The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

On my first morning back in NYC, I had a long-awaited dentist appointment.  At 8, I walked into the bare bleak waiting room; I sat for a moment looking at the scuffed floor, at sad magazines; a serious 30-ish woman whisked me into a chair, bibbed me, X-rayed me, scraped me, made me lay back and say aahhhh, caused me to gag several times, and at 8:30 AM told me I was fine and to come back in 6 months.  I had not been in a dentist’s chair in a wrongly long time, and as I walked by Barney Greengrass on my way home a sturgeon, with dead eyes askew and empty in the window, seemed to warn me not to gloat.  How could I repay my teeth?  I passed my tongue over them; they were proudly arrayed in my mouth, smug and demanding compensation.

Apparently, as I have been reading over at Soho the Dog, a group of scientists (!) have told a bunch of people to try to be happy and then put Le Sacre du Printemps on the stereo.  Then they asked them how happy they felt while listening, and published the results in an academic paper.  (Perhaps this last part is the bit that pisses me off the most.)  I have to say my considered, scientific reaction to this is:  Are you KIDDING me????   For me, the money quote comes when the scientists (?) explain how they came to select Stravinsky’s masterwork.  They deduced it was a good, interesting choice because it was “hedonically ambiguous.”  Bitter inner laugh.  Yes, I suppose you could say that:  when the virgin gets sacrificed at the end of a savage, ever more violent, and yet fertility-oriented ritual, that is somewhat hedonically ambiguous.  Hello?   Clue phone’s ringing, is anyone answering?

Soho, aka Matthew Guerrieri, usually eminently reasonable, seems to suggest that this study means that we shouldn’t do pre-concert talks.  Respectfully, I must admit I am missing some of his deductive links.  In not one of my preconcert talks have I ever told my audience to be happy, or to have any particular emotion at all; merely, mainly, to notice things; to lubricate the attentive faculties.  I’m sure this annoys some audience members sometimes too.

I think the scientific (?) experiment means the obvious:  you should never ask people how happy they are.  It’s a very irritating question.  My happiness goes down considerably when people ask me, and takes a while to recover.  (I send my happiness off to a resort in the Bahamas.)  The question is often asked disingenuously, as in “of course you’re not happy because you’re work-obsessed and aren’t in touch with yourself, but I’m going to ask it already knowing the answer, because I want to help you figure that out, to take you down the enlightened path that I occupy.”  When you blurt through your forced grin, “yes, I’m happy,” people look at you with searing pity, like it’s so sad you can’t admit that you’re not.  Then you want to do violent things to them, which most people would agree is not a happy-go-lucky state of mind.

After my dental appointment, and several cups of coffee, a long day of practicing ensued.  Was I happy while I was practicing?  Well, I didn’t ask myself.  I remember lingering for a while on this moment:

Regular readers of Think Denk may remember that, in place of happiness, I propose the philosophy of the “hap”—a unit of experience.  This Mozart theme is crammed with beautiful haps (it is hap-dense).  I remember thinking a lot about which of these, which little nooks and crannies in the chromatic descent, are the most wonderful, which were the ones that could be enjoyed without slowing or destroying or distorting the whole, the ones that could somehow feel timeless while being swept up in the current of the piece’s time.  I also remember dwelling  on this thing:

…. yes the little beautiful bird of a melody which flies into the development unannounced and soars around, then vanishes, only to come back again at the end of the recapitulation … perhaps the generative, magical “hap” in that passage lies in the very first two notes.  There is the melody note, a G-sharp, which is prosaically part of E major; but then the underlying harmony shifts to the subdominant, making the G-sharp suddenly a wonderfully dissonant seventh, a sensual, possibility-laden thing.  And indeed that dissonance as a jumping off point becomes the occasion for any number of leaps and dialogues wandering from right to left hand, from treble to bass (a series of interlocking joys), all wrapping itself up perfectly into the sentence known in music as the phrase, the delimiting frame, the little package which makes it possible to absorb the beauties within and not to get utterly lost in them.

But then, at 7 PM, post-mortem-ish, delirious, sitting in the train, on my way to a friend’s birthday party, lost in my thoughts, I realized that while part of my brain was feverishly caressing Mozartean nuances, unable to let go, another considerable portion of my brain was replaying certain moments at around 8:12 AM; I was reminiscing automatically on the scrape of metal tools on the borders of my gums.  For a moment, as the subway whizzed, I was looking around a room from a prostrate position, a paying prisoner, trying desperately to keep my mouth open (while instincts screamed protect yourself! flee!); nonetheless I remembered this prostration with some sort of pleasure, some happy misery.  Lovable haps were crammed in this memory, even down to the chalky fluoride, the 70s wood grain of the fixtures, the concise bzz of the X-ray machine … I wasn’t at all sure I wasn’t remembering this moment with more love than Mozart had forcibly wrung from me all afternoon.  I passionately mused over my early dentistry and made a melody out of its suffering.

A man across the car from me was visibly absorbed in a book.  I couldn’t quite make out the title, though the cover seemed to be in an interesting design, and the man—how should I quantify this?—seemed so happy reading it.  I admired him.  He was vaguely smiling, and was not at all distracted when a group of three men entered the subway car and began to sing gospel, very loudly.  They exhorted us, all of us in the car, to be happy.  “Smile,” they said, “it won’t mess up your hair!”  I could feel myself fighting dark urges.  Other people on the train felt the same way.  The singers held out their cup to me as they passed and I looked at it scornfully, despite my better self, which looked on with rolled eyes, thinking grow up, Jeremy.  It’s not their fault they’re happy, I thought, but no smile leaked from the faucet of my face.

59th Street.  The happy reader was getting off!  As he exited, I managed to glimpse the cover of his volume:  it read, neatly printed, THE POCKET GUIDE TO UROLOGY.

Another passenger came and sat in his place.  I had but one more stop to go and my eyes briefly rested on this new arrival.   Hmm.   There was something familiar about her.  I couldn’t quite place it.  It was only when the train began to creak and groan, and make preparations to exhale me … only then I realized that despite absence of mask and glove and other gear, this was my dentist.   She was stoic.  I tried to look at her, get some eye contact, to send mental vibes saying “you made me happy with your fluoride procedures, somehow,” or “I was just thinking about you!” but she read none of my vibes and looked nowhere and everywhere, her eyes evasive and yet still, like the sturgeon in Barney Greengrass.   How many mouths had she reached into since mine, while I had sonically manipulated my 88 black-and-white teeth?

Her reappearance unnerved me.  I felt dazed by unmeasurable correspondences; I felt framed.  As I strode down 51st Street to my destination, I had only one sure conviction.  If a scientist comes up to you and asks you to measure your happiness, on a scale from 1 to 10 or A to Z, or whatever, I give you permission to use as many expletives as possible (to employ cuss-dense, hedonically ambiguous formulations, if you will).  This may do wonders for your personal happiness; it will be a hap to cherish.

While musing on acorns, below, I keep forgetting to link to the very kind article by Mark Stryker in the Detroit Free Press all about me and my so-called spontaneity and slightly embarrassing apartment. Haha. And to thank Alex Ross for linking to same. It amazes me, actually, how my apartment has become a protagonist in my own life, or perhaps a crucial antagonist? And just yesterday, fatefully, a friend left a voicemail about a possible beautiful apartment in Brooklyn with a lovely garden and modern accoutrements, etc. etc. The plot thickens.

Other things:  I find myself enjoying Nico Muhly’s blog/webpagethingy, which almost allows me to forgive him for the unbelievably awful weather I had to endure to go to his Zankel Hall concert.  And kudos to Soho the Dog, who does brilliant cartooning, but also came up with my sentimental favorite music LOL, “Invisible Waldstein.”  Something about the look on Artur’s face.

The sun cannot sleep, and neither can I. I am up (up!) at ungodly 5 am, wearing all brown for some reason, on the first post-solstice day. A friend from NYC emails: “how’s Michigan? can you see the stars?” Yes, there is one star I can see very clearly now, it’s only about 93 million miles away, and I was watching it come up over a line of trees from a paddle boat; also I was watching my waves disturb the water’s peace. I pedaled one small revolution-fraction; then watched the tiny effects of my tiny motion wash off in beautiful wavelets, barely changing the surface of the water: long wise shivers, like the ripple of an elephant’s skin. Then, when my troubles had dispersed, a genial breeze came and the surface in the early light became like a fantastic evanescent chessboard, like chess you’d play in the 15th dimension, ever changing squares, diamonds, vertices, an infinite complexity of motion. As the sun rose, the light became plainer and plainer and these effects vanished. (But they seemed quite real, for vanished effects.) I climbed the hill, brownly, and put on a pot of coffee (blackly); it was going to be one of “those” days.

First up: regrets. I should have written down how I was feeling the other day, because it was really—really—good and somewhat intangible. I had had a long day of practicing, mostly the fugue from the “Hammerklavier,” which by the way is not very easy, and every so often I would glance out mournfully at the overcast weather. A humid hot day of storms was lingering into a second day; but somehow, mid-afternoon, the storms broke, the weather released itself and a boundary was crossed. Wind blew, the trees sprung into life. I walked down to the lake edge and pulled off my shoes and sat at the end of the dock looking at the light and swallowing the new air. Retrograde inversions forgotten.

The wind was coming at me. The lake’s waves were coming at me, a line of them, perpetually replaced, bringing a wonderful water-smell. The sun filtered through the surface of the water, creating what seemed to me an array of golden hexagons over the weedy bottom. These hexagons made me very happy, and I watched them wash out, melt, and reform. (This is nature, thinks the New Yorker; what have I traded away? what Faustian bargain have I made?)

It struck me, this oncoming. I sat for an hour, only partly soaking in the sun; mainly, I was breathing. Nature sweeping herself clean, breathing out … I reflexively, instinctively breathed in. Yes, this is exactly it, I thought, what music feels like when it is going well. Either it is water coming in, or water going out. The waves floating away, consequences of your actions, or the waves resupplying you with yourself.

At the end of Leon Kirchner’s wonderful Sonata No. 2 for Piano (which I played just last night, from which I may still be recovering), the final two pages are unquestionably waves going out, receding away. They are tremendously beautiful pages, partly because they only reluctantly! relinquish the energies and confusions of the preceding material. Yes, beauty, but … There is a terrible sadness, in some ways, to this outgoing; imagine, if you wish, the whole preceding part of the piece as a paddling, the creation of waves: and then, at last, the paddler stops and looks at his waves disperse. They are faint echoes of his desires. He watches. However!, in the final eight measures, the amazing Kirchnerian touch; he won’t quite give up (never gives up); a last inspiration seizes him, a last extended dominant 11th chord, in tremendous dotted rhythms, gestures spread across the keyboard, summoning registers, space … after this last wave there is nothing but silence.

But if in music these outgoing waves can lead to tremendous sadness, nostalgia, cessation, what do the incoming waves do? For some reason, just free associating on this idea, the first things that come to mind are certain retransitions in Mozart, certain magical dovetails, where the loss of one idea, the loss of the dominant tension, its relinquishing to the tonic, death of the development, nonetheless becomes a sort of refueling, a wave which turns around on itself and smiles. Not, for example, like the recap of the “Waldstein” Sonata (thrilling, glorious, virtuosic, triumphant), in which the return becomes a kind of fetish or climax, the crash of a wave upon the shore of the tonic; but the sorts of returns where we find ourselves traveling a new path without really even knowing it. And then the next things that come to mind are the wonderful first entrances of soloists in Bach concertos: those first, propagating inventions in which the instrument arrayed against the orchestra must define its own voice against the common ground of the ritornello … Always, I have thought, these opening moments in Bach concertos have a kind of iconic creativity to them, a self-rejuvenating energy, a joyful skid from thought to thought.

I’m sure readers of Think Denk must have their own ideas of outgoing and incoming wave moments in music.

As I said, I was very happy out there on the dock, breathing in. And later that night, I seriously had the option to write down some of my thoughts about it while it was still fresh … but instead (as so often), I turned on the TV. A newbie to satellite option orgies, I thumbed awestruck through seemingly thousands of channels before settling, amazingly, on “Ice Age: The Meltdown.” It seemed a saner choice than either “Ice Road Truckers” or “Special Victims Unit.” What drew me to “Ice Age” was not the humdrum main plot, but the subplot of a squirrel seeking an acorn. Simplicity itself. Oh, what travails the squirrel goes through to save its acorn, always again to be snatched away! I lay on the carpet and loved it, loved hIs love, his manic unceasing dedication (hmmm, relevance to musician’s life?). He defends his acorn, kung-fu style, from piranhas; he engages in animal trash talk with a hawkling; and finally, he seems to have the acorn in grasp, when a vast flood (“the meltdown”) overtakes him, endangering him and all the other characters. He climbs, bravely, an ice shelf, using the acorn as crampon (obsession as salvation), and is atop the ice shelf when the tiny acorn (illogically, wonderfully, Rabelaisian), wedged in the ice, forces open an enormous crack, splits the entire shelf in two… releasing pent-up flood waters, and saving the entire cast of boring main characters.

So the acorn subplot turns out to be quite pivotal, but in a totally nonsensical way, nice! The wonderful transcendence of the trivial. While the acorn’s symbolic resonance grows, the squirrel’s fate is unknown. As the main plot clunked endward, I found myself wondering, ever more feverishly, what had happened to My Hero the squirrel? The movie makes us endure google-eyed, gag-inducing happily ever afters, ugh, but finally … We see the squirrel, staring up at golden acorn-crested gates, which open; he steps through them, finds acorns strewn liberally across pillowy clouds … Whoever wrote the music for this scene, I declare him or her a genius, one of the greatest living musical geniuses, and I refuse to back down from this; I want to commission an Acorn Heaven Sonata from whoever it is, immediately. But, having snatched up five or so of the innumerable acorns, he drops them all (fatal mistake?) upon seeing a giant golden Acorn in the distance, gleaming, glowing, colossal; the music becomes even more orgiastic; he prances across cloud-banks; it is a magnificent Love-Death of the Acorn …

But of course, at the last moment, when he is about to hold Acorn Utopia, one of the main characters “saves” him, removes him from whatever reality-peril he was in; for a stunned, sad, frozen moment, awakened from his greatest joy, he looks around the real world, cannot believe the disconnect, this last, most devastating tease. He turns upon his rescuer, and for the foreseeable, illimitable future, as far as we can see towards the horizon of time, he is hounding reality.

I clicked the remote; the TV went dark; I crawled into bed, soothed; I slept deeply and remember no dreams.

One of the most curious, wonderful things about the “Concord” Sonata is the obsessive assault it mounts on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Da-da-da-dum has become such an emblem, an audible logo, of classical music; the four notes express our whole tuxedoed, staid obsolescence, our desire to perpetuate ourselves (so they function, for instance, in a recent XM radio ad). Something about their sternness, their immediate minor-key attitude, the inescapable upbeat leading to downbeat, the timbre of the sustaining strings, full throttle … all of this captures perfectly the terminally uncool, that which in classical music takes itself too seriously, refuses to relax. (Don’t even get me started on Wagner.) Hierarchies, even patriarchies.

Was it possible for Ives to hear this work more freshly than we do now? Was it not yet such a victim of fame? Was it like hipster fashion before Urban Outfitters?

I don’t believe so; I think Ives picked it precisely for its cliché value (like he picked so many materials), and his reasons were complex. He is interested, apparently, in only the first four notes, in the germ; by the time Beethoven sequences it down for the second four notes, Ives is already bored by context, rhetoric, tonality’s rationalistic conventions. Bored, perhaps, by what Kundera would call the “spinning spiders” of filling in the space, of making sure the musical plot is continuous, not riddled with holes. (Ives loves meaning’s spread and leaps over gaps.)

One could argue Ives chose this motive partly to rescue it: from its context, and from stifling respect. Did he foresee what would happen to it? In one of the most thrilling passages from “Emerson,” Ives reharmonizes the famous motive; he takes Beethoven, and dirties him up, with a glorious bluesy intensity:

However wild, Ives’ rewriting is partly gestural analysis. Beethoven’s motive “wants” to fall by a third; that is what it does—fateful unstoppable descent—but the rest of the movement seems to try to fight this categorical imperative through counter-ascent, some sort of recoil or opposed force (sequence, agitation, struggle). So, Ives plays with this notion: he allows the motive, in the first rewriting, to go down yet another third:

… which is like allowing the force to move past its target. And then, on Ives’ second “variation,” the motive reverses itself with a start, moving suddenly, surprisingly, up a third …

I love that leaping moment. One feels Beethoven’s idea—its third-ness—caged, growling, searching for a way out. In other words, the forces within it, its musical genes, are adaptable, fierce, looking for outlets in all sorts of directions; Ives paints a vector of raw musical force, freed from constraints, headed for the boundaries of the keyboard-world.

After you listen to Ives’ clustered version, try going back to the original! In these clustered chords, all the decorum of Classicism is stripped away, all the picayune perfection of selected notes. Ives manages somehow to make Beethoven sound harmonically unadventurous (not easy to do, illusory); but the raw energy of Beethoven’s notes is made more vivid. Though what Ives is doing is partly a distortion, a destruction, a mockery, at the same time it is something of an amplification, a homage: an act of devotion. You say to yourself: yes, that expresses something that Beethoven was after; Ives has expressed some “truth” about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, by taking him, so to speak, to the cleaners. (He did not, however, sue Beethoven for 65 million bucks.) Don’t we lowly performers, when we try to play those elemental Beethoven motives, try to compress an immense amount of meaning into them, to express something besides, behind, over and above the plain girder-like notes? Try to sweep their connotations in under them? Ives knows our pain. And he explodes this wanted, connoted meaning into fantastic, variegated improvisation; having ripped the idea out of its context, he places it in all unlikeliest contexts, gives it all the most inappropriate meanings. Beethoven’s motto becomes anything at all. Though it first appears, in the opening cadenza, in rather typical, tautological (Beethovenian, heavy) bass interruptions, it eventually morphs into a million beings, a million Beethovens: light elfin interjections, blurry Debussyean echo-ramifications, gospel-like exhortations, and most paradoxically of all, at the end of “Emerson,” when it comes the last time, the idea (this idea! this paragon of the declarative motive!) becomes a murky, pianissimo, tonality-disturbing force in the bass, the final third descent adding one layer more of tonal ambiguity to the coda’s ever-descending spiral of untangling threads. A final whispered hmm. Though Beethoven’s opening notes appear to say “I’m here,” appear to state and affirm, Ives knows that for all their bluster they are also a question, that they hide some deeper unanswerable insecurity, the movement’s lifeblood.

When I began this post, I wrote “assault” but perhaps that was slightly overstating the case. Ives is not “attacking” Beethoven. Did Ives foresee our vast information age, with memes, ledes, semes and YouTube? Once Beethoven’s idea is allowed to float free, it adapts itself, becoming viral (just as it has in real life … though an impoverished, commercial virus which always represents the same tired thing). At the very least, Ives is against Beethoven’s motive as a symbol of the past: no, he writes, these notes are not Fate knocking at the door; they represent humanity knocking at the door of the future, or of the Divine … of that which might be, not that which is preordained, or circumscribed. (Classical music, he suggests, must never be circumscribed.) Ives’ “attack” on Beethoven is a symbol of a great affection, in the same way that your significant other is allowed to tease you about certain things that the wider world cannot.

It seems a silly simplification to say that Ives is advising Beethoven not to take himself so seriously (though that is part of it). Nor is he trying to redeem or deny the cliché. The motive stands—hackneyed, well-worn—and yet Ives tries to sail away to heaven on it. Lurking, hiding in this paradox somewhere is some of the essence of Ives’ language, his greatness, his unique contribution. It is this contradiction, this problematic question of tone, the conflation of the ridiculous and sublime, that makes it and will make it difficult (on top of the dissonance, of course) for many musicians and listeners to “get” or love Ives, especially as the question of tone somehow calls into the question the whole nature of the “classical piece.” Am I to take it seriously, in my plush red seat in Carnegie Hall? (If not, why did I buy my ticket?)

Luckily, there is a perfect symbol of this whole aesthetic problem lurking here at the Great Lakes Chamber Festival. We have a stage manager or coordinator or whatever, let’s call him X, who is utterly and wonderfully unfazed and umimpressed by any of us. He is roughly 17-19, I would guess… The other day, without any hesitation at all, while I was practicing, he nudged me off the piano bench, saying “want to see something sweet?” Displaced, I affirmed my desire to see something sweet. He explained to me that there is this song Claire de Lune by Debussy which is way hard in the key it was written in. Looking at me plain in the face, guileless, delighted, he showed me how he transposed it down a half-step to make it easier. “I don’t know how you would play it the other way,” he said. He demonstrated the simplified first three notes.

But X’s greatest moment so far in the festival, in my humble opinion, was at the intermission of a concert, when Paul Katz was telling him to make sure the lamp on stage was securely placed. This was a serious issue. As X listened, Paul began to tell the whole story: that the night before, he was in the middle of the Mendelssohn Trio when the lamp began to fall and somehow he had to hold up the music stand with one hand and keep playing and fix the lamp at the same time (I’m paraphrasing, I forget the exact details) … all to prevent the lamp falling on his priceless instrument, and to prevent the piece grinding to a halt. Paul stopped, waited for X’s apologetic response.

“Dude,” X said, “that’s f*&#ing hilarious.”

The look on Paul Katz’s face (cellist of the Cleveland Quartet, eminent and beloved musician, coach and inspiration to so many young musicians) … priceless. He said nothing at all, there were golden drops of befuddled silence. I left the area before anything could sully the moment.

Is this a good metaphor for Ives? I’m not sure. But I think it’s a funny story. Da da da dum.