I was listening to an interview with a pianist on NPR and was kind of interested, but kind of not completely focused on it, until she mentioned that she had recorded some Philip Glass on her new album. Having been a Philip Glass fan for 45 years or so...ever since my best friend Eddie played North Star for me...that really tuned me in. And I was almost immediately sorry that I hadn't listened more closely from the get-go.
So as soon as I got home, I sat down to see if I could find the album that they'd been talking about...only to discover that I'd forgotten the name of the pianist AND the name of the album. Fortunately this is the 21st century, though, and I soon found myself on the NPR website listening to Ms. Dinnerstein's interview in toto.
Wow. That was a good 7 minutes and 57 seconds. Check out what she had to say to NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about Philip Glass's music, for instance:
"His music forces you to listen in the moment while you're playing it. Because though it seems at first glance that it's about repetition, actually it's about constant change. And so though you may be playing the same pattern, something is happening as you repeat that pattern that is transforming it. And you have to be open to it, you have to be listening while you're playing. And as a listener if you're not playing, you have to be open to hearing those changes. So right now this seems to be a period of time when we're almost caught in this sense of repetition each day, not knowing where we're going. You know, there's not this sense of forward momentum that we normally have in our lives and I think that that feeling that I get playing Glass's music is almost a mirror to what we're feeling right now."
You can hear the whole interview HERE.
And when I finished listening to the interview, I most surely needed to get my mitts on that album. After a little stumbling, I went to Ms. Dinnerstein's website to make the purchase--my theory being that the artist gets a better deal if you do it that way. (You can go there, too, if'n you want to: https://www.simonedinnerstein.com/store/a-character-of-quiet-autographed-cd.) And once there I said to my Self, "Self, you have two sisters who are Hard To Buy Presents For people, what about getting copies for them?" So I ended up buying three copies of the CD. And there was a bonus--you could get them autographed...with a personal inscription. Nice! There was still a little room left in the "To whom would you like the autograph made out?" box, so I added this message: "Thank you for helping to restore my soul to some semblance of functionality, Simone."
Which sounds like hyperbole, I know, but was actually not. I have slowly been coming to the realization that the despair that started with my February 22, 2019 ER visit has been seriously compounded by the past 27 weeks of lockdown, and hearing Ms. Dinnerstein talk about dealing with that same despair...and talking about how she moved beyond it and created this album really helped me. And thinking about what she said about Philip Glass is going to let me hear even more in music that I have already loved for many years--not because what she said was really new to me, but because she has shown me a connection between that music and my life in a very immediate way.
So I'm looking forward to hearing this album soon. And to giving (signed!) copies to my sisters.
And to getting back to writing one of those novels I abandoned over a year ago.
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