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| Slawomir Zubrzycki performing in Cracow October 18th |
No, I am not referring to Dan Brown’s book or breaking news that the fictitious conceit in his bestseller that Mary Magdalene had a child with Jesus was indeed proven true last week. Nope, this is even better. Because as I noted when I critiqued the film, Dan Brown’s whole thesis was that the whole world of Christianity would fall apart if this was ever proven to be true, somthing I found ridiculous since whether Jesus ever sired any offspring had nothing to do with his revolutionary teachings of unconditional love and forgiveness. So Brown’s story, though thoroughly entertaining with its mazes of twists and turns, was even more thoroughly ludicrous.
But Brown’s fiction was just that – a fiction. One thing I found supremely amusing about it – and the reason why I consider it to be such a thoroughly entertaining story – is that he crafted his tale so cleverly that he had the whole world believing that Mary Magdalene’s tomb was indeed a centuries-old deeply held Vatican state secret. The proof of this was that tourism at the famous Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland skyrocketed after the book was published since the thrust of the mystery was that Mary Magdalene’s remains, as well as the genealogical records proving the Jesus lineage were all ultimately discovered by Brown’s hero, Robert Langdon, to be there. I found this highly amusing for two reasons: (1) these tourists obviously never bothered to read the final chapter since the book ends with Robert Langdon discovering the true location of Magdalene’s tomb, which was the basement of the Louvre; and (2) it’s so silly that anyone believed this preposterious plot to begin with since any practicing Catholic (or for that matter any literate person period) would have known the truth anyway.
Everyone should know (and a two minute search through Wikipedia would confirm this), that Mary Magdalene went to France after the crucifixion, settled near Marseilles and was buried (and remains entombed to this day) in the ancient little church right outside Marseilles where she regularly worshipped. She’s been there since her death. Pilgrims visit this holy site every day. Never has there been any secret about it. Neither has there been any conspiracy to cover this up, certainly no sinister organization with the sole purpose of murdering anyone who tries to expose this. Aaaah, the powers of a well-spun tale!
Nope, I’m not talking about the fictional Dan Brown DaVinci; I’m talking about the real article. As we all know, DaVinci was a true renaissance man, master scientist, artist, and inventor to name just some of his accomplishments. He left us many wonderful creations. But his greatest legacy are the hundreds upon hundreds of notebooks he filled with any number of visions, ideas, treatises and blueprints for things of the future that at the time were nothing more than incredible fantasies. He invented the first camera, designed an airplane and probably contributed more to medical science with our understanding of human anatomy than anyone else up to that point in history.
And like the artwork in the Hearst warehouses, most of which remains crated sixty years after his death, most of DaVinci’s notebooks have remained unstudied all these centuries. Several years ago, one of these notebooks was opened and one drawing picked. The person doing the picking was Slawomir Zubrzycki, one of Poland’s preeminent concert pianists and the drawing was DaVinci’s crude blueprint for a revolutionary new instrument he called an organista. This was in 1488, fully 300 years before the Italian harpsichord maker Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the modern-day piano-forte. In the 600 years since DaVinci had originally envisioned this instrument, no one had ever attempted to actually build one. DaVinci had designed it for his mother who had always wanted to learn to play the organ. As she died before he was able to build a prototype, the design remained in the notebooks never to see production.
But even without building it, the drawings revealed it to be a remarkably unique instrument, combining properties of the organ, cello, violin, viola, and of course piano in one instrument. So several years ago, Zubrzycki finally decided to take the drawing and attempt to decode it and make the instrument. According to reports, he spent $10,000 dollars, 5,000 manhours, and three years building this thing. It was unveiled last month at the International Royal Cracow Piano Festival to rave reviews. Some musicians have described it as a quartet in one instrument. Everyone agrees the sound is astonishing and unlike anything they've ever heard before. Listen to just a couple minutes of the YouTube video to appreciate how beautiful and unique this new creation is, beautiful and unique enough to make the the evening news.
And Letterman too.
It is remarkable how similar in design this instrument is to what Cristofori came up with for the piano-forte 300 years later. Though it does not have the loud-soft characteristics that make the piano the most tecbnically sophisticated musical instrument ever invented, it is strikingly similar to the piano in other respects and also goes beyond the piano in other ways that keyboard makers had never envisioned before and that, before last month, no one had known that Leonardo had. As one observer commented, it was almost as if this coded blueprint was pulled from the files at random. Who knows how many other wonderful inventions, how many fantastic future visions still lie buried within the covers of those many notebooks?
Every year when I give my annual recital prep concert at Lourdes to practice my new repertoire out on an (easy) audience before going in front of the Guild judge, I flesh out my program by giving a lecture about not only the 300 year history of piano music and the four periods of composing that define it, but also the 3,000 year history of the struggle to invent the piano. The audience always finds it very entertaining. The first keyboard was in fact invented the ancient Egyptians 3,000 years ago, a water-powered organ. It would be at least another thousand years before the first of today’s air-powered organs would come on the scene and a number of centuries more for the clavichord, harpsichord, and finally piano-forte.
That’s right. 3,000 years! And it’s never really been called a piano, it’s a piano-forte which has been shortened to piano in modern usage. Piano means soft, forte means loud, and those are the two characteristics that keyboard makers could not lick until Cristofori came along in the early 18th century and decided to make his life’s work to figure it out. There were what scientists and engineers had for millenia considered to be insurmountable problems of physics and mechanical engineering to create an instrument that could produce an unprecedented range of audio frequencies between whisper softness and booming loudness, not to mention the ability for instant muting which also led to infinite composing possibilities for rapid and repeating notes never before achieved by an instrument.
It was not terribly unlike Edison’s invention of the electric lightbulb. For centuries electric light had been considered contrary to the laws of physics. And this remained conventional wisdom until Edison decided to roll up his sleeves and find a way to do; and finally did after 2,000 failed experiments. Or Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity. For many millenia ever since our ancestors lived in caves, humans had been observing falling objects. But it wasn’t until Newton came along that a human raised the question, "What makes objects fall?" And it was from this initial inquiry that eventually came his Principia that contained the mathematical proof for the laws of gravity. That was the beginning. The other brilliant physicists who came after him seized on this proof and developed further mathematical treatises to finally disprove Aristotle’s belief that the universe was Earth-centric. At that point, six thousand years of accumulated knowledge was turned on its ear ... and the world has not been the same since.
Can you imagine what an earth-shattering find it would be to discover 14th century blueprints for a vaccum sealed carbon filament, Edison’s 2,000th experiment that finally revealed the secret to electric light? Or finding a scroll from the Library at Alexandria that proposed the same mathematical calculations that Newton would formulate many centuries later?
That is what happened last month in Cracow. A musician introduced the world to a vision Leonardo DaVinci had of an instrument that bore an uncanny resemblance to the modern piano 300 years before Cristofori would finally do it for real. It was mid-October when this viola-organista was unveiled to an awed public of music lovers in which the maker regaled his fans with a concert in what I imagined was some famous concerto in C minor, which being of a dolorous sound, was a favorite key of organ composers during DaVinci’s time and a scale I suspect he would have used himself on this instrument had he ever built it. Then last week he posted the video of his concert on YouTube and word made its way around the world with full force. Thanks to the Internet, YouTube, the networks, and yes even Letterman, the world now knows all about DaVinci’s musical genius too and has been given this marvelous gift of his organista.
So it’s like this. My piano tuner is not only a master technician, but also a master keyboard maker. He comes next month for my semi-annual checkup and I intend to get the goods from him. Like most things in my life, this is for the far future. But I will be asking the question – what does he need to be able to make me one of these things?
This one minute video give a brief introduction to the organista:
Da Vinci's 'Viola Organista' comes to life in Poland - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS9c76V4RDE
But to hear the music, check out just a couple minutes of this ten minute video of last month's concert in Cracow:
Viola organista made by Slawomir Zubrzycki - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv3py3Ap8_Y
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