From: sorabji (Mark Alexander Thomas)
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 94 19:28:07 EST


was watching the new horowitz video tonight ("Reminiscences"), saw some of 
it on ch. 13 earlier.  this always happens when i see him play.  his 
hands, it's almost obscene sometimes the way they hack and thrash, then 
they sit and listen, then they hem and haw and rip it up all at once.  
it's like watching a hurricane, it's awesomely beautiful and threatening 
and beautiful and disgusting.

i mean i go on like this, but Horowitz truly changed my life.  i 
hate saying things like that because people say it all the time, "jfk 
changed my life, prufrock changed my life, howl changed my life..."  but 
one day i was in the music library at oberlin and i found these old old 
78 rpm records of horowitz playing chopin and liszt.  not all that old, i 
later found out, they were from 1947, but i have this certain thrill to 
see a 78 rpm record whiz around the turntable so fast, the needle almost 
jumping off the record at times, the hiss and crackle of those old 
shellac platters it still seems miraculous -- sound, recording, it must 
have been such a miracle when it was new.

i was about to give up the piano and go run a drug store somewhere.  i'd 
been listening to recording after recording of pianist after pianist 
playing chopin after chopin g minor ballade, op. 23.  i was learning the 
piece myself, and doing what all piano majors do when they learn a new 
piece, which was go through the card catalogue and get every recording 
of the piece and listen to it, study it, take dutiful notes.  it was 
such a waste of time.

but when these horowitz records, when i first started hearing them i knew 
something was different, i knew this music sounded all wrong, all right, 
it roared it cursed it beat its chest and strangled me and i was flipping 
the records like an addict placing the syringe up to his arm, i was 
shaking and crying and feeling as if i'd been deaf all my life and i 
skipped 4 classes that day listening listening listening.  

i'm blabbering, trying to watch this video and type at the same time.

what finally happened, though, the thing that he did that stopped my 
whole life for several moments is that when i wrote him a letter saying 
kind of what i just said here, when i told him the truth about things and 
about how hearing him play that day was like hearing sound for the first 
time --- he wrote back to me.  he wrote me a beautiful, sincere 
letter which i think about almost every single day of my life.  he said 
that if you expect to become a musician you should study all the arts, 
architecture and painting and opera and the sciences, and when you've done 
all that and you still want to be a pianist, you should first learn all 
the operas, all the symphones, all the chamber music and lieder before 
you're ready for the piano music.



i bumped into David Dubal once at Coliseum Books on Broadway.  he wrote 
some books about Horowitz and knew him well during the last years and 
months.  i told him about the letter horowitz had sent me, and Dubal 
really surprised me by saying he saw literally thousand of letters coming 
in to Horowitz every single week, and Horowitz responded to virtually none 
of them. i have to say that this really shocked me, because i'd chosen to 
belittle this thing as much as possible by assuming he wrote to 
everybody who wrote to him.

i place a lot of stock now in whether or not people respond to letters i 
send them.


Also, look here.