My teenagers had a good time.

This device is—of course—a troll. What gives this troll a special kick is that she is not only trolling the teenage mindset of American blockbuster movies; she is also low-key trolling her own children! That takes guts. I would love to listen in on Wilson’s family therapy sessions when this comes up.

To be honest, I enjoyed The Odyssey a good deal, well-armed with ear plugs and a bag of Sour Patch Kids. For three hours, riding a fierce sugar high, I had no desire to look at my phone. But as I read Wilson’s words, a wave of reality crashed in. The teenage part of me had been delighted; the adult part asked itself “who was Odysseus?” and had no idea. Penelope, Telemachus—even more forgettable and forgotten. I did remember a super cool and scary Cyclops though! So Wilson’s troll was a messenger of truth, a mixture of discomfort and belated self-awareness and amusement.

—

As I pondered the endless Wilson discourse—was she too mean-spirited?, too smug? the living embodiment of elite scorn?—I was reminded of an early Beethoven letter. Ludwig is writing to a friendly Countess to explain some new variations that he was sending in the mail:

The Variations will be somewhat difficult to play, especially the shakes in the Coda. But don’t let that alarm you. It is so arranged that you need only play the shake; the other notes you leave out, as they are also in the violin part…

Notice how he pretends to be helpful, ever so considerate. And then, wham:

I never would have written anything of the kind, but I had already frequently noticed that there was someone in Vienna who generally, when I have been improvising of an evening, noted down next day many of my peculiarities of composing, and boasted about them… And there was another reason for perplexing the pianists here, viz. many of them are my deadly enemies, so I wished in this way to take vengeance on them, for I knew beforehand that here and there the Variations would be put before them and that these gentlemen would come off badly.

This is generally viewed as a hilarious snapshot of the composer—and it is. But there can be no question that this is a troll. And it is not just verbal bad behavior, not just Beethoven in his personal life being a prankster or cad or crazy person. No! You cannot say here that Beethoven the man was different from Beethoven the composer. This letter offers hard, indisputable evidence that he wove trolling into his musical choices. And he seems to enjoy it, even to brag about it.

ChatGPT informs me that the difference between a troll and a provocative remark is a matter of intent. Intent is hard to pin down. So the line between a smug insult and socially useful snark is as slippery as Odysseus himself. But even by this forgiving definition, Beethoven clearly fails the test. His intent is malign. Most of us might just make a mean remark, or write a sternly worded letter; but Ludwig, when wronged, writes some really annoying trills.

—

Who among us has not felt trolled by Beethoven? For years, maybe even since my teacher first assigned me the “Waldstein” at age 13 or 14, I suspected that he was trying to ruin my life.

There are overt passages of trolling in the Beethoven piano repertoire. For instance, this movement from Op. 31 #1, where he satirizes Italian opera:

It’s all there: the predictable pizzicatos in the strings, the long sustained cantilena, the simple harmonies, the congenial and lilting melodic clichés. He had good reason to resent this genre; it was a threat, rising in popularity in Vienna, a new musical blockbuster if you will. Like the letter I quoted, at the beginning of the movement you might think “oh Beethoven is just writing a beautiful, extended aria.” You could imagine his purpose is pure. Perhaps a homage? But then, wham:

He takes a typical singer’s overdone ornaments and amplifies them into the most absurd (and difficult) whorls. It is funny to see pianists play this movement with deep, unsuspecting seriousness, with no awareness that they are being played. This mistake is perfectly understandable, since the thing of it is that Beethoven, by amplifying and distorting, pushes through the satire to some sublimity. How the hell does he do that? It’s annoying how good he is at that. Part of the mastery of the troll is that he gets it both ways—he gets to have fun at people’s expense and yet accomplish serious work. Yet another part of the troll is how annoyed you are by the success of the troll.

—

Let’s take a more serious example: Op. 57, the “Appassionata”. The pianist hunts around the keyboard, stealthily and quietly, up and down arpeggios, looking for what can not yet be known. Enigmatic bits of melody. Eerie trills. A masterclass in dark suspense. And then suddenly, wham:

All pianists know the terror of this passage. Let’s be honest: Beethoven could full well have written a terrifying outburst that would not have been quite so difficult and awkward. In fact, if it hadn’t been quite so cruel, not just that one line of spiky arpeggio, the outburst could have been louder, deeper, more “grateful” to the instrument. It could have been more of a success—in a certain way.

You will rightly object—this is not a troll! But have you ever endured a day of piano auditions, listening to one poor terrified candidate massacre this arpeggio after another? Have you spent an hour of your life working with a young pianist, teaching them how to anchor with the thumb, or cross over more efficiently, or stay closer to the keys, or any of a million other helpful piano tips that may not raise the percentage possibility of success meaningfully above 60, all the while wishing you were having an Aperol Spritz on the beach? I think piano mentors of the world might agree with me—this passage keeps dependably trolling two hundred and change years later. I often imagine Beethoven laughing at us all, still, all these years later trying to surmount this obstacle, trying to sanitize and perfect what was always supposed to be a semi-impossible task.

If we concede again that this is serious music, I implore you to keep in mind the guy who wrote this passage in the “Appassionata” is the same guy who wrote that letter about deliberately impossible trills. He knew how difficult or borderline absurd the things he was asking for were, and he did not care—and he kind of enjoyed it.

There’s a similar awkward passage near the opening of the “Tempest”, weirdly finger-twisting:

Perhaps you know the story of Ferdinand Ries, the student performing a Beethoven sonata in a salon for the master. Ries made a mistake in the left hand, and got a public tap on the head from the composer. Then Beethoven sat down to play the “Tempest.” Ries says Beethoven soon “blundered noticeably.” I’m 98% sure that it was this place. A delicious Beethoven anecdote, because, in a rare moment of cosmic justice, the composer is karmically trolled by his own troll! A princess in attendance subsequently thwacked Beethoven on the head as punishment. Even rarer: a tangible, physical manifestation of a karmic rebound, and amusing evidence that Beethoven’s friends knew perfectly well he was a troll, something we in our worshipfulness tend to forget. (How often I’ve wanted to thwack Beethoven on the head…)

In both the “Tempest” and “Appassionata” you have music that is attempting to create an unusual atmosphere of suspense or fear, even terror. And Beethoven writes unusually terrifying passagework for the pianist. I would argue this is not a coincidence.

—

My catalog of trolls in Beethoven would be large. Many people would likely object, and would want to make a distinction between “serious” and “unserious”, between Beethoven’s pranks and his deep spiritual adventures. My reply is that, yes, there are sillier trolls and more profound ones. I don’t mean to imply that Beethoven is silly—on the contrary. In fact, it is precisely his willingness to troll the most serious depths that makes him great. There is a line connecting his pranks and his revolutions, a continuum between the satires and oafish jokes and the weird, unsettling chasms he creates in our sense of what music ought to be or mean.

So maybe, on the mildly annoying/silly side, that passage near the beginning of the “Archduke” trio where the pianist has to squash all those trills into triplets, and likely spoil the epic majesty of the opening with a bunch of epic wrong notes. On the more serious side of the continuum, the way in the slow movement, after one of music history’s most beautiful themes, you get a strangely empty variation, where the cello plays little fragments—not quite melody—and the piano just drapes arpeggios around it. I watched the young fellows at the Music Academy of the West struggle with this one. What is the main voice, you wonder? Where is the tune? What kind of variation is this? The emptiness forces you to listen differently, to be patient, to think about the harmonies and the passage of time. Ludwig is subtly trolling you into Zen.

Or that moment in the “Hammerklavier” where he writes “a fugue in three voices with some license” before the craziest fugue ever written. Or that moment where you begin to wonder, how f$@!ing long this fugue subject is actually going to go on?…

or the moment at the end of the 106 scherzo where he keeps playing at the silliest possible motive, like a child’s nyah-nyah-nyah, and then uses the same notes to begin one of the deepest, darkest laments of his life

Or the moment in Op. 109 where you start with an innocent, rustling Vivace and suddenly find yourself stranded and lost in a Adagio espressivo? Or in the Arietta of Op. 111 where he doubles the rhythm yet again and in the ecstasy of unfolding his idea arrives at proto-boogie-woogie, somehow provoking many acrimonious arguments centuries later. How did we begin with this most austere and pure and simple of themes, and end up here in this forest of crazy syncopation and dissonances out of nowhere and a time signature that in fact was so weird and unprecedented that Beethoven himself failed to notate it correctly, so that he to some extent trolled himself (again)? It is this line of bizarre and daring and borderline ridiculous that he navigates fearlessly, in pursuit of the most unique, life-changing visions …

—

You get the picture. Perhaps you can see why I have little patience for the moral scolding of Joyce Carol Oates, inserting herself into the scandal by declaring that Wilson’s trolls were out of bounds.

In America, we have seen how futile it is to summon moral outrage as an antidote to the troll. I would argue one reason is a misconception. A troll is not a neutral weapon. You cannot say that it depends on the person using it, and their motivations, whether it is turned to good or evil. The truest troll is both. Its habitat is on the boundary, and part of its superpower essence is non-allegiance, the state of being good and evil at the same time (like us).

Many people seem to feel that the main line of Beethoven’s life was struggle against suffering, illness, and adversity. Yes—he had terrible physical ailments and his creative courage in the face of these was astonishing. For me, the more compelling line is his struggle to be good, against some parts of his nature. Again and again, he tries to be a more constant friend, less susceptible to rages and tantrums, a devoted and moral person without sexual urges, etc. etc. He aches to improve and mostly fails. The struggle between evil and good was central to him, and so the troll is his ideal artistic vehicle—he understood it, he lived it. The wickedness built into the troll, he knew, could be folded in together with aspirational purity; it could be redeemed for shock value, or precious ambiguity, or ravishing beauty, or any number of complacency-shredding goods.

Is this an essay in defense of the troll? Not exactly. It is a tragedy how much certain vacuous and vicious trolls have infected our political life and institutions. But the value and power of the device is that it accepts the mix of virtue and vice in all of us—a reasonable job requirement for art. Odysseus was a stunning example of trolling humanity. Therefore his story is anti-didactic, profoundly relatable, and resilient. It’s possible (at the risk of mansplaining further) that this might have been part of Wilson’s point? Like certain over-reverent interpreters of Beethoven, Nolan tried to purge some of the wickedness from his wanderer, to iron him out, to wring a neater moral sense out of him—certainly a mistake.

My mind kept drifting from self-pitying thoughts to the opening of the Schumann Piano Quartet, clear and luminous…

Schumann dares to take on Beethoven, on his home turf: a slow classical introduction, based on the most fundamental harmonies. He even outdoes him (a rare, almost impossible feat). He adopts the back-to-basics trope but adds his unique Romantic magic, laying out the old chords while summoning a new mystery.

We begin with a string unison. But under this fixed sonority—look—just two notes rising in the piano, with the pedal down. These two notes! They create an unusual, almost inaudible effect: something is moving within the sound of the unison, something is awakening.

Next, the strings play what you might call the Platonic Form of Harmony, a rich chorale moving from one chord to another. Not fancy, Hymn 101, the two most basic chords. And the piano replies with another ascent:

Just an octave, but it says so much (take that, Beethoven!) The strings respond with more wonderful Harmony; the piano rises again. The gist of this conversation becomes clear. Music as we know it, and Harmony, are represented by the strings, gorgeously and roundly voiced in barbershop quartet style, while the open-ended rising of the piano (always with the pedal) creates a kind of halo or overtone around Music. The strings offer the balance of classicism (I goes to V, V goes to I), but the piano keeps romantically rising, asking, unbalancing. The strings keep saying Here It Is, and the piano keeps saying There Is More.

A third statement in the strings—a sudden forte, an outburst of emotion, seems destined to visit the subdominant, the third pillar of Harmony, but

As always with Schumann, the unreachable. The completion of the harmonic love triangle is derailed by a ravishing evasion. The violin falls to an A-natural instead of the A-flat we wanted--our first glimpse of melancholy. It then corrects itself, falling one more half-step to the desired note, but alas, the cello also falls, and so we find ourselves in the minor! In other words, we get lost in a little forest of ambiguity, in various shades of darkness, in chords all around the one we thought we would get.

The piano at last convinces just the violin to join it in rising questions:

Again, the perfect flu medicine. We abandon downward melancholy, we look up to the sky. And off we go.

—

Forgive the obligatory Odyssey reference, but Schumann had his own compositional Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, too much repetition; on the other, too little. He was often in danger of hitting one side or another. Much of his music veers between them, constantly trying to avoid its own pitfalls. In “Pierrot” from Carnaval, he rides repetition as hard as he can, doing the same idea (with its loud-soft gag) an absurd number of times, until it tries to burst out of its cage. He makes this repetition problem work for him, like we all try to make our flaws into assets. In Davidsbündlertänze, conversely, he skates from one mood to the next in a shameless and disorienting and inspired stream-of-consciousness, or attention deficit disorder, placing only one structural repetition in the whole thirty minutes. With the result that we hold this one moment precious; it becomes one of the most heartbreaking musical memories ever written.

This Piano Quartet first movement exploits his weaknesses perfectly. It has, you might say, the best of Schumann’s worst: an abundance of obsessive repetition and also a healthy dose of destabilizing accident. It is not chaos, but it is definitely not order.

The generative seed of this movement is just those four notes of the string chorale, of that first Harmony hymn:

Not really a theme, you might say—more of a question. The piano replies:

This is the Robert masterstroke, against the grain. The piano reply is a bit of a wet noodle. (Yes, that is the precise musicological term.) A long arpeggio down, with expressive notes thrown in. Mostly a falling pattern, reiterated. It goes on slightly longer than it might. Falling, falling, dissolving the energy and urgency of the question. This weird mismatch is exactly the sort of tension Schumann thrives on. The thrusting four notes of Florestan meet the dreamy semi-stasis of Eusebius.

For a while—four obsessive iterations!—we explore this creative tension, and I’d say it builds with some exasperation, the quick forwardness of the four notes versus the dreamier, longer, almost directionless replies. At last, the strings create a more “normal” reply:

This is how the theme should continue, really, but, just then, we slip into a different idea. A recurring pattern of this piece—just when we get somewhere, we are teleported elsewhere.

Another example, about twenty seconds later. The strings at last come to a big resolution, which lasts all of a quarter note:

Huge cadence! and yikes, the E-flat slips down to D and suddenly we are in a different key and a different theme—pure chaos, and yet, somehow, it makes perfect sense? The suspension of logic is a huge part of the Schumann agenda. He wanted to create a space like the literature he loved, where the normative and the bizarre sit side by side, equally believable.

The new theme pinballs around harmonies. It starts on D. Then it lands a tritone away, on A-flat—what the hell ? And what is this theme, anyway? It is a scale up. Full of energy—but finally, just a scale. And then comes a bunch of notes trying to define or land an ending, a slew of stamping accents (see them, up there, eight in a row!), but as often with Schumann you feel that all this desire for closure makes you feel even more unsettled. You’re trying to land a craft that cannot be landed.

—

There is a deep correspondence between our main “themes.” Leave aside for the moment the fact that none of them are all that much of a theme. Consider our iconic four notes, pointing up subtly

And now our scale, not so subtle, a rocketship up

And don’t forget our mysterious rising notes in the piano in the opening

Three rising ideas, each with their own persona. This is a key to the delicious optimism radiating from this piece, its forward-looking wonderment.

—

I’d say the most impressive accomplishment of this movement is the development, which wanders into darkness to visit the terrors always hiding within Schumann’s joys. Here, interestingly, the music proceeds with Beethovenian logic, through a series of clever sequences, bounding from light to dark, getting submerged in the bass and surging back out. No matter how many times I play this passage, it never seems to lose its particular surprise and power.

Once we get to the climax, though, something happens that is beyond belief. We sit on a dominant pedal in desperate suspense, and the strings suddenly find meaning and terrible tension in tension-dissolving Eusebius. The wet noodle is (you realize) not so wet.

Ah yes, they do have something to say to each other, these two characters, these two ideas!—and just at that moment of revelation, the four notes burst out again in glorious, fevered, ecstatic major:

This arrival has no specific note or chord. You don’t arrive “at” this return, you arrive somehow through it, or within it, carried on its wave, which keeps surging past the structure, past the very idea of structure. What a moment. The quivering piano notes, the sense of the chords vibrating. The columns of music are free and alive. At this moment we also hear one of my favorite Schumann discoveries. While many other romantic composers were hunting out rare game, exploring unusual seventh chords or ninth chords, etc. etc., Schumann said “Hold my beer. You guys haven’t even really plumbed the depths of the good old fashioned dominant seventh chord.” And he was right. That familiar chord! It can be so much. Only Schumann (of the Romantics) dug up new expressive worlds in it.

He tells us—there’s life in the old girl yet. Which is exactly how I felt, driving myself back to the Music Academy of the West after the fever passed. My to do list, now that I was reborn? To be a decent mentor, to share what I can. I would be content to take a cue from Robert. It would be a perfect day if I could only explain to an unsuspecting young person the hidden beauty of just one boring chord.

She said my thesis was a copout. “Anything,” she wrote with unusual fierceness, “could be called an essay in the nature of time. Come on. You can do better.” Ouch! I smarted from that for a good while.

She might have been right about this particular bit of prose. But I am not so sure that anything and everything is an essay on time. I mean—yes and no? The vast majority of music attempts to beguile us away from our awareness of time, or to disguise its relentless passage so well that we are temporarily deluded into thinking it is a friend. Or to convert the currency of time into spiritual (and other miscellaneous) goods.

—

I have been obsessing on time and change—you might be able to tell!—and in that mood rereading beloved books. To my surprise and sadness, Lolita left me slightly cold. The Golden Bowl, hilariously, now almost seemed too obvious. The first twenty pages of Doktor Faustus, however, were exactly as boring as I remembered. Time, if anything, had only clarified their tedium. A little ways in, though, I got an unusual wash of pleasure. I’m a skeptic of deja vu but I perfectly recalled the moment snuggled on a velvet couch when I first read these lines, and paused in wonder:

Clearwings were there depicted which had no scales on their wings, so that they seemed delicately glassy and only shot through with a net of dark veins. One such butterfly, in transparent nudity, loving the duskiness of heavy leafage, was called Hetaera esmeralda. Hetaera had on her wings only a dark spot of violet and rose; one could see nothing else of her, and when she flew she was like a petal blown by the wind. Then there was the leaf butterfly, whose wings on top are a triple chord of colour, while underneath with insane exactitude they resemble a leaf, not only in shape and veining but in the minute reproduction of small imperfections, imitation drops of water, little warts and fungus growths and more of the like. When this clever creature alights among the leaves and folds its wings, it disappears by adaptation so entirely that the hungriest enemy cannot make it out.

The weird sensual joys of this!—even carrying through the words warts and fungus, somehow. Was oneupmanship involved? Was Mann trying to outdo Nabokov in his home turf of butterflies?

And “when she flew she was like a petal blown by the wind,” good lord, that was as close to a hands-free orgasm as you can get in the annals of literature, and somehow also the most perfect possible description of the piece rattling around my head…

… the opening of the Ravel Violin Sonata.

—

Sometimes I give Ravel a bit of grief. (I especially despise La Valse, mainstay of modern piano auditions.) My case against Maurice is that he gets hypnotized by the beauty of his sounds and the elegance of his constructions. He dazzles himself into forgetting his meaning. Of course, many people disagree. They hear true terror and demonic energy in Scarbo; I think in many cases Debussy does it better, digging deeper, and I prefer (to take one example) the less seductive, rawer terror of …what the west wind saw.

The Violin Sonata is a big exception, to my mind, and it was a comfort just this last week to play it again, with a violinist whose talents I hope will soon be discovered. Its miraculous qualities felt unchanged.

Everything comes out of that first piano solo, maddeningly difficult in concert—you cannot really pedal it. You have to play it (almost) as cleanly and purely as a Bach fugue subject, but with no pedantry. No, actually, everything about it suggests the untaught and the unteachable, including its arc, how it starts and falls and gracefully turns around in the middle of the keyboard and slowly begins to sail up …

This theme has aspects of a simple country dance, but also the modal notes of an imagined ancient Greece. You can feel the nymphs and satyrs, their light bare feet.

The spirit of the dance lies in the little fillips of rhythm here and there, a little skip, a quicker step. But also the little pauses! Everything is continuous—except, except, except three lingering notes. Each time, stopping on that same F-sharp. The F-sharp, which in our key “should” be the leading tone, has (in this context) no leading quality at all.

Mann’s butterfly is the best metaphor, because above all this theme is aerodynamic; it will not be tied down. It has both iridescence and transparency. Delicious colors, but not a wash of blurry canvas—everything is clear. You can feel in the quicker notes the sudden and irregular motion of the butterfly, the fluttering wings, the way it hovers over one spot for a little while, seems to want to leave, returns, and then at last, in the final few notes before the violin enters, heads off to a more exotic flower: an unexpected B-flat.

‘—

When the violin enters, Ravel begins one of his many clever gambits. He takes bits of the piano theme and intersperses them with ironic, seemingly unrelated interruptions

He keeps at this a few times, hovering in place, hearing the two disparate musical objects (one utterly sincere, the other seeming to mock) over an overriding dissonance, waiting, until the theme can burst out again, in full rapture, with the violin giving the piano the continuous rippling accompaniment it didn’t have in the opening. Then the violin lets loose!—soaring, and how.

Typical, blossoming Ravel pleasures. But the deeper action comes after the rapture has faded. The fast notes ebb away. We are left again with the piano, musing mostly alone:

… in effect, a bit of blues or nascent jazz. Another unexpected musical object, and hard to reconcile with the French or Greek or whatever you want to call the main theme. It does not belong. Not-belonging-ness is precisely what Ravel wants. We have switched styles, and centuries—you might even say millennia. Along with this style change, you sense a gear change. We shift into a slower rate of perception—even though the tempo remains the same.

This “jazzy” idea starts, and then seems to waltz or hum itself away, as you can see (look at that open-ended slur, heading off into the misty distance.) A unpromising gesture, you’d think, to start a new theme and get lost. But it cunningly sets the stage for several escalating acts of getting lost.

The violin repeats this blue-note theme and waltzes away into yet another (essential, form-defining) piano solo:

This, of course, evokes a chiming clock. The dissonances, the slightly askew octaves, offer modernist truth about the sound of a bell. Yes, there are many clock passages in music, but (I’d argue) few more eloquent. I think it’s safe now to ignore my manager’s objections. This piece really is about time!, and Ravel wants you to know it—he makes it painfully obvious. What comes with this clock, also, is a sense of sorrow and emptiness. Emptiness partly because the violin is silent and partly because the harmonies are eerie and partly because the passage has no forward motion, no impetus at all. The lush, rushing pleasures of the previous music seem far behind. We feel held in a kind of musical parenthesis. We are (if you will) with the clock, but outside of time.

When the violin finally reenters, after this time-spell is cast, we get a long and remarkable and curious discussion, filled with pathos. The violin plays what could well be a supple late-19^th century French theme. The piano plays exclusively open fifths—as if it’s stuck in the 1200s, playing organum or some other ancient style or chant…

The two voices meet here and there, sometimes for partial consonance, other times painful dissonance (note the accent):

Both together and not—two styles suggesting different eras, and moving at different speeds, trying to have a conversation. Meanwhile the music is static and spare, and getting ever more so. Time (you might say) is whittling down the musical texture, leaving less and less. Time the great eroder. You do suspect Ravel borrowed some of the genius of this moment from Satie: this invocation of the ancient world, the melancholy of being caught between eras, the sense of being immobilized.

At last, though the violin reaches up, we reach a nadir. We find our emptiest point:

Amazing. As a disorganized person, I am occasionally annoyed by how well Ravel plans everything; this is not one of those occasions. Perhaps because so little is here, and so much. This high F-sharp is the same note we kept lingering on in the opening theme, the one the butterfly kept hovering around. How is it possible? The note that seemed like such an expression of life, leaping out of a dance, now an expression of a near-death stillness. The miracle is the thread Ravel unerringly draws between these, over a long stretch of musical thought, between extremes, between motion and stasis, obviously, and between the bliss of the opening and this frozen darkness. You have to admire it as a piece of craft but also as an emotional truth.

He then manifests the link, to make us meditate on it:

… in a way, we have to absorb this fact or thought, like a moral, before we can move on.

—

The piece does move on. The development is full of fragments, scattering unease; there is a complicated climax; some foreboding; at last a new theme is born that merges with the main theme in glorious recapitulation.

This new theme is an ode to continuity, to fullness. It spins itself out, without rests, without breath: a continuity to end all continuity, you might say. Time is endless, it seems? For delicious pages and pages we follow its line, up and up and up, on from curve to curve, around one harmony and through another, but at last, after all the ecstatic spinning, like a swimmer who has gotten themselves into the middle of a lake, and starts tiring (an experience I know well), the music again begins to ebb:

You can see there in the violin—again—the F-sharps. Notes begin to vanish. The texture thins. The music threatens to become austere and frozen, as before. The sense of clockwork looms again, too.

Two magical solutions dispel the clock and wrap up this essay on time. First, a chord-twist in the piano (last measure, above) argues the F-sharp might be a leading tone, at last. The violin slowly takes the hint, takes the bait. It resolves up and forward … Bliss!

The violin lingers in the pleasure of this resolution, holding on to it, holding the G for effectively forever. The piano has to finish another way. It too gets stuck on that same F#, but takes it on a different path—

Look at the middle voice! The piano resolves down, F#-E-D, in a cadence that sounds uncannily medieval, like Dufay, or maybe Josquin—at the end of what could be a three-voice imitative motet. What the hell time period are we in?

Note the spareness of the ending. We don’t need a lot of notes to get rapture. (I wish Ravel had absorbed this lesson more often.) The two cadences simply resound in our mind. Even if you don’t appreciate the music history allusions, even if you aren’t a super-geek-nerd like me, I think you feel something special here. They are loving and fulfilled, these resolutions, but reach back to embrace the loneliest moment of the piece. The earlier darkness, and its sense of time stopping, is somehow folded into a vision of light.

My manager might think this last paragraph is cheesy, but I’m fine with that.

We begin with the chord the publisher puts on the title page. Immediately we leap up a passionate seventh.

The next bar resolves the seventh and then contradicts its resolution, leaping and falling at once, soaring up to a glorious high note while an inner voice darkens.

And so on.

If you survived this early attack of music theory, maybe you’ll allow this next metaphor. The opening paragraphs of this piece offer a kind of continuous “however,” lurking within music that appears certain. These certainly seem like happy phrases setting forth, bounding along, and it might feel safe to ignore gnawing complexities, to careen ahead.

I was once lectured by a wonderful German cellist (name redacted) on this subject. It happened early in my career, in a cold, stone-floored rehearsal room in Spoleto, Italy, a dark and musty and unpromising room, lifeless like a crypt, but out through a small window high on the wall you could just see that it was another glorious Italian day, a pure orgy of sun, and the window was unspooling a ribbon of light along the wall, a color in which you could almost see the delicious melon or stracciatella gelato you would eat when rehearsal was over, melting in the heat, and dripping on your hand, and you could almost feel how you would lick it off the side of your own skin like a certain character with a peach in Call Me By Your Name, back when we thought he was worth paying attention to.

The cellist thumped his endpin on the stone and said I was paying too much attention to Schumann’s unease and freedom and that the best way to unlock him was to be more literal, more classical, to let the music be. I always thought there was some wise truth to this critique, and some profound bullshit. He demonstrated a bit of what he wanted and I thought—no, man, that’s Brahms, not Schumann. The playing was cold like the room but Schumann is rarely cold. To me, the most eloquent Schumann performances are somehow “about” this tension between his love for certain classical ideals and his even more desperate love for freedom, and there are a million ways to do this. It is bad, of course, to surge and lurch until the audience is seasick. But you cannot pretend the rhythms are just the rhythms. The notes pull at the rhythms, at the phrases. A good Schumann performance—aside from being loving, generous, imaginative, lyrical beyond belief, vulnerable—makes you aware of the fundamental problem, somehow, the problem of this terrible and wonderful uncontainable Romantic feeling being held within phrases…

Schumann bursts at the seams, certainly more than Mendelssohn, more than even Chopin. Chopin conceals his seams; Mendelssohn is content with them, he breathes with them. But Robert!—so much distance between the notes as written on the page and the feeling they are aiming to convey.

—

After the first pair of announcing phrases, famously, the piano takes the wheel to restate the opening idea in a more poetic vein:

In most performances, people seem to agree: it is now a “piano theme.” But this is a mistake—the piano is only the instigator. It plays the opening leap, sure, an eloquent pair of notes. But the cello responds, marvelously down in the deeps, with its own pair:

In turn all the other players contribute—rising sevenths, falling seconds, inversions of each other. Imagine a restaurant where the chef offered a dish entitled Seventh, Two Ways. The seventh rises passionately, if you will, to meet the world. The second reflects, darkens, thinks, falls away. (But again these two intervals are in a music theory sense the same, powerful mirrors of each other). Schumann rarely found such a perfect and tidy and effortless way to symbolize and distill his Florestan and Eusebius, his introvert and extrovert, his two facing selves, the one ready with wonder and passion to embrace humanity, the other shrinking away.

These paired pairs of notes create a kind of running engine behind the unfolding of events. A continuous unsettling, also a symmetry.

—

I have the pleasure this weekend of playing this old chestnut of a piece with the young-ish and fabulous Isidore Quartet—and unloading my decades of baggage on them. I suppose the nicer way to say it is to share with them some of my experience?

It is always striking in this piece, how architectural it is. The first movement grandly builds an arch over emotional opposites:

Joy —- Terror — Joy

If you feel that the first part is just too ebullient, too life-loving, almost monotonously happy—well, the development section comes along to solve that problem. He extracts the joyous quarter notes from the opening theme and it’s not quite right to say he develops them. It is more fixation, monomania, desperation. Once started, the pianist refuses to play anything else—until at last we return, when the nightmare sped-up version of the theme crashes back into the joyous version. It is also, amazingly, one giant syncopation, a lack of rhythmic unity that goes on for pages and pages. Everything in the exposition felt like an affirmation of sorts, and now, the stubborn negation, the refusal to be with, to follow along.

The second movement presents (movingly, wisely) an opposed arch of opposites

Tragedy — Redemption — Tragedy

It is wonderful here how the funeral march is so etched, so clear (he says marcato) and the heavenly passages blurred, all written in a syncopated haze with major and minor and triplets and duples and little acoustical effects built into the theme—fragments of not quite hymn that break off from the main stream and sing out a second time.

The Scherzo is also structurally symmetrical—maybe almost too symmetrical?—full of good humor, one sublime interlude, one rough and ready.

The last movement is a non-arch.

It begins by erupting, to reveal just a humble dance-tune, not in the right key (!), jerkily alternating between blocky chords—a melody that is not exactly catchy, and moreover circles back on itself. It starts on G and returns to G. It seems to have nowhere to go. A good, heavy, meat and potatoes German dance without seemingly much potential. But other, lighter dances come along; a more legato theme emerges from that and spins out at ever-increasing length, and if you forced me at gunpoint to explain what I love about this movement it is that the blocky, square ideas, with all their good-humored German stomping and marching, gradually surrender to incredible passages of release, sites where the beats vanish and anything might happen.

One of the best releases comes in the development, out of nowhere, out of a typically odd Schumann impasse, out of a stopped moment of time:

… a sway built on the simplest harmonies, nonetheless so sensual and delightful. This idea comes again at the end, of course, as part of an unfolding series, as one form of joy piles on another.

—

With coffee, preparing to practice the piece again, I went to a well-regarded classical website, just to see what sort of things people write about it. I found the following passage:

The opening “Allegro brillante” commences with a bold and sparkling musical idea that gradually unfolds and expands. Almost immediately, however, a soft and tender dialogue between the viola and the cello contrasts it. In due course, both themes are extensively fragmented and subjected to far-reaching modulations. The second movement “In modo d’una marcia” exudes the ambiance of a funeral march. A dark and mysterious melody is introduced by the first violin and haltingly accompanied by sobbing musical rhythms. The contrasting musical idea presents a welcome relief from this morose atmosphere, yet the movement is once more rounded off by the return of the ungodly march …

What the hell, I thought to myself—even they were using AI to write content! For instance, the spree of ands, “bold and sparkling,” “unfolds and expands, “soft and tender.” Quintessential AI lack of judgement. “Bold and sparkling” reminded me of mineral water, “soft and tender” reminded me of a cut of meat, “unfolds and expands” reminded me of … well, never mind.

If the theme “unfolds gradually” then how the heck does the second theme appear “almost immediately”?

With my last dregs of coffee, I became flush with a Schumann restlessness, a desperate desire to do everything and no focus for anything. Instead of using this energy to love life, I kept hate-reading these algorithmic program notes, loving to hate our new LLM overlords. Does a funeral march really have an “ambiance”? Would you say to a friend (for instance) that their loved ones’ memorial service “exuded” anything?

My partner quietly came and removed last night’s dinner plates, ever so slightly trying to avoid my gaze. The phrase …

the contrasting material presents a welcome relief from this morose atmosphere

… sent me into a new fury, not just its taste of redundancy, but the impotence of the expression to capture the incredible qualities of this musical passage. “Welcome relief” sounded like you burped out some stubborn gas. No: it was ad copy. A perfect storm of get off my lawn started up—God I hated the never-ending commercialization of the world and meaning and the internet …

But then—of course—I looked at the date of the piece: 2014. Oh God. Not AI, not even close. I’d been angry and depressed, but now I was haunted. First of all mourning that time, not long ago, in my lifetime I think?, when you could confidently say that a piece of writing was by a human. When that was really the only option. Second, maybe darker thought—was AI just finally a reflection and a child of our own laziness, our own unwillingness to try harder to express ourselves?

• a meta-opera on a musicological tome

• a blog punning on my name

• Lord of the Rings references in essays on the “Goldberg” Variations

• dating a grunge-loving Seattle skateboarder (OK, that one was at least semi-cool and super fun)

Etcetera. Even now, as I find myself writing/playing/thinking my way through the Bach Partitas, this mix of native nerd and desperate-wanna-be-cool reasserts itself. I keep getting up in front of people to explain that a Partita is really a playlist, or—even better—a mixtape.

Some will find this annoying. And yet it’s also an attempt to undo past traumas: lectures on the Baroque Suite from college. Weren’t they awful? I still can feel one early morning in my mind, the chilly windowless lecture room, how he wrote on the chalkboard, and I dutifully mimicked in my notebook…

A C S [opt] G

… which looked like a formula, or a bit of DNA. God forbid you forgot that the Allemande came before the Courante. You’d get docked five points on the exam, or whatever. I don’t remember much of a professorial attempt to animate these dances, to recreate their histories or steps; I don’t remember videos of an Allemande being danced, or anyone explaining that the Sarabande came from Latin America as a wild, lascivious genre and then, on transfer to Europe, acquired somehow—how?—a grave, deep meaning. What a story! Was it a colonial repression of the sensuality of the dance, or was it a slow social realization that sex is a profound aspect of human experience?

Mahan Esfahani, the phenomenal harpsichordist, begins his program note for the Partitas with this dense mouthful:

A project of public self-definition by a composer announcing himself to his peers and to those courageous enough to try their hand at playing the music, the Clavier Übung was from the outset an essentially cosmopolitan endeavour responding to a nascent pan-European sensibility sweeping across Protestant Germany.

I’m not brave enough to begin with a sentence like that. I also don’t have the patience or attention span, since the iPhone. But I like “pan-European,” the sense that a Partita proposes an early European Union. German Allemande, French Courante (or Italian counterpart Corrente), Spanish Sarabanda, Irish/English/Scottish Jig. Or, if you will—and I understand if you won’t—a Partita is a Eurovision contest. Nations get up on stage, one after the other, to offer their best genres, talents, and ideas.

It’s a playlist or mixtape because it presents a such a diverting assortment of tempos, styles, ways of being. An ideal vision of variety. It also has “bonus tracks.” It lies somewhere between a Unified Work of Art and a grab-bag. Some up-tempo, some down, some mid; some lightly thoughtful, others deeply silly. When you get tired of one mode, the next dance offers an antidote.

But the story (almost) always ends with a Jig. We always take our leave by gazing across the English Channel, a gesture you could label—do you feel the pun coming?—Brexit.

—

Who dances an Allemande or a Courante or a Sarabande these days? The Jig is the only dance of the old suite that is still with us. Admittedly, you don’t see people dancing jigs all over the streets, but on YouTube, you’ll find jigging lessons galore. The expression “the jig is up” is still archaically around; also “dance a jig” lingers on in some quarters as an expression of a good mood. Here, already, you see an odd marriage between senses of the word—“jig” as trickery or game or scheme, “jig” as a symbol of joy.

Somewhere I read an account of the Jig’s rhythm, a long-short-long-short-long etc. described as “the natural rhythmic impulse of any dancer who has ever felt happiness.”

In Bach’s Partitas, the Allemandes and Sarabandes tend to be dances of the mind, while the Courantes and Gigues are unabashedly of the body. We need both; the Partita happily supplies both. Bach’s Jigs particularly have a conspicuous, almost crazed kinetic energy. Many of his other dances end with the delicious completion of a chord, a couple anchoring notes followed by tracing of the harmonic innards, whether major or minor or (in this case) both, like coloring between the lines:

This gesture is an explanation of where we have arrived, a sort of settling in, like settling into a nice cushion on the couch. But a Jig has no patience for explaining or settling. It finishes with an arpeggio or similar acrobatic leap. Therefore these endings are hard to play. The Gigue of the 1st Partita is emblematic

in this case, leaping not just a bit!, but crossing octaves perilously, one hand over another, at last heading for the harpsichord’s stratosphere. The D major Gigue ends with a pair of arpeggios, one questioning its way up (?), leaving energies unresolved, and then a response arpeggiating down:

So, too, the end of the E minor Partita, an arpeggio combined with a curious hopping rhythm (more on that later):

Crossing, hopping, leaps, skips, lunges. Bach compresses essential, almost uncontainable, vectored energy into Gigue themes. He somehow fits it all into a little musical idea, like a spring in a watch.

I find written descriptions of choreography bewildering, but this one (from Wikipedia on the Jig) felt like it held some insight about Bach:

… the rising step, or the rise and grind, is standard in almost all light jigs. The right side version of the rising step is performed by putting weight on the left foot, lifting the right foot off the ground then hopping on the left foot once. Hop on the left foot again, bringing the right foot back behind the left foot and then shift the weight onto the right foot, leaving the left foot in the air. Dancers use the phrase “hop, hop back” for these three movements, and there is a slight pause between the hop, and hop back. The next movement is a hop on the right foot. Then shift the weight, left-right-left-right. The phrase for this whole movement is: “hop, hop back, hop back 2-3.” To do the step on the left foot, reverse the left and right directions.

Any paragraph about “rise and grind” would appeal to a coffee fanatic like myself. Now (with that description fresh in your mind) turn to the theme of the D major Partita’s Gigue:

One of the most delightful and infectious of his inspirations. The first gesture arpeggiates up, then radiates back down, and then back up, and stops. It feels asymmetrical in a way, an open-ended gesture, and yet there is palindromic symmetry in it too: up/down/up. The silence at the end of the second measure is essential (“leaving the left foot in the air”).

Then a new idea, hopping down from B to E

and after a little pause again the same, hopping one step lower

Perching for a moment before the next release, playing on the wonderful tension between moments of poise and the dance’s desire to rush and bound onwards.

Look back at the Wikipedia jig, the “hop, hop back”. Two hops—perhaps the beginning of a pattern? But no, now we get a gesture that refers back to the first in reverse

more roving arpeggios, this time down/up/down, and an epilogue scale which leads us back into the theme—a relay rod being passed from one voice to another. And so it continues, to the second voice, and on and on, with the implication of infinite regeneration. Later, these epilogue scales will play an amazing game of ping-pong with each other, passing over, sliding under, running, while a third voice tries to contain this energy within harmonic understanding. I think you don’t really play these dances so much as surf them.

—

One of the key, non-negotiable virtues of Bach’s Gigue themes is unpredictability, a leaping or swerving that comes from nowhere or out of nowhere. The theme of the A minor Gigue is a classic example, where Bach sets up a pattern in the first measure:

This has its humor—a leaping arpeggio keeps getting waylaid by a stubborn chromatic wiggle on beats two and four. But then, the third time around, the leaping arpeggio is followed by a feint, or a dodge, a syncopated swerve around a B-flat:

Oh yes, that is fabulous, both the change itself, and more than the change the sense (even within a theme that will recur again and again) that at any time, a chromatic curveball might take us off the familiar traffic circle of fugue onto a road we’ve never seen.

In the D major Gigue, it is almost impossible to know what form of groove comes next. Take it from me, having played it for 25 years or so—I still find myself surprised when the left hand suddenly interrupts, or that an A# appears to bend us into B minor, or whatever. There’s a moment in the first half of the Gigue, where it seems from the chords on two and three that we’ve settled into a nice rollicking oom-pah-pah:

But, just as you begin to feel grounded by the rhythm section, Bach removes it, and lets fast flowing notes free to fly all over the keyboard:

Unmoored rhythm, looping at will. I particularly admire the little disruptive “wrong” accent on the second sixteenth there, the B, the bump in the road, a little accident to play with you or (joyfully) confuse you … and after that of course Bach (never mean-spirited) gives you the most wonderful grounded cadence you could imagine.

—

It is curious, verging on perverse, that Bach’s jigs are fugues. It’s something I’ve taken for granted for so long that I forget to think freshly about it, to re-absorb it. Jigs are the ultimate fun dance and fugues are (to say the least) not everyone’s idea of fun.

Now (putting on, with a sigh, my music history hat for a moment), this is part of a long tradition—back to Froberger suites, a great North German keyboard forebear. Are any of you also having stomach pains, recalling on Froberger from college, having to memorize “Stylus Phantasticus” knowing that you will forget it again for the next twenty years? Poor Froberger! Not the sexiest composer name. Not many people are throwing Froberger projects or festivals these days. He is the undeserving victim of untold jejune burger jokes (including this sentence). Credited with inventing the suite as we know it, he is also a delightful door back to Italy, to Frescobaldi—and maybe part of what we love about Bach is, as Lutheran and German as he is, a little Italian wildness flows through his musical veins.

Have a moment’s pity for Froberger! Watch this video of the harpischordist Marco Mendoboni play him with love and great musicianship…

I adore everything about this video, not just the playing (the Allemande so free and operatic, the Courante so full of two-against-three dance energy, etc. etc.) but also the Stevie-Wonder-ish head shaking, the tuxedo despite the empty room, the bowtie barely tied, on the edge of chaos.

Yes, so the fugue-gigue dates back to Froberger. But still—these two genres are an odd, incompatible couple. No question, a mashup, and (also no question) Bach found tremendous inspiration and pleasure and creative interest in forcing them together. The rollicking energy of the jig absorbing the propagating energy of the fugue, or vice versa. Which one will win out? Is the jig the cool and the fugue the nerd…?

—

I was lost in the labyrinth of what a jig might mean (as it happens) on a New Jersey transit train, a late transfer from the corporate subsidiary of hell known as Newark Airport. The travel gods had karmically smiled. I’d hopped on an immediately available car to find myself in bright fluorescent light, surrounded by heaps of people in weird silence, careening east in hope or sorrow or the deadened rut of a commute. I was asking myself again and again, why do these pieces all end with jigs? I was Googling jig links as fast as I could, and there it was: a person who jigged from London to Norwich, also eastish, about 80 miles.

Will Kemp—famous clown/improv-comic—was fired from Shakespeare’s theatre company, possibly because his end of show antics (known as jigs, or jiggs, or giggs) were getting out of control, or his improvs were too bawdy or distracting, or who knows? As a form of protest, he embarked on a massive publicity stunt, eerily as if he understood social media already, in 1597. He had a drummer follow him, and a documentarian, and he danced his way to the coast of England in nine days, spread out over a few weeks.

The theatrical jig! This hadn’t been part of my musical/cultural understanding or my liberal arts education. What the hell? I wanted to call my Oberlin English professor and lodge a complaint. If only I’d picked up a copy of Grove’s dictionary, where the musical and theatrical jigs have definitions right next to each other…

But no, I hadn’t, not for years. So now, sitting and passing under the Hudson River tunnel, a vast network of connections and meanings seemed to spread out. At the end of Shakespeare’s plays, jig epilogues were mini-scripts, often bawdy, full of word-play. Dancing, rhymes, trickery, a bit of filth. They are referred to (somewhat disparagingly) in Hamlet. There was tension between these popular comics and the authors of the dramas. The comics would insert their improvisations all through the “serious” play, upstaging it. So they were placed at the end, as dessert, given their moment only after the audience was forced to sit through the main event.

Yes, maybe Shakespeare and his well-loved comic actor Will Kemp fell out over this. And yet where would Shakespeare (and we all) be if not for the fools and jesters and comics (obviously inspired by Kemp and his ilk and their gifts for relentless, rollicking word play)? Where would we be without Lear’s fool breaking our heart while he sort of jokes (in the lilting cadence of a jig, it does seem important to point out)

   The codpiece that will house
  Before the head has any,
 The head and he shall louse;
  So beggars marry many.
 The man that makes his toe
  What he his heart should make,
 Shall of a corn cry woe,
  And turn his sleep to wake

… or bitter Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, making relentless fun of brutish Ajax:

Why, he stalks up and down like a peacock—
 a stride and a stand; ruminates like an hostess
 that hath no arithmetic but her brain to set
 down her reckoning; bites his lip with a politic regard,
 as who should say “There were wit in this
 head an ’twould out”—and so there is, but it lies
 as coldly in him as fire in a flint, which will not
 show without knocking. 

Or Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream? I felt a connection from these endless word games and images and tricks—tricks that take on tremendous importance, that stand in proximity and play witness to the deepest tragedies and shades of human feeling—to Bach’s way of playing games and tricks within his gigues, and to the whole gesture of ending these grand pieces with them.

—

There is nothing more disappointing than a bad (or pompous) ending. One of the most vicious disappointments in recent years was—need I even say it?—the crash and burn of Game of Thrones—an almost moral example, the tragic flaw of it, the swift and total collapse of narrative competence. I thought it was absolutely hilarious that they decided to follow the grand last battle with an awkward, extended board meeting. And who knew? a show that was almost entirely about massacring people would end with yet another, bigger (yet somehow more anonymous) massacre.

This sense of a predictable ending rumbling into view is so sad. The novelty and unknown of the premise congeals. Oh yes, now we will have the Final Showdown with the Bad Guy, or the guy will run to the airport to declare his love at the gate …

But Bach’s Partitas do not have that problem. They swerve around the problem of ending, crossing between genres, offering extravagant and deep wit. The mad pile-up of trills in the second half of the G major Gigue, or the sudden “wrong notes” twisting into minor in the B-flat, or the fact that the Capriccio is not a Gigue but shares the wild intervals and syncopation, or the last one in E minor, starting like a sober academic fugue, but halfway down the page, visited by a hopping in the left hand, an irrepressible Gigue-ness dragging us into another realm. I’ve spent so much of my life wondering how to play that one. There’s something beyond the pale about it, an emotional ambiguity and a relentlessness (like Shakespeare’s fools.)

They prove beyond any shadow of a doubt, that you should not play fugues woodenly, or—like certain teachers seem to prefer for Bach—as if every note is engraved on a granite tablet. The instruction for fugues that I get from these gigues is: dance your ass off. I tried to think of a more polite, musicologically sound way to express this, but I couldn’t.

Bach ends his Partitas not by arriving or settling, but by leaping, and there are so many types of leaps—of mind, heart, imagination, faith. As we jump from note to note and rhythm to rhythm the result (I’d argue) is a kind of catalogue—here, he says, are many wild ways to be happy. In Biblical terms: Go forth and multiply! Or, to put it in terms any TV-weaned American like me can understand: just be cool.

Maybe it’s at this moment you feel most profoundly the connection between muscles and frequencies. Squats—through notes. I’m not going to claim my keyboard warmups are fun to hear. But the muscles I am testing and stretching are hidden away, while you feel the singer’s notes and flexing muscles are present, and somehow the same—the chords are cords. Lying in bed, your ears face the singer’s musical anatomy head on, the bodily nature of music, before you’ve had any coffee whatsoever.

I think it is rather extraordinary that Bach begins his first Partita (his first published work) with measures of warming up. You’re not going to catch Beethoven doing something like that. Maybe, for instance, at the beginning of the “Tempest” Sonata you might imagine, oh, I’m going to play a sly, slow arpeggio to get myself used to being awake

But then—much like my father on Saturday mornings—Beethoven tells you to get your lazy butt out of bed

Beethoven’s not generally a big fan of easing you into his pieces. He wants to unsettle or grab or terrify you. Even in his soft, tender beginnings, for instance the opening of the 4th Concerto or the “Archduke” trio, it’s not like you get time to wake yourself up. You must suddenly and instantly play with ultimate sublimity, as if you fell out of bed right onto the top of Mount Olympus.

But here, you have a nice middle of the keyboard B-flat major chord and a little trill. A piano teacher at Oberlin once told me that trills were one of the best ways to start warming up in the morning, far better than scales, which made unfortunate demands on some small muscles. It was better, he said, to ease into all that. I ignored this suggestion for years, a policy I follow with all excellent advice. But here it is, from Bach himself: start with a trill, only then move on.

—

There is an unarguable delight to these opening measures, and I suppose one motivation for writing is to somehow account for it. I am so tired of reading about Bach’s genius, to be honest—I have contributed epically to this problem, with oodles of What Makes Bach Great content. I guess what I’m proposing here is that what makes this movement so alluring is the greatness of non-greatness.

If you’re seeking universe-altering stuff, you might look to the Sarabande of the 6th Partita:

Mad whorls and complications. A dance buried beneath a frenzy of ornaments and yet somehow also the sighing, the sorrow, the spine of the dotted rhythm, keep fighting through all of it, reasserting themselves. This Sarabande holds so much of Bach’s understanding about prolongation, deception, elusive chromatic wandering. You find layered wisdom and depth, clouding the possibility of a final understanding.

But here

the music is as transparent as a window. There is nothing to understand, as there is nothing to puzzle over.

One thing I adore about this nugget of music is how (after the trill) it rises a bit up the scale, and then (after another trill) a bit more, just one step more. Inching up the scale, like an inchworm. And then, the third time!, suddenly Bach sweeps us to the top of the scale, to the high note, a B-flat, as it happens where we also began.

As often in Bach, a metaphor hides in the musical idea. You take one methodical step; based on the first, you take another. They seem like humble steps, which might not get you anywhere, but somehow incremental steps forward lead us—who knew?—far above and beyond. 1+1 equals 5. This is true of piano practicing, and many other endeavors, and as such you could say this theme describes a little act of faith.

The other main thing I admire is Bach’s little dance around the high B-flat, once we’ve arrived. I am not a marvelous dancer, as my ex-boyfriends (and -girlfriends) will attest, but not so long ago I invented a dance for household use. Whenever I manage a minor domestic achievement, for instance clearing smelly takeout remainders from the kitchen counters, or showering two days in a row—I perform the “nicely done dance.” It is funky, at least in my mind. There’s a lot of wavy manic arm motion. The footwork is free form, verging on anarchy—some hopping, some skittering. It lasts less than ten seconds, and sometimes results in injury, but still, it’s so pleasing! My partner enjoys the nicely done dance, but never joins in. He feels I over-celebrate my accomplishments around the house.

In this case, Bach is letting us celebrate the modest accomplishment of a B-flat major scale. We fall a bit away from the peak B-flat, then—in a syncopated piece of fancy footwork—return to it, then scoop way down, with more little syncopations, to where we started.

If you feel I’m micro-analyzing this bit of music, consider that Bach did make it the first musical utterance of his first published work. Everything in this prelude is woven from it. There are no contrasting materials, no episodes to speak of, no subplot. Only this idea, and the simple joys it represents.

—

As we make our way through this musical invention, we visit all of the intervals, like a singer might—seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths. We are opening up a space, or stretching a muscle, prudently, step by step. And we keep returning to the main note for grounding, to touch base, as if the low B-flat was a spotter at the gym, helping us forward with stability. What’s next? Also like an exercise routine--we switch to the other hand, so both lobes of body and brain get a good workout.

There can be no question, this is music of the morning (while the 6^th Partita, for instance, belongs in deepest darkest night). It has an optimism. I have this thing I do with students, drawn from my Juilliard doctoral dissertation. Sometimes I get tired of asking them to define character. Yes, it can be helpful to know whether they consider a passage of music to be “playful” or “triumphant” or “flirty” or whatever it might be. But, if I’m really ambitious, I ask them to define what they think a musical passage does. If you had to pick one verb, what would it be? Sometimes I invoke the famous scene from Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter instructs Clarice to ask what does the murderer want, what are they doing? It’s not always easy to pin down a single verb for a complex musical passage, and yes it can be reductive. But here it does seem reasonably clear. This beginning wants to rise, like a dough or an aspiration or a person in bed listening to a singer warm up.

The morning is the time of day, at least for me, where it seems most possible to get things done, in the first flush of coffee. The afternoon might be a decent time for editing, but the morning seems best for imagining, reaching.

The left hand does its thing—rising—and in our third visit on this same material we slide into the minor. Isn’t there always some bit of melancholy in the morning, even while you’re still rising? (Oh God, another day, but here we go.) The lovely melancholy doesn’t last long, we escape from the minor with this leap to the high B-flat (rising, the defining urge).

In the final bars, you can feel Bach revealing an ending to his open-ended verb. The curtains begin to close on the scene. The right hand descends while the left hand ascends

… a powerful wedge motion, a focusing of the musical intent. In the last bars Bach begins to add more notes, many accidentals, to thicken the chords, to give them more heft. Maybe at the beginning we were playing on a modest demure clavichord, but now the instrument seems like it wants to be an organ. Or, another metaphor: we were just making coffee in the kitchen at first, doing tasks, emptying the dishwasher or saying prayers, journaling, stretching—who knows what sort of simple incremental tasks we all use to get going each day, with the faith that they will help to bigger things?

But now, in the final measures, there’s unmistakable grandeur—

It doesn’t matter how simple or small the material was. No, Bach says: the smallest things can be grand, should be grand— in meaning and in reach. It took very little for Bach to tell us this story, honestly. Look back at the page! It’s easy enough to see what he’s done, and how he’s done it. A bit of this in one key, a bit of that in another, over and over. The sermon is not that this kind of greatness is inaccessible. No—there it is, easy peasy, step by step. You, too, can be grand (and you are). As deep and incredible as the other Partitas are, I’m not sure if this way of beginning isn’t deeper, or more important.

Summer activities often feel infinite-adjacent. You lie by the edge of the sea, you climb a mountain to survey a massive vista and stand inches from plummeting death, you drink an Aperol spritz to slip smoothly into the endless hands of night. Summer pleasures (therefore) shouldn’t have a deadline. It’s silly to try and fit them in between practicing your Fauré piano quartets. You have to stop the clock, and pretend for a while that life is not slipping away, which means you have to believe that what you’re doing right now, this glorious escape at the edge of the infinite, is real life.

In early September, you realize you should have accepted more of those invitations from perfect days, instead of worrying or practicing. You regret your virtue, as much as any sin.

---

In the last moments of summer I tend to go out to the Olympic Peninsula. This year, we played (at my instigation) the Reynaldo Hahn Piano Quintet. The slow movement is one of the most profoundly beautiful pieces in the history of French music.

The pianist begins by strumming in the minor key. A heartbeat, a pulse--whatever form of time you want to call it.

What tempo should I play? This question would seem to require a decision, or a metronome mark, but it’s a process. Crucial and mysterious. It starts as an instinct, maybe, then you begin to test your tempo against experience, experiment, against your colleagues’ thoughts, what the composer seems to have wanted. It starts with pure desire, or a thought, an impulse, one of a thousand possible tempos, and then gradually it becomes a certainty that only one tempo will really do. Maybe you start with an idea, yes, I’m pretty sure the speed of this piece “should” be this (like certain insensitive conductors), but then the music appears and you realize your idea has to bend around the notes. Choosing a tempo should be a sensual or emotional experience. What speed allows the music to speak, helps us to hear and receive events, without feeling pushed and without tedium? How do we want time to feel? I recently heard someone play the theme of the Goldberg Variations so slow that it almost killed me.

The cello starts from the main note, rising a fifth, and already we have something to savor, this mildly unnamable chord on the cello’s second measure:

Some French music—let’s be honest—can feel like an exhausting excess of pleasure. One well-lubricated, gorgeous sonority after another, most often seventh or ninth chords. Lovely, yes, but soon you feel you can’t hold on, like when you put on too much lotion and your hand slides off the doorknob. Hahn gives us an antidote to this: a seventh chord with an interesting problem. It’s not officially a seventh chord, it’s just two dissonances stacked on each other, F#-G#, C#-D#, and yet you feel--it could be one. It could so easily be categorizable--just shift one note up or down! And yet, no. The theme of this movement, and all its depth, depends on the resistance of these not-quite chords, which provide a kind of grip.

The cello rises another fifth, and creates a searing dissonance between this peak note (D-sharp) and an A major chord. Aha. We are nurturing a little family of dissonances, sitting on the interface between pleasure and pain.

We fall back to a conventional seventh chord: the typical open-ended end of a first phrase, a musical comma. In a masterstroke, Hahn sidesteps cliché, and complicates the comma, by shifting the piano’s bass up a half-step. We hear first the “correct” chord and then the altered version, with its pained rub against easy meaning:

A delicious paradox: the slightness of this motion vs. the profundity of the effect. For two beats we listen to this rub of the altered seventh chord with its one “wrong” note, we taste the pain and ambiguity against the memory of the “normal” chord, we feel it sensually without (it seems) the intervention of the mind that so often characterizes German music.

The end of the cello melody is another gorgeous pleasure/pain moment. The cello lands on a familiar note—D#. This D# begins its life written as an E-flat, possibly leading to a distant harmony, opening up new vistas. But in its last moment it returns to its origins, and falls back (with a shiver, I’d say) into the melancholy minor of our opening. In performance, a musical cellist creates a little journey of sound on this one note—shifting bowspeed and vibrato, some alchemy of motion, to alter the acoustic appearance of the identical pitch, to make it shimmer. The dissonance melts and re-forms.

This calls to mind of one of my favorite markings in Franck: non troppo dolce. Lovely and sweet, of course, but not too sweet, not cloying, not vanishing or slipping. It suggests a little closet of different beauties—for different occasions. Some with a sharper edge, cutting you like a knife, and other (more melting) beauties like the glance of a finger along your arm. And it is the complicated, often heartbreaking passage from one beauty to the other (even within one note) that is so fascinating to these late Romantic French composers.

—

Staring out at Lake Sutherland, at all times of day, surrounded by trees and moss and ferns, unimaginable profusion. Out the kitchen skylight, an epic pine that could crush you and the house in one blow, but green and inviting, the texture of the looming trunk—somehow you want to cuddle up to it. There is the ever-varying promise of the morning, coming through the mist, and there are the many incomparable slow sunsets, with the gradual appearance of more distant mountains … all of this unbelievable pleasure can’t be separated from regret, from the summer that was.

The second time that Hahn states his theme, the harmonies subtly change. They have become even more lovely—if that were even possible. It would be easy for me to label the chord changes, to force-feed you “the facts,” but far more difficult to explain why or how the memory of the first time haunts you, or how you just know that the harmonies have changed, even if you don’t know exactly how … I’ve played this movement a fair bit and I couldn’t tell you what happens, and I don’t want to look at the music to find out. Not out of laziness. But because the shiver that it produces is about knowing without knowing—a change that passes through you and is not explained.

An interesting moral: as inexorable as this theme appears to be (as life appears to be), you can still take a different path through it.

The third time through the theme, the piano ripples in gorgeous fives:

This wave of rhythm rubs against the prevailing three to a bar (a clash of prime numbers), and against the larger eight-bar symmetry, a dissonance of rhythm as painful/seductive as the many chords we have heard.

All of these changes are “development” without the baggage of development, sidestepping its traps, abstaining from annoying sequential equations. It really is to be admired, and you keep wanting it go on, as sad as it is, a kind of delicious extended regret.

—

After all the dark unfolding, we reach that most Proustian of narrative events: an impasse. You can see on the page the collapse of the musical story, the piano insisting on various bass lines which don’t seem to go anywhere, the generative rising fifth passing back and forth, unproductively:

If you managed to get through In Search of Lost Time, you are super familiar with those moments, especially in books five and six, when Proust goes in circles, when you can’t bear to hear about *&#(* Albertine again, or whoever or whatever obsession. Dude (you think) maybe even your act of attention is part of the problem, maybe you’ve written yourself into this impasse. Maybe part of the problem is pretending to the world that you have a crush on a woman.

And precisely at the apex of this Proustian disaster, and with the same miraculous sense of knowing and planning (but not pre-ordaining) and finding the one key to unlock the problem and our hearts, the first violinist (silent all the while) manages to come in:

The markings on the page are lovely, as are the pitches. Trés calme, yes, and dolce, again, sweetly—you hardly have to be told. And yet also quite specific about the time relationship. The heartbeat of the old sorrow is the same (slightly disguised) as the syncopated sway of this new idyll.

The math is disguised because the piano is syncopating/palpitating and the cello is replying on the offbeats and nothing about this theme is insisting on its meter, exactly. There is also the little ornament in the melody, blurring the beat, suggesting the sensual, maybe even the erotic. Behind the scenes, you can find two three-bar phrases and then a four-bar. A delicious guiding asymmetry—a proportion you can’t quite hold on to, and you’re not meant to.

A more tender, simple-yet-elusive theme is hardly to be imagined. Pure inspiration and (also) pure craft. It unfolds over a couple pages of the score, and the piano gets its one moment to respond to the theme (which I can’t help milking for all it is worth) … Isn’t so much of French music about creating or re-creating idylls? An idyll has no goal, it does not practice the piano for God’s sake, it merely wants to be, to be left alone or to escape.

—

The main melancholy theme recurs—sigh. We get the sense of a frame, the usual ternary form, darkness framing light.

We are plodding or treading through the melancholy theme again, when Hahn does something marvelous—he brings back the first violin a few more times, with fragments of paradise:

I’m not a huge fan of French combinations of themes. Sometimes it can be ecstatic, I suppose. More often it’s like you’re lounging in Xanadu’s pleasure dome, when your counterpoint teacher bursts in the door. Very few composers can make the academic ecstatic (Bach leaps to mind).

Hahn, luckily, does not really try to combine these ideas—he just interweaves them. The violin remembers the idyll, the rest of the instruments take us back to the sorrow, the violin tries the memory again, more desperately. The harmonies are subtle, and the slow pacing of the interaction, a kind of struggle between worldviews that don’t really want to struggle. It is not a philosophical struggle, like Beethoven—there is no answer. At last the violin wins out (seeming to convince the rest) and we get the idyll again … it doesn’t feel like a victory but a surrender.

What is Hahn trying to tell us? He has offered us two compelling senses of time—one duple, one triple. One treads, another floats. The floating time does not have the complex or deep harmonies of the treading time—but it has other, equally worthy beauties. These senses of time are separated structurally and instrumentally.

Surely you’ve already guessed my metaphor. If the middle section is (let’s say) the beach or some other summer surrender, a perpetual present, the outer section is the real life we are reentering, the semester, the season, the workweek, or whatever your treading reality might be, the profound passage of years, days, hours. Maybe what I find so essential, so moving, is how the music feels torn between them. It is built on the conundrum, organized around the impossibility of reconciling these two faces of time.

It was worse when my first boyfriend left me, not without reason, slicing my concert tux into ribbons, gouging holes in my piano, pouring tequila on the hammers so the whole action had to be rebuilt. The next months were a haze. A precious and beautiful attachment had been lost in a flash—not the slow erosion that aging brings on.

I suppose the most recent version of this for me was the election. The capacity to love the country I live in as an aspiration—that may never come back. The main manifestation for the first few days was fight-or-flight, an inability to slow my nerves. A climax came when I was cooking some dumplings. Some oil spattered. In my state, I retreated crazily, as if fleeing from the scene of a battle, and alas my dishwasher was left open and I fell backwards over it and bonked my head and put a butt imprint in the door. It was hilarious in the darkest possible I-might-have-also-died way.

All the while, I was bringing back a wonderful piece by Missy Mazzoli— Heartbreaker.

For research purposes, and maybe some personal reasons, I wanted someone to remind me what younger love angst was like. I consulted with an undisclosed individual, who’d been left by his love interest. Maybe I was on shaky moral ground. What does it feel like? I asked, if you feel comfortable. He said yes, let’s get down to it, gamely, as if he was just creating a grocery or to-do list, but once he got going there was a glitch in the code. He was looking at himself from the outside and suddenly but what did I do wrong? there must be something! and the person who broke off communications kept changing—was it him or the other person?, the agency kept shifting—and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that this was heartbreak, since he already knew, and yet kept somehow not knowing. It’s over and yet it’s not over.

Heartbreaker begins with a series of gnawing dislocations. You could call them syncopations, but that is not, I don’t think, the perfect word:

I can’t help being reminded of the opening of Beethoven’s Opus 31 #1:

In both cases, a dislocation that will not stop, an obsessive split. Beethoven’s after manic, prankish humor. Mazzoli is after … well, I would say… something uneasier. In many post mortems of relationships, you try to identify an intractable mismatch, we are at different places in life, or I’m not sure we have the same values or whatever, some way to make the severing of an emotional contract add up. For the person doing the dumping, often this mismatch is semi-invented to hide a more hurtful truth. For the dumpee, this mismatch may feel frustratingly small, random, almost silly, something that could be fixed or worked on. With the result that the chasm between you is both small and massive, fictional and real.

In musical terms: a major chord in the right hand (A-flat major) and a reiterated dissonance deep down in the left. And what about the rhythm? Music has upbeats—preparatory breaths to the next downbeat. It also has grace notes, which fold into the beat, allowing a grander, deeper gesture. But Mazzoli’s short notes are neither. Too quick for an upbeat, and too slow for grace, they won’t lead in or fold in—they just won’t match up.

In other words, a dissonance in two dimensions: time and pitch. The relationship is flawed, both in substance and occasion.

—

The first narrative event of this piece is that the right hand chord becomes more complicated, beautifully complicated. A-flat travels through this intermediate chord, to C major.

The dissonant G in the left hand stays constant, throughout this transit. By the end, it’s not a dissonance anymore, but it’s not so simple. It remains dislocated in time. And the doubling of the G is odd, now—its own form of instability, just like in certain relationships when you think, oh, if only we spent more time together, but then when you spend time together it hasn’t exactly fixed the problem, and might have made it worse.

Doublings, voicings, resolutions. These are insider musical things, which makes it hard to write about this piece—perhaps that’s why I love it so much. You have to dig into these excellent details as you practice, the haunting by a persistent bass, the coincidence of desired resolutions with a perpetually shifting flaw in the ointment.

—

Mazzoli does a patented Schubert maneuver. She restarts the story from the beginning, then takes a subtly different turn. Here we are at our original chord (plus dissonance):

We still resolve to C. But this time the bass moves to B, just before the C chord:

What are the implications? She makes us listen to this rub, this resolution/nonresolution, a couple times. Then, in what I’d call a masterstroke, she brings back the initial A-flat:

… It’s spelled G# now, but you can see it there, in the middle of all those fluttering notes. The color is amazing, if you do it right. You really do sense one chord awakening within another. This old dark note made new (call it A-flat, call it G-sharp) grabs onto the dissonant B in the bass, to find E major.

Is this a modulation? It feels more like a transference, a passage, an elusive path from one beauty to another. The C major chord was beautiful, and this is even more so! A kind of hope. And yet, as we sit on it—its insufficiency is also clear. The fifth is doubled again (unstable, again) and Mazzoli writes a crescendo. Three times in a row she makes us hear it (look up there). Listen! There are forces in this beautiful, hopeful chord that cannot sit still. We are forced to burst back out to more difficult things.

—

Bursting out is key to this piece, played against the feeling of being trapped—both relevant to the world of heartbreak. In my half-asleep 90s, I would yearn for someone, which flooded the zone and engulfed all my other problems. Once you were linked, this became a different flood, almost unbearable, the sense of being deeply and beautifully attached and yet the emotion (which I had not grown up with at all, something my family was allergic to) felt so close to that of being trapped.

It’s statistically likely that Mazzoli has been more emotionally mature than me most if not all of her life, and so this particular problem may not have visited her. But she certainly creates vivid pools of unease. The rhythms are sparse, then burst into flurries, like Tourette’s tics, or Janacek speech-rhythms. The awkward waiting. Then the counting, and sudden action!, repeated notes, a rapid summoning of all your pianistic forces. She varies up the bar lengths in a cunning, screwing-with-your-head way. You must count, though time cannot exactly be counted on.

A few flurries in a row, near the beginning, a first big attempt to burst out:

A rhythmic change-up passage comes next, unequal bars, unequal pulses, a heart arrhythmia if you will. Then, it seems, she wants to let us soar:

See the syncopations (a bit of Schumann, maybe) underneath the melody? A sense of flow, breath, continuity, like an old-school Romantic song over a palpitating accompaniment. And yet—none of this quite materializes. The melody doesn’t blossom into a continuous release or catchy hook, it keeps stopping and waiting, and the patterns again are so irregular that a phrase seems like an illusion. Everywhere, could-be or wannabe phrases, bursting and oozing with feeling, sort of resolving, chasing C major like the perfect relationship you never had, and everywhere it doesn’t add up.

At last, there is a terrible build up of desire, in the form of repeated notes for three bars, as if trying to hammer your way out of a cage, and a wild climax. She says, “ecstatic, exuberant” and writes a series of death-defying leaps, full of meaning, unlike my comic collapse on my dishwasher. You’re really just hammering out two notes, over and over, F and G-flat, you’re making many approaches, like an airplane in difficult weather, to a landing in F major. It’s kind of monotonous, this desire, and yet perilously easy to screw up. Like any relationship, it requires tremendous work, and yet it wants to seem easy, thrown off, joyful.

—

I would make a strong case for the canonic value of this piece. I love it, the integrity of it, her uncompromising ending, her subtle harmonic thinking. And yet I have felt heartbroken by it. Until recently, I only felt I did justice to it once, and that was a private performance, on my home turf on my home piano, for my friend Mark Steinberg (from the Brentano Quartet). When I finished, he said urgently, in a semi-whisper, “that’s a great piece,” and that was profoundly gratifying from such a great musician—yes, it is a great great piece but only under ideal conditions.

I have practiced it a LOT. More than most pieces, honestly. And so the frustration is considerable, of not being able to capture the magic, and uncork the genie’s bottle in concert. Recently, though, I started to get closer and closer, to be able to execute all the modern leaps and rhythms and still hear the harmonies in a Schubert-ish, Schumann-esque way.

But curiously all this time I didn’t write Mazzoli. How many times have you wished you could ask the composer (Bach, Beethoven) what they recommended? So, slightly encouraged by recent improvement, I wrote to her asking a simple question, “why is it called Heartbreaker?”

And here was her charming reply:

Hi there!

It was really just a sort of feeling I got from the piece after I wrote it - it’s impetuous, a bit wild, a bit flirtatious and a little out of control. Like a hot guy you meet on vacation. ;)

The piece also had a sense of FUN in it, which is not the norm for me, ha ha, so I wanted a one-word title that was also a bit fun.

Does that make any sense or am I crazy?

Anyway, thank you for playing it!

Missy

First of all, I am glad the composer also wonders if they might be crazy. But secondly, “a hot guy you meet on vacation”… well, that hit me right where I lived! The next time I played it was the best ever—and I started to plan my next vacation. I’d been stuck in a dark loop. It should be a fundamental Rule of Music-Making, at the risk of heresy I’d call it one of the Denk Ten Commandments—you must always remember that a composer’s idea of fun might be different from yours.

One of the truly unforgivable aspects for me about our current moron president is that he and his followers seem to have so much fun, doing their hateful thing. They have managed, even, to make the very idea of fun corrupt, suspect, tainted by the memory of jeering junior high school bullies. Liberals have done their fair share of ruining fun, no question—a major political problem for the left in America. And yet, in the darkness one has to have faith that there is generous and thoughtful and living fun left in the world. That’s why the most severe and deep of the late Beethoven works (131, 110, 106) often have the silliest scherzos: an act of faith. And that’s what saved my heartbroken Heartbreaker.

(credit: drawing by my friend Anya Grundmann)

On the plane I read a book I never wanted to read, a presidential biography, the life of James Monroe, eight hundred pages, the sort of hefty tome that I imagined prosperous men would skim in a recliner, in khakis and leather loafers, and then place on on a coffee table, as manifest evidence that they understood how America became the glorious bastion of representative democracy that it is today.

The story has fire in it, for sure. But it was also an endless roundabout. Arguments with George Washington, ill-managed farms, tariffs, epidemics, slavery “compromises”, diplomatic evasions. We landed. My Lyft driver tried to wish me happy holidays but I was lost in a haze of history. Quickly, I hit my hotel room—key swiped, hands washed, bags dropped. And I was back out the door in search of present experience.

—

I hurried through the hotel lobby, a Multiplex Christmas Orgy. Multiplex because of its six or so seating areas—different theatres of holiday cheer—orgy because all the parts seemed interchangeable. Each area had a tableaux: tree, statue, fake presents, cozy symmetrical armchairs. The statues were reindeer, Santas, birds, in a gold styrofoamy material, probably cancer-causing. I didn’t touch them. Each tree’s ornaments were all of the same color—mauve or red or green.

I was oddly fearful of these pre-fabricated corporate Christmas nooks. I kept veering away from one tableaux, and then nearly crashing into another. As it happens, this is exactly how I behave at a real orgy.

“Have a good time,” the guy at the check in counter called out, assuming I was drunk already.

Glass doors slid open onto the southern night. I turned towards the French Quarter for my tourist’s desire, a Po Boy sandwich. A friend and mentor recently challenged me to write down the things I really wanted out of life, and I was absolutely overwhelmed by it. For now—a sandwich, some chaos, some distraction.

The first encounter was in front of a hat store with a panoramic display window. A man was asking the crowd for area codes. Someone yelled out “215!” He began to rap:

you gotcha philly cheese steaks

and your hard breaks

life’s full of big stakes

It was loud. Someone jostled me, touched me on the shoulder, did I want ... ? No, no, I didn’t want whatever that was, because I was gazing in wonder at the hundreds of hats in the window, from an old-school Mad Men number, which might make you as cancel-proof and sexy as Don Draper, to the dorkiest flannel earmuff extravaganza, for New Orleans’ well-known Arctic weather.

Life was about wearing every hat, loving every hat, I thought, sincerely!, and then immediately Jeremy what the hell is wrong with you, you need a drink or a hug or a long talk.

All these takes

are deep fakes

On to Canal Street. There was an unlit section in the middle for the streetcars, with no lines or lanes, a dark river Styx. You had to hope and cross. On the other side, what appeared to be a hardware store promised POBOYS in red neon. A voodoo sex shop. BURRITOS AND DAIQUIRIS in all caps loomed to my left, the fluorescent light unlivable except for late drunken pit stops. Thin sidewalks waged a battle against swaying walks. I dodged a few characters who looked ready for trouble, and a pack of not especially svelte people in elf costumes.

Was this fun or terrible? I texted my friend but no answer—possibly immersed in a sugar plum fairy.

After a left turn, the situation got wilder. Cars squealed away or screech-stopped to let packs of revelers out of back seats. The roads were mostly torn up—sewer construction—and the sidewalk (already a mockery of level) just became an idea, an abstraction. You walked where you needed to walk. Noise, and music, from every direction. A woman staggered, a couple super-built dudes crashed into me as I was going to be gallant. The thing about chaos is that you can’t really adjust it for your comfort level.

Google said I was at my recommended destination. The doors of the corner bars were all thrown open, creating a Venn diagram of beats and styles, pounding, louder than I could ever have imagined. Peering in the window: a take-out counter with no customers, and two waitstaff leaning in the pose of fuck you for making me work tonight.

—

My search for a Po Boy went on. No more algorithm. From now on, my soul would be my guide. But my soul couldn’t help looking down at my phone again for another suggestion. No, soul!, I thought, just walk, just feel. I turned left, right, right, as if trying to lose myself in a maze, away from noise and revelry, and then out of nowhere, on a corner, a door stood open.

Inside wasn’t full or empty. The right chill vibe?

“Sit anywhere?” I asked, slipping past the door woman, but she was coolly placing a cigarette in her mouth.

I sidled up to a long bar. A well-dressed gay with excellent salt and pepper hair was eating at a high top. Physical proof that I wasn’t the only loner in this world. A drunk straight couple gazed at a fearsome brown platter of fried unknowables. In the back, a few large tables chattered away.

But moments after I hung my nerdy backpack on a hidden hook, I began to sense a mistake. It seemed quiet, too quiet, maybe, now that it was too late, now that I’d chosen. For 8-12 minutes the bartender—white, shaved head, in his fifties or hard-living forties—stood a few feet away from me and stared just to the right of my face, taking glasses out of a dishwasher and rubbing them with a dirty rag. It appeared he was contemplating a philosophical problem, but despite or because of this, he did not seem willing to acknowledge that I existed.

“Hello,” I said at last in a middling voice. Nothing happened, except that a saxophone threw some queasy stylings on Silent Night.

I summoned my courage. A few minutes later, loudly, at the border of rude, I said “Hey? Do you have some water?”

He turned away, did something invisible, swiveled back.

“No,” he said, placing a large full glass in front of me, “we don’t have any water.”

—

I began to enjoy the bartender’s dislike for me.

He allowed me to order, at last, my Poor Boy. Some indecision between shrimp and oyster. The emotion on Bartender’s face as I chose was boredom and again abstraction, like he had to keep some part of his brain busy elsewhere not to die a little inside—exactly how I feel when I see a symphony program with Beethoven’s 5th on the second half.

I pulled my presidential biography out of my backpack, and delved back into the Missouri Compromise, which as you may recall didn’t quite take, and didn’t notice that the tables in the back were clearing out, that the lone gay had left, how the straight couple were fondling their last amorphous fried object. The only thing that grabbed my attention was the smell of bleach. They were mopping the floors around me. Open til midnight, the sign said. Also, the door was still propped, bringing a chilly breeze down the bar.

If they were trying to drive me away, I was ready to escalate.

“How about a beer?” I asked. I tried to look like someone who would nurse a drink for hours and then leave a meager tip. He replied “Yes,” and waited to see who would break the stalemate.

A plate appeared. A giant, split loaf of French bread with an ocean’s worth of fried shrimp on top. If you tried to pick it up, shrimp would rain to the floor. I popped one in my mouth and it had that classic old, frozen ammoniac taste, the flavor you’d expect from a Red Lobster in Peoria. Ah, the true meaning of Christmas, a bait and switch, a classic tale of warmth, frozen through reuse or apathy. This metaphor also felt too easy, a trap. If I wanted anything out of life, it was to avoid these obvious metaphors.

Beneath the shrimp, I started digging for magic sauce—I still hoped, in these circumstances, to know the secret of a Po Boy—and found only a parsimonious smear of mayo. A few lettuce leaves melted into the shrimp, victims of sudden and catastrophic climate change. I imagined how happy the lettuce had been, hours earlier, in the coolness of the fridge. Just two pickle slivers, one towards the far end, another dangling off the near edge, as if trying to escape. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed possible this was the world’s most passive-aggressive Po Boy.

I looked up and caught the bartender looking at me, at last, with curiosity. Is it what you wanted?

I took a nearby sticky bottle of Crystal hot sauce and covered the shrimp with it. The ammonia taste vanished. What was left burned in a satisfying way. The sauce soaked the bread, creating a handy glue or paste, so now you could pick the whole mess up. After ten determined minutes, the sandwich was gone. A giant pile of fries, too, covered in hot sauce, and then ketchup, and lastly (in a nod to European sophistication) mayo.

My friend texted.

As I asked for the check, I noticed a red glop on my gray hoodie, like a wound.

In a flash, the bartender became a good Samaritan. “You need soda water”, he said, firmly. No more philosophical distance. He grabbed a rag, soaked it in soda, and handed it to me over the tall bar with apparent kindness. Our fingers touched, his rough, mine pianist-soft. Was it Jesus soaking the rags?, I wondered, no, now I remembered, the Roman soldiers soaked the rags, or maybe a sponge, was it with wine or water or vinegar?, it was all a jumble, was it at last meant to make Jesus feel better or to mock him?

Anyway, the sign of my empty gluttony vanished. My hoodie was reborn.

—

At the next bar, my friend laughed—“Oh God you went there?!?!?” My soul, untethered from my iPhone, led me to the saddest and most worn out of New Orleans’ many dilapidated leftovers, which figures.

Here, life was newer. Tourists and miscellaneous hangers-on had been replaced by deliberate hipsters. I ordered a “Seasonal Ennui.” There was Korean fried chicken, and edamame, and ‘nana pudding. The down-home abbreviation made me wince.

My friend, swimming deep into a martini, was as charming as always, telling me a redacted version of his life, which neither of us were totally pushing to declassify. Then a metal version of “I Wish You A Merry Christmas” came over the sound system. This launched a kind and sweet person into bitter tales of nominally paid Christmas gigs with choirs that were both preachy and out of tune. Performing the miracle of redemption for possible homophobes on demand. Christian goodness in the era of Trump? A sick joke. But someone that night had gotten lost in one of the famous Nutcracker bits with a crash of dissonance, he said, and this funny memory brought him out of the funk.

—

The next day was all golden sunshine and blue sky. We set out for breakfast. The hangover was a form of wisdom. Breakfast was a way of softening the edges of that wisdom, coming to terms with it.

As we passed along the same streets, my friend said how much he loved this area when it was less itself, trying less hard, how cute and charming it was. Yes. So many beautiful structures had survived the remorseless American desire for newness. It was hard to reconcile the sense of diverse life and gorgeous proportion with the cheap drunk touristy shambles and the third element, which you probably had to say was menace. Menace’s many forms, if one could say that, the hard reality, floods, colonial wars, racism, etc., but at the same time sexy menace, like in the movies when the demons and devils are extra-sexy, that was all part of it.

There were Asian foot massage parlors everywhere, with rows of empty beds, and door attendants, aggressively selling relaxation. Also soap stores with hot Slavic door people, trying to get under your skin, to read your life as if they were psychics (“you flew all the way here for him, honey, I bet”). The plan seemed to be that these personal revelations would guilt you into buying products to clean yourself.

We went into a hushed gallery which turned into a monstrous epic three-floor opulence. French cabinets, chandeliers, rich people portraits, sculptures, boudoirs, gilded samurai suits. At the top floor you found this:

An astounding canvas, far more overwhelming and disturbing in person, in the gallery’s lurid light, a work you could never bring into your home, so New Orleans, the seedy gaze and the referential beauty, the French grand style and the elegance and awareness of history built, if not on, at least adjacent to a moral swamp.

More wandering, more sun, more talking about life and not exactly knowing what to do about it. It was good to think of no deadlines, to be beyond ignoring deadlines. There were no deadlines in this city. Everything had already happened, or would just keep happening. But there was, in fact, a hidden clock ticking. My friend started to look a bit worse for wear, a bit stretched, and my head throbbed—the joy of the walk was about to turn sour. My phone, knowing me, suggested an annoyingly trendy coffeeshop.

It was packed.

At the front of the line was an elderly man with a large walking stick. On the top of the stick sat a green skull with black eyes. And on top of his head, a black Willy Wonka hat with a diorama built in, a scene from Alice in Wonderland. His face, when he turned, was one of the most beautiful older faces I have ever seen, almost as beautiful as Georgia O’Keeffe’s, just the right amount of wrinkle and cheekbone, just the right reminder of youth and all the whittling and thinning and erosion of age had only managed to create something more glamorous. And yet—the skull.

He was attended by two companions, older men but not so old, with none of his glamor, and in the process of consulting with them what to order he clogged up the line in an amazing way.

People began to feed into the place, brunch rush hour, a thousand hangovers awakening, and the line began to snake out the door. Two adorable gays were in line behind me, in fashionable baseball caps, not grungy and sweat-stained like mine, Warby Parker frames, small fashion brand tote bags, the whole nine yards. I felt sure they were doing one of those NYT “36 hours in New Orleans” type things, or whatever. I was bitter. How did they look so good? They also weren’t one of those matchy-matchy gay couples, suggesting a future world of clones having preordained sex with each other. They were distinct, almost too ideally dissimilar. I texted my friend (in an equally clogged line for the bathroom, apparently) that “some gays had arrived” as if this was a newsflash. When he finally returned he seemed nonplussed, as if he only now realized that half of the things I say or think are obvious or profoundly not worth saying.

In the meantime, I’d chatted up these guys. They actually seemed nice, mellow. No archness, as if they were avoiding archness, trying to be inclusive characters in some thoughtful novel. I asked them what to order and they said (mellowly) “we always get the same thing, a flan stick.” Well, well, well! I had no idea how a flan could become a stick, but in the modern world of culinary fusion, I was willing to accept and eat anything. Actually, come to think of it, I was desperate now for the experience of a flan stick, the melting custard somehow encased in some fried or baked Southern charm which would…

Hmm, I was getting horny, that was weird, definitely something to look into with my therapist, if I had one.

As at last the green skull wizard man finished ordering and I approached the pastry case, there was—alas—no flan stick. What there was, and what they had said to me, was “muffuletta stick.”A huge psychic blow. A muffuletta breadstick was too obvious, too easy to imagine. The darker, more disturbing question was how I heard “flan.” Was this some New Orleans distortion field, a blur of phonemes, a drawl of the mind? The LA gays (of course, that is where they were from) were confused by my explanation of this.

I ordered a jalapeño corn cookie, chocolate babka, and the now infamous muffuletta. We didn’t eat any of it. Friend and I pounded six or so delicious glasses of free water and headed out to a table to rest and gaze upon all the awakening people. The man with the green skull was talking with his companions, or minders, or benefactors. The LA gays maybe wanted us to talk to them or maybe not, but everyone stayed at their tables and waited for the day to mature.

Later in the afternoon, when the friend had gone to do some work and I was reading about the Louisiana Purchase, I set all three pastries on the desk. After a couple hours, I looked around for a bite of something, some entertaining nibble, energy to “help me work.” But all the pastries were gone. A day’s calories at least. I had eaten them all, but had no memory of it. Bits of buttery crust lay everywhere. It was not a virgin birth; it was a virgin consumption.

Much of the James Monroe book was more or less the same. Colonial consumption, devouring lands—the insatiable, inalienable hunger of a free people in pursuit of happiness. Consuming, taking, and all the while, act by act, day by day, in a million ways composing a glorious history to help forget.

—-

The next morning, calorie-laden, I was late for a Lyft. As I ran through the lobby, a woman posed for an Instagram selfie in one of the tableaux, fluttering her eyelashes and moving her phone back and forth.

A sensible hatchback waited in the roundabout. I slipped in, to find a driver in a Santa suit. His seat had reindeer antlers, hung with red and green beads. Tinsel everywhere, mini-tree on the dash, Bing Crosby on the sound system, Frosty the Snowman. It took me a minute to notice a smiling skeleton, locked in embrace with the passenger seat in front of me, maybe three feet in length. “Say hi to Eugene!” a note suggested. Is there any city in America that embraces death so openly?

Mixed messages, though, at Christmastime.

An iPad offered me control over the soundtrack. I informed the driver that we were going to do a deep dive into my favorite Christmas tune: Lo! How a Rose, E’er Blooming. He was silent. We started with Sting’s version: a little bloodless, a little fancy. A solo version of the tune, Sting singing nicely enough, though you couldn’t help noticing that the dissonances felt smoothed, and the turn into the minor didn’t quite have melancholy (the absolute essence of this tune is its hovering there, the constant reference of the parallel minor against—a simple trick—but in this case, in its placement in the central joint of a phrase, in its subtle commentary, it becomes the loneliness of Christmas, the wintry barren trees, whatever you want it to be.)

Sufjan Stevens, next, an artist I deeply admire. He added one extra beat which was nice the first verse, less charming the twentieth. The plinking of the banjo, the folking of the tune, extracting it from pretense, from its Renaissance origins, or finding a truer Renaissance origin? His approach renounces sustain. He wants you to hear hypnotic decays of notes, all similar. It creates a sense of waiting, I guess, and you might find this eloquent, but not me, not today, as I explained to the driver—and Eugene of course.

Lastly, as a gag: the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I was prepared to make fun. The hum of hundreds of voices filled the cluttered hatchback. The sun shone; the minor chord spoke. They didn’t do much. They didn’t have to. Pure breath, pure sustain, the philosophical opposite of Sufjan, pure classical music uncool, and when the harmonies got more dissonant, more articulation, a tiny bit more grab and pull. The driver didn’t seem too excited about my explanation of this. But I was fighting tears. The feeling hidden in the almost hackneyed chord progressions flowed over me like water, or wind. How was it possible that this lonely minor chord was understood by every one of those singers at the same time, in the same way?

—

At Elizabeth’s, a New Orleans favorite, we sat under a chalkboard of possibilities. I was kindly lectured by my waiter on the proper pronunciation of Boudin.

Characters entered, stage left. A good ol boy family, two fratty sons in preppy buttondowns, father and mother not really talking. A graying black professor (I guessed, from the glasses and book) with a bunch of antsy, happy kids. A couple out of liberal gentrification central casting, his legs in their high-end denim crossed, rolled up hem, New Balance sneaks, her pregnant in bohemian wear. They checked their phones a lot and stared out into the room instead of at each other.

An un-ignorable family came and sat next to us. One big gay son, flowing hair dyed platinum blonde, looking like a Targaryen from Game of Thrones, if a Targaryen could have fabulous earrings, a Madonna T-shirt, and a bearish Latino boyfriend. His brother, apparently trying to win the most rednecky beard of all time award, held down the head of the table in a tank top and American flag hat. The dad, kind-looking, white-bearded, white-haired but youthful, not quite fat, bespectacled, with a Winnie-the-Pooh shirt that said “Let’s go fuck shit up.” Mother—sensible clothes, no sayings, joyful but worn face, who knows what she’d been through, trying to keep all these men from whatever their tendencies might be? But there they all were, in the spirit of Christmas, with pretty massive political differences one would imagine, sitting down to break bread. I of course couldn’t resist the aww shucks America’s melting pot impulse, how sweet, and all that jazz, or resist the cynical voice, that the melting pot was now a seething stew of rage and resentment. I really wanted to nestle up to the Dad, to let him tell stories and pour drinks and live a nice contented life fucking shit up on top of our American contradictions, shrugging them off just enough to stop worrying, thinking, panicking.

Breakfast arrived.

I have often felt that Southern food is a scam, an excuse for drowning foodstuffs in cream, butter, sausage, ham, etc. A culinary equivalent to overpedaling at the piano.

But on my plate was a trinity as perfect as any Bach fugue or invention. At the bottom these BOO-dan, I’m not sure you could call them the bassline, but they sat down there, earthy, a bit dirty, the mixed textures of rice and sausage with the crisp surface of the fry. Two poached eggs sat on those, yolk running just enough to free itself, both substance and something to fill the gaps. Finally—the miracle I’d not expected—a crawfish etouffée, little toothsome chunks of mild seductive lobstery flesh running through an inexpressibly complex seafoody broth/sauce. To call it a sauce was insufficient; it was a soul, insofar as food has soul. A tremor of chili brought life to the other spices. The breath of the Mormons connected the old tune; this connected the dish.

“Do you need to be alone with that?” my friend asked.

—

My days in NOLA came to a quiet end. Friend had stomach troubles. I found myself at the hipster bar again. Why didn’t I go hear some amazing jazz or whatever? Too much truth, maybe, a reminder, maybe. I ordered a “Sad Boy Club.” which made the bartender give me a look, c’mon man.

When I came out, some guy was doing an amazing Motown thing on the corner; I wandered over, entranced; a truck pulled up, pounding hiphop through its open windows. New Orleans streets offered a constant Ivesian clash of bands, with only brief moments where one music could be heard.

Next morning, Christmas morning, a tree branch grabbed at me as I rushed through the lobby, an ornament fell to the floor. I didn’t stop. Then came a dark reckoning. A blonde young woman at the desk asked me a question. “Oh,” I said, “A couple waters.”

“A Pringles?” she asked.

Yes, I conceded, sure.

“A second Pringles, barbecue flavor?” she asked. Her smile was hard to read, an official smile with some unofficial pleasure.

Ah yes, I said. If they dusted my hotel room, I’m sure the forensics team would find sufficient BBQ crumbs to indict.

“Peanut M&Ms?”

It did come back to me now, maybe, after the third mezcal, that I might have had those too, and who knows what else.

“Just whatever you’ve got is right” I said, desperately, while thinking no no no, Christmas spirit, love, generosity, breathing in and out.

But she kept on. “Two large Fiji waters?” “A bag of pretzels?” “Chex mix?” When I looked hopeless she said “I just want to be sure this is all correct.”

This morning’s Lyft was an unassuming white guy in his 60s, driving on a holy day for what reasons I didn’t ask. The city was religiously empty, an almost serene space, the roads like too big clothes, suddenly too full of room. We sailed through downtown and some industrial spaces, onto a highway.

From that vantage the great old city seemed to go off, flat, like some early pre-anti-Semitic Ezra Pound translation I can’t quite remember, in every direction, the four directions, stretching out, with water at the ends of many of these vectors, waiting, biding its time. Signs for innumerable companies, plumbing, construction, massage, digital services, on and on, and then, lulled by these endless short structures, I was shocked by a monument in the near ground. A massive pole rose up next to the highway, stained somehow, either scraped or rusted or mildewed. What color was it? You had to say it was gray but you knew it was meant to be white.

On top of the pole, two prongs, like a cross maybe, or a fork for some immense crustacean. One prong said La Quinta, the other Wendy’s, way up in the air, floating there.

I was taken by this capitalist cross, by the sheer effort required to erect it, the forging of the metal, the pouring of the concrete, the massive dig in swampy ground, just to say we are here, we want your money. And as I was trying to process that, the visual field gave way to a cemetery—not just any cemetery!—this too was much bigger than you imagined it could be, like if a movie director created a CGI, infinite, inconceivable, overstuffed repository for all the lost souls of all time. We rushed to the airport at 65 miles an hour, with only a few fellow heathens on the road, and gray graves kept coming, ornate mausoleums, gorgeous structures with French arches and crosses and fleur-de-lis, all just sitting there in proximity to the highway like all the signs for all to see and go by and ignore, like an advertisement.

Oh yes, I remembered, I was supposed to be writing down what I wanted out of life.

Many things bother me about this pattern of living, aside from the couch.

One qualm has to do with beauty, the way that beautiful bodies appear at the cold click of a button. It’s not quite porn, but porn-adjacent. I don’t agonize a lot about this—only a bit, and half-heartedly. But occasionally I get a deeper guilt, a cynical ache about the way in this world most Good People are beautiful and most Bad People are not. Take Dune, easily one of the worst offenders—the Baron-villain has to be hideous, disfigured, enormous. (In the first film, Lynch goes heavy on homophobia/pedophilia, complete with oozing pustules of unspecified disease.) Atreides father and son are both ever so handsome and slim and heterosexual—and therefore noble. Jessica is gorgeous, naturally.

Just as bad: that show about the lavender scare (Fellow Travelers), which purports, like Dune, to be a moral fable. An absurd festival of cut abs and lasered chests and rakishly handsome smiles, sprinkled with a few adorable token lesbians. In the evil corner you find Roy Cohn, who looks awful. They wrote a Origin Story Scene which neatly and tightly tied his facial deformity to his moral failure.

This coupling of physical beauty and morality is ugly. It is insidious and corrosive. We put up with it all the time, and I’m sure (like other market-driven algorithms) it wears away at our resistance. Some people are willing to go to the mat for inner beauty or moral beauty but many people want their heroes and heroines to be gorgeous and their villains to look terrible, either just balding and sad, or almost at the edge of human, like orcs1. This makes it all much easier to keep track of.

—

This week, as I went after the “Concord” Sonata one more time, I had to ask a perennial Ives unanswerable question: how ugly should I play it? This is not a joke. It is an almost moral question. I don’t think Ives usually set out to be ugly—not for ugliness’ sake. But the question of too-easy beauty bothered the hell out of him.

It surrounded him, in the form of music American composers were writing at that time, channeling Wagner and Debussy but without quite as much integrity of conception. In a lot of this music, you get the feeling of floating through a decadent, pleasant, well-lubricated harmonic soup (but not too floaty, not so much as to make people freak out!) This kind of beauty was woven with class and society and a certain kind of classical aficionado (which still exists) for which Ives had absolutely no patience, and did everything in his power to antagonize. He was part of that privileged class, and could have slipped into that world easily, except that he didn’t, couldn’t, and/or wouldn’t. He resisted. Resisting this kind of beauty was also resisting that world, and its whole system of taste.

Everyone’s done a lot of work unpacking the toxic masculinity angle of this. Good job everyone! But Ives’ misgivings about beauty were broader and deeper, and I’d argue his solutions were profound.

—

Ives wrote some of the most beautiful American music—at times, passages of jaw-dropping, seductive refinement. I mean, just listen to the beginning of the great great great DeGaetani-Kalish performance of Housatonic at Stockbridge, a touchstone:

At 1:20, you literally get the words “how beautiful!” As we naively name beauty, the music slips into the groove of a whole-tone scale, and veers dangerously close to raw Debussy. The French sense of color is woven into this song, no question.

But what makes this song such a masterpiece is a kind of shotgun wedding of styles. A meeting point for three seemingly irreconcilable notions/systems of musical beauty. First, the hymn, and all of its chaste, religious associations, the simple triads passing from one to the other, the leading voices, the well-worn, homespun cadences—if you will, no sex before marriage. Then a more promiscuous, late Romantic, early Impressionistic harmonic environment—a world where these triads and their hierarchies no longer have as much power, lush and sensual and fluid. Finally, an unknowable, unsystematized cluster world, with craggy vast harmonies that appear out of nowhere, superimposing themselves on the rest—this evokes a sense of the infinite (asexual?) These ideas of beauty meet each other at various boundaries in the song, and melt into each other, and—you have the sense—teach each other something.

The way Kalish plays the last bars: holy crap.

—

At the beginning of Ives’ portrait of Henry David Thoreau, we find ourselves also (curiously) in a French-adjacent musical world:

More than a bit of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun in there! (But if you read Thoreau a certain way you find a lot of proto-Proust.)

The opening arpeggio consists of two chords: A major, and E-flat major. They are a tritone apart, an “ugly” interval. Many classical musician geeks will quickly identify this particular bitonality as belonging to Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, e.g. the well-known clarinet moment:

Stravinsky Bitonality!

In the Stravinsky, the effect is cheeky, ironic, a bit of puppet caricature. Here, Ives is after the opposite of irony, a gauzy beauty, combined with distance, mist… a morning, where things are not yet truly seen, where everything is yet possible.

In Ives’ arpeggio, however, there is one renegade note, that cannot easily be explained: a B-natural. It belongs to neither chord, yet somehow serves as a link between them. A chromatic line whose origin or destination are unknown. This note says “screw you” to the analyst, and spoils the perfection of the musical structure (one form of beauty) in pursuit of something else. This is the quintessential Ivesian note.

At the top of the arpeggio, Ives unfurls a little cluster:

Clusters are not everyone’s favorite, of course; they are in a way the nemesis of conventional musical beauty. A toddler’s careless hand on the piano bangs out clusters, or the cat walking up the keyboard—clusters are a joke, a mistake, a mess.

Ives spells out the cluster, one note at a time, so that you can hear all the chromatic individuals that make up the little mess. The notes are so close that sorting them is tricky; they melt and blur. In the process of the next minute we keep listening to this cluster, and other similar clusters … a clustering of clusters.

To call this clustering harmonic ambiguity is somehow to buy into the realm of conservatory musical analysis—I’m not sure Ives wants us to do that. As the next minute of music unfolds, fragments of melody grab onto one note or another from these clusters, and you can be forgiven for wondering for a moment, this is the main note?, this could be the key? These little attempts at navigation are bound for failure. I’m not sure the question of what key this is in should even come up. You feel—as this passage goes on—that the cluster is the key. A cluster cannot really be a key. You can’t say a piece is in the key of splat! And yet …

The un-beautiful object of the cluster is the thing Ives wants us to truly hear, and come to appreciate as beautiful.

—

Because a single note at the piano always decays, there are many stratagems for making notes richer and bigger, delaying or concealing this unavoidable mortality. Basically—plastic surgery for piano notes.

One of the most common is the octave, a way of deepening and doubling a sound. This hack has been around forever, a stop on the organ, coupling on the harpsichord, and of course the octave becomes a fixture of Romantic piano virtuosity, climaxing in stuff like this famous passage from the Tchaikovsky Concerto:

For Ives, this kind of posturing was his worst nightmare, the masturbatory reflex of an overheated aesthetic, and the Late Romantic Octave represents a kind of existential problem. He needs a way to make his melodies sound rich and singing at the piano—to get an orchestral sound or an organ sound, a density, a depth—but he doesn’t want to double, because it’s too easy, too formulaic, too boring.

The more you play Ives, the more you realize that his solution was to “diversify” the octave. When he writes a minor seventh:

that is often an octave, in meaning. And so too for the “uglier” major seventh:

Or a ninth… things that are close to octaves. In many normative circumstances, these might be heard as a missed note, a slip of the finger. But for Ives all of these things are in a way “truer” octaves, more real doublings.

As you let yourself into this style, you begin to agree with Ives—and you wonder if you’re going insane. You begin to think that these sevenths and ninths sound better or deeper than actual octaves. Octaves begin to sound insipid or empty. The grind of the “wrong” note comes to feel like a kind of color or resistance or grit within the idea of a single note. Alternative octaves allow him to have his cake and eat it too. They contain both the jangle of dissonance plus the meaning of unity.

Elliott Carter sniffed at this—he accused Ives of adding dissonances cheaply, willy-nilly. For certain schools of composers, an octave is one thing and a seventh is another, and to switch them out for each other is a loss of musical integrity, a betrayal. But I feel like he’s applying the wrong value system. And anyway, many composers try to make certain chords “feel like” other chords; Wagner tries to tell us that dominants are actually tonics; Beethoven famously makes the tonic chord sound like a giant dissonance in the opening of the Fourth Concerto; so much of the memorable music we love is about redefining the terms of engagement, the terms on which music is heard.

Again and again, Ives gives us an apparent antithesis of beauty, which turns out to actually deepen the beauty. He keeps daring us to come through that process with him. Much has been made of the way Ives recreates the ideal, fervent musical world of his childhood. His music is indeed a kind of memoir, an attentive act of cultural memory. But I wonder if this is the even deeper insight for him—this turning inside-out of the beautiful.

—

On the plane to Tucson, I was trying to read, or at least give the appearance of being virtuous and consuming a book, but I had to keep some fraction of my brain busy with some BS content (House of the Dragon), so it could quiet down enough to follow the sentences. This ridiculous strategy (a sign of terrible addiction) actually worked for a few minutes! I had completely lost myself in a historical novel when a slithering in my headphones made me look up.

I saw a burned torso bathed in red shiny blood, and the caption

[PUS SQUELCHING]

Really? For a moment it seemed impossible to live in a world with this subtitle. My puffy-faced neighbor appeared unfazed. He didn’t hear the sick liquid sound in his ears, like I did. The word squelching made the sound so much worse, somehow. Couldn’t it just have been blood? why specify pus?

I munched on SunChips for consolation. The aggressively un-beautiful, everywhere, filmed ever so beautifully—murders, gruesome wounds, people burned alive by dragons or raped or tortured on racks, the endless gun porn, the way the characters in The Matrix are at their sexiest when they’re arming themselves with ridiculous amounts of automatic weapons, for instance, and incalculable scenes savoring the slow-mo of bullet casings falling to the floor, or Uma Thurman slicing limbs off of brightly costumed kung fu minions, or beautiful people slaughtering hideous zombies in post-apocalyptic scenarios with shotguns and machetes, or tormented American snipers killing desperately poor brown people from unspecified countries, with sad handsomeness in their eyes and a pious pretense of if only I could have mercy for the cameras … I suddenly felt, there in the plane, squeezed and squelched not by my neighbors but by content. Too much violence available, on top of too much beauty, and too much easy conversation between them.

Sure, this isn’t new. Cast your mind back to Lear or Titus Andronicus or Dante or the Bible or Homer or Greek tragedy and this exploitation of violence for beauty (and vice versa) has been around, a crucial part of human myth-making and story telling and a way to make sense of the violent beautiful world. But doesn’t it seem extra-concentrated and extra-gratuitous right now? Speaking of which:

—

In the middle of “Thoreau,” Ives gives us (and himself) a classically beautiful moment. Thoreau has been rousing himself out of the mists for some action. A few simple chords take us out of the clusters

(Listen to these chords emerge)

A still moment of clarity. Then, some ambition takes over (he is a dude, after all): a “getting goin” passage.

A second time, we stop, get going. Ives is making us participate in a long process of patience vying with impatience.

A third time, now, we stop—and this time, as we “get goin” something unexpected happens. The A and B-flat alternating in the bass climb to C—it’s as simple as that. And we find ourselves in a passage of tremendous excitement and radiance:

(Listen to this climax)

C major, free of doubt—an astounding flash of light, after all the clustering and mists. The left hand, with little eruptions of rhythm, adds notes to our major chord—an F-sharp, a B-flat. In a textbook these would contradict the overriding harmony but here they are blue notes, confirming and adding joy to it.

I always get so terribly nervous here!, like when you’re talking to someone you have a crush on, when you don’t want to say anything wrong, or do anything stupid. These are some of the few wrong notes in the piece that have to be exactly right, at this moment that one half of the piece, with its beautiful desires, crashes into another, and its different desires.

That renegade F# rises to renegade B-flat, a climax, which shoots us beyond the C major to the other side of the circle of fifths, to F major. This is, for Ives, an unusually old-school functional Classical-music-maneuver, a Mozart and Beethoven standby. You’re headed for the tonic. You’re about to resolve by fifth in the bass like all the good Classical music pieces do. But at the moment of final settling you overshoot, and descend one more fifth

G ——> C

could be done and done … but no, wait!

G——> C——> F

To put it in baseball terms that Ives might appreciate, you’re sliding into home, and you end up in the dugout. This appearance of the subdominant F at the eleventh hour is most often a transcendental trick, to pass round and through one’s desire to a place even further within, even further from tension, even further released.

You can see this idea of release embodied in the right hand, those falling Ds to Cs:

But in the left hand something new has started, an etched ostinato. One hand lets go; the other crystallizes. The old thing is falling apart, letting go with great feeling, in an F major that is already becoming a memory, and the other thing is there to hold us up as we let go.

A more perfect climax rarely exists in Ives (or anywhere). For those bars, at the top of the printed page, “Thoreau” is more or less paradise. It’s so perfect and blissful, of course, that Ives has to spoil it:

(Listen to this moment)

Goddamn it! Ives does this so much. At the end of the First Violin Sonata, as the clanging bells die away and the hymn too, and you are left with just a gospel Amen, and a murmuring tremolo in the violin, you hope that Ives will just let you have this one nice moment, just once, so you can let the audience go home bathed in a reverent F major, with only memories of past dissonances. But no! in the last measures, Ives writes this off-key, off-rhythm fragment of something unrelated:

(Listen)

Lest you be tempted to play it too beautifully, as a kind of vaporous after-echo or dream, he writes a pointy wedge on the last note, haha, no, he says, screw you again. In the recording I cheat a little:).

—

The spoiling of Thoreau’s beautiful arrival is also beautiful—and fraught, and dark. Ives takes us to one of his go-to Foster tunes:

The title—ugh, too racist to print. The song is a lament, the imagined mourning of an enslaved person for their owner: a disgusting trope in a demeaning dialect, a moral evasion of the ugliest kind. The musicologist Denise Von Glahn wonders how it is that Foster and Ives, both fervent abolitionists, could find this sentiment acceptable or worth expressing.

The reasons for this particular fragment in this essential slot of the “Concord”? I’ve heard three explanations. One is simply that it was one of his father’s favorite tunes, which reappears at defining moments. A haunting, a visitation, a seance. This is a compelling, likely possibility, but proof seems elusive.

The second explanation is a small word association. Thoreau said he “grew in those seasons like corn in the night” and the word corn brought the familiar Foster refrain to mind. Quite possible! A bit of randomness, a stream of association, is always part of Ives’ master plan.

A third fascinating possibility is offered by Von Glahn and her colleague the cultural geographer Mark Sciuchetti:

… we turn to a lesser-known history of Concord that the naturalist author reveals in chapter fourteen of Walden titled: “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors.” Here Thoreau illuminates what is most often missing from celebrations of Concord, and absent from most Americans’ understandings of the place: the remnants of enslaved peoples’ presence …

In eleven pages Thoreau describes the historical habitations of three ex-enslaved people who lived in Walden Woods—Cato Ingraham, Zilpah White, and Brister Freeman—and more recent inhabitants, including the outcast Irishman Hugh Quoil.

Could be? Ives was extremely familiar with Walden. And however horrendous and morally blind this seems now, Ives (in other works) used this tune to evoke sympathy for people of color, to give them a voice within musical landscapes. You do have a sense at this place of a haunting, again, a lost and sad voice from the past floating through and against the radiant present that Thoreau had just found.

—

Ives’ treatment of Foster has two eloquent reversals. The D gets drained of its brightness, into a darker D-flat. Ives also turns the harmonies backwards. “Down” should be on the IV chord and “cornfield” should be on I, a good old fashioned sentimental “Amen” cadence. But Ives puts the tonic on “Down” and a somewhat ugly IV on “cornfield”, creating a deliberate problem chord:

Tricky to reach, among other things, and to voice. Whatever you might say about the quote of this song, then, it is not uncritical. It is based on doubt and displacement.

He only uses five notes of Foster. From there he extrapolates an “original tune.” This tune is symmetrical. The first five notes get a reply—an even darker reply!—sliding into the chromatic world of the classical lament:

Tropes of sorrow, including the accented, sighing inner line. This is the first real sadness in Thoreau, one feels—just after the moment of greatest elation.

Now Ives repeats the rhythm of “down in the cornfield” but substitutes in a yearning upwards phrase. We are still in mourning mode (that G-flat!).

But the last part of the melody does something we could never expect, five glorious downward notes:

This last five-note idea is immensely more hopeful than the first. It calls back to the rapturous climax of Emerson and the opening of the piece and many many other places. It negates the G-flat. The darker D-flat is reinterpreted as C#, and then is given two possible paths out… first, up to D, then down to C. A way out of this darkness.

Immediately, of course, Ives visits this hopeful cadence with a dark echo—salvation is never easy in his world:

Take a look at all the parts of this theme. Many of its chords have Ivesian alternative octaves in them, sometimes more than one at once. You see all kinds of awkward motions—tritones, voices out of nowhere, leaps that ignore all the niceties. An absolutely pivotal juncture in the “Concord”: a chorale that questions all the conventional beauties of chorales, that juxtaposes hope and sorrow, and merges a sentimental fragment of melody with its ugly, ugly American past. How much more do you really want from one musical moment?

—

I used to refer to a certain kind of Rachmaninoff passage as “afterglow”—post-coital bliss. I realize this is inappropriate, and not usable with students, even though I can’t for the life of me think of a more perfect image.

I’m really referring to the movie version of afterglow (Rachmaninoff provides movie versions of life, I’d say, more than life)… an often filmed moment, a coy after-the-fact euphemism for sex, of pulling out the cigarette from the nightstand, and basking in pleasure and regret. It’s such a black-and-white moment (even the anachronism of the cigarette). In Rachmaninoff you can almost hear the smoke drifting towards the ceiling, the pan of the camera, as he speckles his retreat from a climax with many chromatic, usually flat notes, gorgeous regretful brooding nuances.

Rachmaninoff usually brings us down nice and slow, wave by wave, layer by beautiful layer, to paint a complex picture, the beauty of unfolding and achieving and releasing and loss. It is one of his signature achievements. One of Ives’ signature achievements, also, is the after-passage. But a different kind—almost comically different in its values.

The “Concord” ends with a long come-down. The first sign of the true ending is the appearance of the flute, Thoreau’s flute, heard across the pond:

(Listen to Thoreau’s flute)

Just the sound of it is a relief—the beauty of its timbre against our long suffering with the piano sound. There is also the beauty of the reappearance of a beautiful theme, and the sense of coherence, connection, the story “making sense.” Completion, coherence, connection: all conventional beauties within the classical music value system.

But the piano is subtly working both with and against the flute, and the flute vanishes without quite finishing. Several problems hover around the simple beauty of return. Then the piano has a long epilogue, where fragments pass through the mind. Foster comes back again, with all its baggage, and then the hopeful five notes, and the dark empty echo, then the neutral mists again, ah nature, and way up in the stratosphere, as my wonderful teacher Peter Burkholder suggested, one last attempt at Beethoven’s Fifth:

(Listen to the end of Thoreau)

… just four chords, now, the canon reduced to blank chords, not rapping or knocking but gently pulsing, the stormy pitches have somehow been erased or dulled or eroded into this luminous last hint (is it or isn’t it?).

This is beautiful and of course sad, the erosion, the loss of specifics. It’s ambivalent—but not in a Schubert way. It’s uncanny like Schubert, but not so personal. Ives keeps gesturing towards the universal; he keeps panning the camera out. Because of this, you get more of a sense that beauty won’t quite adhere to a moment, a person, unrequited love, an experience, a harmony, a nation, anything. You become more aware of how it likes to attach itself to anything and everything, to different styles and perspectives—it is slippery.

Rachmaninoff was infinitely better at working within a conception of beauty. He is happy to build on it, comfortable with its foundation. Ives, less gifted in that way, felt that beauty was less reliable, less comfortable. It should “bother” you, like ugliness does. In that sense, you could say that Ives had a better understanding of beauty than Rachmaninoff.

Sitting in the audience, trying to look like a serious teacher, I wondered—what is it about this particular musical melancholy? Why does it ring so true, feel so real? We are bombarded by fake sadness these days, so much aggrieved whining and childish, feigned outrage dominating the news cycle, trickling down into our lives. It felt amazing to drink pure, adult unhappiness. It made me want to unpack it, to see what consolations or truths were held within.

—

The first thing to admire is the empty bar we start with:

It’s not empty, exactly. We have the presence of an accompaniment, a sense of pace, a rhythm—but it communicates an absence.

In this not-empty empty bar, I gave my gifted young pianist some grief for neglecting the slurs. Andras Schiff agrees with me (as you may see in this video). It is essential to play the little slurs, nested within the big slur. If the second note of each beat is released it creates a little sigh within the pulse—this is how annoying details become eloquent.

For Schiff this detail primarily helps to create the feeling of a funeral march, a processional. I’m going to risk semi-disagreeing with him. First, my bias: I’m not a massive fan of funeral marches. I prefer the soaring middle section of the “Eroica” slow movement to the trudging main theme. I’m not wowed by Beethoven’s or Wagner’s funerals for heroes. I dread that famous Chopin one, with all its repeats, and absolutely adore the unrepeated, unrepeatable, nihilistic wind over the graveyard that comes after.

A funeral march suggests some pomp, a sense of public occasion. Does this Haydn theme feel like it has a sense of occasion? It seems oddly fluid for a march. The texture is lighter than you’d expect, more treble-focused. Its rocking motion almost feels like a lullaby at times (at other times, definitely not). Yes, a funeral march is one of the musical referents, but what’s so compelling and amazing about this theme (it seems to me) is that it lives on the border of other genres: a lilting folk song, a lament, even a slow dance, at times an improvisation.

In this way, Haydn reduces the funeral march down to size, making it more private, more personal. Music history is littered with commonplace pieces for grand sorrows—deaths of dukes and kings and patrons, bloody battle memorials, etcetera. But here we have the opposite: a grand piece for common sorrow.

Schiff makes a big deal of speculating that this piece might have been about the death of Mozart. This rubbed me the wrong way. Aside from a total lack of evidence, is it only true sorrow if it’s about a musical celebrity? Is that the only way we can appreciate the depth of it?

—

In my spells of sadness and depression—after my parents died, or my friend Michael, or when I was worn down by other stresses—I learned one thing. Once you begin to feel you have control over the darkness, you don’t. It morphs under the surface and bites you in the ass, in some other amazing and unforgettable way. Sadness has an unsymmetrical, unpredictable shape; it narrows and then explodes.

This theme, too, is asymmetrical and unpredictable. It could never go in a handbook for How to Write a Melody—it is too much of a one-off. It has three peculiar parts.

The first event is a falling gesture (a fifth):

Beginning with the dotted rhythm. Calling it out, as if naming the melancholy, or just giving vent, then releasing.

The second event is more bizarre—more Haydn. The melody, before it can even really get started, gets stuck on F:

This presents an interpretative problem—how do you give direction to the directionless? Pianists especially struggle with shaping repeated notes. It is such a choice, this pokey morass, with a meaning that comes from awkwardness and limitation. But anyone who has been through a depressive episode knows what it feels like to be stuck on one note.

The third event: Haydn marks “tenute,” the melody becomes legato—and we are no longer confined. We find ourselves in a frenzy of scalar motion (you might say, an outpouring.)

These scales are of course not just scales; they make you feel most of the possible “blue notes” in the F minor world. We retrace the opening gesture, touching every painful note in between, and then we feel out the fifth below, as if exploring consequences. In the second measure, we glance by a couple naturals (E-natural, D-natural, a glimmer of light), then contradict them—painting over tenuous light with darker hues. In the third bar a stubborn remembrance of A-flat makes resolution wait. This could have been a two-bar finish, but Haydn manipulates it to be three, to give it extra complication.

This last part of the theme couldn’t be more different than the previous part. And yet in both—stuck on the F, wading through lingering suspensions—the music evokes the idea of refusing to let go. An essential trait of sorrow, seen two ways.

—

Schiff starts his class by being annoyed with the student for playing an extra five measures that he hadn’t known about. This annoyance bubbles up again later, when he criticizes the kid about his breezy approach to the major-key variations.

“Is this a tragic or comic piece?”, he asks, in a super-vexatious Hungarian tone.

I stared at my iPad screen, thinking—tyrannies hide in binaries. The poor student has to say tragic, because the other option is ridiculous. I thought it was unfortunate that Schiff would pose this false binary in this particular piece, a piece all about the incredible complexity and nuance possible within pairs. It’s honestly a miracle that Haydn can write a piece with two themes, each in binary form, inhabiting Western music’s pair of major/minor—a maze of baked-in dichotomies—and still make it feel so fluid, so free, so philosophically interesting.

Schiff knows there are millions of degrees of lightness before you arrive at “comic.” You can be hopeful, or blissful, or suddenly lifted, or even light-hearted, or manic—all different from comic in important ways, and all of which fall under the sway of the major key.

“Tragic” has issues, too. The piece ends with an extraordinary swerve to the dark side, and yet the word “tragic” buries the other half of the piece (and its contradictory lightness) under the weight of a label. Tragedy also tends to suggest noble things, noble people, and fatal flaws. I don’t sense any flaw. There certainly is no hubris. An unfortunate event has already happened, or continues to happen. What’s left to contemplate in the piece’s weird two-faced way is just life, time, death, illness, loss, or change itself.

—

As I listened on to the young pianist play, in between moments of surrendering to the music, I kept murmuring to myself—against my better judgement—the phrase “both sides.” An endemic epidemic phrase nowadays. For instance “now that the media’s tyranny has been lifted, you can hear both sides” or “universities should teach both sides” or crap like that. In junior high school, in 1982, our teacher made us have a both-sides discussion of creationism vs. evolution, and even back then I wondered what the hell we were doing. What is the line between a productive debate and an irresolvable culture war?

From the moment “both sides” is uttered, you are likely not in a meaningful discussion. The game is already rigged. Issues of import to our lives do not (and should not) have two sides. They have many sides, shades, perspectives, so many! But how then do we deal with a world which prefers to paint in twos?

Haydn’s F minor variations are—in a sense—an obvious essay in “both sides.” The heartbreaking minor key theme ends:

And then after a silence (a lot of nuance in how you play those silences!) comes a new major-key theme, not so heartbroken:

Almost the first thing Haydn does is to reinterpret the A-flat of the minor, to show that that single note has “another side.” (In the left hand, that G-sharp…) Why is the first measure of the new theme a chromatic measure? This is a real choice, a real Haydn maneuver, to subtly draw connections between the two worlds.

How can we interpret these connections? So many ways. In the minor-key world, the A-flat often exists to resolve down. In the major-key world, the G# (the same note) moves up. From this fundamental bit of music theory, we can extrapolate a bunch of easy dualities:

Down/Up

Pessimism/Optimism

Despair/Hope

You can come up with more dichotomies till the cows come home.

But what Haydn is painting is far richer than that. Consider that A-flat serves as a kind of icon of the minor: a column within the minor chord and all its melancholy. But in the major, the G-sharp (the same note) often appears as a kind of ornament within a more rococo, pastoral, charming style.

This transposition from one style and expectation to another is not just a change of outfit, or a clever pun; it is subversive. How can sadness exist so deeply within a note, and then it becomes just a passing note? How, indeed, can someone be afflicted by tragedy, and others pass by as if nothing has happened, living frivolously? (Auden on Brueghel, the obvious reference here, but there are so many). Forgive a deliberately shocking analogy: you take someone’s heartfelt poem about the loss of their child and you make it into frilly curtains for your living room.

This sounds ridiculous, maybe. But this aspect of the piece is real, all too real, and far more truthful than most elegies or eulogies—the moral that at any time when someone is suffering, someone else is laughing it off, loving it, not caring. And the suffering and the obliviousness are often woven from the same materials. On a grand national scale this is playing out as we speak. Some of us think of America shifting towards the truth-free oligarchy of modern-day Russia, while countless others see Peace, Prosperity, a new no-nonsense American paradise.

—

I kept watching Schiff. He seems to want to bring the two variations under one basic heading. Let’s concede that sometimes his gifted young pianist plays the major key variations too flippantly, with not enough love, not enough care or cantabile.

And yet! I wonder if there’s a more radical perspective to bring to bear. After the first major-key theme, the minor returns, and exaggerates its own darkness, with more chromatic notes, and extreme sighing:

Seemingly unperturbed by this, the major returns and adds a bunch of trills, exaggerating its own ornamental aspects. At times it seems almost absurd, the amount of froth Haydn crams into the texture:

A phrase to describe this procedure, borrowing from modern political life, is “double down.” The ensuing minor variation similarly doubles down on darkness, and verges towards fury:

After all that, inexplicably, the major responds by doubling down again (!) on ornament and frill, an orgy of lightness:

This is not just odd; it’s an enormous interpretative issue to be reckoned with.

Schiff seems to be after a single-voiced, noble memorial piece, of great dignity and expression. I think it’s just as possible to hear two voices, in two sets of variations, heading off in opposite directions, in a kind of red-blue madness, an emotional polarization. I’d also argue that Haydn doesn’t create a “sensible middle.” He’s not seduced by the idea of some golden Goldilocks compromise between major and minor, the kind of thing proposed by chin-stroking common sense centrists, like the well-intentioned David Frenches and David Brookses constantly trying to tell us where the American sweet spot is, what is reasonable, etcetera.

The piece ends (spoiler alert) with a giant, catastrophic explosion of the minor, and then, at the last moment, by definition too late, a tiny eerie vision of the major, as the piano cries out into the treble.

There is nothing reasonable about it, even though the piece comes out of the heart of the Enlightenment. A middle ground is nowhere to be seen. Haydn wants to show us that the opposites are intertwined. But he does not reconcile them.

—

I thought about the pastoral a lot while listening to my gifted young pianist (and Schiff). This is how I understand some of the major-key sections, with their crazy trills and ornaments. These passages seem drawn from this classical world of shepherds, curvy nymphs, fluttering breezes, an alluring paradise of nature reborn, a lost paradise obviously.

In the world of the pastoral, of course, no matter how delightful the breezes are, coming off the Aegean Sea or wherever, no matter how contented the sheep are, grazing on the rocky hills, there is always the other side, where the same force becomes deadly. The happy fertile rain of spring, helping to bring forth nature’s bounty, becomes the killing frost of winter. Seasons are a form of regime change. Both sides!

I wished my student, as he played, would have more of this uncertainty, this helpless awe in front of the shifting faces of nature or fate—or however you want to put it. I felt similarly about Schiff, to be honest. Control seemed central to his vision of these variations—but the piece, viewed another way, is more about how certain variations are beyond our control.

In the pastoral, the main character is change—all the others are bit players. Everything is a matter of living in the now, while being prudent enough to survive some (but not all) changes. I wonder how those classical shepherds and nymphs would feel if they knew that humanity was aware of a force that would change the whole nurturing system of seasons, irrevocably disrupt the cycles, and leave everyone even more prey to catastrophic uncertainty, and yet, even so, they would chant “drill baby drill”, as if wanting to burn down the whole world out of spite. Even those shepherds, so intimately familiar with the selfish whims of the Gods, might have found this a bit too much to believe.

The knighted pianist was just being cheeky and charming, of course. I think this is false: Fauré gives the most wonderful orgasms. But he certainly takes his time about it. Many people may be so exhausted by the process that they don’t realize they’ve climaxed.

Haha, sorry about that! By orgasm in this case I mean (I hope this is obvious) something metaphorical, spiritual. But in French music, often, some part of the sensual clings to even the purest stuff. The explosion of a taste on the tongue, the skin-shiver elicited by a light touch, a rustle of fabric … To play French music without some of this frisson is appalling (and yet it happens).

—

Looking (Desperately) for Frenchness

On my table for six weeks now: Jean-Michel Nectoux’s definitive, hefty tome on Fauré. This book cost me almost sixty dollars. How much more devoted to the Fauré cause, and French authenticity, could I be?

I’m in the middle of a ridiculous love affair with the Trio, especially its middle movement—the Andantino.  What better way to confirm my love than by looking it up in a book? I consulted Nectoux’s index and turned to page 452, where he prints the opening measures:

He calls this “one of the composer’s most inspired passages”. So far so good! Then he continues: “a moment of beauty such as one finds in Mozart or Schubert.”

Hmm. It seems odd that a French musicologist would refer to two Germanic composers to describe the merits of this particular passage, which should really be in the dictionary definition of French Musical Beauty. Its acoustic and harmonic world calls to mind Satie’s Gymnopedies, maybe, or some more innocent Ravel. The piano vamps a pure bar of F major, simple as can be

a web in which a violin melody appears, reaching down from A to B-flat…

… a big, dissonant interval of a seventh, often associated with pain, but here—pure pleasure. How do the French do that? Coopting the difficulty of dissonance, converting it.

Behind the violin’s melody lie the many mysteries of seventh chords. There are two here (Bb-D-F-A and F-A-C-E) and neither is a dominant seventh, the good old standby, the one that Beethoven always uses to rev up suspense, the one where the seventh dramatically amps up the urge to resolve.

The world is luckily much wider than the dominant seventh. Other kinds of seventh chords feel further from its primal urge. The added seventh, a cherry on top, often effaces the power of the root of the chord, lifting us away from it. Or it causes us to hear and experience two triads, embracing, interlacing—two possible roots. A seventh chord can have an almost quantum-mechanical double life: two chords and one, at the same time.

The dominant seventh chord often feels like one urge: hunger. But many of these other sevenths feel more like experience, like two tastes in meaningful opposition: the acid and sweetness in a dish, for instance, or bitterness and umami, all that food channel combinatorial art.

They often say on the food channel that lemon zest (say) or a hint of acid “lifts” a dish. Lifting, yes! Now look at the beginning piano chords of the Andantino, how they have staccatos marked on them (with pedal, obviously)—the effect is to play the chords not down, but up, away, as if pulling them out of the keyboard. And then scattered through this whole opening there are all these elegant gestures of traveling up, like the final notes of the violin solo:

and the way the cello enters:

and the way the violin re-enters:

Actually, almost every melodic unit of this movement ends with upward motion, a subtly brilliant touch that most people will not notice. But they will feel it. You find a strong association of French/light, German/heavy, in food and in music. Some people therefore imagine that German music is more “serious” or substantial than French music. But French lightness can be a deep act of seeing, an epiphany of removal, like lifting a veil.

A related observation? For all its greatness, this opening section seems to me only a step or two away from a sentimental tune, even a pop song, something you might hear in a cabaret or café. For me, this makes it even more beautiful, the way it perches on the edge of a “lighter” world. I think Steven Isserlis might disagree, but this is OK. I love disagreeing with Steven (whose artistry I adore), and I don’t feel strongly about enforcing classical border walls.

—

Extreme Disagreement with Definitive Authority

Back to Nectoux:

“The emotional tension caused by this opening is so great that Fauré characteristically reacts by introducing a deliberately anodyne second idea, which interrupts the rarefied atmosphere … a sign above all of Fauré’s pudeur and embarrassment at the intrusion of sublimity into his music.”

May I reply to this French analysis with some distinctively American commentary?

In other words, I’ve never read anything more wrong in my life. First of all, “emotional tension”—I don’t buy it. On the spectrum of Fauré passages, this is not especially tense. Rarefied? It is hummable, tuneful, easily accessible.

Then, Nectoux says, comes “a deliberately anodyne second idea.” Fauré disagrees, I think. He writes cantando (unusual marking!), and he gives it a nice big lead up, to call the ear to it:

This new theme is a fascinating creature, actually, with three parts that chain together but each with a distinct purpose. A big, falling pair of notes first:

A-D

A sigh? Then a smaller rising, yearning pair of notes, partly contradicting the sigh:

Eb-G

and finally a longer tag, summing up…

The dotted rhythm deepens the gesture of ending, of declaring “here we are.” And yet there is a slight sensual—you might say sultry or languorous—quality to this ending too. Maybe it’s the register, the cantando, that smoky middle of the piano, that inevitably calls to mind for me Edith Piaf. And the rub, again and again, of the last two notes, the dissonant C# up against the resolving D.  The sexy lower neighbor, if you will, as demonstrated in these two diagrams:

Beneath the three parts of the melody, you find a harmonic two-step. We start in D minor, move to another key, and then slide back. In other words:

home-other-home

A time-honored scheme. But here the “other” is extremely other. Instead of moving to the normal A, or some such, Faure moves a tritone to A-flat—the most dissonant possible interval. This is—as they say—a choice. Fauré folds a rapid chromatic slide into the ordinary. He takes a classical gesture, I-V-I, and twists it, to give you something to taste.

We taste it, and retaste it. The same basic gesture happens four (almost five) times, in borderline obsession. Each time, the middle of the melody creates the motion to the strange “other” chord (as if to say “however”) and each time, this “however” has to be resolved. As the theme keeps tracing this journey, home-away-home, away and back, away and back, a frustration naturally builds with this closed system—beautiful (and weird) though it may be. The melody keeps closing itself off, until the fifth time, when the rising gesture becomes irresistible and we escape in the most miraculous way:

But the pianist’s escape is actually a return to the opening string melody! This old friend of a theme gets a huge hug of recognition, and an ecstatic extension. In other words, the piano reaches back to the violin and cello, after pursuing a long uneasy thought of its own.

An essential narrative moment, full of emotion. Anodyne my butt.

Voices, Wanting Things

The piano reluctantly starts to give up the string theme:

but then it comes back for more:

This moment always takes me by surprise, in the best way, even having played it now twenty or more times. Genius of Fauré—this return to the well. Whatever the strings are offering, the piano needs and wants more of it.

A subtler stroke of brilliance follows. The cello enters, tentatively, as if recognizing at last that the piano has been “playing my song” …

There they are, cello and piano, over ambiguous harmonies, realizing they have common ground. Then the violin does the unexpected. It plays—definitively, with a closure that every previous version lacked—the piano’s theme:

An extraordinary act. You came to me, and I will come to you. Yes, I will call this section to an end, the violin says, by accepting (if you will) the chromatic darkness of what the piano had to offer, as the necessary counterweight to our first theme. I’ll admit this is a poetic reading! Personal, some might say with a sneer, but I stand by it. You heartless skeptics can sniff and scoff on some other Substack.

I do feel like the instruments are not just exchanging musical notes, but desires and perspectives.

—

Program Notes Suck

Whew. For a short, fun break from all this SERIOUS ANALYSIS, maybe we could rant about program notes?

I couldn’t find one note on this piece that made sense. For instance, one writer tells us this movement is a “tender, singing duet for violin and cello with piano eavesdropper…” Umm, no, the piano does a lot more than eavesdrop. The Hyperion liner note says “the slow central movement is mainly a meditation on two themes.” No, you forgot one. Nectoux refers to the “second theme, which appears straight away”—I don’t understand what that means at all. Straight away after what? My favorite is from West Cork festival, referring to “two main ideas” and then writing:

The first theme, announced by the violin and answered by the cello, opens this dialogue, to which the piano soon adds another theme, one that gives rise to much Fauréan chromaticism. A slow ascending theme, led by the keyboard, develops into a passionate central section.

But you just listed THREE themes!?!!!?

This really bugs me. People are not paying attention. The complex and unique dialogue between the piano and strings is lost, for reasons I can’t fathom. This piece has three main themes, and the story centrally depends on all three. One theme is a kind of purgatory. You have to pass through it, always, to get to the next. It has to be worked through and escaped, for the piece to reach its paradise.

—

The Third Theme, Arriving Without Knowing

Maybe you thought I was fussy or silly, when I talked about the way a lot of these phrases end with a little upward inflection. But I will prove to you that I was super-profound. Look at how the violin phrase ends, F#-G, that twist up:

And then look what happens next, in the piano:

Faure says how about it?, let’s just keep going, let’s slide one more note up to A-flat, and voilà!, with that, we are in a new theme, a new world. A tiny detail, a seeming ornament, connected to one of the most important structural junctures in the piece. We’ve heard this gesture many times, as a conventional ending, as a tag, as almost nothing. Now, we watch this almost nothing take off, morph, and birth a vast new emotional arch.

I do really enjoy playing this third theme! Like in a beloved drive (for instance the one from Aspen to Santa Fe, so much more beautiful and haunting than either origin or destination), there are many lovable features along the way. It starts with a dark minor-key rub, A-flat against G, as you see above. In the next bar you contradict this A-flat with an A-natural, which rubs in turn against a B-flat:

(Always the sensual, in each new part of the theme, something to savor.) Rising is the basic urge, and we find ourselves up with another pair of expressive notes, D and E-flat:

And you can see there it keeps climbing, then, to the top of the arch, four notes up to G. So gorgeous, the sense of the piano at last beginning to soar, even though we keep hovering between C minor and E-flat major, between dark and light. We come back down, and arrive at E-flat:

This moment of arrival on E-flat will become the movement’s climax. But the clever thing is that we don’t know this, and there is no way of knowing! It feels at the moment like a passing event, a mere release. Disguising the solution is such a detective novel thing to do, a narrative trick. But it also makes a philosophical point— sometimes the unnoticed moment is the most significant.

—

The Third Theme, Again?

Out of nowhere the strings (who had been more or less struck dumb by all this incredible piano expression) come in with the piano’s melody, sliding up again the same half step …

Now we go through it all—all of this third theme!—again. But this time the strings make a huge change. They get stuck on the crucial bar (the bar we didn’t know was crucial) with stubborn intensity. They tell us that this is the measure to care about, the puzzle, the knot to untie.

This knot fights now against the opening theme, in a slow (almost aggravating) tantric ascent. The bass rises, step by step, one minor key after another, F minor, G minor, A minor, again and again, then perhaps a surprising B-natural, and at last we arrive at the oddness of C# minor, and will not budge. You don’t need to know all these notes! But it is interesting that the bass had been moving (we had no way of knowing until now) up a whole-tone scale. Underneath all the old-fashioned harmonic machinations, something modern, something that undermines it all.

This dwelling on C# is really something—a thorny impasse. Here we are, the music says, here to stay!, and yet clearly unresolved. In the last bars (look below), we feel a vague intrusion of C major into this stubborn world, and then we return to C#—maybe C was an illusion? But then, at the last possible moment, you realize it wasn’t an illusion, it was real. It all melts, all the difficulty, all the contrapuntal mud and struggle, as C# slides down the half step—yes the same damned half-step—to C, bringing us home:

You cannot write a more searing, searching passage of music, and you cannot write a more heartbreaking (and yet gentle) escape. Bonus: not one annoying late-Romantic arpeggio in sight.

—

Satisfaction, the Deepest Kind

I don’t want to yadda yadda the rest, nor do I want to bore you with a blow-by-blow. (Too late, probably).

Let me say, again, to the many people who think there are only two themes, that in the second half of the movement the strings take up the piano’s Edith Piaf theme (for want of a better word), and wrestle with it for two pages—20% of the piece. Look at the cello and violin contrapuntally dueling on this idea:

There can be no account of this movement without understanding how we painfully work our way through this theme. (Like the next four years in America?) This might feel like the most abstruse part, the impenetrable side of Fauré, patience-testing. Like staring at a long Henry James sentence trying to find the verb.

But then—we abandon it. In one of the most beautiful corners of a piece crammed with beautiful corners, the violin starts up the third theme (“espressivo”):

I hate to admit it, as he gets plenty of praise, but Josh plays this moment quite touchingly. You hear that some burden is lifted, and the second, Edith Piaf theme never returns again. The violin extracts just two parts of the third theme, the beginning (as above) and the end:

Both of these gestures—as you may notice—rise. The piano keeps reminding us of the opening theme, and a series of harmonic progressions begins, fascinating progressions, at first conventionally passing through the fifths, but on a seemingly random timescale, and then beginning to radiate rapidly through relative majors and minors. We’re so close to the finish line, for a long time, but then we find ourselves veering through A minor, D minor, D major, F# minor, keys upon keys—a storm of unexpected F-sharps, a frenzy of chromatic notes, suddenly, at the apex of this tremendous protracted upbeat. At last (maybe you saw this coming), the F# slides down—that recurring slide, the accidental detail writ large—and we find ourselves in a world of F major that cannot be denied.

—

The knighted pianist was certainly joking about the lack of climax in Fauré. We all should wish for an orgasm as satisfying as this final page of the Andantino! The piano plays a vamp of eighth notes, connoting both time’s presence and time’s release. There has been so much halting, syncopating, deflecting.

The strings play the hymn (it seems hymnlike now, that third theme, doesn’t it?) and the piano keeps providing one beautiful harmonization after another, deepening the satisfaction of the strings in the best way it knows how. Then the strings stop and listen to the piano play “their” theme, twice—everyone is sharing now. There is no sense of primacy. All the players gather around the idea, and the feeling it represents.

Again and again, the melody goes up to A…

F-G-A

Is it a coincidence that these three notes are the opposite of the famous German falling horn calls, of the Lebewohl and Mahler 9 and Schubert and all that associated German leave-taking and loss? I don’t think so. No, the aged, fatigued, mostly deaf Fauré says, up up up, keep looking up, keep looking forward! But also—back to the note we began with. A French eternity: so simple.

(Listen here.)

.

To make myself ready to play (this takes 95% of my time, and doesn’t always work as intended), I went to the gym in Marylebone. You step through space-age pods after entering a number—two dehumanizing steps—and are ejected into a habitat of mostly men in midday workout routines. Some are gung-ho verging on insane. Some spend a half hour standing still on a treadmill, looking at their phone. Others chat with other manly men friends, leaning on machines and piles of weights, as if posing for a photo shoot in the magazine Gym Life. The lighting is dim and concealing, like in a restaurant, but not atmospheric. I’m not sure a pianist belongs here. Where should a pianist work out?

Sweat accomplished.

Back out of the pods, in fresh air, the first thing I see is an elderly Asian man alone in a wheelchair. His eyes give no hint of seeing me, but I feel like he sees something, in the distance. His face looks smoothed and shiny, as if buffed. What he’s doing there on this sidewalk, helpless, in the frenetic middle of London? A wave of pity and a selfish pang of fear about my own aging (who will take care of me?) and then I see he is not alone. There are two oldish women, circling around him, stooping down in an odd birdlike way. It takes a moment to realize they are picking up red maple leaves that have shaken off a tree on my first blustery day in London. The red, on the gray. They are collecting delicate leaves off this soulless sidewalk, while the man they’re caring for sits and waits. In the post-gym combination of loneliness and endorphins it feels really moving, these paired forms of care and attention.

I cross Marylebone Road with some risk of death by moped, to find a large party on the far side. They’re in fancy ball gowns and rented suits, celebrating an event on the steps of a business school, all strewn with flower petals. The universe seems to be sending me a message, something about plants discarded on the ground. The well-dressed people dawdle and chat, there, with cars roaring past, and exhausting honks.

I find London far more tiring than New York, at times, more overwhelming, especially on a concert day. Don’t you all know I have to play the piano? I wonder and couldn’t you all calm it down. But the world seems only to get more intense once you begin thinking that way.

A bakery for afternoon coffee—there too the soundscape was clattery, edgy. Why so much in the world? I risked sharing my mind with the appealing, unusual-looking person at the register—“loud today”—and she looked over at a corner where two picture-perfect blond toddlers were whining, despite their identical felt pumpkin baskets loaded with candy. The children had a picture-perfect put-together mother who was buying them baby cappuccinos. They kept screaming at every injustice, a candy that was first given to the other child, a candy that was not the candy they wanted, the lack of a baby cappuccino (it’s coming), etcetera, and the world was not enough for them. (Trump voters, I thought.) There would be a brief moment of peace where the last want was appeased, but it was very brief compared to the moments where the next desire was so intense that they had to fight about it. Isn’t that a lot of world history?

In the music of Fauré, which I’m in London to play, you find opposed forces. First—I don’t think you can deny this—comes the pleasure principle. I mean that wonderful French capacity not to let a moment go by without something delicious to taste. Endlessly gorgeous seventh chords, each sliding or resolving through some French logic to the next.

But as you’re working with this music—and I especially don’t think you can deny this—you feel another force, which goes by many names, sometimes elegance, or taste, or a kind of savoir-faire, a distance, or just the rigors of structure, counterpoint, etc. This part of the music resists yielding to pure emotion, rapture, or release. It tells you, not too much. As you play you keep finding that surrender doesn’t quite do it. The music is full of traps, alluring sirens. So many points where you just want to stop—no, listen, let’s stay here on this island of gorgeous harmony—yet it keeps going on.

One classic and astounding example: the last movement of the C minor Piano Quartet.

The piece comes to a seeming standstill and into this emptiness the piano inserts an enigmatic (but highly expressive) melody, or a scrap of a melody, really—just three notes with a dissonance in the middle:

There is beauty here, but it is partial, austere, a beauty in some ways about absence, about what is implied, about waiting, about harmonies that are not fully explained.

Then come two phrases where it gets tested out, the idea. A rustle of harmony helps, filling gaps. A waltz, maybe?

The harmony drifts into the major, becomes more nurturing, more lush … Maybe it will be C-flat major, you imagine, but it never comes, and we switch over to maybe E major, which also never comes, because in the great inflection point of this magnificent development section, the major now flickers into minor.

Before you have time to process this sea change, and seemingly as a result of this sudden melancholy, the enigmatic piano theme discovers its own apotheosis.

In the wake of this evil election, yes, it seems silly to rhapsodize about this rush of beautiful notes. It must be confessed that when we played it just now at the Wigmore, I never spoke up in rehearsal about this place. Our account of that moment that night (I thought) lacked special sauce. (I could be wrong? You can listen here. I thought the Trio from night 4 was pretty good, and the D minor Quintet night 2, C minor quintet night 3, and “Dolly” from night 5.) We were like that group in their fancy outfits on the fancy steps, standing on the strewn flower petals, when we should have been collecting maple leaves off the sidewalk. Honestly, we didn’t even need to go so far as collecting the leaves—we just had to notice (a bit more) that they were there.

Let’s admit it! I’m crazy about this passage, to the point of stalker-ish devotion. Why? The piano melody is at its heart just three descending notes (three blind mice), with a hinge in the middle, a node of meaning that comes through the ever-changing possibility of the middle note.

Here the first three notes (B-A-G) are beautiful enough, in the sudden minor.

But just a few measures later, they are replaced by the same three notes in an incredible rewrite, an edit for the ages.

The second version traces upon the beauty of the first, tells a story upon and within it. The gesture, again and again, is dissonance-resolution. But as we go along, the resolutions get more and more sprinkled with dissonances, and the simple binary gets more complicated, in the best possible, most French possible way. There aren’t dissonances or resolutions at last, this mingling suggests. These are not deceptive cadences, as none of these resolutions is, or should be, considered the “real” or “ultimate” resolution. Each resolution just takes you into another world of possible other resolutions, a giant whirl or circle of desire and beauty and pleasure without real end.

I’m sitting there, playing these whirling triplets—you want to freeze frame, stop the action, but still triplets, triplets, triplets, chords, chords, chords. The feeling is incredible, this unfolding of space, an unspooling, as these chords and all the ideas of beauty that they represent come and go. This is a climax, for sure, but not a climax of attainment, built bit by bit through German ingenuity. It is a climax of relinquishing, over and over.

—

This kind of moment, and the unusual space it creates, is one of the great French contributions to the art of music (and art, generally, and life). It calls to mind my favorite Debussy statement—“pleasure is the law.”  A paradox—law is usually a constraint on pleasure. Legal writing is prose from which pleasure has been purged in pursuit of unambiguity. But in the magic zone of this music, pleasure and law seem inseparable, the best of friends.

The annoying compositional question is how do you build a musical work packed to the gills with sensual sounds for their own sakes, that still makes sense, that still creates some form of narrative? You can see this fascinating problem operating way back, in the music of Couperin and Rameau (two amazing thinkers), and before.

You might even call this a quintessential French compositional quest: to use more fluid, sensual sounds and chords to sculpt a musical grammar, as an alternative to German logic and methods of construction. So it must have been horrifying for French composers to see this thorny problem cracked by Richard Wagner, of all people. Here he comes, with his orgies of seventh chords and unanalyzable chords, sliding every which way, and yet… somehow … it all goes, it all feels inevitable. A problem that French composers had wrestled with for centuries. I suppose one thing that’s interesting about Wagner’s solution is that while French 19th-century music is often susceptible to (and profits from) different strains of cultural influence (gamelan, Spanish music, Arabic music, etc.), Wagner decided he would anchor his musical adventures in the whitest stories he could possibly find (not just set in white places, which would be natural enough, but coded stories about the glories of the Aryan bloodline) and sell his French-influenced progress as Germanic manifest destiny.

I can’t help posing a modern parallel. The Democratic party, after deeply imperfect decades of agitating for labor power, an increased minimum wage, a more progressive tax structure—they might have felt entitled to some claim to Populism. Hey, we’ve worked at it! These are problems we’ve cared about! But along comes Trump, whose platform has two central parts: 1) hating immigrants and 2) being a dick. He cracked what Democrats had haplessly tried to explain and fix with policy for decades. Being a narcissistic dick was all it took, really, to reach the regular American. Democrats are generally not supposed to be dicks, which puts them in an awkward, priggish, lecturing position.

Narcissism worked equally well for Wagner and Trump, though I would argue Wagner left us astonishing, revelatory beauties and musical ideas to compensate. What Trump’s genius will leave behind, we will now find out in real time.

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