Man, a machine.

Why call my budding dissertation superfluous? I used to say to myself, “You know, the world doesn’t need another disquisition about why music mattered to people at a certain point in time, years ago, in France.” What’s a couple thousand words about how French writers in the eighteenth century mulled over the pains and pleasures of musical performance? Well, it’s a bunch of words: it can seem like an overflow, an unnecessary thing compared to sleep or friendships or groceries. But then again an unexpected performance, right here in the twenty-first century, can change my mind about old eighteenth-century musings.

Anni Rossi downright charms me with pizzicati and poignant singing in a live performance of “Machine,” from her recently released album Rockwell. Rossi is all “impulses, impulses, from a machine,” as she sings.

When a performance startles me, I go searching for words to add meaning to the event, and find myself again and again mouthing words from the eighteenth century. Odd? Nevermind. Look at how Rossi thumps away on the shoulders of her viola as she sings. Hear her feet, heels digging into the suitcase on which she stands, in sync, in rhythm. This could be a noisy, unpleasant collection of plucks and squeaks and stomps, but instead it’s a treat. It’s a performance that sounds nothing like it looks: not hard, not wooden and dry, but alive and supple.

In an essay on painting in the mid-1760s, Denis Diderot penned a few lines about the musical performances he loved best: ones in which a player’s stomps and strains never once seemed noticeable. “A violinist struggling and straining over his instrument vexes and annoys me,” Diderot writes. “I require ease and freedom of a singer; I want an orchestral musician to move his fingers over the strings so easily, so lightly, that I have no idea of the difficulties he negotiates. I expect a pure and painless pleasure.” Diderot loved a performance that seemed effortless. I think he would have gotten a kick out of Anni Rossi’s nimble musicality atop her suitcase, onstage.

In fact Anni Rossi’s performance of “Machine” brings me back to the eighteenth-century philosopher’s words with a smile. “We are instruments,” as Diderot writes in D’Alembert’s Dream, “we are possessed of sensitivity and memory. Our senses are so many keys which are struck by things in nature around us, and often strike themselves.”

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