This piece uses a new patch.
I'm passing on a story I wrote that was meant to be accompanied by the music and pictures below. A little late summer fun.
Whos Playing the Piano?
My wife and I recently took a drive through the southern Berkshires. It was an uncomfortably hot and humid afternoon, and our car windows were rolled down, since our air conditioning had long ago stopped working. (You see, were both musicians.) At some point late in the day, we came upon what seemed to be an old abandoned camp of some type. The buildings were faded and dilapidated; doors were hanging and windows broken, and graffiti marred a wall or two.
Struck by the mystique of the lonely place, we decided to pull over and take a few pictures. As we walked around one building a reddish house that we imagined had belonged to the camp manager we noted that a large field in the backyard had been over-taken by the woods. We also found a small cluster of apple trees beside the house. The trees were gnarly and obviously hadnt been pruned for many years, yet we noticed they still bore a small crop of Macintoshes.
As we stood directly across the street from the house, discussing how best to balance the building and a nearby stonewall for the perfect picture, we noticed a soft cryptic sound that hadnt been audible only a moment ago. We froze for a moment at this new and unexpected accompaniment. At first it seemed like wind chimes, and then perhaps the whimsical song of a Catbird. Our minds searched for a calm rational explanation for the sound. But as our ears adjusted to the faint and muffled tones, we realized that it was, without a doubt, music piano music coming from within the house. I looked at my wife and nervously asked,
Whos playing the piano?
Since it was by now late afternoon and long shadows had overtaken the homestead, my wife, pretending that all was normal, prepared to take the first pictures. It seemed best to use a flash in this shadowy setting. She squinted to center the house and wall in the tiny frame of her camera, and then snapped the first photo. The purple flash lit up the face of the building to a far greater degree than we had expected. Together with the yellow light of the setting sun behind us, it reflected in the windows and created an otherworldly blinding blend of natural and unnatural light. It was almost alarming. And at that instant, the piano music ceased. The unexpected silence was even more unnerving than our first recognition that someone was making music inside this crumbling long-abandoned house. For now we knew that whoever was inside was aware of our presence, and we had rudely interrupted their piano playing with our picture taking.
By now, the two of us were in a panic and feeling or imagining a strangers suspicious eye upon us. Regardless, we still wanted to get a few more pictures of the place. The several buildings across the street were irresistibly cryptic in their hard-wooded setting, and overgrown with decades or more of grasses and shrubs, as nature reclaimed her lumber. We hurried up the road perhaps a hundred feet, and my wife snapped a few more pictures of the other structures a small shack, the main cabin, and an immense barn. The cabin, which resembled a plain dormitory type of structure, seemed to have once received a half-hearted renovation, including a turquoise coat of paint. We noticed a few large windows and two doors that did not at all match the age of the building, but no more. The renovation was begun and then quickly dropped, for some tantalizing reason. Perhaps the renovator preferred instead to play the piano in the house across the street.
With the taking of the last picture, we exhaled our relief and quickly returned to our car. I pulled out of the small grassy lot, turned the car around, and began to head home. But my wife suddenly held out her left hand in front of me and whispered, Wait. Stop the car. Turn it off. I stopped in the middle of the road, put it in park, turned off the engine, and listened. I feared to hear what she heard. Yes, it was piano music the same piece, the same Alberti Bass and minor melody only now it was coming from the turquoise cabin. But how could that be? There were no signs of life here, no worn paths or freshly cut grass, but only unkept acres and empty collapsing buildings. My wife, looking straight ahead, with eyes wide open and lips hardly moving, asked the unwanted question:
But whos playing the piano?
I started the engine again, frantically pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor, and we slowly drove away.