The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Courtesy a Japanese typhoon, traveling the Pacific to envelop me, I am becoming a connoisseur of the color gray and a certain unhappy look in a boy’s eye as he is looking through the window of a cafe. His glance like mine must rest on a brilliantly unattractive QFC sign. Floral, Deli, Espresso: it enumerates in navy blue Helvetica, against a yellow which only feebly disputes the clouded canvas of the sky.

Observant Seattle-ites may know by now that I have been spending delicious, self-consciously happy-sad time in Cafe Victrola, on 15th Avenue.

Ah, the beautiful people, ah, the many power outlets, sprouting laptops like electronic blossoms, ah, the pretense of no pretense, … the refusal to serve decaf! Snobbery through omission. And the rain dripping on hooded passersby only clinches it; the rain is a condensation of some futility floating in the air. Or an excuse to feel futile. I go to coffeeshops to stand in line, to await, to smile awkwardly at no one, to sip, to get jittery and dissatisfied; but mostly to watch people work. There, they talk with their laptops or study guides; their eyes are absorbed orbs; some people “have conversations,” “catch up,” but these exchanges are almost uniformly vacuous; it occurs to me that the joy of writing is that no one talks back. Clickclickclick says my computer keyboard, ahem … what do you mean no one?

I know I’m late to this party—like, really late, dude—but at nearby Sonic Boom, which I hear is a rather well-known Seattle record store, I went on a rather hilarious horizon-broadening spree and bought a whole bunch of stuff, including 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields. The girl at the counter, when I read off my desires, looked classically askance. I was smitten. I suppose the term “Classical Music” finally began to feel stale in the back of my throat, like an unresolved stomach ailment, and then I just wanted to go in and swim where the taboos were, drown myself in what I never wanted. Overwrought, anyone? Rain makes me a bit dramatic!

Classical music is so often the victim of a haughty love. Or a nerdy one. The other night, after a concert, I was talking with a young man whose enthusiasm was tremendous but whose every expression of this enthusiasm disheartened me in the extreme. He explained to me, smiling, all the reasons why he refers to the various Beethoven Sonatas in various ways … for instance, never “Les Adieux,” but always “Lebewohl,” since “THE goodbye,” he claimed, doesn’t make sense; “Waldstein” is permissible because it is a dedication; he confessed to using “Appassionata,” somewhat guiltily, but it’s OK because it’s Italian (?); but never, EVER, would he use the term “Moonlight” Sonata. I thought to myself, looking in his sincere, sweet eyes, aglow with these distinctions, that this person loves the same music I do, he’s my target audience, I can give something over to him, possibly, pass on some of my love … but at the same time this conversation about titles made me feel like jumping out the window. Probably I was reacting this way because I saw my teen self in his face … I sincerely hope he is not reading this blog entry, but if he is, what apology can I offer: I’m sorry you made me feel like jumping out the window???

Haughty love is worse than nerdy love, though, and it spreads through the apparatus of the classical world, sometimes through maestros pontificating and glorifying on PBS specials, sometimes through critics who adore to condescend, etc. etc. Everyone is guilty; I am terribly guilty; there are so many lurking clichés. All so well-intentioned, like a benevolent squadron of embalmers. So hard to speak of our music in the present tense!

Which is why, I guess, I went out to Sonic Boom and bought me some Magnetic Fields. I feel utterly incompetent to deal with this music, but I am humming it everywhere, now. The songs are alarmingly simple; they often simply repeat themselves, seemingly out of musical (never verbal) ideas after bar 16 or whatever; and yet, and yet (I feel) something is so RIGHT about them: the careful merging of the musical phrase structure and the rhymes, the subtle or not subtle reworking from verse to verse, of symbol, of syntax … They coalesce.

Or, if they don’t coalesce, they straddle strange contradictions. For instance, I am drawn to “Acoustic Guitar,” in volume 3. It’s not a “serious” song. A short bit of guitar lead-in, a scale in medias res, a bit of vamp, then an awkwardly high voice is crooning (yes, that’s the best word?). The antagonism between the singer and the song is palpable. The singer is obviously singing to bring back a lover; but just as obviously it’s not going to work; he or she is taking it out on the guitar (threatening an inanimate object—“I’ll sell you if you don’t bring back my girl”); but the guitar’s just a stand-in, a projection of the inanity of the song itself, of guitar-playing serenaders, of desperate pathetic unrequited music-writing as a substitute, as a bubble in which the loser lives, finds inadequate comfort; truly the singer hates the very impasse he/she has been brought to, hates the very lyrical impulse itself, and yet … and yet … is singing.

(Or at least that’s how I hear it. Let’s hope Stephin Merritt never reads this and comes after me for over-interpreting his stuff.)

I am smitten with 69 Love Songs for its element of mental play, both destructive and constructive; in much of volume 3, I feel, it’s telling you what’s wrong with the current musical world, pointing out the painful and obvious. It’s whipping the love song with one hand while worshiping it with the other; its obsessive rhymes veer between the incredibly touching and the absurd … The format is absurd, you seem to be reminded constantly; and yet the composer does not abandon it. The boy’s eyes looking out the cafe window seem to say “what is this crap world we live in?;” they critique what they see. Even in the act of perception.

There’s a canard in classical music talk … it goes something like this … the reason we can’t hear classical music as revolutionary any more is that all those dissonances and things have been explored, and we’re desensitized, we can’t really hear dissonance any more. As if dissonance were an addiction and we have maxed out on dopamine. All of classical music’s forced march to atonality, then, was a waste of time, requiring rehab.

I don’t believe Beethoven’s modernity lay in dissonance to begin with, or increased dynamic range, or more dramatic forms, or any of those things in particular. For a long time the equation dissonant-modern has been obsolete. Why, right now (which must, by definition, be pretty modern) we are surrounded by tremendously un-dissonant music … our culture is suffused with it. We are not “used” to dissonance. Hardly. Dissonance is as antiquated as a Ford Model T. So, how could dissonance ever have been the source of modernity?

Dissonances can be eternally fresh if you sense the destructive forces they are about (and only then). Beethoven’s revolution cannot be stated easily, summarized (no more than you can summarize an entire grammar); it is not, as we have said, dissonance; it the destruction of a language written in the same language, upon which (nonetheless, paradoxically) the destructive act depends. The destruction has to be expressed in the terms of what is destroyed; something, perhaps, like a politically conscious teenager, whose leisure and wealth allow him time and opportunity to express the immorality of his leisure and wealth. It is the entirety of a language upending itself: quite a trick: like a person able to lift themselves off the ground. This is impossible; therefore, always partial; the ground always waits (the ground being perhaps, simply, the necessity of saying anything at all).

The Classical Style is boring, inhibiting, rife with annoying patterns and cliché; and yet Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven decided to take it for a ride, give it a go. They both created and destroyed it. They abandoned and fulfilled it (in that order). They knew more than adolescent rebels: it’s not transgression, it’s the quality of the transgression, how good the destruction feels, how much space it opens up. Things crashing into each other, collisions and conventions, the laughter of invention. What’s dangerous in the “Hammerklavier”: something that crosses a line, perpetually. In which direction it crosses is not relevant (past/future, major/minor, chaos/order, dissonance/consonance). The line becomes a string inside of you that is strummed … which is what you want out of life, to be strummed, right?

Admittedly, with all the rain and the dripping and the slick sidewalks I was beginning to get a bit too melancholy (overdosing on Seattle?), and was feeling decidedly unstrummed. But then, I was fetching a beer for Tom Bennett (our wonderful festival chef) and making a martini for host and friend Marty Greene and all this was taking place in a little back kitchen/bar they have at their house. Tom’s assistant, a very delightful lady, came in to dispose of some snacks … together we were clattering and rinsing, and in the next room a group was playing the slow movement of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. I wasn’t expecting to love music, just then. But they were playing just that bit with these three notes …

… which those who know the piece will immediately recognize, and which reminded me at that moment very strongly of certain plaintive hooks in Merritt’s 69 Love Songs. They rubbed over those tones a few times. I hummed involuntarily as I shook the ice, gin, and vermouth … she caught me humming, and our teeth, grinningly uncovered by our mouths, stared at each other across the small room. “It’s so beautiful,” she said, sorting cheeses, and it didn’t seem haughty or nerdy at all, it was in fact unclouded, not dripping with the rain of pretense or any other emotional precipitation; it was shared, fragmentary, un-opinionated, unadvertised, private, real, imagined, communicated, received, loved.

I was truly blown away by a recent comment on this blog. Perhaps in order to really make this clear, I have to explain that much of the early part of my summer was spent working on music by Leon Kirchner, which was celebrated wildly and orgiastically (to the extent a chamber music festival in the surburbs of a Midwestern city is capable of such) at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival. I have a deep affection for his music and for him, and have spent a fair amount of time with him over the last few years…

Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat from my newest recurring nightmare. It’s twenty years in the future, and someone (some student, some panelist in some piano forum in Lapland or Saskatoon) is quoting to me something from the blog … “But, Mr. Denk, didn’t you say blah-blah-blah?” … super-seriously, as if it were some really profound musicological comment, whereas when it was written it was intended entirely sarcastically or ironically or some such … Nono! I say, desperately, that was a joke, the whole thing! but they look at me pityingly, as though I don’t understand anything anymore.

Which brings me to the subject: the recent post in which I “discovered” that the inverted fugue theme of the “Hammerklavier” was actually the theme from the sitcom Three’s Company. Some enterprising reader did the 0.0003 seconds of work necessary (which you’ll notice, I did not do) to find that the composer of said theme was Joe Raposo, who was quite well-known as the composer of music for Sesame Street. This same reader, I believe, informs me that Joe Raposo studied with LEON KIRCHNER at Harvard!

AAAAAAAHHHHH.

Perhaps this visual aid will be of assistance …

Here, in this pentagram, everything is illuminated. Or everything just circles back, sickeningly. I considered fleshing this out a bit more. For example, Joe Raposo is also the composer of “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” which is easy to connect to some earlier Think Denk posts about frogs, as well as a general sense of alienation common to Beethoven, Ives, performers, artists of many stripes (mostly green stripes) … Do I even need to draw the transecting line between Beethoven and Kirchner (through Schoenberg of course)? And my childhood memories of watching Three’s Company and eating cookies (cookies!) while being yelled at by my mother to clean my room? It’s mere child’s play to see that absolutely everything in the universe can somehow be connected to this disturbing incestuous circle and why are baristas always so cute?

Sleepy return to Seattle. The self in the airplane not quite resigned to being in the airplane; it (me?) wants to fly out the window onto distant lights, land in pillowy valleys, roll in wet grass. But the seats around the plane glow (reading lamps); otherwise the tube is dark, the windows are dark; people are bent over People; the beverage cart crawls down the aisle. Each is studiously to his or her own and each seat is a person and each of these seats is bolted in a metal tube and hurled through the air and we cannot leave until the nice people in the uniforms tell us. Study, passengers, pore under your dim lamps. I squirm.

Is it not possible to design a more attractive beverage cart?

Well, I seem to have played the “Hammerklavier” Sonata. A husky-voiced Leon Fleisher passed me (him exiting, me entering) on the backstage path; he said “you should thank me, I had them take up the carpet.” And I do, Leon, I do. Let me add it to the pile of things to thank you for, among which perhaps may I say? … an all-night bus ride with my high school orchestra (me 14 yrs. old?) and waking up at dawn in the deserts of California and playing Fleisher’s Beethoven 3rd on my walkman and between the world outside and puberty and sleep deprivation and the C minor world in my ears being caught in the teeth of something I did not know yet how to name. My fellow scratchy hapless string players slept and I stared out partly into the sad rising sun, partly into my own bus-window reflection … ha, isn’t that a nice metaphor for everything?

Of all the tremendous moments in the “Hammerklavier” surely the most tremendous is after Beethoven sweeps everything off the table; he sweeps his own creation off the table, saying ENOUGH.

I tire, even, of myself. Don’t we all? And then there is this:

His other, better self? Or something selfless? It is worth playing the whole thing (something for a pianist like Shackleton’s Endurance voyage) just to play this moment, I must tell you. The waves of intensity from the previous fugue are crashing against you and you are just still there, trying to hold the line, the new legato line that Beethoven is giving you, trying to hold it against the chaos of the past.

There are many moments, too, in Ives’ “Concord,” where the vast dissonances suddenly give way to the purest tonalities. In “Hawthorne,” Ives sets up a huge wash, total noise, chaos, the opposite of everything pianistic and lovely, and then makes you remove the pedal and there is an F# major chord. It is piercingly beautiful, but beauty made shocking, in an instant, total transformation, a drop over the cliff-face. I think this moment is the one where even the skeptics in the audience say to themselves “maybe Ives isn’t such an idiot after all,” and the wiser Ivesians in the audience think, “that’s only the beginning of what he can do.”

Tremendous chaos, heavy-lifting of mind, and after thinking and working and everything, a simpler solution occurs to you. (Again and again in the Ives this happens.) This new solution is more skeletal, it is barer, like trees stripped of leaves, a crossing of lines not vines, even: pure geometry. For all that, it is not heartless. In fact, it is (for the moment) the most beautiful thing you have ever seen (heard).  So that:  when Beethoven “gets back to business,” re-attempts the main fugue, in further permutations, some part of you may feel this is anticlimactic.   Beethoven keeps looking for more complicated solutions.   But you may still be haunted by D major, gazing back at its simplicity; I know I am.  And yet you go on.

Ives, by contrast, does not try to “stage a comeback;” everything in the “Concord” gives way to Thoreau’s resignation, to non-action.   (Though Thoreau fights this in some ways.)  For Ives and Beethoven, after everything, at 3 AM when the bar closes, or at 7 AM when the all-nighter study session is becoming truly surreal, it seems advisable to let go… to try another way …

What is this letting-go?    Does it betray the purpose of all the preceding … or is it just another, deeper current, another riverbed?  Both pieces wonder about this.   They undo what they have done.  They know the elation of action, and the still trance of non-action; they depict the enormous plunge from one to the other, the wall of experience where they meet.

Speaking of which, maybe I need a nap.

Yesterday, I made a tremendous musicological discovery. I was going to save it, perhaps, for Musical Quarterly, or People Magazine, but I simply cannot wait; it’s bursting out of me, ejaculating (if you will) prematurely.

It is my contention that any pianist, at some point in the process of preparing the Hammerklavier Sonata, will begin to resent the very fact that this idea …

… was ever written on paper. Perhaps it will happen at ten in the morning, at midnight, at some dark hour of the soul, or some deliquescent midday doldrum; perhaps when Beethoven turns the theme backwards and makes you play it with a very strange countersubject; or perhaps when he plays it upside down and rightside up simultaneously: anyway it will happen. You will say to Beethoven, under your breath, muttering darkly, channeling Brando in On the Waterfront … “Why I oughtta…” and Beethoven will simply smile back, knowing full well he has an excellent chance of whupping your butt. (Is that how you spell whupping? Where’s an OED when you need one?)

This pianist petulance may be fleeting; let us hope so.

Anyway: a certain mania sets in. The permutative insanity, kind of a musical caffeine orgy, of Beethoven’s often absurd contrapuntal writing, combined with the trills reproducing like well-fed amoeba all over the registers of the piano, induces a certain fever, a certain “not-again-ness” and as the subject reverberates around your practice room you may feel haunted by some strange spirit, some fugal demon … you may be whimpering on the floor at certain point (not in pleasure) … it depends on the strength of your temperament. I looked to my iPhone for moral support, but it just sat there, pristine, magnificent, unconcerned, on the counter; it simply refused to ring and rescue me from my work ethic.

Yes and I was there, people, I was THERE, at that place, haunted, betrilled, feeling that the theme could-not-would-not come back yet again (like the villain in some horror movie that after seventeen fatal stab wounds and being drowned and set on fire and placed at the epicenter of a nuclear explosion still manages to come lunging back, handling his butcher’s blade) … when I came to this moment when Beethoven inverts the theme:

And at that moment (consider my precarious mental state, readers!), like mysterious messengers marching alongside the music, some words manifested themselves in my brain:

Come and knock on our door
We’ve been waiting for you
Where the kisses are hers and hers and his
Three’s company, too!

I sat back on my bench, stopping midphrase, aghast and atwitter; my brain fever was twisting and turning in the winds of intertextuality. I took a deep breath. I tried to begin again…

But the words came back again, stronger this time, going along with the music…

and I felt I was beginning to play the fugue subject in a sort of boppy, late 70s manner, and I had to stop again. Agh! I held my hands by my sides, let them drop. Fate intervened again, fatefully. A freak wind blew through the piano room and the score’s pages flipped, as if by magic, to the opening page of the fugue, where I read:

Fuga in tre voci, con alcune licenza
[Fugue in three voices, with some license]

Fugue in THREE voices ?!?!?!?!?!?!

I nearly fainted, the world spun … A company of three, with some “license” … but wasn’t “license,” or licentiousness, at least, the very subject, the essence of the discourse of the humorous TV program which was now visiting me out my wasted childhood hours? And then, it hit me like a further lightning bolt: the “true theme” only emerges when Beethoven does the subject in the INVERSION … and isn’t “inversion,” sexually speaking, the sidesplitting eternal joke of Jack Ritter’s presence in the apartment with the two buxom babes? How could even a great genius like Beethoven know what the Three’s Company theme and subject matter would be, one hundred and fifty years before it was even a twinkle in the eye of a television producer? It was as if—and this seemed hard to believe—Beethoven had written the entire Sonata just to bring the theme of Three’s Company into life …

What to do with such knowledge?  Awestruck. Bewildered. Confused. The hour: 11 PM. Further practicing of no avail. There seemed no option but to head to Dick’s for a deluxe cheeseburger. I stood, as so often, under the fluorescent lamps, staring at listless skatepunks, and contemplating my newest plumbing of musical depths … I sucked cynically on my chocolate shake … I know they don’t give Pulitzers for musicology, but it seemed possible. Anything was possible. I felt my iPhone in my pocket, caressed its rectangular smoothness warmly, thinking you and me, baby, we’ll go far, we can be a contender …