Names and Pianos, with a side of Moses - A Short Play

 A conversation with Klavier:

Moishi: Morning, Klavier, or should I say, “Morning, piano?”

Klavier: Good morning, Moishi. I’m delighted to note that you’ve broadened your garden of knowledge by adding the fact that in Germany, a klavier is a piano.

Moishi: Thanks. I do like to know stuff.

Klavier: Knowledge can be very handy residing in the hands of … well … let’s let that be … for now.

Moishi: So why did your parents name you, well, piano?

Klavier: Because they would have considered it foolish to call me Dulcimer or Harpsichord. Anyway, it’s the two-syllable sound with the one-syllable last name, Onk, as much as the meaning that decided them, I think …. Given names and surnames should never have an equal number of syllables; it makes the name too prosaic, too … too, well, not musical.

Moishi: I don’t get …

Klavier: … and then there’s the repetition—or its avoidance—of vowels and consonants. Had they named me an alliterative, say … well, say Gronk Onk, some Country and Western artist would have written a song about Gronky Honky Onk, and … and there’d emerge a new dance called the Honky Gronk, and me and my name would submerge in a sea of pop culture, taking me with it.

Moishi: I still don’t …

Klavier: Then maybe try this on. My father was a concert pianist; we had two baby grand pianos in the house and lived a stone’s throw from the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. To say he worshipped the piano would not be exaggerating. He told me once that the invention of the keyboard literally made the composing of great concertos, symphonies, even opera what they are—I mean, were.

Moishi: I’m … I’m almost sorry I asked, Klav.

Klavier: By the way. Most people mispronounce my name. They say Clah-vee-eh. That’s French. It should be Klah-veerrr’. That’s German. And, by the by, it’s—the instrument, not I—it’s come to be called a piano in English, Spanish and Dutch from the Latin, piano, meaning soft. Luckily the Italians recognize the problem and call it pianoforte which translates, soft/strong.

Moishi: How come you know all this?

Klavier: If your parents had named you Guitar, wouldn’t you be curious about the why? Especially when in your schooldays, everyone joked about “playing on you,” then proceeded to do so? Wouldn’t you seek to know the why, the meaning of the naming of you? Anyway, if my father were alive today, I can hear him saying something like: “The piano and Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt made good music possible; the electric guitar and Clapton and Young did their best to destroy the very concept.”

(Beat)

Moishi: My name is Yiddish. My Mom said it means Moses.

Klavier: And why would your parents call you Moses?

Moishi: Don’t know. I hate it.

Klavier: I think Moses is way more significant than Piano. You should search it out. Perhaps your name will make of you a modern-day Moses.

Moishi: Ah, but what’s in a name anyway? Everyday, I mean. If you rename a rose a Dogturd Flower, won’t it still smell … well, rosy?

Klavier: True … sort of. You’re wiser than you think you are, Moishi. But that’s too big a subject for today, and I yearn for a coffee. Shall I pay today?

Moishi: (As they leave) If your parents named you now, you’d probably be Coffee, or Synthesizer, wouldn’ that ….

 Afterword: Ich hab ein Klavier, einen Hund und gut und gern 500 noch nicht gelesene Bücher daheim. (German writer apparently listing the ingredients of his good fortune: “I have a piano, a dog, and fully 500 as-yet-unread books at home.” -Huby, Felix, Bienzle und der Biedermann.

Dr. Surly meets Ophelia

 

‘Round about the mid nineteen-sixties, I spent time in a 100-seat lecture theatre along with about seventy-five fellow undergrads who’d chosen Physics 101 as an Arts degree elective. I don’t remember the professor’s name, but I’ll call him Doctor Surly; his greeting to us was, “Good morning. I’m thinking you probably don’t want to be here, and I know I don’t. So let’s just get it over with.” (Note how he used a preposition to end his sentence with.)

He was mostly right, of course. Taking a science elective was mandatory.

I have never been a nerd, except that my relative success in the humanities in high school probably branded me that in the mouths of what we now call the STEM people (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Experience had taught me that an orange rolling off the table will end up on the floor, not on the ceiling, but under the cold, dry pronouncement of Dr. Surly, I suddenly became enamoured with the possibility that certain speeds of falling (including terminal velocity) could be calculated mathematically as could the strength of gravitational attraction in relation to material size. (My heights-and-falling-phobia may have been implicated here.)

My days of wondering why, “if an orange in Canada falls down, why doesn’t an orange in China fall … well, up?” were over. Perhaps the attraction came from thinking that Hamlet learning of his mother’s unfaithfulness would inevitably lead to his estrangement from Ophelia. Gravity (in both its definitions) would become integral to plot developments studied in Can. Lit. 101 as well as in Dr. Surly’s half-hearted curriculum.

Physics, the study of the behaviour of things physical. Although behaviour seems the wrong word, as if some choice is allowed an oxygen atom when it bumps into the hydrogen twins on the street and ponders whether or not to pursue forming a water molecule with them. (Sorry, Chemistry, but you’re just a thin branch of Physics in the end.) “Natural laws are immutable, indestructible, 100% predictable, all the time,” Dr. Surly would intone. “There never have been, are not now, and never will be miracles—if miracle means that the laws of nature can be thwarted.” With one wave of his chalk-wand, he turned seventy-five Sunday-schoolers into agnostics; all the water-walkers sank as one.

But, my slowly-awakening, undergraduate mind protested: “Human behaviour is not immutable, predictable. Estrangement doesn’t progress at a specific velocity, is not bound by a terminal speed either. Hamlet doesn’t have to drive Ophelia to suicide. Neither are the odds of a certain choice mathematically calculatable.”

Inadvertently, accidentally, Dr. Surly provided much to the education of the Humanities-bound students in that lecture theatre. For those who would enter careers in what was called, “English teaching,” the dichotomy posed by the material and the emotional would be foundational to everything from literary criticism; to logic; to story construction; to first learning, then transmitting the deepest essentials of human experience to malleable, youthful minds.

Oranges continue to fall earthward, both in Canada and China. And  Ophelia will continue to drown herself in front of high school students annually … and predictably, and her friend Laertes will make that silly comment: “Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,/And therefore I forbid my tears … (Hamlet: IV, vii)

And in classrooms everywhere, a young man will fall asleep on his palms, elbows on his desk, but will produce a startling, lecture-stopping bang when his head-prop slips and gravity smashes his acned face into Hamlet: IV, vii.

Isn’t Physics wonderful? Thank you, Dr. Surly.