I arrived at the perfect moment, almost too late, congratulating myself for my artsy tardiness, and found myself in the front row of a box. As I peered over the edge of the box and (as always) contemplated pre-concert suicide—would my plunge attract more publicity than Yuja Wang’s dress at the Hollywood Bowl?—I suddenly, desperately craved ten minutes to decompress, to come to an understanding with the dark lush carpet, the gilt proscenium, etc. The event felt impending, like a tornado. My neighbors to left and right were friends, people I could be an ass around, but behind me was a charming Japanese woman, an innocent bystander, and I knew in my fluttering spring heart that I dare not, must not ruin the concert for her. The lights dimmed; Mitsuko walked on; with all the theatre of the crammed stage seating and rapturous ovations and extremely low bows, I found myself frozen rather publicly in a scene I had no business being in, like Jennifer Aniston wandering into the Ring Cycle. The first chords came. I tried to sit calmly; but all day Nature had been telling my body to take counsel from the breeze.

42 hours earlier: Brooklyn 1 AM, on a quiet stretch of 5th avenue, South Slope. A bar, of course; some light, not much; my eyes were drawn to a row of retro figurines on an impossibly high shelf, before swerving towards the inevitable chalkboard, listing hipster pub pies. I’m reaching down in the dark beneath my feet for my bag. Everything is falling out. The bag, structureless, my life. As multiple notebooks go flying on the floor and a few receipts and maybe my Kindle I think, yes, this has all happened before and it signifies and it is inescapably comic slash tragic. The soft leather of my bag on the filth of the bar floor is eloquent. At some point after I ordered and consumed the Thai Chicken pie and then coated it with a red slathering of sriracha—the chronology is uncertain, collapsing—certainly after the third gimlet, I was pulling Roland Barthes out of my bag: Fragments of the Discourse of Love. A book X (my companion) knew and loved. I always have urges for Barthes fans. My idea is that they will follow certain pleasures to the end, to the last nook, comma and cranny.

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”

… so says Roland. However, here in Brooklyn, X and I (and X’s dog, I forgot to mention) are having language difficulties; we’re at the end of conversations we’ve had before, in verbal quandaries which keep dead-ending on voids, heavy with “umms,” impasses where the voice is squeezed by the brain’s unwillingness to go on. This is a totally classic, typical X and I moment, this breakdown of communication. Unfortunately I am only able to read the meaning of this non-communication vaguely, and it is surely informed and mistranslated by my wishful thinking, itself conflicted, which is probably crap and all of this infuriatingly, Heisenbergishly impossible to know, because if I break the silence and say do you want to be together or not, our precious vague equilibrium will be destroyed, and the question mark of our relationship will fade away into the sky like a lost balloon. 

So, I respond to the breakdown by reading from a book about breakdowns. I am reading loudly; a disapproving glare radiates from the rest of the bar.  Even through my pie-vodka haze I realize I am flirting via literary theory in Brooklyn, how ridiculous, I disgust myself.

At 2 AM I gaze up at the night sky, steady myself against the distant stars, and think: do they not have clouds in Brooklyn? (I had a belligerent sense of borough inequity) … those bastards, all they have are adorable dogs and cheap bars. It was true. My bill had arrived, for a mere $26, which seemed like it might even be a crime in the city of New York. As I slouched around the back seat of a cab which I must have gotten into at some point, I wondered why Brooklyn seemed vast but I’m always in the same area of it. I thought of dog and X, framed in the street, odd affecting couple, as the cab pulled away. Cabs are always pulling away, it’s such a drag.

Back to the recital. I made it to intermission. This involved following Schubert down all sorts of winding harrowing paths. The harrowing wouldn’t have been so bad, but the winding was really too much. Schubert/Mitsuko would do some ridiculously beautiful assembly of devastating chords, and I would forget everything that the world had ever dumped on or around me, and vice versa, but then S/M would start up some development of said thing and you know how Schubert’s developments are: branching, exhaustive. I wanted things, not iterations of things.

At the break, I let myself be led to the Donor’s Lounge, where you get free treats for having survived thus far. A dubious refuge, this room of clumps and whispers. My friend was sensibly trying to drag me into the normal world with a conversation about grocery stores, after all this was a room set up for conversations, but I was thinking about the room itself. How in this place commentary and critique are concentrated, and yet also forbidden. How you cannot say what you think there, really, for fear of being overheard, but all the thoughts are there, lurking over the tureens of coffee and the cups all arrayed and the catered desserts. Spring was a devil in me, a phrase was born in my mind, and I wanted to scream it to all the whispering crowd: “Think of Schubert in his little room! In his little room!” Did he compose in his apartment? Was it little? Anyway, never mind the facts, I didn’t want to end up like Schubert, in the little room, in an ever-narrowing set of circumstances, writing these ever-larger, rambling works, testing out every set of possibilities as if everything were still possible for him. I wanted to destroy the manicured sweets everywhere. How could you listen to the A major Sonata, and all it entailed, even miserably like I did, and then eat a cookie? But I ate a cookie.

The cheery bells rang for us to return.

50 hours earlier: Sitting at dinner in TriBeCa with an artist I have always wanted to meet. Let’s call her Y. I’m asking roundabout questions, awkwardly dancing around the central, unanswerable one: how did Y become Y? Beautiful coincidence of integrity and fame (not unlike Mitsuko’s). Infuriating how each artist must create a blend/brand of artistry/celebrity/existence their own way, how there is no guided path, except falsely and smugly in retrospect. Y is asking politely, how did I become me; my answers are partial, ridiculous, full of what you might call the idiocy of self-ness. An exchange of stories, but no rapturous communication. But some time later we are back in her apartment. She puts on a record. She begins to dance along with the music; one sort of self vanishes; as I watch her body come into motion, it’s clear: there is where it is, whatever we have to discuss. Instead of talking, we listen to music she admires; we are both, in a sense, struck dumb; we become puppets, on the string of sound coming from speakers on the wall.

As Mitsuko sunk from the gorgeous tonic to the even more spectacular submediant via that unearthly death-trill, I connected X and Y. I should have been thinking about Schubert, perhaps, but who knows what inner deadlines govern the brain? I found a shared meaning between the pulling-out of the Roland Barthes at 2 AM and the turning-on of the stereo: at the point when conversation fails, art comes out. Art’s a tool for emergencies, a replacement, a pacifier. We look at something together and hope the same electricity flows through us both, revives our flagging connection. The combination of these events suggested an unusual definition: art was the failure of human communication.

Perhaps it is impossible for you readers sitting there in your comfortable internet-surfing pajamas to really appreciate the weird difficulties this thought caused me, sitting in the front row of the box thinking I must not move, must not disturb the Japanese woman. But it was terrible/amazing, the way this thought interacted with the present moment. It made me want to lie down on the floor of the box and begin gurgling or whimpering. With the same feeling that you have in a horror movie when you realize the killer is actually the friend you’ve been confiding in the whole time, I realized that this last Schubert Sonata, the very one I was listening to, in the plush prison of the box, was also a form of communication breakdown, a piece about, a piece containing, a piece riddled with these same impasses. Down to the very fact that it was failing to communicate with me, this Spring day, and therefore causing me all kinds of discomfort, so that its beauty made me feel haunted and miserable … (thereby communicating perfectly in its failure) …

With alarming clarity, I was sent back some ten years, to when I was working with 85-year-old Leon Kirchner on his second Violin Duo at Marlboro. The violinist and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to communicate this rambling Mahlerian jazz riff to the public: basic things, like the big tempo relationships, the balance between piano and violin, where to play less and where to build to a climax, how to give a vivid shape that the world at large will perceive. As I recall, Leon was impatient with our questions about these issues. He was obsessed with the articulation of a few fast notes in a few measures in the piano, for instance; he was sure the whole piece would collapse if those few notes did not get “spoken.” Some days he was freakishly sensitive about the timing of one transitional Adagio measure. This would have been fine, perhaps, if his priorities didn’t seem to shift day to day, whereas ours seemed to us (of course) steady and unwavering. Maybe this is just a cliché of cross-generational angst, but sometimes working with the elderly you get these severe communication breakdowns: obsessions with a few key points that have already been said, but which are important to them; and the seeming conflation of detail with essence. As performers, we were torn between thinking of the listener, how to communicate this composer to the world, and thinking of the composer who doesn’t care about the world that much any more.

Mitsuko was rounding the end of the exposition. Instead of the somewhat celebratory increase of energy that often accompanies the arrival on the dominant in the Classical Style (the quintessential example being the virtuosic cadential trill in a Mozart Concerto), you get a pleasant dancing idea which behaves itself up to a point. Then in its second iteration (there are always second iterations ack!), it modulates itself into a quandary. It gets lost, and as the harmonies get lost, the dancing idea stumbles into silence. It keeps stumbling into silences; it creates a new idea that also keeps breaking off into silences, places where the pulse becomes threatened, impossible to perceive; Schubert is not interested in communicating pulse. At the far end of this breakdown come two lonely cadenzas:

Usually the end of a section is a place of fullness, roundness, replete with arrival. Obviously these unharmonized, yearning, falling melodies don’t care about their structural function, which is to show the place where they are. Though they are in the dominant key, i.e. “the right place,” they do everything they can to seem lost.

These weirdnesses in Schubert are not failures of decorum, like the revolutions of Beethoven. These are deliberate failures of communication, slackenings of the narrative, digressions for the sake of digressions; the priorities of the world are not its priorities.

Permit me one more annoying flashback; then I will be done. 78 hours pre-recital, I’m sitting at the farmer’s market (!) with companion Z. Need I mention, a beautiful perfect day, a ridiculous undeserved Spring day. Just the breeze itself would have required odes upon odes. I’m wearing my excellent favorite sunglasses, savoring the unusual experience of just sitting on a park bench, when companion Z turns to me and says “It’s too bad they can’t cure my cancer.” Too bad. It takes me a few moments to do something in my brain, like set the furniture back where it was supposed to be with shaking hands. I’m seized up, cramped by this understated phrase, in the fucking farmer’s market … the same thing as certain thrown-away moments in music, the unassuming phrase trying to hold back something bigger. By us walks one beautiful couple after another, a series of 20-somethings, looking lovely in their sunglasses and brunch outfits and looking a bit bored with all the leisure time stretched in front of them.

Z and I got together again two days later. We had dinner, talked for a long time, and then—I bet you saw this one coming—when the conversation seemed at an end, we ended up in his apartment, listening to recordings. Both silent, both listening. Hofmann playing C minor Nocturne, at Carnegie Hall. What is Chopin saying to the two of us? Too bad, I can’t know exactly. We may both say, that was beautiful; it may be for different reasons. Who knows what is beauty to him, now, incurable?  And for me, still hoping for cures, hoping to be stricken again with stupid incurable love. I rifle through Z’s papers, I feel in my pocket for my phone, I watch the cabs going down Columbus outside, any impatient thing I can get a hold of, I can’t just let this beauty run over me … I need to be it, own it, or something. But looking in Z’s eyes I read a dark communication: beauty is not something that ends, but your ability to experience it ends. And a question: is the immortality of the works you love a comfort?

On top of the terror of becoming a “reviewer,” it was scary and depressing to see the little bio saying “Jeremy Denk is the author of Think Denk.” The word “author” threw me, I guess, like the the word “adult”—when does a blogger become an author? (A pointless question for our time!) Second of all, if an author, I’ve been such a neglectful, slothful one.

But for a sloth, I’ve been slightly busy behind the scenes.

In case you haven’t seen them, I wrote three pieces for NPR Music on the Goldberg Variations:

Why I Hate the Goldbergs
Hannibal Lecter’s Lessons on Bach
This is Your Brain on the Goldbergs

… they were very naughty, especially the first one. Some people in the comments didn’t seem to notice that I really do like the Goldbergs, very much. There is a projected fourth essay which NPR is still waiting for (heh), in which I sum up Bach’s relationship to time, the way variations as a genre are a machine or medium for the understanding of time, the way Beethoven understood this and how he co-opted the Goldberg paradigm in his final triumvirate of Sonatas, how the infinite is always weirdly a theme in pieces about time, with commentary interspersed on why I feel like such a poser shopping at Whole Foods.

This essay has not been completed, may never be completed, due to the dastardly arrival of spring. Spring! Working on Brahms, Ligeti, Liszt, whatever, I just don’t know what to do with my happiness, and I’m composing passionate to do lists that will crumble into dust, and I began a bizarre, rambling piece in my pre-blog Moleskine (a desperate hideout for yearning clauses), a piece about three instances where I met wonderful people and talked with them for hours and then ended up somehow without anything to say but somehow it seemed something burningly had to be said and as a last recourse we ended up listening to recordings, or yelling books at each other at 3 am. This is another Ridiculous Piece I would love to write, now that I’m an “author,” about these three fateful meetings, and in true spring fashion it would mostly be about death, and hopeless incurable things, and things that really cannot be published, not on a family blog.

Now, if you think I’m the sort of person who would run down first thing in the morning and buy nine hundred copies of the New Yorker (and some potato chips) from my local newsstand, you are absolutely correct.

Since the piece is an obsessive and neurotic account of making a recording, it’s interesting to note that I spent some part of Christmas obsessively and neurotically archiving old recordings of myself. I unearthed some provocative memories, ghosts of Denks past. I have updated the “listen” section of my website with a few of these live performances, with plenty of embarrassing warts. For instance, Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives was a very new piece for me when I played it in 2009 …

And I was interested to hear an uneven performance of Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze from 2010,

I will avoid saying what parts I like and hate.

Musicians are torn between the dream of the definitive recording and the dream of the affecting performance, between the paradigms of two different media; I indulge another dream, that I can head off into a space where I’m “just” making music, in context-less paradise. A vacation from occasion and circumstance: not too likely…

The moral is this: we love our content delivery systems more than content.

If you do not believe me, walk into your neighborhood Apple Store. This is an act that used to thrill me a great deal—the heady smell of newly manufactured electronics, the eager acolytes in blue tight-fitting T-shirts. Everything is sterile, clean lines, rows, there is the tiny rectangle of the iPhone, the larger rectangle of the iPad, more rectangles, some standing up some sitting down, all on long rectangle tables which desire not to be seen, to be plain, glistening, polished. Anything resembling content—applications, games, iPhone cases with wacky designs—has been banished to the corner, to the basement. And you can see why, it looks bad. Content is too personal for selling here, it musses the message. A sofa placed there would be stared down by everything else, until it disintegrated out of shame. Its cushioniness is, like content, obsolete. You sense content is obsolete. The Apple Store is the opposite, the nemesis of (say) the English library, filled with dark wood and must and dust and books stacked to the ceiling and leather chairs and a desk with grandfather’s will locked in the bottom drawer. It does slightly amaze me, the consistency of the message here, and particularly the lack of desire to have anything at all ameliorating the severity of the thing, any sign of heritage or aging, and how much we love it as such.

So many happy excited faces walking in, out.

As content delivery devices become more and more important to us, it becomes more and more important that they be sleek, impersonal, industrial slabs. For God’s sake, just consider the original iPod. Now it’s a Chiclet of metal. We’ve been on a long journey from the LP with its huge cover art and from the act of laying the needle gently down on the vinyl, the scratch of contact … to this hard drive encased in polyethylene, clicking through menus, calling up files in a flash. Our wide, fat, tubed TVs have become flat ginormous screens, trying to vanish into the wall, satisfying our urge for bigness while still nodding to a national obsession with youth, slimness. There is a general desire not to have anything particularly distinguishing about the object; the device should be semi-invisible, neutral, like every other object, but somehow also status-laden (size, speed).

Think how desperately the corporate persons must be searching for new ways to sell us content delivery systems, one in every possible size, to fit in every possible nook and cranny of daily life, which at a certain point feels like humanity is eating itself, walling itself in, from the App to the much more boring Application to the operating system, walls of menus, hierarchies of ways of delivering things, ways of encountering things. Paranoiac, I found myself surrounded by menacing content delivery in my own home, phone, Kindle, laptop, desktop, TV … and lastly my eyes rested on the piano.

By now it’s probably sunk in with me that a book’s just a file. Many bleak mornings I have meditated on this. It has nothing to do with the pile of paper I used to call a book. My pile of paper was a sentimental attachment, wasteful, destructive, forest-raping. But don’t you see, in this little war of content versus content delivery … once a book is just a file, once the complete Beethoven Sonatas are just so many megabytes, etc. etc. content is suddenly looking awfully contentless? It vanishes into digital 1 and 0 existence, a great equalizer, river of electrons. With the weird consequence being, that delivery devices are more tangible “things” than the books they hold. No wonder we obsess about them, since the things we used to call things are suddenly files, endlessly electronically vanishing. Our right to them is held in a server somewhere, whereas our computers/Kindles/iPads are ours, we hold them obsessively in our hands, like lovers.

It was an hour’s drive to New Mexico, to my parents’ place, and so I slept the night in the Radisson, oasis astride the parking lot. It had an Italian motif, a Venetian Room (!), a sleep center. I always forget how the dryness envelops everything, changes the feeling of even your eyeballs. The water from the sink gave the hotel coffee packet a wonderfully toxic flavor.

My parents had decided at long last to leave the house I grew up in, and move somewhere with a bit less responsibility, fewer things to take care of. I was faintly jealous. They have a lovely new apartment, but additionally there is a communal dining room, with super comfy wheelie chairs, and rows of high windows–squares of blue sky. I stared at these cloudless squares. Meanwhile, I was getting déjà vu, something about this room and the sense of time unfolding and the little buffet of beverages, the coffee dispensers, the dessert cart with its pie and Jello possibilities.

I’d brought a trusty bottle of habañero hot sauce, and was therefore able to transform the presented cheeseburger pie into something nearly inedible. By the laws of my own idiocy, then, I was forced to guzzle a bladder-busting amount of water. A guy in a scooter tried to beat me to the handicapped restroom, but I showed him.

As I came back from the restroom, the déjà vu vanished into a certainty of recurrence. It was quieter, less frenetic, but I knew where I was-and-wasn’t; the last time I had been here, the here was the dining hall in Dascomb, at Oberlin. A group of regulars at tables, a bit of a buffet, some cliquishness, people coming and going to their rooms. It was like Dorm 2: The Sequel, and if the first one was a manic preparation for an onslaught of life events the sequel is about digesting them.

A piano lurked in the corner of this large dining room, far enough away that I could ignore it mostly. My mother, however, may have let slip at some meal or other that I was a pianist, and after three or so free meals at the dining room, the head honcho of the place came over. “I hear you’re a pianist,” the honcho said. “I guess,” I replied. She looked me over, said the obvious-for-her: “What do you do?” I was mystified. “Well, you’re not a professional pianist any more are you?” and I realized in a flash that at my age she considered music not something to be done any more; music was an indulgence of youth.

As a side note, let me just say that I arrived in town somewhat unexpectedly, and had not packed for a long journey, and so my only pair of shorts on arrival were a pair of gym shorts, which my mom immediately referred to as “Fancy Shorts” which they decidedly were not and which could only mean “really terrible shorts” and so I quickly headed out to Old Navy to pick up some cheap shorts to wear in the New Mexico sunshine, which I wore all week, with the result that I looked like the sort of person who waited until mid-October to buy the cheapest possible on sale shorts at Old Navy and never laundered them.

“Yes, actually,” I said, slightly gritting my teeth, “I am a professional pianist, believe it or not.” She went away.

Later she sent another representative, and really only a person with a coal-black heart could refuse to play. They wanted me to check the piano to see if it was good enough; it was an electric Baldwin masquerading as a baby grand.

For the rest of that week I did not think very much, I’ll confess, of my debut at the Golden Mesa. In fact, I was a bit blasé about the whole thing, I even was practicing and lost track of time, and therefore arrived a bit late for the starting time, which itself had been miscommunicated, so I was nearly a half hour late to begin; there was a silent and large group of waiting people there, arranged in a rough semicircle, possibly disgruntled, and I was still wearing the same shorts believe it or not because in that glorious New Mexico sunshine I could not bear to put on pants.

The first problem is that the piano was not set to be a piano. It emitted trumpet-ish bleats. I tried to explain to the crowd, sweating a bit, that the pianos I usually play on are actually pianos. They did not seem impressed. A blind man named Everett in the front row was the only one who seemed to understand, “You’re a brave man,” he said. The first button I pressed set off a deafening bossa nova. The staff of the facility rushed in to try to help, but I think at last after five minutes of struggling, I was the one who “fixed” it, randomly hitting at buttons that seemed important. Out of the instrument came something sampled from an actual piano somewhere.

As I sat at the bench, a cold terror crept over me. I realized I really had nothing to play for this situation. My mother had strictly forbidden me to play anything too 20th century in exactly the same voice as she would forbid me to stay out past 9 pm when I was fifteen. So, with a song in my heart, I just launched into the Goldberg Variations, planning to stop when someone screamed or … The action of the instrument had an interesting unpredictability, that is, it made a nice soft sound up to a certain degree of pressure, and then suddenly became incredibly loud, with a bit of distortion for good measure. It whispered or grunted. I stayed in the loud dimension, kept adjusting the volume tab on the left, realized I should certainly have done a sound check … I distinctly heard someone say “that piano sounds terrible.” Yes, there was something collegiate about their frankness as well.

After the tenth variation I just stopped. Middling acclaim. I decided the next thing in my repertoire I could try was “The Alcotts” from the “Concord” Sonata. I saw my parents slap their foreheads in the back of the room. It was a disastrous choice, but brief. The imitation piano had no discernible color palette, and the piece therefore made absolutely no sense. It was 5:10ish, dinner wasn’t until 5:30. Twenty empty minutes to fill. What would I do next? The piece I had recorded most recently was Op. 111 of Beethoven, but to play that piece on this piano would be a sin against humanity. I realized whatever I finished with had to be propulsive, impressive, I didn’t want my parents to have to hang their heads in shame in the corridors of their new home.

I launched into the first movement of the “Waldstein.” This was better. The rhythm was a crutch against the piano’s failings. I ripped a page out of my score in the excitement, it drifted off towards the door, hoping to escape I suppose. I heard someone say “he’s so angry.” If I could have drifted out of my own body! Me madly being expressive at this inexpressive electric thing was something of a spectacle, something unusual, a kind of tragicomic masterpiece. But the best humiliation was yet to come. I had deftly timed the work to end promptly in deference to dinner, but the staff did not know this. I was just rounding the corner of the coda, I’d gotten to the moment where Beethoven is tiptoeing on the dominant:

And in perfect balletic correspondence, as if having analyzed the score and understood its most exposed moments, one of the staff tiptoed up to me, whispered in my ear, “Dinner’s in five minutes.” I say whisper, but it was audible in the next county, perhaps even in Albuquerque. There was a murmur of approval in the crowd, “that’s right,” someone said. They didn’t know the piece was just about to end; when I thundered out the final cadence

… it must have seemed as though I tacked it on. I stood up, received a relieved ovation. Another honcho came up, submitted me to the crowd. “We would love to have him again?” he asked with a mixture of hearty enthusiasm and hesitance. The crowd applauded somewhat, there were no audible dissents. But I must have looked at him strangely. He said to me, confidentially, ”We’ll pay you.” I wasn’t offended that they gave me the dinner hook, but the idea that I was holding out for a paycheck … well it hit me the wrong way. Samuel Beckett says “against the charitable gesture there is no defense,” but there is, there is. I had to put extra consolatory hot sauce on my quesadilla. My father’s assessment was on the mark: “I don’t think they’ll lower our rent,” he said, “let’s hope they don’t raise it.” We all laughed.

–

In this account of an ignominious debut I have failed to express the sun-swept week that surrounded it. Friend E was there, she will tell you, there was never one cloud, only light light light, and every morning we stopped at this place BurgerTime where they serve the most perfect breakfast burritos although they unerringly screw up your order, and every morning there were no customers, just us in the car blinking at the sun and the sound of sizzling chorizo behind a screen. Then we would drive around town doing simple errands, raiding grocery stores, evaluating shower curtains, refilling coffee pods, then returning to my parents to play cards or eat or discuss the man in the dining room who loves to rearrange the chairs. For lunch there’s a different burrito place with the magic green chile melting together with shredded beef, and the girl at the counter with that soothing New Mexico accent, both somehow linkable to the way each evening the sunset makes everything purple. We walked around the house I grew up in, surveyed the Christmas trees from my youth, now grown into mammoths; who knows what the new owners will make of these improbable pine trees towering over the cacti? And one day a real treat, driving over the pass to White Sands, lying in the vast whiteness in the vast valley, a story of a lake that used to be but evaporates continuously feeding a vast lake of gypsum; a story made real, of sand that moves and swallows; of the mice with white eyes who live there; we lay on the dunes, light light light, I thought of all our helplessness in the face of the sun and the sand. In the thick of time’s erosion, in the center of its sandblasting workshop, the incredible beauty of things wrapped change in gentleness. The next day, one last visit to BurgerTime. Amazingly, suddenly, there were customers coming out of the woodwork, five cars in the drive-thru alone; E and I looked at each other meaningfully, hopefully, and then laughed; if you take omens from your burritos you have been in New Mexico too long.

Hypocritically however, I just can’ t help gloating what a fantastic, splendiferous week I had playing Mozart with the St. Louis Symphony led by Nic McGegan. I loved it, loved them. They played with such openness and elation: that’s what certain Mozart tuttis are about, don’t you think, a kind of elation, celebrating the appearance or resurgence of the themes? (The pianist finishes a cadential figure, trilling, and the orchestra chimes in: yes yes, all that and more.) A very short and smiley violinist from the orchestra said, “It’s all about the possibilities of C major, what C major means” and she was so right: the thrilling ascending sequences, the crunch of certain intervals, little bumps but a lot of things that are just plain, standing in front of you, in other words no “black keys” of complication.

She and I geeked out about Mozart, blissfully, over a basket of homemade potato chips with a pot of beer and cheddar sauce which my doctor would sincerely prefer I not eat.

In other words, everything would have been perfect if some [expletive] program note author hadn’t started off thus: “K 415 is something of an odd bird, and has suffered abuse from various musicologists [unnamed]” then proceeded to list these anonymous complaints, and then—naturally—compared the work to the more sublime late Mozart. Sometimes that word sublime really bugs me. I swear, if we knew more about Mozart’s complexion, we would compare the sublimity of his zits.

Poor me! From the moment I walk on stage, I have to defend the work from the abuse of the program annotator. The listeners feel from the get-go they are getting a lesser meal, and they have not come to The Symphony to eat McDonalds.

It’s ridiculous and sad and stupid to have to defend a piece of such freshness and beauty. If the PNW (program note writer) had only managed to mention the very first entrance of the piano, for God’s sake. (Excuse me while I go beat my head against the wall.) My theory is that the piano is an instigator. Look at various entrances in classical concertos: there is often something “wrong” about them, something afoot, they come in too soon or too late, they take an awfully long time about something or they rush into things, they’re too simple, too innocent … There’s almost always a wink, a trick, a leap in there somewhere, something teasing, as if the orchestra were a big brother to be slightly mocked.

Maybe you begin to feel the orchestra has been going on too long? The tutti finishes off often a bit pompously, with a fanfare or two. The piano punctures pomposity. The piano’s a thief come to steal boredom.

In 415 the piano-instigation begins right away: with two trills, syncopated, troublemaking against the beat …

Awfully close together, mildly complex to play, a bit hyperactive … twittering “D goes to C, D goes to C” … These compressed, quick trills with their kinetic energy generate a leap up to G:

Marvelous: but what to do with this G on the weak beat? The answer is fairly predictable, gravitational, we fall back down to the C we started with:

Fine. But heads up, here comes the fakeout:

Ha. Which of course is the reversal of the trills. You thought D went to C, well now C goes to D, with a naughty C# in the middle, boldfacing the joke: Mozart is laughing with you, at his silly game of do and re. At this exact moment, the left hand leaps into the situation, leaving its Alberti station … creating a sudden rush of events in the place where the phrase “should” be demurely resolving. Naughtiness filling what should be a polite piece of punctuation.

Even if the PNW can’t bring himself to put into words the infectious mirth of the piano opening, this distilled essence of Mozart, the ONE thing you simply CANNOT neglect to mention about the first movement, the defining oddity, the magic-making curveball, is the SECOND THEME. (Beating my head against the wall again, sorry.) This theme doesn’t appear in the orchestral tutti, for the simple reason that it is not by nature “orchestral”: it belongs to a more intimate realm, it’s an idea for one person, not a mass. And unless you are a heartless person, PNW, you must take notice, somehow give homage to the way this theme gets slightly trapped in E minor, like a fly in the flypaper of melancholy:

… one of Mozart’s most beautifully artless themes. The structure is just 2 + 2 + 4, the simplest symmetrical thing in the world, but the first 2 bar bit drifts into E minor and gets marooned, leaving us to stare at E minor in bars 3 and 4. Then the second half of the theme … simply, beautifully, gradually, in the breadth of its four bars, with an arching melody, wakes us up and out…

Although this theme is in G major, it is “C major-ish” in its lack of concealment; it stares you right in the face; it subjects itself easily to dissection, but thereby loses none of its mystery or power. There’s no elision, there are no hidden joints, no inner voices concealing their subtle workings from us: just these phrases plain as day, doing what they do, the play of E minor against the “real key” … a cloud passing over G major and burning off again.

What’s more, this theme affects the “emotional structure” of the whole exposition …

                1) charm of the opening, wit, laughter
                2) passagework moving us to new key
                3) sudden melancholy, lyricism, bittersweetness
                4) passagework laughing the melancholy off.

Call me a hopeless Romantic, PNW, but I feel that the melancholy of the second theme infects or flavors the laughing surrounding material. I feel you can view the whole exposition at once, in a flash, seeing all the disparate emotions—and from this vantage point it hits you … that the comic material revolves around the seriousness of the second theme, as a center from which it takes profundity and pleasure.

One last thing that the PNW should definitely have mentioned, the single most important thing. As I arrived at the bar with the not so healthy potato chips, a very nice person I know ambushed me: “that last movement, it’s not really Mozart, right?” she said, with savage emphasis on really, as if, come on. I couldn’t help feeling she was emboldened by the PNW to talk this way, to presume to know what’s “really” Mozart. Grr. There I was in my world, where this movement was the most Mozartean thing imaginable, and there was her world across the beer-laden table: where transgression makes it “not Mozart.” The word really kept echoing in my head, unhappily.

She was upset by the Adagios in the last movement, which is the most marvelous weird thing that the PNW didn’t even find time to talk about. The rondo is just bouncing along, rollicking even, when Mozart interrupts these messages (his own messages!) to bring you an emergency announcement. Fermata, sudden slam on of the brakes, silence of suspense. Out of the blue: a lament in C minor, the piano in full diva over a lost love or something or other. Now, it’s patently ridiculous to have a depressive attack in the middle of a frolic; what Mozart is writing, therefore, is a joke tragedy. A giggling lament. It’s just beautiful enough that you might for a moment be seduced by it, drawn into its spell, briefly forget that we are in the rondo.

To write sadness satirically, with a twinkle in your eye, is truly wicked. Naughty Mozart!

This Adagio rings twice, like the postman. Once near the beginning, and again near the end. After this second minor episode Mozart pulls out a double whammy of genius, piling weirdness upon weirdness. Let’s just point out that each and every phrase of the rondo theme ends with a little blip, tag, suffix:

… which of course is quite charming and silly. Out of this silliness comes Mozart’s master stroke: the last time we hear the theme, after this second tragic Adagio, suddenly this suffix multiplies itself, takes over, becomes an obsession, distributes itself through the orchestra, aww hell, let’s let some Brit explain it:

this fragment, tossed between piano and orchestra and multiplied ad infinitum, sails though the whole coda like a flight of fairies in a darkening wood …

Well put, Cuthbert Morton Girdlestone! The blip goes bananas, becomes a murmuring, a continuous laughter, and fragments of the theme echo, ever quieter, ever quieter …

A more beautiful joke could hardly be imagined. After the ridiculous lament comes the most serious, meaningful laughter. So often in the classical composers, the profound thing comes through the deflation of a false profundity, a pomposity punctured …. no not this claptrap, Beethoven says, but if I change one thing about it, slightly alter the proportions, sabotage the usual harmony somehow … there it is. Here too, Mozart directs our attention away from all kinds of normal possible endings, away from the Adagio’s temptations, away from convention itself to the transcendent possibilities of an idiotic suffix. Allowing the laughter to vanish into nothing, Mozart gives the feeling/illusion that it continues forever, eternally. A mirth that overcomes everything—lament, melancholy, fanfare–with its more profound insight, its fleeting permanence. And that, my friends, is really Mozart. Now hand me another potato chip before someone gets hurt.

My Kindle also pities me. Each time I order a new book I can hear it saying “really? really? that’s what you think your life needs right now? … I use the word ‘life’ loosely …” And then I put it to sleep, where it still mocks me, I’m sure, in the sub-ether of gadgetry.

There I was, nerdily paging through the Mozart section of Taruskin’s Text and Act, giggling at its gratuitous insults, when I came across:

For us today, Don Giovanni, say, is not just the opera Mozart and da Ponte knew, bearing only the meanings it had for them and for the audience that greeted it in Prague two centuries ago. Don Giovanni is also something E.T.A. Hoffmann has known and construed, and Kierkegaard, and Charles Rosen, and Peter Sellars. Its meaning for us is mediated by all that has been thought and said about it since opening night, and is therefore incomparably richer than it was in 1787.

A very beautiful, hopeful, interesting, false thing to say. Bewitching fallacies are everywhere. As a foil, how about the famous passage from Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the moment when Murray and the narrator drive past miles of premonitory billboards to the Most Photographed Barn in America:

We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” …

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said.  ”What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns?  We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures.  We can’t get outside the aura.  We’re part of the aura.  We’re here, we’re now.”

Let’s say the barn is Don Giovanni.

For starters, Taruskin’s assertion sets up a really bad binary: richer/poorer. I am surprised he let himself be tempted by it. Is a meaning richer when there’s more of it? Does a work’s meaning automatically increase as we add interpretations to it? The image Taruskin is painting is that “all that has been thought and said” somehow magically gets piled on the work of art: it amasses wisdom, associations, it grows and grows, like certain alien beings in science fiction which draw detritus into themselves, and thereby become ever greater monsters, ever more powerful beings.

Another problem is that Taruskin fails to distinguish between things said about Don Giovanni that are stimulating and interesting, and things that are entombing, distancing, destroying. Actually we need not be black-and-white. There’s a continuous spectrum from stimulating to entombing; perhaps the most middling comments are the most dangerous of all.

There can be destructive interference of meaning, meanings which in their profusion cancel each other out.

I suppose this is a silly example, but I recall taking a course in Mozart’s Operas in Bloomington, Indiana, with an unnamed professor. He began the class by reading to us the New Grove Biography of Mozart in his mellifluous monotone. This took three sessions. It was not mellifluous, by the way, but it was virtuosically inexpressive, and would have been hilariously boring, had it not been 8 am and we all crammed in the fluorescent desks of hell. The smell of this room stays with me, mold, chalk, overhead projector lamp heat, I feel I can almost smell the New Grove Biography of Mozart, as the smell of that room fuses with the monotone of the voice and my fuzzy head and the sense of data, dates, data, data, dusty data floating until it finds its home on a multiple choice exam, there to be guessed at. (To this day I am terrified of Mozart’s biography.) I felt insulted, infantilized even, by this lecture style, and refused to take notes. But my housemate Sasha sitting next to me was furiously scribbling and scribbling. Sometime in the second day, a bit flabbergasted by his diligence, I glanced over to see what the heck was going on. There I read: “Mozart’s goat Nannerl dies; replaced by new goat, also named Nannerl. New Nannerl subsequently writes minuet.” I laughed out loud, abruptly, caught by delicious Mozartean surprise. I destroyed the non-mood of the classroom, caught a withering glare from the professor, but my faith in life was restored. In these pages of falsified facts, in their gleeful irreverence, there was more of Mozart than you could find in the entire New Grove Biography.

And let us not forget (Taruskin, I’m talking to you) that the world is more than reading Kierkegaard, or pondering Sellars productions; there is plenty of cultural noise, not related to the work at hand, that mediates meaning in weird ways. For instance, when I was growing up, there was a commercial—perhaps you know it—in which certain household pets sing a descending four-note figure, not melismatically, but syllabically. Inescapably, this commercial is imprinted on my mind, genetically fused with those four notes, and so every time I play the Franck Sonata, and I come to the last movement with its repeated four note descending figures … at least one of these measures I sing to myself: meow meow meow meow. I just cannot help it! . My interpretation has a certain deranged feline intensity, I cough up hairballs of ecstasy. Sometimes I fantasize that we will be playing along, very seriously, in some dour venue, just another violin recital, when suddenly at that moment thousands of cats will come on stage, fireworks, jazz hands, etc. etc. Classical music is saved!

If you think that entire last paragraph was a silly, gratuitous plug for my upcoming CD of the Franck with Joshua Bell on Sony, you are a cynical perceptive person.

OK, let’s get serious again. Taruskin’s vision omits a central human fact: that we forget (Roland Barthes: “it is precisely because we forget that we read.”) We can add information to our understanding, but old information is always crumbling away. Meaning is not additive; this is true individually and collectively.

Let’s say you go to a talk on Don Giovanni … then you hear a recording of Don Giovanni, but weirdly the performance seems to conflict with what the lecture said. Are you disappointed by the lecture or the performance? Some years later you are listening to Don Giovanni, and you vaguely remember the gist of the lecture, or more likely a line or two, and this vague recollection merges uncomfortably with the new hearing, is this the same piece? Actually your favorite moments of the piece turn out to be the ones you forgot were there; that is, you learned more from surprise than from knowledge.

I once went to a lecture on the A Minor Mozart Sonata by a great musical mind, the thesis of which was “is it permissible to take time at measure X of the first movement?” Seriously: the 45 minute lecture was to diagnose whether a small amount of license could be applied in one measure. One of my favorite measures. My reaction then and now, my perpetually immature instinct, is to take a truly spectacular amount of time there, just because some dude (who is brilliant) tried to tell me I needed permission to do it. Did that lecture add meaning or did that act of hyper-attention (like all the lined-up photographers) limit my ability to see? Does everything that has been said about Mozart contribute to his meaning for us? Or does the profusion of essays and interpretations sometimes lead to nausea, exhaustion, blindness, ennui? Does Taruskin ever think to himself on the morning of a conference, “Oh God if I have to hear Susan McClary explain another modulation in Schubert as a symbol of anal fixation I think I might just kill myself”?

We wouldn’t play this amazing music without craving ever greater understanding, without wanting to delve. But eventually the knowledge clutters up the room; we need a spring cleaning to see the work anew (but with the knowledge still lurking back there somewhere). We dream, so to speak, of a clean room informed by its former filth.

I guess I’m verbosely fleshing out a feeling here, that the process of being in touch with the meaning of an artwork isn’t essentially additive, or cumulative. It is something more beautiful and maddening, more a kind of ebb and flow, an adding on and sloughing off, like a snake, or a butterfly. You keep trying to return to that state where you “see” …. You add on layers, layers, like a cocoon, but then suddenly one day you scratch at one spot (perhaps that piece of information no longer seems important, relevant) and that spot widens, because you see the work more clearly now that you have begun to clear away the cocoon… gradually you are naked again, vulnerable, alive. Your skin feels raw. The work feels new. The work means something to you again; at one level you have forgotten everything you learned.

Let’s be fair to Taruskin. His larger point: it’s dubious to try to get to the “original” meaning of Don Giovanni, it’s impossible for starters, but also we would lose all the wonderful thinking that’s been done about the piece since then! Maybe it would be a shame to lose all that thought, but doesn’t he see why one would want to? I’d draw a connection between the desire to recreate the “original sense” of Don Giovanni and the desire to hear it as you heard it the very first time: both Fantasies of Fresh Ears. Moreover … If you think about it, shocks in Don Giovanni, shocks in Beethoven, the continuous switching of dynamics, mood, texture of the classical style: don’t these seem like ways to get the listener to listen newly, to build chained moments of reborn attention into the musical fabric? The music we have entombed, enshrined so profoundly is also the music that begs us to hear it the most freshly.

To balance all my unfairly negative examples of musical talks, I’d like to recall a wonderful lecture given by Michael Oehlbaum at Marlboro, on the last three Beethoven Sonatas. The thing is I remember very little of it. I remember he said, or more like chanted, “Beethoven again visits one of his trenchant anomalies upon the world!!!” He raised a foreboding finger like Moses on the mountaintop. And I laughed, yes, I thought, trenchant anomaly!, thunderbolt of weirdness, everything goes funny for a moment, then you’re back on the road, but something crucial has shifted, you’re not sure what. That is what Beethoven can be like, that is how he mirrors common experience and at the same time creates his own surreal world. The other thing I remember was Oehlbaum’s explanation of the theme of the last movement of Op. 109: “it’s as if Beethoven looks at you very seriously, earnestly in the face and says, the Tonic goes to the Dominant.” Then he played the gorgeous theme, saying dryly over it “one goes to five” each two bars, and it was oddly funny but so beautiful too, this theme which appears kaleidoscopic is at heart a repeated harmonic cliché. It’s astonishing (almost disturbing) how Beethoven hid a seesaw behind such ravishing beauty.

This insight is contagious; I use it (plagiarist that I am) at masterclasses everywhere, and the students always sprout a smile of surprise and pleasure—not bad for music theory!

I was so delighted and inspired by this talk that I didn’t expect David Soyer to throw cold cynical water on it. Oehlbaum was demonstrating subtle motivic connections between the “anomalies” of the last three Sonatas, and Soyer, who sang with such tenderness in rehearsals, said quite roughly “Couldn’t it all just be a coincidence, I mean, do you really think the composer meant all that crap?“ (He may not have said crap, but boy he meant it.) There was an undercurrent in the room of agreement. It seemed sad to me, this guy had travelled all the way up from New Jersey just to share his insights, and there it was, his insights were resented. I wanted to blame a certain Curtis mindset. But later I felt the impulse for his outburst wasn’t resentment, but a parental protectiveness, a fear that music is throttled by endless consideration.

I don’t believe this; I don’t think thought and music are enemies, obviously … but they are complicated friends. We can only keep Don Giovanni alive by playing it, thinking about it, writing about it, talking about it. But in a sense we also keep burying it under our interpretations, and we have to keep digging it out again. It never stops.

—

Morning after four days of recording. Awoke intensely dazed in the guest room of E’s house. Pleasantly dazed, relieved. (If only I could apply this relief after the task to the task itself.) Sleep caked in eyes. In boxers and T-shirt I wandered out to the living room, waking up two dachshunds and E. The dachshunds ran about abruptly delighted by the morning and I schlumped to the kitchen island. E walked the dogs. She began frying bacon. She does not need to ask me how I like my eggs. Burnt smell of toast. The recording finished, a great project off my mind. A plate arrived in front of me, munch munch. No, no hot sauce. Barefoot, gripping coffee, I padded out to the deck without saying anything and sat looking at the trees. I’d brought with me Nabokov’s short stories, without really thinking about it, for no reason, and read:

At some distance, Schramm, poking into the air with the leader’s alpenstock, was calling the attention of the excursionists to something or other; they had settled themselves around on the grass in poses seen in amateur snapshots, while the leader sat on a stump, his behind to the lake, and was having a snack. Quietly, concealing himself in his own shadow, Vasiliy followed the shore, and came to a kind of inn. A dog still quite young greeted him; it crept on its belly, its jaws laughing, its tail fervently beating the ground …

The room itself had nothing remarkable about it. On the contrary, it was a most ordinary room, with a red floor, daises daubed on the white walls, and a small mirror half filled with the yellow infusion of the reflected flowers—but from the window one could clearly see the lake with its cloud and its castle, in a motionless and perfect correlation of happiness. Without reasoning, without considering, only entirely surrendering to an attraction the truth of which consisted in its own strength, a strength which he had never experienced before, Vasiliy in one radiant second realized that here in this little room with that view, beautiful to the verge of tears, life would at last be what he had always wished it to be. What exactly it would be like, what would take place here, that of course he did not know …

I’ve read a ton of Nabokov. How could he surprise me? But I was ambushed by this sincerity, by cynical knowledgeable Nabokov resting hope in this simple room and its view, refuge from the cynical world. (The others are photographing, but only Vasiliy is seeing). I shivered with admiration for this beautiful writing, I was darkly jealous of his genius, but simultaneously, I was in love with him (again, anew).

Meanwhile: breeze, waving trees, morning without agenda. The paper page present, tactile. I wiggled my toes happily. I burped bacon. I held on to the moment, I inhaled, I tried to become a sponge for experience, I didn’t know how long this magical newness would last.

In the hall we used to use, you’d play, well or poorly, you’d push through a pair of double doors and then you were out … there was a gravel stairway going down away, some grass, and some very tall pine trees. I’ll admit the highway was right there behind the stand of trees, but its rustling could have been a river. If you wanted it to be. And behind the tall pines, pining off towards the north, the sky with the sun slowly leaving it. You could stand there, and there was distance, which made things beautiful, even highway access roads, and staring off after each concert you had a kind of feeling of leave-taking. I remember once standing there after playing Beethoven Op. 70 #2 and someone came up and said something nice about it, and really one of the things I want most in the world is to play a beautiful Op. 70 #2, and I stood there watching the sky and pines with love which is hard to come by. A peevish, urgent nostalgia is for me the essential feeling of Seattle.

Back to parking. Although the party house was in an area I parked in every day to get my coffee, somehow at night this seemed impossible. Crammed cars, driveways, mysteriously painted curb … The directions said balloons on the gate but I saw no balloons on any gates. On either side, shadowy walkers, a mix of hipsters and concert attendees. Which would guide me? Finally E came out of nowhere, saying dude, park over there somewhere, a ways.

Walking from the distant parking space the street seemed darker, more tree-overhung, a truly strange lane, and I felt a bit unsorted perhaps because of the fat burner supplement I’d added to my smoothie in the gym earlier.

So that when I was silhouetted in the doorway, walking into the welcoming light, I was unprepared for onslaught. Just there on the threshold I asked “is this the place”? and they said yes. Still no balloons, don’t know why I was obsessed with the balloons. I stared at their nametags for reference.

“You know what really stands out about you?”

I paused my entering process to smile. As a performer I feel utterly inadequate at receiving the compliment and I just spew thank you thank you until I feel like an idiot, no matter how much I am showered with kindness.

“Your wonderful explanations,” she continued, “everyone talks about them.”

My smile became imperceptibly more plastered on. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.” And she went on about how informative they were, how helpful, how etc. The other lady then joined in. “You know what I else I love? …” she paused I think, “your facial expressions, they are so wonderful, so expressive.”

At some point I realized they had been complimenting me for two or three whole minutes without in any way whatsoever addressing my actual piano playing. It was a virtuoso performance. And let me say how nice they were/are and absolutely I am sure they had no intention of being rude, rather the total opposite, this was all completely unintentional or even pan-intentional but therefore perhaps even more deadly. At least in my current state, which had something to do with a smoothie and perhaps a bit to do with the Manhattans I had drunk the night before.

“Thank you so much,” I said. “Meanwhile, I’m just starving, just really need some food.” This was the natural, polite exit strategy from the conversation and one they and I both wished for, I had the feeling, and it fit hilariously into the stereotype of the Hungry Musician, so they pointed me with smiles to the right, to the dining room.

I smiled. Then I went straight to the left, and stood around by myself, averting my eyes from them though they were a mere ten feet away. I swear I did this. I didn’t do it to be rude either, although in retrospect it seems like one of the transparently rudest things I have ever ever done. Can I apologize now? It was because of the supplement. I caught my breath a little, loosened the smiling muscles from their rigor. But soon a man came up to me, a jolly man, he said “you know that talk you gave about Ives?”

He was referring to a quip-filled intro I’d done ten years ago. It was to explain the idea behind the Ives Piano Trio and for some reason it ended up on the compilation highlights CD of the Seattle Chamber Music Festival and it came up a lot. Honestly, I was delighted that it was loved, on the other hand, it represented a Glory Moment of Wit that I could never recapture. (Peevish nostalgia, yo.) “Yes of course I do,” I said, smile muscles back in their grooves. These days when I smile a small wrinkle appears below one eye.

“That was a great talk.”

“I’m so glad” (variation on thank you). I really was glad, I was proud of that talk, I’ll admit it.

“I bet you I could do that talk from memory right now.”

Wow, that was a lot. “Haha, Good Lord,” I said, and was continuing, “that’s impress …”

But he cut me off. “I never listen to the piece, but I listen to the talk over and over and over.”

Smack, whap, the death blow. Magnificent! One had to admire how he wound up to the (completely unintentional?) slam. The entire PURPOSE of the talk had been to suggest or encourage a love or affection for the piece to follow, but for reasons unknown, karmic reasons, the thing had backfired, boomeranged, misfired, I’d been too clever by half, and now the talk had become more important than the piece itself, and this also became an insult to poor innocent Ives, whose Trio is still the best, most interesting, sincere and wacky piano trio yet written by an American, in my humble opinion. As I smiled like an airport Starbucks employee with their manager over their shoulder, I thought I will never explain anything ever again.

“Well, I’m so glad you enjoyed it.” I stumbled away, took a dumpling from a tray for no reason of hunger. I was bleeding. These people here at this party were the Paganinis of the wounding compliment. Actually (I reflected) it had even started earlier when I’d wandered out to the lobby at intermission. The new maestro was there in the lobby, and since we had worked together the summer before, he gave me a lovely hug which felt a very sincere greeting, a musician’s greeting to a musician. I was reading too much into it, surely, but it was very nice. Also very nice of him to come to the concert, it made me feel immediately like apologizing for clearly not totally being at my best, though I wasn’t going to mention the smoothie. He was introducing me to his wife, when another regular concertgoer of SCMF rather blatantly interrupted.

“Did you say,” he paused, “you were going to record those last pieces you played?” He was referring to the Ligeti Etudes which I attempted to play from memory for the first time earlier that evening.

“Yes,” I said, forced to choose between totally ignoring this new person and rudely interrupting my existing conversation, and choosing wrongly.

He looked confused for a moment. I had an escape opportunity, which I failed to take. He continued: “Is there … a … a market for something like that?” Yes, market was the epicenter of his sentence, the essence of what he had to say. Here at a f&*#ing classical music concert! In the lobby surrounded by all the plaques with all the names of all the people who gave their money on faith and out of love to keep this thing barely afloat. I think I did pretty well considering. “Well, we’ll find out!” I said, jokey, smiley, just letting it all be funny, how financially disastrous it all is, how absurd.

The maestro was no fool, he made his escape, threw me a see you later gesture. My guy looked at me another three seconds, stupefied. Then a bit slowly, “You’re saying … there’s a market for that sort of thing?” As if I hadn’t suffered enough, smiled bravely enough, turning it into a joke, no, he wanted me to really let that lack of marketability sink in, let the poison of un-profit seep through my veins. “If you say so” he eventually said. He wanted me to acknowledge it, how ridiculous that anyone would ever, ever want to listen to that music, ever smack down cash or plastic for something so profoundly impossible, silly, like … It struck me later how he translated his distaste for Ligeti (whose name he did not think worth remembering) into monetary terms, the thoughts of an accountant, and he actually interrupted me to do this.

Back to the party.

I don’t really need to eat after concerts, since I eat rapaciously—even disgustingly—before each and every performance, but there I was on the patio, chewing kale salad. Often the food at these things is so beautiful, I think of all the loving effort put into it, I feel sorry for it just sitting there. This transitions seamlessly into wondering how delicious it might be. In short, a combination of pity and gluttony makes me eat.

As you can imagine, I had some despair on the patio as I ate my unnecessary food, despair of the purpose of saying anything. I was repulsed by my expressive expressions and my helpful explanations. I realized I was terrified of my audience, not when I was playing for them, but immediately afterwards, that they would destroy my bubble, show me it was made of self-delusion.

Everyone was chatting, chairs were moved, drinks were fetched, and in the middle of all these party noises, all the logistics, the scraping of the chairs on the flagstones, I was visited by memories of pre-concert details: ironing my shirt, making sure I had food in place, looking for cufflinks which I didn’t need, worrying where my music was, fretting if my clothes satisfied the new dress code, remembering a fingering I had forgotten …. A silly meaningless mantra started up inside me: this is not a dinner, but a din, this is not a dinner but a din. The din was anything, surface noise, insecurity, the continuous scratchy distraction, the sip of chardonnay, the fake smile, that made it impossible to be back in the lamplit room with piano in fantasyland … door closed, cup of coffee on shelf nearby, just you and the voiceleading, you and two stubbornly meaningful notes which don’t want to give up their meaning to just any old way of playing them.

On the patio, I wished myself away to a place in the Brahms Clarinet Trio, which is not a place and has no patio.

Let’s go there, you and I, to the 3rd movement, where Brahms, after all the Beethovenian Bother, after all the years and years of working out motives and teasing out abstruse musical thoughts, seems to admit without regret that there’s nothing better or purer than a waltz. It’s all there, the easy phrases, flowing one to the other, sighing, growing/blossoming like flowers.

What can you say about that? Brahms says.

Having written a delicious charming wistful waltz would seem to be self-evident. But here, in the coda, we’ve waltzed, we’ve ländlered, we’ve danced through time, and now—Brahms says—this is what I have to say about waltzing, this is what I’ve learned and actually there is only a short time to say it now, because the end of the movement (or death or night) is coming and there won’t be time to say anything anymore. Compressing or compressed—it’s hard to know which, either confined by the pressure of having to say before it’s too late or simply because what he has to say is by its very nature distilled—Brahms utters this last best thing.

He slows the tempo down. The slowing seems to mean listen closely. These notes (he says) are not going to be easy, simple, they will not flow in easy threes like the others, but they have something to say about the others too.

And then he folds everything in an embrace. He heads out to the edges of the keyboard, hugging all possible other pitches between widespread hands. For a moment the embrace is major-ish, (D-F#-A-C#), but only for those couple bars, paradise bars that can’t last, then F-sharp becomes F-natural, world of difference, and the beneficent embrace becomes tinged with sadness, like a wave of sadness, and then, the sadness having broken the embrace, we come slowly down the scale, A, G#, F#, E, D, C#, down the sixth (quintessential waltz-interval, summing everything up while bidding it farewell), each note to be played as the one you never want to leave behind. You can’t do better to express in musical notes how a person reluctantly leaves a hug, having not quite accepted departure and distance.

There are some days (bad days) when all I see in this passage is a peaceful wistful wind-down. On good days, every note is charged with tremendous unspoken unspeakable meaning. I know I said I wouldn’t ever explain anything again, but here I am, what the hell, I can’t help talking about this stuff, like I can’t help eating after the concert. It’s like a belch after a good meal, gases released by aesthetic digestion, it relieves some of the pressure of the greatness of the thing. Sometimes music also explains itself, comments on itself, turns in on itself, as if itself were not quite enough. Why does this waltz not just vanish into simple thin air like so many, into charm? Brahms is not just ending, he’s revealing meanings: the waltz is not just a dance but also an icon, an instrument of memory and desire. Dances end, but their memories, the rustle of a dress or the glance … Each detail of this coda tells. In his embrace of all the registers, you get the sense of trying to gather something together (memories? thoughts? affection?), desiring to hold it all impossibly, in the slowing tempo you get this reluctance to let go, in the harmony, the beautiful seventh chords, you get the sensuality, seductiveness of the waltz, and with the mid-course shift from major to minor, the happiness immediately shot through with sadness, the double edge. Brahms says it all about the waltz, right there, before it’s too late, because it’s too late.

I would give you an audio example from our recent performance but an audience member with an excellent ear for the most profoundly fragile musical moments decided to cough through most of this section.

Damn. Reading all this back, I really seem like even more of a jerk than usual, it would seem I’m picking on the audience, lamenting its very existence, which is not at all the idea, the opposite of the idea (please note, blog commenters, everyone: this is NOT THE POINT.) No. I apologize for this terrible impression. I had a rough post-concert party. Chit-chat can be deadlier than you think after a smoothie and Ligeti. In fact, I forgot to mention one thing. Just as I pushed the door open to the lobby at intermission, standing there in the crush against the door with her cane waiting but not knowing whether I would come out or not (I almost didn’t), there was a woman there who has been coming to these concerts for a decade. The woman is in her eighties, maybe nineties, she went to Oberlin. (Go Oberlin!) She can barely get around, she doesn’t live in Seattle, she lives on one of those islands in the Sound, she has to catch a ferry, it’s like a couple hours trip for her to get to the concert, but she always comes to hear me for one concert, and because it’s so difficult, it’s always maybe the very last time. It’s impossible to know from our brief meetings, it’s likely self-delusion, but I’d like to think for her it’s all about the music, her smile is fantastic through the wrinkles, rippling through the wrinkles in a way that seems to be very musical. My old teacher, who had the most incredible, marvelous, subtle wrinkly smiles at certain moments in Mozart, said you should think while performing as if you were playing for the composer. But the composer is dead, most of the time. Sometimes I think it would be best to think of playing for this woman, or another friend, who knows and forgives everything.

It’s not often that Ives and Rossini share a clause. Now, I could splooge a bunch of ironic verbiage at you to explain how I felt, but I think this artist’s conception will suffice:

The night before I stumbled on this post, weird coincidence! I’d been stumbling down 9th avenue with friend M, in the warm aftermath of a perfect Manhattan. I remember the moment, my brain must have flagged it for some reason, the setting was not ideal, busy sidewalk, a clump of fratboys in front of a dive bar, one of them belched hideously, a hoarse sorority girl cackle escaped from the bar’s french doors, sailed into traffic. I fought screech and belch to let free something hours of humorless practicing had cooped up in me: how incredibly central humor is to Beethoven …

Around 1802 or so (I’m no biographer, look it up) Beethoven said to Czerny: “I am now going to take a new path.” I think this is a relatively important moment in Western Classical Music History, to be filed along with Bach saying to his wife one day “I’m just going to keep writing the same ridiculously incredible music I’ve been writing my whole life” and Stravinsky’s “I am now going to begin composing Neoclassical Music, which very few people will prefer to my early Russian Music, damn it, where’s my vodka.”

Beethoven says “I’m taking a new path.” The very next group of Sonatas he writes is Op. 31. Mr. Tom Service, just take a good listen to the first page of Op. 31 #1:

(click for score)

… the work of a jokester, first and foremost. Also, Beethoven like a child just cannot get enough of his joke, he’s obsessed with it, in fact the gag utterly depends on its insistence, i.e. it’s not just that the right and left hands can’t quite play together, but that they keep not being able to play together until, at last, after perverse amounts of anticipation, they decide to rush up and down the keyboard in an addled, maniacal unison. (How’s that for together?!?) Left and right hands are cast as characters in a slapstick routine. By the second theme, Beethoven’s left funny in the dust, he’s speeding on past silly …

… obviously, you don’t need words or images to be funny. Case closed? My point is not that Mr. Service is wrong, but that he’s SO wonderfully irritatingly wrong that there’s a shiver of pleasure and recognition when you turn his whole proposition inside out. As my key witness (there are millions of others!) I’d like to interrogate the opening movement of Op. 31 #3.

This sonata (the third “new way” sonata) begins with this unusual idea:

Much has been made of this beginning, for good reason. The harmony for instance! Beethoven starts off on a chord which would normally be considered too unsettled (strange to launch your vehicle from quicksand.) It is an audacious 7th-chord, but not an dramatic diminished-7th-chord, no, rather a lovely 7th-chord with a softer edge (“kinder, gentler”). The melody is lovely too: it begins with an impulse and releases to the weak beat (what we sexist-ly call a “feminine ending”), falling down a fifth in the process. These little attributes add up, they’ve been puzzled over pleasurably by generations of pianists, and without fail in masterclasses on this piece the teacher ends up begging the student to play more questioningly, more flirtatiously, more teasingly–it’s never enough, no matter how hard you try. By all accounts Beethoven was not a great real-life flirter but somehow such is life and art he wrote one of the great vexatious/flirtatious beginnings of all time.

What happens next?

Beethoven makes this chord denser, lower, deeper. He changes the soft-edged 7th into a menacing diminished-7th chord. Suddenly the music is transformed, nearly growling, we are in a radically different mood from the one the opening bars promised—ominous, dense, portentous. Beethoven instructs us to slow down, confirming that things are getting “more serious” (weightier) …

Maybe you also find it peculiar that Beethoven would start all flirty and then get immediately all ponderous and significant, before we even have a chance to settle in. [Possible theory for Beethoven’s lack of romantic success? ed.]

The delicious thing is it’s all a set-up. He’s promising, suggesting, preparing, and then finishes the phrase with …

… a throwaway cadence. Gravitas gone, like a popped balloon. Note that all the music up to this point has been unique, distinctive, stuff only Beethoven could write, but this cadence which wraps up the phrase is nothing, generic, anonymous, it’s stuff anybody could write. I get this image of someone crumpling up all the ideas of the phrase, throwing them over his shoulder with a smile, saying “that’s that.” The timing of musical events bears a suspicious resemblance to what we might call “comic timing,” the impulse of a great joke-teller to wind up expectation, to mislead, and then all at once, in a flash, release the punchline.

What you have is a phrase made of three different things

But it’s clear that C calls back to A, in that they both belong in the world of opera buffa—let’s say, the light and laughing. Whereas B’s clearly the stick in the mud. And so you see, structurally, the thing, the generative phrase of the work, depends upon and is built upon this wavering of serious and unserious, the heavy and the light: the serious encased, framed (mocked?) within the comic. This opposition is essential to its meaning, is actually its whole reason-for-being.

Enough of the first phrase, let’s move on. Beethoven repeats, reworks, adds cheeky grace notes etc. etc.

Presently it’s time for all this fun to end, to get down to business, to transition to the dominant key—that’s what all sonatas do don’t they? Beethoven seems to have this dutifulness in mind, a sense of the going-through-the-motions-always-modulating-to-the-dominant thing, because he rolls up his sleeves and commences his transition in a patently prosaic way:

If you take just this passage out of context, it surely doesn’t scream Beethoven. It’s more the work of some boring 1760-something composer, the kind of composer whose symphony #938 you tend to hear in the morning on public radio: niche-filling tonal twaddle. I love it when Beethoven “pretends” to be mediocre. There is actually a lot of roleplaying in Beethoven, in his variations, especially: he pretends to be an oaf or a peasant or professorial Bach or bewigged Mozart, graceful or gruff, any number of adopted voices which wittily weave in and out.

This Boring Traditional Transition is going according to plan, it’s headed for the usual harmonic suspects (dominant of the dominant) and could easily be wrapped up … when we hit a wrong turn:

… haha, brilliant Beethoven stops mediocre Beethoven in his tracks. No time to laugh though, it’s too breathtakingly beautiful, this vision of the opening motive in the minor key, which we could never have suspected. The next measures (plaintive, melancholy, searching) in which Beethoven develops the B idea from the opening are crucial; the narrative which had been so jokey suddenly broadens, deepens. We’re astoundingly far from the dopey transition we began: Beethoven loves to juxtapose incompatibles, the prosaic and profound.

The beauty of these bars functions: it creates a temporary spell, a bubble of seriousness. Now, for a joke to work, some part of it has to be “taken seriously.” That’s why many jokes are in 3s, with the premise set by two normal instances, which go as you expect (predictable, interchangeable, logical) and the third of course being the twist. Listening seriously and literally is an important phase in the process of being shocked, amused, disrupted. These bars, while seducing us, are manipulating us into being serious listeners. With this plaintive augmented 6th chord…

… Beethoven clearly implies an upcoming “feminine” cadence, a gentle entry to the new key and theme very much in the melancholic preceding mood. However:

Notice Beethoven keeps up the dastardly disingenuous illusion till the last possible moment—even the downbeat of the offending bar is still piano—till wham! he thwacks out all those Fs, forte, hacking his way down to the guttural lowest register of the piano. The Beethovenian fox is in the Classical henhouse.

A transition is supposed to lead to, to smooth over changing harmonies, to prepare the way … But here all these notions–the normal definitions of transition–are mocked, trampled on. At the very moment I type this, sitting outside a cafe in Teton Village, looking up at the blissful morning mountains, a large dog has escaped from its owner (whose voice is heard tiredly scolding in the distance), and the dog has decided to squat poetically on top of the most innocent clump of daisies in the nearby perfectly manicured flowerbed. He is letting loose a wonderful dump on those daisies let me tell you, ignoring all the grass, the acres of other possibilities, the whole Grand Teton park for God’s sake, just to dump on those particular daisies. And I’m not saying that’s exactly what Beethoven is doing here, but it does seem a bit of a fateful coincidence.

The wry look of the elderly man at the next table is priceless, inscrutable.

Even if you heard every moment of this sonata more seriously than I have described up to this point, even if you’re perched in reverential bliss at the foot of Great Beethoven, at this moment you surely MUST realize that he’s playing you. He’s a trickster, an unreliable narrator, willing to whip out the rug out from under you, scheming behind your back how to mislead you next. This fascinating willingness even to disrespect his own beautiful inspirations, to destroy moods he has carefully created: a neglected ingredient of Beethoven’s Greatness.

After these loud F’s, we get barely a moment, a blip, a mere eighth note rest, and into the breach quietly sails the jovial second theme.

Just to make sure we’re all on the same bewildered page, let’s have a quick recap of this “transition”:

quiet (sad) … thwack! thwack! thwack! … quiet (happy)

I’d propose, as analogy for this passage, another bit of slapstick: a man is walking along, he suddenly trips on a banana peel, falls, terrific crash as lamps and vases etc. are destroyed, there is a blip/moment of him behind the sofa or screen or whatever, but the next moment he is up again–pretending as if nothing has happened. The comedy is not so much the fall or the invisible clatter, but his rapid attempt at dignity immediately afterwards. Beethoven’s second theme appears instantly, with its Alberti bass, “as if” there had been a perfectly civilized transition, which there has not: this transition is comedy gold, pure irreverence. (Better than Tom Lehrer let me tell you.)

OK, one last thing I want to point out. This second theme is theming along, one phrase two phrase, in high spirits. It rounds off harmonically and then a bit of piano passagework begins:

Obviously, any piano sonata worth its salt must have some virtuoso passagework. Take a close look at that first bar … There are a delicious, irrational 17 notes in the second two beats of the bar … (“normally” there would be eight) … This often causes pianist mishaps, and provokes amusing student consternation. (How the hell do you fit them all in?) Theoretically, one job of the composer is to at least make sure the number of notes in the measure add up, particularly in passagework. Otherwise, anarchy: scales landing on the wrong harmony, flying every which way. But there is a sense here that Beethoven is making fun of this convention, flaunting it shamelessly … or could he be depicting the moment when the pianist “takes a wrong turn” in a passage and has to add an amazing number of notes to catch up? (Not that I’ve ever done that.)

This passage is the Energizer bunny, it goes on, and on, and on:

… it keeps curving up and down, swerving, naturally you begin to wonder: where could all this passage be leading, all this unprecedented scale-work be taking us? It must be something big. But when we get to the end of it, we have …

… the same old theme. The whole damned passage was unnecessary, a pointless curlicue, like an uneaten Cheez Puff. Don’t you feel Beethoven laughing at you, or laughing at his own joke, hoping you’ll laugh with him? (Visions of Joyce in his room alone, laughing hysterically while writing Finnegans Wake). Beethoven has visited upon us a pointless diversion, that is, pointless unless you find it amusing.

Have I made my point? Jokes are not accidental, occasional effects in this Sonata; this is not a serious piece with jokes in it, like those annoying “gag lines” that people scatter into their boring speeches. Humor is structural, form-defining, essential; the whole edifice is laughing, laughing at its core. The crucial junctures are often irreverent, the construction of the main idea is a masterpiece of comic timing, etc. etc. This is of course by no means to trivialize the piece, but to come to grips with it, with its gleeful transgressions, its badboy impulses, its joy set loose. And this is what I was trying to express after my Manhattan: the centrality of humor to this language of High Classical, to Mozart Haydn Beethoven, humor as an essential catalyst, a carrier of profundity.

—

The other day I was at a friend’s house recital and the first piece was the slow movement of the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata. There was a guy sitting in the front row with a particular sort of rapturous look on his face. The rapture was deserved, the performance was beautiful, but his slightly glazed, cultish look … it made me a bit queasy.

It got me thinking. Rachmaninoff will not generally whip the rug out from under you, he’s not an unreliable narrator. An emotion for him is something to “groove on,” something to obsess over, to let flourish. When he has a contrasting emotion, it is usually safely confined to a contrasting section: the form, the structure insulates us against emotional disruption (please note: the absolute opposite of above Beethoven example). He is trying to hold you, womb-like, in the spell of an emotion, to keep you embalmed. From the beginning of each section you can feel the gravitational pull of the climax, the place where that emotion will peak. He will build you up bit by bit, then wind down post-coitally, gradually, scattering embers of afterglow.

The first movement of Beethoven Op. 31#3 has no climax, doesn’t want one or need one. Many (if not most) High Classical works don’t have climaxes in that sense. In place of the single grooved-on emotion heading for its peak, they subsist on play, a wavering of emotions, of tone, from serious to light: they cherish less the emotion sustained than emotion fleeting. It’s a very intense difference of paradigm. In a way, it is ridiculous to think of Rachmaninoff and Beethoven as being both Classical Composers: they’re embarked on completely different projects.

Speaking generally—too generally—the Romantic Era gradually became more uncomfortable mixing the light and the heavy. Let’s take Liszt. He “laughs” through his Rhapsodies, Fantasies, etc. His serious works are serious! (“Faust” Symphony) But people deride the laughing works as fluff and the serious works as overdone—they feel too vapid or too earnest. By separating comedy from tragedy, the serious from the unserious, Liszt got two unsatisfying alternatives. Wagner purged laughter from his musical world (Ring, Tristan, Parsifal: pieces so laugh-free they are irresistible targets for satire). Chopin separated his lighter thoughts (waltzes, mazurkas) from the more serious (ballades, nocturnes, scherzos), except for a few special cases. Schumann … well he hits the light/serious sweet spot a few times (piano concerto slow movement!).

I would connect this light/heavy separation to something else: as the Romantic era wears on, you get a sense of this urge to prolong, to squeeze, to squeeze out emotion like toothpaste. You get Wagner’s love letter to continuity, his modest assertion that he has achieved the most perfect endless melody, mastered the art of the infinitely gradated transition (violently different from Beethoven transition, above). Don’t you feel a certain desperation in some Mahler, a need to spin out his emotions at extreme length, as if off to infinity (9th symphony)? To make those altered states last, abstract hedge against death? It is one good definition of music’s purpose: this idealized notion of emotion, music as preserver or sustainer of emotion, as timeless place where a feeling lasts seemingly forever. Music is so excellent at creating states and spells, places where things can sing themselves out to the last drop. The Romantic era is how we WISH emotions were: endlessly prolongable, leading to satisfying climaxes, etc. etc. But the Classical era is (perhaps) how emotions maybe actually are: subject to inconsistency, wavering, shifting, vanishing, elusive. There is a line between this desire for endlessness and this humorlessness.

In the Romantic Era you feel that gradual erection of a wall between the light and the serious. It is important to reflect (did they?): this wall would destroy The Marriage of Figaro, or Don Giovanni. These two great operatic masterpieces are both symbiotic hybrids, comedy-dramas, in which humor is the indispensable meaningful foil. And don’t give me this ridiculous notion, Mr. Service, that it’s because of the words. Jesus! It’s not that Figaro is the most brilliantly funny script of all time, certainly! It’s the way the music manages to capture, bring alive, make suddenly ring true for us, its comic clichés: the way it captures emotion’s simultaneous truth and folly. It’s that the music laughs, more wisely and profoundly than any verbal gag could. Humor is a jolt, a trick of timing, a flash of the unexpected, but it’s also a fluid that carries forgiveness, empathy, generosity …

It’s sad to contemplate Tom Service’s image: Wigmore audiences tittering at Haydn, to congratulate themselves at “getting the joke.” Humor in classical music should not be nerdy, uptight, insidery, or smug. And sometimes it feels confined to those preordained moments, perhaps because of tradition or fear or etiquette or some other crap we can’t go into. Just to depress myself further, I looked on a classical music forum, with the topic: what’s funny in classical music? And you get a ream of special examples (Haydn this, Malcolm Arnold that, moments here and there) and then eventually hilariously it gets lost in a very unfunny discussion of Nazism in Wagner. Sigh. No no NO, I want to say, stop it, humor is no special example, it’s not a side stream, it’s not vacuum cleaners and celebrity guests and props, it’s the beating heart, it’s one of the main currents, one of the most wonderful. These composers, through flashes of genius, tremendous insight in timing, nuance, all the tricks of comedians, acrobats, thinkers, clowns, poets … they taught us how to laugh in tones: the only challenge is not to forget their living lesson.