by David Oates
Some time before the beginning of the quarantine, walking in a pleasantly not-fancy Portland neighborhood near my own, I was stopped dead in my tracks: Bach on the piano. And close by! Suddenly all my thoughts were of music. The day’s work dropped away; the tangles and labors of writing; the distant threat of disease; the mental backdrop of our national ordeal-by-politics. . . all forgotten. Music.
After a long beat I was able to place it as one of the famous Goldberg Variations. It was coming from a little duplex with a front window facing the sidewalk, a black piano glimpsed just within. And someone practicing this difficult, beguiling music. Not struggling, no indeed quite fluent. But stopping, repeating, working out some tricky bit.
Isn’t it a wonder when music floats in all unexpected? Yes, we all have music on demand. Radios and devices, earbuds and headphones. But there is a change in the air when living sound, sound in the very act of creation, reaches us. We halt, suddenly in the moment. Not digitized, irreal, somewhere else: Here.
It seems like every traveler has a story of music in a faraway place. Choir practice transforming a quiet weekday cathedral, guitar heard in a favela, strain of song floating out over a crooked cobbled street. The moment becomes immortal, at least in the memory of the lucky traveler: the strange magic of the close and the near, the heartsound, found amidst alien ways. Read more »