“Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind..”
Virginia Woolf’s description of the way in which memory works is a fine description of Elayne Jones’s book, Little Lady With A Big Drum. It has been advertised as “the official autobiography” of percussionist Jones. It has also been described as “the story of one woman’s remarkable life and career in her own words; a journey from meager beginnings as a self-described ‘skinny little girl from Harlem,’ to the highest echelons of classical music; with a musical talent and personal drive that enabled her to transcend racial and gender barriers.”
Let’s unpick both of these descriptions a bit, particularly the language used here. For a start, I am uneasy about the ‘transcend’ rhetoric. This is the story of the first black, female percussionist in a well-known American orchestra. Jones is forthright in describing the obstacles she encountered from the very beginning of her acquaintance with the piano at age six, and the political occupies the foreground of her story much of the time, not least because of her involvement in many initiatives, and her determination to make music available to as many as possible. Access is a horribly overused and misunderstood word, but this is exactly what drives her. She loves the music that weaves itself through her life and wants everyone to have the opportunity to experience it from the inside out. She is very clear – it’s not a matter that somehow, if you’re talented enough, all those pesky barriers won’t matter, and if you didn’t succeed, you just weren’t good enough after all. It’s about having good teachers from the very beginning, and ensemble opportunities, and exposure to good playing and music through listening to concerts and gigs. And it’s about being heard on your own merits, rather than through the warping effects of bias and corruption. I am also wary of these ‘highest echelons’ – what is it about certain classical institutions that allows them the cultural authority accorded by such a description? What exactly is the ‘excellence’ that is assumed of these places? Elayne Jones, in her long career, was timpanist of the New York City Opera, the American Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. She freelanced across a wide variety of genres from jazz to music theatre to classical, gave workshops and lectures, taught percussion. Which bits of that extraordinary richness of music-making is permitted to call itself the ‘highest echelons’, and which aren’t?
Thus, Jones’s book is the story of a not-so-historical era that still underpins how much of the classical music world still operates. It is the story of systems and hierarchies, and how they are so often seen as more important than the wonderful, glorious music about which Jones herself is so passionate. It is her own story, indeed an autobiography, but what is that? There have been many explorations of the white-and-male-dominated idea of what an autobiography really is, with the assumption of a teleological structure that maps to a subject’s external chronology. There is little sense that this strict adherence to the idea of time passing is what is important for Jones, or indeed at times even her own position in her own story; I am much more put in mind of Audre Lorde’s finding meaning in recognising difference; of Adrienne Rich’s careful combination of personal grounding and theoretical observation; of Maya Angelou’s examination of “some of the ways love heals and helps a person to climb impossible heights and rise from immeasurable depths”, and Carolyn Heilbrun’s search for autobiography in the actual living of a life, in all its chaos and incoherence - all ways of making our personal narrative interact with the people and places and ways of thinking that are the things that shape us.
There is an integrity to this way of writing, a veracity that is pulled out into the open by an unashamed adherence to it. It gives a hierarchy to Jones’s story; it’s very easy to see what is important to her. It is also because one gets the feeling that much of her life is private to her, or so engrained, so much part of her, that she would be surprised if someone asked for words to fit it. She does not explicitly speak of her divorce, although she reflects on the reasons for it in her customarily frank yet humanitarian and empathetic way. And there is surprisingly little musical detail, especially in the later sections,. Jones does recount being asked why she wants “to play music by white men”, a question she avoids to a large extent. This falls into the category of so obvious that it doesn’t need saying – Jones loves this music – but still, I’d like to know if she sees gaps in the repertoire – if she wants music by black composers, female composers (she once shared a dormitory at Tanglewood with composer Julia Perry, though they remained acquaintances rather than friends). She does touch on the technical complexities of her life as a percussionist, and one particular description delighted me as a non-drummer:
“Timpanists must tune the instrument, hear the notes they need either by having absolute pitch, or knowing the music well enough to use relative pitch for chordal structure […] while singing and tuning the note at the same time, I must keep the count of where I am […] I am kept extremely busy and for the most part I am all alone like swimming in a sea of sharks waiting to devour me.”
At the same time, in the midst of this contextualised way of writing, there is also a sense of the fragmented experience that belongs to us all. Jones is clear that this can only be a snapshot, no matter how wide-angle. Her experience as a black musician in NYC was already different from those of black musicians in the South. Her confrontation of issues arising from the collision of motherhood and creativity is also particularly foregrounded here. She writes about this act of juggling, the expectation of the world that if women are brash enough to think they can do both, that the conflicts and mess must be kept hidden. (There is a meme currently doing the rounds of social media, that says “We expect women to work like they don't have children and raise children as if they don't work”. There is more than a grain of truth here.)
The whole book could have done with a good edit. There are repetitions, sometimes literal, typos and misspellings (Aaron Copland’s name being one example). But that’s my English teacher grandmother channelling herself through me, and I’ll put that part of me back in its box.
This book should be required reading for anyone engaging in classical music through outreach, concert-giving, education, or any of the other ways that music reaches people. Despite Jones thinking that racism is here to stay, she writes with hope, and with such humanitarian empathy.
As she says, “Dreams motivate us to do better, whether they are real or not.”
Elayne Jones plays timpani in this 1953 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5.