The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Suitcase
Originally uploaded by Jeremy Denk.

As I enter the east wing of my apartment, the half-unpacked suitcase from last week’s concert often growls at me. Perhaps after I finish my coffee…

Sitting with two friends in an apartment downtown, doing the iTunes shuffle. Lovely lazing, shlumped out on a sofa for hours, blabbing about nothing.

At a certain point we came upon a series of meditative songs which seemed to go on forever. Certain modern “popular music” crawls over and through me disturbingly; I don’t feel in my own skin. It is melancholic, pulsing, repetitive; it makes me feel suddenly “this is what it’s like to be modern” (me who’s probably stuck in the 19th century somewhere), all that 20th century crap of existentialism comes to me in a wash, and I realize, yes, it’s a dehumanizing routine and mankind’s progress is merely a self-destructive path, etc. etc. I said, with my usual eloquence, “it’s so sad.” And I realized that normally I am a happy person…

But then a Cole Porter song came on, and I turned off the shuffle, and we kept in that world. The charm of one phrase obliterated the whole preceding morass. Above all, there is what is not done: not too much emoting, the rhythm swung but not too much, not too overt. It is always stylized, refined, smooth, cultured; this music is like a graceful, natural pose. But the refinement (the pose) is not snooty, not stifling, it puts no limits on this music’s joy, on its eternal internal smile, its bemused, knowing survey of harmony and verse. It creates its own syntax of style, class, wit. There is no visceral push/pull, all that is behind the curtain: considered, absorbed, relegated.

Think of it: from the Baroque endlessly flowing phrases of Bach emerged the “early classical style,” the new simplicity (Rousseau, etc.) and the four-bar phrase as God. Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven: all mainly in thrall to this phrase ideal. Then the Romantics start putting quotation marks around their phrases, start wondering if phrases exist, melting them, expanding them, denying them; they expand the harmonies which define the phrases, begin a general semantic blurring…. What if a seventh chord actually could be the “tonic”? And Wagner did it. The harmonies get more lush, more plural, more ambiguous. Think Brahms Op. 119 #1. There they all are, those seventh and ninth chords, almost too beautiful to be functional. Wandering, almost meaningless, fragments of phrases …

It struck me! In Cole Porter, all the “Romantic,” blurred chords are there… but there is also this tremendous “last gasp,” or resurgence of the four-bar phrase, of the classical ideal! In these songs, the simplicity of the phrase structure (always subject to exceptions, deviations, but nonetheless persistent, essential) is God again. It absorbs and subjugates the tremendous and refined harmonic language. It is like a game, to make these Romantic harmonies fall into place, to make them obey their phrases. And how delicious it is, what an odd couple the harmonies and the phrases make; and how many subtle transformations and voice-leadings and enharmonic tricks are required to merge them!

I listen to a lot of music and love a lot of it. But on those days when you are tired, weak, feeling a little cynical about the hospitality of the world… then, when you can no longer lie to yourself, you turn to the music you really need, which lies next to your heart, which literally feeds you. And I have to admit that Cole Porter and that whole era: I need it.

Found this passage in her memoirs, hidden among the books in the guest room of a concert presenter:

“It matters very little to me whether people believe one thing or another. Life is short, even for those who live to a ripe old age, and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them.”

After a glittering black-tie gala, I made my way downtown last night to a poser bar. There was only a slight difference between the socialites posing for the cameras and the New York youthful clubsters posing for each other. We were forced to wait in line outside the club, while others (friends of the doorman, regulars, and those too beautiful to wait) went right on in… which made my friend almost insane. I had to calm him. I was oddly patient; standing on 4th Street in my jeans was delicious after a night spent sitting in my tuxedo. Nights in tuxedos are the inevitable price of a career in classical music.

Once inside, my friend headed for the restrooms, and I for the bar in quest of drink. I sat, patiently awaiting my turn to scream “Tanqueray and tonic.” My eyes wandered, and, sitting in a section of the bar that could only be called a “nook,” was an elderly gentleman in a striped cap, speaking animatedly with a swarthy young man. Perhaps this was one of those situations that would be best ignored … but something rang my inner bell. I gave him a long look, and he returned it with a slitting convergence of his eyes–and I realized then that this was one of the old men from the final vignette of Jim Jarmusch’s movie, Coffee and Cigarettes.

His name is Taylor Mead, and not only was he rather an odd sight in this bar of youthful dissipation, but that movie itself is so very surreal, and his totally unique face seemed such a symbol of that surreality, that I felt briefly as though Jarmusch’s artificial world had come to life, and was lurking in the corner of the bar, waiting to swallow everyone.

That particular section of the movie had touched me rather deeply. Two elderly men sit in an strange, large, vaguely menacing, mostly dark, industrial room; a janitor is listlessly sweeping in the background. There is no way to know why they have come to this bleak workingman’s fate, and what dark world surrounds them. They are drinking bad coffee on a break (from what?), and Taylor’s character insists that they pretend for a moment it is champagne. This is, of course, their only escape.

But the essence of this vignette occurs when Taylor cocks his ear to listen, and thereby summons one of my favorite Mahler songs, a song which I obsessed over in my Oberlin days: Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, “I have lost touch with the world.” This auditory hallucination? visitation? is heard by both men (and we as viewers), in fragments… a voice from the other world, utterly foreign to the room we see onscreen. At first nearly inaudible, its volume gradually increases. We want more and more; it blooms, a phrase climaxes; and then, painfully, it vanishes, incomplete. We imagine we are still hearing it even when it is completely silent. This giving and taking away engages a visceral desire for music, like a desire for life itself. This desire can be seen inTaylor’s eyes as he tries to keep hold of this musical “vision,” but eventually it is just gone–he has to give up.

I feel as though I have given up (against my will) many things which I felt since I first heard that song, many feelings which that song virtually embodies. It is a dizzying self-referential dealie: I feel I have lost touch with the song itself, which is about losing touch…

I am surprised that I got up the courage to introduce myself to him (we are back in “reality” at the bar), but I did, and the young man with him was (apparently) an agent trying to sign him on. Taylor was precisely the childlike anomaly that he represented in the movie. He did some delightfully silly gestures when I told him I recognized him from the movie, and said several times “I love feedback.” He told me that Jim Jarmusch loved it when he forgot his lines. He told me about his upcoming show at the Tribeca Film Festival, and his agent quizzed me on the vignette’s dialogue. I said “champagne” in Taylor’s way (French pronunciation), and tried to imitate his “eccch, this coffee’s terrible,” and etc. And he seemed pleased. But I couldn’t stand getting embroiled in too deep a conversation… the risk of disillusionment was too great, like the time I saw a beautiful medieval play where Archangel Gabriel redeems the world, and found the “archangel” puking in an alley later that evening. So, I excused myself.

And this morning, feeling quite out of touch with the world, I came across the following note on my neighbor’s door:

“Last night you woke me again with your noises, screams, bangs on the wall, and LEWD ACTS. This is not a fraternity house, but a place of rest. I will have to call the police…”

And etc. I know the fellow who lives in that apartment. He is a shy, sweet-seeming, 22-year-old former trombonist whose parents came to install him in this ridiculous building. They came and knocked on my door, to get my advice on being a musician in this building, practice hours, and etcetera. I feel sure this boy has done nothing to deserve this note, this intrusion of New York insanity into his existence–just as the men in Jarmusch’s vignette do not deserve to drink bad coffee on a deadline while they dream of the past, Paris, champagne…