The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

I’m getting funny emails from my family these days. For example, a couple days ago, one close relation wrote to ask whether a particular review of a recent Richard Goode recital was “good or bad.” As if I were some oracular interpreter of review-speak. I dutifully and shamefully googled up the thing, and found a worse review than I expected, in which the author, at least in part, assumes a didactic role. It was conceded that there were some good moments at the end; but mainly the pianist was accused of letting his passion surge ahead of his judgment. These sorts of reviews put me in a delicate emotional position. Firstly: without reviewers, our business would be in sorry condition; they create buzz, they evaluate, they stir up the human yen for judgment, they are patient through concert after concert which I cannot be bothered to attend, they are a public voice for our private art “in the wilderness,” they have to write blurb after blurb, finding creativity in a difficult, limited art form… They are also a kind of “conscience” of the artist. I am, finally, grateful to them. On the other hand, (didn’t you know that “but” was coming?) when a reviewer seems to condescend to an artist like Richard Goode, whose artistry ranges into extraordinary realms I dream about late at night, over espresso, wistfully… an artist who with one phrase has occasionally caused me to rethink months of my life … for him to be treated like a naughty misbehaved child on the pages of a national newspaper makes me want to throw my coffee cup across the room and wreak other kinds of havoc, screaming and ranting. Also: aren’t critics always complaining of the “overly safe” practices of classical music these days? Aren’t they always wondering why we don’t take more risks? But then, the Catch-22: if you take too many risks, or the wrong kind, you stand in need of a “palpable corrective” (to quote the review); you can be chastened in the New York Times. What’s a boy to do?

As I say, mixed feelings. And I wasn’t even at that concert (shame on me). Perhaps even this well-meaning expression of my emotional conundrum may cause me to have bad reviews for some time. Hopefully (I think it a safe bet) BH will not read this post. Otherwise, I say, like “our” president: bring it on!

Another family member writes to subtly suggest that the material in the blog can sometimes be pretty inaccessible. Haha. Yes, I know. There are people who feel the other way: that my musical analyses are often too cursory, compared to my philosophy-speak; that I should get down on my hands and knees and be a grease monkey with the notes themselves. I like to get down and get funky with the notes, a lot; and the problem is, I think it takes a long time and a lot of clunky prose to really get at the notes, to unfold their miraculous, wordless patterns. And meanwhile the big black bear with the golden insides lurks in the other room, growling the beginnings of unpracticed masterpieces, warning me that if even Richard Goode can be accused of lack of judgment, I am in a whole heap of trouble.

If you want to know what I’ve been doing the last few days, I’ve been eating out and playing Bach Partitas. Thanks for asking: no, this is not helping to reduce global warming or global poverty or global hunger (except my own hunger and that of my mealmates).

I’ve been dabbing these familiar pieces with fresh paint, and on occasion taking out their whole foundations, roughly. Move aside, old Denk, the new guy’s comin’ through. When I have to do the latter, the heavy (re-)lifting, I get into a manic-depressive cycle: first joyful–so lovely to rip down the timbers which you thought were immovable, so interesting, invigorating, electric to hear the piece anew–and then grumpy and irritable, so that when my friends call I kind of bark at them. Occasional bites of pumpkin bread and sips of decaf Starbucks are not enough to stem this grumpiness, born of mental effort and Bach’s tremendous demands.

In one oasis of pleasure in this desert of effort, I was trying again, again, again, to imagine convincing “phrase rhythms” for the Sarabande of the G major Partita. I may intellectualize the whole all I wish without getting an inch closer to my pleasure. But: I can’t be satisfied without some intellectual effort … and so I think, and hope that at some point, the “mystery force” (which includes some emotional quantity “x”) takes over and my concept gets animated, like Frankenstein (or hopefully some more graceful golem) and whoops! I am there. This happens reliably enough for me to count on it, and when it doesn’t work, there is always the martini.

My tongue is only partly in my cheek.

So, back to the G major Partita. What I find so UNSATISFYING in the CD I own of this piece is the total absence of the hemiola. Now, I know some of you reading out there couldn’t give a crap about a hemiola, but I, and some of you readers, are probably also obsessed with these delightful rhythmic displacements. [Boring explanation for non-musicians follows: a hemiola is where two bars of 3/4, say, are made to sound like three bars of 2/4 — or in other words, 6 is either two groups of 3, or three groups of 2. The three groups of 2, then, become magically a larger bar of 3, kind of a “double measure” or “super-measure.”] And in my Bach Partitas CD, by an unnamed artist, the fact is you can’t hear very well that this Sarabande is “hemiola crazy.”

I know this sounds like a trivial characterization, but almost every phrase has one! The phrases always begin with a little “pickup thingy” (that is actually the musicological term); then continue with one “normal bar” of 3/4, and then have the HEMIOLA. Here are the first two phrases, labeled for your comfort and convenience.

For those of you wondering, “pickup” in the musical sense has very little (but not nothing) to do with the term “pickup line.” Now, the normal bars of 3/4 tend to have some sort of dissonant intersection–lines in conflict, unusual intervals–but somehow the hemiola seems to wrap things up, because by the end of each one we seem to arrive at a pretty clear cadence.

Pickup
Normal Bar
Hemiola
Cadence

Don’t ask me why this is so; it’s just the way Bach wrote it. Heh. It’s as if he wanted the composition to express the following haiku:

At first lines diverge,
But each harmonic puzzle
Hemiola solves.

Now, I associate with each past piano teacher some wisdom-pearl, and John Perry was the first to express to me, so that I really heard it, the very obvious notion: how much poorer Bach would be (nothing, in fact) without the dissonances. (A pianist in master class had forgotten to tie over a crucial dissonant note). This composer, who we imagine so in touch with the cosmic harmony, such a master of musical logic and organization: the logic is built, so to speak, on a sea of contradictions, an uncountable array of types of dissonances. (Ugly, ugly dissonances!) Sometimes you hear Bach performances where these dissonances really “speak,” and also quite often you hear them only by the way… the dissonances become like fresh herbs stirred into a stew too early, losing their flavor in the slow cooking. It is so easy to take them for granted, to forget their edge.

It is hard (paradoxical) to practice freshness. At the beginning of this Sarabande, we have two “accidents” right away: an F-natural on the second beat of the first bar, and a G-sharp on the downbeat of the second bar. Fleshing this out: F-sharp would be the normal, confirming leading tone of the tonic; F-natural (its opposite?) is an odd early contradiction, a step in the “wrong direction” before our sense of the key is really established. And the G-sharp just piles on the unexpected; no more dissonant note to the tonic could be imagined (for your music theory types: an odd leap also in the bass from C to G-sharp, an augmented fifth! calls this note to our attention!) And at the risk of boring everyone to tears, it’s worth pointing out that the F-natural in the left hand measure 1 makes a dissonant tritone (“the devil in music”) with the B in the right hand; but when this “resolves,” i.e. when the B in the right hand moves to C, this C is in turn dissonant with a D that has appeared in the left hand. (A kind of contrapuntal Catch-22.) This is the annoying, detailed way of expressing what I meant, earlier, when I said that in the rhythmically “normal” bars there is “dissonant intersection.”

For me, the conception of the piece has to be based on these premises (as Hannibal Lecter lectures, while he listens to the Goldberg Variations: “first principles, Clarice”)… has to answer this question: How is the beauty of this piece somehow derived from these ungainly uglinesses? For it is, above all, so beautiful; graceful and evanescent; kind of an enigmatic little dance, reveling in the asymmetry of its phrase construction (as enumerated above); reveling in its naughty dissonance and always exploiting the hemiola to zip things up; and like a well-constructed play or novel cunningly telling several stories at once, dovetailing them effortlessly. For example, the dotted descending scale, in measure one, outlining a fifth:

and, in the next phrase, now a fifth higher:

and, in the next phrase, replicating itself, between the hands:

and in the last phrase, Bach supplies a kind of “summary,” the scale repeated, sequenced, now deep in the bass, a harmonic fundament, a continuity:

In each phrase, this idea appears and disappears; a character coming on- and off-stage; I feel as though it has a “separate existence” from the Sarabande as a whole, some sort of private life. It brings, contributes, to the dance when it can, and it leaves without overstaying its welcome. But I know how important it is; as a practicer, as a performer, I want to nod to it when it comes in and be polite to it on its way out; to smile at it with recognition, but not to scream its name across the room. A little congregation of themes, motives, as friends, around a table. And once you have established this dotted descending scale as a friend, then you are so touched by its calling into say hello again, in all sorts of ways which don’t become tiresome; its little favors to your harmonic story. Towards the end of the Sarabande, for instance, it comes in rather normally, to assert the dominant:

No accidentals here; a nice friendly reminder. But then the next one ends on a difficult G-sharp (yes, astute reader! the same G-sharp from the second bar!!!!):

This appearance of our friend, then, has posed a problem… notice the bassline “shuts up” for a measure, as if shocked into silence by this impropriety (G-sharp, so late in the game!). The right hand goes on a little unprecedented wandering journey, disrupted, confused; the G-sharp stands, unresolved, uncontradicted; and then, whew, the left hand comes in again (“as if nothing had happened”), A down to D:

Thanks to this intervention, we are close now, on the dominant… And then THE MOST BEAUTIFUL thing happens; this friend says goodbye, with no tears. The left hand plays the scale “upside down,” ascending from G-A-B-C-D; while the right hand, at the same time, descends, D-C-B-A-G. And in this mirroring dialogue the tonic, and closure, is reached; the piece is over. You are too delighted by the ingenuity of the disappearance to be sad.

All this tedious discussion for just one sub-plot; but examples have to be given! In case you forgot, I was on the subject of how the beauty of the piece is partly derived from ungainly things (strange dissonances, asymmetric constructions); I had been discussing both hemiola and dissonance, and I would like to just show the interaction of these two at one of my favorite moments in this piece. Though the hemiola divides two 3/4 measures into three groups of two, sometimes hemiolas, like human beings, have a conscience.

1 2 3 4 5 6

This is the hemiola division of emphasis: on 1, 3, 5. But if there had been NO HEMIOLA, there would have been an emphasis on 4 (the “normal” downbeat). And so often the hemiolas want to tell us, on the sly, in some mysterious expressive way, where that real downbeat is. In this case E in the right hand moves up to G… the G occurs on 3, the hemiola rhythm, but then, wonderfully, the alto voice moves down to A on 4 … creating a fantastic dissonance on the mysterious downbeat:

The dissonance signifies the missing meaning, the rhythmic might-have-been. How, as a pianist, do you play a note like that, a G that is sustained and attains a different meaning on the downbeat, a G that must change mid-course (when the hemiola meets its nemesis, the normal rhythm), when no correction for a keyboardist is possible? A note in two rhythmic layers. Impossible enigmas for pianists to beat themselves silly over. I can say that I have heard this done so that I hear, by sleight-of-hand, the correction, mid-note, but only rarely.

Similar beautiful dissonances haunt each of the hemiolas of the first four phrases of the piece, and each dissonance is somehow different (questions of context, gradations of emphasis, shifts of voicing). Bach’s ingenuity in these matters seems endless; though there are only four “solutions” to this hemiola/dissonance issue in the first half of the Sarabande, they somehow feel like an infinite number, like a prism of possibilities. Recycling certain elements over and over, nonetheless not finding a limit or end. I stomp around my small kitchen, ignoring crusty day-old oatmeal, trying to imagine the inflection for each phrase… I want same, but different. My sense of freedom is tied to the rigidity of the pattern; I have to know how to be free with the phrases, within the cage Bach has built for me. Somehow the CD’s solution of ignoring, or downplaying, the hemiola, seems like a betrayal to me; a body with some bones missing. It is even, too even; a sentence without accents. I go over it again. Pickup; Dissonant Normal Bar; Hemiola (beginning dissonantly, resolving); Cadence. It is like a mantra, fleshed out.

Fleshed out, yes: each phrase of this Sarabande unique (complex, irreducible) like a human being, though “coded” with recurring genes. I think the recurring element of Bach is easier to capture in performance, so often you hear the motoric continuity of Bach, the motivic coherence, but so often this can regress into a kind of monotony, where the “difference” of each phrase blends out… The man has become a machine. We are so well attuned to Bach’s machine element, his logic, his purity. But the other night when I heard the Magnificat I was more inspired to practice Bach than I had been for some time… inspired by humanity, vocality, even: human failing. I stomped around my kitchen and sang horribly; it helped a lot. So many of the phrases were closer to beer and bread than to the sublime, and better for it. These Sarabande phrases smile at me; they do not glower at me from above. And I can practice this Bach, who is ingenious not like a know-it-all but like a friend who somehow, after a lot of time, still manages to make you laugh.

As I draw the last coffee cup out of my cupboard I sigh and note that these thoughts do not want to end. Apologies for length and ramble. Perhaps a lunch break could help?

…

I admit I’m a snob who sometimes, but not always, sneezes at Rachmaninoff. Is it that it seems too easy for him to whip up a climax? And the peaks seem too clear, too etched, too predictably prolonged? The other night, at the Harry Potter movie, I winced when the strings swelled, smothering a sugary soliloquy in redundant syrup. My ears, my ears! They alone would not exculpate this excess. I often wish I, or anyone, could come up with hard and fast rules, for when something will be “too much”: rules of taste, which one could mail to Hollywood producers, to Oprah, to nightly news programs covering hurricanes, etc. But for whose sake do I wish this? Probably just mine: to save myself irritation, to avert the desire to avert my gaze, to quell my urge to flee the theatre, spilling popcorn, Pepsi, Junior Mints–what have you–in my headlong, heedless escape.

Climaxes are dangerous places, like peaks of mountains, I suppose, where a wrong step is extremely costly… places moreover “earned” with slow assiduous steps. Ugh: even stating this need to “earn” a climax, I feel like a fuddy-duddy in a leather armchair who earned success “the old-fashioned way.”

The other morning I came to the climax (my climax) of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, in the living room of a friend, and while he busied himself emptying the dishwasher and concocting frightening smoothies I was frozen unhelpfully on the couch, in that uncomfortable, antisocial position you assume when you are really paying attention (or trying to). I read this book a year or two ago, admired it, but had forgotten nearly everything about it … except just a few odd details and scraps. If I had forgotten it, how good could it be? But: “it is precisely because we forget that we read.” (Roland Barthes). And also Barthes: “those who do not reread are condemned to read the same story over and over again.”

And so: I attacked the book again. Again admirable, with a continuity and intensity of thought like a leash, dragging me places where I didn’t necessarily want to go. But I had skeptical thoughts, along these lines: It is a Holocaust novel; the story it tells, rather indirectly, is a well that has been dipped into often, sometimes invoking (exploiting?) pathos from history without earning it, so to speak, artistically. What new could one bring to this story?; has the novel’s overwhelming sadness and sense of alienation been “earned,” or simply referred to history, which is supposed to justify it? And I had other problems: a passage depicting the beauties of moths in Wales, for instance, began to seem long; there were seemingly aimless lists of flowers, animals, incidents; and I at times awaited a payoff, which is no way to read.

Locating the climax of Austerlitz would be difficult; it is long, to be sure; but it seems to begin when the narrator goes into a dusty corner of a railway station, purely by chance, and begins to realize that this is where he arrived, many years ago, in 1939, a refugee from Prague, sent to England in a last-ditch effort by desperate, doomed Jewish parents. The climax begins there, but continues, and continues, with a slow decoding of past, fact, identity… the narrator goes back to Prague, meets his childhood babysitter, discovers the names and lives of his parents, retraces his escaping steps, and begins to make sense of all the haunting images of his lost years, to understand why certain sensory data were so important to him.

Ah yes, all the miscellaneous data from earlier now click into place! They were brought to our attention because, and because … Whew, the novel begins to solve itself, like an automated puzzle. But the emotional problem is not solved. Left behind, as a sense of sad history and fact erodes the sad emptiness of the first half of the novel, is still the unshakable alienation of the narrator–stronger than revelation or discovery. And it is this that allows Sebald to sustain the tension (a very musical novel), to bring the climax toward a second wave. Though the symbols of the novel have been “explained,” they still circle, forming various storms, configurations, nebulae… why won’t they stop?

I guess I felt the “real climax” to arrive around here:

In one of the empty spaces not far from the station … the Bastiani Traveling Circus had erected its small tent, much mended and wreathed in strings of orange electric lights. By tacit agreement, we entered just as the performance was coming to a close. A few dozen women and children were seated on low stools round the ring… We were just in time for the last number, featuring a conjuror in a dark blue cloak who produced from his top hat a bantam cockerel with wonderfully colored plumage …

After the conjuror’s exit the lights slowly dimmed, and when our eyes were used to the darkness we saw a quantity of stars traced in luminous paint inside the top of the tent, giving the impression that we were really out of doors. We were still looking up with a certain sense of awe at this artificial firmament which, as I recollect, said Austerlitz, was almost close enough for us to touch its lower rim, when the whole circus troupe came in one by one, the conjuror and his wife, who was very beautiful, with their equally beautiful, black-haired children, the last of them carrying a lantern and accompanied by a snow-white goose. Each of these artistes had a musical instrument. If I remember correctly, said Austerlitz, they played a transverse flute, a rather battered tuba, a drum, a bandoneon, and a fiddle, and they all wore Oriental clothing with long, fur-edged cloaks, while the men had pale green turbans on their heads. At a signal between themselves they began playing in a restrained yet penetrating manner which, although or perhaps because I have been left almost untouched by any kind of music all my life, affected me profoundly from the very first bar …

I still do not understand… what was happening within me as I listened to this extraordinarily foreign nocturnal music conjured out of thin air, so to speak, by the circus performers with their slightly out-of-tune instruments, nor could I have said at the time whether my heart was contracting in pain or expanding with happiness for the first time in my life . Why certain tonal colors, subtleties of key, and syncopations can take such a hold on the mind is something that an entirely unmusical person like myself can never understand, said Austerlitz, but today, looking back, it seems to me as if the mystery which touched me at the time was summed up in the image of the snow-white goose standing motionless and steadfast among the musicians as long as they played. Neck craning forward slightly, pale eyelids slightly lowered, it listened there in the tent beneath that shimmering firmament of painted stars until the last notes had died away, as if it knew its own future and the fate of its present companions.

As a musician, the goose got me (earned my attention). The sudden opening of Austerlitz’s musical nerve played on my inner strings (me, whose musical nerve is always TOO open). Sebald creates this circus, suddenly, out of thin air–this musical, unrecorded, provisional moment–simply to destroy it, in order that in the following pages we can see the massive Bibliotheque Nationale erected upon the spot of this bizarre performance, in order that one priceless moment for one individual can (in a recurring cycle of humanity) be replaced by an enormous vault of bureaucratically organized information. Preservation=destruction? Earlier discussions of futile fortifications, the compulsive architecture and organization of German concentration camps, etc. all suddenly rush in (flood in)–this sense of “rushing,” of symbols coming from every direction, makes the moment climactic for me–and these earlier “dispassionate” architectural conversations become relevant, with the appearance of this library, with its monumental style, four towers, arcades and staircases, forbidding easy access to information, which it holds and buries. (A building with an odd resemblance to Juilliard.) So that: the book is not about the death of the narrator’s mother, nor his father, nor any of these countless human destructions or violences … it is now just about a single goose’s look, squashed under tons of archives.

Aha, climax: one odd symbol becomes the eye of the hurricane around which all the others suddenly organize. Factoids from previous pages swarmed before my eyes; I was overwhelmed by the book “as a whole.” I sipped gallons of coffee unaware; my foot fell asleep. And in the aftermath, (after the goose is cooked), the book falls apart, ends in fragments. This climax is a confluence of creating and destroying, a kind of willful evil of the novelist. We do not mind that the author destroys what he creates, this does not seem immoral?

So earlier I had a metaphor for climax-as-place: a peak of a mountain, say. And now I have climax-as-force–as a nexus of symbolic energy.

What occurred to me later that day, as I was towelling off from one of my long long showers in which I dread the cold of the non-shower world, was the idea of climax as singularity, the way a point in time or a set of words or an image becomes a center, a reference (in this a climax is like a symbol); though we would like a climax (like a shower) to sprawl, by its nature it is ephemeral, and the question is always prolongation, enjoyment, sustainability.

A lot of the musical climaxes I feel squeamish about are about “pouring over,” about excessive enjoyment; they “cling.” Sometimes they outlive their moments, they outstay their welcomes. And they are focused to a point, like a lens: a few measures of unbelievable volume or intensity, against which all other points in the piece can be measured. But there are other kinds of climaxes, more like Sebald’s goose. I am thinking right now of the Schubert Sonata, Op. 143 (which I warily remind myself I must play in Washington in April, alongside Winterreise): the exposition of the first movement. This piece begins in a very serious, overtly tragic “A minor mood,” almost too much so, like someone who makes a show of his sadness, (like Austerlitz), in fragmented, lamenting phrases strangely suggestive of Russian Volga boat songs. These tragic fragments seem to not quite know what to do with themselves (like Austerlitz), they keep ending up in this rather unremarkable tag:

Can this tag become a climax? It tries to hoist itself up, but fails; there is a great deal of ominous, boiling rhetoric; tremolos, slippages, a loud explosion; then two soft chords, and then … then the unbelievable happens:

Unbelievable because Schubert caused us not to believe in E major until this moment. The piece, to this point, has resided convincingly in a certain sound-world, an emotional province; though we may not have noticed, its boundaries have rigorously excluded certain kinds of voicings, nuances (certain very “technical” musical things); have excluded a lot. And when this new theme (why do we need to call it this annoying name “2nd Theme”?) appears, with its close, tender harmonizations, its suggestion of a men’s chorus, or a slow dance, or a folk tune–so many possible associations come to mind–the exclusion is lifted; and in this absence the emptiness of the previous music becomes evident, and a space is opened for something else to rush in. After the first sense of disbelief (I am always amazed by this theme), I definitely feel that rushing, the theme’s web of associations, symbols from afar, an awakening. (Austerlitz’s musical sense is suddenly awakened by the mysterious Eastern music of the circus troupe.) Though there are no sweeping gestures, though it is uttered quietly, inwardly, pianissimo, though not in any way traditionally climactic, this passage is a climax. It does not pour over, exude, or demonstrate; instead it draws energy into itself, retracts, concentrates.

This melody is crafted around a single note, E–the inescapable note, the immovable object. Notice the intensities Schubert can weave around this pedal, this pivot; about what he can do despite–or because of–the limitation of that singularity. (Climax as singularity, as concentration into a point.) Everything is E, we are tied to that note, all of our energies must be drawn within that circle of attention; I feel that theme, with its “limitation,” as a bubble, as an enclosed space, a created paradise which Schubert, like Sebald, will destroy.

What does Sebald’s goose symbolize? It knows, he says, the fates of all the people around it; these fates are probably death, dispersion, erasure; replacement by a soulless monumental library. And yet the goose looks and listens, “motionless and steadfast,” its neck craning in concentration; it is a symbol not necessarily of what-is-known but perhaps just the knowing, the perceiving, itself. If the listening goose is just about the vanishing, then why tell its story at all? Why would Sebald choose as a symbol of the music (itself a symbol, and on and on in an endless chain) something which emits no sound whatsoever? I am reminded of the wonderful Ives quote “My God! What does sound have to do with Music”? Which is ridiculous but true. And also I’d add: what does volume have to do with climax? or climax with plot? or emotional closure with knowledge? All of these can be uncoupled, recoupled, rethought. Let me mail this to Oprah. I will mail her, and the Harry Potter people, that scene in Pnin where Nabokov manages a climax with one elderly man washing his dishes, alone.

In the first part of the exposition, Schubert’s tragic muse keeps exploring the relationship between the tonic and the subdominant … a common neighbor motion, become a plagal obsession. (This is part of what makes it sound vaguely “Russian.”) And lo and behold, the second theme, at its outset, presents us with the same motion: I-IV, transformed. There is nothing to this. There is so little composition, so little sense of craft: just the sudden existence of this same neighbor motion, in the major key. (But so beautiful!) So that I have the feeling that Schubert has not created this moment, but has evoked it, simply by listening, by paying attention: by “knowing the fates of the participants.” I-IV is capable of tragic fates, yes, but what about … He stares out at us, neck craning, concentrating, hearing the harmonies of the music around him, hearing the new major key take shape; at that moment he seems not to compose, not to demonstrate or perform, but instead to listen, remember, perceive.

Thunder rolls through Manhattan, rain spatters, and only Ignaz’s waltzing, promptly at 9:30 AM, stood between me and sleeping until noon. Outside, the honkers honk, displeased I am sure by weather and traffic and having woken up early to deliver goods and services; a snarled mess of roughly parallel-facing cars sits at the east end of my little corner of 91st St., and from this human and vehicular knot a recurring musical sequence emerges: long honk, followed by a series of screams. A Morse code meaning frustration. I shut my window to this aggressive music; it makes my coffee taste funny.

On my piano, behind me, sit three volumes: one is Book I of the WTC, the other the complete Beethoven sonatas. In months coming (April, and February respectively) I have to do my duty to those volumes and admittedly I feel a heavier-than-usual responsibility towards them. And with thunder and rain making the joyful streets of Manhattan a battlefield of frowns, puddles, and umbrella domes, what better time than now, in my own dry apartment? Certainly this is not the time to prance through Soho streets, admiring the beautiful people in the Apple store, lusting after $175 sneakers in Camper; it is no time to lay on the lawn of the Park, except encased in plastic; enthusiasm seems lacking as I consult my inner self for museum attendance; it seems even inadvisable to walk one block to the grocery store–there are three corners at least between here and there and at each may lurk a grayish puddle of uncertain depth through which an angry taxi may crazily swerve, sending forth fountains of sooty spray. So it appears to me from the eighth floor: a dangerous world.

But I have to admit those Beethoven Sonatas seem a bit dangerous today too, with metaphysical puddles and soot which will have to be wandered through before any “happiness” can be attained. For sure, I will run through them the first time and they will sound really good to my new ear and then will begin that magnificent erosion of self-delusion where the true difficulties of playing the piece well (for me, now, at this moment–is there any other time?) will appear, icebergs in my ocean of practicing. This fear and anticipation of the larger, difficult process plays against the desires of the moment, the lamplit pleasures of a few chords in E-flat major in my apt with a cup of coffee on the shelf in its usual place, which admittedly seem like insane, effete, aesthete, capitalist-luxurious pleasures compared to the people below trying to drive their trucks full of fish, bagels, and pipes between double-parked cars. This is my work?

All of which boils down to the same childhood classic moment. Your mother from the next room: “Jeremy, time to practice!” (in various tones, from reasonable to shrill). Your response (always whiny, unjustly interrupted, a young man with things TO DO): “Aww, mom, just a little more TV?” With the years, I have fortunately cultivated an inner mother to remind me to practice, but perhaps I have also unfortunately cultivated an inner TV, or an inner child, or an inner whine: I cannot decide which.