I was deliciously tempted to go down to Frank and pick up some more musty music to add to my piano room piles. But it was a busy day, and there was only ONE thing I even sort of needed ... so I decided to risk a call to see if they had it. I took a deep, calming breath and dialed.
"Hello, Frank Music," Heidi said.
"Hi, I need... I would like ... to find the transcription of Beethoven 4 ... Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto for String Quintet."
I stammeringly strode right into the request, skipping small talk, not wasting her time. I decided not to identify myself; after my last posting on Frank I didn't know how it would play out.
"For what?"
"An arrangement of Beethoven's 4th Concerto for Piano and String Quintet."
"Wow." [Strange pause] "Do you know who publishes it?" she asked...
Generally, I like to think that Heidi is on top of this information, being the one who contacts the publishers, etc.
"No [sigh] I don't" ... a shade sheepish.
"I've never heard of it."
"Well, it exists. It's a newish discovery." [A gambit on my part: the irrefutable fact.]
"Well I don't know of it."
"I thought you knew everything." [Gambit #2: flattery.]
"Well people think that but they're wrong."
"Should I find out who publishes it?" I said, incredulously.
This was really a mistake. Somehow I thought Heidi would fall for the irony, would see the absurdity of my trying to horn in on her area of expertise, and she would immediately try to find out herself where this arrangement existed, and how I could get hold of it. I was so very, very wrong. A long pause occurred. Did she say something under her breath?
"Obviously you know about this, and you need to educate me."
I was stunned and didn't know how to respond: "Hardly..."
"No really, I need to be educated." [nanosecond pause] "And I have to go." [click]
And thus the conversation ended. Needless to say, I was simply too afraid to go down to Frank, and the Krenek etudes or Gottschalk compilations I might have bought on a whim are sitting in their buckets, waiting for the next time. Speaking of next time, I probably won't call ahead. I'll just go down to the store, perhaps in disguise? That which does not kill us only makes us stronger?
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Friday, June 23, 2006
Fairy Tales
Detroit was perturbed with rain. After a strange distended lunchtime concert, I awoke from a short nap, in a non-state-of-mind, to find a darkish sky over a still, mirroring lake. I couldn't resist, and padded to the shore in my flipflops. I unhooked the bicycle boat, slid it out into the quiet water. Mansions slipped by on land, blinking their large windows at me, while I listened to the boat creak and felt the paddles pull against the water; my legs seemed to go through their motions, pedaling obediently and absently. The boat was built for two and the second set of pedals rotated also, pushed by my invisible twin. On this dark day it seemed like a strange penance, a trip with a silent Virgil in a suburban Purgatory. ("Here are those who park in two spots at once at the strip mall, beware their fate!" & etc.) Spiderwebs hung all over the boat, but no spiders. And this suspended, grayly beautiful time went on for a while, until I reached an arbitrary, unknown goal; I had forced myself to do nothing and to feel uncomfortable with that nothingness for a little while.
I turned the boat around in some lilypads and, as I turned, events interjected: it began to rain. Little dark spots appeared on my shorts and on my T-shirt. The lake was a million splashes; its surface went from glossy to matte. I pedaled faster, now conscious of effort; thunder rumbled; lightning might present a problem, such as death. The rain came harder and very soon I was totally, utterly drenched, my hair hanging everywhere, down over my eyes, and my shirt like a towel, clinging; everything was clinging with water. What a delicious excess! Rainstorms give me the urge to run outside wildly and get soaked--anarchically, pointlessly--and to laugh at or with the rain; a few times I have run with the urge, and ended up laughing wryly at myself. I would step out into the rain, and feel no surging careless joy, just an incremental soaking which resembled a forced smile. You cannot be wild on command. Here, nature and circumstance were wild; one half of my brain seemed to embrace this wetness below, around and above, loved the unsheltered abandon; while the other half seemed to be processing a sense of alarm. I kept going back and forth from worry to pleasure and docked the boat with some relief. Once on land, I was able suddenly to notice that it smelled wonderful, the shore in the rain; the rain freeing the smell of the forest; at that point worry fled and I felt showered by Nature and well-pleased, like an otter surfacing. A piano-playing otter, hampered in useless human clothes.
I climbed back up the path to the lovely house, in a lovely Thoreau-ish mood, and right there, on the penultimate step, sat a frog. It sat calmly in my way, and I didn't want to disturb it. I felt rather amphibious myself at the moment, and perhaps in that moment of kinship it had something important to tell me. (It's not easy being green?) I am not given to omens, but I swear (!) the frog stared me down for a moment, and then loped off into some ferns. It wanted to slow my ascent for some reason. As i slid open the screen door, my mind formed the question What Did The Frog Mean? And as I turned the spigot for hot water in the shower, my brain seemed to supply from nowhere: "The frog wants you to play more Schubert."
(I'll leave you a moment now if you want to mark the day that Think Denk crossed into the certifiably insane.)
The beautiful, bittersweet waltz from the end of the Scherzo of the D major Sonata (all naysayers of that piece are forthwith condemned to Suburban Purgatory) came into my head, and I imagined the frog among the ferns, waltzing in circles to those strains in the rain. It was a pleasant image for my steamy shower and I emerged delighted. Dried and dressed, I went to a wonderful piano recital in the evening and subsequently stopped off for a beer and a burger at Dick O'Dow's, where I had spent previously some quality time with Eighth Blackbird. Previousness: sought but not found. Now only frat boys, loud televisions, and sad emptiness sat at the tables where our arguments over Schumann had beerily been perpetrated, and I drove home subdued by food and drink, facing somewhat towards the past as if it were the future. The Burger King sign along Telegraph Road shone bleak and lonely. I squeezed the car in its cul de sac, and ascended the few steps to the front door of my host home, pensively.
There, again, on the penultimate step, sat a frog. An even bigger frog than before, a real green gargantuan, staring and perched as if to hop, but obstinately not hopping. It sat on muscular haunches, a glistening Sphinx.
Coincidence? Now, of course, it occurred to me that frogs come out in wet weather, but always on penultimate steps? There was a difference between the frog-at-dusk, dark green against a slate step, and this night-frog, brilliantly lit by front porch beams, its droplets glistening against dull brick. But perhaps the message was the same, or more of the same, an intensification of the afternoon's. A dire warning or the emblem of an incipient prince? Was it happy to see me? I was abundantly keen to interpret it, and advanced cautiously. It stood its slimy ground. I reached out my cell phone to snap pictures, and it did not wince, blink, or shift.
I stood right next to it. I could have scooped it up. But still, it trusted me and sat. Only when my patience and wonder were exhausted, and I went on to the final step: then it hopped off, casually. It moved on only when it realized I had.
I stood on the other side of the closed door, in the dark foyer, listening to the gutter drip, wondering what the frog had become, to what Prince or Castle or Idea it transformed in the rainy night.
The next night, in possession of a cold Cosmo, and sitting at a long reflective bar of brushed metal, I tried to reckon with the Two Frog Phenomenon. I had a cute little black notebook and a pen. "Frog," I wrote, at the top of an empty page, and then again (but ever so slightly more hesitantly) on the next line, "frog--". I knew that by the end of the Cosmo my perceptions were no longer to be trusted; it was a race against time. Nonetheless, progress was not swift. "Time to stop and smell the frogs," I penned, a silly grin coming on... "A frog a day keeps the Hanon away," I tried again, and realized my serious quest was disintegrating. Proust has wonderful long passages about how we lose the most important insights of our lives due to such frivolity...
A further obstacle: a man sat next to me at the bar, chatted me up, averred I had a "great soul," and left. My frog musings were demoted to scraps between these verbal exchanges, and it is very distracting to be called a great soul in a crowded New York City restaurant, on the basis of a superficial shouted conversation. Looking over the notebook the next day, I noticed I had removed half a page to write my Great-Souled website address down for the effusive man, and had, in a very selective show of efficiency or parsimony, not been willing to waste the remaining half page... frog thoughts were scrawled up the tiny remaining peninsula of paper like desperate cries (ribbits) for help.
In hindsight, a few phrases from the notebook jumped out. The frog seemed to call up the idea of something I wanted: it was a magnet, or symbol, for some unfulfilled desire. It also seemed to be simultaneously a thing and event: a reminder, in some way, within the whirl of concerts and festivals and receptions and rehearsals and post-concert-dinners, that something had happened or was happening. Something. The penultimate step was the temporary stoppage of time, converting flow into event. It was a coincidence written on my life like graffiti carved on a tree, saying "JD loves X" with X, the typical noncommittal variable, somewhat up for debate. Why did Schubert and that piece come to mind?
... it came to me later. I remember this afternoon as one of my happiest to date, an afternoon I played an all-Schubert recital in Bloomington, Indiana, in Auer Hall, as sunlight came in through the high windows of the hall, and gradually dimmed as the recital went on, and we all stood outside afterwards in the late afternoon, spring breeze: friends in Schubert's wake. I felt that I had played reasonably well and I was talking with dear friends who seemed happy for me too, proud of me for having played that way, for having grown, and simply happy for the music which they had heard. There is a G major Trio in the Scherzo which I had always found somewhat elusive, and that day I remember it didn't seem elusive at all but totally overwhelmingly beautiful, and very much like the light that was coming in the hall and like my own happiness that spring had finally arrived... The frog for totally random reasons seemed to suggest, or want to remind me of, that electric connection between the self's experience and music-making. Which is, perhaps, the unprofessional side of the professional pianist. I wanted to play that Schubert piece again to find again (always again) that which is personal and lovable about music making: more than the hammering and honing of certain perfections, the intimate conversation with myself. That which opens up doors to happiest and saddest spots, which destroys the sense of already-experienced, which destroys the horrible saying "been-there-done-that," and replaces it with the present tense, even when it conjures up the past.
After that recital (we are still in the flashback, sorry!), I took a moment--paused penultimately before the party, so to speak--and asked myself what I really wanted to do at that moment to savor the Schubertian afterglow. I found myself at Soma, a beloved wacky counterculture-ish Bloomington coffeeshop, and in front of Soma, as if conjured, leaning against a broomstick, was a super cute member of the staff for whom I had long nurtured a painful, silent crush. This person stood, looking off dreamily into the purple sunset, bathed in the same (but darker) light which had just bathed the hall. The moment was ripe for me to introduce myself. Destiny called. I put it on temporary hold, went inside and ordered a triple espresso and a brownie. When I came out again to the porch, somewhat more jittery, it was empty; the next day this barista was gone forever, shipped off to California for some sort of rehab. Sigh.
And, at the piano, if I just pause for a moment and imagine the phrase without moving, without attacking the piano, without demanding sound, I get a desire for the phrase which sound can never match: the idea of touching the keys, invisible imagined contours of notes heard in the abstract, which the piano could never teach you... the inaudible things hidden behind the sounds, at the penultimate step of meaning where the frog is sitting calmly telling you to stop and then move on.
I turned the boat around in some lilypads and, as I turned, events interjected: it began to rain. Little dark spots appeared on my shorts and on my T-shirt. The lake was a million splashes; its surface went from glossy to matte. I pedaled faster, now conscious of effort; thunder rumbled; lightning might present a problem, such as death. The rain came harder and very soon I was totally, utterly drenched, my hair hanging everywhere, down over my eyes, and my shirt like a towel, clinging; everything was clinging with water. What a delicious excess! Rainstorms give me the urge to run outside wildly and get soaked--anarchically, pointlessly--and to laugh at or with the rain; a few times I have run with the urge, and ended up laughing wryly at myself. I would step out into the rain, and feel no surging careless joy, just an incremental soaking which resembled a forced smile. You cannot be wild on command. Here, nature and circumstance were wild; one half of my brain seemed to embrace this wetness below, around and above, loved the unsheltered abandon; while the other half seemed to be processing a sense of alarm. I kept going back and forth from worry to pleasure and docked the boat with some relief. Once on land, I was able suddenly to notice that it smelled wonderful, the shore in the rain; the rain freeing the smell of the forest; at that point worry fled and I felt showered by Nature and well-pleased, like an otter surfacing. A piano-playing otter, hampered in useless human clothes.
I climbed back up the path to the lovely house, in a lovely Thoreau-ish mood, and right there, on the penultimate step, sat a frog. It sat calmly in my way, and I didn't want to disturb it. I felt rather amphibious myself at the moment, and perhaps in that moment of kinship it had something important to tell me. (It's not easy being green?) I am not given to omens, but I swear (!) the frog stared me down for a moment, and then loped off into some ferns. It wanted to slow my ascent for some reason. As i slid open the screen door, my mind formed the question What Did The Frog Mean? And as I turned the spigot for hot water in the shower, my brain seemed to supply from nowhere: "The frog wants you to play more Schubert."
(I'll leave you a moment now if you want to mark the day that Think Denk crossed into the certifiably insane.)
The beautiful, bittersweet waltz from the end of the Scherzo of the D major Sonata (all naysayers of that piece are forthwith condemned to Suburban Purgatory) came into my head, and I imagined the frog among the ferns, waltzing in circles to those strains in the rain. It was a pleasant image for my steamy shower and I emerged delighted. Dried and dressed, I went to a wonderful piano recital in the evening and subsequently stopped off for a beer and a burger at Dick O'Dow's, where I had spent previously some quality time with Eighth Blackbird. Previousness: sought but not found. Now only frat boys, loud televisions, and sad emptiness sat at the tables where our arguments over Schumann had beerily been perpetrated, and I drove home subdued by food and drink, facing somewhat towards the past as if it were the future. The Burger King sign along Telegraph Road shone bleak and lonely. I squeezed the car in its cul de sac, and ascended the few steps to the front door of my host home, pensively.
There, again, on the penultimate step, sat a frog. An even bigger frog than before, a real green gargantuan, staring and perched as if to hop, but obstinately not hopping. It sat on muscular haunches, a glistening Sphinx.
Coincidence? Now, of course, it occurred to me that frogs come out in wet weather, but always on penultimate steps? There was a difference between the frog-at-dusk, dark green against a slate step, and this night-frog, brilliantly lit by front porch beams, its droplets glistening against dull brick. But perhaps the message was the same, or more of the same, an intensification of the afternoon's. A dire warning or the emblem of an incipient prince? Was it happy to see me? I was abundantly keen to interpret it, and advanced cautiously. It stood its slimy ground. I reached out my cell phone to snap pictures, and it did not wince, blink, or shift.
I stood right next to it. I could have scooped it up. But still, it trusted me and sat. Only when my patience and wonder were exhausted, and I went on to the final step: then it hopped off, casually. It moved on only when it realized I had.
I stood on the other side of the closed door, in the dark foyer, listening to the gutter drip, wondering what the frog had become, to what Prince or Castle or Idea it transformed in the rainy night.
The next night, in possession of a cold Cosmo, and sitting at a long reflective bar of brushed metal, I tried to reckon with the Two Frog Phenomenon. I had a cute little black notebook and a pen. "Frog," I wrote, at the top of an empty page, and then again (but ever so slightly more hesitantly) on the next line, "frog--". I knew that by the end of the Cosmo my perceptions were no longer to be trusted; it was a race against time. Nonetheless, progress was not swift. "Time to stop and smell the frogs," I penned, a silly grin coming on... "A frog a day keeps the Hanon away," I tried again, and realized my serious quest was disintegrating. Proust has wonderful long passages about how we lose the most important insights of our lives due to such frivolity...
A further obstacle: a man sat next to me at the bar, chatted me up, averred I had a "great soul," and left. My frog musings were demoted to scraps between these verbal exchanges, and it is very distracting to be called a great soul in a crowded New York City restaurant, on the basis of a superficial shouted conversation. Looking over the notebook the next day, I noticed I had removed half a page to write my Great-Souled website address down for the effusive man, and had, in a very selective show of efficiency or parsimony, not been willing to waste the remaining half page... frog thoughts were scrawled up the tiny remaining peninsula of paper like desperate cries (ribbits) for help.
In hindsight, a few phrases from the notebook jumped out. The frog seemed to call up the idea of something I wanted: it was a magnet, or symbol, for some unfulfilled desire. It also seemed to be simultaneously a thing and event: a reminder, in some way, within the whirl of concerts and festivals and receptions and rehearsals and post-concert-dinners, that something had happened or was happening. Something. The penultimate step was the temporary stoppage of time, converting flow into event. It was a coincidence written on my life like graffiti carved on a tree, saying "JD loves X" with X, the typical noncommittal variable, somewhat up for debate. Why did Schubert and that piece come to mind?
... it came to me later. I remember this afternoon as one of my happiest to date, an afternoon I played an all-Schubert recital in Bloomington, Indiana, in Auer Hall, as sunlight came in through the high windows of the hall, and gradually dimmed as the recital went on, and we all stood outside afterwards in the late afternoon, spring breeze: friends in Schubert's wake. I felt that I had played reasonably well and I was talking with dear friends who seemed happy for me too, proud of me for having played that way, for having grown, and simply happy for the music which they had heard. There is a G major Trio in the Scherzo which I had always found somewhat elusive, and that day I remember it didn't seem elusive at all but totally overwhelmingly beautiful, and very much like the light that was coming in the hall and like my own happiness that spring had finally arrived... The frog for totally random reasons seemed to suggest, or want to remind me of, that electric connection between the self's experience and music-making. Which is, perhaps, the unprofessional side of the professional pianist. I wanted to play that Schubert piece again to find again (always again) that which is personal and lovable about music making: more than the hammering and honing of certain perfections, the intimate conversation with myself. That which opens up doors to happiest and saddest spots, which destroys the sense of already-experienced, which destroys the horrible saying "been-there-done-that," and replaces it with the present tense, even when it conjures up the past.
After that recital (we are still in the flashback, sorry!), I took a moment--paused penultimately before the party, so to speak--and asked myself what I really wanted to do at that moment to savor the Schubertian afterglow. I found myself at Soma, a beloved wacky counterculture-ish Bloomington coffeeshop, and in front of Soma, as if conjured, leaning against a broomstick, was a super cute member of the staff for whom I had long nurtured a painful, silent crush. This person stood, looking off dreamily into the purple sunset, bathed in the same (but darker) light which had just bathed the hall. The moment was ripe for me to introduce myself. Destiny called. I put it on temporary hold, went inside and ordered a triple espresso and a brownie. When I came out again to the porch, somewhat more jittery, it was empty; the next day this barista was gone forever, shipped off to California for some sort of rehab. Sigh.
And, at the piano, if I just pause for a moment and imagine the phrase without moving, without attacking the piano, without demanding sound, I get a desire for the phrase which sound can never match: the idea of touching the keys, invisible imagined contours of notes heard in the abstract, which the piano could never teach you... the inaudible things hidden behind the sounds, at the penultimate step of meaning where the frog is sitting calmly telling you to stop and then move on.
Friday, June 16, 2006
So There
As I ascend in age, various of my peers seem to be considered for Directorships of various Entities, and I am always happy for them. To date, however, I don't seem to have been invited to Direct anything, and while I suppose that should in a sense be a cause for celebration, I can't help feeling a bit left out. So, I have decided to launch a preemptive strike.
New York, NY, June 16--
We are pleased to announce the Inaugural Season of Pillow 2006-2007, a Festival taking place around Jeremy Denk's pillow on 91st Street in New York, created and founded by Artistic Director Jeremy Denk. "Taking place" is meant here in two senses: geographical and spiritual. As it is not always physically possible to be in the environs of the pillow in question, or any pillow, some events will simply take pillow inspiration from afar, as a source and nexus of artistic impulse.
When asked what the pillow will actually do, Director Denk replied "I'm not totally sure." But, he quickly added, "let's view this uncertainty as an inspiration, a fertile creative field, rather than a problem per se." So for the first season, Mr. Artistic Director Denk plans a series of (sleep-optional) Encounters between wonderful Guest Artists (TBA) of considerable neighborhood renown and the Pillow, where they can spend an amount of time with it, developing both it and their artistic possibilities. To fund these Encounters (to pay for snacks and beverages and other incidental activities that may become necessary during the Encounters, as well as pillow cleaning), a Grand Gala featuring Artistic Director Jeremy Denk is planned, on a rather loose schedule for the entire 2006-2007 season, on mornings when he is in New York City, at the 93rd and Broadway Starbucks, shortly after Mr. Artistic Director Denk awakens, and you may direct your contributions of any kind towards his awaiting Director's palm. Donors of $1 or more will receive their own Titled Pillow Encounter. We hope this anti-Gala will help people to turn the glamorous gala-convention on its head, to revisit the binary of rich/poor, to understand that being a Donor is not all Platinum Circles and valet parking, but that it can also be totally unglamorous and unrewarding.
On top of these exciting ventures, there will be a regular series of:
Fluffings
Drool Panel Discussions
These are intended to help the developing audience understand the nature of the interaction between Artist and Pillow, and to be able to eventually understand any art works that may hypothetically come to exist. The opinions of drool have probably never been so fully explored. "I spend a lot of time with my pillow," Artistic Director Denk explained, "and I want to share some of that joy with the rest of the world, to create a sense of community around the pillow's generous nature. So, it's not just a set of concerts, it's so much more, it's a total nestling experience."
Inquiries may be directed to Artistic Director Jeremy Denk. We are eagerly looking for corporate sponsors.
New York, NY, June 16--
We are pleased to announce the Inaugural Season of Pillow 2006-2007, a Festival taking place around Jeremy Denk's pillow on 91st Street in New York, created and founded by Artistic Director Jeremy Denk. "Taking place" is meant here in two senses: geographical and spiritual. As it is not always physically possible to be in the environs of the pillow in question, or any pillow, some events will simply take pillow inspiration from afar, as a source and nexus of artistic impulse.
When asked what the pillow will actually do, Director Denk replied "I'm not totally sure." But, he quickly added, "let's view this uncertainty as an inspiration, a fertile creative field, rather than a problem per se." So for the first season, Mr. Artistic Director Denk plans a series of (sleep-optional) Encounters between wonderful Guest Artists (TBA) of considerable neighborhood renown and the Pillow, where they can spend an amount of time with it, developing both it and their artistic possibilities. To fund these Encounters (to pay for snacks and beverages and other incidental activities that may become necessary during the Encounters, as well as pillow cleaning), a Grand Gala featuring Artistic Director Jeremy Denk is planned, on a rather loose schedule for the entire 2006-2007 season, on mornings when he is in New York City, at the 93rd and Broadway Starbucks, shortly after Mr. Artistic Director Denk awakens, and you may direct your contributions of any kind towards his awaiting Director's palm. Donors of $1 or more will receive their own Titled Pillow Encounter. We hope this anti-Gala will help people to turn the glamorous gala-convention on its head, to revisit the binary of rich/poor, to understand that being a Donor is not all Platinum Circles and valet parking, but that it can also be totally unglamorous and unrewarding.
On top of these exciting ventures, there will be a regular series of:
Fluffings
Drool Panel Discussions
These are intended to help the developing audience understand the nature of the interaction between Artist and Pillow, and to be able to eventually understand any art works that may hypothetically come to exist. The opinions of drool have probably never been so fully explored. "I spend a lot of time with my pillow," Artistic Director Denk explained, "and I want to share some of that joy with the rest of the world, to create a sense of community around the pillow's generous nature. So, it's not just a set of concerts, it's so much more, it's a total nestling experience."
Inquiries may be directed to Artistic Director Jeremy Denk. We are eagerly looking for corporate sponsors.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Mozart is the Bestest Westest Ever Composer
I was humming the second theme of the E-flat Piano Quartet when I pulled up at the little Plaza of My Needs. Starbucks, bagel shop, and dry cleaners were all in a row. Business before happiness, I told myself, though the lust for the brown liquid was strong; fight the urge, just a moment; I groaned; it was 10:02 AM and I knew I was close to missing the Dry Cleaner Magic Window: ever-changeable, mercurial, heartless. The Gods could strike me down, if I dawdled. A rather comatose boy of 18 stood behind the counter and referred all questions to a mysterious Polish woman in the back; she emerged finally, moved by my enigma; no, they could not dry clean the same day; no, they couldn't press, either; and look you have spots on your white jacket, you need a cleaning anyway! This was intended to shame. But the concert's Absolute Existence she had to concede; all her sophistry could not move my philosophical stone. Tonight at 7:30 a white jacket would be worn by me, no matter what, whether wrinkled spotted or striped, and my left hand would play E-flat major octaves, and spots anyway meant nothing to me, the artiste wandering through the landscaped lawns of the burbs like a coffee-starved polar bear in Bermuda.
(The coffee was necessary, I realized, as I composed the polar bear simile. A baby's screaming on a distant plush chair was enough to disturb my equanimity.)
Polish Dry Cleaning Goddess was unhelpful, when asked for other same-day service: "Look around," she riddled. Cunning Northern Sphinx! I looked; cars passed; the usual in and out of the delineated spots; the shunting digestive system of the strip mall. But across the road, the promise of the Orient: a Chinese Cleaners, with the alluring "SAME DAY CLEANING" stencilled on the window, like a fulfilled fortune cookie. But the hour was drawing late, 10:12, and I had no leg to stand on; I could only beg, plead, depend on mercurial mercy, on the kindness of strangers. Timidly the traveler entered, but the woman saw my crumpled white and black package and in it read some message that knocked her off her chair. She waggled her body in astonishment (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.) "NO, no, no we don't do that!" she said as if I had asked her to participate in some unspeakable act. "We can't clean that today." I had a snarkish attack, pointing at the window; "I guess it was the Same Day Cleaning sign that confused me," I said, and then, sending my sarcasm back at me, she became full-on hostile. "You done missed out on that," she said, "You know you're too late, don't you give me that." And I knew, I was so wrong, so very very wrong. But Mozart is so beautiful! This talisman had no effect.
Happy ending: shortly thereafter I gave thanks to a woman in a blue jumpsuit who took my white crumpled thing with a smile and promised to press it by 4. I pocketed my receipt, my shield against contingency, and congratulated myself on another close brush with Reality. I began to hum Mozart and ordered a heaping Venti, awaiting other Dragons to slay.
(The coffee was necessary, I realized, as I composed the polar bear simile. A baby's screaming on a distant plush chair was enough to disturb my equanimity.)
Polish Dry Cleaning Goddess was unhelpful, when asked for other same-day service: "Look around," she riddled. Cunning Northern Sphinx! I looked; cars passed; the usual in and out of the delineated spots; the shunting digestive system of the strip mall. But across the road, the promise of the Orient: a Chinese Cleaners, with the alluring "SAME DAY CLEANING" stencilled on the window, like a fulfilled fortune cookie. But the hour was drawing late, 10:12, and I had no leg to stand on; I could only beg, plead, depend on mercurial mercy, on the kindness of strangers. Timidly the traveler entered, but the woman saw my crumpled white and black package and in it read some message that knocked her off her chair. She waggled her body in astonishment (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.) "NO, no, no we don't do that!" she said as if I had asked her to participate in some unspeakable act. "We can't clean that today." I had a snarkish attack, pointing at the window; "I guess it was the Same Day Cleaning sign that confused me," I said, and then, sending my sarcasm back at me, she became full-on hostile. "You done missed out on that," she said, "You know you're too late, don't you give me that." And I knew, I was so wrong, so very very wrong. But Mozart is so beautiful! This talisman had no effect.
Happy ending: shortly thereafter I gave thanks to a woman in a blue jumpsuit who took my white crumpled thing with a smile and promised to press it by 4. I pocketed my receipt, my shield against contingency, and congratulated myself on another close brush with Reality. I began to hum Mozart and ordered a heaping Venti, awaiting other Dragons to slay.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Sad
Woke up groggy on a beautiful morning to find that Gyorgy Ligeti has passed away. On top of this sad news, I think it unfortunate that the AP headline reads, essentially, "Space Odyssey Composer Dies." We are no longer free creatures, my friends, we are all subjugates of the vast cinematic dictatorship, and only insofar as our activities pertain to movies (preferably Oscar-nominated ones) do they possess any true importance. Cinematism?
Just a couple posts ago I noted my amusement (somewhat repressed) at a (deliberately) absurd harmonica conclusion to the Lamento of the Ligeti Piano Concerto. I have more complicated feelings about the composer's work as a whole ... why must our feelings about composers go through phases, like relationships? Indulgent nostalgia: a boiling hot summer in Bloomington, Indiana, in the early 90s, with mornings and afternoons spent ascetically in an ice-cold, over-airconditioned practice cubicle on a totally unsatisfactory piano, trying to pound several of the Etudes into my memory banks. For everyone else, it was barbecues and lake outings, but NO, I had to learn my "Automne a Varsovie." (Self-pity meter off charts.) And just a year or so ago, I found myself pounding those same notes back into my head: just as beautiful, elusive, shifting and maddening. Man, at least this man, wishes to be machine briefly to execute more perfectly these things, these devised inexplicable contraptions, which then become challenging pleasures for man (how can machines take pleasure from them?). Is it catty to say that many (most) of the existing recordings seem to leave for the realm of machine and don't make it back, roundtrip, to human-land; that in their quest for perfection and execution they forget the humorous, joyous glint? I did not know him personally; from many accounts, he was not always humorous in person; but the music to me radiates the joy of the intellect combined with just enough (not too much) sensual pleasure, making a perfect cocktail, somewhat astringent, not an "umbrella drink" as so many compositions are these days. I'm still waiting for the recording which feels like a joyous, but mindful release. Let's not forget first impressions: the 20-year-old Jeremy thought they were "cool." True: the Etudes shimmer with coolness, both in the sense of restraint and The Hip. And then, they are also outrageous, over the top, demanding of the impossible, and engaging of the dance rhythm to the end of the mind's range, an orgy of rhythmic complication ... Oh I could go on and on. Rest in peace. The angels or demons, or whoever they are where he is now, had better be able to count.
Just a couple posts ago I noted my amusement (somewhat repressed) at a (deliberately) absurd harmonica conclusion to the Lamento of the Ligeti Piano Concerto. I have more complicated feelings about the composer's work as a whole ... why must our feelings about composers go through phases, like relationships? Indulgent nostalgia: a boiling hot summer in Bloomington, Indiana, in the early 90s, with mornings and afternoons spent ascetically in an ice-cold, over-airconditioned practice cubicle on a totally unsatisfactory piano, trying to pound several of the Etudes into my memory banks. For everyone else, it was barbecues and lake outings, but NO, I had to learn my "Automne a Varsovie." (Self-pity meter off charts.) And just a year or so ago, I found myself pounding those same notes back into my head: just as beautiful, elusive, shifting and maddening. Man, at least this man, wishes to be machine briefly to execute more perfectly these things, these devised inexplicable contraptions, which then become challenging pleasures for man (how can machines take pleasure from them?). Is it catty to say that many (most) of the existing recordings seem to leave for the realm of machine and don't make it back, roundtrip, to human-land; that in their quest for perfection and execution they forget the humorous, joyous glint? I did not know him personally; from many accounts, he was not always humorous in person; but the music to me radiates the joy of the intellect combined with just enough (not too much) sensual pleasure, making a perfect cocktail, somewhat astringent, not an "umbrella drink" as so many compositions are these days. I'm still waiting for the recording which feels like a joyous, but mindful release. Let's not forget first impressions: the 20-year-old Jeremy thought they were "cool." True: the Etudes shimmer with coolness, both in the sense of restraint and The Hip. And then, they are also outrageous, over the top, demanding of the impossible, and engaging of the dance rhythm to the end of the mind's range, an orgy of rhythmic complication ... Oh I could go on and on. Rest in peace. The angels or demons, or whoever they are where he is now, had better be able to count.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Friday, June 09, 2006
Dispatches from New York
We were circling around an evolving Charleston dinner buffet, clinking glasses and sharing not very deep thoughts when a phone rang. Flutist T ran to the porch for the mysterious phone call, and when she returned she had Big News from the Big City. It was 8:53 PM, more or less.
Her friend, let us call him X, was swept up in a typical freelancer's night of stress, a slightly too close arrangement of concerts on either side of the Park. A 7:30 work by Tanya Leon on the East Side was to be followed by an 8 pm performance at Symphony Space (just a stone's throw from my humble home on 91st Street on the West Side). He is caught in a bit of traffic on the way to the West Side, and barely makes it on stage in time; he plays (somehow this part of the story is not so important); and then when the work is over, while he is bowing, perhaps in the rush of having succeeded to make both gigs (I am embroidering here), he gesticulates out to the audience for the composer to come forward. Ignoring some contrary input from his colleagues, and seeing no composer in evidence, he brings his hand to his foreheard to stare out into the audience searchingly. He gestures again; no composer!
He is somehow herded offstage, and only there (but, alas, too late) does he learn that in fact what he has been playing is a memorial concert celebrating her centennial birthday. The composer, being dead, had (how shall we put it?) little desire, or opportunity, or incentive, to come forward.
Gesticulating to a dead composer in the audience at a memorial concert is one of those gaffes you cannot recover from. For me the only option at this point would be to flee the hall, ignominiously, head bowed, disguised if possible. I imagine X slinking out a back door, and down 95th street to West End Ave (Broadway being too dangerous and public, you might come across an enraged relative at the entrance etc.) and grabbing a cab to some dark and dingy bar to escape the view of all humanity, and there spending some days and weeks before coming out again ... But that is just my solution. Feel free to suggest your own.
Her friend, let us call him X, was swept up in a typical freelancer's night of stress, a slightly too close arrangement of concerts on either side of the Park. A 7:30 work by Tanya Leon on the East Side was to be followed by an 8 pm performance at Symphony Space (just a stone's throw from my humble home on 91st Street on the West Side). He is caught in a bit of traffic on the way to the West Side, and barely makes it on stage in time; he plays (somehow this part of the story is not so important); and then when the work is over, while he is bowing, perhaps in the rush of having succeeded to make both gigs (I am embroidering here), he gesticulates out to the audience for the composer to come forward. Ignoring some contrary input from his colleagues, and seeing no composer in evidence, he brings his hand to his foreheard to stare out into the audience searchingly. He gestures again; no composer!
He is somehow herded offstage, and only there (but, alas, too late) does he learn that in fact what he has been playing is a memorial concert celebrating her centennial birthday. The composer, being dead, had (how shall we put it?) little desire, or opportunity, or incentive, to come forward.
Gesticulating to a dead composer in the audience at a memorial concert is one of those gaffes you cannot recover from. For me the only option at this point would be to flee the hall, ignominiously, head bowed, disguised if possible. I imagine X slinking out a back door, and down 95th street to West End Ave (Broadway being too dangerous and public, you might come across an enraged relative at the entrance etc.) and grabbing a cab to some dark and dingy bar to escape the view of all humanity, and there spending some days and weeks before coming out again ... But that is just my solution. Feel free to suggest your own.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Corrections
Again I mourn an empty vessel. Sitting in Modica, a gelateria in Charleston, I am staring at the brown incrustations left on the sides of a tiny white cup, clinging traces of a consumed doppio espresso (hearing the racing of my heart and forbearing another) ... contemplating that absence, I call up the following lines from Eugenio Montale:
With a howl of loyalty
the spring storm shakes my ark,
oh my lost ones.
(tr. Edith Farnsworth)
You are introduced, the crowd is applauding, the theatre is dark, and you walk onstage, weaving towards the piano; you bow and before you know it you are seated and you are staring at this:
How can you thank a composer sufficiently for giving you something like this to play? It is not one of those delicate, evasive beginnings whose success depends on the pinpoint execution of a number of small details, in the heat of the initial moments. You begin with a few strums, as if trying out the keyboard, and before you know it you are mid-inspiration: in the throes without even trying. It is so generous, it seems to express love but in every possible direction, plurally, democratically, towards the piano, towards the listener, and even towards lowly me the performer. And you just let it fly. There is only one puzzling moment, at the end of the provided example: I have "gotten stuck" here so many times, wondering how to play this descending fourth, G to D; a pothole in the too-perfect road; at this moment, Mozart, instead of spinning out perfect, inevitable melody, seems to be "treading water," merely filling in the harmony with an unexpressive interval... Do I play the low D as if Mozart is reaching into the underlying harmony, into another voice? Or is it part of the main melody? Luckily, just at this odd, flagging moment, the left hand interjects another strum and this seems to wake up the right hand, which leaps into another (perhaps even more unbelievable) phrase: we are back on top, baby.
I believe this "odd flagging moment" to be an intentional flaw, the one thing to make the magic melody not work. Why would Mozart choose to fail, even for a moment? Because when the violin enters, playing the same melody, and it comes to the same juncture, it "corrects the problem":
Between the piano's G-D, and the violin's A-G, an enormous abyss. The piano's resolution was non-committal, structural, neutral, a girder at the end of the phrase, holding it (classically, at a distance) in place; while the violin's resolution is made of flesh, sound, sensuality; the sweetness of the violin's suspension somehow finally encapsulates, expresses, condenses the generous loving idea which the piano has set forth. In that one aha! moment, the violin shows the piano how it should have been done, and brings the ecstasies of the opening down to earth. But if the piano had played the violin's resolution earlier, at measure 4, the piece would have been prematurely complete; so the piano "had" to fail. The piano had to look for a second phrase to answer the questions of its first, but the violin makes it clear that the answer was already innate in the opening statement: that we need look no further. Rather than two paired question-answer phrases (the paradigm of classical rhetoric) we have a beautiful symmetrical setup where the initial question becomes the answer.
This resolution (over which I realize I am obsessing), in one of those beautiful paradoxes native to music, brings one motion to an end, and sets the piano on another motion: the aha! moment is the elision of the end of one endless arc, and the beginning of another: the intersection of paradises. Speaking of intersections, yesterday I was playing the "Kegelstatt" Trio, and the page turner and I were having a delightful time, like conspirators back there, because I was excessively drawing her attention to some delicious things that happen in the left hand of the piano in the last movement. You have your thematic moments, you know, when the bass has a kind of purposeful, defining motion ("boring" as such), and then you have these great moments where Mozart slips into a kind of vamp, where the bass just oscillates tonic-dominant or vice versa, and there are these simple little bassline ideas, snippets, making their smiling statements down there.... Mozart draws us into vamp hypnosis, letting us enjoy the wandering, and then--and then--just when are going under, just when the vamp nears vapidity, the theme reappears out of a twist of events, and the bass becomes happily disciplined again, does lovingly its dutiful thing, and those moments at the intersection--in which the theme, a mere thing, appears like revelation--are so wonderful you just want to kiss somebody or something. Unfortunately this is usually not appropriate onstage, and a musical moment is very hard to kiss, except by playing it just so. So it floats on by, the kissed or unkissed moment; you play it the best you can; oh my lost ones.
With a howl of loyalty
the spring storm shakes my ark,
oh my lost ones.
(tr. Edith Farnsworth)
You are introduced, the crowd is applauding, the theatre is dark, and you walk onstage, weaving towards the piano; you bow and before you know it you are seated and you are staring at this:
How can you thank a composer sufficiently for giving you something like this to play? It is not one of those delicate, evasive beginnings whose success depends on the pinpoint execution of a number of small details, in the heat of the initial moments. You begin with a few strums, as if trying out the keyboard, and before you know it you are mid-inspiration: in the throes without even trying. It is so generous, it seems to express love but in every possible direction, plurally, democratically, towards the piano, towards the listener, and even towards lowly me the performer. And you just let it fly. There is only one puzzling moment, at the end of the provided example: I have "gotten stuck" here so many times, wondering how to play this descending fourth, G to D; a pothole in the too-perfect road; at this moment, Mozart, instead of spinning out perfect, inevitable melody, seems to be "treading water," merely filling in the harmony with an unexpressive interval... Do I play the low D as if Mozart is reaching into the underlying harmony, into another voice? Or is it part of the main melody? Luckily, just at this odd, flagging moment, the left hand interjects another strum and this seems to wake up the right hand, which leaps into another (perhaps even more unbelievable) phrase: we are back on top, baby.
I believe this "odd flagging moment" to be an intentional flaw, the one thing to make the magic melody not work. Why would Mozart choose to fail, even for a moment? Because when the violin enters, playing the same melody, and it comes to the same juncture, it "corrects the problem":
Between the piano's G-D, and the violin's A-G, an enormous abyss. The piano's resolution was non-committal, structural, neutral, a girder at the end of the phrase, holding it (classically, at a distance) in place; while the violin's resolution is made of flesh, sound, sensuality; the sweetness of the violin's suspension somehow finally encapsulates, expresses, condenses the generous loving idea which the piano has set forth. In that one aha! moment, the violin shows the piano how it should have been done, and brings the ecstasies of the opening down to earth. But if the piano had played the violin's resolution earlier, at measure 4, the piece would have been prematurely complete; so the piano "had" to fail. The piano had to look for a second phrase to answer the questions of its first, but the violin makes it clear that the answer was already innate in the opening statement: that we need look no further. Rather than two paired question-answer phrases (the paradigm of classical rhetoric) we have a beautiful symmetrical setup where the initial question becomes the answer.
This resolution (over which I realize I am obsessing), in one of those beautiful paradoxes native to music, brings one motion to an end, and sets the piano on another motion: the aha! moment is the elision of the end of one endless arc, and the beginning of another: the intersection of paradises. Speaking of intersections, yesterday I was playing the "Kegelstatt" Trio, and the page turner and I were having a delightful time, like conspirators back there, because I was excessively drawing her attention to some delicious things that happen in the left hand of the piano in the last movement. You have your thematic moments, you know, when the bass has a kind of purposeful, defining motion ("boring" as such), and then you have these great moments where Mozart slips into a kind of vamp, where the bass just oscillates tonic-dominant or vice versa, and there are these simple little bassline ideas, snippets, making their smiling statements down there.... Mozart draws us into vamp hypnosis, letting us enjoy the wandering, and then--and then--just when are going under, just when the vamp nears vapidity, the theme reappears out of a twist of events, and the bass becomes happily disciplined again, does lovingly its dutiful thing, and those moments at the intersection--in which the theme, a mere thing, appears like revelation--are so wonderful you just want to kiss somebody or something. Unfortunately this is usually not appropriate onstage, and a musical moment is very hard to kiss, except by playing it just so. So it floats on by, the kissed or unkissed moment; you play it the best you can; oh my lost ones.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Hypocrisy
A couple of my close friends know very well that I have A PROBLEM with hearing about people's dreams. A friend will call in the morning and start in on some dream they consider mind-blowing and I will be listening in agony and distress, pulling anxiously at my sense of friendship. "And then the pink elephant turned into my mother, and started talking through its nose about mortgages, and meanwhile the sidewalk was made of chocolate and I broke off a piece and ate it, and it turned out to be a piano key." My problem is partly a matter of timing; people are often inclined to tell me their dreams in the morning, just after they have had them, before they can vanish in the fog of day, and this happens to coincide with the dangerous period of the day when I am ramping myself up on coffee to forget the unpleasantness of awakening (no morning person here am I). There is always a jittery, irritable period somewhere in the middle of the coffee cup and the dreams often come over the phone to me around that same time, when my feet can barely keep still, much less my mind. There's no narrative focus! I want to scream at them, before tossing something out the window.
So it is with no small dose of trepidation and hypocrisy that I offer this morning's dream to you.
...the ultimate cliche of Denk dreams: the concert. I am on stage with Joshua Bell and we are beginning to play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. Just as in Oberlin, nearly 20 years ago, I muff the chords just before the violin's entrance, and it seems the very same faculty members from 20 years ago are there, muttering amused, knowing disparagements. We are playing this piece (which we would of course never play in concert, never mind) and somewhere along the way, I feel a tug at my right arm, someone trying to show me how to play a series of chords better, with more arm weight ... more roundly. There he is on stage, interrupting the performance, a mystery man in a black trenchcoat (Death? Tchaikovsky?), offering trenchant remarks. I begin, while playing, to sense a general fracas. Someone tries to "take out" the mystery man, who evades the nameless tackle. Intermission is thereby called. Josh and I walk endlessly down a hallway to our waiting place. People are passing everywhere, talking to us, buying outfits (it seems our dressing room is also a mall), eating meals; there is no sense of a concert whatsoever. I keep begging people to start things up again, but they don't. Finally, inexplicably, we are walking back into the hall. But this time we are in the audience, and the stage is taken up with a giant television screen on which a football game is playing. In a detail which seems gruesomely true-to-life, people are suddenly much more enthused about the game then they were about the concert. Josh is watching very attentively; I poke his shoulder to remind him about the concert but he pays no attention. I begin to shudder. "Will this concert never end?" I realize with horror that this concert may never end, that it may continue for the rest of my life, and I am not at all in control.
And I woke up. Light was streaming through the steamy morning air of my apartment in Charleston. Reassuringly, I glanced at my DVDs of South Park on the bedside table, stacked atop poems of Eugenio Montale. Ah yes my life makes as little sense as always: this must be reality. I downed a glass of water, listening to echoing mental remnants of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. I tend to feel the intrusion of nonsense in dreams as a negative force, as a dangerous slippery slope, a dark destructive underside. But it seemed to me suddenly that dreams interpose a very tangible, useful nonsense, something like a surreal vitamin, into existence. Their deliberate undermining of the 1+1=2 school of life, to which we cling ... an antidote to logic's sadness and completion. The idea that concerts have definite time frames; that performers have a sacred realm onstage; that also the backstage area is a private, elevated zone; that there are spectators and performers, and they are totally separate entities: all of these "truisms" are questioned by the dream, beautifully, which replaces certainty in all these cases with a fuzzy interchange, a nexus of shifting meaning. At least that's what I think I thought. The very red curry before me on a white plate right in a delightfully cool dining room in Charleston, SC, is but the tip of an enormous strange iceberg, and as I gobble it down, I contemplate the surreality of existence with an uneasy delight.
So it is with no small dose of trepidation and hypocrisy that I offer this morning's dream to you.
...the ultimate cliche of Denk dreams: the concert. I am on stage with Joshua Bell and we are beginning to play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. Just as in Oberlin, nearly 20 years ago, I muff the chords just before the violin's entrance, and it seems the very same faculty members from 20 years ago are there, muttering amused, knowing disparagements. We are playing this piece (which we would of course never play in concert, never mind) and somewhere along the way, I feel a tug at my right arm, someone trying to show me how to play a series of chords better, with more arm weight ... more roundly. There he is on stage, interrupting the performance, a mystery man in a black trenchcoat (Death? Tchaikovsky?), offering trenchant remarks. I begin, while playing, to sense a general fracas. Someone tries to "take out" the mystery man, who evades the nameless tackle. Intermission is thereby called. Josh and I walk endlessly down a hallway to our waiting place. People are passing everywhere, talking to us, buying outfits (it seems our dressing room is also a mall), eating meals; there is no sense of a concert whatsoever. I keep begging people to start things up again, but they don't. Finally, inexplicably, we are walking back into the hall. But this time we are in the audience, and the stage is taken up with a giant television screen on which a football game is playing. In a detail which seems gruesomely true-to-life, people are suddenly much more enthused about the game then they were about the concert. Josh is watching very attentively; I poke his shoulder to remind him about the concert but he pays no attention. I begin to shudder. "Will this concert never end?" I realize with horror that this concert may never end, that it may continue for the rest of my life, and I am not at all in control.
And I woke up. Light was streaming through the steamy morning air of my apartment in Charleston. Reassuringly, I glanced at my DVDs of South Park on the bedside table, stacked atop poems of Eugenio Montale. Ah yes my life makes as little sense as always: this must be reality. I downed a glass of water, listening to echoing mental remnants of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. I tend to feel the intrusion of nonsense in dreams as a negative force, as a dangerous slippery slope, a dark destructive underside. But it seemed to me suddenly that dreams interpose a very tangible, useful nonsense, something like a surreal vitamin, into existence. Their deliberate undermining of the 1+1=2 school of life, to which we cling ... an antidote to logic's sadness and completion. The idea that concerts have definite time frames; that performers have a sacred realm onstage; that also the backstage area is a private, elevated zone; that there are spectators and performers, and they are totally separate entities: all of these "truisms" are questioned by the dream, beautifully, which replaces certainty in all these cases with a fuzzy interchange, a nexus of shifting meaning. At least that's what I think I thought. The very red curry before me on a white plate right in a delightfully cool dining room in Charleston, SC, is but the tip of an enormous strange iceberg, and as I gobble it down, I contemplate the surreality of existence with an uneasy delight.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Shards
This last week in New York was supposed to be an organized and organizing diving board for the summer. Instead, it was a frenzied jumble of experiences, which I grabbed at uselessly like a tray full of dishes I have dropped. No way to hold on to any of them: they slip and fall and I accept their breakage as a receipt for time.
Some were good. A broken, ruined afternoon became a miracle. I had to wait in the dentist's office for a couple hours and my only possessions were the clothes on my back, an insurance card, a credit card, and Faulkner's Light in August. This poverty was enriching. Hilarious women stumbled in and out of the office, wagging their damaged mouths incessantly at their cellphones, arranging playdates and pickups for their children, while their cavities and abscesses were X-rayed, and the sarcastic Jewish dentist poked his head out from time to time, summoning them like naughty but amusing children, and arranging treatment which was always too late. Normally, a fertile Petri dish for Denk irritation, but no, all this fluorescent bustle ignored me; I was in a magic circle, traced by the power of the written word. You do not need a beautiful place to read a book, no forest nook or bay window, no idyllic lighting or comfortable chair; this office was poorly lit, crazed, uncomfortable; what you really need is a great book and some mild willingness to surrender.
This was one shard of the week. In another, I was gazing at the chilly dark blue of an evening sky somewhat up the Hudson and sipping a cold white wine, and admiring the perfect shape of a tree. Then we were hurtling down the road in a car, and I was looking over the trees at the perfect bluish glinting of the river, which the sun was just leaving behind, and I was nearly screaming at the driver about beauty and trying in some way to hold onto the moment: a moment defined entirely by its own waning. (Are there any moments defined by their clinging?) My dear driving friend, and the oncoming summer, in which I feared mere repetition, and the year past, now appearing as a sum total, as a lost, accomplished thing, all merged into a windy blue journey to catch a train, the last train of the year, as if I would not escape from the past if I didn't make this fucking train. We were rushing for the train, which was rushing; and the sun was slipping away too; trees slipping from green into black; the river never rushes, but unlike the train alongside it, it never stops. This was my birthday.
In a third shard, I was listening to a wonderful concert in Zankel (David Robertson, et al) and this movement of the Ligeti piano concerto began with a transcendental, eerie lament, and concluded with the most ridiculous harmonica passage, something like a barbershop quartet cadence: totally absurd. Wawawawa. And I laughed out loud, and looked around and saw no one else laughing, and wondered why. Luckily friend S looked over and clearly acknowledged that something was afoot, so I knew I wasn't just going mad, quietly there, in Zankel. Then post-concert I found myself at dinner and I looked up from my plate of pasta, and briefly and suddenly had no memory of walking to the restaurant whatsoever, or the concert; it suddenly seemed as though this post-concert dinner were not connected to the immediate past or future, but to all the other post-concert dinners of my lives, which were now freely floating in a timeless haze. What was I doing there? It seemed I could leap off one cloud and end up on another, for example, at some post-concert dinner in Louisville with a mint julep, or at the coffeeshop eating nachos in Marlboro, or any number of places, having just played or listened, and consuming in the wake of applause. Suppose we could organize the passage of time in our lives using items in the Hold Everything catalog. How would we sort the past? Chronologically, or by subject matter, by import, or by genre of experience? If we put all the post-concert dinners in one basket, would some hidden pattern appear, or would we just stuff that basket in the closet as far back as it could go, in the hopes that it will not have to be opened? Would it be a tasteful rattan basket or one of those plastic dealies from Staples? Luckily, somebody does the organizing for us.
When I was an undergrad student at Oberlin, I often felt rhythmically chastised, and unjustly corralled. I guess I was semi-famous for being rhythmically ridiculous, and it seemed to me my teachers were bores, kind of Ward Cleavers of pulse, leaping on rhythmic diversions as if they were mortal sins. I would plead "Daddy, can't this beat be a little bit late?" and off to the confessional it would be. By my doctoral days, at Juilliard, I felt freer to express my disdain, and mocked mercilessly an endless talk by a very famous music theorist which spent an hour attempting to "prove" that it would be reasonable to take (a bit of) time in a particular measure of Mozart. (As if this phrase "taking time" could mean anything except in the very act itself; as if one needs permission; time is different in every single phrase you play, is conditional upon tactile sound. I'm sorry, but we performers, even more than composers, and so much more than theorists, own time. So there.) But now, these "wiser" days, I often find myself asking of any rhythmic event: "Why?" Cunningly, analytically, heartlessly, I ask myself: is note X late because of my mind, or my finger? I feel the creeping need to justify any departure from the beat--this tyrannical beat to which I have become addicted. Rhythmic organization seems more beautiful to me now, whereas chaos seemed better then. I believe I have to take this onrushing wisdom with a grain of salt, as a partial lie; to place it in quotation marks; to not accept the solution of conformity too easily, not let its power and fashion seduce me. It is possible I was right then and I am still right now, when my convictions are so different in nature.
A week like this last one suggests the allure of the beat, of routine, of pattern. Slipping, sliding from Monday to Friday I found each day a bit terrifying, in my own lack of preparation, and the intensity of each experience. No, wait, I'm not ready to feel that way! And indeed, as I was playing through my beloved Davidsbündlertänze, warming up for a Friday night recital, I was surprised how surprised I was; where are those feelings coming from? They seemed the cadence of the week's phrase, and no ridiculous harmonica anti-conclusion, but as logical a conclusion as emotions can summon to tie together the unprepared jumble of a week's worth of dropped dishes: events cleared of their connecting, supporting strands, coming like accidents, but crashing into a floor which is no accident whatsoever. And then the new Denk reorganizing the old Davidsbündler, finding all the ways in which 21-year-old Denk was lazy about the beat, and stripping time away like varnish, and looking purely at beats without pull. This takes time, and I was still stripping things clean minutes before the recital, and it seemed there was a lot more to do, and each act of temporal cleaning made the piece look unfamiliar, an alien beautiful thing. The piece was once again outside me, rather than the old, absorbed friend. I felt the pastness of the old way, the age of my experience. I was not able to prepare myself for this shock. Playing something with a conscious change and having it sound different from ever before is a mild out-of-body experience, the proof of unpredictability. And particularly in the last three dances, moving from humor to uncertainty to lullaby to memory to tragedy to some thing well beyond any of those, in which Schumann attempts to "summarize" the unsummable, there I felt I couldn't hold on to the piece which was changing and bucking below me like this last week. And I felt suddenly some reason and unity to the preceding days, leading to that moment; sometime, yes, there will be time to gather and organize, and really you should get on that, but in the meantime: break what needs to be broken.
Some were good. A broken, ruined afternoon became a miracle. I had to wait in the dentist's office for a couple hours and my only possessions were the clothes on my back, an insurance card, a credit card, and Faulkner's Light in August. This poverty was enriching. Hilarious women stumbled in and out of the office, wagging their damaged mouths incessantly at their cellphones, arranging playdates and pickups for their children, while their cavities and abscesses were X-rayed, and the sarcastic Jewish dentist poked his head out from time to time, summoning them like naughty but amusing children, and arranging treatment which was always too late. Normally, a fertile Petri dish for Denk irritation, but no, all this fluorescent bustle ignored me; I was in a magic circle, traced by the power of the written word. You do not need a beautiful place to read a book, no forest nook or bay window, no idyllic lighting or comfortable chair; this office was poorly lit, crazed, uncomfortable; what you really need is a great book and some mild willingness to surrender.
This was one shard of the week. In another, I was gazing at the chilly dark blue of an evening sky somewhat up the Hudson and sipping a cold white wine, and admiring the perfect shape of a tree. Then we were hurtling down the road in a car, and I was looking over the trees at the perfect bluish glinting of the river, which the sun was just leaving behind, and I was nearly screaming at the driver about beauty and trying in some way to hold onto the moment: a moment defined entirely by its own waning. (Are there any moments defined by their clinging?) My dear driving friend, and the oncoming summer, in which I feared mere repetition, and the year past, now appearing as a sum total, as a lost, accomplished thing, all merged into a windy blue journey to catch a train, the last train of the year, as if I would not escape from the past if I didn't make this fucking train. We were rushing for the train, which was rushing; and the sun was slipping away too; trees slipping from green into black; the river never rushes, but unlike the train alongside it, it never stops. This was my birthday.
In a third shard, I was listening to a wonderful concert in Zankel (David Robertson, et al) and this movement of the Ligeti piano concerto began with a transcendental, eerie lament, and concluded with the most ridiculous harmonica passage, something like a barbershop quartet cadence: totally absurd. Wawawawa. And I laughed out loud, and looked around and saw no one else laughing, and wondered why. Luckily friend S looked over and clearly acknowledged that something was afoot, so I knew I wasn't just going mad, quietly there, in Zankel. Then post-concert I found myself at dinner and I looked up from my plate of pasta, and briefly and suddenly had no memory of walking to the restaurant whatsoever, or the concert; it suddenly seemed as though this post-concert dinner were not connected to the immediate past or future, but to all the other post-concert dinners of my lives, which were now freely floating in a timeless haze. What was I doing there? It seemed I could leap off one cloud and end up on another, for example, at some post-concert dinner in Louisville with a mint julep, or at the coffeeshop eating nachos in Marlboro, or any number of places, having just played or listened, and consuming in the wake of applause. Suppose we could organize the passage of time in our lives using items in the Hold Everything catalog. How would we sort the past? Chronologically, or by subject matter, by import, or by genre of experience? If we put all the post-concert dinners in one basket, would some hidden pattern appear, or would we just stuff that basket in the closet as far back as it could go, in the hopes that it will not have to be opened? Would it be a tasteful rattan basket or one of those plastic dealies from Staples? Luckily, somebody does the organizing for us.
When I was an undergrad student at Oberlin, I often felt rhythmically chastised, and unjustly corralled. I guess I was semi-famous for being rhythmically ridiculous, and it seemed to me my teachers were bores, kind of Ward Cleavers of pulse, leaping on rhythmic diversions as if they were mortal sins. I would plead "Daddy, can't this beat be a little bit late?" and off to the confessional it would be. By my doctoral days, at Juilliard, I felt freer to express my disdain, and mocked mercilessly an endless talk by a very famous music theorist which spent an hour attempting to "prove" that it would be reasonable to take (a bit of) time in a particular measure of Mozart. (As if this phrase "taking time" could mean anything except in the very act itself; as if one needs permission; time is different in every single phrase you play, is conditional upon tactile sound. I'm sorry, but we performers, even more than composers, and so much more than theorists, own time. So there.) But now, these "wiser" days, I often find myself asking of any rhythmic event: "Why?" Cunningly, analytically, heartlessly, I ask myself: is note X late because of my mind, or my finger? I feel the creeping need to justify any departure from the beat--this tyrannical beat to which I have become addicted. Rhythmic organization seems more beautiful to me now, whereas chaos seemed better then. I believe I have to take this onrushing wisdom with a grain of salt, as a partial lie; to place it in quotation marks; to not accept the solution of conformity too easily, not let its power and fashion seduce me. It is possible I was right then and I am still right now, when my convictions are so different in nature.
A week like this last one suggests the allure of the beat, of routine, of pattern. Slipping, sliding from Monday to Friday I found each day a bit terrifying, in my own lack of preparation, and the intensity of each experience. No, wait, I'm not ready to feel that way! And indeed, as I was playing through my beloved Davidsbündlertänze, warming up for a Friday night recital, I was surprised how surprised I was; where are those feelings coming from? They seemed the cadence of the week's phrase, and no ridiculous harmonica anti-conclusion, but as logical a conclusion as emotions can summon to tie together the unprepared jumble of a week's worth of dropped dishes: events cleared of their connecting, supporting strands, coming like accidents, but crashing into a floor which is no accident whatsoever. And then the new Denk reorganizing the old Davidsbündler, finding all the ways in which 21-year-old Denk was lazy about the beat, and stripping time away like varnish, and looking purely at beats without pull. This takes time, and I was still stripping things clean minutes before the recital, and it seemed there was a lot more to do, and each act of temporal cleaning made the piece look unfamiliar, an alien beautiful thing. The piece was once again outside me, rather than the old, absorbed friend. I felt the pastness of the old way, the age of my experience. I was not able to prepare myself for this shock. Playing something with a conscious change and having it sound different from ever before is a mild out-of-body experience, the proof of unpredictability. And particularly in the last three dances, moving from humor to uncertainty to lullaby to memory to tragedy to some thing well beyond any of those, in which Schumann attempts to "summarize" the unsummable, there I felt I couldn't hold on to the piece which was changing and bucking below me like this last week. And I felt suddenly some reason and unity to the preceding days, leading to that moment; sometime, yes, there will be time to gather and organize, and really you should get on that, but in the meantime: break what needs to be broken.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Adorno
"The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of history than of growth. The usual view explains this with the argument that they are products of an uninhibited subjectivity, or, better yet, "personality," which breaks through the envelope of form to better express itself, transforming harmony into the dissonance of its suffering, and disdaining sensual charms with the sovereign self-assurance of the spirit liberated ... It is as if, confronted with the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its rights and abdicate in favor of reality.
...
Death is imposed only on created beings, not on works of art, and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory. The psychological interpretation misses this. By declaring mortal subjectivity to be the substance of the late work, it hopes to be able to perceive death in unbroken form in the work of art. This is the deceptive crown of its metaphysics. True, it recognizes the explosive force of subjectivity in the late work. But it looks for it in the opposite direction from that in which the work itself is striving; in the expression of subjectivity itself. But this subjectivity, as mortal, and in the name of death, disappears from the work of art into truth. The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being, are its final work.
...
[Beethoven's] late work still remains process, but not as development; rather as a catching fire between the extremes, which no longer allow for any secure middle ground or harmony of spontaneity. Between extremes in the most precise technical sense: on the one hand the monophony, the unisono of the significant mere phrase; on the other the polyphony, which rises above it without mediation. It is subjectivity that forcibly brings the extremes together in the moment, fills the dense polyphony with its tension, breaks it apart with the unisono, and disengages itself, leaving the naked tone behind; that sets the mere phrase as a monument to what has been, marking a subjectivity turned to stone. The caesuras, the sudden discontinuities that more than anything else characterize the very late Beethoven, are those moments of breaking away; the work is silent at the instant when it is left behind, and turns its emptiness outward ... Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which--alone--it glows into life. He does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal."
--Adorno, Late Style in Beethoven, tr. Susan H. Gillespie
...
Death is imposed only on created beings, not on works of art, and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory. The psychological interpretation misses this. By declaring mortal subjectivity to be the substance of the late work, it hopes to be able to perceive death in unbroken form in the work of art. This is the deceptive crown of its metaphysics. True, it recognizes the explosive force of subjectivity in the late work. But it looks for it in the opposite direction from that in which the work itself is striving; in the expression of subjectivity itself. But this subjectivity, as mortal, and in the name of death, disappears from the work of art into truth. The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being, are its final work.
...
[Beethoven's] late work still remains process, but not as development; rather as a catching fire between the extremes, which no longer allow for any secure middle ground or harmony of spontaneity. Between extremes in the most precise technical sense: on the one hand the monophony, the unisono of the significant mere phrase; on the other the polyphony, which rises above it without mediation. It is subjectivity that forcibly brings the extremes together in the moment, fills the dense polyphony with its tension, breaks it apart with the unisono, and disengages itself, leaving the naked tone behind; that sets the mere phrase as a monument to what has been, marking a subjectivity turned to stone. The caesuras, the sudden discontinuities that more than anything else characterize the very late Beethoven, are those moments of breaking away; the work is silent at the instant when it is left behind, and turns its emptiness outward ... Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which--alone--it glows into life. He does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal."
--Adorno, Late Style in Beethoven, tr. Susan H. Gillespie
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Happy Mother's Day
In accordance with the Denk Law of Bags and Possessions, the outer pocket of my new "hip" shoulder bag is now filled with the pulverized remains of a Digestive Biscuit. No blender or food processor, no matter how powerful, could attain the sheer level of dispersion that simple Denkage is able to achieve, through the regular processes of Life. The Law of B&P cannot really be put into words (being one of those mysterious, generative laws of the cosmos), but its essential effect is this: no matter how much Jeremy Denk invests in a new backpack or bag, and no matter the care taken with it, eventually its insides will be coated with the diffused remains of many inappropriate items, sometimes foodstuffs (bananas, muffins, Clif bars, ketchup, stewed prunes, etc.) and sometimes other sundries--provided that these other sundries are able to somehow damage or affect the bag irreparably--for instance glue, indelible ink, or Hydrochloric Acid. One can thus "carbon-date" or "scum-date" the bag's existence conclusively on the basis of a perusal of its insides.
I have come to accept these accidents, in short, as essential: the ink with which my history is written.
By accident, I became a good guy yesterday, for seven minutes. I was getting off the LIRR from Jamaica, at Penn Station, when an elderly lady with a cane asked me to help her with her luggage. Throughout the slow walk to the elevator, I felt both the pleasures of patience and the unfamiliar glow of simple virtue (helping a lady with her bags, how quaint!), and this glow warmed when she began to talk to me about opera. Her accent dripped Long Island; it was a thousand Greek salads eaten in a thousand diners; she told me she went to Rigoletto and found it "so beautiful." The word beautiful took a long time for her to say, and its sincerity was unquestionable ... so different from the standard formulas we musicians are forced to exchange with each other backstage ... beautiful without any reservations, and self-contained, like a flowerpot. As the elevator ascended, she asked me about another opera, "Cavalry something," and I pronounced it for her in Italian, "Cavalleria Rusticiana," with a slightly overdone, proud pronunciatory flourish, and she smiled at me such a charming "look-my-son-grew-up-to-be-a-doctor-and-he-also-speaks-Italian" smile that I realized I had much more than recouped my investment of time with her; it was I that was exploiting her; I had replaced a harried luggage-hauler (the Jeremy-who-would-have-been) with a charmed elevator-rider who might as well amble, since time is not money but infinitely more precious.
The scales at least partly came off my eyes. We emerged onto the concourse, and she started to ask me "when are you playing in New York? Can you..." I told her I wasn't playing really much until October, or December in New York... she asked me where and I told her and her eyes googled in amazement. "Can you...?" she began again, and I assumed she wanted my name and contact info; I asked her if she had an email address, and then the terms of our dynamic changed. "Goodness no," she said, as if it were the most absurd thing in the world, and her eyes hinted vague distrust. A nice lady like her, using email? I offered my number, and she looked even stranger ... I thought I saw my error, and wrote my name on a Harrod's receipt and gave it to her, told her to look for me in the concert listings. This crumpled inscribed receipt, especially, did not impress her. This was understandable; I had no card, no official thing; I wracked my brain. But the source of her disappointment was elsewhere: "What?" she said, "You don't have any tickets?"
I laughed. What else was there to do? It is so nice to laugh in Penn Station, a relief from the linear harassment of the concourse. Yes, I was carrying around free tickets for all my upcoming concerts, and giving them out like candy? I saw in her eyes that while I had once impressed her, I had already travelled deep into a ravine of disappointment. I was also slightly disillusioned myself; she was, after all that, like the rest of us, looking for a free ride. In that short space of the elevator ride, I had travelled the full gamut of a parent-child relationship; from the first mysteries of her discovering who I am and what I like to do, through pride in my accomplishment, to the inevitable coloring of disappointment; the drawn boundary inevitable, as the child asserts its own self, finds its own way, and begins to see the parent as human too. Was this a pre-Mother's day message? Or just, in the immortal words of Homer Simpson, "a bunch of stuff that happens"?
I laughed, and we parted ways, and I could tell she wasn't going to keep my receipt for very long, but it was all good. I ate a Red Sicilian slice in honor of her, and thought of her sitting through Cavalleria Rusticiana, smiling and clapping ...
I have come to accept these accidents, in short, as essential: the ink with which my history is written.
By accident, I became a good guy yesterday, for seven minutes. I was getting off the LIRR from Jamaica, at Penn Station, when an elderly lady with a cane asked me to help her with her luggage. Throughout the slow walk to the elevator, I felt both the pleasures of patience and the unfamiliar glow of simple virtue (helping a lady with her bags, how quaint!), and this glow warmed when she began to talk to me about opera. Her accent dripped Long Island; it was a thousand Greek salads eaten in a thousand diners; she told me she went to Rigoletto and found it "so beautiful." The word beautiful took a long time for her to say, and its sincerity was unquestionable ... so different from the standard formulas we musicians are forced to exchange with each other backstage ... beautiful without any reservations, and self-contained, like a flowerpot. As the elevator ascended, she asked me about another opera, "Cavalry something," and I pronounced it for her in Italian, "Cavalleria Rusticiana," with a slightly overdone, proud pronunciatory flourish, and she smiled at me such a charming "look-my-son-grew-up-to-be-a-doctor-and-he-also-speaks-Italian" smile that I realized I had much more than recouped my investment of time with her; it was I that was exploiting her; I had replaced a harried luggage-hauler (the Jeremy-who-would-have-been) with a charmed elevator-rider who might as well amble, since time is not money but infinitely more precious.
The scales at least partly came off my eyes. We emerged onto the concourse, and she started to ask me "when are you playing in New York? Can you..." I told her I wasn't playing really much until October, or December in New York... she asked me where and I told her and her eyes googled in amazement. "Can you...?" she began again, and I assumed she wanted my name and contact info; I asked her if she had an email address, and then the terms of our dynamic changed. "Goodness no," she said, as if it were the most absurd thing in the world, and her eyes hinted vague distrust. A nice lady like her, using email? I offered my number, and she looked even stranger ... I thought I saw my error, and wrote my name on a Harrod's receipt and gave it to her, told her to look for me in the concert listings. This crumpled inscribed receipt, especially, did not impress her. This was understandable; I had no card, no official thing; I wracked my brain. But the source of her disappointment was elsewhere: "What?" she said, "You don't have any tickets?"
I laughed. What else was there to do? It is so nice to laugh in Penn Station, a relief from the linear harassment of the concourse. Yes, I was carrying around free tickets for all my upcoming concerts, and giving them out like candy? I saw in her eyes that while I had once impressed her, I had already travelled deep into a ravine of disappointment. I was also slightly disillusioned myself; she was, after all that, like the rest of us, looking for a free ride. In that short space of the elevator ride, I had travelled the full gamut of a parent-child relationship; from the first mysteries of her discovering who I am and what I like to do, through pride in my accomplishment, to the inevitable coloring of disappointment; the drawn boundary inevitable, as the child asserts its own self, finds its own way, and begins to see the parent as human too. Was this a pre-Mother's day message? Or just, in the immortal words of Homer Simpson, "a bunch of stuff that happens"?
I laughed, and we parted ways, and I could tell she wasn't going to keep my receipt for very long, but it was all good. I ate a Red Sicilian slice in honor of her, and thought of her sitting through Cavalleria Rusticiana, smiling and clapping ...
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Novels, Ghosts
The ghosts of ten thousand take-out meals hover in my kitchen, a haunted cubicle. I wander into the apartment one day; I'm innocently staring out the window, when quietly, secretly, a vindaloo from 2002 calls to me, a wild vindaloo downed with beer and a giggle, the memory of my friend telling a story while my mouth burned; but trying to speak over it, yelling like some irascible Jewish lady at the deli, is a miserable meal from Teriyaki Boy, a quasi-Udon from the turn of the millennium, and with its raspy uninviting styrofoam-encased memory it attempts to remind me that not all take-out is pleasure and conviviality; most is grim, lazy Necessity. There they are, the consumed spirits, auras arguing in the kitchen; each having made its way into my body and out and somehow (somehow!) determined the course of events, the course of now and the course of future years; but all variables are still in play (except the years now past? ... perhaps even they are in play). Just two days ago, I gazed at the withered remains of a corned beef sandwich, in transition to ghostliness. Have I betrayed you too?, I wondered ... we deserved each other less than we hoped. The meal as pure joyous ritual: I have betrayed that ideal, time and time again; though I believe it is not entirely my fault.
But upon arrival in London you should have seen me in the Marks & Spencer, the way I scoured the aisles. How delightful to find a new food paradigm. There they were, banks upon banks of sandwiches in little plastic containers, and with my child's fervor I smirked as I chose exotic titles only partly for their flavor-appeal:
Wensleydale Cheese Sandwich with Caramelized Carrot Chutney
Hoisin Duck Wrap
Black Pepper Potato and Lentil Crisps
Gala Apple Juice
Milk Chocolate Digestive Biscuits
It seemed impossible they (the nameless clerks) would even let me purchase such an odd assortment. Cross-legged on my hotel bed, clicking the clicker, I giggled and punctured and ate, until my coverlet was stained, tell-tale, with brownish-orange smears, the guilty wake of passionately spilled carrot chutney, a sandwich to which I made such love as I deemed appropriate. How many times have I tiredly wiped my eyes and stroked an eyebrow and moaned wearily of how much the classical musician must travel, but really I'm a terrible hypocrite. Even a foreign sandwich can send me to ecstasy.
As if the chutney-Wensleydale weren't enough, I could probably compose a passionate ode to the potato crisps; oh wait, "inspiration" is coming on:
Oh spirit of peppercorn
Blinking on an oily horizon:
Spice which sank a thousand ships:
Bless me once more.
Make this potato sing.
One symptom of traveling is the loneliness of watching other people's reunions. I was waiting for the Heathrow Express train with a youngish couple, who ended up sitting across from me. They were evidently and manifestly very happy to see each other again, and thus their physical contact increased exponentially with distance from the airport. The dimensions and contours of the seats were their only limitations. I tried looking away, thinking of other things, but the girl's foot ended up in a curious place, and matters were getting--so to speak--out of hand; the train thankfully pulled up at Paddington Station. This couple bounded out the door, enlaced, deeply impatient to get where they were going... and I looked up at the arching roof of the station, and sighed with my luggage. I had too much pride to plod, but I walked pensively, and searched the vast space for some relief; as you have read, I sublimated their energy into sandwiches. It was the available option. You must always accept what is available, as a starting point.
To conclude this rambling post, I would like to ask my readers to offer their suggestions what to do with a barely used copy of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I was ambitious and hopeful; I thought to myself "stop being a fuddyduddy and read something young and hip and current;" I began reading with (a perhaps somewhat contrived) enthusiasm, which quickly dampened. It is futuristic and dark (one might say darkly comic?... whatever) and rather monotonous, and even more overwritten than Think Denk. I skipped forward three hundred pages or so, and found more of the same. And it is written in the manner which I am so displeased to find as the modus operandi of the modern novel: each chapter leaping to a new story... using the opportunity to set an entirely new scene, go into yet another "backstory." Ack, so tiresome; if there are many strands to the story, is there not a way (a less lazy way) to weave the strands into a more continuous narrative? This is not always possible, but consider music as the model? Whatever other stories you have to tell must be connected within the ongoing fabric; the second theme has its own story but must be created out of the momentum of the first, etc. The continuity of a musical work is its discipline, and I guess I'm just a fuddyduddy who doesn't like too much leaping around in my novels; I am not a dog, I don't want to be jerked to and fro; the novelist does not control me, I'm my own man and I have my own sense of time, my own demands; and the point is I loved my Wensleydale sandwich so much more than Infinite Jest and if you have any ideas what to do with a huge, unwanted novel, please let me know.
But upon arrival in London you should have seen me in the Marks & Spencer, the way I scoured the aisles. How delightful to find a new food paradigm. There they were, banks upon banks of sandwiches in little plastic containers, and with my child's fervor I smirked as I chose exotic titles only partly for their flavor-appeal:
Wensleydale Cheese Sandwich with Caramelized Carrot Chutney
Hoisin Duck Wrap
Black Pepper Potato and Lentil Crisps
Gala Apple Juice
Milk Chocolate Digestive Biscuits
It seemed impossible they (the nameless clerks) would even let me purchase such an odd assortment. Cross-legged on my hotel bed, clicking the clicker, I giggled and punctured and ate, until my coverlet was stained, tell-tale, with brownish-orange smears, the guilty wake of passionately spilled carrot chutney, a sandwich to which I made such love as I deemed appropriate. How many times have I tiredly wiped my eyes and stroked an eyebrow and moaned wearily of how much the classical musician must travel, but really I'm a terrible hypocrite. Even a foreign sandwich can send me to ecstasy.
As if the chutney-Wensleydale weren't enough, I could probably compose a passionate ode to the potato crisps; oh wait, "inspiration" is coming on:
Oh spirit of peppercorn
Blinking on an oily horizon:
Spice which sank a thousand ships:
Bless me once more.
Make this potato sing.
One symptom of traveling is the loneliness of watching other people's reunions. I was waiting for the Heathrow Express train with a youngish couple, who ended up sitting across from me. They were evidently and manifestly very happy to see each other again, and thus their physical contact increased exponentially with distance from the airport. The dimensions and contours of the seats were their only limitations. I tried looking away, thinking of other things, but the girl's foot ended up in a curious place, and matters were getting--so to speak--out of hand; the train thankfully pulled up at Paddington Station. This couple bounded out the door, enlaced, deeply impatient to get where they were going... and I looked up at the arching roof of the station, and sighed with my luggage. I had too much pride to plod, but I walked pensively, and searched the vast space for some relief; as you have read, I sublimated their energy into sandwiches. It was the available option. You must always accept what is available, as a starting point.
To conclude this rambling post, I would like to ask my readers to offer their suggestions what to do with a barely used copy of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I was ambitious and hopeful; I thought to myself "stop being a fuddyduddy and read something young and hip and current;" I began reading with (a perhaps somewhat contrived) enthusiasm, which quickly dampened. It is futuristic and dark (one might say darkly comic?... whatever) and rather monotonous, and even more overwritten than Think Denk. I skipped forward three hundred pages or so, and found more of the same. And it is written in the manner which I am so displeased to find as the modus operandi of the modern novel: each chapter leaping to a new story... using the opportunity to set an entirely new scene, go into yet another "backstory." Ack, so tiresome; if there are many strands to the story, is there not a way (a less lazy way) to weave the strands into a more continuous narrative? This is not always possible, but consider music as the model? Whatever other stories you have to tell must be connected within the ongoing fabric; the second theme has its own story but must be created out of the momentum of the first, etc. The continuity of a musical work is its discipline, and I guess I'm just a fuddyduddy who doesn't like too much leaping around in my novels; I am not a dog, I don't want to be jerked to and fro; the novelist does not control me, I'm my own man and I have my own sense of time, my own demands; and the point is I loved my Wensleydale sandwich so much more than Infinite Jest and if you have any ideas what to do with a huge, unwanted novel, please let me know.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Morning Wreckage
I cannot just charge my cell phone; it must be coaxed. The slightest spatial disruption of the connection, a feather-light brush of the cord with my elbow, for instance, will destroy a tenuous symbiosis and cost me another 10 minutes of pleading and cursing. Occasionally it will say "Unable To Charge." Which I find curious, even peevish. To display this message, or any message at all, it must have noticed it was plugged in, which is to say, it has detected the presence of power; but it refuses to acquiesce. Of what does this inability consist? Is the battery not in the right mood? At these moments the cell phone is like nothing more than a reluctant lover; we have a problematic, codependent relationship; it refuses sex (charging) when it feels neglected, perhaps, or when it needs attention of a different kind. Sometimes I am feeling callous; I say: "Go ahead, don't charge, I don't need you!" And I storm off half-happily. But the phone (I kid you not) holds a grudge. It has enormous patience and power of will, sitting there by the socket. And I grow needy, talk-hungry. The lower I allow the battery to ebb, the more difficult the eventual charging (i.e. make-up sex); the more time I must eventually lavish: a week's worth of roses, dinners out, abject apologies; and finally, perhaps, according to whim, and not according to any logical sequence of events, or any model of circuitry one can imagine, I connect things just right, I hit the phone's magic spot, the battery icon begins blinking and the renewal can commence. And then, when the phone says "Charge Complete," we are in the midsummer of our love, and I pick it up and tear it free from its cords carelessly, and talk like no tomorrow; and the cycle of degradation begins again. No I don't see any similarities to any other areas of my life, what are you talking about????
In a completely unrelated development, I had bought a CD alarm clock some time ago which I rhapsodized here, but for a long time now the CD slot in it has yawned empty while I yawned awake to sterile, unimaginative beeping. This morning I realized, as I awoke at 6:45 AM... the sunniest moment by some devilish chance in my apartment ... that music was a void (among others) that needed to be filled and I shook off my flannel duvet and stumbled over my ironing board towards my laptop/jukebox and put on "Rufus Wainwright," the debut album of Rufus Wainwright. Particularly I wanted to hear a couple harmonies in the song "Sally Ann," the harmonies for the line:
There is a little minor key Schubertian inflection in there that seems to me totally top-notch, especially combined with the country-western crooning of the whole. I put it on repeat, and standing there in my underwear in the wreckage of my bedroom I realized I was very very happy, even in the morning. I declined to analyze the various reasons. But it definitely had something to do with that sad, beautiful harmony. And the harmony kept running through my head while my faulty Starbucks cup dripped scalding French Roast onto my hand in the subway, while I clung for dear life to the nearest pole, and the train lurched spastically, and I gymnastically revolved--drippingly--to allow everyone their circuitous, irritable routes into the sardine can labelled #2. A little circle of spots on the floor of the train ephemerally marked my place, and I licked brown caffeine from my aching tingling fingers. Still, I was happy. Even amid the commuter chaos of Penn Station, that one bittersweet harmony seemed triumphant. The QuikTrak machine did not pose an obstacle either, it spit out my ticket obediently. It was only when I came to order my bagel that a serious problem arose, thus:
Me: "Poppy bagel."
Europan Employee: [harshly] "No poppy."
Me: "OK, onion bagel."
[10 second pause]
Europan Employee [Even more harshly] "No poppy."
Me: [Screaming] "OK, onion bagel, toasted, with cream cheese."
[10 second pause]
Europan Employee: "Yes we have onion."
[9 second pause]
Europan Employee: "Toasted?"
Me: "Yes, with cream cheese."
[Employee slices bagel; various other employees and customers intervene; orders fly overhead; chaotic commuters everywhere; I am at the intersection of a thousand journeys; I notice the employee is spreading cream cheese on an untoasted onion bagel.]
Me: "Umm, i wanted it toasted."
Europan Employee: [Smug, wronged.] "Well, you should have told me."
Happiness is an evanescent thing. I lost it, but recovered some while contemplating a hypothetical Arts Section headline: "Pianist arrested for assault with untoasted bagel." Or perhaps in NY Post: "Pianist testy over toasting."
In a completely unrelated development, I had bought a CD alarm clock some time ago which I rhapsodized here, but for a long time now the CD slot in it has yawned empty while I yawned awake to sterile, unimaginative beeping. This morning I realized, as I awoke at 6:45 AM... the sunniest moment by some devilish chance in my apartment ... that music was a void (among others) that needed to be filled and I shook off my flannel duvet and stumbled over my ironing board towards my laptop/jukebox and put on "Rufus Wainwright," the debut album of Rufus Wainwright. Particularly I wanted to hear a couple harmonies in the song "Sally Ann," the harmonies for the line:
You realize you've been there before.
There is a little minor key Schubertian inflection in there that seems to me totally top-notch, especially combined with the country-western crooning of the whole. I put it on repeat, and standing there in my underwear in the wreckage of my bedroom I realized I was very very happy, even in the morning. I declined to analyze the various reasons. But it definitely had something to do with that sad, beautiful harmony. And the harmony kept running through my head while my faulty Starbucks cup dripped scalding French Roast onto my hand in the subway, while I clung for dear life to the nearest pole, and the train lurched spastically, and I gymnastically revolved--drippingly--to allow everyone their circuitous, irritable routes into the sardine can labelled #2. A little circle of spots on the floor of the train ephemerally marked my place, and I licked brown caffeine from my aching tingling fingers. Still, I was happy. Even amid the commuter chaos of Penn Station, that one bittersweet harmony seemed triumphant. The QuikTrak machine did not pose an obstacle either, it spit out my ticket obediently. It was only when I came to order my bagel that a serious problem arose, thus:
Me: "Poppy bagel."
Europan Employee: [harshly] "No poppy."
Me: "OK, onion bagel."
[10 second pause]
Europan Employee [Even more harshly] "No poppy."
Me: [Screaming] "OK, onion bagel, toasted, with cream cheese."
[10 second pause]
Europan Employee: "Yes we have onion."
[9 second pause]
Europan Employee: "Toasted?"
Me: "Yes, with cream cheese."
[Employee slices bagel; various other employees and customers intervene; orders fly overhead; chaotic commuters everywhere; I am at the intersection of a thousand journeys; I notice the employee is spreading cream cheese on an untoasted onion bagel.]
Me: "Umm, i wanted it toasted."
Europan Employee: [Smug, wronged.] "Well, you should have told me."
Happiness is an evanescent thing. I lost it, but recovered some while contemplating a hypothetical Arts Section headline: "Pianist arrested for assault with untoasted bagel." Or perhaps in NY Post: "Pianist testy over toasting."
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Transition States
Friend C wants to be made King. Take note: he does not want to BE King, or act in a Kingly way, or possess or deserve any of the trappings or temptations of power. He wants to live perpetually in the state of being inaugurated; in other words, so that the party never ends. Impossibly prolonged: the adventure and delight of being lifted into a new state. Perhaps party boy should read these harrowing lines of Horace, which left me breathless on the number 2 train en route to Brooklyn:
Is it not eloquent enough just to say "wow"? In this poem, the party is definitely about to be over. I cannot judge the translation (David Ferry) on its faithfulness to the Latin, sadly, but the wham-bam of the poem comes through, like a knife in the heart. Whatever Lydia did, she probably didn't deserve this black, black ode; she probably doesn't deserve to suffer the ingenious, Hellish, dual tortures of convulsing like "mare in heat" and shivering under the cold, bitter, desiccating wind. Poets can really be jerks when they want to be. People looking for truly mean things to send their exes need look no further; a better bitterness is not to be found.
Speaking of bitterness: I recently played Winterreise and had some curious qualms, after the fact. I was blearily watching the news in my hotel room, the morning after the performance, and some newscaster was interviewing a woman who lost her son on 9/11, about the discovery of bone fragments on top of the Deutsche Bank building adjoining Ground Zero. Her voice modulated into a well-worn "sensitive mode;" it dripped as she commiserated: "I know this must have been such a hard week for you." They glanced at each other, cued mournful glances. The televised sympathy made me feel ill. She was a stranger to them, sympathizing with their loss in front of millions of strangers.
Maybe because the first word of Winterreise is "Fremd" (roughly translated: "stranger") I made the uncomfortable connection... Something about that song cycle is so dark and personal that perhaps it should not be observed, made public; it is at times almost obscene. Randall and I were not playing for charity; we made money off the emotional spectacle. What is the difference between our public, reimbursed display of sympathy via Schubert, our exploitation of those dark emotions, and the newscasters' televised, simulated grief? I could not easily dismiss the question.
Normally, I steer clear of discussions of the ethics of music; they bore me to tears. I wanted however to be able to say with a clean conscience, quickly and unambiguously, that something about the intrinsic beauty of the music (some innate, intangible quality) makes performing Winterreise morally "better" than exploiting 9/11 emotions for the willing camera. This seems to be a commonsense truism (but watch out for those); probably many people would agree with this statement, in a general way; and why did I feel uncomfortable with it? The vague intangible felt like a copout, perhaps. How can a classical music concert be an "immoral" act? (I have heard performances, pieces, I considered immoral, at times.) Sometimes I do feel "bad" while playing Winterreise; sometimes I feel bad in the sense of approaching the emotional states of the song cycle (which is pretty damn bad, i.e. suicidal); and sometimes it feels like I have to pretend in order to get there; and between my pretending and the sacredness of the music there is an unpleasant rift. Bad either way: a lose-lose situation. So why do I love the piece so much?
So many of the songs of the cycle begin with rather typical premises, situations, or metaphors drawn from nature--really just clichés of Romantic verse--and then these premises and images have to be "explained" as parallels to the narrator's own experience. For instance: the stream which once ran quickly (in the summer) is now frozen stiff. Love (which once was) is now frozen, sterile, stopped. Yawn. Or, in another song, a leaf hangs on the tree; we watch it, and it falls to its death, like the hope of the lover. Yawn again. There are 24 songs, 24 situations, 24 descriptions: an exhausting array of metaphors for the lover's misery. There is nothing to love about this, per se. What redeems these clichés? I'd suggest the answer to this question is linked to the ethical question I posed earlier. It seems to me that these descriptions, these constantly posed premises, are all fakes, all facades; they are merely the refuge of the narrator, his only defense. Schubert obligingly text-paints these premises; we hear the dogs bark, the stream freeze, the leaf fall; but his real business lays far beyond landscaping, far beyond the too-easy metaphor, and resides instead in the destruction of these metaphorical premises, and in the creation of a musical counter-meaning (a musical insurgency): i.e., that the verbal metaphors are just flood-gates: comforting and distancing scraps of meaning and narrative which hold back impossible rushes of emotion.
From the first song, even: the narrator is attempting to "tell a story," "set the scene," etc. etc. He is very nearly whining. "I used to be happy. I was almost married. Then she left me, and now life sucks, and it's fucking cold." (I hold the rights to this rather loose, contemporary translation.) Schubert's music obligingly walks in a minor key with the narrator; the verse structure sets forth the various facets of the textual description, allows the various complaints to be enumerated and articulated; allows, in short, the story to be told. No, let me put it another way: Schubert's setting allows the narrator to pretend he is telling the story.
But in the final stanza of the poem, Schubert noticed not just the obvious, the more tender tone, but a more subtle and crucial change, a slight shift of the terms of the perennially rewritten contract: Who is telling this story? The famous shift to the major for this final verse, a Schubert cliché (once again he dips into the familiar barrel of tricks for yet another miracle trick), necessitates some reharmonizations, some new interpolated leading tones (E#, G#). These leading tones are uncannily beautiful, and soften the march-steps of the narrator. Who is operating behind the scenes to make this happen, to make the voice-leading work? The composer, of course; some ulterior force. These notes call attention to themselves, and to the narrator beyond the narrator.
Schubert is drawing a distinction between the "gute Nacht" of the previous (minor-key) stanza, which is a brave renouncing farewell, in the mode of a story which is already over, in which distance is already at work, in which the frame of the narration is clear; and the "gute Nacht" of the next (major-key) stanza, which is hopelessly cowardly, impossibly involved, ambiguously told, the frame shifted, in which the Narrator is at war with himself. If he would like to put everything in the past tense ("in the good old days"), the music tells us we are very much in the present tense (you are living now, whether you like it or not); the narrator is a character in his own story; he is not telling the story, the story is telling him. The major key tells us the narrator is false; the perspective he has been adopting, the story he has been narrating, is a sham; and this new "happier" sound world is no comfort. It is, rather, the erosion of refuge, the destruction of metaphorical or narrative shelter, and the intrusion of the vulnerable self: the dangerous, unstable moment where the tenderness emerges from beneath the facade.
The narrator promised a story of a certain type; but now, all bets are off. What is the nature of the story we are about to be told? We have no clue. If everything is over, Mr. Speaker, why is the cycle just beginning? These lies and contradictions are laid bare by the beauty of the music.
Some of the songs of Winterreise are content to remain in abstract realms of rhetoric; they allow the pessimistic metaphors of the narrator simply to stand and exist, as morals, or islands of thought in the story. (But this cycle is not a "story" in anything like the conventional sense; it has no plot; it is entirely a matter of wandering through forests of associated meanings; a story in search of a story.) The song about the will-of-the-wisp is a good example of one of these rhetorical, static gestures. It has a moral, like a fable. Its moral is the metaphor of the "Irrlicht;" everything is elusive, changing, ephemeral: everything is nothing. There is no perspective shift in this song, no moment in which its facade erodes; its irony and pessimism stand unchallenged, knowing, miserable: a song about shiftiness paradoxically uttered from a stable point-of-view.
These songs provide a welcome contrast to the more devastating songs in the cycle, the more centrally shifting and dangerous songs (i.e. not just "about" shifting, but "enacting" shifts), which attempt to evoke not just emotional states or ideas but the vulnerable moments of transition between different states: unbearable breakdowns.
"Im Dorfe" begins (as usual) with the narrator setting a scene: nighttime, barking dogs, rattling their chains; everyone is asleep. Hello, Romantic cliché: the lonely lover awake, attentive, miserable, while happy others slumber. This would be boring; but Schubert's musical agenda is totally elsewhere. In place of a minor-key nocturnal scene, something plainly reflecting darkness--something conforming to the cliché--Schubert's setting is disquieting, worse than one could imagine. He provides a tenuous major key world with minor-key inflections that appear and get washed away... an eerie harmonic half-light. The major-key chords grind uneasily against the rattling/barking motive in the left hand of the piano. And then there are the silences; each bark is answered by two beats of nothing. These silences force the harmonies to leap over them, in long, intense, suspenseful arcs. The voice makes no effort to bark like a dog, but simply poses the endlessness of some imagined, hypothetical phrase against the halting quality of the motive. I call this phrase hypothetical because it creates no melody per se; there is only the motive, and the changing underlying harmonies (like the first Prelude of the Well-Tempered Clavier); no reassuring, predictable melodic contour to absorb meaning, to serve as a cipher, to distract from the "scene": no melodic refuge (melody as persona) for the narrator: only these barking dogs.
The barking of the dogs is clearly a metaphor for menace; but is this menace real? Is the narrator describing a scene, or his own unease? Why, in the night, does he particularly notice these barking dogs and their rattling chains? Clearly, he is externalizing, summoning and noticing these images in order to explain himself to us, under the guise of description. And this ruse continues, as he dwells on the dreams of the sleeping people all around; they were dreaming of all sorts of things ...
Here the music shifts, the barking ceases, and presumably we enter the world of the dream, a hovering dream on the dominant. (Have we left, or entered, reality?) This musical shift is oddly mistimed, since the dreams happened earlier in the poem; now the text is just commenting, in hindsight. The narrator is pretending to tell us about other people's behavior; he assumes a patronizing attitude towards the foibles of humanity: they who dream of joys that will never come, that always vanish.
The music sees through the lie: it blossoms into incredible tenderness (though without leaving the contingent, temporary dream-world of the dominant), exposing a raw current of desire. It is the most beautiful, stunning moment in the song... and the narrator is stuck there, supposedly telling the cautionary tale of humanity but clearly having his own tale told, against his will. The music is first person though the text is third person. He is stuck between his words and the music, pronged by their contradiction of tone, a contradiction which exposes the narrator's sham, his own attempt to hide behind the facade of metaphor, his facade of a persona. And the reason he hides is made evident by the music: the emotion behind the wall is too unbelievable to contemplate; there is so much desire in the dream, so much longed-for happiness. (There it is, in the suspensions in the piano.) Having spun out this beauty, but without resolution, the dominant-dream fades back into "reality"--a magnificent transition which avoids any sense of ending or beginning---and renewed dog barks... the dream's moment of honesty is held uneasily, only through tremendous reserve, in the structure of the song, like a suspended bubble.
And I think this is what Schubert was after: unbearable, tenuous glimpses of things... of emotions. He manages to crystallize a strange transition-state: the surge of unwilling emotion, in which a horrible, unwanted happiness comes to disturb an accepted despair, a boundary at which reasonable expression is no longer possible. I have only seen this kind of expression on people's faces at truly life-changing moments; and it always makes me want to look away. Schubert brings himself to the image-repertoire of lovesickness with a vengeance, with a terrifying imagination, with cruel, tremendous powers of musical metaphor. In a conventional view, he brings the poems to life, but he does so partly by destroying the clichés upon which they are based, by murdering their inert parts, by exposing the lies and shams of the text. I do not think he is "faithful" to the poems, or "unfaithful;" he does not contradict the poem, but the poem after his treatment is surely not what it was.
On the news, you cannot show the lies and shams of grief. Grief on TV is a glassy thing, which you handle with care in order not to break it open, in order not to offend anyone; and obviously there is no need to "question" the sadness of 9/11 relatives. It exists, so much worse than we imagine or broadcast. Schubert does not handle grief with care; he tosses it around like a child's toy, and if it shatters into 24 songs so much the better. His carelessness is inspiring. Somehow I think this makes it so much more, somehow morally "better" than an exploitation or description of grief; he refuses to let the symbol stand for the thing itself, and he keeps grabbing the thing out from its expression no matter how painful it is. He is there to witness it all, hanging on. destroying grief's facades, freshening our experience even at its worst.
To Lydia
It happens less and less often, now, that you
Wake up to hear the sound of gravel thrown
Against your shuttered windows in the night.
It's very seldom, now, that you can't sleep
The whole night through. There used to be a time
The hinges of the door to your house moved ever so
Easily back and forth. Not anymore.
It's very seldom, Lydia, now, that you
Can hear a lover out in the dark complain:
"O Lydia, Lydia, why are you sound asleep
While all night long I suffer in the alley?"
You're going to have your turn out there alone,
Old crone in the nighttime alley weeping, weeping
Over your faithless boyfriends while the North Wind
Coming down from the Thracian cold blows ever
Louder and louder through the dark of the moon,
And ulcerating lust such as the lust
That tortures the mare in heat tortures your heart.
Out there in the night you'll moan that all the young men
Prefer the lustrous ivy and lustrous myrtle
To the withered leaves that winter's companion the cold
Wind causes to scatter and scrape along the alley.
Is it not eloquent enough just to say "wow"? In this poem, the party is definitely about to be over. I cannot judge the translation (David Ferry) on its faithfulness to the Latin, sadly, but the wham-bam of the poem comes through, like a knife in the heart. Whatever Lydia did, she probably didn't deserve this black, black ode; she probably doesn't deserve to suffer the ingenious, Hellish, dual tortures of convulsing like "mare in heat" and shivering under the cold, bitter, desiccating wind. Poets can really be jerks when they want to be. People looking for truly mean things to send their exes need look no further; a better bitterness is not to be found.
Speaking of bitterness: I recently played Winterreise and had some curious qualms, after the fact. I was blearily watching the news in my hotel room, the morning after the performance, and some newscaster was interviewing a woman who lost her son on 9/11, about the discovery of bone fragments on top of the Deutsche Bank building adjoining Ground Zero. Her voice modulated into a well-worn "sensitive mode;" it dripped as she commiserated: "I know this must have been such a hard week for you." They glanced at each other, cued mournful glances. The televised sympathy made me feel ill. She was a stranger to them, sympathizing with their loss in front of millions of strangers.
Maybe because the first word of Winterreise is "Fremd" (roughly translated: "stranger") I made the uncomfortable connection... Something about that song cycle is so dark and personal that perhaps it should not be observed, made public; it is at times almost obscene. Randall and I were not playing for charity; we made money off the emotional spectacle. What is the difference between our public, reimbursed display of sympathy via Schubert, our exploitation of those dark emotions, and the newscasters' televised, simulated grief? I could not easily dismiss the question.
Normally, I steer clear of discussions of the ethics of music; they bore me to tears. I wanted however to be able to say with a clean conscience, quickly and unambiguously, that something about the intrinsic beauty of the music (some innate, intangible quality) makes performing Winterreise morally "better" than exploiting 9/11 emotions for the willing camera. This seems to be a commonsense truism (but watch out for those); probably many people would agree with this statement, in a general way; and why did I feel uncomfortable with it? The vague intangible felt like a copout, perhaps. How can a classical music concert be an "immoral" act? (I have heard performances, pieces, I considered immoral, at times.) Sometimes I do feel "bad" while playing Winterreise; sometimes I feel bad in the sense of approaching the emotional states of the song cycle (which is pretty damn bad, i.e. suicidal); and sometimes it feels like I have to pretend in order to get there; and between my pretending and the sacredness of the music there is an unpleasant rift. Bad either way: a lose-lose situation. So why do I love the piece so much?
So many of the songs of the cycle begin with rather typical premises, situations, or metaphors drawn from nature--really just clichés of Romantic verse--and then these premises and images have to be "explained" as parallels to the narrator's own experience. For instance: the stream which once ran quickly (in the summer) is now frozen stiff. Love (which once was) is now frozen, sterile, stopped. Yawn. Or, in another song, a leaf hangs on the tree; we watch it, and it falls to its death, like the hope of the lover. Yawn again. There are 24 songs, 24 situations, 24 descriptions: an exhausting array of metaphors for the lover's misery. There is nothing to love about this, per se. What redeems these clichés? I'd suggest the answer to this question is linked to the ethical question I posed earlier. It seems to me that these descriptions, these constantly posed premises, are all fakes, all facades; they are merely the refuge of the narrator, his only defense. Schubert obligingly text-paints these premises; we hear the dogs bark, the stream freeze, the leaf fall; but his real business lays far beyond landscaping, far beyond the too-easy metaphor, and resides instead in the destruction of these metaphorical premises, and in the creation of a musical counter-meaning (a musical insurgency): i.e., that the verbal metaphors are just flood-gates: comforting and distancing scraps of meaning and narrative which hold back impossible rushes of emotion.
From the first song, even: the narrator is attempting to "tell a story," "set the scene," etc. etc. He is very nearly whining. "I used to be happy. I was almost married. Then she left me, and now life sucks, and it's fucking cold." (I hold the rights to this rather loose, contemporary translation.) Schubert's music obligingly walks in a minor key with the narrator; the verse structure sets forth the various facets of the textual description, allows the various complaints to be enumerated and articulated; allows, in short, the story to be told. No, let me put it another way: Schubert's setting allows the narrator to pretend he is telling the story.
But in the final stanza of the poem, Schubert noticed not just the obvious, the more tender tone, but a more subtle and crucial change, a slight shift of the terms of the perennially rewritten contract: Who is telling this story? The famous shift to the major for this final verse, a Schubert cliché (once again he dips into the familiar barrel of tricks for yet another miracle trick), necessitates some reharmonizations, some new interpolated leading tones (E#, G#). These leading tones are uncannily beautiful, and soften the march-steps of the narrator. Who is operating behind the scenes to make this happen, to make the voice-leading work? The composer, of course; some ulterior force. These notes call attention to themselves, and to the narrator beyond the narrator.
Schubert is drawing a distinction between the "gute Nacht" of the previous (minor-key) stanza, which is a brave renouncing farewell, in the mode of a story which is already over, in which distance is already at work, in which the frame of the narration is clear; and the "gute Nacht" of the next (major-key) stanza, which is hopelessly cowardly, impossibly involved, ambiguously told, the frame shifted, in which the Narrator is at war with himself. If he would like to put everything in the past tense ("in the good old days"), the music tells us we are very much in the present tense (you are living now, whether you like it or not); the narrator is a character in his own story; he is not telling the story, the story is telling him. The major key tells us the narrator is false; the perspective he has been adopting, the story he has been narrating, is a sham; and this new "happier" sound world is no comfort. It is, rather, the erosion of refuge, the destruction of metaphorical or narrative shelter, and the intrusion of the vulnerable self: the dangerous, unstable moment where the tenderness emerges from beneath the facade.
The narrator promised a story of a certain type; but now, all bets are off. What is the nature of the story we are about to be told? We have no clue. If everything is over, Mr. Speaker, why is the cycle just beginning? These lies and contradictions are laid bare by the beauty of the music.
Some of the songs of Winterreise are content to remain in abstract realms of rhetoric; they allow the pessimistic metaphors of the narrator simply to stand and exist, as morals, or islands of thought in the story. (But this cycle is not a "story" in anything like the conventional sense; it has no plot; it is entirely a matter of wandering through forests of associated meanings; a story in search of a story.) The song about the will-of-the-wisp is a good example of one of these rhetorical, static gestures. It has a moral, like a fable. Its moral is the metaphor of the "Irrlicht;" everything is elusive, changing, ephemeral: everything is nothing. There is no perspective shift in this song, no moment in which its facade erodes; its irony and pessimism stand unchallenged, knowing, miserable: a song about shiftiness paradoxically uttered from a stable point-of-view.
These songs provide a welcome contrast to the more devastating songs in the cycle, the more centrally shifting and dangerous songs (i.e. not just "about" shifting, but "enacting" shifts), which attempt to evoke not just emotional states or ideas but the vulnerable moments of transition between different states: unbearable breakdowns.
"Im Dorfe" begins (as usual) with the narrator setting a scene: nighttime, barking dogs, rattling their chains; everyone is asleep. Hello, Romantic cliché: the lonely lover awake, attentive, miserable, while happy others slumber. This would be boring; but Schubert's musical agenda is totally elsewhere. In place of a minor-key nocturnal scene, something plainly reflecting darkness--something conforming to the cliché--Schubert's setting is disquieting, worse than one could imagine. He provides a tenuous major key world with minor-key inflections that appear and get washed away... an eerie harmonic half-light. The major-key chords grind uneasily against the rattling/barking motive in the left hand of the piano. And then there are the silences; each bark is answered by two beats of nothing. These silences force the harmonies to leap over them, in long, intense, suspenseful arcs. The voice makes no effort to bark like a dog, but simply poses the endlessness of some imagined, hypothetical phrase against the halting quality of the motive. I call this phrase hypothetical because it creates no melody per se; there is only the motive, and the changing underlying harmonies (like the first Prelude of the Well-Tempered Clavier); no reassuring, predictable melodic contour to absorb meaning, to serve as a cipher, to distract from the "scene": no melodic refuge (melody as persona) for the narrator: only these barking dogs.
The barking of the dogs is clearly a metaphor for menace; but is this menace real? Is the narrator describing a scene, or his own unease? Why, in the night, does he particularly notice these barking dogs and their rattling chains? Clearly, he is externalizing, summoning and noticing these images in order to explain himself to us, under the guise of description. And this ruse continues, as he dwells on the dreams of the sleeping people all around; they were dreaming of all sorts of things ...
And in the morning all will have vanished.
Oh well, they had their share of pleasure
And hope that what they missed
Can be found again on their pillows.
Here the music shifts, the barking ceases, and presumably we enter the world of the dream, a hovering dream on the dominant. (Have we left, or entered, reality?) This musical shift is oddly mistimed, since the dreams happened earlier in the poem; now the text is just commenting, in hindsight. The narrator is pretending to tell us about other people's behavior; he assumes a patronizing attitude towards the foibles of humanity: they who dream of joys that will never come, that always vanish.
The music sees through the lie: it blossoms into incredible tenderness (though without leaving the contingent, temporary dream-world of the dominant), exposing a raw current of desire. It is the most beautiful, stunning moment in the song... and the narrator is stuck there, supposedly telling the cautionary tale of humanity but clearly having his own tale told, against his will. The music is first person though the text is third person. He is stuck between his words and the music, pronged by their contradiction of tone, a contradiction which exposes the narrator's sham, his own attempt to hide behind the facade of metaphor, his facade of a persona. And the reason he hides is made evident by the music: the emotion behind the wall is too unbelievable to contemplate; there is so much desire in the dream, so much longed-for happiness. (There it is, in the suspensions in the piano.) Having spun out this beauty, but without resolution, the dominant-dream fades back into "reality"--a magnificent transition which avoids any sense of ending or beginning---and renewed dog barks... the dream's moment of honesty is held uneasily, only through tremendous reserve, in the structure of the song, like a suspended bubble.
And I think this is what Schubert was after: unbearable, tenuous glimpses of things... of emotions. He manages to crystallize a strange transition-state: the surge of unwilling emotion, in which a horrible, unwanted happiness comes to disturb an accepted despair, a boundary at which reasonable expression is no longer possible. I have only seen this kind of expression on people's faces at truly life-changing moments; and it always makes me want to look away. Schubert brings himself to the image-repertoire of lovesickness with a vengeance, with a terrifying imagination, with cruel, tremendous powers of musical metaphor. In a conventional view, he brings the poems to life, but he does so partly by destroying the clichés upon which they are based, by murdering their inert parts, by exposing the lies and shams of the text. I do not think he is "faithful" to the poems, or "unfaithful;" he does not contradict the poem, but the poem after his treatment is surely not what it was.
On the news, you cannot show the lies and shams of grief. Grief on TV is a glassy thing, which you handle with care in order not to break it open, in order not to offend anyone; and obviously there is no need to "question" the sadness of 9/11 relatives. It exists, so much worse than we imagine or broadcast. Schubert does not handle grief with care; he tosses it around like a child's toy, and if it shatters into 24 songs so much the better. His carelessness is inspiring. Somehow I think this makes it so much more, somehow morally "better" than an exploitation or description of grief; he refuses to let the symbol stand for the thing itself, and he keeps grabbing the thing out from its expression no matter how painful it is. He is there to witness it all, hanging on. destroying grief's facades, freshening our experience even at its worst.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Old Friends
"Certain people, whose minds are prone to mystery, like to believe
that objects retain something of the eyes which have looked at them,
that old buildings and pictures appear to us not as they originally
were but beneath a perceptible veil woven for them over the centuries
by the love and contemplation of millions of admirers. This fantasy,
if you transpose it into the domain of what is for each one of us the
sole reality, the domain of his own sensibility, becomes the truth.
In that sense and in that sense alone (but it is a far more important
one than the other), a thing which we have looked at in the past
brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we
looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes were
filled. For things--and among them a book in a red binding--as soon
as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something
immaterial, 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, is in fact, though it calls
itself realist, the furthest removed from reality 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."
... Marcel Proust
that objects retain something of the eyes which have looked at them,
that old buildings and pictures appear to us not as they originally
were but beneath a perceptible veil woven for them over the centuries
by the love and contemplation of millions of admirers. This fantasy,
if you transpose it into the domain of what is for each one of us the
sole reality, the domain of his own sensibility, becomes the truth.
In that sense and in that sense alone (but it is a far more important
one than the other), a thing which we have looked at in the past
brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we
looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes were
filled. For things--and among them a book in a red binding--as soon
as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something
immaterial, 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, is in fact, though it calls
itself realist, the furthest removed from reality 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."
... Marcel Proust
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
I, Odysseus
"Heidi," I grunted into my cell phone, "do you have what I need?" The breeze was stiff and my mind was scattered. At some point in every day, I realized, I reach a mini-crisis contemplating whether someone will, in the long- or short- term, have something I need.
In this case, classical musicians will know to whom I refer: the indomitable guardianess of Frank Music, on 54th Street. She and I have had a mostly mock antagonism for years, since I first glanced askance at her prices. I remember well the subsequent punishment she doled. They say a butterfly in China can cause a hurricane in Florida; and similarly my slightly raised eyebrow (at a Barenreiter price), perhaps the motion of a half centimeter, precipitated a tremendous verbal, virtual storm: off she went about her pitiable situation, and how she didn't get into this business for money but all she hears about is money money money... and never before or since have I felt like such a miserable, soulless mercenary trampling on music's sacred grove. I begged her forgiveness, of course. She has a magnificent ability to evoke the miseries of her business at a moment's notice, threading, like the great composers, masterful variation on top of limited themes; you feel guilty for even noticing the prices she is charging, for imagining that music could ever be expensive. This is just one of the qualities that makes Heidi a paragon of the True New Yorker, and, along with necessity, keeps me haunting her unadorned abode. The shop also smells wonderfully, like Old Library, like the Performing Arts Library when it used to be temporarily in the wilds of way west 43rd street, in an old school building: like must and mold and books and--dare I say it?--it even smells like having a ruler rapped on your knuckles, like a life lived in fear of headmasters and nuns. Somehow I find this smell and its associations weirdly focusing, even addictive; perhaps subconsciously I get some rush of pleasure from the idea of being forced to study ... there is some element of lovable punishment in visiting Frank Music.
Upon returning from my visit (which Homeric incident could Frank be compared to--the island of the sacred cows? the lotus-eaters? Hades? Circe? The cyclops?) I found myself oddly drawn into another adventure. Usually ascending the stairs from the 96th St. station is a glum, treading affair--with the tiredness of commuters like a prolonged, silent, surrounding sigh--proceeding more or less in a linear, uneventful fashion. I trod. There was a tremendous violence, suddenly. All around me, suitcases were falling down steps, collapsing onto people; girls were squealing and cussing; I heard a flurry of "ganz schlecht" and "scheisse" and other phrases which I'm sure were less reputable, and I realized I was caught in a maelstrom of visiting, beautiful German students, and it seemed strange to me that all this youth and freshness was able to be significantly bummed out, even stymied, by a flight of stairs. They clustered and regrouped like foreign bees unsure of their hive. It was impossible to walk around them; I was caught in their midst, fearing a suitcase at any moment, crashing from steps above; I was in mortal peril from these clueless youth. There was a TOTAL STOPPAGE; I imagined impatient Real New Yorkers from behind, building up pressure as water behind a dam, and hoped I would not be drowned in some melee. The noise and confusion was terrifying; then, somehow, I broke through; I passed the turnstile, homefree, and jogged by the leader of the pack, the Mother Superior of the young Germans, looking up unhappily, assessing the next and final flight. Would her birds survive? The Germans ate my sneakered dust. Whew, I thought, as I passed the shoal of Starbucks, I must head home and lick my psychic wounds. What suitors will I find there, disrupting my happiness?
A giant pile of unlearned music. A sink full of dishes. A table full of mail.
The suitors all need my attention; I cannot slay them without another Odyssey, more perilous than the last. And the object of their wooing, their Penelope, is my attention, which I must give over to them, willingly; I have to pay their many and varied debts.
In this case, classical musicians will know to whom I refer: the indomitable guardianess of Frank Music, on 54th Street. She and I have had a mostly mock antagonism for years, since I first glanced askance at her prices. I remember well the subsequent punishment she doled. They say a butterfly in China can cause a hurricane in Florida; and similarly my slightly raised eyebrow (at a Barenreiter price), perhaps the motion of a half centimeter, precipitated a tremendous verbal, virtual storm: off she went about her pitiable situation, and how she didn't get into this business for money but all she hears about is money money money... and never before or since have I felt like such a miserable, soulless mercenary trampling on music's sacred grove. I begged her forgiveness, of course. She has a magnificent ability to evoke the miseries of her business at a moment's notice, threading, like the great composers, masterful variation on top of limited themes; you feel guilty for even noticing the prices she is charging, for imagining that music could ever be expensive. This is just one of the qualities that makes Heidi a paragon of the True New Yorker, and, along with necessity, keeps me haunting her unadorned abode. The shop also smells wonderfully, like Old Library, like the Performing Arts Library when it used to be temporarily in the wilds of way west 43rd street, in an old school building: like must and mold and books and--dare I say it?--it even smells like having a ruler rapped on your knuckles, like a life lived in fear of headmasters and nuns. Somehow I find this smell and its associations weirdly focusing, even addictive; perhaps subconsciously I get some rush of pleasure from the idea of being forced to study ... there is some element of lovable punishment in visiting Frank Music.
Upon returning from my visit (which Homeric incident could Frank be compared to--the island of the sacred cows? the lotus-eaters? Hades? Circe? The cyclops?) I found myself oddly drawn into another adventure. Usually ascending the stairs from the 96th St. station is a glum, treading affair--with the tiredness of commuters like a prolonged, silent, surrounding sigh--proceeding more or less in a linear, uneventful fashion. I trod. There was a tremendous violence, suddenly. All around me, suitcases were falling down steps, collapsing onto people; girls were squealing and cussing; I heard a flurry of "ganz schlecht" and "scheisse" and other phrases which I'm sure were less reputable, and I realized I was caught in a maelstrom of visiting, beautiful German students, and it seemed strange to me that all this youth and freshness was able to be significantly bummed out, even stymied, by a flight of stairs. They clustered and regrouped like foreign bees unsure of their hive. It was impossible to walk around them; I was caught in their midst, fearing a suitcase at any moment, crashing from steps above; I was in mortal peril from these clueless youth. There was a TOTAL STOPPAGE; I imagined impatient Real New Yorkers from behind, building up pressure as water behind a dam, and hoped I would not be drowned in some melee. The noise and confusion was terrifying; then, somehow, I broke through; I passed the turnstile, homefree, and jogged by the leader of the pack, the Mother Superior of the young Germans, looking up unhappily, assessing the next and final flight. Would her birds survive? The Germans ate my sneakered dust. Whew, I thought, as I passed the shoal of Starbucks, I must head home and lick my psychic wounds. What suitors will I find there, disrupting my happiness?
A giant pile of unlearned music. A sink full of dishes. A table full of mail.
The suitors all need my attention; I cannot slay them without another Odyssey, more perilous than the last. And the object of their wooing, their Penelope, is my attention, which I must give over to them, willingly; I have to pay their many and varied debts.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Brahms the Sicilian
Unless I am running for my train, I find it difficult or impossible to pass through Penn Station without getting a Red Sicilian slice at Rosa's Pizza. It appears to be an unruly sea of roiling tomato sauce barely adhering to a thick chunk of bread, but some cheesy, salty secret lies hidden, baked in the redness. How did the tomato find such luxuriant and wonderful friends, and why are they all in my mouth at the same time? Such touching questions are dismissed in favor of rabid munching.
I would like to think some similar, ineluctable urge caused Schoenberg to abandon tonality. Today we say "it was atonal" glibly: ho-hum. But imagine the excitement of those composers, writing atonally for the first time, as they "felt the air of other planets." After all that overwhelming beautiful history, the recorded human history of writing centered around a tone or tones... to step off and deliberately write music with no pitch center at all! No wonder they got kind of Messianic; it must have been thrilling. Just like the moment, after pouring off half of the grease, when I lift the lumbering red slice to my slavering mouth. Yes, the doctor will frown after your next cholesterol test, and yes you may be condemned now to writing some of the least loved music ever heard, but what of it? According to that crazy cat Anton Webern:
If Anton hadn't passed away some time ago, I would seriously have recommended some therapy. Need I enumerate my reasons? 1) Schoenberg (as father figure) giving the law. 2) The law as salvation; am I the only one smelling Kafka here? ("The door was meant only for you, and now I am going to shut it.") 3) The law "forced itself upon them": the law as rapist, as seducer? To be oddly and immediately followed by 4) The law as bride, as lifelong romantic committment? Umm, perhaps I prefer the law of Law & Order. But finally, the voice of reason: "Trust your inspiration! There is no alternative." This, at least, I can agree with.
If indeed the idea of composing without a dominating single tone was a unbelievable thrill, comparable to the arrival of the 40-cent Triple Chocolate Brownie cookie at my local Starbucks (which I now order in satisfying, cute clumps of 4), I had managed to take it for granted, or subjugate it as merely a relic of Music History Survey Class--with all its associations of furtive caresses in library carrels and listening booths--and today, perhaps in karmic retribution for this neglect, I felt completely incapable of convincing a group of Bard students of this thrill, which I glimpsed ... But perhaps I was more disquieted at being unable to communicate the power of the fragments of nineteenth-century tonality they left behind... For example, in Schoenberg's Op. 19, #6, this one climactic phrase:
I have to feel sorry for these beautiful, yearning, enigmatic notes, crafted so that you cannot decide between them, and adding atop this ambiguity the rhythmic befuddlement of quarter note triplets, beginning with a tie and resolving into thin air. A "hairpin," headed for a central intense point, fading away, and to what end? A romantic gesture stripped naked, purged of its underlying signifying harmonies, and trying to mean so very much in their absence: being forced to do so: trying to assume the burden of all that meaning. All right little notes, we've coddled you too long, you're on your own now!
Parenthetically, I'm not sure how I feel about sentences with two colons in them.
A similar sense of crisis, I think, but from just the other side of the divide, haunts Brahms Op. 119 #1 (a place which makes you "feel sorry" for Brahms?)... a piece with strikingly beautiful opening bars, in which thirds spread out like tentacles from a single note, connoting triads freely, kaleidoscopically. Each bar is a fragment, listening to the consequences of these roving thirds, offering no resolution, looking for some more definitive continuation. (A letter of Brahms indicates how he wished these bars to be performed--indications which are often ignored, oddly.) These harmonies--9th and 11th chords etc.--are so familiar to us now from jazz and the whole mishmosh of 20th-century "extended" musical language, that perhaps we have an unfortunate tendency to hear them as "pretty sounds." However, I think their power resides in a double meaning, in the play of meanings, a kind of irony: the uneasy coincidence of a discovered sensual beauty with a sense that somehow this is "not right," a betrayal of principles, of the very things that made his music possible in the first place. Brahms suspects his inner sensualist. This beauty is treacherous. This irony is compounded: Brahms' life's work is filled with powerful use of thirds (perhaps more characteristically than any other interval)--as building block of melody and as prime mover in bass; and now this easy movement by thirds erodes the edifice, threatens to take down the tonal structure: Brahms' own style, subjected to introspection and magnification, threatens to destroy itself.
But, as Anton says: "trust your inspiration! there is no alternative." Brahms is forcing himself into this place, confronting the limits of his own language... accepting the collapse of any language.
I would like to think some similar, ineluctable urge caused Schoenberg to abandon tonality. Today we say "it was atonal" glibly: ho-hum. But imagine the excitement of those composers, writing atonally for the first time, as they "felt the air of other planets." After all that overwhelming beautiful history, the recorded human history of writing centered around a tone or tones... to step off and deliberately write music with no pitch center at all! No wonder they got kind of Messianic; it must have been thrilling. Just like the moment, after pouring off half of the grease, when I lift the lumbering red slice to my slavering mouth. Yes, the doctor will frown after your next cholesterol test, and yes you may be condemned now to writing some of the least loved music ever heard, but what of it? According to that crazy cat Anton Webern:
Only when Schoenberg gave expression to the law were larger forms again possible. Adherence to the row is strict, often burdensome--but it is salvation! The dissolution of tonality wasn't our fault--and we did not create the new law ourselves; it forced itself overwhelmingly upon us. The commitment is so powerful that one must consider very carefully before finally entering into it... almost as if one took the decision to marry; a difficult moment! Trust your inspiration! There is no alternative.
If Anton hadn't passed away some time ago, I would seriously have recommended some therapy. Need I enumerate my reasons? 1) Schoenberg (as father figure) giving the law. 2) The law as salvation; am I the only one smelling Kafka here? ("The door was meant only for you, and now I am going to shut it.") 3) The law "forced itself upon them": the law as rapist, as seducer? To be oddly and immediately followed by 4) The law as bride, as lifelong romantic committment? Umm, perhaps I prefer the law of Law & Order. But finally, the voice of reason: "Trust your inspiration! There is no alternative." This, at least, I can agree with.
If indeed the idea of composing without a dominating single tone was a unbelievable thrill, comparable to the arrival of the 40-cent Triple Chocolate Brownie cookie at my local Starbucks (which I now order in satisfying, cute clumps of 4), I had managed to take it for granted, or subjugate it as merely a relic of Music History Survey Class--with all its associations of furtive caresses in library carrels and listening booths--and today, perhaps in karmic retribution for this neglect, I felt completely incapable of convincing a group of Bard students of this thrill, which I glimpsed ... But perhaps I was more disquieted at being unable to communicate the power of the fragments of nineteenth-century tonality they left behind... For example, in Schoenberg's Op. 19, #6, this one climactic phrase:
I have to feel sorry for these beautiful, yearning, enigmatic notes, crafted so that you cannot decide between them, and adding atop this ambiguity the rhythmic befuddlement of quarter note triplets, beginning with a tie and resolving into thin air. A "hairpin," headed for a central intense point, fading away, and to what end? A romantic gesture stripped naked, purged of its underlying signifying harmonies, and trying to mean so very much in their absence: being forced to do so: trying to assume the burden of all that meaning. All right little notes, we've coddled you too long, you're on your own now!
Parenthetically, I'm not sure how I feel about sentences with two colons in them.
A similar sense of crisis, I think, but from just the other side of the divide, haunts Brahms Op. 119 #1 (a place which makes you "feel sorry" for Brahms?)... a piece with strikingly beautiful opening bars, in which thirds spread out like tentacles from a single note, connoting triads freely, kaleidoscopically. Each bar is a fragment, listening to the consequences of these roving thirds, offering no resolution, looking for some more definitive continuation. (A letter of Brahms indicates how he wished these bars to be performed--indications which are often ignored, oddly.) These harmonies--9th and 11th chords etc.--are so familiar to us now from jazz and the whole mishmosh of 20th-century "extended" musical language, that perhaps we have an unfortunate tendency to hear them as "pretty sounds." However, I think their power resides in a double meaning, in the play of meanings, a kind of irony: the uneasy coincidence of a discovered sensual beauty with a sense that somehow this is "not right," a betrayal of principles, of the very things that made his music possible in the first place. Brahms suspects his inner sensualist. This beauty is treacherous. This irony is compounded: Brahms' life's work is filled with powerful use of thirds (perhaps more characteristically than any other interval)--as building block of melody and as prime mover in bass; and now this easy movement by thirds erodes the edifice, threatens to take down the tonal structure: Brahms' own style, subjected to introspection and magnification, threatens to destroy itself.
But, as Anton says: "trust your inspiration! there is no alternative." Brahms is forcing himself into this place, confronting the limits of his own language... accepting the collapse of any language.
Unwanted Metaphors
As regular readers know, I am all for metaphors; I love them like I love the sour jelly beans at the bodega on 92nd Street. But sometimes, enough is enough.
Need I say more? I certainly don't enjoy thinking of my brain as a giant bowl of soup--though often it behaves that way, kind of splish-splashing around up there--but I certainly prefer the soup model to a symphony orchestra. Imagine the intrigues and infighting, in my own neurons! Imagine how they would kvetch about the chief neurons, behind their backs! And if there are brass players in my brain, I don't want to know about it (sorry, Eric and others, just kidding haha!!!!) Etc. etc. And that last line: "When both are working well, you've got music"? In your dreams, maybe.
"That's where biological psychiatry was then," she told me. "It was about the brain as a bowl of soup. You whip up a chemical, add it and stir"...
Setting aside the bowl-of-soup model did not mean deciding that neurochemicals weren't important. Rather it meant deciding that neurochemistry, and particularly the chemistry dictating how individual neurons communicate with one another, was probably driven by traffic between different brain areas, and that identifying the patterns in that traffic might yield new understanding. (Or, using another metaphor, if the brain is an orchestra, then the neurochemical approach focuses on how well individual players listen and respond to the players adjacent to them; the network approach, like a conductor, focuses on how the orchestra's sections — strings, winds, brass, etc. — coordinate and balance volume and tone. When both are working well, you've got music.)
--David Dobbs, New York Times magazine: "A Depression Switch?"
Need I say more? I certainly don't enjoy thinking of my brain as a giant bowl of soup--though often it behaves that way, kind of splish-splashing around up there--but I certainly prefer the soup model to a symphony orchestra. Imagine the intrigues and infighting, in my own neurons! Imagine how they would kvetch about the chief neurons, behind their backs! And if there are brass players in my brain, I don't want to know about it (sorry, Eric and others, just kidding haha!!!!) Etc. etc. And that last line: "When both are working well, you've got music"? In your dreams, maybe.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Passions of the Denk
So much and so little has been happening more or less at the same time here in Denkland that I am at a loss what and how to post. I feel like my receptors for sadness have gotten bigger, as if swollen by some emotional MSG, but the slow sorting and consideration of this sadness has cheered me up.
The other night I was in the subway, on my way to a totally pointless social encounter, and my eyes wandered. Across and far to my left sat a petite girl of 18 or so with way too much mascara, high leather boots, and quite tight jeans. She was thin, alert, linear, upright; but in contrast her boyfriend lay slumped loosely, diagonally against her, with his face turned entirely into her neck; a scarf was draped over the meeting-point of their bodies and for all I knew he was a vampire drinking her blood. Her face was slightly turned away from this neck-spectacle, as if she couldn't bear to look. The oddest thing was that she held her cellphone cocked to her ear, and appeared to be listening, though there is of course no signal down in the tunnels; was this to prove to observers that she had business more pressing than the amorphous, passive, man/parasite she was with: an imaginary agenda? But sitting directly across from me, a very different sight: a mother and her two twin boys. The boys (who were probably 7 years old) from time to time gazed across at me disquietingly; my heart wanted to run to them; one ate Animal Crackers one at a time from a well-used Ziploc bag, and the other sent his open eyes around the car like me, hungry for people's meanings. The mother's face was clear, free of makeup, with her hair short and pulled back so that her face and especially her eyes seemed to stick out, tired and honest: plain, beseeching. At least it seemed to me there was no parasite or agenda here; only dependency and sufficiency.
I am obviously addicted to the tenuous connotations of appearance. Something about the juxtaposition of these two groups made me quite sad; I felt them both as metaphors for elements of myself, the "cultured" and the plain, the affected and the needy; and while following this therapizing train of thought suddenly I imagined everyone in the car's destinations for the evening, all the beds for which they were headed, and imagined all the unfamiliar smells of their pillows, bedmates, and even the switches on the lamps they would turn off before their bedrooms were dark. It was an overwhelming thought; I imagined myself like Superman following each of them, in turn, to their homes and beds, and how strange it would be to have to pull the covers on myself in all of those odd-smelling places, to trust myself to fate in so many foreign rooms. A New York subway car, itself hurtling, in process, an engine of fate, contains so many fates running into each other at any one time; each other person is a path you have not taken, a randomly avoided--some would say unchosen--self. Finally I imagined my own life as others in the car might see it: settling down into my bed, covered with clothes, books, remote controls, in an untidy strangely shaped room, and I judged myself like a butcher eyeing a piece of meat.
This is the sort of meditation spring has brought to me, when I should more appropriately be obsessed with sex, new asparagus, and shortsleeved shirts. And this same mildly gloomy muse followed me yesterday morning into 60 Centre St., where I was called by the Supreme Court of New York to do my civic duty and possibly judge my fellow beings. In a severe mood, I brought only two pieces of reading material: Cortazar's experimental novel Hopscotch, and a collection of translations of Montale's poetry, entitled "Montale in English."
My time in the jury room became a renewed love affair. Which is good because my "real" love life can easily be sneezed at. I couldn't swallow the novel but the poems came in bite-sized, mind-sized scrumptious pieces, and I sucked them up greedily, again and again, no matter how bitter or sorrowful the inner pill. The frenzy began, really, with the following poem:
Low Tide
Evenings alive with cries, the garden swing
Flashing in the arbour of those days
And a dark veil of mist hardly hiding
The sea's fixed face.
All past, all gone. Rapid slanting flights
Cross the wall now, and the crumbling, the fall
Of all things without respite is a confusion
Burdening the steep bank, burdening the rock
That first bore you on the ocean.
Now I am brought with the light breath of spring
A ghostly eddying
Of the drowned swallowed times and lives; and at evening,
Dusky convolvulus, only your memory
Twines, and wards off time.
It climbs on the parapet, on the tunnel in the distance
Where the slow slow train crawls into its lair.
Then comes a sudden gathering on the hillsides,
The flock of the moon, invisibly browsing there.
(Eugenio Montale, tr. Edwin Morgan)
I clutched at silver linings like I clutched my coffee on the subway; there seemed no more magnificent reason for me to be pointlessly sitting on my butt than to be forced to fully digest this beloved book of poems. That last image (the sudden gathering of the flock of the moon on the hillside) blew me away, and--I assure you I don't exaggerate--I emitted a slight moan, which was heard by the crazy woman sitting across from me; she smiled at me, baring dubious teeth and almost completely concealing her googly eyes, one of which meanwhile weirdly winked, and I felt it was time to flee posthaste to the vending area. When I returned with my cool fizzy ginger ale, she no longer smiled or winked, and I sipped and moaned in peace.
The jury gathering room with its enforced silence and prohibition of cell phones and aura of waiting was a pretty ideal venue for digestion of verse. Really the Winner of All Time, the best possible place to read poetry, is the monument in Tappan Square in Oberlin, of a mid-to-late April afternoon, with a light transformative breeze, and the coolness of the stone underneath you, and the wild quasi-castle of Peters Hall looming, and with your shoes and socks strewn on the surrounding steps, and the cries of frisbee-playing Oberlin students coming across to you like birdcalls from various points in the campus, near and far, and some classmates, nearby, ignoring books and thoughts and finals and all nonsensual activities, sunning themselves in as little clothing as they can get away with, whispering to each other in the grass, and cuddling, and taking themselves off to their rooms from time to time to ...
Oh, excuse me. What was I talking about? Yes, poetry, hm. Yes in those days I was a poetry-reading nerd amidst the herds of students stunned by spring. But anyway, the jury room made it possible for me to really hear the poems in my head, and savor them, in a sense, in the same way I do pieces of music... as temporal, visceral unfoldings... The parallel of poetry and music became very vivid to me, and I kept dipping into the same poems again and again for similar thrills, in the same way you press repeat on your CD player. This one was a favorite:
The first stanza is really "just" the presentation of an image: just a flower planted in parched soil, in the sunshine. But I really love this image, the idea that the blue sky and the yellow/amber face of the flower look at each other, face each other; they stare across their divide like I stared at my subwaymates... and then the added, illogical, unreal, beautiful touch, my favorite: the flower's anxiety.
Whatever meanings one may draw out, this first stanza is couched, expressed, planted in sensual reality: in colors, tastes, things (blue, amber, soil, briny, flower). But the second stanza takes a different approach; it is entirely fashioned of abstractions. It is what in poetry passes for a syllogism, illogical logic, a series of magical deductions, proving the unprovable:
1) First proposition: a tendency: dark/obscure things lean towards clarity.
2) Second proposition, paralleling the first: bodies exhaust themselves in colors.
3) Conclusion: To vanish is the "ventura delle venture," the adventure of adventures, the luckiest of chances... hard to translate.
At each node, a paradox, a seeming contradiction: oscure/chiarità; corpi/tinte; Svanire/ventura. Obscurity towards clarity, bodies towards colors: in between each, a missing, implied transitive spirit, the yearning of one for the other: the passing between, the verb. But I have left out a step: "Queste in musiche." After the two propositions, and before the conclusion, music appears, the interloper, the renegade abstraction: colors in music? No further explanation. The poet barely pauses for breath. I really felt this moment, as I read it, as a sort of deceptive cadence, a central slip or skid of meaning, an accident which holds the key. "Queste in musiche." For we as readers are suddenly forced to leap from the visual to the aural, to imagine bodies into colors into music, the passage of the corporeal into the intangible; and this is precisely the point, the flash of another world of unimagined meaning: the passing over between states: our mind must transplant itself elsewhere, into intangible soil.
The annoying, analytical musician in me calls this poem a ternary form, ABA, in which the outer parts concern the flower and the inner is a contrasting other. Perhaps: Images/Ideas/Images. But Images #2 is not remotely the same as #1; when we revisit the flower in the third stanza, the wonderful deductions of the second have had their effect. In place of the separated dualism of flower/sky, Montale provides a thrilling constellation, a chain... The flower is connected both above and below, to some deeper spring of transparent gold, which vaporizes through it like an essence of life; it passes this essence up to the blue sky, through light (which is what color? an intangible color?); and this whole process is "crazed," a passionate giving-over. Before, we saw the flower staring at the sky, anxiously, we perceived the opposition; now we know what passes BETWEEN the sky's blue eyes and the face of the sunflower, what look, what force they share: the verb is light, which comes from the sky and radiates from the color of the flower; the sunflower is crazed with it, and we too are seduced by the image as action. Between the first and last stanzas, the flower has been poetically brought to life.
Life as verb? We can isolate the verbs of the poem and consider them: transplant, bring, show, tend towards, flow out, vanish, conduct, vaporize ... A relentless catalogue of transferences. (The poem is about transference.) These kind of magnetically attracted words remind me so much of the grouping of ideas in music, of the way certain related musical motifs call to each other ... The energy from word to word, from idea to idea, seemed deeply musical: not the sounds of the words (one aspect of poetry's musicality), but their thought-associations. The musicality of ideas?
I suppose a musical motive can feel at times like a thing, an image: when it is presented, when it is framed. The incredible E-flat Major Prelude from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (which I brought to the courthouse just in case I got sworn in, so that I could propose it in place of the Bible), begins with a beautiful but generic flourish, and then presents us with a specific musical image:
Ahh, the texture is familiar: vocal polyphony, with the rising fourth, passing gently from voice to voice. It is a musical image in so many ways: not just the motive itself, which is powerful; but an allusion to genre, to venue (church), to style (Palestrina?), to countless rules of composition, to a whole sacred musical tradition. The "holy moment." But this image, however beautiful, runs its course, and begins to peter out; the main motive appears in the bass "one last time;" it falls onto a dominant cadence, and you imagine it might be over ... Amen?
But this is not The End. Bach, lover of elision, picks it up just as it flags ... Now the fourth motive is back, with new flowing countermelodies. It is back, and back, and back; it passes between the voices relentlessly, in canon, in stretto... So many times that you cannot believe it... For me, after a certain point, this repetition is the very opposite of tedium or monotony; paradoxically, the rising fourth is almost completely irresistible, the very spirit of rising; I begin to feel that I cannot go any higher and yet I do... (this sense of infinity which so many modern composers try to create through extreme dynamics and repetition and all the tricks in the toolbox: Bach already got it, so there.) Gradually, I am crazed with the idea of the rising fourth, I realize now (hopefully not too late) that this elation is the point, that the few notes are just the emblem of the essence (golden transparent springs), which the piece gradually brings to life, the rising fourth, the simplest possible thing--the idea, the image--finally understood, finally traversed by the arc of the piece, illuminated and resurrected. I really think this is how it feels. I love to be crazed; I love to play this prelude over and over again and to feel the thing, the image, become a verb: to be crazed with Bach's light.
You must love to be crazed, too. Otherwise, why would you subject yourself to Think Denk?
The other night I was in the subway, on my way to a totally pointless social encounter, and my eyes wandered. Across and far to my left sat a petite girl of 18 or so with way too much mascara, high leather boots, and quite tight jeans. She was thin, alert, linear, upright; but in contrast her boyfriend lay slumped loosely, diagonally against her, with his face turned entirely into her neck; a scarf was draped over the meeting-point of their bodies and for all I knew he was a vampire drinking her blood. Her face was slightly turned away from this neck-spectacle, as if she couldn't bear to look. The oddest thing was that she held her cellphone cocked to her ear, and appeared to be listening, though there is of course no signal down in the tunnels; was this to prove to observers that she had business more pressing than the amorphous, passive, man/parasite she was with: an imaginary agenda? But sitting directly across from me, a very different sight: a mother and her two twin boys. The boys (who were probably 7 years old) from time to time gazed across at me disquietingly; my heart wanted to run to them; one ate Animal Crackers one at a time from a well-used Ziploc bag, and the other sent his open eyes around the car like me, hungry for people's meanings. The mother's face was clear, free of makeup, with her hair short and pulled back so that her face and especially her eyes seemed to stick out, tired and honest: plain, beseeching. At least it seemed to me there was no parasite or agenda here; only dependency and sufficiency.
I am obviously addicted to the tenuous connotations of appearance. Something about the juxtaposition of these two groups made me quite sad; I felt them both as metaphors for elements of myself, the "cultured" and the plain, the affected and the needy; and while following this therapizing train of thought suddenly I imagined everyone in the car's destinations for the evening, all the beds for which they were headed, and imagined all the unfamiliar smells of their pillows, bedmates, and even the switches on the lamps they would turn off before their bedrooms were dark. It was an overwhelming thought; I imagined myself like Superman following each of them, in turn, to their homes and beds, and how strange it would be to have to pull the covers on myself in all of those odd-smelling places, to trust myself to fate in so many foreign rooms. A New York subway car, itself hurtling, in process, an engine of fate, contains so many fates running into each other at any one time; each other person is a path you have not taken, a randomly avoided--some would say unchosen--self. Finally I imagined my own life as others in the car might see it: settling down into my bed, covered with clothes, books, remote controls, in an untidy strangely shaped room, and I judged myself like a butcher eyeing a piece of meat.
This is the sort of meditation spring has brought to me, when I should more appropriately be obsessed with sex, new asparagus, and shortsleeved shirts. And this same mildly gloomy muse followed me yesterday morning into 60 Centre St., where I was called by the Supreme Court of New York to do my civic duty and possibly judge my fellow beings. In a severe mood, I brought only two pieces of reading material: Cortazar's experimental novel Hopscotch, and a collection of translations of Montale's poetry, entitled "Montale in English."
My time in the jury room became a renewed love affair. Which is good because my "real" love life can easily be sneezed at. I couldn't swallow the novel but the poems came in bite-sized, mind-sized scrumptious pieces, and I sucked them up greedily, again and again, no matter how bitter or sorrowful the inner pill. The frenzy began, really, with the following poem:
Low Tide
Evenings alive with cries, the garden swing
Flashing in the arbour of those days
And a dark veil of mist hardly hiding
The sea's fixed face.
All past, all gone. Rapid slanting flights
Cross the wall now, and the crumbling, the fall
Of all things without respite is a confusion
Burdening the steep bank, burdening the rock
That first bore you on the ocean.
Now I am brought with the light breath of spring
A ghostly eddying
Of the drowned swallowed times and lives; and at evening,
Dusky convolvulus, only your memory
Twines, and wards off time.
It climbs on the parapet, on the tunnel in the distance
Where the slow slow train crawls into its lair.
Then comes a sudden gathering on the hillsides,
The flock of the moon, invisibly browsing there.
(Eugenio Montale, tr. Edwin Morgan)
I clutched at silver linings like I clutched my coffee on the subway; there seemed no more magnificent reason for me to be pointlessly sitting on my butt than to be forced to fully digest this beloved book of poems. That last image (the sudden gathering of the flock of the moon on the hillside) blew me away, and--I assure you I don't exaggerate--I emitted a slight moan, which was heard by the crazy woman sitting across from me; she smiled at me, baring dubious teeth and almost completely concealing her googly eyes, one of which meanwhile weirdly winked, and I felt it was time to flee posthaste to the vending area. When I returned with my cool fizzy ginger ale, she no longer smiled or winked, and I sipped and moaned in peace.
The jury gathering room with its enforced silence and prohibition of cell phones and aura of waiting was a pretty ideal venue for digestion of verse. Really the Winner of All Time, the best possible place to read poetry, is the monument in Tappan Square in Oberlin, of a mid-to-late April afternoon, with a light transformative breeze, and the coolness of the stone underneath you, and the wild quasi-castle of Peters Hall looming, and with your shoes and socks strewn on the surrounding steps, and the cries of frisbee-playing Oberlin students coming across to you like birdcalls from various points in the campus, near and far, and some classmates, nearby, ignoring books and thoughts and finals and all nonsensual activities, sunning themselves in as little clothing as they can get away with, whispering to each other in the grass, and cuddling, and taking themselves off to their rooms from time to time to ...
Oh, excuse me. What was I talking about? Yes, poetry, hm. Yes in those days I was a poetry-reading nerd amidst the herds of students stunned by spring. But anyway, the jury room made it possible for me to really hear the poems in my head, and savor them, in a sense, in the same way I do pieces of music... as temporal, visceral unfoldings... The parallel of poetry and music became very vivid to me, and I kept dipping into the same poems again and again for similar thrills, in the same way you press repeat on your CD player. This one was a favorite:
Portami il girasole ch'io lo trapianti
nel mio terreno bruciato dal salino,
e mostri tutto il giorno agli azzurri specchianti
del cielo l'ansietà del suo volto giallino.
Tendo alla chiarità le cose oscure,
si esauriscono i corpi in un fluire
di tinte: queste in musiche. Svanire
è dunque la ventura delle venture.
Portami tu la pianta che conduce
dove sorgono bionde trasparenze
e vapora la vita quale essenza;
portami il girasole impazzito di luce.
[1923]
Bring me the sunflower so that I can transplant it
into my soil burnt with brine,
for it to show all day to the sky's mirroring blue
the anxiety of its amber face.
Things that are dark lean towards clarity
the bodies of things flow out and empty themselves
in colours: colours in music. Vanishing
is therefore the luckiest of chances.
Bring me the flower which leads
to the springs of transparent gold
where life like an essence turns to vapour
bring me the sunflower crazed with light.
[trans. Bernard Spencer, c. 1946-8]
The first stanza is really "just" the presentation of an image: just a flower planted in parched soil, in the sunshine. But I really love this image, the idea that the blue sky and the yellow/amber face of the flower look at each other, face each other; they stare across their divide like I stared at my subwaymates... and then the added, illogical, unreal, beautiful touch, my favorite: the flower's anxiety.
Whatever meanings one may draw out, this first stanza is couched, expressed, planted in sensual reality: in colors, tastes, things (blue, amber, soil, briny, flower). But the second stanza takes a different approach; it is entirely fashioned of abstractions. It is what in poetry passes for a syllogism, illogical logic, a series of magical deductions, proving the unprovable:
1) First proposition: a tendency: dark/obscure things lean towards clarity.
2) Second proposition, paralleling the first: bodies exhaust themselves in colors.
3) Conclusion: To vanish is the "ventura delle venture," the adventure of adventures, the luckiest of chances... hard to translate.
At each node, a paradox, a seeming contradiction: oscure/chiarità; corpi/tinte; Svanire/ventura. Obscurity towards clarity, bodies towards colors: in between each, a missing, implied transitive spirit, the yearning of one for the other: the passing between, the verb. But I have left out a step: "Queste in musiche." After the two propositions, and before the conclusion, music appears, the interloper, the renegade abstraction: colors in music? No further explanation. The poet barely pauses for breath. I really felt this moment, as I read it, as a sort of deceptive cadence, a central slip or skid of meaning, an accident which holds the key. "Queste in musiche." For we as readers are suddenly forced to leap from the visual to the aural, to imagine bodies into colors into music, the passage of the corporeal into the intangible; and this is precisely the point, the flash of another world of unimagined meaning: the passing over between states: our mind must transplant itself elsewhere, into intangible soil.
The annoying, analytical musician in me calls this poem a ternary form, ABA, in which the outer parts concern the flower and the inner is a contrasting other. Perhaps: Images/Ideas/Images. But Images #2 is not remotely the same as #1; when we revisit the flower in the third stanza, the wonderful deductions of the second have had their effect. In place of the separated dualism of flower/sky, Montale provides a thrilling constellation, a chain... The flower is connected both above and below, to some deeper spring of transparent gold, which vaporizes through it like an essence of life; it passes this essence up to the blue sky, through light (which is what color? an intangible color?); and this whole process is "crazed," a passionate giving-over. Before, we saw the flower staring at the sky, anxiously, we perceived the opposition; now we know what passes BETWEEN the sky's blue eyes and the face of the sunflower, what look, what force they share: the verb is light, which comes from the sky and radiates from the color of the flower; the sunflower is crazed with it, and we too are seduced by the image as action. Between the first and last stanzas, the flower has been poetically brought to life.
Life as verb? We can isolate the verbs of the poem and consider them: transplant, bring, show, tend towards, flow out, vanish, conduct, vaporize ... A relentless catalogue of transferences. (The poem is about transference.) These kind of magnetically attracted words remind me so much of the grouping of ideas in music, of the way certain related musical motifs call to each other ... The energy from word to word, from idea to idea, seemed deeply musical: not the sounds of the words (one aspect of poetry's musicality), but their thought-associations. The musicality of ideas?
I suppose a musical motive can feel at times like a thing, an image: when it is presented, when it is framed. The incredible E-flat Major Prelude from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (which I brought to the courthouse just in case I got sworn in, so that I could propose it in place of the Bible), begins with a beautiful but generic flourish, and then presents us with a specific musical image:
Ahh, the texture is familiar: vocal polyphony, with the rising fourth, passing gently from voice to voice. It is a musical image in so many ways: not just the motive itself, which is powerful; but an allusion to genre, to venue (church), to style (Palestrina?), to countless rules of composition, to a whole sacred musical tradition. The "holy moment." But this image, however beautiful, runs its course, and begins to peter out; the main motive appears in the bass "one last time;" it falls onto a dominant cadence, and you imagine it might be over ... Amen?
But this is not The End. Bach, lover of elision, picks it up just as it flags ... Now the fourth motive is back, with new flowing countermelodies. It is back, and back, and back; it passes between the voices relentlessly, in canon, in stretto... So many times that you cannot believe it... For me, after a certain point, this repetition is the very opposite of tedium or monotony; paradoxically, the rising fourth is almost completely irresistible, the very spirit of rising; I begin to feel that I cannot go any higher and yet I do... (this sense of infinity which so many modern composers try to create through extreme dynamics and repetition and all the tricks in the toolbox: Bach already got it, so there.) Gradually, I am crazed with the idea of the rising fourth, I realize now (hopefully not too late) that this elation is the point, that the few notes are just the emblem of the essence (golden transparent springs), which the piece gradually brings to life, the rising fourth, the simplest possible thing--the idea, the image--finally understood, finally traversed by the arc of the piece, illuminated and resurrected. I really think this is how it feels. I love to be crazed; I love to play this prelude over and over again and to feel the thing, the image, become a verb: to be crazed with Bach's light.
You must love to be crazed, too. Otherwise, why would you subject yourself to Think Denk?
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