When my eyes are blindfolded, the world suddenly shuts down. I can make out faint rustling sounds as friends mill around to hear me play. I can feel breath, gasps and sighs. I have no idea where anything is, save my keys. I start to feel the surface of the piano, lovingly and softly at first, getting bolder as I go along. The fingers are doing all the walking, as they have a memory of their own. Deprived of sight, I lose any sense of consciousness, and I play from my heart. It is extremely difficult at first, but the fingers guide me, and the music takes over. I don’t think I have had a more life-altering experience than depriving myself of the sense of sight. Such is the power of the specially-abled.
Learning to feel through the mind is also humbling. On a recent trip to Vienna, I visited the Pasqualitihaus, a fourth floor walk up apartment, that housed a famous resident for a while in the 19th century, a gentleman who could not hear well. His name was Ludwig Van Beethoven. As I recalled the opening bars of his Leonore Overture, or indeed the softest triplet passages of the first movement of the now famous Moonlight Sonata, I wondered how someone without the sense of hearing could compose something so delicate, dynamic and rooted in the emotions of pain, love, anguish and sorrow. Beethoven is said to have remarked, “heard it all in my mind… my eyes hear, and my mind responds. My mind speaks and my heart responds with music”.
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Most of those of my generation and the successive one would have experienced the literary beauty of Stevie Wonder’s lyrics. ‘No April Rain, no flowers bloom, No wedding Saturday within the month of June...’. A true musical Wonder, he was born premature, and developed retinopathy that rendered him visually impaired. He went on to win 25 Grammys, including topping the Billboard singles charts almost throughout his career. ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ became the love anthem of the world, as did numbers such as ‘Superstition’.
What I like most about Wonder’s story is that he started his career doing tribute songs to another specially-abled musician, Ray Charles. Charles, who became blind at a young age owing to glaucoma and went on to redefine the way ‘soul’ was heard in music, combining gospel, the blues and rock and roll . One of the most moving stories of ‘Brother Ray’ is how he was taught to read Braille music, which involves a complicated process of learning the right hand parts first, and then the left hand and then combining them together until it is committed to memory.
“Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime..” resonates with me everytime I listen to these stories. Carnatic musician M. Chandrasekaran’s violin can move you to tears, and one wonders if he actually ‘sees’ much more than the average musician, as his music is indeed sublime.
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The specially-abled teach us the true meaning of life, of the experience of music, and the finer aspects of what it means to connect and shape society. If you ask me, they are the ones with vision.
If you want to experience how music dispels darkness, join me at 7.30 p.m. this evening at Chennai’s Museum Theatre as I play blindfolded to raise funds for the visually impaired girl children of the Gnanadarshan Seva Home.
The writer is a well-known pianist and music educator based in Chennai