Spring is here, and deserves this sonnet:

Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 11:52 AM
subject Haydn programme??????

Thoughts, please - or else… Medtner for you, my boy.

I’ll wait while the chills run down your spine. To be threatened with Medtner! Don’t the Geneva Conventions apply to me? I’m a citizen! I have rights! Is there a Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Musicians?

I needed a legal opinion. I was Googling away and was sifting through pages and pages on Post-Medtner Traumatic Syndrome when I noticed a small link …

The Artistic Director, consistent with the doctrine of unitary executive, may suspend habeas corpus for children’s concerts and other wartime situations …

I realize this is dark humour (spelling for the cellist in question), and not really funny at all, when you think about it. I am choosing not to think about it?

Maybe we could lighten the mood with a musicological/geological (and inevitably somewhat scatological) tongue twister:

Liszt’s mistress sifts schists.

This courtesy the marvelous Fred Sherry. And if you’re not titillated by that, how about this fabulous interview with Robert Craft in the erudite magazine Arete, courtesy the also marvelous Carol Archer:

Craft In 1911 Stravinsky sent the composer Maurice Delage a nude photograph of himself in profile, with the upwardly mobile nozzle prominently exposed, and during a vacation in his country residence, they were joined by the notoriously homosexual Prince Argutinsky, whose correspondence, still in private hands in Paris, is a major source untapped by Stephen Walsh. Stravinsky’s pride in his [scandalous word indicating male member] is most evident in a note to Diaghilev, responding to a letter from him in a depressed mood: “If I cannot help you with my music, what can I help you with? Despite my admiration for my male member, I am not willing to offer you consolation with it.” (22 February 1922: Biarritz.)

Areté Is “upwardly mobile” a metaphor meaning that his [scandalous word indicating male member] was capable of erection? Or that it was semi-erect, or “fluffed” for the photograph?

Craft Fluffed, I suspect. Tautening at any rate.

New Musicologists, back to your word processors!!! Stravinsky’s entire oeuvre needs to be reinterpreted, pronto, in the light of this blatant nozzle hubris. I expect your dissertations on my desk by May 16, 2008, along with bottles of Hendrick’s Gin, which I will need to get through them; here are some titles to get your juices flowing:

The Mobile Nozzle: A Re-examination of Harmonic Tautening in Middle Period Stravinsky

Fluffing Pergolesi: A Pornographic Paradigm for Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne

etc. etc.

Yogurt comes in flavors, and classical music should come in flavors too. I suppose it does: Russian virtuosos, for instance.

Composers are flavors and performers are flavors and so a performance of a specific composer is a flavor of a flavor. The superimposition of flavor. Sometimes the oppression of a flavor: as if limes suddenly decided to show bananas who’s boss. And so you read all sorts of reviews and blogs which say “harpsichordist Joeschmoe’s honey glaze overwhelmed the juniper berry of the music” or “the humble well-considered servility of Doofus’ hollandaise allowed the currant undertones of the music to emerge in all their complexity” and so forth.

“I’ll buy all your yogurt for today,” I said to the woman next to me, who was piling plastic containers into her cart headlong, “if you’ll come to my free concert tonight of Beethoven and Ives.” She moved on.

I tried a different tactic with the next yogurt acquirer. “I’ll dump this yogurt all over your head if you don’t come to my free concert tonight of Beethoven and Ives.”

While the manager spoke to me in (perhaps unnecessarily!) strident tones, I couldn’t help going over in my mind all the interesting, fruity flavor combinations of yogurt and what flavor am I? Youngish American Pianist (Also Blogger!) flavor? That is certainly a mouthful. Oh, my flavor! On whose tongue should I be melting right now? Oh, Gods, find me a flavor, find me my perfect flavor and pasteurize me and lab-test my Nutrition Facts and slap some protective tinfoil on me and sell me in grocery stores all around the land!!!

So my mind soared.

Back in the car, I trembled in fear of flavorlessness. It occurred to me that all of classical music, to many people, is one single undifferentiated flavor, and not a great flavor at that, something that you might obtain at Luby’s Cafeteria, like stewed prunes, but without the pragmatic associations of the benevolent laxative.

This parking lot has always interested me. It has a general downward veer, so that the Kroger appears to be a City shining upon a Hill. Because of this slope, it has a little metaphysical story to tell, and retell. If you sit and watch for a while, out of the corner of your eye something in the matrix will move, a surreptitious metal basket; the urge is cautious, then lograrithmically lets loose; it meets destiny in a car door or a curb or some poor person runs after it, trying to save it from itself. The eventual freedom of the cart, racing and rattling over the pavement towards the liquor store, is fantastic. You cheer it on. Whose paint job will you ruin this time on your path to self-realization, you crazy cart?

Headline: Deranged Classical Pianist Found In Indiana Parking Lot Watching Shopping Carts.

“He was supposed to be playing the Concord Sonata, officer, but we found him here, staring out the window, rocking back and forth …”

It would be ridiculous to have feelings about the Kroger. It’s a warehouse of food exchange, an empty case of trade designed to be as similar to others as possible, designed to conform and vanish. Much of the food inside is also empty of content, pure nutritional parenthesis. And yet I cannot deny the intense reality of my feelings about the Kroger; they are clinging to it like a barge in the ocean of experience. There was one night where a bunch of us got the terrible munchies (without chemical stimulants, thank you) and at the same time began to meditate on the joys of Captain Crunch cereal, and we ran out to the Kroger and got every imaginable flavor of Captain Crunch (with and w/o their eponymous berries) and a spectacular array of milk and I still can remember pulling the lids off the milk gallons and the sound of the milk hitting the cereal and the terrible ache of the roof of my mouth the next morning and the laughter of the group, all my friends of that time and all our complicated unexpressed whatever, sexual tensions and mutual admirations and the usual stews of love and resentment and the feeling of having your life invaded which was what you wished for, right … right? When I sit in the parking lot of the Kroger, watching carts drift downhill, I simply cannot help bringing this moment to my mind. Can these feelings really sit atop something as empty as the Kroger? As soluble as Captain Crunch?

Though our lives, through the machinations of real estate developers, etc. etc. are being lived out in ever more predictable grids, in the sway of generic chains whose profitability is pre-calculated, we insist on living our lives specifically. Never mind that all our of most tender conversations are happening in a Starbucks which looks exactly like every other goddamned Starbucks in the world! Nonetheless, you must face it: this is where your tender conversations take place, you must define your difference amongst this monotony.

Now, imagine you are Charles Ives, and you are listening to hymns and ballads since a young age, and at some point it must occur to you that a lot of these hymns and ballads sound the same. That they drift into each other. That they draw upon a certain well of ideas and if you are not careful you could slip from one to the other with little difficulty. Interchangeability is a characteristic of the hymn structure and the parts are supposed in some ways to conform to a generic ur-idea, so that the parishioners are not reinventing the wheel every time they sing a hymn.

Well, I was explaining to some doctoral students at Indiana University in my surely annoying way that 1) there is this crucial five-note descending idea in the “Concord” Sonata, and that 2) Ives’ formal procedures could be perhaps described as hints followed by explosions, or glimmers followed by apotheoses … That is, you don’t get something at all once, but you have faint intuitions, and then at some point (according to some mysterious, wayward law) the intuitions gather enough steam and suddenly you GET IT. This epiphanies are incredible, staggering, often also staggered, so as to arrive when you least expect them.

Even Beethoven doesn’t aim this far into the subconscious; he likes to present his ideas fairly whole at the outset, so their later manifestations can seem logical outpourings. Ives is interested in what we might call now a more “realistic” portrait of understanding, as opposed to an idealized one.

So the first hint of this five note idea comes at the beginning of the “Concord” in the left hand:

And another hint comes here:

And you might say: hold on a moment, Denk! These don’t resemble each other really, since the intervals are somewhat different, and the first one has five notes whereas this second version is just four notes, etc. etc! But this is precisely the point. Ives is not that interested in absolute, exact, mathematical equality (12 tone, set theory, etc. etc.) but in the the space where the specific identity of something blurs into the general, generic place where it might eventually have no identity at all. The place of perceived, but doubted, resemblance.

As it turns out, this idea (vaguely perceived or not) reaches a kind of apotheosis, midway or so into Emerson:

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Because in “Thoreau,” Ives revisits this idea

… ah, a beautiful woodland version … one for Walden Pond … and yet there is one more, even more powerful …

And you realize: it’s “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground” by Stephen Foster (particularly its refrain, with the words “down in the cornfield …”) It’s a turning point, a defining moment in the piece. If you didn’t get the Foster reference, Ives brings it up in his note; he wants you to know. Now, “down in the cornfield” is not something I care about right now, in my life. How about you? But I must say I played it through for the doctoral students, as an academic responsible person, showing them the source materials, etc. etc. …

… and had a flash of feeling about it, some sort of leftover Americana sentimentality. I felt a real feeling for a song which was utterly unreal to me, which was merely or mainly an image.

For much of the “Concord” Sonata, the five-note idea floats around in a sphere of generality, in a sphere where it could be anything. But Ives then affixes it. He compromises its free float, by attaching it to the Foster tune (and onto the tune’s whole complex of associations …)

On the one hand, you have five notes that could belong to any number of tunes, that seem in some way a kind of armature of the Hymn with a capital H: a kind of ur-Hymn-fragment, a shifting bit of hymnic DNA. And on the other hand we have a very specific referent … a composer, a flavor, a text, a sentiment. The general idea has suddenly been flavored, or identified, shot through with specific self. But have we lost something by abandoning the general for the specific, have we limited ourselves? … there is, therefore, an uncertainty, and a melancholy, in this embrace. It’s as though the Idea reaches out and grabs the Foster tune for a moment, and then having gathered it in, having added it to its world, turns around and looks back to the wider universe of notes from which it came; it looks with longing back at the universal from the specific.

Can’t you imagine Beethoven, too, nearing the end of his life, looking back on all those classical style pieces, all the Mozart and Haydn that he knows, not to mention his own works … can’t you imagine, that those voluminous works must have (to some extent) blurred together for him? Indeed, interchangeability is just as key to the classical style as it is to the hymn: Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven all depended on parts that could be lifted from other pieces wholesale, they depended on patches of convention, on the expected recurrence of formulae. It is terribly easy to slip from one Mozart piano concerto to another if you are not careful. Oh, so you are writing a stormy piece in C minor? You might bring to mind your own early Trio, Op. 1, #3, or the 5th Symphony, or the 3rd Piano Concerto, or the Haydn Sonata in C minor, or some parts of The Creation, or Mozart K 491 or 415 or … goodness, there are so many C minor stormy pieces in the Classical Style, calling to each other, a clamoring din of C minor. This blurring must have been evident to him; it would in some ways have been terrifying to him (the death, the futility, of originality), but might also have suggested a new solution, a new possibility, an important aesthetic question. Why bother writing another long original theme in C minor, why add more to the pile, why bother trying to find something “original” at all? Is originality a dead end? Why not build your sturm-und-drang entirely on the tried-and-true; why not construct a theme so simple that it might almost be called generic? …

This idea (the Hauptmotive of Op. 111’s first movement) seems to me a kind of “symbol” or “stand-in” for stormy music … it is what happens if you just give up writing complex accumulations of details, if you say: why don’t we take all that as read, as assumed, and allow the cliché to stand for the whole? Why not expose the cliché at its root and see where that nakedness takes you? Because it is exhausting to keep having to write these great, sprawling masterpieces.

Now, you might say the essence of many C minor stormy works is distilled into this one motive. You might claim it has concision and that it has rediscovered classical purity, hallmarks of the late style. This would be the official version, the tour guide version. But does anyone else feel that this slightly misses the mark? Through this motive, Beethoven steps almost beyond concision to emptiness. For all its bluster, it is continually blowing its wad (forgive the expression). It gazes at the whole welter of C-minor-ness, and in summing it all up, casts at least a glance at the possibility that it’s all much ado about nothing: that all those C minor melodies, with their emphasis on chromatic slippage and diminished seventh chords, can add up to a sameness, a null set, a blur of generic angst. And Beethoven with one stroke makes this nothingness manifest, shows you the empty end of the road, and lays down a wall against it too: in the space where the specific is in danger of becoming a generic nothing, in the space where all the names and events and testaments of our lives begin to blur into the haze of the forgotten and the anonymous, because there is simply too much, too much to say, too much to remember.

At the concert that evening (I managed to escape the parking lot), when I got to the end of “Thoreau,” the last time that “Down in the cornfield” comes back, a very childish thing happened: my lip began to quiver, as though I were about to cry. Even while playing I had to confront this, this possibility of life cracking open, and raining on the illusion of the stage. I attempted quickly to diagnose myself. Was I tired? Had I taken my vitamins? There had, in fact, been something weirdly clouded and dreary about those two days in Bloomington, and perhaps I had ignored, repressed, stuffed the cause back in some closet somewhere … Can I fix this before the piece is over?, I wondered, idiotically.

I had the sense that I needed to figure out what the sadness was before the piece ended, otherwise I would never know. And I was right. There turned out not to be time, and applause killed it.

I think it was a specific Bloomington sadness. I am almost sure it was a memory of some humid lazy Bloomington night, maybe something was barbequed? like my psyche?, but it fled from the tip of my cortex back into the dark rustling cornfields of my subconscious. So I had a taste of it, it lingered at the edge of specificity, and then slipped back into the universal and general, into the whirlpool of the totality of my emotions about everything: but I must say those lingering moments, the seconds as the specific memory appeared and dissolved, were excruciating and amazing.

Behind the tune, there is the wider world of Tunes, and behind that simply the urge to sing; why should you add your specific tune to the ever-larger pile? Why indeed. But this process of extracting and sketching your specific tune from the world’s tunebook, and then—which is just the same act in reverse—losing it again, relinquishing it: well, this unending slippage from one state to the other is joyous, even though it sometimes feels melancholy, or Sisyphean.

At the far end of the concert, you’ll be relieved to know I had a totally different, wackier, feeling. Beethoven’s fugue had me again—this fugue is the diametric opposite, I think, maybe even the spiritual nemesis of the emptiness of the first movement of Op. 111—and it was sprawling around, tossing me about. I held on for the ride. I thought at some point “the Kroger parking lot probably used to be a cornfield.” And then, the scales: I grabbed innumerable carts and tried to stop them from damaging various cars and yet they kept racing away into the distances. While trying to stop them, I cheered for them. Go, contrapuntal voices, go, fly. Sing, and be free: if those two are not mutually contradictory …

What I would like to explore here is the difference between these two states of mind. Myself practicing Chopin on the one hand, and myself practicing Beethoven on the other. My twofold tattered brains. With your indulgence, I feel the only medium for this exploration is the drama. I feel certain you poor readers cannot tolerate another painstaking exegesis of my problems, and I take pity upon you. But what if the two personae—Jeremy practicing Chopin, and Jeremy practicing Beethoven—stood forth from Jeremy proper, came upon the stage, and revealed themselves, in fact, as the Comedic Types that they are? And what if, in the space of Pure Thought, and Inspiration, and all those Cloudy Beautiful Visions that artists are supposed to witness while bedunked in the Bathwater of Brilliance, what if, in that aforementioned space, these two comedic personae were able to visit with the composers themselves and various of their associates, desirable and otherwise? Well. Wait no longer. The answer to this spectacular question, naturally, follows…

THE JOY OF PRACTICING, or, YOU TEUTONIC UNAVOIDABLE MESS OF A MAN
a mini-drama

DRAMATIS PERSONAE
JPB: Jeremy practicing Beethoven
JPC: Jeremy practicing Chopin
B: Beethoven
C: Chopin
GS: George Sand
IB: Immortal Beloved

(A small living room, dominated by a piano. JPB is at the piano, practicing the fugue from Op. 106. B is wandering around the edge of the room, perusing JPB’s cookbooks. Finally he gets bored.)

B: It must be.
(JPB is still practicing the fugue, obsessively, looking rather annoyed; pretends not to hear)
B: (shouting) IT MUST BE.
JPB: (stops playing, peevish) I heard you the first time.
B: Silly me, I thought you’d enjoy having my input. I am Beethoven, after all.
JPB: (sigh) Dare I ask WHAT must be?
B: It.
JPB: A fairly general term.
B: If you have to ask, you shouldn’t bother.
JPB: At least you could tell me if this metronome marking is crap or not.
B: That wouldn’t be fair to all the others. Inside information.
(JPC enters from adjoining kitchen with a cup of tea)
JPC: Darlings, I don’t much care to know what “it” is; but this repeated use of “must” gives me the willies.
[JPC uses fingers to indicate quotations which irritates B and JPB extremely much.]
JPC: Why “must” it be, whatever it is? The imperative seems so … uncivilized. I so prefer “may” or “might” …
B: Your dancing fingers are a pretentious effeminate affectation.
JPC: You know, Ludwig, chill. Even geniuses could use some manners.
JPB: Guys … all this chit chat is “super fun” but I’m really trying to get this fugue under control, so if you could give me a little peace and quiet …
JPC: But Jeremy you promised we were going to the Apple Store today, and then we were going to have a nice massage, and maybe practice a little later in the afternoon, and then an evening walk on the beach … remember that nice time in San Diego and those delicious enchiladas and beers at 3 in the afternoon?
B: [perplexed] Apple store?
JPB: Jeremy, there’s no time. This needs to get done.
JPC: You look awfully tense, Jeremy. Just relax!
JPB: YOU relax.
JPC: [to B] can YOU reason with him?
B: I can hardly speak to him, he’s in such a state.
JPB: Well, look at this. (indicates page of music)
JPC: Jeez, Ludwig, what WERE you thinking?
JPB: Don’t ask him.
B: It must be!
JPB: Which I take to mean that I should get everything possible done as soon as possible.
JPC: Let’s see if we can’t sort all this out with some proper alignment. Let’s just start by cultivating a nice chill atmosphere in the room, OK?
[JPC goes around to the cupboard, finds some candles, lights them, finds and lights some incense, sets a lava lamp onto the music rack, a Zen rock garden, a statue of the Buddha, etc. etc. Meanwhile, JPB resumes practicing.]
JPC: Your shoulders, your neck! I thought we had that all under control!
JPB [Sheepishly]: Me too.
[JPC rubs JPB’s back and neck while he continues to play]
JPC: Breathe, breathe, lift, feel the weight of your arm. Playing the piano is a pleasure, first and foremost, a delight, a kind of extension of the fluidity of the self!
JPB: [Peevish] You try it then.
JPC: OK, Jeremy, if I must. Only if you insist.
[JPC sits, breathes, lifts arm gracefully, begins to play the fugue, soon stops.]
JPB: Umm.
JPC: That didn’t sound very good.
JPB: Nope.
JPC: Agreed.
JPB: What works for the goose cooks the gander.
[B meanwhile begins laughing from his corner of the room, softly at first, but louder and louder]
B: Boys, boys. My problems cannot be breathed away.
JPC: Son of a …
JPB: He’s no help, he only speaks in riddles.
JPC: It’s all going to work out, Jeremy, just pursue the endless circle.
JPB: I prefer to go in a straight line. It’s the shortest distance between two points.
JPC: What will be, will be.
JPB: I can’t accept that. Allergic to fateful tautologies.
JPC: Just listen to the sound you are playing right now, taste the moment, smell the roses.
JPB: But where is it going? Where are we going?
JPC: What does it matter?
JPB: The question is worth asking, it conditions the sound of the now.
JPC: The now is the now; eternal; unanswerable.
JPB: The tension of the future is contained in the now.
JPC: Or this tension is an unproductive resistance to the future.
JPB: And who’s on first?
JPC: Exactly.
JPB: But I cannot help searching for answers. Things must be solved. For instance, why was I up at 3:15 AM the other day watching that Mandy Moore vehicle A Walk To Remember? And why oh why was I tearing up?
B: I bet you didn’t know that I composed the song for that movie, right after Wellington’s Victory.
JPC: This is among the most puzzling questions ever posed. I think it’s a symptom of your difficult relationship to something or other.
[Chopin, George Sand, and the Immortal Beloved all burst in the door, apparently in the aftermath of a long night of partying.]
GS: OH that crazy Balzac.
IB: (giggling) I can’t decide if he’s ugly or, like, uglyhot.
C: Ludwig, baby, this Immortal Beloved of yours is the flirtiest chick since Marie d’Agoult before she found God.
B: Tell me about it, Fred.
(Everyone laughs, except JPB, who obsessively resumes practicing.)
B: Yeah, keep working, Jeremy. (Rolls eyes.) Margaritas, everybody?

Postscript:

This sense that the composer has abandoned you for the relatively serene realm of the grave and that you, who have chosen to program and perform piece X, are the only one left stressing about it: can anyone propose a name for this State of Mind, for this ongoing Lonely Predicament?

It’s like the Composer and You are accomplices in some crime, but the composer zoomed off in his getaway car of death and left you alive to take the rap. That (in sum) is what being a performer is all about. You’re the patsy.

“Yes, that way lies happiness,” I say to myself, “and yet this way lies bacon.” Happiness seems, at that moment, such an unwelcomely long-term proposition. The seared, salty idea of bacon flashes in my mouth, fatty slab of the moment; whereas oatmeal squishes over into a digestive chain of planning and forethought, as if I were a stove and not a man. Am I to be fed to burn, or to burst forth in spurts of inspiration?

Consider the following. Josh and I watched a woman at the Newark baggage claim. The carousel was not crowded. And yet, when her bag dropped from the chute, the woman became a raving, rabid animal. She burst between us, bumping, nearly shoving, and then in her desperation to get that bag, at that moment … well, I felt that even her bag sensed she was in a hurry and revolted, sidled, twisted and turned in strange ways, so that she had a hell of a time getting it off the carousel, and nearly injured several of us “innocent” onlookers. (Don’t worry, Josh fans: He was unharmed!) We couldn’t believe it; the bag would have been there for her, three seconds later; it was not going to vanish; but she was unapologetic for her desperate urgency. Her bag, at that moment, was the great quest of her life, it was her Bacon, and if it was a misspent quest, so be it, she was proud of her idiotic bacon worship.

I watched the carousel spin on. I lifted my bag off it with smug nonchalance which no one noticed; I was proud of my idiocy, too. The humble, grinding, uncaring carousel whispered to me of hubris.

The ease of lifting the bag off the carousel—if the speed is constant, and there is no edge of desperation—reminded me quite strongly of certain moments of perfect preparation and anticipation playing the piano. Just the note, thock! into place. The woman struggling with her bag reminded me equally of certain moments of playing the piano, when you seize the moment, roughly, and the moment fights back.

Moments have all sorts of defense mechanisms against unreasonable seizure.

Confession. I chose to program the Chopin Barcarolle (last week in lovely San Diego!) on the strength of a moment I wanted to seize, on a juicy crispy piece of bacon I once smelled in its interior. Ah, I remember the moment well: a student came in to play the Barcarolle for me—a terrible, terrible student—but when she got to this moment I remember severing my lips from my grimy coffee-pacifier, and looking around the dismal basement room as if it were an alpine vista. “That’s so f&*() beautiful,” I said, regretting the word as it came out, but the student smiled at the silly professor. Here’s the moment …

At the birth of the moment, we have F# major and twelve-eight time, the delicious compound meter of the rocking boat. At the death of the moment: A major, and a faster tempo … the boat has entered a different, spellbinding current, the boat has been released into possibility. “Yes, the boat is floating along just fine, I say, it has been a delightful sail” but, then, after Chopin’s bacon-moment, you realize through the veil of your delight that there is delight and there is delight …

Chopin writes a passage of drift which allows one motion to become another, a flight between ratios, a mysterious differential equation.

This transition is amazing partly because of its disengagement, because of the sensation that the foundations of the narrative have been removed. This transition is not essentially “musical.” It does not conform to the niceties of musical discourse, it does not attempt to be the smooth unnoticeable gearshift. Chopin deliberately removes us from the world of capital-M Music, in which he had allowed us to bathe. The rich, melody-bass texture of the opening idea is gone. No more perfectly situated overtones; no more melodies in Italianate thirds and sixths: no, no, for you, listener, just a deliberately ascetic, spare single line: a cord, a lifeline, a narrow path of notes.

All the harmonic meaning has to be compressed, suddenly, into these few sinuous notes. Our brains must adjust.

Because Chopin has removed the foundations, because he is secretly rearranging the sails while we listen, we are reading the tablet of these barren notes without a lexicon. The rules that applied previously do not now; what we think we know lies to us. We know for instance that “we were in major, but now we’re in minor”—but this seemingly clear fact is a snare. The A-natural enters as a minor coloring of the major, but this guise is a pun, a deception, a mask … it is POSING as an emblem of minor, as a moment of sadness, darkness. But then the passage explodes—quietly, with the power of soft-spokenness—into the opposite, into A major (hopeful, radiant, expectant) …

The tone A is a platform for a deft pivot of meaning; it is this shift of meaning that adds the extra layer, the beauty past beauty. The A-natural, appearing first as a refutation of the warmth and joy of the opening material—a shiver down its spine—is really the proof of it; it is really a secret agent … to put it rather super-poetically… of luminous joy. This is something more profound than a “twist” or a “gotcha,” though it shares something in common with both of these … it’s like a meaning that passes through shades of light and dark, a word or a thought that hides in your subconscious, that comes out of the tunnel of the past, familiar and unexpected at once.

And there is more, more. The Barcarolle could be, if you like, a kind of essay in motion, in different kinds of motion (gliding, lilting motion … ) Now, the speed of motion is expressed as the ratio of two different entities

distance / time

… so, one way to mix things up, to vary the speed (the normal way) is to increase the distance you travel per unit of time; but the other way (the freaky way) to get at speed of motion is to call into question the very existence of time itself, to try to alter or erode the parcelling of units, seconds, beats. When Chopin steps into this transition, into the ascetic single line, one feels the sudden shiver of a lack … This shiver contains, I think, some sort of hidden imperative … it is as though he shushes you, tells you to wait … And then, by sticking to just the one voice (after all those luxurious voices) Chopin compels your continued attention; he continues to ask you to wait; he compels you to continue subtracting each moment, each note added to this chain, from the passage of Time, proper; he wants you to keep regarding each note as special, as suspended, as not-time, a process which extends not-time like a rubber band. Chopin says: each note that I add onto this chain I want you to subtract from time, and I want you, I expect you, to return to time only when I am done. It is a paradox, an immobile motion, wound between two different types of normal motion, a strange slice of removed time …

These two elements have a magical mixed effect. The “lie” of the minor key merges with the sense of not-time. Ambiguity plus falsehood: this is precisely the cocktail that made me curse happily at my student, and want to play this piece. Our honest attempts to seize time are not often rewarded. Time sneaks away, becomes difficult, clings to desires and other times, like baggage. But this passage suggests: fleeting moments might occasionally be seized through deceptions, which lead us—retrospectively—to the most beautiful truths.

I have been breathed in and out of so many airports in the last six weeks, I begin to feel like I should be stamped with a barcode, zipped up, and run through an X-ray machine: I have become acutely conscious of the inelegance of my passages. By moving so much, I become a thing, a crated item. When the baggage carousel grinds into life, buzzing and heaving, when the desk clerk at the hotel treats you with false, permanent cheer, when the hotel fitness room blinks back at you with its bank of TVs turned to news programs filled with prefabricated crap, political “discussion” that consists of idiots refuting idiots … all of these moments, in their monotony and convenience, are inelegant.

But Chopin’s motions: they are so meta-; they are simultaneously so precise and curvaceous; they are the elegant understanding of motion through music. They call attention to the touch of the hand, the very touching act itself, the “laying on of the hands”: they explore the interaction between the idea of touch, between the sensual element of touch, and the complex chromatic interstices of the harmonic world. To play these pieces is to be in touch (literally and figuratively) with elegance, the elegance of the motion of the hand corresponding to the elegance of the motion of the notes, each trying to find their perfect match, their perfect correspondence in each other. Motion that has nowhere to go, and everywhere to be: as if there were both a healthy Bacon and a dangerous, romantic, alluring Oatmeal sitting on your perfectly set table … as if you knew precisely how your day was going to go but had no idea what you were going to do …

Suddenly, there was a break in the action. I was lying on my side in the opposite direction. The room was perfectly peaceful except for the chirping of the two alarms. With the mere brush of a fingertip both were silenced. How horrible to awaken twice, but only once in reality … small consolation! Or, put another way: there is no worse dream than the dream of actuality.

—-

I had one companion in my bed. Don’t get your hopes up; it was Christoph Wolff’s book, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. (It snored all night… or was that me?) I was in extreme proximity to it, my cheek atop its cover, rubbing its bristles on a famous portrait of the beneficent master. Fearful of drool, I raised my head from the book and Bach, thereby revealed, spoke to me from the dust jacket: “You shouldn’t have eaten that spicy squid last night, Jeremy. What the hell were you thinking?” I swear this is true.

While we’re on the subject of people who imagine that Bach consults with them directly, the other day I was over at A.C. Douglas’ famously irascible blog, Sounds & Fury. A.C. was recommending an article:

The following is excerpted from a superb article on Bach written for The Hudson Review by Harold Fromm, Visiting Scholar in English at the University of Arizona …

Hmm, OK, err, yes, delightful, I thought to myself, I shall go over and read said article, in ever greater pursuit of knowledge and insight. And so I did. What I would like to type now, to summarize my feelings on this whole matter of the Fromm article, would be one deeply profound letter not yet invented in any alphabet, just one black deadly character after Z (or, possibly, just before Q) which would refer to things so annoying as to be unspeakable, irritating beyond pronunciation, beyond sigh or grr, beyond hotel room service surcharges, beyond even the sound of unwrapping cough drops in the middle of slow movements …

For me, one of the most telling sentences was:

And, of course, playing Bach on today’s grand pianos is much more egregious.

I slurped sulkily upon an Odwalla juice while I considered my egregiousness. Perhaps Harold Fromm has not gotten the memo that “egregious” cannot be used right now as a term of disparagement, except ironically, or under the influence of cannabis (as in: “that chick was so egregious, dude.”) I don’t know why this is so, but it is so. Perhaps in 2050, in some future halcyon era, in some utopian clime, it will be possible again to say something is “egregious,” and have it taken seriously, but it is not possible now. I might be able to overlook this hapless, earnest use of “egregious” if it weren’t for the accompanying “of course.” This “of course,” presuming agreement on the part of all reasonable parties (for instance, Harold Fromm), is a linguistic patch taped to a sordid Ziploc bag of sophistry. It attempts to enforce agreement with its leaky, pungent premise.

Now, normally I have no objection to English Professors from Tucson telling professional pianists what they can and cannot play. But, if I were elected to office, one of the first bills I would put forth would prohibit Pontification About Bach, it would be an anti—PAB measure. (Pontification is to be distinguished, I hope, from insight, reflection, and probing analysis; it may be difficult to draw the line sometimes, but I have faith in humanity.) What makes Fromm’s article “pontification”? A sentence like this one:

Landowska’s Well-Tempered Clavier revealed more of the music more powerfully than anybody else, squeezing out every drop of its seemingly inexhaustible juices.

In vain I searched for the phrases “I feel” or “in my opinion” or any such which would distinguish such a huge judgement from a declared, journalistic fact. Harold Fromm does not like to admit the possibility of multiplicity of opinion. Here’s another delightful instance:

The later practice of introducing “expression” into Bach’s keyboard music can only be described as a bad joke that reduces power to preciosity.

(I will return to this question of quote-unquote expression later: one rant at a time!) Notice the use of the phrase “can only” … “Can only” is a traditional linguistic weapon of the recidivist Bach Pontificator, the tyrant of taste. Here’s yet another astounding instance of presumptuous opinion:

As for the clavichord, forget about it.

Oh, really, Mr. Fromm? I should simply erase all thought of the clavichord from my mind? But, wait, what about this…

As for the instrument itself, Forkel related that Bach “considered the clavichord as the best instrument for study” and “the most convenient for the expression of his most refined thoughts,” as he preferred the “variety in the gradations of tone … on this instrument, which is, indeed, poor in tone, but on a small scale extremely flexible.”

—Christoph Wolff, Bach: The Learned Musician, p. 174

Fascinating; it would seem that J.S. Bach—who is a fairly relevant person in this discussion—did not exactly take Fromm’s advice and forget about the clavichord! Fromm doesn’t want you to know this, of course. He tells us:

… [the clavichord] never really comes up in any of the three biographies, and its usefulness in music like Bach’s is marginal.

The “really” is the infuriating bit, where he hedges; “really” is where Fromm tries to pretend that he’s not lying to us. The clavichord does come up (as we have seen!), but it’s not convenient for him to mention it, or he has forgotten where it comes up: a particularly interesting memory lapse, since this mention of the clavichord seems to (ahem) UNDERMINE HIS WHOLE THESIS.

Harold (I feel now we are on a first name basis!) continues:

Bach’s posthumous estate lists several harpsichords of various types but no other keyboard instrument. For Bach, it was then and remains now (except for the organ) the keyboard instrument of choice.

Look carefully at this last sentence, which seems so eminently “reasonable.” Notice how the “then” becomes the “now,” by simple clausular addition. It slips down so easily that you may not even notice that it might be difficult for Bach to have a keyboard of instrument of choice “now” because, in fact, he’s dead.

Oh, Harold Fromm. There are already two types of egregiousness to your article which I have detailed:

1) presumptuousness of tone;
2) inaccuracy of content.

But I have so so many more!!! Another crucial rhetorical device of Fromm’s, and one which A.C. Douglas seems to have particularly enjoyed, is the setting up of Straw Men. It is apropos during this political season, I suppose, and yet still irritating. Fromm is talking about certain interpretative qualities of the harpsichord, and certain options for the performer (though he seems to get a bit confused whether he is talking about the performer’s or the composer’s options):

Bach’s Italian Concerto provides a perfect demonstration of all these qualities, with furious propulsion punctuated by dense chords in the outer movements and arioso lyricism in the middle (exploiting two keyboards), written into the music, no “expression” needed, just the player’s skill on the harpsichord. An “expressive” piano performance that turns it into one of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words subverts its most distinctive and powerful properties.

Ah yes, I forgot about those roving armies of pianists who wish to turn the Italian Concerto into a Mendelssohn “Song without Words.” I was going to donate to their organization just last week, but I gave to the Communist Party instead. Hello? Harold? I think we all agree the Italian Concerto is very different from “Spinning Song;” even us idiot pianists get the difference, thank you very much. Could there be ways to play the Italian Concerto expressively and yet not aim for “Songs without Words”? Could there be a way to write an article on Bach and yet not pontificate?

But more central to the problem of this passage, I am sure the reader will realize, is Harold’s use of the word “expression.” I am sure Mr. Fromm is somewhat uneasy about his use of this word, too, since he always puts it in quotation marks, as if that will fix what is wrong with what he is saying. ANYONE who tells you there is “no expression needed” to play the Italian Concerto is an idiot. Just play the notes, they say! Here’s an experiment: plug the piece into Sibelius and have the computer play it back to you. Lovely. I’m sure it sounds absolutely delightful. The very musical translation of despair. This kind of statement, that everything is “written into the music,” reveals a desperate ignorance of the millions of small interpretative and expressive decisions that go into even the most basic realization of a musical score; it goes against the underlying contract of notated Western music.

Let’s be generous, and assume Mr. Fromm puts “expression” in quotes to designate a certain type of expressivity. So that there is no mistake, in defining this type of expressivity, he invokes the Songs without Words… “music for ladies” is the hidden implication here, and if you don’t think so I have a bridge to sell you … Later he refers to the “genteel Gallic” Casadesus family and the “melting, exquisite, precious, Chopinesque” pianist marring Mozart. Do ya get it yet? Not only are you egregiously playing on the wrong instrument, but the way you are doing it makes you a Frenchified girlyman.

Mr. Fromm speaks a few times of “linear expression” or “linear performance”:

Bach wrote his keyboard and organ music for instruments capable of linear performance only, uninflected by touch.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out what this phrase “linear performance” might mean. Does it mean you play looking forward in a straight line? I suppose lines are to be distinguished from curves, whorls, ovoids, and other shapes? He says “uninflected by touch,” but he CERTAINLY can’t mean that, since variations in articulation, in attack, in the nature of the connection from one note to the next—in other words, things inflected by touch—are among the absolute essential expressive devices on the harpsichord, without which the harpsichordist might as well give up, have several martinis, and go home. I guess he means dynamic contrast? The only way in which can agree with Mr. Fromm is to say that, whatever the keyboardist does, while playing Bach, to get the maximum result and pleasure, he or she should pay close attention to the lines that the notes seem to draw amongst themselves, the beautiful patterns they create, their diversions, their turnarounds, and their intersections… all Bach’s magnificent, humane geometry … full of whorls, lines, fractals, parabolas … geometry with no whiff of blackboard and always proving eternity.

Here I come (at last) to the meat of my matter. Mr. Fromm proposes that Bach wrote his keyboard music specifically “not to be inflected by touch.” Now, let’s even leave aside all the keyboard music that is a transcription of music for other instruments—which is quite a bit of music. Let’s give Fromm an undeserved break, and brush that off the table. Do we imagine that Bach sat down to write keyboard music and composed, specifically, music that should be absent of dynamic inflection? This would mean that the keyboard music is somehow weirdly separate, cordoned off from all the rest of the music of Bach. But it seems pretty clear to me, listening to the keyboard Partitas on the one hand, and Cantatas on the other (for instance), that a lot of the same genetic material is there. Countless specific motives are shared, a whole compositional personality is shared … So, are we to believe that a motive in a Cantata would be shaped dynamically by a violin, oboe, or voice, but when Bach wrote a very similar idea for the keyboard, he never even wished for the idiomatic shaping of another instrument?

This separation of the keyboard music doesn’t make any sense to me—intuitively or intellectually—and I’m not even counting the innumerable instances where Bach’s keyboard writing is deliberately and clearly meant to imitate and invoke a violin, orchestra, or chorus, or any number of other groupings which are capable of dynamic shaping up the yinyang! (Cases where Bach himself blurs the line between instruments … where he invokes a musical space beyond the single instrument …) Does Fromm mean to say that Bach, while playing a passage on the harpsichord, never even imagined a crescendo, or what we would now call a hairpin? Anyone who plays a keyboard instrument seriously knows how large a role is played by imagining the timbres and possibilities of other instruments, and yearning for them, even against physical impossibility … somehow imagining your way into the audible illusion. The vastness of Bach’s conception of keyboard music shows that his imagination in this respect was pretty much better than anyone’s in history.

The syllogism … 1) Bach wrote for the harpsichord, 2) the harpsichord is incapable of dynamic inflection, ergo 3) the music he wrote for the harpsichord should be free from dynamic inflection … is faulty, despite its appearance of rationality. (It may be that premise #1 is the most faulty…) It attempts to shortcircuit music’s multivalence; it attempts to replace the beautiful, complex, ambiguous relationship of instrument, composition, score, conception, and audible result—which are all woven together with imagination—with a simplistic logic. This is not to discount the pleasure and importance of knowing the harpsichord’s expressive possibilities, the relevance of its timbral language … But when we say that Bach wrote “for” an instrument, I think we mean more centrally that he wrote towards the possibilities of his instruments, and not to make dogmas out of their parameters.

I suppose I should apologize for my vehemence, for basically being a jerk towards Mr. Fromm, who is probably a very nice person, and an avid lover of Bach. But I won’t. I would use the following quote as my excuse:

Bach is said to have conducted himself in a generally “peaceful, quiet, and even-tempered way” in the face of all kinds of unpleasantness “as long as it concerned only his own person,” but the same source acknowledges that he “became a very different man if he felt threatened in his art, which he held sacred, and that he then became mightily enraged and in his zeal sought to find vent by the strongest expressions.”

-Wolff, p. 401-402

Since Fromm is making pronouncements on what I consider to be my bailiwick, I feel (though I am but a lowly blogger, and he an English professor) it is my duty to impinge upon his, and to aver to you that his article is not only annoying but badly written as well. This is unfortunate, since I read an earlier article of his on Camille Paglia which seems quite good (see, I put some effort into this hitjob!) … what is it about music, sometimes, that draws out the bad qualities in good writers? We musicians should not put up with this. We should be emancipated from pompous writing about our craft.

Quickly, I would like to detail the egregiousness of the writing in this piece. Its first six lengthy paragraphs could be summed up in about two sentences, i.e.:

1) Bach could be regarded as the father of Western music.

2) There is very little information about his life.

Much of what is in the article is culled, in one form or another, from various other volumes: it is a kind of sampling of little interesting tidbits from the biographies he has read, but these tidbits do not cohere, or relate to his underlying purpose of “Bach in the Twenty-first Century.” Egregiousness #503: lack of coherent point. Bach wrote parody cantatas, we learn; we learn some details of organ production and maintenance in Bach’s lifetime; we pause again to castigate “expressivity” in modern Bach performance; we learn there are problems with Bach chronology (oh really?); later, we learn the instrumentation of some cantatas and that they range in length from 10 to 50 minutes. We learn that Bach wrote a cantata a week for quite a while (something I learned in Music History 101). In all, an assortment of things, not all of them interesting, none of them earthshaking, all of them borrowed … Egregiousness #504: boring/obvious observations.

We learn that

Bach did not spring full grown from the head of Zeus

which is a relief, whew!, because I thought he did … later, a complete Bach edition on CD …

fractured any picture I might have had of the emergence of this transcendent music as solidified, discrete units, like packs of candy bars dropping from a vending machine.

… a simile which, for some reason, made me long to be stifled under an avalanche of Mars bars.

But, at last, amidst the chaos, Fromm says …

Now, as I arrive at a retrospective overview of Bach from the twenty-first century,

At which point I said to myself “Wha?” and stared at my refrigerator plaintively. What overview? I frantically scanned all the previous paragraphs for some sense of a broad arc, some sort of connection between the now and the then, some Bachian summation, but no, I couldn’t find it. Egregiousness #505: Summational Sentence Without Preexisting Summation. It reminded me of certain papers in High School English, where you say, “in conclusion,” just to lift the paper onto the home stretch, even though you know perfectly well you got nothin’.

And then, Fromm’s final paragraph baffled me into a desperate need for chemical stimulants. Somehow his point is tied up with Virginia Woolf’s quote “the chapel became a larder.” Now, I don’t want to be picky, but I think Woolf wrote more beautiful phrases … I understand the meaning is relevant, but somehow the phrase sits heavily upon my tongue, like an unwelcome chimichanga. Fromm’s revelation comes at a concert at the Oregon Bach Festival, where

One of the women, toned, lean, and (as we say nowadays) “in shape,” wore a tight long red sheath gown revealing while concealing her athletic frame.

Hubba, hubba! Fromm’s conclusions from this are startling:

The woman in the red sheath conveyed as never before that Bach the musician had finally come into his own. The revolution was over. Providing a nourishment more primal and profound than transient pieties, the chapel had become a larder.

It appears the point is that because a woman was dressed rather provocatively at a concert in Oregon, we seem to have finally separated Bach from his stuffy Lutheran crap, which is mere transient context, and we are now therefore well larded. I think I have it! Bach now makes sense to me, absolutely!

My, my, I get mean-spirited when I’m annoyed. What is saddest about this article is its fear of dealing with the musical notes directly. Its flurry of bygone conclusions and completed revolutions and assured pontifications may distract you from this fact. Fromm gets close to the music only on one occasion:

Most recently, Daniel J. Levitin in This Is Your Brain on Music has tried to shed light on the mystery, but the road is long, the night is dark, and all the cats are still pretty gray.

… and flees abjectly in the direction of vagueness.

I have my own image to counter Fromm’s “chapel/larder” business. My student came to my apartment last week and I was exhausted from one flight or another, and had been working all day, and was hepped up on a million coffees and really hardly in any state to listen to or enjoy anything. This student has had some trouble—by her own admission—associating with Beethoven, Mozart … some of the German so-called “serious” repertory … even though she seems to swim in Chopin pretty well. She sat and played through the C# minor prelude and fugue from Book I of the Well Tempered Clavier—on the terrible, villainous modern piano. She was transformed; I was amazed; her outlook seemed to take her through the whole prelude at once; the complicated sentence made sense, and she noticed beauties along the way … Then the fugue, too, was quite assured, at times touching … she was speaking the piece’s language, she seemed structurally aware in ways I had not seen before. She finished. I told her it sounded like she had really come to know the piece … and she paused and said “I LOVE this piece.” I could tell she really meant it, that the piece meant something terribly important to her … Indeed, a 20 year old, loving and absorbing into her soul an abstruse 5-voice fugue from the early 18th century … I thought to myself, how egregious!, while my heart leapt for joy.

Whatever you need to do to get that image out of your mind, I don’t blame you … (thanks to sharp-eyed audience member in Orange County.)

I was perched in the airport bar, nuzzling a pale ale; to my right, heading off perpendicularly, was a row of seven businessmen: a clustered, beery loneliness. They shifted their eyes from screen to screen, from spreadsheet to departure status, from monotony to monotony; their thumbs worked at invisible Blackberries. I tore my eyes from this dolorous vision, and on my screen, next to a picture of Lang Lang, I read the following lines:

The Apollonian refers (and I paraphrase) to symmetry, invention and elegance; the Dionysian, to art more from the gut, more spontaneous.

More personal too. Dionysus had the stage when I was watching: two ambitious young people were taking part in a system that asks them to use Beethoven and Schumann as ways to sell themselves. Maybe our eminent conductor could have added another distinction to his two-sided debate: that Dionysian pianists care about Dionysian pianists, whereas Apollonian pianists care about music.

This last sentence had a truly magical effect. I looked up from my screen, belched, and with that mystical sound the seven businessmen were suddenly transformed into a panel of displeased, modernized Muses. What message, what tiding of inventory did they bring? I tipped my head up towards the arching domes of that temple of suffering known as the airport, I sniffed to savor its faint, delicious scent-intimations of jet fuel. Dude, why risk retribution? Normally I leave the Gods to take care of themselves, in the same way that I allow globs of toothpaste to congeal on my sink until Monika (my minor nymph of cleanliness) chips them away with a chisel. But clearly I had witnessed a sign. This issue of the Apollonian and the Dionysian intrigued me and I couldn’t seem to leave it, it burned in me…

I can’t explain it: I felt Dionysus needed my defense, and Apollo perhaps needed a bit of a drubbing. Not that one should offend any of the Gods.  My inner nerd was coming out of the closet.

Part I: The Quest Begins

I have long dreamed of cryogenically freezing my nasal passages for future generations to scrutinize and interpret. Therefore, on a free day in St. Paul, Minnesota, I thought I might walk to a bookstore to begin my Dionysian researches, and kill two birds with one stone …

Lone Denk, much swaddled,
Did brave breezes from the north,
And on the grandest street
Despite clasped coffee,
Was forced to flee in red-faced terror,
Nearly dropping his cell phone meanwhile.
(Apollodorus, The History of a Wandering Pianist, 1970 ff.)

Unable to walk, I availed myself of an odiferous taxicab, and arrived at Garrison Keillor’s wonderful bookstore, Common Grounds, where—like the Sphinx incarnate—I tormented the innocent staff with my queries. (Any popular biographies on Dionysus? Any exposés on Apollo?) Through the veil of their Midwestern insouciance, they did not seem to realize what an urgent, earthshaking issue this was. But I was valiantly annoying and persuasively irritating.

I learned some Crucial Godly Dirt on Apollo. Apparently (gasp) he fell in love with a boy, Hyacinthus, and then bashed the boy’s skull to bits with a discus. I would consider this a dating faux pas—but myths are chock full of these kinds of fun, lighthearted hijinks. History seems to blame the jealous West Wind for Hyacinthus’ gruesome death, but here’s my feeling: if you can’t deal with a breeze as a romantic rival, what kind of God are you anyway?

Score one for Dionysus.

Part II: The Plot Thickens, Like Delicious Custard

I left the bookstore in possession of merely one volume: Nietszche’s The Birth of Tragedy. What a pageturner! Later that evening, I consumed an ungodly large piece of banana creme pie, and took to my bed in orgiastic reclining abundance, my stomach resounding magnificently in a revelrous combination of iambs and trochees.

Gurgle and wine-dark gurgle
O, gurgle, on pillowy Olympus
Gurgle Denk gurgle.
(Callimachus, The Ionian Pie, lines 2032-2034)

(… It is difficult in translation to capture the masculine vigor, the rhythmic power of the original …)

With pie interred, and Prison Break flickering idly on the television, I settled down to digest Nietzsche’s account of the Apollo-Dionysus dualism:

The joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo … the deity of light is also ruler of the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy …

But we must also include in our image of Apollo that delicate boundary which the dream image must not overstep lest it have a pathological effect … We must keep in mind that measured restraint, that freedom from the wilder emotions, that calm of the sculptor god. … we might apply to Apollo the words of Schopenhauer … ‘Just as in a stormy sea that, unbounded in all directions, raises and drops mountainous waves, howling, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in its frail bark: so in the midst of a world of torments the individual human being sits quietly, supported by and trusting in the principum individuationis.’ In fact, we might say of Apollo that in him the unshaken faith in this principium and the calm repose of the man wrapped up in it receive their most sublime expression …

In the same work Schopenhauer has depicted for us the tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an exception. If we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that wells up from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the principium individuationis, we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication…

Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man … Transform Beethoven’s ‘Hymn to Joy’ into a painting; let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruck–then you will approach the Dionysian … each one feels himself as one with his neighbor … (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, tr. Kaufmann)

Well said, Nietzsche baby!  Maybe I had written you off as a nutbag too soon!  I love that bit: “where the principle of sufficient reason … seems to suffer an exception.” My whole life is an exception from sufficient reason.

It would seem, in Nietszche’s view, that the Dionysian surrenders, loses him or herself, becomes “self-less,” a servant of the god … Whereas the Apollonian, seeing images “outside himself as objects of contemplation,” is still very much contained within the principle of the self. This seemed a bit different from the image of the Dionysian pianist in love with him- or her- self, as proposed by the author of those fateful lines which inspired my studies …

I surrendered my self to sleep. I would avenge Dionysus; I would be the Bruce Willis of Greek myth.

Part III: I Seek Dionysian Mysteries

I had to play some silly concerts; then I got back to “work.”

It is well known that Dionysus favored raw meat …

—He is sweet upon the mountains. He drops to the earth from the running-packs.
He wears the holy fawn-skin. He hunts the wild goat and kills it.
He delights in the raw flesh.
(—Euripides, The Bacchae, lines 135-137, tr. William Arrowsmith)

I was upon no mountaintop; I was in the student union of Indiana University. The best I could do, my closest approximation, was to procure a Pizza Hut Meat Lover’s Pizza, and settle myself down on the cool, soothing linoleum of the IU Bookstore … amid the Classics Section. My fingers, I believe, are still greasy from this mystical encounter, this frenzy of Bacchic sauce and dough, which has done wonders for my legato.

Part IV: Apollo Wins a Music Competition

Thus ensconced, begreased, sated, I had ample time to consult Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths. It seems that Apollo was an fierce competitor:

Marsyas stumbled upon [Athena’s] flute, which he had no sooner put to his lips than it played of itself, inspired by the memory of Athena’s music; and he went about Phrygia … delighting the ignorant peasants. They cried out that Apollo himself could not have made better music, even on his lyre, and Marsyas was foolish enough not to contradict them. This, of course, provoked the anger of Apollo, who invited him to a contest, the winner of which should inflict whatever punishment he pleased on the loser. Marsyas consented, and Apollo impaneled the Muses as a jury. The contest proved an equal one, the Muses being charmed by both instruments, until Apollo cried out to Marsyas: ‘I challenge you to do with your instrument as much as I can do with mine.’ [Note: Apollo is no stranger to double entendre!] ‘Turn it upside down, and both play and sing at the same time.’

This, with a flute, was manifestly impossible, and Marsyas failed …

Does this not seem like kind of a cheap trick to win a competition? Especially for a God. Of course you can’t sing and play the flute at the same time. But it gets worse:

… Apollo reversed his lyre, and sang such delightful hymns in honor of the Olympian gods that the Muses could not do less than give the verdict in his favor. Then, for all his pretended sweetness, Apollo took a most cruel revenge on Marsyas: flaying him alive and nailing his skin to a pine tree …

(Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Penguin Books, 1972, p. 77)

Apollo was among the first to propose a music competition. That alone would be the darkest imaginable mark on his record, an utterly unforgivable sin. But then, after he wins by subterfuge—like a jerk—he is not particularly gracious in victory.

Whereas: Dionysus never even gets involved in a music contest to begin with… In my opinion, Dionysus 2, Apollo 0.

Part V: The Voice of the Skeptics

I called my neighbor to assist me with this crucial research. Her response was not entirely encouraging.

Jeremy, with all the things you have to do
Why are you obsessed with Dionysus?
And at what temperature do you roast your chicken?
(Aeschylus, The Knowledgeable Woman of 91st Street, lines 212-215)

Part VI: Apollo wins ANOTHER music competition, and is not very nice, AGAIN

Apollo and Pan seem to have gotten in a little tiff … this tiff is commemorated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as a Bach Cantata (BWV 201: Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan). Yes, another music competition: it seems Apollo is one of these “competition lyrists” one hears so much about; perhaps he is (was?) not the high-minded pure musician we all suppose!

How insecure do you have to be to keep proposing competitions with every promising young artist who comes down the pike? Perhaps THIS insecure:

Only Midas—no one else—
Protested, said the verdict was unjust.
Apollo cannot suffer that affront:
He can’t allow such stupid ears to vaunt
Their human shape; and so he made them longer,
And added gray and shaggy hair …

This was the only punishment of Midas:
To wear the ears of a slow-moving ass…
(Ovid’s Metamorphoses, XI, tr. Mandelbaum)

So, let’s get this straight. Apollo wins the damn thing, and only one person disagrees with the jury’s verdict. Apollo cannot tolerate the slightest dissension, and he transforms Midas’ ears into donkey ears as punishment.

Dionysus: 3, Apollo: 0. If I could give Apollo a negative score at this point, I would.

Part VII: Who Killed Orpheus?

The attentive reader at this point might suspect, vis-a-vis my scholarly inquiries, that I am “fair and balanced” somewhat in the spirit of Fox News: paying close attention to Apollo’s faults, while downplaying all of Dionysus’. Mea culpa. I think one can say, safely, that occasionally the Dionysian follower can get a bit out of control. For instance, on a fine day, Orpheus is just minding his own business, playing a run-out concert in the sticks somewhere:

Such were the songs of Orpheus; with these
The Thracian poet charmed the woodland trees
And souls of savage beasts; even the stones
Were held in thrall by Orpheus’ tender tones.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI)

When suddenly, the gig goes terribly terribly wrong; a bevy of Bacchantes (followers of Dionysus) goes all spring break on him:

But now the Thracian women—all had cast
the hides of beasts around their frenzied breasts—
down from a high hilltop, spied Orpheus
as he attuned his lyre and his sweet voice …

… Nothing now can check the wild attack;
Fanatic Fury whips their rage. In truth,
the song of Orpheus could have subdued
all of their weapons; but his lyre is drowned
by shrieks and caterwauls, the raucous sounds
of drums and twisted Berecynthian flutes,
Baccantes pounding hands, and strident howls.
and so at last the stones were stained with blood,
the blood of one whose voice could not be heard.

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI, tr. Mandelbaum)

So, Dionysians killed Orpheus! What a cad! Dionysus clearly hates music! But, wait …

But Bacchus would not leave that crime unscourged.
His grief was great; and to avenge the loss
Of Orpheus, the poet who had sung
Of Bacchus’ sacred mysteries, the god
At once bound fast with twisting roots all those
Who’d shared in such a crime.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Mandelbaum)

I’m so confused. Who’s responsible? I need closure, here. The following passage from Graves did not help matters, one little bit:

In Classical Greece … Orpheus did not come in conflict with the cult of Dionysus; he was Dionysus, and he played the rude alder-pipe, not the civilized lyre … Apollodorus (i.3.2) credits him with having invented the Mysteries of Dionysus.

Nor this one …

… Orphic priests … [distinguished] Dionysus, the god of the senses, from Apollo the god of the intellect. This explains why the head of Orpheus was laid up in Dionysus’s sanctuary, but the lyre in Apollo’s. Head and lyre are both said to have drifted to Lesbos, which was the chief seat of lyric music …
(both quotes: Graves, p. 114)

So did Dionysus kill Orpheus because Orpheus was worshipping Apollo, or was Dionysus Orpheus, one and the same, and … were they all Lesbians? My head spun in frenzies and I began to regret ever beginning this scholarly quest.

Part VIII: Jeremy Talks Turkey

Suppose we admit that it is often annoying to look at people gesture wildly and make faces while they play, especially if you are not generously inclined towards them in the first place.

Now, having admitted this, let us examine the question of the perfectly still artist. My assertions may involve some sacrilege, I am sorry to say. Let us pose the example of Jascha Heifetz, a god-performer if there ever was one. He stands tremendously still while playing, gazing with laser Jascha-vision upon his own fingers at work. It is all result, no theatre (except of course for the theatre of his stillness…) He is Apollo, the living embodiment of the principium individuationis. Now, are there other people out there who feel like I do: that Heifetz, while impressing me and astounding me to the bottom of my being, does not give me the warm and fuzzies? That if I really wanted to enjoy some of the violin repertoire, in a “spiritually satisfying” way (whatever that means), I would probably not choose my Heifetz recording of X? I would never want to hear him play, for instance, the “Archduke” Trio … to choose a random example of a piece that I am attached to deeply, suffused with human, tender lyricism that I feel Heifetz would never be able to capture. Heifetz to me seems unable to accept the vulnerability of the self to something greater than the self; that is an ingredient I refuse to do without.

Wow, I’m going to get into trouble saying that. But I feel it is true. And when I see those famous videos of Heifetz teaching, I realize: yes, Heifetz is truly revealed as a god, in the sense of being cruel and arbitrary, capricious and inhumane. All his rigor of thought, his knowledge and wisdom, is saved for himself and his own playing; and it finds form towards others only in mockery. The rigor of his mockery is impressive. He seems like he would affix ass-ears on his detractors. He is in love with his own image as god, and it is sad to see. It is true, the classical music world seems to enable this god-behavior, to approve of it, despite its transparent pitfalls…

Now, I feel totally differently about Rubinstein, whose playing I adore: humane, generous. But even, sometimes, I feel his pose of stillness at the piano is just that: a pose. I have wonderful video at home of Rubinstein playing Schumann Fantasiestücke, and he gazes up at the ceiling and he lifts his arms dramatically, and it is all wonderful … not theatrical, but of a piece with the expression: pure, sincere Romanticism. His motions seem a balletic version of certain impulses within the music, a dialogue with the music which allows his arms to fall at the right moment, which allows certain upbeats to happen in certain ways, which allow different structural moments within the music to be felt as “changes of aspect”: the change in body language corresponds perfectly to the changes of harmonic motion.  There is no question of motion vs. sound.

This is my favorite sort of Rubsintein.  But sometimes don’t you feel that some of his recordings are too self-consciously Apollonian, purged of expression to the point of being statues, instead of gracefully etched motion? Maybe some of you feel, as I do, that on rare occasions the pose of the observing artist got to him?

I think we need to glorify efficiency of motion cautiously. The fetish of stillness at the piano can become its own kind of restriction, a kind of profundity-esque masking emptiness. I have seen some very well-known artists play recitals, and be perfectly still, and I have watched their stillness translate with eerie precision into what was heard, into the musical thought: i.e. nothing was said, nothing was done. It was magnificently efficient motion in cold-blooded pursuit of absence of content, absence of meaning, absence of beauty. Michelangeli leaps to mind. (Ouch, I’m going to get in trouble for that too!)

My own teacher, Sebok, was a model of stillness at the piano. I think it is safe to say I am not, despite my best and ongoing efforts. (I idolized him and his Apollonian musicianship.) And yet he almost never mentioned my faces or motions during all of my years studying with him. He was harsh on me in the contrary sense: he talked mainly about ways to increase my range of motion … of course, not theatrical motion, gazing at the ceiling, etc… but range of motion in the places it counted, arm wrist elbow finger shoulder: motion as it related to a wider repertoire of expression. And he would say:

Motion is not necessarily important, but mobility is indispensable.

Part IX: The Dionysian Artist Who Cares About Music

Paradox: Stravinsky was an Apollonian, I think we need not argue about that. But what could be more beautiful than the “Dithyramb” from the Duo Concertante?

Let us return to the sentence which began this whole thing:

… Dionysian pianists care about Dionysian pianists, whereas Apollonian pianists care about music.

King Pentheus was punished quite severely for not acknowledging the divinity of Dionysus: he was torn to pieces by his own mother. But the author of this quoted sentence is watching piano competition documentaries of his own volition. This suggests a significant capacity for enduring suffering: perhaps more than any torment the Gods could devise. Let’s be more generous than the Gods are, and admit that the author has a point, with which we often agree, and yet not always. Let us suggest that Dionysus cannot or should not be excluded from music …

Is my point, after all this, merely the same as Nietzsche’s? That art is a fusion of the Dionysian and Apollonian? I confess I have another, more dangerous inclination: let’s tell the Gods to go to hell, and make music not for their sakes, but for music, pleasure, sadness, delight, pain, and love …

Death is not part of life. Death is not lived through. If we think of eternity not as endless duration, but as timelessness, then he who lives in the moment lives eternally.

(Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

Early Rose
The world is
Asleep – sleeping
In those leapless
Limbless hours
When powers fail, save
The billion slopes which
Rise and rose and fall
In a billion breaths on their
Beds of repose.

To the garden, awake,
Tiptoe, quick, go
Slick-stairs down the
Steps to the pre-dew
Night morn before the
Dawn’s birth is born.
Follow to the foliage where,
Hidden as the future’s
Fall or rise, the rose –
Petals closed – will bud-burst
A billion atoms of beauty.

Let us bend down, our faces
Towards the flower which
Wakes and trembles
In that pause of hour.
Let us say the words which
Shake or stumble
In day’s poor prose, pour
Verse into the stamen’s
Quivering cup.

So when the day dries
Dreams, wakes dew, and
Sunplay in dazzling green
Or hue, the perfume from
That secret rose will
Breathe our poem to every
Nose: sigh language of love;
Encrypted script of ecstasy.

An unqualified, enthusiastic, passionate admirer of Mr. Hough’s playing, I had never before encountered his verse. I could not help a twinge of envy creeping as if from the sorrowful depths of my almost empty Venti. I felt that I, too, had something to offer the poetry world, reams perhaps of unwritten odes which could offer a poised foil to this “encrypted script of ecstasy.” I, too, wished to “pour verse into the quivering stamen” of something-or-other.

But wait!

I recalled, at this dark moment, that I did have a poem to offer the world. Mr. Hough’s poem is about the universal wonder of morning, of dew-covered, trembling foliage; whereas mine, poor postmodern thing, is more centrally concerned with mold and fungus. Let me explain. After many years of passionate entreaties from my friends, and the Department of Health, I was finally convinced to hire someone on a regular basis to come in and clean my apartment. This wonderful person, Monika, I have come to think of as sort of the “conscience of the greater world,” since when she leaves, my apartment looks more or less like you would imagine a normal person’s apartment should, if they were impoverished, blind, and loved to purchase books that no one else really wanted to read.

But, by a terrible twist of fate, both Christmas and New Year’s fell on Tuesdays, her regular day, and I found myself having to live several weeks without her, having become addicted to the semblance of normalcy she provided. And thus, out of the darkest moments, comes the greatest inspiration:

ODE TO MONIKA

Oh Monika, you moniker, you monster!
Oh beast who promised cleanliness
But now leaves only dusty loneliness
My detritus, you moniker, you monster!

Oh Monika, my dishes pile in savage heaps
From whence (who knows?) aroused bacterium leaps
Receipts and disused papers teeter in the winds
and crusted honey dropt from oatmeal past now binds
the sinful slothful pages of my present domicile
telling sermons on my flushed youth
an obsolete guest, a loosened tooth
well past prime, a milk gone sour a while…
like a poem written in the ancient style.

Oh Monika! my stale testosterone, I hear it!
It echoes down the empty corridor,
echoes nothing: vacuum of vacuums,
My filth foredoom of dooms
in these empty and yet cluttered rooms
once cloistered wombs, now tombs upon tombs
requiring brooms.

OK, so don’t feel any pressure out there, Think Denk readers, but which of these poems do you like better? That’s what I thought.

I challenge Stephen Hough to a pianist vs. pianist poetry slam smackdown kind of situation, in front of screaming tens of people. Venue TBA, Prize TBA, let’s just do this.

This cool slimy cuke unaccountably made all my sorrows rise, and dance for joy. (They could not comport otherwise with the clown they inhabited.) Their arguments for their own existence withered, they disproved themselves in a breathless glee of smell, in a cool evaporating flush. Happiness–at last I understood!–is a remnant of misused cucumber.

Tablemate J smiled too, at last. I had hoped to wake the room from its somnolence, but it snoozed on. Many rooms and persons seem to be dreaming away the winter, wide awake.