In 1994 orthopedic surgeon Tony Cicoria, while at a lakeside family gathering, was making a call at a pay phone to his mother when a bolt of lighting passed through the phone line and struck him in the face. Remembering: I was flying forwards. Bewildered. I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, “Oh shit, I’m dead.” I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman — she’d been waiting to use the phone right behind me . . . over my body, giving it CPR.
I floated up the stairs — my consciousness came with me. I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be O.K. Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light . . . an enormous feeling of wellbeing and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up. . . . There was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, ‘This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had ’— slam! I was back.
Experiencing pain from his body burning, but otherwise seeming all right. Then, after a few weeks, Cicoria feeling an insatiable desire to listen to piano music. After buying recordings and finding he especially enjoyed a Vladimir Ashkenazy’s recording of Chopin favorites, he felt a craving to be able to play this music. When a babysitter asked to store her piano in his house, he readily agreed, and began teaching himself how to play. Also, he also began hearing music in his head. The first time, it was in a dream, he recalls. I was in a tux, onstage; I was playing something I had written.
Upon waking, and realizing the music was still playing in his mind, he got up and began writing down what he remembered. Then, whenever practicing Chopin, this music that he had heard in a dream, he says, would come and take me over.
Getting up at 4 in the morning, practicing piano, writing down his music, and at home after work at the piano again, practicing and playing. My wife was not really pleased, he admits. I was possessed.
Three months after surviving his lightning strike, Cicoria feeling the only reason I had been allowed to survive was the music. Beginning to think he’d been given a mission, to tune in to the music that he called, a bit whimsically, the music from Heaven. Coming to him, usually in an absolute torrent of notes, without spacing between the notes.
Oliver Sacks, “A Bolt from the Blue,” The New Yorker, July 16, 2007, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/23/a-bolt-from-the-blue.
Psychologist Oliver Sacks, interviewing Cicoria for The New Yorker magazine —saying to him, after looking into my eyes as if looking through me — that the music went through an awful lot of trouble to get here, so the least you can do is write it.
Cicoria recalling, I was so shaken by what he said, I went home and bought a Sibelius music writing program. Then, Cicoria, spending the next seven months writing and intensely practicing the piano, performing a year later the piece at the Goodyear Performing Arts Theater at the State University College in Oneonta, New York. And making a CD, Fantasia The Lightning Sonata.
Tony Cicoria, “The Electrifying Story of the Accidental Pianist & Composer,” Missouri Medicine, 2014 Jul-Aug; 111(4): 308, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6179476/.
No comments:
Post a Comment