I dreamed I was at a concert hall where a pianist was scheduled to perform Sorabji’s complete Opus Clavicembalisticum.
I was unaware of the pianist’s name or identity, but I assumed it was going to be Jonathan Powell, whose performance of the O.C. I attended on June 20, 2004, at Merkin Hall.
The dream was amusing. None of the ushers knew what was going on. This was not so much because they were unfamiliar with Sorabji. It went beyond that. Somehow the impenetrability of Sorabji’s music extended into the social and material aspects of the evening, causing the very place to become wracked with obscurities.
The sign for Merkin Hall became an unreadable sprawl of incoherent letters, looking something like one of those squiggly-lined CAPTCHA forms you see on some web pages.
The program notes were written in some kind of hybrid language that combined near-nonsense words and symbols.
The opening "Introito" movement was called "Œrntr__tð", and the "Preludio-Corale" and "Fuga I" were called "Preilig Ļ Fug."
In fact the middle word from "Preilig Ļ Fug" used a character I can not seem to find. It looked something like a British pound sign (£) without the cross in the middle and with less of a hook on the top.
The concert hall was empty when I arrived, but I noticed it was far larger then Merkin Hall. That seemed like a good thing, as I assumed this meant a larger crowd was expected than what turned out at Merkin.
Unfortunately the seats were about an inch high, making it more likely that concert-goers would trip over them and not sit. The ceiling of the hall was tremendously high — hundreds of feet up — with thousands of wind chimes blowing in the atmosphere.
There was no piano. There was a modest-sized pipe organ that a stagehand found in the basement. I remember thinking the pianist was going to be rather surprised by this.
The ushers looked at me and laughed. They seemed drunk. One of them held the program notes in her hand and chuckled, unable to make sense of the language used on the pages. She started trying to hum the opening notes of the Opus Clavicembalisticum but her singing wandered off into that dreamland sort of thing that only made sense while I was asleep. When I woke up I still heard that usher singing. It sounded to me like sounds from some kind of science project involving wind tunnels and high-powered fans.
During the dream this all seemed just about right. It was not funny until I woke up.
