Category Archives: Writing about music

12th February, 2008

No accountants were harmed in the writing of this post

About a month before the launch of this site, I started showing test versions to friends and soliciting their comments; no page received half as many as the bio. These were, ahem, wide-ranging, with “very amusing,” on one end of the spectrum, and “are you out of your stinking mind?” on the other. Thought-provokingly in the middle was the following: “I like your bio – but what on earth do you have against accountants??”

I should probably pay more attention to my friends, as the other day no less august a source than the CBC quoted me, eliciting this nettled but polite response. (I would take exception to the description of the Schumann and Grieg concerti as BORING, but I’m not really operating from a strong position here.)

So, the time has come to set the record straight: not only do I have nothing against accountants, I’m very grateful that they exist, doing work that is in fact both necessary and creative, and which, given the avalanche of papers I refer to rather optimistically as my “files,” clearly I have no aptitude for. (I might add that my grandfather was an accountant, but I fear that might have a certain “some of my best friends are jewish”/”not that there’s anything wrong with that” flavor.) And when I contemplate what I put my accountant through annually at tax time, I really have to wonder what I was thinking picking this fight…

So, for the profession-based bigotry, a sincere apology. And suggestions for how I might replace the sentence in question will be welcomed.

17th October, 2007

LvB

“What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life – only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce…”     – Ludwig van Beethoven, from the Heiligenstadt Testament, 1802

I think this explains, far better than I ever could, why playing Beethoven – doing him justice, or at least coming as close as one can – feels like a matter of life-or-death.

Or perhaps even his words are unecessary: the force of his personality, the intensity of his need to say what must be said — these are made plain in his music.

My Beethoven CD was released earlier this month. Just my most recent attempt, in a series which I hope will last a lifetime, to come to terms with the most life-affirming, yet unfathomable music I know to exist.

(A further attempt to explain what this music means to me can be found here.)