Where have I been? What has happened to me? To explain, I might just as well begin with a particularly terrible bowl of Spaghetti and Meatballs in Akron, Ohio.
It was my very first meal of a tour with Joshua Bell, a violinist you may have heard of. Now, a pianist has a function, which is to play too loud while waving his/her head around expressively. 
And pasta has a function too: it’s supposed to serve as a canvas or frame for delicious sauce. But this flaccid frame simply refused to cooperate. It resented sharing its space. Nothing would stick to it. Therefore the sauce (which was not red, but a surly pinkish-brown) oozed forlornly about the corners of the takeout container, commenting wryly on the whiteness of its companion, as if to say “look, just look at what I have to deal with!,” and refusing to fulfill its remaining function, i.e., taste. Liquid flavorless recalcitrance! And the meatballs. As you gauged their mealiness in your mouth you felt you could count, like rings on trees, the number of times they had been frozen and irradiated.
Three different ingredients–sauce, pasta, meatball–and three different functions… How crucial that they act upon each other, how crucial that they profoundly communicate with one another!
I meditated painfully on this Threeness of Spaghetti and Meatballs in the cinderblock cage of my dressing room. It seemed a woeful injustice to begin the tour with such a terrible meal, and I’ll admit, I was still dwelling on it as I walked onstage, even as I sat down at the piano. I belched quietly into the pre-concert expectant silence … obviously, the three elements had not properly merged even in the accommodating cavern of my stomach. And so it happened–such is the power of fate!–that my mind was darkly attuned to failures of threesomes as Joshua and I began to play (for the first time) a work in … you guessed it … three profoundly interacting parts.
That no-name violinist played a melody:
And I played two separate streams of accompaniment, one in the right hand, one in the left:
The right hand is a river of sixteenth notes, a middleman … filling in the chord, “saucing” the melody. While the left hand, a slower stream of eighth notes, reveals a starchy bass-line. I couldn’t decide at the moment if the melody was the meatball; anyway, it didn’t seem central to my interpretation.
What defines the melody is partly the rocking, halting rhythm of the Siciliano: long and short notes in alternation. Also: the melody has a tendency to stop and start, to pause on pivot notes, before moving on. The two accompanying ingredients are utterly different: they do not halt or alternate; they are inexorable, they are continuous. Playing there onstage, in my peculiar food-furious state, I felt this as a kind of culinary contrast: the intermittent, impulsive melody set in relief against the knowing stream of harmony, like two different “philosophical flavors.”
There is no reason to mix pasta with sauce that won’t cling to it: it’s a category error, a basic mistake. There is (similarly) no reason to make melodies with arbitrary bass-lines; I mean, why write (tonal) music if the relation between your melody and your bass is going to be uninteresting? A lot of composers write music where the bass-lines ooze sorrowfully around the corners of their containers, looking reproachfully at the melody. A crucial element in musical composition is to create between these voices a clinging of some kind, some reluctance to let go, some salivation, some moment that lingers in the mouth.
The clinging of the melody to the bass is astoundingly beautiful in this piece (Bach BWV 1017). The melody is built more or less on a skeleton of chords …
… It “likes” to arpeggiate through chords. But the bass has an opposed tendency: it wants to descend by step, in a long line, through the C minor scale …
This process–chords versus scales–is set in motion from the very beginning:
The melody outlines the chord of C minor, but even by the second beat the bass has moved on to B-flat. Superimpose B-flat on a C minor chord, and you get, of course:
A wonderful chord, briefly glimpsed. This sonority, where a chord is “infected” with the next lower root, is (for me, for me!) the secret soul of this movement. Many of the chords in this Largo are haunted by this restlessness of their roots–while the melody clings to the past, the bass moves on. The resulting sevenths pop up throughout, dissonant beauties of passing. They keep appearing, persistently, but always briefly! They owe their existence to motion, to the tendency of the bass to descend, and therefore they don’t linger.
Bach, as chef, understands that if you take a melody tasting of triads and put it on top of a bass that descends linearly you get these particularly delicious sonorities. This is the reason he has put these ingredients together: to wring these beauties out of them. If you fail to taste them while you play, it’s your loss (and of course the audience’s).
I will give you a favorite example. At one point the violin and keyboard decide they are going to cadence together on E-flat major …
… but it only lasts for one half of a measure, for one beat. The accompaniment immediately moves on: again, the bass has a thing for moving. The violin’s still playing E-flat, holding onto it, optimistically or stubbornly. The bass moves down to D: and so the keyboard plays the dominant of C minor against E-flat: a wonderful, grinding dissonance. [When people say they can’t stand “dissonant music,” of course you can tell them they’re idiots, they actually LOVE dissonant music, because without dissonance Bach (for example) would have nothing to say whatsoever.]
At the beginning of the measure, all three parts are in beautiful E-flat major. By the downbeat of the next measure, the E-flat has been “re-thought” as a part of C minor. But I like the beat in-between: when the E-flat doesn’t know yet that it has been rethought. Where the melody’s and harmony’s tendencies clash, where the parts diverge, you get a kind of blurred double image of past and future. If you agree with me that Bach is a particularly profound essayist in the nature of time, you might agree with this leap of assocation: that dissonant beat is the present. It is neither here nor there. In its in-between-ness, it is the most beautiful, tastable moment of all. Why is it always the moment you want to hold onto, that is passing by?
That’s why it sometimes seems to me that music theory is one of the most despicable disciplines there is, because you’d probably label the bass of that magical chord a “passing tone,” and once you’ve labeled it a passing tone it’s a bit deflating … doink!, it goes in the bin with all the other passing tones. Somewhat like passing through Trenton on your way to Philadelphia: unremarkable. In the same way, once you call something Spaghetti and Meatballs, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ve understood anything about pasta, or that you should serve it to paying customers, or why a pianist might eat such a ridiculous thing before a concert, or any of the related questions that might come up. But Bach had that way of using passing tones so that you could meditate on the passing-ness of things, what it is to pass, to move on, to leave beauties behind … of labeling the labels with meaning, breathing life back into the most basic, even the most unassuming, words.
Does this explain why I haven’t been blogging?
Jetlagged Manifesto
I woke at 3:32 and stumbled over my open suitcase towards the kitchen, neither awake nor asleep, floating in time-purgatory.
A slice of slightly crusty Monterey Jack from the back of the refrigerator did not bring comfort. All sorts of anxieties bubbled out of my last hour of sleep: even they were groggy, dazed … maybe a bit crabby.
In other words, a classic jetlag situation where you confront the weird empty hour thinking what the hell am I going to do with you? I stared out the window at nothing, and my mind helped itself to a ridiculous and comically dark train of thought, which (for some reason) I can’t help sharing:
Ouch! But fasten your seatbelts, it gets darker yet:
Ha! Yes, I realize it’s unfair to carp about program notes at 4 am just because you’re grumpy about being awake and stressed about practicing Ligeti Etudes! But this program note thing had been on my mind for a while.
It seems regrettable that a writing style called Program Note Style ever came into existence. It’s hard to define, I suppose; you know it when you read it, by a slight heartburn of the soul. When I start to compose program notes, I feel the Siren of this Style, calling me. The words clump into clichéd paragraphs, habits learned from hundreds of programs, perused in waiting moments … You begin with a few dates, then you slip in the curious historical tidbit: “while he composed X in 18xx, curiously he didn’t publish it until 18xx …” The tidbit that makes it seem authoritative, knowledgeable, yawn yawn … Agh! Select All. Delete. Contemplate blank screen with relief.
I would like to enumerate the Deadly Sins of program notes.
The first one is HISTORICIZATION:
I’ve never been a big fan of the “imagine how revolutionary this piece was when it was written” school of inspiration. For my money, it should be revolutionary now. (And it is.) Whatever else the composer might have intended, he or she didn’t want you to think “boy that must have been cool back then.” The most basic compositional intent, the absolute ur-intent, is that you play it NOW, you make it happen NOW.
If you’ve ever been pestered by a composer to play their music, you know what I mean.
Now, history and understanding are delicious, essential! At the same time, I don’t think program notes should rub your face too much in the NOT NOW. It certainly doesn’t help classical music’s “age problem.” I’ll confess: historical context is good for me (context me good, baby!) mainly to the extent that it creates a kind of suspended now in which the work can exist again–present, perpetually different. There’s generally not room for that sort of context in a program note; instead, a thicket of dates and boring circumstances tends to evoke an officious wall between us and the living work, reminding us for no good reason that the composer is dead, conjuring his coffin, a notched timeline. Consider this opening to a program note:
This note is for the “Trout” Quintet. You, listener: get serious, be studious and pensive for the urban middle class specimen you’re about to hear! If the performer’s aim is to recreate the piece in the present, immediate, alive, why do so many program notes make that so much more difficult?
The second sin is MAKING GENERIC: the sausage-like conversion of extraordinary musical moments into blobs of generic prose. Think of the program note as a field of battle on which the great defining characteristics of a work of art lie strewn, wounded by flying bullets of blandness.
Generic-ization is a very understandable sin; there’s nothing worse than a program note writer who goes hogwild with subjective and silly adjectives, like me. (I hate my own notes, for the most part, but I can’t help writing them!) To avoid this, the “typical program note writer” holds back, purging description of individuality. For instance:
Now, it’s not that this sentence isn’t true, or isn’t a valid, cogent structural observation about the Stravinsky Piano Concerto. But this phrase “varied form” sticks in my throat–generic, indigestible. It seems a wasted opportunity. Varied how? To what purpose? I mean variation is nearly everywhere, it’s like the amino acid or DNA of music: a replication process which allows life to happen.
In fact, in this particular piece (the Stravinsky Concerto for Piano and Winds) the last movement visits some particularly grotesque, comic transformations on the ideas of the first. And as it turns out, the first movement is a set of inventive rethinkings of Bach and the Baroque: so, the last movement is a transformation of a transformation! While the first movement has ragtime mashed in with its toccata-Bach, the last allows Bach to head towards vaudeville, towards the Charleston, or the Foxtrot. The main thematic material is good crusty Baroque fare: full of pointed, jagged intervals, evoking an academic abstruse fugue, food for angular counterpoint … to allow this to become roaring 20s jazz is a punning leap from the cloister to the cabaret. The composer is grinning, he’s courting sacrilege; it’s a wicked, almost brutal mashup.
Perhaps you feel my description goes too far. But would you say …
“Picasso in his Cubist period takes up the motive of the guitar in varied form.”
No, I didn’t think so.
Sin #3: INSIDER’S CLUB.
Included in many program notes are tidbits of historical information.
It’s amazing how canonical these tidbits can become. I played Beethoven’s First Concerto a number of times last season and every single program note noted that while the First Concerto is called number 1, it was actually composed second, after the Second Concerto, which was actually first. Now, as a performer and person, I am theoretically glad I know this, in the larger context of the Beethoven story, but, finally: YAWN. In fact, double yawn! Yawn times infinity plus one! Suppose you as a listener and program note reader do not know the Second Concerto, and you’re just looking for help to appreciate the work before you: this seems like a pretty “meta” piece of information to help you out; it seems like what a kind of tedious museum guide would say. Ironic, because of all Beethoven works the First Concerto is not “meta”: from the moment the piano enters, its simplicity requires no insider information. Beethoven takes care to speak to you with obvious grammar, with clear rhetoric, almost Phrasing for Dummies. And he takes you dummies through an epic tale nonetheless, using the harmonic equivalent of “see Jane run” as a doorway to shaded, subtle corners of tonality.
When I find these tidbits in program notes, I get an unshakable mental image: a group of gentlemen in smoking jackets, smoking cigars in a private club, exchanging “I say, old chap, did you know that the first concerto was actually composed second”? They’re chortling to each other, but their back is to you; through the knowledge they share, they exclude the larger group. The tidbits of knowledge are a badge of belonging, even though they do not particularly or centrally illuminate the work in question. For some reason these tidbits have become a habit, even a required element of program notes: I have no idea why.
And the last sin: DOMESTICATION.
These works are not our pets. They are not tchotchkes to be set upon the shelf for occasional amusement and decoration. But certain turns of phrase in program notes seem to reduce tremendous originalities down to size, seem to want to put composers’ innovations in their place. I found the following in a program note for the Stravinsky Piano Concerto (again):
A “fondness” for asymmetrical rhythms? FONDNESS? You may as well say “Proust has a fondness for discussing the passing of time,” or “Beethoven has a fondness for exploring the relationship between tonic and dominant,” or “Shakespeare has a fondness for observing character traits.” It’s the fatal understatement, the polite absurd word that stops meaning in its tracks.
Stravinsky’s attack upon, and reinvention of, rhythm is obviously core to his life’s work, core to his whole revolution of musical time, which has haunted and inspired much of the twentieth century. It is not a fondness, but an artistic essence, the grammar of a thrilling, unsettling new language. Program notes should avoid this mistake; and yet, it is the very human, natural mistake of someone wandering too long through an art museum, fatigued by one great canvas after another, trying to know what to say. Sometimes, sadly, you don’t have the option to say nothing!
—
Through the grimy kitchen window (I really should get that cleaned!) there was a gradual increase in the green and now yellow and blue stripe of dawn. I’m a sucker for quickening colors. My anxieties began to blow away, leaving reality sitting on the table: a hunk of sweaty cheese. Having written down my rant, I realized I wasn’t upset at any one program note writer; I was upset at the construct, the genre, and its expectations.
I perversely Googled one last program note, for the Archduke Trio. It began:
I mean, I can’t argue with it, it’s depressingly true–but somehow the word “importance” gets on my nerves. The piece is very important to me. But the sense of the word “importance,” in this context, seems violently different from that personal importance. I scrolled down to see what the author said about my favorite movement:
I found all my enumerated sins. Of course I was evilly looking for them. “Dreamy coda which extends as a bridge to the finale”–it’s accurate, but upsets me. It absorbs one of my favorite moments in music, absorbs it into terminology which seems too comfy, too prosaic … like putting caviar on mashed potatoes.
I wasn’t being objective, I admit that. This Archduke note is just fine, it’s even quite good; it is well-written, and what’s more, it doesn’t force any particular vision. But…
What is it about these variations, why do they make me so happy? Maybe they have what I feel I lack? Patience, reliance on the beauty of a few tried and true harmonies, on color itself, and time: all of these givens, given space to breathe. The cumulative effect of all this space and breathing and inevitability is a kind of love expressed in tones, not the potiony feverish love of Tristan but–I’m embarrassed to say it, I suppose–love for the universe, love for things as they are, or if not that either, love for just being. Felix Galimir, the famous violinist and teacher, at my first lesson on the piece, said that it was “the only truly beautiful thing ever written for the piano.” (Haha.) Yes, in its profound color-thinking at the piano, the exploitation of the overtones, registers: it was (is, continues to be) a new kind of prayer to sound, sensual sound as a sign of love. Of course, you cannot say “prayer to sound” in a program note; that would be ridiculous. It’s so much safer to say “series of variations on a hymnlike melody,” don’t you think?