Thank you, Coldplay, for the power of 'Viva La Vida'

A little musical discipline is worth its weight in gold

SLOUGH, ENGLAND:

In 2011, my husband brought home a gorgeous Yamaha acoustic guitar. “I am going to master this,” he informed me solemnly. Now. You don’t know this man, but you already know where this story is headed. You are thinking, “I bet that guitar has become a dust collector of the highest order as you moved from house to house, and I bet no one has ever looked at it since he brought it home.”

Well, you, dear reader, are too cynical for your own good, because only a mere ten years later, the dust came off, and our budding musician booked himself some guitar lessons. Buoyed by her father’s budding musical genius, Rania, our third-born announced that she wished nothing more than a piano for her seventh birthday. A 44-key keyboard was procured, and this time you, oh prescient one, are thinking, “There is no way that child is going to look at that keyboard half an hour after she gets it.”

You are, of course, absolutely correct. Rania’s attention melted away with dismaying swiftness, which turned out to be excellent news for our firstborn, Rayan, who seized upon the keyboard as if it were the last face mask in a global pandemic. “I’ll keep this in my room if no one wants it,” he said to no one in particular and whisked it away before his sister could realise what had just happened. Night after night, with the aid of YouTube videos, he sat in his room for hours at a stretch, finding his way around Counting Stars by One Republic.

“I need a bigger keyboard,” he said six months later.

Rayan got his wish when a full-size keyboard found its way into our home. At the time, we had moved from South Africa back to the UK, which was a terrible state of affairs for Rayan, because he now found himself in a school surrounded by teenage boys committed to becoming the leading future criminals of the hemisphere.  

“My school is horrible,” he said every single night for a whole year. “They threw a bottle at the music teacher today and made her cry. The maths makes no sense and I’m shorter than everyone else. I want to move schools.”

Tragically, moving to a school where he was taller and the maths was easier was not an option. His plight was made worse by the irritating knowledge that his sisters were thriving at their school academically and had made about a million new (shorter) friends. The only bright spark on the horizon in his life was the hour he had at home every evening with the full-sized keyboard and a YouTube video. He had by now graduated to Viva La Vida by Coldplay, which was apparently a lot harder.

“You don’t understand,” he explained to me, a musical dunce with only a Grade 8 in flute. “It’s got a very syncopated bass rhythm and it’s in A flat. That means there are 4 flats, you see.”

I did see, because I figured if my 14-year-old could pick it up after only a few weeks of YouTube videos, I, a bonafide flautist with an A-level in music, would probably be able to pick it up in an hour. I couldn’t, not even after six months. Using two hands to play piano, it transpires, is a lot harder than blowing into a flute. Delighted by my failure, my darling boy finally learned how play Viva La Vida with his eyes closed, pronounced Counting Stars ‘babyish’, and moved on to perfecting Mozart’s Turkish march.

Musically, he was doing astronomically well. Mathematically, however, his test scores continued to plummet. “It’s because our teacher never taught us any of this,” he explained.

Rayan loves to blame his teachers for anything he can pin on them but often forgets that he lives with a Pakistani mother. “Listen,” I said, suddenly remembering being told at school that children who play an instrument are excellent mathematicians. (This research has never applied to me personally.) “You have all of YouTube at your fingertips. I don’t care if your teacher hasn’t taught you. Look it up and figure it out.”

This was the extent of my parenting advice because I couldn’t figure out how to factorise equations any better than I could master Coldplay on the piano.  Because he is a teenager, my dear son resisted all attempts to listen to common sense. However, after my daily figure-it-out lecture proved far too tiresome, he dragged himself over to his laptop and started devoting two hours every night to doing past papers. Already well-versed in using YouTube to teach himself new skills, for every answer he got wrong, he looked up how to get it right in a video. Two months later, on his next paper, he got 63/80. It was as if he had won the Nobel Prize for maths.

“I actually got the highest in the class, but, you know, I don’t really care about that,” he said in a cool off-hand tone trying to hide unsuccessfully that he cared more about his stratospheric scores than anything else in the world.

Suddenly, my boy stopped worrying that he was the shortest in his year. He began to walk straighter and started taking charge of his own learning. His brain, so used to soaking up new skills, began to apply the same methods to all his other subjects. The Ds that he was getting when we first moved here have turned into As. That piano ended up being the best investment we ever made. It saved the boy who was on the verge of giving up, taught him the power of resilience, and allowed me to appreciate Viva La Vida in a way I never had before.  

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