A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from a fellow dance musician — a talented pianist — with whom I occasionally have the pleasure of making music. Her brief message read, “Sometimes, when we’re lucky, we get to feel this way while playing,” after which she attached the following passage:
…somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them as a “mantraâ€: extatique, paradisiaque. And maybe more importantly, I began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life (such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the notes!): people’s eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total and absolute tenderness. (This is sentimental, too personal: I know. How can you write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?) I felt that same sense of outpouring (â€pouring overâ€) that comes when you just have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own body, when you are briefly no longer yourself — and at that moment I was still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano. And each chord is even more beautiful than the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic, reverberant… each chord seemed to pile on something that was already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable… and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to “move yourself,†to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous place. Luckily, the piece was almost over… When I got offstage I had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.
This is from Think Denk, the engaging, beautifully-written blog of classical pianist Jeremy Denk. As I read, I remembered times when I’ve felt something like this while playing my violin. For me, these moments often come when I’ve been feeling sad, or anxious, or fearful, and the sense of outpouring that Denk describes feels to me like a lament, a wish, a prayer — all the more powerful for coming, wordlessly, through my violin.
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I don’t have any words for this that would add to it- just to say this strikes a chord.
I love this! I’ve often felt great sensations or had wonderful visions while playing the piano. A Hungarian dance comes alive, complete with dancers, the movements of their feet, hands, eyes. Real life’s feelings of stress are channeled forward, and I feel as if I have arrived in another world. When the song comes to an end, I find myself abruptly in the “real world,” and wonder how time can pass both so quickly and yet seem to last so eternally. It doesn’t happen every time, but it is so rewarding when it does!
How beautiful! I know this joy often when I sing, and those are the times that I never feel more alive. Becoming one with the music and the words of the song is amazing. It’s an honor and a blessing!