the plus side it means I can watch the same movie and TV show several times without realising it; on the minus side I come across as rude, inconsiderate, a bit stupid. And it is fucking annoying not being able to remember almost everything to the point that it takes me several minutes to figure out what I had for breakfast, why I left the house, what day, month and year it is.
All the more weird that I can remember over 100,000 notes in a piano recital. All the more amazing that sat in front of a piano is one of the few places I am truly grounded.
I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. As a kid dissociation was the only way the world could be vaguely manageable. If you don’t remember you can’t be terrorised by the past. Our psyches are fucking brilliant – designed to deal with any and all eventualities, at least until they are overloaded and break in two. And yet, even then there is often a way back to something approaching a working state.And my closest friends are aware of it and they don’t get upset when I ask them the same question twice in forty-five seconds or have no recollection of a holiday we took a few months or years ago. Which is exactly why they’re my closest friends and why I can count them on the fingers of one hand.
TRACK FOUR
Bach-Busoni, Chaconne
James Rhodes, Piano
(shut up, I’m proud of this one)
Bach wrote several groups of pieces in sixes – six partitas for keyboard, six for violin, six cello suites, six Brandenburg Concertos and many more. Musicians are weird like that.
There was a piece of music that Bach wrote around 1720 which was described by Yehudi Menuhin as ‘the greatest structure for solo violin that exists’. I’d go much further than that. If Goethe was right and architecture is frozen music (what a quote!), this piece is a magical combination of the Taj Mahal, the Louvre and St Paul’s Cathedral. It is the final and longest movement of his second (of six, of course) partita for violin. It is a set of variations (sixty-four of them, I counted) on a theme that drags us through every emotion known to man and a few bonus ones too. In this case, the subject is love with her attendant madness, majesty and mania.
Brahms said it best in a letter to Schumann’s wife: ‘On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.’
THE SEXUAL ABUSE WENT ON for nearly five years. By the time I left that school aged ten I’d been transformed into James 2.0. The automaton version. Able to act the part, fake feelings of empathy, and respond to questions with the appropriate answers (for the most part). But I felt nothing, had no concept of the expectancy of good (my favourite definition of ‘joy’), had been factory reset to a bunch of fucked settings, and was a proper little mini-psychopath.
But something happened to me bang in the middle of all of it that I am convinced saved my life. It remains with me to this day and it will continue to do so as long as I’m alive.
There are only two things I know of which are guaranteed in my life – the love I have for my son, and the love I have for music. And – cue X Factor sob-story violins – music is what happened to me when I was seven.
Specifically classical music.
More specifically, Johann Sebastian Bach.
And if you want to be ultra detailed, his Chaconne for solo violin.
In D minor.
BWV1004.
The piano version transcribed by Busoni. Ferruccio Dante Benvenuto Michelangelo Busoni.
I can keep going with this for a while yet. Dates, recording versions, length in minutes and seconds, CD covers etc etc. No wonder classical is so fucked. A single piece of music has dozens of extra little pieces of information attached to it, none of which is important to anyone other than me and the other four piano-mentalists reading this.
The point is this: in anyone’s life, there are a small number of Princess Diana moments. Things that happen that are never forgotten and have a significant impact on one’s life. For some it’s the first time they have sex (aged eighteen for my first time with a woman, a hooker called Sandy, who was Australian and kind and let me watch porn while we did it in a basement flat near Baker Street for £40). For others it’s when a parent dies, a new job starts, the birth of a child.
For me there have been four so far. In reverse chronological order, meeting Hattie, the birth of my son, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, getting raped for the first time. Three of these were awesome. And by the law of averages, three out of four ain’t bad.
I’ll take it.
A few things about Bach that need clearing up.
If anyone does ever think about Bach (and why would they?), the chances are they will see in their heads an oldish guy, chubby, dour, bewigged, stern, Lutheran, dry, unromantic and in dire need of getting laid. His music is considered by some to be antiquated, irrelevant, boring, shallow and, like the beautiful architecture in Place des Vosges or Regent’s Park, belonging to other people. He should be confined forever to cigar adverts, dentists’ waiting rooms and octogenarian audiences at the Wigmore Hall.
Bach’s story is remarkable.
By the age of four, his closest siblings have died. At nine his mother dies, at ten his father dies and he is orphaned. Shipped off to live with an elder brother who can’t stand him, he is treated like shit and not allowed to focus on the music he loves. He is chronically abused at school to the point that he is absent for over half of his school days to avoid the ritual beatings and worse. He walks several hundred miles as a teenager so he can study at the best music school he knows of. He falls in love, marries, has twenty children. Eleven of those children die in infancy or childbirth. His wife dies. He is surrounded, engulfed by death.
At the same time that everyone he knows is dying, he is composing for the Church and the Court, teaching the organ, conducting the choir, composing for himself, teaching composition, playing the organ, taking Church services, teaching harpsichord, and generally going mental in the work arena. He writes over 3,000 pieces of music (many, many more have been lost), most of which are still, 300 years later, being performed, listened to, venerated all around the world. He does not have twelve-step groups, shrinks or anti-depressants. He does not piss and moan and watch daytime TV drinking Special Brew.
He gets on with it and lives as well and as creatively as he can. Not for the fanfare and reward, but, in his words, for the glory of God.
This is the man we are dealing with here. Drenched in grief, emerging from a childhood of disease, poverty, abuse and death, a hard-drinking, brawling, groupie-shagging, workaholic family man who still found time to be kind to his students, pay the bills and leave a legacy totally beyond the comprehension of most humans. Beethoven said that Bach was the immortal God of harmony. Even Nina Simone acknowledged that it was Bach who made her dedicate her life to music. Didn’t help her so much with the heroin and alcohol addiction, but hey ho.
Clearly he was not going to be emotionally normal. He was obsessed with numbers and maths in a scarily OCD way. He used the alphabet as a basic code, where each letter corresponds to a number (A B C = 1 2 3 etc). BACH. B=2, A=1, C=3, H=8. Add them up and we get 14. Reverse
