Music and the Self

In Every Note Played, music is a crucial aspect of identity, inextricable from the self. For Richard and Karina, the two narrating characters, the loss of music is the loss of identity and even of life. Richard is facing his own death by ALS, but on the way he will also be deprived of his piano playing, which for many months seems worse to him than facing mortality. Karina understands this impulse as perhaps no one else can. When she hears Richard can no longer move either arm, she thinks: “Richard without the piano. A fish without water. A planet without a sun” (72). She knows that lack of a piano will so gut Richard that he will no longer be himself or have the capacity for life, just as a planet with no center of gravity around which to orbit. Richard later articulates...