Relevance and Music ...

The word relevance keeps cropping up in posts, conversations and essays on programming music. Composer Ned Rorem was compelled to write to the New York Times about it today. And many are bristling with the first breezes of the oncoming Mozart storm, wondering about the relevance of his music in our time.

Ned Rorem's letter paints a dismal scenario of highly practiced, empty-minded virtuosos playing to score points with incurious audiences. Both are apathetic toward the new. Both have a disdain for the relevant. And they have developed a comfortable distance from the exuberance and freedom that comes with the intriguing shock of the unfamiliar.

The complaint is complicated. It begins with the problem of selling. Marketing music can mean working in the Devil's workshop, or at least setting up office just a couple of dangerous doors away.

The ongoing and furious experiment of using irrelevant visuals to lure a profitable number of ears is not working. While there is great fantasy and possibility in the visual realm, and while that realm is now astonishingly easy to pass on to thousands of people, the thing being marketed is not a thing meant for seeing. It's a thing meant for hearing.

In radio broadcasting, there are often stories of really marvelous intersections of the visual and the aural realms, confessed by listeners. A driver drenched in Mozart navigates a crowded city street in the fall ... a solitary soul with Messiaen in his earbuds shuffles through a snowy campus at dusk ...

The driver, stuck at a stoplight, is compelled to focus for a moment on the pulsing, longing gestures that are unfolding in the clear air of a Mozart slow movement. His eye catches the tempo of some perfect and oblivious cloud crossing silently above the chaotic throbbing of the crowd in the crosswalk ... and he has a moment of altered perception. Elevated sensibility. An inexplicable tenderness pours through him ... a feeling of oddly removed involvement -- of being human.

I would say that this is relevance.

The solitary walker, pushing through the wind, feels the brittleness of ice under his feet, and as he plods, the bright whistle of Messiaen's piano birds fills the blue air of his consciousness. His eyes scan the shapes of the naked trees and his perception of them changes ... he sees their shapes as hauntingly beautiful. He has an inexplicable sense that he and the landscape belong together.

In these cases, the listener's perception of his own, real world is dramatically altered by music.
It's not using visuals to lure the listener.
Rather, the listener has listened, and the world has changed.

Mostly sky ...

Sam and I walked briefly yesterday on a beautiful beach. It is the paradise of my young summers, and on that rocky point stands a miraculous house which is no longer in the family. And while there is still, decades later, a visceral pain of nostalgia, I still squint at it, admire it and imagine my smaller feet giddily exploring the temperatures of its vast wooden floors. I noticed when I got home yesterday that I'd taken a picture of the house ... but barely.

It's mostly sky.

And now I'm wondering whether that's perhaps a sign that, as time goes by, I've found a certain wisdom that compels me to see a broader picture ... (this seems unlikely). Or perhaps I'm still denying the loss, and pushing the house out of the picture ... (and photographing the wrong thing).

If the first were true, then I'm inclined to run to the piano and get at, say, the Schumann Fantasy, which is so full of smaller, internal intrigues. Maybe, with this new wisdom of age, I'd get the broader picture ...

On the other hand, I might focus only on its "clouds" -- and leave the elemental things to fend for themselves (I've done that before). I suppose that, as in the photo, the "clouds" would be interesting and enjoyable to consider ... but I'd still have it wrong, wouldn't I?

Sam's just turned thirteen. And I can see now that the photo that she took is the wise one:

"When I am playing well, I feel as if warm oil were pouring through my arm."

Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe tells the story of an astonishing and little known pianist of our time. Now 76, she has 119 recordings (including the Chopin/Godowsky etudes, which she's been practicing since she was thirteen!). She's worked with Cortot, Richter, and Haskil. No public performing in the past 25 years because she is living with cancer, and was once told that it is "impolite to look ill." She's still recording and has major projects planned. Read about Joyce Hatto.

High-heeled piano

One of the Schimmel pianos.

The Wyner/Levin encounter

The post below should have included this link to an hour spent with pianist Robert Levin and composer Yehudi Wyner just prior to the world premiere of Wyner's piano concerto. It was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and dedicated to Levin. During the show, Levin plays music by Wyner and Mendelssohn, and Wyner exposes some of his creative process at the keyboard, including the unleashing of a riotous song called "The Florida Express." Both offer insights into music, friendship and life.

Revolutionary relaxation

It was a deep pleasure to spend the evening with two major musical forces based here in Boston. The delicious dinners that they create are famous in the music world. This composer/pianist and his wife, a conductor and former world-class soprano, are the warmest possible creatures. Midnight arrived, and there'd been so much wordplay, so many stories, and such a volley of hilarity-and-profundity, that I left feeling like I'd taken a vacation.

They told us that soon after they'd finished converting their garage into a composition studio, Susan one day discovered a number of curious neighborhood women who had descended upon the composer to find out exactly what he was accomplishing in there. Yehudi fell mischievously into a brash display at the piano, beginning with Chopin's Revolutionary etude, followed by choice bits from the Tempest sonata, and more. The women exhaled in unison, and Susan heard them oohing and aahing. Finally one of them exclaimed, "Oh, that is so relaxing!"

As a classical broadcaster, I realized, while laughing, that I've developed a bristle which happens automatically when I hear the word relax in the context of art music. It has been for some time the talk of the industry (and not only broadcasting, certainly). I've come to believe that it is symptomatic of a problem of vocabulary.

God knows that music, by nature, resists explanation. Like poetry, it works its magic at levels we will never be able to name. But what would cause someone to call the dangerous and unstable blowing, rushing winds and waves of a Chopin etude "relaxing?" I imagine that it must be the first word that springs to the mind when the music has done its generous clearing-out. It is a sweet required focus that it demands. The dozens of needling daily stresses that bark and yelp for attention are forced to fall away when these exquisite waves come crashing into the foreground. That, perhaps, prompts the word "relax". It is similar to focus ... to a higher kind of attention.

I remember the pianist Russell Sherman telling me that he is a "great fan of tension." But, he said, it must be elegantly ... elegantly distributed throughout the body.

Right.
What can we possibly accomplish without tension?

The strength of tenderness ...

I stole an hour from myself on this bright blue summer afternoon to practice the tenderest of things ... the first of the three Opus 117 Intermezzi by Brahms, and the warm ache of the second movement of Schubert's "little" A Major sonata.
And I was struck by the unique kind of strength required to sharpen the perfect limbs of those melodies ... to keep them focused and poignant, ringing, and singing, while the background blushes and sighs in a focused haze of color.

This is what the eyes do when they focus on little Samantha in this picture I just recently developed (after it languished for six sad years in a drawer). Her shapes, her fingers, the sun in her hair, all become sharp enough to melt the heart when the eyes admire her. That little body looks ready to turn and walk contentedly, heart-breakingly, away ... and with the eyes fixed on her, the lush greens of southern France blur into the sweetest and softest of hazes.

This effect I fought for in my stolen hour with Brahms and Schubert. And when I caught it, I was sure I'd come closer to knowing the meaning of tenderness.

Humor envy ...

I develop an occasional paralysis... a blogging block ... and large chunks of time go by without posting.
This is the opposite condition of Lance Mannion, who can blind you with his sheer blogging virtuosity.

He's quick ... funny ... and boy, he's just got LOTS of time to post.
I've got Lance fixed in a kind of Mozart category. Mozart's hyper-achieving defied the normal passage of time. There must have been a "Mozart minute" which adhered to none of the rules of earthly science.

Or maybe Mr. Mannion's a little like Art Tatum. I learned recently from a brilliant
scientist/pianist that psychoacousticians (I also learned that there are psychoacousticians) have a unit of speed called a Tatum, indicative (I hope I've got this right) of the maximum amount of audio information that the human ear can take in in one second. It's named for Art Tatum, who could play more notes in one second than any other human.
And he was blind ...
Which probably, somehow, helped.
They could have called it a Paganini ...
but Tatum's hipper.

Here's where to go to hear an interview I very much enjoyed doing with scientist/pianist Michael Hawley. He describes the life and magic of Art Tatum, and plays transcriptions of Tatum's recordings with astonishing prowess. He also plays Bach/Busoni, Chopin, and Guastavino. click here

And here's a little afternoon toast to Lance -- whoever you are.

... I'd pay.

Landing on the Moon with a 12-year-old ...

I was recently invited to the press opening of Robert Lepage's "The Far Side of the Moon" at the American Repertory Theater.
Desperate as I am for magic, and desperate as I also am to help my children to appreciate a desperation for magic (or something close to that), I took my youngest one along ... not knowing the degree to which the thing unfolds with a kind of elegant, exquisite desperation of its own.
Desperately innovative.
Desperately poignant.
Desperately symbolic.
And desperately beyond her.

Theater can do such magic. I'm so sorry I'm so rarely in its grip.
This is a virtuosic one-man show with Yves Jacques playing two brothers, both desperate, really ... one a gay weatherman in love with money, the other a kind of sweet, depressed misfit obsessed since childhood with the space race. And he is constantly, constantly failing at everything. He's really not able to connect with other humans, and his only success is a sad home-made video of his own tiny, luckless world. The video wins a contest and is chosen to be sent into space.
He deeply loved his mother, who ages and dies (it's discovered later that she killed herself), and in one scene he becomes her ... with green pumps and a dress ... dancing slowly and lovingly with a small, alarmingly expressive three-foot-tall astronaut-doll.

Effects through projection and trompe l'oeil took my breath away. I remember feeling physically excited by their elegance and cleverness.

The final scene used the enormous mirror that had tilted and twisted to astonishing effect throughout the play. In the end it took on an angle which allowed the actor to writhe around the floor of the set and perfectly, perfectly! create another reality in the mirror. There he was -- floating, weightless, without gravity ... slow somersaults and exquisite tumbles ... and he was perfect. A contented astronaut finally in his element.
The first movement of the "Moonlight Sonata" accompanied his floating, and it worked amazingly well.

In fact, I imagine I'll never hear those triplets in the same way again.
All of it was a gorgeous thing. I was feeling that I understood every decision ... every symbol ... every delicious metaphor for life and its absurdity. Every bit of humor was marvelous.
I wanted to kiss the actor.
At the end the theater was up on its feet, and I asked my 12-year-old if
she liked it ...

And she said she really didn't like it at all.

Of course she didn't. How could she?
She found it strange.
But it had an effect ...
The other night she told me that she's writing a short story at school about a daughter and father who discover, when rummaging through the basement, that the mother had killed herself.
(I can imagine what her teachers are thinking.)

And so up again sprang a recurrent little distance-of-mothers theme that just keeps knocking inside me. Being the reader for Earl Kim's piece "Dear Linda" the other day didn't help to make it go away, either.
Anne Sexton's love letter to her daughter is pretty damn hard to pull off: "I'm in the middle of a flight to Saint Louis ...." "I was reading a New Yorker article that made me think of my mother" ... "I love you 40-year-old Linda" ... "I wrote unhappy, but I lived to the hilt ... you live to the hilt, too Linda ...." etc. etc.
All with hauntingly sad piano sounds and flute sounds ... and cello sounds ... percussion sounds ...
It's one thing to rehearse it in a basement practice room in Harvard Square. But put the damn thing in a large, darkened concert hall, add the strange intimacy of a microphone that gives you the odd and sexy power to make huge your most whispered voice so that it reaches the exit signs ...
Well, then the thing, even when it is at its most musically cliché, becomes a thing of power ...
When you are asked to deliver: "I too was 40 once, and with a dead mother who I needed still" ...
and then think of your own mother (dead when you were 40, of course) ...
Then it gets a little surreal.
At the end: ("x, o, x, o, x, o x, o .... Mom.") the pianist and percussionist were so understated, and my x's and o's became so small, and so big ...
The audience was so very, very quiet, that the decay of the last sounds (after "Mom") went on interminably, and my eyes grabbed onto a distant corner of the room and couldn't blink, or see. Everyone's breathing seemed to have stopped. It was such a very big relief to lower my hands in a slow signal that the thing had ended.
Thank God.

Suburban Doughnuts

Found the poem below scribbled in a badly-kept, well-wrinkled little notebook ... written in honor of suburbia's inspired gathering places (Dunkin' Donuts). I found in that same notebook the autograph, with an Italian phrase I cannot read, of Carlo Bergonzi ... must have grabbed the sad little wrinkly pad while on a musical tour of Tuscany, drinking too much wine in an attempt to prolong the dream.

I also found verses in praise of a train -- one which muscled its sleek way past all types of elegant graffiti, and husks of inexplicably burnt cars, and manicured lawns ...
a train which hustled me straight to the miraculous playing of the inspired keyboard navigator
Marc-André Hamelin ... who arrived at the piano, reached forward, and generously melted away the walls of the Miller Theater -- in order to let in the exquisite light of Albeniz's Ibéria.



Click here for an interview/performance with Marc-André Hamelin.

I also found notes scribbled during a financial aid information session at a potential college for my oldest girl.

All badly scrawled, and separated by many, many blank pages ...

I don't keep notebooks well.

_________________________

This is where fluorescent dreamers
gulp their milky
caffeine --
Chew at their
sourceless bread --
And pretend that the walls
offer comfort ...

Tricky-eyed.
Looking downward.

And just outside --
Beside the glass --
The sky is ravishing!
Blushing ...
Bright ...
A sweet, fiery sun
between the sad single trees
And the unending turnpike ...

Here ...
Cold clumsy cars made of
dirt
Keep dancing and
blinking --
Women in tired heels
Look downward --
Tricky-eyed.

From the ceiling,
At a careful slant,
A television
screams
To keep our pupils
shrunken ...

The ravishing sky
deepens and
closes.
No wide eyes
to sparkle at ...
No poets to gleam for.

So the sunset dies.

And the fluorescent ghosts
pay no attention
to the
dark.

Visions ... and hearing loss ...

Sex sells.

Musicians are offered up as sensual visions.
Chosen ones with secret breezes that blow their locks just so.
Bearers of the torch of beauty and light.
Tantalizing in their perfect understanding of shadows and curves, with eyes wide (or shut) to signal their thrilling arrogance.

They are pictures.

I wonder. When they are bought ... if that moment of purchase is just a lusty
grab ...
Then what happens after that?
Does the music pour forth and a divine path become suddenly cleared to take the trip from lusting to listening?
And then from listening to loving?
And then from loving to ...
transcending?

Are these glossy visions meant to symbolize sheer
commanding power?

Like elegant strippers?
Specially made bodies fueled by the irresistable essence of
art?

Am I being reminded that it is the musicians who control those secret breezes which tickle my most private of places?
That from the ideal face flows the perfect phrase ...
From the shapeliest shoulder, the most truthful vibrato ...
From the highest-heeled ankles, the most exquisite pedalling ...
From the roundest bosom surely must come the most insightful, devastating, inspired unleashing of the layers of life that
throb and throb
in the greatest of fugues.


What nasty business, the business of selling

Inside a Steinway B

Miraculous geometry ...

Stuffing my pockets at the bookstore ...

Last night's January twilight was glazed over with ice.

At the bookstore, I just couldn't spend that $35.00 on every last word packaged up so nicely into a new and attractive book
by Mr. Rosen .


So I spent $3.00 on a latte and strapped myself into these damn reading glasses (suddenly they're necessary) and began
stuffing his dry words into whatever pockets I could find in my over-burdened
memory.

Now on this brittle January morning I've checked my pockets and found that they must have holes.
I must have littered the parking lot with those well-chosen Charles-Rosen-words.

Maybe there are some in the car.

Some I still had. I found 1814-1819
and nephew
and suffering.
Opus 90 is caught up in that ugly time of deafness and mad desire to take ownership of the nephew.

Disintegration

It's the best of the words. It's always there in Beethoven. Imagine laying such careful plans to disintegrate. Imagine writing such beautiful undoings of beauty (that's not Mr. Rosen. He's better than that. And certainly more careful.)

I scrounged around and found that I still had Mr. Rosen's small and honest confession in one of my pockets. He admits that he's just not clear as to whether the end of the opus 90, having slowed, ought to gear up and move past its original tempo in that final cascade, and then retrieve the tempo in the last two bars ... or simply accelerate just enough to be back by the end.

It is a marvelous uncertainty set down boldly in a stern little font.
I found that reassuring.

And, as always, I again found my own confession. It kicks around in various costumes in virtually every pocket I own.
A nagging little ghost that scratches at the heart, claiming I've missed some elemental piece of knowledge.
Some essential wisdom which will prevent me from playing the music as they say it should be played ....

I just keep digging to see who they might be.

Small silver phones pressed desperately against the ear ...

Think of the depth with which we search the syllables, and each of their letters, and the nature of the breaths that surround them.
Think of the deep diving we do into the nuances of the vital voices that reach us by cell phone.

In a parking lot, perhaps, a call from someone deeply loved, whose voice comes but occasionally. A miraculous human.
I hear every inhalation ... each curl of the lip that darkens or brightens a vowel. (Might that be sadness? Could that slight sigh between words -- the one that teases my senses -- could that be some small resignation? a little motive that will develop later into difficult news? Is there a new distance? I clutch subtle accent, the audible smirk. Mundane words are given slightly new pitches and never-before-taken tempos. What are the secrets that motivate these punctuations?)

These, I thought, once I'd snapped the small silver phone shut ...
These are the questions I ask when practicing Chopin ...
When hearing a Schubert song ...
And while weeping through the ebb and flow of Schumann's Fantasy ...

How carefully we listen to our deeply loved voices on these small silver phones ...
What insightful listeners we are.

If only music could receive such attention.

The window and the Sarabande ...

It's changed.
It had been a darker affair. A single rectangle with a weakening sill and peeling paint. Brittle blinds with broken ropes.
(It seemed just as well ... only a cruel suburban crossroad to see. A house or two and a flagpole with its proudly clanging chain.)
There was, though, something right about
it.
Its dimensions I think.
Maybe its darkness.
Its angle on the shrubbery below?
It did ignite a memory of me-as-child and my window back then, with its same proximity to the piano.

It's changed now.
Someone new has bought the house, and I keep renting the walls for the sake of the ceilings. And suddenly, here it is! A dramatic bay window. And there, too, is the sky!

Old men now walk at length. I can learn their gaits. I once followed the shuffle of an ancient man for the entire first page of the G Major French Suite ...
Now children in this sun-soaked frame have complete choreographies to unleash.
Bicycles float past ... I have light on my face and my hands.
I can see the seasons.
There is a tree, and I'm learning its branches.
Chickadees halt and stare in at my anguishing.

And I wonder.
Does this change the practicing?
Deeply in love with the random dances that waltz into this dramatic frame, I wonder ...
Does this change the practicing?
For me, who never imagines changing the space myself,
I admire the thinkers who envision these big panes of glass.
I wouldn't have thought of this.
I wouldn't have guessed it would cause this warmth.

But whether the French Suite is better ...
Perhaps.
Because this bigger view keeps urging me to consider these unexpected dances, and allows me just enough time to absorb them.
The old man's arrival in the window frame ...
Strangely slow. Meticulous.
A purposeful trip across the glass. An elderly propulsion.
Never a change in tempo, but constantly new in his nearness to trees
and puddles of darkness and sunlight.
An occasional turn of the head.

Cruel suburban shuffle.
It's a lesson for a Sarabande.