It was a rainy day in ’92 when I decided to use a letter as the libretto for a short, experimental opera I was near completing. The letter was long, nearly five pages, and it had been mailed by a young woman who claimed to be a great-grand-niece of the late German conductor and composer, Otto Schlotzhauer, of Munchen, Bavaria. How the letter reached me and set off the series of events that followed, I never understood -- but I was astounded that day, when as a college senior, upon pulling back the brass hinged door of my campus post box, I discovered a single envelope resting on its side. I reached my fingers into the box slowly and hesitated over the envelope before grasping it. Something like an electric jolt shot through my fingers. I felt a psychic hammer blow to my head -- a feeling that my life had been perturbed. I was possessed. Possessed. Exhilarated. Dismayed. was wholly overcome by the thought of my own damnation. A student at The Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, it just so happened that I was obsessed with Schlotzhauer. I was obsessed with trying to emulate – from my limited capabilities – his ability to evoke tactile emotions from the scores he conducted and from the musicians who played them. From what I had studied about him, and from listening to recordings, I could attest to the fact that listening to his musical evocations was the same as experience a concrete happening. For lack of a better description, attending his performances resulted in the experience of a thing. An actual thing. Matter or energy, I would not venture to state, but I would state something was made real. The notes on the page were transmuted into feeling. The feelings were transmuted into substance! This was not only my opinion, but had been corroborated by first-hand witnesses, audience members I had spoken with as primary resources for my senior thesis, who stated the same idea – that the music took on the sort of substance one feels when playing with magnets of the same charge by holding them close together. Anyone who has played with magnets that slide away from one another knows that there is vigor there. A solid, perceivable, magnetic vigor. This vigor was what I was interested in achieving as a young student, as an experimental composer. Was it a learnable skill? Was it a God-given talent? I did not know, but the mysterious envelope’s arrival at precisely that moment in my life -- that moment when I was most aware of my vigor -- was synchronous, to say the least. I noticed that neither name on this found object was my own -- Phillip Tsong. Though I stared a good fifteen seconds at the envelope, it never appeared, never materialized. It was meant to have gone to Florida. It had arrived from Budapest. Regardless, I took the envelope! I did not drop it back into the outgoing slot. I did not bring it up with the student help working there that day. I took the letter, placed it in my bag, and walked out!
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 03:18:10 +0000
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