This afternoon when I might have been mopping the floor I dug out the book of Bach two-part inventions and sat down at the piano. I hadn't played a Bach invention in a long time, so it was a slow and clunky process to inch my way through a few of them. But it was an unexpectedly satisfying process too. I love the glimpses inside the brain of someone long dead. I want to ask him: how did you decide on that chord? I would never have come up with that riff on the theme -- how long did it take you? This is, I suppose, why Bach is regarded as a composer of enduring genius and I am not.
Playing music is a specifically incarnational kind of pleasure. My brain signals my fingers with a blend of long-buried muscle memory and busy in-the-moment thought; my fingers tell the keys to move the hammers, which set the strings and the wood case into vibration. My ears receive that vibration, and through the everyday miracle of a lightning-fast Fourier transform I am able to make sense of the signal. My soul is fed by something that requires the intense engagement of my body. The work of sitting at the keyboard, fixing my mistakes and slogging along to the next measure, affords me an enjoyment that I just don't get from listening to recorded music, pleasant as that may be.
Today I felt a distinctive burst of satisfaction every time I got to the last measure and played the chords before the final resolution. There's a bit of dissonance in that last measure, most often a seventh chord that's prepping the listener for the last note. And I don't know why, but today that dissonance scratched a spot I hadn't known was itchy. I am telling you this in case you could use a little encouragement to sit down at a slightly dusty musical instrument. Mopping has its virtues but I don't find that it feeds my soul.
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