Practicing, practicing, practicing: my hummus and pita is strangely unsatisfying (if necessary) after 6 hours of Bach. What is amazing is how IDIOTIC the “old ways” of playing something seem (and by old I mean six months ago): how incredibly self-critical you become. And the idiocy is usually inattention… and so I force myself, bit by bit, to pay attention. This is painstaking work, measure by measure, repetitive (sometimes to no apparent result)–trying to truly “pay attention.” It is weird to repeat paying attention; repetition tends to give way to tedium, and inattention. Practicing is straining towards the opposite of this natural tendency. But then, invariably, you run across another problem: mental attention translates inaccurately into muscular tension (this movement from intangible to tangible runs through piano playing, in every direction: printed score to evanescent sound, for example). Your perception of attention is misplaced; you confuse a hunched muscle for a sparking neuron.
Then you must think about something else, on top of the impossibly intricate music: you must think of your OWN BODY, you must consider it separately while the music goes on. The real goal is the “how,” in between the “whats” of you and the piano: the perfect superimposition of motion and desire. But this goal hovers in the middle, is an impossible thin “balance state;” sometimes you must think purely of desire, and sometimes purely of motion, just as sometimes you must think by turns of your right or left hands. The Parkinsonian patients in “Awakenings” cannot sustain themselves there, between total lock and manic motion, they cannot be in our in-between, normal, human state; and while I am practicing, sometimes, I feel it too, the difficulty of remaining in the middle. It is a comfortable, beautiful place, and my happiness often depends on finding it.
Then I am online, taking a break, surfing blogs, and a friend IMs… a non-musician friend. He asks me what I’m doing and I tell him; he says “I don’t like Bach.” It’s impossible really to imagine, heartbreaking. My mother, too, actually professes not to love Bach, although she has stifled this over time, seeing me play Bach again and again. There is no more nourishing music, no more varied, no more …. how can one say you don’t like it, as if it were a brand of ketchup? Sometimes we musicians need to be shocked into realizing how much people think of music as food, as something that one picks off the shelf, something used, consumed, enjoyed casually, stored in a pantry for when you need it. Some of my friends would say that that is good, that it is a healthy attitude… Obviously I can’t be reconciled to this; turning Bach out would be to revoke part of the universe.
Memo Pads?
I must feel some extreme subconscious need to “explain Falstaff,” because this morning I awoke from a vivid dream where I was doing just that. At an upright piano, in a beautifully furnished room (seemingly drawn from the set of the WB show Charmed), I was explaining to an unknown woman the beauties of Verdi’s only comic opera. Feeling like my audience wasn’t quite getting it, I pointed to the score to show one of Verdi’s incomparable markings. I was translating from Italian, a language I don’t know … “Look, here it says to ’sing as though it were an aria written on an old memo pad.’” Somehow I attempted to demonstrate this at the piano; at that point, the dream became too impossible even for a dream, and I woke up.
Last night I was walking down the street (a memory which now seems like a dream) and I found myself unable to locate the downbeat in the Sarabande of the 6th Partita. Somehow the piece, which I have played so often, has become worn at the edges: the barlines have rubbed off. I placed the score on the piano this morning, and just looked, and played little bits, with their meters intact, reasserted. Clear as day! Though when I played them, they threatened to dissolve again, they wanted to disappear (just like my dream’s bizarre reality wanted to evaporate). I thought through the whole thing, the pulse and its disappearing act, while I washed the dishes. Hooray.
Even last night on the street, adrift without the meter, I thought through the pitches, trying to clear away the undergrowth (all the ornaments which “clutter it up”, which make the meter and the structure opaque, distant): trying to hear only this recurring motive (obsessive, idee fixe) of the falling second (the first motive of the piece … and a symbol of pathos), and the way Bach plays on the two notes, perversely resisting any too-clear direction, wandering over them, only allowing them occasionally to accumulate into larger sequences (2+2=3 in this musical language, two falling seconds makes a third, two thirds makes a fifth)…. There is a wonderful moment towards the end–when one might get distracted by the top voice–where the tenor emerges with a sequence of chromatic versions of this motive (E to D-sharp, to D-natural, to C-sharp, to C-natural). Every time I come at this piece, this place tugs at me, this tenor voice seizes my attention… and every time I get closer and closer to letting it dominate, to “understanding it.” But something about the piece, the way it is written, resists this reduction to “truth.” Is it my laziness or Bach’s wiliness? I know, though, that i want this tenor voice to be the fundament of this passage, its entrance to be a climactic summary, and the hemiola that follows to be “just” closing, “just” resolution …