My aunt Thelma was a pianist and teacher who frequently performed in Washington DC in the 1940’s and 50’s. After about 1958, she no longer performed in public. When she died, she left dozens, maybe more than 100, of journals dating back to the 1920’s. These journals, with the exception of one of the earliest, whose pages were roughly torn out, had an extraordinarily limited content: they were a meticulous list of every piece of music that she had played each day, alone in her studio. She kept these journals, almost to the end of her life, as a kind of diary, completely incomprehensible to anybody but her.

When we emptied out her house, I took the journals home in several boxes, but seeing that they were pretty thoroughly uninteresting, I threw them out. Occasionally I would think to myself with some anxiety that I did not want to end up like aunt Thelma, a non-performing pianist needing to boost my self-esteem by counting up my private repertoire.

Like everybody else today, I am in “social isolation”, which means no rehearsals, no concerts, no audience. So it is down to the basement to rifle through my boxes of musical scores, looking for what I might want to play, just to soothe my soul, so to speak. I began with Brahms, a set of variations very dear to me, that Bonnie Thron had suggested could be arranged for string sextet. The next day it was Bach’s Art of the Fugue, Contrapunctus I, somber, steady, otherworldly - dictated on his deathbed. I also had the idea to arrange a movement from the Brahms Requiem, after listening tearfully to the Kempe/Fischer-Dieskau/Grümmer recording. Yes, I guess I was shook up and depressed, like many others. I brought up box after box of scores, sifting through them, trying out which things fit my mood. Very moving were a set of Milhaud pieces written in 1944, The Household Muse, reflecting gratitude for daily life in a time of war. They included a piece called “Caring for the Sick”. Talk about resonant - I almost fell off the bench!

Today it was a Beethoven Allegro, sturdy, nonchalant, stoic, joyful. And then back to Bach, a prelude that I recall as the dark and foreboding theme music from an Alec Guinness spy series.

I write down the names of these pieces in my journal, and they reflect to me who I am, what I do, and how I feel. Ah, Thelma!