The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

What a wonderful word is “moot”… I imagine a map like Tolkien’s, of Middle Earth, with a land named Moot, to which all irrelevant comparisons and questions are banished; or perhaps they simply choose to live in Moot, like some people choose to live in Idaho. There they would live, exchanging non sequiturs, while the rest of us pursue our linear, logical ways.

Someone came up to me the other day after a Brahms g minor Piano Quartet performance and wondered why Brahms insisted on putting the mutes on the strings in the second movement. A perfectly reasonable question, I suppose (wouldn’t the strings be able to play louder without them? wouldn’t they have a greater emotional/dynamic range?) but to me it was moot. And I struggled against its mootness: my face, I am afraid, assumed that strained expression it gets when I am attempting to appear to consider something reasonably… something which I am aching to rudely dismiss. But something about this question was familiar, echoed within me, and I vaguely remembered moments from my many rehearsals of this piece, listening to string players discuss who should be muted, for how long, and why.

Hard experience has taught me often to put on my own mutes when matters of “string playing” are being discussed in rehearsal. Unless earnestly implored, I will never offer my thoughts, for instance, on bowings or fingerings or slides. I learned this a) from being yelled at, and b) from my own irritation, for example, when a string player (who also plays piano) will suggest some pedaling or fingering to me. This latter is especially irritating if the fingering or pedaling is good, and I must think up some extravagant, false reason to disprove their insights. Just kidding, sort of.

So, I tend to “zone out” when this mute question is discussed. I look benignly at the ceiling, or I think abstractly about how I will play some phrase later on in the movement, and when I feel the string players’ eyes rest on me some minutes later, I smile my best smile and agree with whatever they have decided, even though I have very very strong feelings on the matter. For me, the whole movement must be inward, not too fast particularly, and never going out of a certain emotional frame… something recalled, something seen from a distance, slightly blurred, slightly worn down by experience, time, melancholy, or thought. The muting of the strings perfectly expresses this quality, and if occasionally I tend to play a chord too loud in the movement, it is never without severely reproaching myself afterwards. The mutes are synonymous with the movement then, the exact sonic equivalent of its emotional intent, and so to ask “why mute the strings?” … well, to me it is like asking “why is blue blue”?

I am reminded of past witnessed mootnesses: my friend M. from grad school complaining that they were too cruel to Falstaff after a performance of the eponymous Verdi opera; and, a fellow faculty member at Indiana University wondering why Beethoven had to write that “ugly” pedaling in the last movement of the “Waldstein” Sonata. She/he was referring to the long, magnificent pedal markings in the main theme of the rondo, which indicate a blurring of the tonic and dominant. In both cases, what is questioned is what seems to me the essence, the most beautiful thing, the quality which makes the theme/work transcendent, unique, its reason-for-being.

And so these questions are not so much “moot” as strangely central; they challenge the root, the core. To be fair, then, to the very intelligent person who asked this moot mute question that I am unfairly dissecting, it is the most important question one can ask.

And anyway the post-concert schmooze is an absolute Invasion of the Moot. Everything seems moot after you have just played away for forty-five minutes at a giant romantic epic… or after any performance, when you descend or ascend into the green room and people mill about and pick up on little moments from your performance or your outfit or whatever tangent they can find. And sometimes I wish I could write down all the moot things people say, and make a compilation; it would be hilarious, or tragic, or both.

Wing carcasses were everywhere, and red, crumpled remains of napkins. As I brought the final wing to my mouth, and spread it with extra spicy sauce, I had the first pangs of end-of-summer sadness. As Proust might point out, I knew they were the “first pangs” precisely because I had had them before: because they resonated with past end-of-summer experiences, and this made them merge past and present in a powerful way, which took me by surprise and reminded me that although experience repeats itself, it can do so while feeling absolutely new.

And: the smallest thing can trigger the biggest sensations. I will mock myself: I found myself, against all odds, cleaning my room and the sight of a dry cleaning tag made me tear up, slightly. It was a dry cleaning receipt from the day before. It was a last-minute, desperate, pathetic attempt to get my white tux jacket recovered from its sea of wrinkles. So my thoughts ran: never, never again would I (probably) go back to that same dry cleaners, with that same person, and feel the same way. The summer is over! Now, that white tux jacket will go into the closet, be unused, dusty, till the next summer… I felt pity for the poor jacket, alone like us all … And so on, yadda yadda. I was disgusted with myself, I laughed, even as I let the dry-cleaning nostalgia wash over me. (What other blog would discuss dry cleaning nostalgia? Tell me!) It reminded me suddenly of the moment in the hilariously horrible movie The Day After Tomorrow when the father and son were reunited at last after much idiotic tribulation in the frozen library, and I looked over at my friend C., and she was crying a little, she couldn’t help herself, and she saw me seeing this, and saw a slightly mournful expression on my face as well, and burst into laughter with her tears; I laughed with her, helplessly.

The chicken wing was, by the way, purely incidental to my sadness; it was no madeleine. Probably it was the breeze, a smell in the breeze, a way the sunshine hit me in the little courtyard where we were eating, and the kind of sudden realization that that night was the last concert (which calls to mind the seemingly infinitely far away starting point)–no matter how well you know something, you must at some point know it “for real.” These knowings are completely irrational and have their own timings.

I’m trying to connect a thread here. Really. Let me hit one more moment. An Oberlin night, fifteen years ago … walking along one of its tree-lined, perfectly quiet streets … I looked up from my careless dorm-bound footsteps, into the glow of the living room of a house, where several students were gathered, as if to celebrate simply the light of their own selves. On one boy’s face–at that precise moment–I saw the birth of a smile, the turn of his head and the softening of his features in recognition of some affinity, some accord; his hand reached out beyond the window’s frame.

Wanting to be the one in the window is a futile, inchoate longing, and a literary/artistic cliche, a “trope”: the man (the wanderer, die Winterreise, “das ist ein Floten und Geigen” from Dichterliebe) stuck outside, looking in, seeing the conviviality of others, which brings home all the more forcefully the loneliness of the observer. The observer=the artist, of course… or just anyone, who, by the act of observing, and by nature of being separate, becomes (temporarily) an artist.

OK, lost the thread again! I keep wandering down the little avenues the thoughts suggest, rather than lumping them all together. (The taut thread of my summer is loose, and my brain is amok.) I am looking through the window in Oberlin… and this is a spatial metaphor for the sense I have of the brightness of the past, the idealization of memory. The past appears to be complete, enclosed, lit, separate, unreachable, “not your destination” … like the living room in my story. But we all know exactly how boring it can be to actually walk into the living room we have seen from the street. So, whatever I saw that night actually does not belong to they who were gathered there (living those perfect, idealized, students-gathering lives); whatever “actually went on” was surely not what I saw through the window; what I saw, and wanted, belongs entirely to me. And so too the essence of those past moments for which a dry cleaning tag may seem like a no-trespassing sign. Knock again, and something will open.

Tonight I walked home along streets of Portland, Maine eerily similar to those in Oberlin (hence this stream of consciousness); no windows beckoned but the atmosphere of the street at night was very striking… almost tense in its tranquility! Tomorrow, a plane carries me back to New York and a total chaos of familiar faces and activities, concerts, etc. In Manhattan there are so many glowing windows that you cannot abandon yourself to the longing for any one…

Those who, like I, go to a more than a few different festivals during the summer (there is a more indelicate term for this) know the phenomenon of a “host family.” Like viruses, we musicians invade the homes of our hosts (ostensibly for the purpose of “playing concerts”), raid their provisions, make use of their facilities, and then flee for the next fully-stocked home. I imagine like viruses we occasionally leave our hosts feeling a bit dazed, not exactly tip-top, and it may take 7-10 days for them to recover from our “visits.” Advice for these hosts: no need for the doctor; simply bed rest and lots of fluids, and try to stay away from musicians for the time being.

Sometimes, like in certain species of tree frog (I am entirely making this up), the host and hosted develop a symbiotic relationship in which the virus appears to be viewed benignly by the host. I am not kidding. Thus the other day I was practicing Bach partitas in one of the most beautiful, vast, serene rooms imaginable… wood everywhere, curving, graceful staircases, enormous, magisterial fireplace, subtly Asian furnishings, windows looking out over hills to distant water… and, as I say, I was invading this space with Bach. On his way to the shower, my host apparently paused. I noticed him, then, wandering around (extremely aimlessly) in a towel, with a camera, up and down the central staircase of the main hall, then off into the distance, then up close–so close that he was soon filming me from behind, right behind my left shoulder, at which point I became vaguely self-conscious, and began missing quite a few notes in the gigue of the 5th Partita. Then came the magnificent moment, the perfect response to my blooper: in a saucy voice, still filming, he said: “close.”

“… but no cigar” would have been superfluous. A host who knows when you are missing notes in a complex work of Bach is rare, and a host who is willing to say so, point-blank, in a towel: rarer still. Then, he began bearing gifts: at some point he came in with an espresso; would I prefer a cappuccino?; an impromptu extraordinary lesson in foaming milk ensued (which began “when I was trying to stop using coke back in the 70s…”); at a later point he asked me if I wanted some pasta (his wife, in another room, separating herself gracefully from this delightful folly); I declined; minutes passed; he then emerged, grinning, with a beautiful steaming bowl of noodles emanating the summery scent of fresh pesto; I did not decline but eagerly dined. I expected him at some point to bring out frankincense and myrrh. I was a pampered practicer, and, somehow, I managed to play through all the Partitas, and the diversions served merely to focus my inner lens. Each new movement seemed a miracle, even the ones I knew to tedium, and his delight in the “mathematics of the staircase, and the house, and the music, like playing out the house” was contagious. Like a virus, contagious delight: lubricant of the universe.

They are gone now, leaving us the house to ourselves–often the privacy can feel like a blessing, but in this case (?) a loss. I sit here, foaming milk in that special newly-learned way, and ponder symbiosis, and the sad fact that I must get off my butt and do some serious practicing.

Over my third espresso this morning, I noticed that the penultimate paragraph of last eve’s blog entry could be characterized as nostalgia about nostalgia, in other words, “God I miss the good old days when I used to miss the good old days.” I’m trying to think of other examples of such meta-nostalgia… musical or otherwise. Blog-readers? Observe: I am now blogging about my own blogging.

You’ll notice that I chose Strauss in those early Oberlin days; that was before I graduated to the turbocharged, “Extra Strength” nostalgia of Mahler–now with 30% more personal vulnerability and despair! Currently, Brahms Op. 116 #4 will do nicely, thanks.

Caffeinated, I looked back at my first blog entry and envied its brevity. Do other readers feel the same? (Ominous silence.) I just got off the phone with a friend who apparently went so far as to PLAY THROUGH some of the musical examples in my Mozart blog at the piano, but this effort, or my prose, exhausted her, and–as she put it–she got “caught up” in Dirty Dancing and stopped reading halfway. Then, inexplicably, she moved from Dirty Dancing to poems of Neruda. Which suggests the following, ascending order of artistic interest:

My blog
Dirty Dancing
Pablo Neruda

Am I as far below Dirty Dancing as Neruda lies above? Sad, but perhaps not as sad as this picture of an RV camp moved into the environs of Mahler’s famous hut where he composed the Third Symphony. Thank you, Alex Ross, for that final reminder of the destruction of all that is sacred. At least the hut makes me feel less bad about the size of my own apartment.