I Am a Strange Loop

For me, the best illustration of the idea of better and worse fits or “resonances” between souls is musical taste. I will never forget what happened, thirty-some years ago, when a pianist friend praised Béla Bartók’s second violin concerto to the skies and insisted that I get to know it. This was an act of reciprocation for my having introduced to her, a few years earlier, one of the most stirring pieces of music I knew — Prokofiev’s third piano concerto. At that time, she had resonated to the last movement of the Prokofiev in an incredibly powerful way, a fact that seemed to signal that we were on much the same musical wavelength; therefore, I took her passionate endorsement of Bartók’s second violin concerto with great seriousness. To egg me on, she said that Bartók not only used her favorite chord from the Prokofiev over and over, but he used it better. Say no more! I instantly went out and bought a record of it. That evening, with high anticipation, I put it on and listened carefully. To my disappointment, I was utterly unaffected. This was very puzzling. I listened again. And then again. And again. And again. Over a couple of weeks, I must have listened to that highly-touted piece a dozen times if not two dozen, and yet nothing at all ever happened inside me, except that a fifteen-second section somewhere in the middle mildly engaged me. You could call this a blind spot — or a deaf spot — inside me, or else, as I would prefer, you could just say that the “fit” between my soul and Bartók’s is extremely poor. And this has been corroborated many times over with other Bartók pieces, so that now I am quite confident about what will (or rather, won’t) happen inside me when I hear Bartók. Although I like a few small pieces (based on folk songs) that he wrote, the bulk of his output doesn’t speak to me at all. And so my sense that this friend and I had a lot in common musically was greatly reduced, and in fact our friendship subsided thereafter.

After writing that paragraph, I grew curious as to whether a thirtyyear-old memory might be revealed invalid, or whether in the meantime my soul might perhaps have opened up to new musical horizons, so I went straight to my record player (yes, vinyl), put the Bartók violin concerto on once again, and listened to it carefully from beginning to end. My reaction was totally identical. To me, the piece just seems to wander and wander, never getting anywhere. Listening to it, I feel like a magnetic field bashing headlong into a superconductor — cannot penetrate even one micron! In case that’s too esoteric a metaphor, let’s just say that I’m stopped dead, right at the surface. It makes no sense at all to me; it is music written in an impenetrable idiom. It’s like looking at a book written in an alien script. You can tell there is intelligence behind it — maybe a great deal! — but you have no idea what it is saying.

I recount this rather gloomy anecdote because it stands for a thousand experiences in life, involving what, for lack of a better word, we call “chemistry” between people. There just is no chemistry between Bartók and me. I respect his intelligence, his creative drive, and his high moral standards, but I have no idea what made his heart tick. Not a clue. But I could say this of thousands of people — and then there are those for whom the reverse holds equally strongly. For instance, there is no piece of music in the world that means more to me than Prokofiev’s first violin concerto, written within just a few years of the Bartók concerto. (In fact, to my bewilderment, I have even seen the two mentioned in the same breath, as if they were cut from the same cloth. They might have some superficial textures in common here and there, but to me they are as different as Bach and Eminem.) While the Bartók rolls off of me like water off a duck’s back, the Prokofiev flows into me like an infinitely intoxicating elixir. It speaks to me, soars inside me, sets me on fire, turns up the volume of life to full blast.

I need not go on and on, because I am sure that every reader has experienced chemistries and non-chemistries of this sort — perhaps even relating to the Bartók and Prokofiev violin concertos in exactly the reverse fashion from me, but even so, the message I am trying to convey will come across loud and clear. Music seems to me to be a direct route to the heart, or between hearts — in fact, the most direct. Across-the-board alignment of musical tastes, including both loves and hates — something extremely rarely run into — is as sure a guide to affinity of souls as I have ever found. And an affinity of souls means that the people concerned can rapidly come to know each other’s essences, have great potential to live inside each other.

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