Making music

For many years Monday nights in my family were "special".   From 1967-1973 we lived in Pittsburgh and every Monday night we would go to the fancy apartment of my Aunt Bess.   Bess was my grandfathers younger sister,  but she was also the concertmaster of Pittsburgh's Gateway Symphony.  Every Monday, we would go to her apartment on Fifth Avenue for dinner.  And, after dinner, my parents would do the dishes as my brother and I would be called one by one into the den for our weekly Violin lesson.  With the exception of Pizzicato, Rosin a bow, and metronome,  I dont remember much about those lessons.   I was horrible. I invented sounds that didnt exist.     My brother, on the other hand, was brilliant. No shock there.... After about a year, even Aunt Bess gave up on me.   My brother continued with the lessons.  We continued with the dinners. He used my time as well  and I got to do the dishes with my parents. To this day, I still love doing the dishes....
After years of family abuse and ridicule,  I finally got over my failure, and i must admit I just love to listen to the Violin.    Last night I wantched from the 5th row as Itzhak Perlman played a benefit for the Israel Sports Center for the Disabled.   The very place, as a young child, after being diagnosed with Polio, Perlman attended in Israel,  to learn how to swim and to play ping pong and to begin to gain control of his terribly weakened body.  As always,  he was awesome. He was  humerous, engaging and immensely talented. He made the violin do things that I didnt think possible. He made it look so easy.   As he scooted out in his amiga chair, I felt for a moment that I wasn't at Symphony Hall, but was comfortably siting on the couch in Aunt Bess's Den.  He made it look so easy.  But,  thats what everyone at the Israel Sports Center for the Disabled does every single day.   Swimmers with one leg, 16 year old Wheelchair ping pong players, Para-olympic tennis players.   Its with determination, guts, and focus  that these athletes accomplish their dreams. Its these individuals who inspire me to push myself to always be better.      Watching him last night reminded me of the very famous Itzhak Perlman story I shared at the very last High Holiday sermon I gave at Temple Sholom 11 years ago, just after 9/11.  

Jack Riemer from the Houston Chronicle once wrote about a concert that Itzhak Perlman gave at Lincoln Center in New York City in 1995. Just as he finished the first few bars of the concerto, one of the strings on his violin broke. Instead of finding another violin or another string, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. The writer mentions that Perlman played with such passion, power and purity, as he had never heard before.
"Of course", he wrote, "anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. You could see him modulating, changing, and recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before."
When he finished, there was silence in the room, and then there was an extraordinary outburst of applause. The audience leap to their feet, screaming and cheering, showing how much they appreciated what he did. He then raised his bow to quiet the audience and simply said: "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left."

In some ways thats what we all must do each and everyday in this amazing world in which we live.    We must make music:  First  we do it with all that we have, and then, for whatever reason when that is no longer possible, we make music with what we have left.

Aunt Bess.....I'm very sorry I didn't practice.