James Rhodes is a British classical concert pianist who is known
for his iconoclastic, pop-inspired performing style. He is also an outspoken survivor of childhood
sexual abuse who is equally frank about his struggles with severe mental
illness. Rhodes’s memoir Instrumental
is a tribute to the healing power of music.
Indeed, music quite literally saves the author’s life; it is only when a
friend smuggles an iPod loaded with Bach into his psych ward that Rhodes
regains the will to live.
Rhodes does not mince words.
We learn that he was violently raped by a gym teacher on a regular basis
for five years from the age of five. Left with severe internal injuries that
produce wracking pain, he requires multiple surgeries. He soon also develops dissociative symptoms, drug
and alcohol addiction, self-injurious behaviors, and chronic suicidal ideation.
Barely able to function, he endures many tumultuous years during which he abandons
the piano. The author’s subsequent journey
from physical and emotional fragmentation to wholeness through music provides
the substance of his book.
The preface to Instrumental
is designated “Prelude,” and the ensuing twenty chapters, labeled “tracks,” all
correspond to musical works. (All twenty
tracks may be listened to, for free, on Spotify.) In addition, as if to assure
the reader he is in good company, Rhodes offers psychological profiles of famous
composers. We learn, for example, that Bruckner
suffered from a morbid obsession with numbers, and that Schumann, after
throwing himself in the Rhine, died in an asylum.
