Maybe it was reading about music and what it does to the brain.
Maybe it was listening to so much Rachmaninoff.
But I suddenly decided what I want to do.
What I want to pour my energy into.
I'm going to learn to play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number 2.
It's been my favorite since I first heard it in my twenties.
I've heard it live.
I've listened to it countless times.
I've always thought that if I was ever going to get married I'd walk down the aisle to my favorite part of the concerto where the music is dramatic and grand and really if you're going to parade in front of a room of loved ones and strangers in an insanely overpriced but fabulous gown I can't think of a more appropriate soundtrack than the intense drama of this piece.
I wrote a paper on the concerto in college because I was fascinated that it'd been written out of a mad depression because Rachmaninoff's previous work had been such a failure.
He locked himself away with his suffering and wrote this.
And it's incredible.
The piece is entirely beyond my skill level.
Laughably so.
It's the equivalent of me cooking all of Julia Child's recipes when I can barely make toast or sending a V10 on the bouldering wall when I poorly send a V1.
It's just really fucking hard.
Insanely, monumentally hard.
I don't even think I'm fully aware of the level of its difficulty.
Miraculously, (like it was meant to be or something) I actually found the sheet music free online the next morning.
I printed it off, all 37 pages.
Thirty. Seven. PAGES.
Do you know I don't even know what year it was the last time I taught myself how to play something new on the piano.
No, wait, I do.
It was 2008.
I was living in Rhode Island and it was because they paid me to play the piano so I had to learn the music for the show.
Since then I've only ever played piano music I'd already learned.
And now I was going to learn something new that was insanely difficult.
We already knew I was crazy.
Ambitious maybe?
No, probably just fucking nuts.
The thing is, I was so excited I went home on my lunch break and spent the whole time playing through the first few pages.
And when I got off work I sat down and started playing right away again.
And even just the few hours I played today my painfully slow tempo has increased.
Minutely. But it's the teensiest bit faster.
That's the hardest part about trying to learn this.
I already know what it should sound like and how fucking fast it needs to be.
Hell, I can sing it.
But I can't play it.
Yet.
I know it's gonna take me forever to learn this.
Like weeks upon months upon I can't even imagine how long.
And even once I finally do learn it it's not like I'm going to have the orchestra playing with me that makes the piece really great.
But I don't even care.
It feels incredible to have something to pour my energy into.
To have a goal for myself.
To already see a minutia of growth on just the first day.
And it even feels poetic.
Because just days after he took away his music, music that was bringing my mind peace, I found my own.
I'm making my own music.
And it's the calmest I've felt in a long time.
I spent hours today working out just four pages, at a fraction of the tempo it needs to be, still not trusting the notes I was playing or the placement of my hands or even the fingering I was using.
But I started.
I started and I can play the opening chords of one of my favorite works of music.
And it took me thirty four years to realize I can love something desperately and revel in it entirely by myself.
I guess sometimes losing the people you love really does make room for something else great.
And this time, the greatness would be in me.
Rachmaninoff's masterpiece brought him out of his depression.
Maybe mastering it will bring me out of mine.
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