To listen.

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-         -  So… only some of us can hear this music?

-        -   No, only some of us listen to it.

This dialogue was the most striking moment of the movie August Rush for me. It was not only about music or beauty of the world around us that we don’t notice so often. It was more than that. I suddenly realized how often I don’t listen, I don’t look, I don’t think. I prefer to say that I don’t hear, I don’t see, I don’t know. That I don’t notice.

When I was studying piano at music school a mandatory part of our program was ensemble. My teacher was really good in selecting partners for ensemble: students in her ensembles have never had the same temper; they always had different performance styles. I was a too tall for her age teenage-girl, a little bit clumsy and uneasy with guys. Well, at least that’s how I fell about myself. My partner was my best friend, a frail skinny girl with blond eye-lashes and tiny fingers. An image of a girl for me at that time.

I remember my frustration and envy because I always got the second voice on the piano in the kingdom of bass, accompaniment and pedal. I always sounded heavy and dull; I always had to play quieter to let the melody in the first voice reign in the air. At least that’s how I felt about my part. And my delicate friend in the first voice always performed this refined, beautiful melody with the tinkling notes of the upper octaves. Moreover, she always sat closer to the audience and I knew from personal experience that nobody noticed the second voice performer, everyone followed fingers of the first voice performer. I confess, I thought it was unfair that my teacher never gave me the first voice.

I graduated from music school after 9 years of studying with big doubts whether I should leave music or not. My friend dropped off after 3 years.  And it never crossed my mind that my teacher’s strategy of choosing partners and distributing voices in fact was supposed to flatter me. I never realized till now that the second voice in most of the ensembles is the hardest and the most important one. The accompaniment has to be deep and strong, full of feelings and thoughts; it has to be a true soul of the piece. While the first voice is just the front facade of the piece, the brilliant but meaningless decoration of the building, it’s the face, not the soul. Pretty often the first voice score is much easier to perform than the second one.

It wasn’t till couple of days ago that I noticed that if you cut off the first voice part from most of the pieces (even not ensembles) you will still hear the melody, you will still see the core of the piece. The true melody of the music is in the second hand’s score. This discovery made me thinking of the true core in different things, not just music. How often we notice only the bright facade, the “first-hand’s score” of the world around us choosing a good-looking person over the kind one to be friend with, buying a colorful, shallow magazine instead of modest-looking but profound book, watching the vacuous, super-hero movie with special effects instead of thoughtful, but “not-action” one. We are greeting famous sportsmen, musicians, scholars forgetting to notice their coaches, their teachers who are often the base of their success but always live in the shadow.

Everyone can see, everyone can hear, everyone can know. It’s just about making an effort to notice a small, unpretentious room with books behind the luxurious sparkling entrance.