The music between the notes

By Anna Goldsworthy

My grandfather’s metronome has a slight lilt, a swing that has become more pronounced over time, like a mutation amplified by the generations. If you position the sliding weight to 60, it ticks alongside the seconds of the clock for a while – anticipating every other beat just a little – until it becomes funky and syncopated and then peels away entirely. 

Sixty beats per minute: an easy Larghetto, a good resting tempo for the human heart. When a tempo is much slower than this it is difficult to feel each beat as a single unit. Instead, you start subdividing, filling out the beats with the rhythm of your heart. 

My grandfather was a serial graduate of the University of Adelaide, collecting a Bachelor of Science in 1948 and a Bachelor of Arts in 1962 alongside various diplomas in education. He was a passionate educator: both at work, in his roles as a schoolteacher and headmaster, and at home, where the dictionary and encyclopaedia made reliable appearances at mealtimes. Later, when he became a regional director of the Education Department, he met the piano teacher who would change my life, Eleonora Sivan, during a school visit. He was a true gentleman, she recalled later, but with a natural authority. 

I imagine a metronome big enough to measure the larger beats of life: an hour, a year, a decade. Four decades: a broad Larghissimo. Four decades ago, I performed in Elder Hall for the first time at Mrs Sivan’s annual student concert. At the dress rehearsal, as she instructed me on Bach and Shostakovich, I became overwhelmed and started to cry, and my mother took me outside to the Goodman Lawns to recover. But the following night the concert went well. After I had played, I joined my family at the back of the auditorium, my heart still thumping in my chest. 

It appears nobody has prepared a speech, my grandfather declared as soon as the concert had finished and strode up to the stage to deliver one. My parents rolled their eyes at each other; I sank into my seat. But certain themes reappear within families, and forty years later – a single oscillation of that metronome – I find myself stepping onto that same stage every Friday during semester, to introduce our Elder Hall lunchtime recitals. 

I think of my grandfather often in my current role: his impact as educator; his vitality and purpose; his equanimity under siege. After he retired from the Education Department, he studied the piano and pipe organ with the obsessive focus that characterised all his endeavours. I would often return home from school to find him monopolising my piano; when he completed his AMEB Associate Diploma in the same year as me, I felt a mixture of sibling resentment and astonished pride. 

Time is supposed to be linear, but more and more it seems to move in loops. And sometimes it stands still, just for a moment.

He takes me and my little brother upstairs to the balcony, so that we can watch something incomprehensible happen to our mother on the stage. Some months earlier, she had danced out of the medical school back to our car on Frome Road – I’ve passed! I’ve passed! – and the builders on the scaffold renovating the façade had broken into a round of applause. The medical school was not very hospitable to young mothers in those days, and it was an enormous achievement that she had pulled this off. Now – a single click of that metronome – I am wearing one of these flapping gowns myself, reading out the names of our latest crop of graduates from that same stage. As I gaze across this sea of shining faces, I can almost see the bewildered expressions of two small children at the front of the balcony. They are a long way away, but they are also very close. 

Music is an art written on time: the beat, the bar, the phrase.

Time is supposed to be linear, but more and more it seems to move in loops. And sometimes it stands still, just for a moment. During the pandemic, when we had to teach piano over Zoom, one of my students in China lost her sense of time. Her scales became erratic; her Beethoven stalled, before scrambling towards the end of the phrase. Finally, I asked her to place a metronome in front of the camera, and then watched, fascinated, as it traced its trajectory through the air and froze mid-stroke. It was the world that had lost sense of time, not my student. In music, a fermata is a pause of unspecified duration, represented ironically by the symbol known as corona. After a few moments, her metronome clicked back to life and swooped towards the next beat. 

When I returned to the Elder Conservatorium after many years of living away, the common room still smelt the same, and the intercom in the green room made the same startling sound, jolting performers onto the stage as if from a dream. Thirty years after I entered this building as an undergraduate, I addressed our new student cohort for the first time as director. I cannot remember much about that day, but I vividly remember that other day, 30 years earlier: the maroon t-shirt and khaki shorts I was wearing; the Body Shop lotion I had rubbed into my legs; the vistas of adulthood lying reassuringly ahead, where I liked them. 

Sometimes I think time is the most profound subject of art: Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu; Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Sometimes I think it is the only subject. My grandfather passed away last year, but there is a plaque on a seat in Elder Hall, acknowledging a donation he and my beloved grandmother made during our most recent fundraising campaign. He doesn’t really need a plaque; he is there anyway. For years I used his metronome for my practice, until it became so wayward I surrendered, and uploaded an App to my phone instead. 

Professor Anna Goldsworthy is Director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music, and an award-winning pianist, author and playwright.

The metronome in the image belonged to Anna’s grandfather, Reuben Goldsworthy, also an accomplished teacher and pianist who gifted this symbol of time to his granddaughter, along with his lifelong passion for music. 

Photos by Isaac Freeman, photographic editor of Lumen.