The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Bach must have known just how I would feel this morning (some 255 years after his death), dragging myself out of bed to practice on a rainy day after wings and beer with my friend last night–as he composed just this exact feeling into the last fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier:

Let us be clear: this theme is work. It was not tossed off in a moment’s inspiration, light as air. It is heavy, gradual, painstaking (too heavy, too painstaking). And when the other voices enter, it gets worse, more bogged down; too many strings are attached. What possessed the man to create this alien, chromatic landscape? What made him choose precisely these bizarre voice-leadings, these ungrateful leaps?

But the fugue is visited three times by a miracle. The theme vanishes, and in its place we have bars of fluid counterpoint… These bars are not “difficult” like the theme, and they require no special compositional prowess: they are simple, almost banal. If the theme is an exercise in complexity, these passages, too, are like compositional exercises, but in a primer: dissonances and resolutions for three voices, example 1a. But they have an amazing power. They are a voice from beyond the fugue … they feel otherworldly, the excessive gravity of the piece seems to lift.

They are scattered through the fugue irregularly: twice close together towards the beginning (as if trying to intervene)… and then the fugue proper takes over again, we are plunged into more and more elaborate counterpoint. We think, perhaps, it will never come again. Then, finally one last visitation, near the end. I think “visitation” is the right word, the appearance of a divine spirit, a revelation which must vanish, which must be postponed for the next life. Back to the chromatic vale of tears. And me, too, back to the piano, to get something done.

Richard Goode once told me that his ideal day would consist of reading and practicing, interspersed. This was intimidating; I don’t imagine being able to sustain that “artfulness” (or artyness?), without healthy doses of the sensual, the silly, and the plain idiotic. Thus in between chromatic Bach fugues, I feel it is necessary to watch WB shows about tanned surfers and their difficult, complex 15-to-19-year-old life problems. While watching said shows, I tend to eat delicious spare ribs and house special fried rice from my nearby Vietnamese restaurant.

But the fact is, I have been reading, and really enjoying, this book of stories, Island, by Alistair MacLeod. And this passage sums up (though speaking about miners in Nova Scotia) some of the classical musician’s plight:

“… I would have liked to reach beyond the tape recorders and the faces of the uninvolved to something that might prove to be more substantial and enduring. Yet in the end it seemed we too were only singing to ourselves. Singing songs in an archaic language as we too became more archaic, and recognizing the nods of acknowledgement and shouted responses as coming only from our own friends and relatives. In many cases the same individuals from whom we had first learned our songs. Songs that are for the most part local and private and capable of losing almost all of their substance in translation…”

It is funny when you are most absorbed in your work (as I am now) and most convinced of its substance (as I am now), that the pessimistic flip side raises its voice convincingly as well.

bachsarabande
Originally uploaded by Jeremy Denk.

For those musicians who are reading, who want to “follow along” with the last post…

The chromatic tenor line in question begins in the geographical middle of the page, continues for two measures … savvy readers and analysts will note that it is a continuation/response to a chromatic descending line in the top voice for two measures before that (starting on G, desc. to E).

Sorry to all you non-music-readers out there!

I must feel some extreme subconscious need to “explain Falstaff,” because this morning I awoke from a vivid dream where I was doing just that. At an upright piano, in a beautifully furnished room (seemingly drawn from the set of the WB show Charmed), I was explaining to an unknown woman the beauties of Verdi’s only comic opera. Feeling like my audience wasn’t quite getting it, I pointed to the score to show one of Verdi’s incomparable markings. I was translating from Italian, a language I don’t know … “Look, here it says to ‘sing as though it were an aria written on an old memo pad.'” Somehow I attempted to demonstrate this at the piano; at that point, the dream became too impossible even for a dream, and I woke up.

Last night I was walking down the street (a memory which now seems like a dream) and I found myself unable to locate the downbeat in the Sarabande of the 6th Partita. Somehow the piece, which I have played so often, has become worn at the edges: the barlines have rubbed off. I placed the score on the piano this morning, and just looked, and played little bits, with their meters intact, reasserted. Clear as day! Though when I played them, they threatened to dissolve again, they wanted to disappear (just like my dream’s bizarre reality wanted to evaporate). I thought through the whole thing, the pulse and its disappearing act, while I washed the dishes. Hooray.

Even last night on the street, adrift without the meter, I thought through the pitches, trying to clear away the undergrowth (all the ornaments which “clutter it up”, which make the meter and the structure opaque, distant): trying to hear only this recurring motive (obsessive, idee fixe) of the falling second (the first motive of the piece … and a symbol of pathos), and the way Bach plays on the two notes, perversely resisting any too-clear direction, wandering over them, only allowing them occasionally to accumulate into larger sequences (2+2=3 in this musical language, two falling seconds makes a third, two thirds makes a fifth)…. There is a wonderful moment towards the end–when one might get distracted by the top voice–where the tenor emerges with a sequence of chromatic versions of this motive (E to D-sharp, to D-natural, to C-sharp, to C-natural). Every time I come at this piece, this place tugs at me, this tenor voice seizes my attention… and every time I get closer and closer to letting it dominate, to “understanding it.” But something about the piece, the way it is written, resists this reduction to “truth.” Is it my laziness or Bach’s wiliness? I know, though, that i want this tenor voice to be the fundament of this passage, its entrance to be a climactic summary, and the hemiola that follows to be “just” closing, “just” resolution …