I can remember the image of the classical musicians laughing at me; they were laughing for many reasons. Foremost, they laughed out of fear, fear for me and fear of me. They knew what they had been through to achieve their level of success. They knew all the tricks that they learned by making mistakes. They knew I was likely to make all those mistakes too, if I stayed in pursuit of the dream, the idea, and they drew their laughter out of the many emotions that their frustrations had drawn out of them through the years. They could remember the emotions; it was one of the keys to playing well, knowing what you were supposed to feel when you were playing a piece, and putting all of that feeling into the instrument and making the instrument sound the emanation. They laughed because it is next to impossible to learn how to play like that; to play like that without a mentor is a phenomenon that scares them, because it means more frustration, born of something not obvious or something obvious that maybe they hadn’t thought about or felt. They wanted to be prepared to play, but that is no easy task.
When I told them I was going to compose a symphony, they laughed even harder; it was like a hard rain of a hurricane becoming the band filled wit the most saturation, the saturation that rises from below the ground and goes to the highest storm cloud of the storm. People don’t write symphonies – they progress through music circles and they wind up with one already written that they piece together out of works they already know. They looked at me, struggling to remember which key I was in, which note my finger was on, unable to read music at speed, nearly incapable of keeping time on a score sheet, and their laughter, well, even I could understand their voice.
That, was thirty years ago. Some days these days, I can remember the key, and I can play well enough to demonstrate and hear the idea; but I am still riding against the wind. I am still riding against the opposition which says “Symphonies are for time; make contemporary music first”. But maybe that’s all wrong. Maybe wanting to be a writer, wanting to build a system to create inroads to Education and motivation and music and arts and sciences and broadcasting and the religion of scriptures, all of it reaching out toward enlightenment, toward God is THE SYMPHONY, the sound of the place where we are, and that is the sound which reaches out to time.
I still wondered, would they bother to hear? Would they bother to notice that my applications say NEED EMPLOYMENT not WANT employment, although want is “in there too”. I want to work, but they’re not letting me. I work on my own, I study, I practice, I learn, but the cost is taking my life now, not in some distant future. The cost has me practicing where I compete with the echo of the airplane that just took off with its four hundred dollar seats, and my five cent bank account. I don’t have a room where I can hear the notes, the reach of the emotion, the feel changing in response to hitting it wrong, or staying the same when it is right. I am likely to get pushed around “just one more time” like a junkie on a last ride, an winter is here, although it is nearly 90 degrees outside today, winter is here, because the cold will penetrate my “practice room”, but I will not stop playing until the instrument is taken too, and the cold is snow and the freezing is penetrating the practice room of the downtown parking lot where I am managing to get nearly an hour, maybe two a day instead of the three or four or more [on the subject] that it takes to catch the wind. I am nearly all caught up with the wind, but the wind does not seem to penetrate the laughter ….
No comments:
Post a Comment