“So, Dr. Franklin, what does all that mean?”
“What does it mean?” he said. “Well, simply put, it means that Karl Abbasonov communicates, verbally, through his ears.”
IV.
The piano in Karl Abbasonov’s living room is an old, wood-finished Steinway upright. The legs are scratched, and there are spots along the body and on the bench and on the lid where the finish has been rubbed away. “Those come from water damage,” Abbasonov told me. “My mother had a goldfish in a small fishbowl on the top of the piano for a while — which, in hindsight, doesn’t make much sense — and I accidentally broke the bowl against the wall, sometime during my Beethoven phase, a year or so into my piano lessons.” He paused for a moment before concluding: “I was very exuberant about Beethoven.”
His parents had bought the piano from a woman who had wanted to learn but who had quit playing after just three lessons. No one plays the old piano anymore, as most of the hammers have been worn away through Abbasonov’s exuberance, but he has kept it as a memento of his parents, his childhood. On more than one occasion, a music fanatic or a freak show fetishist has offered to buy Abbasonov’s old piano from him, and one woman from Wyoming once offered to buy, for fifteen thousand dollars, his entire collection of piano lesson books, the kind of by-rote scale books used by elementary school children when first learning to play. Abbasonov’s, the ones he showed me, looked untouched.
Abbasonov’s piano and piano books, however, aren’t the only thing collectors and museums have requested. The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia has offered, in the event of Karl’s untimely or unexpected or, even, natural death, to preserve his body in the exact position in which it is left at the time of his passing. And though they have assured him of “star treatment”—his own exhibit complete with a piano and copies (if not the originals) of his musical scores — they haven’t offered him any financial compensation.
“I haven’t told them one way or the other yet. Partly I like to string them along, but mostly I just don’t think about it. Really, in the end, all of that will be left up to either Dr. Franklin or Dr. Johnson. Though I’m pretty sure one of them will keep the piano and at least some of my old music books and all of my own music. But who knows what they’ll do with me.”
His parents and his first piano teachers faced a similar problem — What should we do with Karl? — once he began taking piano lessons. He started with a forty-five minute lesson once every week, on Wednesday nights. Western music comprises twelve diatonic major scales and twelve diatonic minor scales. Of the minor scales, there are three different variants — melodic, harmonic, and natural. The natural minor scale is, note for note, the same scale as a major scale, except that it begins with a different starting tone and results in a different interval pattern. These forty-eight scales are the standard for Western tonality, formed and used extensively between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In the six days between his first lesson and his second lesson, Abbasonov had mastered the complete range of diatonic scales, all forty-eight of them, this after being taught only the very first, C major. His piano teacher, after she heard him run flawlessly over each, was speechless. His parents increased his lessons to two a week. After a month, though, he had to find a new piano teacher, one more advanced and who might be able to keep up with him. Three months after that, Abbasonov moved away from piano teachers altogether and moved into the Southern Methodist University’s conservatory program, where he took daily lessons from professors of musicology, music theory, and advanced piano, and where he first took up the violin.
“I was in heaven. I felt so completely submerged in music. There I was, an eight-year-old kid who didn’t have to go to school but for a half day, who could spend his days around instruments and around music. Sheets and sheets of music. I’ve always been a fair sight reader, and so I used to play through whatever I got my hands on. It frustrated my teachers no end, because I would jump from new piece to new piece, and it took all of their energy to get me to focus enough on one piece to really polish my performance. But after a while, they just let me go, figuring that I was only eight and that I would settle down with age. I didn’t care what was placed in front of me, I would play through it, and maybe play through it again if it had been particularly difficult, like a Rachmaninoff or a Liszt, both of whom had larger than average hands and much larger hands than mine, and so I had to improvise while playing their music to get the full range of sound that they could produce. Life was perfect, and sometimes I like to think that, if I hadn’t been introduced to music composition, life would have stayed that way, but I’m sure, after a while, I’d have stumbled into composition on my own, and then it would have happened anyway.”
The “it” happened just before he reached his tenth birthday, when one of his professors gave him a small book of blank score sheets “for those melodies, he told me, running through my head that might be mine and that might be lost if they’re not written down. At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about, had become so caught up in Bartók and Mozart and Schubert to even think about my own notes, but then, once the notion was pointed out to me, the notes just followed. That’s when I had my first seizure. A short one, to be sure, since the melody I thought out was short and simple, very much a nine-year-old melody, so it was less of a seizure, more of a stiffening, and not throughout my whole body, but in my shoulders. Back then, it always started at the base of my neck and in my shoulders.”
Abbasonov never thought much about his stiff joints and minor seizures. It was, in fact, his parents who noticed their son shuffling through the house in a slightly hunched and stiff-hipped manner. When they asked him about it, he shrugged them off, told them he was busy, that he was in the middle of thinking through a song, that he had almost finished it, and that he needed to start writing it out. When he came back out of his bedroom, the piece finished, he would be fine and fluid again, and he would claim that he didn’t know anything about the way he was walking, and, no, he didn’t remember being in pain.
“The next time, though — long before we figured out that it was in any way connected to music — I had started work on a scherzo, playful and fun, but longer and more complicated than anything else I’d tried to compose, and then it was unignorable, unavoidable. I couldn’t get out of bed, and after a while, I couldn’t move even my eyelids. My parents had no idea what was wrong with me. The doctor, when he came to the house, couldn’t figure it out, either, other than to say that I’d had some sort of fit or seizure. They hooked me up to an IV so that I could get food and water, had a nurse come to the house to stay with me, because no one knew what this was, much less how long this was going to last. I’d been working on the piece for about two weeks, and I wasn’t bedridden until the last three or four days. It was a longer score, but not that long, really. And so, I wasn’t even scrunched up, nothing like the way I am now. I was just flat on my back, stiff as a board, stuck in bed, while I ran through the music in my head.
“I knew, part of me knew, that what was going on was caused by the music in my head, but I didn’t want to think about it that way. Instead, I thought that the music was what was helping me through these strange seizures, thought that I was occupying myself by thinking about the music and nothing else but the music, and that if I could make it through this melody in my head, see it all the way through, picture exactly how it should sound, then I would pull myself, or the music would pull me, through this seizure, and the next seizure, and the next.”