| was terrified of losing my place in the rests. Counting measures always put me into a trance of daydreaming, and I had to resort to counting on my fingers, something I still do today. When my mind slipped away, the fingers would continue to mark the measures, and sometimes I could recapture the number. It's an awful feeling, in an opera you don't know well, to have lost the countwaiting for your next entrance, usually a solo, wondering if you will recognize it, if the conductor will cue you beforehand, or if he will only glare wrathfully when it is too late. Before all this, when I was a child, I would fall asleep listening to music, and wake hearing music no man had written, and that would drain away from me far too quickly, like water from a leaping fish. I grieved its loss, and I sought out its source in every piece of music I learned. I never found it, but sometimes I felt near. And never so near as in the mystical constructions, the crystal-like structures of J. S. Bach. Now, so many years later, I know from experience that this is one mystery I was not destined to penetrate, that all I can expect is to perform these great works, and endure the wanderings of my mind. And what do I think of? Of anything. |
| When I am playing a solo, as I am tonight, I think of what I must do afterward, of bowing. Of whether I shake the conductor's hand first or the concertmaster's. Or I think of all the times I have played this piece, or, more likely yet, I think of the hours spent practicing, of waiting to perform it, of imagining its performance. Where does the music come from? I might as well be asleep, where perhaps I still hear those unearthly symphonies. One part of me minds the music; and that is not a conscious thing, rather a kind of falling, a slow falling, like a dive into green water with the surface almost out of sight. And the other part is wading in cattails with my rod held high, thick rubber boots over my knees, the smell of the mud just released in bubbles around me as I step and sink, and the sudden jar of the water moccasin striking my leg. |
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