Tales Which Have Neither Sense nor Reason

So, I know that I always add passages, quotes, and excerpts from one thing or another in my blog. This may or may not be annoying, but to be consistent, here’s an excerpt from The Collector, by John Fowlers. It’s often considered to be an avant-garde piece in the psychological thriller genre.

Another time G.P. It was soon after the icy douche (what he said about my work). I was restless one evening. I went round to his flat. About ten. He had his dressing-gown on.

I was just going to bed, he said.

I wanted to hear some music, i said. I’ll go away. But I didn’t.

He said, it’s late.

I said I was depressed. It had been a beastly day and Caroline had been so silly at supper.

He let me go up and made me sit on the divan and he put on some music and turned out the lights and the moon came through the window. It fell on my legs and lap through the skylight, a lovely slow silver moon. Sailing. And he sat in the armchair on the other side of the room, in the shadows.

It was the music.

The Goldberg Variations.

There was one towards the end that was very slow, very simple, very sad, but so beautiful beyond words or drawing or anything but music, beautiful there in the moonlight. Moon-music, so silvery, so far, so noble.

The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.

Accepting the sadness. Knowing that to pretend it was all gay was treachery. Treachery to everyone sad at the moment, everyone ever sad, treachery to such music, such truth.

In all the fuss and anxiety and the shoddiness and the business of London, making a career, getting pashes, art, learning, grabbing frantically at experience, suddenly this silent silver room full of that music.

Like lying on one’s back as we did in Spain when we slept out looking up between the fig-branches into the star-corridors, the great seas and oceans of stars. Knowing what it was to be in a universe.

I cried. In silence.

At the end, he said, now can I go to bed? Gently, making fun of me a little bit, bringing me back to earth. And I went. I don’t think we said anything. I can’t remember. He had his little dry smile, he could see I was moved.

His perfect tact.

I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me.

Not for his sake, but for being alive’s.

The first time I finished this passage, I immediately reread it, savouring the words. Then I proceeded to type out the whole passage in my Google Drive folder, which I fill with inspirational and beautiful writing. (In Fowlers’ novel, the eponymous character collects butterflies and young girls. I collect bits and pieces of interesting poetry and prose.)

I also do love to savour Bach’s Goldberg Variations -- usually Glenn Gould’s recordings. I also savour Bach’s Cello Suite 1, as I’m sure many other classical music aficionados do as well. I’m also not sure how many times I’ve listened to Bach’s Partita in D minor for violin, particularly the Chaconne (BWV 1004)¹.

In one episode of the NBC TV show Hannibal, the titular character remarks that the piano, an instrument he plays masterfully (in addition to harpsichord), has the quality of a memory.

I find that this is true.

I’ve played piano since elementary school. Over the years I picked up other instruments -- the recorder in third grade (I owned a plastic blue one and switched parts with my friends to make a tri-color accessory), the violin a year after that, the guitar (partially), and vocal choir -- but none seem to be so poignant as the piano to me. Perhaps because it was my first instrument, but to me, it is the definition of versatility and sentimentality. Piano introduced me to Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and jazz music; to Bach and Brahms and Coltrane and Herbie Hancock and Helene Grimaud.

But all music carries memory. It’s a kind of travelling to me. I wrote in my college apps about how writing, particularly fictional writing, transports me to different civilizations and timelines.

Music is another kind of traveling for me. Deep, magical forests engulf me when I play Stravinsky’s Firebird with my orchestra (read about that here). On piano, when playing Mendelssohn’s boat songs, I’m aboard a rocking gondola, floating through Venice’s waterways, serenaded by a gondolier. Playing traditional Vietnamese piano music for my parents brings a piece of the old country to our home here in America.

It’s impacted me monumentally; but only recently have I realized how much it’s influenced me. Since I’ve been surrounded by music -- classical, pop, Eastern, Western -- since I was young, it’s almost as though I take it for granted, as though I can’t really fathom the influence it has on my life since I can’t imagine my life without it; I’ve never had life without it.

Music.

There’s so much history, so much beauty:

From orchestra days playing Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, which reminds me of weekend retreats, up in the mountains surrounded by my fellow orchestra members, playing music for hours in rehearsal only to return to our cabins and practice individually some more, listening to this music and imagining the story of a vizier’s daughter, a collector (hah) of stories and anecdotes, who told these enthralling, enchanting tales to keep herself alive for a thousand and one nights, an infinite, timeless desert story  --

To listening to Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, imagining a smoky, blue club in New Orleans during the Harlem Renaissance, living in the time of a revolution! in a time of new poetry and new literature and new ideas, to spending nights and nights inside these jazz clubs listening to upright basses and seductive saxophones and knowing that that is soul music --

To learning of Helene Grimaud, a woman who fell in love with Brahms’ music at a young age, hearing her play and watching her, brim full of emotion, this indescribable, unnamable thing, thinking she -- she would just explode, because the music channeled through her, the feeling channeled through her is too much.

Imagine music back then. Imagine the symphony in the 1800s playing, and you only hear it once -- listening to music then was an active thing, an activity that required sight and sound and --

And the piano, the music, has the quality of a memory because it’s transient; it’s this beautiful thing.

Now, every day we have ways of channeling emotion, of articulating ourselves; there’s something raw and beautiful about something indescribable, something about the indefinite the indefinable, undefinable. Now we can access this emotion and feeling and quite literally time-travel anywhere we want by listening to these songs.

It’s so interesting to me: music from Brahms, over 100 years ago, played today still has so much energy, and memory, but it’s not quite the same emotion, not the same; it’s layered, so that every artists’ interpretation of this music has been woven together in this beautiful thing, this sort of Frankenstein retelling. How can we understand, relate, to music written so long ago? Because music is like emotion translated into sound: minor keys are associated with sadness, major keys with happiness.

But why? How can something “sound” happy?

Perhaps it has something to do with the way we can recognize emotion even in other languages, or how we can read body language; this universal way to connect, to sympathize, empathize.

Regardless, to me music is a large part of my life, but never one to be taken lightly.

“The piano has a quality of a memory."

- Hannibal

“Your heart will become a dusty piano in the basement of a church and she will play you when no one is looking.

Now you understand why it’s called an organ.”

- Rudy Francisco

¹ “Our guest today is the violinist Itzhak Perlman, who is going to play the Partita in D minor, by Bach. The work ends with the great Chaconne, the best known of all Bach’s works for unaccompanied violin, and one of his most remarkable achievements.” This was the introduction given for Itzhak Perlman’s performance of the Partita at Saint John’s Smith square in London, in 1978. Acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell has said the Chaconne is “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect.” Composer Johannes Brahms wrote to his peer in 1877: “On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.” [Wikipedia’s article on Partita for Violin No. 2 (Bach)]