The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

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.

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!

Although I did not admit as much to my companions, I had one of the best burger experiences of my life tonight: a turkey burger (!) at the Old Town Bar. Its fresh, juicy simplicity, topped with three thick pickle slices, was almost enough of a sensual experience to drown out the surrounding, overwhelming din of drunken college girls who sounded like geese.

I’m assuming the rain brought this on: the trip home and much of the evening was freakish. There was a woman in the lobby of the Village Cinemas East who made amazing, insistent, high-pitched alien sounds, like an exotic bird in heat. Standing in front of the ritzy club at the northeast corner of Union Square we came across a whole, zoological spectrum of hipsters: boys wearing both Armani suits and John Deere caps; strutting peacock men in well-cut shirts; sassy girls with tight, tight jeans. A drunken man came up to me as I was standing outside the Old Town, and asked me if they served food; “Yes,” I said; he said “How fast?;” and what could I say? “Medium fast.” He stumbled in, tripping himself on the threshhold. And then there was a cellist playing an amplified “Swan” with electronic accompaniment in the Times Square subway station; and a purple pile of vomit on the platform; and several homeless men cleaning out or sorting through a giant duffle bag in the 2 train, debating the worth of some weirdly shaped piece of silver (a retainer? whose?). Dirty socks, gloves, papers came out… “This looks like a welfare form.” Everything went onto the soaked and filthy floor. What futile bureaucrat gave him that form?

It was a weird New York Night; I am home, buttoned up in my apartment with the remnants of the Indian food I had for lunch, and thinking about a clean tomorrow.

Bach must have known just how I would feel this morning (some 255 years after his death), dragging myself out of bed to practice on a rainy day after wings and beer with my friend last night–as he composed just this exact feeling into the last fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier:

Let us be clear: this theme is work. It was not tossed off in a moment’s inspiration, light as air. It is heavy, gradual, painstaking (too heavy, too painstaking). And when the other voices enter, it gets worse, more bogged down; too many strings are attached. What possessed the man to create this alien, chromatic landscape? What made him choose precisely these bizarre voice-leadings, these ungrateful leaps?

But the fugue is visited three times by a miracle. The theme vanishes, and in its place we have bars of fluid counterpoint… These bars are not “difficult” like the theme, and they require no special compositional prowess: they are simple, almost banal. If the theme is an exercise in complexity, these passages, too, are like compositional exercises, but in a primer: dissonances and resolutions for three voices, example 1a. But they have an amazing power. They are a voice from beyond the fugue … they feel otherworldly, the excessive gravity of the piece seems to lift.

They are scattered through the fugue irregularly: twice close together towards the beginning (as if trying to intervene)… and then the fugue proper takes over again, we are plunged into more and more elaborate counterpoint. We think, perhaps, it will never come again. Then, finally one last visitation, near the end. I think “visitation” is the right word, the appearance of a divine spirit, a revelation which must vanish, which must be postponed for the next life. Back to the chromatic vale of tears. And me, too, back to the piano, to get something done.