An Equal Music
Page 42
Rain begins to fall. It strikes the skylight with a faint patter.
After the eleventh contrapunctus is the interval.
Now will coirte the chaos: the uncertain ordering of the pie.ces when I return - and here, in the foyer, the chatter of gossip and praise. I cannot hear any more.
I push through the crowded lobby into the rain. I walk a long while, through the streets, the darkness of the park. Once more I stand by the Serpentine. The rain has washed my earlier tears away.
Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music - not too much, or the soul could not sustain it from time to time.
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Author's Note
Music to me is dearer even than speech. When I realised that I would be writing about it I was gripped with anxiety. Only slowly did I reconcile myself to the thought of it.
Friends and strangers have helped me in this work: string players, often those in quartets themselves or who, because of their involvement with early music, have had to deal with the problems of variant tuning; pianists; other musicians, both players and composers; makers, repairers and sellers of instruments; those who aid or attempt to aid the creation or dissemination of music teachers, critics, musicians' agents and managers, e'xecutives of record companies, managers of halls and festivals; those who know the places I have written about better than myself - Londoners, Rochdalians, Venetians and Viennese; those who understand the world of the deaf - medically, like the many doctors who have advised me, or educationally, in particular my lip-reading teacher and her class, of from personal experience of deafness.
Many people talked to me about the world of these characters; a few about the characters themselves. A number of friends generously agreed to read the first draft of the manuscript - a task I can hardly bear to do, even for my own work. Others forgave me for disappearing in script, voice and person from their lives.
At the cost of redundancy I would like most particularly to thank three musicians - a pianist, a percussionist and a string player - who helped me, in quite different ways, to go where imagination alone could not have taken me: to get some sense of what it might be like to live, to have lived, and to expect to continue to live in the zones that lie at the intersection of the world. of soundlessness with those of heard, of mis-heard, of halfheard and of imagined sound.