The Pianist's Parkinson's

He begins at the place others quit: rudiments. From then on to fingering and preparatory exercises up till his delight at his own first tunes, he pores through page after page of five lines and the spaces in between. The moment he begins mastering his favourite key of C, he has G to face and F to conquer or be vanquished by A flat. He runs at the scales to visit with masters before his age such that from his first day before a synthesizer to his first night at the concert grand, he has seen several years of assiduous rehearsals daily, knowing that a day missed is made up for by another or two. With time he reels out the notes of his first performance piece.

Oh the monster-saint of performance! Should he show up as a demon, the child pianist is cast out of the concert hall to seek some other career. Should he grace it as an angel of the spotlight with the blessings of Beethoven and Chopin, unto us is a child of wonder born, and the grease shall be upon his knuckles that the feet of all la belle monde beat a path to the repertoire of yet another prodigy of awesomeness at the 88 keys. Performance is the place where he begins, the place where he peaks, the place where he flickers. Thus he approaches each piece as though it were a performance, always seeking to make the appropriate impression, whether it be in the privacy of his home studio or in the grave quiet of a packed Carnegie Hall. Whichever way it is: the pianist makes the performance or the performance makes the pianist, no one can tell them apart for nothing matters more than the ebonies, the ivories and the phalanges that make them sing.

Be he self-trained, gone through a school of music, exercised under a tutor or submitted to a mentors challenge in a church choir, this one man has endured a soldier’s regimen without a lash or a bullet wound. Yet there had been lashes of agoraphobia and the internal scars that curse the knuckles with pain, both from which he has been delivered. But never does he recover from the moment of hesitation before each first bar, the smoothness of a flawed scale flow, the sensitivity of replicated touch or the rigours of precision dexterity featured only in privacy. These constitute the pianist’s Parkinson’s―a caution to his soul, a quaking for his body.

So, with hundreds of tunes played, volumes of hymns read, scores of maestro classicals fingered and dozens of delicate jazz chords jammed, he arrives at a point where he seems to have seen it all. Nothing is sufficiently challenging anymore than the perfectionism of a sniper. The great eagle begins to clip worn quills pouring out his own masterpieces of improvisations for the next generations of pilgrims seeking conquests of mythical and mystical legends of the score.