The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

I’m having a weird sensation tonight. My last day in Vermont, I felt as though I had a million kazillion things to write about, material for an infinity of blogs, and I felt this immense desire to write it all down (no way to get it down fast enough). Now I have had four days to “recover” in the city, and I feel that the valves that were open are now closed, closing, vanishing. My body is awake, sniffing around like a dog on the hunt, restless, aggressive, but my mind has no clue, is a neglectful, lazy master. So that my prey–the ideas I had, their realizations–have had the luxury of running far away, since the dogs do not follow closely; they scurry and find their impregnable hiding places.

But, I am posting anyway.

In one of my very favorite poems, Pound (as “translator”) alternates visions of joyful meetings and hopeless farewells. There seems to be no structure, except this chain, this gobbledygook of “we met, then we left, then we met, then we left…” ad infinitum. And each time it seems like the last farewell, and then somehow they manage to meet again, and the meeting is wonderful again, but different–each time different/same (Barthes’ “let us begin again”). The chain calls to mind for me the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which alternates what seem to be happy, if loaded, memories (nostalgic lyrical passages) with premonitions of death. They were written very close to the same time, if you don’t count that Pound was working (loosely, rhapsodically) from Chinese verse well over a thousand years old. We can well understand preoccupation with farewell and death in the period just before and during World War I, but how do we understand this episodic structure? In the Mahler, I find it difficult to settle on the “most important” memory, the “most catastrophic” premonition; the tale is too long for an abstract, for an outline, too unmanageable to graph or compare… it is a series of events, cycles, uncategorizable in some ways like life. Writing out “life” skirts tedium, and it is a miracle that I don’t find either work tedious, though I feel and love their loosenesses intensely, like a stretched-out, worn out piece of clothing that you wear into the ground. So that when they meet the first time–

By the south side of the bridge at Ten-Shin.

–and–

… were drunk for month on month, forgetting the kings and princes.
Intelligent men came drifting in from the sea and from the west border,
And with them, and with you especially
there was nothing at cross purpose,
And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing,
If only they could be of that fellowship…

–I am not at all spoiled for the later times, when

In the storied houses of San-Ko they gave us more Sennin music,
Many instruments, like the sound of young phoenix broods.
The foreman of Kan Chu, drunk, danced
because his sleeves wouldn’t keep still.

–and the still later time:

Pleasure lasting, with courtezans, going and coming without hindrance,
With the willow flakes falling like snow,
Adn the vermilioned girls getting drunk about sunset,
Adn the water, a hundred feet deep, reflecting green eyebrows…

–for each time Pound’s brutal ending to the festivities is as beautiful as brutal can be–

With that music playing …
And I, wrapped in brocade, went to sleep with my head on his lap,
And my spirit so high it was all over the heavens,
And before the end of the day we were scattered like stars, or rain.

–or–

… then I was sent off to South Wei,
smothered in laurel groves,
And you to the north of Raku-hoku,
Till we had nothing but thoughts and memories in common.

–or–

And the wind lifting the song, and interrupting it,
Tossing it up under the clouds.
And all this comes to an end.
And is not again to be met with.

This (the Exile’s Letter from Pound’s collection of translations entitled Cathay) is the power of alternation; each phrase (to perpetrate musical semantics on a poem) concludes with a “deceptive cadence,” a denial (party’s over), the opposite direction, a reversal; but Pound’s language is most assured, most vivid at these moments. The awful recurrences of reality, necessity, the need to part, the impossibility of being together, coincide with the most beautiful, clear, lyrical nodes in the verse. Including this final, unbelievable passage:

And if you ask how I regret that parting:
It is like the flowers falling at Spring’s end
Confused, whirled in a tangle.
What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,
There is no end of things in the heart.

Now, at 35, I can see something peculiar in the fact that as an Oberlin student, from the tender age of 16, I would indulge in the last days of each school year in a nostalgic free-for-all: I had a tape of Strauss’ Four Last Songs which I would blast again and again out my dorm windows, and it had also the trio from Rosenkavalier, and there was some late Brahms piano music also, I think, and oh I forget what else. And my then off-again-on-again significant other Polly would come into my room and make herself useless while I packed, interjecting snide comments, and I would babble at her about memories and the year gone by and where has it gone. Time flew and “all this comes to an end and is no longer to be met with.” Nowadays I am a little less prone to this sort of thing, though it takes me unawares. I have been listening today to CDs of my Marlboro performances (Mozart Wind Quintet), presumably to educate myself, but partly of course to enjoy myself. Oh God you’re thinking, he’s having an attack of Marlboro nostalgia. No. I found myself listening and thinking “this is what I have said, this is what I have done, this is what I am aiming for…” (musically) and though I like some of it, most of me thinks, “There is no end of things in the heart,” and a small corner of me wonders: “What is the use of talking”? Cause there is always more in the phrase to say, and it’s exhausting. The Mozart phrase I was talking about yesterday on the blog: I listened to myself play it with a certain conviction, and was immediately convinced of an absolutely opposite way of playing/thinking about it.

Some music tries to get away from alternation and dualism, overblown oppositional rhetoric, to the endless gradual process (say, Steve Reich), so that the changes are “unnoticeable” which is all very cool. But perhaps unlifelike? Piano-Phase feels like music to me, while Mahler’s Ninth feels like life. Changes are very noticeable, I’d say. “Something else” always happens. Again and again. (And we begin again). Yet another premonition, yet another memory. Last week in Vermont was something, and this week in New York is other, to be sure; I can’t for the life of me decide which one to be nostalgic for.

Last post’s concerns: words containing layers of metaphors and connections… words as fossil poems, poems which can be dug up again, reconsidered. At least one reader, Erin, seems to enjoy this line of thought, and that’s enough encouragement for me.

I was intending to write about the opening of the Mozart Wind Quintet, which I played at Marlboro… and I got stopped by a metaphor. “Opening” means “beginning;” in this case I am using a synonym (constant, careless expedient of writing) to refer to the piece’s slow, magnificent introduction. But: “opening” like the opening/raising of the curtain at the beginning of an opera, of an entertainment? I posit this equivalence of spatial (curtain going up) and temporal (first moments of anything) without any hesitation; it is an accepted currency exchange. But how is this moment of the piece like other openings–like, say, the lifting of the lid of a box to see what lies inside; or, the opening of a flower; or, to use a metaphor given me by Anner Bylsma post-concert, the cracking open of a walnut? In each case, something is revealed, which was initially concealed; we have to “get at” the main thing, which is behind the opening (opening as looking for a thing, opening as action, opening as layer/obstruction which must be pulled aside). Again, these are spatial constructions, seemingly separate from music, where tones dance in their so-called abstract space: how can one moment in music be “behind” another, in the way that the opera’s set lies behind the curtain? It would seem that every moment in music comes “after” the previous (not behind)… in a row, in order… if we were to be literal. But I think every listener feels at some point that some moment in a piece is a core, a kernel, a revealed, lurking truth (it’s out of order, from another place). And I am speaking not just of goals or climaxes, which are the obvious cores and kernels, but also the secret, random, quiet moments, parenthetical turns of phrase from which other things radiate (another spatial, physical metaphor).

Schenkerian analysis seems to address this spatial possibility of music by proposing levels: background, middleground, foreground. Music has deeper and more surface levels, like a cave! But the background in the Schenker view is almost always the same, the deepest level is the unfolding of a triad, of a single chord. It is true that very often phrases seem to reveal harmonic frameworks; I will concede that this may be, in fact, the purest, least metaphorical way of expressing what phrases reveal (as they open, unfold, show). But I cannot resign myself to that; for me this prioritization is too meticulous, systematic. Sometimes, I think, phrases reveal quirks, they reveal not the central thing but the detail; I have a more “literary” view of these levels. Each phrase of music pulls back, opens, to reveal its own rounding, its own completion… (or lack thereof) … which may happen with a flourish, or merely “by the way,” or any number of ways. A single word may outweigh the grammar of the whole.

The Mozart Quintet begins with the “usual” suspects–strong chords outlining our main characters–

Tonic, dominant, tonic. I, V, I. I resolve, therefore I am. But these three pillars, announcing the bold opening curtain, seem to exist to reveal this quiet, intense, compressed phrase in the piano, this little powerful truth–

–which one feels barely has time to express itself before the demands of the next phrase weigh in. “I am opening” the first chords say, and the piano says what is behind the curtain, the intensities hidden in the tonal world.

The focus of this little phrase is a seventh chord. (Avid readers may notice a similarity to the seventh chord at the center of the passage in E major I cited a ways back as being played in a rather amazing manner by Mitsuko Uchida.) A digression on seventh chords: consider this linchpin of Western tonality:

The dominant seventh chord (seen above, bar 2 of the Mozart Quintet, opening curtains). As posed in this example it is poised to resolve to F major, perfectly, with no loose ends. But if you take the third of this chord, and shift it down a half-step, you have something quite different:

Now there are loose ends, there is no one-step resolution… (there is no simple solution)… the chord is more free-floating. So, too, if you raise the seventh of the chord a half-step:

These two, more complicated, seventh chords are part of a larger group, a species… Allow me a little oversimplification, musician friends, starting now! I feel like they (these kinds of seventh chords) live most naturally, freely, decadently (like Gauguin in Tahiti, say) in French music of the late 19th century, for some reason, though of course they appear very often in Mozart, Bach, whatever. But French music tends to savor these seventh chords, or let them savor themselves, as sound. They lounge nude in the flora of romantic French excess. In this classical German music they live a less easy existence; they need to be “resolved,” intellectually dealt with… against the three enlightened, classical, clarity-obsessed chords of the opening of the Wind Quintet the seventh chord in the piano is a dangerous blurring, a sensual transgression. I have observed this many times… which is why I feel justified rambling on at length about it here!

[To cite another instance: at the opening of Beethoven Op. 111 (brutal, intellectual, obsessive first movement), we have a couple of shocking diminished seventh chords which, despite their radical appearance, resolve relatively easily (dim 7th, V, I)… but the third time the phrase departs, and the pivotal moment of this departure is one of these seventh chords–E-flat, G-flat, B-flat, D-flat–neither here nor there, not resolvable with ease, promising a long untanglement, which indeed is what happens.]

All this just to answer a child’s question: Why, oh why, is the opening of the Mozart Wind Quintet so incredible? And the recurring refrain for me, some inevitable part of the answer, has to do with these seventh chords, the ascending sequences based on seventh chords… pouring over, one after the other–notice the dynamic contrasts in this passage for the piano, the seventh chords coming like thunderbolts, like flashes of inspiration:

And, to take it further: these seventh chords are a metaphor for the extraordinary, supernatural, the sensual, the unresolvable–that which later would become the foundation of the romantic. There is a wonderful audacity in Mozart’s way of including the sensual in the language, and mastering it intellectually, allowing it to be both celebrated and absorbed–a dangerous element which is summoned, and against which the music must break itself (break itself open, like a walnut). So that every time it happens, every time you hear that same old Mozart masterpiece which belongs in a dusty museum somewhere, and you hear the predictable unpredictable event–the shock keeps shocking, its electricity keeps flowing. It’s just a seventh chord, a common chord, nothing to write home about, the stuff of music theory books. And how do you make these common, workaday chords do such heavy lifting? How also do you get really common words to do beautiful things, Hugh Kenner wonders in “The Pound Era”… and he cites T.S. Eliot’s

Because I do not hope to turn again

and Yeats’s

The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs

and Pound’s

So slow is the rose to open

Interesting: the opening flower. And he sums up: “Such power, as experience suggests, is latent (though rarely released) in the simplest words…” Which brings us full circle.

With something like ecstasy I am plunging into my second cup of Starbucks coffee, and to be truly New Yorkish, home again, I am insisting on eating a bagel while composing this post, which means I shall have to stop and occasionally wipe poppy seeds and dollops of lox spread off of my trackpad. Some lone poppy seed will probably make its way into the bowels of my laptop, and lounge there indefinitely.

It seems I have a tradition, now, forged secretly and now confirmed, today of all days. After a summer’s committments, the race from concert to concert, and then the inevitable Odysseus-like (though not so heroic) return… the journey through festivals being something like a guided, regimented trip through the underworld … the lures of various Sirens being ignored of scheduling necessity … there is that day (or set of days, a month, sometimes a whole year) when I must reorient myself, get my “real life” legs back. A million dancing deadlines appear in my head, born paradoxically of my sudden, total lack of schedule. (Projects, projects, dreams, desires, total organization fantasies, lives yet unlived!) And at that moment, when I am paralyzed by things to do when I have nothing obvious to do… I always seem to resort to the same process, the same expedient, an act like a dog’s peeing on a hydrant or a pole, declaring territory-time: I go to Starbucks with an old, favorite book, I drink a lot of coffee and I read. I almost force myself to do this, slowly, patiently, “wasting” my newfound time. As I waited in line today for my Grande Drip, I remembered many beautiful occasions when I had done this before: on a stoop of my friend Evelyne’s house in Bloomington, while she dashed around trying to organize the piano department at the beginning of an IU September semester, I read Proust lazily in the sunshine, smelling newcut grass and feeling alive, and she grumbled at me about my freedom; on a boat with my then-friend Zach (these things happen) in the Adirondacks, also reading lovely, irrelevant (?) Proust while Zach prepared frantically for his upcoming lectures; sitting in Cafe Lalo reading something I can’t quite remember several Augusts ago while my friend Carmelle brought me steamed, herbed eggs… reading Susan Sontag guiltily in Starbucks, as I had just satirized her at Marlboro, and being caught by Scott Nickrenz “in the act”… all these memories came to me in a rush. Amazing. Always that same end-of-summer bubble, a million variations of a life theme.

But today’s exactitude pressed in. I chose to read a chapter from “The Pound Era,” by Hugh Kenner, which was an excellent choice, very inspiring: all about the interconnectedness of languages, etymologies, the web of Language (above and beyond any single language), the nodes of meaning in single words or phrases … But meanwhile, as I read snippets of Provencal-esque poetry set in idyllic landscapes–

Wind over the olive trees, ranunculae ordered
By the clear edge of the rocks
The water runs, and the wind scented with pine
And with hay-fields under sun-swath

–I gazed across 93rd street to the gray, looming wall of the opposite building, and my fellow Starbucks denizens seemed to conspire to remind me of the gridded city: a nice, friendly Jewish boy talking on the phone to his girlfriend (perhaps?) about the frog in his throat, saying “what are your problems?,” sharing at length stories of disease, colds, fevers, complaints; then, a very unpleasant woman stranded on the far end of a visit to New York, deeply eager to get out, kvetching endlessly at her poor uncomplaining husband about everything (“this place is so dingy,” she said, nailing it on the head, finding the precise, poetic, even onomatopoeic word); and two men with their iPods and Blackberries discussing business deals, acquisitions, real estate (grrr, more “problems” which require “solutions”); and finally, touchingly, the two elderly men, respectful, shaking with Parkinson’s, who come in day in and day out to play chess. I was thinking, I love this place, but want also to be separate, untouched by it, uncontaminated by the negativity which seemed to radiate here and there, inflamed by coffee and cloudy weather, and presently I came to the following passage in “The Pound Era”:

Nicea moved before me
And the cold grey air troubled her not
For all her naked beauty, bit not the tropic skin…

My “tropic skin,” returned from Vermont/Seattle/North Carolina/etc., slightly in shock from cold grey New York air… I am still lingering in the surreal ending day or two of Marlboro (rainswept, dark, half-built, not civilized) … people leaving the place in all their varied, bizarre ways, at their own times, beginning or ending relationships, packing up impossibly messy cars, flailing at all the recurring farewells of summer camp, and I am still feeling my body as arranged for country life, toned by lots of swimming and hiking up and down the hills, accustomed to sweating in my cot-bed, now finding itself underused, pampered by luxury in my not exactly luxurious apartment… It feels like (as it always, always does at this time of year) my mind is bubbling, and I want to stay in, let the bubble float off for a bit, keep it from hitting anything hard and bursting:

And if I see her not,
no sight is worth the beauty of my thought.
(Si no’us vei, Domna don plus mi cal,
Negus vezer mon bel pensar no val.)

Does any of this make any sense? Staying in my own mind? If that passage is applicable to me, what is my “her”? Unanswerable, today. And so I have turned to the bubble of my blog… Here I can be in the abstract space of my browser window, listening to the airconditioner hum. Let the dogs howl: Bach to practice, bios to send out, recordings to find, schedules to fix, friends to catch up with, groceries to buy, students to teach, people to call, toilet paper to obtain, mice to trap humanely, pianos to tune, suitcases to unpack, failures to apologize for, insurance to arrange, emails to write en masse, and in general things to straighten out, priorities to choose. But I choose none, today, or if I choose one or another, it will be a whim and not a plan, winding and not straight… I want my acts today to be both practical and metaphorical.

Which reminds me of this most wonderful passage from “The Pound Era”:

The great thing to remember is that all poetry was once in the language itself, and still underlies the dry bones of even our dictionaries. Every word, a metaphor, perhaps several degrees deep, still has the power to flash meaning back and forth between apparently divergent and intractable planes of being.

So: my apologies for not blogging for a few weeks. I should be blogging more now, as I attempt to flash meaning back and forth between my Marlboro and “normal” planes… wish me luck!

I knew something was up. The sign next to the refrigerator read: “white wine in the frig”. (Perhaps: the frigging fridge? the frigate?) On a nearby shelf, my newly acquired Mozart action figure was lifting his left hand dramatically up to pounce upon a Quaker Oatmeal Bar, balanced cleverly upon a pair of Sunmaid raisin boxes to simulate a piano. Though unsettled by these backstage oddities, I went bravely onstage to deliver a delicate Mozart duet, and then an impassioned Piano Quartet of Joseph Suk. Well, not all the notes were there, but… something was communicated. Meanwhile, all my ill-sorted, bulging bags were outside in the car, saying take me! take me! check me in at baggage claim! And then, too suddenly, I was whisked–no, I whisked myself?–away to the airport, and without setting my head down again on a real bed I have managed to eke out 40 hours or so, split between Seattle and Vermont. A giant pair of plastic woman’s breasts stood at the gateway to my Vermont destination… as you may have guessed, now I am in a dubious dorm in Marlboro, in a warm dusty barren room, with nighttime’s bugs pressing at my window screens, and two empty suitcases, and I am sitting on a metal folding chair, at a student’s industrial desk, next to two army cots–and a copy of the Mozart Wind Quintet is lying open on the desk, like a reminder of civilization. (Outside, I hear “do you know where the hooch went?” And off the hooch-seekers go.) I am not tired, because Seattle is back 3 hours and I am still partly there… but I cannot address myself fully to Mozart either; he is too demanding.

I am thinking about my transition from place to place, and the whole summer already, and all the little things that strike the memory. Pitiful, hapless details: the detritus of festivals. In my bag, now veteran of several festivals this summer, I find:

1) a scrawled note (perhaps by Unabomber disciple?): “Tuned 7-8-05”
2) the business card of Cathy L., “Professional, Limo-Style Taxi Service”… the card does not mention her propensity for cannabis, easily sensed upon proximity
3) deodorant (thank goodness, that’s where it is)
4) USB and other adapter cables of unknown usage or origin
5) the business card for “Pho of Aurora” (i.e. Crazy Pho Lady of earlier post)
6) twelve wadded-up Starbucks credit card receipts
7) the email address, scrawled on the back of a program, of the lovely bartenderess from Boone
8) fifteen used boarding passes and a partridge in a pear tree

What a bizarre thing it is to pack up your mini-lives (for that is what festivals are, summer camps for adults, where your roots grow in and you tear them out), and set off for others… Enough uprootings in a row, and you have, voila! the monotony of difference. Somehow between hello and goodbye you should be able to say something different, to take another path. (Roland Barthes: “those who never reread are condemned to read the same story over and over again…”) How to tie it all together? How not to be overwhelmed by the accumulation of these bizarre facts, the history of your life?

This all sounds very overdramatic and kind of contemplative in a dark way, which is only understandable given my redeye flight and my long lazy swimming session in the afternoon and two beers and probably also the sun and heat which got to my head today… But the point being I have left Seattle and now I am in a whole other Petri dish of people and situations (Marlboro) and it will be an effort to dip myself in, commit myself, and get out while the getting’s good. I can distinguish certain brain states: like the totally involved, fairly carefree state when I am working on a piece –because you really NEED the whole brain to play the piano, to make a piece work… in fact you need more, you need at least all you’ve got… and then, when I come out of the glare of the work, my brain is a deer in the headlights of contingencies, of these bizarre, strung-together, random events, emergences and subsidences of people/ things/concerns… of “normal life,” which is so much less organized than music. The brain is underused, and prone to pick up on peculiar details. And perhaps I don’t have a strong enough balance right now of real, non-musical concerns, so that these transition moments and their salient details can make me feel odd, bizarre… my mind’s a bagful of neglected boarding passes… Right now, that’s where I am: I am one unmoored ship, heading off to crazyland, and I hope to drag my blog readers down with me! Hooray!