Today's prompt: Take a "music bath" -- find a comfortable spot to relax in, pick out a favorite song or piece of music, turn off the lights, close your eyes, and listen.
I have always felt that I was a musician, trapped in a body that decided not to be a musician. Sure, I can play the piano, dabbled in the guitar, and was once told by some drunk woman that I did a good karaoke rendition of "Wonderful Tonight." But I know these things do not a musician make.
However, what I consider my greatest musical accomplishment, for but a brief moment made me feel like one. I have Clint Mansell's score for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain to thank for that.
The movie itself left me quite confused and feeling robbed of a more profound emotional experience. I wanted to feel what I thought I was supposed to feel: sadness, grief, maybe even hope. But I felt that the movie was so bogged down by abstract metaphysics and new-agey conceits that I walked away feeling nothing. An abstract, metaphysical nothing, but nothing.
Until the end credits rolled, when I heard the song I would later learn was called "Together We Will Live Forever," a piano ballad that set the idea of loss and longing to music. In its soft, nuanced piano arpeggios was a story richer and more poignant than the movie ever could have been.
I immediately decided, without any pretension or hubris, that not only did I want to play this song on the piano, but I could, transcribe not only the notes, but also the quiet sadness, the crescendo of dispair.
Because at that time, I thought I understood sadness. My boyfriend at the time taught me the true meaning of "irreconcilable differences." With few possessions, I moved out of his condo and found a miniscule studio in a building overlooking the freeway, in a neighborhood leaving much to be desired. It was an old building, creaky and odorous. I had no TV, no internet, and my phone was mostly used as a morning alarm. The unit had no heat in the winter, no air in summer. I lived there, like that, for a year.
Obviously, I got out of that funk (and that apartment) and grew to be the well-adjusted guy I am today. Obviously. But it was there that I finished my transcription and in the years that followed, it has become somewhat symbolic of my time there. It is now my go-to piece when I want to sit in front of the piano and just play something. After the final note, Sam would often say, "Awww, it's very pretty," and while it is (the song, not necessarily my playing), I kind of have already acclimated to its beauty. I have listened to it enough where I no longer feel like I have to pay attention in order to hear it. The melody has been imprinted onto my brain as clearly as the memories of that apartment and that year.
So when I put my earphones in, laid down on the bed and actually--effortfully--listened, I expected to think of sadness, of my depressed state when I first heard the song, of the bitter cold that seeped into the room while I was trying to learn it.
I didn't think of any of those things. Instead, I remembered all the days I spent hunched over my piano in that tiny room, pencil tucked behind my ear, listening to three-second chunk after three-second chunk of this beautiful new song I had discovered called "Together We Will Live Forever." I thought of how my hands were either busy scribbling eighth notes on homemade sheet music or testing out measures on the piano or rewinding my iPod obsessively, of how it felt to hear the song played by my clumsy fingers for the first time. I remembered that during those days, I really did feel like a true musician.
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