Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

She played and I recognized the piece. Bach’s Chaconne. Do you know it?

I do.

One of the finest pieces of music written for the violin. Johannes Brahms wrote about Bach’s Chaconne in a letter to Clara Schumann, saying that it captured every emotion possible in a few minutes and that if he, Brahms, had written it, he would surely have gone mad.*

How did you come to know it?

Mathematicians like Bach. You must know that.

Zafar was right in a sense. I read in one of my father’s science journals about a study showing that a strangely disproportionate number of mathematicians rank Bach as their favorite composer.

Yes, but how did you first hear it?

I arrived for a tutorial with Professor Sylvester one day. There was classical music playing in her room. As I sat down, she went over to turn it off, but I asked her if we could listen for a minute. After the tutorial, she asked me if I wanted to borrow the cassette. That’s how I found my first ninety minutes of Bach. The Chaconne was on that tape.

Emily, continued Zafar, played with technical mastery. The violin was in tune, the harmonies were in tune, there were no scratches of the bow, the music was straight and clean. I am not a musician, I have never learned to play a musical instrument, but I’d heard enough music to be able to tell these things at least. What I could not account for then was the emotion I had: I felt nothing. The music was lifeless.

I have heard musicians speak of phrasing and shaping, I know that they talk about articulation and interpretation, but I do not know what they mean when they use these terms, not precisely, and I knew less then. All I could say was that her music, music that was perfect in its notes, was cold to me, but I doubted my authority; I felt I could not pronounce on these things, that I would exceed my station.

These rehearsals were fraught with guilt for me but not because of the subterfuge involved. I tell you why I sneaked into those halls. I did not sneak in because these were rehearsals from which the public were excluded; in fact, many of them were open to the public, and there were rehearsals where I saw visitors come and go, sit and listen. I sneaked in because this music did not belong to me and I had no right in it. And because I had no right, there was guilt. I felt treacherous, but of what?

Of course you have a right! I said with an emphasis that surprised me.

But that was how I felt. It’s not about passports or naturalization certificates.

Exactly. It belongs to everyone.

Do you know Bach’s Prelude No. 1, The Well-Tempered Clavier ?

Not by name.

You probably do know it. It’s a beautiful piece and quite short. It has a lot in common, I think, with his first cello suite: a geometric simplicity and progression. I heard it once — the prelude — at one of those lunchtime concerts in Hall, and the student sitting next to me asked me what I made of it. I thought he was probably asking me about the performance rather than the composition, and I remember thinking it would be presumptuous to comment on the skill of the pianist when I knew nothing of playing the piano. It’s a beautiful piece of music, I replied. The young man smiled and said that he’d always thought it a trifling thing, a practice piece for children.

That’s ridiculous, I said to Zafar.

I now think he was wrong, continued Zafar. But it takes time to overcome another person’s educated confidence. The feeling of entitlement is just that, it’s just a feeling. Just as the feeling that one does not have an entitlement is nothing more than a feeling.

Isn’t that a matter of choice?

Can you choose not to love a person?

Don’t you mean: Can you choose to love a person?

Well, that would be more relevant to you, wouldn’t it?

Bach’s Chaconne, you were saying?

There might be ways to make it easier not to resent another person.

Chaconne.

We’ll come back to it, said Zafar.

But again he seemed to disappear into his own thoughts.

* * *

Some years ago, in my first year at Oxford as I recall, a friend of my mother, an actress-turned-director, came to dinner in my parents’ home. The director described tools an actor might use to convey intelligence. It seemed to me that certain character traits come off a person without words, that they just rise from the surface like moisture burned off by the sun, and intelligence, I thought, was just such a trait. I’ve met people whose intelligence is apparent, before sound waves can carry their words — not infrequently, they are a rather laconic sort. But how, I wondered to my mother’s friend, does an actor convey the intelligence of a character, an Einstein or a Newton, whose intelligence might be greater than his own?* The director explained that one device is to have the character appear to drift off into his thoughts.

Today I regard her thesis with a certain skepticism. There are many reasons why a person might wander off into his or her own thoughts, daydreams, and preoccupations. She might, for instance, be contemplating what color nail polish she should wear for the upcoming ball next weekend. He might be wondering if he switched off the gas on the stove and could be retracing his movements before leaving the house.

There I was, continued Zafar, sitting in a patch of shadow in the church, she oblivious of my presence, listening to this note-perfect rendering, technically accomplished even to my ear and yet hollow. It made a mark on me. A few years later, in 1991, at a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I asked the German composer Nathanael Sandmann-Hoffmann, a visiting professor of musicology, if he had encountered this.

Encountered what?

I asked him if he’d ever heard a piece of music played perfectly, music that he knew was sublime, and yet had been completely unmoved by it. The professor’s face broke into a wrinkled smile, and I thought he was remembering some moment or episode, perhaps once forgotten, that had amused him.

I have, he replied, setting down his glass of wine by the stem.

In the last year, explained the professor, there was in Berlin a concert, which was of course the year after the coming down of the wall, in fact. Many musicians from East Germany are now in West Germany, the doors to which have suddenly opened to them. A number of such musicians are very good indeed. There was such a feeling of excitement in the German air, so much goodwill toward all men, with reunification now an imminent reality. The political mood added to one’s excitement as a lover of music to hear all these musicians from the East. As I have mentioned to you, I attended a concert that included a performance of … it was Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major by a young German pianist from Leipzig, the city where Sebastian Bach was cantor at St. Thomas, as I expect you know.

The German people, continued the professor, can be rather earnest about their music, which is not in every instance to be taken for discernment. On this occasion, the whole audience leaned forward and furrowed their brows in the most severely concentrating manner. I felt exactly what you have described. I wanted, so to speak, to shout, The emperor has no clothes! The music was stillborn. It was really quite dead. But, you know, this sort of thing is very common in conservatories. I see it all the time in students. I have under my tutelage one student now, for example, who plays in this way. He is from the southern part of America, from Alabama, I believe, and, I gather, he comes from a devout Baptist Christian family. I have wanted to say to him that he should get out more, that he should live a little. He should get himself fucked, I have wanted to say, as the great Martha Graham said to her dancers, but of course the sexual correctness of the American university being what it is, I have never done so.