The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

It’s dangerous to roam the Classical Internet. Surfing and clicking from the discomfort of my ancient Hoosier sofa, it seems that every time I turn around, I run across yet another article entitled: Who (or What) Killed Classical Music? Or, more optimistically present tense: What is Killing Classical Music?

Seriously: I can’t take it anymore. I really don’t know how to say something like this, but I need closure.

I killed Classical Music. That’s right; just me. No accomplices. Hahahaha! And here’s how …

[sitcom-style dream sequence transition, distant saxophone]

Rain caught and held the reflection of red neon; the innocent night street looked washed in blood. Halfway through my third double bourbon I realized I had forgotten something a third-and-an-eighth-of-the-way through my second. I stared at the spattered greasy window, aching for a view; with flabby, twitchy fingers I played a forgotten melody on the chipped edge of my highball glass, and dug in my memory for the last comforting remnant of loss.

“History,” I growled, and knocked my glass over, spilling ice, liquor, dispersing the smoke and mirrors of self-destruction. I was not trucking in abstractions; History was the name of the bartender.

He came by ineluctably. “Spilled your drink again, did you? … You spilled your drink.”

History tended to repeat himself. It was something you got used to. “Another bourbon,” I said, grimacing.

“Those who don’t learn from their mistakes,” he murmured. But he filled my glass with fresh ice and let another healthy finger of poison drizzle over it, and I listened to the ice crackle and the rain whip against the window, and just at that moment four miserable pitches yawned out of the sullied night:

Those four fateful notes were what I had forgotten, the four voices of my inner Gesualdo madrigal, the horsemen of my Apocalypse, through-composed and yet monotonous, not quite repeating and never explaining the eternal, haunting, profound-yet-superficial madrigalisms of my subtexted so-called life … The four notes, I yearned to know what to call them, if I ran across them in a deserted alley. Were they the dominant of a dominant? A predominant? Some sort of modified two chord? And for God’s sake which of the notes was a dissonance and which a consonance and if we couldn’t answer that, if there was no kind of moral-contrapuntal-tonal framework, how was I, or any of us, going to go on?

The door creaked open. A body settled into the sagging stool next to me. “Oh hi, Jazz,” I said. He just grooved, passing time. I couldn’t help imposing my problems on him, disturbing his detachment.

“You see it’s a F a B a D# and a G#, what the hell is it?”

Jazz chuckled. “Call it what you want, man. That’s some multivalent whatever. Just let it go where it wants to go, baby.”

Oh I love Jazz but when he gets all tolerant on me I just want to smack him. Maybe, I thought, he’s just playing into my own clichéd preconceptions? Speaking of which, the door creaked again and in came World Music, with an entourage: fawning ethnomusicologists, dancing around her gorgeous copious bejangled body in myriad tempi and costumes; they stared at her every incensed inch, concupiscent. Oh and who else should the cat drag in but Classical Music, dressed soberly, oozing stifling refinement, following at a greater distance, but giving World Music a watchful eye.

You see, Classical Music was my childhood sweetheart. Even in the sixth grade, when I was King of the Nerds, we would dine on cafeteria pizza and tater tots and talk of Opus Numbers. We would go to the Multiplex and sniff at John Williams and hold hands across dimly lit tables at 2 am at the Village Inn and stay up all night inventing Developments and Recapping with green chile and eggs in the morning. Classical Music was more than love. She was a sea in which my life was drowned. But: not even a glance. Classical brushed right by. I got up to say hello, but… Jazz grabbed my shoulder. “Don’t do it man.” His voice was a gravelly flatted seventh. “It’s gone, just let it go. I hear Classical’s got somethin’ goin’ with World Music, and it’s pretty intense.”

It was true. Even now I heard faint klezmer sounds; a clarinet blew in from nowhere, and the ethnomusicologists were braying abundant, dirty augmented seconds; and to my horror Classical Music looked on admiringly, swaying, daring to dance, to be caught up in the spell… Then without warning World Music began to rumba, and Classical gyrated along, smitten, living vicariously, stripping off sober clothes and …

No, no, I thought; I couldn’t watch this. Classical Music is not supposed to have fun without me! Not this kind of fun! A rage took shape; I was dizzy with jealousy; I was a naked, dripping, unlabelled Tristan Chord in the empty, burning staff paper of the World. Jazz tried to hold me back, but I realized I had the perfect weapon. I ripped my 3-volume set of Schenker’s Der Freie Satz from my pseudo-hipster (no longer a nerd here! sort of!) messenger bag, and threw it with utmost force, and I caught Classical by surprise, right at a moment of joy … it was an accident of course, some thorny middleground analysis caught her in the throat and she was allergic … she fell over; the dance ended; jingles and jangles subsided into the rainy night.

Silence.

World Music leaned over. “She’s dead.” I noticed a tear on Jazz’s cheek. My throwing arm throbbed. It began to sink in. All those young people’s outreach concerts were for naught. And then History, as always, said the obvious.

“Nothing to do but move on.”

[sitcom return-from-dream-sequence effect]

So there you go. Now that I’ve confessed, can I go on Oprah and be absolved?

More importantly: if l take the rap, if I do the time, can we PLEASE not have any more articles about the death of Classical Music?

Do you butter your bagel as though it were a clandestine act? From the moment I set foot in the breakfast room of my hotel, my ears leave the normal world and I hear only the strange, squirming hush of repression. Typically, I wind up next to a couple, about to embark on a touristy fun day in beautiful San Francisco (a city I have a perpetual crush on). This single traveling pianist could imagine a lovely evening away from the kids in a hotel room, sharing a bed cozily, etc. & etc., and I guess one would HOPE that the situation would be a joyous one: a satisfied afterglow mixing with the anticipatory joy of a day spent together, not a care in the world: wandering about the hipster-strewn streets, eating chowder out of bread bowls, ignoring the homeless … but perhaps my romantic notions are bound to crash against the wall of reality. One young couple sat in egg-cracking silence, broken only by:

This tea is nasty.

Crack, sip, slurp, swallow. And five minutes later:

Man: Hussein got sentenced today.
Woman: (Bored) Mmhmmm.

Then, simply more silence. Whatever thoughts may have followed upon this serious observation, were left hanging.

Yet another young couple was a study in contrasts; the boy seemed to be falling apart at the seams, clothes and limbs drooping on the floor, his hair a restless paragon of bedhead, the table before him a maze of plates and remnants, while his blond girlfriend sat bolt upright, as though in the court at Versailles, or at Alexander lessons, letting not a crumb fall from her muffin-eating mouth. She wiped her mouth gracefully ten times for every bite and I began to feel deeply unclean, like my body was a dust bunny that the Cosmic Swiffer had left behind. Then I have overheard several couples critiquing the hotel from within its very bowels (daring insurgency!), and on one occasion I leaned over and attempted to convey the poetry of the Huntington Hotel (the hotel on the hill!) to them; with my eyes I tried to express the blue of the bay as seen from my third floor window and with my hands the expanse of the luxurious bathrooms and the crisp sensual whiteness of the sheets on which … Ahhh, but it was too much.

Woman: If you ate some protein with your breakfast, you wouldn’t be hungry again in an hour.
Man: Mmhmmm.
Woman: Why don’t you have an egg?
Man: I HATE hardboiled eggs.

This couple was easily in their sixties. Was this the first time they had managed to cover the topic of his hard-boiled egg problem, or (as I suspected) was it the thousandth or millionth time? Reasons for my singleness suddenly became luminously clear, like the sky over the airport at dawn, when you realize–as always!–you are leaving a town just as the weather turns perfect.

In each corner of the breakfast room, insanity: a teen spreading cream cheese obsessively on a bagel for fifteen minutes, punishing it with dairy as if the bagel were a bully who had tormented him in the fourth grade; a man in the corner turning over each page of the paper, sniffing dismissively at each turn, as if some new layer of absurdity was discovered (the sound of the pages turning and folding like the flapping of vultures’ wings, scavengers of newsprint)… And finally the repression of all these little conversations, the accumulated deflection and squelch of behavior, gets to me… I begin to feel like a prisoner, all I want to do is run up to my room and throw open the window and scream out to humanity: Live! Live! Enjoy life, everyone! Buy some shoes or go for a walk! Don’t sit in dark rooms complaining about tea! Instead, like any good boy, I go and practice, in a windowless subterranean room. Provisional escape for me.

The second movement of Mozart 488. Mozart invokes “what has already been written,” the siciliano, a style? genre? dance?, a halting haunting rhythm …

And by rights a siciliano, like any dance, should not really begin by falling apart. But Mozart, after a simple opening measure, breaks the texture, syncopates-interpolates-anticipates, all the while subjecting the melody to a series of seventh leaps:

The melody and rhythm both are subject to sudden fragmentation and confrontation, before the movement or premise can really get started. A siciliano with “issues.” I am always struck playing it (as I did the last three nights in San Francisco) by the immediacy and the complexity of this breakdown. But later, at my second entrance, I am amazed–how do I put this?–in the opposite way: I get stuck on two harmonies and in a certain melodic compass, I circle around chromatically in that C#-A, unable to escape the sixth, the rising sixth (attempt) followed in each case by the inevitable fall back (failure) …

This “stuckness” is horrible, it makes me feel even more lost than the opening (which is more daring), or: lost in a different sense. If the opening is a kind of broken dance, this second entrance is like a broken record, symbolizing a more fundamental breakdown/crisis: a deliberate moment of being at a loss what to say, a kind of sudden poverty of invention, something really truly incredible: the composer who always has something to say, deliberately choosing to find only the barest words; the pianist/protagonist can only see the pathos before him, the confining circle of his thought, and nothing else (like we humans so often) … spiraling redundancy, with no way out.

When, the third cycle around, the strings enter and suddenly this hovering around F# minor ends … the string timbre (which releases the piano from its prison) at that moment is (I think we can all agree) one of the most beautiful things ever, like an aura around possibility, a pure promise. It promises A major, in annoying music theory terms; but, A major is a metaphor. In the subsequent transitional passage (annoying music theory term #2) the promise of major and the presence of minor interlace constantly and the too-simple promise of the string entrance is understood to be more complex, more than you “bargained for” … I realize this is all a very emotional reading of this movement, but can there be any other? Can the purists out there forgive me?

What Mozart manages to do, I think, is keep the A major feeling “provisional,” almost throughout the whole middle section … Yes, everything is somewhat lifted, the halting tread of the siciliano has disappeared, the mood is less oppressive, even happy?, but as I am playing and listening, I don’t yet feel totally confident … I feel I am exploring it (A major and whatever A major might “mean”) rather than living in it. Only towards the end of the section, the piano seems to begin to exult in the key, in its majorness; we have a long, spun-out, establishing cadence (Mozart’s amazing gift for the coincidence of emotional/harmonic function), leaping up to a high E (not at all coincidentally the highest note in the piano of the movement):

This cadence is simultaneously the harmonic certainty we have waiting for, and a kind of emotional release, an escape, a real difference! And it is, of course, PRECISELY at that moment, when the pianist’s happiness is at its height, when the spell of mournful F# minor seems to have truly been broken, precisely at the hinge in the structure when A major is established for sure, that Mozart closes the door, the door he himself opened: the winds in two simple, terrible bars take A major and destroy it, twist it exactly back to the beginning. That is what is devastating: how little work it really is. Then, what else? I have no choice but to play the opening again; whatever I have glimpsed of the other is ephemeral, impossible, gone.

Escape is a theme of this movement, perhaps its most important theme … On the Neapolitan 6th chord, one of those fated, fatal chords which MUST lead to the cadence, the pianist, before allowing the cadence, tries to leap “out of the register,” tries a kind of virtual escape, thinking perhaps by postponing the cadence to postpone the inevitable:

… and so too again at the end, though the writing is on the wall and the movement is drawing to an end and nothing can really happen to alter the fate of things, the piano keeps reaching up the octave, C-sharp to C-sharp, as if it hopes to find something up there …

Does the soloist want to escape from its own instrument, from its own compass, to get out of the world it has created? But the desire for escape is written into that world, intrinsically; it is part of the bars of the cage.

My umbrella needs no Viagra. It jumps at every chance. It attempts to come open under tables, in drawers, as I am passing through doors; it is coiled kinetic energy; it is a teenage umbrella in heat and I have considered buying it Judy Blume books just to calm it down. I am nervous it will embarrass me at any moment. If it is possible to screw up the purchase of an umbrella, in every imaginable way, I have done so. Attention to detail, even in failure, is my strong point. Fed up with the evil person who stole my last magnificent green domed colossus from the locker room at New York Sports Club in the middle of a tremendous downpour (bad, bad karma, whoever you are!), and no longer willing to humor its substitute, a tattered, paisley, hopeful but pathetic remnant of cloth, its frame poking crazily askew like a squashed metal spider, I finally strutted into Duane Reade on a rainy morning with a mad, to-do-list-checking, umbrella acquisition urge. But every New Yorker knows, you should NEVER buy an umbrella in a store: you should only buy them on the street, from suspicious vendors, in the middle of a precipitation event. Only then do urgency, need, opportunity, and economy-of-scale meet in a flash of cash-only swiftness which makes one glad to be alive. Haste makes waste, and bad taste; my foolish desire and unusual simplicity-of-action bade me ignore the sign reading “The I Love New York Umbrella,” with its typical, disgusting, rebus-substitution, and I bought what appeared to be a black normal umbrella (is that so much to ask?), but which turned out horribly to be a TOURIST umbrella, broadcasting on two of its panes “I [heart] New York,” a sentiment which this magnificent city, in all its industrial bespattered grimy cynical splendor, can only regard with utter distaste. Yes, we [heart] you too, all you people from Iowa, or Minnesota, and let us express our love with refrigerator magnets.

Wow. Kinda lost it there. Apologies to all from Iowa/Minnesota. That burst of Manhattanism was really just an emotional reaction to the stress of walking down Broadway in the rain, suffering all the trials of a New York resident, living in what other people would consider a cupboard, but still having to appear to all the world like a tourist. And moreover that Duane Reade, the ultimate depressing New York City drugstore, would betray me thus! Et tu, Duane?

Speaking of losing it, and Minnesota. A week ago, I was slated to do a rather ridiculous thing, i.e. fly altogether too late to a concert, fly the morning of a concert out to Bemidji, MN.

Now, it is a journey out to Bemidji, and I had played it semi-safe by booking, through my manager, the earliest possible flight. My schmancy alarm clock thus buzzed most unwelcomely at 5:30 AM, in the palatial West Wing of my apartment, and there ensued that daze and misery of the sudden urgency and the socks that won’t go on properly and the assembly of clothes and the impatient phone call of the waiting limo driver and the scurrying of my various butlers, all of which I survived to find myself at JFK’s Terminal 4, at a respectable 6:35.

But my hubris of timeliness was ill-rewarded. There was no reservation under my name, or under any of my many aliases (all very sexy and mysterious), and I ended up with a quivering cell phone under my ear, learning from a very sweet lady that I would have to buy a fantastically expensive ticket then and there to get to my destination, and, there was nothing available on the 8 o-clock flight, and, so I’d have to leave at 11:30, and pretty much barely make it.

Please understand! I am already in a very vulnerable emotional state in those early-airport moments, something like a baby that emerges from the womb only to face a firing squad.

Nonetheless I am a proud frequent traveler, averse to exhibit the base emotionalism of all the “amateur travelers” who get all cranky when their rental car is not the color they requested. I was the soul of politeness to the Northwest Airlines staff, whose fault this situation was not, and did not let the depth of my distress leak to them … except for occasional aphorisms such as “life is a vale of tears.” But once I had my ticket, and I found myself adrift in the food court for several hours, with just not quite enough time to get home and back again, a whole new existential situation began to present itself. I began to think the saddest thought I have ever had: my bed, lying empty, without me in it.

Bed. And again bed. Rustle of sheets; sensual whisper of pillow. The glow of the pre-sleep moments, the soft sinking of consciousness, the surrender to rest and relief. I imagined myself in a fetal position, clutching Marcella Cucina, my favorite cookbook, as I sank into dreams of Risotto. Meanwhile, the fluorescent light of the food court bounced horrendously off the yellow formica of my table, and I squirmed painfully on my concrete bench, and sipped another in a series of recurring coffees which did not wake or calm me, but exacerbated my neither/nor-ness (not a word). Ranting cell phone calls were placed, and many weekend minutes were tossed casually into the vault of wasted time. My rage spun slowly around its object: whatever had happened to my reservation. And then I paced, Rilke’s panther in the cage, paced again and again past Sbarro and McDonalds and Sharper Image, the bars behind which no world appeared, and when I unwrapped my Egg McMuffin I dropped the egg upon the floor (indignity of the imprisoned man!). I sought relief in the world of ideas, i.e. the bookstore, and unbelievably! the first book that presented itself on the first shelf I came to was William Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating:

In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is “the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!” What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves, – seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy – mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; – have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

How comforting.

That evening, exhausted, I played two Bach Partitas and the Liszt Sonata. Moments after I finished, a woman about 50 years of age came by my dressing room and told me in a Midwestern rhythm that she felt it was a once in a lifetime experience and that many of her friends felt the same way and she thanked me for coming and making the long journey and her face was as plain as a blue sky. She let her eyes sit with me for a while and I could see that while many New Yorkers’ faces seem to be a miracle of added-on layers, of wrinkles of experience and cultural accretions, her face over the many harsh winters seemed instead to have been whittled down; things had been removed with time and what was left seemed very honest. She politely excused herself and, as I heard her steps going down the corridor, something snapped and finally I felt myself let go of the held breath of the morning’s frustration. I was still exhausted but now in a good way, in a real way which could be solved with sleep. I sat in front of the dressing room mirror and recognized myself. I was happy. I remembered a few phrases I liked in the concert and knew why I was doing what I was doing. And just then the Spirit of New York City came into the dressing room; it was pretty pissed off, yelling at me for getting “all CBS After-School-Special,” and threatened to beat me senseless with my [expletive] tourist umbrella if I didn’t pull myself together and get good and miserable for the long return flight home.

Favorite Quote of the Week

“We’ve done Peter and the Wolf so many times, we’re starting to root for the wolf.”

–unnamed person affiliated with the St. Louis Symphony

Most Ridiculous Quote of the Week

“There is absolutely nothing artificial about Glenn Gould’s playing.”

–Bruno Monsaingeon

Polite response: a certain stylization is actually somewhat characteristic of his work. Less polite response: I mean come on, what kind of Kool Aid are you drinking? Is there anything NOT artificial about his playing?

Favorite Meal of the Week

An egg-salad sandwich on toasted white bread with iceberg lettuce, a pickle, a glass of ice water, and a Wild Turkey on the rocks.

and finally,

Runner-Up Favorite Quote of the Week

A photographer friend is looking desperately for an apartment, and has been in email contact with all sorts of persons to that end. He received the following philosophical missive which seems to stray off the subject of subletting considerably:

“Thanks for giving the world nice photos and for being Gay. I’m not Gay, but I support full Gays rights, and I wish that I would wake up in the morning and find the 95 percent of the world population has turned Gay. The world would for sure be a better place. This might save the world because it’s too over populated and mother nature doesn’t have a chance.”