It has been a while since I heard this piece by Beethoven. I know it sounds hoity-toity to listen to classical music. Or that our daughter prefers it over “All Things Considered” or gangster rap, particularly when rap is played on “All things considered”. If tamil music or hindi music were piping in at those hours, and if that were something I’d want to listen every day in my off-time, I would gladly do it.
But say what you may, the music by these guys does have something in it. I know as much about sonata in C minor, as I do about the music made by the whales or gangster rap. But the music I tend to like has to do a few things: (1) Should take me places and jog a few memories (2) Be good to listen to, without having a to hum the more objectionable lyrics.
I just ran into one today. It took me a bit longer than usual today to drop our daughter off at school today. The president was on the radio discussing the need to raise the debt ceiling, and how progress has been too slow for the market’s comfort. She sat silent for the ten minutes he was on, looking out the window. I asked her if she knew who that was on the radio. “President Obama”, she piped up. I felt bad she wasn’t getting her share of music, and switched stations to land at a hip hop music station. She yelled “No! Something else appa!” The little one does not like loud music. I thought to myself “Just wait until you know what the lyrics mean!” So I played the CD, which played a nice Beethoven piece, which she wanted to listen to again. I dropped her off soon thereafter, and was pulling out of the lot, when a familiar song started playing.
It is called “Moonlight”, a piano sonata; whatever a sonata is. It took me back 15 years to Chicago. The lab where I worked was an old creaky building. There were 5 of us graduate students, and 3 post-doctoral researchers. The advisor was an interesting fellow. He lived in his office most of the time, when he owned a place in a ritzy part of downtown. One weekend, he had a couple of his students move in his piano to his office from his apartment. He seemed restless most of the time, partly due to the funding situation. So to calm his mind, he played the piano and played it so well. You learn that you know so little of someone, when it catches you by surprise at hearing them play the piano.
This story of one weekend that summer, and it involves one of the Korean PhD students, a quiet and unassuming waif of a man. He always struck me as the stereotypical, self-conscious Asian student, who was used to taking a lot of flak for mistakes; be they his own or others. He lived in the dorm with his wife and 3 children, and hardly ever spent time with them. His PhD work was floundering, and it looked like it would take another 2 years to reach the finish line. The situation had been tense between him and our advisor. Its not a good prospect, when you have a family to support, and invested 4 years of your life into work, and then realize that you could lose it all. The only thing I saw of him those days fear; fear of our advisor, fear of the uncertainty, fear of losing everything he had worked for, and a lot of self-loathing.
All that changed that weekend. I sat in the sofa in the reading room, reading a journal that morning, when in walks this guy. I knew right away that something was on his mind. He looked into our advisor’s office to make sure he wasn’t around and sat down at the piano. He played the Moonlight sonata. The piece has a very gently, melancholy feel to it. Coming from him though, it carried a purely rebellious intonation to it. I made him play it three more times, and even got him to teach me the first line. Of course, I forgot how to within a few seconds after. After he played it, he quietly got up and went back to his corner of the lab. That was the last I heard him play. It was as though, he wanted to prove to himself that there was more to the life than work and work. He did end up graduating, although a good 3 years later, and works somewhere in Seoul. I never thought of him as the classical pianist type, even though he had the long fingers for it.
All along this song was in the CD, and I kept skipping it, since there was a great piece coming right after it. That’s what I meant by the power of a good piece. It can take you back years, as though it happened yesterday. I played the piece 3 times between the school and the office.
Good times. Good times.
