JOHANN STRAUSS AND THE WATER FAUCETS...

One of the world's favourite waltzes, and mine too, is Johann Strauss's 'An der shonen blauen Donau' (On the beautiful blue Danube). This waltz in fact is the THE waltz which has set the standard for other popular waltzes. So far reaching have been its effects that it has become part of modern music and culture. (For those who need to recollect, recall the omnipresent music piece from Kubrick's '2001, A Space Odyssey')

I have listened to this waltz thousands of times, in every form, for many years. But in spite of my love for it, the sublime piece of music never lent itself to my humming. And my philosophy is; if I can't hum a tune, I can't play it on the keyboard. And this philosophy has worked well for me. Baroque pieces (Handel, Bach etc.) I can hum, ergo they are the ones I most frequently play, sometimes even entire suites. But not the blue Danube. In its vast, flowing depths, it always hid a a certain unwillingness which I could never coax out of it. But as they say, every hummer has his own day...

For the umpteenth time, I was playing the piece today. I can only hum its first three movements, so I always have been playing it's first three movements. After the third movement, there is a sudden change of scale. Although I always KNOW what that it is in my mind, when it comes to humming it, somehow there is a loss of connection between my brain and my manifested musical sense. So I end up knowing the entire waltz, but playing only the first three movements. And so I thought it would be today. However, I have always tried to make an effort to recall the slippery tunes every time and play, and every time, they wriggle their way out from my consciousness. Today, I finished the first three movements, and, according to self-set tradition, tried to recall the next sudden change. Lo and behold! Slowly, but surely, the tunes not only came to my mind, but gracefully hummed their way out. Hum once, hum twice, and I actually hummed the entire fourth movement! I couldn't believe it. I stopped, as if in a dream. This had happened for the first time. Just to make sure it wasn't the effect of some ephemeral brain malfunction like deja vu, I tried again. Again, the tunes came out. What about the fifth movement? Would it work? Not wanting to pause and allow it to slip away, I tried. Thumbs up for the fifth! How far could I go??...

As the vagaries of practical life would have it, I had to go out somewhere in one hour, and before that I had to take a shower. This reality struck home hard. But I possibly could not bear to lose this marvelous musical offering, now that I had gotten hold of it. Hum the sixth, hum it in the shower...Hum the seventh.....and there's shampoo in my hair. I am ecstatic now, being able to remember AND hum almost the entire waltz; in fact I am waltzing the waltz in the shower, starting in my room (Ahh, the benefits of living alone...)...Hum the eighth...I am dancing and jumping in the shower, neglecting the shampoo (and the time)...hum the ninth...I am in seventh (or should I say 'ninth') heaven....and the HOT WATER GOES OUT!! Outside, it is 2 degrees celsius. Amidst my humming and gamboling, I have stayed long enough to make the water heater devoid of its precious contents. Hum the ninth...Damn the ninth! What should I do? As the plane of my existence cruelly changed, I decided to take a blitzkrieg shot under the shower. In about 10 seconds, I mercilessly shook the suds out of my hair with as much cold water as I could endure, and bounded out, freezing. But no starch...I was finally with old Johann! The first thing to do was to try to play the tunes, and again make sure that they hadn't been simply visitors to my cranium. But no...fate has been good to me, at least until now, and I am humming the entire waltz again and again. Maybe I will even record my humming. For what it was worth, the cold water could be metaphorically thought of as a dip in the Danube (Or maybe this is just exalted wishful thinking on my part...whatever!). It made me cold, it made me blue (literally) and it made me happy. What else could you want from life?!...Ta na na na na, ta ta, ta ta...