The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Just returned by taxi to my apartment, and convinced yet again of Verdi’s greatness, whatever that means. Heard Deborah Voigt, Paul Plishka and etc. in Un Ballo en Maschera. I have always had a soft spot for the unbelievable contortions of operatic melodrama–a kind of game played by operatic composers and librettists, working with a small core repertoire of emotions (love, betrayal, duty, honor, etc.), and attempting to wring from this core some new twist, some extraordinary extenuation. In this case, the (at last) honorable king, renouncing his love (his best friend’s wife!), is singing farewell to her to the backdrop of an elaborate masked ball… Somehow this heart-rending duet finds a “match,” a harmony with the waltz of the frivolous crowd. This is stage one of Verdi’s “game;” the lovers are not allowed to part in private, in a separate scena; they must coexist with this unrelated event. This musical correspondence, this crush of events, has symbolic overtones (the dance of life/death, things must go on, love is merely a dance, etc.) But, meanwhile, the conspirators are huddling, preparing to strike, seen by us (the audience) but not of course by the lovers … this is done musically by adding to the waltz just one chromatic note, in a single instrument (obsessive, repetitive, not “musical,” ergo symbolic). This is Stage 2 of the game: a small touch but impossible to miss; held within, not altering the larger musical structure (thus not tipping off the lovers, who are waltzing heedless to doom) but clearly audible to the audience, just as the black cloaks of the conspirators are visible. The death, then, is nearly incidental, passes by with only the “usual” musical attention, because Verdi’s attention is directed elsewhere: to the king’s forgiveness of his own murderer.

The game so far has been about polyphony, about the tragic, bizarre superimposition of layers. In answer to these dislocations–the masqueraded crowd; the frivolity of the ball vs. the tragedy of the impending events; the loyal friend now become murdering conspirator; the dissonant note underlying the waltz; and etcetera–this forgiveness is uttered with total unanimity–assembled crowd, ill-starred principals, everyone. Univocal, concentrated; the act, the emotion, is so intense that it submerges all individual expression.

It appears I am now linked at Terry Teachout’s very serious and thoughtful arts blog, for which I am grateful…

I am aware of how presumptuous and odious it is for a lazy, self-satisfied non-composer (such as I, heading out to tan like any serious artist in Central Park today) to lecture hard-working composers on their shortcomings, as in the last post. Mea culpa. But the point of that post is really not the (considerable) shame and decay of modern culture–and so-called “classical music” in particular–but the idea of a musical work as the counterpoint of various voices–not in the literal, “compositional” sense of soprano, alto, tenor, bass, but using the word “voices” somewhat as Roland Barthes uses the word “codes” in his book, S/Z:

“The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes…

Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is “lost” in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voices (of the codes) becomes writing, a stereographic space where the five codes, the five voices, intersect…”

And so, in accusing composers of not “multitasking,” I am not saying that they are lazy, but that somehow their compositional approach is not open to this kind of interweaving. A voice (a style, a method, a logic, a sound) is found; it is cultivated, but other voices are suppressed, or never explored; this univocal cultivation sometimes results in something that is “well-crafted” (the ultimate in faint praise), but is not really “writing” or “composition.”

What I love about Barthes is how he avoids placing works of art next to each other in some grand Hall of Great Art, where their qualities glower at each other and are subject to endless art-historical comparisons, proposing instead a much wider (infinite), nearly unimaginable context: the unimpeded, total plural, what he calls the “writerly”:

“… the writerly text is not a thing, we would have a hard time finding it in a bookstore … the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world … is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.”

I imagine myself in a hall of the Metropolitan Museum, staring up at busts of Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Bach, etc. I have that faint headache I often get in art museums, that sense of standing too long, the ache in my feet, an irritation with the lighting. Barthes’ quote above (despite its intellectualism?) makes the hall, the whole museum, vanish; in its place a starry, endless field with infinite crossing lines, where Op. 111 Beethoven is actually connected to me directly (by uncountable threads), where I myself might compose some part of Op. 111 (say), where there is no “pitiless divorce” between me and the music… The writerly is a “perpetual present;” and come to think of it, that is the perpetual goal of my piano practicing, in all its seemingly repetitive tedium. As Robert Mann once said to me in a lesson (and I am paraphrasing): you don’t practice in order to repeat exactly what you have practiced on stage (that is in order to be a serviceable, reliable robot–and we are all familiar with those performances) but instead to be able to create freely at the moment of the performance… in order to access the “writerly,” after all the initial freezing of the musical idea into the score, and the subsequent ossification of centuries and tradition, to do the impossible and rescue the text back into the present.

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.

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?