The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

By now, we are all familiar with the recent performance of Miss Teen South Carolina. (I know what you’re already thinking: “why, Jeremy, why from the shelter of your Upper West Side comfort, hemmed in by prolific ATMs, would you feel the perverse need to pile any more scorn upon this poor girl? Just get a puppy if you need something to do!”) I think it helps to divorce oneself from the visual component of this event, and focus on the pitiless words themselves:

Q: Recent Polls indicate a 5th of Americans can’t locate the US on a world map. Why do you think this is?

A: I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the US should help the US or should help South Africa it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.

… and they say poetry is dead! Grammar itself cowers in terror before this free-ranging masterpiece. Most readings so far of this text seem to focus on its evanescent “meanings” (or ambiguities of same), conforming—even without being aware of it—to workaday conceptions of coherence. I, however, would like to propose a different methodology, yielding quite different, even shocking results. The proper vehicle for addressing this text is musical, not semantic or grammatical (though it refers to the semantic and grammatical in order to create its pseudo-musical paradigms). It begins innocently enough, with seeming Mozartean grace:

Antecedent phrase: I personally believe the US Americans are unable to do so…
(moving from tonic to dominant)

Consequent phrase: because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps.
(dominant back to tonic)

The tremendous idiocy of the content should alert you: everything is a façade. Falstaffian glee lurks behind her glassy eyes. The simple up and down of this statement (a Newtonian, classical “pose”) lulls you into knowing complacency, into a careless condescension, prematurely, leaving you vulnerable to the surprising twists and turns to come. The meaning of the sentence (incidental) conceals a web of musical, motivic connections that then become the “subject” of the ensuing development.

Theme One: personally, believe, I, our (symbolizing possession, self-centeredness, isolation)

Theme Two: some, out there, US Americans (paradoxically creating “other” out of “we”)

What follows is an intertwining, a composing-out (Durchführung) of these two themes. If the opening sentence can truly be understood sequentially-semantically, the middle can only be understood as music, as the reiteration of sounds (proper names, fillers) which, in their peculiar order, jangle against meanings only accidentally, if at all. She has absorbed the lessons of Verlaine, but has transported them to Applebee’s. Cunningly she promises parallel construction (“I believe that our education”), indicating she might begin another “sensible” phrase, invoke another antecedent and drop another meaning-bomb; but then, with a deceptive cadence, she diverges into what in Haydn would be termed a purple patch:

like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as

This is where her genius shines absolutely: she exploits “like such as,” a musical tautology (and what else is music but beautiful tautology?), in order to bracket the other: “in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere.” These other nations are a mere ironical neighbor-tone to the central message—“like such as”—if the central message is not, in fact, the very bracketing construction itself. To put it another way: “like such as” is a beautiful nonsense phrase intended (if we are not overreaching) to symbolize the nonsensical demarcation of the other.

Now you see, once the musical proposition has been set up, the rest falls into place. What seemed like chaotic babble is now a disturbingly brilliant elided phraseform. For instance:

and I believe that they should our education over here in the US

Here she recalls the deceptive beginning of the last phrase, she reechoes “belief” as motive, she mixes in a bit of anti-grammatical subversion (“should our”—where is my missing verb? you could sit up all night wondering … “improve” might be a possibility, but nah, it’s too easy!), and strums upon “our” and “here,” the familiar themes. Then, the masterstroke:

should help the US

If there was any doubt of her subversive and musical intent, this haunting re-echo (say it to yourself: “should our education over here in the US/should help the US”), or “extension,” in music theory speak, should quench it forever. The mirrored, Alice-in-Wonderland, navel-gazing quality of “Americanism” has never been more poignantly evoked; it falls away in fragments. The reduplication of “should” and “US” inevitably calls to mind the “like such as” from before, and reminds us that as much as we would like to define an other, our definitions merely boomerang back upon ourselves. The rest is mere ramification, teasing out, the thud of trajectories hitting home:

or should help South Africa
it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries
so we will be able to build up our future
for us

The harmony ends ambiguously; its Tristan chord is not resolved, but worked into further contortions, chromatic notes beyond knowing. Do you hear it: “help” and then again “help” and then again “help”? There is a kind of helpless quality, if you will, to this helping: its attempt, in various clauses, to reach some definitive meaning, to find a site, a place to stanch the wound, to heal the bleeding world. And at last, the parenthetical tautology: our future/for us. A final gasp, in undertone: a guttural reiteration of narcissism, relinquishing meaning and sound to the chaotic consequences of self.

As usual, I am sandwiched between summer and reality. I am a slice of bologna squished between the flatbread of summer and the heartier rye of fall, spread heavily with the mustard of sloth. I am sentient bologna. I wish to squeeze free of my bread parentheses and flop out, out, onto the table, and inch myself greasily towards the great deli counter in the sky. I want to be served with Dr. Pepper. I want you to yearn for fries but order the salad. I want to be sliced freshly from a giant slab; I want to fall gracefully from the mandoline, in meaty balletic dollops, to be picked up by gloved loving hands and hygienically transferred to truth. I want to be the only piece of bologna ever to play the Goldberg Variations. Amen.

I would like someday to write the definitive monograph on the post-concert reception. Working titles:

1. The Bland and the Restless: A Morphology of Clustering in Green Rooms

abstract: Between the desire to reach the front of the line and deliver one’s encomium and the desire to escape the line altogether, the green room well-wisher is caught in a complex mechanism of conflicting interest: a crossfire of kindness, social urges, promotional self-interest, and what some have claimed is the only happiness—the absence of suffering. Networking between various attendees is a crucial but unpredictable part of the equation, making the entire mechanism similar in mathematical complexity, say, to the formation of tropical storms in the Atlantic. To address this issue, we intend to evaluate a sample of backstage clusterings at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, as well as the more cramped and topologically complex Zankel Hall, and to feed this information into the new supercomputer at the University of Maryland, to figure out how everyone can get the hell out of there quicker.

2. Buffet or Not Buffet: Flow Patterns in Condominiums and their Relation to Hungry Performers

abstract: The relative placement of wine, salad, plates and main course has long vexed the post-concert planner, especially in light of the rabid hunger and thirst that musicians transplant into the peaceful environment of the condominium, home, or other random board-approved location. Of crucial interest for the general good is how to avoid conversations in the middle of the buffet line, which prevent flow and food obtainment and generate unwanted resentment. Whether beverages and food should be separated is another burning question. We attempt to exploit a combination of the Fibonacci series and Bach ritornello forms to posit the paradigmatic party layout, and to explode preconceptions of grilled salmon and couscous.

3. Far From the Nodding Crowd: The Tragedy of Dislocation in Reception Discourse

abstract: This paper takes its departure from anecdotal propositions, with wide metaphorical resonances. Suppose (hypothetically) you are a pianist who just spent a great deal of time contemplating and rehearsing a rarely heard Schubert masterwork, the 45 minute, 4-hands “Divertissement on a French Motive.” You are in the flush of post-performance euphoria and you make the mistake of walking around, dazed, in the lobby. A man comes up to you (hypothetically) and says, with jolly intensity, “how ever do you fellas get yer fingers to play together?” From the “high” philosophical realms in which the pianist’s mind is revolving to these more prosaic “low” concerns yawns a great semiotic abyss, difficult to cross without some access to concepts most familiar from Epictetus and the other stoic philosophers. Or suppose, in another entirely hypothetical instance, that you are in Santacafe Restaurant having a lovely dinner with family and friends after playing the Brahms C minor Piano Quartet, and you walk over to the bar and some fellow recognizes you and says “you know, I really wish they would shut the lid on the piano sometimes!” Another semiotic abyss opens; how is one to solve it, other than dumping one’s Tanqueray-and-tonic on the man’s head? These issues can only be addressed, this paper purports, through access to the binaries of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, and the understanding of play-of-opposites, in this case axes of profundity/triviality, smile/fake-smile, politeness/annoyance, and to that end we will examine the complex, dialectical meanings and ramifications of the phrase “pissed off.”

Other monograph suggestions are, as always, heartily welcomed.

The opening of the “Kegelstatt” trio is unusual: unusual enough that it obtained a (probably) spurious nickname. And yet, at the same time, there is nothing revolutionary in there. It is the usual classical bag o’tricks: dialectical, question-and-answer fragment-phrases, moving from tonic to dominant to tonic etc. etc. Then, predictably, there are two paired, longer phrases: one with a deceptive cadence, one with a full cadence … from the point of view of construction, there is absolute tedium, just Generic Structure, nothing to see. (And the more you describe it in these terms, the less you may see.)

The nickname “Kegelstatt” derives from something unusual in the material itself, not the phrase construction (though I mostly distrust distinctions between form and content). Here’s the famous motive …

… a strong tonic note (foundation), a turn (ornament, fancy), a downward arpeggio (tail, conclusion), also in the tonic. The bowling image is—whew!—not totally idiotic. It works, as would any metaphor with an initial attack or impulse, followed by a kind of helpless release: anything with consequences that fall away. These consequences are not willed, made, or manipulated; they are to be heard as “just” the result of the first note, the result of musical physics.

An ornamented tonic arpeggio is really the most boring, conventional way to begin a classical work, or any work; why is this arpeggio special? If I think closely about what in the motive appeals to me, about how it “feels” to play it, when I am playing it well (IF I am ever playing it well), it has something to do with the downward passage of the four last notes, the sense of passing. It’s as if, while blowing, you pulled out a valve on a horn, smoothly, evenly, and the various notes of E-flat are touched on their way down, in a gliding motion. Though you hear the individual notes of the E-flat triad, what you feel is the smooth gliding of the valve.

One of the crucial aspects of Mozart’s exploration of our audible frequencies is his ability to imbue just a simple, expectable arpeggio with a special, sensual quality, a quality somewhat at odds with functionality. Of course, everything functions. Everything functions, in fact, as it should, in “textbook” fashion, even—your Theory Teacher can show you how it’s done but could never do it—with perfect, well-versed voice-leading (to say the least). This perfect functioning is a kind of innocence at the end of exhaustive knowledge. (Innocence figures prominently in Mozart’s iconography: Mozart the child genius, the gift from God, music written in heavenly script and only transcribed by its human conduit …) Every note, every motive, every moment can say: I’m “just” an arpeggio; or, I’m “just” the tonic headed to the dominant; I pass from here to there, filling this space … It shows its workings transparently; you can write flawless harmonic analyses till the cows come home. And yet against this innocence, I hear other qualities, unexpected searing beauties tucked away in the nooks and crannies of the tonal system, which rub against the grain of the tonal system even as they function within it. These sensual qualities (or “qualia” in philosophical speak) are the truly subversive parts: just the sound of a certain arpeggio framed a certain way; the timbre of an instrument coloring a particular voice; anything at all. The uniqueness of the moment finds a way to protest the generic tendencies of the construction. Beauty subverts functioning.

(This last sentence has been proven in my life 3,793,421 times; the last time was just yesterday, when Cory called me at 3 in the morning to explain that he was following two beautiful 18 year old girls, and had found himself inexplicably in their company at a McDonalds—McDonalds! I did not answer the phone but woke up nonetheless and then found myself stumbling over to my phone which was charging against the wall and listening to his voicemail and then sleeping very intermittently until 7 when I decided to get up once and for all, super grumpy. Cory, meanwhile had 7 hours of rehearsal and a 3 hour drive the next day, and when contacted by phone seemed a bit turgid or sluggish in temperament; I, too, found myself often staring at a sock on my floor, simultaneously langorous and bitter, and incapable of will. Thus, the beauty of the two girls—which I did not even witness!—passed, like a virus, through Cory to me and impeded both of our functionings. Astounding.)

This subversive beauty could be attributed to certain parameters: the octave G down to G, transected by two thirds and a fourth, a registral shift, also the fact that the chord is E-flat at the 1st inversion, the notes at the beginning and end are not “stable” notes … all of these factors sound like scientific indicators of “why” this moment, this motive has a certain quality. Only by playing the passage a number of times, by caressing these parameters, by exerting your imagination upon them in fits and starts, would you arrive at some cogent realization of its qualia for you: what it is, after all, you hear “in it.”

I said already, and let me lay heartless words upon heartless words: it has something to do for me with the relationships of the notes, with the instability of the Gs at either side of the arpeggio, the G passing down to its octave lower compatriot, neither of which a true stopping point, both of which provisional, but opening up a registral space, a triadic configuration, for contemplation.

“Opening up a triadic configuration” does not sound very beautiful, does it?

What does it open into? After the last pin falls, there is silence. The phrase fades, falls into four eighth notes of nothingness. It is in this silence, perhaps, that one truly “hears” the motive that was just played. Hmm. You can use that time to reflect on the qualia of the preceding notes, which we have just slavishly buried under a mountain of words.

The opening of this piece is, in fact, stacked heavily with silences; Mozart wants us to hear, rehear, expect, wait. (Our acts of hearing and waiting are “built into” the structure.) I said the piece begins by opening up a registral space; I might metaphorically extend that; it’s like the piece opens its mouth, as if to sing … The bowling motive “functions” (forgive me) as a kind of musical yawning … Yawning is suggestive, because once the jaw drops (G-Eb-Bb-G), nothing comes out … or, more precisely… you are waiting for something and (after a calculated, exasperating pause) what comes out is impish, courtly, flirtatious, a bit glib:

Charming: perhaps a bit funnier, lighter than you would have expected from the opening idea, but thereby playing the dialectical, paradoxical games of the classical style. This second idea also (like the first) closes with a kind of opening. Its concluding grace notes are wonderful, like a last-minute flip, a wondering and upturning smile. It would seem the piece is beginning to take shape. But after the smile, we have yet more silence; the measure goes by while the smile freezes upon your face.

By the time we hear the bowling motive again, if you’re not clueless, you have figured out that Mozart is positing a kind of peculiarly slow rhythm of happenings. Actually, the construction, the template, is fine. 2 bars and 2 bars, etcetera, etcetera. But the material is too short! It ends way before its time and we simply have to wait around till the arriving barline prompts us. Why would Mozart deliberately write material that does not fill the space?

Mozart’s no fan of extra effort. He does the simplest thing; he creates space in order to fill it, in order to reveal the miracle of continuity. He forces you to listen to the silences; this (slightly perverse) act then rebounds and makes you re-comprehend something you would normally take for granted: the line of a phrase. The clarinet appears and soars:

Harmonically, this is (again) nothing special, I-IV-V-I. You can pick it up by the bushelful at the Classical WalMart. What special quality, what qualia, does Mozart manage to affix to this most prosaic of constructions? Well, the answer is quite simple, sensual, basic: the continuity depends upon, our attention is drawn to, the breath of the clarinetist, a miracle (life itself). Mozart makes us hear breath. We had such long spaces for breath before, even: too much time to breathe, to get ready for the next phrase, a series of overlong pickups or misfired cues. All those breaths, those rests, those baited breaths, while fragmentary phrases waited for their futures … all of that just to hear the clarinetist breathe once, simply, out. The sing-song, the see-saw, the tit-for-tat, all condense into a singularity. Logic and dialectic give way to air.

Afterthought. The outlining notes of the clarinet melody are:

Sound familiar? It’s a transposed version of our earlier arpeggio:

… i.e. the “breathing-out” of the first phrase. If you think that this resemblance is a coincidence, you’re an idiot. (I’ve been watching too much House.) The short, quick exhale of the opening motive is magnified 6 times over; it becomes the tremendous redemptive descent of the new theme: a breath which finds its groove, its deeper meaning.

Actually, I lied. (Again, too much House.) The clarinet does not play the entire arpeggio. It plays the first three notes:

and then the piano “interrupts” it, takes the last note, stealing the clarinet’s destined conclusion:

(I love the silence there, the wicked sixteenth-note rest in the clarinet part, just at the last moment, the fulfilling moment.)

… and you didn’t believe me when I said timbre was subversive! Mozart has visited us again with functional, whispered, sweet-nothings. That chord is just plain yummy, partly because it is stolen; the pianist’s intervention here is an unexpected beauty, a joyous theft, coinciding with the deceptive cadence (harmonic deception=timbral deception) … a little zing, a bait-and-switch beneath the seamless perfection of the whole. It’s not the sort of thing you’d read about in any theory textbook, probably: it’s too dangerously like life, like the strange, hidden switches behind events, coursing coincidences, qualities or impulses that wake us up at 3 in the morning, and are endlessly hard to explain.

Readers, you missed it. There’s never been a more uproarious assemblage of Elgar specialists than Sunday night, around 8, at Bard’s Spiegeltent.

I was in full end-of-summer celebration mode. I made my way expeditiously to the sangria counter—where little Elgar expertise was in evidence—but after two glasses, I still couldn’t get the Herbert Howells Piano Quartet out of my head. (It’s not that bad!) Additionally, memories of the reverent Dream of Gerontius in Gehryland were waging a pitched battle with the down-and-dirty Slavonic band playing in the mirrored tent: dialectical, diabolically different worldviews taunting each other across the lawn of my mind, while mother Nature relaxed into night, gazed calmly on. In the Elgar, death is the window onto harp-strewn, chordal heaven; but the Slavonic band, stuffed to the accordion’s gills with death, proposed no post-mortem.

I was alive. Neither musical answer seemed relevant to the question of now.

Even during the concert, Elgar’s vision of death did not sit absolutely well with me. I kept craving Mahler’s 9th Symphony, for example: something really despairing and not so comforting. Maybe it was the words? Death seemed awfully verbose. But then Mahler was not exactly concise.

What’s a party? You need some sentient beings looking for less sentience (a “sentience reprieve”); then there are inanimate requirements: beverages, snacks, tables, chairs, space to walk around, air to breathe. I wandered about the party for a bit like a camera; I was just there (essentially alone) to take snapshots. Tables scattered on the lawn, lights, clusters of people, each a bubble with its own modes of communication, each conversation part of some great tradition of party conversations, some well-worn path …

At some point I made the transition from seeing to feeling. I talked too freely, on subjects which were somewhat taboo. I tried, but I couldn’t quite read my own freedom on the faces of others. The True Party, perhaps, would be the breaking of every taboo, the yielding of every secret, the confession of every desire. After this hypothetical Ideal Party, in the grey light of the following morning, the only option would be drastic … some enveloping oblivion. A movie I have always loved is The Party, with Peter Sellers. It begins as a typical elite Hollywood gathering; everyone is having the usual chitchat; the roles are circumscribed; but Sellers is the renegade, the divine idiot who steps in and destroys virtually everything. This escalating destruction is the party’s success, of course; pleasure and destruction are related; a party planner is an oxymoron. The saddest thing in the world is the sour person at a party who glances at their watch and says “honey, isn’t it about time we go home?”

Elgar’s sense of death was very communal, oddly party-esque. As Gerontious is dying, he has a whole chorus of people to help him on, encourage him … The message is: we are all in this together. I like that. But Mahler, in good old number 9, with still a very large orchestra on stage, suggests the opposite: that we are all in it alone. Even (especially) in a crowd. A vast assemblage of musicians contrived to depict the ultimate savage solitude of the human condition. I like that too.

I found myself in a few unusual, unpredicted conversations. A man still in his tuxedo, with his tie untied poetically around his neck, seemed iconic, a relic of some party long ago. I consulted my brain: the Howells was still in there, sifting around; I sang a few diatonic tunes to myself, channeling my inner Brit. I ignored whatever music was playing. What was time?

There was a last dance. Just a few of us jumped around in the circle, exchanging glances here and there, exchanging coded meanings which we would later decipher, knowing we were the last ones, closing up shop. Each of us, I feel sure, was closing something different, something of our own, something for which this party was just a symbol. How profound! I laughed at myself constructing elaborate symbolic frameworks, enjoyed that too.

Then, by common consent, time was agreeably up. (The music ended.) We exited onto a quiet lawn. There were too few of us and there was too much night; we were dissolved in it. Occasional streetlights: paths curving off into the waiting campus: but mostly wonderful, friendly summer darkness. We’ve all seen this scene before, but don’t we love it, doesn’t it just send us to a wistful planet? The partiers dispersed, in twos threes fours, loudly or quietly: they dispersed into the night. Laughter echoed … nasal snippets of exclamations … in every direction diminuendo to nothing, thoughts expressed now far away, now part of the background hum of the world. In some dorm room somewhere someone was telling someone they loved them.

My own, undirected happiness took a walk into the night sky.