Notes From the Dead

[Voilą another Brinkerhoffian discursion. -- The Producer]

It occurred to me one day that those of us who have wasted their youth indoors struggling with the hormonal instinct to pound out the diabolical sheaves of the waste of other people's lives personified vicariously in sheet music which our parents have mistakenly or nefariously allowed us to encounter, and those of us who have similarly and no doubt consequently wasted the precious carcinogenic beach bum post-adolescent Coppertone years, when no folly goes unspurned, trying to tame those by-now memorized and memorialized hormonal imbalances, while simultaneously trussed and hamstrung by the digital misfits, the pre-silicon pathological polymaths who pass off their misanthropy as tutelage, well, it occurred to me when thinking of all or some of this that we have now ourselves become those touts, direct heirs to the great tonal tyrants, and as such have thirty years or so invested in the tiny songs we replay endlessly because they fly by in seconds, and that when we hear others play our pieces we know why each note is the way it is, why it is different, maybe even what the cold-lipped keyboard technician had for lunch, and that all this passively-amassed trivia and profundity is passed from musician to musician without ever being recorded, that no non-musician will ever be privy to it, and who thereby, lacking such stockpiles of gossip and glory, cannot be expected to appreciate the vast failures and small successes that make the musician's world so syncopatedly dismal and orgiastic.

    No one ever told me this was privileged information, possibly because no one ever thought I had retained any of it, which is perhaps why I have only a hundred pages of things to remember about what it is I think I am doing, but I thought the telling might at least delineate the gap between those who are obsessed with the piano and those who secretly hope it will roll into the orchestra pit and take the flailing pianist with it, leaving nothing on stage but a bit of smoke and wire, thus providing the thread which leads backwards through time to that juvenile, vaguely fatal Minotaur, as all sudden deaths in music, such as Lully, blood poisoned by stamping on his foot while beating time with his enormous baton; or Alkan, crushed to death by his bookcase while reaching for the Talmud; or Fritz Wunderlich, who fell down the stairs - all such deaths may possibly have taken place slightly before the presumptive late musician was about to reveal issues similar to those you are about to encounter. I am of course foolishly allowing myself the luxury of anecdotal liberty.