The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

I was sitting in Seattle, worshipping an enormous donut, slinging down coffee like an oil slick over my soul, when my eyes beheld an advertisement in the New York Times …

Journey of a Thousand Miles:  My Story  … by Lang Lang (w/ David Ritz)

You can pick up your own copy here.  Now, I know him a little from Marlboro and other places, and he is a very gifted artist and has always been charming and friendly to me. But, when I saw this autobiography, I became upset, against my better judgment.  Why, you ask?  Because I have been working on my own autobiography, all this while, which was to be released in tandem with the Albuquerque Olympics.  And who wants to read TWO pianist memoirs?  In other words, he and his ghostwriter scooped me, and that’s not all.  By a strange, curious coincidence, the title of my autobiography is very similar to his, and it is called …

Journey of a Thousand Pop-Tarts:  The Toasting of a Concert Pianist

Chapter 1.

I dreamed of many things as a boy in New Mexico.  Air conditioning, for example.  And a functioning septic tank.  But one touching dreamy episode from my youth will infer you so many volumes and volumes, about my youth.  Here it is.  Halley’s Comet only comes really once a lifetime, as I’m sure all of you know out there, and it came right astride my puberty, streaking across my tweens, in phallic phosphorescence.  (Take that, LL!  I bet that phrase isn’t in your autobiography.)   Well, I had just finished practicing the twelve Liszt Transcendental Etudes, twelve times, and my parents and I had an emotional conference about the comet while my father prepared a snack of tortillas and Cheez Whiz.

(This last sentence is an example of “local color” which I learned about at Las Cruces High School, from my charmingly insane English teacher.  From this teacher I learned to write one-page essays about Kafka, asserting in their first paragraph that Gregor Samsa is an “unholy trinity of Christ, bug, and man,” and concluding “in conclusion, I have shown that Gregor Samsa is an unholy trinity of Christ, bug, and man.”  My eloquence leaves me without words.)

Oh (Proustian digression) if only I could reconstitute those squished tortillas with Cheez Whiz–or sometimes creamy peanut butter!–if only the disturbing smell of them would permeate the mouse-ridden shadows of my New York Apartment, resurrecting those halcyon dehydrated days … just the way my father would dip his knife into the jar and scoop back those processed gobs, and slather them upon the slimy floury surface, fresh from the crisper!

So we had a conference, and I expressed so much wonderful youthful enthusiasm about this timely phallic comet that my parents agreed to wake me up in the middle of the night to see it streak.  And so I went off to my happy sleep, in my JC Penney’s pajamas, confident in astronomical joys.  Let me remind you now that I was a very artistic child with tremendous gifts (tremendous!).   It would be a shame for me, even now, not to share my every last snore with the world, as they are and I am so artful and imaginative.  Oh, wait, I was supposed to put all that in the third person, or something.

Anyway!

What transpired over the comet was only reported to me the very next day.  My parents apparently came in to wake me up.   Dare they disturb the sleep of such an artistic child?  But step to my bedside they did, indeed, over the shag carpet which cushioned the ever-creative tos and and fros of my burgeoning gurgling existence.

“Oh, Joe, should we wake him?”

“He looks so peaceful and creative and musical sleeping there, it seems a shame.”

“Yes he needs his rest if he is to learn the complete works of Bach tomorrow.  But … it is a once in a lifetime moment.”

And that decided them.  They tapped upon my shoulder, and when I turned to speak to them, I said the following:

“*&*() you, I don’t want to see the &*()#$ Halley’s comet.”

Oh youthful openness to wonder.  I was like a flower stretching open to receive the universe’s radiance.  And I was quite hilariously outspoken!

This is a true story except for most of it, but in conclusion I think it speaks vast volumes about my youth as I have said, and with that I must move on to another crucial formative moment in my life, about which I am sure you will be thrilled to read.

I noticed that in Lang Lang’s autobiography, around 19/20ths of the way through the book, he gets a finger injury and is forced to take a month off, during which he absorbs the existence of Shakespeare, Monet, Descartes, and etcetera.  It is an exciting episode.  Now, my mind is altogether too absorbed by art and music and love of the universe to devote any space to envy or competitiveness, but I feel I should note as a matter of journalistic integrity (who am I but a journalist of myself?) that I appeared in a Shakespeare play at the prodigious age of 11.

Yes, I was approached by the cream of the Las Cruces, New Mexico theatre community to take the role of the changeling boy in Midsummer Night’s Dream:  the very precious boy that the fairy king and queen are fighting over.  (Oh, irony!  Oh, fate!)  Indeed, this changeling boy is an important element of the play, important enough that Shakespeare felt that silence, that most beautiful of sounds, would be his best verbal representation.

Breathlessly I accepted.  And I devoted to my non-existent lines what ten Laurence Oliviers, working with of an infinity of monkeys, could not accomplish in a lifetime.   But as I polished my non-utterances, like the doorknobs of enchanted gardens, I began to realize a fateful fateful fact; that is, when you stripped away the dross and gloss, all the limousines and toasts and the non-stop cocktail parties of the LC theatre scene, when you pruned away the beautiful inessentials, what seemed to be left of my thespian responsibilities was to stand around in a diaper.   A green diaper, with a sash; but still … it was a disheartening mix of Shakespearean sophistication and infantile regression.

And as I stood, night after night, in the diaper, some deep malaise must have grown in me, some dark foreboding, some abhorrence of a vacuum where my pants had been.

Predictably, came a crisis of the soul.   One night, well into my theatrical run, I found myself staring at a large pan of frozen fried chicken, which my mother had carefully selected from a bank of frozen meals as best to nourish my artistic growth, and with grateful ardor, I tucked into it strappingly.  Thus fortified, I then headed off to perform.  But even as our station wagon glamorously pulled up to the loading dock, something about that fried chicken had cast me in doubt.  I slipped on my sashed diaper, and sat musingly in the green room.  Is Art this sense of unease?, I wondered.  This was my first beautiful meditation on the nature of Art, and I am sure you look forward to many more as my tale profoundly unfolds.

Doubt was soon expelled from my mind while my ample meal was expelled from my mouth, and now gave the green room a dimension of green it had never longed for.  I lost my artistic epiphany, but in a way, gained a great work of art in odor, which was under-appreciated by its audience, like so many masterpieces.  I was quite eager to go on stage nonetheless, as I felt altogether better (always the performer!!!), but there were artistic reservations.   Oberon and Titania seemed slightly offput by certain aspects of the situation, and did not give their most salutary performance, and I am sure someday someone will do some research on me (“Neurosis and Performing in Early 21st Century New York:  A Dissertation with Copious Notes on Cocktail Consumption”), and will find accounts of these performances in the Las Cruces Sun-News and other important periodicals of the surrounding chile-growing regions, and marvel at how early, and how tangibly, my effect was wreaked upon the artistic world.

[more to come....?]

Airport, luggage, dawn. Desolate lanes of structure, sleeping planes like sorrowful birds, vans vrooming out of the darkness towards lonely kiosks. I boarded the bus. I had just settled myself in my seat, when a woman deposited two two-year-old boys opposite me: they swayed there, it seemed to me, like two jiggly jello molds. Aww. Casting occasional coos at them, the mother de-and-re-boarded many times, for toddler equipment … the kind of equipment you’d need a congressional appropriations bill for … carseats, strollers, baby duffels, tripods, a gross of Ziploc bags, do I see riot gear? I watched and watched. But while executing this cargo transfer, she found time to deposit with each boy a small stuffed dog, saying …

“…here’s your puppy …”

and a small container, saying …

“…here’s your sippy …”

The boys each seemed to magnetize around their puppies and sippies, and slowed their jiggling, like planets held in place by dual suns. I was instantly swept by waves of envy. Where’s MY sippy, dammit? Where is my metaphorical mommy to give my sippy for playing my Schubert Sonata a few days ago? The piece is a &*()#$ hour long and I don’t get a sippy? Here, here, on the airport bus, of all places, I need my sippy, and not some faceless wakeup call from a stoned clerk, or some crappy Cobb salad, or minibar jelly beans ($7.95!). I looked down at my fist. My clenched, desperate cup of coffee was there. What a sour, sad sippy it seemed, alas.

The last person to get on the plane sat next to lucky me. He was the window to my aisle, a tall lunk of a lad, and he casually sported a sweatsuit that was disintegrating at its edges, into threads that swept like a bead curtain over my face as he swung over me, smelling of nervous stomach. He said, by way of greeting,

“I’ve got movies.”

Trouble, I thought. As I parsed this statement and its implications of excessive friendliness, he called the passing stewardess over:

“I have an anxiety problem.”
“Yes,” she replied, serenely.

“And listen, I really don’t like flying, and I’m just really nervous.”
“Everything will be fine. Just relax.”

And this genius of customer relations walked away and he kind of trembled and swayed and gulped and I was left there with my rowmate and his movies. It was my job to do something, to prevent a full-blown freakout … (where is my sippy) … and I realized that this, THIS, was my heroic moment, that I had to be the brave sippy to his lunky puppy! Ahem, I said. This is an easy flight and I take it all the time! I fluttered by him all my horrible pretentious expertise about flying, all that well-traveled ‘tude, bravado all to make him happy and I told him (become the cheerleader you’ve always wanted to be, Jeremy!) yes I LOVE movies and I’d enjoy peering over at the screen to peep soundlessly on whatever movie you want to watch … I was groggily heroic and stoic and zzzzz.

Some of my jellybeans spilled.

The plane took off. The ground receded into misty morning distance, far from buses and lanes. “Is it normal, for the plane to go up like this?” he asked nervously.

I didn’t exactly know what to say.

And then there ensued that amazing mostly monologue of the Person From The Midwest Who Has Never Been To New York Getting All Excited About Coming To The Big City And Asking You What To Do But Looking Extremely Dubious and Bored About Any Suggestions You Give Him For Enjoying It. Finally I was in the taxi and against all expectations my luggage was in the backseat with me, turning into a giant alligator and it began hissing at me louder and louder about ssssssssss … sir you have to wake up now we are at your apartment, the maniacal driver said. And in my clean apartment I watched everything do nothing for a while. And I thought about that Schubert B-flat Sonata.

First, there is the folksong. I actually can’t tell you why, while practicing this piece over the last weeks, I kept thinking folksong, folksong … maybe it had something to do with Ives or Bartok or with my need to get back to the people or a vitamin deficiency. But the more you look at the tune, the more you wonder about it, and of course the famous half-cadence at the end with the famous trill

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

… of course, of course. (A little note to all of you who freak out every time I begin to mention terms like “half-cadence”: don’t freak out, everything will be OK, do you need a sippy? Look it up on Wikipedia or something. Jeez.) Now, it seems to me that this melody, that this opening of the Sonata, perfectly represents something Schubert did that Beethoven was more or less incapable of doing: that is, patting his head while rubbing his tummy.

If you think of Beethoven openings

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

… dramatic, tragic, rhythmic … or

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

… suspenseful, waiting to explode … or

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

… joyful bounding quiet energy waiting to explode … or even

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Beethoven openings can be conflicted consecutively, but not simultaneously. There can be tit-for-tat, but rarely (if ever) tit/tat. In this wonderful opening of the “Tempest,” there is the mysterious arpeggio, promising unanswered questions till the cows come home, and then there is the agitato, Allegro reply which doesn’t find much satisfaction either (neither urgency nor patience are rewarded) … but, you see, these are two characters in dialogue and not one really screwed-up schizophrenic (no offense to you schizophrenics, I love you all). In Beethoven, conflicts arise in the narrative but are not woven into the DNA; they are not inoperable tumors of meaning. They arise from tendencies within the musical “characters” (as in classic Greek tragedy) which inevitably lead to conflicts: but these Beethoven characters are good solid movers and shakers. They at least have tendencies, and are not prone to strange loops of self-deception and doubt. They need anger management, maybe, but not Zoloft.

Schubert’s tunes are made to reflect upon themselves, doubtfully. Also they draw so much more deeply upon cliché, upon signifiers of folk style, which are lingering around them, casting webs of (often sad) association. These webs of association may be part of Schubert’s special compositional “problem.” It makes his music feel less divorced from the world, more prone to weakness. When Schubert writes a little mini plagal cadence at the end of the first phrase …

and then immediately begins the second, strikingly, by lifting himself up to the same harmony at length …

Well, this is the perfect example of what I mean. The plagal is a cliché, coloring the end of the first phrase, a beautiful but hackneyed detail; but the clincher is the subsequent elevation and reinterpretation of this cliché, held up there for for three beats while you listen to the aching quality of the subdominant (despite its past prosaic identity). No, stop, it’s a cliché, you say, but why is it so beautiful?

Yes, that is one thing about Schubert: the musical cliché within, and without; as detail and suddenly in your face; moved from inner voice to outer, and no one, but no one, understood voicing better than Schubert. This revoicing is the eruption of the inner world … only what’s inside is old news, a torn worn keepsake.

Back to the main thesis: Schubert has managed to do two things at once. He has written a beautiful, lyrical, pastoral melody, and at the same time has removed some element of naturalness or some urge from this melody, from this genre, from this world. He has imposed some other voice which says not so fast or simply but or why. Not the florid, surging, questing why of Schumann’s “Warum?” but a darker, bleaker why. The trill is the final, coalescing materialization of this unease or malaise hiding behind the melody, but it is not (in my opinion) its first appearance. In the same way that Beckett, for instance, will begin a novel by tearing apart the justification for writing at all …

I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money. Yes, i work now, a little like I used to, except that I don’t know how to work any more. That doesn’t matter apparently. What I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying. They don’t want that.

… so Schubert begins by writing the folksong that is expected of him and yet, perhaps, his heart is not in it. To that end, I feel that the most chilling moment of this tune is not when the trill (death?) appears, but just before: just the beat where the dominant chord is sitting there, alone, without a bass, abandoned, waiting.

God, I’m suddenly really pissed at myself, calling the trill death, even in parentheses. It just smacks of too-easy equivalence and New Musicology, etc. etc., short-circuiting Schubert’s meaning, making it all Lifetime Movie. How you “understand” the trill may be so important to the movement, and calling it death is–let’s face it–kind of a cheap out. Ack. It may make the audience ooh and aah, but are those really the oohs and aahs we want?

To think of it another way, look at the contour of the main melody …

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

… Now, part of what makes this theme seem as though its “heart is not in it” is the way it circles around its very limited space. (Charles Rosen wrote the definitive article on this somewhere or other, but I’m too lazy to look it up … something about the gradual expansion of melodic space in Schubert.) It circles around its room of tones, not exactly looking for a way out; however, we as listeners may feel the absence of drive or will. We may feel the room’s limiting presence without exactly knowing it’s there.

Compare, perhaps, to the opening of the Archduke Trio …

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It seems fairly clear to me that Schubert’s melody is based upon Beethoven’s, but the intervals have merely been flattened out. Both themes are “about” the subdominant though (or you could say they are vehicles for, or toward, the beauty of the subdominant) and dwell on it before leaving for a half cadence. Compare Beethoven’s ecstatic half cadence with Schubert’s haunting half-cadence. There you go; that’s all you really need to get, to understand the “relationship” between these two pieces. It is the Archduke Trio theme, deflated and purged … without directionality, or with only the hint of directionality, with remnants of purpose, or question marks over its purposes. In Schubert I hear the simultaneous expression of something and the sadness of having to say it. The Archduke is not sad about what it has to say, no, no.

Now look back at the main melody contour … and now compare that to the little “event” of the trill:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The main melody essentially travels Bb-C-D-C-Bb, up a third and down, and so too the trill (F-Gb-Ab-Gb-F). These two circling movements are the same sort of thing, but at two different layers, and in two different modes. This combination of resemblance and dissonance is disturbing. There is a kind of grinding of layers against each other, a tectonic meaning-grinding, a deep-seated ambivalence. And after all it is just a folksong, right? (Right.) For me the trill is not death but this terrifying ambivalence, the darkest possible manifestation of the question mark of the half-cadence, the perfectly wrong thing. While the melody attempts to sing us into a certain space, the trill questions the existence of the space itself.

I don’t think Beethoven ever wrote anything as disturbing as this folksong with the bass trill undertone, its cousin and its existential nemesis. Beethoven, clearly, had his sippy, but Schubert … Even comfort is uncomfortable to him.

I besat myself in front of the irradiating monster, and invoked its mysterious POWER button. Flicker, flicker …

“I always thought yogurt was just yogurt,” said Jamie Lee Curtis, “until I did some serious reading in the yogurt aisle.”

In search of similarly penetrating wisdom, I left the television’s radius and found myself at the Ten Thousand Waves Spa in Santa Fe. I had laid myself out near the pool when two gentlemen entered the scene, separately … they seemed to know each other. The following conversation took place under the beautiful Santa Fe sun, with a stiff breeze from the pines blowing through the slats of our shelter …

“Greetings, man.”
“Blessings. What are you doing here?”
“My girlfriend’s workin today.”
“Dude do you feel that wind today … it’s like … Gaia is speaking to us.”
“Yeah, dude, he is.”

(As you might imagine, your faithful narrator was not entirely impassive at this moment, but let us leave him discreetly in the shadow of his towel.)

“So, I lost my best friend last Saturday.”
[slight pause]
“Bummer, dude.”
[Stammers]
“Yeah.” [allowing friend to twist in the wind of his inadequate response] “It was my dog.”
[relieved] “Oh, f*#$, dude.”
“Yeah a couple months ago, he like sneezed.”
“OK.”
“Except he sneezed out these huge bloody lumps.”
“Whoa.”

[Meanwhile, let us not forget, a whole group of people is lying out there, attempting to have a spiritual sunsoak. Ancient Native American Lady looks on in the corner, naked, pendulous, while the Dudes discourse.]

“Yeah like two or three big bloody lumps and I guess the vet told me later they were tumours which he passed through his nose.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah then he couldn’t breathe too well for a while … “
[imitates desperate breathing of his dying dog, at length]
“and eventually you know it was just time, he couldn’t suffer any more.”
“I’m sorry man … did you have a burial ritual?”
[no response … silence… for a while]
“Well, blessings of the Earth upon you, Dude.” [leaves pool area.]

I was called away from the scene at that point, both sunburned and spiritually scarred. The dog’s bloody tumours sneezed through my waking dreams.

But that was nothing compared to what horrors awaited me on the Internet. For instance, the following photo on Feast of Music:

… which apparently is me bowing before or after the Goldberg Variations at Wall-to-Wall Bach. This photo sent me straight to the nearest gym where I tried to sign up with every personal trainer on staff. White is not slimming, clearly; but eeeeeeeeek! However, the Gilmore people were clearly trying to wreak a more psychological kind of revenge, by cruelly posting the following on their website:

Oh. My. God. Bummer, dude. I feel the only way to recover from this is to propose a caption contest, a la New Yorker. What caption would you put below either of these pictures (with special emphasis on the Gilmore picture)? For example, what could I be thinking while I have that look on my face? Do not forget the Curtis Doctrine: yogurt is not just yogurt.

The best caption will get some sort of dubious prize. Blessings of the earth to all of you fair readers who participate.

My excuse for not blogging is world domination. My plan: work from the core of the country, and ooze outwards.

The following map shows the fiendish ingenuity of my campaign; it reveals the Denk states:

Residents of Kansas City were assaulted by my unholy mixture of Mozart and Strauss some 6 weeks ago, in which I spiced innocence with decadence and smothered decadence in giant rivers of chocolate syrup. I promised them a severe increase in liberality of Mozart interpretation, which I would pay for by cutting indulgent ritards in the Strauss Burleske, and why not promise them the moon?, I suggested the possibility of endless timpani solos. A mere four days after that came a call from the Fort Wayne Symphony, a Call to Action, which I answered bravely in my pajamas. In between brave little blobs of oatmeal, blobs which unfortunately contained somewhat moldy blueberries, I agreed suddenly and groggily (if such a coincidence of adverbs is possible) to play Beethoven’s First Concerto. Why not, I thought. What is it, anyway, but a bunch of C major? That is my new angle: dominant and tonic are the Rocky and Bullwinkle of music, and not to be feared.

Now, of course, C major and moldy blueberries are inextricably linked in my mind. I want to call up Messiaen and tell him it’s not moss-green as he might have imagined.

Then, there was a Stravinsky interval. I supposed, karmically, I had to return to the concrete jungle, to pour some ascetic, Attic salt upon my festering Midwestern wounds. Jennifer Frautschi and I had many distended rehearsals in my headquarters. We cursed Stravinsky’s fecundity. The hours eked by in irregular meters. I munched irradiated takeout between phrases. Jennifer asked with distaste, “Jeremy, what are you eating?!”

Oh, Jennifer, Jennifer, what WON’T I eat?

And Igor, Igor, if you have three notes why must they all be five miles apart? Why are my poor exhausted hands mere jerky puppets of your disjointed imagination? I longed for smooth, adjacent notes without articulation, without acrid wit: I longed for a soothing milkshake of music, gliding down my mental esophagus, towards my awaiting, lactose-tolerant soul. My meal was wet, but my music was dry, and I longed for vice versa.

After the Stravinsky concert was a truly bizarre spectacle: a meal for the festival sponsors, in the spectacular nave of St. Bart’s, proving that if sponsors wish to drink three kinds of flavored vodka in a church, they most certainly will. All hail sponsors! The meal was pretty unbelievably great and I set to the twenty courses with a vengeance to recover all the calories Stravinsky’s leaping had cost me. I was asked if I was single (oh, yes, yes, yes) and was offered a glowing description of a recently divorced 30-something daughter who is looking for a good man. It occurred to me: if they were to consider a pianist a good prospect, then their standards must be fluctuating, or collapsing. But caraway vodka could account for their lack of judgment.

The Lord looked down on us all, feasting and boozing and matchmaking in His or Her house.

Now, now, now, back to the Midwest, to dominate the heart of the land: I headed for the Gilmore Festival in beautiful Kalamazoo. Rather than walk this town’s linden-strewn boulevards, I found myself—just as in college days—locked in a windowless, airless practice room, promising myself future rewards. Occasionally I would run to a deserted vending area and buy a tongueful of Cheetos, or program some strange machine to make me terrible terrible coffee. I would suffer through this coffee, telling myself it was a meaningful pain. Is it not beautiful and fitting that just at the most fecund, imaginative, passionate moments in our young people’s lives, we shut them up in these practice rooms to dim their latent lights? The college in its wisdom provides windows, but high up, thin, inaccessible: just hopeless hypothetical glimpses of sky.

I had agreed to play the Janacek Capriccio. My poor left hand suddenly has to step onto the Kalamazoo stage. Oh Janacek, Janacek! Perversely, most of the left hand part is in the very highest registers of the piano and one feels squeezed like toothpaste into the awkward corners of oneself. My practicing could be summarized thus:

LEFT HAND: But I don’t WANT to play a trill!
Jeremy (moderator): But you HAVE to play a trill. See, Janacek wrote it!
LEFT HAND: mffff.
RIGHT HAND: Look, it’s easy! (trills wildly)
Jeremy: See how easy it is for the right hand?
LEFT HAND (weeping): I HATE you when you compare me to him! You ALWAYS compare me to him!
Jeremy: You’re right, I’m sorry, it was wrong of me …
RIGHT HAND (gleeful): whee! See, I’m trilling, I’m trilling!
Jeremy: Right hand, stop it, stop gloating. Go to your room.
LEFT HAND: I’ll prove it to you, I’ll prove it, you jerk you jerk.

And so my left hand became a determined, competitive, embittered sibling to my right.

There was a logistical mishap. Someone didn’t tell me what the rehearsal order was, so I ended up in Grand Rapids, Michigan with two and a half hours to kill. I won’t mention a name here (Tina), but it’s written in blood all over my hotel room walls. (Kidding?) Seeking succor, I walked down the street and pushed open the saloon-style doors of … Mojo’s Dueling Piano Bar.

Let us say from the outset that the atmosphere was not as duelish as one might have hoped. Where the screaming, cheering audience might have been, a vast array of empty tables beckoned like receptacles for some alien race. As far from the stage as geometrically possible, a few people huddled at the bar, their hands wrapped around drinks. The empty seating area smelled of cleaning fluid and fear. My query “Where should I sit” was greeted with a rueful, sarcastic smile, and I chose a Switzerlandian table: neutral, but privy to the action, should it ever arrive. In fact, on stage was only one rather worn-looking man, with long hair that yearned to be a combover: he was not singing, or dueling, or slamming the pianos (they are called “slam pianos”!); this was the curious bit; he was repairing them, seemingly with a Q-tip.

Was this the entertainment?

Sadly, no. Eventually, the repairer was was joined by a youthful slim fellow in a backwards baseball cap. In his eager clean-cut eye I read a hieroglyphic of hope. He emanated the hooded, fraternal pleasure of innocent song, whereas the worn man, with hair astray and displayed, seemed to be song as knowledge, or song as experience. (Just TRY and stop me; I’ll slap a metaphor on anything I can.) Just as I finished eating my deep-fried cream cheese appetizers (the healthiest thing I could find to order), they began to “perform.” Youthful cap sang a polite song, as if to express the imprisonment of his hair. Worn man then turned up the volume and launched into a savagely passionate ballad in which his pitch described fantastic whorls and curves around the correct pitch, without ever touching it. The chilling coup de grace: they joined in together, and this marriage of young and old male voices was (I guess) the dueling, oh cruel sport of precision meeting disaster! It felt like sound waves had been flattened into painful, but alas not lethal, darts. My ears, inconsolable. My cholesterol count went up to 400, briefly. Climax of course inevitable: crashing chords, finito, emotive jism.

Ice tinkled, silverware clinked.

All the kind of trivial sounds of the world seemed to suddenly be heard, rebuking the preceding intensity. A random “toot” from the road completed the ironic cadence; the waitresses circled like unmotivated vultures, and the bartenders’ eyes attempted to avert themselves from the wandering tales of their drunken patrons. Despite the apocalypse of ugliness we had just witnessed, the world went on as before:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

–Auden, something or other

The white legs of music disappeared into the green water of nullity.

All six of us were survivors of a boring natural disaster. The men began their patter, to explain, to justify: “You can’t hate us, because you’re stuck with us all night.” But it was clear from reading the audience’s twelve eyes that they could hate them all night if need be. I hated them, a lot; I scribbled Goldberg Variations on a song request slip. But then, I felt evil and ashamed. From the depths of my own immaturity, I pitied them, their sad small audience, the world’s rebuke of their musical spasm.

The next day a similar sad performance occurred. Imagine a coffeeshop, with just three people in it, clutching warm cups of joe as shields against the rubbing of the world’s weird waves. From stage left, enter large large loud man. He was claiming just to get some coffee, but then, he attacked me thus: “Look at you, you look exhausted and it’s just 9 in the morning.” Ack, it was true; I slept horribly in my Radisson suite which smelled of last night’s room service. I hated the truth of his statement. Lord, I hate to be evaluated, except rapturously! “Have you ever had an energy drink without caffeine?” No. “You haven’t tried Excess Energy Drinks, have you? You’ll feel better… ” Promise me love, promise me riches, promise me fame, if you will, I thought, but don’t promise me, you bastard, to feel better; it is the seduction I cannot resist! It seemed cruel for him to victimize us, the coffee junkies! How dare he! Preying on our vulnerability, in our holy safe place!

He bellowed to the entire coffeeshop, as if he were singing Wotan at the Metropolitan, and as if Wotan were also Willy Loman. (Biff, I built Valhalla for you!) He got inspired, the more we ignored him, the more that mockery was hidden beneath our complaisant smiles. And, the more impassioned he became, the more he failed, the more he only achieved the pity of the pitiable.

Both of these performances came back to haunt me while I played the Janacek Capriccio, in the same way that a steak after 10 pm will give birth to the most incredible, exhausting dreams. The Janacek Capriccio is an amazing, impossible piece, and despite my bitter left hand boot camp I am totally wowed by it. I am in love with its infelicitous instrumentation. The poor left-handed pianist, playing in the “wrong” register; the flute and piccolo straining to be lyrical; the cloudy oompah band of low brass doing things they normally would never be asked to do.

The Janacek is written for a deeply pitiable ensemble: flute, two trumpets, three trombones, tenor tuba, piano left hand. After I played it, someone asked “is your right hand alright?” and I looked at her for a moment; I said yes yes and waggled it at her threateningly, fingers trembling and shaking. She went away.

The deliberate choice to write awkwardly for the players has a tremendous expressive effect. Everybody is submitting to humiliating requests, performing despite embarrassment. It is Mojo’s Dueling Piano Bar, but the sadness of the audience is “factored in.” Witness polkas, marches, waltzes, sentimental songs: familiar folkish genres hug sonic happenings that are more abstruse, more drawn from outer space, from haunting Janacek-land. Life laughs at the sentimentality of the musicians, then cries. The bits of street-band music are antiques fraught with emotion; when you touch them (hear them) they give you a shiver, they tell you of generations past, of ghosts … the piece often feels like an empty, haunted room … Janacek leaves space open; he wants some vacancy, to people with ghosts, memories, or possibilities.

One of these memories is clearly a beer garden band, oompahing. With the accordion wheezing. Maybe a waltz? Oh, it’s so hard to settle yourself; Janacek won’t let you sit down; he won’t let you perform with comfort; an idea, a memory, never has time to get comfortable, to stretch its legs. He perpetually crossfades from fragment to fragment; every performer appears awkwardly, stumbles on stage, duels with absurdity …

I guess the sadness of the performance in the coffeeshop was (among other things): doesn’t this guy have more of a life than to try to sell energy drinks to random tired people in coffeeshops? But he is brave to do so, and reveal his sorry pass. And then the balding man who sang so out of tune in Mojo’s, he too was delusional and brave, throwing his voice and his feeling out to an empty, undeserving room.

There is a brave turn at the end of the Janacek. After a tremendous chromatic collapse, the ensemble braces itself, dares the impossible, gets its act together. The one-handed, crippled pianist, having spent himself in the chromatic cadenza, waits while the “orchestra” collects this brave thought. Though the last movement is fraught with angst, with difficult harmonies, with anxiety and yearning, somehow Janacek wrenches the end around, in a kind of rotation of inspiration, creates a last shining turn to D-flat major, to resolution and pride. This D-flat cadence is pretty unbelievable; it is very complex for a cadence; a kind of gritted, ground-up, generated joy. The pianist is playing at the top of the piano, with his one hand goose-stepping triumphantly in the pathetically wrong place. Yes, I’m with you, the piano says. Let’s perform (no matter what). We are all joyous, yes, at last; but it is not easy, it is never easy.