It’s been a way arty week for UD: A local production of The Drowsy Chaperone featuring her cousin; Bloomsday in Chestertown; piano/violin duets at my place with my friend Annie (Saint-Saens, The Swan; Schubert, Serenade; a stab at Mozart, Sonata No. 7); and, at the moment, a photography exhibit in DC – ‘eighties pix of The Smiths. (Here’s the book.) UD was dragged here
by her sister the Morrissey fanatic. (The photographer is the woman in the black dress/black shoes.)
The duets were initially nerve-wracking and then exhilarating. UD – a hopeless amateur at the piano – has never tried actually performing with another person, and Annie is a serious violinist. But UD accepted her invitation to play some pieces together, and it went pretty well. More importantly, UD experienced the great and somewhat astonishing pleasure of creating with another person celestial harmonies. She found herself thinking about a line from Albert Schweitzer — he recalls that when he was young something as simple as the two-part harmony in the song In The Mill by the Stream “thrilled me all over, to my very marrow, and similarly the first time I heard brass instruments playing together I almost fainted from excess of pleasure.”