The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

When I say American I mean uncorrected by the main history of human suffering.

–Saul Bellow

Such as myself, in this photo (yes that is the hat from Lubbock):

I have mixed up two poems in my head, poems about mixing it up. One is Harmonie du Soir:

Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!

Sounds and perfumes circle in the evening air;
Melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo!

and the other, Correspondances:

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

Like extended echoes which mingle far away
In a mysterious and profound unity,
Vast as the night and as light,
Perfumes, colors and sounds answer each other.

A recent leak in my bathroom ceiling has led to a new, mildewy scent in my apartment, and this morning I decided to begin again using my French coffee press. Stepping in my PJ’s from bedroom to living room, I got the full, mixed-up effect … the lovely smell of ground coffee, the heated-metal smell of the cheap stove in my apartment, the grassy mildew smell, and probably others too faint to mention. All of which was bound to conjure mornings in 1992, in my student slum house in Bloomington, at Hunter and Highland, permeated with moistures past and present, with baseboard heaters, sometimes with the smell of cut grass, and always full of coffee grounds and us three students jolting up. Memories particularly of “how I heard music then.” Fascinating. The famous, heartbreaking quintet from Mozart’s Idomeneo among these memories: music that seems otherwordly, aristocratic, supernatural. Heard in a hideous cinderblock library listening carrel, frantically preparing for a final exam (M 451, “Mozart Operas”), but wideeyed with wonder. How to connect from mold to Mozart?

Coffee in hand, I begged off my sunny, grassy, studential memories of Idomeneo and turned the stereo on–again–to the Rufus Wainwright disc my friend lent me yesterday. Like an archaeologist picking through ruins, I looked at what needed to be done in my apartment. Meanwhile, Rufus crooned:

I don’t know what I’m doin
I don’t know what I’m sayin
I don’t know why I’m watchin
all these white people dancin

As if on cue (and this was the disturbing part, the part that made me feel some force out there had already contemplated my reaction, was toying with me), my alarm CD clock came on (must have forgotten to turn it off?), and good old white Ignaz Friedman starts waltzing away. (“Valse melancolique et languoureux vertige!”) Battling sound systems! The combination of Rufus somewhat pretending to be a modern Schubert, and Friedman playing a souped-up suite of Schubert waltzes was unexpected and horrible. Rufus began to sing about “waltzin” around that time too. I put down my coffee. I was just contemplating a blog entry about the Schubertian harmonic twists in Rufus, and other classical quotes… also about the suspension of disbelief required to be touched by a song rhyming “cruisin” and “bruisin”… but the cacophony seemed to want to dissuade me from these easy amusements: it was a deep, ugly mass of conflicting sound. Like a nightmare, I wanted to interpret it.

I was being ambushed by unexpected combinations in my own house. The little universe I have set up here at 91st and Broadway, though mainly detritus, still has gravitational effects and mysterious laws. Smells, check. Sounds, check. Which senses, which correspondences, were left, and how would they be linked?

Baudelaire’s combos are tremendous, unnerving, they never cease to send me:

L’innocent paradis, plein de plaisirs furtifs…
[That innocent paradise, full of furtive pleasures…]

Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
Comme une fleur s’épanouir.
[And heaven watched the splendid carcass
unfolding like a flower.]

Et que de l’horizon embrassant tout le cercle
Il nous verse un jour noir plus triste que les nuits;
[and when filling the whole circle of the horizon,
the sky pours out upon us a black daylight more gloomy than nights]

Something about the Rufus CD–even before the intrusion–unsettled me, brought Baudelaire to mind. It is, on occasion, so close to so much classical music; he summons its ways too easily? too glibly? and passes by. This makes me queasy at times, and other times is simply silly, but other times truly haunts me, gets me in the deepest places. In the song I have mentioned, there is a beautiful deceptive cadence just at the moment in the text where the narrator reveals his “underside”… this makes me very happy … someone out there also knows this stuff, thinks this element of text-setting is still important … but there is something falsely quoted about it too, something misattributed. I can sense a modern person re-hearing, and placing in the past, the tropes I have tried to make present to myself (in a sense, my whole world). The lostness of my repertoire is made evident to me. Its usage is stylized, and I am forced to contemplate a cynical definition of style–arbitrary combinations, at arbitrary times. If you dig Schubert up like this, does he open “like a flower,” or is this just a holographic image?

I’m in love. Can I just say that? I’m over the moon for Humboldt’s Gift. Will it last? Only time can tell. I have a book on my shelf entitled “Can Love Last?” by a perceptive, dead psychoanalyst. I have read it several times, remembering nothing.

Actually the last five days, their heavy servings of airports, subways, and hotels, have made of me a hungry, swift reader, a promiscuous lover of books. Books feel like rapids: I jump in them and am dangerously off. In Cold Blood went down my mental gullet in two disturbing days, with flashes of joy when the style zoomed. And now the late Saul Bellow, with whom I had dinner twice (I knew nothing but a name then)…

Bless the subway. When you are on the subway to/from Brookyn–a journey of 45 minutes or more from my house–you really have no choice but to read; it is a protected, hurtling interval; you cannot practice, clean, blog, or call people back. You are relieved of your contractual obligations, freed by an enclosing car.

But now, today, I have constricting choices; I am at home; the pile of mail beckons. Projects, projects. My beloved friends are calling, worried, where am I?, am I OK?, and I am reading. (Recovering, perhaps.)

Is reading so irresponsible? Today I saw an intriguing book in the Juilliard bookstore: Joseph Polisi’s The Artist as Citizen. It tugged at me; I grabbed it, felt its dimensions, then dropped it like a hot potato. I sensed and dreaded a whole new raft of obligations, a whole new role: how I could transform myself into an upstanding whatever. A pianist with a conscience. Now, The Citizen as Artist: THAT’S a book I want to read! Polisi’s book would be responsible reading, for me; which is precisely why I don’t want to read it.

My bibliophilia saved me–if nothing else–from television, in Louisville. I got no further than the introductory channel, the hotel’s default media launching point… On this channel, a woman was selling Pay-Per-View movies. But she wasn’t selling them in a sexy way; she was EXPLAINING them. What is worse than crap? The explanation of crap. Standing in a faux living room, she explained that “the makers of ‘Batman Begins’ were faced with a unique problem.” Oh yes, what was that? How to spend their money? No, she went on: “How to bring freshness to a story that has seen so many incarnations.” Such a unique problem indeed (almost every piece of literature ever written). Actually what she really said was much more inane than that, my brain simply won’t recall it… “we explore the young Batman,” who in turn “explores the boundaries of good and evil,” “tries to understand himself as a superhero,” and–of course–“comes of age.”

One feels like an idiot pointing out its idiocies. I turned the TV off, for days, favoring unintroduced books. What bothered me most was her insistence on a tone, the way she tried in her earnest way to elevate her subject-matter, to take whatever piece of drivel and toss explanatory sauce on it and serve it up like a real meal. Today’s Special. Just like TNT replays a movie, and calls it a “New Classic.” Ah, oxymoron! No: you have to earn it, you can’t market it into remembrance.

I have verged into rant, doubtless at the subconscious behest of my new love Bellow. As a classical musician surrounded by a non-classical world, I sometimes get touchy, even misanthropic. (Is there a word like “misanthropic,” applicable to a prevailing cultural milieu?) I love my books; I want to murder my TV. Today, though in love, I am grumpy and recovering and staring at my pile of mail (ever more daunting) and having to deal with real life, and therefore retreating into safe, magical books (like musical scores without notes). The outside world–for instance, people with double-wide strollers in Starbucks–unpleasant intrusion. I think this passage from Humboldt’s Gift is applicable, and incredible:

For after all Humboldt did what poets in crass America are supposed to do. He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide. He plowed himself under. Okay. So did Edgar Allan Poe, picked out of the Baltimore gutter. And Hart Crane over the side of a ship. And Jarrell falling in front of a car. And poor John Berryman jumping from a bridge. For some reason this awfulness is peculiarly appreciated by business and technological America. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar sytem. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either. Look at these good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.” So this, I was meditating, is how successful bitter hard-faced and cannibalistic people exult.

Wow, that’s harsher than I remember from the first read-through. Especially, the end. Rest assured I am not feeling that harshly myself today… except towards my pile of mail. After all, I’m in love.

For the first time, a reader has posted a comment, in essence “blogging” about something that happened to me–something I was planning to blog about–BEFORE I HAD A CHANCE to do so. I can’t decide if I’m angry about this, touched, or simply amused:

There was a magical moment around the time of the “tripped out” Sarabande. In the silence right before you started playing the Sarabande, one could hear sirens from a distance. Then the dance began with a hauntingly blurred not-quite-arpeggiated chord. The sirens became a bit louder. The music proceeded into what could best be described as a delirium. Soon, the boat started rocking. I could not tell what was driving what – the music’s intensity making the barge pull against its moorings; the waves on the East River driving the already fidgety Sarabande into flights of further frenzy; or merely a cosmic coincidence. In any case, I was breathless.

All this is true. And there is more. Last evening, on the Barge, I began the Sarabande of Bach’s 6th Partita to the accompaniment of distant sirens, which persisted, increased … And then the boat began to shake frighteningly, noisily, excessively, as I ranged towards the movement’s more extenuated moments. It did feel like a strange coincidence, or a conspiracy. I couldn’t see the cause of the shaking, or of the sirens; in fact, I saw nothing; I kept my eyes painfully, intently closed. It was a tour de force of distraction; all the forces of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the East River seemed arrayed between me and Bach, and I had to keep staring him (blindly) in the face, holding the thread taut.

You will not believe what I did: I began to think of whoever’s tragedy motivated the sirens (what could it have been? some accident?) and tried to connect it to the heavy-hearted Sarabande. I couldn’t; it was both too abstract and too maudlin. (Too selfish? Using anything for my performance.)

Then (it is a long movement) I began to think of the music as an antidote to the sirens… a small battle was drawn. I couldn’t drown out the sirens (they were external to the sacred, floating performing space: renegades), but I could try to make my phrases more compelling, more meaningful. It is hard to battle against a sound that was designed to penetrate no matter what, a sound bred for irritation and attention: only possible by fighting on “your own terms.” And it was interesting, because the distractions were so great as sometimes to feel like they literally “got between” me and the music, like a wall, or like static which overwhelms bits of a transmission. I would miss words, lose meanings. I had to climb over the wall repeatedly to get back into the music’s syntax each time. So there were ephemeral gusts of mental effort, where I climbed back into relevance, tried to sum things up even more cogently than before… because I knew I only had “that moment.”

So there you go, blog reader, now you know what I was thinking. I often get that question after the concert (“what are you thinking about?”), and often the answer is quite dull, technical, or too complex to be answered in words. How do you cultivate the mental process of performing (what to think about, what to concentrate on) over 30 years? How do you summarize this to someone in 15 seconds? Ah, yes. Nice impossible questions. But last night was an exception, and I’m happy to finally answer this question in a reasonable, non-paradoxical way.