I knew something was up. The sign next to the refrigerator read: "white wine in the frig". (Perhaps: the frigging fridge? the frigate?) On a nearby shelf, my newly acquired Mozart action figure was lifting his left hand dramatically up to pounce upon a Quaker Oatmeal Bar, balanced cleverly upon a pair of Sunmaid raisin boxes to simulate a piano. Though unsettled by these backstage oddities, I went bravely onstage to deliver a delicate Mozart duet, and then an impassioned Piano Quartet of Joseph Suk. Well, not all the notes were there, but... something was communicated. Meanwhile, all my ill-sorted, bulging bags were outside in the car, saying take me! take me! check me in at baggage claim! And then, too suddenly, I was whisked--no, I whisked myself?--away to the airport, and without setting my head down again on a real bed I have managed to eke out 40 hours or so, split between Seattle and Vermont. A giant pair of plastic woman's breasts stood at the gateway to my Vermont destination... as you may have guessed, now I am in a dubious dorm in Marlboro, in a warm dusty barren room, with nighttime's bugs pressing at my window screens, and two empty suitcases, and I am sitting on a metal folding chair, at a student's industrial desk, next to two army cots--and a copy of the Mozart Wind Quintet is lying open on the desk, like a reminder of civilization. (Outside, I hear "do you know where the hooch went?" And off the hooch-seekers go.) I am not tired, because Seattle is back 3 hours and I am still partly there... but I cannot address myself fully to Mozart either; he is too demanding.
I am thinking about my transition from place to place, and the whole summer already, and all the little things that strike the memory. Pitiful, hapless details: the detritus of festivals. In my bag, now veteran of several festivals this summer, I find:
1) a scrawled note (perhaps by Unabomber disciple?): "Tuned 7-8-05"
2) the business card of Cathy L., "Professional, Limo-Style Taxi Service"... the card does not mention her propensity for cannabis, easily sensed upon proximity
3) deodorant (thank goodness, that's where it is)
4) USB and other adapter cables of unknown usage or origin
5) the business card for "Pho of Aurora" (i.e. Crazy Pho Lady of earlier post)
6) twelve wadded-up Starbucks credit card receipts
7) the email address, scrawled on the back of a program, of the lovely bartenderess from Boone
8) fifteen used boarding passes and a partridge in a pear tree
What a bizarre thing it is to pack up your mini-lives (for that is what festivals are, summer camps for adults, where your roots grow in and you tear them out), and set off for others... Enough uprootings in a row, and you have, voila! the monotony of difference. Somehow between hello and goodbye you should be able to say something different, to take another path. (Roland Barthes: "those who never reread are condemned to read the same story over and over again...") How to tie it all together? How not to be overwhelmed by the accumulation of these bizarre facts, the history of your life?
This all sounds very overdramatic and kind of contemplative in a dark way, which is only understandable given my redeye flight and my long lazy swimming session in the afternoon and two beers and probably also the sun and heat which got to my head today... But the point being I have left Seattle and now I am in a whole other Petri dish of people and situations (Marlboro) and it will be an effort to dip myself in, commit myself, and get out while the getting's good. I can distinguish certain brain states: like the totally involved, fairly carefree state when I am working on a piece --because you really NEED the whole brain to play the piano, to make a piece work... in fact you need more, you need at least all you've got... and then, when I come out of the glare of the work, my brain is a deer in the headlights of contingencies, of these bizarre, strung-together, random events, emergences and subsidences of people/ things/concerns... of "normal life," which is so much less organized than music. The brain is underused, and prone to pick up on peculiar details. And perhaps I don't have a strong enough balance right now of real, non-musical concerns, so that these transition moments and their salient details can make me feel odd, bizarre... my mind's a bagful of neglected boarding passes... Right now, that's where I am: I am one unmoored ship, heading off to crazyland, and I hope to drag my blog readers down with me! Hooray!
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
The Meaning of Chorale
Yet another coffeeshop: students finishing papers behind me, a couple finishing (amicably?) their divorce settlement to my right, three men forming a start-up on the patio, and to top it all off: some man continuously clearing his throat, an act which produces a bizarre sound, quasi Fat Albert (It is a four-part chorale: studential giggle, strained financial discussion, business bravado, and finally the Fat Albert basso continuo: ahhh, the counterpoint of coffeeshops!) Oh, and it's a barista's birthday, they are lifting a cake over the counter and singing and cheering. Grrrr. I have had a rough couple days, with the onset of some cold/flu thingy and yet--no rest for weary pianists--the concerts continue to come on, every two days... I'm industrial-strength miffed.
I've played many pieces since getting here--Dvorak D major Piano Quartet, Strauss Piano Quartet, Shostakovich Quintet, Schubert Adagio and Rondo--but the piece that is still sticking in my mind, making me happy, is the Brahms A major Piano Quartet, which I played in North Carolina. As I drove, the last night, over back mountain roads, towards Greensboro (my birthplace)... I found myself needing comfort, which Christian and right-wing talk radio did not seem to provide (to each his own). Instead, then, I played over and over in my head passages from the A major Piano Quartet. The entire black, curvy drive was surreally lit by this sunny piece.
For me, this is one of the holiest, most sacred of pieces, perfect in every detail. But very serious, intelligent musicians have suggested that the opening theme of this piece is evidence of Brahms' mediocrity... an aberration, a mess. It is true, it is an odd opening theme... made of chords more than melody (there are too many chords for the melody). And yet it would be "fine," except for an odd move to F#-major in its fourth bar, sounding a little forced, ill-prepared, artificial... the A# jangles like a "mistake" against the A, the main note of the piece... of course this artificial (let's say "extraordinary") event, once accepted, clearly poses itself as a premise for the whole piece, as a protagonist. Perhaps the piece, its vast structure, requires an initial suspension of disbelief. Perhaps any vast structure does.
I remember thinking, when I first looked at the score, what a stupid theme it was... what an idiot.
It is a very difficult theme to play because you want to keep the legato of the melody, and yet each chord must have its integrity, must be beautifully voiced, entire. But when it feels good, it feels GOOD; your hands move from chord to chord, as if running over, caressing, the roots of harmony ... and the best feeling, the real satisfaction, comes at the recapitulation, when you play the same theme down an octave... the lower, richer register making it sound like a chorus of horns or a men's chorus, something deep, the root, basis, the fundament. There has been much Romantic angst in the development, and now... harmony.
The four-part harmony of Bach chorales is, in a sense, an "archaic" item, an anachronistic insertion in the more homophonic world of Romantic music; but, paradoxically, can also be seen to underly everything, the whole of Western classical composition (the art of counterpoint, etc.) In the Mendelssohn C Minor Trio, which I also happily played in North Carolina, a chorale makes two entrances in the last movement, and in that case the chorale stands out as an "other," as a symbol, a triumphalist religious moment which Charles Rosen (I think unfairly) labels "kitsch."
I was listening in my car to some Bach chorales I played on a recital with the Ives "Concord" Sonata (!) and even though I theoretically played the damn thing, I was stunned at how beautiful the harmonies were, at how they illuminated the simplest notes: going up and down the same old (in this case, G major) stupid scale seemed like a magical journey.
In the A major Piano Quartet, the chorale element intervenes not in order to give the music some "plot." It is not triumphalist at all (unlike the Mendelssohn), and if it is religious it is utterly nondenominational. When you hear the chorales in that piece, you hear pure voicings; the chords are objects of contemplation; the piece suddenly becomes communal, "harmonious;" the basic building blocks of Western harmony are beautiful for their own sake (and not for the sake of where they are going)... harmony as solace, as shelter (from the storm of rhetoric, of musical plot). This is made clear in one of the piece's most extraordinary moments: in the slow movement, after the pianist "lets loose" with an anguished, full-throttle outburst, the height of Romantic direction and pouring-over... after this, the strings play the only thing "they can," a quiet, intensely beautiful chorale. Opposed to Romantic outcry... but somehow also its answer and source, its vanishing point.
I've played many pieces since getting here--Dvorak D major Piano Quartet, Strauss Piano Quartet, Shostakovich Quintet, Schubert Adagio and Rondo--but the piece that is still sticking in my mind, making me happy, is the Brahms A major Piano Quartet, which I played in North Carolina. As I drove, the last night, over back mountain roads, towards Greensboro (my birthplace)... I found myself needing comfort, which Christian and right-wing talk radio did not seem to provide (to each his own). Instead, then, I played over and over in my head passages from the A major Piano Quartet. The entire black, curvy drive was surreally lit by this sunny piece.
For me, this is one of the holiest, most sacred of pieces, perfect in every detail. But very serious, intelligent musicians have suggested that the opening theme of this piece is evidence of Brahms' mediocrity... an aberration, a mess. It is true, it is an odd opening theme... made of chords more than melody (there are too many chords for the melody). And yet it would be "fine," except for an odd move to F#-major in its fourth bar, sounding a little forced, ill-prepared, artificial... the A# jangles like a "mistake" against the A, the main note of the piece... of course this artificial (let's say "extraordinary") event, once accepted, clearly poses itself as a premise for the whole piece, as a protagonist. Perhaps the piece, its vast structure, requires an initial suspension of disbelief. Perhaps any vast structure does.
I remember thinking, when I first looked at the score, what a stupid theme it was... what an idiot.
It is a very difficult theme to play because you want to keep the legato of the melody, and yet each chord must have its integrity, must be beautifully voiced, entire. But when it feels good, it feels GOOD; your hands move from chord to chord, as if running over, caressing, the roots of harmony ... and the best feeling, the real satisfaction, comes at the recapitulation, when you play the same theme down an octave... the lower, richer register making it sound like a chorus of horns or a men's chorus, something deep, the root, basis, the fundament. There has been much Romantic angst in the development, and now... harmony.
The four-part harmony of Bach chorales is, in a sense, an "archaic" item, an anachronistic insertion in the more homophonic world of Romantic music; but, paradoxically, can also be seen to underly everything, the whole of Western classical composition (the art of counterpoint, etc.) In the Mendelssohn C Minor Trio, which I also happily played in North Carolina, a chorale makes two entrances in the last movement, and in that case the chorale stands out as an "other," as a symbol, a triumphalist religious moment which Charles Rosen (I think unfairly) labels "kitsch."
I was listening in my car to some Bach chorales I played on a recital with the Ives "Concord" Sonata (!) and even though I theoretically played the damn thing, I was stunned at how beautiful the harmonies were, at how they illuminated the simplest notes: going up and down the same old (in this case, G major) stupid scale seemed like a magical journey.
In the A major Piano Quartet, the chorale element intervenes not in order to give the music some "plot." It is not triumphalist at all (unlike the Mendelssohn), and if it is religious it is utterly nondenominational. When you hear the chorales in that piece, you hear pure voicings; the chords are objects of contemplation; the piece suddenly becomes communal, "harmonious;" the basic building blocks of Western harmony are beautiful for their own sake (and not for the sake of where they are going)... harmony as solace, as shelter (from the storm of rhetoric, of musical plot). This is made clear in one of the piece's most extraordinary moments: in the slow movement, after the pianist "lets loose" with an anguished, full-throttle outburst, the height of Romantic direction and pouring-over... after this, the strings play the only thing "they can," a quiet, intensely beautiful chorale. Opposed to Romantic outcry... but somehow also its answer and source, its vanishing point.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Symposium
I would really like to post right now, but it is a beautiful, searingly clear Seattle morning and out there in the wider world there are coffeeshops and parks and pines and blue shining bays. I mean, really, which would you choose? Unfortunately, today, I have some five hours of rehearsal, during which I will NOT be sailing across Elliott Bay to some distant island and watching the Olympic mountains come closer and closer, and drinking rosé. (Yes, I have a standing offer, which I have to refuse). The coffeeshops here ... I just stepped out of one, with a large Americano in my slightly singed hands (no java jackets!) ... and the people in them seem to be perfectly typecast for coffeeshop-people: a blondish, late twenties fellow with a pensive look and a Hawaiian shirt, smoking in his flipflops on the entrance ramp, probably contemplating his next short story for workshop; a dark-haired fellow with an intense face, looking like a hipster evolving into a therapist; a pert woman with red hair, numerous piercings, a blue t-shirt and a Red Sox cap, joining a much larger table of pert, sassy ladies... They are like extras, hired by some producer (God perhaps, the God of the Pacific Northwest) to appear charming and fascinating (though indigenous), grungy yet sexy, to make you want to sit over a big creamy dark cup of espresso and stare at them, and write silly blog entries.
Anyway, I said I wouldn't post, but here are some bits from The Symposium that I am really enjoying:
...
"No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, for he is wise already; nor does any man who is wise seek after wisdom.
Neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want...
Who then ... are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the foolish?...
They are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them. [Emphasis shamelessly added] For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant."
...
Love itself (a "great spirit... intermediate between the divine and the mortal") is just one (!) of the myriad lovers of wisdom? I "love" that. I'm sure this translation is mangled, but somehow I don't care. (How often do you read one translation of a poem and you go to another and the line you loved is suddenly totally flat? This happens to me a lot. Which do I prefer... my own happiness or an accurate translation?) At one moment, also, Love seems to be a great spirit, at another, a kind of poor relative of the other gods, at another, Love transmutes from person to principle. Love is one of us! But not.... This business of love as a mean, as an intermediary, not as an absolute ("neither mortal nor immortal"), but something in between, relative, connecting, is opposed to this (more expectedly Platonic) conception of beauty: "beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things." Another extraordinary, paradoxical image. I'm a sucker for paradoxes. I am now looking out the window longingly from the computer/piano room: through the window, the beauty of the sun outside and Seattle waterscapes; to my right, the piano, the beauty of (for example) the slow movement of the Mendelssohn d minor Trio; and if I jump in the car, the beauty of the people happening to be in the coffeeshops, their ever-changing congregation. How can I possibly choose?
One more quote:
All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry.
Why do I feel that even my choice, what to do today, how to relate to the sunlight, what coffee to drink and how to savor it, how to play certain Andante tempos, how to quell my jealousy that my computer illiterate hosts just bought a 17-inch Apple Powerbook ... all of this passes from non-being to being, is being created every second (against, or with, my will)... all of this could be my poem of the day.
Anyway, I said I wouldn't post, but here are some bits from The Symposium that I am really enjoying:
...
"No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, for he is wise already; nor does any man who is wise seek after wisdom.
Neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want...
Who then ... are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the foolish?...
They are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them. [Emphasis shamelessly added] For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant."
...
Love itself (a "great spirit... intermediate between the divine and the mortal") is just one (!) of the myriad lovers of wisdom? I "love" that. I'm sure this translation is mangled, but somehow I don't care. (How often do you read one translation of a poem and you go to another and the line you loved is suddenly totally flat? This happens to me a lot. Which do I prefer... my own happiness or an accurate translation?) At one moment, also, Love seems to be a great spirit, at another, a kind of poor relative of the other gods, at another, Love transmutes from person to principle. Love is one of us! But not.... This business of love as a mean, as an intermediary, not as an absolute ("neither mortal nor immortal"), but something in between, relative, connecting, is opposed to this (more expectedly Platonic) conception of beauty: "beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things." Another extraordinary, paradoxical image. I'm a sucker for paradoxes. I am now looking out the window longingly from the computer/piano room: through the window, the beauty of the sun outside and Seattle waterscapes; to my right, the piano, the beauty of (for example) the slow movement of the Mendelssohn d minor Trio; and if I jump in the car, the beauty of the people happening to be in the coffeeshops, their ever-changing congregation. How can I possibly choose?
One more quote:
All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry.
Why do I feel that even my choice, what to do today, how to relate to the sunlight, what coffee to drink and how to savor it, how to play certain Andante tempos, how to quell my jealousy that my computer illiterate hosts just bought a 17-inch Apple Powerbook ... all of this passes from non-being to being, is being created every second (against, or with, my will)... all of this could be my poem of the day.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Crazy Lady Pho
I was on the brink of devastation. My colleague, the violist Toby Appel, gave me the worst possible news: my usual Pho joint was closed.
On concert days I insist on regular, predictable food. As if they are mini-birthdays, any departure from my desires, any obstacle, makes me irritable, petulant, a fussy child. I do what I do those days, and woe betide those who tell me otherwise.
In Seattle, every concert day, after dress rehearsal, this is what I do: I cut via backroads, through industrial zones and car repair shops and adult bookstores, and other businesses of dubious aspect, and settle myself in the most dubious of all: Pho of Aurora. From the parking lot, the view through the steamy kitchen's back door is not enticing... it promises nausea, not nutrition... but one day, in the distant past, like Columbus sailing westward, I was brave or hungry enough simply to walk in, and so a compulsion was born.
A compulsion? An addiction. I was hooked, not by the broth, nor by the voluminous fatty tendon, but by the place's unearthly patroness. How can I describe her? Though she presides over the dumpiest Pho joint in Seattle, she dresses each day as if descending, reluctantly, to the ballroom of the Palace of Versailles. White lacy gowns, powder blue dresses, purple velvet: no outfit too outlandish, no makeup too heavy. Radiant, resplendent, she finds it enough to exist: she does (nearly) nothing, she simply talks. But it is not normal speech, it is closer to incantation ... an unearthly voice ... she delivers, I think, sermons from the noodle god. Vietnamese from her mouth is a garden of fascinating, dangerous phonemes, sounds foreign to human cords. She "talks," and I slurp, and since no one responds (several younger people seem to do all the actual work of the place, while watching Vietnamese Idol), I assume she is talking to herself. Or she is very, very frustrated. Or both. How many hours have I spent, speculating as to what she might be saying? Perhaps in my belongings, my heirs will find endless sketches for a (sadly) unfinished novel: Thoughts of Crazy Lady of the Pho. It will be my masterpiece.
A calendar next to her each month presents a different beautiful Asian model (a modest centerfold calendar), and it appears she dresses partly to match the woman on the wall. Though timeless, and anachronistic, she's in cahoots with the calendar! Her acolytes dress in deliberately shabby American garb, torn jeans, faded T-shirts. All business is transacted with them (she is too noble for this menial work, though her nobility is confined to this one dreary room). If I go up to pay, and none of her assistants are there, she will condescend to take my money, but only--get this--after putting on white silk gloves. My fellow noodle-eaters--truck drivers, mechanics, a decidedly blue-collar crowd--seem to accept all this... to accept their queen... they, like I, respect the place's bizarre order; they laugh only on the inside.
So with a heavy heart, I went by to see the place closed up, to bid it goodbye. But imagine my delight. Toby was wrong... it was still open (though in even more disrepair than before). I walked in, joyfully, saw that the personnel were EXACTLY AS I LEFT THEM last year, and ordered my noodles promptly. What do they think of me? I only come for a week or two each summer, show up quite regularly on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (and on no other days), and then depart. I never speak to the help; we never penetrate each other's mysteries. Are they curious about me? Do they wonder why a nerdy fellow with scores and books, and with a taste for really spicy soup, comes in like a token breeze of summer, and spills broth all over chamber music masterpieces? Does my pageturner at this festival ever wonder at the red and brown stains on, say, the Shostakovich Quintet?
For me the lesson (the warning) of the summer festival season is mystery, variety, youthfulness, love. (I have been rereading The Symposium.) What do I mean by that? Though the piece (any piece, whatever) has been played many many times for numerous festivals and often in the same way... all those qualities (mystery, variety, etc.) are still valuable, necessary, even: indispensable. Why would I go into Pho of Aurora? Totally arbitrary. Why would Crazy Lady dress up (at no minimal effort) to sit there, a useless appendage, every single day? In summer festivals, preparing these familiar pieces on short notice, we tend to have scads of "sensible" rehearsals, putting things in place, balancing them out, being mature... and sometimes as I go through the season of this sort of rehearsal, I find myself wanting to say totally unsensible things, to take unseemly rubati, to be contrary, simply cause the spirit seems to boil up inside of me, something feels too familiar, too confining, too conventional. I could easily, in these situations, become like the Crazy Lady of the Pho... sometimes indeed I do feel like I'm dressed in the wrong outfit, speaking the wrong language to no one, a nutcase babbling to himself at the piano. And perhaps that is when I am happiest.
On concert days I insist on regular, predictable food. As if they are mini-birthdays, any departure from my desires, any obstacle, makes me irritable, petulant, a fussy child. I do what I do those days, and woe betide those who tell me otherwise.
In Seattle, every concert day, after dress rehearsal, this is what I do: I cut via backroads, through industrial zones and car repair shops and adult bookstores, and other businesses of dubious aspect, and settle myself in the most dubious of all: Pho of Aurora. From the parking lot, the view through the steamy kitchen's back door is not enticing... it promises nausea, not nutrition... but one day, in the distant past, like Columbus sailing westward, I was brave or hungry enough simply to walk in, and so a compulsion was born.
A compulsion? An addiction. I was hooked, not by the broth, nor by the voluminous fatty tendon, but by the place's unearthly patroness. How can I describe her? Though she presides over the dumpiest Pho joint in Seattle, she dresses each day as if descending, reluctantly, to the ballroom of the Palace of Versailles. White lacy gowns, powder blue dresses, purple velvet: no outfit too outlandish, no makeup too heavy. Radiant, resplendent, she finds it enough to exist: she does (nearly) nothing, she simply talks. But it is not normal speech, it is closer to incantation ... an unearthly voice ... she delivers, I think, sermons from the noodle god. Vietnamese from her mouth is a garden of fascinating, dangerous phonemes, sounds foreign to human cords. She "talks," and I slurp, and since no one responds (several younger people seem to do all the actual work of the place, while watching Vietnamese Idol), I assume she is talking to herself. Or she is very, very frustrated. Or both. How many hours have I spent, speculating as to what she might be saying? Perhaps in my belongings, my heirs will find endless sketches for a (sadly) unfinished novel: Thoughts of Crazy Lady of the Pho. It will be my masterpiece.
A calendar next to her each month presents a different beautiful Asian model (a modest centerfold calendar), and it appears she dresses partly to match the woman on the wall. Though timeless, and anachronistic, she's in cahoots with the calendar! Her acolytes dress in deliberately shabby American garb, torn jeans, faded T-shirts. All business is transacted with them (she is too noble for this menial work, though her nobility is confined to this one dreary room). If I go up to pay, and none of her assistants are there, she will condescend to take my money, but only--get this--after putting on white silk gloves. My fellow noodle-eaters--truck drivers, mechanics, a decidedly blue-collar crowd--seem to accept all this... to accept their queen... they, like I, respect the place's bizarre order; they laugh only on the inside.
So with a heavy heart, I went by to see the place closed up, to bid it goodbye. But imagine my delight. Toby was wrong... it was still open (though in even more disrepair than before). I walked in, joyfully, saw that the personnel were EXACTLY AS I LEFT THEM last year, and ordered my noodles promptly. What do they think of me? I only come for a week or two each summer, show up quite regularly on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (and on no other days), and then depart. I never speak to the help; we never penetrate each other's mysteries. Are they curious about me? Do they wonder why a nerdy fellow with scores and books, and with a taste for really spicy soup, comes in like a token breeze of summer, and spills broth all over chamber music masterpieces? Does my pageturner at this festival ever wonder at the red and brown stains on, say, the Shostakovich Quintet?
For me the lesson (the warning) of the summer festival season is mystery, variety, youthfulness, love. (I have been rereading The Symposium.) What do I mean by that? Though the piece (any piece, whatever) has been played many many times for numerous festivals and often in the same way... all those qualities (mystery, variety, etc.) are still valuable, necessary, even: indispensable. Why would I go into Pho of Aurora? Totally arbitrary. Why would Crazy Lady dress up (at no minimal effort) to sit there, a useless appendage, every single day? In summer festivals, preparing these familiar pieces on short notice, we tend to have scads of "sensible" rehearsals, putting things in place, balancing them out, being mature... and sometimes as I go through the season of this sort of rehearsal, I find myself wanting to say totally unsensible things, to take unseemly rubati, to be contrary, simply cause the spirit seems to boil up inside of me, something feels too familiar, too confining, too conventional. I could easily, in these situations, become like the Crazy Lady of the Pho... sometimes indeed I do feel like I'm dressed in the wrong outfit, speaking the wrong language to no one, a nutcase babbling to himself at the piano. And perhaps that is when I am happiest.
Friday, July 08, 2005
Boone
Rule #1: Pursue hints of unexpected pleasure. Rule #2: relax. These rules are applicable to both life and musical interpretation.
Two nights ago, at dinner, a lovely bartenderess. Same bartenderess (go figure!) shows up at coffee joint while I am blogging yesterday, chats me up. I took the hint, and invited her to join us for drinks/dinner last night, and there she proposes going to hear some zydeco being played at the Boone Saloon. FANTASTIC! I discovered the real reason to come to Boone. I watched people totally consumed with pleasure: good old (and young) country boys, whose faces seemed at first reticent and reserved, began to stomp the floor with contagious musicality and abandon, with unmistakable unfeignable joy in life; and the girls were bouncier, a little goofier, floating all sorts of hilarious and eclectic moves around them... I remember thinking I have never enjoyed a dominant-seventh chord more (it was prolonged so long, almost like Tristan and Isolde). Though it was a bar, the music and the dancing were clearly the main thing, much more so in some ways than in the classical concert hall, where the focus is enforced. I don't want this to be another "I wish classical music were more unbuttoned" post, but .... what can I say? I wish classical music were more unbuttoned, but only in a certain, not vulgar way. (Carnegie Hall, but with pool tables?) The Boone Saloon didn't feel vulgar at all, though the floor was sticky with spilled beer and people wore wide-brimmed cowboy hats and there was a hefty mean-looking bouncer at the door: not even seedy, just: real. I think it was the music that did this, that made the space perfect. It was fantastic to watch the violinist too, who looked completely uninvolved, almost moronic; his bow arm barely seemed to move; and yet his playing was super-energetic, uplifting. There's a lesson for my own piano playing in there. I followed both rules above by the way: I pursued the hints, against better judgement, and I got an unexpected pleasure, and my elation relaxed me.
...
To quote (or rather paraphrase) Alex Ross, "there is no specifically musical reason for including" the following, but it seemed noteworthy. As last night's bartenderess (which is not same as earlier bartenderess) served us our appetizers, she regaled us with a tale of tooth damage. An old chipped tooth had become rechipped, and she had gone to the dentist to have it repaired. Lest this not be sufficient detail, she drew us a diagram (no, this is true, this actually happened) on a cocktail napkin, which we could study next to our bruschetta:
Magnificent. Especially the way she scribbled horribly with the pen, nearly tearing the napkin in two, to indicate the irritated part of her tongue. I have tried to simulate this, as best I can, with my laptop trackpad. Why did this dose of dental reality not turn me off as I sat at the rather fancy bar, preparing to eat? It seemed merely hilarious and not disgusting. This would never happen in New York; nor would the repair of said tooth cost a mere $22 (I am not kidding, that is what she paid). Have I seen people dance like that in New York either? I have to admit I will play the last movement of the Brahms A major Piano Quartet quite differently tonight, with a little hillbilly in my gypsy.
Two nights ago, at dinner, a lovely bartenderess. Same bartenderess (go figure!) shows up at coffee joint while I am blogging yesterday, chats me up. I took the hint, and invited her to join us for drinks/dinner last night, and there she proposes going to hear some zydeco being played at the Boone Saloon. FANTASTIC! I discovered the real reason to come to Boone. I watched people totally consumed with pleasure: good old (and young) country boys, whose faces seemed at first reticent and reserved, began to stomp the floor with contagious musicality and abandon, with unmistakable unfeignable joy in life; and the girls were bouncier, a little goofier, floating all sorts of hilarious and eclectic moves around them... I remember thinking I have never enjoyed a dominant-seventh chord more (it was prolonged so long, almost like Tristan and Isolde). Though it was a bar, the music and the dancing were clearly the main thing, much more so in some ways than in the classical concert hall, where the focus is enforced. I don't want this to be another "I wish classical music were more unbuttoned" post, but .... what can I say? I wish classical music were more unbuttoned, but only in a certain, not vulgar way. (Carnegie Hall, but with pool tables?) The Boone Saloon didn't feel vulgar at all, though the floor was sticky with spilled beer and people wore wide-brimmed cowboy hats and there was a hefty mean-looking bouncer at the door: not even seedy, just: real. I think it was the music that did this, that made the space perfect. It was fantastic to watch the violinist too, who looked completely uninvolved, almost moronic; his bow arm barely seemed to move; and yet his playing was super-energetic, uplifting. There's a lesson for my own piano playing in there. I followed both rules above by the way: I pursued the hints, against better judgement, and I got an unexpected pleasure, and my elation relaxed me.
...
To quote (or rather paraphrase) Alex Ross, "there is no specifically musical reason for including" the following, but it seemed noteworthy. As last night's bartenderess (which is not same as earlier bartenderess) served us our appetizers, she regaled us with a tale of tooth damage. An old chipped tooth had become rechipped, and she had gone to the dentist to have it repaired. Lest this not be sufficient detail, she drew us a diagram (no, this is true, this actually happened) on a cocktail napkin, which we could study next to our bruschetta:
Magnificent. Especially the way she scribbled horribly with the pen, nearly tearing the napkin in two, to indicate the irritated part of her tongue. I have tried to simulate this, as best I can, with my laptop trackpad. Why did this dose of dental reality not turn me off as I sat at the rather fancy bar, preparing to eat? It seemed merely hilarious and not disgusting. This would never happen in New York; nor would the repair of said tooth cost a mere $22 (I am not kidding, that is what she paid). Have I seen people dance like that in New York either? I have to admit I will play the last movement of the Brahms A major Piano Quartet quite differently tonight, with a little hillbilly in my gypsy.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
What's The Score?
I have been blog-lazy; no more. I've been storing up thoughts about scores and musical interpretation, which sounds like a truly annoying and boring post, and probably is.
Basically, I've been trying to find a recording of Davidsbündlertänze (by Robert Schumann) for my new friend X. X does not demand anonymity, I just enjoy naming him/her X. I have dibbled and dabbled, online and elsewhere, and due to the nature of the piece, it's fairly easy to extract little bits -- it's a piece made of little bits, a meal of German, evocative, romantic, elusive tapas. I won't name names, but I've consulted quite a few recordings and found none remotely to my satisfaction. The problem, you may say, and I will say, lies with my unending need for satisfaction rather than the artistry of the various recordings... So far, I have not recommended X a recording. (V. Nabokov, when asked "what's your favorite book?" answered: "the one I am about to write.")
Inciting event: X and X's colleagues were arguing with me in a bar that Schumann really was not such a great composer after all. Well into my second, or third, Belgian ale, my arguments distilled themselves frighteningly into a very narrow retort: simply the word "Davidsbündlertänze," nearly screamed, several times in a row, with accompanying head-shakes and signs of distress, like those of a mental patient. Feeling rather replete, I adjourned to the facilities. Upon my return, my argument was not augmented: I simply kept saying, overly loudly, in the Irish pub, the title of my favorite Schumann work, (I feel sure I was the only one in the pub using that particular word, possibly ever) which seemed to me the purest, most eloquent defense of Schumann's genius ... How I longed for the powerful, calm derision and reserve with which, say, Mitsuko Uchida might have looked upon persons who dared to question Schumann; if only I had been able to consult her as to what to say, what to do. I could almost see her, perched over an Egg McMarlboro (at Marlboro, of course), her eyes narrowing ... I myself was a clown in comparison.
Davidsbündlertänze is full of clowns and clowning, the boisterous Florestan messing around with the ruminative Eusebius... full of moments of silliness, but that kind of humor which is so extraordinary and manages to coexist with the most unbelievable, haunting sadness. (The humor that virtually generates that sadness.) That would almost seem to be the piece's premise: the posing of funny, displaced fragments and their metamorphosis/assembly either into crazy, lopsided dances, or long lyrical outpourings, or laments, or whatever: come what may.
So there I was listening, to my favorite moments in one of my favorite pieces, and so often the pianist would seem to miss the "main point," that is, the sort of overarching gesture, mood, gestalt of the thing. And I would say to myself: you are imposing too much of your own desire on this! Try to listen impersonally, to see what they see. Because these are serious artists, they see important things. And so I would try again; I would start the track from the beginning, and try to listen through their lens, pay attention to their priorities, hear their desires. Sometimes this works for me, but in this piece I could NOT. I had to give up too much, it was too painful, too many intervals went unnoticed, too many searing moments passed by, it just couldn't make emotional sense to me. I gave up, unhappy, kind of exhausted. I took the coward's way out: I went and played it myself.
I think (and this may be partly the cause of my unhappiness, above) this is one of those pieces with an amazing plural--whether because of its "loose" structure, or its dependence on fragments (where just a few notes are made to take on a lot of meaning), or its utterly Romantic frame of mind, its intense if brief emotional states. We are used to saying and thinking that a piece has any number of possible interpretations, and we are used to hearing the expression that certain performances/recordings can be considered fairly "definitive." I would like to express my total detestation of the word "definitive;" a performance is never a definition, unless we are willing to reconsider entirely our definition of definition.
We classical musicians lurk under the idea, a burden, that there may be, hiding in the score, somewhere, some "true" interpretation of a piece, some original composer's intent. But I have begun to wonder if even the composer, as he puts his notes down on paper, considers the score-as-written already, partly, his enemy? (It limits what he has to say, what he has meant to say; on the other hand, it lets the piece loose from the limits of his mind, opens it to other, maybe lesser, minds.) We say, casually, that a musical score "lends itself to many different interpretations," which is a sort of cliché which makes us comfortable with the difficulties of scores. I want to go further:
A musical score does not just "allow for" differing interpretations, for disagreements; it provokes them. This is because a set of notes will inevitably suggest nuances that cannot be simultaneously realized--which are antithetical to each other. The score is a provocateur, a trickster (although it is of course also a comfort, a guide, a resource). It contains paradoxes, and thus makes consistent, complete definition impossible.
This is truer of some scores than others. Every performance leaves out, by definition, a good deal (an infinite amount) of the score, of its possibility. This would seem to be a negative view of performance, from a performer. What does the performer put in its place, how does he/she fill the space cleared away, the destruction wreaked, by his/her choices? I have to admit I tend to distrust those colleagues of mine who seem to know every dynamic, dot, dash, and marking of the score, every last articulation and expressive indication, and who seem to feel they "know the score" as a result (not that it is bad to know the score well!)... I guess it is an emotional thing, I always prefer to think of the score as harboring yet some unknown, as a jungle whose overgrowth will not be pruned, penetrated... I hate to think of it as a cleared field, as laid bare, too clear, too evident, prematurely disillusioned. Only with the performance is the score temporarily bare (temporarily absent), and then from the moment of applause onward the score reasserts itself, just as impossible to untangle.
To take up this thread of "definition," I love the notion of every word as a "fossil poem." (Words as active, not passive, webs of force, not solid, named things--read Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era...) Think, if we reawaken each of a word's origins, etymologies, mythical antecendents, the primal acts of classifying, connecting, understanding, which finally gave way to the "civilized" word, its so-called definition? Poems do indeed reactivate these sense of words ("give words back their tribal meaning," is this Mallarmé?). Okay, in this sense, I could imagine a "definitive" performance, one which makes the musical word active, definitive not as in "really getting it right", not as in just-as-the-composer-"intended" (How do we KNOW the composer had a single intention? Don't we think the composer might have been just as mystified and overwhelmed by the options of his own notes?), but as in opening up some active possibilities of the piece, working backwards to origins and forwards to consequences, an act which I think is closer to "un-definining" the piece, removing it from the dictionary... freeing it.
For an example of the sorts of notes in Schumann that particularly defy this notion of "definitive," perhaps:
It is a waltz, (a waltz in fragments) that much is relatively certain (this notion of waltz is somehow extramusical, right? it brings in a whole cultural world, codes of nostalgia, loss, experience)... but which notes to "go to," which to emphasize, and how? Nothing is more idiotic than the comment in rehearsal, the agreement to "go to" a particular note... how will we go there? Rhythmically (by rushing, ritarding)? Dynamically (by crescendo, diminuendo)? Texturally? Emotionally? The possibilities are infinite, and each has a satisfying opposite. Everything is going or coming, to say "let's go here" says (almost) nothing.
For you music readers, including X, if you do not feel a shiver of pleasure, a moment of "perfect Schumann" at the end of this last example, when the second voice enters, at the "wrong time" (in the middle of the established grouping), and deliberately in order to form a dissonance with the upper voice... (C against B) ... if you don't "get that moment," if you aren't waiting to see in what beautiful fashion the wrong-note B will resolve, you are voted off the Schumann island. (You non-music readers, just listen to the last track, shouldn't be too hard to follow). This dissonance, which is just the edge of longing to which the preceding fragments allude, becomes generative, becomes an obsession; the waltz, though sad and gentle, is suddenly full of these dissonances which need to be resolved, which create more, the sense of clash, every note's (by turns) inability to live with itself:
... a stream of consciousness leading from that first entrance of the "second voice," from that generative dissonance, following the idea of the dissonance to whatever consequences ... and another stream, gradually attempting to "fill in" the fragmented waltz, to swing gradually from halting pairs of quarter notes into a more typical, dotted waltz rhythm (see example above, second measure, A G F E): this second stream, an urge to find melodic/rhythmic continuity. Two streams, and many others which we haven't mentioned, and how can you possibly feel them all while playing? Not to mention, in public? All these are in the score, simultaneous, clamoring: a bewildering cacophony of thought. The score is impossibly demanding.
The streams seem to lead gradually downward, smoothing out their dissonances, to this "answer":
Yes, it is the same sixth leap which began the waltz, G up to E, but now instead of fragments and half-steps and half-phrases, there is just a long, unbroken, lilting descent... I adore this final phrase, partly because I feel it is not enough, it does not really, truly resolve; but it is heartbreaking for me: the essence of tenderness, too late. I have words for this final phrase; I have written them in my score; but I will never tell anyone; anyway, they are nonsense words, meaningful only for me, German words with no grammar whatsoever. (Tribal meanings?) Can I say that this beautiful phrase "resolves" the previous longing and dissonances? Yes and no, I'm not sure that I totally "understand" the relation of the final phrase to the rest... it is a meager connection, sustained by slight threads of thought, threads that can never be definitive.
It is totally infuriating to imagine a music theorist at this point trying to describe the form of this last piece. (Is it ternary? binary? modified binary? Arrggghhh!) With a piece like this, Schumann seems to satirize even the idea of musical form, the notion of completeness, and its relevance. And it was infuriating to hear all these beautiful, sensitive versions which did not capture even an iota of my tremendous emotional attachment to this last waltz... they were all incomplete somehow. I can't help thinking of my own hypothetical version. Someday, when I return to this piece, my version ... will hopefully be even more incomplete, even less definitive.
Basically, I've been trying to find a recording of Davidsbündlertänze (by Robert Schumann) for my new friend X. X does not demand anonymity, I just enjoy naming him/her X. I have dibbled and dabbled, online and elsewhere, and due to the nature of the piece, it's fairly easy to extract little bits -- it's a piece made of little bits, a meal of German, evocative, romantic, elusive tapas. I won't name names, but I've consulted quite a few recordings and found none remotely to my satisfaction. The problem, you may say, and I will say, lies with my unending need for satisfaction rather than the artistry of the various recordings... So far, I have not recommended X a recording. (V. Nabokov, when asked "what's your favorite book?" answered: "the one I am about to write.")
Inciting event: X and X's colleagues were arguing with me in a bar that Schumann really was not such a great composer after all. Well into my second, or third, Belgian ale, my arguments distilled themselves frighteningly into a very narrow retort: simply the word "Davidsbündlertänze," nearly screamed, several times in a row, with accompanying head-shakes and signs of distress, like those of a mental patient. Feeling rather replete, I adjourned to the facilities. Upon my return, my argument was not augmented: I simply kept saying, overly loudly, in the Irish pub, the title of my favorite Schumann work, (I feel sure I was the only one in the pub using that particular word, possibly ever) which seemed to me the purest, most eloquent defense of Schumann's genius ... How I longed for the powerful, calm derision and reserve with which, say, Mitsuko Uchida might have looked upon persons who dared to question Schumann; if only I had been able to consult her as to what to say, what to do. I could almost see her, perched over an Egg McMarlboro (at Marlboro, of course), her eyes narrowing ... I myself was a clown in comparison.
Davidsbündlertänze is full of clowns and clowning, the boisterous Florestan messing around with the ruminative Eusebius... full of moments of silliness, but that kind of humor which is so extraordinary and manages to coexist with the most unbelievable, haunting sadness. (The humor that virtually generates that sadness.) That would almost seem to be the piece's premise: the posing of funny, displaced fragments and their metamorphosis/assembly either into crazy, lopsided dances, or long lyrical outpourings, or laments, or whatever: come what may.
So there I was listening, to my favorite moments in one of my favorite pieces, and so often the pianist would seem to miss the "main point," that is, the sort of overarching gesture, mood, gestalt of the thing. And I would say to myself: you are imposing too much of your own desire on this! Try to listen impersonally, to see what they see. Because these are serious artists, they see important things. And so I would try again; I would start the track from the beginning, and try to listen through their lens, pay attention to their priorities, hear their desires. Sometimes this works for me, but in this piece I could NOT. I had to give up too much, it was too painful, too many intervals went unnoticed, too many searing moments passed by, it just couldn't make emotional sense to me. I gave up, unhappy, kind of exhausted. I took the coward's way out: I went and played it myself.
I think (and this may be partly the cause of my unhappiness, above) this is one of those pieces with an amazing plural--whether because of its "loose" structure, or its dependence on fragments (where just a few notes are made to take on a lot of meaning), or its utterly Romantic frame of mind, its intense if brief emotional states. We are used to saying and thinking that a piece has any number of possible interpretations, and we are used to hearing the expression that certain performances/recordings can be considered fairly "definitive." I would like to express my total detestation of the word "definitive;" a performance is never a definition, unless we are willing to reconsider entirely our definition of definition.
We classical musicians lurk under the idea, a burden, that there may be, hiding in the score, somewhere, some "true" interpretation of a piece, some original composer's intent. But I have begun to wonder if even the composer, as he puts his notes down on paper, considers the score-as-written already, partly, his enemy? (It limits what he has to say, what he has meant to say; on the other hand, it lets the piece loose from the limits of his mind, opens it to other, maybe lesser, minds.) We say, casually, that a musical score "lends itself to many different interpretations," which is a sort of cliché which makes us comfortable with the difficulties of scores. I want to go further:
A musical score does not just "allow for" differing interpretations, for disagreements; it provokes them. This is because a set of notes will inevitably suggest nuances that cannot be simultaneously realized--which are antithetical to each other. The score is a provocateur, a trickster (although it is of course also a comfort, a guide, a resource). It contains paradoxes, and thus makes consistent, complete definition impossible.
This is truer of some scores than others. Every performance leaves out, by definition, a good deal (an infinite amount) of the score, of its possibility. This would seem to be a negative view of performance, from a performer. What does the performer put in its place, how does he/she fill the space cleared away, the destruction wreaked, by his/her choices? I have to admit I tend to distrust those colleagues of mine who seem to know every dynamic, dot, dash, and marking of the score, every last articulation and expressive indication, and who seem to feel they "know the score" as a result (not that it is bad to know the score well!)... I guess it is an emotional thing, I always prefer to think of the score as harboring yet some unknown, as a jungle whose overgrowth will not be pruned, penetrated... I hate to think of it as a cleared field, as laid bare, too clear, too evident, prematurely disillusioned. Only with the performance is the score temporarily bare (temporarily absent), and then from the moment of applause onward the score reasserts itself, just as impossible to untangle.
To take up this thread of "definition," I love the notion of every word as a "fossil poem." (Words as active, not passive, webs of force, not solid, named things--read Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era...) Think, if we reawaken each of a word's origins, etymologies, mythical antecendents, the primal acts of classifying, connecting, understanding, which finally gave way to the "civilized" word, its so-called definition? Poems do indeed reactivate these sense of words ("give words back their tribal meaning," is this Mallarmé?). Okay, in this sense, I could imagine a "definitive" performance, one which makes the musical word active, definitive not as in "really getting it right", not as in just-as-the-composer-"intended" (How do we KNOW the composer had a single intention? Don't we think the composer might have been just as mystified and overwhelmed by the options of his own notes?), but as in opening up some active possibilities of the piece, working backwards to origins and forwards to consequences, an act which I think is closer to "un-definining" the piece, removing it from the dictionary... freeing it.
For an example of the sorts of notes in Schumann that particularly defy this notion of "definitive," perhaps:
It is a waltz, (a waltz in fragments) that much is relatively certain (this notion of waltz is somehow extramusical, right? it brings in a whole cultural world, codes of nostalgia, loss, experience)... but which notes to "go to," which to emphasize, and how? Nothing is more idiotic than the comment in rehearsal, the agreement to "go to" a particular note... how will we go there? Rhythmically (by rushing, ritarding)? Dynamically (by crescendo, diminuendo)? Texturally? Emotionally? The possibilities are infinite, and each has a satisfying opposite. Everything is going or coming, to say "let's go here" says (almost) nothing.
For you music readers, including X, if you do not feel a shiver of pleasure, a moment of "perfect Schumann" at the end of this last example, when the second voice enters, at the "wrong time" (in the middle of the established grouping), and deliberately in order to form a dissonance with the upper voice... (C against B) ... if you don't "get that moment," if you aren't waiting to see in what beautiful fashion the wrong-note B will resolve, you are voted off the Schumann island. (You non-music readers, just listen to the last track, shouldn't be too hard to follow). This dissonance, which is just the edge of longing to which the preceding fragments allude, becomes generative, becomes an obsession; the waltz, though sad and gentle, is suddenly full of these dissonances which need to be resolved, which create more, the sense of clash, every note's (by turns) inability to live with itself:
... a stream of consciousness leading from that first entrance of the "second voice," from that generative dissonance, following the idea of the dissonance to whatever consequences ... and another stream, gradually attempting to "fill in" the fragmented waltz, to swing gradually from halting pairs of quarter notes into a more typical, dotted waltz rhythm (see example above, second measure, A G F E): this second stream, an urge to find melodic/rhythmic continuity. Two streams, and many others which we haven't mentioned, and how can you possibly feel them all while playing? Not to mention, in public? All these are in the score, simultaneous, clamoring: a bewildering cacophony of thought. The score is impossibly demanding.
The streams seem to lead gradually downward, smoothing out their dissonances, to this "answer":
Yes, it is the same sixth leap which began the waltz, G up to E, but now instead of fragments and half-steps and half-phrases, there is just a long, unbroken, lilting descent... I adore this final phrase, partly because I feel it is not enough, it does not really, truly resolve; but it is heartbreaking for me: the essence of tenderness, too late. I have words for this final phrase; I have written them in my score; but I will never tell anyone; anyway, they are nonsense words, meaningful only for me, German words with no grammar whatsoever. (Tribal meanings?) Can I say that this beautiful phrase "resolves" the previous longing and dissonances? Yes and no, I'm not sure that I totally "understand" the relation of the final phrase to the rest... it is a meager connection, sustained by slight threads of thought, threads that can never be definitive.
It is totally infuriating to imagine a music theorist at this point trying to describe the form of this last piece. (Is it ternary? binary? modified binary? Arrggghhh!) With a piece like this, Schumann seems to satirize even the idea of musical form, the notion of completeness, and its relevance. And it was infuriating to hear all these beautiful, sensitive versions which did not capture even an iota of my tremendous emotional attachment to this last waltz... they were all incomplete somehow. I can't help thinking of my own hypothetical version. Someday, when I return to this piece, my version ... will hopefully be even more incomplete, even less definitive.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Unexpected
I am dangerously attempting to begin this post without having truly consumed an appreciable amount of coffee. Sip sip. But it may not kick in soon enough...
I just thought this event was surreal enough to warrant mentioning. Yesterday afternoon, I went down round 5 to the hotel fitness room, to do some stairmaster. And I was full-on sweaty and stepping and dazed, when I heard the door open; I turned my head, and to my utter shock and disbelief: Leon Fleisher entered the room. For you non-pianists or non-musicians out there, this may not seem like such a big deal, but pianists will understand... (for a scientist, the parallel might be that Einstein entered the room; for an author, Salman Rushdie... I don't know, you get the idea). It is the sort of thing that would happen in a dream. Listen to this, man: last night I dreamed I was washing the dishes, and Leon Fleisher walked in and told me to do it more spiritually, etc. What's more, it was too late for me to turn off the drippy romantic comedy about three aspiring country western singers I was watching (at FULL volume), starring River Phoenix and a young Sandra Bullock and other people too mediocre to mention. (I certainly could not claim I was NOT watching it; the stairmaster faced the TV completely and closely). They were making their way onscreen to success via love, loss, and the sober road of experience. Leon seemed not to notice this more profound aspect of the film as he cast what I (perhaps overly) interpreted as a rather dismissive glance in the movie's direction, and headed for the treadmills. How could I explain to him, without becoming ridiculous, that I had brought Cervantes' Dialogue of the Dogs with me to read (certainly a philosophical and profound entertainment), but that this particular stairmaster had no holder for reading material? That therefore I was a helpless TV consumer? That I had read much of Proust on the stairmaster as well, in years past (in lost time)? How could I explain that I was allowing myself to be moved (were they beads of sweat or tears on my brow?)by country-western music just hours before my Mozart Double (my debut, for God's sake!) with the Philadelphia Orchestra? Why was I watching this drivel instead of, say, the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour? No. All explanations were moot; all I could do was finish my routine, and slink out of the room. So it goes. I noted, as I left, that he was watching the weather. Ah, indeed, sigh, that is what a great artist does on the treadmill, I thought! Perhaps he did not even notice the weather forecast; it was only a background for his great treading thoughts, as the ever-changing weather is a background for our lives.
My new favorite quote: "The best part of repentance is the sinning."
I just thought this event was surreal enough to warrant mentioning. Yesterday afternoon, I went down round 5 to the hotel fitness room, to do some stairmaster. And I was full-on sweaty and stepping and dazed, when I heard the door open; I turned my head, and to my utter shock and disbelief: Leon Fleisher entered the room. For you non-pianists or non-musicians out there, this may not seem like such a big deal, but pianists will understand... (for a scientist, the parallel might be that Einstein entered the room; for an author, Salman Rushdie... I don't know, you get the idea). It is the sort of thing that would happen in a dream. Listen to this, man: last night I dreamed I was washing the dishes, and Leon Fleisher walked in and told me to do it more spiritually, etc. What's more, it was too late for me to turn off the drippy romantic comedy about three aspiring country western singers I was watching (at FULL volume), starring River Phoenix and a young Sandra Bullock and other people too mediocre to mention. (I certainly could not claim I was NOT watching it; the stairmaster faced the TV completely and closely). They were making their way onscreen to success via love, loss, and the sober road of experience. Leon seemed not to notice this more profound aspect of the film as he cast what I (perhaps overly) interpreted as a rather dismissive glance in the movie's direction, and headed for the treadmills. How could I explain to him, without becoming ridiculous, that I had brought Cervantes' Dialogue of the Dogs with me to read (certainly a philosophical and profound entertainment), but that this particular stairmaster had no holder for reading material? That therefore I was a helpless TV consumer? That I had read much of Proust on the stairmaster as well, in years past (in lost time)? How could I explain that I was allowing myself to be moved (were they beads of sweat or tears on my brow?)by country-western music just hours before my Mozart Double (my debut, for God's sake!) with the Philadelphia Orchestra? Why was I watching this drivel instead of, say, the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour? No. All explanations were moot; all I could do was finish my routine, and slink out of the room. So it goes. I noted, as I left, that he was watching the weather. Ah, indeed, sigh, that is what a great artist does on the treadmill, I thought! Perhaps he did not even notice the weather forecast; it was only a background for his great treading thoughts, as the ever-changing weather is a background for our lives.
My new favorite quote: "The best part of repentance is the sinning."
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Better
I'm better today, thank the powers that be. I thought I would post another installment of the subway poetry "experiment"... zipping back and forth from 91st street to Mozart rehearsals on 58th street, I found plenty of time to contemplate the #1 trains... for those who don't remember, it is a not-so-subtle attack on the whole "subway verse" thing, by intermingling lines from the posted poems with the surrounding advertisements and public service announcements. I wish I could say I was continuing by "popular request," but really I'm just continuing for my own perversity. The following, to my mind, gives the nihilistic and famous speech from Macbeth a kind of post-modern, ironic punch, which it probably didn't need:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Investing in futures
creeps in this petty pace from day to day.
Tighten skin without surgery
to the last syllable of recorded time.
Lighten up!
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools.
Please don't rush or push on
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Number One makes all stops.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player.
My future: a theatre director
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.
What you thought you knew is history
and then is heard no more; it is a tale
it's a work in progress,
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury--
He may be without a home, but he's not without help,
Signifying nothing.
Get prepped for success!
I feel the end is even more bitter than the original? Comments, including cease-and-desist orders, are welcome, but may be ignored.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Investing in futures
creeps in this petty pace from day to day.
Tighten skin without surgery
to the last syllable of recorded time.
Lighten up!
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools.
Please don't rush or push on
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Number One makes all stops.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player.
My future: a theatre director
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.
What you thought you knew is history
and then is heard no more; it is a tale
it's a work in progress,
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury--
He may be without a home, but he's not without help,
Signifying nothing.
Get prepped for success!
I feel the end is even more bitter than the original? Comments, including cease-and-desist orders, are welcome, but may be ignored.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Carter and the Things You Want
I'll admit it. I'm in a foul mood today. For me there are three kinds of foul:
1) "Irritable" foul: where everything just peeves me, from the wait in line at Starbucks to the cheery hello of my doorman.
2) "Overwhelmed" foul: when the volume of unopened mail and unattended crap gets all metaphysical on me, and makes me feel panicky.
3) "Seriously" foul: where something deep has shifted, and part of me has yet to adjust.
Today's foul is a bit of 2, mixed with a lot of 3. It's funny: I'm cheering myself up just a bit, even enumerating these foulnesses. Ironic that my foul day should be the longest day of the year. (Bitter laugh)
What does all this have to do with music, you ask? Well what I'm suffering from is a fascinating medical condition known as the Post-Festival Blues, COMBINED with a little bit of Pre-Festival Panic (since I am simply between festivals). Post-Festival blues is like the melancholy of the last day of summer camp... all of us overgrown classical-music-children, going to camp every summer, making friends and enemies, not writing home as much as we should, and then it's over... This one is particularly bad, for reasons that are hard to pin down, irrational reasons; it feels as though something were given to me, and then taken away. And I want it, even though I'm not precisely sure what "it" is.
As it is impossible for me to deal with any personal issues in my life without sublimating them into music first (just kidding, kind of) it got me to thinking about musical passages where this sort of thing happens: and it seems to me that this giving and taking away is not a bad thing in music, but an essential part of its meaning... I've often enjoyed the quality of certain music where only a few notes are made to suffice (not TOO many notes, because that would ruin it, overwhelm it): one of the great virtues of modernism. Late Romanticism: a giant surplus of notes, of "explained" meanings, of overblown programs, of chromatic complexity. Modernism converts
O fair white silk, fresh from the weaver's loom,
Clear as the frost, bright as the winter snow--
See! friendship fashions out of thee a fan,
Round as the round moon shines in heaven above ... [etc.]
to
O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.
Less is often more; the single word (the single note) connotes more, is free, open-ended. (For example, the fabulous
"also.")
I played the Elliott Carter Piano Sonata this last Saturday, and while I was practicing it I kept playing over the final section; it seemed at once elusive, impossible (because of its spareness) and also to hold, behind its reserve, the most profound and beautiful thoughts. The piece continually plays with the giving and taking away of harmonic information, the expansion of one or two notes into an complex harmony, and then back again, until you are made to find satisfaction in fewer notes, to find resolution in absence. It is so beautiful to trace his thinking in this manner in the last bars of the piece: he carefully delineates which notes should be retained with the pedal, and when precisely should they be made to vanish: a constant game of resolving to "too few notes," then adding some other notes which raise new questions, which necessitate further resolutions, which keep the piece alive. Just when there is too little, he adds something new (which is "too much," which needs to be dealt with in some way, just like I need today to deal with my unresolved, undirected wants)...
Each time I played it, I couldn't get over the beauty of the final bars, of the piece's "answer." Let me be analytical for a second: here Carter summarizes and merges two main themes of the piece, this melodic cell:
and this rhythmic motive:
Both of these are "protagonists" of the piece; we have heard them millions of times (seemingly). But not like this, their merging moment:
F# (high), F# (low), C# (top note of chord)... that would seem to be it, one more recap of the "tune," BUT as you slowly release the pedal, the B emerges from beneath its cloud of notes, a lonely, uninflected, uncluttered tonic. This note, on the "weak beat," the unaccented syllable of the sentence, a rhythmic aftershock ... turns out to be the strong foundation, the center, the fundament from which the other notes have radiated. Carter does not want it to be played so much as revealed. Instead of overtones coming off of a played note, Carter here allows the "undertone" to come from its overtones, allows cause to follow effect.
And there it is: just that B. You hold it until it fades away. The other notes, beautiful B major notes like A#, F#, C# linger in the memory more faintly (vanished overtones). And why do I find this so affecting? When I start to hear just the B, there is at first a rush of pleasure: it is so pure, perfect, so resolving; then I begin to feel its relation backwards, its threads of connection... I want to go back and play the whole piece again, to hear his flights of fancy, racing through fifths and fourths from B up and down the keyboard... those amazing scorrevole passages from the first movement, the giant jazz fugue in the second. But no, it is over. The B is a relinquishing of all the other notes, not at all a triumphant arrival, but a removal...
Right now, in my foulness, in my apartment with laundry and dry cleaning to do and millions of unopened bills and pieces to practice, I would love to go back also, perhaps to the last festival, and argue about Schumann with quirky musicians in the sports bars of suburban Detroit; but today, there is only the B and the thought of what notes might come of the B--entirely hypothetical musings, speculations. I am awaiting the return of my overtones.
1) "Irritable" foul: where everything just peeves me, from the wait in line at Starbucks to the cheery hello of my doorman.
2) "Overwhelmed" foul: when the volume of unopened mail and unattended crap gets all metaphysical on me, and makes me feel panicky.
3) "Seriously" foul: where something deep has shifted, and part of me has yet to adjust.
Today's foul is a bit of 2, mixed with a lot of 3. It's funny: I'm cheering myself up just a bit, even enumerating these foulnesses. Ironic that my foul day should be the longest day of the year. (Bitter laugh)
What does all this have to do with music, you ask? Well what I'm suffering from is a fascinating medical condition known as the Post-Festival Blues, COMBINED with a little bit of Pre-Festival Panic (since I am simply between festivals). Post-Festival blues is like the melancholy of the last day of summer camp... all of us overgrown classical-music-children, going to camp every summer, making friends and enemies, not writing home as much as we should, and then it's over... This one is particularly bad, for reasons that are hard to pin down, irrational reasons; it feels as though something were given to me, and then taken away. And I want it, even though I'm not precisely sure what "it" is.
As it is impossible for me to deal with any personal issues in my life without sublimating them into music first (just kidding, kind of) it got me to thinking about musical passages where this sort of thing happens: and it seems to me that this giving and taking away is not a bad thing in music, but an essential part of its meaning... I've often enjoyed the quality of certain music where only a few notes are made to suffice (not TOO many notes, because that would ruin it, overwhelm it): one of the great virtues of modernism. Late Romanticism: a giant surplus of notes, of "explained" meanings, of overblown programs, of chromatic complexity. Modernism converts
O fair white silk, fresh from the weaver's loom,
Clear as the frost, bright as the winter snow--
See! friendship fashions out of thee a fan,
Round as the round moon shines in heaven above ... [etc.]
to
O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.
Less is often more; the single word (the single note) connotes more, is free, open-ended. (For example, the fabulous
"also.")
I played the Elliott Carter Piano Sonata this last Saturday, and while I was practicing it I kept playing over the final section; it seemed at once elusive, impossible (because of its spareness) and also to hold, behind its reserve, the most profound and beautiful thoughts. The piece continually plays with the giving and taking away of harmonic information, the expansion of one or two notes into an complex harmony, and then back again, until you are made to find satisfaction in fewer notes, to find resolution in absence. It is so beautiful to trace his thinking in this manner in the last bars of the piece: he carefully delineates which notes should be retained with the pedal, and when precisely should they be made to vanish: a constant game of resolving to "too few notes," then adding some other notes which raise new questions, which necessitate further resolutions, which keep the piece alive. Just when there is too little, he adds something new (which is "too much," which needs to be dealt with in some way, just like I need today to deal with my unresolved, undirected wants)...
Each time I played it, I couldn't get over the beauty of the final bars, of the piece's "answer." Let me be analytical for a second: here Carter summarizes and merges two main themes of the piece, this melodic cell:
and this rhythmic motive:
Both of these are "protagonists" of the piece; we have heard them millions of times (seemingly). But not like this, their merging moment:
F# (high), F# (low), C# (top note of chord)... that would seem to be it, one more recap of the "tune," BUT as you slowly release the pedal, the B emerges from beneath its cloud of notes, a lonely, uninflected, uncluttered tonic. This note, on the "weak beat," the unaccented syllable of the sentence, a rhythmic aftershock ... turns out to be the strong foundation, the center, the fundament from which the other notes have radiated. Carter does not want it to be played so much as revealed. Instead of overtones coming off of a played note, Carter here allows the "undertone" to come from its overtones, allows cause to follow effect.
And there it is: just that B. You hold it until it fades away. The other notes, beautiful B major notes like A#, F#, C# linger in the memory more faintly (vanished overtones). And why do I find this so affecting? When I start to hear just the B, there is at first a rush of pleasure: it is so pure, perfect, so resolving; then I begin to feel its relation backwards, its threads of connection... I want to go back and play the whole piece again, to hear his flights of fancy, racing through fifths and fourths from B up and down the keyboard... those amazing scorrevole passages from the first movement, the giant jazz fugue in the second. But no, it is over. The B is a relinquishing of all the other notes, not at all a triumphant arrival, but a removal...
Right now, in my foulness, in my apartment with laundry and dry cleaning to do and millions of unopened bills and pieces to practice, I would love to go back also, perhaps to the last festival, and argue about Schumann with quirky musicians in the sports bars of suburban Detroit; but today, there is only the B and the thought of what notes might come of the B--entirely hypothetical musings, speculations. I am awaiting the return of my overtones.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Groceries
For those who suspect classical musicians are a different breed, I have solid scientific evidence. The other evening, I was playing a concert with violinist Soovin Kim and cellist Peter Stumpf. In a distant (15-20 miles) suburb, cellist Andres Diaz and violinist Chee Yun were also playing a concert. After our concert, Soovin and I parted company with Peter, who went home to drop off his cello. Soovin and I then decided, on a whim, to go directly to the grocery store for post-concert treats...
We wandered the lonely aisles, selecting the usual gourmet fare: an Entenmann's danish, white peaches, a frozen pizza, baked Cheetos... and there at the checkout counter, we ran into Peter, who had just then run into Andres and Chee Yun! We were like migratory birds, destined for groceries, magnetically and mysteriously drawn from distant climes to a single Kroger at a particular hour... What Beethovenian machination of fate was at work?
One further oddity: Soovin's and my white jacket and tie drew some amused remarks from some 30-ish ladies ("nice tuxes")... who then kept waving at us in the parking lot, kind of desperately, as if we were soldiers going off to war. Soovin thinks they were trying to "pick us up," but my theory is they were like minor divinities, somehow associated with the fateful musical convergence, trying to deliver us some omen or message which we will never, ever know. As Rilke says, "we must live the questions, and someday our lives will become the answer." Or something like that.
Following up, finally, on the narcissistic theme from the last post, I went to Barnes & Noble (boo hiss) to pick up some Montale poetry which had been very inspiring ... (texts for an Elliot Carter piece which I just heard). Alas, there was no Montale in the Bloomfield Hills B&N, as I was informed by a pierced, patchouli-scented aide; but next to where he might have been (again fate) was Ovid's Metamorphoses, which I drew out of the shelf to refresh my memory of the tale of Narcissus. What a beautiful tale! Especially the encounter of Narcissus (the boy in love with his own image), and Echo (the girl who can do nothing but echo what other people say)... what a spectacular, symbolic, heavy, association-rich episode this is in the tortured history of the Western mind! And super-fraught with associations for us migratory classical musician-birds: we are forced to echo pieces written long ago; in one sense, we are as helpless as Echo, we can only say what "has been said;" but what we get out of them, the return of our encounter with them, is always at least partly ourselves. We cannot help seeing and feeling ourselves, reflected in these pieces. These pieces (great masterworks, texts of seemingly infinite association and possibility) are like mirrors to us, like Narcissus' fatal pond... mirrors against which we cannot help but feel insecure, vulnerable, incomplete.
We wandered the lonely aisles, selecting the usual gourmet fare: an Entenmann's danish, white peaches, a frozen pizza, baked Cheetos... and there at the checkout counter, we ran into Peter, who had just then run into Andres and Chee Yun! We were like migratory birds, destined for groceries, magnetically and mysteriously drawn from distant climes to a single Kroger at a particular hour... What Beethovenian machination of fate was at work?
One further oddity: Soovin's and my white jacket and tie drew some amused remarks from some 30-ish ladies ("nice tuxes")... who then kept waving at us in the parking lot, kind of desperately, as if we were soldiers going off to war. Soovin thinks they were trying to "pick us up," but my theory is they were like minor divinities, somehow associated with the fateful musical convergence, trying to deliver us some omen or message which we will never, ever know. As Rilke says, "we must live the questions, and someday our lives will become the answer." Or something like that.
Following up, finally, on the narcissistic theme from the last post, I went to Barnes & Noble (boo hiss) to pick up some Montale poetry which had been very inspiring ... (texts for an Elliot Carter piece which I just heard). Alas, there was no Montale in the Bloomfield Hills B&N, as I was informed by a pierced, patchouli-scented aide; but next to where he might have been (again fate) was Ovid's Metamorphoses, which I drew out of the shelf to refresh my memory of the tale of Narcissus. What a beautiful tale! Especially the encounter of Narcissus (the boy in love with his own image), and Echo (the girl who can do nothing but echo what other people say)... what a spectacular, symbolic, heavy, association-rich episode this is in the tortured history of the Western mind! And super-fraught with associations for us migratory classical musician-birds: we are forced to echo pieces written long ago; in one sense, we are as helpless as Echo, we can only say what "has been said;" but what we get out of them, the return of our encounter with them, is always at least partly ourselves. We cannot help seeing and feeling ourselves, reflected in these pieces. These pieces (great masterworks, texts of seemingly infinite association and possibility) are like mirrors to us, like Narcissus' fatal pond... mirrors against which we cannot help but feel insecure, vulnerable, incomplete.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Wow and Wind
Anonymous writes, "this entire blog is an exercise in narcissistic pretense." Hooray for anonymous! He/she is correct, as always. Pretense courses through every entry: things are omitted, rewritten, made readable, given "a style, a voice"... there lurks in the background that pretentious word "literary." I can't, therefore, present myself, whoever that might be; I seem to present how I imagine myself, or even how I imagine others imagine me, or--and these are the parts I admit, in my narcissism, I like the best--myself as illuminated by certain passages of music, the cross-section between my persona and certain sound patterns... Some parts of Jeremy Denk: did they exist until I encountered particular phrases, pieces of music? Chicken and egg: until the "Dumky" Trio, was humanity's sense of nostalgia less rich? (Or did "Dumky" depend entirely on preexisting emotional patterns in humanity?) Did those tender phrases permanently add to mankind's emotional repertoire, give nostalgia a definitive auditory example?
Today (for me) is a joyous day, with a fresh cool wind blowing through the suburbs of Detroit... (oppressive summer lifts)... I am so happy today and part of this happiness is stuck to, glued to, the act of putting my hands down on the piano keys a certain way and coming up with a luminous, sensual sound, a sound of which I approve, which suggests further sounds, further motions, further pleasures. The exact equality of the intention and the result; motion=sound; idea=event. Me me me. But add to this the liberating fact that the music is already written for you (Dvorak, Mendelssohn for me tonight), so that you just "throw yourself into it." I am a puppet with strings pulled by dead European composers; but I love it, this willing marionette is me. Don't you think the puppet influences the puppeteer? I think so (in my narcissism). Dvorak depends on me to express something about Dvorak. Pooh on the people who say it's all on the page; it most certainly is not.
In the puppet vein, I saw a production of Pierrot Lunaire this last weekend featuring Lucy Shelton's riveting, completely possessed sprechstimme, a delightful life-sized Pierrot puppet (Blair Thomas puppet theatre of Chicago), and my fellow Oberlin alums, the ensemble Eighth Blackbird. The work was frantically staged, and all the musicians performed from memory! It was tremendous to watch Lucy interact with the puppet, to "literally" address Pierrot (who eventually is brought out, poor fellow, in a wheelchair); but my favorite part was how she and the puppet interacted with the instrumentalists (and even their instruments). Musicians are usually "left alone," treated with deference (after all, they must concentrate!), but here they were treated irreverently, like just another part of the surreal gang. Music inspires choreography, which in turn rebounds back and influences the music, the musicians, draws them into the game... There they were, marching across the stage behind a prancing Pierrot, who jumps into the piano, turns back to look at them... the musicians in turn look back, as if to see what Pierrot is looking at... who or what are they looking for (is there some secret agent in the wings?)... Who or what is in charge? No member of the ensemble seemed to lead, to be privileged. Which to me is the perfect way to express the unhinged, expressionist mind.
I really liked the sense that the musicians were forced to confront their own creation (like a mad scientist, like Dr. Frankenstein); the music they were playing almost attacked them! There are musicians out there who aim to be pure, uninvolved channels for music to pass through, who look on impassively while their fingers create... For them, this Pierrot would be kind of a nightmare. I have never been able to pursue this ideal (never cherished it especially, either), except to the extent that you don't want your personal involvement, your emotional attachment to the music to get "in your own way," to hinder auditory expression. In my narcissism I find that the music keeps turning in on me, and vice versa, and I cannot stop this wheel from turning, except every so often to send it back the other way, like a pendulum or seesaw. And so this Pierrot was like an actualization of something I feel so often: the meddling of music in my personal life, its lack of boundaries, of respect for my "personal space."
Today (for me) is a joyous day, with a fresh cool wind blowing through the suburbs of Detroit... (oppressive summer lifts)... I am so happy today and part of this happiness is stuck to, glued to, the act of putting my hands down on the piano keys a certain way and coming up with a luminous, sensual sound, a sound of which I approve, which suggests further sounds, further motions, further pleasures. The exact equality of the intention and the result; motion=sound; idea=event. Me me me. But add to this the liberating fact that the music is already written for you (Dvorak, Mendelssohn for me tonight), so that you just "throw yourself into it." I am a puppet with strings pulled by dead European composers; but I love it, this willing marionette is me. Don't you think the puppet influences the puppeteer? I think so (in my narcissism). Dvorak depends on me to express something about Dvorak. Pooh on the people who say it's all on the page; it most certainly is not.
In the puppet vein, I saw a production of Pierrot Lunaire this last weekend featuring Lucy Shelton's riveting, completely possessed sprechstimme, a delightful life-sized Pierrot puppet (Blair Thomas puppet theatre of Chicago), and my fellow Oberlin alums, the ensemble Eighth Blackbird. The work was frantically staged, and all the musicians performed from memory! It was tremendous to watch Lucy interact with the puppet, to "literally" address Pierrot (who eventually is brought out, poor fellow, in a wheelchair); but my favorite part was how she and the puppet interacted with the instrumentalists (and even their instruments). Musicians are usually "left alone," treated with deference (after all, they must concentrate!), but here they were treated irreverently, like just another part of the surreal gang. Music inspires choreography, which in turn rebounds back and influences the music, the musicians, draws them into the game... There they were, marching across the stage behind a prancing Pierrot, who jumps into the piano, turns back to look at them... the musicians in turn look back, as if to see what Pierrot is looking at... who or what are they looking for (is there some secret agent in the wings?)... Who or what is in charge? No member of the ensemble seemed to lead, to be privileged. Which to me is the perfect way to express the unhinged, expressionist mind.
I really liked the sense that the musicians were forced to confront their own creation (like a mad scientist, like Dr. Frankenstein); the music they were playing almost attacked them! There are musicians out there who aim to be pure, uninvolved channels for music to pass through, who look on impassively while their fingers create... For them, this Pierrot would be kind of a nightmare. I have never been able to pursue this ideal (never cherished it especially, either), except to the extent that you don't want your personal involvement, your emotional attachment to the music to get "in your own way," to hinder auditory expression. In my narcissism I find that the music keeps turning in on me, and vice versa, and I cannot stop this wheel from turning, except every so often to send it back the other way, like a pendulum or seesaw. And so this Pierrot was like an actualization of something I feel so often: the meddling of music in my personal life, its lack of boundaries, of respect for my "personal space."
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Rubato from Another Planet; or, Waking Up Early
Last night, inexplicably, I put a new CD in my CD alarm clock. (Avid Think Denk readers--is this a plural? or even a singular?--will recall volume two of Nina Simone's "Tomato Collection" residing there previously.) I felt no particular urge for change; it just hit me, like the smell of sour milk emanating from a Mr. Softee truck. And let me tell you, there is nothing like waking up, bleary, at 6:50 AM on a Friday morning, after staying up stupidly late staring at an over-packed suitcase and a list of things to do upon awakening (1. Throw out garbage 2. Pack toothbrush and toothpaste 3. Pay rent 4. Check wallet for credit card and drivers license) and trying to remember music I might have forgotten to pack... there is nothing like waking up after one of those short, stressed-out nights to zany Viennese lilt, chords and notes flying everywhere, and sudden blasts of tender, lyrical playing unheard of in modern days: in other words there is nothing like waking up, exhausted, to Ignaz Friedman's Alt Wien. It coaxed a silent laugh out of what is often my darkest hour; I was awake for a strange non-moment before it came on (curse my inescapable, time-laden consciousness) and I drifted back to sleep; with a harrumph it began in B-flat, and I was smilingly, totally awake; its joyous abandon blasted into the half-lit, half-cleaned apartment like secular incense, blessing my early morning scramble.
I meant what I said about the "harrumph." In the boisterous waltzes, Friedman's downbeats have outrageous, tremendous impulse; they are huge, sprawling, but also springy, dancing catapults ... the intervening 2 and 3 beats are often overwhelmed, virtually swallowed within the downbeat's energy, in a way that modern conservatory education would find unacceptable (tut tut! don't swallow those beats!) I yell back: Yes Friedman, swallow them! Keep it coming! Go for it, baby! This is taken to almost comical extremes, admittedly; sometimes neither the rhythms or notes of the 2 or 3 are very clear or accurate, there is only a vague sense of intervening chatter between the rollicking, galloping 1s. This is when Friedman surrenders himself entirely to the waltz as frenzy, as leap, as twirl... then he stops, reassembles, recomports himself, a tender strain enters ... everything is suddenly placed again, the internal beats are nuanced, proportioned, perfect .... ah, Vienna, the good old days...
A very famous pianist (and irreproachable artist) of my acquaintance disparaged Friedman for being too crass. I know he is wrong. Or, maybe, I think he is right but I don't care; when he says it it passes into one ear, one lobe of my brain, and I smile an empty smile; the other lobe recalls all my favorite Friedman moments and adores them internally while I pretend to agree. Am I a hypocrite? Anyway, Friedman makes up for any vulgarities--his sudden accents, added octaves, etc.--with an abundance of grace. His B-flat Chopin Polonaise (which comes right after Alt Wien in my Naxos recording) is a virtual philosophical demonstration of charm (Hmmm, apply the Kantian Categorical Imperative: what if every pianist in the world today were suddenly compelled to play as charmingly as that? Would piano playing in the modern world come to an end?), he transfigures an "ordinary" piece: Chopin's filigree has never been so light, and not sugary-sweet-syrupy-silly... simply appropriate, decorative, the pianist's hand passing over the keys, "like a feather."
I know what it is: Friedman's playing is not limited by a Beethovenian "es muss sein" (it must be)... it has a place for the arbitrary and the accidental. Sometimes he seems motivated by rhythmic/musical forces from another planet, and there is no way to know what he is thinking, and why he is thinking it. This makes me happy; I puzzle over his rhythms with pleasure. For example, Friedman's account of the opening (rather simple) bars of the B-flat Polonaise doesn't resemble any way that anyone I know would play the dotted rhythms they contain. It is as if some other layer of harmony and tension, unbeknownst to mortals, was apparent to Friedman, made it impossible to play the dotted rhythm in its typical tum-tee-tum; somehow the "tee" is too important to him, it's got something to say, it drags against itself. I adore these rhythmic displacements in his playing, irregularities born of secret expression which sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. I know a lot of pianists out there cannot accept the "sometimes fail" (despite this, they still sometimes fail, as we all do)--they must aim for the "always succeed."
In case you don't own any recordings of Ignaz Friedman, go on and buy one. Obviously he is one of my heroes, especially at 7 in the morning. And when else do we need heroes more desperately?
If you thought the writing in this post was a bit fanciful, perhaps it can be explained by this photograph, taken "candidly" in the Northwest airlines terminal, awaiting the flight that Friedman woke me up for, which I feel captures my state of mind perfectly. I append it with no further comment.
I meant what I said about the "harrumph." In the boisterous waltzes, Friedman's downbeats have outrageous, tremendous impulse; they are huge, sprawling, but also springy, dancing catapults ... the intervening 2 and 3 beats are often overwhelmed, virtually swallowed within the downbeat's energy, in a way that modern conservatory education would find unacceptable (tut tut! don't swallow those beats!) I yell back: Yes Friedman, swallow them! Keep it coming! Go for it, baby! This is taken to almost comical extremes, admittedly; sometimes neither the rhythms or notes of the 2 or 3 are very clear or accurate, there is only a vague sense of intervening chatter between the rollicking, galloping 1s. This is when Friedman surrenders himself entirely to the waltz as frenzy, as leap, as twirl... then he stops, reassembles, recomports himself, a tender strain enters ... everything is suddenly placed again, the internal beats are nuanced, proportioned, perfect .... ah, Vienna, the good old days...
A very famous pianist (and irreproachable artist) of my acquaintance disparaged Friedman for being too crass. I know he is wrong. Or, maybe, I think he is right but I don't care; when he says it it passes into one ear, one lobe of my brain, and I smile an empty smile; the other lobe recalls all my favorite Friedman moments and adores them internally while I pretend to agree. Am I a hypocrite? Anyway, Friedman makes up for any vulgarities--his sudden accents, added octaves, etc.--with an abundance of grace. His B-flat Chopin Polonaise (which comes right after Alt Wien in my Naxos recording) is a virtual philosophical demonstration of charm (Hmmm, apply the Kantian Categorical Imperative: what if every pianist in the world today were suddenly compelled to play as charmingly as that? Would piano playing in the modern world come to an end?), he transfigures an "ordinary" piece: Chopin's filigree has never been so light, and not sugary-sweet-syrupy-silly... simply appropriate, decorative, the pianist's hand passing over the keys, "like a feather."
I know what it is: Friedman's playing is not limited by a Beethovenian "es muss sein" (it must be)... it has a place for the arbitrary and the accidental. Sometimes he seems motivated by rhythmic/musical forces from another planet, and there is no way to know what he is thinking, and why he is thinking it. This makes me happy; I puzzle over his rhythms with pleasure. For example, Friedman's account of the opening (rather simple) bars of the B-flat Polonaise doesn't resemble any way that anyone I know would play the dotted rhythms they contain. It is as if some other layer of harmony and tension, unbeknownst to mortals, was apparent to Friedman, made it impossible to play the dotted rhythm in its typical tum-tee-tum; somehow the "tee" is too important to him, it's got something to say, it drags against itself. I adore these rhythmic displacements in his playing, irregularities born of secret expression which sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. I know a lot of pianists out there cannot accept the "sometimes fail" (despite this, they still sometimes fail, as we all do)--they must aim for the "always succeed."
In case you don't own any recordings of Ignaz Friedman, go on and buy one. Obviously he is one of my heroes, especially at 7 in the morning. And when else do we need heroes more desperately?
If you thought the writing in this post was a bit fanciful, perhaps it can be explained by this photograph, taken "candidly" in the Northwest airlines terminal, awaiting the flight that Friedman woke me up for, which I feel captures my state of mind perfectly. I append it with no further comment.
Friday, June 03, 2005
Release
For the first time, blogging by request... A friend suggests by email that I write about the Quartet for the End of Time and (what do you know!) I just finished playing my last one here in Spoleto at the 1 pm concert. I am happy to blog about it because the performance was totally overwhelming for me personally, for mysterious reasons. Was it exhaustion, or accumulation, or release? Daniel Phillips (one of my favorite musicians) was playing the last movement, and I felt that I was going to lose it on stage... i.e. burst out crying. This is rare for me... After some polite goodbyes, I decided to "celebrate" by walking home alone, away from cars and people; I ambled down quiet Church Street, and tried to give my brain its own time.
It is a piece for the "end of time," and yet the pianist (yours truly) has to be time. In the cello and violin solo movements, I simply play chords, awkwardly slowly, marking moments which are much slower than seconds, and marking (with my harmonies) a larger, really time-free, arc of meaning under the melody. In no other piece do you feel such a tremendous strain between something achingly large (something that only eventually will be expressed) and the snail's steps you must take to express it. But he (Messiaen) manages it; not a note is out of place in the last movement; every harmony is extraordinary, an essential step, a grammatical and striking word of the holy overall sentence... somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them as a "mantra": extatique, paradisiaque. And maybe more importantly, I began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life (such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the notes!): people's eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total and absolute tenderness. (This is sentimental, too personal: I know. How can you write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?) I felt that same sense of outpouring ("pouring over") that comes when you just have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own body, when you are briefly no longer yourself -- and at that moment I was still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano. And each chord is even more beautiful than the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic, reverberant... each chord seemed to pile on something that was already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable... and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to "move yourself," to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous place. Luckily, the piece was almost over... When I got offstage I had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.
It wouldn't have gotten to that state without the architecture of the whole, its obsessive completeness. The clarinet movement with its desolate slow melodies ("abyss of the birds")... total despair. Then the amazing, sensual cello movement ... As I walked home I meditated on the idea that the whole piece is somehow in E but only truthful about it occasionally... when the "E majors come," they are such solutions, total releases of implication, homecomings for the soul. I think it was a release for me: the release of all the stress of the concerts (true enough, if not that interesting), and/or the release of some bottled up affection? This second is more intriguing: Music as Therapy. I was therapized by today's concert, by the end of time. It was a difficult session, I but I think I enjoyed it... where will all that affection go?
It is a piece for the "end of time," and yet the pianist (yours truly) has to be time. In the cello and violin solo movements, I simply play chords, awkwardly slowly, marking moments which are much slower than seconds, and marking (with my harmonies) a larger, really time-free, arc of meaning under the melody. In no other piece do you feel such a tremendous strain between something achingly large (something that only eventually will be expressed) and the snail's steps you must take to express it. But he (Messiaen) manages it; not a note is out of place in the last movement; every harmony is extraordinary, an essential step, a grammatical and striking word of the holy overall sentence... somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them as a "mantra": extatique, paradisiaque. And maybe more importantly, I began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life (such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the notes!): people's eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total and absolute tenderness. (This is sentimental, too personal: I know. How can you write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?) I felt that same sense of outpouring ("pouring over") that comes when you just have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own body, when you are briefly no longer yourself -- and at that moment I was still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano. And each chord is even more beautiful than the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic, reverberant... each chord seemed to pile on something that was already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable... and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to "move yourself," to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous place. Luckily, the piece was almost over... When I got offstage I had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.
It wouldn't have gotten to that state without the architecture of the whole, its obsessive completeness. The clarinet movement with its desolate slow melodies ("abyss of the birds")... total despair. Then the amazing, sensual cello movement ... As I walked home I meditated on the idea that the whole piece is somehow in E but only truthful about it occasionally... when the "E majors come," they are such solutions, total releases of implication, homecomings for the soul. I think it was a release for me: the release of all the stress of the concerts (true enough, if not that interesting), and/or the release of some bottled up affection? This second is more intriguing: Music as Therapy. I was therapized by today's concert, by the end of time. It was a difficult session, I but I think I enjoyed it... where will all that affection go?
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Call of the Wild
"Fie on Charleston for clogging your blogging." So writes reader Erin, and though Charleston deserves no fie, I am grateful there are readers to know when there are no posts. I have returned from two concerts (11 am, 1 pm) where I played that joyful, bounding, cloudless Schumann work Faschingsschwank aus Wien. God, what a wonderful piece! And in the somewhat dry Dock St. theatre I felt able to articulate all sorts of things, to come out from Schumann's occasional muck. (Sometimes one wished for a small helping of muck). And then I have had the delicious pleasure of peeling off my somewhat dampened concert clothes and draping them semi-carefully on chairs and bedposts, and reverting to shorts and flip-flops... aah. Flop I go on my wicker sofa. The relief after a concert, after what one considers a semi-successful performance, is luckily almost as deep as the anxiety that precedes the next one.
Charleston is one of those places that makes you think sensually, constantly. So now, as I go over in my head the eternal question "how do I want to spend the rest of my day?," what occurs to me is not a list of tasks but a rush of feelings. For example: sand beneath my feet; the cold of a coffee gelato; the breeze as I pass through Charleston's historic alleys, fast, on my bicycle; the taste of a grilled tender scallop; and certainly not the godawful cold clammy fluorescent light of the one practice room with its poor bedeviled piano, which is acting like a Northerner unused to the heat and becoming grumpy, with several sticky keys... new ones each day! Oh the sensual deprivation of practicing! Only after a hour's persistence do you finally get to the meat of the matter, to the place where you can deal mentally with your issues... and during that whole hour the outside world calls to you, you imagine people streaming down King Street, their sandals slapping against the pavement as they window-shop, as they stop for wings and beer, as they attend cute cultural events and jibberjab and argue about parking. Today it may be too much for me; the sensual may overwhelm the cultural; and so off I go....
Charleston is one of those places that makes you think sensually, constantly. So now, as I go over in my head the eternal question "how do I want to spend the rest of my day?," what occurs to me is not a list of tasks but a rush of feelings. For example: sand beneath my feet; the cold of a coffee gelato; the breeze as I pass through Charleston's historic alleys, fast, on my bicycle; the taste of a grilled tender scallop; and certainly not the godawful cold clammy fluorescent light of the one practice room with its poor bedeviled piano, which is acting like a Northerner unused to the heat and becoming grumpy, with several sticky keys... new ones each day! Oh the sensual deprivation of practicing! Only after a hour's persistence do you finally get to the meat of the matter, to the place where you can deal mentally with your issues... and during that whole hour the outside world calls to you, you imagine people streaming down King Street, their sandals slapping against the pavement as they window-shop, as they stop for wings and beer, as they attend cute cultural events and jibberjab and argue about parking. Today it may be too much for me; the sensual may overwhelm the cultural; and so off I go....
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Morning
It is 8:33 AM. I have been awake for 33 minutes and have to play a concert in slightly less than 2 1/2 hours. I am on my second cup of coffee and have to judge how much will keep me alert until concert time, without sending me into a mania. I shake my head back and forth, wiggle my cheeks, and make silly sounds ... will that help? Charleston life is so very different from New York life, and my brain does not seem to function in a linear, Northern way, I begin to think like a mint julep and blogging seems exotic, bizarre, impossible. Post, an inner voice says, post! And yet the gelateria beckons. Perhaps a walk around the battery, or just a sit in my own lovely garden. Or a casual bikeride around this most beautiful of towns.
Curse the man/woman who invented the morning concert. And I have played so very many. The morning is already the "difficult" part of my day, the mini-crisis of every day. In the afternoon, I often look back at the person I was at 10 AM and think, what a silly boy, what complicated, difficult thoughts he deluded himself with, life is really so uncluttered and simple... but then again at 10 AM the next day it is the same thing, the same morass. Coffee is the acid with which I cut through that primeval, post-sleep ooze. Then add the stress of pre-concert preparations, etc. (where's my suit? is my shirt ironed? do i have my music? blah blah blah) to the whole mix: a morning with a concert is just a mess... i have to evolve from dinosaur to aristocrat in two short hours. Just not enough time: too often a Tyrannosaurus Rex walks out on stage...
Curse the man/woman who invented the morning concert. And I have played so very many. The morning is already the "difficult" part of my day, the mini-crisis of every day. In the afternoon, I often look back at the person I was at 10 AM and think, what a silly boy, what complicated, difficult thoughts he deluded himself with, life is really so uncluttered and simple... but then again at 10 AM the next day it is the same thing, the same morass. Coffee is the acid with which I cut through that primeval, post-sleep ooze. Then add the stress of pre-concert preparations, etc. (where's my suit? is my shirt ironed? do i have my music? blah blah blah) to the whole mix: a morning with a concert is just a mess... i have to evolve from dinosaur to aristocrat in two short hours. Just not enough time: too often a Tyrannosaurus Rex walks out on stage...
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Irreconcilables
Yesterday morning I awoke in a shuttered suite, bathed in pastels, sunshine leaking through the cracks, and when I flung open the curtains (averting my bleary eyes) I saw pristine white boats preparing for a day of fishing in a calm ocean. And I finally put my head back down again in my darkened New York apartment, lulled by "Manhattan waves": the rush of cars up and down Broadway.
Both places had clutter in common. It is amazing; no matter how spacious and sumptuous the hotel room, it seems I react to it like an artist to a blank canvas: I must fill it, or die trying. From the bed yesterday morning, I could see sneakers, dress shoes, socks, shirts, boxer shorts, etcetera laying a trail into the distance, until they reached the living area, where leftover cheese, crackers, and fruit took up the slack: a clump of Boursin here, a used red wine glass there, the wrapper of the crackers placed "just so" on the floor next the coffee table. It was a composition! I had replaced the sanitary perfection of the suite with my native, magnificent disorder, and in record time! Is there a market for this sort of art?
There must be a Latin saying along the lines of "If it is there, it will be consumed." (Perhaps in Spanish: "the tapas will always be gone by evening"?) This hotel was certainly a marvel of consumption. I was not blameless; I fell in with the herd; I ached to consume every inch of my room, every lotion in the bathroom, and in a fit of pique over my $34 room service charge for oatmeal, coffee, and juice, I shoved all the unused toiletry items into my suitcase. (Needless to say, I do not recommend this resort for my more frugal friends). The room service bills were like veritable poems of greed, an endless tally of fees and surcharges which you would hopefully forget about on the beach, in the sunshine.
And I did; I opted against practicing (using the trusty "when in Rome" excuse) and ambled to the beach with nothing other than my shades and my Moleskine notebook (in which I wrote nothing). There I cell phoned my friends, who were amused and/or jealous (my intended effect). I ordered a mango frozen beverage. Then I sat, and baked, and tried to imagine Beethoven. I am not kidding. Actually, I think it was Beethoven (that dead European jerk) who wouldn't leave me in peace. Phrases from the "Spring" Sonata (which I was supposed to play that evening--a piece for which I have never had a totally natural affection) kept popping into my head (how will you play me tonight? don't you owe me something?), and then, when I tried to ignore them, more imperious phrases from the last Piano Sonata (Op. 111) attacked at will. In front of my eyes, the world's most perfect surfer girl and boy settled themselves on chairs to tan (though they were spread perfectly with brown, as if to demonstrate the very Platonic form of "tan"), pulling off shirts, stretching their lithe bodies, with almost comical languor--it was like an Abercrombie & Fitch poster--and while I was observing this, sweating profusely, attempting to appear like I naturally "belonged" here on the beach, like the crabs and the jellyfish, the dotted opening phrase of Op. 111 kept jarring my brain awake:
Could Beethoven have written that piece, here on the beach? I imagined him sitting there, in his shades, with sheafs of manuscript paper, his brow knitting with anger and anxiety, getting ready to notate that first, shocking diminished seventh chord ... when suddenly a 17-year-old girl in a tight, becoming shirt comes up and says "may I take your drink order?" Would he scream at her, tell her to go away? Or would he crumple up the manuscript and have a daiquiri? And could you imagine the surfer boy and girl listening intently to the variations of Op. 111, following them to their transcendental conclusion? No; Op. 111 and the beach are irreconcilable.
Problems basically have two categories of solutions, either to hold on harder (concentrate, buck up, pull up your bootstraps, put your nose to the grindstone), or to let go (release your tension, get some perspective, some sleep, some peace of mind). A lot of my work these days at the piano is directed at increased attention, sending my brain more intently and constantly to the tips of my fingers, trying to keep track of both hands, make them lively, active, willed. And the music I play rewards this attention, richly... I realized on the beach how difficult it was to let my attention wander completely, to "let go," how strong the boundary was between practicing and tanning (as strong as that between Beethoven and surfer chick). I was so used to paying attention; I could even feel myself bringing concentration to bear on my relaxation. I wondered if lying by the pool or ocean, drinking daiquiris and reading People magazine, slathering lotion and eating quesadillas... well, is that really the ideal way to let go? It seems to be a societally recognized method; Florida is one vast spigot through which Americans drain their anxieties. The pool was mobbed with reddened relaxers.
And so, on I theorized... I won't say I didn't enjoy my time at the beach, but I enjoyed the evening performance much more. The release of acting, of creating a phrase more or less the way I wanted (in the "Spring" Sonata which had molested me earlier)--it felt enormous, true, complete. But that's me. Probably I just need to learn how to relax. But in the meantime, I better go practice.
Both places had clutter in common. It is amazing; no matter how spacious and sumptuous the hotel room, it seems I react to it like an artist to a blank canvas: I must fill it, or die trying. From the bed yesterday morning, I could see sneakers, dress shoes, socks, shirts, boxer shorts, etcetera laying a trail into the distance, until they reached the living area, where leftover cheese, crackers, and fruit took up the slack: a clump of Boursin here, a used red wine glass there, the wrapper of the crackers placed "just so" on the floor next the coffee table. It was a composition! I had replaced the sanitary perfection of the suite with my native, magnificent disorder, and in record time! Is there a market for this sort of art?
There must be a Latin saying along the lines of "If it is there, it will be consumed." (Perhaps in Spanish: "the tapas will always be gone by evening"?) This hotel was certainly a marvel of consumption. I was not blameless; I fell in with the herd; I ached to consume every inch of my room, every lotion in the bathroom, and in a fit of pique over my $34 room service charge for oatmeal, coffee, and juice, I shoved all the unused toiletry items into my suitcase. (Needless to say, I do not recommend this resort for my more frugal friends). The room service bills were like veritable poems of greed, an endless tally of fees and surcharges which you would hopefully forget about on the beach, in the sunshine.
And I did; I opted against practicing (using the trusty "when in Rome" excuse) and ambled to the beach with nothing other than my shades and my Moleskine notebook (in which I wrote nothing). There I cell phoned my friends, who were amused and/or jealous (my intended effect). I ordered a mango frozen beverage. Then I sat, and baked, and tried to imagine Beethoven. I am not kidding. Actually, I think it was Beethoven (that dead European jerk) who wouldn't leave me in peace. Phrases from the "Spring" Sonata (which I was supposed to play that evening--a piece for which I have never had a totally natural affection) kept popping into my head (how will you play me tonight? don't you owe me something?), and then, when I tried to ignore them, more imperious phrases from the last Piano Sonata (Op. 111) attacked at will. In front of my eyes, the world's most perfect surfer girl and boy settled themselves on chairs to tan (though they were spread perfectly with brown, as if to demonstrate the very Platonic form of "tan"), pulling off shirts, stretching their lithe bodies, with almost comical languor--it was like an Abercrombie & Fitch poster--and while I was observing this, sweating profusely, attempting to appear like I naturally "belonged" here on the beach, like the crabs and the jellyfish, the dotted opening phrase of Op. 111 kept jarring my brain awake:
Could Beethoven have written that piece, here on the beach? I imagined him sitting there, in his shades, with sheafs of manuscript paper, his brow knitting with anger and anxiety, getting ready to notate that first, shocking diminished seventh chord ... when suddenly a 17-year-old girl in a tight, becoming shirt comes up and says "may I take your drink order?" Would he scream at her, tell her to go away? Or would he crumple up the manuscript and have a daiquiri? And could you imagine the surfer boy and girl listening intently to the variations of Op. 111, following them to their transcendental conclusion? No; Op. 111 and the beach are irreconcilable.
Problems basically have two categories of solutions, either to hold on harder (concentrate, buck up, pull up your bootstraps, put your nose to the grindstone), or to let go (release your tension, get some perspective, some sleep, some peace of mind). A lot of my work these days at the piano is directed at increased attention, sending my brain more intently and constantly to the tips of my fingers, trying to keep track of both hands, make them lively, active, willed. And the music I play rewards this attention, richly... I realized on the beach how difficult it was to let my attention wander completely, to "let go," how strong the boundary was between practicing and tanning (as strong as that between Beethoven and surfer chick). I was so used to paying attention; I could even feel myself bringing concentration to bear on my relaxation. I wondered if lying by the pool or ocean, drinking daiquiris and reading People magazine, slathering lotion and eating quesadillas... well, is that really the ideal way to let go? It seems to be a societally recognized method; Florida is one vast spigot through which Americans drain their anxieties. The pool was mobbed with reddened relaxers.
And so, on I theorized... I won't say I didn't enjoy my time at the beach, but I enjoyed the evening performance much more. The release of acting, of creating a phrase more or less the way I wanted (in the "Spring" Sonata which had molested me earlier)--it felt enormous, true, complete. But that's me. Probably I just need to learn how to relax. But in the meantime, I better go practice.
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Mythologies
Yesterday morning it was on ABC News, and today it hits the New York Times: mystery "Piano Man" is now a big-time star, complete with an alluring photograph, where he clutches his music and the sun glints through his hair. (Kudos to Dean Olsher for first alerting me to this breaking news; he knows what is and isn't news!) The Times shares my cynicism, opining obliquely: "There is, of course, the delicate question of whether the man is a bona fide patient..." The "of course" says it all; it's a figure of speech intended to bring us all into communal agreement, whether or not that agreement exists; it is the implication of hushed, huddled gossip, of connivance; it says that what it's about to say needn't really be said, since it is obvious, and yet it will say that thing, since something needs to be made manifest, has to be expressed... "There is, of course," [what?]
Let us hypothesize for the moment that we have a delicious sham on our hands, and that Piano Man is a monstrously clever chap who has decided to create a career through this bizarre and instantaneous publicity. What he has done is very simple. He has merely externalized the internal metaphors which we all carry around in our mythology of "the artist." He has made the cliché into reality:
The artist is a loner. Check: he was found wandering alone on the Isle of Sheppey. No kin have come forward.
The artist speaks only through his art. Check: he has not spoken to hospital personnel; he only communicated one thing, his drawing of a grand piano (drawing=art, not speech).
The artist is a foreigner, an exile, "not one of us." Check: he seems to have emerged from the sea itself, soaked in ocean water (though wonderfully, in a Kafkaesque touch, still in his concert attire). From what distant, exotic land could he have emerged? My bets are on Atlantis.
The artist is the survivor of trauma, which he communicates to an audience. He suffers for his art. Check. This trauma is even more powerful because we have no way of knowing what it is. It is, therefore, unimaginable. Did he throw himself overboard because of a lost love? Etcetera, etcetera. Or more appropriately: yadda yadda yadda.
The artist is attractive. Since what he/she communicates is beautiful, he/she must be beautiful too. Check. Without this, the whole scheme would be ruined. One must count one's assets.
The artist is insane. Check, as defined by his current accommodations.
The artist has no identity, outside of his art. Check: No kin have come forward. Labels, even, were cut out of his clothing. Nothing about him is inscribed. On the contrary, the artist inscribes, does all the writing, the telling, the showing. He himself is a blank slate, a pure expressive instrument. No one can truly know the artist, since he has no "self." Artists, therefore, only truly love their art. Etcetera.
Against which, I must counterpose the "reality" of myself as artist, on May 18, 2005, in a Manhattan apartment, clutching coffee in one hand while I stab at my laptop keyboard: the difficult reality that I must once again go to the piano and try to begin again, with that giant pile of wonderful, clamoring music. The labels are still on my clothing. Like my apartment, my playing is full of things I would like to "fix up;" there are some things that could be remodelled in a single go, but most things require constant care, mundane attention, a daily calisthenics of the fingers and the mind and proddings for the imagination... The greatest pianists I know seem to approach even their most familiar pieces like blank crossword puzzles, as something to be filled in fresh; each time just as daunting, the whole piece must be "understood again." This is reality as I know it. The clichés of Piano Man can be understood in a flash, as a totality; that is why they make great news. They have the completeness of image. But the Schubert Trio (the E-flat Major) I am about to practice: I know I will never traverse it completely, ever. Which is a good thing.
Let us hypothesize for the moment that we have a delicious sham on our hands, and that Piano Man is a monstrously clever chap who has decided to create a career through this bizarre and instantaneous publicity. What he has done is very simple. He has merely externalized the internal metaphors which we all carry around in our mythology of "the artist." He has made the cliché into reality:
The artist is a loner. Check: he was found wandering alone on the Isle of Sheppey. No kin have come forward.
The artist speaks only through his art. Check: he has not spoken to hospital personnel; he only communicated one thing, his drawing of a grand piano (drawing=art, not speech).
The artist is a foreigner, an exile, "not one of us." Check: he seems to have emerged from the sea itself, soaked in ocean water (though wonderfully, in a Kafkaesque touch, still in his concert attire). From what distant, exotic land could he have emerged? My bets are on Atlantis.
The artist is the survivor of trauma, which he communicates to an audience. He suffers for his art. Check. This trauma is even more powerful because we have no way of knowing what it is. It is, therefore, unimaginable. Did he throw himself overboard because of a lost love? Etcetera, etcetera. Or more appropriately: yadda yadda yadda.
The artist is attractive. Since what he/she communicates is beautiful, he/she must be beautiful too. Check. Without this, the whole scheme would be ruined. One must count one's assets.
The artist is insane. Check, as defined by his current accommodations.
The artist has no identity, outside of his art. Check: No kin have come forward. Labels, even, were cut out of his clothing. Nothing about him is inscribed. On the contrary, the artist inscribes, does all the writing, the telling, the showing. He himself is a blank slate, a pure expressive instrument. No one can truly know the artist, since he has no "self." Artists, therefore, only truly love their art. Etcetera.
Against which, I must counterpose the "reality" of myself as artist, on May 18, 2005, in a Manhattan apartment, clutching coffee in one hand while I stab at my laptop keyboard: the difficult reality that I must once again go to the piano and try to begin again, with that giant pile of wonderful, clamoring music. The labels are still on my clothing. Like my apartment, my playing is full of things I would like to "fix up;" there are some things that could be remodelled in a single go, but most things require constant care, mundane attention, a daily calisthenics of the fingers and the mind and proddings for the imagination... The greatest pianists I know seem to approach even their most familiar pieces like blank crossword puzzles, as something to be filled in fresh; each time just as daunting, the whole piece must be "understood again." This is reality as I know it. The clichés of Piano Man can be understood in a flash, as a totality; that is why they make great news. They have the completeness of image. But the Schubert Trio (the E-flat Major) I am about to practice: I know I will never traverse it completely, ever. Which is a good thing.
Monday, May 16, 2005
Desire and Forgetting, a Birthday Blog
Birthdays are usually days where I insist on indulging myself to the fullest, to the point of making myself very unhappy. Case in point: my 21st birthday, where, extrapolating from my love of coffee, I declared that I would drink as much coffee as possible (based on theorem more=better) resulting in an irritable, cranky, wired mess. Today life seems to be indulging me however, and I am content to let it. For example, this morning at 9 the TV provided me with not just "any" episode of Charmed, but the very first episode, so that I could see exactly how the three witch sisters first came to be aware of their awesome powers, and I could wonder how the show ever survived its pilot. A highlight: when Piper's boyfriend, "Jeremy," turns out to be a horrible, murderous demon--much as I was on my 21st birthday after three thermoses (thermi?) of Kenya AA.
Then, I received a delightful email from my friend regarding a lonely, speechless, piano player found wandering a windswept road on the Isle of Sheppey. Though the article is meant to be somewhat touching and melancholy, I laughed and laughed. The "windswept road" is my favorite touch; the article author is given over to literary pretensions, to be sure, a la Thomas Hardy, perhaps, of The Mayor of Casterbridge? Are we sure these are not the shenanigans (the brilliant maneuvers) of some out-of-control publicist? Perhaps this "mystery piano player" will soon be touring the world, appearing in Carnegie Hall to sold-out crowds, etc. Please be assured, this is not me! I have never been to the Isle of Sheppey.
Finally, though, on my "indulgent" birthday, I had to make a choice, between a carton of butter cookies and some delightful leftover chocolate sauce (Belgian chocolate with cream):
or oatmeal with honey, strawberries, and banana:
Basically, a choice between virtue and vice. I am happy to tell you I chose virtue. But what does the Bible (or any other religious document, for that matter) have to say about choosing virtue in order to feel less bad about subsequent vice? For indeed I chose oatmeal as a sort of counter to expected and likely overindulgence in food and drink with friends this evening, in the Village. It would seem just to be a roundabout way of choosing vice, of ameliorating vice. I turned not to the Bible, but to the Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephen Mitchell:
Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!
Hmmm, not too helpful. Seems to free me to do just about anything! How about:
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the oatmeal and/or chocolate sauce.
(I have slightly edited this translation for current circumstances.) This is better; perhaps I should not get caught up in desire for either oatmeal OR chocolate sauce, or margaritas, or that delightful dish I can't wait to have this evening with the stuffed poblano peppers with the pomegranate seeds. Oops. Turning back to timeless wisdom:
... the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come,
as for example pilots of Charmed,
and emails about piano players,
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
Actually I REALLY LOVE those last two lines, the business about forgetting! They gave me another delicious birthday pleasure, which was a connection to another quote I love, which is my true birthday blog indulgence, just for me... some more Roland Barthes:
"Yet reading does not consist in stopping the chain of systems, in establishing a truth, a legality of the text ... it consists in coupling these systems, not according to their finite quantity, but according to their plurality (which is a being, not a discounting): I pass, I intersect, I articulate, I release, I do not count. Forgetting meanings is not a matter for excuses, an unfortunate defect in performance; it is an affirmative value, a way of asserting the irresponsibility of the text, the pluralism of systems: it is precisely because I forget that I read." --S/Z
And I will now (finally) take the advice of the Tao:
Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.
Then, I received a delightful email from my friend regarding a lonely, speechless, piano player found wandering a windswept road on the Isle of Sheppey. Though the article is meant to be somewhat touching and melancholy, I laughed and laughed. The "windswept road" is my favorite touch; the article author is given over to literary pretensions, to be sure, a la Thomas Hardy, perhaps, of The Mayor of Casterbridge? Are we sure these are not the shenanigans (the brilliant maneuvers) of some out-of-control publicist? Perhaps this "mystery piano player" will soon be touring the world, appearing in Carnegie Hall to sold-out crowds, etc. Please be assured, this is not me! I have never been to the Isle of Sheppey.
Finally, though, on my "indulgent" birthday, I had to make a choice, between a carton of butter cookies and some delightful leftover chocolate sauce (Belgian chocolate with cream):
or oatmeal with honey, strawberries, and banana:
Basically, a choice between virtue and vice. I am happy to tell you I chose virtue. But what does the Bible (or any other religious document, for that matter) have to say about choosing virtue in order to feel less bad about subsequent vice? For indeed I chose oatmeal as a sort of counter to expected and likely overindulgence in food and drink with friends this evening, in the Village. It would seem just to be a roundabout way of choosing vice, of ameliorating vice. I turned not to the Bible, but to the Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephen Mitchell:
Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!
Hmmm, not too helpful. Seems to free me to do just about anything! How about:
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the oatmeal and/or chocolate sauce.
(I have slightly edited this translation for current circumstances.) This is better; perhaps I should not get caught up in desire for either oatmeal OR chocolate sauce, or margaritas, or that delightful dish I can't wait to have this evening with the stuffed poblano peppers with the pomegranate seeds. Oops. Turning back to timeless wisdom:
... the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come,
as for example pilots of Charmed,
and emails about piano players,
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
Actually I REALLY LOVE those last two lines, the business about forgetting! They gave me another delicious birthday pleasure, which was a connection to another quote I love, which is my true birthday blog indulgence, just for me... some more Roland Barthes:
"Yet reading does not consist in stopping the chain of systems, in establishing a truth, a legality of the text ... it consists in coupling these systems, not according to their finite quantity, but according to their plurality (which is a being, not a discounting): I pass, I intersect, I articulate, I release, I do not count. Forgetting meanings is not a matter for excuses, an unfortunate defect in performance; it is an affirmative value, a way of asserting the irresponsibility of the text, the pluralism of systems: it is precisely because I forget that I read." --S/Z
And I will now (finally) take the advice of the Tao:
Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Schumann's Sleight-of-Hand
I read a wonderful quote the other day: "A mathematician is a device for converting coffee into theorems." (Don't ask me to source it, I forget.) And today, from my first sip, blogposts bloomed in my brain, begging to be let free. I want to follow up on some Schumann stuff... Yesterday I compared a passage in Roland Barthes' Lover's Discourse to the various "manners" of Schumann, and lying in bed this morning, further examples of the three "stages" (affirmation, doubt, re-beginning) leapt to mind. For you Schumann fans, the Fantasy, Op. 17, last movement, is a perfect example of this "let us begin again," this return which is not a repetition, the affirmation of difference, and the love affair in question here is between Schumann and Beethoven, an austere, distant, but intense love, visited with all kinds of anxiety and power imbalances, like any good relationship. Haha.
But I would like to get technical today, and for those of you non-musicians, don't freak out because I am going to make all kinds of oversimplifying analogies to language and physics which will have two virtues: 1) to make it easy to understand what I'm saying and 2) to infuriate any music theorists who might be reading. In fact, I will forward this post on to a couple especially crusty music theorists I know and hopefully there will be all sorts of withering commentary, like my favorite remark scribbled on the margin of the first draft of my Juilliard doctoral document: "Yuck."
Oversimplifying analogy #1: Music is a language, i.e. it has a grammar and a syntax. For a given phrase, we've got a "home key," which we call (don't freak out) the TONIC. And the harmony which leads us to the tonic is the DOMINANT...
DOMINANT goes to TONIC
and then of course before the dominant we might have the dominant's dominant, the pre-dominant...
Dominant of Dominant
goes to
Dominant
goes to
Tonic
(Musicians reading this will be bored. My apologies. This is all, like, basic musical "logic.") Now the tonic is, in a sense, the "object" of the phrase. Oversimplifying analogy #2 coming up. Let's take the sentence "Last night I ate risotto." If I say simply "Last night I ate..." your listener will certainly be wondering; did you eat a roast beef sandwich at Subway, or New Zealand red snapper with caramelized persimmon and coconut-candlenut foam (as I did at Jefferson just the other night, highly recommended)? Analogy: what you ate (object of sentence) = tonic of musical phrase. Take it or leave it. Now, take this phrase of Schumann, the opening outburst of the Intermezzo from Faschingsschwank aus Wien:
In this phrase, we have all the "logical" ingredients above: predominant, dominant, tonic. I have labeled them all up there in the score ... take my word for it, or ask a crusty music theorist to confirm it for you. But the way that Schumann writes the phrase, ALL THE EMPHASIS IS ON the subject and verb (predominant/dominant), and THE TONIC IS NOT really a significant part of the gesture. Consider the melody: there is a leap up to an accented note (the predominant) then a beautiful turn-around gesture (the dominant)... on the tonic harmony there is no melody, only absence--the resolution only occurs in the left hand. All the semantic emphasis is in "the wrong place." Last night I ate (risotto).
Schumann in this phrase is acting like a magician. Through his sleight-of-hand, our attention is "misdirected." Instead of the harmony to which all the harmonies are headed--instead of the goal--we are made to notice the predicates, the preparatory harmonies. The resolution, the conclusion, is parenthetical, a "non-event." Schumann slips it in where it won't be noticed, "under our noses."
What's more, radical Robert Schumann persists in these sorts of phrases, perpetually putting the accent on the wrong syllable, and by this inversion creates a kind of reverse syntax. This mirror syntax is on the one hand perfectly logical (since all the harmonies are there, in the right order), and on the other hand unsettling, asymmetrical (as the emphasis is always away from the proper place, as if the rhythm of tonality constantly has to be rewritten, challenged, undone).
Now, Schumann can build whole pieces on these "imbalanced" phrases; he loves them. Let me take this a step further. For me, as a listener and performer, I feel like the main force here is not any one chord, but the tension between the predominant and dominant. ("Music is between the notes.") They exert a kind of gravitational pull towards each other. When I play them, I feel a kind of tension and release in my gut, or somewhere... Oversimplifying analogy #3 coming. But: the main sun of this solar system is the tonic, it is the ultimate source around which the other harmonies "orbit." Without that tonic, the other harmonies would have no "meaning." The tension which Schumann adores is between two moons; he neglects the sun.
How does one build on swirling tension (for that is what this Intermezzo does)? If the brick is a "feeling of tension or pull," how can those be solid enough to hold up a musical building? This tension is not quicksand; those "preliminary" chords, those pairings (predominant/dominant) feel awfully strong; the piece, though unsettled, has tremendous energy (note the tempo marking, "with the greatest energy.") Schumann... revolutionary, Romantic... redefining the terms, forcing us into a different frame of reference, finding strength in reversal.
But I would like to get technical today, and for those of you non-musicians, don't freak out because I am going to make all kinds of oversimplifying analogies to language and physics which will have two virtues: 1) to make it easy to understand what I'm saying and 2) to infuriate any music theorists who might be reading. In fact, I will forward this post on to a couple especially crusty music theorists I know and hopefully there will be all sorts of withering commentary, like my favorite remark scribbled on the margin of the first draft of my Juilliard doctoral document: "Yuck."
Oversimplifying analogy #1: Music is a language, i.e. it has a grammar and a syntax. For a given phrase, we've got a "home key," which we call (don't freak out) the TONIC. And the harmony which leads us to the tonic is the DOMINANT...
DOMINANT goes to TONIC
and then of course before the dominant we might have the dominant's dominant, the pre-dominant...
Dominant of Dominant
goes to
Dominant
goes to
Tonic
(Musicians reading this will be bored. My apologies. This is all, like, basic musical "logic.") Now the tonic is, in a sense, the "object" of the phrase. Oversimplifying analogy #2 coming up. Let's take the sentence "Last night I ate risotto." If I say simply "Last night I ate..." your listener will certainly be wondering; did you eat a roast beef sandwich at Subway, or New Zealand red snapper with caramelized persimmon and coconut-candlenut foam (as I did at Jefferson just the other night, highly recommended)? Analogy: what you ate (object of sentence) = tonic of musical phrase. Take it or leave it. Now, take this phrase of Schumann, the opening outburst of the Intermezzo from Faschingsschwank aus Wien:
In this phrase, we have all the "logical" ingredients above: predominant, dominant, tonic. I have labeled them all up there in the score ... take my word for it, or ask a crusty music theorist to confirm it for you. But the way that Schumann writes the phrase, ALL THE EMPHASIS IS ON the subject and verb (predominant/dominant), and THE TONIC IS NOT really a significant part of the gesture. Consider the melody: there is a leap up to an accented note (the predominant) then a beautiful turn-around gesture (the dominant)... on the tonic harmony there is no melody, only absence--the resolution only occurs in the left hand. All the semantic emphasis is in "the wrong place." Last night I ate (risotto).
Schumann in this phrase is acting like a magician. Through his sleight-of-hand, our attention is "misdirected." Instead of the harmony to which all the harmonies are headed--instead of the goal--we are made to notice the predicates, the preparatory harmonies. The resolution, the conclusion, is parenthetical, a "non-event." Schumann slips it in where it won't be noticed, "under our noses."
What's more, radical Robert Schumann persists in these sorts of phrases, perpetually putting the accent on the wrong syllable, and by this inversion creates a kind of reverse syntax. This mirror syntax is on the one hand perfectly logical (since all the harmonies are there, in the right order), and on the other hand unsettling, asymmetrical (as the emphasis is always away from the proper place, as if the rhythm of tonality constantly has to be rewritten, challenged, undone).
Now, Schumann can build whole pieces on these "imbalanced" phrases; he loves them. Let me take this a step further. For me, as a listener and performer, I feel like the main force here is not any one chord, but the tension between the predominant and dominant. ("Music is between the notes.") They exert a kind of gravitational pull towards each other. When I play them, I feel a kind of tension and release in my gut, or somewhere... Oversimplifying analogy #3 coming. But: the main sun of this solar system is the tonic, it is the ultimate source around which the other harmonies "orbit." Without that tonic, the other harmonies would have no "meaning." The tension which Schumann adores is between two moons; he neglects the sun.
How does one build on swirling tension (for that is what this Intermezzo does)? If the brick is a "feeling of tension or pull," how can those be solid enough to hold up a musical building? This tension is not quicksand; those "preliminary" chords, those pairings (predominant/dominant) feel awfully strong; the piece, though unsettled, has tremendous energy (note the tempo marking, "with the greatest energy.") Schumann... revolutionary, Romantic... redefining the terms, forcing us into a different frame of reference, finding strength in reversal.
Friday, May 13, 2005
Today I Bite the Hand that Feeds Me
... Never bite the hand that feeds you. But today I will.
Yesterday, apparently (according to an urgent communiqué from my mother), my performance of Brahms E-flat Sonata with Richard Stoltzman was played on NPR's Performance Today. Apparently the host of that program, the delightful and eternally curious Fred Child, mentioned my blog, and there is a link on NPR's site!!! I am grateful.
But then, by a curious twist of fate, today I read an article on Slate ... an article also featured on NPR's Day-to-Day... which has enraged me, beyond reason. In it, the author attempts to "reconstruct" a recipe for Proust's madeleine from Proust's own words. Read it yourself, if you must; he comes to the conclusion that the madeleine, such as Proust describes it, "never existed." Short rebuttal: duh. Longer rebuttal, with ranting:
1) Anyone who obsesses about the madeleine and Proust hasn't really read Proust. ("Oh yes, Proust, the chap with the madeleine, rather long book, that.") There's a lot more book out there, kids, go to it! If you get past page 40, let me know! I'll be really proud of you!
2) The WHOLE MASSIVE NOVEL is ABOUT the elusiveness of experience, memory, time... it debunks "realist" description at every turn. Nothing is ever as it seems; everything is in flux, subject to change, perception, etc. etc. Therefore, it is not a place to seek "recipes." Again: read the book! The whole thing!
[Insert Howard Dean-esque scream here. Magnify times 10. Then imagine me in my pajamas running around my bedroom yelling like that as I read the article, and write this post.]
3) OK, I'll quote from the article: "Many cookbooks claim that you can reproduce Marcel Proust's magical madeleine in your own kitchen. But do any of the recipes yield the genuine article? " Aaarrgggghhhhh. Repeat after me! THERE IS NO "GENUINE ARTICLE." Keep repeating until you have a literary sensibility. The whole proposition is patently absurd! Then later on, he refers to Lydia Davis' translation as the most "accurate." Again, with the ridiculous words!
It's enough to send me scrambling through my volumes for the perfect debunking Proust quote, and within 5 minutes I found:
"For things ... as soon as we have perceived them [i.e. the madeleine] are transformed within us into something immaterial [are you listening?], something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend. A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it. And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with 'describing things,' with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces [refer again to article, and various diagrams in it], is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the FURTHEST REMOVED FROM REALITY [emphasis added, mea culpa, I'm in a mood] and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time. Yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express; then at least, if it fails, there is a lesson to be drawn from its impotence (whereas from the successes of realism there is nothing to be learnt), the lesson that this essence is, in part, subjective and incommunicable."
This endless baker's dissection of Proust's description... reminds me so much of cocktail party conversations where nothing is ventured or gained, where trivia are exchanged endlessly and knowledge hovers in the background, unable to penetrate. Also to some extent, it reminds me of some post-concert receptions, where people come up, very friendly, wonderful people, and ask me all sorts of bizarre minutiae about composers, their eating habits, the strings on their pianos, their views on elephants--I don't know, whatever. And while I am telling them I have no idea, I am thinking "I could tell you a lot, maybe, if you'd ask the right questions."
Yesterday, apparently (according to an urgent communiqué from my mother), my performance of Brahms E-flat Sonata with Richard Stoltzman was played on NPR's Performance Today. Apparently the host of that program, the delightful and eternally curious Fred Child, mentioned my blog, and there is a link on NPR's site!!! I am grateful.
But then, by a curious twist of fate, today I read an article on Slate ... an article also featured on NPR's Day-to-Day... which has enraged me, beyond reason. In it, the author attempts to "reconstruct" a recipe for Proust's madeleine from Proust's own words. Read it yourself, if you must; he comes to the conclusion that the madeleine, such as Proust describes it, "never existed." Short rebuttal: duh. Longer rebuttal, with ranting:
1) Anyone who obsesses about the madeleine and Proust hasn't really read Proust. ("Oh yes, Proust, the chap with the madeleine, rather long book, that.") There's a lot more book out there, kids, go to it! If you get past page 40, let me know! I'll be really proud of you!
2) The WHOLE MASSIVE NOVEL is ABOUT the elusiveness of experience, memory, time... it debunks "realist" description at every turn. Nothing is ever as it seems; everything is in flux, subject to change, perception, etc. etc. Therefore, it is not a place to seek "recipes." Again: read the book! The whole thing!
[Insert Howard Dean-esque scream here. Magnify times 10. Then imagine me in my pajamas running around my bedroom yelling like that as I read the article, and write this post.]
3) OK, I'll quote from the article: "Many cookbooks claim that you can reproduce Marcel Proust's magical madeleine in your own kitchen. But do any of the recipes yield the genuine article? " Aaarrgggghhhhh. Repeat after me! THERE IS NO "GENUINE ARTICLE." Keep repeating until you have a literary sensibility. The whole proposition is patently absurd! Then later on, he refers to Lydia Davis' translation as the most "accurate." Again, with the ridiculous words!
It's enough to send me scrambling through my volumes for the perfect debunking Proust quote, and within 5 minutes I found:
"For things ... as soon as we have perceived them [i.e. the madeleine] are transformed within us into something immaterial [are you listening?], something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend. A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it. And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with 'describing things,' with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces [refer again to article, and various diagrams in it], is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the FURTHEST REMOVED FROM REALITY [emphasis added, mea culpa, I'm in a mood] and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time. Yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express; then at least, if it fails, there is a lesson to be drawn from its impotence (whereas from the successes of realism there is nothing to be learnt), the lesson that this essence is, in part, subjective and incommunicable."
This endless baker's dissection of Proust's description... reminds me so much of cocktail party conversations where nothing is ventured or gained, where trivia are exchanged endlessly and knowledge hovers in the background, unable to penetrate. Also to some extent, it reminds me of some post-concert receptions, where people come up, very friendly, wonderful people, and ask me all sorts of bizarre minutiae about composers, their eating habits, the strings on their pianos, their views on elephants--I don't know, whatever. And while I am telling them I have no idea, I am thinking "I could tell you a lot, maybe, if you'd ask the right questions."
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