A friend shared the following story with me. It says more about the ability to improvise than anything I've encountered.
On November 18, 1995, violinist Itzhak Perlman came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If you've ever been to one of his concerts, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. Stricken with polio as a child, Perlman has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, can break your heart.
On that evening, as on others, he walked painfully, yet majestically, to his chair. He sat down, put his crutches on the floor next to him, undid the clasps on his legs, tucked one foot back and extended the other foot forward. Then he bent down and picked up his violin, put it under his chin, nodded to the conductor and began to play. But just as he finished the first few bars, the unthinkable happened. One of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap - it went off like gunfire across the room.
The audience sat in stunned silence and waited. They expected Perlman to have to repeat the painful ritual of traversing the stage yet again to retrieve a string or another violin. But he didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled to the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began and Perlman picked up where he had left off and played with such passion and power and purity as no one in the audience had ever heard before.
It's not possible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. Even I know that. But that night, Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. People in the audience could see him modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was re-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them - sounds the strings had never made before. When the piece was finished, silence filled the room. And then...the audience rose to its feet and cheered.
Itzhak Perlman smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his bow to quiet the crowd and then said, quietly, "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left."
What a powerful line. Perhaps that's the definition of life - to make "music" with whatever we have available to us. In other words, to improvise.
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