Why do we sing? What ever prompted some precursor of the homo sapiens to open her mouth and emit a sound that had no essential communicative purpose (or perhaps it did), to belt out a song? Was this a lament? It may have been joyful. It may be that an idle moment came and with it the realization that there was one more thing this voice could do. It could have been in imitation of a bird or a beast. It was, perhaps, a beautiful mistake.
At some point, someone no doubt made the serendipitous discovery that a string stretched across a space and plucked made a pleasing noise. I would imagine they already knew that striking a hollow piece of wood with a solid one made a delightful sound. A raw voice, a plucked string, a drum. Many punk rock bands began with less.
I recently attended a transcendent performance of the Second Piano Concerto of Rachmaninov at the Seattle Symphony. I was struck not only by the essential beauty of the music, but much more deeply moved by the sheer unlikeliness of all these forces coming together in this place together to form this sound. How is it that the plucked string became the four of the violin, or, yet more remarkable, the 88 of the piano encased in a wooden box and struck with hammers? What wells and vast oceans of creativity and genius are implied by the existence of the bassoon. Have you really looked at a bassoon recently? It's come a long way from blowing over the mouth of a hollowed reed.
I also find the dedication implied by the mastery displayed by the 26-year-old pianist Behzod Abduraimov nearly unfathomable. To have a delicacy of touch while maintaining such essential power of expression is astonishing enough, but to show such range and comprehension at such a young age is awe-inspiring. Add to that the hundred or so other musicians who had to pursue their art for decades to reach this stage and meld themselves so perfectly with his playing. Multiply that by the sacrifices which must have been made by families to support these pursuits. Then step back and marvel that we value this noise highly enough to build a beautiful and expensive hall to contain it, that we will pay to see it, will go out of our way, give up a quiet night at home to witness it. I know the word is overused, but this all seems to me something of a miracle.
We plucked a string. We howled a dirge. We whiled a way an hour wondering what would happen if we carved a hole just there on this hollow stick. To us, a cello may seem obvious, but nothing about it was foreordained. It could have been otherwise. Yet there I sat, gazing at hands much like mine that could do things mine never could and never will be able to do, using the same muscles and tendons and ligaments I use for shoveling dirt to coax from a box with strings and hammers the sound of gods and angels.
I have no idea what the genesis of music is in us humans. It is surely unique to us. Though birds sing and other animals low and bellow and roar and growl and bark and purr and hiss, nothing in any other species approaches this essential surrender to complex form and function, growing in complexity as our history progresses, until the stage is set for the wonders of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Adams, and, yes, Rachmaninov. Oh, I know, there are those who have written the history of music; I'm sure I could learn, if I wished, precisely how we got here. But I don't care about the physical history of the thing. What causes me to wonder, to sit back in awe, with tears in my eyes, is pondering what in us holds beauty so dear that we would give such a vast quantity of our time, our effort, our tears, our failures, and our genius to making and witnessing it. That I was present at one of those nexuses of time in which all of this came together in a moment of transcendent bliss seems improbable at best. And yet I was and was transformed, as all art makes us more than what we were and ever more human and, simultaneously, divine.
At some point, someone no doubt made the serendipitous discovery that a string stretched across a space and plucked made a pleasing noise. I would imagine they already knew that striking a hollow piece of wood with a solid one made a delightful sound. A raw voice, a plucked string, a drum. Many punk rock bands began with less.
I recently attended a transcendent performance of the Second Piano Concerto of Rachmaninov at the Seattle Symphony. I was struck not only by the essential beauty of the music, but much more deeply moved by the sheer unlikeliness of all these forces coming together in this place together to form this sound. How is it that the plucked string became the four of the violin, or, yet more remarkable, the 88 of the piano encased in a wooden box and struck with hammers? What wells and vast oceans of creativity and genius are implied by the existence of the bassoon. Have you really looked at a bassoon recently? It's come a long way from blowing over the mouth of a hollowed reed.
I also find the dedication implied by the mastery displayed by the 26-year-old pianist Behzod Abduraimov nearly unfathomable. To have a delicacy of touch while maintaining such essential power of expression is astonishing enough, but to show such range and comprehension at such a young age is awe-inspiring. Add to that the hundred or so other musicians who had to pursue their art for decades to reach this stage and meld themselves so perfectly with his playing. Multiply that by the sacrifices which must have been made by families to support these pursuits. Then step back and marvel that we value this noise highly enough to build a beautiful and expensive hall to contain it, that we will pay to see it, will go out of our way, give up a quiet night at home to witness it. I know the word is overused, but this all seems to me something of a miracle.
We plucked a string. We howled a dirge. We whiled a way an hour wondering what would happen if we carved a hole just there on this hollow stick. To us, a cello may seem obvious, but nothing about it was foreordained. It could have been otherwise. Yet there I sat, gazing at hands much like mine that could do things mine never could and never will be able to do, using the same muscles and tendons and ligaments I use for shoveling dirt to coax from a box with strings and hammers the sound of gods and angels.
I have no idea what the genesis of music is in us humans. It is surely unique to us. Though birds sing and other animals low and bellow and roar and growl and bark and purr and hiss, nothing in any other species approaches this essential surrender to complex form and function, growing in complexity as our history progresses, until the stage is set for the wonders of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Adams, and, yes, Rachmaninov. Oh, I know, there are those who have written the history of music; I'm sure I could learn, if I wished, precisely how we got here. But I don't care about the physical history of the thing. What causes me to wonder, to sit back in awe, with tears in my eyes, is pondering what in us holds beauty so dear that we would give such a vast quantity of our time, our effort, our tears, our failures, and our genius to making and witnessing it. That I was present at one of those nexuses of time in which all of this came together in a moment of transcendent bliss seems improbable at best. And yet I was and was transformed, as all art makes us more than what we were and ever more human and, simultaneously, divine.
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