Artistic Endeavours Part II

And then there's music, one of the world's greatest places to get lost.  I love to listen to music that speaks to me where I am at the moment, but my biggest pleasure comes from playing or singing.  Give me a good piano, some good-n-poundy Beethoven and some finger-twinkling sonatas, and an empty house, and I will work out any stress or anxiety that has weighed down my heart for weeks past.  My mother even warned my husband, as we were getting married, that he'd want to be sure we always had a piano in the house!  

I love getting lost in it.  I love sweating out a passage I knew twenty years ago but which is now rusty, until it's better.  I love pounding the heck out of the instrument to make myself feel better.  I love to sit down at the piano and just play whatever's in my heart, made up on the spot and completely irreplicable (hang on, is that a word? unable to replicate... If it isn't, it should be).  Especially that.  It astounds me to hear the sounds, the melodies that my heart is carrying come leaking out through my fingers; and it is disappointing and beautiful at the same time that I will never again play exactly the same piece.

I love, too, the fact that what music expresses defies articulation.  Much like visual art.  I relish words, but I tire of them and their canned meanings.