic process.

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Along the way, Sarah offers incidental glimpses of a lost Montreal. There are atmospheric scenes at the former Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal, housed in the aging Palais du commerce on the site of Berri St. now occupied by the Grande bibliothèque, and from college days spent with friends in the then economical McGill Ghetto . listening to the Beatles Revolver and building a harpsichord.

There are epiphanies, but more often than not Sarah describes the kinds of life changes that take place before we know what has happened. When giving up his clarinet studies, he writes: “I don’t think I even understood that I was giving up when I quit. There was no turning point, just a long, slow drift. “

Crucial to the effectiveness of Music, Late and Soon is Sarah’s account of a relationship that forms the dramatic heart of the book: her decades-long experience with the late Phil Cohen, the eccentric piano teacher from whom generations of musicians were mentored. For Sarah, the responsibility of writing about a person who had played such an important role in her life was not taken lightly.

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“It became obvious to me, because he was such an unusual teacher, someone who left a substantial legacy in the piano world, most of it unwritten, that I couldn’t help but write about it as it really was,” he said. . “It would have felt totally unnatural to change his name and change the details. He could have done that, but he could also have been writing a novel, and he didn’t want to do that. There was definitely anxiety around him. It wasn’t until I wrote enough of the book to read an excerpt that I got over it. ”

You shouldn’t have worried. It is a nuanced and affectionate portrait of Cohen drawn by Sarah; he deserves all his credit as an uncompromising mentor and unique musical mind.

As for the place of music in her life today, the prominent placement of a piano in her home, the same piano her mother bought when Sarah was in kindergarten, tells its own story.

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“The problem is that there is never enough time to keep everything in order,” he said. “Sometimes work deadlines don’t let me play the piano for a few days. Sometimes the piano breaks get too long and I waste time writing or reading. I think I have learned to go where the energy is at a certain moment. I don’t consider it a sacrifice. I think of it as juggling. “

And what about the initial idea that the book would be based on a performance?

“I felt like, unless you were going to act, what business did you have in taking piano lessons at 59?” Sarah said with a laugh. “Writing the book helped me understand where I had been with music and helped me regain it as a fundamental and recognized part of my life. Preparation is the part of music that I really missed: perfecting a piece for the sake of the music itself, taking it where you can take it, and then the next day taking it somewhere else. There is no end. It’s a bottomless process. “

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