think denk

It is a stunningly beautiful, clear day in Manhattan and all the healthy people stand around on Broadway in their jogging outfits at 9:42 am, quite smug. I elbow past their toned calves and $300 headphones, humming the Berg Chamber Concerto. In Starbucks a man demonstrates that good jeans and a T-shirt can be the absolute apogee of fashion; nothing else is truly necessary. I am waltzing in my mind, with headphones of thought. Venti, please.

Sometimes I do emerge from my circling self-referential dancing to look around the world wide web, like a “real” blogger. I know I do not do this enough, forgive me!!! Several things pleased me immensely and I wanted to just throw them out there:

1. I want to give Kyle Gann a big, fat, sloppy, hymnic kiss for this:

I sprinted out and bought John Kirkpatrick’s recording of Ives’s Concord Sonata, which somehow looked to be his most celebrated work - perhaps Machlis had said as much. Once home, I had no idea what to think of it. It seemed a towering mess. I had already partly digested The Rite of Spring, which was bizarre enough, but at least its comparative repetitiveness made its oddities stick in my head. The Concord Sonata was just a mass of notes with, here and there, a tune, even a quotation I recognized. But I listened over and over and over, struggling to make sense of it. And gradually, inevitably, I fell absolutely in love. It became my favorite piece of music, and remains so to this day.

Yowza! His FAVORITE piece! Which leads me to…

2. I had lunch with charming Terry Teachout, as you can read over there. We agreed that Falstaff is the greatest opera ever written, and that anyone who doesn’t like Falstaff is an idiot. (Terry might not have literally said any of that.) Which leads me to…

3. I was as delighted as a quivering Jell-O mold to see that Alex Ross (without whom the classical blogosphere would have so much less center and soul) quoted a passage from one of my very superduper favorite novels, Pictures from an Institution. (I also dated someone from Sarah Lawrence, so it all resonates!) This same novel, in hardback, sat quite prominently on Terry’s bookshelf. Alex’s quote is about the emigre composer Gottfried Rosenbaum and his wife Irene. Later on, we learn this about Gottfried:

Falstaff was his favorite opera, and he played it so much that Constance knew even the little themes that come in, flicker their wings once, and are gone forever.

… which is, I think, one of the best one-sentence allusions imaginable. Here’s another great passage about Gottfried:

… he pointed, with a sober smile, to a painting which hung on the wall of the classroom (A Representation of Several Areas, Some of Them Grey, one might have called it; yet this would have been unjust to it—it was non-representational) and played for the class, on the piano, a composition which he said was an interpretation of the painting: he played very slowly and calmly, with his elbows, so that it sounded like blocks falling downstairs, but in slow motion. But half his class took this as seriously as they took everything else, and asked him for weeks afterwards about prepared pianos, tone-clusters, and the compositions of John Cage and Henry Cowell; one girl finally brought him a lovely silk-screen reproduction of a painting by Jackson Pollock, and was just opening her mouth to—He interrupted, bewilderingly, by asking the Lord what land He had brought him into. The girl stared at him open-mouthed, and he at once said apologetically that he was only quoting Mahler, who had also diedt from America; then he gave her such a winning smile that she said to her roommate that night, forgivingly: “He really is a nice old guy. You never would know he’s famous.”

“Is he really famous?” her roommate asked. “I never heard of him before I got here. But gee, before I got here I’d never heard of Dr. Crowley.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s famous—anyway, famous in Europe,” the girl replied. Then her eyes brightened and she exclaimed, in scorn at her own forgetfulness: “Of course he’s famous! He’s in the Britannica, in the article on Schönberg.”

Ah, students.

4. Via Gabriel Kahane, ever a source of the genius of Craigslist, the following two posts:

Composer

Date: 2007-09-19, 4:02PM EDT
I am looking for a composer who can take a small musical theme and produce a fully ochestrated arrangement. The composer should be able to emulate the styles of prominent composers from the past and present and insert his or her own creative spin and style. This will be a paid project although producers have not yet specified compensation levels …

Yes, that one is good but how about this one?

Music Composer

Date: 2007-09-19, 8:49PM EDT
Need a composer (Soft Rock & Rock Ballad)I am looking for someone who writes music. I have 30-40 songs that need music and most of them melody …

5. Finally, I have to say there are Serious Blogs, Comprehensive Blogs, YouTubeish Blogs, Deliberately Boring Blogs, and all blogs under the sun, but I think The Standing Room has an infectious, joyous quality that makes me desperately want to park illegally in every neighborhood of San Francisco. Via the Standing Room, I discovered that Joyce DiDonato has been blogging her recording project. I had one rehearsal with Joyce last May in the basement of the Met, and it was truly, seriously, an amazing musical experience and I was extremely sorry that unforeseen events prevented us from performing together. I am a huge fan.

Her blog did call to mind certain transitions that are necessary from Working With Strings to Working With Voice, certain divides of style.

Suppose you’re a garden variety Serious Pianist, you know the sort of pianist who cares about dots versus wedges in Mozart, who would never dream of programming Gottschalk, etc. etc. and suppose somebody asked you, in rehearsal, you know, how do you think such-and-such phrase ought to go? And this hypothetical pianist, in a chamber rehearsal with strings, might say something like this:

I think it goes to the middle of the third measure, and then releases to the half cadence. But I really love that harmony in the second measure and I think we should somehow “notice” it a little more.

At which point the other players might hum, hem, and possibly haw and suggest maybe the peak is in the second measure or some other interesting place … or … they might just agree and everyone can go have dinner sooner.

Now, should you ask your garden variety Serious Singer the same question, you’re more likely to get an answer like this:

I mean I really identify with this woman and my last coach told me this great story about how this song came to be composed, which was that Chausson was in Mallorca and fell in love with this Albanian waitress, and almost left his wife for her but then over a plate of couscous he really realized how much he loved his wife, and I came to realize that motivation here is complicated, like the wife wants to hold onto her love, be the fierce mother-protector, the fabulous earth-mother, but something in her heart is trapped in the past and it’s kind of YOU GO GIRL and then after she’s done it and gone, she’s full of conflicted guilt and her ex-boyfriend maltreated her, and that’s why there’s a diminuendo.

It’s a mildly different communication style. Something like the difference between the conversation you have at Staples when you’re asking for your printer cartridge and the conversations you have with your unhinged Jungian analyst. I’m not passing judgement here.

3 am Prussia Cove, I am sitting in the candlelit refectory, chatting about who knows, after a concert and well-spiced lamb stew and Ashley’s Cornish ale and eccentric lyrical speeches by the festival’s father figure, Hilary, and a dubious reading of the Brahms A Major Piano Quartet… As I said, it’s 3 am, and the composer-in-residence comes wandering in: he cannot find his cottage. He has been wandering in the darkness.

A performer, I am ever the humble servant of the composer, right? I offer to show him home. We set off through the night, over the stony paths, along the cliffside. I feel like Virgil. My Dante is not sure-footed. I brandish my WalMart flashlight confidently; I am a beam of navigational surety, a compass, a well-worn path. And under the hedges and over the hills and dales and there we are, at the thatched cottage, and I open the door and welcome him into the inn, which has vacancy for him (unlike “Das Wirtshaus” from Winterreise which we heard earlier in the evening) … He stumbles into the light, and I close the door behind him, and set forth, feeling bold and adventurous (though with no specific adventure in mind).

Paces, breaths. Halfway back I found my friend C, waiting along the curve of a wall. My flashlight was weaving wildly in the darkness apparently. Off it went. And in twenty seconds my eyes were stripped of their annoying certainties. The next day, in the rumbling crowded train, I was repeatedly revisited by this near-silent moment, this singing absence. You click the button, and at first you see nothing at all: just void or impossibility. You are looking, but there is no information; you’re the same person, but no longer plugged in; you are running on the battery of your memories, of your idea of the world. All you can do is wait. If the void went on forever, you would be dead. But it doesn’t (this time); your brain slides open, begins to feel light on a different scale, more subtly, like the slightest touch of a finger along your arm. Truth is associated by tradition with light, with sun, rays, beams and bulbs, but at that moment it seemed truth was darkness, a dark embrace which helped you to perceive: the slight silver of the water, oscillating; the dark dark black of the hills, cliffs and trees; the lighter, freer black of the sky; and, of course, a million festive lights above, a slow-moving, eternal fireworks; finally, there was the vague shape of the Milky Way draped like a carelessly strewn scarf, and if you had to pick one sound it would be the careless washing of water down below in the cove, the barely audible heartbeat of the sea.

The world has gone dark and then relit itself, from within; and you are displaced. Something like walking into a room you have been in a million times (the room is yourself) and sensing that a piece of the furniture has been shifted, but you can’t say which, or why it is different. 3 am drifted towards 4 am or maybe 5, we listened to the ocean. I remember so few words of so many conversations.