The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

One of the unexpected perks of playing with the New World Symphony is that its music director may assign you reading material. Assigned reading is my fantasy. (One of them, anyway.) Lock me in a room, with snacks, maybe a few well-chosen posters; tell me I have to read 6,000 pages before tomorrow and ensure I have no other decisions to make. Hours and hours spent poring against a deadline on the arch in Tappan Square in Oberlin, Ohio; bare feet across the marble of the arch; fingers scraping across the clean smooth page, fresh from the bookstore; no goals but pages and escape and beauty; your eyes wander, grab glimpses of ambling reality, and then you force them back deliciously, painfully into the word world.

Now that Halloween is over, the holidays steal upon us. In my assigned reading, I came upon this heartwarming holiday scene, which I thought I would share with all of you:

You must surely know that on this season, Christmas and New Year’s, even though it’s so fine and pleasant for all of you, I am always driven out of my peaceful cell onto a raging, lashing sea. Christmas! Holidays that have a rosy glow for me. I can hardly wait for it, I look forward to it so much. I am a better, finer man than the rest of the year, and there isn’t a single gloomy, misanthropic thought in my mind. Once again I am a boy, shouting with joy. The faces of the angels laugh to me from the gilded fretwork decorations in the shops decorated for Christmas … But after the holidays everything becomes colorless again, and the glow dies away and disappears into drab darkness.

Every year more and more flowers drop away withered, their buds eternally sealed; there is no spring sun that can bring the warmth of new life into old dried-out branches. I know this well enough, but the enemy never stops maliciously rubbing it in as the year draws to an end. I hear a mocking whisper: “Look what you have lost this year; so many worthwhile things that you’ll neveer see again. But all this makes you wiser, less tied to trivial pleasures, more serious and solid—even though you don’t enjoy yourself very much.”

Every New Year’s Eve the Devil keeps a special treat for me. He knows just the right moment to jam his claw into my heart, keeping up a fine mockery while he licks the blood that wells out. And there is always someone around to help him, just as yesterday the Justizrat came to his aid. He (the Justizrat) holds a big celebration every New Year’s Eve, and likes to give everyone something special as a New Year’s present. Only he is so clumsy and bumbling about it, for all his pains, that what was meant to give pleasure usually turns into a mess that is half slapstick and half torture.

I walked into the front hall, and the Justizrat came running to meet me … He smirked at me in a very strange way and said, “My dear friend, there’s something nice waiting for you in the next room.” …

I felt that sinking feeling in my heart. Something was wrong, I knew, and I suddenly began to feel depressed and edgy. The the doors were opened. I took up my courage and stepped forward, marched in, and among the women sitting on the sofa I saw her.

Yes, it was she. She herself. I hadn’t seen her for years, and yet in one lightning flash the happiest moments of my life came back to me, and gone was the pain that had resulted from being separated from her.

What marvellous chance brought her here? What miracle introduced her into the Justizrat’s circle? … I didn’t think of any of these questions; all I knew was that she was mine again.

I must have stood there as if halted magically in midmotion. The Justizrat kept nudging me and muttering, “Mmmm? Mmmm? How about it?”

I started to walk again, mechanically, but I saw only her, and it was all that I could do to force out, “My God, my God, it’s Julia!” I was practically at the tea table before she even noticed me, but then she stood up and said coldly, “I’m so delighted to see you here. You are looking well.” And with that she sat down again and asked the woman sitting next to her on the sofa, “Is there going to be anything interesting at the theatre the next few weeks?”

You see a miraculously beautiful flower, glowing with beauty, filling the air with scent, hinting at even more hidden beauty. You hurry over to it, but the moment that you bend down to look into its chalice, the glistening petals are pushed aside and out pops a smooth, cold, slimy, little lizard that tries to cut you down with its glare.

[… the party continues for a while…]

Julia picked up a sparking, beautifully cut goblet and offered it to me, saying, “Are you still willing to take a glass from my hand?” “Julia, Julia,” I sighed.

As I took the glass, my fingers brushed against hers, and electric sensations ran through me. I drank and drank, and it seemed to me that little flickering blue flames licked around the goblet and my lip. Then the goblet was empty, and I really don’t know myself how it happened, but I was now sitting on an ottoman in a small room lit only by an alabaster lamp, and Julia was sitting beside me, demure and innocent-looking as ever. Berger had started to play again, the andante from Mozart’s sublime E-flat Symphony, and on the swan’s wings of song my sunlike love soared high. Yes, it was Julia, Julia Herself, as pretty as an an angel and as demure; our talk a longing lament of love, more looks than words, her hand resting in mine.

“I will never let you go,” I was saying. “Your love is the spark that glows in me, kindling a higher life in art and poetry. Without you, without your love, everything is dead and lifeless. Didn’t you come here so that you could be mine forever?”

At this very moment there tottered into the room a spindle-shanked cretin, eyes bulging like a frog’s, who said, in a mixture of croak and cackle, “Where the Devil is my wife?”

Julia stood up and said to me in a distant, cold voice, “Shall we go back to the party? My husband is looking for me. You’ve been very amusing again, darling, as overemotional as ever; but you should watch how much you drink.”

The spindle-legged monkey reached for her hand and she followed him into the living room with a laugh.

“Lost forever,” I screamed aloud.

“Oh, yes; codille, darling,” bleated an animal playing ombre.

I ran out into the stormy night.

Thank you, E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Readers, I would like to tell the tale of how I ran the New York City Marathon. I would like to do this without boasting, and shirk the baleful demon of exaggeration, but demons track me even into the darkest labyrinths. I may be the only person in history to have run the Marathon against his will.

First, my infinite wisdom. I was on a flight from Fort Lauderdale, arriving at LaGuardia at 3:30 pm. Then, I had scheduled a rehearsal to begin at 5 pm at Klavierhaus, located at 58th and 7th. Perhaps, in retrospect, this seems the naïve sin of an optimist, like one of Quixote’s unforgivable fantasies; and yet, and yet … I had hope in my heart, and tunes of timeliness running through my head. When, in fact, my flight touched down 10 minutes early, I extracted my carryon from the overhead bin with a little fillip of joy and the schadenfreude of undeserved fortune.

With the knowing evil of a regular traveler, I skipped around a large taxi queue and found another “secret taxi stand” just moments away with no line at all. So long, suckers. My driver groaned under the weight of my Samsonite TravelPro but we were off, westward ho!

As we drove past the Jackson Hole Diner, I began to hear ominous Arabic chatter from the front seat. The numbers 66, 85, 97, 106, 116 (curiously, in English) figured prominently in these intercepted transmissions and seemed eerily to coincide with possible exits from FDR drive. A certain hopelessness colored these Bluetoothed snippets and I sensed something and then on the rickety gray arch of the Triboro the truth emerged, as if from the bent exhaust pipe of fate. Marathon. Aside from driving, perhaps, to Vermont or Ottawa or Altoona and then U-turning at some Cracker Barrel on a distant interstate, there seemed to be very little chance of actually transporting ourselves from where we were to my apartment on the Upper West Side. I prayed for quantum anomalies.

Indeed, though we had departed LaGuardia at 3:32, at 4:30 we were still pretty heavily mired in FDR brakelights. Melismatic sighs wafted from the front seat. Kafkesque signs read “NO CROSSTOWN WEST OF 1ST AVENUE” and there seemed no chance of exiting the FDR ever, ever, and I imagined myself at the tip of Manhattan having no recourse but to drive into the harbor like Thelma and Louise and composing my hurried, lyrical epitaph on my laptop which I would toss out the window just before we drove off the Battery seawall, hoping that someone at the Genius Bar would find it and understand.

This dramatic suicide proved unnecessary: we were able to exit at 97th street. For a time, progress was made. But then the transverse at 97th was suddenly closed, and a loop-de-loop took us some aggravating time while I glowered at healthy joggers, saying “yes, run, run, you *&(&*()#$” which amused my driver considerably. A second crossing was attempted and completed at 85th Street (4:43), though it was pretty unbelievably slow which made me even more charming a passenger than I had hitherto been.

My apartment: 4:51. I bid fond adieu to my driver, with whom I had spent more time than most of my friends lately, I ran in, punched elevator buttons as if to destroy them, dropped my bag in the midst of the living room with an emphatic thump, put on a nice wool sweater and a heavy corduroy blazer and reversed course out the door feeling like a mild success. The subway would take me and I would not be too late. Indeed, the subway came right on time, which was, in retrospect, a cruel, false joy. Then, at 79th Street, while immersed in my book, I began to notice the conductor was announcing something. Something horrible. I despise weekend service changes to the depths of my soul. This one was nigh unbearable: this train was going to skip directly from 72 to 42 and there was absolutely nothing to be done.

Heartless obstacle! A great conundrum assailed. Get off at 72nd and walk to 58th or stay on and brave the transfer? You New Yorkers, you know what I am talking about, what pain these decisions can involve, what uncertainty lurks in the mathematics of minutes while you tremble above the abyss of MTA hell. 5 minutes went by in the station while I wrestled with this. Meanwhile, marathoners came onto the train in droves and lorded their accomplishments around and I have to admit I was somewhat pleased when a girl tried to get a seat for her boyfriend by saying “he just ran the Marathon,” and the person sitting there replied “I don’t give a *&() what he did.”

But why, you might ask, were we waiting in the station?

“We are stopped here because of a medical emergency on board. Please be patient.”

With that, I snapped. 5:08. I felt it was no longer tenable to remain on the subway with medical emergencies and transfers and God Knows what else. I headed up to the street, where a frantic twilit mob sought cabs. Hands outstretched, anxious faces, Zabar’s shopping bags and foil marathon capes every which way. You have to run, I told myself, it’s all up to you now, no one will help you, you’re screwed. No man is an island, my foot.

And so if you were passing along Broadway between 79th and 58th yesterday you may have seen a maniacal man with a messenger bag sprinting along, heedless and perturbed. I ran for my life. I passed Barney’s at 76th and thought NO TIME FOR BARNEY’S and I passed Grom and I thought NO TIME FOR GELATO and all of these places seemed like heavenly pastures past which I must run furiously, not knowing why.

Miraculously I saw a cab at 73rd, and threw my hand out: it pulled over! Can you imagine my relief? My heart sang for joy. But, I was just getting into it when a pregnant woman holding a baby came up to me. She clutched her child and her face was Pieta and some dim moral fiber stirred in the back of my pancreas and told me that it was not right to take a cab from a pregnant woman carrying a baby. It’s true that proximity to a baby in the plane had slightly lessened my love for babies (which is not in any case infinite) but when she moaned “Can I please take it?” I melted and left the yellow vehicle to her …

And on I ran, ran, ran. My wool sweater and corduroy coat and black leather boots seemed like excellent wardrobe choices now, let me tell you, and as my T-shirt began to drip with sweat which I could feel cold and clammy dripping down my back at the traffic lights near Lincoln Center, I asked the Lord what I had done wrong, besides all the obvious things, which we really didn’t need to discuss. As I neared Columbus Circle, the crowd thickened, it was truly ridiculous, milling and grazing out-of-towners, and my previous moral qualms lessened. I wouldn’t say I exactly pushed a child out of my way, but I did lift her urgently to a more convenient location. I walked/ran viciously and with no pity. I murmured unpleasantries. 5:22 at Columbus Circle, a policeman blocked my path. “Medical emergency,” he said. I saw people 15 feet away walking towards my destination … I begged, I threw out a puppydog glance, “man I’m so late, I just have to get there,” and he said “no exceptions” and I gestured as if to cross anyway and he said very firmly “you take another step I’ll take you in,” and I thought that though I loved the Trout Quintet I really didn’t want to get arrested for it. This last obstacle seemed truly unspeakable, comical, outrageous, like certain drag queens in Miami. My mood hit rock bottom and I took the Lord’s name in vain and around I went, zigzagging towards the Time Warner building and ignoring police telling me to walk on the sidewalks and saying “what the hell are you doing?” and finally, breathless, arrived to see my colleagues all lined up, smiling that unhappy waiting smile.

But I had done it. I ran 26 blocks (several diversions towards the end) in 22 minutes with Macbook Pro on my shoulder and tales of ETA Hoffman etc. etc… I know this is not particularly speedy but isn’t the point that I finished? A block is arguably somewhat less than a mile, but the 26 is indisputable. I took a deep breath, tried to play the first arpeggio of the Trout, and missed all the notes but one. Which of my mishaps had been the hidden true note, how I wish I knew.

[To all new readers: the following is the sort of long, laborious, but utterly unsystematic analysis that sometimes happens when I get all excited and some of you clearly find this all very boring and incomprehensible and some of you seem to enjoy it. So there.]

Why, oh why, was I so mean to Tchaikovsky? I must examine my own motivations: I’ve been a bit overworked lately? I missed San Francisco like some sort of windy Xanadu? … Whatever the reason, I apparently needed to trash Tchaikovsky in order to make delicious love to Brahms, which is unfair to both (and undesirable to at least one). I could have so easily detoured around the snark and taken a leisurely drive in lands of tender admiration.

And yet the snark signifies? There is a certain eagerness-to-please in Tchaikovsky … a lurking “look at me!” This is, perhaps, why I find myself glowering at him like a teacher’s pet, withholding the praise he richly deserves. It is not the “look at me” of a confident narcissist, of Strauss for instance; it is more desperate. Occasionally you see this desperation straight in the face, unconcealed, unsublimated (i.e. undeveloped, not subjected to typical musical rigor), and it makes you want to cry, the naked neediness, and then Tchaikovsky is truly, utterly lovable. Also, when Tchaikovsky is dreaming or dancing, and not trying to solve or surmount life’s problems: I love him then too.

Anyway.

What I really wanted to convey was the quality of the Brahms Motive. Its haunting, lifting recurrence. Its message-carrying allure. (A carrier pigeon of promise and loss.) And I want to talk more about all the meaning and feeling that gets swept up in that, in the dance of the Motive through the piece.

I misprinted the Motive hideously in the last post; it is not JUST a dotted rhythm; it is a dotted rhythm with a little hiccup, like so …

… and to omit the little rest in the middle is like taking the gills out of a fish and throwing it back and saying “swim.” The rest is the breath of the idea, its life force. (And the idea is the piece’s life force.) The silence acts as a hinge: with one act, it holds the idea back and then impels it forward. The quickstep of the last two notes is a response to the stoppage of the first—a continuation, not merely of sound, but of sound “against silence.” Breath is framed between notes; the notes hold the breath in between them like the skin of a bubble, like our skin holds us in.

We have a story in three phases (in three movements) … and the dotted motive, with its bubbled breath, is the code, thread, cipher connecting them. Like the key to a code, it matches one thing to another; it says: this is the same as that. (A musical equal sign.) It attaches personhood, or at least identity, to moments of music, and drags this personhood around, reluctantly, from place to place … (repetition in music is so much more than repetition).

Phase one of this story, the first movement, is to my mind simply good times. What could be more of a good time than the opening of Brahms G major Violin Sonata? The pianist is a gentle giant down there in the low register, with pillowy, gorgeously voiced fundamental chords: pure triadic happiness, over which the lighter breath of the violin skirts and curves. Brahms’ picture of happiness is musical, of course (happiness for a composer is good voicing)—something close to the ideal of accompaniment and melody. Such “ideal textures” abound in the first movement—for instance, the second theme also—and evoke a bubble of youthful, uncomplicated pleasure.

The dotted rhythm, in the first movement, is essential to—the code for—this pleasure. I hear it in the first movement as a seedling for a waltz (dance of pleasure). It lends the second theme a tentative waltzishness …

and then returns in a totally “out of the closet” waltz:

Brahms displays such a combination of simplicity and ingenuity with the dotted rhythm, such a faith in it … he allows it to be fruitful and multiply. First we have single dotted rhythms:

Then a lovely hemiola (Brahms just can’t help himself!), a chain of three dotted rhythms:

Then an incredible profusion, dotted rhythms “gone wild,” letting loose at Spring Break (the piece was written in the springtime of 1879, let us not forget!):

Bounding, unstoppable… as if drunk on dottedness … the rhythm, which is “properly” kind of a halting, stopping force, becomes a flowing river, an obsession: a connective, collective rhythmic joy. The world of the first movement owes itself largely to this free-floating dotted rhythm, which gets caught up continually in a sort of Brahmsian 3-step, a simplicity-involvement-extrication process: he alludes to the waltz, or simply to the dance (step 1), which then gets snared in more complicated compositional webs (step 2), which then inevitably breaks out to dance and sing again (step 3).

The Motive, in its basic form, it is all on the same pitch. That is, it is somewhat neutral to the question of pitch; it adapts itself to circumstances. But it is not neutral about rhythm; it takes on, by choice, at its core, one of the fundamental dialectics of music (especially German Music): the question of upbeat/downbeat. The Motive has a kind of impelling self-direction towards the last of its notes, which “seems to be” the beat. It is a perpetual upbeat, perpetually implying an elusive downbeat. This is part of what the “code” is about.

Recipe, perhaps, for a dull code. In much German Music, the upbeat/downbeat hierarchy can become tiresome, heavy, undesirably fraught: an eternal, marching, everything-goes-to-this-ness. Yes, es muss sein. Once upbeats become the beat, they die a little rhythmic death; downbeats are the corpses of living upbeats … (The grave is the last downbeat of our lives, in a manner of speaking.) Many pieces—and performances—die horrible deaths from too many downbeats. But Brahms is aware of this issue; his code is constantly shifting; the last note of the dotted rhythm is met by a million little accidents, which lighten or rub against the grain of the natural tendency, the natural implication … which make the downbeats feel less “down,” less of a necessity.

In the first movement the dotted motive mostly runs with the poetic flow, conforming to its “proper” upbeat role … the dotted rhythm leads, it lifts; it comes at beginnings … it is a balloon lifting the phrase off the ground … that is, its place in the PHRASE corresponds metaphorically to its relation to the BEAT. It is almost always a prefix: an inhale, an invocation of a musical sentence to come.

But in the second movement, phase two of our story, the dotted motive does the opposite … It is almost always the suffix of the phrase, the Last Word. It closes things, weighs them down (whereas in the first movement it was so lifting, and lifted). Watch, each phrase in turn ends with a dotted rhythm:

and the whole movement ends with dotted rhythms…

And in the contrasting section of the second movement, the dotted rhythm becomes a funeral march:

… which is just about as weighty and closing a genre as you can summon up (downbeat as death, indeed).

Let’s revisit the idea of the motive as a cipher, a secret code. The dotted idea keeps reappearing, it is patterned, it suggests some recurrent meaning which can be de-ciphered. But its constancy is played against serious semantic uncertainty. In the first movement, the dotted rhythm codes “waltz” and “swing” and “lilt,” perhaps … Whereas in the second movement it codes “final” and “cadence,” and “march” and “trudge” and even “death,” if you want to get dramatic about it. The motive encodes radically different things, though it is always (infuriatingly, wonderfully) the same. Unbending selfness of the motive, endless variety of implication: immovable object, irresistible force.

In both movements I think the dotted rhythm feels “impelled” or “impelling.” In the first it impels us to enthusiasm, to further circles, to invention and dance. In the second it impels us to the cadence, to the tonic and down the line, to the march (fate) …

Here is, I think, Brahms’ master stroke: in the last movement the motive takes on a third guise. This guise is enigmatic, unreadable—though pervasive, evasive. We hear the Motive everywhere; the pianist, particularly, cannot seem to stop saying the Motive over and over again, obsessively, the left hand leaping over the right in order to reiterate it at different octaves:

It is here we learn that the Motive is a haunting, magical seed, which ends up, as the story unfolds, growing backwards into the past, blossoming in reverse. (The piece is written to impel us backwards, it is a time machine.) In fact it’s like a detective story—aha!, the last movement did it!—this material, the melancholic theme of the last movement, is where the Motive “came from.” Retrospective understanding. For Brahms formed this Sonata, clearly, from the Song “Regenlied,” which begins (no surprise!) with the dotted idea, with our Motive:

Yes, it dawns on you … the whole Sonata arises from the last movement, which arises from the song, which springs from the dotted rhythm, which arises from the poem (a chain of derivations without end) …

I have heard some people call the third movement a “problem movement.” But it’s here, precisely, at the end, that we probe to the source, the “why” of the motive, and of the whole piece. And here, particularly at the source, the motive is reluctant to describe itself, to pin down its own meaning. This magnificent reluctance, this secretiveness, is the so-called problem; and indeed if you don’t like enigmas or cracks between meanings, this movement could be a problem for you. But then you shouldn’t listen to it.

Because it is here that Brahms paints a whole new matrix of possible meanings of his dotted breath. There is the dominant pedal in the piano, the eternal sad call and response of the D’s over the raindrops (going nowhere, can’t think of any escape), and then there is the ecstatic reworking of the slow movement theme with excited dotted rhythms (surging somewhere joyfully), and then there is heaven as an unbroken chain of dotted rhythms (again going nowhere, why leave when things are so good?) …

And finally, because heaven is simply boring, or unsustainable, there is this last yearning sequence of dotted rhythms going up by fourth…

Where this is going, we won’t return from. If you have not spilled over into tears by this point, you are heartless—here, where Brahms (at last) shows his hand. Here, perhaps, the dotted rhythm becomes faintly Schumannesque (another code, another vanishing autobiographical meaning?): new harmonic leanings, new tenderness. Contagious tenderness passing from piano to violin.

In Mahler’s 9th and Schubert’s Winterreise, to take two extraordinary instances, we have nostalgic works which begin from “game over,” from a condition of preexisting loss, where everything—happiness, life, dreams, hope—has already evaporated from measure one, and we merely count our disintegrating losses. But most composers of nostalgic pieces take the more traditional route: they create worlds of happiness in order to destroy them. This seems, perhaps, mean-spirited? But then the third, unpredictable step is applied, a door is opened onto neither happiness nor despair. An emotional note is sounded on a foreign clef, undermining and questioning the whole previous vocabulary and proposing a more meaningful, but even more evanescent understanding, which perches like a bird on the last note of the piece and flies away never to be heard again. In other words: the place where you arrive at the end of Brahms G Major Violin Sonata cannot be summoned to mind or soul “on demand.” It cannot be remembered. It is perishable, even as an idea. It is the precarious, extraordinary result of all the conflicting codes and messages of all the preceding notes, the message hiding behind the Motive which only tells you, at that moment, what it might have been. Someone is there working through the night for you, deciphering this code, your code, understanding your whole life, and they pass a final translation to you on a piece of paper which …

Sometimes talent sweeps, nay, whisks across our lives like a well-oiled Swiffer, leaving the twisted surfaces of our minds polished, smooth, and reflective. We observe ourselves in the mirroring perspective that results, and say “I’m not half bad!” or “I really ought to get a haircut,” or “What the hell are you looking at anyway?”

I have come across such a talent, in a strange corner of human endeavor. This talent streaks like a scruffy comet across the sky, or at least along the streets of Richmond, Virginia. He is a once-in-a-generation supernova of desperation, inspiration, and venue; he is surely only a flash, an ephemeral blossom, but what a flash!, a talent which will stride off to other planets and professions leaving us heartbroken, comet-starved, searching our dark boring constellations and finding only the usual revolving stars and the grating headlights of society’s grinding Hummer behind us, honking at us, telling us to act or be crushed.

At most engagements, from the moment you arrive to the moment you are sent away (often with sighs and moans of relief), you are assigned to an Artist Liaison. This is the person who Sees To Your Needs. The brilliantly evil element in the whole situation is that as soon as you have a person who Sees To Your Needs, you dream up whole forests of needs you never imagined: you need needs.

Most Artist Liaisons are friendly, delightful, helpful; they are agents of function, smiling wardens of the invisible prison of your stay. But most do not possess, to my mind, that particle of job-specific genius required in order to make the Liaisoning Act into a Work of Art. Until today, I believed that Duane, in San Francisco, with his interspersed, wry observations of life and various artists, delivered with understated but razor-sharp simplicity, was the absolute greatest Artist Liaison Artist (and this still may be true). However, I have met someone who made me reconsider the entire Notion of the Artist Liaison itself, who rattled my (mis)conceptions to their core:

I knew from the very moment I first walked out of the hotel lobby with Prabir that something was afoot. In place of the typical sleek sedan, I saw Prabir casually and without comment mount a giant white unmarked van. I hauled myself and my messenger bag up into the passenger seat of this Great White Whale with some difficulty. I opted for no smart remark, suspecting a prank. But this was no prank: this van is in fact a main mode of transport and haulage for Prabir’s band (Prabir and The Substitutes) and is quintessentially a band van. Thus the stuffy classical artist must immediately confront his casual, beloved nemesis, Popular Music. (I fantasized myself as a hip band member, considered sad impossibility of same, etc. etc., wept and wailed, became resigned, sighed). The van’s floors are well-scuffed and gravelly. The transmission hiccups after each Stop sign; each restart seems a last sputtering hurrah. It takes bumps with shuddering but joyful lack of aplomb, and this pianist bounced wildly, a plaything of potholes, with my coffee flying perilously and yet grasped like the last lifejacket on Earth.

Prabir, astride his derelict Moby Dick, understands, already—after only working a few weeks!—the absurd existential fix of the Artist Liaison, who is supposed to take whatever crap the cranky, stressed-out artist is dishing out, and come back smiling. We discussed as much in our very first meeting, which was, I realized, a Brilliant Maneuver for letting me know (in the guise of “conversation”) that if I thought about throwing any diva fits while I was there, well, he already had my number. And so at the very cusp of my role, just at the wings of the stage, this actor was given a new script. You see: this Artist Liaison was deeply reconsidering the very Meaning of the Liaison; he was Liaising on a meta-level (!), making me engage not just with him but with the expectations deeply encrusted in the situation; he made me want to rewrite this old story, and do something revolutionary, in which perhaps the Artist would help the Liaison? I wanted to beat him at his own game, but I knew that even by doing so, I was falling into his trap.

Conversation with Prabir was like no conversation with any other Artist Liaison, perhaps in all of history. Prabir eschews conventions of commuting chatter. He would tolerate none of the tried-and-trues: “where are you from?”, “where did you go to school?”, “what was it like being brought up by wolves?” (etc. etc.) Each trip to rehearsal was conceived somewhere between a vision quest, an indie rock song, and a therapy session. What realms of life, love, art, and loss did we not visit?

I discovered that Prabir is immensely gifted at concise summation. He is undaunted by cultural weight. To give just a few examples:

Prabir on Beethoven:

He couldn’t hear, and he couldn’t get laid.

Prabir on Hemingway:

You know, he’s kind of an old bastard, but I appreciate his honesty.

Prabir on Radiohead:

Who would you rather listen to: John Cage or Beethoven? Well of course everyone’s going to say Beethoven. End of story.

Prabir on Jeremy Denk:

Your head man. Your head is to Beethoven what Pete Townsend’s arms were to the guitar.

A recurring topic between us was the Jerry-Springer-ish marriage of love and art. Love versus art, art making love, love perverting art, art telling love to get a life. I confessed to Prabir that the last time I had come to Richmond to perform, I was in the process of Losing a Love, pretty spectacularly, which seemed, ironically, despite sleepless nights comprised of long, unimaginable phone calls, to make me play better than usual. Pathetically I seem still to be proud of myself for playing well that day, and thus to be able to disassociate myself from the simultaneous act of Screwing Up My Life. Prabir, as always, was prepared with the money quote:

Dude, what’s more important … your personal happiness right now, or the individual creating something unique to the individual?

As Prabir let this question out into the humid atmosphere of the van, I couldn’t help staring wistfully at him, and at cloudy Richmond beyond, shuffling by. He was actually discoursing on the relationship between art and personal woe, just before explaining that he had to stop for gas.

Confronted with timeless dialectics, Prabir does not present a fixed, stultified view of the universe. He told me the first day that he had decided to forsake the pursuit of women for a time:

I have a flirting problem. You know, whenever I’d go out, like even now, say, if I saw that chick there (he points to a girl crossing the crosswalk in front of us) I would be like “nice boots, where you from?”, and then I’d be showing off, like, “you want Symphony tickets, I work with the Symphony, I can get you Symphony tickets” … and it would all lead to heartache…

So now I’m doing a lot of dude time, building a wall in my apartment, stuff like that.

(Yes, I mused, Symphony tickets do often lead to heartache.) Interestingly, the very next morning Prabir confessed to me that

I met this girl last night at the bar who was kind of cool and we kissed

But then, ten minutes later, there were second thoughts …

She just texted me, like, “good morning,” and I’m not sure I want to get into all that…

But by the end of rehearsal, two hours later, Prabir said:

… we gotta book it back to the hotel because i’m having lunch with that girl …

By the same evening, however …

I’m not sure if I’m ready to be a marionette.

And on and on Prabir went, his cosmos shifting and spinning, a multifarious mosaic. “Prabir,” I said, “you are a man of conflicting appetites, much like myself.” He agreed; there was some odd common ground between us. Both of us wanted nothing to do with the usual conversations that were taking place in sedans all over the world, where artists were being shuttled to their orchestral rehearsals and settled in warmup rooms, and asked what they needed, but never what they really needed. This part of the day, too, needed to be lived with gusto, observed; we tasted uncertainty, felt flux on our palates, and feared not the big issues; we strode among them like giants, measuring our lives—despite van, locale, rain, weariness, everything—amidst grand schemes and grand themes.

Prabir had an unusual view of the Symphony, above and beyond its propensity to heartache. If I can paraphrase:

Going to the symphony is a chance to be intimate without the actual experience of intimacy. You can lean over and say “isn’t that great,” you can whisper in their ear, get close to their ear, their hair, or just touch their arm, or they might graze your arm …

I’ll never forget this one moment in reading class, when I was 13, when this girl leaned over and whispered in my ear “I hate this book!” and the word book resonated through my body and I was like what’s going on? … my body’s not supposed to feel like this … just the word book ? …

… the lightest touch is the best kind of touch.

And that evening, when I sat to play the first propitious, magical chord of Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto, I imagined Prabir and some girl in some dark corner of the hall, and her arm almost accidentally falling on his … I imagined the whispered word “book” shaking off its meaning like a bad dream and becoming just a sonic thrill.

It is too bad I cannot tell you here, on the blog, all the wonderful stories Prabir told me on our trips, that he somehow crammed into our brief encounters: How Prabir’s Father Predicted That A Girl Would Break Up With Him, or How Prabir Came To Have A Drink Named After Him, or how to get a date to progress smoothly from G to PG to PG-13 to R … (start with Scrabble!) I can only suggest you get yourself booked to play with the Richmond Symphony, as soon as you can, before he gets fired or moves on to greater things. Or, if you are not a performing musician, perhaps just go to Richmond. According to Prabir, there are a number of bars there, and “they all have the same five people in them, and I’m one of them.” So a Prabir should not be hard to find. Why is it, then, there are so few of them?