The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Dissonance is cool. Its cool-factor and yuck-factor are often, however, at war.

For every elderly concertgoer who wrinkles his face and complains “it’s so dissonant!” there’s a conservatory student in his late teens at a carrel in a listening library hearing Gesualdo or Kreuzspiel for the first time, beaming, eyes wild, thinking “dude, that’s f*&*()#$ awesome!” You know I’m right about this. So am I suggesting youth cherishes dissonance and age consonance? Or just bandying stereotypes? I know, for example, my parents are in their 70s (I don’t know if that’s considered young or old anymore) but they can be quite dissonant in the mornings, especially when my dad’s making green chile and eggs and mom gets in the way of his frenetic journeys to and from stove and sink. Anyway.

Syllogism: Dissonance is cool. The Fonz is cool. Ergo: dissonance is the Fonz. He (or you can imagine a female Fonz if you like) strides in in a leather jacket; he does what he wishes; he cares not for convention; he is not fazed by conflict; he makes waves, stands out, attracts attention; he is seductive; he attracts and exists in clusters; he resists resolution, i.e. conformity, but he values his relationships; he knows where he is going, but is in no hurry; he loves to be prolonged (aeyyyyy!); he has a distinctive identity; he lives over the garage… Imagine if you must all the dissonances living in a little apartment over a garage, partying harder and harder through the 19th-century, testing their limits, until finally Schoenberg comes along and emancipates them all (the Abraham Lincoln of dissonance); suddenly with a shudder and one last mournful Tristan chord they come to realize all the fun’s gone and that without limits the party’s just a lame bunch of drunken dissonances above a garage, getting old and with nothing to do.

The cool “Fonzian” dissonance of the day (should this be a regular feature of Think Denk?), which prompted these “profound” reflections, comes from good old J.S. Bach BWV 1052:

Just look at that puppy! Madrigalian, searing dissonance. The F-sharp there in the bottom of the cembalo, travels down to F-natural, on its way to E-natural, just slidin’ on down “innocently” (nobody here but us chickens!); meanwhile the A in one treble voice is heading up to C# and has to pass through B-natural, and there it is, the “Fonzian tritone” (I so TOTALLY invented that term, dude) that results, F-B, the ultra-hip diabolus in musica, a viscerally satisfying traffic accident of passing, colliding lines in which no one needs to get hurt but there is all the thrill of conflict and the onward rush of the incompatible. The B-natural is also wonderfully dissonant against the A pedal (the dominant pedal, that is) and the general D minor-ness of everything (music theorists, moan if you must, at this imprecise labeling, moan on and on, I’m not listening lalalala), and its searing ascent reverses a large extraordinary pattern of preceding descent, so it’s also semantically dissonant, so there! These dissonances are linked, spiritually connected, to the ongoing tension of the dominant; they symbolize and represent the music’s captured, caged, not-yet-allowed-to-hit-the-tonic fury. If you are at the Carnegie concert on Dec. 2, or at the other Orpheus appearances, and you recognize this moment, and you remember to think of the Fonz, please say “Aeyyy!” to yourself, quietly, in your mind. If you say it out loud, it might be distracting. Or say it to me backstage, I’ll be delighted.

In a mostly unrelated note, one of my exes delightful, dear old friends studied my concert schedule and casually invited herself to stay in my apartment while I was away playing. During her tenure, my dish soap apparently gave out (certainly not due to overusage on my part!) and she replaced it not with Palmolive but with one of those so-called Natural Soaps from the Organic Aisle. For months I have been using this Natural Soap, as if under the evil, irresistible spell of Whole Foods, and I had apparently forgotten the real nature of suds; for today when the natural stuff ran out and I had to use some new Green Apple Palmolive, it was like being reborn in the Scrubbing Garden of Eden. The suds fairly overflowed the sink with joy at returning after long exile to my besoiled domicile, and I too couldn’t help smiling as the smell of a green apple jolly rancher filled the kitchen, and I meditated that dissonance is a lot like a green apple jolly rancher, sour but tasty and eventually melting, etc. etc.

P.S. I have never been and probably will never be a fan of the show Happy Days. I obtained the proper spelling of the Fonz’s catch phrase from this indispensable website, in which the cultural milieu of my pubescent years is enumerated.

Yours truly settled warmly into plush, red row W at Carnegie Hall, in a single seat at the end. I felt suspiciously glanced-at in my unaccompanied state (no, really, I have a life!) by my more elderly neighbors, and little suspected I had forgotten how K. 503 went. I thought I knew my Mozart (idiotic mistake), I smugly clutched my glossy program in preemptive assurance, and was later so abashedly, completely happy to have forgotten. Perhaps a professional classical pianist should not “be able” to forget 503, or should not admit it, but I really don’t care.

As all those “in the know” know, the piece begins with a rather grand gesture, taking its time through two 8-bar phrases to say “here I am.” (Benignly, nobly: not at all like, say, Jack Nicholson making his axed entrance near the end of The Shining). This Mozartean hello matched my memories; things were proceeding C-majorly, according to plan. There was even time to observe the similarity of these opening sixteen bars to the archetypal first four of the Well-Tempered Clavier:

But, as those “in the know” also know, the second 8-bar phrase is met at its conclusion by a little accident, a 2-bar extension. That’s the evil jargon we boring musicians use to express the idea of some “extra” measures at the end of a phrase, some kind of musical so-called superfluity. Extension, by the way, like so many music theory words, always seems like much too heartless a descriptor–it calls to mind a reprieve on a paper, or some add-on to a house, rather than some deliberate, beautiful volatility or asymmetry introduced into an evolving text. (Any readers who wish to propose a substitute name for “extension,” please do!) By the dastardly genius of Mozart these two bars are pretending to be no big deal, just a little echo, i.e. the same as the last two bars of the phrase, but in the minor key. They are, however, a big deal.

It was at this moment, just after the little echoing 2-bar minor key pivot, that my memory failed. Precisely at bar 19, I had no idea what was happening or was going to happen. And what seemed to be occurring onstage, in my ears, or brain, or near the ceiling, or wherever (no specific site for the happening) in this new unknown space seemed to be unbelievable, at least for a moment: a moment of creation and possibility. I say this without exaggeration. I felt: if that could happen–

why, anything could happen.

At intermission I ran into friends E and J and I tried to put my 503 excitement into words, but the words coming out of my mouth were flat and unsuccessful: something “wouldn’t take,” something elusive, crucial, misplaced.

The basis of my happy disquiet was the feeling that there were two worlds, or two spaces. Mozart first poses the obvious, the overt and harmonically noble, the world of grand operatic entrances and declared high purpose (musically speaking, a world of slow unfolding I-II-V-I, circular perfect tonic-establishing entities). But then he immediately poses an undermining counter-text: a chromatic, agitated sequence in the minor key … Later on, in rampant caffeinated pursuit of the something that wouldn’t take, I indulged myself and tried to make a little table contrasting the two materials, grouping simple musical contrasts with associated metaphors:

I realized: this contrast, this shift to minor, would not nearly be so riveting if it did not seem to immediately and fundamentally strike at the very meaning of the opening material. (Bar 19 is not different in kind, but different in essence.) The first sixteen bars are all about certainty; they define, they enumerate, dispose, declare, set forth. They confine themselves; there is nothing to call a melody; there is simply harmonic assertion; there is no fancy, no diversion; the phrases are rhythmically identical, martial, symmetrical; they flirt with the conventional, even: the stodgy. Having gone to such lengths to dispel doubt at the outset, to create such a capital-O Opening, why suddenly intervene so early on, so disturbingly? I think this (rhetorical) question is near the crux of what was hitting me so hard about the piece.

I love those moments in music (but perhaps not so much in life) where you feel the ground has been pulled out beneath you, and inexplicable profusion ensues. Here in bar 19, certainties vanish, the musical ground vanishes–easy to define and enumerate (rhythm, major-key, texture, style)–and so also disappears a whole set of associated metaphors and ideas, which are harder to define. There is a sudden vacuum created by dispersed certainties, by this vanishing of meaning, and the thing Mozart creates, places in this vacuum, poses as a new possibility, is compelling, suspenseful, with unprecedented rhythmic energy, as if we were suddenly inserted in medias res into the really interesting part of some high, tragic drama, perhaps some moment of wonder or enigma in which various characters are at odds or wondering what is going on, a point just before some sort of climax or revelation. But (!) we are not at the climax of anything yet; we are barely settling in.

To rephrase, this moment is essentially double-edged: with one turning act Mozart creates and destroys; he creates a void only in order to fill it; he erases certainties in order to inscribe a new world. This world does not naturally coexist with the first, but it is “in communication” with it. It is not enough to say the turn of events is a surprise; it is more fundamental than that, a more revolutionary change of perspective. For some reason a ridiculous analogy comes to mind: those moments so common in movies where a character is standing on what he/she thinks is solid ground which turns out to be the hand of a monster, or a giant living tree (when the camera pans out), or the mouth of a whale. The walls are alive, the moment seems to say (the harmonic walls of the piece). There is something quickening in the heart of the piece which is antithetical, perhaps threatening, to it.

The magic, oft-invoked word in The Classical Style is “synthesis,” which the great 3 composers are said to have achieved. Mozart is praised for balance, proportion, grace, naturalness, ease, among so many other things. But I’m not sure this moment feels “organic” or “natural.” It is, rather, perfect but unnatural; it feels like a rhetorical interjection, the insertion of an Idea, the intervention of Thought. Its genius is not an easy flowering and development, but a sudden dizzying epiphany, a slippage of the mind.

Though the minor literally comes after the major, I’m not at all sure succession is the primary communicated meaning. To me it has a much more interesting relationship to time, something like coexistence, not narrative: the side-by-side vision of opposites. In other words, its message is not “this happens, then that happens” but rather something more disturbing: “it could just as well be this, or that.” And then when the major returns after our “bubble” of minor, does it seem to other people that it’s just a little too eager to assert itself, that its rising scales and triumphant sequences almost ring a bit hollow, too much of a muchness? Come to think of it, perhaps the opening was a bit too certain of itself as well. Why does it feel to some extent that that grand façade of the opening is peeled away to reveal this inner minor-key angst (raising questions of opening as façade, as curtain, questions of musical “truth”)?

I wouldn’t obsess over this moment if Mozart didn’t set me up for it. This first minor key intervention is so striking, that it forces us to ask: if it happened once, why not again? It isn’t really possible, in the Classical cosmos, to have something so extraordinary happen and then not to follow up on it (events follow, in the Classical world); and yet, and yet, this minor-key shift isn’t really typical of the Classical cosmos either; how can a non-Classical event be understood or developed in a Classical way? The listener is on high alert, even in the gilded, privileged confines of Carnegie Hall. And Mozart treats this uncertainty as a Theme, in the literary sense. The minor key keeps poking its head in, at regular and yet unpredictable intervals, enough to maintain a perpetual doubt-of-meaning, a constant waver in the fabric of the piece; it shimmers to show the dark minor side and shimmers back into major so that gradually you begin to perceive the work not as a solid entity but as a window, always promising or threatening another side. One can no longer say, comfortably, “this is an antithesis,” or smugly: this is major and this is minor. You begin to see yourself, as perceiver, as narrator, stuck between.

I caught myself doing something, I think … When bar 19 started and my familiarity dropped away, I caught my brain just for a second, like a swimmer in trouble, thrashing, trying to “make sense,” to map the pattern of the present onto the past. But I was unable to match the events either to my memories or to the first 16 bars of the piece: to anything at all. There it was: my mind was searching for a pattern connection between the two parts, and Mozart’s music at that moment depended on that activity, depended on its attempt and failure (its failure was Mozart’s success). I realized, part of the work of the composer is to create roadblocks to pattern perception, beautiful areas where the brain gropes blindly. I realized, too, part of what makes some music sound “too easy” or vapid is the absence of that kind of challenge; allowing the brain to laze around like a couch potato processing patterns in a daze. Mozart, the easy listening, un-dissonant composer (so I read in an interview in the program, aghast, as if this music wasn’t living and breathing dissonance nonstop), this long-dead Mozart was the one poking my brain, saying: stay awake, stay awake, keep living, you never know what will happen!

Life’s dangerous. You could be walking down Broadway, round 94th Street, and find yourself in a near-head-on collision with a former student. These sorts of things happen all the time. Clutching cellphone to ear with another friend, you say a cautious external hello, wondering: what tutelage grudges have been stewing all this time, waiting to explode?

Take comfort, gentle reader, this is a friendly encounter; Former Student is harmlessly (?) heading off to teach Counterpoint. I am returning from Starbucks Odyssey episode 2,342.

One of my little life-improvement dreams is to ruthlessly restudy counterpoint until my species are all settled down and in their proper places. Back in the halcyon year of 1995, I studied copiously (like the little good boy I am) for my Juilliard Doctoral Placement Exam, in the New Mexico sun, while ingesting huge amounts of chips and green chile salsa, dripping and smearing wonderful amounts of salsa on my music notebooks which gave the counterpoint exercises a kind of antique quality, a spicy charm — at least so I felt at the time. But this chile-induced crammed knowledge could not last long, it was bound to melt like cheese on a quesadilla.

“What are those rules of counterpoint?” I inquired hypothetically of Former Student. I was curious not to hear them, of course, but to know how he would express them.

He started with the curious ploy of the obvious. “Well, no parallel fifths.” As if, ironically, taking the question seriously? Then continued, “no unisons… which is really funny.” At least I think that is what he said; his mind moves faster than a Roadrunner across the top of a mesa in the creosote smell of the desert after a good rainstorm. Sometimes FS’s thought processes leave even this Generation Xer mystified, I who should by right of Birth be cynical of Everything and mystified by Nothing.

I decided to leap in. “Parallel fourths are a problem too, sometimes?” He began to enumerate the situations when they might or might not work, then (I speculated) got weary, in the present moment, with the sun shining down, and the day beckoning, and the brisk cold reminding the skin of its own very existence, of the dos and donots. Perhaps it was all a failed experiment in postmodernism. “There are exceptions.”

The breeze blew. A minisecond passed. My other friend waited on the cellphone to tell me something more that I should know about the strange way I conduct my life, or she hers.

Former Student’s voice interrupted its own pause impatiently. “There are lots of exceptions. The exception is if you’re dead you can’t do any of those things.” The Carpe Diem School of Counterpoint was thus defined and founded on the corner of 94th and Broadway, in front of a liquor store.

Saturday 7:50 am. I woke to the wreckage of nail salons: crumbling glass, scattered particle-board, chairs, and three dusty men dismantling endless hours of beauty. Helpful sign explains: “WE HAVE MOVE.” It seemed early to be pillaging, at least on the Upper West Side. Why, most people haven’t even finished their Pilates yet, not to mention walking their pugs and baking their organic brioches. I was irritated to find that the new staffperson at the 93rd Street Starbucks seemed to think we were living in the ‘burbs. She smiled a TV smile (in HD) and threw me a perky plastic how-are-you, and when I (grudging, mumbling, quiet) returned the formality she went into a story about how tired she is [insert braying laugh a la Rachael Ray here]… but she’ll make it, thanks. My subsequent smile was like the crisper in my refrigerator: full of wilted, dried-up, and congealed things. If I had been carrying a volume of Sartre I might have climbed over the counter and attacked her with it. Morning is not my time.

Ah, safely back in the apartment. Whew. I try to really make an art of my grumpiness while it lasts, to live it to the last drop; I am not sure it is not a strange, amphibian form of happiness.

Speaking of grumpiness, I was over again seeing how a real blog works at The Rest Is Noise, and I read the following:

… the one [concert] that cannot be missed is the mainstage Carnegie bill of Electric Counterpoint (with Pat Metheny), Different Trains (with the Kronos), and Music for 18 Musicians (with Reich and his ensemble). I don’t see anything as exciting on the entire New York season schedule…

Ummm, excuse me? What about Jeremy Denk’s super-wuper fantastically exciting all-Bach recital on Oct. 20th in the new exciting totally unusual late-night format at the Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center (tickets available)? Or Jeremy Denk’s thrilling debut wild-possibly-involving-naked-supermodels appearance at Carnegie Hall with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Dec. 2nd? Just to pick a couple items at random from the concert schedule, items I have no stake in whatsoever, you know, just, by the way. I thought I worked that in pretty well, don’t you? Not too pluggy, kind of seamless?

And then to speak again of grumpiness, a while back I went a bit to town on the first episode of Greg Sandow’s book on the future of classical music. I have to admit I’m not in love with the formulation “performing” a book, but I let myself be carried full tilt into high dudgeon, overhastily. I went back there and it appears he took in a lot of criticism and decided to start again, writing more tightly and with less anecdote; he seems to be reangling it as a kind of historical account of how classical music got “boxed in.” The following passage made me pause uneasily:

This scholarly, detached, analytical view of classical music then gets translated into the formality of performances, the immobility and silence of the musicians and the audience, and the lack of communication, the lack of any explanation of what’s really going on (which I’ve criticized so relentlessly in earlier episodes). All this turns many people off, especially since it runs directly against almost every trend in contemporary culture. How can people who (for example) listen to pop music that offers strong views about contemporary life, and about which listeners have really strong opinions–loving this band, hating that one–accept a classical music world in which they’re told, repeatedly, in measured, unexcited tones, how great the great composers are?

But there is something courageous about it. Here on Think Denk, we try to get as excited as we can about Bach etc., and try to pass it on through verbiage and (soon to come, exciting exciting!) sound bites, but we (royal) have to admit Mr. Sandow has a generally true-feeling point. To argue with what he is saying seems like arguing with commonsense, with the same pros and cons. Go ahead and argue; you may be right, but ignore it at your peril. In fact he has a lot of points that feel queasily correct in the main though I get nervous about the wide net he is casting … To cite my main qualm, I guess I feel he’s a little too comfortable with generalizations, and with the deadly Grouping Of Stereotypes Fallacy (“scholarly, detached, analytical”)… Scholarly does not have to be detached, or analytical, for instance. Analysis is not necessarily detached either. These are all free-floating “connotations.” And then he equates the scholarly attitude with the detached immobile performances, claiming a causality. But often it seems to me just the opposite: the scholars are the ones getting excited about the music while the performers, who are too busy to hear from them or don’t want to hear from them or think they don’t have anything to offer, ignore them and offer up the same old same old conservatory crap. How’s that for blunt? Strike one for scholars!

So I have my Denkish qualms, but am impressed by the rewrite and new approach. Go read Sandow’s stuff, and I apologize for jumping on the first post: so very Jeremy and so impatient. The ocean is still teaching me (vis a vis last post).

Then, to survey other areas of the Classical-Web, I noticed there’s a big discussion of the “pretentiousness” of classical music going on at Sequenza21. This seems to me largely a discussion between composers, and am I generalizing too much (a la Sandow) if I see this discussion and the word “pretentious” as a euphemism for what is quickly becoming the Composers’ Eternal Question:

Should I write tonal, boppy stuff, or not?

I imagine the devil posing that question, slyly, in the postmodern wilderness … Please enjoy, among other things, the myriad spellings of “pretentiousness” that sprinkle this forum, which made me doubt my own memory, and which evokes, charmingly, composers at play, perhaps multitasking, transposing on Finale or Sibelius in the background while burning CDs in another window and pondering music’s moral state in between, too busy to avail themselves of a spellchecker. This is all coming out overly snarky … am a big fan of Sequenza 21 …

Without being presumptuous, I guess it will have to be up to me to answer the Eternal Question for all composers for All Time. I would refer them once again to Roland Barthes’ wonderful dictum “there is only what I would choose to write, to put forth in this world of mine, and what I choose not to.” I apply this dictum daily, thousands of times, when playing the same old boring totally unexciting (just kidding, for those with no ear for irony) Bach phrase again, or some stupid out-of-touch-with-modernity (still kidding!) Beethoven thingy, and I am teetering between “Ways To Play This” and some are Interesting, some are Unexpected, some are Classic–oh oh oh, the burden of choice!–and then finally there is a period of honestly asking myself, “what would I choose to hear? how is this meaningful to me? what makes me sit back and say that is beautiful?” and there is the test, does this wow me, is what I’m hearing interesting to me, 2006 Jeremy?, and I look for the answers through that set of questions (and similar)… through the self-wow test … It’s all really spectacularly beautiful heady totally tremendous stuff, so that when I have to go out of the apartment and away from my Linus-esque security blanket combo of piano and Great Masters to get some coffee from some perky young thing I get a little, you know, on edge.