The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

“Heidi,” I grunted into my cell phone, “do you have what I need?” The breeze was stiff and my mind was scattered. At some point in every day, I realized, I reach a mini-crisis contemplating whether someone will, in the long- or short- term, have something I need.

In this case, classical musicians will know to whom I refer: the indomitable guardianess of Frank Music, on 54th Street. She and I have had a mostly mock antagonism for years, since I first glanced askance at her prices. I remember well the subsequent punishment she doled. They say a butterfly in China can cause a hurricane in Florida; and similarly my slightly raised eyebrow (at a Barenreiter price), perhaps the motion of a half centimeter, precipitated a tremendous verbal, virtual storm: off she went about her pitiable situation, and how she didn’t get into this business for money but all she hears about is money money money… and never before or since have I felt like such a miserable, soulless mercenary trampling on music’s sacred grove. I begged her forgiveness, of course. She has a magnificent ability to evoke the miseries of her business at a moment’s notice, threading, like the great composers, masterful variation on top of limited themes; you feel guilty for even noticing the prices she is charging, for imagining that music could ever be expensive. This is just one of the qualities that makes Heidi a paragon of the True New Yorker, and, along with necessity, keeps me haunting her unadorned abode. The shop also smells wonderfully, like Old Library, like the Performing Arts Library when it used to be temporarily in the wilds of way west 43rd street, in an old school building: like must and mold and books and–dare I say it?–it even smells like having a ruler rapped on your knuckles, like a life lived in fear of headmasters and nuns. Somehow I find this smell and its associations weirdly focusing, even addictive; perhaps subconsciously I get some rush of pleasure from the idea of being forced to study … there is some element of lovable punishment in visiting Frank Music.

Upon returning from my visit (which Homeric incident could Frank be compared to–the island of the sacred cows? the lotus-eaters? Hades? Circe? The cyclops?) I found myself oddly drawn into another adventure. Usually ascending the stairs from the 96th St. station is a glum, treading affair–with the tiredness of commuters like a prolonged, silent, surrounding sigh–proceeding more or less in a linear, uneventful fashion. I trod. There was a tremendous violence, suddenly. All around me, suitcases were falling down steps, collapsing onto people; girls were squealing and cussing; I heard a flurry of “ganz schlecht” and “scheisse” and other phrases which I’m sure were less reputable, and I realized I was caught in a maelstrom of visiting, beautiful German students, and it seemed strange to me that all this youth and freshness was able to be significantly bummed out, even stymied, by a flight of stairs. They clustered and regrouped like foreign bees unsure of their hive. It was impossible to walk around them; I was caught in their midst, fearing a suitcase at any moment, crashing from steps above; I was in mortal peril from these clueless youth. There was a TOTAL STOPPAGE; I imagined impatient Real New Yorkers from behind, building up pressure as water behind a dam, and hoped I would not be drowned in some melee. The noise and confusion was terrifying; then, somehow, I broke through; I passed the turnstile, homefree, and jogged by the leader of the pack, the Mother Superior of the young Germans, looking up unhappily, assessing the next and final flight. Would her birds survive? The Germans ate my sneakered dust. Whew, I thought, as I passed the shoal of Starbucks, I must head home and lick my psychic wounds. What suitors will I find there, disrupting my happiness?

A giant pile of unlearned music. A sink full of dishes. A table full of mail.

The suitors all need my attention; I cannot slay them without another Odyssey, more perilous than the last. And the object of their wooing, their Penelope, is my attention, which I must give over to them, willingly; I have to pay their many and varied debts.

Unless I am running for my train, I find it difficult or impossible to pass through Penn Station without getting a Red Sicilian slice at Rosa’s Pizza. It appears to be an unruly sea of roiling tomato sauce barely adhering to a thick chunk of bread, but some cheesy, salty secret lies hidden, baked in the redness. How did the tomato find such luxuriant and wonderful friends, and why are they all in my mouth at the same time? Such touching questions are dismissed in favor of rabid munching.

I would like to think some similar, ineluctable urge caused Schoenberg to abandon tonality. Today we say “it was atonal” glibly: ho-hum. But imagine the excitement of those composers, writing atonally for the first time, as they “felt the air of other planets.” After all that overwhelming beautiful history, the recorded human history of writing centered around a tone or tones… to step off and deliberately write music with no pitch center at all! No wonder they got kind of Messianic; it must have been thrilling. Just like the moment, after pouring off half of the grease, when I lift the lumbering red slice to my slavering mouth. Yes, the doctor will frown after your next cholesterol test, and yes you may be condemned now to writing some of the least loved music ever heard, but what of it? According to that crazy cat Anton Webern:

Only when Schoenberg gave expression to the law were larger forms again possible. Adherence to the row is strict, often burdensome–but it is salvation! The dissolution of tonality wasn’t our fault–and we did not create the new law ourselves; it forced itself overwhelmingly upon us. The commitment is so powerful that one must consider very carefully before finally entering into it… almost as if one took the decision to marry; a difficult moment! Trust your inspiration! There is no alternative.

If Anton hadn’t passed away some time ago, I would seriously have recommended some therapy. Need I enumerate my reasons? 1) Schoenberg (as father figure) giving the law. 2) The law as salvation; am I the only one smelling Kafka here? (“The door was meant only for you, and now I am going to shut it.”) 3) The law “forced itself upon them”: the law as rapist, as seducer? To be oddly and immediately followed by 4) The law as bride, as lifelong romantic committment? Umm, perhaps I prefer the law of Law & Order. But finally, the voice of reason: “Trust your inspiration! There is no alternative.” This, at least, I can agree with.

If indeed the idea of composing without a dominating single tone was a unbelievable thrill, comparable to the arrival of the 40-cent Triple Chocolate Brownie cookie at my local Starbucks (which I now order in satisfying, cute clumps of 4), I had managed to take it for granted, or subjugate it as merely a relic of Music History Survey Class–with all its associations of furtive caresses in library carrels and listening booths–and today, perhaps in karmic retribution for this neglect, I felt completely incapable of convincing a group of Bard students of this thrill, which I glimpsed … But perhaps I was more disquieted at being unable to communicate the power of the fragments of nineteenth-century tonality they left behind… For example, in Schoenberg’s Op. 19, #6, this one climactic phrase:

I have to feel sorry for these beautiful, yearning, enigmatic notes, crafted so that you cannot decide between them, and adding atop this ambiguity the rhythmic befuddlement of quarter note triplets, beginning with a tie and resolving into thin air. A “hairpin,” headed for a central intense point, fading away, and to what end? A romantic gesture stripped naked, purged of its underlying signifying harmonies, and trying to mean so very much in their absence: being forced to do so: trying to assume the burden of all that meaning. All right little notes, we’ve coddled you too long, you’re on your own now!

Parenthetically, I’m not sure how I feel about sentences with two colons in them.

A similar sense of crisis, I think, but from just the other side of the divide, haunts Brahms Op. 119 #1 (a place which makes you “feel sorry” for Brahms?)… a piece with strikingly beautiful opening bars, in which thirds spread out like tentacles from a single note, connoting triads freely, kaleidoscopically. Each bar is a fragment, listening to the consequences of these roving thirds, offering no resolution, looking for some more definitive continuation. (A letter of Brahms indicates how he wished these bars to be performed–indications which are often ignored, oddly.) These harmonies–9th and 11th chords etc.–are so familiar to us now from jazz and the whole mishmosh of 20th-century “extended” musical language, that perhaps we have an unfortunate tendency to hear them as “pretty sounds.” However, I think their power resides in a double meaning, in the play of meanings, a kind of irony: the uneasy coincidence of a discovered sensual beauty with a sense that somehow this is “not right,” a betrayal of principles, of the very things that made his music possible in the first place. Brahms suspects his inner sensualist. This beauty is treacherous. This irony is compounded: Brahms’ life’s work is filled with powerful use of thirds (perhaps more characteristically than any other interval)–as building block of melody and as prime mover in bass; and now this easy movement by thirds erodes the edifice, threatens to take down the tonal structure: Brahms’ own style, subjected to introspection and magnification, threatens to destroy itself.

But, as Anton says: “trust your inspiration! there is no alternative.” Brahms is forcing himself into this place, confronting the limits of his own language… accepting the collapse of any language.

As regular readers know, I am all for metaphors; I love them like I love the sour jelly beans at the bodega on 92nd Street. But sometimes, enough is enough.

“That’s where biological psychiatry was then,” she told me. “It was about the brain as a bowl of soup. You whip up a chemical, add it and stir”…

Setting aside the bowl-of-soup model did not mean deciding that neurochemicals weren’t important. Rather it meant deciding that neurochemistry, and particularly the chemistry dictating how individual neurons communicate with one another, was probably driven by traffic between different brain areas, and that identifying the patterns in that traffic might yield new understanding. (Or, using another metaphor, if the brain is an orchestra, then the neurochemical approach focuses on how well individual players listen and respond to the players adjacent to them; the network approach, like a conductor, focuses on how the orchestra’s sections — strings, winds, brass, etc. — coordinate and balance volume and tone. When both are working well, you’ve got music.)

–David Dobbs, New York Times magazine: “A Depression Switch?”

Need I say more? I certainly don’t enjoy thinking of my brain as a giant bowl of soup–though often it behaves that way, kind of splish-splashing around up there–but I certainly prefer the soup model to a symphony orchestra. Imagine the intrigues and infighting, in my own neurons! Imagine how they would kvetch about the chief neurons, behind their backs! And if there are brass players in my brain, I don’t want to know about it (sorry, Eric and others, just kidding haha!!!!) Etc. etc. And that last line: “When both are working well, you’ve got music”? In your dreams, maybe.

So much and so little has been happening more or less at the same time here in Denkland that I am at a loss what and how to post. I feel like my receptors for sadness have gotten bigger, as if swollen by some emotional MSG, but the slow sorting and consideration of this sadness has cheered me up.

The other night I was in the subway, on my way to a totally pointless social encounter, and my eyes wandered. Across and far to my left sat a petite girl of 18 or so with way too much mascara, high leather boots, and quite tight jeans. She was thin, alert, linear, upright; but in contrast her boyfriend lay slumped loosely, diagonally against her, with his face turned entirely into her neck; a scarf was draped over the meeting-point of their bodies and for all I knew he was a vampire drinking her blood. Her face was slightly turned away from this neck-spectacle, as if she couldn’t bear to look. The oddest thing was that she held her cellphone cocked to her ear, and appeared to be listening, though there is of course no signal down in the tunnels; was this to prove to observers that she had business more pressing than the amorphous, passive, man/parasite she was with: an imaginary agenda? But sitting directly across from me, a very different sight: a mother and her two twin boys. The boys (who were probably 7 years old) from time to time gazed across at me disquietingly; my heart wanted to run to them; one ate Animal Crackers one at a time from a well-used Ziploc bag, and the other sent his open eyes around the car like me, hungry for people’s meanings. The mother’s face was clear, free of makeup, with her hair short and pulled back so that her face and especially her eyes seemed to stick out, tired and honest: plain, beseeching. At least it seemed to me there was no parasite or agenda here; only dependency and sufficiency.

I am obviously addicted to the tenuous connotations of appearance. Something about the juxtaposition of these two groups made me quite sad; I felt them both as metaphors for elements of myself, the “cultured” and the plain, the affected and the needy; and while following this therapizing train of thought suddenly I imagined everyone in the car’s destinations for the evening, all the beds for which they were headed, and imagined all the unfamiliar smells of their pillows, bedmates, and even the switches on the lamps they would turn off before their bedrooms were dark. It was an overwhelming thought; I imagined myself like Superman following each of them, in turn, to their homes and beds, and how strange it would be to have to pull the covers on myself in all of those odd-smelling places, to trust myself to fate in so many foreign rooms. A New York subway car, itself hurtling, in process, an engine of fate, contains so many fates running into each other at any one time; each other person is a path you have not taken, a randomly avoided–some would say unchosen–self. Finally I imagined my own life as others in the car might see it: settling down into my bed, covered with clothes, books, remote controls, in an untidy strangely shaped room, and I judged myself like a butcher eyeing a piece of meat.

This is the sort of meditation spring has brought to me, when I should more appropriately be obsessed with sex, new asparagus, and shortsleeved shirts. And this same mildly gloomy muse followed me yesterday morning into 60 Centre St., where I was called by the Supreme Court of New York to do my civic duty and possibly judge my fellow beings. In a severe mood, I brought only two pieces of reading material: Cortazar’s experimental novel Hopscotch, and a collection of translations of Montale’s poetry, entitled “Montale in English.”

My time in the jury room became a renewed love affair. Which is good because my “real” love life can easily be sneezed at. I couldn’t swallow the novel but the poems came in bite-sized, mind-sized scrumptious pieces, and I sucked them up greedily, again and again, no matter how bitter or sorrowful the inner pill. The frenzy began, really, with the following poem:

Low Tide

Evenings alive with cries, the garden swing
Flashing in the arbour of those days
And a dark veil of mist hardly hiding
The sea’s fixed face.

All past, all gone. Rapid slanting flights
Cross the wall now, and the crumbling, the fall
Of all things without respite is a confusion
Burdening the steep bank, burdening the rock
That first bore you on the ocean.

Now I am brought with the light breath of spring
A ghostly eddying
Of the drowned swallowed times and lives; and at evening,
Dusky convolvulus, only your memory
Twines, and wards off time.

It climbs on the parapet, on the tunnel in the distance
Where the slow slow train crawls into its lair.
Then comes a sudden gathering on the hillsides,
The flock of the moon, invisibly browsing there.

(Eugenio Montale, tr. Edwin Morgan)

I clutched at silver linings like I clutched my coffee on the subway; there seemed no more magnificent reason for me to be pointlessly sitting on my butt than to be forced to fully digest this beloved book of poems. That last image (the sudden gathering of the flock of the moon on the hillside) blew me away, and–I assure you I don’t exaggerate–I emitted a slight moan, which was heard by the crazy woman sitting across from me; she smiled at me, baring dubious teeth and almost completely concealing her googly eyes, one of which meanwhile weirdly winked, and I felt it was time to flee posthaste to the vending area. When I returned with my cool fizzy ginger ale, she no longer smiled or winked, and I sipped and moaned in peace.

The jury gathering room with its enforced silence and prohibition of cell phones and aura of waiting was a pretty ideal venue for digestion of verse. Really the Winner of All Time, the best possible place to read poetry, is the monument in Tappan Square in Oberlin, of a mid-to-late April afternoon, with a light transformative breeze, and the coolness of the stone underneath you, and the wild quasi-castle of Peters Hall looming, and with your shoes and socks strewn on the surrounding steps, and the cries of frisbee-playing Oberlin students coming across to you like birdcalls from various points in the campus, near and far, and some classmates, nearby, ignoring books and thoughts and finals and all nonsensual activities, sunning themselves in as little clothing as they can get away with, whispering to each other in the grass, and cuddling, and taking themselves off to their rooms from time to time to …

Oh, excuse me. What was I talking about? Yes, poetry, hm. Yes in those days I was a poetry-reading nerd amidst the herds of students stunned by spring. But anyway, the jury room made it possible for me to really hear the poems in my head, and savor them, in a sense, in the same way I do pieces of music… as temporal, visceral unfoldings… The parallel of poetry and music became very vivid to me, and I kept dipping into the same poems again and again for similar thrills, in the same way you press repeat on your CD player. This one was a favorite:

Portami il girasole ch’io lo trapianti
nel mio terreno bruciato dal salino,
e mostri tutto il giorno agli azzurri specchianti
del cielo l’ansietà del suo volto giallino.

Tendo alla chiarità le cose oscure,
si esauriscono i corpi in un fluire
di tinte: queste in musiche. Svanire
è dunque la ventura delle venture.

Portami tu la pianta che conduce
dove sorgono bionde trasparenze
e vapora la vita quale essenza;
portami il girasole impazzito di luce.

[1923]

Bring me the sunflower so that I can transplant it
into my soil burnt with brine,
for it to show all day to the sky’s mirroring blue
the anxiety of its amber face.

Things that are dark lean towards clarity
the bodies of things flow out and empty themselves
in colours: colours in music. Vanishing
is therefore the luckiest of chances.

Bring me the flower which leads
to the springs of transparent gold
where life like an essence turns to vapour
bring me the sunflower crazed with light.

[trans. Bernard Spencer, c. 1946-8]

The first stanza is really “just” the presentation of an image: just a flower planted in parched soil, in the sunshine. But I really love this image, the idea that the blue sky and the yellow/amber face of the flower look at each other, face each other; they stare across their divide like I stared at my subwaymates… and then the added, illogical, unreal, beautiful touch, my favorite: the flower’s anxiety.

Whatever meanings one may draw out, this first stanza is couched, expressed, planted in sensual reality: in colors, tastes, things (blue, amber, soil, briny, flower). But the second stanza takes a different approach; it is entirely fashioned of abstractions. It is what in poetry passes for a syllogism, illogical logic, a series of magical deductions, proving the unprovable:

1) First proposition: a tendency: dark/obscure things lean towards clarity.
2) Second proposition, paralleling the first: bodies exhaust themselves in colors.
3) Conclusion: To vanish is the “ventura delle venture,” the adventure of adventures, the luckiest of chances… hard to translate.

At each node, a paradox, a seeming contradiction: oscure/chiarità; corpi/tinte; Svanire/ventura. Obscurity towards clarity, bodies towards colors: in between each, a missing, implied transitive spirit, the yearning of one for the other: the passing between, the verb. But I have left out a step: “Queste in musiche.” After the two propositions, and before the conclusion, music appears, the interloper, the renegade abstraction: colors in music? No further explanation. The poet barely pauses for breath. I really felt this moment, as I read it, as a sort of deceptive cadence, a central slip or skid of meaning, an accident which holds the key. “Queste in musiche.” For we as readers are suddenly forced to leap from the visual to the aural, to imagine bodies into colors into music, the passage of the corporeal into the intangible; and this is precisely the point, the flash of another world of unimagined meaning: the passing over between states: our mind must transplant itself elsewhere, into intangible soil.

The annoying, analytical musician in me calls this poem a ternary form, ABA, in which the outer parts concern the flower and the inner is a contrasting other. Perhaps: Images/Ideas/Images. But Images #2 is not remotely the same as #1; when we revisit the flower in the third stanza, the wonderful deductions of the second have had their effect. In place of the separated dualism of flower/sky, Montale provides a thrilling constellation, a chain… The flower is connected both above and below, to some deeper spring of transparent gold, which vaporizes through it like an essence of life; it passes this essence up to the blue sky, through light (which is what color? an intangible color?); and this whole process is “crazed,” a passionate giving-over. Before, we saw the flower staring at the sky, anxiously, we perceived the opposition; now we know what passes BETWEEN the sky’s blue eyes and the face of the sunflower, what look, what force they share: the verb is light, which comes from the sky and radiates from the color of the flower; the sunflower is crazed with it, and we too are seduced by the image as action. Between the first and last stanzas, the flower has been poetically brought to life.

Life as verb? We can isolate the verbs of the poem and consider them: transplant, bring, show, tend towards, flow out, vanish, conduct, vaporize … A relentless catalogue of transferences. (The poem is about transference.) These kind of magnetically attracted words remind me so much of the grouping of ideas in music, of the way certain related musical motifs call to each other … The energy from word to word, from idea to idea, seemed deeply musical: not the sounds of the words (one aspect of poetry’s musicality), but their thought-associations. The musicality of ideas?

I suppose a musical motive can feel at times like a thing, an image: when it is presented, when it is framed. The incredible E-flat Major Prelude from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (which I brought to the courthouse just in case I got sworn in, so that I could propose it in place of the Bible), begins with a beautiful but generic flourish, and then presents us with a specific musical image:

Ahh, the texture is familiar: vocal polyphony, with the rising fourth, passing gently from voice to voice. It is a musical image in so many ways: not just the motive itself, which is powerful; but an allusion to genre, to venue (church), to style (Palestrina?), to countless rules of composition, to a whole sacred musical tradition. The “holy moment.” But this image, however beautiful, runs its course, and begins to peter out; the main motive appears in the bass “one last time;” it falls onto a dominant cadence, and you imagine it might be over … Amen?

But this is not The End. Bach, lover of elision, picks it up just as it flags … Now the fourth motive is back, with new flowing countermelodies. It is back, and back, and back; it passes between the voices relentlessly, in canon, in stretto… So many times that you cannot believe it… For me, after a certain point, this repetition is the very opposite of tedium or monotony; paradoxically, the rising fourth is almost completely irresistible, the very spirit of rising; I begin to feel that I cannot go any higher and yet I do… (this sense of infinity which so many modern composers try to create through extreme dynamics and repetition and all the tricks in the toolbox: Bach already got it, so there.) Gradually, I am crazed with the idea of the rising fourth, I realize now (hopefully not too late) that this elation is the point, that the few notes are just the emblem of the essence (golden transparent springs), which the piece gradually brings to life, the rising fourth, the simplest possible thing–the idea, the image–finally understood, finally traversed by the arc of the piece, illuminated and resurrected. I really think this is how it feels. I love to be crazed; I love to play this prelude over and over again and to feel the thing, the image, become a verb: to be crazed with Bach’s light.

You must love to be crazed, too. Otherwise, why would you subject yourself to Think Denk?