Word of the Day

I transcribed the complete Dictionary of Ro thinking it might help me understand the mechanics of inventing a language. It did not, but it was a fun mindlock for a few days. I became interested in Ro after spotting the 2-letter word on a Wordswarm.net Random Words page.

I have transcribed many things in the same spirit. I copied long poems -- From Gloucester Out by Ed Dorn and BREATHLAHEM by Jim Brodey -- in a spirit of both servitude and hoped-for bonding. All those words passing through my hands, I imagined, would grease the wheels of inspiration and lead to me writing like those great poets.

No such transformation happened. My poetry is bad, and my poetry will always be bad no matter if I transcribed every line of poetry from Shakespeare's "fairest creaturesto Ginsberg's "urn of ashes". The mechanical act of reproducing great and not-so-great works of others lead me to no ease of craft or connection with the masters.

I may have arrived at this notion of inspiration-via-replication from having been a pianist for so long. Classical music is a re-creative art, an art of compromise in which the traditions of past eras meet practices of today. At one stage of my life my knowledge of the pianists' repertoire was pretty comprehensive, and I imagined that a pianist whose knowledge of the reportoire is fluid might be at an advantage when they set pen to paper and compose their own scores. As with the transcribing of poetry I find that all that a systematic knowledge of others' music gave me little advantage in creating my own music. The value comes from the dialogue between one individual and another, not from laborious analysis and marching orders.

One of the most pointless rituals of conservatory life was the march to the library to listen to every available recording of a certain piece of music. This routine part of the learning process assumed an imitative relationship between the student and the recording artists.

I did this too though I felt it was folly.

My feelings about the futility of this ritual were confirmed in a breakthrough moment at the conservatory library.

While attempting to learn the Chopin G Minor Ballade I, like any typical conservatory student, went to the library to hear as many recordings I could find of this piece. I might have sat through a dozen or so recordings by pianists of varied fame before spotting a strange item in the card catalogue. I remember the card as being very old with minimal information about the record, but it appeared to be an old recording by an unknown artist of this Chopin Ballade.

The record, it turned out, was in storage, and I had to wait a day or two for it to be retrieved from there.

A day or two later I had the record, or rather records. It was a stack of 78rpm platters of Vladimir Horowitz playing Chopin and Liszt. I had to find a special turntable at the library to play these ancient discs, which spun so fast that each side only held a couple of minutes worth of music. If I remember right the Chopin Ballade was broken up across 4 or 5 sides of these records, and as each side ended I could tell where Horowitz stopped his playing to accommodate for the end of the side and the listener's manual process of flipping the records over to continue the music.

These logistics, while exciting in their way and evocative of a past era in recorded sound, took nothing from the unbelievable sounds of Horowitz attacking this Chopin Ballade like Jacob wrestling with God. I had never wept so freely at the sounds coming off a record. I sat for hours replaying the old 78rpm platters, watching them spin so fast that the needle almost jumped from the surface of the records,  listening and listening again as the sounds of Horowitz roared like a conquering lion.

I would later hear and vigorously agree with the oft-repeated cliché about Horowitz, that to hear him play was to feel you had been deaf your whole life. Everything sounded different to me after that day. Not just music but everything. Those days in which I listened and re-listened to that Chopin Ballade and then the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody #6 made me believe more strongly than ever that the  imitative approach to pianism was the worst kind. Yes, I had found a recording which changed the way I thought about the music I was learning but it was in a way that I could never imitate, in a way that made imitation look preposterous, and in a way that made all my work up until then seem tiny. I never played that Chopin Ballade again.