The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

After a glittering black-tie gala, I made my way downtown last night to a poser bar. There was only a slight difference between the socialites posing for the cameras and the New York youthful clubsters posing for each other. We were forced to wait in line outside the club, while others (friends of the doorman, regulars, and those too beautiful to wait) went right on in… which made my friend almost insane. I had to calm him. I was oddly patient; standing on 4th Street in my jeans was delicious after a night spent sitting in my tuxedo. Nights in tuxedos are the inevitable price of a career in classical music.

Once inside, my friend headed for the restrooms, and I for the bar in quest of drink. I sat, patiently awaiting my turn to scream “Tanqueray and tonic.” My eyes wandered, and, sitting in a section of the bar that could only be called a “nook,” was an elderly gentleman in a striped cap, speaking animatedly with a swarthy young man. Perhaps this was one of those situations that would be best ignored … but something rang my inner bell. I gave him a long look, and he returned it with a slitting convergence of his eyes–and I realized then that this was one of the old men from the final vignette of Jim Jarmusch’s movie, Coffee and Cigarettes.

His name is Taylor Mead, and not only was he rather an odd sight in this bar of youthful dissipation, but that movie itself is so very surreal, and his totally unique face seemed such a symbol of that surreality, that I felt briefly as though Jarmusch’s artificial world had come to life, and was lurking in the corner of the bar, waiting to swallow everyone.

That particular section of the movie had touched me rather deeply. Two elderly men sit in an strange, large, vaguely menacing, mostly dark, industrial room; a janitor is listlessly sweeping in the background. There is no way to know why they have come to this bleak workingman’s fate, and what dark world surrounds them. They are drinking bad coffee on a break (from what?), and Taylor’s character insists that they pretend for a moment it is champagne. This is, of course, their only escape.

But the essence of this vignette occurs when Taylor cocks his ear to listen, and thereby summons one of my favorite Mahler songs, a song which I obsessed over in my Oberlin days: Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, “I have lost touch with the world.” This auditory hallucination? visitation? is heard by both men (and we as viewers), in fragments… a voice from the other world, utterly foreign to the room we see onscreen. At first nearly inaudible, its volume gradually increases. We want more and more; it blooms, a phrase climaxes; and then, painfully, it vanishes, incomplete. We imagine we are still hearing it even when it is completely silent. This giving and taking away engages a visceral desire for music, like a desire for life itself. This desire can be seen inTaylor’s eyes as he tries to keep hold of this musical “vision,” but eventually it is just gone–he has to give up.

I feel as though I have given up (against my will) many things which I felt since I first heard that song, many feelings which that song virtually embodies. It is a dizzying self-referential dealie: I feel I have lost touch with the song itself, which is about losing touch…

I am surprised that I got up the courage to introduce myself to him (we are back in “reality” at the bar), but I did, and the young man with him was (apparently) an agent trying to sign him on. Taylor was precisely the childlike anomaly that he represented in the movie. He did some delightfully silly gestures when I told him I recognized him from the movie, and said several times “I love feedback.” He told me that Jim Jarmusch loved it when he forgot his lines. He told me about his upcoming show at the Tribeca Film Festival, and his agent quizzed me on the vignette’s dialogue. I said “champagne” in Taylor’s way (French pronunciation), and tried to imitate his “eccch, this coffee’s terrible,” and etc. And he seemed pleased. But I couldn’t stand getting embroiled in too deep a conversation… the risk of disillusionment was too great, like the time I saw a beautiful medieval play where Archangel Gabriel redeems the world, and found the “archangel” puking in an alley later that evening. So, I excused myself.

And this morning, feeling quite out of touch with the world, I came across the following note on my neighbor’s door:

“Last night you woke me again with your noises, screams, bangs on the wall, and LEWD ACTS. This is not a fraternity house, but a place of rest. I will have to call the police…”

And etc. I know the fellow who lives in that apartment. He is a shy, sweet-seeming, 22-year-old former trombonist whose parents came to install him in this ridiculous building. They came and knocked on my door, to get my advice on being a musician in this building, practice hours, and etcetera. I feel sure this boy has done nothing to deserve this note, this intrusion of New York insanity into his existence–just as the men in Jarmusch’s vignette do not deserve to drink bad coffee on a deadline while they dream of the past, Paris, champagne…

Just returned by taxi to my apartment, and convinced yet again of Verdi’s greatness, whatever that means. Heard Deborah Voigt, Paul Plishka and etc. in Un Ballo en Maschera. I have always had a soft spot for the unbelievable contortions of operatic melodrama–a kind of game played by operatic composers and librettists, working with a small core repertoire of emotions (love, betrayal, duty, honor, etc.), and attempting to wring from this core some new twist, some extraordinary extenuation. In this case, the (at last) honorable king, renouncing his love (his best friend’s wife!), is singing farewell to her to the backdrop of an elaborate masked ball… Somehow this heart-rending duet finds a “match,” a harmony with the waltz of the frivolous crowd. This is stage one of Verdi’s “game;” the lovers are not allowed to part in private, in a separate scena; they must coexist with this unrelated event. This musical correspondence, this crush of events, has symbolic overtones (the dance of life/death, things must go on, love is merely a dance, etc.) But, meanwhile, the conspirators are huddling, preparing to strike, seen by us (the audience) but not of course by the lovers … this is done musically by adding to the waltz just one chromatic note, in a single instrument (obsessive, repetitive, not “musical,” ergo symbolic). This is Stage 2 of the game: a small touch but impossible to miss; held within, not altering the larger musical structure (thus not tipping off the lovers, who are waltzing heedless to doom) but clearly audible to the audience, just as the black cloaks of the conspirators are visible. The death, then, is nearly incidental, passes by with only the “usual” musical attention, because Verdi’s attention is directed elsewhere: to the king’s forgiveness of his own murderer.

The game so far has been about polyphony, about the tragic, bizarre superimposition of layers. In answer to these dislocations–the masqueraded crowd; the frivolity of the ball vs. the tragedy of the impending events; the loyal friend now become murdering conspirator; the dissonant note underlying the waltz; and etcetera–this forgiveness is uttered with total unanimity–assembled crowd, ill-starred principals, everyone. Univocal, concentrated; the act, the emotion, is so intense that it submerges all individual expression.

It appears I am now linked at Terry Teachout’s very serious and thoughtful arts blog, for which I am grateful…

I am aware of how presumptuous and odious it is for a lazy, self-satisfied non-composer (such as I, heading out to tan like any serious artist in Central Park today) to lecture hard-working composers on their shortcomings, as in the last post. Mea culpa. But the point of that post is really not the (considerable) shame and decay of modern culture–and so-called “classical music” in particular–but the idea of a musical work as the counterpoint of various voices–not in the literal, “compositional” sense of soprano, alto, tenor, bass, but using the word “voices” somewhat as Roland Barthes uses the word “codes” in his book, S/Z:

“The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes…

Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is “lost” in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voices (of the codes) becomes writing, a stereographic space where the five codes, the five voices, intersect…”

And so, in accusing composers of not “multitasking,” I am not saying that they are lazy, but that somehow their compositional approach is not open to this kind of interweaving. A voice (a style, a method, a logic, a sound) is found; it is cultivated, but other voices are suppressed, or never explored; this univocal cultivation sometimes results in something that is “well-crafted” (the ultimate in faint praise), but is not really “writing” or “composition.”

What I love about Barthes is how he avoids placing works of art next to each other in some grand Hall of Great Art, where their qualities glower at each other and are subject to endless art-historical comparisons, proposing instead a much wider (infinite), nearly unimaginable context: the unimpeded, total plural, what he calls the “writerly”:

“… the writerly text is not a thing, we would have a hard time finding it in a bookstore … the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world … is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.”

I imagine myself in a hall of the Metropolitan Museum, staring up at busts of Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Bach, etc. I have that faint headache I often get in art museums, that sense of standing too long, the ache in my feet, an irritation with the lighting. Barthes’ quote above (despite its intellectualism?) makes the hall, the whole museum, vanish; in its place a starry, endless field with infinite crossing lines, where Op. 111 Beethoven is actually connected to me directly (by uncountable threads), where I myself might compose some part of Op. 111 (say), where there is no “pitiless divorce” between me and the music… The writerly is a “perpetual present;” and come to think of it, that is the perpetual goal of my piano practicing, in all its seemingly repetitive tedium. As Robert Mann once said to me in a lesson (and I am paraphrasing): you don’t practice in order to repeat exactly what you have practiced on stage (that is in order to be a serviceable, reliable robot–and we are all familiar with those performances) but instead to be able to create freely at the moment of the performance… in order to access the “writerly,” after all the initial freezing of the musical idea into the score, and the subsequent ossification of centuries and tradition, to do the impossible and rescue the text back into the present.

I woke up early this morning and was productive; I will not make that mistake again.

From 10-12 AM I was occupied, in a quasi-professional capacity, listening to the music of young composers. It is fascinating to see all these different ways of throwing notes on paper. Mostly the music felt brackish, unclear, and when it was clear you wish it weren’t. Perhaps I can find a way to blame modern culture (pop music etc.) for all this: but these young “classical” composers seem unable to multitask, to accomplish more than one compositional parameter at once. By parameter, I don’t mean the conventional ones of rhythm, melody, harmony, etc., but larger, less literal ones that one might look for in a piece of music:

Atmosphere
Beauty
Structure
Logic
Direction
Invention
Imagination
Transformation
Surprise
Wonder
Empathy
Conviction
Diversion
Engagement
Absorption
Substance

This is a partial list. Of course, if you just write a great tune, you might be able to avoid worrying about any of the above. But most composers (other than Gershwin and Schubert) probably have to slog along and think about these things. This morning from 10 to 12, I heard a lot of strange and varied omissions: logic without direction; beauty without invention; structure without surprise; absorption without logic… The one element absent most often was “invention”–closely followed by “imagination.” How many reworkings of the same phrase rhythms can we really tolerate? Why is everything so rut-bound and modelled? I know there’s nothing new under the sun, but do you have to prove it to me?

The thing is, you don’t have to write a piece through in one go. You don’t have to concentrate on everything at once; you can “gradually multitask,” and devote yourself by turns to various elements … There is this mythic notion that you conceive a piece all in one inspiration, but I think Beethoven’s sketches very clearly show a different, gradual process–the fleshing out of a thought, the step-by-step addition of ideas, layers, unforeseen anomalies–the “hewing” of a piece, in the sense of this definition: “To cut something by repeated blows.” The different cuts of the mind from different directions, finally creating a 3-dimensional musical object.

So, this afternoon I sat down and played through Stravinsky’s Piano Rag-Music. After all those muddy, lukewarm pieces, it was like a cold club soda with lime, sharp and refreshing.