April 5, 2020
Today, after spending around two years away, I re-joined Facebook. Everything there was still intact, and I was able to get in instant touch with my friends from long ago and far away, and could see how they are doing in their various places of isolation. I left Facebook so that I could engage more in real life relationships—actual experiences with people, and now that such relationships are not possible I’m very grateful that Facebook is there. Wherever there is. I practiced the last two movements of Beethoven Opus 59/1 today, and will be ready to play it with a recording (my own personal Beethoven year project) by the end of the week. It is hard and high, and some parts go really fast.
Michael and I went to get gas for our mowers today, and there were more cars on the streets in Charleston than you would probably see in New York, Chicago, Boston, or Los Angeles. I learned from a Facebook friend that 53% of people in Charleston are staying home. I’m not sure where that number comes from, or how true it is. Tonight, with mask and gloves, Michael is going to pick up take-out food from El Rancherito. Our kids, who grew up eating there, are very excited. We will send pictures that they can see in their homes in Los Angeles and Boston.
April 6, 2020
I like to imagine a future where we can play music together again, but I fear that the changes that will happen in the musical world after the virus has been eradicated will be lasting. It took more than ten years for musical life in my part of the country to recover from the audience loss that happened as a result of the recession. How can we be sure that people who like to go to concerts will have the money to support performing organizations, or even buy tickets, once we are able to play concerts again?
The online professional musical possibilities for musicians are expanding, I guess. More and more people are figuring out how to teach through various video platforms. Some people boast of their great success. What if this becomes the new normal after the virus is gone? What will happen to the profound kinds of musical interactions that happen between students and teachers when they can play together and make one another's instruments vibrate because of resonance. Not being able to really hear what is coming out of a student's instrument because of the lack of high-quality reception means that I am not able to accurately tell if a solution I suggest is really working. Do other people experience this as a frustration, or am I just a fish out of water, a relic of an older kind of musical life. And now is as good a time as any for a passage from Fernando Pessoa:
I'm like a playing card belonging to an old and unrecognizable suit--the sole survivor of a lost deck. I have no meaning, I don't know my worth, there's nothing I can compare myself with to discover what I am, and to make such a discovery would be of no use to anyone. And so, describing myself in image after image--not without truth, but with lies mixed in--I end up more in the images than in me, stating myself until I no longer exist, writing with my soul for ink, useful for nothing except writing. But the reaction ceases, and again I resign myself. I go back to who I am, even if it's nothing. And a hint of tears that weren't cried makes my stiff eyes burn; a hint of anguish that wasn't felt gets caught in my dry throat. But I don't even know what I would have cried over, if I'd cried, nor why it is that I didn't cry over it. The fiction follows me, like my shadow. And what I want is to sleep.
[Section 193 of "A Factless Autobiography” from The Book of Disquiet translated by Richard Zenith]
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