The Open Ears Project - Episode Six: On What Cannot Quite Be Said

CLEMENCY BURTON HILL: This is the Open Ears Project, it’s day six.

[Music - Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, Second Movement]

IAN MCEWAN: It almost seems on the edge of language. Touching meaning; it's just an inch away but it cannot quite be said, but it's almost being said. So you fill in for yourself and you hear in this music, a kind of love poem.

This is Ian McEwan, a British novelist, and we're going to talk about music, which is one of the great passions of my life.

I've chosen a Concerto for Two Violins by J.S. Bach. This meant a great deal to me over the years the years and it has a particularly beautiful slow movement.

I was living with my parents in North Africa and there was no school around me, so I was sent away and I went into a kind of shock. Something closed down inside me at the age of eleven. I just became a very quiet, very shy boy. And something happened around the time I was 16. I suddenly noticed that I existed really.

Because I'd come from a background without classical music or without much music at all. For me that was my teenage revolt into art, into music, into landscape, and all the kind of things that had not happened in my childhood. 

So this music came at just that moment of a kind of eruption of self-awareness, of longing for things that I couldn't even name, which was probably sex… So Bach would have to do. 

There's something so rich and human and tender in this piece of music. It's as if it’s got a pulse, like a sort of heartbeat is underneath this music. And it seems to me like a flood of love, the second violin comes in repeating that exact same phrase, while the first violin falls away and then they, then they both come back together and then… uh...

You could almost imagine his two lovers either speaking or in the act of love with immense tenderness.

The last time I reached for this piece of music was when my friend Christopher Hitchens died. I took the call from his wife in the evening and went downstairs and found the bottle of whiskey that he had last poured and there was just an inch left and I poured it for myself, put on this piece of music. But, the sorrow really hit me with this movement.

I think, you know, when a close friend dies the first thing you confront is… is the love. The love that must now become one-sided, and music like this emanates from the sort of aura that comes off that love.

CBH: Ian McEwan choosing the slow movement of the Concerto for Two Violins by J.S Bach, and for this one, I would say that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing today, if you can, just take a moment. It’s about six and a half minutes long, and just let it do its thing. It will be up in a moment. But if you do need to come back to it later, maybe with a glass of whiskey in your hand, and call your best friend to tell them you love them, that works too. We make it very easy to hear all of the tracks that our guests choose, just head to openearsproject.org, and it’s all there. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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