Caught Up

Who was the chicken's favorite composer?

(The pianist and writer, Alfred Brendel, died today and I will miss him. How can you miss people you’ve never known? But if they’re people whose writing or music has affected you, how can you not.)

One of my favorite recordings is Brendel playing Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor. It feels improvisational, flung wide-open, and almost flamboyantly free. I like to put it on in the car, loud, and drive around the backroads with my family while we all go on far-out trips in close proximity. Listening to it has an effect kind of like that of a mind-expanding drug—like LSD or something, which allows you to be able to hold, say, a piece of bread, or look at a plant, and really see all of its textural and dimensional and colorful complexities—maybe more like the way you took things in as an infant—except with self-awareness and a kind of regret that your normal un-drug-addled brain has become so flat. Hearing it makes me wonder just how much other wild stuff Bach must have been capable of.

Sometimes I get caught up in trying to make sense of him, his existence, how he did what he did. I wish he had gone on composing forever.

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Shostakovich listening to Bach

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