A convergence of twain

When artworks collaborate in your brain

There’s something unique about the piano. About learning a song. You spend hours learning the notes, the timing, their duration, practicing the same segment again and again and again until you can play it without error, or at least convince your teacher that that is mostly true anyway.

But then, when you’ve gotten it to a sort of wooden precision, each note in its place, the teacher sits back and says, “You need to feel the piece.”

“I did feel the piece.” My retort sometimes was. I felt every staccato, every semibreve, I could name them all for you. I could hit most of them. I played exactly as I was meant to.

But I also didn’t, because there’s a reason why a human plays better than the music notation software. The beauty of music is not about every note falling in exact, precise perfection, it’s about every note falling exactly as the player intends, falling imperfectly, slightly, but with more meaning for the slight pause, the small delay, the slight change in volume and pressure of the piece.

And the feel of the piece never truly made sense. My teacher could not articulate what it was meant to be, she just knew ‘that’ it had to be.

I learned a song titled Rose from the soundtrack of the film Titanic. I had never seen the film, so I had no concept of who ‘rose’ was or what you were meant to understand about her. All I knew was that it was somehow related to the story of the unsinkable ship that sank.

I knew it was a song of life, and of loss, but not whose life and whose loss.

But around the same time I read a poem by Thomas Hardy, called The Convergence of the Twain. The poem was true artwork. It was man’s pride set on an inevitable date with fate. A marriage. And the aftermath.

When I next sat down to play, the poem struck me powerfully. Every line of the music felt like it was pulled directly from the poem.

Nothing had changed, but somehow, the two art-forms had come together in my head. And they had made something new. Something better.

In my next music lesson, I played this song. Truly played it. Truly felt it. My teacher was happy with the result.

But when I exuberantly tried to explain my exact thought process and exactly how all this had come together in my head. She barely managed to feign polite interest.

Now this is not her fault. She had a job to do, to teach me piano, and she needed to move forward in the lesson. The exact particulars of how I fulfilled her instructions were up to me…

…and it’s not like I’m known for my brevity.

But it felt like there was something missing by just playing for her, like somehow by not knowing the poem, by not knowing what it means alongside the song, half the artwork was missing from the equation.

Sontag’s Against Interpretation argues that art is more valuable when we don’t try and interpret it. When we aren’t burdened with this extra information.

And perhaps some of this is accurate.

But I think there’s a real case to be made for art being often richer for the collaboration.