MICROSTORY OF ART

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Dedicated to School

(Picture: Bodoklecksel)

School

(21.8.2023) The song School by the band Supertramp opens with a mouth harp, as if we would embark to see a Spaghetti Western (in German: Italowestern). With wide panoramic landscape views, rough territories, close-ups of worn-out faces, and tragic memories coming back. But no, we go to school. And this is big opera, too. Actually it is probably the one big opera in life that never ends (in one’s lifetime), the reservoir of memories that have to do with hopes and fears, with cruelty, boredom, humiliation, desperation and all that, with love perhaps and hope for finding love, and we probably measure all that comes afterwards with what we have experienced in school. And a feel of slow motion, even of a lacking sense of time, is one of my memories, although reason might tell me that this particular time span in which I might have felt that has been rather short.
The song School by the band Supertramp is staged like a drama, like a mini-opera, and although it is not a song which is particularly convenient to be played on the piano, it is famous for its piano solo (or piano break). Actually the song is staged to reach this piano solo, an outbreak of unspeakable memories, sadness, desperation, perhaps, after which there is a clearing storm of aggressive emotions to finish this drama which is never finished.

1) On Sadness

It is interesting to note that the song School, whose main composer seems to be Roger Hodgson, is not a celebration of having learned the three chords at school, from a teacher, but a celebration of sadness. We will come to the question of how to treat one’s memories from school with fairness later, but the chords the song is built on, the harmonic pattern (A-Minor, E-Minor, E-minor, D-Minor; A-Minor, E-Minor, G-Major, D-Minor), is sad in itself, without being associated with a retrospective view on school. And with the three chords Roger Hodgson seems to have learned from a teacher I mean the very basic musical skills that allowed him to accompany a song on a guitar or a piano. And this might actually also be seen as the start of a remarkable career as a composer of songs.
But School definitely displays sadness. And the reason for this seems to be that the song is about not to have had the kind of upbringing one later wishes or imagines to have had. And the question here would be: are you really being fair about your present life? Or do you blame school for everything that went wrong, although you did learn the three chords at school?
Was there »dark sarcasm in the classroom« as Pink Floyd had it? No, it seems that, here, it was (and it is) about a retrospective view on school that diagnoses: I did not get what I would have needed, and this can never be changed, since time is sealed, and there is no going back to correct that.
Pink Floyd, by the way, with Another Brick in the Wall, the other song inspired by the English school system, staged and imagined a surreal defiant march, defined by a Nile-Rodgers-kind of rhythm guitar part, a defiant march of school children, against an Orwellian system of thought control. And these two influencal songs see and define school in various ways, but both songs are about school in retrospection, and it is interesting to think about how one did experiences these two influential songs while being at school. Was it that serious? Perhaps. But the experience was probably diverse, and perhaps one does find what one is looking for, in the deep well of one‘s memories, and if one did learn at least the three chords at school, one should remain a little cautious, afterwards, to be that critical about one’s upbringing.

2) The Piano Solo

I find the piano solo not that difficult to play today, but I remember that I found it difficult to play then (while being at school). And this makes a huge difference. It is not, I think, that I would not have been able technically to play it then, but somehow, then, some insight (as to the voicings of the right hand, perhaps) was lacking. And if I find it rather easy to play now, while I am sure that I found it difficult then, this makes me somehow happy now. Because I have overcome this particular difficulty of finding out about the voicings of the right hand.
Playing through that solo, whose composer certainly is Rick Davies, means to experience deep sadness, perhaps the sadness of Rick Davies, who seems to have helped also with the lyrics of this song, so that one can imagine that the experiences of Rick Davies at school might come in here, but to play through that solo is also a complicated kind of joy now, and perhaps this is meaningful, since it means that it can be possible to reach a different view on things, but also a different grasp of things. Banal things, less banal things (such as piano voices), or things that are not banal at all (perhaps such as the view on one’s own past, of one’s own experiences at school).

3) Fairness and Memory

It is interesting to review one’s experiences through a certain prism, might it be the prism of the Italowestern, or the prism of one (or two songs). To review means: to take a slightly remote view, a playful view, and this seems also to be a healthy way to confront one’s own past. One does know what is true and what it is not (and time is sealed), but the prism can be changed. And the actual catalyst of this short musing on School was not the song in the first place, but actually a book I had come across, a book that seemed to promise to sum up, in one volume, all the knowledge one had to learn in school regarding six main topics. And I did browse this book playfully, to check my knowledge as to the physics of the bike perhaps, or as to peoples of the past pushing other people (tribes) towards Europe. It seemed to be a ridiculous perspective to hallucinate that such one book would have replaced ›going to school‹ (since, due to this one book, one would have had all one needed), but so ridiculous a perspective that it inspired me to look in another directions, so that the next step could be to see school, all the memories from school, through the prism of a song, a piano solo, and through the prims of sadness. But this is not the only prism. Even sadness is made of many elements, and suddenly one of these elements might turn sadness into something else. May the mouth harp sound again! But now it it may be a Spaghetti Western on TV.

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