Stephen Harper's piano

What would you say if he sang out of tune?

Harper; Stanley; piano

I owe you some sort of thoughtful piece on Mark Carney’s new defence industrial policy, but winter travel threw logistical curveballs into my day so that will have to wait until I have more time to myself.

Instead I find myself writing on a train, so here’s something different.

---

I want to come back to one, not particularly political, detail in the Stephen Harper portrait that was unveiled the other day: the piano.

You can see it above, in the detail I’ve cropped from Phil Richards’ acrylic-on-canvas portrait. Stanley, the Harpers’ family cat, lurks under the piano (a baby grand?), which in turn is so far over to the side of the painting that you can see no more than a foot of its width in the full portrait.

Richards’ portrait is a sort of toile à clef, packed with details that refer to important moments and relationships in Harper’s life. The piano is one such. While he was prime minister it was a matter of some notoriety that Harper enjoys playing piano for relaxation. He used to have friends over to 24 Sussex Drive regularly to play as a rehearsal band, with professional musicians hired to fill out the group. That lineup would sometimes perform in public, usually at Conservative Party social events, under the name Herringbone. At a National Arts Centre fundraising gala in 2009 Harper sat in with faster company, singing and playing a Beatles song with the National Arts Centre Orchestra and guest cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

---

Shortly after the NAC gig, Harper gave an interview about music to Maclean’s editor Ken Whyte. Turns out he was once fairly serious about the instrument for a long time. “I took piano for 10 years,” he told Whyte. “I got my Grade 9 Royal Conservatory.” I’m impressed: I went only as far as Grade 6 in piano and then, in high school, Grade 10 in trumpet, which was enough for me to half-consider a career in music. Harper’s problem was that he was nervous, his hands would shake. “Indirectly, this led to where I am now because at a very early age, almost from the first time I ever gave a public speech at school, I spoke without notes so nobody would notice I was nervous.” The turns a life takes.

When music came back into his life, it was on different terms. No more clammy kid worrying about his hands shaking. This time it was social.

“I played the piano hardly at all for almost 30 years. I only started to get back into it a bit when my son Ben started to pick up the guitar and he wanted me to accompany him, so I'd play a few chords. And then Roger Charbonneau, our house manager and a great musician, he would play guitar and fiddle at house parties we would have, and I would sing with him. And over the last couple of years, it got bigger and bigger…”

My chats with Harper have always been brief and intermittent. The only time we talked about music, he showed how thoroughly he had come to enjoy the human interaction of group interplay. Somehow it came up that I used to play the trumpet. “Then you can come over and play ‘Penny Lane’ with my band,” he said. I didn’t take him up on it, but I was struck by the easy generosity of the thought. It’s fair to say that, while I did interview him formally a few times over the years, Harper never responded to my mention of any political topic with the offer of an interview.

---

Stephen Harper will be relieved to learn this isn’t really a post about Stephen Harper. It’s more about the pleasure of making music with other people. It’s different from playing alone. You lose whatever control, or illusion of control, you might have had. But in return, you become part of something bigger.

I remember my first few times rehearsing piano duets in my teacher Mrs. Vasey’s living room in Sarnia, sitting next to a boy named David on the same bench. Suddenly it wasn’t good enough to play when I was ready. I had to play as soon as David had played two measures — right precisely then, from one beat to the next — and in the same tempo, and on the same downbeat.

If you make a mistake when you’re playing alone, it’s human nature to stop and try again. In any group larger than one, this choice becomes impossible. You have to keep going. The other musicians have to pretend nothing bad happened. Success depends on musical skills that are hard to distinguish from social skills. You have to wait your turn and be ready when it comes, be humble and then bold, sit still for 48 bars and then bam. You have to listen — to adjust your attack, tone and tuning to a consensus that evolves as it moves. Your only hope of making something beautiful together is trust.

I wasn’t really serious about music until I started to play in my high school band, four or five years after I started taking piano lessons. My greater interest and engagement were all about the difference between solo and social. I was a year younger than most of my classmates and not athletic. Music was the only arena in which I could hope to compete, and later, my only hope of impressing girls, although, Lord knows, not most of them.

But of course music quickly becomes more than jousting and flirting if you have any heart in you at all. It becomes a way to get to know about people, the specific ones you’re playing with and people in general. I once asked the violinist Pinchas Zukerman about teaching, a discipline he took seriously. I told him that when I was a kid, I used to tutor younger students in math, music and French, and that teaching helped me figure out my own processes: the first step to helping a trumpet player stop making that horrible sound was to figure out how to produce that horrible sound, and then how to back up and find the path to making a prettier sound.

Zukerman was dismissive. Teaching for self-development? “That’s so basic,” he said. “The real reason you teach is that if you’re lucky, you might hear something beautiful.”

Society, benchmarking, humility are basic characteristics of working with peers, and they’ll come to you late, if ever, if you stick to yourself. That’s why Billy Higgins, a central figure in jazz drumming, used to tell younger players, “Get to a bandstand as soon as you can.” It’s why, when Miles Davis got tired of calling his music jazz or debating whether it was jazz, he took to calling it “social music.” To some extent the term is redundant. If it’s music it’s social. (The other benefit of getting to a bandstand is that it enables the other fundamental interaction in music, which is between musicians and audiences. Also deeply social.)

A very different kind of drummer, Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, got to bandstands as soon as he could. In fact he dropped out of high school because he’d got to bandstands. “I found a kid up the street with an old drum set,” he said in his South by Southwest keynote address in 2016. "I found a kid down the street with an old bass. I found a kid across the street with an old basement. And we found a kid across town with an old PA. Several awkward jam sessions later, and we had a band.” A few bands later, Grohl and Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic changed music, at least for a while.

Grohl also said the way to make music is to suck until you don’t suck. So on top of all the other things music is about, it’s about learning to forgive yourself.

---

It’s so important to meet other musicians where they are that even famous loners soon learn they won’t get far without peers and colleagues. I’ve long been struck by an eerie echo in two pieces of advice from Thelonious Monk and John Cage, near-contemporaries in 20th-century jazz and concert music.

Monk used to give the members of his bands advice, or Zen riddles, or odd observations. Eventually in 1960 the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy wrote some of this stuff down. The result, two pages scrawled in a ring-bound notebook, has been making the rounds of creative people for decades.

Some of Monk’s advice strikes me as glib (“You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?”) and some of it has stayed with me for years (“A genius is the one most like himself”). But in the middle of it all, career advice: “Don’t sound [i.e. bug or annoy] anybody for a gig, just be on the scene.”

Compare with the advice a silkscreen artist and art-studio teacher named Sister Corita Kent used to give her students in the late 1960s, advice that was popularized by the avant-garde composer John Cage to such an extent that some sources don’t even mention Sister Corita. It’s similar stuff to Monk’s advice:

All of this is worth at least a conversation (“If you work it will lead to something,” damn) but again, there’s something about just showing up: “Always be around. Come or go to everything.”

Any of us who work in any creative field — this certainly includes politics, and maybe journalism — knows the importance of this advice. Be on the scene. Always be around. One thing I learned early in journalism was that pesky questions aren’t seen by other journalists as a faux pas, as long as they’re questions about the material and not about work opportunities as such. Questions about the material are evidence of interest, and the only young people who get to ask their elders pesky questions are the ones who show up. Geoff Keezer — another jazz musician, sorry — talks about meeting the legendary Herbie Hancock after a show when Keezer was an impossibly nerdy-looking 18-year-old.

“Mr. Hancock, Mr. Hancock! Can I ask you some questions?”

He said, “Ok.”

I had them all ready: “What are the last four chords in ‘Dolphin Dance?’ What’s the turnaround on ‘Footprints?’ And what’s that dissonant voicing in ‘Eye of the Hurricane?”

He said, “Oh! Well, here,” and takes me up on stage, literally within ten minutes of finishing the set. People are still sitting at tables and settling up, and gives me a private lesson in front of everybody. He showed me all that stuff.

This stuff is so hard to figure out, and so few people out in the rest of the world even care, that there’s an instant camaraderie between the people who know and those who want to know. For many years now I’ve sent the bulk of my charitable donations to OrKidstra, an Ottawa organization that gives free lessons and long-term instrument loans to children whose parents usually can’t afford either. It’s a fantastic organization that makes my city better every day. But one of the things I love is when these kids sit down for joint rehearsals with the musicians of the NAC Orchestra, who are some of the best musicians in the world. The pros automatically start addressing the youngsters as colleagues. They don’t talk down. Imagine how that makes the students feel. There’s a hierarchy of knowledge but no hierarchy of worth, because they’re all trying to figure the music out.

---

I’ve wandered pretty far afield from Stephen Harper and his piano, but maybe not all that far. For most of his adult life Harper was just a politician, and despite the energetic and mostly charming Harper-washing of Official Portrait Week, not universally beloved. But even public people aren’t only public people, and each of us spends part of our time wondering who we are. There are any number of ways to sit with that question or work through it, meditation or sports or writing or naps, but music is one of the best.

It doesn’t even matter if you aren’t anybody’s idea of a great musician. At some point in their life, artists often start to fight against the notion that only artists should be permitted to make art. Chick Corea returned to that theme many times in his last years. Most musicians worth the name are trying to pull as many people as possible into the circle, not push any out.

Pianos used to be more common in portrait art because they used to be more common in houses. It was good to see one in a new portrait. These are some of the things I think about when I think about Stephen Harper’s piano.