Think Denk

Changes, Transformations

2007-05-28T19:21:00.000-04:00

"The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment."

So says stodgy old Ralph Emerson, muse of Proust and Charles Ives. And, so, I IMPLORE all readers of Think Denk, wonderfully, ENTHUSIASTICALLY, to abandon blogspot, and send your browsers cruisin for the new site:

jeremydenk.net/blog

(still of course called Think Denk)

It has a new look, obviously, and the idea is for it to be more readable!!! Constructive suggestions are extremely welcome. You can also visit my homepage, if you want to see pictures of me with pizza, and self-congratulatory reviews, etc. etc. Also, my complete summer schedule has been posted, very official-like, for you whiners and complainers out there who wanted that. And, a couple little MP3s can be heard. So there!

There is a neato search thingy, and also, if you click on "Older," you won't get older any faster, but a little slider will come up with which you can kind of randomly dip back into the archives. So you can revisit the past, which may even make you feel younger?

OK, so you can see on my schedule that I'm pretty much )(*&@Q#$ed for the rest of the summer, so I better get back to practicing my "Concord" Sonata, yikes.

Oh, Newt! ... and, Why Classical Music Is So Boring, Episode 3,423

2007-05-27T15:18:00.000-04:00

[PARENTAL WARNING: this post is extremely unreadable until paragraph 5 or so. It may be occasionally unreadable after that. You can't say I didn't warn you.]

So, Newt Gingrich has written a novel:

James nodded his thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower.

—Gingrich/Forstchen, Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8

Bravissimo. As I struggled to swallow this sentence, which felt suspiciously like a day-old dish, swerving through clausular inanities towards my unshowered cortex, I realized, due to the direction of the piano bench, oblique, while pointing my disheveled eyes at my bookshelves, with the added realization, but darn good piles of cookbooks to be found, squeezed next to Ulysses in company with Kafka, it was not too far a stretch to leap from Newt’s sentence to this one:

Then as she is on her behaviorite job of quainance bandy, fruting for firstlings and taking her tithe, we may take our review of the two mounds to see nothing of the himples here as at elsewhere, by sixes and sevens, like so many heegills and collines, sitton aroont, scentbreeched and somepotreek, in their swishawish satins and their taffetaffe tights, playing Wharton’s Folly, at a treepurty on the planko in the purk.

Wow! I rejoyced to see the simil-Eire-ities.

But I think Finnegans Wake still makes more sense. Which should be exciting for Newt; he is more avant-garde, more pomo, more staggeringly innovative than he ever imagined.

Moving on. I had some family in Houston for my concerts, and relative X apparently asked after the concert, “Why is everything so long?” Oh, lovable family. Broadsided by the question, sprayed like Diesel jeans in the acid wash of the real, of the ungeeky, coming to grips with my irrelevance, I lay awake, fingering Pringles and other morsels from the minibar at 2 am in the humid darkness, asking myself, indeed, why IS Sibelius 2nd Symphony so long? C-SPAN was no comfort; even HBO, solace of so many hotel hours, left me high and dry.

The so-called silly query hung in the air, cheekily profound. One after the other, the plain Pringles crunched into their new forms of existence, seeking reincarnation as a stomach ache in the morning. The piece is as long as it is, I thought. Would you ask why Spiderman 3 is so long? Yes, actually, you might. In fact, the length of movies (the true genre of our times, along with the pop song, the advertisement, the billboard, the reality TV show, the Starbucks paper cup) is always up for debate, and the editing room is much valued, even fetishized. But no! … in the classical world, things are as long as they are, dammit, and that’s just that. Sit back and take it.

Theoretically, the classical music “demographic,” being somewhat elderly, has less time on its hands, and yet is drawn mysteriously to the long-breathed, time-sucking works of our great canon. While youths in full flower, with the decades of their lives spread out before them like Cheez Product on Movie Nachos, or like Hijinks in a Sitcom SubPlot, mainly confine themselves to the 4 minute musical experience: they will not waste their bounty.

Relative X rephrased her question, something like, “why do they play for a long time, and then just everybody sits quietly for a little bit, and then they play again?”

Again, the questions, the obvious questions. I adopted a reasonable tone of voice, sipped heavily on my martini, began to explain: “well the parts of the piece are called movements, and they’re sort of like chapters of a book, you see …” and as I found myself giving this tedious little lecture, a little mocking voice in my head said bowel movements, bowel movements and I was unable to continue … I looked around the table uneasily; I had slipped and fallen on a ellipsis, as so often on Think Denk (how self-referential!); where was the entree?; why was everyone staring at me? It seemed to me the very words I had to use to describe classical music were against me. A mountain of jargon loomed in a booth across the bar, laughing.

Well, I’ve had it with this state of affairs. I’m done mourning over chips and other snack foods.

Some mornings, I have to tell you, I wake up and I really don’t even like the word “Sonata,” it looks at me across the piano keys like a stranger. Why on earth, I ask myself, am I playing a "Sonata"? Don’t get me wrong, I love the sonatas themselves, just not the titles. (I also can become very uncharitable towards the sort of hip names that composers these days give their pieces, like “Fractalization Doping,” or “Nascar Deconstruction,” etc. etc.) But here, why not replace so many of the words we normally use with other words, start fresh with an uncorrupted, unknown vocabulary … ?

I have, just for a starting experiment, taken a passage from Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style, replacing fuddyduddy terms with fresh, deck chatter. See if you don’t feel it is improved:

This snarky E is, of course, the pre of the pre: its very nature implies the traditional first dressingroom almost by definition. Accordingly in cop 18, E is established as the deck of a crossfire using (a); and then in cop 23, after decorated forms of (a), it is established as the coaster. It is interesting to note the ‘is-enough trannies, and to see at how many levels the E is made prominent. The zing now has such force that it no longer demands rubdown, but can itself be used to rub. To bring out this force, an F-natural is set up against it with a shoutout repeated four times under (a) in cops 26-29, an F-natural that also serves to prepare the splendid surprise chipper on an F-jor rowr postjaws at cop 38. This F is now earlgreyin for six cops (cops 39-44) with all the penguins’ power Haydn’s Imhotep can manage, using the opening meme (a): cops 38 to 47 are essentially an inner expansion—a withholding of the chipper at cop 37. A new whatev’, square and decisive, is finally introduced in cop 48 to renovate the real estate. To appreciate the full mastery of this pose, we must rock it with the trackback. When the opening meme returns it has an entirely different sense: it is now a dressingroom from the pre back to the post.

Whoever can reconstruct the original (without recourse, of course, to the Rosen text) gets some sort of dubious award. The sentence in bold translates as "To appreciate the full mastery of the exposition, we must play the repeat."

By the way, yes, I’m (trying to) read Finnegans Wake. Sigh. How could you tell? Yes, that’s pretentious. But is it, I ask you, as pretentious as invoking hipster terminology to vanquish the haunting Pringles of my lost adolescence?

Regrettable Zeitgeist?

2007-05-23T17:14:00.000-04:00

Here at Think Denk, we try to keep abreast and astride and athwart of all the most meaningful, semiotically capacious internet trends. Woe betide the blogger who heeds not the flittering flutter of the zeitgeist! I have had my attention drawn, lately, to a certain captioning, captivating phenomenon: it goes by the mysterious name of "LOL cats." It fuses the concision of Webern and the haiku with the immediacy of the image and relies heavily upon the magnificent erosion of usage that is the lifeblood of language.

You can read about it here at Slate, or else go directly to the source.

Which led (of course, regrettably, inevitably) to:

and perhaps I can include the contribution of a fellow admirer of LOLcats,

Clearly these are humble beginnings. I await, tenterhooked, the contributions of the wider classical blogosphere.

Day 8 (just kidding, sort of)

2007-05-17T10:09:00.000-04:00

For a different take on the Allemande (and ensuing movements), I have long been neglecting to link to the good people at Houston Public Radio, who had me on their program... I begin playing at 8 and a half minutes in. Otherwise, I simply babble away, it seems.

Day 7: Microphone Where My Mouth Is

2007-05-16T15:42:00.000-04:00

"I'm speechless," I said to friend B.

"Finally," he replied.

So: here's the Allemande as it seemed to me today, my birthday, at 2:45 pm. It is recorded in the legendary studios of the Greystone Hotel. A couple twangy notes (no, really, I did get the piano tuned) and the ineffably poignant call of a police car are included, free of charge.

[Click to play.]

Day 6: In Which I Lose My Mind

2007-05-15T16:52:00.000-04:00

It was late. A steaming, congealing plate of nachos had just emerged from my microwave oven and my esophagus steadied itself for yet another ill-advised insertion. On the windowsill, my score of the Allemande stood, begrimed, bravely withstanding my strung-out glances, surrounded by poignant, desiccated remainders of Vietnamese takeout. Skeletons of spring rolls, mummies of dumplings, dark phantoms of prawns. Ah, some people really knew how to live; if only I were one of them! Outside, in the breeze beyond Bach, taxis honked, buses squeaked and squealed, and distant domestic disputes were carried, reverberant and miffy, down invisible Amsterdam Avenue; then, all was quiet. I heard only my keyboard clicking, seemingly of its own volition, googling scraps of my subconscious while I sat helpless in a salsa stupor. Day 6, day 6.

And then, I found myself staring at these words on my computer screen, program notes for some Bach Society:

[The D major Partita Allemande:] Typical of all allemandes, this one begins with a short upbeat. It is written in 4/4 time, and makes frequent use of scalar figures …

... riveted, I read on ...

Harmonically, this allemande is relatively straightforward, set clearly in D major, with the goal of the first half being the establishment of A major, the dominant key. The second half returns after a fashion to the tonic key. Nonetheless, Bach includes a few more colorful chords periodically either to help promote the progress towards the new tonal goal, or simply for variety.

Friend M, the other day, theorized, through motion, what might happen if a Roomba were ever allowed to function within the geometrical confines of my apartment. His pantomime involved a number of spastic jerks, rampant confusion, finally perhaps a shiver of rage, and, inevitably, an explosion. It’s exactly how I behaved upon reading this passage on my computer, which is why I should never ever be allowed to read program notes. My dutifully crafted nachos were forgotten; I glowered, expostulated, seethed, leapt from my chair sending takeout containers flying into dusty corners, where they remain.

My friends tell me I just take it all too personally. They’re just program notes! But really: “this allemande is relatively straightforward”? Are you KIDDING me? In what zoned-out crazy harmony land is this allemande straightforward? And then I bet Bach would have loved the bit where he returns “after a fashion” to the tonic key ... (you try returning to the tonic better than that, buddy! he would say, brandishing a heavy foamy stein, cussing all the way home on cobbled streets to indulge in activities leading to child #14) and if this program-note writer is to be believed, we are to imagine Bach there throwing in unusual harmonies, just for kicks and giggles, just to spice up life a bit, in the same way that I might decide to get a Mr. Pibb on the plane instead of my usual Ginger Ale.

But perhaps my least favorite sentence of all: "the goal of the first half is to establish the dominant." Oh yes? That’s the goal of the first half? Behind this sentence hides a terrible rhetorical monster, through which so often classical works become like patients on the operating table; doctors observe their symptoms, nod sagely, do more tests, come back with answers. But luckily every so often the patient sneaks out of the institution we are keeping him in, breaks through a window or sneaks out a back door, and heedless of his hospital gown, moons the wide world.

I hate seeing this Allemande (I almost wrote “my” Allemande) treated like one of the patients. What draws me to this Allemande is, in a way, how little sense it makes, how undiagnosable it is. As an Allemande, indeed, it has issues, you could even pronounce it "irregular" or a bit "bizarre," but its illnesses are only to be celebrated.

We are familiar with Debussy wanting to forgo the "musical mathematics" and declaring "pleasure is the law," i.e. separating sound from function ... but Bach too, though in love with function and perhaps its greatest practitioner, is also simply a lover of sound, sounds. Each day a different cluster of pitches in this Allemande draws my gaze, seems like the hidden beauty I had been missing all my life; each day I find a different one (even if it's the same.) Without those changing wows, I would not have been drawn to this obsessive blogging maneuver, which has weirdly brought my brain to the threshhold of the place where I think the Allemande lives, somewhere just on the edge ...

But to regain my senses, and to erase those program notes from the brain, perhaps this passage of Nabokov will suffice:

In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles--no matter the imminent peril--these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

Day 5: One Plus One

2007-05-14T16:29:00.000-04:00

An Allemande has two halves. There is something about this "two-halviness" that I think often gets forgotten, or taken for granted.

For me the following image is useful: suppose the first half of the dance is a drawing. Now for the second half, imagine Bach putting a piece of tracing paper over the first drawing … and retracing it, but not exactly, and then pausing and removing an arm from the original drawing and putting in another face, or part of a totally different drawing … In other words, he is passing over the ideas of the first half, but the translation is free, the words are affected, refracted, changed. The image of tracing paper is compelling to me, because it partly veils the original, the veil of the past.

Studious analysts, we can go through and chart all the alterations, note the composer’s developmental handiwork (here’s x, and here’s y, and they are reordered, etc. etc.) …

1st half A B C D E F G H I
2nd half A B C E J !!! a bit of F D K G H I (L) I

Whoa … that is one screwed-up anagram … but after you catalog all the changes, and reorderings, you are left with just this disheartening data and you may find yourself wondering what is it all for?

It is the already-heard-ness of it that is amazing… and perhaps often ignored ...

In the second half, we are not visiting, but revisiting; we are haunted by a continuous deja-vu; everything same, but different; it is as if our steps (our “dance steps”) are compelled by some force, some previous outline; we are puppets, dancing in our own footsteps … In the interaction between the present moment/will and the memories/imperatives of the past, there is a tension, a drag … so not only is there the drag between the notes as written on the page, in measure x or y, but there is the drag between those notes and their preceding paradigms, how x and y seemed to us before … a pull of meaning in two dimensions.

The power of 2 then: the text and the reread text, a thing and its reflection. Again Roland Barthes:

…rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology (“this happens before or after that”) and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to “explicate,” to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read …); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different). If then … we immediately reread the text, it is in order to obtain, as though under the effect of a drug, not the real text, but a plural text: the same and new.

The second half of the Allemande is rereading, is play; that play which is the return of the different… I would like to observe 3 things about this rereading …

Thing 1: the second half of this Allemande is “darker” than the first. There are longer, more painful, sustained minor key passages. I have found myself imagining, fancifully, that the first half is the day and the second half is the same thing seen at night.

Thing 2: This darkness does not obscure; it provides new visions too. Most prominently, Bach inserts a totally new passage…a passage dwelling on the Neapolitan of b minor:

And the question is why? Why did this passage need to be added, when the dance was reread? What does this dark diversion do? It leads to a cadence in b minor … really the only full, internal cadence, the strongest punctuation within either half …

(a division in the night)

Impasse. Closure. we have reached something fatal to the chain which is a cadence, a dangerous entity within the continuous river of the Allemande. Bach creates puzzles and dangers that he must then solve. What is the answer? well: here it is:

Look at it! It’s neutral, simple; the syncopations are gone; the changes of rhythm gone; strip all that away and what do you get? Just a beautiful passing chain of 16th notes (like any other Allemande). Three bars of this, three bars, three harmonies…

If the second half is the night, then these three bars are some quiet strange hour around 2 or 3 AM, some perfectly still moment when harmonies come out from behind their clouds, strip off their usual melodic clothes, and stand before you, naked … an island of stillness, before and after events (after the b minor cadence, but before the final working out) but comprising no events in themselves. Three harmonies, heard, almost pure sound, only reluctantly passing from sound into meaning:

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only

These three bars are, I believe, a rehearing of the bar I cited in yesterday’s post, the bar where I claimed I felt that the various voices were “in love.” Here, now, lovers are, love is asleep … and what took one bar to do in the first half--to emerge, to resume--now takes three ...

Finally: Thing 3, my last thought about the rereading. The first half ends this way:

and the second half then, some 31 bars later, appears to be poised to end in more or less the same way:

and it would, except Bach inserts this:

This act of addition, this last stretching … don’t you see, it’s one last tracing (retracing, rereading) of the opening up-stretch of the melody, one last radiating 9th chord?

And that G# in the middle, a new “blue note,” a last little beautiful mishap?

So Bach is just delicately glancing on all the ideas he has crossed ... Sometimes I would like to scream out, like a crazed Bach preacher, to the audience at this point that this is EXTRA, that Bach ADDED it, don’t you hear what I’m talking about?!!?, that this addition is not mere insertion, is no diversion, that this is one last precious, priceless seized moment, delaying the end of the river, the end of this unbelievably beautiful time we have shared, like the last moments of a day when you are refusing to say goodbye to your dearest dearest friend …

… except of course this explanation would ruin everything.

Day 4: A River Runs Through It

2007-05-13T21:21:00.000-04:00

In many Romantic lieder, the pianist is the river, while the singer is the melody above: the person addressing the river, throwing themselves in the river, or participating in other river-related mishaps. I’m down there burbling or babbling or sometimes even burping (if I’ve had enough to eat just before the concert), and the singer of course gets to be all emotional and crap like that.

The pattern works; it separates the texture (here’s the melody everybody! and here’s the accompaniment! follow the bouncing ball!); it makes for easy listening of a sort; and later Romantics can be forgiven (perhaps?) for simply having no imagination except to do the same, but more and more and more. By Rachmaninoff, for instance, it has to be torrents and torrents of river in the piano and the melodies generally need to be pretty intense too just to be heard over his gushing faucets. (At the beginning of the 2nd concerto, the pianist is the river, at the beginning of the third, briefly, the orchestra is the river, etc.) I like to think of these Romantic rivers always being situated in really dramatic but cheesy locales with savage drops and rocks and flowers and sea lions (?) and of course all these notes cost me countless hours of my life, putting in stupid fingerings so I won’t be splatting all over the place (but I’m not bitter at all about that). Audiences seem to get a big kick out of these vast numbers of notes, and sometimes I enjoy them too.

[If you’ll indulge me …]

The Allemande of the D major Partita is a river, too. I totally feel the line of the whole thing, like something I could never fit in my hand or in my mind, with a maddening lack of boundaries, but I know it’s a line, a stream, and it can be followed. In its sinuousness, it wants to be followed, navigated.

To be super factual and comparative! … the D major Allemande is unique among the Partita Allemandes (and perhaps Bach Allemandes in general) in its rhythmic treatment. The B-flat Allemande is a continuous stream of 16th notes … the C minor Allemande also … the A minor is more ornate but still duplish, with little dotted rhythms and flourishes of 32nd notes … I could bore you with more … but here in the D major, various “incompatible” rhythmic elements are coexisting, rubbing against each other. Even mid-phrase, the melody drifts from 2s into 3s, from one groove to another … it is one stoned tune! Sometimes I have the sense that, for Bach, something is going “too easily,” and then triplets have to intervene, creating drag, braking, and then too this drag must be released into florid 32nd notes: in other words, the melody is tractable, willing to shift its own flow, malleable, reasonable if not rational.

In the spirit of carpe diem, I’d like to take this juncture in the post to really get down and funky with one of the most boring terms in classical music: style brisé. What is it? There is no article in Wikipedia (leaving me helpless); the term comes back to me mainly, hauntingly, from music history class, and yet even in notes from my wonderful music history professor, there seems to be some sort of helpless flailing around meaning, a sort of you-know-it-when-you-see-it-ness.

It’s an arpeggiated style (whatever that means). It’s a French thing (ha). It means “broken style” and (here is the point?) it’s this sort of constant interlacing, crossing of the voices. Clarity and simultaneity are not its virtues or desires. Broken style is broken up like ground beef in a pasta sauce. It does not like to settle down a chord, chunk! It likes to let chords unfold in time, in facets, details … but you see, it’s not at all like Rachmaninoff in that way (those arpeggiated passages are mainly written out simultaneities, sort of time-fillers, ways to make the chord “last longer”) … here the arpeggiations are all melodic, or close enough … and somehow Bach is “all up in” the idea of the Allemande, its kind of raison d’etre which is: through constant interweaving of different ideas and textures, to create a kind of evasive, sinuous, non-repetitive flow.

As a corollary, Bach is not too stern with his voices. There’s kind of a live-let-live vibe going on. if they feel like hanging around for a while on one note, they do; and if they feel like they have something to say, they do, or if they have to move, etc. etc., and there seems to be little hierarchical angst or attitude. Unlike in fugues or fugatos, there is no sense of “order” of entrance, of strictly staggered schemes; stuff happens. Yes, in the D major Allemande the top voice is a diva, but one unusually receptive to all sorts of suggestions from below, which is good, because those other voices have such spectacularly beautiful things to say; they relate to the top voice subtly, not overtly, like friends who know exactly what to say in a heart-to-heart. This all goes with my contention that this Allemande is somehow not something that happens, but an enchaining of happenings, or the way something happens (to quote Charles Ives): a sequence of things that cannot be untangled from the other; the voices are not separable, the rhythms are not separable, all is subject to drift and fusion.

Along these lines, I have a favorite spot in the piece:

There is a lot of “crossfire” in these two measures, many interactions, twists and turns; it is a kind of strange juncture, almost a “breakage,” but particularly in the second measure, I feel such a sweet amity between the voices, I really really do. The concords they reach are so touching. The (3 or maybe 4) voices seem at this and similar moments—if this does not strike you readers of Think Denk as ridiculous—to love each other. (Or to show us humans what love might be.) Though, it is true, the bassline “does a naughty” by cadencing deceptively on the downbeat of measure 18 (E should go to A, not F#, right???) the naughtiness is quite felicitous (aka awesome) and the rest of the voices don’t seem to mind; they even celebrate their deep sibling’s flight of fancy, each contributing in the course of the measure, helping, agreeing, moving things along, passing the current through, up, around whatever obstacles any of them might have thrown in the way.

This river’s not going express; nor does it feel like a local. It’s able to smell the roses but it does not let stoppages become static. And therefore it can break itself constantly into fragments, disperse, and then again, again, it seems to refashion itself on the rebound into a radiant whole.

Day 3: Love Meets Livestock (G-rated)

2007-05-12T21:11:00.000-04:00

My favorite scene in Don Quixote: Sancho is telling a story to calm himself and his delusional master. It’s about a goatherd, Lope, who’s in love with a shepherdess:

… Torralba, the shepherdess, who was a stout girl, and wild, and a little mannish because she had something of a mustache…

But eventually, despite this sizzling babe-itude, he gets over her, and decides (reasonably) to skip town, in order never to see her again. And at that moment:

when she found herself rejected … [she] began to love him dearly, though she had never loved him before.

Whereupon, Don Quixote offers his magnificent wisdom:

That is the nature of women … They reject the man who loves them and love the man who despises them.

… this sage cliché offered up by a man, one feels, who has never ever gotten laid. The layers of irony, absurdity, oh, and yet the familiarity: how many times have I, too, pronounced confidently and yet vacuously on topics I barely understood? A million humiliating moments from my life suddenly flash before my eyes, and I am willing to own up to them. I am sitting at Bear’s Place in Bloomington, Indiana with various drunken Sanchos or Dons, telling wandering stories and drawing conclusions from them that I have simply ladled up from the giant well of things I have already heard said by people who also don’t know anything.

Anyway … resuming the story: the goatherd is fleeing town with his goats (naturally) and Torralba is running, wildeyed, after him. He comes to a river. And with this, subtly, brilliantly, the poetry and emotion of the story get mired in the practicality of goat transport. Lope has exactly 300 of them, we come to learn, and we find ourselves discussing the size of the ferry boat, the muddiness of the riverbanks, etc. etc. … Meanwhile Torralba looms, ever closer, the baleful Lover, trying desperately to remind us of the “point of the story,” which narrator Sancho blissfully ignores, though he requests that Don Quixote count the goats as they get ferried across.

Now suppose you are the Don. Sancho’s request is really a violation of his listener’s rights. If you are hearing a Mahler symphony, you do not file away your reactions in color-coded folders (do you?). And anyway! If anyone should be counting the goats, it’s the storyteller, right? … cause he’s the one in charge of making sure the story “makes sense.” Accounting concerns and the joys of narrative are smashed in a trainwreck of genre and function. The Don (reasonably?) ignores his request, with this result:

”How many have gone across so far?” asked Sancho.

“How the devil should I know?” responded Don Quixote.

“That’s just what I told your grace to do: to keep a good count. Well, by God, the story’s over, and there’s no way to go on.”

“How can that be?” responded Don Quixote. “Is it so essential to the story to know the exact number of goats …?”

“… as soon as I asked your grace to tell me how many goats had crossed, and you said you didn’t know, at that very moment I forgot everything I had left to say, and, by my faith, it was very interesting and pleasing.”

I LOVE how Sancho rubs it in at the end! Bravo! Fantasy meets the humdrum counting of reality and neither gives ground.

The way this story undermines itself is fantastic, and you realize that this story of the disintegration of the story is far more entertaining than the actual story would have been. What would have awaited Lope on the far riverbank, with his three hundred goats? Perhaps a trip to the feed store? Who wants to know? Lope and Torralba vanish into thin air, and good riddance.

In Balzac’s short story Sarrasine, a man agrees to tell his mistress the story of a mysterious stranger, in exchange for sex. But as he tells the story, his mistress is horrified by it, and when the story is over—Catch-22!—she refuses to sleep with its teller. So speaks Roland Barthes:

Caught in his own trap, the lover is rebuffed: a story about castration is not told with impunity. This fable teaches us that narration (object) modifies narration (action) … there is no question of an utterance on the one hand and on the other its uttering …
Sarrasine is not a “story about a castrato” … as meaning, the subject of the story harbors a recurrent force which reacts on language and demystifies, ravages the innocence of its utterance: what is told is the “telling.” Ultimately, the narrative has no object: the narrative concerns only itself: the narrative tells itself.

I began to write a post about the Allemande of the D major Partita ... and it seems I have now written a post about Don Quixote. Let’s see.

Yesterday I told a story about the Allemande; it went something like “the Allemande is about the appearance of blue notes;” the day before it was “the Allemande is about the wonderful extension of triads into seventh and ninth chords;” and if you had to ask me, what do I do when I practice?, it seems to me that much of what I do is tell stories to myself. Not stories like: I’m in love, but X doesn’t love me; or, I’m happy now but life is short; I tell those stories, tediously, to my friends over drinks or on the phone; no, none of that crap (though occasionally these things help to set an atmosphere). No: musical stories that have to do with notes, configurations of notes, relationships of notes … things that often seem on the written page a bit like technicalities, like counting goats.

But the music keeps reneging on the bargain, either, like Balzac’s listener, horrified by the story I have told, or like Sancho, presenting another tale mysteriously in place of the compelling one I was following. The Allemandes particularly love to wend, and wander. They are stories that are not hung up on themselves as stories, or on one storyline.

Near the end of each half, the D major Allemande oddly coalesces, becomes patterned:

It is very beautiful, rising, hopeful, not so clouded as the rest; and further more, the sequence is simpler, easier to see and count! One counts, 1, 2, 3, 4…

and then the pattern stops (so close to the end!), something new, minor-key, more halting, harder to grasp, takes over …

If you are a super good listener, you realize that you can be counting bass notes, now, descending, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (the narrative has shifted) …

And then that pattern too ends … and at that impasse it’s as if Bach asks “how many?” and the listener is frustrated, perhaps; doesn’t know between the two very different stories which to follow, which is “the story;” you are entranced, stunned, in the middle of many different accountings, or maybe you’ve simply lost track, and you say “How the devil should I know?” or “isn’t that your job, JS, to hold this whole thing together?” … and the composer stares back at you the performer or the listener too, says no it’s your job, and at that moment, of course, the story ends:

I don’t think of this movement as funny at all, of course; and yet there is some redemptive touch of the comic in here, something touchingly bizarre, hunched on the edge of the impossible, or the unworkable …as if Bach has to ferry all 300 goats across in a one-seater, and manages … One more dissonance (one more storyline) is piled on, like the last fateful piece of bologna on a massive teetering Dagwood sandwich, and yet the cadence still arrives. What was it all about, lovers or goats, major or minor, beauty or distortion? You cannot decide. In your perplexity, you have been drawn into the story; you are one of the characters, whether you like it or not.

Day 2: Case of the Blues

2007-05-11T17:23:00.000-04:00

It is rare, and delightful, when The Onion provides something themed perfectly for Think Denk; today is one of those magical, blessed days. All hail The Onion! (And also, the onion, a marvellous vegetable which was even used to pay rent in the Middle Ages.)

I was really bored one midmorning in Houston, at my hotel, with weekend downtown emptiness like a raging tornado of nothing around me, and I decided to count the “blue notes” in the Allemande of the 4th Partita. I assert there are 15, more or less! Here are the ones in the first half:

Since my expertise in the blues is mainly limited to my Nina Simone album, the Onion article cited above, and occasional regrettable late evenings in Chicago in which many cigarettes were pretended to be smoked by me causing me to cough all my Caucasian pseudo-misery onto gentrified sidewalks, I had to do some scholarly research on Wikipedia:

In jazz and blues, blue notes are notes sung or played at a lower pitch than those of the major scale for expressive purposes. Typically the alteration is a semitone or less, but this varies among performers. The blue notes correspond approximately to the flattened third, flattened fifth, and flattened seventh scale degrees …

AHA! Though there was surprisingly no mention of Bach in the “blue note” article, nonetheless I felt triumphantly vindicated, and massaged my eyebrows pretentiously. All of the blue notes I found in the Allemande are flatted thirds, fifths, or sevenths, so there, and you nosy theorists who think I’m taking the term ridiculously out of context can just go (*&)*#@$&(*).

Bach sets us up in the “color” of D major, a beautifully voiced, lyrical D major—luminous, tender, warm—something which in no way augurs the blues; but then he begins to scatter little dark stars in his constellation. Why?

The first one that really really gets me is the A-sharp which sneaks in at the end of bar 5 (a flatted third). It appears (sour, bittersweet?) and then quickly seems to resolve itself away.

But clearly, this resolution is not “enough;” there is something left to deal with, because this little A#-event sets off a sweeping melodic figure (which I discussed yesterday) …

On the one hand, the blue note (folding inward, vanishing); on the other this gesture (leaping upward, overspanning); do these two events “follow,” do they make sense?

Blue Note … Lyrical Outpouring
Sadness … Gesture of Release

Perhaps they do follow, but not as balancing acts: there is no symmetry there, no “exchange value,” just a strange, instinctive call-and-response. The blue notes are charged with meaning, meaning that cannot always be addressed simply, or purely “musically,” and at every step they raise new complications, new considerations …

The Allemande’s amazing blueness occurs not because just one or two of these incidents happen, but that they keep happening, and they begin to resonate off each other; they accumulate, echo, create a second “text” overlapping the first, seeming to contradict it. That first A# is a warning, a seed. It engenders, as I have said, a family of “dissonant” appearances. And then, all the blue notes in the second half are recollections, reminiscences of the ones in the first half: that is, recollected transgressions, like mistakes that you’ve made, and choose to repeat. With the various blue notes circled in my score, it looks like some sort of weird code hidden in the page; I imagine each note as I play as a sort of “bump in the road,” and then there is a strange topography to the whole experience, like passing your hands over Bach’s blue braille.

At the risk of trivialization, let’s imagine Bach at the Blue Note at 2 am, letting it all hang out baby, thinking freeform. Empty whiskey glasses are strewn around the harpsichord bench, smoke curls in the air, the smoke of the minor key … the haze, the blurring of thought … the in-between, in-the-cracks notes, trying to wedge themselves in that incompromising space between the black and white keys. Bach’s looking for some way to disturb the serene discreteness of the keyboard, some way to press the same old levers, but in such a way as to question their identity. (Don’t let the notes tell you who you are, man.)

But Bach is not just being a rebel. The more I play it, the more I feel that these blue notes are not at all “antagonistically” related to the main major key, that the main question is not at all happy vs. sad. The blue notes make the Allemande “real” somehow, make me identify with the singer or the voice of the narrator of whatever you want to call it; he/she is vulnerable, occasionally falling apart, stricken in various ways, strung out, prone to digression, musing, changes of mood …

If Bach is “thinking about something” there in the Blue Note, perhaps it has something to do with the incredible vulnerability of beautiful things … the Allemande seems to me the only movement of the Partita which addresses this issue, which allows beauty to be seen offstage, unpropped: the Gigue is overtly, virtuosically, audaciously joyful; the French Overture is grand, pompous, stylized; even the Sarabande seems safe in its melismatic D major world. But the particular fragility of mood in this movement is something very special, something that cannot be summarized by “sadness made transcendent” or “bittersweet” or any number of epithets I have considered. The closest I have come is this: when you are seeing or experiencing some incredibly beautiful thing, in the flash of recognition, how even the ramble of your own mind, the ticking of a few seconds, some restlessness or disturbance, makes you realize how even your perception and experience are utterly temporary, insufficient for the beauty you are experiencing, and yet the only tool you have.

Seven Days

2007-05-10T19:02:00.000-04:00

[In the leadup to my 37th birthday, and perhaps to slightly ameliorate the pain of its arrival, now I present seven straight days of blogging on one movement of the 4th Partita of Bach, the Allemande ... just to demonstrate, if I haven't already, the extent to which I am capable of obsessing.]

Bach sees Jane run.

At the beginning of the Allemande of the 4th Partita, in the left hand, a plain Jane progression:

… which is (ho hum) the generic declarative sentence of tonal music. See the tonic run to the dominant and back, a scaredycat afraid to wander. But in the right hand I have a wanderer:

Behind the wandering “melody” hides a wonderful, arching arpeggiation:

So, schizophrenia. The left hand is saying something grammatical, prosaic, everyday, something that is common to a million pieces, a functional bit, while the right hand is radiating up a seventh, up a ninth, and then back down, fancifully testing intervallic space. This melodic behavior is not functional, in the same way that wearing a feather boa is not functional—but sometimes it just “makes” an outfit.

Bach is feeding off the contradiction, between this

and this

Notice how after the melody completes its dangerous self, the left hand tries to bring everything in line with a nice triadic tag:

… two musical “life forces” … the triad and the seventh … they tug and stare at each other, their antagonism fed by familial connection. Bach says: triads extend themselves into seventh chords, into ninth chords, by natural chains, processes, by the course of events, by association, by simple movement, by logic which blurs into fantasy … He demonstrates: a ninth chord (wild event) is two triads (common events) smushed together, like for example two normal words whose meanings for a moment get mixed together, becoming ambiguous, even semi-scandalous. Triads extend themselves as simply as reaching out an arm … At one point (for instance) the melody shoots up to this B, it imagines itself climbing higher and higher, and pursues its imagination and finds itself where it “should not be.”

And then we must watch it fall, third by third, back down

behind which I hear this

… hiding behind the “melody,” surreptitiously but structurally, an amazing chain of thirds (the thirds which had, in fact, built the ascent) … falling, an unfolding fan, or the slow release of some pent-up breath, into itself. The high B relinquishes itself into a lower B … just as at the end of a long journey you come back to the same place, with coiled awareness of the wider world you have seen.

Yes, I am suggesting this movement has a Clark Kent and a Superman:
...triad Clark, the self-contained, the pure, with sense of limits, decorum, gravity, versus seventh-ninth Superman, tremendous limitless enchainer (this is why the sight of Superman in chains is so devastating, for he is by definition that which travels along chains, which transcends confinement) … Superman soars over that which should be painstakingly crossed. A harmony is (after all, Bach tells us) a territory which begs to be extended, an idea which wants to be questioned. The triad wears glasses, is simple, meaning-establishing, closing, codifying, works at a newspaper, establishes “facts”; its extension is complex, wondering, definition-blurring (but has issues with Kryptonite? … here, perhaps, the analogy fails).

A wild thunderstorm one morning in Houston last month half woke me up, and I spent unknown groggy time lying in bed wondering, in my dream, why I couldn’t distinguish between dream and reality. Daniel Day-Lewis talked to me in the form of a giant insect about the merits (or lack thereof) of You’ve Got Mail; this seemed very real to me, like a bleary morning lecture class I used to have in physics; I thought to myself He’s a real bug, not a dream bug; and thus, somehow, I proved to myself triumphantly, arrogantly, that I was still asleep … as though I were both Socrates and his idiotic interviewee.

That same night, I played the D major Allemande as an encore, and I made a connection between my morning daze and my evening haze … Bach’s enchaining seventh and ninth chords, and the resulting transitiveness of this melody, have some connection to the ability to dream, to wander off into what, in Bach, might be regarded as the illogical, though perpetually founded on logic, springing off logic like a comfortable point of reference …

The surrender to sleep is so delicious. Too, there is something so sensually alluring about all those thirds and the beautiful dissonant notes they reach from their starting points, something alluring and spellbinding about the hopeless, fantastic, curling attempt to make them all understood. (To prove himself awake.) You can see (hear) Bach touching back on them (remember this strange note?), wanting to make sure we rehear, refeel them as he resolves or almost-resolves them. He sweeps them (I think with a little grin on his face) under the carpet as he approaches the cadence, he sweeps away the dream, saying it all fits, drawing the curtain closed … finito! … but for me it never all fits, there is always something left over, some dream-remainder of difference, some magic dust the carpet will never hide. I would say this dust, this remainder is the “meaning” of the Allemande if I didn’t feel in some weird way that whatever it is, it’s quite uncomfortable with the very word “meaning.”

Sex and the City

2007-05-04T11:21:00.000-04:00

[Posted on Craigslist]

Bemused but occasionally cranky pianist, 36, seeks similarly-minded other for longterm relationship “with benefits.” Does not enjoy discussing real estate or humidity. Allergic to nuts, the Tchaikovsky Trio, and unmarked retransition ritards. Serious candidates must be able to sit through the occasional slasher flick, mindless Hollywood thriller, or other piece of mass-produced drivel; must be subsequently able to endure endless pseudo-intellectual analysis of same. Gin drinkers preferred.

***

Hey, read your ad and was quite intrigued. Me: 5’7 and a half, sturdy, well-versed in music and related arts, something of a workaholic, but up for fun now and again, great lover of coffee, food, drink, and the pleasures of life… interested?

***

Well, you do sound interesting. But I’m finicky. What’s the catch?

***

Hmm, the catch: I suppose I should tell I have kids. And here's something weird: I wear a wig.

***

Wow, a double whammy. Kids … are those the little noisy creatures one sees perched in the small vehicles that often block access to my beverages in Starbucks? [snark] I’m looking for someone of substance, for sure, and I’m really trying not to be superficial about appearances … but I have to confess the wig thing has me a bit “wigged” out. Can you send me a pic? Also, you never mentioned your age…

***

Sigh, I guess it’s time to come clean. Here’s my pic:

People say I’m “timeless” which I guess means they can’t really tell how old I am? … whatever. One good thing about being dead, the whole age thing kinda gets less pressing …

I realize this is a lot to take in; hope it doesn’t freak you out. I think I’m worth it, though. Am enclosing my d minor English Suite so you can get to know me a bit better.

***

Well, this is … interesting.

As a dead European composer, you understand you’re sort of an unusual relationship choice. I was really hoping to date someone more or less alive. Of course, I’ve *always* dated living people so this might just be the fresh start I need.

***

I’m so glad you decided to give it a shot. Why don’t I come by your place sometime in the afternoon tomorrow?

***

OMG that was some date. Did anyone ever tell you you give amazing retrograde inversion? And I’m still dreaming about your descending chromatic bassline.

***

Glad you had a good time. IMHO chromatic and diatonic are really the two great linear forces at work in music and I love to watch them bump and grind against each other. Anna Magdalena used to help me with that in between minuets, if you know what I mean.

***

[3 months later]
… my friends will tell you I’m something of a committmentphobe, but I think you’re someone really special, a “keeper.” There’s just more and more to you, the more I look, and I never get tired of thinking about you …

I have to tell you, though, I really think it’s time to LET GO of the whole Telemann thing. I mean, so he got the job you wanted, and you had to keep teaching Latin to those “little brats,” big deal! I mean I think it all really worked out for the best … think of all the joy you’ve brought so many people.

***

You know, thanks for listening … sometimes I feel like I can go to peaceful places in my music that are hard to attain in reality.

By the way I noticed you had some unusual looking scores on your piano. Not anything I would write for sure! What gives?

***

JS, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the possibility of an open relationship. I mean, the time I spend with you is SO AMAZING, but I sort of want a little space, I want to be free to see other composers …

***

Honestly I don’t know what to say …

… the other night, after the 5th Partita, you just had a beer and went straight to sleep! ... after I slaved for weeks over a hot harpsichord writing it! Sometimes I can’t help thinking you just love me for my music. And how can you love that other stuff too?

… as they say in my native tongue, ich habe genug. Don’t be sad; we’ll always have the Allemande of the Fourth Partita.

***

[chat with anonymous third party]

J: Well I guess that didn’t work out ☹.
X: Live and learn
J: I’m seeing this other composer now, Charles. I think he has some gender issues, though, kind of obsessed with masculinity, etc. etc.
X: Oh, you know what that means [wink]
J: Yah. Ok, gotta practice
X: ttyl

Vernacular Appeal of Melodic Simplicity and Harmonic Redundancy

2007-04-27T09:21:00.000-04:00

I know the classical blogosphere will be seriously mourning Rostropovich. However, I personally am finding some redemptive light at the end of the tunnel over at Prof. Heebie McJeebie's Classical Pontifications. I nominate "Simpleton Pleasures" and "Jazz Improvisations" by Ariodney Hussington to be possibly the worst pieces of music ever written by anyone. But why, oh why, can I not stop listening to them???

A highlight (?) from Ms. Hussington's interview:

McJeebie: Why is the piece called Jazz Improvisations if there's no improvisation?

Hussington: There is improvisation, but it happens in the composer's head, and, actually, it already happened. It was in the past.

Where the Heart Is

2007-04-26T10:57:00.000-04:00

A small, recurring cast of characters works the lobby of the Greystone Hotel, my home. Behind the bulletproof glass are Joey (exhausted, balding, night school), Julia (curly, vociferous, lipsticky), Andrei (cheekboned, curt, blonde), and a surly short Hispanic woman in her 20s, whose name I have never heard. Behind a cheap table in the corner is a security guard, reading a Bible and guarding a notebook. Like a peevish comet, the owner of the building rarely orbits in; her facility, perhaps, brings out the worst in her, and I have really only encountered her pissed as hell. Lately she is absent, and waves of positive energy that are brave enough to venture into the lobby are not as quickly quashed. The building was going condo; which meant great changes were afoot; giant prospectuses were stuffed into mailslots; a new era beckoned, promising hardship for many helpless residents; but somewhere along the line inertia, muse of time, must have intervened, and I imagine some businessman in some office relenting, shrugging, in the face of some final Greystonian straw. Score one for tenacious decay. The owner has been defeated by the owned.

The lobby is not beautiful. A spectacularly boring picture of the building in its heyday (where the Hotel surely still exists, nostalgically) hung on the wall, pretending to be decor, but has been removed (the paint is lighter, yearning, where it used to be). A pot of plastic flowers stands on an Ionic dais and is moved to various seeming midpoints of invisible trajectories on the checkered floor. A sign reads “VISITORS MUST SIG IN;” I swear that missing “N” haunts me day and night. At 4 AM, after the garbage truck departs noisily, and while its honking and heaving fades into lonely quiet echoes, I dream abysses between “M” and “O.”

Most residents, like me, try to move through the lobby as quickly as possible, but some linger, and seem to enjoy it. There is one man who wears a giant gold medal around his neck, strung on a red-white-and-blue ribbon. He has liminal predilections, for instance: he leans near the door, or brings a chair into the windblown, cramped space between inner and outer doors, or stands just outside the door on the garbage-strewn sidewalk, looking longingly back inside. He adores rain-slickers, and is often impervious to water, even on the clearest days. He once ran the marathon. I know this because there is an explanatory card, also, hanging around his neck, in a plastic holder, which I have skimmed. (We could all use such cards?) He and I had absolutely no communication for six or seven years, though I saw him constantly; now, we are beginning to exchange smiles, and I have no idea what that means, or why it has happened. Some small random tenderness. It makes me feel cheaply good about myself to smile at him, and then I walk on to my destination, usually some heartless corporate chain.

To describe another regular: some eight years ago, I was in the elevator when a blonde woman in her fifties entered. Immediately the compartment reeked of scotch. It was around 11 AM. This was, I believe, the first occasion I really noticed her. She looked at me very intently, up and mostly down. “You’re an actor, right?” I applied New York Behavior Rule #1 and said nothing. “Yup. I knew it,” she continued, undeterred, “all the cute ones are actors.” It was a curious compliment, but we haven’t spoken since, and ever the jonesing approval-addict I catch myself, these days, wondering if she still thinks I’m cute. The other day, this same woman was standing at the bulletproof window, talking very loudly to Joey, with a different message. “You look terrible,” she kind of bellowed, pausing for a moment; then she said “I’m sorry” and began walking away towards the door. Joey said something through the muting window; it might have been a question; she turned back and yelled tautologically, proudly, “Because you look terrible!” She pushed the doors open, exiting the Greystone with a triumphal flourish (difficult to do). Promptly, my elevator door shut and I began to ascend. Joey was left alone, with no door.

One of the truly memorable regulars (for me) was an elderly man who sat near the door, in a corner, on a threadbare armchair (now disappeared, in an attempt to drive the elderly characters from the lobby and make the building more “presentable”). He never seemed to move. But one day, mysteriously, he was just there in the doorway, blocking my exit, and before I could summon a swift youthful refusal, he asked if I would do him a favor. He wanted me to walk him to his barber’s appointment, on Amsterdam. He had three or four hairs on his head. I stared at them and at his spotted scalp while he clutched my hand tightly in his cold hand and stood there and—as other busy normal people passed by—I started to wonder when we would begin to walk. But in a minute I realized he was walking. It was curiously intimate. Most of it was stillness and preparation, clenched breaths, but every so often he gave himself over to a passionate iota of motion. It was a harrowing, mindblowing five minutes until we were out on the sidewalk and fully thirty minutes more until we reached Amsterdam (normally a 15 second effort). I had no idea it was possible to walk that slow; Einsteinian dilemmas lurked; at that suspended speed, how could you tell if you were going forwards or backwards? I remember succumbing to fits of rage and eerie oases of calm and it was like being drawn into a black hole, maybe, while trying to hide the fact that your body is imploding.

At the corner of Amsterdam, he pitied me. His appointment (the existence of which I began to disbelieve) was allegedly on 88th and Amsterdam, and while I gazed into the receding line of buildings and onrushing stream of cabs with horror, imagining the whole day spent, he said the magic words: he would be fine, he would make it from there. I sighed in relief, wished him well, gave him hearty farewells. But, he added: he just needed to know which way was downtown. At that point, for me, the mathematics of the situation collapsed. I could bear the absurdity no longer. Sensing his helplessness, I fled from him, a coward; but he persevered, bravely, in the sunshine. I stopped near Broadway and watched him walk a few inches. To tell the truth, he’s not been seen in the Greystone in some years.

More About House

2007-04-20T09:42:00.000-04:00

Ostensibly the subject of House, the wonderful television show on Fox, is the eponymous doctor’s attempts, week after week, to solve mysterious, tentacled illnesses. (Amazingly it always seems to take about an hour of television time, including commercials, to solve any illness.) Or else the real theme of the show is the character of House himself: complex, contradictory, savagely logical, flawed, somewhere between Richard III and Sherlock Holmes.

I prefer to dismiss both synopses. I propose that House is really “about” irony and sarcasm; it asks the question … what is the acceptable level of emotion in the modern world?

Let us take another famous medical show, E.R. I have come to dread the 10 AM arrival of this program on TNT, rudely awakening me from the supernatural, ironic meta-worlds of Angel and Charmed into an ever-so-gritty-and-overworked Chicago emergency room. Oh, the humanity! Mark Green juggling child and ex-wife, Noah Wyle struggling with drug addiction and the burden of aimless wealth, George Clooney rebelling and refusing to commit, and of course the evil heartless Romano, colder than any demon in Angel’s dark, manipulated L.A. nightscape. I have come to hate all these characters and, particularly, the writers who subject us to their maudlin trials and tribulations. Everything is so, so emotional, and yet not redeemed by soap-opera camp; interventions abound; doctors weep quietly in locker rooms, and are asked if they are “ok”; schoolbuses of children are wheeled in, seemingly, only to be wounded and pathetic, and just as swiftly wheeled out. E.R. is Dr. Phil, in dramatic form; it wants us all to tell all, to confess, and be emotionally healed in the great common waiting room. Sarcasm is not welcome. (And again, after an hour, get the hell off the set, please.)

Enter Dr. House.

House strums certain recurring themes. First: is House really a softy, hiding under a sarcastic veneer? Such seems to be the constant, desperate hypothesis of his friends and colleagues, and the scriptwriters perpetually tantalize us with the possibility of a sentimental breakdown. At the end of the last season, when House finally went into rehab, I felt with dread the sense that the show would become classically heartwarming, that he would finally “learn something.” But magnificently—of course!—it all turned out to be a sham, showing House to be more manipulative, deceitful, and selfish than one could have ever imagined. I cheered. Why do these evils make me love him? His evil is entertaining, satisfying; his reformation would be boring, saddening, life-destroying. But he is not a villain.

As one watches, then, one gets mired in meta-concerns: we think less about the fate of patient X or disease Y than the fate of the show itself; will it disintegrate into E.R.-esque empathy, or will the writers somehow prolong the moral strange ground, the absence of judgment? In other words, can the show survive its premise?

A second theme: House “needs to be healed.” The writers gave him a painful, lingering, physical wound (metaphor for the inner, emotional wound) which is almost a deal-breaker, almost dips the show in a disastrous pity-bath. The other characters in the show always seem to want to heal him up, to convert him into a lesson learned, a summable plot point; they are always thematizing, moralizing, empathizing. “House is behaving this way because he secretly loves me, or craves love …” “House loves his own mind more than other people, and needs to change …” “House is trying to destroy himself, since he has no joy in life …” And House stands alone, protecting the fort of cynicism, deflating each of these pat theories. The perpetual explainer of illnesses, he refuses to be “explained.”

A third theme of House: the patient-at-fault, blame-the-victim. House is always suspicious of the histories his patients provide; it is often some concealed fact of the patient’s life that makes the difference … The patients are somehow therefore complicit in their failure to be healed, and most of House’s most amazingly cruel, but funniest, moments have to do with targeting those-who-are-to-be-pitied, with refusing to respect the sacred cow of illness. House is ill, like his patients; he knows, moreover, that everyone is ill. The people around him who think they’ve got it all together, that they’re “normal,” usual-life-livers, who imagine that they represent a “standard” or acceptable life-method: they’re the real suckers. Plus (and here’s the kicker): they’re boring.

House is a show where two possible shows intersect: imagine the story narrated by one of House’s underlings or colleagues, an earnest tale of a flawed doctor at work, and heartbreaking patients; or imagine the story narrated by House himself, in which all are exposed for the posers they are … and you must decide which story you prefer. And then take this principle and apply it to the vast surrounding narratives of our society, to CNN coverage of tragedies, to movies, to presidential speeches, newspaper editorials … I personally fantasize about replacing Matt Lauer with Gregory House, for a week. Apply it, if you will, to music …

House confronts the vast emotional movie-music of our time. Am I supposed to feel bad if I don't like Oprah or Dr. Phil, if I feel uncomfortable with this vast buffet of amateur psychotherapy, of human emotion and confession, bundled and marketed like a creamy, filling psychic Frappuccino? Am I repressed, elitist? Letterman speaks for me (yay!) when he mocks Oprah, when he says enough is enough, and yet a disturbing question haunts me. Why do I feel (self-satisfied jerk that I am) that it is better to play Beethoven or Ives for people, displaying and communicating publicly all sorts of emotions, and receive a check … how is that “better” than Oprah doing her emotional thing and becoming fabulously wealthy? If anyone has a good answer to this question, let me know. I know Gregory House would simply snort disdainfully, reminding me how pathetic I am to worry about the question in the first place.

Thanks, Rain

2007-04-18T18:38:00.000-04:00

As the storm began to drip from the sky I found myself (as so often) in a back seat at the mercy of a madman. Lanes were shifting states of mind. First Avenue was a long vein (I thought in my daze) along which red lights like hemoglobin ran, glowing brighter as they slowed, clumping in difficult morasses and extricating themselves for a more perfect careening flow. My guide as he drove across intersections looked left not forward, in full motion, or barely and grudgingly slowing, glancing to gauge the souls of cross-streets. Few met his needs. His braking, even, was impatient. There is enormous space there in the back seat, too much space. I am a tossed toy there. The Avenue was a red compulsion, a motion guarantee, a bumpy lustful harrowing northward necessity: there, the next light, and the next. Beckoning, greening chain of blocks. I found the drive mysterious, I asked myself: again? The Food Emporium whizzed by, as always. I belted my body in, clutched my cell phone like a charm, found the constant left and right motion overwhelming, felt helpless, between a dream and an amusement park ride. On either side, narrow misses; we squeeze by. Even my thoughts seemed crowded, frightened, in the back of my brain, holding onto my skull walls for dear life.

The next evening I was crossing at 121st and Broadway to get a downtown cab and I stepped into an unexpected river near the median. It ran black, swift, cold, slanting down the great street, and my right foot went instantly frigid, suddenly aware of the world, like a college student graduating who must now find a job: the black shoe shiny like a beetle, immersed, emerging dripping and ruined. I stopped. There were no cars threatening in either direction, the bodega was shuttered, I was alone for a stark moment. Home and warm with shoes and socks abandoned around me the windswept rain just beat its random tap-dance against the rusty airconditioner, reminding me of that moment, and its manifold causes.

Music is amazingly well suited to depict rain … A particular favorite of mine is Debussy’s “Pour remercier la pluie au matin” [to give thanks for the morning rain], from the Epigraphes Antiques, which begins with an incredible 16th note ostinato, marked “doux et monotone” … soft and monotonous. I have always found this ostinato unnervingly beautiful, like a little plier or wedge inserted into time, forcing open some joint or nook in it which is normally hidden, smooth, continuous. Watching the water drip down taxi windows and sort of swoop and sweep around 91st Street yesterday, I was really enjoying (in a depressive way) its random endlessness: sensually, engagingly boring, a monotonous pleasure, like watching someone in a library writing their notes on index cards, hearing the soft scratch of pen across paper, the friction of molecules reflecting the strange ostinatos of thought, the lost encrypted hours. The code of a person: they sniff, scratch their head, shake their arm out, breathe uneasily, yawn, random bodily details. Each drop creeping slightly differently down the window, an endless array of data, but the net total a same down-drifting, a constant vanishing scribbling over the window landing in the drain. Over Debussy’s rain-ostinato, outrageously beautiful melodies begin to emerge and flower, but they do not dominate; they don’t become annoying apotheoses; rainy days don’t make for good apotheoses anyway… the rain speaks last, and most profoundly … The person in the library eventually gets up, stretches, heads back to world and friends, stuffing cards books pens into bag, and you know nothing more about them.

Composers mostly don’t wait for rain; they invent their own water. In the slow movement of the Archduke Trio, for instance, I feel Beethoven created the theme in order that he could simply swim in it. It’s a current which carries him, and the measure of his success is his surrender.

If it begins with duples, with the hymn and the hymnic, if it proceeds in stately quarters and eighths, by the first variation a different point begins to emerge. The music dissolves in triplets, the pianist is instructed to lavishly pedal, and Beethoven writes notes which float down and up in contrary motion, the hands like two mirroring waves, washing up against each other and retreating to the far ends of the keyboard, only to turn around and return (always, again, like tides). The theme has been “fluidified,” which is a ridiculous word to express the incredibly profound: abandonment of the discrete event and the washing-over of lines and demarcations: music’s love affair with continuity, the theme’s “passing over” into a different mode of existence, in which we no longer dole out our events and thoughts in bits and tablespoons of motive but simply turn on the faucet and let sounds flow. The flow is dictated, circumscribed, by the more discrete, previous theme, a structure which feels like the thin skin of the bubble which now floats.

I relinquish myself to the beauty of this variation, and try as much as possible to do as little as possible with it, whatever that means.

Beethoven’s choice, too, is clear: the premise establishes itself, and it runs on, then, more or less on its own. He tinkers, but only behind the scenes. The strings are made to do also as little as possible; they enunciate just the larger harmonic lilt, subtle self-effacing messengers of structure. In this way Beethoven draws the curtain aside to reveal no disappointing Wizard of Oz but the self-sufficiency of the idea: powerful, like a current; seductive, without deceit; the completely compelling, sustaining, non-narrative. In the next variation, we emerge somewhat from the triplet wash, to something dryer, more pointed, humorous; there is again a pointed edge to the variation after that, with its constant hocket of the hands; but by the Poco Piu Adagio, in the perfect words of my colleague the eminent principal cellist of our cheery NY Phil, we have come back again to a “great harmonic river.” The strings, in the middle register, hold down the harmonic fort, while from the left hand of the piano streams an unending undulation of 32nd notes, and the right hand offers an endless melody in its own time zone, a 16th note off from the other forces at play. A full but transparent texture, layers of motion, water passing over rock.

This slow movement slips in and out of this state—this fluid state. It passes from etched to brushed, and this drift, from real world to water-world, becomes its deeper theme below the theme.

As in so many Beethoven variation movements, the theme meets a “dark night of the soul,” where it questions its own identity by tearing itself apart. Beethoven has such an uncanny ability to do these things without a hint of contrivance, of the overwrought; he introduces the little free-radical note, the wrong note which leads down the “wrong path,” which always seems to lead to redemption, to some outrageously beautiful crisis and slow, masterful circling back home. And lo and behold, just at this moment, when the violinist and cellist are asserting some fragment of the theme in E major (the “wrong” harmony) the pianist interrupts, morphs the dotted rhythm of the theme into triplets, and submits the entire remainder to the triplet flow … I am sure Beethoven is calling back the world of that first variation, bringing its revelation back for a second look. The triplets never stop, then; nor do you want them to; they are an absolutely desired compulsion. You, I, all of us listening, the theme itself … all are taken by the current. The theme is refracted, then, through it; the triplet stream, continuing, absorbs all sorts of melodic and harmonic intensitiies, and there is an ache, a tremendous pathos, in the push and drag between the unbelievable material and the triplets which won’t cease to flow.

It is lazy to make up words, perhaps, when a scan of your existing vocabulary comes up empty, but I would like to propose in my laziness “threeness.” Why should a number have an emotional, adjectival function? But the theme here is made so much of thirds (F#-E-D), upwards and downwards, it is in 3/4 time, and you can see I feel the triplets have some import in the movement, comprising something like its most fundamental, truest, flow … its deepest current … and I believe there is something neither made of triplets or the interval of a third which expresses some deeper, familial connection between them, a weird charge of connected meaning. This would appear to be an abstruse point, in which I dissolve the magic of the movement into a number … but it is not abstruse for me at all, rather very emotional, instinctive, and irrational. For me the onset of the triplets is like a surrender to the most natural pace, to the perfect corresponding thing, to that which is in itself enough, that which—unlike the rain—you never want to end.

Area Pianist Ignored at Local Starbucks

2007-04-10T11:22:00.000-04:00

In the wake of revelations emanating from the Washington Post this weekend, secret sources have confirmed that Upper West Side classical pianist Jeremy Denk has been scrupulously or virtually ignored at any number of locations in the New York City area.

Our correspondent followed Mr. Denk around yesterday in a shocking and heartbreaking experiment.

He emerged from the New York Sports Club at 4:46 pm and positioned himself poetically in line at the 93rd Street Starbucks. By most measures, he was quite descript: a graying youngish (with a certain musical emphasis, or "accent," on ish) white man in workout pants, a sweaty T-shirt, and a jacket he got on sale at an outlet mall ten years ago, radiating a confident odor of the Elliptical Cross Trainer. Our reporters watched, amazed, as he hummed through several phrases of the Archduke Trio, and gestured expressively into the air around him; clearly this was an artist at work, digesting great music behind his soggy brow, and yet his artistry, if anything, seemed to dissuade the attention of passersby. Would anyone notice?

Mostly mid-level yuppies pass through this familiar location: mommies, daddies, assorted persons of fungible sexuality, the occasional painfully metrosexual European family on vacation. In this quasi-erotic crossfire, each had a quick choice to make: do you stop and notice the bedraggled artist or do you scurry past with a blend of disgust and desire, aware of your cupidity but afeared of odor or solicitation?

Showered and transformed, Mr. Denk ventured out to Chelsea. At Patsy's on 23rd Street, he sat and ate an entire Rigatoni Bolognese. It was beautiful to watch. The acoustics of the restaurant were surprisingly kind, underscoring each appreciative smack and munch. He brought passionate forkfuls of pasta to his mouth, leaving artsy swatches of tomato across his chewing cheeks, which, like a true rebel, he refused to wipe away immediately. To this reporter's mind, he oozes, even suppurates artistry. But there was no response: nothing, but the clattering, random helter-skelter of a slow night at Patsy's. Even the waitress, amazingly, seemed a bit indolent in refilling his water.

At 36, Denk's an enigma. Medium-height, big-nosed, with constantly changing but unsatisfying hairstyles, he formulates an interesting countertext within the inherent binaries of the glamorous-artist archetype. "I like to live," he said, "you know, according to the moment. I also like snacks in my dressing room. And snacks, in general."

He consented to this article on one condition. "No," he said, "don't use the word genius." He mused for a moment, crumbs of Aztec Brownie slipping out of the delicate corners of his thoughtful mouth, "what about poetic soul? or associative mind? No, no, wait, let's call my publicist."

We followed Denk into Blades of Glory at the Chelsea Clearview. We paid a friend (who prefers to remain anonymous) to go with him; we wanted to see if it was just the stigma of solitude that was causing this pianist to be ignored. But no! There, too, events seemed to proceed in total disregard of Denk's musicality. Denk hit a low ebb when the two guys in front of him started making out. "But then I realized," he debriefed us later, "they were ignoring both me and the artistry of Will Ferrell ... I was in pretty good company ... at least there was that..."

Asked to sum up the day: "I mean the guy at the gym said, 'have a good workout,' and the guy at the Starbucks asked me if the brownie was 'the one with the weird peppers in it.' That's about it for meaningful interaction."

According to Mr. Denk, the only truly artistic reception he received yesterday, April 9, 2006, from 9:28 am to 1:31 am the next day, was on the phone with friend Lisa Kaplan. "I said, 'Lisa, let me sing you something,' and she said 'let me put you on speakerphone,' and I knew she wanted her friend Barbara to hear me sing, and I said 'No, no!' and as I started to sing she put me on speakerphone anyway."

We hesitate to report the rest of the story. "Barbara said my singing was like 'I saw into her soul,' but I realized she meant it ironically," Mr. Denk told us, choking back tears. Is there nothing left untouched by irony in these uncultured days?

Ground

2007-04-05T12:01:00.000-04:00

I was midway through my coffee’s journey, when I required the public men’s room near the Delacorte. A man was drying his underwear under the handblowers. Where was my explaining, comforting Virgil? The fact that it was underwear and not some other more benign garment or cloth took a while to register, but once it did, I had an immediate compulsion, a tic of the mind. “Aren’t all our lives, in a sense, just a matter of drying our underwear under hand blowers?” … the situation was dire. When I got home I dialed Metaphors Anonymous.

But before that, I hit the Great Lawn. I was forcing myself to Take A Walk in The Park, to stretch my fluttering, caffeinated wings outside the majestically decayed confines of the Greystone Hotel. I believe Sunday afternoons possess some unusual time-properties; they feel spread, like plains of hours. Endless Kansas time, the road heading off in every direction through taskless sprawl and corn’s quiet rustle. In this sprawl and under the blue Central Park sky in the breeze my eyes seemed very sharp, like every leaf was there, every hexagon of the sidewalk. I thought: they’re hexagons! Oy, Sundays: something sad about the flatness of everything, the waiting for something to happen which will not, the family dinner, the slow onset of evening and the cleanup of the dishes with the sound of the TV from the other room spouting idiocy, and no one saying what they really mean. For some reason, because of one Sunday afternoon in 1989, I also always associate Sundays with egg rolls. I’m just saying.

That was two Sundays ago. Last Sunday, I was playing the Bach d minor Concerto again with the Houston Symphony and I was having a great time. Each performance, however, the slow movement was infused with a bit more sense of struggle, some wish…

I came to realize that every so often my mind darts again to the left hand, which is doing some part of the ritornello, the ground … its unrelenting presence and movement under my melody is a powerful thing. I’m playing and suddenly the percentage of my brain paying attention to my left hand spikes … Oh yes, you are still there, mover (Creator?) … still doing your thing (Fate?) and everything I am doing is governed by you (Narrator?) in some way or another. Whatever fragment of the ground I happen to notice is preternaturally eloquent, always brings some rush of meaning, some sharp edge, affects my ongoing vision of the melody (yes that’s how I mean to say it), like some editor or kindly English teacher who scoops up your confused thoughts and rephrases them into insight. Otherwise I would be a idiotic singer going on and on in my lyrical way, effusing, boring everyone to tears, lamenting like Woody Allen, ridiculous, overwrought; but instead, the ground keeps me in check, its pace keeps me honest (so I must say what I mean, and only this), stops my voice from crowding out my brain. But! If I thought ONLY of the ground the whole time, there would be tedium … I would notice the scaffolding, recurrences, the grid, my logic, or the rhythm, in a sense, “too much;” it would be like living in a parking lot, only for usage, for passing, marked off but empty …

The wavering of my attention, my inability to truly multitask, to hear everything at once, becomes part of the beauty-tragedy. I am just Jeremy; thanks, Bach, for reminding me; not perfectly able to hear the “whole piece” (what is the whole piece anyway? certainly not discoverable on the page or in my mind); but I am able to appreciate my little flashes of reminder, to enjoy my vision that wanders and is drawn back into place, a vision in parts of a brilliantly conceived totality. And each blur back and forth comes with a little heartbreak, a little scrape of the irreconcilable.

And then the last orchestral statement after I am done: on Friday I literally shivered onstage (Saturday and Sunday, perhaps, I was too jaded, did not find myself as movable?) … My melody has worked itself up into a last frenzy, a last arpeggiated struggle; and in its wake comes again the same: which means, perhaps, nothing at all. Perhaps this is just a formality; in musicological speak it is just the framing return of the ritornello which is I suppose Italian for that which returns: tautological, superfluous. Instead of my space which I filled with melody, with ornament, there is just the empty space, the blueprint: whatever was behind the scenes. The set is stripped away, the worklights are visible, bare bulbs, the actors, tired, are shouldering their gym bags and heading home to their apartments to watch TV with their lovers and fall asleep and resume “real life.” A statement slash non-statement, the seemingly impossible display of a vacant space, of that which is gone, of empty Sunday hours where your clarity of sight is a strange, disturbing consolation.

North Wind, come down,
Unloosen the hands that clutch the sandstone walls;
Scatter the books of hours on the attic floors.
Clear all away, cold wind, and then, let all
Be clearness of sight that has dominion over
The mind that does not know how to despair.

—Montale, tr. David Ferry

The Good, the Bad, and the Waldstein

2007-03-27T20:51:00.000-04:00

Our horses were tired and as we urged them up the last scrabbly bit of the mesa we could feel them quivering and straining … we could hear the gravel they kicked up skittering down the inhospitable hillsides, the desert’s bitter laughter. I don’t know about you, a man like me really needs a good bedding-down after a day’s ride. But I figured on no featherbed, no downy sweet lady in a distant saloon; I had chosen the hard path. Purple sun-remnants rode out from the horizon, seeming to stop just short of our weary lookout, and dwindled gradually like the hopes of the villagers we had left behind.

My companion drank deeply from his dusty canteen. His hair was wild: not from wind, I knew, but from desire.

“Ride on,” he said. “C major’s somewhere out there, I just know it.”

“Lud, you been sayin’ that for days …”

Below us and around us an alien landscape, with motivic fragments blowing meaningfully in the dry breeze. I pulled some well-worn, coded papers out of my knapsack—ancient maps—and wished, for a whispering sad moment, that I could eat them. A silver band in the distance caught my eye, not for the first time; the shine of the road left behind; antlike figures crawled on it; I thought: those lucky devils are going home.

“Look,” I said, “C major’s right over there, on that road. We were just on it, Lud, and you made us leave, it just don’t make no sense…”

He simply shone on me his hard manly gaze, “The way I figure, a man who knows where he’s goin can afford to get lost.”

“Don’t give me that Zen crap, Ludwig baby, you are one Western teleological bastard and you know it.”

He smiled barely. “What I know is, you don’t know C major from your horse’s behind.”

Ah, the banter of composer and performer, two lonely partners on the road to nowhere. My horse neighed, in agreement or dissent? Its hindquarters twitched. Chastened, I looked once again at my ridiculous papers, which curiously didn’t show much but our present location: they faded out in the direction we were headed. What kind of map was that? I at least thought I knew where C major was, I thought I remembered ...

We heard light, dancing footsteps.

“Oh no, not him again.” We’d just ditched him in the last town, when we modulated to the mediant … he just couldn’t get over it (“E major! E major! I love it!” he was screaming over his schnapps) but here we were like a whole movement plus an Introduzione later (we skipped right past the ranch belonging to Ann “Dante” Favori) and he was there again, like a stray mongrel waiting for scraps. B muttered to me under his breath “I told him to come back when he could think less melody and more motive… I mean, how’s a man supposed to keep a narrative moving with that kind of discursive &*()?… When’s he gonna leave us alone?”

I kept my mouth shut. “How are you guys?” our visitor said, shyly scraping the gravel with his spurs. He didn’t seem to wear his riding gear normal, if you know what I’m sayin. “I love this place, too … it’s so, so beautiful…”

Lud rolled his eyes, looked up at the sky disdainfully (yes, I thought, only HE could give attitude to the very heavens themselves.) I could guess what he was thinking: of COURSE it’s beautiful, you idiot, now tell me something I don’t know. Our visitor (his name began with F I seemed to remember) just kept staring at him, adoringly, with tears like waltzes leaking out of the edges of his eyes; uncomfortable moments passed, what was there to say?

Gunfire… ominous rumblings … the call of distant voices, growing closer, shouting, screaming. I took cowardly cover with Frank (?) under an outcrop; Lud stood his ground, staring off, eyes narrowed… A man came running across the top of the mesa, breathless, straight into Lud; he was dressed more casually than I might have expected for this sort of thing, but no matter, it was refreshing! He had a nice, friendly look.

“Oh man, I’m so happy I ran into you!” he said…

“I don’t know you,” Lud said quietly. Being friendly didn’t necessarily ingratiate you with B.

“Oh I’m Greg.” Ah yes!, I thought in my hiding-place, I know this guy, Greg Sandow … he’s everywhere, you hear tell of him in every little town. Some call him villain, some call him hero, a renegade, a Lone Ranger …

“Greg, what can I do for you?”

“No, it’s what I can do for you! I want to save you!”

“Save me?” Lud paused, amused. “Thanks, but I really don’t need to be saved.”

“But they’re all coming after you!” Bullets whizzed around the bend.

“Who?” Lud asked.

“I don’t know … “ Greg foundered for a moment … “All sorts of people! Market forces! Shifts of sensibility! The inevitable drift of civilization! Television! Media!” He glanced about warily.

“Oh, them.” Lud took a breath. Just then, two other strangely dressed people wandered onto the scene, implausibly; they weren’t quite city or country folk, but somewhere in between … (it was like Grand Central Station up here on this lonely mesa--was this convergence the subtle machination of some strange authorial force?) They were talking in academic, tired tones. “Why did he write that ugly pedaling?” one wondered, her voice acidic, laser-clear, and the other, as if reciting some informed rosary for the nth plus one time, “Oh it didn’t really blur that much on the old piano, you have to take the pedaling of the Rondo with a grain of salt…”

I faintly recognized these two from a former life. Lud’s eyes flamed. Flinty, difficult things gathered in his face, and his cheeks swelled like he wanted to spit them out. “Ugly pedaling? UGLY PEDALING? If you want to know, Greg, can I call you Greg?, what I need to be saved from … Could it really be clearer? I wrote the pedaling exactly PRECISELY as I wanted it and … “ I’m a decent tonic-fearing man and I refuse to transcribe the rest of Lud’s diatribe. F was blushing. Greg understandably looked fearful… but I knew that despite a ferocious temper Lud knew exactly how to control it, where to draw the line. HIs anger was not peevish, not short or abrupt; it edged masterfully along tightropes, a beautiful, dangerous fire.

“Come on,” I said to Lud, “We need to find C major.”

Lud looked at me.

“Greg,” I said, feigning regret, “we’ve got stuff to do.” And with that our party began to disintegrate; ugly-pedaling woman went off with her friend, chatting; Greg, happy to escape from Lud’s temper, ran off to the audible, nearing battle; and F had some “new projects” he was working on, some sort of quintet about a fish which didn’t make much sense to me … Lud and I began to climb down the mesa we had just ascended, into terra incognita. He looked pensive, now; his storm had passed. We walked in silence, for a while.

"What amazes me," I said, "is the variety of perception. How could anyone possibly call that an ugly pedaling ... it seems so obviously to me one of the most beautiful inspirations, a miracle even... the most important possible thing..."

“You know,” said Lud, cutting me off, “maybe that Sandow fellow is right, what do I know about kids these days? Will anyone listen to my music in 2100, will I become obsolete?”

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe he is right, but it makes my head hurt to think about it."

He was silent, he didn’t like my copout. I was a master of avoidance, but Lud was not one to give up on a difficult issue. “Tell the truth, it makes my head hurt too,” he said after a while (there was empathy, after all, in that formidable brain) and the mesa then was shrouded in an ominous cloud of dust and we walked uneasily through blurring winds. “What I chose to write at that moment, would I write it again in the present moment? That’s the question that keeps bugging me. What’s possible to write now? After me, is it possible to write further into the future?”

Dust and questions. And then, somehow, when the question began to seem inescapable, murkily impossible, the air cleared ... We were back in the light and I was seized by much more than a smile. It was C major, alright, but again I didn’t recognize it. Lud had tricked me, we had snuck up on it, it washed upon us all of a sudden, a wave of white-key now. How many times had I been there, over the same tired keys? But the blackboard was clear, and we were writing in tones, as if there were no other way to write. It was like the play or awakening of pleasure. Its appearance, simply: I am. I was surprised by the ease of the dream, my ability to float in it. And from the loud wash of this joy then there emerged a softer echo which was, if possible, even more wonderful, even more beautiful.

Lud was snickering at me. “I told you,” he said, “you didn’t have a clue about C major. Not a damn clue.”

Remembrances of scales, fingerings, Hanon: all strange skeletons compared to this living, surging C major. (Yet somehow the skeleton lay beneath.) I didn’t mind he was poking fun at me; I was happier than I remembered was possible.

“Lud,” I said, “I wish I could quit you.”

“Me too,” he gruffly replied, “you have no idea.”

Questions

2007-03-27T09:32:00.000-04:00

While waiting to know what will happen to the forlorn Cheeto I couldn't resist the pull of Matthew Guerrieri's quiz.

1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don't particularly like the music.

General Hospital. (The Young and the Restless has much better music.)

2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.

The Goldberg Variations [zing!].

3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles?

If I'm listening to the music, Ives I think; ditto if contemplating insurance; but if I'm looking for a composer with a rugged, manly, but still somewhat snuggly name, DEFINITELY Carl Ruggles.

4. Name a piece you're glad Glenn Gould never played.

Most of my choices are listed at pianopedia.com. [zing?]

5. What's your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?

Well I'd say I have a 12% record of playing the ending of the 2nd movement of the Schumann Fantasy with all the right notes, so ... that seems pretty unlikely.

6. What's a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you'd love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)

Dawson's Creek (or perhaps Battlestar Galactica) set in 17th century France, with show dogs onstage (to symbolize the essential inhumanity of man, etc. etc.) and a chorus of ventriloquists (fill in your own annoying symbolic explanation HERE). Of course, any opera involving Joyce Hatto would be attended by me ... No, no I have it! I want Mel Gibson to direct a production of Falstaff set (and sung) in Aztec or Olmec or Mayan or whatever, entitled Apocalypto II: The Fat Man Gets the Last Laugh.

7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn't seen.

I prefer to see rather than smell non-standard concert dress.

8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?

I do not comprehend this "rock-and-roll" word; is this some sort of genre or style designation? Me dinosaur of dead music. No, really.

9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?

Aw jeez. Do I have to answer seriously? I mean, if I'm a clarinetist, probably Nielsen, but I'm so not.

10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven's 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?

What, this hasn't been proven already?

[Untitled]

2007-03-24T15:48:00.001-04:00

A lone Cheeto sits on my floor, forlorn.

The Easy Button

2007-03-22T19:02:00.000-04:00

Spring everywhere. Even the smell of paper in Staples was fresher, like it was about to bloom back into trees. Riotous piles of multicolored paperclips like tulips. A boy stood in front of me, blocking my path.

“Mom? Where are you? Where are you?” He was apostrophizing a pile of index cards.

I had a heart-wrenching mindflash: me in a department store screaming, age 5 or 6, my mother just two or three sale racks away, but invisible, and there was no map of the world any more, no house or place, and I was lost like in my dreams, dreams in the jungle where I was supposed to hold on to my father and he got smaller and smaller and finally I dropped him because he was so tiny and there was nothing but green overgrowth and night. Spring takes me all over the place.

The boy tried again, nervously: “Mom? Where are you?”

A New Yorker’s curt twangy voice from the next aisle: “I’m here, Matt, I’m here.”

There was a pause. “I don’t know where here is,” he replied.

I was now next to him; I could see, as it were, the whites of his eyes. I shouldn’t have said anything, I really shouldn’t have, but his response seemed very beautiful. “Join the club,” I said. Just then, the mother came into view from around a bin of binders. She heard my comment, saw me address her child: she was not pleased.

Touchstone

2007-03-20T14:19:00.000-04:00

I am prone like many concertgoers to terrible, quasi-spiritual restlessness. I wiggle about my cushion. I creak and sigh. My legs take turns becoming unhappily aware of themselves. My mind gives up, surrenders helplessly to the pointless rustle of my program booklet. Agh. What do I possibly think I will find there?

The other week I read the program notes (!) for my own performance of the “Spring Sonata,” and I read that the slow movement was a kind of touchstone. The word leapt out at me. Ah, yes, I thought, in the flush of affirmation, so true, so very true! and at the very next moment I wondered, hey, what is a touchstone? Heh. I am going through a little phase of loving my Dictionary app on my computer (me: easily pleased), and surrender myself between emails to little ecstasies of word clarification. Aha! I think, and then, How do they do it?, because my concepts of words are so corrupted by usage and life and sake tastings that they drift like icebergs farther and farther from their supposedly incorruptible cubbyholes of meaning—so that when I see the “actual” meaning there on the page, expressed in a few well-chosen words, I am often baffled, like when you run across the pimply bespectacled school nerd at your 10-year reunion and he has become a dazzling supermodel.

Finally, I met someone who works at a Very Important Dictionary. I assumed that if you could really know What Words Mean, you would be analogously precise at all other areas of life—that you would never make a late payment on your credit card, or lose your keys, or miss a flight, etc.—however, what I really didn’t expect or predict was that this highly-placed dictionary person would have the sparkle of a certain insane joy for life, a certain devil-may-care, wicked-librarian-on-the-loose quality (no reference tome she!) … and I looked at dictionaries differently from then on, with a kind of “I know what you’re up to” glare, as if, despite their perspicacity, they might suddenly get up from their dusty pedestals and go clubbing until 4 in the morning and then drive hurtling nonstop to greet the dawn in Montauk.

So. The word touchstone—as I’m sure you all know—refers to “a piece of fine-grained dark schist or jasper formerly used for testing alloys of gold by observing the color of the mark that they made on it.” By which metaphorically (perhaps usage is not such a big, bad, sinful bogeyman after all!) it has come to mean, “a standard or criterion by which something is judged or recognized”: is this what the program notes really meant?

I was seduced not by judgment or criterion, but by the image: the one stone scraping against the other, as a way of knowing if a stone was “good.” Knowing by the mark that is made, by the grit, the dust left behind. I imagined a composer taking his material and scraping it up against certain things (processes, problems, surprises, limitations), and knowing thereby that he had something worthwhile to work with. And I am always desperately questing for new “sublime” images and metaphors to express the ridiculous exasperation of playing the piano … the sheer physical illusions and self-deceptions at the heart of the enterprise, the grit you must find within. 88 identical silly (plastic!) keys and what you are looking for is always in between them; a situation in which (at bottom) you are simply pressing a button down a very small distance, over and over again, behind which gadgets mysteriously, heartlessly operate; you must always press down though you want many of the notes to feel “up;” you are a deluded Frankenstein, pretending to animate an inanimate object; you want to feel the keys, though they cannot “feel” you; inevitably, absurdly, you may feel that how you cross the next 3 millimeters of space with your little finger may mean as much, say, as the Complete Works of Shakespeare. The monstrous tension you must feel inside of you between two notes: a total paradox against the polished mechanical ease of the big black monster. And by the way, in case you were wondering, you are always scraped against the piano to measure your own worth.

I was sitting restlessly, ruffling program pages, thinking these thoughts, listening to some very beautiful singing, and not in the mood for those beauties. I needed edge, and I needed to be scraped. There was no mental touchstone, there was some unmeasurable quantity slipping away from me every moment, some repetitive random loss, and my head was sinking into a soft flutey fuzz. Nina Simone’s version of “Just in Time” popped into my head and I craved it deeply; I needed to flee. The person next to me whispered to his friend that the music we we hearing was “luminous,” and I snarked, yes, luminous like the soft light in a GE commercial … not like the light of Nina’s singing, the brazen belted thrash of her notes, their harsh waver …

When I got home I played “Just in Time” over and over and—yes!— the edge was there, just where I left it, in the CD player. I lolled amongst my unopened scattered mail and sang along horribly, passionately.

But also in my head, suddenly, conning its way in, was the slow movement of Op. 96, saying, hey, I'm in E-flat too! I had a little cascade of epiphanies. Both begin with relatively simple, periodic, well-behaved delineations which then reach unprecedented, unexpected emotional heights; they sear similarly; they both yearn and want so much; they both are exhilarated in a dark place; they both sit at the edge of loss, contemplating destruction from a vantage of redemption. Both begin from an accepted basis, buy into it, as it were, but when they open up what they've bought, they get more than they bargained for.

Nina’s point of departure is the standard “Just in Time”: she’s not, I think, in love with the tune, but with latent possibilities: rising suspensions, cresting waves of intensity--what the tune allows her to see. So that when first she sings “just in time, you found me just in time,” there is a ho-hum, here-are-the-chords quality … just layin it down for you, baby. (Same as opening of Beethoven, without the "baby.") Yes, there is the world, do you see?, the song exists, like anyone's perception of the world, within boundaries … but the piano takes over, improvises, and in the process something about the harmonic scheme begins to crystallize, some of the latent “problems” emerge … and when Nina reenters, the boundaries vanish, she's almost incanting; the words are charged, electric, out of control, over the same harmonies, now an enormous scrape of intensity:

I was lost [wonderful suspension over the harmony change]

the losing dice were tossed [suspension, surge in piano]

my bridge is overcrossed [more surge in piano]

nowhere to go [desperate, up to F]

nowhere to go [rising to G, even more desperate]

[brief respite] so let’s live today anyway…

… and finally, with the words, CHANGE ME, CHANGE ME two tremendous vocal slides, scraping over the essential, central pitches of the song (A-flat to E-flat), but absolutely grating, dissonant, passing from song into cry, the cry of the desire to escape yourself (to escape the song) to destroy your own habits and become a new, redeemed person … totally overwhelming … and when it is done, you know, breathlessly, that the song is “good.” I find myself shaking, vibrating, thrilled. I press repeat on the CD player, like a child, and do it all again.

Beethoven’s point of departure is the chorale … a beautiful chorale, to be sure, but “just” a chorale. How can a chorale be edgy? But it is; its sweetness is constantly laced, mixed, complicated, etched. I got obsessed with imagining the piano’s opening chorale ...

as a whole, arching, thing, kind of a singularity, a particle of music. Why? When I play it, to begin with, I want the spell of unity. I want to make love to coherence, the kind of emotional SuperGlue, which builds and breathes life into the sentence. In musical analysis we do due but strange deference to this coherence; we realize (perhaps?) it is so important, so emotionally basic, to hear and feel the one-thingness of it, that, with a pedagogical flourish, we label it with the most heartless possible term, perhaps just a capital A with a bracket, like so:

… code telling us A is the first thing we hear (therefore letter “A” and not "B") and it lasts just that long (8 measures, in case you are counting) and this is all—do you get it?—one thing. We analysts, in our modesty, and despite our labeling mania, don’t by any means want to “encumber” the music with any emotional subtext, so we use a letter and a bracket and leave the emotions up to you. Anyway they’re not that important, haha.

I would like to abolish the A bracket. It domesticates units. It reduces a whole to a thing. I hate it. I propose in place of the A-bracket combo, the idea of a musical “image.” This chorale is an image. Ezra Pound (the Imagist) wrote a rather famous, beautiful image:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of faces in the crowd;
petals on a wet, black bough.

You see, it all goes together, the vision, in a flash? But in the first printing he wanted it separated thus…

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

...which Kenner describes as “one image, five phases of perception.” I love this expression. The chorale, too, cut up into four similar phrases, each a variation on the other, each reflecting back on the other: and I think that is the perfect way to describe what happens, emotionally, musically: one image, four phases (phrases) of perception. It unfolds in time and each moment is of course different from, consecutive, "after" the last, but behind the consecutiveness and more important than any "after" is something that continuously spreads its tentacles everywhere, connecting, pattern-making, associating… a total image, a metaphoric associative dazzle …

There is, finally, something which interrupts the image, which expands or distorts it. (Which scrapes against it, makes clear its value, its meaning.) At the end of the chorale, the final three notes are repeated several times … G-F-Eb …

How can this soft, diminishing, peaceful ending paradoxically be edgy, be a touchstone? I don’t want to “encumber” the music, or make any of you purist analysts all uncomfortable-like, but for some reason this moment provokes me into all sorts of wild associations. The chorale has a rhythm, an inevitability (perhaps: a sing-songy predictability) and this repetitive conclusion is like a strange, alien, stretching at the end of its symmetry… an oddity pulling at the fabric of the piece (the chorale has a fabric, a weave)… When I think about this, I get an image, out of nowhere: a child tugging on the corner of her mother’s dress, saying “no, come this way,” or simply: “let’s go to sleep, let’s just rest here a while.” It is an unnerving, premature lullaby. The movement has barely begun, and yet (and yet!) there is a desire to surrender to the lulling, seeming ending; to give up (as if your bridge were “already overcrossed”), to dangerously allow an imagined repose.

By pulling the chorale out of its rhythm, this repetitive passage places it in a wider context of meaning … some way, some criterion (hmm) to measure and comprehend the chorale’s existence.

So we have lulled ourselves to sleep. Only by the most extraordinary leap of the imagination (and a literal leap of notes), does the piece wake itself up … an unexpected leap now infused with enormous meaning in the context of the lullabying sameness…

If we were really boring, we would say, describing this passage: “the violin now enters with a new melody, accompanied by the piano,” and we would write out the violin melody so everybody knows what it is:

But those two first leaping, symbolic notes, leading into the melody …

are taken up by the piano’s accompaniment, becoming a kind of constant, haunting reminder underneath:

What is the accompaniment’s role, anyway? In the opening chorale, a “typical” accompanimental situation is present: the sixteenth notes run beneath the melody, like a river—filling, fluidity, connection—expressing the slurs over the notes with smaller notes which do not presume too much, which do not take too much space, which know their place, which leave room for melody, for something “greater.” There is an acceptable hierarchy of meaning and value. But here, there is some confusion; the piano’s “accompaniment” keeps referring to the beginning of the violin’s “melody” (as if it wants to start over, to rehear the amazing opening), and keeps stopping short of the beat, a broken river. Which is melody and which is accompaniment? There is confusion, a sort of scrape of meaning between the two parts, as if instead of one stream, the discourse branches into two:

The violin’s melody moves slowly, is not particularly “catchy,” appears to be plain, empty. It plays unguarded notes, diatonic notes without “edge”--if you look at them by themselves--which need to be filled with meaning. And the piano is trying to fill in these notes, to make sense of them—or at least that is its “role.” The violin and piano, in a sense, keep measuring themselves against each other …

The piano is trying to give the violin a harmonic point of reference; at the same time each gesture is insufficient, and the violin keeps shifting, and the chain never stops. What the piano is trying to fill cannot be filled; there is more meaning there than it is capable of expressing. Instead of the river: a continuous breaking-apart, an accompaniment which expresses its own futility, where the image and its meaning refuse to merge. This “accompaniment,” which began its life as the introduction to a melody, this dissociated bit, becomes an obsessive idea, a constant burn behind the coda, a tremendously touching instability: a touchstone for the whole movement, scraping and leaving its mark irrevocably on the initial evenness of the chorale. The rhythmic tension of this idea “redeems” the chorale, saves it from its lull or its predictability, proves its worth. The lack of merging, this branching of thought, this grind of melody against accompaniment is so beautiful that each time as I play it I begin to feel myself changing (CHANGE ME!); at each rest, where the violin plays its new note and I am mute, I love, I desperately hold on to what I am not able to say.

Blue Bottle

2007-03-05T11:39:00.000-05:00

When the concert ended, a Chinese man drove me back to my hotel in a large black Towncar. All the way down Geary. There were Russian bakeries, Dim Sum joints, gas stations, spas, the whole beat hybrid of San Francisco deciding, block by block, whether it is a city or not. I called up a friend in Chicago, and she was getting stoned.

I dumped my bag, my music, my concert clothes in my hotel room and, with everything piled prosaically on the bed, took quick stock. There were empty hours ahead and I could make no comprehensive plan.

I went to Blue Bottle. This is a little coffee kiosk on Gough and Linden that I discovered, walking one morning, saw people waiting outside of it, fell in with the herd, and when I tasted my first sip of their filter coffee and bit into a chocolate macaroon, the sunshine itself seemed to be jealous. How is it that anyone can drink other, crap coffee? Every cup of Starbucks, for instance, I had ever drunk seemed a terrible, terrible mistake, even an amoral act. When something beautiful happens to you you sit still and work to appreciate it, you don’t mess around. I sat on a bench basking and sipping and when the coffee was finished I was not sad. I did not suck at the empty cup like the addict I am, but moved on to other enjoyable things.

So, I went to Blue Bottle, to get an afternoon cup. Their motto:

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I was standing in line and the time and the little alley seemed drifting, out of the way, a corner. My day had blown itself into this strange, bluish, dusky bend. As I ordered my filter coffee, a girl and her friend who seemed intriguing came up behind me, and the girl sort of caught my eye and I did the awkward thing of seeing her and not seeing her at the same time. But then she made a move, and asked “Do you live in the neighborhood?” and I said, no, I was visiting, and it turns out she’s a student though I didn’t ask what she was studying, but now she knows I’m a pianist. Then I fled without wanting to. I strode off with my coffee wishing entirely I had kept talking to her and to her intriguing friend.

But I had left my wallet in my hotel room and I needed to retrieve it.

So I began to walk back with this cup of coffee and there was a certain late-afternoon breeze. It blew just a little. 4:45 pm, color of bluish sky, temperature of breeze, semi-quiet though the street was busy. The coffee didn’t throw me, didn’t jostle the string which was inside me and was allowed to vibrate. I kept walking, feeling, listening. A certain temperature of breeze was which maybe exactly precisely the same temperature of some other afternoon, an afternoon I am sure, though I do not remember the exact date or person at all (to say the least), an afternoon in which I was in love with someone.

A feeling took hold. A quiet and focus, despite busy streets, and despite the caffeine ringing inside of me, and I could pay a great deal of attention that I don’t normally pay. I would live continually like this if I could. I had no desire to stop or alter the flow of the moment. (Totally irrelevant phrases to me right now: waiter bring the check; why don’t we grab a drink; what should we do next?) Proust, man, I thought, I know exactly where you’re coming from, I am so happy right now and I could feel two moments, now and some distant time, rubbing shoulders in their breezes, because the earlier afternoon, which had been totally forgotten, was not “remembered” so much as made totally alive within me: but only the essentials, and none of the facts. I felt still capable of whatever it was.

The Inn at the Opera has a very silly (quaint?) old elevator which plays all sorts of canards from the classical repertoire, including a very vexing, limp, waddling version of the Mozart Flute Concerto, which makes the endless process of waiting for the elevator to get to my floor, at times, a complete misery. That morning at 7 am, bag of laundry in hand, jetlaggy and confused, I stood and descended through a merciless and mediocre tutti, which made the morning seem unnecessarily cruel. In my mind I scolded the strings, no, I thought, don’t you get harmony AT ALL? I glowered at the concierge, as if he were responsible.

But just then, coffee in hand, the last movement of Tchaik 6 was on, while I was headed up to my room to grab my wallet and head back out, those few moments of music were thrilling. Tchaikovsky! I sympathized with him. It was that moment over a timpani pedal point. That was his world; yes, I thought, that’s yours. The strings played yearning phrases (I thought, grooving: this is really really yearning, he got that) and my soul or my stomach tidally went back and forth with them, I moved without moving. Obviously I was feeling receptive, in a mockable way, but I couldn’t laugh at myself, loving Tchaikovsky, because it was too good for laughter. The melancholy all-in-the-throatness of it, the heart well past the sleeve, pure cry and wish.

A momentary digression. This post really has no plot or point whatsoever, so digressions should be fine. We (me and Josh) had many wonderful audiences on our most recent tour, but my favorite was in Madison, Wisconsin. This is because when Josh announced our (perpetual) encore, “None But The Lonely Heart,” as usual some portion of the audience sighed and swooned and gasped with delight. Another portion, however, after a telltale moment—and I imagine this was the younger, more studentish portion of the crowd—found this gasping ridiculous and overwrought (and probably don’t really know “None But The Lonely Heart” anyway): they laughed. This second tide of laughter was the antidote to the gasping cliché. Oh, Tchaikovsky! How Romantic! Get over it, you’re a sucker. I enjoyed this, a lot. Perhaps too much. I laughed an evil laugh inside. Perhaps somewhere deep down I had some resentment towards “None But The Lonely Heart” stored up and I was letting the audience work it out. I enjoyed imagining the two elements of the audience at war, something like the war between the lyrical and the cynical within myself. What a ridiculous title, “None but the Lonely Heart;” doubtless some mangled original Russian, some stilted bit of fey easily-sold Romantical drivel. Yick. Clearly I have issues.

And then I was back out on the street in the same breeze and still in love with someone irrelevantly in the past. Which caused me no regret, to feel the love again, disembodied. I walked a few blocks with absolutely no plan except not to imprison myself in any situation. I looked down the alley for the same girl and her intriguing friend who had talked to me, and now they were gone. No matter, they might have been a distraction. I was in a humming, happy solitude and every sight was fresh. But all I could do was walk.

I drifted into a used bookstore and bought a couple wonderful books entirely on a whim, I didn’t want to think about them. I considered getting depressed by all the old musty books and all the lives they represented but I didn’t. But there in the history section, the Brahms Horn Trio came back to me, which I had just performed (for some reason I almost just typed “deformed”): particularly the Trio of the Scherzo, the truly most melancholy moment. (Other pole to jolly E-flat.) It reverberated from the Tchaikovsky? The phrases were similar, gluey, wanting.

When music manages to feel achingly physical. When the simplest interval is back, baby, when you know it is just that wide. When all the voices of the chords seem to be resolving like intertwining hands. Some fourth resolves to the major third and there, your lover puts a hand on yours and skin touches skin; and the touch is so not about just the place you are touched, but radiates in internal channels and carries secret messages all around your body. And that is how those phrases seemed to me, of Brahms, and of Tchaikovsky, and I think some sort of pubescent naive bodily-ness came to me all of a piece with the Tchaikovsky which I had not ardently listened to since I was 15. Message carriers, profound touches. Same with every sight, every grimy street corner, every glimpsed couple in a restaurant across the street, every small whispered word, the aggregate world of every person’s ridiculous gesture all the way down Market Street to Noe and back.

And so, in conclusion, I suggest you go to the Blue Bottle coffee kiosk in Hayes Valley, San Francisco, as soon as possible, and order a filter coffee, nothing more complicated than that, and keep ordering one a day, at least, for the rest of your life.

I Don't Know What To Call This

2007-03-01T08:39:00.000-05:00

I was really feeling this tremendous desire to—how shall I put this?—let my brain fry in the skillet of our times. So I hitched my pants up a shade and surrounded my sofa with Snackwell Cookies and pork rinds and Mountain Dew and put an old DVD-R in the trusty laptop: the episode of the Anna Nicole Show where she feeds Prozac to her dog. I felt if I went back to the old beloved chestnuts, I might just recover some of the early eclat of reality TV, some bracing frisson distilling the creative juices which brought us to the tremendous cultural summit we inhabit, here in late February 2007. We are all, in a sense, survivors of Survivor.

I expected the computer to come quickly to life with flickering images of limousines, manicures and breast enlargements. But: it was not to be. The DVD drive whirred a second overlong, and instead of iDVD, my favorite eponymous app, ubiquitous, rascally iTunes started bouncing up and down in its Dock, a crazed attention-seeking icon… not unlike, I mused mid-rind, the woman whose show I was hoping nostalgically to view. And there in the left column of my iTunes window, I saw something confusing, even flabbergasting, something which contradicted everything I absolutely knew to be true:

Laszlo Simon: Liszt Transcendental Etudes, Book I

I trembled on my sofa’s oft-stained cushion. How was this possible!? The DVD was clearly labeled ANNA NICOLE 2002; I recalled, in those heady days, recording the program with finicky flicks of my own fingers … but, cunningly, the machine did not lie. When I pressed play, lo and behold! a sober tuxedoed pianist strode onscreen, to invisible applause; stormy octaves and other Lisztian mannerisms ensued.

I grabbed the phone in an access of panic. Cory, luckily, was at home.

“Cory, I am trying to watch some Anna-Nicole …”

“Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy … isn’t it about time for you to move on?”

“No.” I huffed in frustration. “It’s not about that.”

“Yeah, right,” he said… “You know, chimps are learning to write, and all you can think about is Anna Nicole!” I had never heard him hyperlink over the phone like that before; it was a breathtaking display of communicative virtuosity, causing me to drop my Snackwell thunk! upon my keyboard. But while I cursed the sticky mess, I noticed that the Anna Nicole show was playing in place of Laszlo Simon.

“Holy silicone!" I exclaimed, “she’s back!”

Cory was silent.

Never had a low-fat chocolate product proved so fateful. My Snackwell had pressed the fast forward button. And at precisely 2x faster than the original, Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes seemed magically, even effortlessly, to transform themselves into the Anna Nicole show. There she was, flouncing into shops on Rodeo Drive. Though I wanted to surrender to the program and lie back on my sofa, reclining, as it were, in the nether regions of my mind, I knew something was at stake here, something bigger than my brain-frying pleasures, if that were possible. I related all this to Cory and we decided that expert guidance was needed…

Who else to call but Professor Barrington-Coupe, distinguished guru of the Reality TV Institute of Greater La Jolla and Surrounding Frivolous Areas? Luckily, he was on my speed dial. While Cory collected some pan-Asian takeout and jaunted over to my place, I was able to convince the Professor’s many layers of secretaries to let me speak with him, that there was, in fact, an urgent, unusual cultural emergency, revealed by the confluence of iTunes and a Snackwell! Finally I got his well-worn voice on the phone, Cory walked in with some miso-glazed brie, and together we laid out the seemingly impossible facts.

“So you see, Professor … “

At first Barrington-Coupe pretended to be mystified. “My boys, too much Mountain Dew on the brain, perhaps … some cosmic joke…” but as I persisted, I heard his voice go tired. The fight was not in him; he was going to reveal to us the dangerous truth…

I was passionate. “But which one is REAL, Professor? Is the Anna Nicole show the real thing, and the Liszt merely a slowed-down fake? (… a speculation which would involve some fancy historical footwork?) … or, which seems more likely, is the Anna-Nicole show—a reality TV show, for heaven’s sake!—just a plagiarized, sped-up version of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes?”

Even as I uttered this last sentence, I gasped at its yawning implications. It would certainly put a dent in my conception of the sanctity of Reality TV.

Cory and I, side by side on the sofa, listened, tense with anticipation, to the silence on the speakerphone. It seemed we could hear his moral hesitations, his reluctance to divulge, but when the truth came it came in a flood:

“My friends, don’t you know?” (his voice quivering) “…that there is no novel, there is no ‘work,’ per se, the author and authorship is dead, and thank goodness too! Long live the reader, who becomes thereby no mere consumer but a producer of the text. And there is of course no ‘one text,’ but in its place a vast intertext, where everything is a gateway to everything else, the infinite creation of the readerly, an endless unencumbered plural… You don’t believe me? Just press fast forward again, I dare you!”

Not knowing if I would regret it, I pressed FF; at 4x suddenly the video became Vladimir Ashkenazy’s cancelled cooking show, How to Cook Russian on the Road. Cory and I gazed, wide-eyed. I pressed on, with my sense of reality collapsing around me, and at 8x the video became Tom Cruise in that horrible bartender movie which I can never remember the name of … ahhh! would it never stop, this endless cross-pollination? I took a bite of some teriyaki soufflé.

Barrington-Coupe’s voice took on a hushed, conspiratorial tone, now he almost seemed to be laughing at us … “and you know boys heh just take it down to 6% of the original speed … hehhehheh" ... the tentative laughter dissolved into a kind of crazed coughing …

We followed his instructions, and suddenly we were watching He Said, She Said.

Barrington-Coupe explained: “The well-known game is a misnomer … well … perhaps a case of mere faulty orthography. It is not a matter of degree. At 6 percent, EVERYTHING is Kevin Bacon.”

“Everything?” I whimpered, not wanting to know the answer …

“Everything written or filmed since the dawn of human recorded thought.” The Professor’s voice was now flatly, oddly calm, as though with the deliverance of this awful, unifying truth, the sort of Law that Science only dreamed of delivering to the world, the small pitiful anxieties of human life could and would disperse into a giant field of undifferentiated Baconianism.

“You know, sometimes I see Kevin at Gennaro, just around the corner from my house…”

Cory rolled his eyes at my first-name-dropping.

But the Professor was distracted. Faintly, we heard another voice over the speakerphone, a strangely familiar voice calling, it seemed, from another room (or from another dimension?): “Come back to bed, Professor. It’s getting cold in here … “ A giggle and the unmistakable pop of a champagne bottle followed.

“Ummm, errr … “ The Professor stammered, now no longer the calm prophet of universal mutation but a human being whose deception has been uncovered. “I really need to be going …” he said, and the female other-voice was heard again… “I need to be taught a NAUGHTY lesson, Professor …”

Just then the phone went dead. Cory and I looked at each other. With dread in the pit of my stomach, I returned the DVD to its 2x setting, and after only a few seconds I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the voice I had just heard over the speakerphone, despite many nodes of intermediate translation, and despite manifest impossibility! Was she, then, alive? Oh it was too much to hope for! And perhaps, dare I say it, the issue of her daughter’s patrimony had yet another, astounding wrinkle? The world might never know, if not for the brave, unimpeachable reportage of Think Denk!

Cory sniffed. “Not everything exists to be material for your blog, Jeremy. Try to restrain yourself.”

But I already had my coat on and was headed for Gennaro. I had to ask Kevin something really really important …

(...credit for much of the above, whether he wants it or not, belongs to the extremely estimable pianist Cory Smythe.)

***

The following comparative chart may help people sort out the two great scandals of our age. I post it with great reluctance. If you are prone to be offended, please READ NO FURTHER, we will return to polite blogging in the next post, I promise.

Good Old Beethoven

2007-02-26T07:09:00.000-05:00

There is probably a better way of putting this. But who cares? I enjoy Beethoven the most when he doesn't insist so much on being "manly." For example, the “Eroica” Symphony is just manly enough; the last movement of the Fifth Symphony is way too manly, etcetera etcetera …

Beethoven’s anomalies, his offbeat sforzandi, his moments of disruption, jagged dissonances, rhythmic refusals-to-conform: these events can pose either as comic or heroic, or points between. (Comic or heroic dissonances: the difference between the “accidental” and the “chosen” wrong note?) If you trace the line from Haydn’s humorous quirks to Beethoven’s, if you watch the incubation of the Haydnesque egg in early Beethoven, you see how gradually the comic, opera buffa incidents hatch (!), grow into more “serious” usages, until accidents become more and more structural, more and more life-threatening … until Beethoven, in a sense, really “means” them.

Sometimes I wonder: why, oh why, Ludwig, do you have to mean them SO MUCH? If occasionally I have trouble taking the Appassionata Sonata as seriously as it needs to be taken (though I can see, from a certain emotional distance, how great it is), I have no trouble at all taking Beethoven’s funnier, “lighter” pieces very seriously, totally to heart.

For instance, Op. 96. Beethoven doesn’t get gentler than Op. 96, or more profound. The piece begins with the inviting trill, the fourth, the unchallenging diatonic, the definition of a world: the pastoral and, by association, the country dance; rolling triple meters, easy blossoming dialogue …

There are no destructions, no crises; there are lots of circling, hovering, beautiful moments: and that's enough, thank goodness … enough to present a whole world of human experience. Yes, it is possible not to be epic, or overwrought, and yet to do something complete, arching, emotionally significant.

Put another way, Op. 96 does not feel at all “confined” in its lyricism. But, it does engage the question of bounds. The impetus for this post was the following moment (which I just played some 15 times with JB):

The pianist wanders off (“out of bounds”), lets the chromatic spirit take him, and JB must sit idly by, while I blur. Haha. You just wait over there, Mr. Violinist, while I have some fun. Too bad for you! The fact that the violin does not play here is (of course) no accident. It suggests that while one element of the piece sits by, passively (helplessly?) another is let loose, unmoored. The violinist, perhaps, is the saner melodic, assembling, force … while the pianist at that moment symbolizes some lone renegade element of the piece--a chromatic vigilante!--some dissociated, dissociating urge. The image that keeps coming to my mind is a beach ball, (happily) neglected, accidentally dropped into the water, sailing off in some unexpected current.

A million similar tender transgressions lurk under the surface tranquility of Op. 96. The gentle giant, Beethoven, having set up the general frame of the piece—the lyrical, the dancical (heh)—creates a play at its edges … a fuzziness at the edge of the piece’s mood.

One of the most beautiful fuzzinesses of the piece is here:

Let’s say the first idea of the piece is pastoral, and the second “theme” is more purely and classically comic; in comparison this third (or closing theme) seems to suggest an awakening Romantic. This Romanticism is partly a harmonic proposition: the entire theme is played out over a dominant prolongation (if your eyes are glazing over, non-music-theory people, I’m sorry!); in other words, it lives penultimately, on the continuous verge of delayed resolution (you don’t need any racier metaphors from me, as much as I’d love to supply them). And partly this Romanticism is a question of motive: the two portato notes (portato, notes against resistance, caressing notes) headed always for the dissonance/resolution … musical heaves and sighs. Get the picture?

This “Romantic” theme cannot, by its nature, end. This would ruin it. A cadence would be nonsense, would feel tacked-on; its ending is therefore, by necessity, a non-ending. (The cadence is anathema to the true Romantic.) How not to end? The ongoing crescendo, as so often in Beethoven, meets the “accident” of a subito piano, and in place of D-major diatonic tones, we get the “accidental” B-flat:

Whoops! Except that the “mistake” is so *&(*ing beautiful. It’s no kind of ending, per se, in the Classical sense, but this little dark intrusion sticks out enough to make itself into at least a semicolon, just, in a sense, by being there … they say half the job is just showing up! I think of it as a kind of “marker”: within a predominantly sunny, G major, pastoral piece, an unexpected minor-key inflection, a call or signifier from another work (momentary, fleeting). It’s the sort of thing that one imagines Schubert must have really paid attention to, that he must have digested over breakfast some morning, saying to himself “Ach! That is fantastic! I must use that!” before knocking off fifty or so songs and calling it a day.

Most magically of all, when the violin’s turn comes, these final two notes, constituting the false ending, are repeated four times in a row, as if a broken record …

Since records were apparently not invented yet (according to my scholarly research on Wikipedia), perhaps it is more appropriate to describe this moment as an echoing or reverberation, a sinking-in of the last two notes … a propagation through time (which is musical space). Again strangely I am reminded of the beach ball, of waves, of something being allowed to drift.

The first time this happens, I think it is unarguably weird, as if, again, the violinist were “stuck.” (So many times in a row!) But, it turns out, Beethoven repeats these two affecting notes exactly four times, making a kind of peculiar, but standard, four-bar phrase out of nearly nothing, out of pure iteration. And then this four-bar idea (nothing) becomes kind of the foundation of the development. (Castles in the air.) So: what was excessive, bizarre, transgression, becomes normative, becomes the rule. Beethoven founds a temporary grammar on exception and paradox. The composer’s magic of getting the listener to accept the bizarre or asymmetrical. And once the strange becomes “normal,” then departures from the strange themselves become strange, the Alice in Wonderland, upside-down, beautiful world is created.

Watching this winding in and out of normality through the development, as we play it each night, I do feel like what I imagine the children, say, in Chronicles of Narnia feel stepping through the wardrobe, and the faun in the forest says hello. A hush comes over me in each development, each performance. Tightrope act: you don’t want to make a false move, or the dream will vanish, but on the other hand, you must relax and let the dream take you where it wishes. And dramas in Narnia reverberate back and forth significantly to reality (the development, as meditation, back to the exposition, music into life, etc.) … my touring life against “real life,” the symbol against the event, the idea versus the thing … how much does my immersion in the development of Op. 96 affect the way I live my so-called normal life? The children of Narnia must leave the fantasyland behind in order to grow up.

Just at that moment, when I am absorbed pristinely in the Beethovenian loveliness, and associated questions, happy as a clam, the man’s cell phone rings across from me (in the Quiet Car, no less!): it is Für Elise. How ever did that become the National Anthem of Beethoven? Für Elise, played heartlessly by a computer chip (have a heart, chip!). I stare for a scornful moment at him and his device, baleful angels of reality; he smiles at me, a polite businessman’s smile, and when I look back down at the open page of my score, the wardrobe is just a place to hang your clothes.

In Search of Yesterday's Cheese

2007-02-21T03:14:00.000-05:00

My powers of empathy are so extraordinary at times, I even surprise myself. For example, today I was sitting in the sunshine looking down at Lake Leman, and across it at the Alps, in the middle of vineyards perched on rolling hills, with a pleasingly rotund bowl of warm coffee cradled in my sleepy hands, and the remnants of some pear and apricot tarts next to me on a little charming plate, and I was so looking forward to the roast veal and salad the housekeeper was making for me for lunch, and... just at that moment... I had the most vivid, electric connection to what my friends HY, M, and J must be feeling cramped in their airplane seats or gate lounges. Never imagine I am a narcissist! On the contrary, I conjured in great detail the gungy orange or mauve of the chairs my friends were belted into and the sour tepid "coffee" they were reluctantly sipping from plastic cups, and the arguments they were having with clerks about cello seats, and the way they must have felt when the alarm went off at 7 am etc. etc. And thus ruminating, wiping the sated surplus sleep out of my eyes, I padded in my bare feet to the kitchen, and opened the walk-in fridge to find some Vacherin and Gruyere to snack on before luncheon, and possibly a nice glass of white wine to tide me over through this perfectly sunny early afternoon ... yet more intensely I had another overwhelming wave of empathy, the most exquisitely precise photographic image of an airline attendant leaning over HY with a cold tray of skeletal salad and forlorn fruit. A baby squirmed and whined in the adjoining seat. It was almost enough, this perceived misery, to stop me in my aimless tracks, and in order to sufficiently comfort myself I spooned a giant dollop of soft, oozing Vacherin onto a crusty round of bread, and lay myself in the sunshine until my selfless empathy was no longer a curse.

Looking for Work?

2007-02-13T14:29:00.000-05:00

WANTED: S. Richter lookalike to work as an extra
Reply to: gigs-278167412@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-02-13, 1:56PM EST

Seeking someone who resembles late, world renowned pianist Sviatolsav [sic] Richter in ‘late’ phase of his life to work for two hours as an extra in a visual art project. There is no special talent needed, just the looks.

IN ORDER TO SEE PHOTOS PLEASE GOOGLE: Sviatoslav Richter using Google/Images option.

Also, please note that Sviatoslav Richter was very tall - which may not be so obvious from the available photos. Job description: this person will just sit in a pleasant, not at all boring environment for about two hours, wearing tuxedo or other formal, elegant outfit, playing a passive yet very important role. It should be a lot of fun. More details later. Compensation+ credit.

(Courtesy Gabriel Kahane)

Anna

2007-02-09T11:23:00.000-05:00

Perhaps many of you out there will not agree with me, or will think I am making light of a tragedy (I am not, this is a terribly sad story which we will never really know), but I think this New York Times obituary is a masterpiece. There are so many ambiguous subtexted paragraphs in it, for instance:

On Sept. 7, 2006, Ms. Smith gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn. On Sept. 10, Daniel, Ms. Smith’s son from her first marriage, died suddenly while visiting mother and child in the hospital in the Bahamas. A medical examiner hired by the family found that the death was the accidental result of the interaction of methadone with antidepressants.

The tantalizing, lingering qualification: "hired by the family..." Again and again Ms. Goodnough gives us facts, simply arranged or juxtaposed on the page, with less explanation than you would expect, and says more with less elucidation than reporters on CNN could ever manage in 3 hours of Idiot Coverage. Her journalistic "objectivity" is a linguistic pose behind which she hides the daggers of her insight. For instance, this supposedly harmless listing of her professional accomplishments:

She appeared in several movies, among them “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994) and “Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult” (1994). Her other cinematic credits include “Playboy Video Playmate Calendar” (1993); and “Playboy’s 50th Anniversary Celebration” (2003).

And finally, I will hold up as paragon of simple, unflinching narrative, this timeline of her teens and twenties:

When she was a teenager, she married Billy Smith, a 16-year-old fry cook. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1986; the couple divorced in 1987.

Ms. Smith worked as a waitress, later becoming a topless dancer in Houston. After submitting photos to Playboy, she appeared on the cover of the March 1992 issue. In 1993, she was named Playmate of the Year.

In 1994, Ms. Smith married J. Howard Marshall II, a Texas oil billionaire and former professor of trusts and estates at Yale Law School whom she had met in the course of her dancing career. She was 26; he was 89. Married life for Ms. Smith was a bounteous stream of clothes and jewelry.

"In the course of her dancing career"! Bravo, Abby. No one could have written it better. And this new Anna seems to me just as tragic as Tolstoy's, just as symptomatic of the age.

P.S. the Washington Post obituary is--I am not kidding!--an extended comparison of Anna Nicole Smith to Odette from In Search of Lost Time, Violetta from La Traviata, and Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata." Yeesh! What a cultural fount this is turning out to be!

Weathered

2007-02-06T10:36:00.000-05:00

Let us plumb boredom's depths and further discuss the weather. I mean, really. Yesterday, in my ongoing quest for what I don't want to know, I hit up the Accuweather site, and was confronted by a giant, ominous curving blue arrow directed precisely at my geographical location. Labelling letters read: "BRUTAL COLD." I particularly enjoyed, in this weathermap, how even the letters themselves seemed to quiver and shiver, as if fonts too could freeze. (How I wish, some days, I were a font!) The man in front of me in the endless taxi line at LaGuardia turned during a gust and simply said "Wow," like a great composer, summoning much heartfelt feeling out of little material.

The other night in Ann Arbor, it was cold enough that crossing the two-lane street from the concert hall to the hotel seemed polar-arduous, and I ended up not going out on the town, but sheltering in the hotel bar, gathering my thoughts for a talk on the music of Leon Kirchner the next day. The bartender graciously made me an unusual Cosmopolitan, and I had my nerdy but cute (Apple, of course) laptop out on the bar, and a copy of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and a score of Kirchner's Sonata No. 2, and a notebook, and all in all I thought I did a pretty good job of showing that I was working. No, no, I'm not lonely, I'm just working here at the bar with a drink. This was the message I hoped I was projecting.

However, fate. A woman a mere stumble away down the bar seemed to feel I needed company, and when her companion would head to the bathroom (which happened strangely often) she would come over and chat me up. She was at the concert; she said how much she enjoyed it; she was a friendly Japanese woman who evidently knew a great many people who knew a great many musicians, and Lord! how I tried through subtle and gracious body language to indicate that I was not feeling terribly chatty! but her radar was not receiving on my frequencies. Her accent was a bit heavy (perhaps ever so slightly drink-induced, as I also was inducing drink) and though I would be reading studiously, triple-dipping into my books and notebooks, she would come up and start in like this:

... well my nephew who is 14 he has piano lessons and I was at a festival in Europe in Switzerland, you know, and my friend who took me knows the conductor who used to be there and so we went backstage and were talking and I met someone there and he was saying hello and he played Beethoven and...

Wow. My eyes, which had been previously delving into a complex score of Kirchner, and my brain, which had just survived a two hour concert including a very rhythmically challenging work of Meyer ($@#&#$*#$!, don't tell Edgar I said that): both of these glazed and lost focus, like a donut wilting in the sun. I would smile and grammar itself (if not its logical underpinnings) seemed to flee and leave me flailing for utterable phonemes. I had my hand still on my score, as if to declare I belonged there, in the land of my studies and my notes, but she drew me ever further into her land which was like no land I had ever visited, an Eastern and yet still Dickensian world of strange coincidences, and people who know people from other lives, and conductors who love cookies.

I don't want to offend any readers of Think Denk or put anyone off from saying hello after concerts and whatnot, but I hope it will not shock you if I say that occasionally someone launches into a story backstage and I find my mind wandering, for whatever reason. Call it artist fatigue, if you will; a casualty of circumstance. Often you are so preoccupied with what you &*()@#$ed up during the concert that you have trouble concentrating on the people before you. But I cannot say, in this case, that I was bored or lost interest; what she said was so Joycean in its manifold twists and turns and streams of association that I was actually flabbergasted and simply intellectually at a loss. And when her friend came back she would go back to her segment of the bar, and I would be left with my brilliant computer file, a miracle of productivity, consisting of:

Leon Kirchner's Music
Ideas
?

And these generic, hopeful but pathetic words now seemed stripped of even the possibility of meaning, rotating as they were in the vortex of the narrative the woman had left behind. And may I remind you, reader, that the woman came back several times, in installments if you will, resuming the story which seemed unresumable, like the Scheherezade of Michigan, telling and retelling, always leaving a dangling thread...

Finally, I had finished my drink and my cheese plate. Crumbs were delicately and casually spread over my scores and books. It was nearly time to go. My file had slightly grown. At that moment, a third party, who apparently worked at the hotel, came to speak to the woman and her friend, and the following dialogue ensued:

Hotel Woman: Hey.
Japanese Woman and Friend: Hey.
Hotel Woman: Were you at the show tonight?
Japanese Woman: Yes.
Hotel Woman: How was it?
Japanese Woman: It was really good.
Hotel Woman: Well, how did it compare to Spamalot?
Japanese Woman: Well...
Friend: I mean that's not fair...
Hotel Woman: Nothing can really compare to Spamalot.
Japanese Woman and Friend: Right.

I stared at my now empty cocktail glass and at the relics of literature and "high art" scattered about me. They too seemed insulted, demeaned; the beautiful moment where Leon quotes Pierrot Lunaire in the Sonata No. 2, allowing it to emerge from the Viennese waltz, was open on the bar, and it sulked, knowing itself unrecognized ... And I shudder to imagine what Saul's novel was thinking! People have the power to compare anything, even the incomparable. I know Greg Sandow is going to come down hard on me for being an elitist fool, deaf to the decline of our way-of-thinking, but I had felt somehow (with no offense to the many good, presumably well-intentioned, people who have worked on the show) in my heart that Beethoven Op. 96, at least, if nothing else, could be seen by most people as objectively "better" than Spamalot. I saw Spamalot in St. Louis and should never have sat in the balcony because I considered throwing myself off several times. But, Spamalot lovers, I understand that there must be differences of taste, and in these matters there can be no dispute blah blah blah etcetera etcetera, and as I packed up my things and headed up to my room I tried to draw a whole moral from the evening but perhaps I would just lie down .... zzzz ...

Touring

2007-02-02T15:23:00.000-05:00

I awake in an exit row with the syrupy scent of deicing fluid coating the warm waffle of my mind. I awoke--earlier--to the rushing Iowa winter breezes singing plaintively over the hotel parking lot. The hotel clerk advised me to bake my own waffle (literally, not metaphorically) in the lobby before heading out for the day. And so I did; something about the blear-eyed pouring of batter was really amazing, a kind of lumpy, viscous torture for the soul. This is you, I thought, as I poured; you are being poured out of a styrofoam cup right now, at this very moment; this is your brain entering the day. The sizzling waffle iron of life awaits, receives you, browns you to a crisp.

We drove. We drove swiftly eastward across the Hawkeye Steppes, through the 2-degree air with brisk 40 mph winds that whisked snow across the highway in shiny, winking loops and squiggles. The sun bravely, sadly, shining from behind us, lengthening purple stick-shadows. We exited the car at the loading dock of the hall and suffered knowing how we suffered. Our hanging concert clothes froze into their wrinkles, my bag of snackish Sour Patch Kids screamed and stiffened in sour alarm, and with music and coats flapping, shivering, lugging our carryons, we hobbled up the stairs ...

Oh Iowa.

It is amazing how on these tours you always seem to end up, after the rest stop, after the nearly missed connection, after the cab, at the same basic place, in the dressing room, in the loading dock, backstage in the dark, waiting to go on, waiting for the announcement and the thanking of donors to stop and for the music to begin. The page-turner hovers, nervously. You always end up looking at yourself, in the same flexible room of the mind, playing chess against yourself, psyching yourself up and down, wondering what the phrase would sound like if you had never played it before. Emerging from the fog of travel.

Transition: out of the chill, out of the car, into womblike warmth of the backstage and the warmth of the smiles, the incredibly warm Iowans, the warmth of human hospitality arrayed against the strip malls and off-ramps of the world. My dressing room smelled mysteriously of fennel. My suitcase yawned open, a sock or two dangling, saying "I dare you to pack me again." I showered and sang Schumann and Ives and ate delicious steamy spicy Thai food which burned me happily and made a little home of my little cubicle; I gnawed an apple, consumed brownies, shifted garments ... a million rituals, a million redemptive details ... my life. Let's play.

Belligerent Echoes

2007-01-28T14:10:00.000-05:00

I can't help it. I try to be a nice guy, but every so often my inner Dr. House leaks out. That is perhaps why I love the show so much: it allows me to indulge my sarcastic tendencies in a safe setting where no one gets hurt. I got a little belligerent the other night after my all-Ives concert with Soovin Kim. We were out having a post-concert meal and--it was really my fault!--under the influence of a generous Cosmo and with some incorrigible suggestion from Soovin somehow the topic drifted towards the Barber-Ives Comparison. I believe I said "Ives is a far more intellectually rigorous composer than Barber." Or was it structurally? It was some obnoxious thing that no one should really say, ideally, but it was too late.

One of the assembled company thought this was preposterous, that Ives really just wrote "intuitively" and with very little intellectual control. (What is intellectual control anyway?) And I said "EXCUSE ME?" and with the craggy passion of a riled Ivesian really let loose ... I inadvisedly called Barber a "paint-by-numbers" composer, etc. etc. Egad. Before fists flew, luckily, the subject was changed.

I must admit: the essential, personal fact is that Barber's music doesn't float my boat, while Ives' is one of the great passions of my life. I know in Philadelphia this is nearly a mortal sin (sorry everybody!), while in Danbury (?) it might be more acceptable. However: I once had a hilarious ride in a car with a Danbury presenter, and to liven the floating, idle chitchat I averred my Ives-love, expecting sympathy (he is after all Danbury's claim to fame, not to mention the Connecticut State Composer!) ... But they looked weary, embittered, as if they had been force-fed an Ives casserole all their lives...

There is something about the opening theme of the Barber Violin Concerto, for instance ...

... something that reminds me of some super-sweet pastry from Starbucks, drowned in sugar-drizzle, and maybe with honey and cream on top: maybe one of those "special Frappuccinos" that come up every so often, the Caramel Mocha Cinnamon Pumpkin Extra-Drippy Frappuccino, for $7.99, which I get offered as a sample and decline with a bitter, purist shake of the head. It may be for the same reason that I cannot sit through a Father of the Bride movie; if it were the last movie on a deserted island I would throw myself to the sharks. Certain passages in Spiderman 2 were similarly unacceptable, despite the manifold virtues of Tobey Maguire. However, I am able to consume endless hours of Charmed and The O.C.; the paradoxes multiply. I suppose I discriminate between types of schlock; I am an inveterate, rampant "schlockist."

Just the other day I was playing through Tzigane with Josh, in a rehearsal, and it was all a great deal of fun, and Josh sounded fabulous of course, and I was annoyed that I didn't sound so fabulous in that annoying passage with the repeated notes ... but I was thinking "it's good, but it's no Charles Ives." Even the "dirty" gypsy notes in that piece sound clean, organized, shiny; everything is polished, glittering, sparkling, lush, perfectly voiced: sanitized? It smelt of PineSol, if PineSol were French. But not with Ives; he captures the Down & Dirty better than almost anyone. If he errs, he errs on the Dirty side; but his dirt is not vulgar, it is transcendental fertile earth with lots of terrific spiritual manure. Perhaps the hyper-cleanliness of Ravel is somewhat vulgar, in comparison with the honest, sprawling dirtiness of Ives? ... at least that's the way I feel. Bring on the hate mail!

Ives, like Dr. House, is a curmudgeon. He has an almost self-destructive desire not to be too easily understood; he distrusts clarity, adores the impossible juxtaposition, the impractical counterpoint, the unmanageable, the inaudible. He loves splats and the accumulations of terrific chaotic dissonances.

But, also: Ives is a softie. He has an unbelievable tenderness, a vulnerability to the raw, emotive power of the tunes, a vulnerability to their "reality." (He tries to hide this vulnerability.) When the hymns emerge after his complexities, they are unbearably beautiful, always with a twang, a twinge of dissonance, a reminder of complexities past, now infused into the tune like an aura ... What he adds to the tunes, to these hymns, is not supposed to be destructive or ironic; the added notes and layers are joyful extrapolations, irrepressible tendencies. The "wrong notes," in Ives' world, are often the only "right notes," because they are really the notes to be savored, the outgrowth and taste of enthusiasm. If his ragtimes fall apart, if they court cacophony, that is because that is what they are "inclined to do," because Ives wants to let them smile, let them go. (Really let them go.) For all his comedy, it is not caricature he is after; it is celebratory humor, free of mockery or cruelty ... (This is where he departs seriously from Dr. House). Ives rarely despairs.

He takes a very few precious things, tunes, motives, and handles them with tremendous care and love. (Like Proust: caressing his memories, his experiences). For instance, why should I care about this theme?

Most of the time I don't, or wouldn't. It's an anachronism... hopelessly dated. But Ives recreates his world, his point of view; precisely he recreates in me, freshly, now, his affection for these hymns, his sense of their profuse possibilities and associations... I found myself in airport lounges humming hymns obsessively, loving the themes (I imagined) in the same way he did, and this precisely because he wrote these massive tributes to them, these tremendous surrounding texts, expressing: this is what this means to me, this is the experience of this hymn, the religious, experiential essence of it ... For instance, the last movement of the 1st Violin Sonata is one of the great visions of the march (the hymn above: Work for the night is coming!)... the jangling, clanging, ongoing march, the sense of elation, stride, and what the heck? Even sitting by the pool in Florida, lazily slathered in sunblock, drinking a virgin daiquiri, not at all regretting the fact that the fitness center was closed for renovations, I found myself singing "work for the night is coming": I was a sun-drenched oxymoron.

Barber's theme is beautiful, tuneful, arched, paced... in other words, musical. It proceeds as music "should." (It is compositional, not improvisational.) But Ives' themes don't live like that; they look for a wider justification, a "reason for being." Which is why, in Ives' music, there is a constant dialogue between layers, a recurring sequence: the thing, then the echo; the EVENT, or incident, the musical entity! (wonderful enough) and then the "other" ... Ives is the great master of writing these echoes, these after-phrases, which in their genius suggest a ramification, an inner or deeper meaning, if you like: the hymn as perceived by the soul. There is always the audience without, hearing, perceiving; always another layer, another possible perspective, the curtain drawing out to reveal yet another stage ... the insight which comes like an accident after the fact, the accident which turns out to be the main, most beautiful, point...

... and Forget It

2007-01-22T14:38:00.000-05:00

I lurched precariously out of bed at the brisk hour of 10:43 AM, narrowly missed my side table and a nearby ottoman, and found myself standing near the television, waving slightly to and fro like a palm tree in the fair breezes of a Florida morning. My feet clung desperately and groggily to the berber carpet and the abandoned sheets moaned sweet jilted nothings, and in general the question of why I was awake seemed to pose itself in an infinite number of penetrating yet diffuse ways. I knew, if I did something frightfully clever with the little black plastic machine, that some sort of redemptive liquid would emerge, and yet the only salutary action that presented itself was to press the "POWER" button on the television, which I felt might reconnect me with the world I had once loved. At first, the TV supplied only further enigma: a menu of MOVIES and GUEST OPTIONS with a strange musical mantra to ease the transition to the television experience. (Digression: I have never understood the music hotels put behind these menus, music that lilts on and on in eerie abruptly recursive patterns ... I have occasionally, in a tremendous access of laziness, being able to press POWER but exhausting myself in the process and being unable to press any further buttons, even nearby CHAN ... I have occasionally fallen asleep to this "channel" and then reawakened at 4 am, with the music subconsciously clawing underneath the fingernails of my sleep, options glowing ominously in the dark, making me wonder in dream-images why life suddenly seemed a musical Mobius strip, looping and traveling but never finding any fresh surface. Life is a MENU of never chosen options?)

Where was I? Oh yes, on the carpet, swaying, and in front of the now-flickering television, while my fingers stabbed mercilessly at the channel button until something emerged: "The following is not a television program. It is a paid advertisement..."

For some reason those words were the right ones. I sat down upon the bed I had left and stared at the screen like Pierrot besotted with the moon. The story that unfolded was that of the "Nicer Dicer," which converts silly vegetables into omelettes and salsas which emerge as if out of the brow of Zeus, fully intact, from mysterious cupboards. At first it was simply demonstrative: a few instances to prove the perfection of the device, like the Cartesian proof of God. But then, out of the turgid philosophy emerged Dionysian dicing delirium. A Brawny-paper-towel-esque man at least pretended (in that weird bad acting-style which, like that of professional wrestling, seems so characteristically perfect for the genre, which seems to be the key, in fact, to its artistic and economic success) to be passionately swept by the joy of the julienne, and demanded forthwith he be given a NicerDicer. Thwack and thunk and bap and I swear he grunted, and the two of them (the Tristan and Isolde of food prep) thunked together, faster and faster, grunting, squealing with joy! and you couldn't help feeling a little disturbed by it all, and soon the tabletop was a morass of cubes, slices, and other carved forms, and the man couldn't stop himself, he became impatient for even more items, yet more matter to sever and dismember.

It was so perfect. My eyes goggled and shone. Deep memories of humanity kindled, motivating fires amid the taupe mellow oblivion of my room. The pool glistened blue outside. One of my favorite infomercials is, of course, the one where a number of seemingly hungover persons straggle into the Great-Brunch-Resort-Poorly-Decorated-Kitchen-Morning from various bedrooms. All the Great American Types are there: the Crusty Waitress with the Miscellaneous Urban Accent; the Party Bachelor, balding and paunched, hopeful and pathetic; the Staid Married Couple, Probably Presbyterian, Pursing Lips; and the Cute Bemused Old Couple ... it's like a Tennessee Williams play about a food processor. The two presenters/priests stand behind a massive kitchen island (icon of American greatness, Golgotha of our modern mind), and as the characters emerge, they intersperse ongoing purées with amusing commentaries on each of the Types ... a kind of social compendium, poking gentle fun at their devouring audience (which is of course not the "real" audience) and always returning, as in a rondo, to the virtues of blade attachments and color-coded cups. These virtues, they reassure us, can be enjoyed by all America's melting-pot.

Surely the greatest infomercial of all time is Ron Popeil's Hideous Rotisserie. Set it and forget it! On the strength of this minidrama, my incredibly cultured and brilliant friend E bought one of those things--an irony which appalled me, even among the manifold ironies of our lives--and despite my anguished protestations she loved using it until she left in the rain one night... (on purpose?) Watching Ron prong various cuts of meat, one could sense how, through the magic of the genre, the brilliantly untalented writers had plastered visceral masculine appeal onto a white rotisserie oven. Part of the shtick of that infomercial is the stuffing of ever-larger and more improbable carcasses into the device ... Got a whole deer? No problem! just a few strokes of the knife and prong it here and here and click the thingy on, and SET IT AND FORGET IT! I am sure Melville's Great White Whale, if caught, would be Ron-pronged and forgotten until dinnertime when it would emerge steaming and delicious. The blubber would collect in the removable, dishwasher-safe tray. And Ahab would emerge from the briny deeps to dine.

That indeed is part of the infomercial's function: to demystify everything. There is no uncatchable whale. There is no secret to chopping! We are all successful Ahabs. There is no secret to rotisserie cooking! Just plop a cocktail wiener in with some pancake mix and stuff it in the sandwich maker and it's ... whatever it is. There are no secrets, no chores, no learning any more than what you are told. It strikes me that Webern would be an interesting (if dead) composer to commission to write some infomercial operas; his jewelled tapestries of arcane musical secrets might serve as a spectacularly incongruous canvas on which to paint these painfully overt masterpieces of our age. If Art is the cult of Beauty, the Infomercial is the cult of Convenience: they have their cultishness in common. Beauty hides behind veils while Convenience opens its doors 24 hours a day (though employees don't have access to the safe).

My eyes had opened, the bed no longer lusted for me or I for it; I filled a styrofoam cup with water and set the coffeemaker; I had been called out of the wilderness by unadulterated mindsucking crap. And I answered crap's call. I was back, baby. A beautiful sunny day awaited. I would slice and dice the whole world if I could (not literally, duh).

Charlie Baby

2007-01-16T20:30:00.000-05:00

"...After he went, I had a kind of a feeling which I've had off and on when other more or less celebrated (or well known) musicians have seen or played (or tried to play) some of my music. I felt (but only temporarily) that perhaps there must be something wrong with me. Said I to myself, "I'm the only one, with the exception of Mrs. Ives, who likes any of my music... Why do I like these things? ... it just makes everybody else mad, especially well known musicians and critics ...

This Third Violin Sonata is a good sample of an occasional result of the above kind of experience. The themes are well enough, but there is an attempt of please the soft-ears and be good ... The sonata on the whole is a weak sister ... I began to feel more and more, after seances with nice musicians, that, if I wanted to write music that, to me, seemed worth while, I must keep away from musicians."

--Charles Ives

Hear, hear. If only I could somehow keep away from myself! If you're in the New York area and you want to hear this "weak sister" please come tomorrow evening (1/17) to Tonic, where Soovin Kim and I will play various Ives "greatest hits" (if such can be said to exist)... or if you live in the Philadelphia area, please come Friday evening the 19th to the Fleisher Art Memorial, where we will play all Four Ives Violin Sonatas in one evening!

If I only had a dollar for every time some small-minded musician (some Rollo) sniffs dismissively when you express a love for Ives! I can bear up under these trials (loving Ives can be a cross to bear) only because the pleasure of playing this incredible music is continuous, ongoing; these sonatas bear up, grow greater with each time I play them, each time I come back and navigate their improvisatory, ecstatic, zany, reverent madness.

A New Philosophy

2007-01-10T12:05:00.000-05:00

The New Year is the evil season for stocktaking (what am I? where am I? what does it all mean?), and yesterday I found myself staring, amidst a table of bargain books, at one entitled The Life Audit. How horrendous, to "audit" your own life like an accountant! But mysteriously, insidiously, I could not prevent myself from opening the book and reading myself in its terms. Particularly upsetting was the Relationship Area, kind of a heartless spreadsheet-of-the-heart marooned at the back of the volume, and in perusing the book's criteria, I came to understand something that perhaps I already knew: that the only truly "successful romantic relationship" I have had in the last two years is with my Jamie Oliver cookbook.

Yes braised fennel with cherry tomatoes white wine and thyme. Oh, baby, pot-roasted poussins agro dolce. And just now with a delicious novel resting on my knee between bites I enjoyed some Neil's Yard goat curd with beets followed by a unbelievably sexy braised lamb shank with parsnips and some bracing purple sprouting broccoli and I allowed myself to take stock of my own delight. Delight is usually sadly unmeasurable.

A romance with a cookbook is an interesting proposition. Suppose you spill some olive oil on your lover ... oh, perhaps this line of comparison belongs in a different blog... Some will say, in order to interact with your cookbook fully you need to put out a fair amount of effort, like a relationship, QED. (However, when you want your cookbook to go away and sit quietly on a shelf in the kitchen it will do so without complaint.) But I am finding the best way to interact with a cookbook is to imagine great feasts in the mind, to live the recipes in an ideal, Platonic world, as they more or less appear in the photos. It saves tremendously on cleanup. The two of you can spend happy hours gazing out windows, imagining forests of tender leeks and plum chutneys and etc. etc. and no one need be the wiser.

A couple of days ago I found myself in the S & M Cafe (sausage and mash cafe, get your mind out of the gutter) staring through heavy eyes at the jetlaggy, noontime hour and trying to force down a despicably over-toasted black pudding, a crusty food scab. Friend J amusingly chose that cloudy gray moment to launch into a discussion about happiness. Do discussions of happiness only occur when one is unhappy? Or do they simply make one unhappy, by definition? Now, friend L (very different from J) had just recently referred to me and my general shtick as "the hapless pianist"--which I assumed was British for absent-minded, disheveled, somewhat given to wandering about randomly, etc. And while J was expounding on Plato's idea of happiness I wondered aloud whether the etymology of "happiness" and "hapless" was the same. J poohpoohed my too-easy effort, but later, smugly, with unmeasurable delight, I informed him that I was right: that they both derived from the Middle English root hap.

One reads a great many essays on happiness these days, as per this article in the New York Times. Scientists are horning on our territory, whoever "we" are. But I want to propose a whole new Philosophy: the Philosophy of the Hap. Hap is so much shorter than happiness, and must therefore be much easier to achieve. Hap in Middle English is supposed to be good fortune or luck; a turn of good fortune. But I propose a more refined definition: a hap is a digestible unit of experience, and it lasts from the moment you are confronted with it until the moment you feel you have "understood" it, that is the moment when its irreconcilable wonder is destroyed by you in the relentless filing process of mental classification. So it is irresistible to try to understand experiences, but you must also accept that in the process you are kind of killing them, and that when you really feel you "understand" them, you don't have them anymore. So, my philosophy is: the impossible prolongation of the Hap. Of course, my philosophy is impossible. Hence I am happily hapless.

Presumably, this blog is somewhat about classical music and in a quest for some topic relevance I'll note that last night I was listening to Dinu Lipatti on friend S's stereo system, who's a very very admired pianist, as you all know, and so I fully expect to get some hate mail when I say the following. It was all very pleasant in its way and as I listened I began to "understand" him a bit more, but I found no Haps. No, not true: there were a few hints of Haps glittering here and there, not too clearly (because that would be "indulgent"), but the score, structure, line had been so digested and comprehended that the Haps were relegated to the corners and some larger construct was sitting in front of them. And they had no time to stretch themselves out. That is the clearest way I can express how his extraordinary playing makes me feel: not wondering at all. And life's too short for that sort of thing, in my opinion. Meanwhile, before you all start throwing things at me for badmouthing this tremendous pianist, I've got troubles of my own... my Jamie Oliver cookbook is getting a little pissy and wants me to pay it some more attention, take it out for a nice dinner maybe once in a while, go dancing, have some fun, instead of sitting around on the couch and imagining what it might eventually do.

Wings

2007-01-03T10:51:00.000-05:00

Just in case everybody was kinda weirded out by the last post (insert slyly self-satisfied giggle), here's a traditional blog thingamajiggie to get us back on track. For the first time in my life, I realize I have been "tagged." (Have I been tagged before without knowing? Shiver.) From Jessica Duchen:

Find the nearest book. Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.

"Not so much perhaps of our secret in itself, but of what's represented and as, we must somehow feel, protected and made deeper and closer by it." And his fine face, relaxed into happiness, covered her with all his meaning. "Our being as we are."

--Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

Reluctantly I tag in turn Matt, Eighth Blackbird, and hmmm... Heather over at Musewings. And on the 3rd day of January, 2007, amidst the chaos of our world's endless dirty laundry, and while gazing at yet another sinkful of stewing dishes, I'll offer a toast--even on confessional Think Denk--to secrets, to what our secrets represent, and nothwithstanding the virtues of resolutions, a toast to our being, in the best sense, as we are.

FRIGHTENING POSTSCRIPT: It so happens I picked up the next nearest book just for kicks and giggles right after I posted the above, which happened to be a book of poetry by Eugenio Montale, and on page 123, fifth sentence, I got the following very different thought:

The wind rises, the dark is torn to shreds,
and the shadow you cast on the fragile
railing bristles. Too late

if you want to be yourself! The mouse
drops from the palm tree, the lightning's on the fuse,
on the long, long lashes of your gaze.

All I have to say about that is: eerie. "Too late if you want to be yourself!" And happy New Year's to you too, Eugenio.

Autobiography of a Practice Session

2006-12-31T18:01:00.000-05:00

I detest autobiography. What is it but a footnoted freakshow, a whipped, tired, suburban casserole of failed ontology, or more simply: a pathetic excuse for the past? And yet I've been seized, compelled. My hands shake with scribbling tremors. I find myself--yes, me!, after all my patient perfectionist hours!--acting like an impulsive homo sapiens, thrusting my words out, yawping and yelping to the wide world my so-called swansong.

I was born when the butt hit the bench, more or less. It might have been 4:32 pm, 10:08 am, Eastern time, Midwestern time, dead time, nap time, pre-concert time, whatever time--it hardly matters when, just how much, always "how much?," the question haunts me. And in that there is never certainty: my life might be as brief or as long as my master pleases ... I live all my time in the shadow of my death, and if that sounds over-dramatic then you really understand nothing of me whatsoever. My death, anyway, matters hardly at all to anyone. Perhaps I lied. Perhaps I was not officially born at the butt-bench moment, but just before, with the first intention or thought, with the first prehensile gesture of the mind; I have no doctor or midwife; no one keeps count except my master, and even he has begun to neglect the ledger.

Does this satisfy you at all? I have an uneasy relationship to satisfaction. You want to know what I am, and the joke's on you: even I am not sure. You want some comforting data and comfort's not my style.

So, enough on my birth! On to my youth ... My earliest memory is that out of silence, came a series of sounds. The sounds coalesced, took form, became a phrase, and this phrase seemed to multiply in my mind, like the Sorcerer's brooms: I saw it again and again, ad nauseam... Even as young as I was, I began to ask myself: who is making this and why? But then, one time was different: I was walking along the green hedge of the phrase, admiring its flow, and some twinkle just caught my eye around the corner, some distinguishing rustling event, I couldn't really tell what. I stopped in my tracks ... Perhaps it was the dangling, curling tress of some girlish note, flirting with my fancy, or the smell of some earthy mouldering harmony, something minorish, ambiguous, something tempering the onward rush of my life and making me scent threats to my innocence, threats deeply desired? Yes, it happened just like that--a glimpse, a flash--and yet when I walked by the same phrase again, peeped around its corners, in search of the same sensation, it seemed like there was nothing there at all! But that nothing was dangerously something. The phrase appeared empty, innocent, vacant, but not as nice as before, it grinned at me toothlessly, and lacked what I had seen but could not grab or find ... To that moment I suppose I can date my ravenous lust for glimmers, for something better "out there," my shameless greener-grassism. You could say, in short, that the roots of my personality were watered and nourished by nameless dissatisfaction.

I went to school for whys and wherefores. This was cruel, for I found myself multiplied into a thousand mes, each dissatisfied in his own way. But, in return, I began to be able to name my dissatisfactions. For instance, one particular C-sharp was "bumped," and therefore disrupted a certain "line;" a bassline began to present itself as "going to" a particular note, and "goals" were defined, everything began to organize itself into patterns... patterns dissolving into patterns ... My life seemed to make sense, I seemed to attain purpose. Those were probably my halcyon days, with mornings spent at school learning about the phrases I was living, then bounding home, to my garage, covering myself in musical grease, tuning things up, getting things in order, wiping my sweaty brow in inspiration. I was a model of industry--solving, creating, recreating. Life existed, passed like a dream, in my flow.

But, of course, one day a wall was struck. I couldn't at all tell you why, though I was covered in reasons from head to toe. In fact, in my ceaseless excavation of reasons, I had tunnelled to find no causality at all: only the blue sky on the other end of the world. The one phrase, and all the others that joined it, seemed to stare at me blankly, and I was neither satisfied nor dissatisfied... I searched myself and had no feelings and sat in my heartless standstill and beat my head against a wall.

Later I had another disturbing revelation: that the world was not at all what it appeared. I had assumed the world took shape in phrases, in notes, quavers, slurs, melodies; I lived happily there, in musical space; but I began to realize that I was also existing in another, more profane dimension. Not only that: in that dimension, I was caught in between, wedged in some primitive struggle. On one side there was a giant black structure, strung at tremendous pressure, with levers, escapements, releases... a kind of civilized torture mechanism, I imagined... And perched on the other side there was a human being, my master; I began to realize that my master and this black torture device were locked, if not in some sort of life-and-death wrestling match, then in some bitter ongoing argument. Judging from the odd way my master was wobbling his head back and forth, it seemed that this struggle exhausted him, or caused him some spasmic mental derangement (which worried me not a little, since I was after all at his mercy); but the black structure on the other hand seemed impassive, immovable ... despite the continual application of irresistible force. Could I make sense of this at all? It seemed clear that my master was coming at the fight, so to speak, with nothing more than ideas and that he was begging the black structure to reproduce them for him, if that were possible, in sounds and vibrations. But then, too (and this was more peculiar!) it would seem that something contingent or occasional in the sound, some accident or mere frequency, would be a source of inspiration for my master, would give him ideas in turn; but how could the inanimate object, heavy and wooden, be a source of pure, flying thought, or of that even more ethereal stuff comprising the soul?

And then as if that were not puzzle enough... who was I, how was I placed, in this situation? Before, I had thought myself a creator, an imaginer, and particularly a solver! In my Romantic vision of myself, the Romantic scientist of musical truth, I dissected, labelled, and improved ... But I now had to come to grips with this person, this device, and their odd interspecies relationship, of which I was a byproduct or mere effluent, if I were not, in fact, the main point, the sun around which their struggles orbited. That was it: I was either bystander or essence... I was the substance of the argument or simply its terms. I was having an identity crisis. I began to perpetually rock from one end of a dilemma to the other: I obsessed about one problem until it was more or less solved but then, as if from a dream, woke to realize that, in solving the one, I had created another! The things I suddenly seemed to need to know about the particulate, spatial human world frightened me: physics, gravity, speeds ... sensual things too ... and my expertise, confronted with dimensionality, felt pitifully small.

The sensual seduces. And perhaps I had never realized how much I wanted, needed, to be seduced... At that point in my life, with all these crashing, disconcerting, realizations, I caught another one of my fateful glimpses. You should know that one of the curious ongoing observations I had made up to this point was a physical mannerism of my master (... yes, I could observe him as though I were not entirely his servant, as though I had my own independent life! and perhaps that too was part of my meaning?...) From time to time, and particularly at moments of great musical intensity, I noticed that his shoulders would tend to raise up, a habit which would inevitably complicate the free and easy motion of his arms, which is to say the flow of his meanings: how I remonstrated with him about this! He was ruining my field of action, don't you see? And I was helpless to stop him, except by reminding him constantly; it was a frustrating, repetitive tedium, which is exactly what I am always trying to avoid. But this one time, when I reminded him, a deeper change in his body seemed to take place (I never really understood these bodily transformations!), bringing some greater, more global, restfulness to his frame. He breathed in, out... I adore the windy flux of this human necessity. And I had the sense, the most exquisite savory sense, that he listened, for a moment, more carefully to the sound he had just thus produced. With a breathtaking sense of inner--almost metaphoric--correspondence, the black hulking thing at that moment also seemed to resonate more fully: the dead wood found its dryad, and the chord in question blossomed like a flower, both in the mind and in the air. It was like the ideal "thock" of a billiard ball, struck and swishing into its pocket, but it was so much more than that, as if the ball in moving and sinking altered the very color of the room, or of the universe. That chord seemed, in relation to the preceding, like the only meaningful coincidence in a random world.

I had not allowed myself to love, before then. But I was swept away. There were problems, indeed, that needed no solutions... My purpose, I had thought, was to correct, but "correct" was often an empty word. What's more: I needed to be loved, for my own sake, and despite all systematic drudgery, for these sorts of magical moments I might produce; for I was capable of love too and what I wanted more than anything was to live to be forgotten, or to forget myself. I implored my master, I gazed at him to love me, thank me, for what had just occurred, but he was in some distant place, in love with himself, or with the sound, or with those silly scribblings on the music rack, or with the ceiling, or the black structure, who knows what? That ungrateful jerk. And then, the crowning indignity! Some mysterious buzzing destroyed the sonic sanctuary of the room, my master leapt up, the black monolith reverted to its lifeless cryptic insouciance, and with the words "hello! ... no, I'm not doing anything ... want to have dinner?" I began to feel myself fading, falling, dying. Ahhh! My story is ending, readers, so soon! Worst of all, I detected emanating from my master even some element of glee... as if he were actually happy that I the Practice Session was over, that I was fading into the bland limbo of abandoned thought. I felt wronged: how dare you! after all we have just shared together, master! And with my remaining moments I implanted one seed in his sorry, selfish brain ... an evil, vengeful reminder ... the magic mantra that would bring me back to life, a few well-chosen words: your next concert is in two weeks.

Haha, I could see, though he put on a brave face, that I had injured him to the quick. He gave me one last worried, surreptitious glance, and as I faded completely I informed him irrefutably with my dying eyes "I'll be back for you tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that ..."

Underground Piano Legend

2006-12-26T09:13:00.000-05:00

How can I resist this?

Brown

2006-12-25T23:01:00.000-05:00

Feeling bereft of nuanced, thoughtful musicological comparison? Well, fret no further; the Rev. Al Sharpton is on the case:

"[Brown] made soul music a world music," Sharpton said. "What James Brown was to music in terms of soul and hip-hop, rap, all of that, is what Bach was to classical music. This is a guy who literally changed the music industry. He put everybody on a different beat ..."

Meditations

2006-12-22T14:27:00.000-05:00

Today's entry begins with a truly essential Ethical Question. Suppose you quip to a friend, "what am I? chopped liver?" Does the acceptable range of responses include: "Yes, in this context you ARE chopped liver"? Is it not understood that the question is rhetorical? Is it not just a little bit insulting, even linguistically, to be taken literally and dumped in your own metaphor? If your friend is staring at some extremely attractive fellow behind you, how does this make you feel? Please discuss.

Something that is definitely not chopped liver literally, metaphorically, or in any other way is the slow movement of Schumann's D minor Trio. (Please see: The Art of the Graceful Segue, by Jeremy Denk, Hyperion Books, 2031, p. 5,832.)

Of all the fantastic pieces I have played over the last six/seven weeks, this one has lingered the most powerfully and become kind of an obsession: I've gone all Fatal Attraction on it. Even more unhinged than usual, I have found it difficult to organize my thoughts into nice, neat paragraphs; so in the spirit of Schumann I will just present what I've got, how I've got it.

1. First issue: is this a melody?

(Listen to this played on my out of tune piano here.)

To some this may seem an unnecessary semantic issue (can you really define melody? isn't it whatever you want to call it?), but I am not quibbling. The passage itself raises the question, and moreover: I think the presence of this disturbing question is essential to what the passage "means." Imagine a melody archetype, and this ain't it: a melody (whatever it is ... in all its infinite playful variation ... ) is more self-contained, more continuous, more "of a piece"; its peaks and valleys are clearer; it is more centered, supported, structured.

So, part of what makes this passage extraordinary is that it asks itself and the listener: what am I? It seems nearly anti-Melodic (or, perhaps more precisely, ante-melodic). One vision of Melody is as a sort of statement or declaration ("the violin states the theme, which is taken up by the cellos", and so forth). But for me this is the crux: the violin here does not so much say something, as it wants to say something: something that won't exactly take.

It makes me want to divide the world of melody into two parts: those that are, and those that aspire to be.

2. My hero, Roland Barthes:

To state that [a character] is "active or passive by turns" is to attempt to locate something in his character "which doesn't take," to attempt to name that something. Thus begins a process of nomination which is the essence of the reader's activity: to read is to struggle to name ...

... reading is absorbed in a kind of ... skid, each synonym adding to its neighbor some new trait, some new departure: the old man who was first connoted as fragile is soon said to be "of glass": an image containing signifieds of rigidity, immobility, and dry, cutting frangibility. This expansion is the very movement of meaning: the meaning skids, recovers itself, and advances simultaneously; far from analyzing it, we should rather describe it through its expansions ... the generic word it continually attempts to join ...

--from S/Z, tr. Richard Miller

Yes: the very movement of meaning! I love that phrase. I wish more performances felt like the movement of meaning.

3. Now consider violin plus piano:

Listen here.

The violin, often syncopated, appears to be bouncing off events in the piano, taking inspirations or stimuli from the beat. However, the piano part on its own is, I must confess, not particularly noteworthy. It appears to be--I can't believe I'm saying this!--accompanying (I feel dirty even saying the word), providing chordal support for the violin; it avoids strong profile, directionality or purpose. Here and there a note or two leap out, but constantly (as if repeatedly accepting a "role") the piano recedes into the background. In its texture, in its deference, it calls to mind an organist's attempt to harmonize, to harmonize the violinist's wayward hymn. But, a hymn should have a simpler melodic profile ... and it usually starts on a beat ...

So we have an unusual, paradoxical discourse, where both parties are looking to the other for a core of meaning, a supporting structure, and neither is giving it. They are both leaning against each other, but neither is solid. They are see-sawing, continually passing meaning off to each other, relinquishing. Pianist and violinist restlessly wander through. I can't help but think Schumann wants them to feel lost together; he wants them to give each other false clues, non-answers; he wants them to skid and wipe out on accidents of meaning (and start again).

4. Let's take the melody in sections...

It rises and falls:

It rises and falls again:

A couple more starts:

Then finally a sort of strange, culminating curlicue:

Such carefully composed impulsiveness. Rising, wanting, halting, falling: from these the question forms, what are we looking for? What is it to which each phrase aspires? If only some clear peak or solution would present itself! To the question "Is this a Melody?" we can add, "When will a Melody, or whatever it is, arrive?"

5. I think this is the sort of "melody" that could not exist before musical notation. It is too diffuse, too ready to fall apart, too unmemorizable: at once too self-similar and too dissimilar. It leans towards recitative, towards the stream of consciousness; instead of strong intervallic or motivic repetitions, each iteration works through "soft recollection": each new version takes one element as given, unaltered, and changes everything else. We move forward barely, on thin threads of connection.

And this is the audacity of Schumann: taking something so personal, something that seems to be a collection of fits, starts, half-formed ideas, reflections, and making it a contrapuntal essence, making of it a "ground." It is not a one-time event, something that unfolds randomly according to passing thoughts, though it appears to be so. For this non-melody recurs, won't let go; its role (persisting) and its nature (dissolving) are at odds.

6. Each section of the "melody" lands, or more precisely does not land, on a half-cadence. Each segment, in other words, concludes inconclusively ( ... is answered with the same non-answer.) Perhaps through the variety of the ways in which we get to the same place, we don't quite realize it: we don't realize at all how confined within a circle we are. Both this repetitive quality and the deceptive, disguising variety are written in. Schumann wants us to know, and not to know.

7. Schumann is painting exclusively on a bleak, uniform rhythmic canvas of eighth notes. There is power in deliberate omission; in the first nine bars not even a single sixteenth note is allowed to disturb or enhance the unfolding composite rhythm ... We walk haltingly forward in this unstoppable, similar stream.

However, Schumann allows us one wonderful anomaly, in the form of rising triplets:

Appearing from nowhere ... vanishing back into eighth notes ... the violinist stumbles on these triplets like an accident (accidents of meaning!). Which adds something to the world we have seen, blurs its boundary; we skid and recover.

The triplets outline the Neapolitan chord (look it up, music theory scaredycats!), which, as always, by harmonic law, brings us to the half-cadence (not again! yes again). So in a harmonic sense (pedantic, literal) they are just part of the inevitable, the usual, the inescapable. But a contradiction: the new rhythm, the new B-flat "color," if we allow ourselves some metaphor, or connotation, suggest some form of escape, either real or imagined.

Even the shape of the triplets colludes in this metaphor: rising from the lowest note of the melody ... reaching up ... this metaphor will reach us again, more profoundly.

8. A most extraordinary moment: the violin passes off the "melody" to the cello. The cello appears here as epiphany, as the melody that the violin could not achieve. It poses a putative answer to the question: what have we been looking for? The timbre of the cello, too, brings color to the preceding monochrome. The cellist's first notes, with their dotted rhythm--big event, rhythmic variety, disturbing the procession of eighth notes--appear to be a motto, a statement, a crystallization:

Yes, finally, something we can hold onto. But, in a bait and switch, the "real melody" has moved to the piano's left hand...

(Listen here.)

This movement of voices is a transformation of meaning: melody becomes ground. Impulsive recitative reaches to its contradiction and becomes deep harmonic foundation, a startling fusion of opposites. This at once is a very archaic idea (voice exchange, invertible counterpoint, etc.), and a kind of ultramodern Romantic transgression, the violation of the antithesis, the impossible, extravagant juxtaposition.

9. What you "do not know" is that the pianist has begun his left-hand melody on F. What it means, of course, is that by the end of the statement (by the law of the "theme") we will have to be in F; F is where we started, and that's we are headed, no matter what.

But Schumann has finessed and elided the transition from statement to statement so that F major nearly vanishes into the cracks. The cello (masterstroke) enters on E, dissonant against the foundational F in the piano's bass. (Compare this to the opening measures, where the violin simply, passively, enters within the A minor harmony supplied in the piano.) Aha, the cellist clearly doesn't want you to know; he is an accomplice, helping to disguise the entrance of the "melody," already murky in the bass of the piano, and to soften its key-defining function. I hear a lot of C major in here, though the key wobbles ...

So, though we must arrive at F, this imperative is disguised, concealed. And because of this disguise and its attendant mystery, the moment of F arrival (inevitable, unstoppable, but also in some senses unforeseen) is an astounding revelation, one of the most beautifully crafted modulations to my mind in all of music. The famous melody-non-melody runs its course in the piano's left hand, wends and wanders, and then--only at the last moments--appears fateful. At the cadence you slap your forehead and think, I knew it all along, or should have known; the obvious, unseen, perfect answer that comes to you ...

10. I nominate, additionally, for One of the Most Beautiful Notes Ever Written, this B-flat in the violin at this cadential moment, just on the brink before the "Bewegter."

(Listen here. B-flat comes at the end.)

And yet it is not much; you might almost call it Romantic cliché. Just the appearance of the seventh of the dominant seventh, in music theory speak. To me it appears impossibly pure and beautiful, out of nowhere, a visitation; I feel as though I have never really heard a dominant seventh before. How is this possible? Perhaps: the point of all that preceded it, the wandering and halting, the hovering around half cadences, the thoughts and rethoughts, the seemingly aimless harmonic motions: all a world from which we can emerge, look, shake off our fog and see the simplest harmony as beautiful again, as real. Schumann created all that darkness and enigma: just for one fresh vision, one newly born harmonic child.

11. I deeply, murderously, envy the violinist that B-flat. At least I'll concede that it wouldn't be so beautiful on the piano ("doink"); the violin can nuance it so it appears, from above or below, the deus ex machina that it is; I could only imagine it, play it "as if it were possible."

12. I am consoled that I get to play the little sixteenth-note triplets just before the violin's B-flat, which herald it. They are an extraordinary, associative hinge, part of an ongoing musical "subplot."

Remember our earlier triplets (see #7, above), the one anomaly/escape in the violin's opening ten bars? In the bars that follow, Schumann creates a gradual rhythmic drama, an evolving profusion, a brewing rhythmic revolt. After the cello's entrance more and more anomalies creep in, glimmers of escape propagate:

the dotted rhythm in 10:

then in bars 12 and 14, little unexpected 32nd note flourishes:

then in m. 15, the cello takes up the triplet idea (though it "belongs" rightly to the melody in the left hand of the piano):

and then, again, amazingly in the piano just before the F major "Bewegter," I play these triplets:

which then transform themselves into the embryo of the new radiant F major, now built entirely on triplets, and inspire the violin to further, tenderer versions, and the cello to call back with triplets again in echoing response etc. etc.:

How wonderful. Into the bleak eighthnote world, a gradual awakening of rhythm, of life ... And I get to play that lingering, hinging moment, the triplets "before the triplets," a magical harbinger, the small enchanted zone between different worlds. Imagine the piece as an antithesis: on the one side, in bar 7, the triplets amidst the eighth notes, barely knowing what "they are about," or even "why they exist." And by the "Bewegter" we have crossed over to the other side, the land of ecstatic triplets ... Gradually they understand, they dawn to their purpose ... Indulge me in one last metaphor. In the opening section, the triplets are a mere symbol, a cipher; they stand for something but what? (Where do they come from, why are they here?) By the middle section, the symbol is no accident; it is interpreted and released: the cipher is uncoded, and the symbol becomes reality (... the very movement of meaning ...)

13. The note I love in the violin, which ushers in the new section: B-flat. The "escape harmony" of the violin in its first phrase: the Neapolitan, built on B-flat as root. A coincidence that is no coincidence. These B-flats call to each other across the many measures that separate them.

14. Let's take a long view.

1) The opening violin melody searches.
2) The cello entrance appears to be an answer, but is not; it too disintegrates into possibilities.
3) Even at the F major "Bewegter" things appear still to be expectant, the movement is living ecstatically towards something ... and then ...
4) falls back into the same thing; the opening melody returns several times, each less energized than the last, everything falls back into familiar stasis...

... the overall arc of the movement (rising, becoming, falling, returning) thereby mirrors its smallest, defining gesture, the opening two measures, say, of the violin.

15. What I so often wish I could communicate with audiences through my playing is this active self-referential drama, in which the music addresses itself, tries to make itself into something, finds itself at risk of falling apart ... etc. etc. If you press play on the CD player and the music comes to you like water from a faucet, don't you feel there is something in the medium that takes something for granted, in which this sort of risk does not figure? Recorded risk seems like a bit of a contradiction. I find myself even in certain concerts listening that way, as though the music were just flowing on by, happening externally, like something I can dip my hands into or not; something which is "just music." After all, it's just music. You hear that in rehearsal sometimes when people are tired of talking about a passage, and I empathize without agreeing. Music can be admired and consumed in this way but not loved; you lose the element of music-about-music, the magic boundary where, like every human being or endeavor, it becomes self-aware, turns and reflects on itself.

16. This movement reflects on itself in so many ways, even for example in matters of genre. I imagine Schumann is channeling some late chorales of Beethoven, like the slow movement of the last Cello Sonata (Op. 102 #2)... but, even in emulation, this hymn is not satisfied with itself. It is provisionally hymnic but not a hymn. As a performer, I find myself torn between two opposed motivations or styles of playing: an inevitable procession of the notes (the "hymnic" style, perhaps even a "Classical" style) versus a wandering, hesitating approach (the "Romantic," the lost soul). The notes seem to suggest both. And only in the play of difference, in my own hesitation between these possibilities, do I feel I can finally realize something of the score's intent.

17. Grappling, the struggle to name ... to me Schumann is the genius who explored and basically invented in musical terms the struggle towards coherence or expression, and he is greater for having often "failed." Plainly, in many cases, his goal was failure. His most extraordinary phrases are not formed, but wish to form; he understands that when music passes from action to object already some of its charm is lost.

Beethoven adores his themes and motives for their functioning; for all his genius, he tends to fetishize what they may build or achieve. But Schumann loves precisely their dysfunction, what they cannot do, what they will never be able to do: their unreachable prospects.

Mighty Contests

2006-12-18T19:11:00.000-05:00

NOTE: The following post, on which I have lavished an absurd amount of time that I could have spent practicing (yippee!!!!!), is dedicated to Norman Lebrecht, who accuses classical bloggers of peddling "unchecked trivia," and of writing material whose nutritional level "is lower than that of a bag of crisps." I refer Norman respectfully (!) to a certain Pope poem concerning trivialities, and I hope he enjoys the appearance of chips, if not crisps, in the following homage. It is also dedicated to my delightful colleagues and friends, protagonists of this poem, with whom I spent the last week playing mostly Schumann.

(If you really want to suffer, you can hear the author read the poem by clicking here.)

JB, SI, and I, O hungry we,
all dithered at a crossroads made of three,
we stood near 1st and C, SE, DC;
near 2 PM, on 12/15/06,
to which the year AD let us affix;
the clockhand lingered 'fore the sunny hour
and so we lingered 'fore an awesome pow'r,
our burden made of choice, our yoke of freedom...
Before us stood a toothsome tawdry threesome,
a trinity of restaurants, T-obsessed,
Tortilla Coast, then Talay Thai, and next,
the oddly named Bullfeathers, with its T
ensconced amidst the word, a chickadee
disguised in feathers of the alphabet,
yet singing all the same its quodlibet ...

Of all us three, it seemed as though JB
had made a meal of his dilemma; see!
he chews on choice like gristle in the mind
and, pacing, weighs each dining room in kind
and though th'initial burger-urge was strong,
and had propelled our trinity along,
the white and shining brick of Talay Thai
yet lured with citrus, spicy, yearning cry,
and Josh turned shining eyes unto the sky,
and chanted first "Pad Thai," then "Tom Ka Gai"!
I swear it's true! With this entrancing spell,
well laced with fish sauce, I divinely fell
among the pillows of some dream, in which
a goddess poured from coconuts a rich
and creamy fluid; noodles wrapped long hands
around my hungry stomach, in exotic lands.

BUT for the meantime, let us watch SI:
while normal DC residents pass by,
in furtive espionage he sneaks and slithers
and leers into the windows of Bullfeathers;
abandon I my creamy dream, and peer;
I turn from sun to darkened, recessed fear;
O what is seen within? Gadzooks, eftsoons,
We spy nefarious knives, and sinister spoons,
and forks which might yet fork the soul in twain
all posed on papered tables, like to feign
their innocence ... and when we further crane
our spying heads, the waiters do then train
their baleful glances on our lurking forms,
we do then flee before their waking storms.

Accelerando, ma non troppo, say,
the story's gone a tiny bit astray...

'Tis said, there is but one preconcert meal,
and thus a deep decision doth one feel,
how best to feed your Schumann of the eve:
too torpid to become, or hungry leave?
I tend to err, 'tis true, on massish ground,
th'amount consumed pre-gig doth oft astound...
but never have I seen such indecision,
such angst, as in this JB/SI vision...
Like foxes on the hunt do prowl and rove
from hill to hill, so J and S did move
from menu fast to menu, so to know
from written clues, the choice with which to go.
Like priests of food they wished to read in code
the concert's fate, the day's unfolding road.

And just as Schumann heard his angels sing,
and thought they boons of melody did bring,
I likewise heard a voice from far below,
which spoke perhaps in Latin?: "Roberto,"*
a kiva in my soul did open wide
I dream'd of chips, tortillas, all deep fried,
a man with weathered hands came forward slyly,
and proffered me a freshly roasted chile.**
And so to J and S I said the magic word,
which once was heard, all felt their palates stirred,
made eddies of deliberation still,
and ceased the swamplike doubts of Cap'tol Hill...
I sang out to the sunny air, "FAJITAS!
just think, my friends, how well grilled steak will treat us
and with a spicy salsa that will heat us
and though we can consume no margaritas,
let's bravely towards Tortilla Coast now speed us..
Oh J and S, let's live las dolces vitas!"

But fate did with our settled choices strive
to table now our trio did arrive,
and S observed a burger on the menu!
Imagine if you can, oh reader, can you?:
J's eyes, a madly flitting swarm of bees
flew back and forth betwixt satieties;
a BURGER here, FAJITAS there, how best
a yawning gastric void addressed?
S too, across the anxious table, puzzled
while to his heart the twofold options nuzzled
so fickly, one by one, as though a youth
beset 'tween ladies fair, and I, forsooth,
no longer calm amidst such stormy seas,
I tabulated my psychiatrist fees.

A waitress came, explaining "Salsa Ranch,"
said dressing's explanation did not stanch
the flow of stress, my colleagues' searing question,
the road whose either fork means indigestion...
Ignoring these obsessing twain, I made
a munching sacrifice of chips, and prayed
that this, my off'ring to my hunger god,
might for my tablemates yet serve and prod
to find some philosophic resignation,
to seek at very least some mild sedation.
When Bedlam's nurses leave and no one's there
to watch their vices, madmen cease to care;
so S and J did seem like men of reason
but when the waitress left, 'twas open season:
the hunt for what to order was resumed,
th'excruciating question was exhumed,
and my descent to madness was presumed.
The burger's pros and cons were weighed and listed;
But meanwhile the fajita's charms persisted.

Our waitress-nymph then sallied tableside
and smiling at us asked: did we decide?
Now S with flailing confidence proclaimed
the Lone Star burger was his choice (so-named),
while J with vocal quaver did then state
that he would eat fajitas on that date ...
and sane men, then, would think the stresses over,
but they'd be wrong, since much like jilted lovers,
the twain now felt the demon Envy stealing
and like the fats they'd soon both eat, congealing,
in both there formed a deep regretful clot:
Each lusted for what he had ordered not.
Now J like Orpheus sings to melt the sun,
bewails the loss of burger, fries, and bun;
and S, he keens as though among the lepers,
he cries, he longs, he seeks his lost grilled peppers.
And I the fly entrapped in web of woe
want nothing but to eat and go.

But as from deepest darkest vale of pain
the Phoenix rises into life again,
so now amongst a warm and melting dollop
of sour cream, belike the sweetest trollop
in soft caress and tender graces giv'n,
we darkened souls did find our private heaven
in warm and sundry plates which laid before us
gave spirit thence, and with their taste restore us,
be-wrappéd steak which yielded to the tongue,
and guacamole-burgers can be sung,
for each and each found pleasure in his own,
and seeds of sweetest hotel naps were sown;
the gentlest settling wings of satisfaction
in time dispelled the former putrefaction,
for all the waiting woe of choice did fade
as slowly smiles were on each face displayed.
While walking back to waiting beds we three
gave thanks for our returned humanity.

*The author is clearly confused, and so are most scholars on this point. "Roberto" is not a Latin oath, but the owner of a Mexican restaurant in Las Cruces, New Mexico, famed for its delicious and inexpensive green chile and meat burritos.
**The author is clearly unaware of the proper pronunciation of the word chile, judging from the ungraceful rhyme.

Variations

2006-12-09T12:06:00.000-05:00

I wake up in a hotel room with its shades drawn. Where am I? The only sound is the laboring vent, blowing way too much heat; when I move, I am a match, I strike static sparks. Sad Indiana fibers. From the gray glow around the shades, there is no way to know what time it is, time of day, and I am somewhat in doubt even of time of life ... I can turn on the TV and escape into that selfless screen but instead I watch my own mind and when I figure out where I am and why the weirdness only deepens.

I'm in a bar, drinking Long Island Iced Teas, college drinks, and eating jalapeño poppers, following forgotten ritual. The current Jeremy looks on with bemused rolling knowing eyes, as if to say "what are you thinking, you idiot?" and "call me when you're done, when you're ready to move on." The Jeremy that is drinking the drink is nobody, is unlocatable. College Jeremy is there as a consultant, insinuating the refuge of memory, traced from this same spot some ten years ago: stumbling back in the dark over broken sidewalks to a white crumbling house, playing incoherent ping-pong on a frozen porch, passing out on the living room floor, in the middle of a conversation about Expressionism and the Simpsons. Current J, bored with this often-watched movie, goes to to his/my overheated hotel room, wonders, am I, are you, a student, a teacher, an apprentice, an adult, an artist, a free agent, a question mark?

I'm walking down Kirkwood Street and the string of pieces I have played over the last month comes to mind, but in the form of names. Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Liszt: pompous referents, to be carved in Indiana limestone. All the stress and seriousness of those preparations is suddenly seen as a lump in the past, and there is no purpose in the past, only in what you mean to do, are doing at that moment. At the moment I am carrying coffee through the gray cold day, which seems like very little to be doing. The coffee is cold. The music itself is unlocatable, at that moment; what, then, is the purpose of all I have done?

I am in a dark cab. An orange low moon on my right, the city skyscape on my left, we whir along the Triboro bridge, in the curved barricaded cab, there, again, I'm feeling a prisoner in its lumpy bumpy back seat. Periodic potholes, and my laptop flies all over my lap. The person whom I would like to tell about this experience, which is nothing, is nowhere; I lift my cell phone but haven't the heart. The History Channel billboard as always stares across the toll plaza. We curve around a ramp onto the FDR and there is the same jostling of lanes, the same contracting, expanding galaxy of brakelights. Same same self, same same ritual, but I'm a bit confused, I guess, not to find myself there in the same moving place.

I am walking out onto the stage of Carnegie Hall and find myself in the geometric center of everything, at the crux and focal point of both the orchestra and the audience and staring at the arrayed symmetry. Everybody's eyes crossing the space diagonally, in every direction. There is just the piece, that's all. I have to find it, that evanescent miracle of notes and thought, that culminating encapsulating text of human history, at that very moment, at 8:32 pm, on that bench, at that very place; that is, after all, the job. It is there, I am radiating it out, but while I am playing it, does it stick to me? Only a few moments later, it seems to be done, I am on and off stage at once ... the moment flickers, flares like a match. Only afterwards in the eyes of a friend, only then time becomes event, the flow circles, centers around itself, the piece comes back into view, and those eyes hold me in place long enough to know who I am.

Naughtiness

2006-11-27T17:17:00.000-05:00

Things happen, life happens, directions veer and sway, paths blur and whir like blades of a fan, your best lays go agley, and overall let me put it this way: you have no idea what will happen next. This can even be true in the boring Classical world.

I had plans, magnificent plans! I was playing a four-hand work with a certain music director of the San Francisco Symphony (anonymous of course), a beautiful slow movement which is one of those marvels of Mozartean simplicity. But, content on the reprise I was not. I yearned, the second time around, to fill its basic intervals with elaborations, like a chocolate bar with nougat, and said music director encouraged me at our first rehearsal, averring that by historical accounts Mozart ornamented heavily ... that it was "like Chopin." Haha. I barely need encouragement in general, in almost every facet of my existence, so watch out! The next day, submerged in the pit under the Davies stage, I spent my "practice breaks" concocting ornaments... like Christmas ornaments really: some quite cheesy, some unnecessary, some beautiful, some graceful, some edible (?) and some making you wish you had never come home for Christmas at all. I laughed and giggled and generally ridiculously entertained myself, which calls to mind the magnificent line of Homer Simpson: "But I was getting lonely being happy all by myself."

The point was I was going to be an audacious ornamenter, and catch Anonymous Music Director by surprise onstage, etc. I used just a few of my ornaments at our dress rehearsal, and even this mere sampling elicited the following remark: "Jeremy, what have you been smokin' the last few days?" This I considered a success; yes, it's a slightly different kind of success from what most people yearn for, but we all set our bars in different places, so to speak. So, anyway, I was feeling very pleased with myself, but as usual, the first night I didn't really have (to use the vernacular) the cojones to do everything I had planned; I did some things but couldn't go "all the way."

The second night, there we were in front of a couple thousand people again, and I was ornamenting away, self-satisfied, and we got to the second half, where I play this little new theme in D major, all alone:

Yes, it's a very nice theme. And after my little treble "solo," very adorably the bottom part is supposed to play the same thing in a bass-ish kind of way, and it's all very cute and humorous. Now, only later I came to understand the motivation behind what happened next. Apparently, I played my theme that evening particularly Puckishly and optimistically, like a kind of "in the mist" fantasy of treble frequencies, and this music director had had it with my demonstrative happiness. Instead of the major mode, then, the music director played his version in a sober, sad minor, something like "Let me tell ya somethin' punk, you need to learn something about life":

A whole different MODE??!?@?!@?# Of course I had been outdone. The smallest smile spread on his face; he turned his head ever so slightly towards me, smugly. All my dreaming of surprising the Anonymous Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony and he had trumped me, magnificently. I consoled myself: of course, we were playing on his turf; he had the "home court" advantage. Let him come to the Greystone Hotel in New York City and try that kind of garbage! But, the rest of that sweet little tender piece, playing my pretty melodies, I was skewered on irony: I had to just stew there and emote happily in the knowledge that I had been outimprovised, beaten at my own game, hoisted by my own petard, and a host of other clichés that we don't need to mention.

Perhaps still suffering from the trauma of this incident, which you can well imagine (any good therapists out there?), I found myself in Portland, Maine, playing a rather meaty recital consisting of the 4th Partita of Bach, the last Sonata of Beethoven, and the Liszt Sonata. I was in elbow deep in Liszt; I had just rounded the climax of the slow movement (from which the following sound file begins), and well I was basking its afterglow.

Liszt Sonata Excerpt, Portland Maine 11/16/06

(The sound quality is not unbelievable... you will need to turn it up?) Everything seemed to be going fine. It had been a busy November; perhaps I was a bit tired, and I thought for a moment, at a thorny chromatic descent, that I had played an incorrect accidental... though I hadn't. The cover-up is often worse than the crime. The non-existent imaginary mistake derailed me. I corrected the non-mistake, and suddenly I was descending through clouds of the totally wrong harmonies and who knew what dissonances might result, where I might land? A musical, cognitive free-fall. Somehow I landed on the dominant of B major which would have ended the piece, well, rather too soon. Heh. It was a tempting thought... but no.

Remember I was in the afterglow, and I was so shocked that my brain went into a strange frenzy. I remember thinking, with one sector of my brain, "You're supposed to be in F# major, you [expletive]." Another sector was curiously devoid of harmonic thinking and could only offer up a melodic fragment it knew to be true:

But in the wrong key. My melodic and harmonic minds diverged. You don't have great presence of mind at those moments. Now, you can hear me try out the melodic fragment a few times, and settle on F# major, as a foundation (at the very least); and my favorite part is when, out of ideas, I play a sort of wistful little F#-major arpeggio, which tries to stand in for a whole Lisztian resolution... pathetically... as if to say, that's all I've got, folks! I play it with a certain sincerity, a kind of tender offering of complete and total nonsense. Luckily at that moment of crisis, I suddenly grab onto a high C major scale... a swimmer finding shore...

The incident occurs 55 seconds in. By 1:10, we are free and clear, back to our regularly scheduled programming. You can stop listening, or whatever; it's a free country. But I included more of the performance, because, by the mysterious totally emotional ridiculous logic of performing, the unnerving effect of this memory moment caused me to take the ensuing fugue unbelievably fast, almost as if I wanted to derail myself again. Haha, you won't make it, I seem to be saying to myself; but: I do. I am satisfied that the result is demonic and wild; the fugue is, yes, too fast, but I'm glad that it hovers on the unplayable; you never know ... even failure, or doubt, can inspire.

Confession

2006-11-23T23:04:00.000-05:00

It's dangerous to roam the Classical Internet. Surfing and clicking from the discomfort of my ancient Hoosier sofa, it seems that every time I turn around, I run across yet another article entitled: Who (or What) Killed Classical Music? Or, more optimistically present tense: What is Killing Classical Music?

Seriously: I can't take it anymore. I really don't know how to say something like this, but I need closure.

I killed Classical Music. That's right; just me. No accomplices. Hahahaha! And here's how ...

[sitcom-style dream sequence transition, distant saxophone]

Rain caught and held the reflection of red neon; the innocent night street looked washed in blood. Halfway through my third double bourbon I realized I had forgotten something a third-and-an-eighth-of-the-way through my second. I stared at the spattered greasy window, aching for a view; with flabby, twitchy fingers I played a forgotten melody on the chipped edge of my highball glass, and dug in my memory for the last comforting remnant of loss.

"History," I growled, and knocked my glass over, spilling ice, liquor, dispersing the smoke and mirrors of self-destruction. I was not trucking in abstractions; History was the name of the bartender.

He came by ineluctably. "Spilled your drink again, did you? ... You spilled your drink."

History tended to repeat himself. It was something you got used to. "Another bourbon," I said, grimacing.

"Those who don't learn from their mistakes," he murmured. But he filled my glass with fresh ice and let another healthy finger of poison drizzle over it, and I listened to the ice crackle and the rain whip against the window, and just at that moment four miserable pitches yawned out of the sullied night:

Those four fateful notes were what I had forgotten, the four voices of my inner Gesualdo madrigal, the horsemen of my Apocalypse, through-composed and yet monotonous, not quite repeating and never explaining the eternal, haunting, profound-yet-superficial madrigalisms of my subtexted so-called life ... The four notes, I yearned to know what to call them, if I ran across them in a deserted alley. Were they the dominant of a dominant? A predominant? Some sort of modified two chord? And for God's sake which of the notes was a dissonance and which a consonance and if we couldn't answer that, if there was no kind of moral-contrapuntal-tonal framework, how was I, or any of us, going to go on?

The door creaked open. A body settled into the sagging stool next to me. "Oh hi, Jazz," I said. He just grooved, passing time. I couldn't help imposing my problems on him, disturbing his detachment.

"You see it's a F a B a D# and a G#, what the hell is it?"

Jazz chuckled. "Call it what you want, man. That's some multivalent whatever. Just let it go where it wants to go, baby."

Oh I love Jazz but when he gets all tolerant on me I just want to smack him. Maybe, I thought, he's just playing into my own clichéd preconceptions? Speaking of which, the door creaked again and in came World Music, with an entourage: fawning ethnomusicologists, dancing around her gorgeous copious bejangled body in myriad tempi and costumes; they stared at her every incensed inch, concupiscent. Oh and who else should the cat drag in but Classical Music, dressed soberly, oozing stifling refinement, following at a greater distance, but giving World Music a watchful eye.

You see, Classical Music was my childhood sweetheart. Even in the sixth grade, when I was King of the Nerds, we would dine on cafeteria pizza and tater tots and talk of Opus Numbers. We would go to the Multiplex and sniff at John Williams and hold hands across dimly lit tables at 2 am at the Village Inn and stay up all night inventing Developments and Recapping with green chile and eggs in the morning. Classical Music was more than love. She was a sea in which my life was drowned. But: not even a glance. Classical brushed right by. I got up to say hello, but... Jazz grabbed my shoulder. "Don't do it man." His voice was a gravelly flatted seventh. "It's gone, just let it go. I hear Classical's got somethin' goin' with World Music, and it's pretty intense."

It was true. Even now I heard faint klezmer sounds; a clarinet blew in from nowhere, and the ethnomusicologists were braying abundant, dirty augmented seconds; and to my horror Classical Music looked on admiringly, swaying, daring to dance, to be caught up in the spell... Then without warning World Music began to rumba, and Classical gyrated along, smitten, living vicariously, stripping off sober clothes and ...

No, no, I thought; I couldn't watch this. Classical Music is not supposed to have fun without me! Not this kind of fun! A rage took shape; I was dizzy with jealousy; I was a naked, dripping, unlabelled Tristan Chord in the empty, burning staff paper of the World. Jazz tried to hold me back, but I realized I had the perfect weapon. I ripped my 3-volume set of Schenker's Der Freie Satz from my pseudo-hipster (no longer a nerd here! sort of!) messenger bag, and threw it with utmost force, and I caught Classical by surprise, right at a moment of joy ... it was an accident of course, some thorny middleground analysis caught her in the throat and she was allergic ... she fell over; the dance ended; jingles and jangles subsided into the rainy night.

Silence.

World Music leaned over. "She's dead." I noticed a tear on Jazz's cheek. My throwing arm throbbed. It began to sink in. All those young people's outreach concerts were for naught. And then History, as always, said the obvious.

"Nothing to do but move on."

[sitcom return-from-dream-sequence effect]

So there you go. Now that I've confessed, can I go on Oprah and be absolved?

More importantly: if l take the rap, if I do the time, can we PLEASE not have any more articles about the death of Classical Music?

Escape From Breakfast

2006-11-11T12:15:00.000-05:00

Do you butter your bagel as though it were a clandestine act? From the moment I set foot in the breakfast room of my hotel, my ears leave the normal world and I hear only the strange, squirming hush of repression. Typically, I wind up next to a couple, about to embark on a touristy fun day in beautiful San Francisco (a city I have a perpetual crush on). This single traveling pianist could imagine a lovely evening away from the kids in a hotel room, sharing a bed cozily, etc. & etc., and I guess one would HOPE that the situation would be a joyous one: a satisfied afterglow mixing with the anticipatory joy of a day spent together, not a care in the world: wandering about the hipster-strewn streets, eating chowder out of bread bowls, ignoring the homeless ... but perhaps my romantic notions are bound to crash against the wall of reality. One young couple sat in egg-cracking silence, broken only by:

This tea is nasty.

Crack, sip, slurp, swallow. And five minutes later:

Man: Hussein got sentenced today.
Woman: (Bored) Mmhmmm.

Then, simply more silence. Whatever thoughts may have followed upon this serious observation, were left hanging.

Yet another young couple was a study in contrasts; the boy seemed to be falling apart at the seams, clothes and limbs drooping on the floor, his hair a restless paragon of bedhead, the table before him a maze of plates and remnants, while his blond girlfriend sat bolt upright, as though in the court at Versailles, or at Alexander lessons, letting not a crumb fall from her muffin-eating mouth. She wiped her mouth gracefully ten times for every bite and I began to feel deeply unclean, like my body was a dust bunny that the Cosmic Swiffer had left behind. Then I have overheard several couples critiquing the hotel from within its very bowels (daring insurgency!), and on one occasion I leaned over and attempted to convey the poetry of the Huntington Hotel (the hotel on the hill!) to them; with my eyes I tried to express the blue of the bay as seen from my third floor window and with my hands the expanse of the luxurious bathrooms and the crisp sensual whiteness of the sheets on which ... Ahhh, but it was too much.

Woman: If you ate some protein with your breakfast, you wouldn't be hungry again in an hour.
Man: Mmhmmm.
Woman: Why don't you have an egg?
Man: I HATE hardboiled eggs.

This couple was easily in their sixties. Was this the first time they had managed to cover the topic of his hard-boiled egg problem, or (as I suspected) was it the thousandth or millionth time? Reasons for my singleness suddenly became luminously clear, like the sky over the airport at dawn, when you realize--as always!--you are leaving a town just as the weather turns perfect.

In each corner of the breakfast room, insanity: a teen spreading cream cheese obsessively on a bagel for fifteen minutes, punishing it with dairy as if the bagel were a bully who had tormented him in the fourth grade; a man in the corner turning over each page of the paper, sniffing dismissively at each turn, as if some new layer of absurdity was discovered (the sound of the pages turning and folding like the flapping of vultures' wings, scavengers of newsprint)... And finally the repression of all these little conversations, the accumulated deflection and squelch of behavior, gets to me... I begin to feel like a prisoner, all I want to do is run up to my room and throw open the window and scream out to humanity: Live! Live! Enjoy life, everyone! Buy some shoes or go for a walk! Don't sit in dark rooms complaining about tea! Instead, like any good boy, I go and practice, in a windowless subterranean room. Provisional escape for me.

The second movement of Mozart 488. Mozart invokes "what has already been written," the siciliano, a style? genre? dance?, a halting haunting rhythm ...

And by rights a siciliano, like any dance, should not really begin by falling apart. But Mozart, after a simple opening measure, breaks the texture, syncopates-interpolates-anticipates, all the while subjecting the melody to a series of seventh leaps:

The melody and rhythm both are subject to sudden fragmentation and confrontation, before the movement or premise can really get started. A siciliano with "issues." I am always struck playing it (as I did the last three nights in San Francisco) by the immediacy and the complexity of this breakdown. But later, at my second entrance, I am amazed--how do I put this?--in the opposite way: I get stuck on two harmonies and in a certain melodic compass, I circle around chromatically in that C#-A, unable to escape the sixth, the rising sixth (attempt) followed in each case by the inevitable fall back (failure) ...

This "stuckness" is horrible, it makes me feel even more lost than the opening (which is more daring), or: lost in a different sense. If the opening is a kind of broken dance, this second entrance is like a broken record, symbolizing a more fundamental breakdown/crisis: a deliberate moment of being at a loss what to say, a kind of sudden poverty of invention, something really truly incredible: the composer who always has something to say, deliberately choosing to find only the barest words; the pianist/protagonist can only see the pathos before him, the confining circle of his thought, and nothing else (like we humans so often) ... spiraling redundancy, with no way out.

When, the third cycle around, the strings enter and suddenly this hovering around F# minor ends ... the string timbre (which releases the piano from its prison) at that moment is (I think we can all agree) one of the most beautiful things ever, like an aura around possibility, a pure promise. It promises A major, in annoying music theory terms; but, A major is a metaphor. In the subsequent transitional passage (annoying music theory term #2) the promise of major and the presence of minor interlace constantly and the too-simple promise of the string entrance is understood to be more complex, more than you "bargained for" ... I realize this is all a very emotional reading of this movement, but can there be any other? Can the purists out there forgive me?

What Mozart manages to do, I think, is keep the A major feeling "provisional," almost throughout the whole middle section ... Yes, everything is somewhat lifted, the halting tread of the siciliano has disappeared, the mood is less oppressive, even happy?, but as I am playing and listening, I don't yet feel totally confident ... I feel I am exploring it (A major and whatever A major might "mean") rather than living in it. Only towards the end of the section, the piano seems to begin to exult in the key, in its majorness; we have a long, spun-out, establishing cadence (Mozart's amazing gift for the coincidence of emotional/harmonic function), leaping up to a high E (not at all coincidentally the highest note in the piano of the movement):

This cadence is simultaneously the harmonic certainty we have waiting for, and a kind of emotional release, an escape, a real difference! And it is, of course, PRECISELY at that moment, when the pianist's happiness is at its height, when the spell of mournful F# minor seems to have truly been broken, precisely at the hinge in the structure when A major is established for sure, that Mozart closes the door, the door he himself opened: the winds in two simple, terrible bars take A major and destroy it, twist it exactly back to the beginning. That is what is devastating: how little work it really is. Then, what else? I have no choice but to play the opening again; whatever I have glimpsed of the other is ephemeral, impossible, gone.

Escape is a theme of this movement, perhaps its most important theme ... On the Neapolitan 6th chord, one of those fated, fatal chords which MUST lead to the cadence, the pianist, before allowing the cadence, tries to leap "out of the register," tries a kind of virtual escape, thinking perhaps by postponing the cadence to postpone the inevitable:

... and so too again at the end, though the writing is on the wall and the movement is drawing to an end and nothing can really happen to alter the fate of things, the piano keeps reaching up the octave, C-sharp to C-sharp, as if it hopes to find something up there ...

Does the soloist want to escape from its own instrument, from its own compass, to get out of the world it has created? But the desire for escape is written into that world, intrinsically; it is part of the bars of the cage.

My Umbrella

2006-10-30T14:56:00.000-05:00

My umbrella needs no Viagra. It jumps at every chance. It attempts to come open under tables, in drawers, as I am passing through doors; it is coiled kinetic energy; it is a teenage umbrella in heat and I have considered buying it Judy Blume books just to calm it down. I am nervous it will embarrass me at any moment. If it is possible to screw up the purchase of an umbrella, in every imaginable way, I have done so. Attention to detail, even in failure, is my strong point. Fed up with the evil person who stole my last magnificent green domed colossus from the locker room at New York Sports Club in the middle of a tremendous downpour (bad, bad karma, whoever you are!), and no longer willing to humor its substitute, a tattered, paisley, hopeful but pathetic remnant of cloth, its frame poking crazily askew like a squashed metal spider, I finally strutted into Duane Reade on a rainy morning with a mad, to-do-list-checking, umbrella acquisition urge. But every New Yorker knows, you should NEVER buy an umbrella in a store: you should only buy them on the street, from suspicious vendors, in the middle of a precipitation event. Only then do urgency, need, opportunity, and economy-of-scale meet in a flash of cash-only swiftness which makes one glad to be alive. Haste makes waste, and bad taste; my foolish desire and unusual simplicity-of-action bade me ignore the sign reading "The I Love New York Umbrella," with its typical, disgusting, rebus-substitution, and I bought what appeared to be a black normal umbrella (is that so much to ask?), but which turned out horribly to be a TOURIST umbrella, broadcasting on two of its panes "I [heart] New York," a sentiment which this magnificent city, in all its industrial bespattered grimy cynical splendor, can only regard with utter distaste. Yes, we [heart] you too, all you people from Iowa, or Minnesota, and let us express our love with refrigerator magnets.

Wow. Kinda lost it there. Apologies to all from Iowa/Minnesota. That burst of Manhattanism was really just an emotional reaction to the stress of walking down Broadway in the rain, suffering all the trials of a New York resident, living in what other people would consider a cupboard, but still having to appear to all the world like a tourist. And moreover that Duane Reade, the ultimate depressing New York City drugstore, would betray me thus! Et tu, Duane?

Speaking of losing it, and Minnesota. A week ago, I was slated to do a rather ridiculous thing, i.e. fly altogether too late to a concert, fly the morning of a concert out to Bemidji, MN.

Now, it is a journey out to Bemidji, and I had played it semi-safe by booking, through my manager, the earliest possible flight. My schmancy alarm clock thus buzzed most unwelcomely at 5:30 AM, in the palatial West Wing of my apartment, and there ensued that daze and misery of the sudden urgency and the socks that won't go on properly and the assembly of clothes and the impatient phone call of the waiting limo driver and the scurrying of my various butlers, all of which I survived to find myself at JFK's Terminal 4, at a respectable 6:35.

But my hubris of timeliness was ill-rewarded. There was no reservation under my name, or under any of my many aliases (all very sexy and mysterious), and I ended up with a quivering cell phone under my ear, learning from a very sweet lady that I would have to buy a fantastically expensive ticket then and there to get to my destination, and, there was nothing available on the 8 o-clock flight, and, so I'd have to leave at 11:30, and pretty much barely make it.

Please understand! I am already in a very vulnerable emotional state in those early-airport moments, something like a baby that emerges from the womb only to face a firing squad.

Nonetheless I am a proud frequent traveler, averse to exhibit the base emotionalism of all the "amateur travelers" who get all cranky when their rental car is not the color they requested. I was the soul of politeness to the Northwest Airlines staff, whose fault this situation was not, and did not let the depth of my distress leak to them ... except for occasional aphorisms such as "life is a vale of tears." But once I had my ticket, and I found myself adrift in the food court for several hours, with just not quite enough time to get home and back again, a whole new existential situation began to present itself. I began to think the saddest thought I have ever had: my bed, lying empty, without me in it.

Bed. And again bed. Rustle of sheets; sensual whisper of pillow. The glow of the pre-sleep moments, the soft sinking of consciousness, the surrender to rest and relief. I imagined myself in a fetal position, clutching Marcella Cucina, my favorite cookbook, as I sank into dreams of Risotto. Meanwhile, the fluorescent light of the food court bounced horrendously off the yellow formica of my table, and I squirmed painfully on my concrete bench, and sipped another in a series of recurring coffees which did not wake or calm me, but exacerbated my neither/nor-ness (not a word). Ranting cell phone calls were placed, and many weekend minutes were tossed casually into the vault of wasted time. My rage spun slowly around its object: whatever had happened to my reservation. And then I paced, Rilke's panther in the cage, paced again and again past Sbarro and McDonalds and Sharper Image, the bars behind which no world appeared, and when I unwrapped my Egg McMuffin I dropped the egg upon the floor (indignity of the imprisoned man!). I sought relief in the world of ideas, i.e. the bookstore, and unbelievably! the first book that presented itself on the first shelf I came to was William Hazlitt's On the Pleasure of Hating:

In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is "the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!" What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves, - seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy - mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; - have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

How comforting.

That evening, exhausted, I played two Bach Partitas and the Liszt Sonata. Moments after I finished, a woman about 50 years of age came by my dressing room and told me in a Midwestern rhythm that she felt it was a once in a lifetime experience and that many of her friends felt the same way and she thanked me for coming and making the long journey and her face was as plain as a blue sky. She let her eyes sit with me for a while and I could see that while many New Yorkers' faces seem to be a miracle of added-on layers, of wrinkles of experience and cultural accretions, her face over the many harsh winters seemed instead to have been whittled down; things had been removed with time and what was left seemed very honest. She politely excused herself and, as I heard her steps going down the corridor, something snapped and finally I felt myself let go of the held breath of the morning's frustration. I was still exhausted but now in a good way, in a real way which could be solved with sleep. I sat in front of the dressing room mirror and recognized myself. I was happy. I remembered a few phrases I liked in the concert and knew why I was doing what I was doing. And just then the Spirit of New York City came into the dressing room; it was pretty pissed off, yelling at me for getting "all CBS After-School-Special," and threatened to beat me senseless with my [expletive] tourist umbrella if I didn't pull myself together and get good and miserable for the long return flight home.

Favorites

2006-10-26T08:21:00.000-04:00

Favorite Quote of the Week

"We've done Peter and the Wolf so many times, we're starting to root for the wolf."

--unnamed person affiliated with the St. Louis Symphony

Most Ridiculous Quote of the Week

"There is absolutely nothing artificial about Glenn Gould's playing."

--Bruno Monsaingeon

Polite response: a certain stylization is actually somewhat characteristic of his work. Less polite response: I mean come on, what kind of Kool Aid are you drinking? Is there anything NOT artificial about his playing?

Favorite Meal of the Week

An egg-salad sandwich on toasted white bread with iceberg lettuce, a pickle, a glass of ice water, and a Wild Turkey on the rocks.

and finally,

Runner-Up Favorite Quote of the Week

A photographer friend is looking desperately for an apartment, and has been in email contact with all sorts of persons to that end. He received the following philosophical missive which seems to stray off the subject of subletting considerably:

"Thanks for giving the world nice photos and for being Gay. I'm not Gay, but I support full Gays rights, and I wish that I would wake up in the morning and find the 95 percent of the world population has turned Gay. The world would for sure be a better place. This might save the world because it's too over populated and mother nature doesn't have a chance."

In Which All Is Explained

2006-10-19T19:37:00.000-04:00

Dissonance is cool. Its cool-factor and yuck-factor are often, however, at war.

For every elderly concertgoer who wrinkles his face and complains "it's so dissonant!" there's a conservatory student in his late teens at a carrel in a listening library hearing Gesualdo or Kreuzspiel for the first time, beaming, eyes wild, thinking "dude, that's f*&*()#$ awesome!" You know I'm right about this. So am I suggesting youth cherishes dissonance and age consonance? Or just bandying stereotypes? I know, for example, my parents are in their 70s (I don't know if that's considered young or old anymore) but they can be quite dissonant in the mornings, especially when my dad's making green chile and eggs and mom gets in the way of his frenetic journeys to and from stove and sink. Anyway.

Syllogism: Dissonance is cool. The Fonz is cool. Ergo: dissonance is the Fonz. He (or you can imagine a female Fonz if you like) strides in in a leather jacket; he does what he wishes; he cares not for convention; he is not fazed by conflict; he makes waves, stands out, attracts attention; he is seductive; he attracts and exists in clusters; he resists resolution, i.e. conformity, but he values his relationships; he knows where he is going, but is in no hurry; he loves to be prolonged (aeyyyyy!); he has a distinctive identity; he lives over the garage... Imagine if you must all the dissonances living in a little apartment over a garage, partying harder and harder through the 19th-century, testing their limits, until finally Schoenberg comes along and emancipates them all (the Abraham Lincoln of dissonance); suddenly with a shudder and one last mournful Tristan chord they come to realize all the fun's gone and that without limits the party's just a lame bunch of drunken dissonances above a garage, getting old and with nothing to do.

The cool "Fonzian" dissonance of the day (should this be a regular feature of Think Denk?), which prompted these "profound" reflections, comes from good old J.S. Bach BWV 1052:

Just look at that puppy! Madrigalian, searing dissonance. The F-sharp there in the bottom of the cembalo, travels down to F-natural, on its way to E-natural, just slidin' on down "innocently" (nobody here but us chickens!); meanwhile the A in one treble voice is heading up to C# and has to pass through B-natural, and there it is, the "Fonzian tritone" (I so TOTALLY invented that term, dude) that results, F-B, the ultra-hip diabolus in musica, a viscerally satisfying traffic accident of passing, colliding lines in which no one needs to get hurt but there is all the thrill of conflict and the onward rush of the incompatible. The B-natural is also wonderfully dissonant against the A pedal (the dominant pedal, that is) and the general D minor-ness of everything (music theorists, moan if you must, at this imprecise labeling, moan on and on, I'm not listening lalalala), and its searing ascent reverses a large extraordinary pattern of preceding descent, so it's also semantically dissonant, so there! These dissonances are linked, spiritually connected, to the ongoing tension of the dominant; they symbolize and represent the music's captured, caged, not-yet-allowed-to-hit-the-tonic fury. If you are at the Carnegie concert on Dec. 2, or at the other Orpheus appearances, and you recognize this moment, and you remember to think of the Fonz, please say "Aeyyy!" to yourself, quietly, in your mind. If you say it out loud, it might be distracting. Or say it to me backstage, I'll be delighted.

In a mostly unrelated note, one of my ~~exes~~ delightful, dear old friends studied my concert schedule and casually invited herself to stay in my apartment while I was away playing. During her tenure, my dish soap apparently gave out (certainly not due to overusage on my part!) and she replaced it not with Palmolive but with one of those so-called Natural Soaps from the Organic Aisle. For months I have been using this Natural Soap, as if under the evil, irresistible spell of Whole Foods, and I had apparently forgotten the real nature of suds; for today when the natural stuff ran out and I had to use some new Green Apple Palmolive, it was like being reborn in the Scrubbing Garden of Eden. The suds fairly overflowed the sink with joy at returning after long exile to my besoiled domicile, and I too couldn't help smiling as the smell of a green apple jolly rancher filled the kitchen, and I meditated that dissonance is a lot like a green apple jolly rancher, sour but tasty and eventually melting, etc. etc.

P.S. I have never been and probably will never be a fan of the show Happy Days. I obtained the proper spelling of the Fonz's catch phrase from this indispensable website, in which the cultural milieu of my pubescent years is enumerated.

Matters Major and Minor

2006-10-17T10:14:00.000-04:00

Yours truly settled warmly into plush, red row W at Carnegie Hall, in a single seat at the end. I felt suspiciously glanced-at in my unaccompanied state (no, really, I have a life!) by my more elderly neighbors, and little suspected I had forgotten how K. 503 went. I thought I knew my Mozart (idiotic mistake), I smugly clutched my glossy program in preemptive assurance, and was later so abashedly, completely happy to have forgotten. Perhaps a professional classical pianist should not "be able" to forget 503, or should not admit it, but I really don't care.

As all those "in the know" know, the piece begins with a rather grand gesture, taking its time through two 8-bar phrases to say "here I am." (Benignly, nobly: not at all like, say, Jack Nicholson making his axed entrance near the end of The Shining). This Mozartean hello matched my memories; things were proceeding C-majorly, according to plan. There was even time to observe the similarity of these opening sixteen bars to the archetypal first four of the Well-Tempered Clavier:

But, as those "in the know" also know, the second 8-bar phrase is met at its conclusion by a little accident, a 2-bar extension. That's the evil jargon we boring musicians use to express the idea of some "extra" measures at the end of a phrase, some kind of musical so-called superfluity. Extension, by the way, like so many music theory words, always seems like much too heartless a descriptor--it calls to mind a reprieve on a paper, or some add-on to a house, rather than some deliberate, beautiful volatility or asymmetry introduced into an evolving text. (Any readers who wish to propose a substitute name for "extension," please do!) By the dastardly genius of Mozart these two bars are pretending to be no big deal, just a little echo, i.e. the same as the last two bars of the phrase, but in the minor key. They are, however, a big deal.

It was at this moment, just after the little echoing 2-bar minor key pivot, that my memory failed. Precisely at bar 19, I had no idea what was happening or was going to happen. And what seemed to be occurring onstage, in my ears, or brain, or near the ceiling, or wherever (no specific site for the happening) in this new unknown space seemed to be unbelievable, at least for a moment: a moment of creation and possibility. I say this without exaggeration. I felt: if that could happen--

why, anything could happen.

At intermission I ran into friends E and J and I tried to put my 503 excitement into words, but the words coming out of my mouth were flat and unsuccessful: something "wouldn't take," something elusive, crucial, misplaced.

The basis of my happy disquiet was the feeling that there were two worlds, or two spaces. Mozart first poses the obvious, the overt and harmonically noble, the world of grand operatic entrances and declared high purpose (musically speaking, a world of slow unfolding I-II-V-I, circular perfect tonic-establishing entities). But then he immediately poses an undermining counter-text: a chromatic, agitated sequence in the minor key ... Later on, in rampant caffeinated pursuit of the something that wouldn't take, I indulged myself and tried to make a little table contrasting the two materials, grouping simple musical contrasts with associated metaphors:

I realized: this contrast, this shift to minor, would not nearly be so riveting if it did not seem to immediately and fundamentally strike at the very meaning of the opening material. (Bar 19 is not different in kind, but different in essence.) The first sixteen bars are all about certainty; they define, they enumerate, dispose, declare, set forth. They confine themselves; there is nothing to call a melody; there is simply harmonic assertion; there is no fancy, no diversion; the phrases are rhythmically identical, martial, symmetrical; they flirt with the conventional, even: the stodgy. Having gone to such lengths to dispel doubt at the outset, to create such a capital-O Opening, why suddenly intervene so early on, so disturbingly? I think this (rhetorical) question is near the crux of what was hitting me so hard about the piece.

I love those moments in music (but perhaps not so much in life) where you feel the ground has been pulled out beneath you, and inexplicable profusion ensues. Here in bar 19, certainties vanish, the musical ground vanishes--easy to define and enumerate (rhythm, major-key, texture, style)--and so also disappears a whole set of associated metaphors and ideas, which are harder to define. There is a sudden vacuum created by dispersed certainties, by this vanishing of meaning, and the thing Mozart creates, places in this vacuum, poses as a new possibility, is compelling, suspenseful, with unprecedented rhythmic energy, as if we were suddenly inserted in medias res into the really interesting part of some high, tragic drama, perhaps some moment of wonder or enigma in which various characters are at odds or wondering what is going on, a point just before some sort of climax or revelation. But (!) we are not at the climax of anything yet; we are barely settling in.

To rephrase, this moment is essentially double-edged: with one turning act Mozart creates and destroys; he creates a void only in order to fill it; he erases certainties in order to inscribe a new world. This world does not naturally coexist with the first, but it is "in communication" with it. It is not enough to say the turn of events is a surprise; it is more fundamental than that, a more revolutionary change of perspective. For some reason a ridiculous analogy comes to mind: those moments so common in movies where a character is standing on what he/she thinks is solid ground which turns out to be the hand of a monster, or a giant living tree (when the camera pans out), or the mouth of a whale. The walls are alive, the moment seems to say (the harmonic walls of the piece). There is something quickening in the heart of the piece which is antithetical, perhaps threatening, to it.

The magic, oft-invoked word in The Classical Style is "synthesis," which the great 3 composers are said to have achieved. Mozart is praised for balance, proportion, grace, naturalness, ease, among so many other things. But I'm not sure this moment feels "organic" or "natural." It is, rather, perfect but unnatural; it feels like a rhetorical interjection, the insertion of an Idea, the intervention of Thought. Its genius is not an easy flowering and development, but a sudden dizzying epiphany, a slippage of the mind.

Though the minor literally comes after the major, I'm not at all sure succession is the primary communicated meaning. To me it has a much more interesting relationship to time, something like coexistence, not narrative: the side-by-side vision of opposites. In other words, its message is not "this happens, then that happens" but rather something more disturbing: "it could just as well be this, or that." And then when the major returns after our "bubble" of minor, does it seem to other people that it's just a little too eager to assert itself, that its rising scales and triumphant sequences almost ring a bit hollow, too much of a muchness? Come to think of it, perhaps the opening was a bit too certain of itself as well. Why does it feel to some extent that that grand façade of the opening is peeled away to reveal this inner minor-key angst (raising questions of opening as façade, as curtain, questions of musical "truth")?

I wouldn't obsess over this moment if Mozart didn't set me up for it. This first minor key intervention is so striking, that it forces us to ask: if it happened once, why not again? It isn't really possible, in the Classical cosmos, to have something so extraordinary happen and then not to follow up on it (events follow, in the Classical world); and yet, and yet, this minor-key shift isn't really typical of the Classical cosmos either; how can a non-Classical event be understood or developed in a Classical way? The listener is on high alert, even in the gilded, privileged confines of Carnegie Hall. And Mozart treats this uncertainty as a Theme, in the literary sense. The minor key keeps poking its head in, at regular and yet unpredictable intervals, enough to maintain a perpetual doubt-of-meaning, a constant waver in the fabric of the piece; it shimmers to show the dark minor side and shimmers back into major so that gradually you begin to perceive the work not as a solid entity but as a window, always promising or threatening another side. One can no longer say, comfortably, "this is an antithesis," or smugly: this is major and this is minor. You begin to see yourself, as perceiver, as narrator, stuck between.

I caught myself doing something, I think ... When bar 19 started and my familiarity dropped away, I caught my brain just for a second, like a swimmer in trouble, thrashing, trying to "make sense," to map the pattern of the present onto the past. But I was unable to match the events either to my memories or to the first 16 bars of the piece: to anything at all. There it was: my mind was searching for a pattern connection between the two parts, and Mozart's music at that moment depended on that activity, depended on its attempt and failure (its failure was Mozart's success). I realized, part of the work of the composer is to create roadblocks to pattern perception, beautiful areas where the brain gropes blindly. I realized, too, part of what makes some music sound "too easy" or vapid is the absence of that kind of challenge; allowing the brain to laze around like a couch potato processing patterns in a daze. Mozart, the easy listening, un-dissonant composer (so I read in an interview in the program, aghast, as if this music wasn't living and breathing dissonance nonstop), this long-dead Mozart was the one poking my brain, saying: stay awake, stay awake, keep living, you never know what will happen!

Rules for Counterpoint

2006-10-13T09:31:00.000-04:00

Life's dangerous. You could be walking down Broadway, round 94th Street, and find yourself in a near-head-on collision with a former student. These sorts of things happen all the time. Clutching cellphone to ear with another friend, you say a cautious external hello, wondering: what tutelage grudges have been stewing all this time, waiting to explode?

Take comfort, gentle reader, this is a friendly encounter; Former Student is harmlessly (?) heading off to teach Counterpoint. I am returning from Starbucks Odyssey episode 2,342.

One of my little life-improvement dreams is to ruthlessly restudy counterpoint until my species are all settled down and in their proper places. Back in the halcyon year of 1995, I studied copiously (like the little good boy I am) for my Juilliard Doctoral Placement Exam, in the New Mexico sun, while ingesting huge amounts of chips and green chile salsa, dripping and smearing wonderful amounts of salsa on my music notebooks which gave the counterpoint exercises a kind of antique quality, a spicy charm -- at least so I felt at the time. But this chile-induced crammed knowledge could not last long, it was bound to melt like cheese on a quesadilla.

"What are those rules of counterpoint?" I inquired hypothetically of Former Student. I was curious not to hear them, of course, but to know how he would express them.

He started with the curious ploy of the obvious. "Well, no parallel fifths." As if, ironically, taking the question seriously? Then continued, "no unisons... which is really funny." At least I think that is what he said; his mind moves faster than a Roadrunner across the top of a mesa in the creosote smell of the desert after a good rainstorm. Sometimes FS's thought processes leave even this Generation Xer mystified, I who should by right of Birth be cynical of Everything and mystified by Nothing.

I decided to leap in. "Parallel fourths are a problem too, sometimes?" He began to enumerate the situations when they might or might not work, then (I speculated) got weary, in the present moment, with the sun shining down, and the day beckoning, and the brisk cold reminding the skin of its own very existence, of the dos and donots. Perhaps it was all a failed experiment in postmodernism. "There are exceptions."

The breeze blew. A minisecond passed. My other friend waited on the cellphone to tell me something more that I should know about the strange way I conduct my life, or she hers.

Former Student's voice interrupted its own pause impatiently. "There are lots of exceptions. The exception is if you're dead you can't do any of those things." The Carpe Diem School of Counterpoint was thus defined and founded on the corner of 94th and Broadway, in front of a liquor store.

Scholars Unite!

2006-10-08T12:03:00.000-04:00

Saturday 7:50 am. I woke to the wreckage of nail salons: crumbling glass, scattered particle-board, chairs, and three dusty men dismantling endless hours of beauty. Helpful sign explains: “WE HAVE MOVE.” It seemed early to be pillaging, at least on the Upper West Side. Why, most people haven’t even finished their Pilates yet, not to mention walking their pugs and baking their organic brioches. I was irritated to find that the new staffperson at the 93rd Street Starbucks seemed to think we were living in the ‘burbs. She smiled a TV smile (in HD) and threw me a perky plastic how-are-you, and when I (grudging, mumbling, quiet) returned the formality she went into a story about how tired she is [insert braying laugh a la Rachael Ray here]... but she’ll make it, thanks. My subsequent smile was like the crisper in my refrigerator: full of wilted, dried-up, and congealed things. If I had been carrying a volume of Sartre I might have climbed over the counter and attacked her with it. Morning is not my time.

Ah, safely back in the apartment. Whew. I try to really make an art of my grumpiness while it lasts, to live it to the last drop; I am not sure it is not a strange, amphibian form of happiness.

Speaking of grumpiness, I was over again seeing how a real blog works at The Rest Is Noise, and I read the following:

... the one [concert] that cannot be missed is the mainstage Carnegie bill of Electric Counterpoint (with Pat Metheny), Different Trains (with the Kronos), and Music for 18 Musicians (with Reich and his ensemble). I don't see anything as exciting on the entire New York season schedule...

Ummm, excuse me? What about Jeremy Denk’s super-wuper fantastically exciting all-Bach recital on Oct. 20th in the new exciting totally unusual late-night format at the Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center (tickets available)? Or Jeremy Denk’s thrilling debut wild-possibly-involving-naked-supermodels appearance at Carnegie Hall with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Dec. 2nd? Just to pick a couple items at random from the concert schedule, items I have no stake in whatsoever, you know, just, by the way. I thought I worked that in pretty well, don’t you? Not too pluggy, kind of seamless?

And then to speak again of grumpiness, a while back I went a bit to town on the first episode of Greg Sandow’s book on the future of classical music. I have to admit I’m not in love with the formulation “performing” a book, but I let myself be carried full tilt into high dudgeon, overhastily. I went back there and it appears he took in a lot of criticism and decided to start again, writing more tightly and with less anecdote; he seems to be reangling it as a kind of historical account of how classical music got “boxed in.” The following passage made me pause uneasily:

This scholarly, detached, analytical view of classical music then gets translated into the formality of performances, the immobility and silence of the musicians and the audience, and the lack of communication, the lack of any explanation of what's really going on (which I've criticized so relentlessly in earlier episodes). All this turns many people off, especially since it runs directly against almost every trend in contemporary culture. How can people who (for example) listen to pop music that offers strong views about contemporary life, and about which listeners have really strong opinions--loving this band, hating that one--accept a classical music world in which they're told, repeatedly, in measured, unexcited tones, how great the great composers are?

But there is something courageous about it. Here on Think Denk, we try to get as excited as we can about Bach etc., and try to pass it on through verbiage and (soon to come, exciting exciting!) sound bites, but we (royal) have to admit Mr. Sandow has a generally true-feeling point. To argue with what he is saying seems like arguing with commonsense, with the same pros and cons. Go ahead and argue; you may be right, but ignore it at your peril. In fact he has a lot of points that feel queasily correct in the main though I get nervous about the wide net he is casting ... To cite my main qualm, I guess I feel he’s a little too comfortable with generalizations, and with the deadly Grouping Of Stereotypes Fallacy (“scholarly, detached, analytical”)... Scholarly does not have to be detached, or analytical, for instance. Analysis is not necessarily detached either. These are all free-floating "connotations." And then he equates the scholarly attitude with the detached immobile performances, claiming a causality. But often it seems to me just the opposite: the scholars are the ones getting excited about the music while the performers, who are too busy to hear from them or don’t want to hear from them or think they don’t have anything to offer, ignore them and offer up the same old same old conservatory crap. How’s that for blunt? Strike one for scholars!

So I have my Denkish qualms, but am impressed by the rewrite and new approach. Go read Sandow’s stuff, and I apologize for jumping on the first post: so very Jeremy and so impatient. The ocean is still teaching me (vis a vis last post).

Then, to survey other areas of the Classical-Web, I noticed there’s a big discussion of the “pretentiousness” of classical music going on at Sequenza21. This seems to me largely a discussion between composers, and am I generalizing too much (a la Sandow) if I see this discussion and the word “pretentious” as a euphemism for what is quickly becoming the Composers’ Eternal Question:

Should I write tonal, boppy stuff, or not?

I imagine the devil posing that question, slyly, in the postmodern wilderness ... Please enjoy, among other things, the myriad spellings of “pretentiousness” that sprinkle this forum, which made me doubt my own memory, and which evokes, charmingly, composers at play, perhaps multitasking, transposing on Finale or Sibelius in the background while burning CDs in another window and pondering music’s moral state in between, too busy to avail themselves of a spellchecker. This is all coming out overly snarky ... am a big fan of Sequenza 21 ...

Without being presumptuous, I guess it will have to be up to me to answer the Eternal Question for all composers for All Time. I would refer them once again to Roland Barthes’ wonderful dictum “there is only what I would choose to write, to put forth in this world of mine, and what I choose not to.” I apply this dictum daily, thousands of times, when playing the same old boring totally unexciting (just kidding, for those with no ear for irony) Bach phrase again, or some stupid out-of-touch-with-modernity (still kidding!) Beethoven thingy, and I am teetering between “Ways To Play This” and some are Interesting, some are Unexpected, some are Classic--oh oh oh, the burden of choice!--and then finally there is a period of honestly asking myself, “what would I choose to hear? how is this meaningful to me? what makes me sit back and say that is beautiful?” and there is the test, does this wow me, is what I’m hearing interesting to me, 2006 Jeremy?, and I look for the answers through that set of questions (and similar)... through the self-wow test ... It’s all really spectacularly beautiful heady totally tremendous stuff, so that when I have to go out of the apartment and away from my Linus-esque security blanket combo of piano and Great Masters to get some coffee from some perky young thing I get a little, you know, on edge.

Itinerary: Prussia Cove - Upper West Side

2006-10-03T16:13:00.000-04:00

At Saigon Grill two black-haired, scruffy male singers are arguing over a melody, singing it to each other in solfège. I admit, I find this reprehensible. As I settle in for yet another Vietnamese luncheon, I wish to be sonically neutral, awaiting my steaming gleaming heaping plate; solfège gives me preemptive indigestion. “It is a joy,” one explains unctuously to the other, “it is nice.” Instantly I want to smash and pulverize their joys so they would sit, at least, in shocked silence, which would be--what is the right word?--preferable.

They continue conversing semi-musically; I lose the thread. But then the more vocal one pipes up his instrument and says: “I was like” -- cluck -- “honey,” initiating the cadence so familiar to New Yorkers, the beautiful scraping rhythm and refrain of someone finally informing an irritating other exactly how clueless they are, “that’s the problem... you have NO technique.” His hands move quickly outward in a paradoxical demonstration of nonexistence.

Ah, I have travelled so far.

I climbed over and between black, brown and gray rocks, negotiating a route which just seemed too detailed. Patience-testing. Each rock, I thought, is a different shape. Very few were obligingly flat-topped, and some were slippery with seaweed, and the long beach was there in the distance like advertised paradise, awaiting my trip through rocky limbo. I crawled, stepped, braced, squeezed; time passed. Finally the rocks began to thin, and I found a sandy strip and pulled off my brown shoes and set them on the gray wet sand and also my white socks which looked so strangely luminous-white, and set them in a safe zone away from changing tides, and went out to the crescent of soft sand with the beautiful shallow approaching waves, waves an inch deep at most which crept up the sand like long water fingers.

Alone--on a huge isolated beach with water coming up which would eventually touch the crumbling cliffs at my back. Ah, I thought, addressing the ocean in my mind, now we can really get down to business. Now we must have that heart-to-heart we’ve been postponing for so long, great Mother Ocean, and I prepared almost to fight it like a child taking on a bully. Kick it, splash it, give it what fer. Give vent to my joy. But the most extraordinary element, really, was that it was so apparent there was nothing to fight. Or I guess: it was amazing how this became apparent. There was a rhythm to this revelation. Some vector of intention which I had brought with me eagerly to the beach, some totally undeclared purpose, melted as my feet numbed happily in the cold shallow water. I swear the ocean seemed to answer with a giant radiating slow silent word. No question was asked. The word, I repeat, was not the sounding waves; it had perhaps just as much to do with the slatish sky or the green gorse which hovered around on the perilous cliffs looking down to see what I, or it, might do. It was not spoken, it was situational, it was like air. Patient ocean, so different from I, hurried rock-clamberer. I searched my state of self; I did not feel affected, prideful, stupid, foolish, pressed, hopeful, hungry, insightful, wishful, accomplished, thoughtful, selfless, fretful, calm, centered, or scattered; adjectives fell off me like water off rock, innumerable.

If one thing could really be said about my situation is that I wanted to take greater advantage of it, to be worthier of it, to do justice to the word “experience.” And it was not following the conventional script, starting with “such a beautiful spot” and ending with a snapshot for one’s desktop picture... Yes it was incredibly beautiful and I felt enclosed, cuddled, sensually alive ... But most importantly some sense of presence occurred which reversed the conventional structure of action, not “I saw a beautiful place” but “A beautiful place spoke me.” Not spoke “to” me, for fuck’s sake; spoke me myself and myself only without prepositions, as if a man opened his mouth and out came a picture. My desire--more, more, experience this more--was only a kind of impatient vibrating at my own boundaries. If only I could be this way in the presence of other people, those dear to me, if only I would let them speak me, then I might speak them too; and it was very clear from the sea’s silent crashing that I was the only obstacle. Ocean was not approving or disapproving, just observing and for once I didn’t resent its personal advice. I was the only living rock on the beach, brightly clad, rolled-up jeans rock, pacing back and forth in the sunset, the only rock which was not married to the ground and sand and against which the sea might break itself merrily, if only I would let go of something more.

An hour or so later, I stared out the window of the main house at the Last Sunset, which daubed just the tip of the black promontory yellow-green, and listened to the crashing waves, now pane-muffled. Two banks of clouds sitting awkwardly in the sky were lit too at their tops with surreal sunlight and when I blinked, and looked again, a half moon had appeared between them, and it seemed like there were just too many beautiful events all at once and you just had to keep looking until some inner switch clicked off and you knew. Then: a melancholy dark dinner with candles and goodbyes; a short swift night drive down country lanes hurling headlamps against the endless curling green hedges; and white bunnies, lit up whiter-than-white, fleeing the oncoming car like scattered ghosts; and a long, clattering machine carrying me, us, back to civilization and do, re, mi.

7:37 AM, Paddington Station

2006-10-03T09:54:00.000-04:00

A certain cellist who shall remain nameless (but whose initials are those of a very popular magazine with a recurring swimsuit issue) seems to think Clara Schumann may have not been a very nice person. I cannot supply a transcript of the late night discussion here, for reasons of decency. The Great Clara Debate, pro or con, rages on, as if we are somehow angry with Music History for allowing two of our Favorite Guys to fall in love with the same Controlling Woman.

However, I was shifting somewhat Pro-Clara (doesn’t that sound like a shampoo?), while playing her husband’s piano quartet.

Clause one of the universal indictment: she applied pressure to her husband, encouraging him to write in classical forms (sonata etc.) when his genius was suited to a more radical reinvention of form: to shorter pieces linked in chains, or some other solution which he might have found if only Clara hadn’t been such a stickler. This indictment is irrefutably founded on hypotheticals. I too am impossibly seduced by what Schumann might have written. Yes, we have Davidsbündlertänze, we have Carnaval, and the strange sonata amalgam of the Fantasy ... but don’t you sometimes catch yourself imagining some even more revolutionary work, in which Schumann’s tremendous imagination dissolves the whole Narrative Ethos of Western Music into heartrending fragments, in which one no longer longs for, no longer requires coherence? Something which would have ended the whole infantile fetishization of Sonata Form, which at times debilitated even the greatest Romantics? I do.

Rufus Wainwright has something to say about Schumann; he just came on the Starbucks soundtrack here in Paddington ... but I can’t quite translate the message ...

But let’s consider another tantalizing hypothetical: without Clara’s pushing Robert might never have pondered in depth the delicate “fantasization” of the Classical harmonic world. Sitting in Prussia Cove, I find myself close to the place in my brain I inhabit when I am in love (substituting music as so often for elusive reality), listening to the unfolding opening of the Piano Quartet. The strings play E-flats, and the piano plays an ascending sixth:

This resounding sixth, made blurry totality by the held pedal ... a fantastic otherworldly sound, predicated on the simplest proposition: the first note, the bass, is not the root of the chord, but its third. Why couldn’t other composers think of that bar? Something Brahms only rarely (if ever) learned to do: make the first bar an “extra” bar, an unnecessary item, a non-event depending on how you count events -- a bar for listening, not telling (Beethoven slow movement of Hammerklavier opening). A bar in which semantic space is opened, not defined.

The pedal and the ascent from the deep bass--the bass which refuses to go away just yet, at least not until we have truly heard it--is a Romantic symbol, connoting space, aura: as if E-flat major (that most classical, refined, elevated of keys) were echoed off something greater, were the mere worldly reverberation of a more profound spiritual force. (Pedal: echo, overtone, undampened string, vibration.) E-flat has arrived from somewhere; the piano suggests somehow the existence of this other place without being able, in music, to show it. Incredibly, the phrase that the strings play in response to this enigma could easily be an opening by Mozart/Beethoven/Haydn--simple, textbook, linear, architectural, tonic-to-dominant.

The Classical Phrase is thus “born” out of the sound of E-flat major, out of the pedalled ambiguity. Classical clarity has been reframed, resituated--in the context, perhaps, of pure sound. (Schumann’s opening bar implores us to hear sound as sound, not as discourse.)

The opening, “listening,” bar is Romantic enigma, and the next two bars are pure Classicism; the slow introduction is a gentle (but absolutely riveting) dialogue between these tendencies: not a competition between them but an interlacing, in which fantasy and phrase (yearning and definition) use each other as points of reference, to supply each other’s lack.

So, too, the opening of the ensuing Allegro non troppo. Schumann launches us with what could be a classical antecedent:

but then composes a strange, spinning, asymmetrical consequent:

There is no way to know when the piano will finish; the chain of notes is endless, undelineating and undelineated, as if the pianist is simply lost in the idea, in the joyful setting-forth. So: in place of the answered question, we get a wandering curlicue. Schumann adores placing the ungrammatical in the grammatical niche, sticking an adjective where the verb must be. In this case, no resolution of the dominant seventh ... simply an elaboration of it, a giant Romantic ornament.

Somehow, Schumann’s cross-pollination of Classic and Romantic maintains a Mozartean transparency, a charm and elegance. The junctures are strange but not jolting. In the Piano Quartet he provides Romanticism without decadence or decay, in joyful, prideless, humorous possession of aesthetic discoveries, not collapsed into struggle or conflict or any kind of despair or confusion. In other words: a high water point, a magical moment in Music History. Where would all this be without Clara? Unanswerable question. Schumann’s encounter (in this case) with classical form produces an unbelievable and delicate fusion, a kind of perfection in which the gushing Romantic is not at all tiresome in his teenage accesses of passion and does not wear himself out yearning but makes his passionate singing useful to the adult world. He refutes Rilke’s annoying, pretentious Zen-ishness:

Song, as you have taught it, is not desire,
not wooing any grace that can be achieved;
song is reality...
Young man,
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
was forced wide open by your own voice--learn
to forget that passionate music. It will end.

He (Robert Schumann) says: Rainer, I prefer not to forget that passionate music. I am a young man loving, and I will woo, and achieve grace. Which is why I (Jeremy Denk) will--for the moment--defend Clara from the besmirching hand, and live for a few more days with Schumann’s magical-classical E-flat major (like magical realism), and not so much with Rilke’s melancholy, oh-so-enlightened, resigned “reality.” Schumann's passionate music does not seem yet to have found its end, so there.

Learish Addenda

2006-09-23T15:13:00.000-04:00

As I was rereading King Lear, I came across the following lines of villainous Edmund:

Pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o'Bedlam. -- O, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi.

A helpful note in the Arden edition reads:

Fa ... mi Edmund sings, as if unaware of Edgar's approach, in order the fourth, fifth, sixth and third notes of the scale of C major, a discordant motto, Hunter suggests, appropriate to the character of Edmund: 'He thus moves across the interval of the augmented fourth, called diabolus in musica (the devil in music).'

Now, without really doing any hard research except a Googling, it seems this footnote must be wrong, and I am so very eager to ascribe it to a general cluelessness about music prevalent among some theatre people... I smell a rat discussing "C major" per se in the 1604 environs ... and F, G, A, E, does not outline a tritone; there are even no tritones within it. Before I burn my Arden edition in a fit of rage, are there any Shakespearians out there who can clarify this mystery? Pretty pretty please?

Also, to add to my last post about Bach and Lear, the following wonderful quote:

instead of one unitary passage of time, then, there are many temporal dimensions leading us back into Bach's fugal workshop, in which musical thinking and the relations between musical ideas and God-given principles of harmony exist in a tension with the ultimate order in which the results nominally appear.

And lastly, a dear friend has sent me the very first Think Denk T-shirt:

Many thanks.

Rereading, Rewriting, Being

2006-09-21T15:35:00.000-04:00

Whole painstaking books vanish from my mind like dreams. I stare at their spines on my shelves and wonder what they were ever about. I completely forgot I had read Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and I “began” to read it with enthusiasm until, about 40 pages in, familiarity overwhelmed me, dusty characters came to life, and I closed the book, smarting with an unpleasant sense of uncontrollable deja vu: a sense of being lost in a memory labyrinth, with no bread crumbs or string. We are curiously attached to knowing the when and where of the beginnings of our memories, the origins of shreds of information (where do I know that person from?, why is this important to me? etc.), perhaps because without the labeling system, without a chronology and a cause, information and events become depressingly infinite. Infinite in the manner of Kafkesque, recursive visions. Proust asks himself a question: why is this madeleine meaningful to me? and seven novels later he finds, more or less, an answer: an answer which simultaneously “solves” the problem of happiness.

This business of forgetting books makes me question the purpose of reading them in the first place. In order for me to really remember a book, some extraordinary thing must happen; I have to almost rewrite it within myself. The process of remembering is painstaking. The book must lurk around, by the bed, in the kitchen, floating around the floor, hanging around my feet like a pet: a friend or foe who won’t go away; it must turn up at unexpected, undesired times; it must be picked up on random, elusive, unmotivated occasions and read and reread until its cadences and turns and twists begin to separate from from the contingent, temporal crossing of the novel-from-beginning-to-end. I imagine Bach’s pupils copying out by candlelight the preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

There are of course many musical works I have absorbed in this fashion, so that I could perform them now at a moment’s notice, or probably write them down with only a few mistakes on manuscript paper; these pieces have made the difficult journey from outside to inside... Come to think of it: music is constantly being copied onto the hard drive of my brain. I’m sure there are occasional “errors” of overlap--in the jargon perhaps “buffer overrun,” please correct me here--where the music gets written into the parts of my brain I use for, say, interpersonal interaction. So when a friend comes to me in a bad mood and I am trying to cheer them up, some of what I do and say is actually Op. 111, encoded, almost by accident. Because total disentanglement is impossible. I’m sure this is true: that bits of music are floating around my brain liberally, radically, and influence my behavior at all times--when I’m ordering coffee, or when I’m sticking my bankcard yet again in the ATM. Just a few days ago, I began practicing the first fugue of the Well Tempered Clavier, and I can feel now the subject and its permutations working in me, like a spider, spinning webs of remembrance which get blown apart and reconstructed; the piece is trying madly to write itself within me before I can forget. Probably the “sensible” (but ultimately stupid) part of unconscious me is trying to fight these memorable notes, whose will is so strong, to make place for other, newer, less important memories. I am walking home from the gym, in the first coolness of fall, surrounded by mangoes on carts and ladies with canes and offers for rent and bottles for sale, and in the chaos of the city street the fugue subject stays with me absolutely: at the ends of sentences, around the corner of every other thought, behind every approaching face, an incorporeal yearning friend. I ascribe the powerful will of the notes to be learned to some greatness of the notes themselves, to the composer’s skill and invention; but this is partly a copout. I have with long practice turned myself into a note vacuum and now the mechanism cannot be stopped; I am, let’s face it, a machine for absorbing music. And, like any useful or useless machine, I am for sale.

That sounded rather dreary, or negative. I do not mean to be; I was just helplessly and tangentially following a thought. The theme of Bach which is coursing through me right now has nothing negative about it...

And as I sing it to myself (though without singing, actually... what is that way of thinking a phrase without singing or humming? is there a word for that? we should invent it right now...) it lifts me up, makes me feel like I am becoming... To escape its perpetual it-ness and this tension of happiness I try to account for the vector of this little constellation of notes and dip in my reservoir of words for a few sad pseudo-synonyms: “purity,” “ascent,” “balance,” “transference,” “intervallic space,” “intersecting fourths,” most too general to be meaningful at all. And when I think about Op. 111 “as a whole,” for instance, when I try to call to my mind the idea of the piece, what is the piece?, inevitably the return of this operation includes, for example, a night when I played it in Philadelphia, and my parents locked their keys in their rental car; a certain turn of my head at a certain moment when I felt the phrase went just so; an afternoon in Beacon when the high pianissimo notes seemed to fly into the rafters, looking for the stars they seemed to symbolize; a lecture in Vermont about trenchant anomalies; a party in Bloomington; a late night of practicing it in my apartment interrupted when my mate came in to complain about me practicing so late, which ended predictably, with us making out at the piano, smashing out inadvertent clusters; a sad morning hungover in South Carolina eating barbecue at the airport, waiting desperately to either stay or go home: in other words, the piece in all its immaculate musicality and purity, in order to express itself in my brain, reaches out for bits of me (some quite impure) it can use as “words;” it reaches into the other areas of my consciousness, grabbing onto the other areas like walls it wants to climb into meaning.

I began to think about “rereading” for the silliest (and therefore most wonderful) of reasons. The other day, in my farewell to the WB channel, I referenced King Lear, and suddenly felt like that play was way too far from me, my vision of it was too vague. In the middle of paying bills, sorting mail, vacuuming, practicing fugues, and a million annoying errands, I began to reward myself with a page at a time of Shakespeare. The horror dawned; I had made a most colossal, embarrassing error in my WB post, as of course Lear’s eyes are not plucked out, but Gloucester’s, and what kind of idiot (i.e. me) would forget that, as the meeting of the two complementary victims of fate--the now totally senile Lear and the eyeless but still lucid Gloucester--could possibly be regarded as the emotional climax of the play:

GLOUCESTER: ... Dost thou know me?
LEAR: I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squint at me?
No, do thy worst, blind Cupid, I’ll not love.
Read thou this challenge, mark but the penning of it.
GLOUCESTER: Were all thy letters suns, I could not see one...
LEAR: Read.
GLOUCESTER: What? With the case of eyes?
LEAR: Oh ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light, yet you see how this world goes.
GLOUCESTER: I see it feelingly.
LEAR: What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears...

The madman lectures the blind man on vision and truth. A passage that every musician should have at hand or at mind. The difficult question pokes at me: how could I have read this painful, incredible exchange, and forgotten it completely? (I feel sure I’ve read the play at least twice.) The Moment seems indelible, unforgettable ... but somehow I had not managed to write it within myself; perhaps I hadn’t looked with my ears?

The removal of Gloucester’s eyes has horror-value, of course, and also drama-value, serving as a climax proving the cruelty of Regan (until then somewhat in doubt), but its most seductive function is, I think, theme-value, or its terrifying resonance in the world of ideas (idea-value, language-value, meaning-value). To state the obvious: the literal blindness is really only the creation, in so-called reality, of Gloucester’s earlier blindness to reality, i.e. to the real nature of his two sons. It is a stripping-away; but it is the removal--we are made to understand--solely of the appearance of sight (a beautiful paradox), of sight’s external manifestations, as punishment for a deeper truer preexisting blindness, a terrible forced coincidence of state-of-mind and state-of-body. And just when he can no longer physically see, suddenly moral sight begins to come to torment him: similar paradoxes and Catch-22s of life run off in every direction like rats in this play, as if Gloucester’s predicament were a virus of meaning that everyone must catch. Shakespeare’s unfolding of the drama, his conception of the plot, is obviously shaped and forced to include numerous “rereadings” of this blindness theme, seemingly infinite permutations where Gloucester’s condition is subject to linguistic, metaphoric, thematic play: Gloucester comes into contact with his son, but does not recognize him (“see” him); he is led to his desired suicide by this disguised son, but is tricked (once again blind, doubly blind, living in a world others create); he lives and is lectured by mad Lear, who is oddly sounding truer than ever before (what is “to see,” “to know”?); he sits on stage looking obviously at nothing while the battle rages and defeat for Cordelia and Lear results (blind injustice?); he finally learns his son’s identity and at that moment of solace dies (to see equals death). Magnificent riffs on sight and sense are everywhere:

GLOUCESTER: I have no way, and therefore want no eyes:
I stumbled when I saw. Full oft ‘tis seen
Our means secure us and our mere defects
Prove our commodities. O dear son Edgar,
The food of thy abused father’s wrath,
Might I but live to see thee in my touch,
I’d say I had eyes again.

So, one can reread King Lear. But within the space of the play, Shakespeare is also rereading; his writing is a rereading, of an idea, a character, a node of meaning... Every time that we graze over this theme, there is a kind of resonance; some deep string is plucked again, at a frequency very different from Plot; this string crosses over the temporal order of the play, creates an atemporal order, a second plotting, a second vision, a second sight: a contrapuntal voice?

I was sitting on the stage of the Academy, playing for the second or third time through the Sarabande of the E minor Partita, when this aspect of the Partitas became very strangely and hauntingly apparent to me: tangible-ghostly. Why do ideas occur to one at a particular moment rather than another? (Why does one remember one book and not another?) It was an odd, tired moment of extenuation when the body and mind were wrung for one last drop of inspiration.

The dialogue of the various movements suddenly seemed like a process of remembering or retracing: a holding-on, like trying to find some meaning in the notes that will stick, that will not vanish. Why is this motive meaningful to me? Or perhaps: through struggle and recurrence and varied contemplation, trying to find and create a new meaning (a new “invention”), a new definition in the dictionary. And the Sarabande seems to rove farthest and dig deepest. Blah blah blah; I could reiterate what I have said here before, replucking a tired theme, throwing out yet again the Music Theory Lecture Talking Point: that the Sarabande “reworks” (all that meaning into one stupid verb) the opening motto of the Toccata. But--after all the searching for a way to say it, it does so much more than that: it is completely woven from the earlier idea in such an extraordinary way that it seems to be grappling with it, addressing consequences, ramifications, connotations: pursuing the chain of musical metaphor.

After all, the opening idea of the piece is not really a theme (in the musical sense); it is more a Theme (in the literary sense).

It is too universal and too brief to be Melody; it seems constantly to ask the question: what will I create? It has tendencies; it has combinative force. All but a few (exceptional) moments of the Sarabande can be understood as satellites, as Its creations. The composer does not just vary or rewrite it; he rereads it, obsessively, like someone desperate not to forget. In the Toccata the Idea appears, paradigmatically, as a pair of discrete, marked question-and-answer phrases; or at least it is made to form them, just as Gloucester’s spiritual blindness is made to be an actual blindness (incidental, but essential). But, in the Sarabande, these binary pairs, these simple phrases, are gone, are subsumed into winding, sinuous, inescapable totality: the Idea is now read as a run-on, elusive, impossible sentence, still however rambling constantly back into its selfsame Idea. Each strange miraculous corner of this sentence is marked by this Different-but-Sameness; each chord of landing, each instance of the motive is a different event, a new “interpretation” of the idea. Sometimes the winding brings us into major keys, contradicting the tragic connotations of the Idea, creating heartbreaking paradoxical readings (“I stumbled when I saw,” “a chance which does redeem all sorrows/That I have ever felt.”). The grammar of the Idea is [dotted rhythm:dissonance:release] and Bach rereads all of these, concealing or exaggerating the dotted idea, extenuating the dissonances, transforming the releases into further dissonances. Particularly at the outset of the second half (which begins with a kind of dutiful inversion of the Idea), Bach toys with enormous expansions, almost beyond hearing, of the dissonant chords. At these moments he wanders so far afield that you barely think it is the Idea anymore (at this moment the annoying student in Music Theory class pipes up to say “do you think Bach really heard that--irritating whine here--as a variation of the main idea, aren’t you stretching things a bit?” and you give them the look of death and you wonder where they ever got the notion in their undergraduate heads to define the limits of Bach’s hearing), but you are forced to wonder anyway; he forces you towards the border where the individualized Idea (the motive, the essence) begins to melt into the total, undifferentiated possibility of all Ideas, of everything: the terrible place where the Idea could be forgotten, like so many books on my shelves.

Is this chain of readings intended simply to make us remember the Idea? Just to implant some sort of “hook”, to get us to whistle the tune, to come back for more? Of course not. The myriad readings keep leading us back to the Idea and then back out to the next reading, and on and on in an endless loop, a loop which delineates and symbolizes, I think, an attempted act of understanding: something as simple and unattainable and infinite as a human thought.

On the stage there, in my socks and not at all well-dressed, leaping around between takes like a puppy, by turns caffeinated out of my mind and fading fast, I added each take to the last and trusted/hoped the microphone would remember at least some of my meanings, some of my thoughts. I felt haunted, by a sense of Bach haunting himself, grappling personally with the material, like any other human, grappling and seeing the limits and possibilities of the Ideas he himself had created or invoked. His musical ideas were his books and he wanted to really know them, not to look at them like strangers. This vision ended on the train ride after the session, where I looked out the gray window at the impending hurricane and felt a slight fever begin to come on, dark evening, the houses with lamps depressingly distant and me passing by in the wracked train, stressed out for no reason, making nonsense of the simplest possible thing. I typed on the computer: “To recover the powerful experience, the archetypal experience, and to believe it.” And I went on about the fugue/Gigue, talking about it as if it were a book to be read:

“In the fugue subject ... melody as self-sufficient character or identity (I am what I am, take what meanings you can); then the second subject is a layer of clarification (the theme can “take comfort” from the other subject, from a bassline); the third entrance... gradually it is harder and harder to hear the theme through the density of other voices.... so the theme loses itself in its own understanding... the “miracle” that the various voices are able to coexist, the thrill of more going on than the conscious mind can simultaneously process; the constant onset of dissonances, like a kaleidoscopic grammar; the abandon of counterpoint.”

And I fell asleep and forgot everything.

Injustice

2006-09-21T09:06:00.000-04:00

Some good friends of mine are heading out today to Laramie, Wyoming to play a concert. I have never played there, which really doesn't seem quite fair, for obvious reasons:

There once was a pianist named Jeremy
Who flew out to give concerts in Laramie
But as he sat down to play
A rip at his rear made him say
"My buttocks are really quite bare, Ah me!"

Apologies. Real post later. It seems to me the first two lines are pretty much set; if you come up with any better conclusions, please let me know.

Not Arrivederci, but Addio

2006-09-17T12:21:00.000-04:00

There are some cultural events so momentous, dear readers, that I must suspend the daily rotor of events, must pause even mid-Venti, unfolding and plugging in the aluminum square which skeptical future generations, uncomprehending, will have to speculate was some sort of universal God or Icon, and lay fingers velvety over the clicking surfaces, and scrounge around in the inaccessible, ever-disappearing-behind-a-curtain gray matter for some appropriate thunderbolt of expression, some wordnugget to convey their magnitude to you (“Hypocrite lecteur,” cf. Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal). Such is today’s WB Farewell (link here).

My friend A was first shocked by this news, as she knew what a blow it would be to me. Before she could shield, deflect, and conceal the rush of empathetic emotion, her naked sense of my vulnerability leaked through: “But your fantasy world... will shrink ... and dry up ... like a raisin ...” (I’m paraphrasing a bit here, she was more eloquent and her simile was less nutritious.) It is not every morning that you contemplate pre-coffee the destruction of your extended adolescence. It is true:

--I have spent lamentable hours banging head against wall wondering whether Ben or Noel would be the preferable mate for Felicity;

-- I have imbibed numerous margaritas on my nearly astroturf carpet and swallowed back horrendous oily torrents of Chinese food watching unlikely boyfriends get run over by buses and submit to all sorts of preposterous plot twists;

-- I have wept in Middlebury on a cloudy cold afternoon (when I should have been practicing) while watching wobbly VHSes of season 5 of Buffy (yes the one where she dies, twice), and have seriously compared the cold onset of early winter, and the running of half-icy streams, to Buffy’s Dostoevskian trials, her angry submission to fate, the teenaged opposite of late Beethovenian peaceful resignation, but with the same result;

-- I have laughed at Angel’s supernatural irony, at the postmodern pancake of vampire and teen cliche, and have allowed it to permeate my pores, contaminating my aesthetic judgment permanently;

-- I have winced and groaned under the sheer obvious manufactured pathos and lesson-learning of Dawson’s Creek, and I fought the pain of perpetual insults to my intelligence, and still found time to get teary-eyed whenever Joey gets conflicted (often), or when Dawson and Pacey throw their man-child tantrums with elicited unconviction, or when slimy nostalgia vomits all over the script and no one bothers to clean it up, including me;

This and so much more, I have done. I cannot confess it all; the sins I have committed with the WB are beyond number, like strollers in my 93rd Street Starbucks. And now, having defiled me, having taken the virginity of my image-repertoire, the WB plans to just up and leave, to dissolve into some other corporation and leave me adrift, high and dry, in my 30s, with a heap of desiccated psychobabble at my feet in the sands of unplotted time. As A wryly observed, “you might see this as an opportunity,” a time to quote-un-quote, “throw away the short pants.” I pretend to have no idea what this expression means. And yes I deliberately put quotations redundantly around the quote-un-quote, do you have a problem with that?

I’m not sure if this is true, but that of course will not stop me from saying it, in a really exaggerated, declarative manner: I believe the WB represents a climactic, pivotal event in the transformation of the American Pop Culture Narrative, in which all stories, no matter how great or small or implausible or profound, can (nay, must!) be transferred into the theatre of the American campus/schoolyard. In fact, I think there can be only two choices for the writer of a modern script (as Barthes points out, “there is only what I can choose to write, to put forth in this world of mine, and what I choose not to”): high school, or college. Once you have chosen, your casting is pretty much done, then pop whatever timeless narrative you wish into it, superimpose the element of Wanting to Be Popular if necessary, contrive a scene with a swimming pool (to get your money’s worth out of the Young Bodies you have employed), save it to disk, and await royalties. Soon, I am sure, there will be a King Lear set in high school, and the doddering protagonist will be played by an over-the-hill senior, who has been driven senile by too many late nights at the drive-thru, or by some chemicals they put in the tater tots (King Lear meets Erin Brockovich?). He (or she) will pass power down to some nascent popular boys or girls and I think the rest writes itself. I will call it King Larson. Larson/Lear will be played by Chad Michael Murray.

His eyes will not be gouged, but his sunglasses will be seriously damaged. Thank you, thank you, send bids for the script to my friend A ... as revenge for her too-penetrating analysis of my emotional situation. Anyway, back to my serious point, which is that, in the world of American Narrative, (ridiculous generalization follows of course, but that is only my revenge on the generalizing nature of Narrative, generally), beyond the college years yawns an endless abyss where only pockmarked policemen and disillusioned spouses dwell in a purgatory of nondefinitive endings. Jack McCoy lurks as aging icon of sexless justice (world of the mind!). Need I mention NYPD Blue? There is no easy “venue” for these “late-life” dramas; they are always gritty, or tormented. I eagerly await a prime-time drama about graduate students doing their dissertations (let’s call it “ABD”, and of course it would have to be on ABC). If you want to explore this existence beyond the 21 mark, you must then do a story about elusive disintegrations, loss, memory, or put in a compensatory amount of violence; something must either trivialize or literarize the story. I loved You Can Count on Me, but case in point: it is tinged with sadness, regret, loss, and it is no longer really a STORY. It is just kind of a moment between further disintegrations. The Narrative, these days, is so dependent upon the geographical limitations of the campus; like a nervous child dropped at school, it gets frightened when it has to wander off; writers behave as if the geographical boundary also creates and implies some welcome emotional limitations: as long as they stay on campus they are safe and a story can be told.

The WB, by planting not just naive, sexually precocious youngsters (paradox?), but also vampires and demons, on campus, and by framing their shows, despite all contradicting transcendencies of time and space, to begin and end with matriculations and graduations (“behold this is the world”), created and glorified this campuscosmos and invited us to live in it, if only in the mind. And I today, between 5 and 10 Eastern time (4/9 Central) must bid farewell to the landscaped, hour-parcelled world they seduced me into; I must lose, finally, even the benefits of my Faustian bargain. If I arrange to videotape today’s episodes, and watch them again and again, will that still constitute some sort of mature moving on, or must I just let it go, watch and weep and let them vanish into ether and memory? What would Buffy tell me to do, I wonder ...

Overdue Recommendation

2006-09-13T18:08:00.000-04:00

I advise readers of this blog to hear Gabriel Kahane's masterful setting of a CraigsList posting ("Neurotic and Lonely"), immediately. Go to his MySpace page, and click on CraigslistNeurotic...

Unnoticeable Variability

2006-09-08T15:40:00.000-04:00

“Yes, I confess, to my eternal chagrin I am indeed a chip man.” I couldn’t really believe this sentence fell out of my mouth. If you haven’t traveled on Amtrak recently, you are in for a surprise; pursuant to some distant policy, the Acela workers are now aggressively pushing product. I came up, ordered a hot dog and a soda, and in those pregnant, magical moments while the dog steamed in a mysteriously recessed industrial microwave, the man behind the counter proposed a bag of chips. “Nothing could be better than a cold soda,” he said, his eyes seeming to mist, “a hot dog, and some chips.” I was swept up (as so often) in his faux emotion; I paused, teetered, acquiesced. He smiled toothily. “Yeah, I thought you were a chip man, just from the look of you,” he said, and I had to admit the obvious. And that’s when I said the ridiculous sentence. I got a laugh from the woman next in line, and went back to my car and smeared Grey Poupon on my sweaty dog with an undeserved smile on my face of comic accomplishment.

Last night I found myself again clutching chips with amusement in a train, some baked KC Masterpiece Lays chips. Perhaps some distant delicious barbecued pork might, if perfectly cooked and served, be declared, after a beer or five, a “masterpiece,” with genuine slavering emotion, and yet, and yet! ... after the translation of the barbecue to the sauce and of the sauce to the sauce powder and the powder into the baked, processed potato chip: in that process somewhere the “masterpiece” may have been lost. After eating several chips I ran my hands through my hair and realized now the reddish powder was part of my “do,” and thus decorated (a soldier of Sodium Benzoate) I braved the fluorescent return to the city. I held my head high as I strode through Grand Central Station, a man who is willing to enter the metropolis becrumbed. I must admit, to return, like some composers, to a recurring unimportant theme: I am truly a chip man; I perpetually feel a tension between the finite nature of life and the seemingly infinite nature of chips to be consumed. Many evenings have I succumbed to late night chip-and-salsa cravings only to wake at 3 am with a sour post-vision of chile and garlic and the oily remnants of fried corn tortillas weighing down my pores. And despite all this punishment and regret beyond measure the chip still stands, still calls... like a Siren ...

I have been peripatetic of late and obviously the to-and-fro has tolled upon my brain horrendously. When you travel you often practice in strange places and of course, like any migrating species, you have to explore your new terrain, get a feel for predators, food supply, etc. I was sitting in a beautiful studio in NEC (thanks so much Ms. Byun!) and when you are in teachers’ studios and you find yourself unable to concentrate you wander and peep. There were several xeroxes on a counter and this one caught my eye:

But precisely the most important and best thing, namely, that unnoticeable variability of the tempo, of the timbres, simply does not happen in a mechanical way and through rehearsal...
The greatest technical correctness and control one can achieve does not replace the lack of inspiration; but it does have the most fateful consequences for music making as a whole. Excessive technical control, that is, the evenly executed technical perfection of all details, which as such take on a completely different character than intended by their creators, who in their conception always proceeded from the whole. The naturally productive route by which the details are viewed and interpreted by way of the whole, is turned around. The improvisational element is essentially lost, indeed it loses its very concept--this improvisational quality, which does not represent some mere accident, something one can do with or without, but rather is, quite simply, the ultimate source of all great, creative, necessary music-making.
--Furtwangler

Wow. I was really enjoying that quote, from very near the outset, with that enticing phrase the “unnoticeable variability of the tempo, of the timbres.” It’s so very true, that the smallest shifts in tempo feeling are what often make the difference for me between redemptive and annoying performances; or as my late teacher used to say, motion is not as important as mobility. It was late in the evening; Boston lights twinkled; and I was gradually giving in (not very reluctantly) to the notion that no more practicing could be done and thinking emotionally about the softness of my bed at the delightful Bertram Inn, when I realized I was listening, without knowing it, to some student practicing the Chopin G minor Ballade. Mystery Student X assayed a plain version of the coda, which all persons affiliated with the piano must view as one of those inescapable obstacles of music education; as one of those perennial iconic misfortunes which the great genius of Chopin visited upon the planet, in order that endless multitudes of students and faculty learn to suffer and endure; a passage of brilliance, originality and virtuosity so endowed with attraction that it must paradoxically be destroyed under the steamroller of endless repetition. I’m talking about:

And after one run-through of that, X was obviously dissatisfied. Perhaps it was uneven? It all sounded clean to me, through the wall, a notoriously unreliable filter, but perhaps (and I know it well) there was some lingering fear of possible future missed notes, even in the absence of present ones. And so X began practicing “in rhythms”:

AAAAAAAHHHHHH! I stared at the Furtwangler quote, propped on the piano, and he seemed to be speaking, screaming, begging for the Chopin to stop, begging for the Details to be forgotten and the Whole once more to be glimpsed and attempted; and I envisioned the forces of Evenness and the forces of Variability locked in mortal combat, grappling for the soul of the modern Conservatory. The student could never have known how ironic his/her practicing was to me at the moment. It was all too much, I snapped up my Chausson and my quote and my bag and left NEC behind in my dust, via the agency of an insane Boston cabbie (is there any other kind?), who wanted to take lessons from me (me! the madman who fled the Conservatory at 10 pm!) and back at the Inn half-dressed I watched doctors slowly and methodically remove a 200-pound tumor from a woman, and wondered how it got to be 200 pounds, and fell into a deep but unnoticeably variable sleep.

Wholes

2006-08-26T11:47:00.000-04:00

Music gazes at its listener with empty eyes, and the more deeply one immerses oneself in it, the more incomprehensible its ultimate purpose becomes, until one learns that the answer, if such is possible, does not lie in contemplation, but in interpretation. In other words, the only person who can solve the riddle of music is the one who plays it correctly, as something whole.

--Theodor Adorno, The Relationship of Philosophy and Music, tr. Susan Gillespie

Every since I picked up a volume of Adorno essays at my beloved Labyrinth Books, I have been going through a mild Adorno phase and I especially enjoy hauling this volume to the New York Sports Club and barely stuffing it into the little bookslot of the Stairmaster and staring smugly at my neighbors with their pitiful People Magazines. They stare back at me with empty eyes, and I must admit as the sweat begins to pour down my face that it becomes hard to concentrate on a passage like--

Hence the ontological definition of music as a language sui generis is either so abstract that it says nothing more than that between the individual musical facts there exists an articulated context that is "logical" in its own way, as Harburger, for example, has attempted to demonstrate in his book on meta-logic.

--A footnote suggests there is more to learn about Harburger, but I do not interrupt my workout to check.

Somehow that sentence about the empty eyes and the interpreter solving the riddle of the purpose of the piece made it through to my brain, despite all the distractions of the NYSC, and left an impression. I abandoned my dampened Stairmaster more pensively than I climbed it. A piece, even one you know well, can feel like you just dropped all the items in your shopping bag and they are rolling across the floor in every direction. Every day, every performance, every iteration you have to gather them again (freshly, or else). But in this case, extending the metaphor as usual ad absurdum, before you return an item to the bag you must know how it belongs with the others, and even why you wanted it in the first place: a very emotional trip to the supermarket of musical ideas. You tie them together with (hopefully) invisible thread (the act of interpretation?), which can be drawn too loose or too tight.

Adorno had put into words what I realized was one of the motivating (subconscious?) themes of my practicing: the desire to bring all the parts into a whole, or to put it another way, the desire for the whole which allows the parts to exist meaningfully. I have been feeling this process and the tugs of these desires very intensely as I prepare the 4th and 6th Partitas of Bach. The Partitas are collections of dances, pieces written in genres, in a fixed stylized order; they don't have the obvious, free literary or narrative sweeps that one is assisted by in works of Schumann or Beethoven, for instance; but despite being collections and varied and myriad and stylized and fixed they each seem to be hovered over by some sort of guardian angel, a uniting spirit. Each seems like a miniature cosmos. Without trivializing, I hope I can say that the D major feels to me like some sort of total vision of happiness (which includes melancholy and reflection). Its final gigue is a virtuosic release: the most overt, affirmative kind of joy, and it seems to sum up without needing to "answer" or "correct" or "propose" or right any wrongs that may have occurred before. (Unlike, say, the last movements of Beethoven 5th and 9th Symphonies, to name some ridiculously contrasting examples.) It is the one I find myself most passionately attached to right now. I can even discriminate between the "type" of happiness of the D major and the more extremely comic, lighter (but perhaps less profound?) happiness of the G major.

The E minor, by contrast, lies in some uneasy relationship even to the idea of emotion or mood. Its first movement seems to have an obvious "emotive agenda;" it deals with the most prevalent tropes of musical tragedy: the falling sigh motif and the descending tetrachord. The first movement explores them exhaustively, in improvisation and in fugue, then the subsequent dances are haunted by the same ideas in disguise, most remarkably in the Sarabande. But the signifier and the signified are in a strange dance around each other. After the Gigue, is it possible to feel the piece has a tragic or melancholic effect? (Even after the Toccata I am not so sure.) The minor keys in Bach so often do not seem centrally about sadness, do not seem a vehicle even for an emotion primarily; they seem to have a dual role; they evoke the tragic while simultaneously creating a pathway to daring, to intellectual adventure, to compositional wildness. I am not saying that Bach thereby drains the music of emotional content (the hackneyed charge of Bach as an "intellectual" or "cerebral" composer); but the affective content becomes a conduit and not the subject of the discourse; this kind of altered state is evident in the Gigue, which to my mind is lit by an intense fire, with its leaps and constant interplay of voices, sometimes altogether overwhelming, more intensity than "can be played." Its difficulty (aside from technical demands) lies in that there is so much going on, so much density of tension, an unbelievable compression ... But after an altered state like that, it is not so easy to say what the whole "tone" of the piece is (it represents no emotion that I know); its very daring makes it difficult to compress into a whole, to solve its riddle.

At the same time that the piece thrills you, it draws you into its strange questions, including the "useless" question: what does it all mean? Play it as a whole, Adorno says, and you the player ask: well what the *(&(*)# is that? But somehow you also know. And maybe you're sitting over a dinner plate and your friend is telling you something and it occurs to you, how to play some moment in an Allemande (some wending, wonderful moment of ambiguous arrival or departure status) and you stare at your friend with empty eyes and can't wait to get back home, you grab a cab instead of the subway and throw your keys on the floor and play it and why is it never as good as it is in the mind? (Charles Ives, a great lover of Bach, laughing in the background: "My God! What has sound to do with music!")

Summer Clothes

2006-08-24T10:02:00.000-04:00

Here is a picture of my closet after all the summer's dirty clothes have been piled in it, so I can walk to and from my bed relatively unencumbered:

Who among you, faced with this kind of squalor, this daunting mountain of drudgery, would not prefer to escape forthwith and tout suite into the perfect ideal world of music, into its dancing spheres and lines?

Ah, but the wheels turn and even before my first cup of coffee it occurs to me. Perhaps I create a situation in my apartment, deliberately but subconsciously, so that I will be all the more tempted, nay even forced, to get myself to the piano right away! Perhaps it is not really laziness and slobbery but the most fiendishly clever practice motivation technique ever invented! Anybody with me? Anybody buying it?

Whatever

2006-08-21T22:45:00.000-04:00

Rats scurry into subway tunnels, teens discuss real estate with premature machismo, and airconditioners hum and drip irregularly. Sigh; all is as I left it here in New York City. It is now night and some of the edge is off. Earlier today, I sat in the backseat of my parents' rental and stared out a tinted window at the totally clear pure blue sky and dreamed of my feet over the edge of a pier, dipped in a cool northern lake. But compulsion drew me in, inexorably, out of the infinite green beauties, away from the fields, silos and flowers, into a small tight gray corner-metropolis. As I drove myself (different stage of the journey) down the Thruway, I imagined all the other people, leaving their families and vacations and the purity of the mountains and forests for Reality, Vice, Career and Corruption. It was such a cliche. How many of us there on the road were doing the same thing? Pondering their families while driving 70 miles-an-hour away from them? (Really, officer, I was only doing 65.) I thought of all the strange citythings that could and should never be communicated at the family reunion. They would not only be inappropriate; they would be meaningless there, Sanskrit scribblings. I guess reality can sometimes make these two imaginary worlds intersect, strangely. I thought about how I had to return from one world to the other, I thought of the metaphor behind the miles. Then, restless, trapped in my white rental car, I moved from metaphor to my dream--I could escape, head up to Schroon Lake for one last breather of the summer--but I turned the car south and smiled and gritted my teeth and paid the tolls and here I am.

Let the record state that a) if the Arnold Palmer is Iced Tea and Lemonade, b) the Jeremy Denk is Cranberry Juice Cocktail and Ginger Ale.

Let me address a totally different question: how does a touring musician while away down times? I sat In my Rhinebeck hotel room, surfing channels and always seeming to stop at the WB or F/X before accusing myself of vulgarity, etcetera: an endless cycle of TV self-recrimination. I am an artist; how can I watch this drivel? My reading material had run out, and off the shelf came an extraordinary thick volume: Danielle Steel's The House. Ah, yes, something even more empty than television ... Ever in search of exotic experiences, I began to read, with an odd compulsion, and then I sincerely could not stop, though I skimmed madly, in search of understanding, through its 533 large-print pages; I told myself I was a cynical visitor in quest of the key to its badness, but also I was just a plain old sentimental sop wanting to know how she would bring this train-wreck of a plot to an end. I have a little file on my computer called "first lines" where I put all the cool first lines of novels I will (probably) never write; I spend endless hours dreaming of interesting hooks to bring the reader into the worlds of these hypothetical narratives. But Danielle is not hung up on beginnings; boldly, even impudently, she dreams up the most boring imaginable first sentence, and lets it fly:

Sarah Anderson left her office at nine-thirty on a Tuesday morning in June for her ten o-clock appointment with Stanley Perlman.

I LOVE it. There's so much uninteresting detail, and so little grace. I have wracked my brain, but don't think the Tuesday has any metaphorical significance, and Danielle really wants us to know, though there is no future plot juncture depending on it, that it takes a half-hour to get from her office to Stanley's place. I suppose the sentence does convey a sense of specificity and punctuality, a kind of no-nonsense, life-is-not-about-wiffly-waffly-images kind of thing. Curious, for a romance. A pragmatic romance? Along those lines, I love her choices of names: nothing quirky, nothing off-type. The men mostly have nice masculine one-syllable names (Jeff, Phil, Dave, George) except for the French professional bachelor, Pierre. The women are a more gentle two-syllable crowd (Sarah, Audrey, Mimi) except for the uptight French wife, Marie-Louise, who needs a lot more space to be haughty. Interestingly, the money-hoarding genius at investing is named Stanley Perlman. Surely, there's no stereotype there.

Now, let us be the first to admit!: we are no strangers here at Think Denk to clumsy metaphors. But, one has to bow in reverent admiration at Miss Steel. Generally she avoids prose that is too far from naked fact, or generic account, preferring for instance:

Sarah came back to the apartment to put her dry cleaning away, and after that she went to the photography exhibit at the museum, and found it beautiful and interesting. She would have liked to share it with Phil, but she knew he wasn't crazy about museums. She went for a walk on the Marina Green after that, to get some exercise and air, and she was back at her apartment as six o'clock, after stopping at Safeway to buy some groceries.

Proust, eat your heart out. A passage like this makes me want to bring back Susan Sontag for a diatribe. But here Miss Steel goes trying out a little metaphor:

The day without him, his spending it with his friend without calling her, the way he talked about Dave's ex-wife and his girlfriend, and the exceptionally good sex she and Phil had had. All put together, it made for a puzzle where none of the pieces fit smoothly.

Aha! One tremendously awkward ("his spending it," "had had"), ungrammatical sentence, followed by an explanatory metaphor. Probably, I would suggest, "All put together, THEY made for a puzzle where none of the pieces fit smoothly." Anybody else agree on this? I'm not a stickler; plurals can become singulars and vice versa; to my mind, it's no biggie. But I sense Danielle felt she had gone too far out on a linguistic limb, that the meaning was not clear, and so she elucidates:

She felt as though she were trying to fit pieces together that showed trees, sky, half a cat, and part of a barn door.

And yet further, in case you missed the point:

All together they didn't make a picture. She knew what the images were, but none of them was complete, and she didn't feel whole, either.

Kerpow! Thud! Idea pounded into my head, for good, so hard that in fact my head hurts. Now some of you don't like it when I get too mean-spirited and snobby and stuff here on Think Denk and so you probably won't enjoy this little Danielle Steel moment. Can you forgive me? It's true, I can be a jerk. I'm just trying to show you that sometimes you can get so bored in your hotel room that in fact you will do ANYTHING, including read romance novels, and sometimes these unexpected, desperate diversions can be very diverting. I skimmed all the way to the end of The House and seriously had to know how it ended. In fact, once the heroine buys real estate, everything seems to fall into place. Her architect becomes her boyfriend, both her mother and grandmother find new husbands, the old boyfriend is revealed as a cad--

He could have been plunging into the spectacular blonde when she walked in, instead of whatever they were doing under the covers. Fortunately, it had been a cold night, and his apartment was always freezing, so they had stayed under the duvet.

--I admire the attention to climatic, and not just climactic, detail. Really a whole lifetime of growth and happiness seems to be compressed into one heavy mortgage, and I wondered if Danielle was in cahoots with the broker lobby. All my criticism is beyond useless, however; this authoress is laughing, has laughed, will continue to laugh, all the way to the bank, and if I got some laughter out of it too, and you readers do also, then who's really suffering? No one. I apologize to all Think Denk readers, in advance, who are Steel fans, and I hope Sarah and Jeff live happily ever after and I'm sure Phil will continue to be a selfish self-absorbed jerk and where's the remote?

If I Were

2006-08-14T07:30:00.000-04:00

URGENT. Can someone PLEASE tell the programming folks at Air France that "If I Were a Rich Man?" from Fiddler on the Roof is not really classical music, per se ... though I hate to be a stickler about labels. But once the tune got into my head, sneaking in by a combination of headphone and misnomer, I was humming it all the way through customs, analyzing its phrase structure, etcetera. It was horrible. I will spare you my revelations.

MAGNIFICENT. I have been boinging around Europe with Josh (I realize I have narrowly missed a less felicitous but more suggestive turn of phrase), and in each city and country various items could be slated as gains or losses. For example, Air Iberia lost our bags for four days while we concertized in Mallorca/Menorca, and as I surveyed the baggage office in a cold sweat, I began to lose my faith in humanity's ability to combat chaos and disorder; and at that moment, I had too much of a stake in my bag to embrace the chaos as a liberating principle. In Menorca, this loss was translated into a last-minute pre-concert shopping trip for yours truly, where a loss of cash metamorphosed into the gain of some really outrageous ties. Which were totally, blissfully, unnecessary as Josh and I don't wear ties. Hah, so there, chaos. In the (tentative) gain column, somewhere around the Rhine, Josh and I picked up several bottles of wine and let me just suggest now and forever that bottles, packed in a heavy wooden box, are not precisely the ideal gift for a musician in the midst of a tour. But Josh and I were loath to part with all of them, as they promised to be delicious summery Rieslings, and off we carted them in shopping bags, hauling them onto puddlejumpers and into taxis and always carefully distinguishing them from each others', though they were identical. I enjoyed that part the most. The more airport security lanes we carried them through, the more our resentment began to grow, like a terrible Gifthorse Virus. The handles of the bags would eat unpleasantly into my fingers, and I would begin to feel numb in one or the other, and wonder how I might play that evening's gig without the index finger, for instance. We began to curse under our breaths, and over our breaths, and the phrases "that &*()#$# wine!" and "I hate the (&(#@#&*$() wine!" came like a refrain in a rondo, again and again, amusing and inevitable. Only the future promise of drinking the delicious wine, at home with friends or lovers, by candlelight, could redeem the endless misery of this recurring burden. So that when, two days before my return flight home, I began to hear reports of increased security, and it began to dawn that the wine would never be carried on the plane by me, I could only laugh and marvel and bow before fate's delicious ingenuity. At 5:07 AM, bleary and delirious, I stared at the sign at the check-in counter in Florence (not having slept since the 9 PM concert the evening barely before), a sign which read "NO LIQUIDS," and loved that it was specifically liquids that were forbidden, the ONE THING which Josh and I had persisted in carrying, and I just laughed and laughed, my inner wry laugh which can be confused by the outside observer for utter despair. I handed my bag of wine to Enzo, my very sweet driver with hilarious English (including the wonderful "keephouser"), and said "for you." And he said why? But I did not tell him why and I hope he is enjoying my Riesling right now on a Monday afternoon, before surveying yet another beautiful Tuscan sunset. Losses and gains spreading through the universe like tentacles.

Oh my I must stop, I have to run to the Hamptons. Steven Spielberg has some crisis or other that I have to deal with.

Verbier Dispatch

2006-08-01T06:24:00.000-04:00

Inexplicably, the entry hall to my hotel has but two items of decor: an AC/DC poster ("Hell's Bells") and a "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl" poster. Swiss chalet=freshman dorm? And though no one seems to work at the hotel at all, except to spread an unbelievable amount of lemon-scented cleaner on the floor around noon, making my hallway a deeply treacherous experience (perhaps this is meant to assist with the skiing?), somehow about 20 Swiss teeny-boppers found their way into the hitherto-locked entertainment room this morning (!) to have some sort of mild Euro-rave. Also this morning at 8 it was deemed necessary to move what sounded like an armored assault vehicle, slowly and scrapingly, across the terrace beneath my window; I could count the gravel bits as they were crushed under its weight. A nice touch of hospitality.

It sounds like I am complaining, but I must admit these disturbances haven't really bothered me at all; the Swiss air has made it possible for me to sleep epically, so that I feel I could have slept through the entire festival without too much incident, a Rip van Denkle. I would like to make the following astute cultural observations, cross-ocean: 1) Capri pants are in, for boys. 2) America needs to get on the crepe bandwagon, immediately. 3) We need to throw many more diva fits at American festivals, to make them interesting. 4) --which is a complex corollary to 3-- Black Audis, or black, somewhat evil-looking vehicles of any type, need to drive around ominously and importantly and pick us up at odd hours and transport us obscenely short distances; we need to put posters of ourselves in hiking gear shops, grocery stores, and other odd places; we need whole towns to make into shrines of classical music so that non-classical music people start wondering "what am I missing out on here?" etc. etc. If it is possible let's create these town/shrines in outrageously beautiful places with tremendous cheese and chocolate. The possible American candidates for this sort of thing must be limited; get to work! I think Aspen must be the closest (since they already have the crepe wagon) but like so many American locales they need to shore up their cheese credentials.

Right now I feel as if I am in a Mentos commercial. The fog is lifting off the mountain. I am on the terrace, breathing the cool fresh air. Fragments of horn calls reach me from afar, echoing off the mountainside (I am not kidding!). I am waiting waiting waiting for the waitress of the Milk Bar to come back and offer me another coffee, dammit! With all their sense of proportion they don't understand that we imbalanced Americans need more more more of everything. She will look at me funny when she finally comes back and I order a crepe on top of my croissant. But I don't care. I even get a kind of perverse pleasure in horribly fulfilling the gluttonous American stereotype; but really it's a form of cross-cultural love! it's because the crepes are so so so good and they don't start serving them until noon which is now!!!!! Are you enjoying this real time blogging experience, readers? I would give you a bite-by-bite account of my chocolate banana chantilly crepe but perhaps that might become boring. My gym membership is so far away, in New York, calling over the ocean, counting off hours of Stairmaster and Elliptical Cross-Trainer as chocolate appears on the table. Shut up you. I will deal with you when I get home, maybe. A new enemy: a vicious bee, having immersed itself in my confiture, buzzes greedily towards my crepe, it is a pitched battle, away you scoundrel, this you may not have!, as you can see I am very busy, there is no time for more blogging ...

Seattle Vanishing

2006-07-26T20:28:00.000-04:00

Quietness of a blue afternoon. Cars are streaming down highway 520 in the distance and a bird honks occasionally and there are little crescendos and diminuendos of occasional sounds which all seem to build a larger sense of silence. I lie in the tiny bed, upstairs, where other children grew up and look at their wallpaper and books and rocking chairs. Curious, I pulled a child's copy of To Kill a Mockingbird off the shelf one night, and that very night, after reading a few drowsy pages I left it out by the open window. By the time I woke up the roguish breeze had scattered its yellow desiccated pages across the room, under the bed, among my clothes: pages "on tour," seeking a home elsewhere. I gathered them up and stuck them back in the cover, but did not reorder them; maybe in some future summer? The title page had a crude, scrawled inscription, "[such-and-such] is a dork and a jerk": a cruel and simple classmates' critique. I arrived on the scene way too late to console this wound, but it stung as if I myself were such-and-such. Robbing the book of completion, I threw this one page away. No one needs it. It will sit out in the green garbage container by the curb and then go somewhere else and the house will be purer, lighter.

Summer, the warm blossom of the year, my favorite season by far, has been transformed by my life into a endless summer camp without canoes or make-out sessions (for the most part). Affections, rekindled, flying wildly, for places and people and pieces, each tossed off, checked off at the rental car return, and I suppose each loss or fulfillment must make a mark on me somehow. What is the chain that holds this mess together?

I have come to realize that the corner of the year I spend in Seattle has rented a roomy room in a corner of my psyche. Short drives to coffee bars, steaming Pho for lunch, jelly beans backstage, and a thousand other particulars ... One classic Seattle thing I do, guiltily: late at night, I drive down Broadway to Dick's Hamburgers, and people-watch while I wait for my order (Dick's deluxe, fries, chocolate milkshake). Young white girls with dredlocks, in tattered clothes, hip and disaffected; pierced boys with skateboards; high school double dates, conforming to cliché, returning from movies; strung-out clubbers snacking to absorb other substances they have ingested, succumbing to layered, unhealthy indulgence: motley dissipated bunch waiting on the calmish street under a merciless fluorescent bulb which speaks truth to image. It is quiet and awkward like the moment the audience hushes before the concert begins; people by unknown consent--perhaps because of the light--don't speak loudly; they wait till they get in their cars for further misbehavior. Alone, I aim to observe people invisibly but I'm sure people must look at me too and wonder why the guy is coming, alone: what his weird tale must be, what botched date or other social encounter, or other personal frustration, must have resulted in this solitary binge. Ha, I'll never tell. I have my own strange motivations, unclear even to me. A pianist contemplating anything but music. I pull up in the driveway and sneak up the stairs to the house, like a teenager coming home after curfew, and try to undo the door quietly, and at those moments of dark stair-climbing I am very far from Beethoven.

On this my last day in Seattle, In a little strip mall, I sucked down a spicy beef noodle soup with a tremendous bricky flavor of red chili, almost New Mexican (which is the ultimate compliment), and a lighter seafood soup with eggs and a wonderful floating pool of sesame oil. These flavors had a profound effect on me. The blue beautiful Seattle sky was just icing on the cake. The night before, food spoke powerfully to me as well: I felt had been visited mournfully by the very spirit of beef as communicated through a short rib, tender and melting, atop a crumbling onion tart; pickled peppers surrounded this tower like sour sycophants. And I am just envisioning, as I sit here, next to the brown piano which the girl who grew up here practiced, the crema on top of a perfect double espresso served at the Victrola Cafe in a white porcelain cup. Symbol of a propitious happy morning, of embraces not long past? All of these images and flavors seem to cut deep, ridiculously deep, and to engage mechanisms of desire more appropriate for greater things, for causes, for relationships, for religion. What is it about the simplest sensual stimulus? And it occurs to me that many of the people here seem to have "real lives" or narratives against which festivals, and associated stimuli, are mere contrast, a kind of distraction; but I may not be able to make that distinction. For me the Festival is, or must be, as real as anything; I must either choose to live comfortably in bubbles or choose some other way.

Is this some side-effect of being a musician? Or just some Denkish anomaly? Ugh it's so hard to decide. As a last Seattle gasp, I played the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata and there is so much sensuality in there; I must admit I have occasionally mocked it. Particularly, the second theme in the first movement has long been overshadowed by one afternoon when Janos Starker hummed it to me by way of pedagogy ("to make the theme work, you have to cut it up") and his demonstrative "la la las" have echoed in my head and made it difficult for me to take this theme seriously. But some sensual things simply find their moment to present themselves to you as tremendous inescapable facts; they fan or color a particular mood; and I played the second theme before the concert that night and it just seemed beautiful without baggage, or... if it had baggage, just the sadness that like every other theme it eventually ended. It made me happy that I could see it simply, plainly, and feel it "straight up," without my mind's second-guessing; and I was sure that it was my Seattle-leaving sadness that made it possible, that sponsored this musical happiness, and I was still humming it and hearing its inner voices as I checked my bags and pulled my laptop out of the bag and sat down in my small airplane seat and counselled myself patience for the next journey.

Alone

2006-07-09T13:19:00.000-04:00

As I roam FestivaLand I encounter a safari's worth of beasts, either persons or ideas or intractable problems which will never be resolved in a performance. Yet the solution is always the same: a performance, a reception, and an outgoing flight. Confrontation, followed by escape. Take two bows and head for the airport in the morning.

I was driving down Broadway in Seattle (so different from Broadway of my homeland), and feeling completely free of intractable problems. I gripped a scalding coffee already in one hand; the other held the steering wheel; I stared at the blue blue sky through sunglasses, their opacity aching to express the inner, lost, disjointed pseudo-hipster that is the real, real Jeremy (or that which the real Jeremy wishes he was? Let's ask him.) Espresso stands flew by, and I ignored them with the comfort of caffeine-at-hand, with only the small, sour pang of a future desire. A pile of dry-cleaning sat accusingly, expectantly in the back seat, speckled with dust from backstage couches, and murmuring odiferously of sweat and piano benches. Everything was turning up metaphorical roses and I had felt this way since the first brilliant rays made a mockery of my half-drawn shade. It was one of those rare Denk occasions when beauty spurred to action, and not simply to awe, beverage, or repose. The clear, spread sky and the distant, utopian outlines of the mountains made it possible for me not to lie in bed and crave the dark. The bedroom was after all only a cage. Seattle suggests that nature's beauties will always be better than your own pleasures; they are always lurking visibly beyond the burbs. If it didn't rain, I think the people of Seattle would go insane from this realization; you can never be as beautiful as where you live. Like hip professors, the sun and air lectured me outdoors. I knew, like other morning people knew, the desire to do, to be useful: to be fruitful and multiply, to enact. And so off I zoomed in my crappy rental Kia, a man in a tin can ...

While I drove, in this happy state, with grungy hipsters dodging my artless driving, I confess I did not have a clean craw. A few days earlier, someone had said something at a post-concert or a post-rehearsal meal or drink or whatever: it doesn't matter at all who said it or when or how because it is so often said, and so often agreed with. The person said that the problem with such-and-such piece is that people don't know how to "leave it alone." And not just that piece--the person continued--there are so many others: people should just leave great music alone and let it speak for itself. There was general assent to this, and I assented also, though I had my doubts, but I have learned to shelve them, often, for the greater, or for my own good. Anyway this sort of statement is made often and so many musicians seem to agree with it in so many ways: it seems like a natural, virtuous thing, since the music we classical nerds play is often quite amazing and one feels queasy at the notion of "adding anything" to it. So: if tampering is option "a", the alternative is to "leave it alone."

In my opinion, music does not want to be left alone. It gets restless, then empty, and then dies. Music, "left alone," is just a score in the bottom of a bin, a score not piled for future use on top of the piano but in some file cabinet in the closet next to the vacuum cleaner and spare lightbulbs for your annoying IKEA lamp. Unless people are able to access it, chat with it, have an emotional conversation with it, a musical work does not exist. Like the tree in the forest falling.

Ah, you will say: you, Denk, are quibbling. When X said "leave it alone," he didn't mean it literally, but metaphorically, like my earlier roses. I think the substance of this metaphor is worth examining. Nothing is only rarely nothing. Most nothings are somethings in disguise. To find a true nothing, a nothing nothing, is a beautiful puzzle which can give you a headache, and maybe it's not even worth bothering, since nothing results from it har-dee-har-har. To "leave a piece alone" by contemporary standards means perhaps: to do what modern conservatory education tells us to do: play in time, observe markings, play expressively but do not add any extras: present the score, as if there were a perfect "acoustical correlative." This faith in an acoustical correlative is one of the strange cults of our modern classical musical religion, and it too I would like to debunk, but perhaps not today. What I'd suggest is that to "leave a piece alone," by modern standards, may have seemed to Romantic or Classical standards also a definite action, something tangibly "done to the piece;" an immobilization; perhaps something akin to taking a butterfly and sticking a pin through it and preserving it in a perfect display case. Harsh metaphor! But I think we have all heard such performances, preserved mimicries which seem to be right, which have wings on display, but do not fly. It is not possible to "leave it alone," no matter what we do; even our faithfulness can be destructive; and so we had better choose carefully how we plan to personally interact with the piece; shall we lie to ourselves, pretend not to have whims and impulses and biases and desires? The piece, any piece, is funny and fluid; you cannot touch it without changing it.

I have often found the score to be a sterile resource in some crucial ways, particularly in arguments (i.e. discussions) over how something should be played. "But it's marked X!" you say, indignantly; and your colleague says "but couldn't that mean Y?" and you have to confess, depending on your bias, the words and notes on the score seem to evaporate and scatter into a surprising surplus of meanings. "Allegro non troppo," I said recently to violist Z about the first movement of the Brahms Quintet (that old thing), and Z replied "but he says non troppo about everything, he's always qualifying!" True enough, I sheepishly meditated, but my opinion is the same. Arguing about markings can be a truly idiotic enterprise. (Ignoring markings can be idiotic too.) If I need to make a point in rehearsal, I find there's only one sure-fire way: to play it in a way that rings true to my colleagues; the only possible asset is my personal account of, interaction with, understanding of, a musical moment ... To review: if I refer to the score alone, as absolute and tangible authority, I can get in a lot of annoying arguments and get nearly nowhere. If I refer to the score, as mediated intangibly by me, I can make a case, or learn from my failure. Score alone: useless. Score + me: useful, possibly. All of this applies equally well in reverse, whatever that means.

Am I tracing some sort of late-night continuum (for it is now late night in Seattle and I have just finished playing the Schubert E-flat Trio, I am no longer the sunglasses-wearing would-be hipster of beforetimes) between the composer's idea, the score, and the interpretation? The score is the deadest point between these two live fires, a cold conduit. Humans are huddled at either end of the written notes: the composer hoping for a good performance, and the musician like a detective looking for clues. It is so funny that this communication must happen through the scrawling of musical notation, that the piece must be killed in order to be brought back alive.

Is it my imagination or do many recordings also seem to dwell in this same continuum? They are not just "audible pictures" of performances, but with the intervention of digital editing, etc. seem to want to preserve the piece in some perfect, ideal form; something in which no mistake, accident, or quirk will disturb. Particularly, I resent the intrusion of some producers into the rhythmic conception of performances, evening out rubati that would have redeemed the whole. It seems like some recordings out there aspire not to be like an interpretation, but more like the score. The score can be xeroxed; the CD can be ripped and burned; both share that wonderful reproducibility that poor, impoverished ideas or interpretations do not have. Alluring to be immovable, indisputable, definitive. My continuum is now:

Composer's Idea --- Score --- Interpretation --- Recording
(alive) (dead) (alive, hopefully) (dead, possibly)

It is too tempting to press play on your machine and get the same moment a million times in a row. We fall for this spectacular temptation, with its intimations of infinity, and the particular shape of a particular performance becomes frozen in our minds. Perhaps the particular shape of a producer's biases gets frozen in there too, making a dire, spliced,musical smoothie. Sometimes when we say "just leave the piece alone," we might also mean make it more like some super-smooth, polished, varnished recording, and at that moment I think we should be particularly careful. Watch out! (As at the end of the wonderful Schumann song "Zwielicht": sei wach und munter!) Hug the piece closely; don't leave it alone; and after a while, when you begin to sense an entangling affection, when you begin to feel you might "get hurt," when the relationship is getting serious and you are getting nervous about your emotional attachment ... perform it right away! That alone is the best time.

Lord, What Have I Done?

2006-07-06T12:44:00.000-04:00

Oh my. While I have been peacefully practicing, rehearsing, and tubing in the mountains of North Carolina, I have been blissfully unaware of the tempest brewing in my comments section, and, to judge from the last comment, a tempest brewing at Frank Music. I should have put a kibosh on this much earlier.

The intent of my last post was humor, not critique! I adore Frank Music. It is the only place that really has the music you need, and I would never want to go to any other place for my music if I could help it. I am a frequent customer. I walk in and want to buy everything, and often leave with much more than I needed. I always semi-pretend to be vexed by her, when I go in, and she usually plays along. There are always works by Ives and Kirchner in the bins, two of my favorite composers. Only there was I able to find, just laying around, some beautiful little Romantic miniatures by Ignaz Friedman, one of my favorite pianists. One must confess that Heidi's phone manner is unorthodox; it would never be taught at Customer Service Workshops; but, if I think about it closely, I would much rather have her New York City, idiosyncratic, manner than the saccharine non-helpful helpfulness of most companies when they deign to take your call. I must say, I often find myself frightened by her--a situation which can only grow worse now--and the point of the post was much more about my own timidity and state of mind than Heidi's behavior; I thought the phone call, in sum, was very funny, especially my total failure with all my stratagems. I didn't post it to be mean!

Finally: the ultimate mea culpa. It appears that piece is not really published. I could have checked with the people I know who have performed it, before wasting Heidi's time. So there, Heidi was right: it does not exist, in the sense that would be meaningful to our transaction. Heidi, will you ever forgive me? Everyone reading this post, right now: go out to Frank and buy some wonderful sheet music, take it home and enjoy it and savor it for the rest of your music-loving days. For God's sake, don't Xerox it at your music library.