I was returning from a day of study at the Bibliotheek. Since my bike was still sadly marooned outside a bar in the North of the city – somebody stole my keys, bike keys, and alas my little Bonpoint navy mac at The Volks Huis – I was going by foot. I walked along the St Nicholaastraat and, still a little giddy from the intense period of focus and work on Phoenix Road, decided to make a rash purchase of a pair of expensive shoes. They were silver, yet rubbed with a black polish that produced the chiaroscuro effect of distressed metal and made them seem – I thought – like two little stormy skies. Doubly confused now by the whirl of money and work, I was unsure how to return home: should I take the way by St Jacobs and passed Dampoort or the way by the water? Perhaps, a little uncharacteristically, I chose the way by the centre.
I reached the whimsically-named Town Hall in the Kornmarkt – a strange, large, modern edifice that occupies a central position in the city. It is redolent of both a church and an outdoor covered market as it has a wooden-slatted peaked ceiling but no walls. Festival and day concerts are regularly held there and in the early weeks of my move to Ghent a public piano was stationed at its centre, which people often played to a small audience – as late as eleven or twelve at night. This time I deliberately avoided the Town Hall curling round extreme edge of it, passed a chocolatier and the municipal concert hall. But suddenly my onwards journey was stalled by a sound so fine that I had no choice but to redirect my footfall towards Ghent’s modernist agricola.
As I drew closer towards the sound – the tremulous, sweet bowing of a single violin – I noticed that others had stopped too. Indeed, all around the sound and the central figure dressed all in black occupying its centre, pedestrians had frozen like statues in an automata. Embarrassed almost to approach the centre of the sound, as votaries might be to approach a saint or a commoner to address an emperor at court, I drew closer to the figure in black. As I approached a strange smile forked across her face, which was already squeezed, almost painfully it seemed, up against the violin. It was a strange sight – the sight of genius and almost supernatural talent at work – yet she did not look as the wringing sweetness of her playing would lead you to expect. The violinist was small and squat with a completely shaved head, wearing a black leather jacket, fingerless gloves and doc marten boots. Her posture was not upright, but huddled and cowed, almost wretched, and she drew her instrument in, towards herself like a child. When I dropped a few supplicatory golden coins at her feet, the painful geometry of her smile persisted and she uttered a few words to me in a strange accent that I did not recognise as Flemish. Perhaps she was Hungarian or Czechoslovakian. Afraid almost, to be too close to this violinist and not wanting to disturb her, I drew back respectfully – and dropped my shopping bags, which I was also a little ashamed, suddenly, to be carrying, in the presence of this much real beauty.
What heliotropes and rockets of sound she created in the furnace of her art. The playing had an unmistakeably visceral effect on me: my blood seemed to redouble in its surging circulation around my body, the violin forte made my heart swell, swooping arpeggios or the jagged lightening-streak of an ascending scale, sent my mind spinning off is whirligigs of pleasure. Drawing her bow like a knife or a blade, cutting up the air around her, extracting impossible cadences and flights of sound from out of it – it was a kind of sweetness that approached pain, an ecstasy that flirted with the edge, an audacity that threatened imminent disaster. Indeed it made me feel that at the top of its musical range the violin produces a sound unlike any other instrument, a sound in the abstract, closer to the squeaking language of dolphins or the high frequency tinkling of the empyrean than anything else.
The violinist was playing the great sonatas and concertos of the romantic composers, and her playing once again made me feel, as the lunch time recitals at university did in the past, that the human being is poor vehicle for the gift of such rich music, and our way of honouring great performances – the restrained tapping together of hands– is as laughable and insufficient as having the greatest sex of your life and then saying a polite thank you afterwards. In fact, what Romantic composers like Beethoven achieved was actually rather illicit as well as being unprecedented: they established a sensual link between the music and the listener that was emotionally and viscerally direct. When you listen to Beethoven, you do not find the distance or objectivity of refinement or decorum placed between yourself and the music as you do in baroque or early renaissance music. Instead it is sheer penetration, the music is an experience and your body is temporarily pervaded and taken hostage by it. Thus, Romantic music is art as a kind of pornography, one that stretches an umbilical c[h]ord between the art and the spectator, so that you experience a temporary physiological fusion with it.
A couple stood not far from me with their arms slung around each others’ waists. Each time a saraband, waltz or mazurka finished and our Salome paused for breath – which she seemed to gulp greedily, down like a frog – we would exchange looks as if to say Can you believe how good she is? Isn’t this incredible? And we were friends suddenly, fellow conspirators, drawn together by mutual appreciation of one of the finest violinists I have ever heard in my life. Figures were dotted here and there – it was a cold week-day in the late afternoon. But those who listened did not leave, their feet were rooted, as mine were, to the ground. It was a performance that was impossible to leave, and unthinkable to turn your back on.
I suddenly mused that one of the differences that marks out buskers or street performers and professional musicians, is where they decide to make their stage. This violinist did not bother to fiddle to passersby on a street corner or under a bridge, she had placed herself in the very centre of the city, under the eaves of a modern market hall, where the acoustics, for an outdoor space are unparalleled. Her ragged, beggared stance upon the stool notwithstanding, the foyer in which she had chosen to play, demonstrated to me that she had a professional musician’s discernment for seeking out true theatrical context.
It was beautiful to see the environment around us responding so palpably to the violinist. Cyclists would swerve from their paths along the Botermarkt in order to come closer to the diabolic figure of the violinist upon her stool. Sometimes, like lonely planets in elliptical orbits, they would perform multiple turns around the Town Hall. Families and children would quieten as they approached and stand in happy tribes under the rafters of the church among hippies, students, businessmen, those in the flower of their youth and those in the winter of their life. All gathered to receive the sweet nectar of her music – allowing it to trickle into their ears and saturate their minds with melody.
Eventually I left, but there was no right time to go. I remember thinking I should write then and there, upon the pavement, of what I had seen. I knew there was a rational explanation – there is a famous conservatorium in Ghent, a city which in any case has a strong culture of classical music performance and composition, and I had already met many musicians living and working here – but still, this encounter with the punk violinist, who cut the air around her instrument like a knife – was just the sign that I needed after returning home from The Rainbow. Welcome home, she seemed to say, Welcome Home to Ghent, a place where real art exists everywhere – especially in the most unexpected of places.
833 words a day 