Friday, March 27, 2009

Hearing is believing.



The other night I went to hear Chase Coleman play on the CCC campus. The piano recital was a prelude to some modern dance. The dancers were good, but still severely upstaged by Mr. Coleman's fingers. It was not so much that his fingers moved quickly and with agility (although they certainly did) but that they were visual representation of the music in the same way dance (ideally) is. Indeed I believe even without sound one could have felt the music simply by watching Mr. Coleman's fingers. Or even that the sound was the audio accompaniment to the music his fingers were displaying visually. So was the music in the vibrating strings of the piano? Mr. Coleman's fingers? The dancers’ bodies? Or rather something more ethereal? Some pure content beyond the grasp of our form addicted minds, to which our instruments of flesh and mettle are conduits, giving eminence to that which is truly transcendent? A machine can “hear” sounds but only a soul can, whether by ear or eye, know music.