Sowing

This is a very, very special photo for me. Emilia Fadini and Laia Martín, one next to another. You can not see me, because I was 600 km away, but at the same time I’m there, 100%. From Emilia Fadini, today still very bright at 89 years old, a thousand things emerged in my life. In those distant years 80, my passion for questioning about the music I did found in her and her courses a path that led from then, solidly, to look at the treaties (even more than the instruments) the answers to the questions that arose when observing the scores. Thanks to her I discovered the clavichord, I heard for the first time the names of Santa María, Diruta, and many others whose existence I know that many of my readers have discovered in my books, and I began to live in first person an intimate way of sharing music whose values had nothing to do with the ones that were being proposed to me, in those same years, in the conservatory classes.

This week, at 20th FIMTE – International Festival of Spanish Keyboard Music, so brilliantly organised by Luisa Morales, Emilia has shared the FIMTE Symposium with Laia Martin, who from that lineage is, in many ways, the continuation. Without me being seen, in this picture I am in the middle. As the current teacher of one and the old student of another, seeing them together gives me a wonderful feeling. Without what I saw in those Emilia classes, I doubt that Laia would even know who I am, nor would I be orienting her doctoral thesis at the University of Aveiro, nor would she, most likely, have been in Mojácar this week. And that is the meaning of that peculiar sowing that is teaching. Teaching and also writing, which allows you to share with many people what you consider important even away from your physical presence, in a process that often ends in a future whose trajectories move far, out of sight. But when these trajectories intersect, as has happened these days in the FIMTE, even without having been there, happiness is very deep.