Living in harmony with musical neighbours
Tolerance is a wonderful British quality, but it can be sorely tested by the budding genius next door
What do you consider an acceptable decibel? Last week an Essex couple lost a costly two-year legal battle with a neighbour whose garden pond, they said, trickled too loudly and made them constantly need the loo. By contrast, the neighbours of a Herefordshire woman with a yapping terrier brought a successful case which ended with £30,000 costs and a one-way trip to the vet for Scally the dog.
Barking can certainly drive you round the bend. But what about music? Does classical piano belong on the irritation spectrum between yapping dog and trickling pond?
Having pounded the keys myself at the Royal College of Music (RCM) at all hours of day and night, obliviously fixated on my dream of a piano career, I instinctively take the side of the unlucky Carrabino brothers – James, 17, and Stephen, 14, who have had a noise abatement order slapped on them by Kensington council at the behest of their neighbour.
The brothers study at the RCM; James has been a finalist in Young Musician of the Year, and is working towards a concert career.
But the council order restricts the boys to only two hours’ practice a day. Since you need three or four hours for serious technical work, this is likely to kill off their ambitions, argues their lawyer. This cuts no ice with the neighbour, who said his family life is being ruined by the “torture” of piano playing and sang tunelessly in court in order to illustrate what he meant.
The protagonists are multimillionaires. But money cannot guarantee peace and quiet, and despite my sympathies for the talented young musicians, I can see the complainant’s point. Our former neighbour was determined to master
Danny Boy on the piano in his conservatory, just the other side of the fence, and went over and over it hour after hour, day after day, always stumbling at the same place.
How I longed to climb that fence and beg him to let me provide one tiny lesson so he could move on, perhaps to bloody Für Elise. Instead, I climbed the walls. Thank God, the new neighbours only have a yapping dog. That’s preferable to me; I’m not even considering a court order.
What this case reveals is that learning classical music isn’t all wonder and beauty. Skill on the piano or violin or trumpet comes with endless repetition of exercises in order to perfect the muscular control required for evenness of tone and gradations of expression and subtlety. Then once you practise the wondrous and beautiful piece itself, you not only have to practise the same bleeding chunks over and over, but you also need to develop a wholly different volume, attack and penetrating tone – one suitable not for your lounge, but for the concert hall. If the neighbours
can’t hear it through the party wall, you’re being too discreet.
That there are professional musicians up and down the land who don’t get taken to court, therefore, is a sign of the tolerance that exists in Britain. We should rejoice at this. And while their neighbour’s wish to curtail the boys’ professional progress may seem pretty heartless, it turns out that his determination to silence them is mild compared to some. The neighbour of a Spanish concert pianist, for example, demanded not only seven years’ jail for the performer but a legal ban on her from engaging in any musical activities whatever.
And we should remember, too, that North Korea carried out a nuclear test last month partly in reaction to South Korea blaring Kpop over the border. Music can be the food of war, not love.