The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

A week of 90s in Seattle … my hostess and I are both heading down delirium’s loopy driveway. The notes on the piano that I don’t feel like practicing swim in the heat. I flee to an air conditioned coffeeshop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other night I woke up from a vivid dream in which Anne Midgette was trying to prove that Charles Ives was gay using musical examples from his First Piano Sonata.

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

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

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

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

“And you’re Walt Whitman,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

In April, I drifted off course, steadily. I can’t decide if I was the Titanic or the Exxon Valdez. Icebergs massed around me in the gloom of my pleasures. The boat needed a captain, but the captain was tired of giving orders, had had enough, and perhaps not without cause. Now we are here in May, the month immortalized by Schumann:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, I was just sitting round the apartment on my same old butt, eating crappy Indian takeout, looking longingly at the box of wine my friend C sent me, etc. etc., when I decided to do some due diligence regarding my exciting assigment as vlogger for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. In case you don’t know, the YouTube Symphony will be performing at Carnegie Hall on April 15 and there will no end of excitement there and symphonic synergy smoothies and virtual musical orgasms and DJs and free naked snowboarding lessons and everything your heart can desire, so you should buy your ticket here. (Can I have my check now?)

Anyway, as you can imagine, I was very curious to see who got picked as the pianist winner. You can go look for yourself at this link. The pianist is by his own admission not primarily a “classical player,” whatever the heck that horrible phrase means, but there is something very likable about the playing.

For some reason I found his video very moving. Something about the Italian sunlight–or is it a spotlight?–streaming in from the undisclosed above; something about the beaten-up upright, cornered against the wall, guts exposed … But maybe most affecting is the dog in the corner, slumped expectantly. I admire how the video begins without people, with just piano and dog; who knows, perhaps only at this moment of being filmed they realize they are both beasts?

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