05.30.08
Unequalled Music
It was the most pervading sound I’ve heard in such a long period of time, and it transfused through musical veins as a lingering vibrato. It seemed too familiar that I could almost touch it, yet strange how it also implied distance. Though it was always known to ebb from the shores of lethe, had I not heard it today, it would have remained resigned and reposed in the remote
perimeters of my memory. Two unified voices that drifted from intense persuasion to silence, and from silence to a soft cry and from that gentle cry, little tremors, and from those vibrations something more incomprehensible. The conversation between the viola and the piano.
I remember speaking the language once, but not fluently and the viola
misunderstood the piano’s uncertainty for mere whims until the
conversation ended too abruptly. To hear it once again spoken eloquently by musical sovereigns can only bring me to a ripple in time where nothing else could be heard but the viola and the piano… and the undertone of a great violist who once told me, “A violist is nothing without a pianist.” He proved himself wrong, and yet I’m sure of this, there is a merged language between the viola and the piano all their own. Not Asturian, not as woeful as the cello dialect, neither as lofty as the violin idioms, but an empyreal language that today
hauntingly whispered, “When feelings are profound, torments are sweet.”*
Is this language dying?
*A line from La Maja Dolorosa, one of the songs from
Kim Kashkashian and Robert Levine’s Asturiana album.
.
.
.
.
.
