The premier blessing and curse of my life right now is its self-scheduling nature. Today I find myself in a familiar bind: I started practicing around 10, worked, put in fingerings, yadda yadda yadda, and around 1 I begin to feel the first pangs of hunger. I say to myself: “You should eat, you won’t get any good work done if you are hungry.” But then my eyes stray to one or another measure and I manage to eke out another 10 minutes on that… these “last-minute” practice windows are often the best ones, the most distilled. Then fatigue sets in again, my mind wanders back to lunch, and I have to be my own boss, and decide when I can eat. Delaying the decision, temporizing, I go in the other room, I check my email, I wander back to the piano, I find another productive 5 minutes, and then slowly rotating into this vortex of indecision is the question of what exactly do I want to eat? What, when, how, where: all these questions hover, unresolved. Perhaps I could decide every evening exactly what I will do the next day, make a precise schedule. But something bothers me about this: it seems to counter my free will, the joy of living in the moment. Then again, since each day of free will seems to bring the same, seemingly predetermined, indecision, what kind of free will is it?
Elations
The best part of this past weekend I spent alone on the stage of the 92nd Street Y. I had a propitious, quick, smooth cab ride across a sunny Central Park, with coffee in my left hand, and a score propped open on my right knee, and I was very happy to land on the east side just in time: an unlikely pianist in shorts, sneakers, T-shirt, and baseball cap (covering intense bedhead), trying to get his mind in order before an afternoon concert. First the mind, then the hair. Sometimes I wish I were one of those artists who could appear everywhere in glamour garb, who finds time for meticulous, persistent image control–alas.
Sometimes practicing feels like a chore (like milking cows, say) and sometimes like a solitary mystical rite. Yesterday it was neither: it was a particular sensual/mental pleasure going over the accompanimental arpeggios in Schubert’s Auf Dem Strom, hearing them come back to me from the empty hall … the kind of Schubert writing that when I was 16 (to refer again to this earlier Jeremy) would strike me as unthinkably boring. 16-year-old me was right, in a way; it is almost aggravatingly naive, willfully simple. So many bars of E major arpeggios! It is a real challenge to play these as though you were simply inspired to play them, as though nothing in the world could please you more than to play these rippling E major sounds, for as long as the composer demands.
But there in the hall yesterday, my dissatisfaction waned; I played them through until their long phrase rhythm settled in, (here is the dominant, here is the six-chord, here is the subdominant) until I understood the “hypermeasures”… which is as though Schubert finally intervened, walked into the empty hall, and said “there there, Jeremy, calm down, stop worrying about where it will go, it all fits into place like this and this…” Something like this happens with every piece at some point … the composer shows you a way, and it “clicks.” The problem is, I never know when this will happen, I have no particular system for arriving at this understanding. I have the feeling many composers don’t want you to click too easily. You work, and work, and these epiphanies arrive in their own time. It lends itself to superstition: you must perpetually keep working, in case you miss the epiphany of the day. I suspect I am not alone in this, which is why I think so many musicians go around on edge, and become irritable in the periods before their concerts, waiting for the composer to help them out. Sometimes it arrives before the concert; sometimes not.
The thing is, everyone arrives at these understandings. And they arrive at totally different results, which are all nonetheless contracts or “truces” between themselves and the composer (and the piano, and the hall, and etcetera). Hopefully, most of these negotations are carried on “in good faith.”
To contrast with this legalistic notion of a “contract” between composer and performer, I have had several ecstatic moments lately: yesterday, walking across the park after the Y concert, with the final bars of Auf Dem Strom in my head; Thursday, after a read-through of the Schumann Adagio and Allegro with Carter Brey; and Saturday night, during Mitsuko Uchida’s cadenza of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto. These were each musical elations which passed over into a personal sense of well-being. Each of these are major-key, joyful pieces; I was not elated, however, by their “general mood” (nothing can be more depressing than an empty, happy piece) but rather by moments from each I would describe as “flowing over”: in the Schubert, the final quatrain’s descending melodic lines, which seem to address a void, to provide a sort of beauty “missing” from the rest of the song (bestow a blessing); in the Schumann, the lead-in to the recapitulation, which develops the chromatic gist of the piece in even more passionate directions; and in the Beethoven, the appearance of this monstrous “tarantella” in the cadenza, the insistent intervention of darker, minor-key harmonies, the whipping-up of unprecedented tension, all aimed at a luminous release.
Each of these moments emerges from the piece’s frame, is in a sense “illegal” (the composer breaks his own contract with the piece he has written), pours over boundaries. A tarantella cadenza? Impossible. But then, having been accustomed to winter’s rules of coats and gloves, we all find it possible to wear shorts and even flip flops, we pour ourselves outside and drink frozen drinks… It doesn’t seem possible that spring could exist, and further that it could be such a pleasure again (I have seen it before). But it does, and is.
Leon
I am obsessed right now with a single memory: a 16-year-old me standing in the cafeteria line of Dascomb dormitory at Oberlin. I was studying the E minor Partita of Bach, which I am playing tomorrow night, and which I played at my New York debut recital, and on innumerable other occasions. Conservatively, I have played the opening bars of that piece thousands of times, tried to make every note clear, tried to play in tempo properly, to articulate, to enunciate, not to double-dot, not to swallow notes–I have obsessed. But then I mentioned to Leon Kirchner that I was playing that piece, and he sang it once for me, in an anguished tone of voice: a sweep to the top, and then an eloquent falling sigh. It was so much better than any of the times I had played it; it was so much closer to how I imagined it at 16 while waiting, tray in hand, for sloppy joes. So here’s to you, Leon! Tomorrow night I will try to play it much closer to how you sang it, to replace the raw 16-year-old emotion in it, without forsaking my accumulated craft. Wish me luck!
Club Soda
I woke up early this morning and was productive; I will not make that mistake again.
From 10-12 AM I was occupied, in a quasi-professional capacity, listening to the music of young composers. It is fascinating to see all these different ways of throwing notes on paper. Mostly the music felt brackish, unclear, and when it was clear you wish it weren’t. Perhaps I can find a way to blame modern culture (pop music etc.) for all this: but these young “classical” composers seem unable to multitask, to accomplish more than one compositional parameter at once. By parameter, I don’t mean the conventional ones of rhythm, melody, harmony, etc., but larger, less literal ones that one might look for in a piece of music:
Atmosphere
Beauty
Structure
Logic
Direction
Invention
Imagination
Transformation
Surprise
Wonder
Empathy
Conviction
Diversion
Engagement
Absorption
Substance
This is a partial list. Of course, if you just write a great tune, you might be able to avoid worrying about any of the above. But most composers (other than Gershwin and Schubert) probably have to slog along and think about these things. This morning from 10 to 12, I heard a lot of strange and varied omissions: logic without direction; beauty without invention; structure without surprise; absorption without logic… The one element absent most often was “invention”–closely followed by “imagination.” How many reworkings of the same phrase rhythms can we really tolerate? Why is everything so rut-bound and modelled? I know there’s nothing new under the sun, but do you have to prove it to me?
The thing is, you don’t have to write a piece through in one go. You don’t have to concentrate on everything at once; you can “gradually multitask,” and devote yourself by turns to various elements … There is this mythic notion that you conceive a piece all in one inspiration, but I think Beethoven’s sketches very clearly show a different, gradual process–the fleshing out of a thought, the step-by-step addition of ideas, layers, unforeseen anomalies–the “hewing” of a piece, in the sense of this definition: “To cut something by repeated blows.” The different cuts of the mind from different directions, finally creating a 3-dimensional musical object.
So, this afternoon I sat down and played through Stravinsky’s Piano Rag-Music. After all those muddy, lukewarm pieces, it was like a cold club soda with lime, sharp and refreshing.