Читать книгу Devils & Islands - Turner Cassity - Страница 8

Fantasia on Dummy Keys

The harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating.

—Sir Thomas Beecham

The practice keyboard teaches only fingering.

Interpretation is beyond it. Lacking sound,

It will forgive wrong notes, not know an exercise

From Bach, if there indeed is some distinction. Mute,

It is the ideal medium for twelve-tone works,

If not the Chopin repertoire. Without response,

How judge of touch? Too firm? Too light? One must assume

Seducers learn and necrophiliacs do not,

Else why do spinet’s key and quill go at it so?

Is Czerny a perversion? And if harpsichords

Seem musical cadavers, are the fringe who play

“Authentic instruments” grave robbers? They, in proof

Of scholarship as folly, preach that out-of-tune

Is what is called for. Vocal exercises—scales—

Employ an instrument whose authenticity

No one can doubt. A vocalise may have no words,

But is expression in a way dexterity,

Viewed, cannot ever be, although Franz Liszt might say

“My fingering could surely semaphore the deaf,

Who at recitals should be charged full ticket price.”

To speak of heartstrings being plucked is retrograde,

As to both time and mechanism. Live hearts hammer.