The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Every morning, my CD alarm clock just starts spouting off:

Just in time
You found me just in time
Before you came,
my time was running low,
I was lost,
the losing dice were tossed,
my bridges overcrossed,
nowhere to go.
Now you’re here
and I know where I’m going.
No more doubt or fear.
I found my way.
So let’s live today, anyway
Change me!
Change me once again…
(undecipherable)
and lucky day.

I suppose I could Google the words, but I LIKE not knowing exactly how the song ends. I’m wondering: is this too intense a song to wake up to every day? It definitely plays on the “time” motif well, but is it useful to think that “time is running low,” that “the losing dice were tossed,” each and every morning? I really like the “anyway.” It could be just another carpe diem sentiment, but the “anyway” makes it casual, suggests that “living today” is just an (arbitrary) choice, not a command or a need… am I reading this right?

I realize as I listen this morning that Nina Simone albums represent the present for me, they are the characteristic new CD in the soundtrack of my life. By the present I am including last summer (already separated from me by some serious landmarks), when I bought her Blues album in Boone, NC. She is the sound of now (if now means this academic year). So by listening to her, am I truly “living today,” prolonging the moment, or am I dangerously close to creating an enormous chain of yesterdays?

Can a classical pianist admit that late Brahms Intermezzi would not be his first choice on his CD alarm clock? I could bore you and tell you that Nina went to Juilliard, was classically trained … if I ever have that conversation again (“they were classically trained, you know” speaking of some harmonica trio) at a reception you will know, because you will read in the paper that I murdered some nice person with a (probably plastic) fork. But if you don’t know this track, you should listen. It is harmonically thrilling, and you know that essay by Charles Rosen where he says that Schubert achieves much of his effect by gradually expanding the melodic range, by in effect making each note count, making each new note a discovery? Well maybe Nina read it cause towards the end while the piano is buzzing around doing the most thrilling kinds of suspensions and dissonances and figurations, she’s sticking to that tonic E-flat and its lower neighbor D like a fly on flypaper. She holds to her guns but then climbs one note, then another, and of course the climactic new notes are on “Change me! Change me!” which she sings twice like a cry of the heart. Hardly any notes and tons of heart.

Suitcase
Originally uploaded by Jeremy Denk.

As I enter the east wing of my apartment, the half-unpacked suitcase from last week’s concert often growls at me. Perhaps after I finish my coffee…

Sitting with two friends in an apartment downtown, doing the iTunes shuffle. Lovely lazing, shlumped out on a sofa for hours, blabbing about nothing.

At a certain point we came upon a series of meditative songs which seemed to go on forever. Certain modern “popular music” crawls over and through me disturbingly; I don’t feel in my own skin. It is melancholic, pulsing, repetitive; it makes me feel suddenly “this is what it’s like to be modern” (me who’s probably stuck in the 19th century somewhere), all that 20th century crap of existentialism comes to me in a wash, and I realize, yes, it’s a dehumanizing routine and mankind’s progress is merely a self-destructive path, etc. etc. I said, with my usual eloquence, “it’s so sad.” And I realized that normally I am a happy person…

But then a Cole Porter song came on, and I turned off the shuffle, and we kept in that world. The charm of one phrase obliterated the whole preceding morass. Above all, there is what is not done: not too much emoting, the rhythm swung but not too much, not too overt. It is always stylized, refined, smooth, cultured; this music is like a graceful, natural pose. But the refinement (the pose) is not snooty, not stifling, it puts no limits on this music’s joy, on its eternal internal smile, its bemused, knowing survey of harmony and verse. It creates its own syntax of style, class, wit. There is no visceral push/pull, all that is behind the curtain: considered, absorbed, relegated.

Think of it: from the Baroque endlessly flowing phrases of Bach emerged the “early classical style,” the new simplicity (Rousseau, etc.) and the four-bar phrase as God. Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven: all mainly in thrall to this phrase ideal. Then the Romantics start putting quotation marks around their phrases, start wondering if phrases exist, melting them, expanding them, denying them; they expand the harmonies which define the phrases, begin a general semantic blurring…. What if a seventh chord actually could be the “tonic”? And Wagner did it. The harmonies get more lush, more plural, more ambiguous. Think Brahms Op. 119 #1. There they all are, those seventh and ninth chords, almost too beautiful to be functional. Wandering, almost meaningless, fragments of phrases …

It struck me! In Cole Porter, all the “Romantic,” blurred chords are there… but there is also this tremendous “last gasp,” or resurgence of the four-bar phrase, of the classical ideal! In these songs, the simplicity of the phrase structure (always subject to exceptions, deviations, but nonetheless persistent, essential) is God again. It absorbs and subjugates the tremendous and refined harmonic language. It is like a game, to make these Romantic harmonies fall into place, to make them obey their phrases. And how delicious it is, what an odd couple the harmonies and the phrases make; and how many subtle transformations and voice-leadings and enharmonic tricks are required to merge them!

I listen to a lot of music and love a lot of it. But on those days when you are tired, weak, feeling a little cynical about the hospitality of the world… then, when you can no longer lie to yourself, you turn to the music you really need, which lies next to your heart, which literally feeds you. And I have to admit that Cole Porter and that whole era: I need it.

Found this passage in her memoirs, hidden among the books in the guest room of a concert presenter:

“It matters very little to me whether people believe one thing or another. Life is short, even for those who live to a ripe old age, and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them.”