Hommage a Samuel Hsu: a life precís
My dear teacher and friend,
I write you one last precís and hand it in to our great Teacher, our precious Savior, who has called you home. This precís is not a chapter summary of Dahlhaus or Soundings. It is not about Debussy, Schumann, Walter Benjamin, Rachmaninoff, Franck, Hewitt or Bach, at least not directly. It is a precís on the poem of your life.
You have taught me that true pianism involves questions. It concerns playing the music of others who have asked the same questions. Indeed, playing is to undertake their journey of development and to begin our own. To play is to engage with paradox, to grasp at the lurking, hidden beauty found through that engagement. To play is to explore order excavated from disorder, to hold the beauty that is born from strife. To play piano is to actively engage this remarkable and wonderful paradox of living here in Our Father’s World.
You have taught me that historical progress is a meeting of the horizons, leading to an eclipse, because of the intersection of the timeless moment. Playing piano, then, is a taste of music as it truly is, an idea capturing life’s joys and struggles however never being caught by them. We only taste music here, but you, now that you know Christ fully, know music truly.
You have taught me that the true narrative of the journey can be found in whatever medium presents itself because the Author writes everywhere. So then, the deep intertwining of music and life reflected, rather burst out of your life upon me, your student. You became to me a translator of the Word of God, unpacking His marvels, collecting His glories in the poem of your life.
You have taught me the polyphonic settings of the mass ordinary, of Schütz, Schein and Lully. You have shown me their courtship with counterpoint, text and music and then of the great marriage between them in Bach. You have introduced me to great giants of thought: Rosina Lhevine, Charles Rosen, Karl Geiringer; to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and to poems of T.S. Eliot and George Herbert. You have shown me the inner workings of music itself- of color, interpretation and truth, of the way ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and the history of that development.
But you have taught me that these words and ideas mean nothing unless they resonate deep within the drawers of the heart through the miraculous work of the music giver, the beauty maker, Love and truth Himself. In this, the poem of your life, you were and will always be, a critic of historic proportion, an alchemist practicing the obscure art of transmuting the broken, fallen elements of this world into the shining and enduring gold of truth through your knowledge of the Word of God. Watching and interpreting the unfolding of the Divine meta-narrative in any genre, person or time, you have taught us of the magnificent transformation of redemption.
You have taught me of the Theo-centricity of music, of the process that is this life, of the eclectic gathering up of life’s thoughts tied up in a bundle called music and of music ‘taking us upstairs’. By extension, your life enriched our comprehension of your words and we your students have discovered ourselves through you, illuminated by the poem that was your life.
Samuel Hsu, Secondo, my wise and beloved teacher, how I shall miss you here. But before long we will all be rejoicing together in the great company of believers, making music together. How blessed I am to have had you here for my teacher, my Sherpa, my brother, my dear friend teaching and guiding through His mercy in the poem that was your life.
