More with the tape recorders

Presenting Joshua Bell; Samuel Sanders, piano; Joshua Bell, violin

I played around with our portable tape recorder quite a bit during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Sometimes I would record a second piano part so that I could play the first or solo piano part along with it. Now and then Mom and Dad would have me make a tape of some piano music to send to some relatives. Any number of reasons would have found me with the tape recorder sitting on the top of the piano. Suffice it to say that there are recordings of me playing the piano thirty to thirty-five years ago, maybe earlier.

The art-TEEST in me never wants to hear them. No way. I would cringe at every note, I’m sure. What in the world were you thinking there, I would ask myself. And the answer would be, I wasn’t thinking. I was too busy learning how to play the piano.

For a while, Harry Connick, Jr, put out solo albums in five year increments starting at “20”. On the day that he released the “25” album, he also re-released a second album called “11”. As you can guess, the thirty-minute long album features Mr. Connick, Jr., playing the piano in a Dixieland setting at a club on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana – when he was eleven years old. I wonder if he flinches when he hears this recording.

And I wonder if Joshua Bell trembles in frustration when he listens to this, his first major recording on a major classical label. He was twenty-two years old at the time that he recorded these masterworks and he’s done nothing but grow in musical stature, taste and maturity since then. He probably plays all of these pieces differently now. I listen to this recording and I hear acclaimed mastery of a difficult instrument matched with skilled and heated prowess, not needing to tangle much with technique … indeed, is eager to lure the music to rise to the top of the simmering pot and set it afire.

I appreciate the fleeting nature of the performing arts. Music is time sensitive. Once the note leaves the string, it reverberates against whatever it can find, then steals away forever. A single brushstroke of green or blue on a canvas can belong to the ages. That brushstroke never needs to be repeated as long as the original still exists. Musicians get to hide a bad performance behind Father Time … unless a rolling tape recorder lurks in the vicinity. I will gladly play the piano for anyone, anywhere at anytime, surviving and thriving on enormous amounts of self-confidence. But the moment a recording button is pushed and my musical renderings are no longer cursory - I am now completely naked in a room lit by ten thousand stars with only ten fingers to obstruct what I don’t want perceptible.

Boy, talk about your paranoia.

Credits: To the success of every debut recording of every budding artist. The hard part is done. You can put your clothes on now.