While stepping off the stage, I could only feel disappointment. That note–that one very loud and very wrong note right at the top of the pyramid–robbing me of all performance pleasure, ensuring that I hear no praise of admiration, no smiles and nods of approval, paralyzing my senses.
Then she rushes up to me with an unnecessary urgency (because I’m not really going anywhere) and exclaims how appropriately I have performed Bach, saying it was “just right,” how certain phrases were played “exactly as they were supposed to be played”.
“Thank you, thank you very much, thank you”, is all I can numbly repeat as she bombards my space with compliments that were only partly for me. All the while, I simply want to ask, “Who the hell is Bach?”
I don’t know who this man is. I never met him. I certainly don’t understand what I’ve heard about him. A lot of facts and dates that don’t amount to me talking with the man, seeing how he would hem and haw between thoughts or observing what would capture him in a long gaze. Something beautiful, perhaps? In its physicality? Or in its meaning? I wouldn’t know. Why, then, would I be able to play anything he composed the way it was supposed to be played…exactly…right?
My emotional interpretation of this music is overdone. Bach’s prowess for dismantling a chord progression, even just one scale, creates a mesmerizing, addicting irony. Seven notes that cannot be broken down are cracked into dozens of pieces, and then stacked into layers. The layers I unfold in performance aren’t symbiotic with Bach, nor symbolic of him, which makes it personal for me. She didn’t see me though.
I am weary of our idolization of artists, the divinity that we imbue on those who capture emotional expression and spectacularly funnel it through an artistic medium. We’re given an opportunity to experience a moment in time, complete with the emotional, mental, and physical implications of the world in which it was created, through the lens of the body that created it. Then we liken that creation to the artist and declare him creator. Not artist–but creator. Bach didn’t create the sounds that are organized into music, the human mechanisms that allow us to hear it in a myriad of ways, the scales, instruments, or even the wood that is used to make the instruments.
And so she credits Bach with the creation of my performance, of my emotive interpretation, of my climax and denouement, of me.
Bach established the schema, yes, but not the pyramid.
Look: Evolve 