Seymour - An introduction

Among the rare few films or stories about someone that pursues a passion not for glory but for passion alone this is one.

Seymour (Bernstein) is a documentary made by Ethan Hawke about an eponymous classically trained pianist.  It is a biographic that the artist agreed to over the course of his getting to know Ethan and is filmed in NY where he lives a monkish life at a ripe old age of 90.

While Seymour could have attained fame and gone on to perform variety of world stages he backed out 50 years ago in part due to the nervousness of being on stage and the constant pressure to live up to someone else's expectation.

Instead he chose to do what he loves - teach, make new music and enjoy the time spent with the piano.  The film is full of Confucian sounding quotes from the master some of which are listed below.  He has wondered aloud as to why we do not see/hear of any new Bachs or Beethovens and some of that can be explained when you read this.

• The piano is like a person. They build them the same way. They never come out the same way.
• During the Romantic Period, it was unthinkable for anyone to study an instrument who didn’t compose. Creativity and re-creativity went hand in hand. There were no computers there was no television. There were no distractions.
• One of his students in the film said: Learning to listen to yourself makes you able to listen to other people [and sense their emotions].
• [Life] has conflicts and pleasures, harmony and dissonance. That’s how life is. Can’t escape it. By the way, the same thing occurs in music. There are dissonances and harmony and resolutions. I believe that you won’t enjoy the resolution unless you have that dissonance. What would it be if we didn’t have the dissonance? We wouldn’t know the meaning of the resolution.

One of the conversations in the movie addresses a bigger problem with today's society -

• Our culture deliberately drives people to focus outside so it can control them because if you can make people slaves of consumerism, slaves of success, Slaves of status you can manipulate them completely. 

In the film Ethan also captures banter between Seymour and his students that tangents into an uncanny coincidence describing the master artists like Brahms composing to the same note as what NASA has published on their website.

Astronomers say they have heard the sound of a black hole singing. And what it is singing, and perhaps has been singing for more than two billion years, they say, is B flat -- a B flat 57 octaves lower than middle C.