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Claire
Cain Miller is a freelance journalist based in By Claire Cain Miller The
Chaconne, Johann Sebastian Bach.s masterpiece about suffering and resilience,
has become a sort of theme song for Joseph Mastroianni. After hearing Andrés
Segovia play the piece on the classical guitar, Mastroianni decided to learn to
play it himself. With almost no experience, he moved to During
his 11-year recovery, as he learned to walk again against doctors. predictions,
the Chaconne took on new meaning for Mr. Mastroianni. He re-taught himself to
play the classical guitar, and though he didn.t play the whole Chaconne until
several years ago, he credits his recovery to the inspiration and empathy he
found in Bach.s work. The
Chaconne also inspired Mr. Mastroianni.s first novel, titled Chaconne and
published this fall. It weaves together the stories of Mr.
Mastroianni, a retired helicopter pilot, lives in Tell me about the Chaconne.
How did you develop an interest in the piece? The
Chaconne was written for violin, and my father was a professional violinist
with the New York Philharmonic. That was one of the pieces that I heard and
somehow it stuck with me. Later in life, I heard Andrés Segovia play it. I was
dumbfounded. It sounded much better to me on the guitar than the violin. What was it about Bach.s piece
that struck you? There.s
something in the music that.s quite wonderful. He wrote it at a time when he
had been away on a very short travel. By the time he returned home his wife had
not only died, she had been buried. He was totally devastated. I think he wrote
that in memoriam to his wife, and others have come to that same conclusion. How did you decide to learn to
play the Chaconne on the classical guitar? When
I heard Had you studied music as a
child? I
studied piano, but then after my dad left when I was nine I studied no music. I
didn.t like studying or the piano. Had you ever played the
classical guitar before? No.
I had a bang-up guitar that I used to fool around with. But I went out and
bought a very, very fine one. That was in the .70s when I got serious. It was
sold to me on time payments and it took me two years to pay for it, maybe more,
but it.s priceless to me. Was
it difficult to not only learn classical guitar, but start by learning such a
difficult piece? Most
people that try to achieve the level that.s necessary begin their studies very
young, and I didn.t begin until I was much older. There were difficulties. My
fingers weren.t as supple. I had been flying helicopters, which requires a
whole different approach where all your fingers are used together, whereas with
guitar you use them independently. I struggled to make one finger move without
moving another. There.s also the problem of having the time to put into it,
having to learn how to read music, just getting the basics down. But I used the
piece itself, its scales and arpeggios made into exercises. So when I
eventually got to the point where I.d memorized the piece, I had already been
playing the scales and arpeggios for a long period of time. So it made it a
little easier. After you were hit by a car,
did any of your injuries make it difficult to play the guitar? In
the accident I had seventeen or so fractures including three or four fingers
and my thumb, and I had head injury and memory loss. I couldn.t even play a
note. I picked up the guitar and couldn.t remember a thing. I also suffered
nerve damage, which caused double vision. The music had so many notes and they
were so small. A friend, my teacher, Jose Maria, took the music and broke it
down into variations and had the notes enlarged so that I could more clearly
see them. Then I memorized the thing. It took a year-and-a-half or two years to
memorize because I couldn.t see very
well. Tell me about the car
accident. I
was in downtown What were your injuries? I
had multiple fractures, almost lost my leg, and spent 11 years in rehab. They
were going to remove the leg. I refused. I got a recommendation for an
orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Richard Ryu, in And you recovered much better
than the doctors predicted? Finally
I got to where I could walk again without a limp. That.s when I took my bike
ride. I celebrated my rehab in 1999 by riding a bike across the Tell me about your recovery
process. I
spent several months in a wheelchair. I can.t tell you how many months I spent
on crutches for one leg or another. I got so good I could move on those
crutches faster than I could run. It was 160-odd steps down to beach, and I
could fly up and down those steps on crutches. All told, on and off, it was at
least four or five years that I was in some fashion immobile. How did you deal with that
emotionally? Just
like anything else. At the time, when something bad happens, you think it.s the
worst thing that ever happens to you. Often it turns out to be the best. It
gave me a lot of time to think and study and write and spend with my son . how
can you think of that as bad? Do you think the Chaconne
helped you recover from the accident? I
don.t think I could have gotten through the ordeal without it. I used the
guitar just doing chromatic scales, following the frets. I started doing that
to exercise my fingers and as a meditation. Slowly things started coming back.
It was a year-and-a-half before I could start playing anything again. I studied
three to four hours everyday all through my rehab. Now I study at least two
hours a day. When you heard the music,
could you connect to the pain Bach felt writing it? Oh, absolutely. You will hear everything in that music. If
you sit and listen to it you will hear the pain and the anger and the turmoil,
and then the acceptance that hey, she.s not coming back, it.s over. And then
there.s the resolution of the acceptance that it.s done. It.s kind of a
microcosm of life. It.s everyone.s experience, so everyone can relate to it.
That.s what got me connected to the music. When did you first play the
whole Chaconne? Well
after my accident. When I finally played it through it took me 32 minutes,
still making mistakes. Violinists play it in anywhere from 13-15 minutes. As
you gain more confidence and accuracy you start speeding it up. It took five
years until I got to a speed I liked. I play it every day at least once. It.s a
meditation. You also took up writing
during your recovery? During
that time I was just writing therapeutically. I wrote notes and poetry and so
on. About five or six years ago I ended up with about 5 or 600 pages of notes.
I couldn.t conceive of it being a book, writing about my own experiences. A
friend advised me, .Look, just write it as fiction. That freed me. When I was
able to fictionalize, it all came together. The sections about Bach are a
mix of fact and fiction, correct? The
Bach is historical fiction. Bach was not known well in his day so there wasn.t
a lot written about him then, but his music is so profound that as it was found
and analyzed, people developed a sense of the person he was. I went through
much of the literature and most of it was analysis of his music and not much
about the man. So how did you go about
turning Bach the man into a character? The
literary view of the man is totally different from the one I came up with. I
looked at what his life might have been like, within the context his music.
Bach is thought of as a very holy man, a religious man, because he wrote church
music. But I went back and found that much of his music, when analyzed today,
would be considered jazz, very secular. He wrote for the church, but in his
time if you didn.t work for the court or church you didn.t work. He had to take
his jazz and sell it as holy to get paid. In my mind, in the book, he had to
convince the Church that his secular music was sacred. The historical facts are
accurate, but the story is fiction. The Bach chapters give him a voice in the
first person, and fictionalize how he came to write the Chaconne. Do you find a connection
between writing and playing music? Certainly,
I love the way Bach wrote his music; to make things harmonize, with clear
melodic themes, rhythm, tempo, and counterpoint. I think it.s the same with
writing. I don.t know if I was able to achieve that, but I tried to write in
that fashion as a standard. If you.re reading and the rhythm somehow gets
broken by a word, you trip over it, and it breaks the tempo. It.s very much the
same with music. What about the processes of
writing and performing music? It.s
kind of a similar process. Really they.re both languages. I.ve never composed
any music, but I would assume that the processes are pretty much the same. You
have to have a theme or plot, a beginning, middle, and ending, a resolution.
You can.t leave people hanging when you write a story . it.s the same with
music except there is a more dynamic connection with the audience because they
are listening rather than reading. In
the novel, You.ve
heard people speak about the ring of truth. When you were young and did something
wrong, whether or not your parents knew, you always knew the truth, didn.t you?
It is often referred to as the ring of truth. I sensed that in Bach.s music.
When you look for that sensation, it helps you make good decisions. Everyone.s
had situations when they know they shouldn.t, but do it anyway. Truth can be
ignored, denied, but it can.t be altered, so it.s that sensation of ah ha, you
just know, a bell goes off. And yes, having sensed that feeling in Bach.s
music, I look for a similar sensation when trying to make decisions. It helps
me make better choices. it acts as a guide. At
the end of Mastroianni.s novel, the protagonist |
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