The condition of music

(that magnificent unreachable shimmering source of being)

Maude, unofficially named after a composer, had often thought it a stroke of unrealized destiny that she had not ended up a musician herself. There was also that ancestral tether to pianos seasonally shoved through windows and played across the maple forests of Quebec. This might have been what instigated a long line of piano teachers in her youth. The last was a Russian instructor who referred to Bach’s Preludes as the blend of triumph and tragedy in a “deadly shooted bird.” He thought Maude had promise, but any potential she showed at the keyboard was more determination than natural ability. The instructor gradually disappeared in a whirlwind of world tours and Maude, out of habit, continued to toil away at the keys by herself. However, after an incident in the 7^th grade with a five-second abyss in the middle of performing the Skaters’ Waltz, she officially retired from considering the piano seriously, though occasionally relapsed into Chopin waltzes.

The violin was a replacement for this musical habit. Simpler for its one set of staff lines rather than two, it was easy to play but difficult to play well. With it, Maude found herself in a series of haphazard school orchestras, where she spent more time whispering with the other girls in the front row than truly considering the music. It was perhaps the gossip more than the playing that led Maude to believe she could not live without it, which was what gave her the strange and perhaps predestined idea to take up the viola the summer after high school. With the same strings as the cello but the ergonomics of the violin, she liked that it was resonant, misunderstood, and usually underrepresented. She thought these qualities might make up for her lack of private lessons and allow her entry into a university orchestra more easily than the ubiquitous violin.

As it turned out, she was the worst musician in the conservatory, perhaps because she had internalized that playing music remained grounds not to take it seriously. But a kind instructor agreed to give her lessons. He saw her aims as unrealistic, though had the good grace to call her a “dreamer.” He frequently described music as an act of dreaming, which finally introduced Maude to something more than the habit of scales and repetition, to grasp momentarily at that indescribable beauty which stirred oddly familiar intonations of an unknowable beyond. It became clear that she had merely been reading notes before, and that truly playing music with any level of finesse required as much effort and imagination as writing—reading stories did not make storytellers. But the precipice of this beyond disappeared in the toil and frustration of pursuing something too elusive to be captured. This magnificent unreachable shimmering source of being through sound only further emphasized that the viola was a pipe dream.

But it was what introduced Maude to Margaret, who was another regular at the conservatory and a much more accomplished musician. What they both had in common—beyond a propensity for whimsy—was a passion for the arts in their entirety, and a wanderlust to seek the places where these intersected. They had both signed up for a brief opportunity to research abroad, which brought them to Paris for ten grey days in January. Both nineteen years old at the time, they felt the history and the words and the images in that city more than they had felt the textured layers of predetermination settle around them. At the time, it had not been so significant that their hotel was in the same arcade as the dwelling where George Sand and Chopin had passed many years together in the days when Romanticism was a way of life.

On one of those days, they took the train to Versailles. There in the half-hibernating grey and green gardens, overcome with the sprawling, immaculate vastness, the two had felt an unshakeable impulse to play tag, a game which good sense had long since told them should have been outgrown. They only learned later that those grounds were where the foolish courtesans of the Sun King and his forebears in crinolines and powdered wigs had played games, including tag, to occupy their languid afternoons. Perhaps it was the ghost of this frivolity which compelled Maude and Margaret to run in that deep, mysterious knowledge that they had been to that place before ever setting foot on the garden path.

After coming back from that trip and devising the midnight, orange-plucking scheme to return to Paris, Maude’s middling at the viola did not improve despite endless repetition of the first two movements of a Telemann concerto. Much later, she came across the art critic Walter Pater’s conclusion, that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” That is, an experience both abstract and emotionally evocative. Maude realized what she had always loved about the art of resonance was how it could make one feel and remember without saying a word. Simply imitating the melodies was as much as she was ever capable of accomplishing, and it did not recreate this magic. Her most supreme pleasure was in listening, and it no longer seemed worthwhile to struggle through mediocre recreations. There was a profound relief in giving it up, which allowed her to claim writing instead. Music dissipated into only an echo of her identity, the distant melody of ancestors calling from those faraway maple forests. But it was persistent enough to insist that Maude could not abandon the art form entirely. She perennially befriended Margaret’s concentric circles of music makers and studiers, and still occasionally maintained a flirtation with Chopin’s piano waltzes.

Not long after moving to France, Maude became a regular at a jazz bar down the street. She had discovered it while in need of refuge after the circuit breaker exploded in (but did not burn down) the five-hundred-year-old house where she was renting a room. There she met musicians of all kinds who came to jam for the sake of exploring sound. She marveled at the mere nods and eye contact which formed their improvised cohesion, rather than the prescribed dynamics of the classically conducted melodies she had grown up playing. They smiled and nodded at her, too; they liked thinking they heard swaying palms and ocean breezes in her California accent.

One of them had been improvising at the piano but later introduced himself as a bassoonist. Hearing the whispers of resplendent Tchaikovsky symphonies in this claim, Maude learned that he was employed in the local orchestra, occasionally composed, was partial to Romantic literature, and had a proclivity for rescuing cats, many of whom simply wandered into his ground-floor apartment. There, Maude formed a habit of sticking around, writing in the same room where he composed and let the neighborhood cats come and go. It turned out to be a curious harmony between writers and musicians—they both understood the impulse to create (sometimes at odd hours) but could not be jealous of the others’ universe. This had worked rather well for Sand and Chopin, too, whose separate worlds traversed the same orbit of feelings and themes but never eclipsed each other.

Maude read Sand’s memoir with the explicit intent of uncovering the details of how a writer and composer had cohabitated before. But the book, typically clocking in at over 1600 pages—a veritable cobblestone—was disappointingly lacking in detail regarding its author’s romantic affairs. The more Maude thought about it, and the better she got with navigating the French simple past, she realized that George Sand was doing something unprecedented. Leaving her romantic entanglements to be mentioned merely in footnotes, Sand’s L’histoire de ma vie, or what was left of it, was indeed the story of her life, and did not devolve into a tale about if or how she had given herself over to other people. In an era when a rising Romantic movement was championing women dying for love as the epitome of Romantic sentiment, Sand simply wrote romance out of her own life and occasionally infused it into her fiction instead.

Sand said in her memoir that life was a novel, and that each of us has one within ourselves. Her life was no exception to this claim, though she offered only casual anecdotes about her discovery of the thrill of disruption. In her youth, she once rode her horse into a local church in the middle of a service. She was never asked to dance at balls, an act of male resistance to her being “too independent.” She went on to clothe herself in men’s suits and shoes because they were both more economical and practical. She became possessed by a supreme need to feel, something music was capable of resolving. A Romantic herself, she nevertheless described love as “égoïsme à deux” and qualified ideal friendship as something altogether more rare. This, of course, was how Maude and Margaret had long since become the respective archives and archivists for each other’s lives as far back as that grey afternoon in those gardens in Versailles.

Maude was afraid that returning to the gardens a second time without her usual travel companion would reveal that the magic which had been there before was merely a one-time stroke of madness. But during a breach in an overcast July afternoon, she found herself there with the bassoonist. Though much of the gardens were freely open to the public, Marie Antoinette’s hamlet required paid admission. This quiet corner of the grounds had been the queen’s own personal playground, a fairytale paysan village where she escaped the excesses of court to play at peasant life. In conjunction with this systemic royal disregard for the lower classes, public access to the hamlet had transformed into something behind more than a mere paywall. There was an empty moat surrounding the 10-foot stone barricade which made accessing by any entrance other than the front gate presumably impossible.

And yet... there was one place by the back gate of the hamlet where no one was standing guard, and where the wall on the other side of the empty moat, which was really just a ditch, had bowed with the weight of time. On principle, and perhaps having traipsed through that same spirit of revolt which had prompted Marie Antoinette’s demise, the bassoonist was determined they should have unrestricted access to the gardens—revolutions were fought for freedom, not the free market. So they scrambled into the moat. Maude found her footing in moss-covered stones older than traceable ancestors, and the bassoonist pushed her over the wall. She then helped pull him up and they emerged from the bushes at the periphery of the hamlet, as though they had just come from a portal to another dimension, into a sunny afternoon in 1783. No one dared question where they had come from or how they had gotten there. But if anyone had asked, the two might have said that they had achieved, for an afternoon, the condition of music; that is, having transcended time and the limits of a physical reality.