The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Last night I dreamed that I had the most wonderful idea for a blogpost, and this morning no amount of coffee can bring it back. Black, black coffee; grey clouds; the wind came along last night and blew my neatly piled mail into a total chaos, a tempest of notifications and receipts. Demons, tricksters, loosening my tenuous grip on organization. I blame the rain. How can one fight it? One dark, humid, drippy day after another.

I am posting this in revenge against the rain, partly suggested by darkness (the sunless week past), partly just because it’s beautiful:

I experience alternately two nights, one good, the other bad. To express this, I borrow a mystical distinction: estar a oscuras (to be in the dark) can occur without there being any blame to attach, since I am deprived of the light of causes and effects; estar en tinieblas (to be in the shadows: tenebrae) happens to me when I am blinded by attachment to things and the disorder which emanates from that condition.

Most often I am in the very darkness of my desire; I know not what it wants, good itself is an evil to me, everything resounds, I live between blows, my head ringing: estoy en tinieblas. But sometimes, too, it is another Night: alone, in a posture of meditation, I think about the other, as the other is; I suspend any interpretation; I enter into the night of non-meaning; desire continues to vibrate, but there is nothing I want to grasp; this is the Night of non-profit, of subtle, invisible expenditure: estoy a oscuras: I am here, sitting simply and calmly in the dark interior of love.

…

X confides: “The first time; he lit a candle in a little Italian church. He was surprised by the flame’s beauty, and the action seemed less absurd. Why henceforth deprive himself of the pleasure of creating a light? So he began again, attaching to this delicate gesture (tilting the new candle toward the one already lit, gently rubbing their wicks, taking pleausre when the fire ‘took,’ filling his eyes with that intimate yet brilliant light) ever vaguer vows which were to include–for fear of choosing–‘everything which fails in the world.'”

–Roland Barthes

In an unrelated development, apparently we are now to seek tranquility in our dish soap:

I laughed in the aisle of the Duane Reade… The image of a tranquil dishwasher, therapized by Palmolive, smiling idiotically; smelling, scouring and scrubbing. Though the drugstore is supposedly a place one goes for health and personal care, why do I feel so often that everyone in there is up to no good? Other Manhattanites might understand my desire to re-write Dante’s Purgatory, placing most of the action inside a Duane Reade; the new location on 94th Street is suggestively cavernous, looping, illogical; one has to penetrate beyond cellular service, into the bowels of the building, in order to get the simplest things (soap, paper towels); the staff seem surly guardians of a dubious salvation; I myself often feel an urge to call a friend (some temporary Virgil) to help me “get through” my visit, to explain my path back out…

You’ll notice I’m in no mood to address the new Beethoven manuscript.

What better morning than oatmeal, juice, coffee, whatever CDs strike my fancy, and a pile of books (Bellow, Baudelaire, Montaigne) on my bed, while the clouds gloom it up outside? And playing a phrase of Schubert over and over, for kicks, and running to the piano, trying to figure out the harmonies in Rufus Wainwright. I know these hours (the first, “most productive” hours of the day) are sinful idleness, an egghead’s Eden, and only marginally my profession; I know that my own pleasure is unreasonable but it exists. Afterwards I do not feel a stomachache as I do after nachos, popcorn, etc. How can I harvest my own positive energy at these times for the world’s greater good? I must be plugged in there somewhere.

I am very insecure about what I’m about to do: “prove” a puppy love. Today, and yesterday, and the day before, I am truly loving Memphis Skyline from Rufus Wainwright’s album, Want Two. I am worried this blog contains nothing but love letters to pieces whose right to be loved is already beyond dispute (though these pieces are, therefore, loved less than they deserve–like old friends taken for granted). So, let me stick my neck out into dangerous territory of which I know little. Will this bring me any “street cred”?

I want to be specific (even rational) about this affection, not just gesture at it. It has to do with these lines:

So kiss me my darling
Stay with me till morning

Not noteworthy, maybe even banal? In fact,

A deliberate, unassuming cliché. Where does it come from … ? Nowhere and everywhere. I wouldn’t even think about it, wouldn’t bother about it (in the same sense you wouldn’t analyze a comma), except that it seems to be a subject of contemplation in the song: the song ITSELF submits this cadence to analysis. It does this by toying with cadential possibilities. The example above is the “basic” version–ending in a root position V chord (G)–but Rufus colors it most of the time with the third below, E:

And some of the time he goes further, adding a more disturbing, questioning, intruding note (B-flat):

The E (voiced carefully down) simply makes the cadence somewhat “multivalent,” softens its too-classical tonality. But if this E is a “coloration” of the dominant, the B-flat feels more like a “contradiction.” In music theory terms, the B-flat heads us in the other (the wrong?) direction, back towards the subdominant …

So, Rufus is toying with options, with shadings of this cadence–and the music keeps coming back to this incomplete cadence, almost irritatingly. (No matter what). Again and again starting tonic, going to dominant; each phrase a question, never really answered. No corresponding, replying phrase: no “consequent.”

It is in this consequent-free context that my magical moment appears. Towards the end of Memphis Skyline, the piano is ruminating (obsessively) over this same cadence. We hear it three times in a row! (The cadence is now isolated, seprated from the phrase, understood as “the point”). The first two times, the E is present, the B-flat is played; an impasse; an unanswerable contradiction; let’s try again. But the third time, the piano plays a conventional V, a good old-fashioned V-7, actually… sounds almost hymnic, barbershop quartet? … perhaps it will simply resolve, finally, this cadence, this obsession?

But Rufus, so close to the ground, seizes this opportunity to take off, to make a visit to an implication: the B-flat, that “contradiction.”

So, when this B-flat is heard a third time, it is not an accident, not a “wrong note” (though it has posed as one). Rufus, inspired by it, enters a third above this B-flat (“So … “), on a D; a high F tremolo is heard. Voila! A harmony: B-flat; D; F. Are we in “pure” B-flat major, is this what the B-flat has “meant” all this time?

Before answering that question, obliquely, another: If you were going to set those lines (“so kiss me my darling, stay with me till morning”), give them a melodic contour, would it be this?:

This is Rufus’ setting. (I have flattened out the rhythmic relationships to make a point). It seems like the setting of an idiot, someone with only three notes on his electronic keyboard. These (E, D, C) are “cadential” melodic notes … (Three Blind Mice, Lebewohl, Schenkerian 3-line) falling, relinquishing, and if only Rufus could settle on C, it could end, the tension could be resolved… but you can see that he keeps going over the three notes, reiterating the obvious. The texture explodes into shimmering, quiet, pulsing arpeggios. The whole purpose of this passage is to introduce a shifting cast of characters beneath these familiar notes (to think over the cadence!). Rufus visits upon these basic, relinquishing tones (E-D-C) a tremendous amount of expressive resistance. The melody’s desire to resolve (leave, depart, be finished, pass away) vs. the harmony’s desire to prolong? (“Stay with me till morning.”) And so each go-around has a different harmonic connotation… first D-C (“kiss me”):

Then back through E-D-C with an especially long wait on the beautifully harmonized D:

Then my favorite! He takes another spin through the 3 notes, with a fantastically unexpected bassline. Rufus must love this one too because the bass slides down from A to D, calling attention to itself. I always feel a little desire to jump around, to make some frenetic movement at this moment, because there is this supercharged static electricity for me here, some sense of repressed force:

And one last, incomplete, version… E E D … (where’s my C?)…

Don’t forget that that dominant cadence (from before we ever got into this beautiful mess) is still waiting to be resolved. Rufus has not forgotten. With that B-flat excursion, he merely wanted to make us forget; so we can be made to remember. He was written a purple patch. And on this last D (“-ning”) he seems to notice at once that the dominant’s time has come (though of course he has prepared it inexorably), and to want moreover to make the “simple dominant” as thrilling as all the rest has been. Wonderful, ranging scales in the bass, unexpected voicings, permutations of the dominant, the dominant is alive! And no simple ending either. At the moment of resolution, while the strings are still holding a suspension (C), a “wrong-note/right-note”, a muted trumpet enters with B. B and C blur against each other: another contradicted cadence.

I was on the phone with a good friend who told me, if I “ever ran into Rufus,” to tell him that the sucking, breathing sounds he makes between phrases in the live recordings are “very distracting.” Hopefully I will “run into” Rufus someday, if only to tell him how much I have enjoyed even just thinking about this one passage, but I will not pass on my friend’s advice. I sympathize with those sounds. If you have a simple melody note to sing, over complicated harmonies, there is a gap of meaning which you are dying to fill. I often take complicated breaths before simple notes at the piano, trying to put as much meaning into my little E or D or C as I can, as much as I feel is in there. It is never enough, and my moaning and gesturing and whatever body language I bring to the piano will never be enough either. But: the gap is thrilling. I am glad Rufus (someone out there!) is writing melody notes that have so much to yearn for, that are so incomplete. Listening to this acoustic desire, I wallow in my own desires and let them carry me to elation or melancholy, by turns. Isn’t that puppy love? QED.

Unearthed in my desperate attack on the mail, a program from the Great Lakes Chamber Festival, with texts:

Non c’e un unico tempo: ci sono molti nastri
che parelleli slittano
spesso in senso contrario e raramente
s’interseccano. E quando si palesa
la sola verita che, disvelata,
vienne subito espunta da chi sorveglia
i congegni e gli scambi. E si repiomba
poi nell’unico tempo. Ma in quell’attimo
solo i pochi viventi si sono riconosciuti
per dirsi addio, non arrivederci.

[Montale speaks of time in terms of parallel paths “that rarely intersect.” When these paths do cross, the observer experiences their intersection as a single moment, negating their multiplicity. Yet in that moment, the observer perceives that only addio (farewell) is possible, not arrivederci (see you again).]

The poem is by Eugenio Montale, the summary by Elliott Carter. Even this dispassionate, deliberately non-poetic summary (oddly, describing the poem from a place “once removed”) managed to blow me away, the night of the concert. Two days ago, when I came across it in the pile, it seemed less earth-shaking, but then yesterday it hit me again, full force, with one of those lovely non-insights. (Poetry not as a collection of insights, aphorisms, truisms, but as the expression of lack-of-knowledge.) It came in and out of focus, like a lens. You know there is a truth there, something that speaks to your experience. But you hesitate to nail it down. Once you have nailed it, it will seem less beautiful. Anyway, it is sufficiently “nailed” by the poem, right? (But something tells you you still want to know/name more.) I will chance a metaphor from my own daily experience: a piece of silverware falls behind the refrigerator, but you know this only from the sound, from the clunk; you cannot tell which; a knife, fork, spoon, spatula?; is it one of the essential utensils, that you cannot go another day without?; or can you wait till the next spring cleaning?; is it worth leaning, reaching blindly in the near-dark brought on by the burnout of my halogen bulb?

Such hesitations do not trouble one of my dear friends, for which I tease her unfairly. In the midst of my gesticulating ecstasies on a passage of Roland Barthes, she will fix me with the gaze of a woman judging vegetables at the market, and ask “but what does it mean?” And I will stumble to explain. In the process I discover how little of its meaning I possess, perhaps even how little I want it to mean anything at all. Curse your pesky questions and meanings. I am often satisfied if it simply beautiful, well-phrased, intriguing, if it has the “appearance of meaning;” I am a dandy of ideas, like the man in the gold leather zip-up boots in the Barney’s catalogue I also recently unearthed.

So, annoyed, I wait for my friend to leave and then I pursue her question in solitude. This is often productive, but of course I never admit to my friend that her skeptical question was helpful. (Except now). I played through a recital program for her once, which included Beethoven’s last Sonata, Op. 111. And I came to the Arietta:

Well, it got better as it went along, but the opening theme really didn’t “click.” I was tentative, didn’t have the sound I wanted, was playing on edge. This theme is so spare. If you don’t “get” the essence of that basic motive (C G G), you’re building a pretty massive structure on sand. Well, I finished, and my friend gave me one of those looks again, a look with a small portion of “so what?” I’m sure it was not intentional; it just seeped out of her. My (internal) reaction: don’t you get it? This is a towering masterpiece of Beethoven? But how could she “get” what I didn’t give to her? More relaxed, and by way of illustration, I replayed the opening theme for her. Ah, if only all recitals were the second time around! It was now solid, and she looked illuminated. The theme seemed beautiful to her, now; but they were the same notes as before.

So, perhaps, there IS a point to all this practicing and crap. (But what IS it? The illumination of meanings? Communication to others? Fidelity to a score? Preservation of cultural heritage? Exploration of the self? I don’t want to nail it down.) But you never know when it will precisely pay off. The other day, spontaneously, my friend Eddie asked me on stage to play the final waltz of Davidsbündlertänze, to illustrate a point he was making in his lecture on Schumann. Well I hadn’t really prepared it, but I think anyway it was one of the best times I had ever played it, and I felt I “got” it in a way that I had not before. It was a pleasure to play it and simultaneously listen to it (a rare performing pleasure), and simultaneously also–learn from it. Time sort of stopped; threads intersected; many past practicings came together, unexpectedly. And at that moment, I also knew something of this epiphany was irrecoverable… what I was feeling was definitely not a confident “see you later,” such as you bid to a friend who you are soon to meet for coffee, lunch, whatever, but was much closer to “goodbye.”

A top ten list of things prone to put me in a foul mood would certainly be headed by 1) my mail, paperwork, bills, matters of accounting; 2) daytime television after 10 AM (not coincidentally when Charmed ends). So: off goes the TV. But I have to confess it took some time and mental energy for me to choose some music to put on the stereo. I cannot deal with the mail in silence.

I reasoned thus: if I’m going to be grumpy, let’s take it all the way! So on went some late Schubert: Schwanengesang. It was the perfect choice. Admittedly, long periods went by where no documents were fondled, where I lay on the floor, feet propped up on my bed, blood rushing to my head, eyes closed, and I pretended to myself I was productive in a worldly way, while letting the music wash over me. It was a nice relief from the effort of trying to produce the music myself. Nice that I was patient enough to truly listen, and admire. The bubble of my ego must have temporarily burst.

Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise are both pretty familiar to me, but this last cycle (not really a cycle), even after many listenings, still feels wonderfully, powerfully alien. Not confined to a single plot, or dramatic arc, it ranges from subject to subject, from world to world: the familiar dialogue of lover with nature, with the brook; meditations on the unhappiness of Atlas; a man confronting his shadow; a barely-sketched-in scene of a tearful, fateful encounter on a beach (between lovers? friends? who knows?); the tender cliché of the letter, posted in longing and love. All these people, characters, populating Schubert’s plane of existence; they would never meet in “real life.” The music is often classical, no doubt; it calls on its own classicism, say, for comfort, and sometimes simply because there is nothing else; its simplicity is often heartbreaking; but between the classical lines (exploiting them) the austerity occasionally takes over and leads to bizarre, spare harmonic and melodic moments… the equivalent of musical empty space? I imagined a stretch of desert, in which ruins of Greek temples (disturbingly) rise from the ground intermittently instead of mountains, rocks, or mesas. Was the blood rushing too much to my head?

I don’t think the desert that far-fetched. There is definitely a sense of being on a frontier: at the edge of truly desperate, extended emotional states, depressive places. The one-two-three punch of Die Stadt, Am Meer and Der Doppelgänger … I mean, really… how are we supposed to survive these three songs in a row? Why don’t I just stop listening and go shopping at the Gap? I feel like Mahler took the DNA of Am Meer off to his lab in the mountains, mad scientist that he was, and cloned it into his entire, angst-ridden oeuvre. If I were a more diligent blogger, I would find the passages in Mahler directly copied from this song and display them (trophy-bearing hunter of lineages) proudly on this page. It is an extraordinary song; it seems to distill some Viennese vein of thought, of musical pain; distilled it enough that Mahler could then dilute it without loss. I had listened to this song for years, not knowing the text (for shame), and therefore was surprised to see what was there:

… The tears poured from your loving eyes.

I saw them fall onto your hand, and fell on my knees,
and drank the tears from your white hand.

From that hour my body has wasted away,
and my spirit is dying of desire.
The wretched woman has poisoned me with her tears.

First reaction? THIS poem is the one Schubert devoted THAT music to? It did not seem to “deserve” it. The music seemed more metaphysical than that, not just a lover’s farewell (?… which it could be, but may not). But the composer, in setting it to music, has reread the poem for you… has found preemptive meanings. I began to think more about “my spirit is dying of desire” (“die Seele stirbt von Sehnen”–what an unbelievably German line), the triumvirate of tears, poison and desire… Things became clearer; the barbed, enigmatic poem began to grow into the song.

And I ran across these lines from Montaigne:

Why does no one confess his vices? Because he is still in their grip now; it is only for a waking man to tell his dream. [Seneca].

The diseases of the body become clearer as they increase. We find that what we were calling a cold or a sprain is the gout. The diseases of the soul grow more obscure as they grow stronger; the sickest man is least sensible of them.

Diseases of the soul. The man who sees his terrifying double image; who is poisoned by his own desire; visited by apparitions of loss. I feel I can connect Schubert’s spare austerities, these extenuated harmonies, those enharmonic slippages, to this sense of encroaching disease…classical harmonies and phrases visited by anomalies, by small and large symptoms. Another image (hallucination?) came to mind while my feet were propped: the music, or was it the way it was being performed… had the eerie quality of a child singing, but the anachronistic sentiments of a dying, hopeless old man. Does the child believe what he is singing? Is Schubert sensible of this disease (this disconnect, this rift), or is he too sick to tell us his dream?

You can see how low the mail can take me. Wow. You’ll notice I blame the mail and not Schubert.