Cory Stockwell
The Keybordist
He didn’t even have a keyboard. It’s true that there was a stand near the middle of the stage on which he could have placed a keyboard. But all I could see on the stand was what appeared to be the top of a red sphere, as though the sphere were emerging from the stand’s flat surface. Every once in a while, the keyboardist, who stood behind this sphere for virtually the entire concert, would raise his right hand and strike it with an open palm. This would produce a brief sound resembling a low violin note, one that sounded distinctly “synthesized,” as though generated by an old computer. Of course, a computer today would be capable of producing a virtually exact replica of the sound of a violin. Which means, I suppose, that the synthesized nature of the sound was the whole point.
I barely noticed him at first because my attention was mostly focused elsewhere. On the singer, for instance, who moved around the stage and sang the duo’s songs, the hits that had made them famous several decades ago. But also on the light shining from eight large screens that were joined together (four on the bottom, four on the top) to form a sort of rectangular wall behind the duo, light that would slowly change from one colour to another—mostly deep shades of red, green, and blue. The screens would alternate between emitting this light and showing videos the duo had made when they were at the peak of their popularity. These videos were synchronized with the live music such that, as the singer sang the words of the songs, the younger version of the singer mouthed the words at the same time. Not at the very same time, however: there was always just a slight interval—a time difference, as it were—between the older and younger singers. I was transfixed by the videos, by how beautiful these men had been in their twenties—beautiful in the sense that their look was a perfect expression of their music.
When I finally looked over at the keyboardist, I realized he was just standing there. It’s true that he was swaying slightly, doing a little dance (all of the duo’s songs are very danceable). But in essence, he was just standing in front of his sphere—the longer I looked at it, the more it seemed like it was emerging from a body of water—and waiting to make the next synthesized violin sound, of which there were only a few in any given song. His presence seemed superfluous, and this is how it had always been with the duo, as was clear from the videos, in which all the keyboardist really did was look at the camera with an expressionless gaze. His role in the duo, in other words, was essentially to do nothing, and I wondered for a moment whether this reflected a hierarchy. In the videos, the keyboardist often stands a few steps behind the singer; in one iconic shot, the singer’s face takes up much of the foreground, while behind him, the keyboardist leans back against a brick wall, perched on one foot—he has bent his other leg so that the sole of his white trainer also rests against the wall. Do these shots turn him into an object of desire, the desire with which so many of the songs deal? Are all of these songs about him; do the videos exist simply so that, as we watch them, we can project our desires onto him—in which case he’d in fact be at the top of the hierarchy, as a kind of mute and inaccessible ideal of beauty? But there was no discernable hierarchy on the stage. Sure, it seemed like the singer was doing all the work. But near the end of the concert, when he introduced the keyboardist by name and asked the audience to give him a round of applause, there wasn’t a trace of ill will or condescension in his voice. On the contrary, his words seemed deeply loving: they seemed to say that without the keyboardist—without the inspiration of this muse—none of the duo’s music would have been possible.
At one point the keyboardist left the stage for a few minutes. The videos had vanished, replaced by a deep red light that brightened and darkened and that, in its pulsations, seemed like nothing less than the movement of life itself. The singer walked slowly across the stage from left to right, his bald head almost impossibly white against the background, singing one of the duo’s love songs, a song that sounds like something you’d hear in a dream. He looked not at the crowd but toward the wing of the stage, where I imagined the keyboardist standing behind the curtain, leaning against a barrier, one foot tucked in behind him, looking back toward the singer without the slightest trace of an expression.