Read Instrumental for Free Online Page B

powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceivedthe piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.’
    THE SEXUAL ABUSE WENT ON for nearly five years. By the time I left that school aged ten I’d been transformed into James 2.0. The automaton version. Able to act the part, fake feelings of empathy, and respond to questions with the appropriate answers (for the most part). But I felt nothing, had no concept of the expectancy of good (my favourite definition of ‘joy’), had been factory reset to a bunch of fucked settings, and was a proper little mini-psychopath.
    But something happened to me bang in the middle of all of it that I am convinced saved my life. It remains with me to this day and it will continue to do so as long as I’m alive.
    There are only two things I know of which are guaranteed in my life – the love I have for my son, and the love I have for music. And – cue X Factor sob-story violins – music is what happened to me when I was seven.
    Specifically classical music.
    More specifically, Johann Sebastian Bach.
    And if you want to be ultra detailed, his Chaconne for solo violin.
    In D minor.
    BWV1004.
    The piano version transcribed by Busoni. Ferruccio Dante Benvenuto Michelangelo Busoni.
    I can keep going with this for a while yet. Dates, recording versions, length in minutes and seconds, CD covers etc etc. No wonder classicalis so fucked. A single piece of music has dozens of extra little pieces of information attached to it, none of which is important to anyone other than me and the other four piano-mentalists reading this.
    The point is this: in anyone’s life, there are a small number of Princess Diana moments. Things that happen that are never forgotten and have a significant impact on one’s life. For some it’s the first time they have sex (aged eighteen for my first time with a woman, a hooker called Sandy, who was Australian and kind and let me watch porn while we did it in a basement flat near Baker Street for £ 40). For others it’s when a parent dies, a new job starts, the birth of a child.
    For me there have been four so far. In reverse chronological order, meeting Hattie, the birth of my son, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, getting raped for the first time. Three of these were awesome. And by the law of averages, three out of four ain’t bad.
    I’ll take it.
    A few things about Bach that need clearing up.
    If anyone does ever think about Bach (and why would they?), the chances are they will see in their heads an oldish guy, chubby, dour, bewigged, stern, Lutheran, dry, unromantic and in dire need of getting laid. His music is considered by some to be antiquated, irrelevant, boring, shallow and, like the beautiful architecture in Place des Vosges or Regent’s Park, belonging to other people. He should be confined forever to cigar adverts, dentists’ waiting rooms and octogenarian audiences at the Wigmore Hall.
    Bach’s story is remarkable.
    By the age of four, his closest siblings have died. At nine his mother dies, at ten his father dies and he is orphaned. Shipped off to live withan elder brother who can’t stand him, he is treated like shit and not allowed to focus on the music he loves. He is chronically abused at school to the point that he is absent for over half of his school days to avoid the ritual beatings and worse. He walks several hundred miles as a teenager so he can study at the best music school he knows of. He falls in love, marries, has twenty children. Eleven of those children die in infancy or childbirth. His wife dies. He is surrounded, engulfed by death.
    At the same time that everyone he knows is dying, he is composing for the Church and the Court, teaching the organ, conducting the choir, composing for himself, teaching composition, playing the organ, taking Church services, teaching harpsichord, and