Concert

This came from the concept of my fictional pianist, lost in the Himalayas, his fingers bleeding from the cold and climbing. I played a concert in Kathmandu back in 1964. The next day, the ceiling collapsed in the embassy and the piano was destroyed. It may have taken the rap for me.

I did the yeti films in the Chugach because the commercialism of the Himalayas has altered its former isolation.

Beckett said that the characters of Proust are like giants buried in the ages, touching the past and the future at the same time. The hieroglyphic scratchings of the antiquated system of musical neumes come from Pope Gregory II in 720 or so, although the art of writing down notes began in the 10th century. It will continue into the unforeseen future.

The high priestly language of Egyptian hieroglyphics was chanted or sung from memory, as were Homer’s Odyssey and the Norse sagas.

The poem is a metaphor for writing, especially in the disappearing ink of altitude, where you can’t remember anything once you’re above 18,000 feet and without oxygen. “Metaphor” is Greek for transcription, translation.

Every pianist has been somewhat horrified by the Harvey Keitel character in Fingers, his fingers bleeding on the keys. The Bach E Minor Toccata he plays is the same one Chris O’Riley played for the Tippet Rise barn raising and in The Making of Beethoven’s Quartet.

Every concert pianist worries that the hieroglyphics of music, what T. S. Eliot called “the inexplicable mysteries of sound,” are koans, paeans, runes out of forgotten cultures that can only be partly absorbed, at best, by a modern audience.

Backcountry skiers used animal skins, now made of Teflon, for traction in skiing uphill. But of course pianists touch the ages with the skin of their fingers. Music is a life or death event, where musicians play for their lives, as the Polish pianist Szpilman played for his survival in front of Wilhelm Hosenfeld, a Wehrmacht captain who hid and fed him as a result, which Polanski dramatized in his film The Pianist.

Every concert is a prayer for survival, for the momentary suspension of the cosmic momentum.

The aura of the night sky is as outmoded as classical music. The glistening points of starlight are what happened millions of years ago. Most miracles, most mirages are illusions from an unseen sea, from invisible gods, from microscopic water particles in the equally vaporous atmosphere. The miracles of sound we present as prestidigitations from ancient Egyptian magic or from Restoration drawing rooms are frequencies fallen out of the air from centuries ago, its notes as likely to disappear as letters on the erasable writing tablets children use as toys, although Snapchat, Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp base their popularity on digital versions of disappearing messages.

If sounds from the past flash up and disappear after a concert like words inside the Magic 8 Ball, at least we can will them into reappearance with our dedication as musicians and as fans.