Learning from the master

There's a wonderful article in the current New Yorker by Jeremy Denk, a concert pianist, that focuses in large part on his relationship with his former mentor, the Hungarian pianist Gyorgy Sebok. Denk remembers Sebok's sheer physical presence; his flagrant disregard for the rules against smoking in the college studio; his tendency towards Zen-like aphorisms ("To show love for someone, but not to feel that love - that is the work of Mephistopholes"). But he also recalls, vividly, the way in which Sebok revealed new landscapes or levels in the music that Denk was learning.  As a student played a Mozart concerto, Sebok once rose, sat at a second piano, and added occasional chords: enunciating, as Denk puts it, a higher rhythm of events. And then the alternation of two harmonies sped up, "and suddenly Mozart released everything into eight sailing bars - a balloon drifting, all ties to the earth cut. It was unforgettable," claims Denk, "this demonstration of structure..."

Lovely, no? But touching (if not quite unforgettable) demonstrations of structure are not confined, thankfully, to Mozart. The other night, I was putting Cleo to bed when she paused and turned to her battery-operated night lamp, in the form of a ladybug. She carefully and gently tugged at each of the ladybug's legs, so that all of them were splayed, pointing straight out from the body. 'What are you doing?' I asked, truly intrigued. 'Just straightening her legs, so that she doesn't sprain her ankles,' answered Cleo.

I'm not half the observer that Denk is, and Cleo, I'll freely admit, is no Sebok. But in that moment, I too enjoyed a deep and sudden flash of insight into a pattern that had been only superficially visible to me. A new structure had been revealed, a private motivation come to surface... and I remain thankful for it, days later.