So I was in the studio and then I wasn’t and then I was trying to find the studio inside and to get to it I found a studio rhythm and this is indeed helping me to dwell in the reality of the studio inside and even though I have not got to painting yet I am in something, definitely.

And all the time, every possible day, I have been playing Einaudi’s Divenire on the piano that I have been given the keys to in the neighbours’ downstairs apartment.

In the studio week I finally linked, for the first time, the bits I knew with the mysterious bit in the middle, and suddenly I had a whole.

But it was a kind of scratchy, awkward, patched-together whole, because my fingers had not been accustomed to playing music for such a long time, nor my brain for concentrating so continuously on something so precise. The piece is nearly ten minutes long and it is a work to hold my attention in the exact present without having it distract somewhere else – and in fact usually this distraction does not totally affect the flow, but what does affect it is the jolt of realising that you are elsewhere and then trying to relocate yourself in the music, which usually causes a stumble.

So each day of the month since I left the studio I have been playing – of course as part of the studio rhythm – and then often recording myself to hear how the piece is feeling. It has taken time to ease out places of complexity and to smooth the trickier jumps of hand and the release the tension of areas which require more skill and concentration, which is all very well, but until the skill and concentration is mastered, there is anxiety that makes itself felt by the listener.

Over the month, I have become aware that somehow the piece was also taking me somewhere; in losing myself into it, I am finding a self, I am becoming – divenire – a self that I have not been for a long time, perhaps ever.

There are different elements in a journey of allowing music to form you; some are intellectual, some physical, some emotional, some deeper. There is an integration that has to happen which must be then somehow anointed with a grace from somewhere else. It is work and mystery.

Yesterday I had a very important insight: I had been working towards a recording that sounded accurate; each note in place, sounding beautiful. Yesterday it was sounding often beautiful, but still, there were occasional, sometimes jarring errors. But suddenly it came to me, listening, that I’d forgotten the fundamental fact of live performance; that there is a humanity in it that cannot and should not be eradicated, the eradication of which, in fact, would substitute a kind of overworked tension, and anyway would only likely be possible through mechanistic means.

But this insight had a follower, as if hidden behind its back. If it already was (almost) beautiful, and there would always be some humanity left in the beauty, then the moment I had been waiting for might be arriving sooner than I’d expected.

And then yes, this morning, I was there, in a beautiful completion of piece and self. Divenire.

And now I am waiting for what happens next.