The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.
bachsarabande
Originally uploaded by Jeremy Denk.
For those musicians who are reading, who want to “follow along” with the last post…
The chromatic tenor line in question begins in the geographical middle of the page, continues for two measures … savvy readers and analysts will note that it is a continuation/response to a chromatic descending line in the top voice for two measures before that (starting on G, desc. to E).
Sorry to all you non-music-readers out there!
I must feel some extreme subconscious need to “explain Falstaff,” because this morning I awoke from a vivid dream where I was doing just that. At an upright piano, in a beautifully furnished room (seemingly drawn from the set of the WB show Charmed), I was explaining to an unknown woman the beauties of Verdi’s only comic opera. Feeling like my audience wasn’t quite getting it, I pointed to the score to show one of Verdi’s incomparable markings. I was translating from Italian, a language I don’t know … “Look, here it says to ’sing as though it were an aria written on an old memo pad.’” Somehow I attempted to demonstrate this at the piano; at that point, the dream became too impossible even for a dream, and I woke up.
Last night I was walking down the street (a memory which now seems like a dream) and I found myself unable to locate the downbeat in the Sarabande of the 6th Partita. Somehow the piece, which I have played so often, has become worn at the edges: the barlines have rubbed off. I placed the score on the piano this morning, and just looked, and played little bits, with their meters intact, reasserted. Clear as day! Though when I played them, they threatened to dissolve again, they wanted to disappear (just like my dream’s bizarre reality wanted to evaporate). I thought through the whole thing, the pulse and its disappearing act, while I washed the dishes. Hooray.
Even last night on the street, adrift without the meter, I thought through the pitches, trying to clear away the undergrowth (all the ornaments which “clutter it up”, which make the meter and the structure opaque, distant): trying to hear only this recurring motive (obsessive, idee fixe) of the falling second (the first motive of the piece … and a symbol of pathos), and the way Bach plays on the two notes, perversely resisting any too-clear direction, wandering over them, only allowing them occasionally to accumulate into larger sequences (2+2=3 in this musical language, two falling seconds makes a third, two thirds makes a fifth)…. There is a wonderful moment towards the end–when one might get distracted by the top voice–where the tenor emerges with a sequence of chromatic versions of this motive (E to D-sharp, to D-natural, to C-sharp, to C-natural). Every time I come at this piece, this place tugs at me, this tenor voice seizes my attention… and every time I get closer and closer to letting it dominate, to “understanding it.” But something about the piece, the way it is written, resists this reduction to “truth.” Is it my laziness or Bach’s wiliness? I know, though, that i want this tenor voice to be the fundament of this passage, its entrance to be a climactic summary, and the hemiola that follows to be “just” closing, “just” resolution …
Practicing, practicing, practicing: my hummus and pita is strangely unsatisfying (if necessary) after 6 hours of Bach. What is amazing is how IDIOTIC the “old ways” of playing something seem (and by old I mean six months ago): how incredibly self-critical you become. And the idiocy is usually inattention… and so I force myself, bit by bit, to pay attention. This is painstaking work, measure by measure, repetitive (sometimes to no apparent result)–trying to truly “pay attention.” It is weird to repeat paying attention; repetition tends to give way to tedium, and inattention. Practicing is straining towards the opposite of this natural tendency. But then, invariably, you run across another problem: mental attention translates inaccurately into muscular tension (this movement from intangible to tangible runs through piano playing, in every direction: printed score to evanescent sound, for example). Your perception of attention is misplaced; you confuse a hunched muscle for a sparking neuron.
Then you must think about something else, on top of the impossibly intricate music: you must think of your OWN BODY, you must consider it separately while the music goes on. The real goal is the “how,” in between the “whats” of you and the piano: the perfect superimposition of motion and desire. But this goal hovers in the middle, is an impossible thin “balance state;” sometimes you must think purely of desire, and sometimes purely of motion, just as sometimes you must think by turns of your right or left hands. The Parkinsonian patients in “Awakenings” cannot sustain themselves there, between total lock and manic motion, they cannot be in our in-between, normal, human state; and while I am practicing, sometimes, I feel it too, the difficulty of remaining in the middle. It is a comfortable, beautiful place, and my happiness often depends on finding it.
Then I am online, taking a break, surfing blogs, and a friend IMs… a non-musician friend. He asks me what I’m doing and I tell him; he says “I don’t like Bach.” It’s impossible really to imagine, heartbreaking. My mother, too, actually professes not to love Bach, although she has stifled this over time, seeing me play Bach again and again. There is no more nourishing music, no more varied, no more …. how can one say you don’t like it, as if it were a brand of ketchup? Sometimes we musicians need to be shocked into realizing how much people think of music as food, as something that one picks off the shelf, something used, consumed, enjoyed casually, stored in a pantry for when you need it. Some of my friends would say that that is good, that it is a healthy attitude… Obviously I can’t be reconciled to this; turning Bach out would be to revoke part of the universe.
As my friend put it, it is “All Bach All The Time” in my place these days, which is wonderful but overwhelming. One would guess that a lot of the work would be very cerebral: fingerings, sorting-out, mental gymnastics. That is true, and it takes a lot of patience– but much of the work for me is color/affect/energy. It is so easy for the stream of notes to degenerate into motoric motion, or autopilot, or on the other extreme: manic characterization. To find just the energy necessary to propel the piece forward, but not so much that it flails.
And then there are those “miracle moments” where you find exactly the right affect for the material. For instance I am playing the D major Toccata, which I had usually experienced as mainly a joyous romp of virtuosity (despite a mournful, central fugue in f# minor). But thinking about the opening section of this Toccata as walking music — I suddenly made the (fairly obvious) association to “happy pilgrims.” Bringing a sort of liturgical element into it (a piece I had viewed as entirely secular) made the whole piece now a kind of meditation or service –and also it has been Passion Week… The minor-key fugue could be Good Friday, and the final D major gigue/fugue Easter Sunday! I played the final fugue again, with the sense of (and I am not a religious person) “Christ is Risen!” and I swear it was entirely different (though I had always played it joyfully before)… but this purpose behind it, the sense of communal joy, and the PROCESS of the entire Toccata culminating, all of this worked. I will spend the week trying to recapture that moment’s inspiration.
Thus the form of the Toccata, its “sectional problem”–which I had never viewed as a problem, as these pieces are favorites of mine, but audiences seem to be puzzled to some extent–can be related to the parts of a Mass. The improvisatory sections linking the main elements are like “readings,” or pastorly reflections on passages heard… however you want to draw the analogy, it becomes of a piece, a ritual, a happening.
