The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Today I am a squirrel. I am stocking away fingerings for the long, hard festival season. The squirrel hoards for the winter, and I for the summer. Presenters (you know who you are) don’t always seem to care about my peace of mind, and thus for a given trimester of festivals I rarely have a single overlap, a single piece played twice (unless I really throw a tantrum) … At a certain juncture in the summer–the “tipping point”?–the pace of oncoming concerts overwhelms my accumulated credit of preparation, and at that point it is every man for himself … no, every piece for itself. Me, I am adrift, a contestant on Survivor: Chamber Music — stay tuned, will the next piece kick my butt?

I am squirrel in other ways as well. I have a huge pencil problem at the piano. Consider this “simple” process:

a) pick up pencil from music rack
b) neatly write fingering
c) put the pencil down in the same place for easy retrieval

Something about this confounds me; it can “gang agley” at a, b, and/or c. For example, I put the pencil back down on the music rack. I am playing along, happily, I feel I sound reasonably OK (as probably occurs too often), so I don’t stop, I turn the page, swept up in the moment… (at the very least my page turn will be done with gusto, will express the spirit of the passage I am playing!) At this point the pencil, perched innocently on the music rack, gets caught up in the fracas, flies away, onto the floor–cruelly and perversely landing behind a huge pile of music waiting to be learned (and fingered). I bravely ignore this, but when it comes time again to put in another fingering, then I have to stop playing, crawl on the floor, look for it, and past experience (cruel mother of statistics) has taught me that I have at least a 40% chance of thereby bumping my head against the bottom of the piano (collateral damage). Usually this irritation overwhelms my desire to write in the fingering, and so no more fingerings will be written. So there.

My solution is brilliant, and yet socially unacceptable. (Luckily piano practicing is a deeply antisocial activity.) I keep a pencil in my mouth (!) at all times while practicing, and this makes me look rather idiotic… like a squirrel or chipmunk. But the pencil is thus always at hand (at tooth, I should say), and I have become quite attached to this posture; this idiocy tames my mind, arranging it in the ideal “flow state” for practicing. Sometimes all I need to do is put a pencil in my mouth to put myself “in the mood” (not tonight, Steinway, I have a headache). Pencil is to me as blanket is to Linus and yes I know Schroeder was the one who played the piano but Linus was and is my hero.

After three hours of fingering yesterday, I headed to my local sleepy Indian restaurant, which, judging from its takeout menu, is “Under New Management.” There is of course no reflection of this in either the service or the cuisine. As always, I order “Balti Jalfrazi,” and, as always when I eat in the restaurant, it is totally in another planet of tastiness from the same dish, delivered. A bowtied, elegant waiter wipes my plate with a pristine white towel before gently laying it down on the table in front of me. The dish is presented in a beautiful, miniature copper pail. Fragrant basmati rice steams from an oval platter. I refuse to believe the food suffers that much from the four block journey to my house. Here is my theory: when you sit in the restaurant, they are forced to confront you “as a person,” to believe in your existence… they cook with courtesy, ethically. But as a mere delivery, a numbered apartment on a numbered street, it is just business, just the endless flow of curry up and down Amsterdam Avenue…

If to seek the last beans out of the coffee bean bag is to “suck at the marrow of life,” then consider me today a Bon Vivant:

A rough measure of the urgency of the coffee-making process is the amount of coffee spilled in getting from the grinder to the French Press:

New Yorkers know that their subway cars are peppered not only with advertisements for chemical skin peels and trade schools, but also with sponsored snippets of poetry. It would be noble, perhaps, to enjoy these bits of verse as an artsy escape from the maelstrom of the trains, the screeching of their brakes, the scurrying of rats on tracks, and the other, more generalized difficulties of the commute–but I am not noble in this respect. The choices are often insipid, and the poems seem to me so out of place, uncomfortable, artificial, on their little slanted panes. It seems too desperate, kind of sad, like raising a golden retriever in a New York studio. Poem, run free!

In response, therefore: this. I composed it on my way home tonight. It is the first (and maybe last, depending on feedback) of a series of poems in which lines of “Subway Verse” are interspersed with lines from other ads and posters in the specific subway car. Here goes:

Music, when soft voices die,
must be made available to people with disabilities,
vibrates in the memory–
Map it!
Odors, when sweet violets sicken
on the subway,
live within the sense they quicken;
please be aware that not all disabilities are visible.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead–
(you’ll be seeing this a lot)
are heaped for the beloved’s bed:
This is the symbol of our commitment.

And so thy thoughts
must be in one of the first five cars.
When thou art gone,
Become a dental assistant!
Love itself shall slumber on:
This could be the last ride of his life.

In case you didn’t enjoy this, in the words of another subway poster: “It’s a work in progress.”

One could have paid a lot of money over the last week to see grown adults act like children. There was Dawn Upshaw , daring to prance around the august stage of Carnegie Hall on an imagined hobby-horse. And there was Richard Goode, tenderly coloring Mussorgsky’s quirky chords around and behind her, making tritones sound like a child’s wrinkled nose.

I find this Mussorgsky set — “The Nursery” — an unbelievable masterpiece: brilliantly funny, perceptive, so exactly mirroring a child’s behavior, in all its innocence and inconsistency … and quite sad. The child is visited by little tragedies (crashing on his hobby horse, for instance, getting a little “boo-boo”) and in these melodramas, these minor losses-of-innocence, I feel the adult’s premature, imposed regret: the implication that the child’s miniature sadnesses are precursors of (rehearsals for) greater, later ones.

But then, Mitsuko Uchida and Mark Steinberg played the E minor Sonata of Mozart (among others) on Saturday night. The first movement is the adult tragedy that Mussorgsky foresees: stormy, brainy, beset. And so, too, the beginning of second movement, a melancholic, minor-key menuet. But finally:

She played with the wonder of a child. We have not really heard E major before in this piece; for me it was more like I had never heard E major before, ever. And certainly nothing like the seventh chord which the E major leads to… She played the beautiful, rising response:

And then there is the longer phrase, with the motion temporarily moving to the left hand, the phrase that connects, the longer arc that “justifies” the two preceding fragments:

In the Mussorgsky, a child’s innocent pleasures are somehow colored, spoiled by adult awareness. (What could the child possibly be nostalgic for? his former life? Really, only adults are nostalgic …) Time and events encroach. But here, in Mozart, the (extraordinary) adult’s music is rebuked, refuted by this (even more extraordinary) bubble of E major, this frozen wisdom of a child. Nothing encroaches on it; time is, as they say, suspended; it is not threatened by possible decay; it is immortal, pure, rounded.

Mitsuko taught me many things in her playing of this section… In the longer phrase (3rd example, above) I had always looked for beauty on “the way up,” on the leap from E up to C-sharp. But the most beautiful moment (the defining moment) of her version was, subtly, one measure later, on the way down. (The two arrows show the two places.) I had always deceived myself, or let Mozart deceive me. The phrase appears to be about rising, towards something; but it actually turns out to be about relinquishing. After all, we have heard that C-sharp already, in the second “phraselet;” it is letting go of the C-sharp that has yet to be accomplished.

I always found this place intimidating to play. If a musical moment is so concentrated, so distilled, you want it to last forever, or at least longer than “real time.” It is easy to get in a Catch-22: no matter how much you stretch it out, it never seems long enough; and if you stretch it too much, it gradually falls apart, like dough. It is of course written in the “language of time;” without a certain timeliness, without its rhythm, it would become meaningless, and yet, and yet… it seems to grab at time, attach its hooks to it, not want to let go. So as a performer I feel torn between two selves, the person who must keep playing the quarter notes, feel the pickups, the meter; and someone else who just wants to listen, to savor, to enjoy … between an adult and a child?

EVEN BEFORE MY COFFEE yesterday morning, the very first thing I did (usually I start counting events of any day from the moment of my first sip of coffee… not A.D. but A.C. … nothing “really happens” before coffee) was go to the piano in my pajamas and try to play these phrases, try to absorb what Mitsuko had shown me about them. This means it was an emergency for me. After a couple tries, I won’t say it was the same, but it was “good enough.” I did not feel hurried, or distended; I could savor the beautiful chords (as sonorities in their own right) and still keep things moving and meaningful. I was happy and I made coffee with a serene self-satisfaction. I stole this happiness from Mitsuko, or borrowed it…

One more thing Mitsuko and Mark did to cement and circumscribe the beauty of this section… There is a pause in its second half; they waited out this pause, the last time; they both breathed a long breath. It was longer than it “should have been,” but they entered together, without anxiety… So that there was this effect of infinite patience, combined with anticipation… for the last time we will hear the theme, for the final, rounding E major strain. That way, I could hear it, one last time, fully appreciate it, and let go. I’m not sure I’ve let go of my childhood with the same equanimity.