Music, My Love

For someone who hardly ever bothers to turn iTunes on when I'm on my computer, or to utilize my cd player/radio stereo, it's perhaps an audacious claim--but I say music is in my blood. It's intoxicating, it's heartbreaking. It's the classical music I heard all the time as a kid, Dvorak's New World Symphony transfused into my system. And when all the other genres I've embraced pour into the mix, it can be like vinegar and soda; it spills onto the piano in a wretched torrent of feelings and clumsy fingers. I am sure, I am so sure that Beethoven--when he could hear--and if he could restrain his rage at my lack of technical discipline--would know exactly what I was saying tonight on the piano. I don't even begin to suggest he would have thought me a great pianist. I'm severely undisciplined. It's ideas, ideas, feelings, sentences, questions, exasperation, insistence, acquiescence, the daughters of Jerusalem.. and I think Beethoven would have understood every word. And whatever beauty is behind the speckles will stay behind the speckles unless I let go of the purely experiential aspect. Trial by fire-refine it, tear it up, remake it, rediscover it, set it free. And so far, it's far easier to leave the music in its prime state, like a child cavorting in the forest, chopping at trees, picking flowers, with no shame or conscience that it's muddy and and lost, because in that world, home is never more than two or three chords away.