The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

[Posted on Craigslist]

Bemused but occasionally cranky pianist, 36, seeks similarly-minded other for longterm relationship “with benefits.” Does not enjoy discussing real estate or humidity. Allergic to nuts, the Tchaikovsky Trio, and unmarked retransition ritards. Serious candidates must be able to sit through the occasional slasher flick, mindless Hollywood thriller, or other piece of mass-produced drivel; must be subsequently able to endure endless pseudo-intellectual analysis of same. Gin drinkers preferred.

***

Hey, read your ad and was quite intrigued. Me: 5’7 and a half, sturdy, well-versed in music and related arts, something of a workaholic, but up for fun now and again, great lover of coffee, food, drink, and the pleasures of life… interested?

***

Well, you do sound interesting. But I’m finicky. What’s the catch?

***

Hmm, the catch: I suppose I should tell I have kids. And here’s something weird: I wear a wig.

***

Wow, a double whammy. Kids … are those the little noisy creatures one sees perched in the small vehicles that often block access to my beverages in Starbucks? [snark] I’m looking for someone of substance, for sure, and I’m really trying not to be superficial about appearances … but I have to confess the wig thing has me a bit “wigged” out. Can you send me a pic? Also, you never mentioned your age…

***

Sigh, I guess it’s time to come clean. Here’s my pic:

People say I’m “timeless” which I guess means they can’t really tell how old I am? … whatever. One good thing about being dead, the whole age thing kinda gets less pressing …

I realize this is a lot to take in; hope it doesn’t freak you out. I think I’m worth it, though. Am enclosing my d minor English Suite so you can get to know me a bit better.

***

Well, this is … interesting.

As a dead European composer, you understand you’re sort of an unusual relationship choice. I was really hoping to date someone more or less alive. Of course, I’ve *always* dated living people so this might just be the fresh start I need.

***

I’m so glad you decided to give it a shot. Why don’t I come by your place sometime in the afternoon tomorrow?

***

OMG that was some date. Did anyone ever tell you you give amazing retrograde inversion? And I’m still dreaming about your descending chromatic bassline.

***

Glad you had a good time. IMHO chromatic and diatonic are really the two great linear forces at work in music and I love to watch them bump and grind against each other. Anna Magdalena used to help me with that in between minuets, if you know what I mean.

***

[3 months later]
… my friends will tell you I’m something of a committmentphobe, but I think you’re someone really special, a “keeper.” There’s just more and more to you, the more I look, and I never get tired of thinking about you …

I have to tell you, though, I really think it’s time to LET GO of the whole Telemann thing. I mean, so he got the job you wanted, and you had to keep teaching Latin to those “little brats,” big deal! I mean I think it all really worked out for the best … think of all the joy you’ve brought so many people.

***

You know, thanks for listening … sometimes I feel like I can go to peaceful places in my music that are hard to attain in reality.

By the way I noticed you had some unusual looking scores on your piano. Not anything I would write for sure! What gives?

***

JS, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the possibility of an open relationship. I mean, the time I spend with you is SO AMAZING, but I sort of want a little space, I want to be free to see other composers …

***

Honestly I don’t know what to say …

… the other night, after the 5th Partita, you just had a beer and went straight to sleep! … after I slaved for weeks over a hot harpsichord writing it! Sometimes I can’t help thinking you just love me for my music. And how can you love that other stuff too?

… as they say in my native tongue, ich habe genug. Don’t be sad; we’ll always have the Allemande of the Fourth Partita.

***

[chat with anonymous third party]

J: Well I guess that didn’t work out ?.
X: Live and learn
J: I’m seeing this other composer now, Charles. I think he has some gender issues, though, kind of obsessed with masculinity, etc. etc.
X: Oh, you know what that means [wink]
J: Yah. Ok, gotta practice
X: ttyl

I know the classical blogosphere will be seriously mourning Rostropovich. However, I personally am finding some redemptive light at the end of the tunnel over at Prof. Heebie McJeebie’s Classical Pontifications. I nominate “Simpleton Pleasures” and “Jazz Improvisations” by Ariodney Hussington to be possibly the worst pieces of music ever written by anyone. But why, oh why, can I not stop listening to them???

A highlight (?) from Ms. Hussington’s interview:

McJeebie: Why is the piece called Jazz Improvisations if there’s no improvisation?

Hussington: There is improvisation, but it happens in the composer’s head, and, actually, it already happened. It was in the past.

A small, recurring cast of characters works the lobby of the Greystone Hotel, my home. Behind the bulletproof glass are Joey (exhausted, balding, night school), Julia (curly, vociferous, lipsticky), Andrei (cheekboned, curt, blonde), and a surly short Hispanic woman in her 20s, whose name I have never heard. Behind a cheap table in the corner is a security guard, reading a Bible and guarding a notebook. Like a peevish comet, the owner of the building rarely orbits in; her facility, perhaps, brings out the worst in her, and I have really only encountered her pissed as hell. Lately she is absent, and waves of positive energy that are brave enough to venture into the lobby are not as quickly quashed. The building was going condo; which meant great changes were afoot; giant prospectuses were stuffed into mailslots; a new era beckoned, promising hardship for many helpless residents; but somewhere along the line inertia, muse of time, must have intervened, and I imagine some businessman in some office relenting, shrugging, in the face of some final Greystonian straw. Score one for tenacious decay. The owner has been defeated by the owned.

The lobby is not beautiful. A spectacularly boring picture of the building in its heyday (where the Hotel surely still exists, nostalgically) hung on the wall, pretending to be decor, but has been removed (the paint is lighter, yearning, where it used to be). A pot of plastic flowers stands on an Ionic dais and is moved to various seeming midpoints of invisible trajectories on the checkered floor. A sign reads “VISITORS MUST SIG IN;” I swear that missing “N” haunts me day and night. At 4 AM, after the garbage truck departs noisily, and while its honking and heaving fades into lonely quiet echoes, I dream abysses between “M” and “O.”

Most residents, like me, try to move through the lobby as quickly as possible, but some linger, and seem to enjoy it. There is one man who wears a giant gold medal around his neck, strung on a red-white-and-blue ribbon. He has liminal predilections, for instance: he leans near the door, or brings a chair into the windblown, cramped space between inner and outer doors, or stands just outside the door on the garbage-strewn sidewalk, looking longingly back inside. He adores rain-slickers, and is often impervious to water, even on the clearest days. He once ran the marathon. I know this because there is an explanatory card, also, hanging around his neck, in a plastic holder, which I have skimmed. (We could all use such cards?) He and I had absolutely no communication for six or seven years, though I saw him constantly; now, we are beginning to exchange smiles, and I have no idea what that means, or why it has happened. Some small random tenderness. It makes me feel cheaply good about myself to smile at him, and then I walk on to my destination, usually some heartless corporate chain.

To describe another regular: some eight years ago, I was in the elevator when a blonde woman in her fifties entered. Immediately the compartment reeked of scotch. It was around 11 AM. This was, I believe, the first occasion I really noticed her. She looked at me very intently, up and mostly down. “You’re an actor, right?” I applied New York Behavior Rule #1 and said nothing. “Yup. I knew it,” she continued, undeterred, “all the cute ones are actors.” It was a curious compliment, but we haven’t spoken since, and ever the jonesing approval-addict I catch myself, these days, wondering if she still thinks I’m cute. The other day, this same woman was standing at the bulletproof window, talking very loudly to Joey, with a different message. “You look terrible,” she kind of bellowed, pausing for a moment; then she said “I’m sorry” and began walking away towards the door. Joey said something through the muting window; it might have been a question; she turned back and yelled tautologically, proudly, “Because you look terrible!” She pushed the doors open, exiting the Greystone with a triumphal flourish (difficult to do). Promptly, my elevator door shut and I began to ascend. Joey was left alone, with no door.

One of the truly memorable regulars (for me) was an elderly man who sat near the door, in a corner, on a threadbare armchair (now disappeared, in an attempt to drive the elderly characters from the lobby and make the building more “presentable”). He never seemed to move. But one day, mysteriously, he was just there in the doorway, blocking my exit, and before I could summon a swift youthful refusal, he asked if I would do him a favor. He wanted me to walk him to his barber’s appointment, on Amsterdam. He had three or four hairs on his head. I stared at them and at his spotted scalp while he clutched my hand tightly in his cold hand and stood there and—as other busy normal people passed by—I started to wonder when we would begin to walk. But in a minute I realized he was walking. It was curiously intimate. Most of it was stillness and preparation, clenched breaths, but every so often he gave himself over to a passionate iota of motion. It was a harrowing, mindblowing five minutes until we were out on the sidewalk and fully thirty minutes more until we reached Amsterdam (normally a 15 second effort). I had no idea it was possible to walk that slow; Einsteinian dilemmas lurked; at that suspended speed, how could you tell if you were going forwards or backwards? I remember succumbing to fits of rage and eerie oases of calm and it was like being drawn into a black hole, maybe, while trying to hide the fact that your body is imploding.

At the corner of Amsterdam, he pitied me. His appointment (the existence of which I began to disbelieve) was allegedly on 88th and Amsterdam, and while I gazed into the receding line of buildings and onrushing stream of cabs with horror, imagining the whole day spent, he said the magic words: he would be fine, he would make it from there. I sighed in relief, wished him well, gave him hearty farewells. But, he added: he just needed to know which way was downtown. At that point, for me, the mathematics of the situation collapsed. I could bear the absurdity no longer. Sensing his helplessness, I fled from him, a coward; but he persevered, bravely, in the sunshine. I stopped near Broadway and watched him walk a few inches. To tell the truth, he’s not been seen in the Greystone in some years.

Ostensibly the subject of House, the wonderful television show on Fox, is the eponymous doctor’s attempts, week after week, to solve mysterious, tentacled illnesses. (Amazingly it always seems to take about an hour of television time, including commercials, to solve any illness.) Or else the real theme of the show is the character of House himself: complex, contradictory, savagely logical, flawed, somewhere between Richard III and Sherlock Holmes.

I prefer to dismiss both synopses. I propose that House is really “about” irony and sarcasm; it asks the question … what is the acceptable level of emotion in the modern world?

Let us take another famous medical show, E.R. I have come to dread the 10 AM arrival of this program on TNT, rudely awakening me from the supernatural, ironic meta-worlds of Angel and Charmed into an ever-so-gritty-and-overworked Chicago emergency room. Oh, the humanity! Mark Green juggling child and ex-wife, Noah Wyle struggling with drug addiction and the burden of aimless wealth, George Clooney rebelling and refusing to commit, and of course the evil heartless Romano, colder than any demon in Angel’s dark, manipulated L.A. nightscape. I have come to hate all these characters and, particularly, the writers who subject us to their maudlin trials and tribulations. Everything is so, so emotional, and yet not redeemed by soap-opera camp; interventions abound; doctors weep quietly in locker rooms, and are asked if they are “ok”; schoolbuses of children are wheeled in, seemingly, only to be wounded and pathetic, and just as swiftly wheeled out. E.R. is Dr. Phil, in dramatic form; it wants us all to tell all, to confess, and be emotionally healed in the great common waiting room. Sarcasm is not welcome. (And again, after an hour, get the hell off the set, please.)

Enter Dr. House.

House strums certain recurring themes. First: is House really a softy, hiding under a sarcastic veneer? Such seems to be the constant, desperate hypothesis of his friends and colleagues, and the scriptwriters perpetually tantalize us with the possibility of a sentimental breakdown. At the end of the last season, when House finally went into rehab, I felt with dread the sense that the show would become classically heartwarming, that he would finally “learn something.” But magnificently—of course!—it all turned out to be a sham, showing House to be more manipulative, deceitful, and selfish than one could have ever imagined. I cheered. Why do these evils make me love him? His evil is entertaining, satisfying; his reformation would be boring, saddening, life-destroying. But he is not a villain.

As one watches, then, one gets mired in meta-concerns: we think less about the fate of patient X or disease Y than the fate of the show itself; will it disintegrate into E.R.-esque empathy, or will the writers somehow prolong the moral strange ground, the absence of judgment? In other words, can the show survive its premise?

A second theme: House “needs to be healed.” The writers gave him a painful, lingering, physical wound (metaphor for the inner, emotional wound) which is almost a deal-breaker, almost dips the show in a disastrous pity-bath. The other characters in the show always seem to want to heal him up, to convert him into a lesson learned, a summable plot point; they are always thematizing, moralizing, empathizing. “House is behaving this way because he secretly loves me, or craves love …” “House loves his own mind more than other people, and needs to change …” “House is trying to destroy himself, since he has no joy in life …” And House stands alone, protecting the fort of cynicism, deflating each of these pat theories. The perpetual explainer of illnesses, he refuses to be “explained.”

A third theme of House: the patient-at-fault, blame-the-victim. House is always suspicious of the histories his patients provide; it is often some concealed fact of the patient’s life that makes the difference … The patients are somehow therefore complicit in their failure to be healed, and most of House’s most amazingly cruel, but funniest, moments have to do with targeting those-who-are-to-be-pitied, with refusing to respect the sacred cow of illness. House is ill, like his patients; he knows, moreover, that everyone is ill. The people around him who think they’ve got it all together, that they’re “normal,” usual-life-livers, who imagine that they represent a “standard” or acceptable life-method: they’re the real suckers. Plus (and here’s the kicker): they’re boring.

House is a show where two possible shows intersect: imagine the story narrated by one of House’s underlings or colleagues, an earnest tale of a flawed doctor at work, and heartbreaking patients; or imagine the story narrated by House himself, in which all are exposed for the posers they are … and you must decide which story you prefer. And then take this principle and apply it to the vast surrounding narratives of our society, to CNN coverage of tragedies, to movies, to presidential speeches, newspaper editorials … I personally fantasize about replacing Matt Lauer with Gregory House, for a week. Apply it, if you will, to music …

House confronts the vast emotional movie-music of our time. Am I supposed to feel bad if I don’t like Oprah or Dr. Phil, if I feel uncomfortable with this vast buffet of amateur psychotherapy, of human emotion and confession, bundled and marketed like a creamy, filling psychic Frappuccino? Am I repressed, elitist? Letterman speaks for me (yay!) when he mocks Oprah, when he says enough is enough, and yet a disturbing question haunts me. Why do I feel (self-satisfied jerk that I am) that it is better to play Beethoven or Ives for people, displaying and communicating publicly all sorts of emotions, and receive a check … how is that “better” than Oprah doing her emotional thing and becoming fabulously wealthy? If anyone has a good answer to this question, let me know. I know Gregory House would simply snort disdainfully, reminding me how pathetic I am to worry about the question in the first place.