James Rhodes: Find what you love and let it kill you Bashny.Net

My life as a concert pianist can be frustrating, lonely, demoralizing and exhausting. But is it worth it? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt.

After the inevitable "How many hours a day do you practice?" and "Show me your hands", that often people say to me when they hear I'm a pianist is "I played the piano in childhood. I'm really sorry that I left". I represent writers who have lost count of the people who speak about the "book inside them".

I think we've become a society, mourning and lost creativity. A world where people just give up (or which were driven into submission) sleep walking to work, home, the payments on the mortgage, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, children with attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity, and the temptation to eat fastfudnogo chicken in the course of correspondence with the customers at 8 PM on a weekend.





Count. We can function – sometimes quite brilliantly – with six hours of sleep a night. Eight hours at work was more than enough for centuries (Oh the desperate irony that we actually work more with since invented the Internet and smartphones). Four hours is enough to take care of the children, clean the apartment, to eat, to wash and various others.

And we are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do what we want. And all we want is to freeze and give even more money to Simon Cowell (the popular British TV presenter)? To scroll through the feed of Twitter and Facebook in search of romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? Experience the nostalgia, painfully drunk in a pub where you can't even smoke?

What if you could know everything you need about playing the piano for hours (something like that claimed the late great Glenn Gould, which I believe is true)? The basics of how to practice and read music, the physical mechanics of the movement and position of the fingers, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece – these can be written and distributed as a guide for self-assembling furniture; it falls on you to make you scream and you cry, and drive the nails in my fingers in the hope to decipher something unspeakably foreign yet; and if you are very lucky, in the end, you get something resembling the final product.

What if a couple of hundred pounds, you could get an old piano on EBay? And then you would say that with the right teacher and 40 minutes of practice a day, you can learn to play you always wanted to be able to play in just a few short weeks? It would be worth studying?

What if instead of the reader's club, you joined the writer's club? Where every week you would (really should) bring three pages of your novel, tales, plays and read them aloud?

What if instead of paying £ 70 a month for membership at a fitness club that enjoys making you feel fat, guilty and infinitely distant from man, whom I married your wife, you would have bought a few blank canvases and some paint, and spent every day painting your version of "I love you", until you realize that any woman that, would you (as Jack rose in "Titanic") just for that despite the lack of cubes you have on the stomach?

I have not played the piano for 10 years. Decade, the slow death of the greedy work in the city, chasing something that never happened in the first place (security, sauvagine, don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer).

And just when the pain of doing a stronger business than the perceived pain of doing this, I somehow found the strength to do what I really wanted and what was possessed with 7 years – to be a concert pianist.

According to the General opinion, I moved by a few extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four classes for a full day the amazing and insane teacher in Verona, a desire that was so necessary; it cost me my marriage, nine months in a psychiatric hospital, most of my personal dignity and the loss of about 16 kg of weight.

And the pot of gold at the other end of the rainbow, well, maybe not the disney happy ending, the way I saw it, lying 10-year-old in bed and listening to Horowitz, Rachmaninoff performing in Carnegie Hall.

My life is filled with endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practice, the lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively evil reviews, isolation, confusing incentive programs, airlines, psychotherapy, stretchable nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage until filled room), punctuated by short moments of extreme tension (to play 120 thousand characters from memory in the correct order with the right fingers, the right sound with the right pressing on the pedal, in parallel telling about the composers and their works, and knowing that in a hall there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghosts of the past and they all look) and perhaps most devastating – the understanding that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. And just maybe someday, with luck, hard work and a hefty dose of self-forgiveness, he will be "pretty good".

And again. The indescribable reward to take a stack of scribbled ink on paper from the shelf in a music store Chappell of bond street. To take the metro home, to put the score, pencil, coffee and ashtray on the piano and after a few days, weeks or months to be able to do something that crazy, brilliant, demented composer 300 years ago heard in his head, while his mind was gone from grief or love or syphilis.

A piece of music that will always baffle the greatest minds in the world, which just can't be meaningless, it still lives and floats in the ether and will do so for centuries to come. This is incredible. And I did it. I'm doing this, to my continuing surprise, all the time.



The government cut music programs in school and reduces subsidies on the arts with the same glee as behaving pathologically American kid in Baskin Robbins. So if it concerns the person, is not worth it to fight his little way?

So, write your damn book. Learn a Chopin prelude, go to an exhibition of Jason Pollock with the kids, spend a few hours writing a haiku. Do it because it has value even without the fanfare, the money, fame and photo shoot in Heat magazine that all our children now think they are now entitled because Harry styles (member of the musical group One Direction) made it.

 



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The translation of the column of James Rhodes in the guardian.

 

 



Source: iva2012.livejournal.com/2506.html