The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

In a shocking development, I went downstairs to get my mail.  I was really after the score of the Thomas Ades Piano Quintet, which was mailed to me and which is PFD (translate how you will).  But then, another package caught my eye.  It was addressed to “Yo Yo Ma,” and below this vaguely familiar name was my own address:

Haha, very amusing, how droll, I thought—all in succession.  I giggled wryly to myself like a tickled melba toast.  Some friend seeks to punk me or prank me or something; a joke lies concealed within.  But when its contents were revealed … they were not funny, at all.  Inside were two CDs of cello music by Peter Sculthorpe and the following postcard:

It seemed serious, earnest:  your typical semi-solicitation.  Hmmm.   Did the virtuoso, in days of yo-yore, live in the Greystone Hotel, even:  in this VERY ROOM?  Casting my eyes about, it seemed unlikely.  Which left only one other possibility to consider:  that I am Yo Yo Ma.

Jeremy’s Wild and Wacky Week in San Francisco: A Quiz

Question One

True or False: The only entity Jeremy made out with all week was a French Bulldog named Noe.

Question Two

After Wednesday’s performance, yours truly encountered some serious stomach issues which made Thursday not the unbelievably delightful day it might have been. Looking back on what he ate the day before, which do you think was most likely to have caused these issues:

a) Beef with BokChoy lunch in Chinatown;

b) Medium to extremely rare burger from hotel room service just before concert;

c) A bun comprised of: yellow bean paste, preserved egg, ginger, and squash which was ostensibly dessert after lunch in Chinatown, obtained at one of the oldest bakeries in the district;

d) nausea at the ennui of hipster life.

EXTRA CREDIT

If you were feeling ill and had to play a concert that same evening, which of these therapeutic foods would you choose to settle your stomach:

a) chocolate macaroons and filter coffee from Blue Bottle;
b) thin-crust spinach pizza;
c) gallons of Coca-Cola Classic;
d) all of above.

Question Three

If you buy some rather tight-fitting, expensive jeans in Hayes Valley and then the very next day you put them on and the fastening snap breaks almost immediately, do you a) cower in humiliation and accept karmic retribution for your hipster purchase?; b) go immediately to the gym and start in on Atkins?; or c) brazenly return to the shop and claim the jeans were defective?

Question Four

Jeremy’s obsession with Blue Bottle Coffee is well known. If a cup of filter coffee costs $2, and he is staying at a hotel not entirely within walking distance of Blue Bottle, how much do you think Jeremy is willing to spend on round-trip taxi costs to get his morning coffee?

a) $8
b) $14
c) $20

EXTRA CREDIT: Calculate the cost of flying roundtrip from New York City to San Francisco to get Blue Bottle coffee. Factor in AirTrain fares, therapy resulting from the aggravation of the AirTrain, carservice costs when the AirTrain fails, and burritos obtained at the JetBlue foodcourt. Multiply this by 100. Write out a check for this amount to the Jeremy Denk Needs Coffee Charity, LLC. Drop it at the Starbucks at 93rd and Broadway.

Question Five

The opening tutti of Beethoven’s 1st Piano Concerto is rather long. (This pianist takes revenge for this during the cadenza heh heh.) You stride out there, all blustery and full of confidence, and then the orchestra just keeps on going, doing Beethoven’s C-major-ish version of the Energizer Bunny. What do you do to pass the time?

a) Breathe deeply and imagine the forces of harmony moving in great tectonic plates;

b) Glance meaningfully at orchestra members, which may irritate them;

c) Fantasize about gnocchi from Union Square Cafe (don’t forget to come in!);

d) Wonder what the piano will sound like, since you haven’t been able to try it out for hours;

e) Reminisce over Noe’s redolent saliva.

Question Six

A tentative question from a housekeeper at the Huntington Hotel, a sort of trembling “do you want me to clean your room now?,” seemed to imply a quiet, desperate climax to an ongoing battle through the week. How would your average housekeeper, in a fine hotel, in the 21st century, react to a pianist in a room who scattered clothes everywhere with lustful abandon and treated roomservice carts, pizza boxes, and minibar remainders with fervid nonchalance? The area which she deemed “cleanable” shrank each day until there was a mere corridor through the room, a corridor in crisis, as it was eternally threatened by chaos. So, too, Beethoven’s “purple” excursions at times in the first movement of the First Concerto, which stand in dire, magnificent contrast to the kind of simple columns of tonic and dominant which anchor the structure. Compare Beethoven’s desire to create and evade harmonic difficulties with Mr. Denk’s tendencies in the Huntington Hotel. Put your observations in the form of a concerto-allegro-with-narrator, and send the score to every performer whose email address you possess. Trust me: they’ll love it.

It is incredibly difficult to step from the sacred to the sensual, or vice versa, convincingly. Many composers have stumbled there, at the perceived threshold of transcendence. You might argue the journey sacred-sensual (round-trip super-saver fare) was the project of much of the later 19th century, a project which mostly failed. The most colossal, brilliant failure to cross this divide was Liszt’s. Oh he felt it alright, the need to merge sensual and sacred, perhaps more than anyone. He was, in “real” life, the poster-child of this paradox. But then, it seems, he couldn’t be objective enough about it to paint it for the rest of us. His failures are almost always of tone, a failure to be able to be taken seriously at his most passionate: a incapacity to see beyond himself to imagine the rejuvenating, remorseless, creative cynicism of the human mind, which tolerates only so much bombast before destroying it with rolled eyes.

His sacred moments are either strangely sensual or annoyingly self-righteous; his sensual moments often disintegrate into hedonistic wandering (much like my life?) …

I’m sure someone will argue with this, but for me the name Beethoven and the word “sensual” don’t mesh. Beethoven is almost never languorous, for instance (but always rigorous.) Sometimes, in some very special slow movements, he approaches this world (“Emperor,” “Archduke”) but never releases us entirely into it; he cradles us but never fondles us. HIs strength, or yours, is always at stake. There are, to be sure, amazing sensory pleasures, rivers of beauty, but never do you feel you can fall asleep in them, let yourself dissolve into the desired impossibility of sense without mind. Whereas, to take an opposed instance, Rachmaninoff is the master of afterglow, if nothing else; many of his greatest moments seem like coiling smoke rings from post-coital cigarettes; he should be sued along with the tobacco companies.

When Beethoven is after the spiritual (last movement of 109, 111, slow movement of 102 #2, etc.), he usually employs the hymnic. It is a sensible matching of genre and aspiration. The hymn, the prayer: it is serious business. There is something measured about this, something particular, discrete, note-by-note, reasoned; and it is only against these columns of severity that any kind of sensual decoration finds play. The slow movement of 102 #2 (to take one of many instances) begins with a funereal hymn, where the phrases are as rhythmically predictable as the lines of a limerick:

These become sombre dotted rhythms, the more majestic trappings of a march (distancing, observing, genre as obstacle):

Now out of these austerities, these deliberate restrictions, comes a heavenly middle section, when minor gives birth to major, and the rhythms find flow …

Here is the spiritual center, the beautiful core, molten major-key lava at the middle of our funereal world. If there is something “sensual” in this movement, it is here: the sensualization is partly the release of the rhythm, a breeze drifting through our window of time, but if you are looking at the pitches possibly one of the most sensual moments is simply the switch from B-flat to B-natural, the pianist’s little neighbor motion which opens up a whole new world (or an agonizingly beautiful memory)…

This is a classic instance… this gesture, and just this, is seemingly enough sensuality for Beethoven (just the glimpse, the touch); as the major section unfolds, the most breathtaking moments in fact are simply ascending scales, arpeggios, things that seem like girders, structures, things that cannot weaken.

For the Romantics this was not enough. (Why?) There is something about humanity’s sensuality and sexuality that must be an integral part of their musical world. (It is true, this is mostly missing from Beethoven, or has been redirected, sublimated.) Why should it be missing? And once it is included, what are the consequences? There is the danger that the sensual becomes cheap, becomes sickening, becomes its own destruction. Sensing this, insecure about their own beauties, nervous about the morality of sounds, the composers of the 19th century seem so often to try to find “purpose” for their sensualities, “reasons” to be beautiful. And so the uneasy fusion of profundity and pleasure.

Many of the world’s favorite moments in Wagner are exactly this: triumphant, shocking fusions of sacred and sensual: Isolde’s Liebestod, obviously; and the paternal, idealized love of Act III of Die Walküre, with the fire as sensual symbol, as caging freedom; so, too, the unbelievable, unleashed passion of Siegmund and Sieglinde in Act I. Yes, they are sexually frenzied, out of control; but they are also part gods; their sexuality is fated, divinely sanctioned, desired, united with spring, season, rebirth (and also with destruction, taboo, tragedy)… the first cello choir passage where Siegmund and Sieglinde gaze at each other is one of the iconic passages of Romanticism, and of chromaticism. It is frankly erotic but at the same time pure, beautiful, perfect.

As Roland Barthes puts it:

Besides intercourse … there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted, bewitched: we are in the realm of sleep, without sleeping; we are within the voluptuous infantilism of sleepiness: this is the moment for telling stories, the moment of the voice which takes me, siderates me, this is the return of the mother … In this companionable incest, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled.

Yet, within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears; it cuts off the diffuse sensuality of the incestuous embrace; the logic of desire begins to function, the will-to-possess returns, the adult is superimposed upon the child. I am then two subjects at once … through all the meandering of my amorous history, I shall persist in wanting to rediscover, to renew the contradiction—the contraction—of the two embraces.

The contraction of the two embraces!

I have been practicing the Berg Chamber Concerto, for performances in Philadelphia, and as happens every time I approach that piece, I find myself playing over and over again the part where I don’t play: the beginning of the slow movement. (I am not always a model of efficiency.) I look at the page lovingly while I slobber my cereal. I call my friends on the phone and say “listen to this” while tears form in my eyes and then I suddenly have to hang up, saying I have to go. I try to share the unsharable. I wonder, idly, if I could ever somehow convince my parents to listen to the piece attentively up to that point, as I feel sure they would be happy once they got there, and maybe then we would all understand each other a bit better.

Berg makes the violin into an apparition, the beauty of being. Just as Mozart makes the first appearance of the clarinet in the “Kegelstatt” into a meditation on breath, on long-breathedness, this appearance of the bowed string after all the blown winds and struck keys of the first movement is a sensual “happening” first and foremost: a sound made new. The drawn string, the weight of the bow …

What comes just before the violin is an escalating waltz, toppling itself in lustful whirl. The theme of the first movement seems, in its searchings, to “want” to be a waltz (itself a fraught symbol of want) and always culminates in a beautiful, relinquishing coalescence: languor, emerging from abandoned surges and urges. The last variation allows this languor to grow and evolve; the waltz turns crazed, demonic, canonic, gets fruitful and multiplies: the piano emphasizes the accompaniment (vulgar, obsessive) and the curling melodic idea curls and turns ever more, and in the final measures of the first movement the bass ascends chromatically, wildly … into …

One of the truly heartbreaking things about this passage is so simple: the fact that the bass continues climbing. Even though we have crossed an abyss of dynamic, of thought, of sound, of meaning, even though everything has changed, though a thunderbolt has struck the piece’s world, this one continuity, this one argument remains. It is like an aftershock, some sort of drifting, remembered tendency which cannot, should not, be abandoned. The upwards chromatic: chromaticism is closeness, intimacy… the smallest possible interval, the overlap and brushing of bodies … there is no gap between the skin of one note and the skin of the next.

You might say: this page of the violin’s entrance is terribly lush, Romantic-with-a-capital-R. (The R-word can be disparaging.) The passage is thick with sounds that could so easily be clichés: 7th and 9th chords, jazzish mixtures, a quivering A-flat major tremolo chord in the winds … And yet, though built with decadent, sensual materials, the girders of late Romantic excess, this passage seems to me absolutely, strangely, wonderfully holy: you wouldn’t want to alter a single note, the notes seem suspended in a kind of ideal space: it’s like a chromatic hymn, a hymn in a silken bed, lusting for nothing but to be. There is some connection, for me, between Beethoven’s hymnic style and this passage, some shared reverence and wonder, some separation from the world’s ongoing narrative. (In the Beethoven, inevitable death; in the Berg, inevitable desire.) I am completely spellbound by it; for those minutes, if I want to live another moment, it is because I want to hear what chord comes next.

Berg achieves what so many Romantics could not: the contraction of the embraces. The sexual is in there with the sacred, and they are not uneasy bedmates. He hits that magical sweet spot, straddles the divide, which is partly just a form of faith: faith in the touchable, the tangible, the paradoxical perfection of the flesh. The body is not a curse, a collapsing corruption. Look, he says, it yearns, I yearn, you yearn (ever upward, chromatically), and though the yearning is endless it is not empty.

And why is it I am so touched by this? The rest of us—for whom perhaps the sensual and the sacred are not one indivisible territory—glance at them separately, from the vantage point of our peak of selfness, from our dilemma’s horn; we wish we could travel to them both at the same time. But they recede to opposite horizons. We must buy two tickets, or stay at home, and dream.

It is a stunningly beautiful, clear day in Manhattan and all the healthy people stand around on Broadway in their jogging outfits at 9:42 am, quite smug. I elbow past their toned calves and $300 headphones, humming the Berg Chamber Concerto. In Starbucks a man demonstrates that good jeans and a T-shirt can be the absolute apogee of fashion; nothing else is truly necessary. I am waltzing in my mind, with headphones of thought. Venti, please.

Sometimes I do emerge from my circling self-referential dancing to look around the world wide web, like a “real” blogger. I know I do not do this enough, forgive me!!! Several things pleased me immensely and I wanted to just throw them out there:

1. I want to give Kyle Gann a big, fat, sloppy, hymnic kiss for this:

I sprinted out and bought John Kirkpatrick’s recording of Ives’s Concord Sonata, which somehow looked to be his most celebrated work – perhaps Machlis had said as much. Once home, I had no idea what to think of it. It seemed a towering mess. I had already partly digested The Rite of Spring, which was bizarre enough, but at least its comparative repetitiveness made its oddities stick in my head. The Concord Sonata was just a mass of notes with, here and there, a tune, even a quotation I recognized. But I listened over and over and over, struggling to make sense of it. And gradually, inevitably, I fell absolutely in love. It became my favorite piece of music, and remains so to this day.

Yowza! His FAVORITE piece! Which leads me to…

2. I had lunch with charming Terry Teachout, as you can read over there. We agreed that Falstaff is the greatest opera ever written, and that anyone who doesn’t like Falstaff is an idiot. (Terry might not have literally said any of that.) Which leads me to…

3. I was as delighted as a quivering Jell-O mold to see that Alex Ross (without whom the classical blogosphere would have so much less center and soul) quoted a passage from one of my very superduper favorite novels, Pictures from an Institution. (I also dated someone from Sarah Lawrence, so it all resonates!) This same novel, in hardback, sat quite prominently on Terry’s bookshelf. Alex’s quote is about the emigre composer Gottfried Rosenbaum and his wife Irene. Later on, we learn this about Gottfried:

Falstaff was his favorite opera, and he played it so much that Constance knew even the little themes that come in, flicker their wings once, and are gone forever.

… which is, I think, one of the best one-sentence allusions imaginable. Here’s another great passage about Gottfried:

… he pointed, with a sober smile, to a painting which hung on the wall of the classroom (A Representation of Several Areas, Some of Them Grey, one might have called it; yet this would have been unjust to it—it was non-representational) and played for the class, on the piano, a composition which he said was an interpretation of the painting: he played very slowly and calmly, with his elbows, so that it sounded like blocks falling downstairs, but in slow motion. But half his class took this as seriously as they took everything else, and asked him for weeks afterwards about prepared pianos, tone-clusters, and the compositions of John Cage and Henry Cowell; one girl finally brought him a lovely silk-screen reproduction of a painting by Jackson Pollock, and was just opening her mouth to—He interrupted, bewilderingly, by asking the Lord what land He had brought him into. The girl stared at him open-mouthed, and he at once said apologetically that he was only quoting Mahler, who had also diedt from America; then he gave her such a winning smile that she said to her roommate that night, forgivingly: “He really is a nice old guy. You never would know he’s famous.”

“Is he really famous?” her roommate asked. “I never heard of him before I got here. But gee, before I got here I’d never heard of Dr. Crowley.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s famous—anyway, famous in Europe,” the girl replied. Then her eyes brightened and she exclaimed, in scorn at her own forgetfulness: “Of course he’s famous! He’s in the Britannica, in the article on Schönberg.”

Ah, students.

4. Via Gabriel Kahane, ever a source of the genius of Craigslist, the following two posts:

Composer

Date: 2007-09-19, 4:02PM EDT
I am looking for a composer who can take a small musical theme and produce a fully ochestrated arrangement. The composer should be able to emulate the styles of prominent composers from the past and present and insert his or her own creative spin and style. This will be a paid project although producers have not yet specified compensation levels …

Yes, that one is good but how about this one?

Music Composer

Date: 2007-09-19, 8:49PM EDT
Need a composer (Soft Rock & Rock Ballad)I am looking for someone who writes music. I have 30-40 songs that need music and most of them melody …

5. Finally, I have to say there are Serious Blogs, Comprehensive Blogs, YouTubeish Blogs, Deliberately Boring Blogs, and all blogs under the sun, but I think The Standing Room has an infectious, joyous quality that makes me desperately want to park illegally in every neighborhood of San Francisco. Via the Standing Room, I discovered that Joyce DiDonato has been blogging her recording project. I had one rehearsal with Joyce last May in the basement of the Met, and it was truly, seriously, an amazing musical experience and I was extremely sorry that unforeseen events prevented us from performing together. I am a huge fan.

Her blog did call to mind certain transitions that are necessary from Working With Strings to Working With Voice, certain divides of style.

Suppose you’re a garden variety Serious Pianist, you know the sort of pianist who cares about dots versus wedges in Mozart, who would never dream of programming Gottschalk, etc. etc. and suppose somebody asked you, in rehearsal, you know, how do you think such-and-such phrase ought to go? And this hypothetical pianist, in a chamber rehearsal with strings, might say something like this:

I think it goes to the middle of the third measure, and then releases to the half cadence. But I really love that harmony in the second measure and I think we should somehow “notice” it a little more.

At which point the other players might hum, hem, and possibly haw and suggest maybe the peak is in the second measure or some other interesting place … or … they might just agree and everyone can go have dinner sooner.

Now, should you ask your garden variety Serious Singer the same question, you’re more likely to get an answer like this:

I mean I really identify with this woman and my last coach told me this great story about how this song came to be composed, which was that Chausson was in Mallorca and fell in love with this Albanian waitress, and almost left his wife for her but then over a plate of couscous he really realized how much he loved his wife, and I came to realize that motivation here is complicated, like the wife wants to hold onto her love, be the fierce mother-protector, the fabulous earth-mother, but something in her heart is trapped in the past and it’s kind of YOU GO GIRL and then after she’s done it and gone, she’s full of conflicted guilt and her ex-boyfriend maltreated her, and that’s why there’s a diminuendo.

It’s a mildly different communication style. Something like the difference between the conversation you have at Staples when you’re asking for your printer cartridge and the conversations you have with your unhinged Jungian analyst. I’m not passing judgement here.