Good Old Beethoven

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

"...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

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

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

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

How can I resist this?

Brown

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

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

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.