What Matters Is More Than Music

What Matters Is More Than Music

Sometimes, “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” is only a hypothesis. This is not to say that, subjectively, we are unwilling to consider things from another person’s perspective. It is simply that something like “experience,” in the final analysis, can only be gained by having gone through it; it cannot be reached through imagination, logic, or intelligence alone. The overwhelming waves stirred in the heart of a secret admirer—or someone deeply in love—by the smallest smile or frown of an otherwise ordinary person (and in some sense, everyone is ordinary) can never be fully known by an onlooker, nor faithfully conveyed by any outsider’s description. In this respect, each of us is a Tower of Babel. The literary work that renders this kind of feeling most penetratingly is Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It is hard to believe that, without profound lived experience, a girl barely in her twenties could have written about loneliness with such precision.

If the person we are trying to understand is suffering severe torment of the spirit, then understanding becomes almost impossible. No matter how much effort we make, we may still be unable to knock open a heart sealed shut by hurt. More often, as bystanders, we can only do what Watanabe does in Norwegian Wood: watch helplessly as Naoko sinks little by little into the black hole inside her, until she disappears. Of course, this is not what any loving onlooker would wish for. But sometimes, rash comfort and sympathy may only cause more harm. Mental pain is often unlike bodily illness: it cannot be directly observed, diagnosed, or made intuitively legible to others. Yet the one analogy available to us is this: spiritual suffering is often even harder to bear than physical pain. Therefore, if we lack enough experience to understand what someone is going through, and lack enough professional knowledge to offer real support, then perhaps refraining from casually giving opinions and advice is the closest thing to true empathy. If a person is already confronting inner torment and trials, then the least an outsider can do is not force them to face the same sort of pressure from the outside world as well.

At the very beginning of Instrumental, James Rhodes speaks without any attempt at concealment about what happened to him in childhood. He writes of being sexually abused for five years, beginning at the age of five, by his gym teacher, and of the ways that abuse went on to shape his life: promiscuity, drugs, shame, and an inability to truly live or truly enter into a relationship. This account is not offered in order to solicit sympathy. As he himself says in the book, there was a period when he had already learned how to use his miserable past to gain certain advantages. But this book was not written for that reason.

As I see it, Instrumental, written by James Rhodes as an autobiography at the age of thirty-eight, carries at least several layers of significance. First, by recounting his childhood experience and its catastrophic effect on his life, it may draw the world’s attention—even if only a little more—to child safety and protection. Second, through its analysis and appreciation of classical music, and its introductions to the lives of classical musicians, it attempts something new in promoting classical music and cultivating new listeners. Third, through its truthful portrayal of the inner world and daily life of someone suffering from mental illness—specifically trauma and post-traumatic stress—it offers the general public and the mental health profession the most concrete kind of material and reference, enabling the world to understand such people a little better, even if only by a small degree. Fourth, it is an expression of gratitude for love, family, and friendship, showing what kind of care a person needs in order to heal from damage when personal effort alone is not enough.

In Instrumental, all of these meanings are rendered thoroughly and deeply. As a work, it is successful. Yet the faint current of despair that runs between the lines is worrying. What a book means to the world may not, in the end, be all that important; what matters is whether it truly fulfills what the author hoped for. James Rhodes may not have written Instrumental with any of the above meanings primarily in mind. What he may have hoped for was the rescue of the self that was continually sinking in the whirlpool—just as Lin Yi-Han wrote Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise. On the surface, James Rhodes, as a popular concert pianist, seems to have achieved calm and rebirth. But whether the shadow lurking inside him might emerge again at some moment and swallow him whole is something even the author himself cannot be sure of. Just as Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise may save many girls but could not save Lin Yi-Han herself, whether Instrumental can truly save James Rhodes is something no one knows.

And yet I hope that Instrumental can become the first real step in James Rhodes’s escape from his inner demons. After all, he has been fighting this old enemy for more than thirty years—far longer, and with far more experience, than Lin Yi-Han ever had. After all, he still has the company of so many great masters and works of classical music, from which he draws peace. After all, he still has a lover, friends, and the son he loves most in life. The strength these people give him is greater than the solitude Lin Yi-Han endured.

After all, what matters is not only music, but also love—and being loved.

Selected passages from Instrumental

Deep down, like most people, at the age of thirty-eight I have an empty black hole inside me. There is nothing, and no one, that can fill it.

Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 was written in memory of a friend who sent him a farewell letter and then killed himself. Of all the music I have ever heard, it is the most exact description of frantic, chaotic madness.

In 1828, in the few months before he died at the age of thirty-two, Schubert completed a fifty-minute trio—Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major—for piano, violin, and cello. He used his brief, tragic, shattered life as the thread of the music, offering up to his own misfortune the only counterpoint that could answer it.

If Goethe was right that architecture is frozen music (what a marvelous phrase!), then this work is the perfect combination of the Taj Mahal, the Louvre, and St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is the final movement of Bach’s Partita No. 2 for solo violin.

Brahms said it best in a letter to Mrs. Schumann: “In one page of stave notation, for one little instrument, this man writes a whole world, full of the deepest thoughts and the most powerful feelings. If I could create it—or even truly understand it—I am sure the overflowing excitement and earth-shaking experience would drive me mad.”

The real world does not slow down by even a single minute just because I have wasted away my life. It hurries on without the slightest regard for me, while I have no power at all to catch up.

Love has always been a practical test, never a theory. In the face of love, all the thoughts in this world ultimately become meaningless. It is like learning the piano by reading the manual. You may think you know what to do, but only when you sit down at the keyboard do you realize how vast it is, how much concentration it demands, and how completely ignorant you were before.

Composers and mental illness follow one another like shadows—rather like Catholicism and sin, or America and obesity. Schumann, too, suffered from severe depression. He threw himself into the Rhine; after failing to kill himself, he voluntarily committed himself to an asylum, where he died alone and afraid.

The pieces in the book, which also serve as its table of contents

1. Bach, Goldberg Variations, Aria
2. Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No. 2, Final Movement
3. Schubert, Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major, Second Movement
4. Bach–Busoni, Chaconne
5. Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111, Second Movement
6. Scriabin, Piano Concerto, Final Movement
7. Ravel, Piano Trio
8. Shostakovich, Piano Concerto No. 2, Second Movement
9. Bruckner, Symphony No. 7, Second Movement
10. Liszt, Totentanz
11. Brahms, A German Requiem, First Movement
12. Mozart, Symphony No. 41 “Jupiter”, Fourth Movement
13. Chopin, Étude in C major, Op. 10, No. 1
14. Chopin, Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49
15. Ravel, Piano Concerto in G major, Second Movement
16. Schumann, Ghost Variations for piano
17. Schubert, Piano Sonata No. 20, D959, Second Movement
18. Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 5 “Emperor”, Second Movement
19. Rachmaninoff, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
20. Bach, Goldberg Variations, Aria da capo