Where Does Music Go? It Lives On In Our Bodies

"Why do that? Everything is dedicated to you anyway.” — Schubert, upon being teased by his pupil and muse Countess Caroline Esterházy about not dedicating any of his pieces to her.

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Elation: my heart pounded in my throat as the rest of my body erupted with joy. I’ve always had stage fright. Despite performing in public with some frequency since I was young, I always manage to have a case of the nerves. The performance wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t matter. As the final chords dissolved into applause, I was consumed with an overwhelming sense of warmth and delight.

It was Valentine’s Day, and “Heart and Soul” was the encore to an eclectic program of classical music, jazz, and opera that my partner and some friends put on for a few dozen people at a boutique in the Upper East Side. All of the pieces were supposed to have something to say about love, or the loss thereof, but the theme was really just a pretense to gather loved ones together and make some music — and an acknowledgment that nobody actually goes out on Valentine’s Day proper in New York.

“Heart and Soul” is a weird little piece of music, a jazz standard that’s taken on a life of its own as that song that two people play on the piano at a party. I gigged as a jazz pianist when I was in college, and nobody ever called it out when they were on the bandstand — but it has a place in the world as perhaps the ur-duet. It’s also tied with “Chopsticks” as the song that you simply must play if you ever find yourself, like Tom Hanks in “Big,” at the oversized piano on the top floor of F. A. O. Schwartz in Lincoln Center.

We never quite got the tempo down while we were playing together, my partner picking out the high notes as I tried very hard not to lose my balance jumping around in major thirds. But it was undeniably fun in the way that a toy store should be — a sense of childish delight, total bodily joy.

Neither my partner nor I knew the lyrics to “Heart and Soul” when we started to bounce out the bass and melody, the keys blinking beneath our feet. We were just going through the motions that any vaguely musical person does, having a little bit of fun with a friend sitting at a piano. If I were a little less earnest, I might even call it a cliché, a “say the line, Bart”-esque moment of musical reference.

I didn’t have the chance to find it trite: I was too busy trying to bounce out the double notes of the bass line in time without tripping over my feet. As it turns out, it’s pretty hard to play that oversized piano. I had a newfound respect for Tom Hanks’ athleticism when we finished up the last few bars and jumped off, sweaty and out-of-breath. (If I ever do that again, I’ll wear workout clothes).

As we walked to the subway, I took one Airpod and she the other. We then spent 46 blocks of downtown train trying to find a suitable version, one that matched what was playing in our heads. Spotify was sparse with versions — the Huey Lewis and the News song of the same name notwithstanding, it took three or four tries, hastily searching and queuing up songs as we regained service at each subway station, to find Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition.

We immediately realized that the novice-piano-duet strips out some important parts of the song: subtle lines ending each verse provided a sense of resolution instead of endlessly repeating the same refrain. It was actually a difficult piece to pick up; we had a few practice sessions before the party, and each time we’d run through it, we’d uncover new complexity. It even took a while to finalize the lyrics. We eventually cobbled together a canonical set from Google and thorough listening to a few 1940s big band versions.

Music is an ephemeral thing, and after it is performed, that art lives in our memories and in our bodies. Before the advent of recorded music, an avid (and sufficiently wealthy) fan might see a favorite symphony performed seven or eight times in their entire life. But the experience was no less deeply felt by past audiences, who erupted in applause “to the point of ecstasy” upon hearing Beethoven premiere his Seventh Symphony in Vienna in 1813. Think back to the last great concert you saw, or the last time you listened to a truly great song in bed with headphones on — think of how it felt to have the sound rush over you.

There is no better way to preserve a memory than to embody it. There is no recording of my partner and I performing “Heart and Soul” together for the people we love — we did pose for a few photos, and a stranger in F. A. O. Schwartz did snap one of us on the big piano those weeks prior — but I couldn’t go back and listen to what it sounded like. But I do know what it felt like: the sweat on my brow, nervous breath drawing into my chest, catching her eye as we started the opening verse, embracing to applause after drawing the song to a close. The music lives on, embodied in me.