The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

“Fie on Charleston for clogging your blogging.” So writes reader Erin, and though Charleston deserves no fie, I am grateful there are readers to know when there are no posts. I have returned from two concerts (11 am, 1 pm) where I played that joyful, bounding, cloudless Schumann work Faschingsschwank aus Wien. God, what a wonderful piece! And in the somewhat dry Dock St. theatre I felt able to articulate all sorts of things, to come out from Schumann’s occasional muck. (Sometimes one wished for a small helping of muck). And then I have had the delicious pleasure of peeling off my somewhat dampened concert clothes and draping them semi-carefully on chairs and bedposts, and reverting to shorts and flip-flops… aah. Flop I go on my wicker sofa. The relief after a concert, after what one considers a semi-successful performance, is luckily almost as deep as the anxiety that precedes the next one.

Charleston is one of those places that makes you think sensually, constantly. So now, as I go over in my head the eternal question “how do I want to spend the rest of my day?,” what occurs to me is not a list of tasks but a rush of feelings. For example: sand beneath my feet; the cold of a coffee gelato; the breeze as I pass through Charleston’s historic alleys, fast, on my bicycle; the taste of a grilled tender scallop; and certainly not the godawful cold clammy fluorescent light of the one practice room with its poor bedeviled piano, which is acting like a Northerner unused to the heat and becoming grumpy, with several sticky keys… new ones each day! Oh the sensual deprivation of practicing! Only after a hour’s persistence do you finally get to the meat of the matter, to the place where you can deal mentally with your issues… and during that whole hour the outside world calls to you, you imagine people streaming down King Street, their sandals slapping against the pavement as they window-shop, as they stop for wings and beer, as they attend cute cultural events and jibberjab and argue about parking. Today it may be too much for me; the sensual may overwhelm the cultural; and so off I go….

It is 8:33 AM. I have been awake for 33 minutes and have to play a concert in slightly less than 2 1/2 hours. I am on my second cup of coffee and have to judge how much will keep me alert until concert time, without sending me into a mania. I shake my head back and forth, wiggle my cheeks, and make silly sounds … will that help? Charleston life is so very different from New York life, and my brain does not seem to function in a linear, Northern way, I begin to think like a mint julep and blogging seems exotic, bizarre, impossible. Post, an inner voice says, post! And yet the gelateria beckons. Perhaps a walk around the battery, or just a sit in my own lovely garden. Or a casual bikeride around this most beautiful of towns.

Curse the man/woman who invented the morning concert. And I have played so very many. The morning is already the “difficult” part of my day, the mini-crisis of every day. In the afternoon, I often look back at the person I was at 10 AM and think, what a silly boy, what complicated, difficult thoughts he deluded himself with, life is really so uncluttered and simple… but then again at 10 AM the next day it is the same thing, the same morass. Coffee is the acid with which I cut through that primeval, post-sleep ooze. Then add the stress of pre-concert preparations, etc. (where’s my suit? is my shirt ironed? do i have my music? blah blah blah) to the whole mix: a morning with a concert is just a mess… i have to evolve from dinosaur to aristocrat in two short hours. Just not enough time: too often a Tyrannosaurus Rex walks out on stage…

Yesterday morning I awoke in a shuttered suite, bathed in pastels, sunshine leaking through the cracks, and when I flung open the curtains (averting my bleary eyes) I saw pristine white boats preparing for a day of fishing in a calm ocean. And I finally put my head back down again in my darkened New York apartment, lulled by “Manhattan waves”: the rush of cars up and down Broadway.

Both places had clutter in common. It is amazing; no matter how spacious and sumptuous the hotel room, it seems I react to it like an artist to a blank canvas: I must fill it, or die trying. From the bed yesterday morning, I could see sneakers, dress shoes, socks, shirts, boxer shorts, etcetera laying a trail into the distance, until they reached the living area, where leftover cheese, crackers, and fruit took up the slack: a clump of Boursin here, a used red wine glass there, the wrapper of the crackers placed “just so” on the floor next the coffee table. It was a composition! I had replaced the sanitary perfection of the suite with my native, magnificent disorder, and in record time! Is there a market for this sort of art?

There must be a Latin saying along the lines of “If it is there, it will be consumed.” (Perhaps in Spanish: “the tapas will always be gone by evening”?) This hotel was certainly a marvel of consumption. I was not blameless; I fell in with the herd; I ached to consume every inch of my room, every lotion in the bathroom, and in a fit of pique over my $34 room service charge for oatmeal, coffee, and juice, I shoved all the unused toiletry items into my suitcase. (Needless to say, I do not recommend this resort for my more frugal friends). The room service bills were like veritable poems of greed, an endless tally of fees and surcharges which you would hopefully forget about on the beach, in the sunshine.

And I did; I opted against practicing (using the trusty “when in Rome” excuse) and ambled to the beach with nothing other than my shades and my Moleskine notebook (in which I wrote nothing). There I cell phoned my friends, who were amused and/or jealous (my intended effect). I ordered a mango frozen beverage. Then I sat, and baked, and tried to imagine Beethoven. I am not kidding. Actually, I think it was Beethoven (that dead European jerk) who wouldn’t leave me in peace. Phrases from the “Spring” Sonata (which I was supposed to play that evening–a piece for which I have never had a totally natural affection) kept popping into my head (how will you play me tonight? don’t you owe me something?), and then, when I tried to ignore them, more imperious phrases from the last Piano Sonata (Op. 111) attacked at will. In front of my eyes, the world’s most perfect surfer girl and boy settled themselves on chairs to tan (though they were spread perfectly with brown, as if to demonstrate the very Platonic form of “tan”), pulling off shirts, stretching their lithe bodies, with almost comical languor–it was like an Abercrombie & Fitch poster–and while I was observing this, sweating profusely, attempting to appear like I naturally “belonged” here on the beach, like the crabs and the jellyfish, the dotted opening phrase of Op. 111 kept jarring my brain awake:

Could Beethoven have written that piece, here on the beach? I imagined him sitting there, in his shades, with sheafs of manuscript paper, his brow knitting with anger and anxiety, getting ready to notate that first, shocking diminished seventh chord … when suddenly a 17-year-old girl in a tight, becoming shirt comes up and says “may I take your drink order?” Would he scream at her, tell her to go away? Or would he crumple up the manuscript and have a daiquiri? And could you imagine the surfer boy and girl listening intently to the variations of Op. 111, following them to their transcendental conclusion? No; Op. 111 and the beach are irreconcilable.

Problems basically have two categories of solutions, either to hold on harder (concentrate, buck up, pull up your bootstraps, put your nose to the grindstone), or to let go (release your tension, get some perspective, some sleep, some peace of mind). A lot of my work these days at the piano is directed at increased attention, sending my brain more intently and constantly to the tips of my fingers, trying to keep track of both hands, make them lively, active, willed. And the music I play rewards this attention, richly… I realized on the beach how difficult it was to let my attention wander completely, to “let go,” how strong the boundary was between practicing and tanning (as strong as that between Beethoven and surfer chick). I was so used to paying attention; I could even feel myself bringing concentration to bear on my relaxation. I wondered if lying by the pool or ocean, drinking daiquiris and reading People magazine, slathering lotion and eating quesadillas… well, is that really the ideal way to let go? It seems to be a societally recognized method; Florida is one vast spigot through which Americans drain their anxieties. The pool was mobbed with reddened relaxers.

And so, on I theorized… I won’t say I didn’t enjoy my time at the beach, but I enjoyed the evening performance much more. The release of acting, of creating a phrase more or less the way I wanted (in the “Spring” Sonata which had molested me earlier)–it felt enormous, true, complete. But that’s me. Probably I just need to learn how to relax. But in the meantime, I better go practice.

Yesterday morning it was on ABC News, and today it hits the New York Times: mystery “Piano Man” is now a big-time star, complete with an alluring photograph, where he clutches his music and the sun glints through his hair. (Kudos to Dean Olsher for first alerting me to this breaking news; he knows what is and isn’t news!) The Times shares my cynicism, opining obliquely: “There is, of course, the delicate question of whether the man is a bona fide patient…” The “of course” says it all; it’s a figure of speech intended to bring us all into communal agreement, whether or not that agreement exists; it is the implication of hushed, huddled gossip, of connivance; it says that what it’s about to say needn’t really be said, since it is obvious, and yet it will say that thing, since something needs to be made manifest, has to be expressed… “There is, of course,” [what?]

Let us hypothesize for the moment that we have a delicious sham on our hands, and that Piano Man is a monstrously clever chap who has decided to create a career through this bizarre and instantaneous publicity. What he has done is very simple. He has merely externalized the internal metaphors which we all carry around in our mythology of “the artist.” He has made the cliché into reality:

The artist is a loner. Check: he was found wandering alone on the Isle of Sheppey. No kin have come forward.

The artist speaks only through his art. Check: he has not spoken to hospital personnel; he only communicated one thing, his drawing of a grand piano (drawing=art, not speech).

The artist is a foreigner, an exile, “not one of us.” Check: he seems to have emerged from the sea itself, soaked in ocean water (though wonderfully, in a Kafkaesque touch, still in his concert attire). From what distant, exotic land could he have emerged? My bets are on Atlantis.

The artist is the survivor of trauma, which he communicates to an audience. He suffers for his art. Check. This trauma is even more powerful because we have no way of knowing what it is. It is, therefore, unimaginable. Did he throw himself overboard because of a lost love? Etcetera, etcetera. Or more appropriately: yadda yadda yadda.

The artist is attractive. Since what he/she communicates is beautiful, he/she must be beautiful too. Check. Without this, the whole scheme would be ruined. One must count one’s assets.

The artist is insane. Check, as defined by his current accommodations.

The artist has no identity, outside of his art. Check: No kin have come forward. Labels, even, were cut out of his clothing. Nothing about him is inscribed. On the contrary, the artist inscribes, does all the writing, the telling, the showing. He himself is a blank slate, a pure expressive instrument. No one can truly know the artist, since he has no “self.” Artists, therefore, only truly love their art. Etcetera.

Against which, I must counterpose the “reality” of myself as artist, on May 18, 2005, in a Manhattan apartment, clutching coffee in one hand while I stab at my laptop keyboard: the difficult reality that I must once again go to the piano and try to begin again, with that giant pile of wonderful, clamoring music. The labels are still on my clothing. Like my apartment, my playing is full of things I would like to “fix up;” there are some things that could be remodelled in a single go, but most things require constant care, mundane attention, a daily calisthenics of the fingers and the mind and proddings for the imagination… The greatest pianists I know seem to approach even their most familiar pieces like blank crossword puzzles, as something to be filled in fresh; each time just as daunting, the whole piece must be “understood again.” This is reality as I know it. The clichés of Piano Man can be understood in a flash, as a totality; that is why they make great news. They have the completeness of image. But the Schubert Trio (the E-flat Major) I am about to practice: I know I will never traverse it completely, ever. Which is a good thing.