#3. A Quickie with Stravinsky
"The wound is the place where the Light enters you" - Rumi
It's a rainy Autumn Wednesday in Berlin. Golden leaves of varying hues are flying through the air with the audacity of a third act and the fallen Linden flowers have coated the concrete with a slippery sap, turning many morning commutes into banana peel slapstick. I make my way through the unpleasantness, across town to the revered Berliner Philharmoniker, for their weekly lunchtime recital. Free to the public, this short lunch hour program is a seasonal rotation of orchestral members, emerging artists and dazzling repertoire.
The foyer is packed to the brim with no demographic in sight. Seats are filled, the carpet is strewn, even the zig-zagging staircases are lined with dangling limbs, young and old from all nations and walks of life. In the moment the crowd falls silent and players begin to tune, taking their preparatory breaths, where we’ve been and where we’re going ceases to exist. All that matters in that moment is togetherness.
Something keeps bringing me back to my old life lately.
As far back as I can remember, Saturday mornings smelt of resin. Somehow I landed the first lesson of the day and it stuck for over a decade, arriving every week to bone cold ivory and the strongest part of freshly burning incense. My teacher told stories while I played, something about saints and conspiracies, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, all the regulars. All the greats. Eventually I moved from the buttercup yellow upright in the front room of the Strathfield terrace to the vast expanse of the main studio’s grand Bösendorfer where my hand span always felt inadequate and you really had to work to make those keys sing.
My musical trajectory was never mapped. It budded until I noticed Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier would quench my thirst like running water and every other kind of academia became severely uninteresting and even detestable. I enjoyed the meditative rigour of music, the challenge and validation of excelling as well as the simultaneous peace and rush that performing brought me. Then, before I knew it, it bloomed.
The piano as an instrument is so beautifully brutal. Unless you are in the small percentile able to have a Steinway flown to you, you make do with what you get. Sparkling and new or honky tonk and wooden, you must always be the conduit for music most consider holy. You dare not take too many liberties, but you better play like no one's ever heard before. You dare not make a mistake but if you do, it better not be sizable or even noticed. You better do what you’re supposed to, always, and never ever make it about you.
The first time I played a Fazioli on loan from the Sydney Town Hall in the Verbrugghen Hall of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, I was already in my fourth year, preparing for my final honours recitals. I still remember the sound cutting through the air like a golden drop of opium falling onto an outstretched tongue. In slow motion. So electric. So bright. So golden. I had been playing for over two decades but it was a sound I’d never heard before. In an endlessly timeless sea, those are the musical moments I cling to.
I am not a virtuoso, and I don’t care to be. I’m an evocative mood setter. A colour-inner. A conjurer. Moments before stepping onto stage my then teacher said to me, lay your ego out to pasture and allow something bigger to move through you, you are but a vessel. The truth is though, there's a hefty price to pay for momentary bliss, too often in the currency of sacrifice and loneliness.
During the London years early on in my career, I spent a lot of time underground at a music studio somewhere at the end of the northern line practising, teaching, accompanying, and performing. In the evenings I would go to Wigmore Hall or line up for ten pound tickets to the Rite of Spring at the Royal Opera wondering if I'd be less lonely had I picked an orchestral instrument or become an opera singer.
I’ve always loved music, but it had started to wear me down and at some point, it broke me. I now understand that it broke me so that, to paraphrase Rumi, it could re enter in the way it was always supposed to be; as light.
The year before the period I call my musical hiatus, things were seemingly wonderful. I was performing on the Sydney Opera House's main stage, doubling some big names in television as well as teaching wonderful students. But music had broken me not just spiritually but also physically, with an excruciating injury in my wrist that made me feel even more isolated and alone then ever before. I took a pause from my gruelling schedule, rehabbed slowly and focused on other things.
I no longer believe in pursuing dreams that ask you to betray yourself. That ask you to mould yourself to the shape of a certain perception of success. I believe in breaking moulds and reconnecting with yourself because that is how you connect with others through art, and that is all that really matters in the end.
During the pandemic I listened to a lot of pop music. I love pop music. I don’t think I listened to pop music for a good 6 years during the peak times of my classical career. I leaned even deeper into my yoga practice, played the harmonium and chanted the divine love that Bhakti Yoga speaks of through meditations and mantras. I used to love to sing as a child. During the pandemic I bought a guitar and taught myself to play. I’d never before allowed myself to even think of a second instrument; the honour and responsibility of mastering the piano was more than enough.
A psychic once told me she saw honey always pouring from my hands. That they were destined to craft and conjure sweetness, and it wasn’t too long until I felt the call of the dormant but undeniable part of myself. The part that craved to know melody and bathe in harmony and to live as a working musician again. But on my own terms.
So here we are again. Back to the beginning.
The same structures, the same cadences.
But with a new set of rules that remain
unequivocally breakable.
