Handed in my last paper for the Marx class, on gender and class struggle, 20 pages double spaced – here is the first page before it morphs into who said what, when, who said something else, when, why, who gave a shit about that, who thought whatever smart, who thought whatever wrong and then morphs into a very Hey Jude outro with tambourine and sing-a-long.
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Being a pianist, I consumed a lot of piano music and one day when I was 16, I came upon something exhilarating, the Hungarian Rhapsody #6 by Franz Liszt. Within this single piece there were many pianistic fireworks and like a true masterpiece, its climax left me stunned. Liszt designed a finale where the pianist played swift octaves in their right hand. Imagine the pinky and thumb fully extended like arrows pointing in different directions, simultaneously moving at the speed of a competitive sprinter and keeping this up for more than the duration that usually causes tendonitis. That in itself felt impossible, but then this madman Liszt turned the entire experience further inside out and restated the same melodic idea with the left hand. These were head exploding designs.
It’s one thing for the right hand to enter a drag race but quite another to hand the steering wheel to the left hand and expect it to not complain and keep up. What super human could possibly achieve that level of mastery? The cassette had a grand piano on its cover, I turned it over to read the name of the superhuman recording artist and was further confounded – Martha Argerich – a woman. That moment of reading Martha Argerich’s name on the back of the cassette gave me reason to wonder about myself. What happened in the previous years, to position my 16 yr. old self to assume women were not equal to men?