You talk of 'losing yourself in music'.
It is the comfy clothes of the clichés of approbation to be used
today - like 'love'. To 'love' a band could mean a degree of enjoyment
or devotion that spans mild appreciation for the choice of the iTunes
shuffle, or rampant, obsessive fandom.
This last week, I was late for the
concert of a brilliant pianist, and declining to make an obvious
entry between the flow of pieces (between which there was no window
of applause), I felt it necessary to rather linger in the
anteroom outside than intrude foolishly amongst the better-mannered,
and more punctual audience. I sank onto a step, and listened.
There is nothing so thrilling, I
have often said, as the green-room sound of an orchestra warming up
in the pit. The Konserv at Stellenbosch is a myriad of doors and
walls whose generous confines occasionally allow vaporous sounds,
thrilling airs, to flutter past the passers-by. What now emptied from
the hall was an overflow of notes, tumbling and raining down from
Chopin and Rachmaninov preludes. Streams and cascades fell between
torrential thunderstrokes with earth-moving finality, and I was left
breathless.
Another person appeared. We smiled
briefly at each other, in reciprocal sympathy for our tardiness, and
mutual pleasure of the performance. He hovered at the crack of the
door. I watched in fascination as, eyes closed, he his fingers began
to move, yearning after the sounds pouring from the keys, his head
tossing gently in thorough acquaintance of the piece.
Another man entered; a small man,
compact, with wizened grey scruff covering his face and pate, and
with a ready smile, though missing a tooth or two, and gesticulating,
with the over-exaggeration of a complete foreigner, he mimed a
request to join me on the little step. I smiled and budged over, a
gesture more to indicate my willingness than of necessity. In
unbroken silence – but for the thunderous passion booming gently
through the walls – the three of us lingered to wait out the storm.
Though the first soon left, the second remained tucked on the step,
blue cap in hand, staring at the carpet, tossing his head,
dolphinlike, to the waves.
I could feel my head beginning to
empty. It had been alarming, the first time this happened, to feel
the return of conscious thought seeping back cautiously after the
first brilliant performance I witnessed. I felt like I had somehow
broken the bonds of gravity and had floated in ephemeral space,
buoyed up by the flurry and flourish of the tumultuous sound of that
stately instrument. But now I embraced it. The very furtherest extent
of my thought, when it did come, was that next door, these notes were
being brought to life; someone's fingers were creating and killing
them right next door. And as they dripped and danced about the room,
I was swept up in the tide, plummeting from their short lives,
jostled out by over-eager successors.
With gradual interest I began to notice
my little foreigner on the opposite end of my step. Sitting with
knees pulled up close, half-leaning against the wall, one hand lay
forgotten, neatly on his lap, and the other brought to his eyes. It
was too intense for sleeping; I watched his chest heave with mighty
effort - I half expected to presently find him weeping - moved beyond expression by what he heard. I could not but
look on with envy and with awe, admiring him from one step away.
Could that unearthly music be made visual, if you could paint it, it was, all
its electrical energy, its heavy falls, all its impossible pouring
rivers, somehow entirely captured by this little man, huddled against
a carpeted wall, his eyes closed in thorough absorption.
And then I was lost. We stayed for the
rest of the concert, slipping in at the eventual applause for an
encore, and witnessed the insect fingers that scuttled at inhuman
speeds, bringing forth more sounds than could be heard, and joined
the applause at the end. But if I forget the face of the pianist, I
will never forget the face of his music.
I shook hands with him afterwards, and
he held mine. Even if I could speak his language, I don't know what I
would have said to convey my wonder of his.
