The Daily Grist:
“I have found that if you love life, life will love you back…
People are always setting conditions for happiness… I love life without condition.” … Artur Rubinstein
How old can a person get and still be able to play music? I worry about this question a lot because I love to play music. And, I’m getting old. We all have to face up squarely to this inevitable sad fact of aging one of these days unless we are one of the unlucky ones who die too young.
January 28 was the birthday of a music legend and I happened to be surfing obscureTV channels on that day. I became transfixed by the image of a white haired tuxedoed gentleman absolutely killing Chopin’s Scherzo number 2 in B flat minor. A bluegrass tune played really fast is hard too but just look at the ink-spilled page of a Chopin scherzo score and I think you’ll be impressed. The way Rubinstein’s nimble yet wrinkled fingers danced over the keyboard was just unbelievable to behold. And the powerful sound they produced on the fortissimo passages was impressive. I think the video was a German archive and I searched in vain for a link but you might just have to take my word for it.
I’ve seen video of Bill Monroe playing fiddle tunes when he was approaching 80 years old. Not in his prime to be sure but his fingers fly over old tunes like Frog on a Lily Pad, Galley Nipper and Dusty Miller. So, I have hope that I and other aging baby boomers might still be able to pick a few tunes twenty years from now. Some people age differently of course. Maybelle Carter recorded Wildwood Flower on the autoharp for the Circle Unbroken album because her arthritis made the guitar too difficult.
Rubinstein was a genius and I can testify to the fact that he was still an able musician as an octogenarian because I saw him live in Boston in the early seventies. He retired a few years later at around ninety after a performance career that spanned eight decades.
Can you imagine what a bluegrass musician Rubinstein might have been? Too bad, but just maybe there are other musicians like that out in bluegrass land right now. I think probably that there are.
