The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Birthdays are usually days where I insist on indulging myself to the fullest, to the point of making myself very unhappy. Case in point: my 21st birthday, where, extrapolating from my love of coffee, I declared that I would drink as much coffee as possible (based on theorem more=better) resulting in an irritable, cranky, wired mess. Today life seems to be indulging me however, and I am content to let it. For example, this morning at 9 the TV provided me with not just “any” episode of Charmed, but the very first episode, so that I could see exactly how the three witch sisters first came to be aware of their awesome powers, and I could wonder how the show ever survived its pilot. A highlight: when Piper’s boyfriend, “Jeremy,” turns out to be a horrible, murderous demon–much as I was on my 21st birthday after three thermoses (thermi?) of Kenya AA.

Then, I received a delightful email from my friend regarding a lonely, speechless, piano player found wandering a windswept road on the Isle of Sheppey. Though the article is meant to be somewhat touching and melancholy, I laughed and laughed. The “windswept road” is my favorite touch; the article author is given over to literary pretensions, to be sure, a la Thomas Hardy, perhaps, of The Mayor of Casterbridge? Are we sure these are not the shenanigans (the brilliant maneuvers) of some out-of-control publicist? Perhaps this “mystery piano player” will soon be touring the world, appearing in Carnegie Hall to sold-out crowds, etc. Please be assured, this is not me! I have never been to the Isle of Sheppey.

Finally, though, on my “indulgent” birthday, I had to make a choice, between a carton of butter cookies and some delightful leftover chocolate sauce (Belgian chocolate with cream):

or oatmeal with honey, strawberries, and banana:

Basically, a choice between virtue and vice. I am happy to tell you I chose virtue. But what does the Bible (or any other religious document, for that matter) have to say about choosing virtue in order to feel less bad about subsequent vice? For indeed I chose oatmeal as a sort of counter to expected and likely overindulgence in food and drink with friends this evening, in the Village. It would seem just to be a roundabout way of choosing vice, of ameliorating vice. I turned not to the Bible, but to the Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephen Mitchell:

Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!

Hmmm, not too helpful. Seems to free me to do just about anything! How about:

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the oatmeal and/or chocolate sauce.

(I have slightly edited this translation for current circumstances.) This is better; perhaps I should not get caught up in desire for either oatmeal OR chocolate sauce, or margaritas, or that delightful dish I can’t wait to have this evening with the stuffed poblano peppers with the pomegranate seeds. Oops. Turning back to timeless wisdom:

… the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come,
as for example pilots of Charmed,
and emails about piano players,
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

Actually I REALLY LOVE those last two lines, the business about forgetting! They gave me another delicious birthday pleasure, which was a connection to another quote I love, which is my true birthday blog indulgence, just for me… some more Roland Barthes:

“Yet reading does not consist in stopping the chain of systems, in establishing a truth, a legality of the text … it consists in coupling these systems, not according to their finite quantity, but according to their plurality (which is a being, not a discounting): I pass, I intersect, I articulate, I release, I do not count. Forgetting meanings is not a matter for excuses, an unfortunate defect in performance; it is an affirmative value, a way of asserting the irresponsibility of the text, the pluralism of systems: it is precisely because I forget that I read.” –S/Z

And I will now (finally) take the advice of the Tao:

Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.

I read a wonderful quote the other day: “A mathematician is a device for converting coffee into theorems.” (Don’t ask me to source it, I forget.) And today, from my first sip, blogposts bloomed in my brain, begging to be let free. I want to follow up on some Schumann stuff… Yesterday I compared a passage in Roland Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse to the various “manners” of Schumann, and lying in bed this morning, further examples of the three “stages” (affirmation, doubt, re-beginning) leapt to mind. For you Schumann fans, the Fantasy, Op. 17, last movement, is a perfect example of this “let us begin again,” this return which is not a repetition, the affirmation of difference, and the love affair in question here is between Schumann and Beethoven, an austere, distant, but intense love, visited with all kinds of anxiety and power imbalances, like any good relationship. Haha.

But I would like to get technical today, and for those of you non-musicians, don’t freak out because I am going to make all kinds of oversimplifying analogies to language and physics which will have two virtues: 1) to make it easy to understand what I’m saying and 2) to infuriate any music theorists who might be reading. In fact, I will forward this post on to a couple especially crusty music theorists I know and hopefully there will be all sorts of withering commentary, like my favorite remark scribbled on the margin of the first draft of my Juilliard doctoral document: “Yuck.”

Oversimplifying analogy #1: Music is a language, i.e. it has a grammar and a syntax. For a given phrase, we’ve got a “home key,” which we call (don’t freak out) the TONIC. And the harmony which leads us to the tonic is the DOMINANT…

DOMINANT goes to TONIC

and then of course before the dominant we might have the dominant’s dominant, the pre-dominant…

Dominant of Dominant
goes to
Dominant
goes to
Tonic

(Musicians reading this will be bored. My apologies. This is all, like, basic musical “logic.”) Now the tonic is, in a sense, the “object” of the phrase. Oversimplifying analogy #2 coming up. Let’s take the sentence “Last night I ate risotto.” If I say simply “Last night I ate…” your listener will certainly be wondering; did you eat a roast beef sandwich at Subway, or New Zealand red snapper with caramelized persimmon and coconut-candlenut foam (as I did at Jefferson just the other night, highly recommended)? Analogy: what you ate (object of sentence) = tonic of musical phrase. Take it or leave it. Now, take this phrase of Schumann, the opening outburst of the Intermezzo from Faschingsschwank aus Wien:

In this phrase, we have all the “logical” ingredients above: predominant, dominant, tonic. I have labeled them all up there in the score … take my word for it, or ask a crusty music theorist to confirm it for you. But the way that Schumann writes the phrase, ALL THE EMPHASIS IS ON the subject and verb (predominant/dominant), and THE TONIC IS NOT really a significant part of the gesture. Consider the melody: there is a leap up to an accented note (the predominant) then a beautiful turn-around gesture (the dominant)… on the tonic harmony there is no melody, only absence–the resolution only occurs in the left hand. All the semantic emphasis is in “the wrong place.” Last night I ate (risotto).

Schumann in this phrase is acting like a magician. Through his sleight-of-hand, our attention is “misdirected.” Instead of the harmony to which all the harmonies are headed–instead of the goal–we are made to notice the predicates, the preparatory harmonies. The resolution, the conclusion, is parenthetical, a “non-event.” Schumann slips it in where it won’t be noticed, “under our noses.”

What’s more, radical Robert Schumann persists in these sorts of phrases, perpetually putting the accent on the wrong syllable, and by this inversion creates a kind of reverse syntax. This mirror syntax is on the one hand perfectly logical (since all the harmonies are there, in the right order), and on the other hand unsettling, asymmetrical (as the emphasis is always away from the proper place, as if the rhythm of tonality constantly has to be rewritten, challenged, undone).

Now, Schumann can build whole pieces on these “imbalanced” phrases; he loves them. Let me take this a step further. For me, as a listener and performer, I feel like the main force here is not any one chord, but the tension between the predominant and dominant. (“Music is between the notes.”) They exert a kind of gravitational pull towards each other. When I play them, I feel a kind of tension and release in my gut, or somewhere… Oversimplifying analogy #3 coming. But: the main sun of this solar system is the tonic, it is the ultimate source around which the other harmonies “orbit.” Without that tonic, the other harmonies would have no “meaning.” The tension which Schumann adores is between two moons; he neglects the sun.

How does one build on swirling tension (for that is what this Intermezzo does)? If the brick is a “feeling of tension or pull,” how can those be solid enough to hold up a musical building? This tension is not quicksand; those “preliminary” chords, those pairings (predominant/dominant) feel awfully strong; the piece, though unsettled, has tremendous energy (note the tempo marking, “with the greatest energy.”) Schumann… revolutionary, Romantic… redefining the terms, forcing us into a different frame of reference, finding strength in reversal.

… Never bite the hand that feeds you. But today I will.

Yesterday, apparently (according to an urgent communiqué from my mother), my performance of Brahms E-flat Sonata with Richard Stoltzman was played on NPR’s Performance Today. Apparently the host of that program, the delightful and eternally curious Fred Child, mentioned my blog, and there is a link on NPR’s site!!! I am grateful.

But then, by a curious twist of fate, today I read an article on Slate … an article also featured on NPR’s Day-to-Day… which has enraged me, beyond reason. In it, the author attempts to “reconstruct” a recipe for Proust’s madeleine from Proust’s own words. Read it yourself, if you must; he comes to the conclusion that the madeleine, such as Proust describes it, “never existed.” Short rebuttal: duh. Longer rebuttal, with ranting:

1) Anyone who obsesses about the madeleine and Proust hasn’t really read Proust. (“Oh yes, Proust, the chap with the madeleine, rather long book, that.”) There’s a lot more book out there, kids, go to it! If you get past page 40, let me know! I’ll be really proud of you!

2) The WHOLE MASSIVE NOVEL is ABOUT the elusiveness of experience, memory, time… it debunks “realist” description at every turn. Nothing is ever as it seems; everything is in flux, subject to change, perception, etc. etc. Therefore, it is not a place to seek “recipes.” Again: read the book! The whole thing!

[Insert Howard Dean-esque scream here. Magnify times 10. Then imagine me in my pajamas running around my bedroom yelling like that as I read the article, and write this post.]

3) OK, I’ll quote from the article: “Many cookbooks claim that you can reproduce Marcel Proust’s magical madeleine in your own kitchen. But do any of the recipes yield the genuine article? ” Aaarrgggghhhhh. Repeat after me! THERE IS NO “GENUINE ARTICLE.” Keep repeating until you have a literary sensibility. The whole proposition is patently absurd! Then later on, he refers to Lydia Davis’ translation as the most “accurate.” Again, with the ridiculous words!

It’s enough to send me scrambling through my volumes for the perfect debunking Proust quote, and within 5 minutes I found:

“For things … as soon as we have perceived them [i.e. the madeleine] are transformed within us into something immaterial [are you listening?], something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend. A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it. And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with ‘describing things,’ with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces [refer again to article, and various diagrams in it], is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the FURTHEST REMOVED FROM REALITY [emphasis added, mea culpa, I’m in a mood] and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time. Yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express; then at least, if it fails, there is a lesson to be drawn from its impotence (whereas from the successes of realism there is nothing to be learnt), the lesson that this essence is, in part, subjective and incommunicable.”

This endless baker’s dissection of Proust’s description… reminds me so much of cocktail party conversations where nothing is ventured or gained, where trivia are exchanged endlessly and knowledge hovers in the background, unable to penetrate. Also to some extent, it reminds me of some post-concert receptions, where people come up, very friendly, wonderful people, and ask me all sorts of bizarre minutiae about composers, their eating habits, the strings on their pianos, their views on elephants–I don’t know, whatever. And while I am telling them I have no idea, I am thinking “I could tell you a lot, maybe, if you’d ask the right questions.”

Writing about music: a hazardous enterprise. I’m comforted that sometimes even brilliant people can write stupid things about music. Roland Barthes is one of my heroes; nothing makes me happier, for example, than his unique book The Lover’s Discourse; but then:

“… the same composer can be minor if you listen to him, tremendous if you play him (even badly) — such is Schumann.”

Schumann is a “minor” composer if you listen to him????? Can you see the smoke coming out of my ears? Actually, I tend to have the opposite feeling. My first days practicing a piece of Schumann tend to be awkward, uncomfortable, like a shotgun marriage–not at all a torrid, instantaneous love affair.

But my first Schumann listenings are torrid in the extreme. The first time I ever heard Davidsbündlertänze, for instance … My brain retains things from the Oberlin (undergraduate) years in categories. Certain things are rawer, more vivid, they cut me more deeply. This Schumann is one of them. It is one of the chosen, cherished moments my brain has culled from exams, parties, study guides, dormitory meals, dormitory showers, piano lessons, lectures, rehearsals, first friends, lost friends, first kisses, and late-night snowbound walks. My brain said: REMEMBER THIS. And it is so. If I call that piece to my mind, a set springs into place: a dimly lit concert hall, a girl (now woman) playing the piano, seeming far away, and myself in the seat, blown away by the music, not quite believing what I am hearing… it is like a photo thrust in front of my face. It is odd. This is primarily a memory of a sonic event, of moving (affecting) sounds. The memory only came into prominence, gathered significance (like a rolling snowball) from the nature of the music. But it comes back to me completely as a visual event, a film still, a snapshot–timeless, soundless.

It also brings with it a feeling, a sinking, blurring feeling which is the collapse of the past into my present, and the sense of all the things I could teach that 18-year-old boy now if I were sitting next to him… He seems tangible; I want to touch him (though he is me). What would my then skin feel like to my current hands? Would I be able to reach that stubborn, enthusiastic, overworked teen and tell him what he needs? Would he laugh at 34-year-old me? But this is all after-the-fact.

The moment in Davidsbündlertänze is also after-the-fact, it is a recurrence, the recurrence: the second piece of the set comes back after a long absence. After the piece’s many events, its varied cast of characters, its ebullient and melancholy dances, a memory arrives, the first (only) real memory, which then unexpectedly surges into a tragic, violent outpouring, a revolt (no this cannot be a memory, cannot be MY memory, no this sadness cannot return, I cannot take it again, no I refuse to allow the penetration of the past into my present), and the only solution: the final piece, a luminous, otherworldly waltz. The waltz is nonsense (not present, not past, only future?); though it feels like a memory, it is not; it is in the “wrong” key (therefore absurd as an ending, though it is one), it is fragmented, halting, and what does it mean?, perched as it is between comfort and farewell and anticipation and loss… in the words of Roland Barthes:

“Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself) …

[Could there be a better description of some of Robert Schumann’s music? I don’t think so]

There follows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love’s value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation; this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment …

[… which describes pretty well another goodly portion of Schumann’s music… ]

Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can “surmount,” without liquidating; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency: I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new); Let us begin again.“

[And this, I think, accounts for the remainder… those unusual Schumann moments which are not consumed either in fevers of enthusiasm or melancholy but somehow define another, transcendent category… like the last waltz of Davidsbündlertänze.]

Now, I think that’s pretty good stuff. Roland, let’s make up. I forgive you for calling Schumann a “minor” composer (sort of). Let us begin again.

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