Remembering During a week saturated day and night in piano, the first Gilmore Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, MI 1991 One pianist, over a week of long lunch breaks, played every Beethoven Sonata for piano every one. One after the other after the other in an intimate hall of a small town museum. I took off my white lab coat, removed my latex gloves, safety goggles, and radiation monitor badge, closed my research notebook and stepped away from the bleached safe metal lab bench. I walked alone the tree shaded blocks, to the glass and steel museum, down the granite stairs and into the basement reception hall filled with plastic chairs a grand piano. For four days I sat in the front row, a mere arms length from the arms that were playing, watching fingers fly, brows focus, feeling the vibrations deep in my bones. I could hear the pianists sighs, his moans and gasps. I felt his fingertips on the keys, his foot on the pedals. I imagined Beethoven himself, there, close enough to touch. I basked in the notes as if they were sunlight, they permeated me like soaking in a hot springs. Separation fell away. I wept. I swooned. I joyed. At some point he began to play my body. The final day I did not sit in the front. I stayed in the very back. Two steps above the seated crowd I leaned against the door jam. This lunchtime one of the three sonatas he would play was The Appassionato. Unseen by the rest I closed my eyes and gave myself over to Beethoven. After four days of foreplay, I said succumbed. I swayed, sighed, and moaned into the crescendos, was silent with longing during the pianissimos. Hips and shoulders moved in their little, uncontrollable ways. My arms raised over my head. My body became the sounding board, as well as the keys, the hands, the composer, the woman. I felt the rise and fall of the written, visual score. I smelled the musk of the artist pouring himself out as he wrote it, I felt the first piano ever to receive this music. I fell free fall, breathless, into the valleys of anticipation, and climbed the blazing heights of insistent fingers until, somewhere in the third movement, my knees gave way. I slid down the door jam, head back, lips parted, eyelids closed, my dress billowed about my legs. Gone. Applause woke me from reverie. The crowd was standing, cheering, all but one. One man at the far end of the back row stood in his fine tailored bankers suit, unmoving, watching me. The softest of smiles on his face, his eyes understanding. Ive been told that within certain indigenous traditions an event is made real by the witness. I had a witness. Beethoven The Appassionato Enjoy youtube/watch?v=1yCiFZvjfuU
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 13:02:16 +0000
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