In the fall of 1984, in Rochester, New York, I walked into Kilbourn Hall to watch my close friends in the newly coined Meliora String Quartet perform their debut recital as the student ensemble specially selected to be apprenticed to the Cleveland Quartet at the Eastman School of Music. I was a third-year doctoral student, working on my dissertation and not sure of anything except that I had somehow fooled myself into believing that I was a composer. The Meliora played Debussy on the first half of the concert. I had only listened to this quartet once before, when cramming for my masters exam at Penn. Now the Andantino came to me as if I had never heard any music at all before now. I was shattered. As the movement unfolded, I became so overwrought that I slid down onto the floor beneath my seat, hoping my hyperventilation wouldnt disturb anyone (luckily, I was sitting way up in the last row, on my own). To this day, I dont know why that music devastated me so completely. It probably had something to do with the fact that my friends were making it happen. It was beyond my comprehension how these four kids—who I hung out with and threw baseballs at and had Buffalo wings with—could bring this miracle of beauty into being. Whatever the reasons, I slunk out of the hall after the Andantino, shuffled back to my dorm room, got into bed, and didnt rise again for three days. I wish I was kidding. It was one of the worst passages of my life. I had a high fever the whole time. When I didnt show up for meals, my friends living on the same hallway brought me soup and bread and told me later that I mostly muttered nonsense and sweated like...well, like someone suffering from a bout of Debussy-induced flu. What I experienced at that recital, and during the following ordeal, was something like a Confirmation ceremony. Every great native culture has one for both its young men and women. Mine transpired inadvertently. I was to the mania born; I just needed the right circumstances, and a floating virus, to set it in motion. 30 years later, Im still afraid of the slow movement of the Debussy Quartet. Meliora means Get Better! Its the motto of the University of Rochester. Nope. Sorry, alma mater. Ive got the bug for good. Heres the Tokyo Quartet. So good. https://youtube/watch?v=efVsasSSyec
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 01:15:05 +0000
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