A piece of music has the power to paint its own pictures, just as much as a book or a play or a fable. Sometimes it can create more than a painting or a sculpture; those are set and stationary, whereas music is more malleable in its images. Such is the case with this magnificent work by Kayhan Kalhor – ‘Blue As The Turquoise Night of Neyshabur’ – here performed by Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble. The stories that may be spun from hearing it run through the mind along myriad paths, each one slightly different, taking new turns and twists depending on the listener. It begins in a calm if slightly mysterious and tense tone, before gradually unfurling into a rollicking adventure.
Maybe it’s a love story, with all the tumult and passion of a first kiss. Maybe it’s a realization – a mystery slowly solved over the course of its fifteen minutes. Maybe it’s a journey, a trip we have taken to a new place, a new city, a new country. Maybe it’s a party, from the anticipatory preparation through the tense starting minutes to the bombastic climax when all the guests have assembled and the state of happy camaraderie crests in loud laughter and the majesty of merriment.
Listening to this on a dark January night when all that lay ahead were more dark January nights, I felt the gentle and insistent tug of art and beauty, the tantalizing wisp of imagination and inspiration, the call of some distant muse or siren. It was a tempting invitation to travel from the comforts of a conversation couch to any number of far-off lands and worlds. Why limit our experiences to what we can physically achieve when the body is so bound by time and place?
And so I listen to this piece of music, not looking up its genesis or background, not wanting to be influenced or nudged into something for the first few times I experience it. I want it to make its own way, choose its own adventure, conjure its own castles of creation. Make its own memory from a pile of mental rubble. My wrists ache, my knees are sore, my eyes are failing by the minute – the body begins the downward slope. The brain, such as it ever was, remains mostly intact – and the imagination, my one shining strength in a world of largely unimaginative comrades, is still sharply honed. It’s kept me going for all these 47 years, and it pushes me forward on this turquoise night, when I hear music that makes me feel like I can fly…
