Mister Gurdjieff’s Harmonium (Accordion Piano)

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No matter how late, each night in the salon after dinner Gurdjieff took his little accordion-piano on his knee and, while his left hand worked the bellows, his right hand made music in minor chords and haunting single notes.

But one night in his aromatic store-room he played for five of us, alone, a different kind of music, although whether the difference lay in its sorrowful harmonies or in the way he played I do not know. I only know that no music had ever been so sad. Before it ended I put my head on the table and wept.

‘What has happened to me?’ I said. ‘When I came into this room I was happy. And then that music—and now I am happy again.’

‘I play objective music to make cry,’ Gurdjieff said. ‘There are many kinds such music—some to make laugh, or to love or to hate. This the beginning of music—sacred music, two, three thousand years old. Your church music comes from such but they don’t realize. They have forgotten. This is temple music—very ancient.’

Once when he played I thought the music sounded like a prayer—it seemed to supplicate. And then I thought, ‘It is only my imagination and my emotion,’ and I tried not to feel what I was feeling. But when he had finished, instead of smiling and tapping the top of the instrument with his hand, he sat quite still and his eyes stood motionless, as if he were looking at us through his thoughts. Then he said, ‘It is a prayer,’ and left us.

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