Nocturnal Exegesis

One evening, as I sat down to toy with the piano, my wife asked that I play some Chopin. She was, to put it lightly, a little tired of my nightly improvising. "Play something you know," she said, "from back when you were a concert pianist". Eager to prove that my fingers and heart are still nourished by that time, I pulled the sheet music from the drawer and committed myself to the sacred text (sacred, an old professor would remind me, every time I dared ignore some dynamic notation on the sheet). I committed myself to performing the music exactly as written.

I was not prepared for the inner struggle that followed. Could I no longer surrender to tradition? The music felt distant, museal. I stopped. I didn't know how to proceed. I felt lost in the worlds of new music, forgetting where I came from, unable to find my way back to Chopin. Have I become a composers' composer?

The memory of that evening followed me for months. It hurt me, it demanded that I ask it questions, that I find a way to bridge the rift it had revealed to me. So I tried to build a bridge. To connect our tradition to our daily lives, and contemporary music to its own heritage. Just like Judaism treats its sacred texts. Like an Exegesis.