The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

I am not sure which of the following three phrases best applies to my Christmas Vacation, so-called:

a) amorphous blob of experience, with emphasis on late-night bodega snacks;

b) productive, yet difficult, time of intense self-analysis, with emphasis on late-night bodega snacks;

c) the usual practice obsession crap, with emphasis [etc.]

Luckily, at the crucial juncture of New Year’s Eve, friend Cory phoned all the way from California to deliver an inspiring voicemail:

Jeremy, another year, Jeremy, another … chance … oh God … [sigh] alright [heavy sigh], bye [click]

Perhaps the climax or crux of my vacation was when I was deeply in the folds of a vicious flu, sitting on my sofa, with the television on mute, watching onions fry on the Food Network. There is something wonderful and pathetic about watching TV on mute, in my opinion, and this moment was no exception, it was a marvel of forlorn lassitude. A virtuosic etude of turpitude. A minefield of scattered zinc lozenges and their discarded wrappers lay around me in an irregular semicircle: my domain. Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

Unluckily, perhaps, I had a Beckett novel right there on the sofa with me: Malone Dies. I decided to stop watching the silent screen, and turned to good old Samuel:

But space hemmed him in on every side and held him in its toils, with the multitude of other faintly stirring, faintly struggling things, such as the children, the lodges and the gates, and like a sweat of things the moments streamed away in a great chaotic conflux of oozings and torrents, and the trapped huddled things changed and died each one according to its solitude.

Yikes! Enough of that. I immediately turned the sound up on the TV. And what did I hear?

Now, here’s my super duper secret tip. OK? You gotta mash up the second can of black beans, mash em up in the can with your spoon, before you pour em into the pot, and that’ll make the stoup super thick and meaty. I’m calling it a stoup because it’s part stew and part soup. Yummo!

You, reader, cannot possibly imagine the existential despair I found myself in at that moment, caught between (betwixt!) Samuel Beckett and Rachael Ray. It seemed like the darkest forces in the universe had massed themselves. I felt sure, for instance, that if I turned on my DVD player, it would be playing The Mummy Returns, or Titanic, or some similar atrocity.

I closed the book, I turned off the TV, I waited for a few solemn moments, senza media. In a flash of clarity, it came to me: Beckett was misery that I loved; Ray was cheerfulness that I despised. Even with a flu, I would rather waddle through thickets of thorny Beckett than suffer even one more flouncy use of the word stoup.

What was appallingly clear on MUTE: Rachael Ray continually mimes her motor-mouth. If she refers to herself, she points a thumb at herself; if she presents an idea, she raises a finger to enumerate it (she mostly only counts to one); if she says the word “running” she brings comical fists up in pseudo-jog; at phrases such as “what are you going to do?” she shrugs, like a perplexed puppet. This superfluity conceals an emptiness. That is, she cannot possibly fill the space she feels in her heart (or stomach, or soul, or spleen?); though she talks through every available nanosecond, time drips on, leaking boredom or stillness, and so she frantically works at sealing us in with the grout of her gestures.

And there were more thoughts that came to me there amidst the lozenges, amidst the absence of flickering screen. It struck me that the Food Network is stricken with a continuous, abject coitus interruptus. Every show is foreplay towards a meal, every show is impotent when it counts. It should get a complex! For when the beef must melt upon the tongue, when the soup must warm and worm its way down your esophagus, the TV is utterly helpless: this conqueror of nations, destroyer of culture, this liquid crystal Genghis Khan rampaging over the minds of youth is like a fish trying to topple its own fishtank. It has wooed, promised, suggested, evoked: but it can never ever deliver, at the moment of taste, at the instant of experience. I’m sure you’re all familiar with this: the falsest moment of a cooking show is when everyone is huddled around the finished dish, saying “mmm…” I have never seen a truly convincing “mmm” on television, and it is surely no coincidence that the theme music inevitably returns at that moment, to tunefully patch the void.

Now, Beckett, when he wants you to taste something … well, he is luckier, he just wants you to taste thought. His words, while describing impotence in great, lurid, circular detail, are super-potent. For instance, this passage from Molloy … (Quick plot summary) The speaker, on his way to his mother, has killed a woman’s dog with his bicycle and is almost beaten by a vengeful mob. The woman saves him by saying she was taking the dog to the vet anyway to get it put to sleep, and it saved her the expense which she could ill afford. Then the woman is talking to him, telling him that she needs him, and he needs her:

She needed me to help her get rid of her dog, and I needed her, I’ve forgotten for what. She must have told me, for that was an insinuation I could not decently pass over in silence as I had the rest, and I made no bones about telling her I needed neither her nor anyone else, which was perhaps a slight exaggeration, for I must have needed my mother, otherwise why this frenzy of wanting to get to her? That is one of the many reasons why I avoid speaking as much as possible. For I always say either too much or too little, which is a terrible thing for a man with a passion for truth like mine. And I shall not abandon this subject, to which I shall probably never have occasion to return, with such a storm blowing up, without making this curious observation, that it often happened to me, before I gave up speaking for good, to think I had said too little when in fact I had said too much and in fact to have said too little when I thought I had said too much. I mean that on reflexion, in the long run rather, my verbal profusion turned out to be penury, and inversely. So time sometimes turns the tables. In other words, or perhaps another thing, whatever I said it was never enough and always too much. Yes, I was never silent, whatever I said I was never silent … For to say I needed no one was not to say too much, but an infinitesimal part of what I should have said, could not have said, should never have said. Need of my mother! No, there were no words for the want of need in which I was perishing.

I would like to propose to the Food Network a 48-episode, epic miniseries entitled Samuel Beckett Makes Risotto. (Each episode is 60 minutes.)

Parts 1-3: Samuel Beckett comes to understand the presence of an onion
Parts 4-9: The onion is “chopped,” whatever that “means.”
Parts 10-11: Consideration of the pan, ironies of shape, futility of cleanliness
Parts 12-18: The onion is browning, apparently, sweating, oozing, while the tragic remorseless life of a chicken flashes before our eyes before becoming broth.
Parts 19-25: 800 grains of arborio rice are counted out, one by one, and each compared to each of its predecessors. .
Parts 26-31: Philosophical Interlude: Beckett outlines the distinction between the flavor of an onion and the onion itself.
Parts 32-35: Return to Action: Broth and wine leap into the pot while Beckett sleeps, Beckett is struck with a ladle several times senselessly, seeks bicycle.
Part 36: “It is a gradual dribble of broth, like life.” The speaker of this line is unknown, unknowable.
Parts 37-43: The desire to eat is compared to the desire to die: death determined preferable to eating, though we will eat anyway. When can we eat? When can we die?
Parts 44-47: It becomes clear that the risotto will never be finished.
Part 48: The onion is no longer visible, it has no “presence,” even as a concept. But there is just the onion, itself. And then it is not there.

I think it would sell, baby. Tell me it wouldn’t be a hit. I’m gonna take Rachael Ray DOWN with this puppy.

I was listening to the wonderful Andras Schiff lectures on the Beethoven Sonatas (link here). He gets to the last movement of the “Hammerklavier” and promptly points an accusatory finger at the performer:

It should really not sound like chaos. If it sounds like chaos, it’s the performer’s fault; you have the right as a listener to understand something of this fugue, and it is [the performer’s] duty…

He adds:

…really the more you think about this fugue, and the more you analyze it, you discover an incredible sense of order.

I am not disagreeing with him, but I must admit this constant putting-Beethoven-in-order gets on my nerves. It makes me want to yell at the guy in Starbucks when there’s no blueberry crumbcake. Probably no other composer has been so obsessively mapped (Google-mapped, Google-streeted, even); his schemes have all been “found out;” he has been explored down to the last nanometer of contrapuntal unfolding in the deepest inner voice of the world. What should by rights be remote, a breathtaking Timbuktu of tones, is instead littered, when you arrive, with the droppings of musicologists, theorists, selling Schenkerian souvenirs and helpful pamphlets comparing legions of past performances. They tell you with one voice: we have already been here. (Oh, but, by the way, why are you modern performers playing so boringly, so predictably?)

Yes, the listener has a right to “understand something of this fugue.” But the listener has other rights. They have the right to be thrilled by this fugue, for example, and I could list others: the right to be dazzled, confused, whirled around, amused, stunned, bewildered, frenzied, the right to join in, to be caught up, to laugh wickedly with Beethoven and to feel out of breath, winded by stretti, by the endless chain of interruptive entrances, by dizzy leaping trills, and then to welcome the D major section, to bask in the one breath of the fugal dragon, its transcendent inhale before the fire resumes.

Let’s call this Jeremy’s Bill of Rights of the Hammerklavier Fugue. It is amenable to amendments. Let’s concede that many performances, for all sorts of forgivable human reasons, veer unproductively towards chaos and its simpler cousin, mess. So, this inspires Schiff’s wise advice.

However, though the building is brilliantly structured, I don’t think it is supposed to appear–voila!–perfectly, miraculously, shining on the hill. It is not impregnable. It is not a castle. It is the opposite of fortified; every wall is fluid, every column quicksand. It is an impossible, Seussian creation that is crumbling constantly, toppling over itself, and yet remaining valiantly structured, somehow, a structure continually vying with decay. What’s more: the decay is embraced happily, as the food of fantasy; the dangers are laughed at and laughed off, into joyful oblivion.

A fugue (let us say) is like a teacher, piling one proposition or idea upon another in order to demonstrate and accumulate a larger, more complex organism of thought. In this analogy, the teacher first proposes something: “here’s an idea,” (this idea is the subject, in music theory speak). The teacher then builds upon this proposition; the second entrance intervenes and a whole set of other notes must be invented to go along with it (subject/countersubject::idea/consequences). Then comes the third entrance, and with this yet more must be done etc. etc. Reasons pile upon reasons. And yet the process, particularly at the outset, is terribly, intentionally transparent. It takes pains to explain itself. The subject is always presented alone at first–for simplicity’s sake, for clarity’s sake–for the “ease of understanding,” and to allow for subsequent progression into complexity.

The Hammerklavier fugue subject, the exposition, is a fascinating rethinking of this conventional process of “explaining itself.” It begins with the well-known leaping tenth to a trill:

This is the “ahem” of the theme; it coughs trillingly to let you know it has arrived. Then come descending passages, based on the skeletons of thirds (Bb-G-Eb-C-A-F):

These thirds have been well-documented as the idée fixe of the whole Sonata, and if you look back at the three preceding movements,, you can see that clearly (and if you don’t you’re an idiot). Now, thirds are marvelous things, and they can spin us off on rollercoasters through the most varied tonal regions, but–if you had to complain about them at all!–you might say they are a little too yielding, a little too multivalent, overly pliable, like me after a couple Cosmos. They are terribly consonant, which is theory speak for agreeable.

Beethoven addresses, then, this third “problem.” Somehow against the easy descent, he must interpose something else, something difficult. The sliding, lubricated logic of the thirds is delightful, yes, but ultimately empty; it must be arrested to have … meaning? (whatever that is). So, having rearrived at the F from which the theme began (clever, clever, Beethoven baby!), a new idea is proposed, which we might describe as follows …

Suppose you wanted to start on that F and get to the D above it in the middle of the next beat.

Using only the diatonic notes of the B-flat major scale, however, there is a bit of a “problem”:

Yes, you end up one note too high, on E-flat. Whoops. There are not enough notes within the scale to fill the rhythmic space. So. The easy solution would be to interpolate just ONE chromatic note somewheres or other. For instance:

Yes, then the little G# lurks subtly in the middle, helping us to fill the space between the consonances F and D in the desired rhythmic pattern. There are many similar options for Beethoven to “hide” his dissonance (like you would hide a nail or bolt behind some molding or whatever) … But Beethoven does not choose to hide his chromatic interpolation, his “wrong note.” No, he chooses the most “in your face” dissonance possible:

… such that the dissonance appears on the strong part of the beat. This dissonance argues forcefully with the tonic, a rather important note. (No, you jerk, not B-flat, B-natural!) Then he does the same, again, a fourth higher …

Aha. And then the telling detail: Beethoven now goes over that whole gesture once more:

I think any performer must ask themselves: why twice? Why duplicate a duplication? Why is this subject flirting with redundancy? Twice over this idea, and then perhaps you–the listener–are ready to move on to the next lesson. The lesson is (says Beethoven, sternly, also laughing): “the strong beat is the dissonance, the true note is concealed next to it.” Beethoven wants you, needs you, to grasp this before he begins extrapolating wildly upon it. (Wildly, indeed.) True, the dissonances are sprinkled within a framework of consonances, but they are sprinkled awkwardly, provocatively, and they begin to make their presence more and more overt, more and more difficult, more and more outrageous. For example, the last five beats before the second subject comes in:

Every first 16th note of each beat is a “wrong note,” for five straight beats! … a kind of constant meta-understanding which the listener must grapple with, or to put it in less technical terms: an unrelenting act of “being difficult.” (Quite natural to Beethoven, apparently, in his personal life.)

So the fugue begins by outlining a nice, pleasant chain of thirds, each on the well-behaved strong beat, and then drops in the subversive idea of a dissonant neighbor tone; Beethoven reiterates this dissonant neighbor tone idea so that you cannot forget it, a seeming tautology that allows the idea to be more effectively used as a jumping-off board; and then towards the end of the first statement, Beethoven allows himself to go berserk with dissonant neighbors, letting the principle fly. Somewhere, apparently, there is a lecture or essay by Anton Kuerti in which he says that the fugue subject is not as long as it seems in this first statement; that Beethoven simply adds an “appendix” in order to heighten the excitement before the entrance of the second subject. True, true, I say! But at the same time it seems a dry, academic, mildly boring way of saying that the first statement of the subject is completely bonkers. “Appendix, heightening excitement” or “completely bonkers”?: you decide which you prefer. I understand some people find “bonkers” a bit too familiar for a dead European composer.

The point is: even the very premise of the fugue has a desire to run on, to veer off, to run off the rails! Which is a magnificent, life-affirming way to begin a fugue: with a subject that cannot contain itself.

Beethoven has his reasons for extrapolating from the irrational, for building his edifice upon a quivering cornerstone. Let’s say, the subject could be described as the appearance of the irrational from the rational: the dissonances are the creeping mania of the fugue, its emerging wildness and refusal to be tamed. They are “logical” (real note plus or minus one half step) and yet after a certain point, their excess of logic becomes pathological, and they crunch into the texture, strengthening and mystifying simultaneously. And when this “bonkers” subject gets turned upside down, or backwards: it is like viewing a delirium in a mirror, it is an Alice in Wonderland world. Don’t forget, Lewis Carroll was a mathematician. Everything in Beethoven’s fugue is mathematically justifiable, as Schiff carefully demonstrates, and yet what is the math’s effect? The most lopsided ideas emerge–portraits, seemingly, of insanity. There is no comforting equal sign. This fugue, in fact, engages the very idea of reason itself: reason as organizational principle, and conversely, reason gone mad, taken to absurd lengths.

So that I would propose that this fugue should not appear or aim to be a essay in order, eschewing chaos. I think it is primarily a play of opposites, a fiery binary: chaos/order. (And thus, one of the great deconstructive texts!) But I agree with Schiff that the chaos should not be random, or accidental; it should be born out of the order, and vice versa (… that is what makes the chaos so powerful, so radical: its orderly origins.) The two odd bedfellows should rejuvenate each other.

Or, perhaps, this fugue is about the inseparability of thought and its disintegration–the life cycle of seemingly immortal thought. Either way, it’s heady stuff, baby. Good work, Beethoven. I’m proud of you. I thought you were off your rocker but maybe you were just “playing” me the whole time.

(Washington, DC)  Former Senator George J. Mitchell released a blistering report Thursday that tied 89 performers of so-called “Classical Music,” including Mitsuko Uchida, to the use of illegal, non-musical cultural performance-enhancers. The report used informant testimony and supporting documents to provide a richly detailed portrait of what Mr. Mitchell described as “classical music’s thinking era.”

The Mitchell report ran about 400 pages and was based on interviews with more than 700 people, including 60 former “classical” musicians, and 115,000 pages of documents.

Ms. Uchida was the most prominent name on a list that included seven other most valuable players as well as players from all instruments of the orchestra, with the exception of the tuba. The list included more than a dozen players who have had significant solo engagements with the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philarmonic, and others.

“Personally, I find it somewhat disturbing,” said a prominent classical musician (Musician X, in the Mitchell Report), who elected to remain anonymous. “I mean, if you can read books and be culturally aware and thoughtful, and all that, it gives you an unfair advantage over all of those classical musicians who are just trying to play, honestly, without any of that stuff.” Musician Y gruffly agreed: “what happened to good old-fashioned playing in tune?” Classical Music Commissioner Zemlinsky Alban MacGonegall, addressing a crowd of 3 or 4 at his news conference, observed: “What is the point of sealing off our classical musicians in conservatories, if they’re just going to go crazy and start acquainting themselves with the world around them? Our whole system was set up to prevent this sort of thing, and obviously it has not been enough.”

Individual P is quoted describing how he injected Ms. Uchida with cultural influences at least 342 times from 1985 to the present. But most damning was the evidence that she befriended many brilliant personages from other cultural spheres, including Susan Sontag and others. “All that inspiration,” said Witness V, “makes a mockery of those of us who try to play by the rules.”

Behold. In the days of King Charles of South Carolina it was the custom (and remains so, as his days continue unabated), that he and various of his shepherds and minstrels journeyed south several times a year to collect a census of lovers of classical music. King Charles did most charmingly spin yarns amid the musicians’ diversions, and most welcomely did he treat in particular the youthful fair maidens of the fair green South, most welcomely indeed.

In the Year Of Our King 2007 three of these minstrels, Arron, Kim, and Denk, were far from their homes, shepherding in a bleak asphalt field just below the Statehouse in Columbia. Truth be told, these three wanderers were not all in the same mood. Denk was mourning past love via the strange medium of an espresso milkshake, culled from the delicious, mildly virginal sheep of the Immaculate Consumption. Kim meanwhile, oblivious, was telling off-color jokes and desiring to fax a letter at Kinko’s. If indeed Arron could be said to have a state of mind, it was amusement at the discrepancy between those of his companions.

The three supposedly wise men thus debased themselves, and Denk descended so far as to worship the canvas calf, by purchasing some local sportswear, including a hat and some tight swaddling clothes, which he donned, and which amused Arron yet further.

Lo! A Google map appeared in the East, and the 6 cylinder camel was mounted, and the shepherds crossed highway twenty, and when they approached the city of Camden, there was really plenty of room in the inn. Plenty. The inn manager did then give the shepherds ethernet cables and keys and returned to the Weather Channel.

When the shepherds got to their rooms, the Internet was not working, nor was there HBO, and they thought of the long empty evening ahead, and were sore afraid.

Whereupon, the angel of the Lord appeared to them and said “Do not be afraid! I bring you tidings of great joy. Get thee up, and thence to the liquor store, and get some tequila.”

Denk did feebly protest. “Lord, is this not an easy out?”

The angel grew more stern and glorious and imperious: “Enough! And on thy way back, thou must stop at Wal-Mart.” And suddenly with the angel there was a great throng of the heavenly host, brandishing debit cards and shot glasses, and singing hymns, and glorifying. And so shepherds Arron and Denk set forth, leaving Kim to practice in his room, and accomplished the first of the angel’s tasks, and beparked themselves amidst many trucks in a great thronging lot and set foot into the superstore, as the Lord had commanded.

And once returned to the inn, the shepherds sang hymns as they unboxed this heavenly gift from the Far East, which was borne out of its cardboard nearly immaculately, if a bit squished, and praised it with frankincense and flame retardant,

and made holy agave offerings,

and everyone was glad,

and King Charles was mightily pleased.

Nor was this all. For the very next day, the tree performed a miracle, that of Being Stuffed into the Trunk of a Car With Minimum Loss of Ornaments.

And then the day after that, at 6 AM, there was the miracle of Tree Passing Through Airport Security. And right after that, a third miracle, the Tree Appearing in the Overhead Bin! It seemed there was no end to its miracles.

Many persons did marvell and remark upon these miracles, and it was a glorious season, and even King Charles was moved and mentioned the indomitable travelling tree in his tales.

And the lion lay down with the lamb and the cellular phones lay down with the cellular phone chargers and the luggage tags lay down with the luggage and in general everyone wanted to lay down because they were pretty f*&()#@ tired, including Denk, who glanced briefly at the glowing tree, which like many miracles seemed to be bit confused to be sitting upon his kitchen table.

Denk smiled at its glow, and realized the true meaning of Christmas, which he quickly forgot, because he fell into a delicious, overdue sleep in his swaddling clothes.