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:

Sometimes performances bring pieces to life, but sometimes they (I, we) kill them instead. Performers (and this seems obvious, inevitable, we’re human, we’re all culpable) are sometimes complicit in the Death of Classical Music.

Ouch! But fasten your seatbelts, it gets darker yet:

If the concert is sometimes a “murder” of what should be a living work, program notes are the chloroform rag we use to numb the victim, before dragging it to the scene of the crime.

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:

The world was changing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The authority of monarchies, no matter how enlightened they might be, was challenged: the American colonies against England, Hungarian peasants against Austria under Joseph II, the people of France and Louis XVI. Economic power was shifting away from the landed aristocracy to an urban middle class that included bankers, lawyers, merchants, and factory owners.

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:

The last movement takes up the motives of the first in varied form.

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):

Although Stravinsky moved very far from his earlier “Russian-period” works in the Piano Concerto, we may recognize him, among other things, by his fondness for asymmetrical rhythms, which is evident in all three movements of the work.

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:

Despite the considerable contributions of Haydn and Mozart, it remained for Beethoven to give the piano trio an importance it had not enjoyed before.

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:

The serene slow movement … is a series of variations on a hymnlike melody. [“hymnlike”: true, but GENERIC] (After Beethoven’s death it was gratuitously adapted to a choral setting of verses by Goethe.) [HISTORICIZATION, INSIDER’S CLUB] There are four variations, of great melodic and rhythmic interest [GENERIC: what interest? how?], and of growing tension and complexity, but after the fourth the theme is restated in its original purity [GENERIC: not exactly, crucial changes are made], to be followed by a dreamy coda which extends as a bridge to the finale (yet again as in Op. 59, No. 1–and numerous other works of its period). [INSIDER’S CLUB, DOMESTICATION]

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?

This essay has an alarming thesis: that the Brahms B-flat Concerto has been getting longer. The author (Walter Frisch) does not rely upon anecdotal evidence; he supplies a carefully researched graph which would seem to place the issue beyond a doubt:
        

What could this graph mean? I phoned up a reliable cross-section of experts: arts administrators, conductors, concert-hall caterers, etc. Conferring with them, I came up with the following rough calculations.

For each 5 minutes of length added to Brahms, Op. 83, you can expect:

– intermission restroom lines will grow by 8-10%;
– coughing between movements will grow by 25%;
– coughing during most beautiful part of slow movement explodes by a staggering 43%;
– hairlines of male audience members will recede by .0000003%, but if you figure in compound interest, this could really add up;

Surely there are other effects we cannot yet envision. And we have to assume, in the absence of contrary evidence, that these problems are ongoing. The following graph shows the slowing of the concerto to date, as documented by Frisch and his crack team of CD collectors around the world, followed by a projection into the future:

As you can see, the model suggests that a recording of Brahms Op. 83 made in 2072 would last 3 hours and 25 minutes! In minutes adjusted for inflation, that is 142% longer than the most tedious performance of the Goldberg Variations to date.

Here is a sample passage from Brahms Op. 83 as it might be recorded in 2043, as rendered by a hired stunt artist:

Astounding. As you can hear, this could cause untold suffering; our children’s children would bear the brunt … I needed no more convincing. I immediately convened a conference in Copenhagen, but reconsidered; Amsterdam might be more Andante-friendly. I applied for government grants to pay for my accommodations and expenses. Obviously, also, some lobbyists would be required to argue for the interests of faster Brahms in Congress.

Just as I was tucking into my room service at the Four Seasons Amsterdam, I received a rather disturbing phone call. Apparently someone hacked into the email server at the Music Department of Columbia University, and forwarded thousands of emails to the Marlboro Music Festival, which historically has had an interest in slowing the pace of Brahms. With their vast financial resources, they hired a team of interns and unearthed the following:

FROM: Walter Frisch <xxxxxx@columbia.edu>
TO: Richard Taruskin <xxx@berkeley.edu>
SUBJECT: Brahms Op. 83

I think I’ve just completed Robert’s (Mann) trick of adding in the real tempos to each series for the last 20 years (from 1981 onward) and from 1961 for Maazel’s to hide the decline.

and…

FROM: Lawrence Kramer <xxx@fordham.edu>
TO: Walter Frisch <xxxxxx@columbia.edu>
SUBJECT: Oy, FOIA

I do now wish I’d never sent them the data after Hepokoski’s FOIA request. Uncertainty in turntable calibrations adjusted, corrections made and I think it’s solid. But there is a relatively small number of people who don’t or won’t ‘get it’ … Meanwhile, who let Taruskin rewrite the whole History of Western Music? I mean, at least it wasn’t Susan McClary.

Between the backbiting and the tempo uncertainties … well, before long there was a full-blown media storm, a battle between slowing deniers and alarmists. Sarah Palin addressed this BrahmsGate (for so it was now called) in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post:

The BrahmsGate emails reveal what the American public has long suspected, that the slowing of Brahms Op. 83 is not nearly as certain as some elite musicologists have banded together to suggest. If those musicologists think they can attack our way of life by making our Andantes flow more freely, they have no idea the world of hurt they’re in for.

Even if Brahms is slowing, who’s to say it’s caused by human activities?

Call me crazy, but I’m old enough to remember that in the 70s, various musicologists were warning us that Brahms Op. 83 was actually getting faster. It’s possible that Brahms Op. 83 is slowing because of cyclical, natural variations in tempo. For instance, variations in sunspot activity …

In the final analysis, there are so many better ways to deal with this slowing trend, aside from the drastic, unreasonable solution of playing the piece faster.

I was still sure that Brahms was slowing–after all, there was the graph!–but began to have second thoughts as to the cause. Although the presence of a thoughtful, nuanced expert like Sarah Palin seemed to discourage further inquiry, perhaps I could humbly contribute something to the scientific literature. To create an objective, controlled experiment I decided to deal with an unrelated work: Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. This would free me from any emotional baggage or bias as relating to Brahms Op. 83, and yet would speak to the reliability of durational data, from which a series of conferences might more reasonably address the question of what length really is, how it might be measured, and eventually set a groundwork for understanding how long Brahms Op. 83 should be.

The premise of my experiment was to measure my perceived desired tempo (PDT) for the opening of Beethoven First Piano Concerto at various times of day, and under the influence of certain key circumstances.

first attempt: quarter = 144 (midday, 3 hours after coffee, just before lunch)

We could call this a “baseline” tempo. Addicted to this data gathering (this science stuff is fun!) I began sampling my own PDT’s wildly:

before coffee: quarter = 138
after coffee: quarter = 160
before sex or equivalent* quarter = 154
after sex or equivalent* quarter = 126
after one beer quarter = 148
after two beers quarter = 122-164
after three beers (unmeasurable data)
after watching an episode of Real Housewives of Orange County quarter = 232
after shopping at Fairway quarter = 187
(* for instance, a really good muffin)

A graph of this data proved elusive, and inconclusive; there are just too many factors at play!

And now it became clear to me, that tempo is more dangerous than an illusion, it is a kind of myth promulgated by all sorts of fascist types in order to destroy the natural and beautiful cycles of PDT that are native to the human freedom instinct. The next time a conductor asks me “why are you moving so much faster here?,” referring to some passage X of a concerto, I will simply say “natural variability of sunspots,” and when the conductor says “that’s ridiculous,” I will say “you can’t prove to me it’s NOT sunspots.” I’m sure this will go over very well.

        Monday night, I went to see Twilight: New Moon. For the second time.

The first time, it was a rainy afternoon. It was the second of three Beethoven Concerto performances in Naples, Florida; the beach was a dismal grey ringed by reproachful mangroves; I couldn’t bear to haunt my hotel room a moment longer, staring at the dumb mauve art. HBO was playing “The Making of Braveheart;” meanwhile, The Grand Piano Foyer, a floor below me, contained “Dinning [sic] Divas and their Darling Dogs” …

… and I had barely recovered from the Urology Specialist Holiday Party the night before. So you see, I had no choice, I had to flee the Hilton and its Grilled Chicken Caesars. A matter of life and death. A total vroom situation.

When I am driven by such desperation to The Movies, I try to selectively turn off my ears, at least the parts that feel pain when terrible music is happening. If only my new ear hair trimmer had such a function! As you can imagine, most of the music of Twilight is a spool of new age melancholy-lite with interchangeable aspartame chords and a spectacular disregard for monotony and cliché: the sort of thing you run across 12-year-old girls playing, to express themselves, on upright pianos in junior high chorus rooms after the last tater tots have been shoved down the last pimply gullet of the last smug bully before the last bus creaks out of the parking lot, sending wheezes of diesel sadness into the dusk as yet another chalky day of teaching scrawls to an end. Here’s an example:

… you get the idea. I was just settling in with my movie nachos, just getting used to this aural upholstery–anything that does not kill you, etc. etc.–when (suddenly!) a few notes reminded me that there might be a better world. Bella gets knocked against a wall, her arm’s bleeding …

… and in a flash Dr. Cullen–a vampire who has virtuously pulled back his fake hair and steeled himself to resist his blood-urge–dismisses his weaker, ravenous vampire relatives, and prepares to stitch up her gaping wound. As he stitches, we hear:

This was no nacho hallucination! There really WAS a Schubert song lurking in this teen vampire romance … and not just Joe Schubert Song, but a setting of one of the greatest Goethe poems. But why this song? And why Schubert? My mind immediately and shamelessly ran after musicological ramifications: “Schubert is sucking at the neck of the subdominant, to demonstrate vis-a-vis the fangs of his modal mixture the inadequacy of conventional polarities of dominance” … (Susan McClary, eat your heart out!) Though I dismissed the notion of a hidden musicological agenda I suddenly wondered how many vampires take refuge in the musicology faculties of our nation’s universities.

This was one of these moments where Popular Culture decides for a capricious instant that Hundreds Of Years Of The Western Canon are temporarily useful for appropriation; it does classical music a huge favor by Noticing It. Lovers of classical music are supposed to beam and pant like a petted dog, grateful for any and all attention. Wag wag, woof woof, good boy, go play in your cute tuxedo now! Classical music often serves an iconic, representative, dubiously honorable purpose in popular film, and this instance of classical quotation–besides reminding me what a steaming load of crapola I had been listening to previously–reminded me very much of the famous scene in The Silence of the Lambs, where Hannibal Lecter brutally murders and partly eats his two guards to the strains of the Goldberg Variations.

In both these scenes, classical music becomes an emblem of distance and detachment. Cullen is looking directly upon blood without giving in to his hunger; he is practicing Zen-like separation from desire. Lecter has a very different detachment, the detachment required to kill perfectly, ruthlessly, without regret or remorse; his is the detachment, the disconnect, the absence of “normal” emotion which marks sociopathy.

In both scenes, the music is ironic. It’s effective in a way that horrific or disturbing, i.e. “appropriate” music would not be. Its meaning lies in its otherness … While Lecter commits one of man’s darkest taboos (cannibalism), behind him rings the decorum and organization of Bach, with its peerless canons and schemes and rules; the Goldbergs whisper to our ears all the connotation and comfort of human Enlightenment, while the Dark Ages scream at our eyes from the screen. Cullen is stitching a raw wound; he fills a bowl full of blood … The camera lingers on both, in the way we imagine Cullen’s eyes unconsciously might; meanwhile the song proceeds in uncanny calm, a calm which feels strange against our sense of a repressed murderousness. The calm is a classical music calm, an alien calm, it evokes the price and pressure of Cullen’s self-repression. I have noticed often that the forces of Hollywood cannot use classical music to express “normal” emotions, but only extremes, only things that must be seen weirdly, in reverse.

In both scenes, blood. Both Lecter and Cullen traffic in blood, and their bloodiest scenes bleed classical music. Yes, we can say, the director is suggesting that classical music is “beauty” against which the horrors of bloodlust are seen more starkly. But if the music is supposed to be the opposite of the bloody scene, isn’t the implication somehow that the beauty of classical music is “bloodless”? Lecter is a soulless monster, and he loves Bach; Cullen is a soulless vampire, who uses Schubert to calm himself while he repairs a wound. Always soulless; always other; always anachronistic; classical music is the preference of monsters. I can see how the age of the music connects to the immortality of the vampire, I can see how the Bach connects to Lecter’s genius, but why must classical music be the language of monsters, of the fringe?

Schubert’s not distant, not alien, not detached, he’s full-blooded and alive, he’s home for me, he’s the emotional trailer park where I live, don’t you get that?, don’t you hear it’s so beautiful?, so much more intensely felt than this movie?, I wanted to scream all through the room, to the mainly 50-something women who had come alone in their Lexuses through the Florida rain to the mildewed and neglected theatre. No, no, so beautiful, I thought as Schubert’s echoes dopplered away and we returned to the morose mediocrity of the main score. I was like Bella abandoned by Edward, soundtrack bereft.

The movie proceeded like so many–a series of proppings. Yes, there’s no real plot structure but OK in the weak moments prop it up with effects. When the effects don’t work OK in the weak moments prop it up with shirtless men. The shirtless men cannot remotely act but OK in the weak moments prop it up with music, or blood. I felt a certain pity for each sadly inadequate piece of the puzzle. In fact, there could be no simpler, greater rebuke to this film than the Goethe text for the Schubert song:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

[Over all the hilltops
there is rest,
In all the treetops
you hear
hardly a breath;
The birds are silent in the forest.
Only wait, soon
you too shall rest.]

A haiku house without seams, strong beyond strong. In the music of these words, there is nothing to be propped … each rhyme coolly and clearly clicks into the joints of the meaning. I’m shivering here in my kitchen just reading through it, and not just because the window’s open. You pity no word in it, no matter how humble, each simple word lives. At its foundation we find the strongest word, an untranslatable word, “Ruh,” meaning rest or calm or quiet or silence or peace. First we see “Ruh” spread over the hilltops … it’s a landscape-word. At the end “Ruh” has become a verb (”ruhest du auch”), and in this paradoxical transformation (rest acts!) the word itself becomes a poem.

A poem that appears to be painting a landscape for us turns on its heels, turns on us, and intimates our death. It does this through one other very strong word, the last word, the pillar at the other end of the arch: “auch.” How is it possible that a simple notion–you too–becomes so charged? (Don’t even get me started on how “auch” rhymes with “Hauch,” breath.) But it is, of course: all our lives we are dealing with the consequences of you too. Yes life is a story of I’m me yielding to you too, and this hint of death rings against the restfulness of the scene; the two notions are in perfect, compensatory conflict–a conflict which is from another perspective just a total, complex understanding of a single thing. Death and the peaceful landscape are hung, in suspension, against each other. The birds are in the middle of the arch, refusing to sing.

The only things in the movie that seemed as well-constructed as this poem were Taylor Lautner’s abs:

… and these elicited an appreciative “Damn!” from more than one corner of the theatre. (Schubert got no damns. Nor Goethe.) Each pair of muscles like a rhyme. The next day, after hanging up with my new personal trainer, I wondered: why are poems better than abs? Between lateral crunches, I mused: aren’t abs just poems of the stomach? But it seemed to me great poems last longer than abs. And they generally don’t require trips to the gym. As I puréed my second protein shake, it struck me, I should phone some poets, do they have phones? Did Goethe go to the gym? Maybe during his Italian Journeys? So many imponderables! But maybe there’s only one truly unanswerable question: why did I go back for a second viewing?

It was for the Schubert, I swear.

A person quite close to me feels Chopin is pure boredom in a jar. I told Mitsuko Uchida once that I might have trouble choosing between Chopin and Schubert, and the storm that crossed her brow would have shut down the airports for days. I’ve had my moments of doubt too: occasions when I sat through the E minor Piano Concerto (a wonderful piece, IMHO) as performed by such-and-such marvelously talented young pianist and I couldn’t reconcile this superficial finger-doodling and quasi-emoting with the shiver I know, the deeply delicious savoring of passing notes, the web-like harmonic world that Chopin holds me in … hours spent at home, passing your fingers over the piano, you’re playing and you’re shivering at the same time, trapped happy fly eaten by genius spider.

Just take the slow section of the Polonaise-Fantasie:

… And you thought nothing more could be wrung out of that old whore, dominant-and-tonic! Hard to know why this is so astoundingly beautiful. In the left hand a wave, rising-falling, and in the right hand the intersecting wave, more muted, as if a mere reflection of (or commentary on) the larger wave. Compare this to the climax of Tristan und Isolde:

Which is almost the same–the same gist, with a reversed harmonic polarity–but Chopin has drained it of Wagnerian emotional hyperinflation, burst the bubble of the grand demonstrative stage, distilled from I and V a purer love: perhaps just the intimate (but often seemingly almost erotic) love of Chopin for the piano itself.

This pure moment would be so much less, however, without its bizarre and brilliant lead-in. We start with the bluster of a diminished seventh chord, here:

and that explodes into a massive chromatic whorl:

Standard Romantic expostulation? Maybe you have the feeling that this is a bridge too far, the chromatic’s too oozy, the drama’s outsized: you’re right about that. For the bluster somewhat obviously, tiredly wears itself out, the curlicue oozes downwards, loses steam, loses faith in itself–and we finally settle on a lone F#. What was the point? If you feel also that the new key has not quite been prepared by all this flailing about, that the transition has been ineffective, you’re right about that too: for, now, a “true preparation” comes as a rebuke to the “false preparation.” Look, see, the F# is looking for a context; Chopin makes us listen to it for a moment, alone, then with a strangely sour chord,

then alone again, then with the “right” chord, waiting waiting waiting,

and then the epiphany comes, utterly different from any previous moment in the piece, or any moment to come:

… magic doorway of the other. Chopin’s simplicity rebukes Chopin’s complexity. The Genius of Chopin is sitting there, in his self-rebuke, sandwiched between an almost-clichéd chromatic transition, a pedal point, and a lyrical slow section rocking between the two most common chords there are: this glimpse of screw-you-I-can-write-something-so-beautiful-that’s-made-of-almost-nothing, as an unearthly transition between things that are also almost nothing. The four mysterious bars are a messenger, unveiling a new chapter before vanishing, a chapter which turns out to be the quietly beating heart of the piece.

I want to go back to that long pause on the F#.

One of the great and strange elements of the Polonaise-Fantasie, one of its “themes,” is that the act of listening is woven into its fabric. Chopin wants you to listen–carefully! thoughtfully!–to certain sounds, certain pitches, certain moments; the structure of the story he is telling is utterly dependent upon this listening. But he knows that listening is an inherently lazy activity, often thoughtless, often lulling itself into complacency. Just look around the boxes of Carnegie some night if you don’t believe me on this. [Sometimes I look out into the crowd while I’m playing and I will see some rapt individual beaming ecstasy, and I will tell myself not to look any more, but then I can’t help it, I look around later and there is some guy searching the back of the program for classified ads and clearly desperate to get out of my concert and straight to the liquor store and then home to ESPN.]

Anyway. So Chopin writes “enforced” listening moments into the piece–strangely arresting moments, like that F# held, alone, then heard against an astringent dissonance, then heard alone again, then heard against the “correct” dissonance, the dominant seventh–moments that enact, in a kind of slo-mo, the very process of hearing dissonances resolve against a pedal …

The beginning of the Polonaise-Fantasy is an extraordinary example of this. Chopin begins with two announcing chords … and then follows them with a long unmeasured arpeggio (prolonging the harmony of the second chord) …

The same gesture of chord arpeggio is then repeated:

These arpeggios have, in a way, a mundane purpose. They fill up the thwunk and the attack of the piano with beauty: the arpeggio sails languidly into the dead space, the still lagoon of the note’s decay. But this is not all. A kind of rhythm is established, in this very unrhythmic beginning, a rhythm of events: chords, fermata, arpeggio … act, stop, listen. The pauses are quite long–deliberately almost too long–and so the action is weighted towards listening (thought) and against action. The pianist “does something,” plays two significant or signifying chords, then is forced to meditate on what he or she has done: the arpeggios are parentheses seeming to be inaction, but perhaps are the truer action (meditation, understanding). In creating this pace of events, by “building in” reflection and observation, Chopin creates an unusual kind of beginning. This piece does not begin in order to begin, but rather in order to summon some spirit to allow us to begin: in other words, the introduction is an invocation. And of course the spirit Chopin is patiently invoking is sound, the resonance of the piano, the ringing of the wood, some appreciation of the beauty of the struck harmonies drifting through time.

This often odd “enforced” listening to retained, held notes persists. For instance:

Chopin extracts, strangely, the middle voice from the chord, forces us to listen to it for a moment alone, then uses it as a pivot to the next event. He’s trying to encourage complex listening skills, by delving into the crusty middles of chords! Definitely not a superficial thrill, but a thrill for those “in the know.” Or perhaps this example, where we land on a B-flat:

… and twice Chopin makes us listen to the B-flat alone, while the rest of the voices attempt to cadence around it, before ending simply, perfectly, profoundly:

But the most wonderful, strange example of enforced listening is at the end of the piece. We are flush from the ecstasy of a climax, an A-flat major explosion of the slow section theme … this ecstasy is slowly winding down. Chopin gracefully abandons the energy of the climax, unravels it in circles, and in the echoing of this happiness he finds something unlooked-for, a kind of dark “second thought”:

… This darkness (or sadness, if you like) complicates the emotional image of the end, disrupts the fading bliss. And then Chopin throws over the ending a magnificent anomaly. As you see above, the dark measures cadence, we have a quiet, low A-flat major chord … the piece might be over? … and then while the low chord still sounds in the pedal, Chopin instructs the pianist to play one loud A-flat major chord, in the high register.

Yow. The luminous final chord then resounds against the dark overtones of the previous bars: a jarring double image, a bright light on a dark canvas. The effect is not either of those chords, but how you hear them decay together, their resonant death.

The pianist’s typical virtuosic, towering gesture is to try to “sum up” all the registers of the piano at once, to be everywhere at once, to be (sort of) an orchestra. This is the pianist equivalent of the phallic, midlife crisis truck purchase. Chopin is past such insecurities; here, things are definitely not all at once: the chord, the sensation, the understanding of the ending is assembled from disparate parts, foundation and overtone mismatched. It’s as though two endings are superimposed–the brilliant ending that could have been, the sad ending that could have been–and therefore the actual ending is a rare hybrid, with genes of two could-have-beens.

Chopin could have finished the piece with a surge, one last surge to victory (surges are so popular these days); but no, he is not finishing a piece, he is finishing a thought; this is a moment not for the pianist’s glory but for one last, complex listening. Listening “between” two layers of sound. My late great teacher used to talk about Chopin’s hypersensitivity, his mind “like the paws of a cat,” and then he would take his stocky Hungarian body, once employed as prisoner of war to break stones in the Carpathian mountains, and with a few gestures and a lifted eyebrow he’d make himself seem as light as a cat’s step, and with feathery gestures of his hand he’d come down on the piano, on some simple but illuminating pair of harmonies, and then his eye would meet my eye and I felt he was trying to communicate to overprivileged American me Chopin’s vast refinement of thought and elegance and culture, how he valiantly rescued the original from the salon’s tremendous pressure of cliché … elusive fragile epiphanies of sound, standing on the summit of the piano’s wood-and-wire construction … well, that’s the Chopin I love, and he’s no dummy.

But so it happened that, a week ago, coming back from a long day of editing the “Concord” Sonata, I stopped in Grand Central Station—where Ives must have come and gone many times—and bought myself a pretty copy of Leaves of Grass. I started reading it in the subway with blurry eyes and a brain filled with dissonance, and it didn’t seem over the top at all. It seemed like a clear voice I had been missing, which Leon’s quip had brought back into my life. I started reading bits to my friends over the phone. And so it happened also that I started carrying it around with me, wherever I went … and it was in my bag this morning, slung over my shoulder, as I was walking down 9th Avenue, and clicked on my iPhone, and learned that Leon was dead.

Opening the book to a random page on 57th street, I found:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then … I contradict myself;
I am large …. I contain multitudes.
I concentrate towards them that are nigh … I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work and will soonest be through with his
     supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me … he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed … I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the
     shadowed wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air …. I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you

Some difficulty. Am back at home, looking at a giant writing project on the Goldberg Variations which I am supposed to finish, f&*(). How I wish I could ask Leon about them right now.

The answer would take longer than the piece, it would ramble, and you would hardly know what it was or what it meant, it would be good health to you nevertheless …. its important meanings would stop some where waiting for you to find them. You planted so many seeds in my brain, Leon, you lion, the last of which I guess was Whitman; another was the endlessly recombining quest and beautiful urge of your music; another crucial one was your faith in me; I’ll wait for the others (I’m sure there are others) to grow; I miss you.

My American ingenuity was stirred and perhaps even plucked; well heck, goshdarnit!, why not craft my own healthcare bill? Everybody’s doing it. How hard can it really be? …

111th Congress
1st Session

HR _________,

To provide affordable mental health care for American pianists; to reduce the runaway costs of therapy; to mitigate post-concert food and cocktail consumption; and for other purposes.

——-

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Mr. DENK introduced the following bill, without the sponsorship of Mr. AX, Mr. BRONFMAN, Mr. GOODE, nor any other pianist of note; which was referred to the Committee on __________.

——–

A BILL

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF DIVISIONS, TITLES, AND SUBTITLES.

(a) SHORT TITLE–This Act may be cited as the “America’s Pianists Affordable Sanity Choice Act of 2009,” or alternatively as “Freedom of Banging Act.”

(b) TABLE OF DIVISIONS, TITLES, and SUBTITLES.—This Act is divided into divisions, titles, and subtitles as follows:

DIVISION A–BASIC PIANIST RIGHTS

1) The word ”pianist“ shall be construed broadly, i.e. to be any person playing the piano in public, or submitting their stylings to YouTube;

2) Despite all temptation and valid justification, there shall be no discrimination against pianists who have attended or are attending The Juilliard School, or pianists specializing in Medtner, or any other disadvantaged group;

3) A pianist may not be sued for playing too loudly; nor for arguing with cellists about tempos; nor for shaking their heads poetically, or looking up at the ceiling pretentiously; nor for any other common foible;

4) No pianist shall be required to read Lang Lang’s autobiography, now or at any other time. Should a pianist accidentally do so, in whole or in part, he shall be covered under Medicare Section 1103e for all injuries he will commit to his own person, for a period not to exceed 20 days or as mutually agreed upon by the restraining physician.

If a pianist is playing the ”Goldberg“ Variations, a whole series of provisions pertain, viz:

a) for each mention of Glenn Gould at the post-concert reception, or at any question-and-answer session, the pianist is permitted three (3) massage sessions, and such aroma- and gastro- therapy as he may require, in addition, to be covered under the Groupies for the Assistance of Pianists Agency;

b) for each time that the pianist is asked to compare the earlier and later Gould recordings of the ”Goldberg“ Variations, he is permitted one (1) rude outburst, as dictated in HR 131, the so-called ”Really? Can’t We Talk About Anything Else? Act“;

c) the pianist is entitled to take all or any repeats, with the stipulation that no matter how many or how few repeats he/she takes, someone will question his/her decision thereby; mental agitation from this is NOT covered under any government pianist sanity policy, and can only be resolved in civil court, or on the reality television show ”Real Pianists of New York City;“

d) for each occasion that the pianist is asked why he or she is playing said work on the piano rather than the harpsichord, the pianist may beat his or her head against the wall for up to ten (10) minutes;

e) performing this work may be considered a pre-existing condition under various state and federal laws; and only pianists demonstrating reasonable forbearance in situations a), b), c), and d) will be permitted to enroll for the Goldberg Subsidies Program, which provides low-cost ethanol to Goldberg-producing pianists.

DIVISION B–DEALINGS WITH PIANO TECHNICIANS

1) If a pianist complains about a certain problem with a piano and a piano technician pretends to repair it but actually does nothing at all and then the pianist says it’s much better, the technician shall be prohibited from pointing out that he didn’t do anything, but shall instead smile and tell the pianist how perceptive he is, and if found in violation of this rule, shall be condemned to no less than ten (10) years of harpsichord maintenance.

…

DIVISION C–BAD OUTFIT INSURANCE

1) Pianists, like all other citizens, should be insured against the possibility of bad outfit outcomes;

2) This bill distinguishes between bad outfits ”by accident“ and bad outfits ”by choice.“ A government panel, reporting to the Farm Bureau, shall determine in ambiguous cases whether the pianist merely suffered a lapse in judgment, or really should have known better, girlfriend;

3) If a ”pianist“ is known to perspire in any way excessively, either through his or her own recognizance, or by being alerted to odiferousness vis-a-vis interested parties, he or she may not wear any of the following: a) thin or see-through linen tops; b) anything known as mesh or mesh-like; c) any light colored button-down shirts without reasonably protective undergarments, as set forth in Sections 33.3332 and following. Each violation carries the penalty described in the Armpit Awareness Avoidance Act, and penalties shall be multiplied in the case of chamber music performances, dependent upon the proximity of colleagues.

4) To prevent such mishaps, this bill sets forth a public outfit exchange. A pianist may choose from a set of publicly approved ensembles, and for this purpose pays into a pool. Pianists with a history of violations who still insist on selecting their outfits privately shall pay a fine for each subsequent violation, up to five (5) violations; at which point they shall be sentenced to a year of performing all-Krenek recitals in polyester suits in South Dakota.

…

DIVISION D–FACEBOOK QUIZ AND BACKSTAGE SNACK INSURANCE

1) Pianists who request backstage meals and enter their dressing room to find a plate of carrots and celery with ranch dressing shall be permitted to make a nuisance of themselves; henceforth, hurling Ranch dressing shall not be considered a crime within the confines of Performing Arts Centers.

2) Pianists shall be insured against the possibility of bad hotel room service meals, particularly against Midwestern Alfredo Sauce; but also not-entirely-unfrozen Mozzarella Sticks; and any boneless chicken breast which has been grilled more than fifteen (15) minutes. For each incidence of the foregoing, the pianist will be permitted one preposterous head-toss during the course of the concert; or one inappropriate flirtation with a member of the orchestra with which he or she is appearing, whichever comes first.

3) Pianists who post results of the following quizzes on Facebook:

a) What Chopin Etude are you?
b) What Beethoven Sonata are you?
c) What Great Composer are you?

… and any other similarly constituted or equivalent quizzes, as deemed by a representative panel of musicologists and social networking experts, relinquish all rights to all insurance heretofore enumerated.

…

DIVISION E–CAP-AND-TRADE PROVISIONS

1) Modern piano technology has enabled a profusion of piano-related activities that have only grown in intensity as the demand for them increases. Coupled with steady growth of the Standing Ovation Curve, and encouraged by the Piano Competition Incentive, this spiraling crisis threatens to deafen us all;

2) Herein we set forth a goal of a 10% reduction in octave emissions by 2015, to be achieved thus:

a) For each Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2 or 3 which is performed, the pianist must offset his emissions by performing, or purchasing credits for, two (2) Bach Partitas, or three (3) Mozart Sonatas;

b) For each Prokofiev 7th Piano Sonata which is performed, the pianist must offset with no less than three (3) Fauré Nocturnes or Debussy Préludes.

In the case of recital programs with not one, but two or more Russian virtuoso classics, the pianist shall be required not only to offset but in addition to perform community service, such as stroking another pianist’s ego, or listening very carefully to the preconcert talk.

3) It is understood that this exchange might create an unnatural incentive, and spur an explosion of, say, all-Morton Feldman recitals. This problem will be addressed in future legislation, The Froo-Froo Programming Act of 2010.

4) In order to encourage the growth of green pianism, a $2500 tax credit will be given to all pianists who do not play any Russian Concertos during a given season. An additional $500 tax credit will be given for every work performed that ends quietly, except for the Strauss Burleske.

5) Pianists complaining about their life, or complaining about the number of concerts they have, or how busy they are, or in general taking for granted the incredible privilege of daily contact with the most extraordinary music of the last 3 centuries, should be punished in some way to be determined, such as being beaten over the head with an overcooked chicken breast.

I welcome any and all amendments. Serious proposals only.

Outside, nothing but blue sky and hipsters in shorts. The trembling tattooed hand of the barista shapes the milk into beautiful rosettes, which swirl down the drain of my throat. Gimme another, I say, like the weathered movie cowboy at the saloon, I’m thirsty, pounding my demitasse on the faux tile of the espresso bar, and instead of a gun/holster I slide my MacBook into my messenger bag and harrumph off into the blazing sunlight.

Overheated, over-caffeinated, I manufacture outrage. I scream inwardly — thoughtless accents are the enemy of music!! I want to spend my day making up similarly unnecessary manifestos, penning declarative sentences like fortifications that will piss people off. People will come to find me in my castle of This Is True, they’ll knock timorously on my leaden door of Certitude, but in the meanwhile I will have snuck off to a grass hut on the beach, lying half in and out of it, in swim trunks, my feet playing idly with the sand. So long, suckers!

Later that day, on the way to play a concert, I order myself a pizza but am disenchanted by my warm box of dough and cheese. I add a berry gelato to my order, and soon I am driving down I-5, spooning gelato frenetically into my mouth while cursing at traffic. This is not cooling enough; I start rubbing the pint of gelato all over my face and arms; the gelato melts, drips berry color all over me; my concert clothes luckily are in the back seat, looking on reproachfully, with furrowed, wrinkled cuffs. I arrive sticky and nauseous backstage. Excellent.

Hot, vexatious, residually sticky, I sit down at the piano to play:

And already I am happier. I’m amiably asymmetric, ‘cause Brahms wrote my part that way! I play four inviting bars: classical, simple. But when I’m done the violin adds on one little bar, a romantic suffix:

Together the four plus one make something, an interesting five. At the outset of the piece, Brahms keeps repeating this lesson, explaining this particular 4+1=5 over and over again. Almost like Sesame Street lessons in musical arithmetic? Let’s say I’m the Cookie Monster, and the violinist’s interjection is a cookie added to my hoard. I try to play each phrase with the understanding that I crave the next cookie, and–eventually, who knows?–all the cookies in the world.

Whoa, I believe I have just created Cookie Monster Musical Analysis. Schenker, eat your heart out.

There is something about this asymmetry that is flirtatious, too (most affections are asymmetrical). All the elements of the practiced flirt are there. The violinist offers but the one bar each time: a minimum of attention, but just enough to keep the piano interested. The violinist flatteringly repeats back what the piano offered, but with a more sensual, flowing rhythm: a good mixture of stroking the pianist’s ego and suggesting an alternative. This one “extra” bar is not an insertion but a compressed, distilled meaning: not just the tentative beginnings of a dialogue, but a symbol of encounter itself, a parenthetical musical rendezvous.

After the flirting is over, Brahms gives us some Serious Development:

This is a mathematics lesson, without cookies. It’s Terribly Serious; two bars of 3 are presented, then subdivided into 3 bars of 2, as if to actually embody the equation 3×2=2×3! Our delicate flirtation has become loud and square, all too quantifiable. You might complain: oh Johannes, off you go again, with your subdivisions upon subdivisions. We get it, but what’s the point?

Brahms creates this structure in order to dissolve it. One of his most characteristic and moving gestures is to create complications, and then to release and transform these cogitations into sensual delight. The “musical mathematics” do not last long; soon enough, the hemiolas become:

These two bar units are still divided into threes, but more subtly, with a softer hand. The principle of division remains; but the insistence fades. The boundaries waver. There’s a whiff of the waltz. The piano stops enunciating the quarters, and relinquishes them to a flow of eighths. Earlier, in HemiolaLand, Brahms connects his moments with stiff, bulky girders, but now, at the crucial emotional moment of juncture, we have this:

A masterstroke: starting in the fourth bar above, the violin sneaks upward chromatically, all alone. This is a transition made of nearly nothing, the most delicate possible thing, a slender thread of suspended time. A tenuous slide from one note to the next. And the pianist, invited by this gossamer gesture, enters with one of the most beautiful themes ever written, an almost iconic waltz, in which each bar is now divided into 2, though the meter is in 3 …

Within a short span, we watch Brahms convert himself from a Beethovenian Constructor to an Evanescent Waltzer.

Over this second theme, Brahms writes teneramente, tenderly: which is all you need to know? Yes, there’s a sweetness, but each “main note” of this theme is a dissonance, a discord. And each dissonance is slightly different from the last; each a different shade of wistfulness, or of pain. I came offstage with S and we smiled at each other feeling we had shared something; a wonderful moment of musical affinity. But I kept wondering, why is this piece (of all the pieces in the world) so important to me right now? Why is the tenderness of this movement and particularly that theme so important to me amid all the crap, all the travels, and festival madness? A jaded devilish voice inside of me says it’s just Brahms A major sonata, everyone’s played it already, it’s already been done, etc. etc. but another says that that theme still has yet to be played better, that some pianist has not yet pursued all the repercussions and consequences of tenderness hiding in those notes. It’s an inscrutable sweetness, a tenderness that unwinds a knot of contradiction, shows you briefly how the knot is made — and closes it up again.

Back in the car, I find a half-full pint of pinkish liquid, a tepid pizza, and a cell phone with a tender message on it. I press–what else?–redial. A familiar voice answers, flirtatiously.

The main thrust of this dream (so to speak) was clearly a reproach: I need to finish memorizing that monster of a piece before I go off to the delightful Ojai Festival. And the second thrust was another reproach cum regret: that I have not yet mentioned Anne Midgette’s ambitious and wonderfully interactive blog on Think Denk! And welcome, while I’m at it, to Stephen Hough, an idol of mine since a long time. The musicological implications of this dream we shall abandon for the time being.

On one of the many beautiful days we have been given these last two weeks, I went to visit the 90-year-old composer Leon Kirchner, who recently broke his leg. I opened the door of the apartment; perplexed commotion and hubbub ranged through distant hallways. Wandering in the direction of perplexity–my general tendency, anyway–I came to the back room where he was lying. Just before I arrived, he had hit the good leg on something and it had set him bleeding pretty seriously; his legs were propped up on the bed, heavily bandaged.

“Leon,” I said, “you’re a soldier wounded upon the fields of music.”

He fixed me for a moment with his lucid blue eyes. I had no idea what would come out of my idiotic metaphor.

“And you’re Walt Whitman,” he said.

During the stunned pause while I absorbed this, a faint impatient horn from Central Park West was carried up to us on spring breezes. He had taken my stupid conceit and hung meaning upon it. And here I thought I was coming to offer HIM assistance in time of need. From Whitman’s hospital notebooks:

… that night at the church in the woods … previously, the silent stealth march through the woods, at times stumbling over the bodies of dead men in the road … between midnight and 2 o’clock we halted to rest a couple of hours at an opening in the woods — in this opening was a pretty good sized old church used impromptu for a hospital for the wounded of the battles of the day thereabout — with these it was filled, all varieties horrible beyond description — the darkness dimly lit with candles, lamps, torches, moving about, but plenty of darkness & half darkness — the crowds of wounded, bloody and pale, the surgeons operating — the yards outside also filled — they lay some on blankets, on the ground & some on stray planks — the despairing screams & curses of some out their senses, the murky darkness, the gleaming of the torches, the smoke from them too, the doctors operating, the scent of chloroform, the glisten of the steel instruments as the flash of lamps fell upon them … 

Around us the room once bedroom, now impromptu workshop, the corners of the TV tray crammed with CD covers, medical implements, the midday light peering dimly through the drawn curtain, scrawled scores, an electric keyboard with a well-padded chair in disuse, books upon books, typed comments for future editing huddled between those, awaiting their moment, a walker, a Bose CD player stacked with hand-burned copies of past concerts — so many notes and thoughts about notes trying to resolve themselves — the glint off backs of CDs, the question marks on the dates of past performances, the faint snore of the disinterested dog, a life’s wounds bandaged with music and then the music itself becomes the wound.

Yes, I’ve long wanted to be Walt Whitman. A poet of the piano, American, disheveled, ambiguous, over the top, God, Leon knows me so well!, and he nailed me straight onto my deepest (possibly humiliating) desires. Just when you think you’re coming to offer someone else something, they throw a giant bucket of truth onto you.

Before I can really process all this, Leon leaps into one of his amazing branching stories. It’s like a tree of life experience that you huddle under, while the rain of the present moment leaks through.

The guy next to me in Starbucks, while I write these (and other, even more fatuous) words down in my little black notebook, is writing a love song–yet another in the infinite series, the infinity-plus-oneth love song. I can’t resist spying and make out the phrase “thought of letting you go” amid a misshapen stanza in red pen. He looks up, catches me peeping; for a moment our eyes meet across the crusty whorish tabletop; and I just can’t believe it but with a slow opening of his face he sends at me a brotherly smile, construing me in a glance as a fellow poet. (No, I’m just a wigged-out blogger!) It is not the first discombobulating tender smile I have received this spring.

Step one. Suppose you clear away all the happinesses that you distrust? Step two. Clear away all the unhappinesses that you have come to trust. Get rid of them too, don’t count on your miseries or your titillations. What will be left behind? Perhaps, after you’ve cleaned all that out, you might find in the back of your cupboard something like the theme of the Goldberg Variations. A deeply trustable happiness. A tender, discombobulating–but not discombobulated!–smile with just enough sadness and loss in it to be believable, to be endurable.

When I was an idiot (read: teenager) I used to really rock out on the ending of the Goldberg Theme, just the last bar and a half, and really especially I enjoyed dwelling on the last dissonant F-sharp, making it into a little orgasm of delay.

I distinctly remember the snort my teacher emitted when I did this. (Conflating detail and essence!) Now, however, I seem to be more or less the same idiot, since this same cadence still calls to me, speaks to me, but it’s seasoned differently–it’s become part of a larger stew. Now I’d put it this way: Bach invests the cadence itself with tremendous consolatory power. (Notice how my rhetoric shifts from youth to age: from orgasm to consolation.) And this is extraordinary because a cadence is an ordinary, obvious thing–like the period at the end of a sentence, from which you don’t expect much meaning. Part of its function is to be taken for granted.

If “cadence” were a word in the dictionary (OK, it is, but you know what I mean), Bach in the Goldberg Theme has found one of its less-often-used meanings; one of the fun ones; and he locates this meaning with the help of the “words” that he uses to lead into it … through their implications … Bach takes us on a little arching journey before the cadence, making it appear to be the unwinding of a long spool of thread-thought. Now, this journey is a Departure from the Theme Proper. The theme (so far) has been a flowery accumulation of ornaments, dotted rhythms, and sudden fillips: something like a dancer, or at least a harpsichordist trying to be a dancer. But then, newly poised, the theme abandons itself, releases itself to a continuous stream of sixteenth notes:

… and precisely at the climax of that stream, of that moment of release and change, the theme stops. Just at the moment that it suggests continuity–that which might not end–it ends! This paradoxical hinging of the cadence (return) on the back end of the arch (departure) gives a sense of motion and transcendence to the conclusion: it puts wings under earth. The consolation of the necessary made extraordinary. And it is not, of course, just that one time; every variation revisits that element of unwinding, falling back (escaping back, lofting back) into the tonic, rewrites it, refashions it … Every variation! At some point you could just order up some Chinese food, lay back in bed and eat Sesame Chicken and drop bits of gooey rice on your Bärenreiter while you compare just the cadences of all THIRTY variations, notice how delicious they are, fall asleep full and greasy and smiling, and wake up at 3 in the morning in the middle of a dream about MSG. Not that I’ve done that.

In the morning when you wake from your glutamate nightmares you can read all over the webosphere about the various canons in the Goldbergs and analyze them until your eyes water. Go nuts, have fun with that! Each of them is at a different interval, displaying incredible mastery of counterpoint blah blah blah.

Call me crazy, but “incredible mastery of counterpoint” is one of those phrases that just leaves me cold. Let me pursue my own inadequate analogy. Suppose I call friend X, I know when I call him that he will worry about his career; whereas if I call friend Y we will speculate about life on Mars, and make fun of each other; and if I call friend Z it is partly because I am craving her tone of voice, which helps me feel that my apartment is not empty of everyone but myself, my toaster, and my piano. Bach must have felt the intervals were his friends, don’t you think? His best buds. He was closer to understanding them than anyone in history–their possibilities, their limitations, their quirks. Actually, let’s not kid ourselves: It is largely through his understanding of them that we now understand them. And here he is, Bach is explaining to us the circle of his closest friends, introducing us to them … Like a good friend too he is showing us their good sides, but without mythologizing them: they have their “rough spots.” (Knowing the weak spots, the thorny corners of each interval, knowing these deeply, might be one way to define “mastery of counterpoint.”)

Each canon’s a loving portrait, as if Bach is saying “that’s just classic fourth behavior, isn’t it?”, poking you, nudging you, laughing a little bit at the stodginess of the fourth while at the same time loving its dependability for construction, like a Lincoln Log. The Canon at the Second is a great example … Bach lets the second do what it’s naturally inclined to do, to make a chain of expressive dissonances:

… but then, as if to say, OK that’s a bit obvious, that’s the side of the Second we all already know … when he comes round the bend, he sends in some renegade dissonances:

B and B-flat, vying; then C and C#, yow! … all of which as if to reveal some hidden perversity in the interval itself, to show some concealed possible corner of the second’s personality … what the Second does when he’s at home alone, when no one’s watching.

Yes, there is some irreverence in each portrait of each interval, which is as it should be. Love and reverence are not synonymous. I have a great deal of reverence and love for irreverence (also, a great deal of impotent irreverence for love?) In part, the mishmash of reverence and irreverence is what really gets me off about the Goldbergs. Throughout the piece, peeking in often like a child, there’s an impish leaping spirit of virtuosity; meanwhile down below–always, always–you find the same sober flowing bass. The bass which makes perfect sense; above it all sorts of madness, finger-play, coruscation, invention.

If you like, the variations have one desire to drift off course, and another to remain on message. (Hence the theme’s powerful confluence of cadence/wandering.) Enough about Bach, back to me: I’m here, in the wunderschönen Monat Mai, recovering from the April’s onset of spring fever, from emotional wanderings, but still savoring meanings of smiles, wondering about things said outside bars at 4 AM … am I back on course? Or is there still more oil slick in my future? Casting about my notebook for clues, I find a few journal entries: “Practiced Bach hungover. Extreme joy.” The next day: “Much more Bach, finding center, strength in RH, the incredible audacity of the cadenzas … rocking out …” The next day: “Bach d minor cadenza, the reiteration, the insistence, a kind of harmonic mania, moving by destabilizing 5th …” Each day some words that are proper and musicological and some that betray an urge to insanity. And then each day the words run out, I can see where I lose patience with them and yet am inspired by them and run to the piano to play.