En route to the scientific meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, I will be sorry to miss the sold-out Keith Jarrett concert tonight. The last two occasions in Dublin were not only musically memorable but also gave gerontological food for thought.
The first time I heard him in concert was more than 30 years ago, a distraction from the tensions of the final year. Even the choir balcony tickets were eye-wateringly expensive, the National Concert Hall in Dublin barely half full on a damp November night and the experience was unforgettable. Through the ears of Jimmy Rabbitte it has been immortalised in Roddy Doyle's Jimmy Jazz, a short story at the end of The Guts.
I had first come across Jarrett while on my student electives in Hamburg. His Köln Concert (the largest-selling solo piano album in history) was firmly embedded in their cultural landscape, his persona as Serious Artist at one with earnestness of German culture. It even pierced my Irish cultural fecklessness in a way that surprised me.
And so I found myself waiting with bated breath for this daunting persona, legendary for not brooking distraction of any sort from his audience, known to distribute cough sweets to his audience, and on one occasion to lead a group cough to clear the collective throat.
The concert was of almost scary intensity, a journey through a single-minded vision of gently evolving melody, pile- driving chords and his trademark grunts and tuneless singing. What emotion there was remained masked and unyielding until his encore, a melting and totally riveting exploration of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
Thirty years later, the same hall had sold out within hours, the pre-concert buzz was electric, the crowd encompassing a remarkable spectrum of ages. But this was not the only difference: as a geriatrician, I could not help my growing fascination at the change in Jarrett. Gone was the taciturn and austere artist, replaced by a more casual and relaxed figure in a soft green shirt, trading gentle jokes with his audience between pieces.
The music was also different: shorter pieces – although still substantial – more rounded, economical and with a restrained warmth that disarmed and conquered in a deceptively effortless fashion.
The mastery and maturity of ageing can be hard concepts to transmit to those outside of gerontology – but to those of who had been to both concerts it was unmistakable.
His final encore illuminated the slipperiness of the concept that you cannot step in the same river twice – surely some landmarks remain the same? And so it was with Somewhere Over the Rainbow three decades later on the same stage, the music the same but not the same, 30 years telescoping and yet expanding, a reminder that we constantly revisit and renew our life experiences, reframing and recontextualising landmark emotions.
It was only afterwards that I realised my gerontological focus on ageing and maturity had been entirely directed outwards, on Jarrett and his artistry. This in turn led me to reflecting on how little attention we pay in gerontology to our own ageing, dealing with those who age in an objectified manner.
One aspect of what we gain is the release from the intensity and unconscious intolerance of early adulthood, whose angular edges can be a spark for action and innovation but which are often uncomfortable for those around us.
This change resonates with the wisdom that old men dream dreams and young men see visions. As one astute observer has noted, a vision contains the idea of synthesising elements that are apparently contradictory. A dream, on the other hand, gives us a world in which contradictory things can co-exist.
Instead of synthesising and finding a way out of contradiction by resolution, dreams find a world in which contradiction can exist without conflict.
In addition, with ageing we grow to trust that the deep core of what we are trying to communicate to others has a logic of its own, and this security can disarm others and ourselves in equal measure.
But it was Jarrett’s music in the final analysis which relayed most forcefully to me what ageing adds to our lives, bearing out Mendelssohn’s aphorism that it is not that music is too imprecise for words, but rather that it is too precise.
A version of this column appeared as a BMJ blog. Prof O'Neill is a geriatrician in Dublin and will give the Joseph T Freeman Lecture on cultural gerontology to the Gerontological Society of America in Orlando on November 20th
Des O’Neill is a consultant physician in geriatric and stroke medicine, and a professor of medical gerontology at Trinity College Dublin and Tallaght hospital.
