Post

Dear friends of piano music, 

today I have to tell you something sad. I was with my parents, played on my old grand piano, in between let my gaze wander dreamily over the autumnal landscape behind the house, then devoted myself again to music, a wonderful piece that I recently discovered. Well, discovered is an exaggeration - someone who plays the viola beautifully in the desert asked me to record it, which I will do soon. The doorbell rang, my parents opened it, I half heard a conversation with a man who spoke very Westphalian, which has always made me a little nostalgic lately, because it's the language melody of my childhood. But I continued to practice, so that I can only tell this sad story secondhand. The man who simply brought a package to my parents was also a musician. A trumpeter, coming from a family of other professional musicians. While in the generation before him everyone had their livelihood by playing in an orchestra, our trumpeter has to deliver letters and parcels. That wasn't an unpleasant job in the past either, my grandfather worked as a postman for many years, and my mother used to deliver the mail during the semester break. You had to get up early and sort letters, but then you could take a kind of very long walk, have a nice little chat here and there, because you had gotten to know the people behind the mailboxes a little over the years. If you were very sporty and fast like my mother you would have finished in the early afternoon latest and theoretically could have spent hours practicing the trumpet, composing operas, carving cuckoo clocks or whatever you wanted. In short: you still had time to be a person, maybe even an artist. Today, however, and of course we know it, but it is particularly painful when you are told about it by an unemployed musician, today everyone has to work more than is actually healthy. He has to hurry to finish his quota, has no more time for a little conversation or a look up to the cloud formations in the sky or down to the small blue flowers along the way. It was only because he heard me playing the piano  that the man told of his sad fate. He runs and rushes to deliver everything on time, is exhausted and tired after work, and then he takes care of his sick mother. He lacks the time and energy to play the trumpet. Can you stop being a musician? Can you stop being a human being in order to instead turn into a creature driven by profit margin optimization and soulless algorithms? I am very sad today.

Kerstin