September 3, 2007
Work
I like the way musicians and athletes think about work. It’s a way that seems to escape the many of us. They just don’t call it work, they call it play. Even the amateurs in the arts and in the sports (literally, the lovers of the work or whatever) catch some of that spirit when they’re into it and, of course, have shoes that fit.
Millions of people are are out of work and without a place to lose themselves. Millions of people have only make-do work, without a place to find themselves. This Labor Day and all the others celebrate work and workers. It’s a kind of gossamer holiday, maybe even a joke on ourselves. For those of us for whom it is a day off from a work that does not exist, it is not even much of a time for play and too much of a time for anxiety.
An ad more or less about work and play came in the mail the other day. It announced, and urged me to be excited about, a piano that performs all by itself at the touch of a button.
It assured me that I could hear — and even watch — my piano play my favorite songs — jazz to country, classical to Broadway. “It’s almost like your favorite artists right in your living room,” it claimed. A player grand “system” awaits you, now starting at under $10,000.
The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz once was asked, What is music? He answered that music is made up of little dots on a page, some black and some white. He said that anyone can learn to “read the dots,” then render them quite accurately on some instrument, rather like an expert stenographer might transcribe shorthand.
But, he warned, this is not music. One must first discover what is “behind the dots” for there to be music. Then one must play this discovery from one’s heart in one’s own way with spirit and imagination, maybe even quite differently from time to time, and certainly not be satisfied merely to replicate it. Only then is there music.
I thought about the ad and about Horowitz’s definition when CP and I were lately at a reception in the great lobby of one of those fashionably musty retirement high-rises for the geriatrophied among us. You know the type — motel art on the walls, artificial schefflera in Rooms-to-Go Ming Dynasty urns, make-believe orientals on the floors. Over in one corner, the faux theme continued. Nineteenth-century parlor ballads labored forth out of a splendid Yamaha grand, its Walter-Mitty keys pock-a-ta, pock-a-ta-ing right along. There seemed to be absolutely nothing behind its dots, ironically putting one more musician, might we say, out of work, off the bench, and out of play.
As soon as CP was distracted elsewhere and nobody was watching, I disconnected the Yamaha’s life support. Nobody else seemed to notice, but the silence was music to my ears.
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