think denk

Yet another coffeeshop: students finishing papers behind me, a couple finishing (amicably?) their divorce settlement to my right, three men forming a start-up on the patio, and to top it all off: some man continuously clearing his throat, an act which produces a bizarre sound, quasi Fat Albert (It is a four-part chorale: studential giggle, strained financial discussion, business bravado, and finally the Fat Albert basso continuo: ahhh, the counterpoint of coffeeshops!) Oh, and it’s a barista’s birthday, they are lifting a cake over the counter and singing and cheering. Grrrr. I have had a rough couple days, with the onset of some cold/flu thingy and yet–no rest for weary pianists–the concerts continue to come on, every two days… I’m industrial-strength miffed.

I’ve played many pieces since getting here–Dvorak D major Piano Quartet, Strauss Piano Quartet, Shostakovich Quintet, Schubert Adagio and Rondo–but the piece that is still sticking in my mind, making me happy, is the Brahms A major Piano Quartet, which I played in North Carolina. As I drove, the last night, over back mountain roads, towards Greensboro (my birthplace)… I found myself needing comfort, which Christian and right-wing talk radio did not seem to provide (to each his own). Instead, then, I played over and over in my head passages from the A major Piano Quartet. The entire black, curvy drive was surreally lit by this sunny piece.

For me, this is one of the holiest, most sacred of pieces, perfect in every detail. But very serious, intelligent musicians have suggested that the opening theme of this piece is evidence of Brahms’ mediocrity… an aberration, a mess. It is true, it is an odd opening theme… made of chords more than melody (there are too many chords for the melody). And yet it would be “fine,” except for an odd move to F#-major in its fourth bar, sounding a little forced, ill-prepared, artificial… the A# jangles like a “mistake” against the A, the main note of the piece… of course this artificial (let’s say “extraordinary”) event, once accepted, clearly poses itself as a premise for the whole piece, as a protagonist. Perhaps the piece, its vast structure, requires an initial suspension of disbelief. Perhaps any vast structure does.
I remember thinking, when I first looked at the score, what a stupid theme it was… what an idiot.

It is a very difficult theme to play because you want to keep the legato of the melody, and yet each chord must have its integrity, must be beautifully voiced, entire. But when it feels good, it feels GOOD; your hands move from chord to chord, as if running over, caressing, the roots of harmony … and the best feeling, the real satisfaction, comes at the recapitulation, when you play the same theme down an octave… the lower, richer register making it sound like a chorus of horns or a men’s chorus, something deep, the root, basis, the fundament. There has been much Romantic angst in the development, and now… harmony.

The four-part harmony of Bach chorales is, in a sense, an “archaic” item, an anachronistic insertion in the more homophonic world of Romantic music; but, paradoxically, can also be seen to underly everything, the whole of Western classical composition (the art of counterpoint, etc.) In the Mendelssohn C Minor Trio, which I also happily played in North Carolina, a chorale makes two entrances in the last movement, and in that case the chorale stands out as an “other,” as a symbol, a triumphalist religious moment which Charles Rosen (I think unfairly) labels “kitsch.”

I was listening in my car to some Bach chorales I played on a recital with the Ives “Concord” Sonata (!) and even though I theoretically played the damn thing, I was stunned at how beautiful the harmonies were, at how they illuminated the simplest notes: going up and down the same old (in this case, G major) stupid scale seemed like a magical journey.

In the A major Piano Quartet, the chorale element intervenes not in order to give the music some “plot.” It is not triumphalist at all (unlike the Mendelssohn), and if it is religious it is utterly nondenominational. When you hear the chorales in that piece, you hear pure voicings; the chords are objects of contemplation; the piece suddenly becomes communal, “harmonious;” the basic building blocks of Western harmony are beautiful for their own sake (and not for the sake of where they are going)… harmony as solace, as shelter (from the storm of rhetoric, of musical plot). This is made clear in one of the piece’s most extraordinary moments: in the slow movement, after the pianist “lets loose” with an anguished, full-throttle outburst, the height of Romantic direction and pouring-over… after this, the strings play the only thing “they can,” a quiet, intensely beautiful chorale. Opposed to Romantic outcry… but somehow also its answer and source, its vanishing point.

I was on the brink of devastation. My colleague, the violist Toby Appel, gave me the worst possible news: my usual Pho joint was closed.

On concert days I insist on regular, predictable food. As if they are mini-birthdays, any departure from my desires, any obstacle, makes me irritable, petulant, a fussy child. I do what I do those days, and woe betide those who tell me otherwise.

In Seattle, every concert day, after dress rehearsal, this is what I do: I cut via backroads, through industrial zones and car repair shops and adult bookstores, and other businesses of dubious aspect, and settle myself in the most dubious of all: Pho of Aurora. From the parking lot, the view through the steamy kitchen’s back door is not enticing… it promises nausea, not nutrition… but one day, in the distant past, like Columbus sailing westward, I was brave or hungry enough simply to walk in, and so a compulsion was born.

A compulsion? An addiction. I was hooked, not by the broth, nor by the voluminous fatty tendon, but by the place’s unearthly patroness. How can I describe her? Though she presides over the dumpiest Pho joint in Seattle, she dresses each day as if descending, reluctantly, to the ballroom of the Palace of Versailles. White lacy gowns, powder blue dresses, purple velvet: no outfit too outlandish, no makeup too heavy. Radiant, resplendent, she finds it enough to exist: she does (nearly) nothing, she simply talks. But it is not normal speech, it is closer to incantation … an unearthly voice … she delivers, I think, sermons from the noodle god. Vietnamese from her mouth is a garden of fascinating, dangerous phonemes, sounds foreign to human cords. She “talks,” and I slurp, and since no one responds (several younger people seem to do all the actual work of the place, while watching Vietnamese Idol), I assume she is talking to herself. Or she is very, very frustrated. Or both. How many hours have I spent, speculating as to what she might be saying? Perhaps in my belongings, my heirs will find endless sketches for a (sadly) unfinished novel: Thoughts of Crazy Lady of the Pho. It will be my masterpiece.

A calendar next to her each month presents a different beautiful Asian model (a modest centerfold calendar), and it appears she dresses partly to match the woman on the wall. Though timeless, and anachronistic, she’s in cahoots with the calendar! Her acolytes dress in deliberately shabby American garb, torn jeans, faded T-shirts. All business is transacted with them (she is too noble for this menial work, though her nobility is confined to this one dreary room). If I go up to pay, and none of her assistants are there, she will condescend to take my money, but only–get this–after putting on white silk gloves. My fellow noodle-eaters–truck drivers, mechanics, a decidedly blue-collar crowd–seem to accept all this… to accept their queen… they, like I, respect the place’s bizarre order; they laugh only on the inside.

So with a heavy heart, I went by to see the place closed up, to bid it goodbye. But imagine my delight. Toby was wrong… it was still open (though in even more disrepair than before). I walked in, joyfully, saw that the personnel were EXACTLY AS I LEFT THEM last year, and ordered my noodles promptly. What do they think of me? I only come for a week or two each summer, show up quite regularly on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (and on no other days), and then depart. I never speak to the help; we never penetrate each other’s mysteries. Are they curious about me? Do they wonder why a nerdy fellow with scores and books, and with a taste for really spicy soup, comes in like a token breeze of summer, and spills broth all over chamber music masterpieces? Does my pageturner at this festival ever wonder at the red and brown stains on, say, the Shostakovich Quintet?

For me the lesson (the warning) of the summer festival season is mystery, variety, youthfulness, love. (I have been rereading The Symposium.) What do I mean by that? Though the piece (any piece, whatever) has been played many many times for numerous festivals and often in the same way… all those qualities (mystery, variety, etc.) are still valuable, necessary, even: indispensable. Why would I go into Pho of Aurora? Totally arbitrary. Why would Crazy Lady dress up (at no minimal effort) to sit there, a useless appendage, every single day? In summer festivals, preparing these familiar pieces on short notice, we tend to have scads of “sensible” rehearsals, putting things in place, balancing them out, being mature… and sometimes as I go through the season of this sort of rehearsal, I find myself wanting to say totally unsensible things, to take unseemly rubati, to be contrary, simply cause the spirit seems to boil up inside of me, something feels too familiar, too confining, too conventional. I could easily, in these situations, become like the Crazy Lady of the Pho… sometimes indeed I do feel like I’m dressed in the wrong outfit, speaking the wrong language to no one, a nutcase babbling to himself at the piano. And perhaps that is when I am happiest.