above the everlasting snow
today i’m going to pay a homage to rach 2—a terribly over-performed and almost cliched work of music that manages to thaw the heart of a cold genius.
a cold genius is basically untouchable. such type of being never opens up. if they do awaken from a self-imposed slumber, the source of awakening deserves no small attention.
What power art thou?
Who from below
Hast made me rise?
Unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow!
For ages, we attempt to understand why this piece of music—or any piece of music–moves us. music, as succint as philosophy, is not a form of art that is easily accessible. on the other hand, we mortals are eternally drawn to music and philosophy—even if we might never understand them.
i won’t deny that, before this performance, i had my reservation about lim. as much as i’m invested in the trustworthiness of the cliber competition, lim’s execution of transcendental etudes eclipses him. haochen zhang, who released the exactly same recording approximately at the same time, is the point of reference here. when one hears talent, one hears talent.
yuncham lim, the recent cliburn laureate, came to ann arbor last week with rach 2. i won’t lie: i was terribly touched by his music. to the extent that i think he played as great as haochen zhang. the latter presented rach 2 as an epic novel of tolstoy. lim, on the other hand, managed to engender an unusual tirade of emotions in the audience—since i was not the only person sitting in the auditorium who was brought to tears; instead, as an avid onlooker of not only the person on the stage but also the persons sitting underneath the stage, i noticed many, many people in my preceding rows were emotionally shaken. the energy in the air was unmistakably condensed into the collective action of active listening—which is not a phenomenon that occurs at every concert.
Oh! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?
a little background: rach 2 was a product of a rachmaninoff who just walked out of a catastrophic episode of depression. the straw was, he was grieved by the failure of his first symphony. rach 2 marked the first composition that he produced after he rose above the depression.
a friend in my feminist philosophy class once commented in class, that how philosophy likes to disembody itself and disassociate itself away from the personal. my friend illustrated their point to the class with the example of john stuart mill: one of mill’s writing wasn’t accessible to them until they found out that at that specific point of mill’s life, mill was experiencing grief related to his marriage.
why am i mentioning mill? because i find this case very similar to my progression of crackling the point of rach 2. rach 2 commences with the heavy weight of some feet in the wide, dark, and dense sea of history—one chord is followed by another chord with crescendo. 4 rach-size (unbelievably expansive in terms of my hands) chords are 4 distinct markings of watersheds of saying a grave feeling out loud, afraid of not being able to be heard or seen. after that resolution of the a minor follows with the wave-like accompaniments of piano drowning beneath the orchestra. what is rachmaninoff ruminating when he writes passages after passages that compels the souls of almost every listener? what is rach trying to utter behind those ineffable notes that pile up?
rachmaninoff, at that point of his life, was trying to rise above the fog imposed by a roadblock in his life—and a musician’s music is their life. if their music is demoralized by the lack of recognition, their life will plummet. i interpret the first movement as such.
the third movement is the recovery from the roadblock. the recovery constitutes to manage to do all the works that one has to work for happiness, or the absence of unhappiness. sometimes people also nametag the secret antidote to recovery as “time”—whatever it means. to lift up from the abyss also means to unleash the miraculous ideas that have been buried and dragged down by depression. for the third movement, to snap out of an episode is the bursting of previously repressed feelings.
we listen to rachmaninoff while listening to our own interactions with life.