The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

I’m delighted to report not only did this blog appear in the Wall Street Journal, but has been selected at Top Ten Sources as one of top ten sources for classical music. Thanks to both. And while we’re tooting our own horns (thereby causing horns of a different sort to sprout from the top of our heads), anyone in the New York area is cordially invited to Friday night’s concert at Miller Theatre (Columbia campus), where I will be playing the Berg Chamber Concerto with the amazing Mark Steinberg and Reinbert deLeeuw is conducting a tremendous band of wind and brass players.

Enough of all that. Jeez.

Such is my influence in the classical music world, now: regular reader R J Keefe is apparently dreaming up pretentious things to say to his wife at the Dec. 3rd Carnegie concert, so that I can overhear them and write about them disparagingly! I advise all attenders to keep their ears perked, and not solely to the performance. An update: he was not the person I overheard, so I issued an unnecessary apology for offending someone else; but I stand by my weaselly retraction. So there.

The question remains: do I have something to say of substance in this post? Or am I just wasting pixels? Well, yesterday I came out of the gym at around 9 PM, having turned the Stairmaster up to an unprecedented level 12, and my brain was awash with nearly hallucinogenic inspirations. I had this vision of myself beginning Op. 111 Beethoven (the thousands? of times I have begun it), and all the different mental states and types of attention I have brought to it. It was an image hard to hold in the hand, with immense variety of scale: sometimes just a flea, trying to mentally get myself squeezed in the space between the fingertip and the key, trying to calibrate those micro-motions, and sometimes telescoping out, not just to the whole piece, not just all of Beethoven, but trying to take in all of Western music–since Op. 111 kind of stands out as a landmark in it somewhere, perhaps on the edge of a cliff.

As I was walking home I was thrilled by the idea of somehow capturing in writing, seizing with the pen, my sense, all at once, of this “total 111 experience.” No, I don’t think any one, even unbelievable, performance, can capture this total experience… an individual performance is not a sufficient place for all your past learnings to take shelter. Each performance is partial, part of a larger text, which you write within yourself, which you gradually compose. If only you could pour out that larger text onto an audience, how wowed they would be! But they are busy composing their own texts.

So this all-at-once vision is impossible. But when I reach into my brain to find it, this impossible entity, I come back with things. What I saw mainly when I was trying to find my total 111 was much closer to forgetting, closer to a series of false starts, than to any integral, faithful memory. The piece for me, more and more, is a million (now a million plus one) fragments, and each performance is like a desperate attempt to reassemble. I know too much; luckily the piece seems partly to be about knowing too much. (Beethoven has seen so many sonata-allegro movements, so why not dispense with some formalities? Condense matters? But perhaps we miss them?) When I reach in, I get a strong vision, for example, of practicing it in my friend Evelyne’s living room in Bloomington, while she was working in the next room, and what I remember was enjoying the very grain of C major, how beautiful it was, in the live acoustic of that wood-filled room, and how I wanted to prolong and understand simply the consonances, the thirds and sixths, and partly to eliminate anything that intruded on the C major, on the sensual satisfaction of it. But the piece is full of things that must intrude on this sensual satisfaction… therefore my love for it at that moment was in part a reduction, a disservice. But Evelyne came in and we were talking about how beautiful it was, and it was a sincere moment of communication about music (reasonably rare) in which both of us seemed to understand the terms on which our tentative statements were based. And then there is the moment where I played it at a noontime concert in Spoleto, Italy, after a jetlagged night of absolutely no sleep, and all I remember is a really wild jazzy variation in the second movement, a sense of total technical command and lack of fear for that moment.

All day long we dredge into our brains to solve some impossible problem … we ask it “What is my total experience of 111?” or “What do I want to do with my life?” etc. etc. and somehow the brain is not a computer that freezes up or crashes in the face of impossible demands but bravely offers SOMETHING, anything, temporarily even, to make its owner (?) happy. And I find it fascinating to see what my brain offers me about that piece right now: what comes up from the murk and says hello, why is it important to me, what do I take for granted and what is missing. This little collection of memories, fragments of intense moments I shared with the piece (including a night when I practiced the opening trill the “wrong way,” a night when I was cramming the piece for a concert that was too soon, an exhausting evening in Bloomington after a long day playing it in Indiana Univ., etc.), these come up, and I extract from each some insight about the piece, something to add, something once ventured and never found again.

Not to belabor the point, but I feel like Beethoven’s compositional life must have been, at some point, like that. Asking his own brain an impossible musical question. Reaching into the murk (the world of compositional possibility) for one thing, one idea, change, something your brain offers you to do different; then so many consequences following on these little revolutions. Which is partly why we think of the searching, heaven-storming Beethoven, the questioner; which is not just the questioner of musical “tradition,” but the questioner of musical language, of expression itself, of how to attach ourselves onto some end of the impossible infinity of the questions we ask ourselves.

The Berg Chamber Concerto ends with four notes, F-G-A-B… I should say, it doesn’t end with those notes, but with their reverberation: a fading memory of those notes, what they used to sound like. The final scattered, scattering, disintegrating events of this piece are in fact directed by the composer to be timed to the pace of that fade; they need to be attuned to that slow vanishing. A series of quick running gestures throw themselves away into that persisting chord; against the very, very slow process of the sounds diminishing in the piano, we hear these ephemeral, ever shorter, fragments; a weird, disturbing disjunction of quick and slow; the slow gesture is, as always, more “powerful;” and so the last fragment “conforms,” does not fight the piano’s stubborn but softening pitches; the violin simply plays the same F-G-A-B, quickly, which we then barely still hear, as if an echo or shadow, in the piano (are we sure we still hear it? do we imagine it?) … an odd gesture, full of uncertainty of perception, for the final moments of a piece.

Those notes, as far as I can tell (and I do anticipate/dread corrective acidic commentary from theorists galore) first truly come to our attention at the beginning of the slow movement. Though I don’t play the slow movement I look at it with longing. I have played through its opening bars hundreds of times just for the pleasure; a mixed, intense pleasure; suffice it to say I often feel the need for a cold shower or cigarette afterwards. It is that good. Yet again Berg proves that the moment when the pianist stops playing is the best. I do not relish being replaced by such beauty.

Again, back to those notes, in proper order G-F-A-B. They emerge, cleverly, as if having been played for some time, out of the chaotic, accelerating waltz of the end of the first movement. There can be “no solution” to the circling and re-circling wildness of the first movement, no solution in that direction anyway; only the violin, entering from a totally different direction, can answer it, can make any progress. The switch of instruments is a metaphor for a different world, a voice “from the wilderness.”

To be technical (bear with me), the four notes the violin plays are separated by whole steps. Then it plays an ascending, sensual gesture of all the remaining eight pitches (only those damned 12 pitches in all of our Western music); a gesture which means anything which is NOT G-F-A-B; then it returns to the “motto” G-F-A-B. It keeps returning to these four, a broken record; this returning is its meaning; it is an answer, a refrain, a cipher. Its “whole-step-ness” (another made-up word which I stand by) is essential, and not just as a technical name, of course, but as a sign. Debussy is of course famous for tearing down the Western tonal structures of meaning with the simple whole-tone scale. Instead of directed dissonances and half-steps, instead of asymmetry and territory, there is the evenly spaced, “unbiased” world of notes all equidistant. It is as if he wanted to wipe the slate clean, to start fresh with sound. How else can you counteract the powerful German narratives, the tonal imperative? In this very German work of Berg, dissonances of course abound; it is a massive architecture of leaning and resolving half-steps; but these four notes G-F-A-B, without half-steps, represent therefore something separate, something uncontaminated by dissonance, resolution, direction. Which it is why it is so powerfully affecting that the violin keeps coming back to them, keeps seeking out the whole-steps, that “blank” sound. That is it for me, the sign: these notes, and I am influenced for sure in this by the fact of their being all “white keys” on the piano keyboard, are a blank, an absence. The piece keeps wanting to retreat, to come away from itself and its contrapuntal, functional madness, to find shelter in this nothing. And so, when you hear these same notes, persisting at the end, as a recurring answer to the little fragments, it is like an existential non-answer to all the piece’s questions, all the more powerful for the fact that the pianist need not replay the notes but simply let them resound, with the pedal (the piano stands by its earlier statement, nothing, no matter what you have to say about it). I don’t know whether to take comfort or not…

I’m reminded of these lines of Montale (trans. Jeremy Reed):

Then obliterate if you wish
the errors of a life,
as a sponge erases
the chalk marks on a blackboard.
I need to re-enter your circle,
find help in my fragmentation.

I eased the seat back a few degrees, gazed fondly at the crumbs of my now-departed muffin, sipped at my piping coffee-of-the-day, and savored the accelerating embrace of the train as it sailed up the west side of Manhattan, up the Hudson. Soon I would be in Bard, fulfilling my duties to some aspiring pianists. Meanwhile, as in life: enjoy the ride. To that end, I picked up my book, which I had chosen in a time-honored manner, rooting around the crowded shelf while putting on socks, shoes, looking frantically around the apartment for keys, etc.: an impulse read. And in the book, a college president was lecturing a prospective faculty member:

… we don’t punch a time-clock here, Miss Rejnuev, but we must ask you, in all conscience, not to emulate Bard and Sarah Lawrence and treat us as if you were a commuter…

I swear, I looked around the train guiltily. (Perhaps for some perching ghost of Mary McCarthy? for some accusatory fellow passenger?) I, commuter I, had been BUSTED by my own book. At least, I mused, some things never changed (the book written in 1951). How had it known, how had it schemed to be picked off the shelf?

But never mind, I managed to forget this eerie coincidence with the following hilarious passage about a French professor taking his students abroad:

As he sat sipping his vermouth and introducing himself to tourists at the Flore or the Deux Magots, the boys and girls under his guidance were being robbed, eloping to Italy, losing their passports, slipping off to Monte Carlo, seeking out an abortionist, deciding to turn queer, cabling the decision to their parents, while he took out his watch and wondered why they were late in meeting him for the expedition to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Returning home, usually minus one student at the very least, he always deprecated what had happened, remarking that there had been “a little mix-up” or that the Metro was confusing to foreigners.

All of Mary’s wry, caustic appraisal of academic politics, her magnum opus of the faculty meeting, her “Tenure Lost”, did not however spoil for me the scene on arrival in Bard, which seemed a sincere, ideal “quiet Saturday.” The students seemed quelled, pacified, content with their hangovers; I spied a girl in torn jeans on sunlit dorm steps with a notebook open, a pen, a serious grappling look on her face… ignoring the alluring sunny outspread November early afternoon … I walked to the music building through breezes, empty campus roads, students scattered widely, dispersed, their voices from afar, laughing. I felt so jealous of the girl with her empty notebook, though I often stare at empty notebooks myself. I wondered what she would write.

On the train ride home I was forced to watch the sun of that afternoon set, to experience piece by piece, in dimming red-orange light, the close-parenthesis of the day. In the train you cannot evade the light and the ending of that day was sad; it had been so beautiful, so opportune.

In Berg’s Chamber Concerto, towards the end of the final, very complicated movement, a rondo, Berg prunes away the complexity for a few clear glimpses of the preceding slow movement. It is a hackneyed maneuver–the “reminiscence”–and easily (in some works of Liszt, say) falls into bathos. Perhaps it is a question of how the reminiscence is approached, how it is “justified.” In this case they are not surging re-arrivals but something like removals (like dimming light). Every time I hear these moments, or play over their chords at my beautifully rebuilt piano (which seems particularly to “take to” the harmonies of this sunset piece), I get a fresh ache. Did Berg mean for the rest of the movement to sound, at that moment, like insane modern chatter, like the “wrong answer”? (The piece refutes itself). I thought to myself, while hearing this moment on my stereo: yes, the modern world IS numbing. I had no idea how numbing, until now. Relief and overwhelming sadness simultaneously, a wonderfully Viennese, heartbreaking contradiction … a piece definitely for the evening, not for perusal over a muffin in the morning, a piece for when you are slinking down the Hudson in the last reddish moments of a beautiful day and about to emerge into fluorescent light, into the crowded, anonymous no-man’s-land of Penn Station. Forgive me my metaphors.

I should probably create a whole separate blog to catalog reactions to my practicing of Berg’s Chamber Concerto. The elderly lady living down the hall from me, though often friendly, merely scowls these days when we meet by the elevator; she sullenly awaits more euphonious days. I am offending her, personally. But another young fellow’s mixed reaction was quite enjoyable. I closed and locked my door, and found him standing there, and he said “you’re the guy playing the piano all the time right?”

There was no denying it. I was caught red-handed. Only seconds ago I was retrograde-inversioning away (quit your quibbling, it’s close enough to a real word). I nodded.

It’s funny how some people feel the need to reassure you, without knowing you, that you are actually capable at your craft. As a musician, I suppose, you are by definition “handicapped,” provisional. He said, channeling Ward Cleaver, “You know it’s pretty good. Good work.” (Pregnant pause) “There’s some pretty strange stuff you’re playing though, pretty disjointed…”

I beamed at him. “Yes, isn’t it wild?”

He slowly asked, “Ummm. What is it?”

My best, enthusiastic, used-car-salesman smile: “It’s Alban Berg.” (No recognition) “One of those German Expressionists.” (Vague glimmer)

My enthusiasm caught him by surprise. He assumed (perhaps?) I was playing it out of obligation. My smile, the sense of delight in Berg I was trying to communicate to him, changed the expression on his face, from assurance to concern; he suddenly looked like the court psychiatrist in Law & Order assessing the competence of a mass murderer. Our downward elevator ride thus passed in uneasy silence, with several sidelong glances. To exacerbate the situation, I started humming one of the piece’s many disturbed waltz-tunes (I find myself wondering: can other dances be doomed? Or only waltzes?). I smiled at him again, especially wide, as he exited the elevator and (is this my imagination?) ran for the exit: 91st Street, escape.

And today, in Logan, Utah, I was practicing wildly in a very nice member of the faculty’s studio (and I had just finished proudly scrawling “Arnold Schoenberg” over a particular phrase); but his students were gathering outside for their impending studio class. At some point, they decided enough was enough, and a firm knock was heard. And in flounced perhaps seven girls, mostly blonde, smiling, and apologetic to interrupt me, but they had to have studio class. “It sounds good, though,” one said, as if I might think they were giving me the hook. They looked at me sympathetically. I smiled again, a complicated smile this time, and packed my things. The same one piped up, “that thing you were practicing, that’s really … interesting.” The others nodded, oddly. “What is it?” I rattled it off, “The Berg Chamber Concerto, for Piano Violin and Winds.” As so often happens, they were bored with the answer, perhaps a bit annoyed by its exactitude. I’m not sure what I should have said instead, how I should have played it. As it was, they looked confused, their eyes variously averted around the small studio, and I made my exit… No no I wanted to tell them, this is one amazing piece. But the door shut behind me and I had to walk back in the Utah sunshine singing doomed dances to myself.