All is water. --Thales, ca. 600 BCE.

Thales Updated:
On Hearing Lang Lang

by Angus Verspeeten

Lang Lang played Prokoviev last night. One imagines Lang Lang, finished, lighting a cigarette, laying a hand gently on the piano, and asking, "Was it good for you?"

As another musician, Christoph von Dohnanyi, emeritus director of the Cleveland Orchestra, recently pointed out, "We have to remember what's important. Who remembers who the foreign minister of Prussia was when Beethoven was writing his music?"

Music is a universal language not only for the transient, ephemeral, raging hormone-culuses of pop culture but, in the best hands and out of the best throats, for whatever soul and heart we embody.

It is possible to speak of higher things and be heard.

Whatever the medium, the artist gets in the Way, sets things in motion, and then gets out of the way. What in one tradition is referred to as death of the ego, and in another tradition is called the communion and fellowship of the holy spirit.

Precious moment? No more and no less than that of the unseen tiger leaping or that of the unseen orchid blooming or that of the unfed child dying or that of the cancer host screaming. The horror, the horror. The beauty, the beauty.

The busyness of art: to say the pain and the joy. Yes. With weapons of Prokoviev, Lang Lang deftly attacks the piano, which by turns screams and sings. No match.

Yin and yang, light and dark. Here, the two perfectly configured, perfectly co-joined to our continuing bafflement and disgruntlement. In the doing, in the playing, they flash before us, pain and joy, pain and joy. For a time, after-images merge in a reminder of implied, impossible One: the way beyond the Way. The One that is not one beyond the imagined written-about thought-about one.

All is reminder.

The ten thousand things are reminders. Strings around our nerve-filled fingers. Crosses, scimitars, stars and stripes, numbers, letters, sounds and lights: hints, auguries, intimations.

Not: lest we forget, but: because we forget.

Homo absent-minded.

END

See also Angus Verspeeten's earlier appreciation of Lang Lang's first CD.

Midi for this page: Schumann-Liszt: Widmung (Dedication).

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