The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Flight of the Concord, in this week’s New Yorker.

Now, if you think I’m the sort of person who would run down first thing in the morning and buy nine hundred copies of the New Yorker (and some potato chips) from my local newsstand, you are absolutely correct.

Since the piece is an obsessive and neurotic account of making a recording, it’s interesting to note that I spent some part of Christmas obsessively and neurotically archiving old recordings of myself. I unearthed some provocative memories, ghosts of Denks past. I have updated the “listen” section of my website with a few of these live performances, with plenty of embarrassing warts. For instance, Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives was a very new piece for me when I played it in 2009 …

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And I was interested to hear an uneven performance of Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze from 2010,

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I will avoid saying what parts I like and hate.

Musicians are torn between the dream of the definitive recording and the dream of the affecting performance, between the paradigms of two different media; I indulge another dream, that I can head off into a space where I’m “just” making music, in context-less paradise. A vacation from occasion and circumstance: not too likely…

When the new Kindle was announced a couple months ago, I had a revelation that I am sure everyone else already had, like most of my revelations. The sheer quantity of analysis/verbiage/content circumambulating this “event” amazed me, a mass delusion that the creation of a new gadget (comically similar to past gadgets) is something to get excited about. Or an enforced delusion, a ritual. My reward for reading all these numbing specification-speculations was a depressing awareness; I felt sure that prose about the Kindle would dwarf prose created about any single book on the Kindle.

The moral is this: we love our content delivery systems more than content.

If you do not believe me, walk into your neighborhood Apple Store. This is an act that used to thrill me a great deal—the heady smell of newly manufactured electronics, the eager acolytes in blue tight-fitting T-shirts. Everything is sterile, clean lines, rows, there is the tiny rectangle of the iPhone, the larger rectangle of the iPad, more rectangles, some standing up some sitting down, all on long rectangle tables which desire not to be seen, to be plain, glistening, polished. Anything resembling content—applications, games, iPhone cases with wacky designs—has been banished to the corner, to the basement. And you can see why, it looks bad. Content is too personal for selling here, it musses the message. A sofa placed there would be stared down by everything else, until it disintegrated out of shame. Its cushioniness is, like content, obsolete. You sense content is obsolete. The Apple Store is the opposite, the nemesis of (say) the English library, filled with dark wood and must and dust and books stacked to the ceiling and leather chairs and a desk with grandfather’s will locked in the bottom drawer. It does slightly amaze me, the consistency of the message here, and particularly the lack of desire to have anything at all ameliorating the severity of the thing, any sign of heritage or aging, and how much we love it as such.

So many happy excited faces walking in, out.

As content delivery devices become more and more important to us, it becomes more and more important that they be sleek, impersonal, industrial slabs. For God’s sake, just consider the original iPod. Now it’s a Chiclet of metal. We’ve been on a long journey from the LP with its huge cover art and from the act of laying the needle gently down on the vinyl, the scratch of contact … to this hard drive encased in polyethylene, clicking through menus, calling up files in a flash. Our wide, fat, tubed TVs have become flat ginormous screens, trying to vanish into the wall, satisfying our urge for bigness while still nodding to a national obsession with youth, slimness. There is a general desire not to have anything particularly distinguishing about the object; the device should be semi-invisible, neutral, like every other object, but somehow also status-laden (size, speed).

Think how desperately the corporate persons must be searching for new ways to sell us content delivery systems, one in every possible size, to fit in every possible nook and cranny of daily life, which at a certain point feels like humanity is eating itself, walling itself in, from the App to the much more boring Application to the operating system, walls of menus, hierarchies of ways of delivering things, ways of encountering things. Paranoiac, I found myself surrounded by menacing content delivery in my own home, phone, Kindle, laptop, desktop, TV … and lastly my eyes rested on the piano.

By now it’s probably sunk in with me that a book’s just a file. Many bleak mornings I have meditated on this. It has nothing to do with the pile of paper I used to call a book. My pile of paper was a sentimental attachment, wasteful, destructive, forest-raping. But don’t you see, in this little war of content versus content delivery … once a book is just a file, once the complete Beethoven Sonatas are just so many megabytes, etc. etc. content is suddenly looking awfully contentless? It vanishes into digital 1 and 0 existence, a great equalizer, river of electrons. With the weird consequence being, that delivery devices are more tangible “things” than the books they hold. No wonder we obsess about them, since the things we used to call things are suddenly files, endlessly electronically vanishing. Our right to them is held in a server somewhere, whereas our computers/Kindles/iPads are ours, we hold them obsessively in our hands, like lovers.

The El Paso airport was pretty quiet at midnight. I dragged my wheelaboard past the baggage claim, out the door where the cool desert night lives side-by-side with the heat radiating up from the sidewalks. It’s an amazingly weird airport, on a busy street filled with every fast food joint you’ve heard of and many you never want to, but as you fly in you see only wasteland, endless sand and creosotes. There is nothing, nothing, nothing, and suddenly there you are on the ground in the middle of town, as though town were a façade, barely separated from drought, a place with a soul of dust.

It was an hour’s drive to New Mexico, to my parents’ place, and so I slept the night in the Radisson, oasis astride the parking lot. It had an Italian motif, a Venetian Room (!), a sleep center. I always forget how the dryness envelops everything, changes the feeling of even your eyeballs. The water from the sink gave the hotel coffee packet a wonderfully toxic flavor.

My parents had decided at long last to leave the house I grew up in, and move somewhere with a bit less responsibility, fewer things to take care of. I was faintly jealous. They have a lovely new apartment, but additionally there is a communal dining room, with super comfy wheelie chairs, and rows of high windows–squares of blue sky. I stared at these cloudless squares. Meanwhile, I was getting déjà vu, something about this room and the sense of time unfolding and the little buffet of beverages, the coffee dispensers, the dessert cart with its pie and Jello possibilities.

I’d brought a trusty bottle of habañero hot sauce, and was therefore able to transform the presented cheeseburger pie into something nearly inedible. By the laws of my own idiocy, then, I was forced to guzzle a bladder-busting amount of water. A guy in a scooter tried to beat me to the handicapped restroom, but I showed him.

As I came back from the restroom, the déjà vu vanished into a certainty of recurrence. It was quieter, less frenetic, but I knew where I was-and-wasn’t; the last time I had been here, the here was the dining hall in Dascomb, at Oberlin. A group of regulars at tables, a bit of a buffet, some cliquishness, people coming and going to their rooms. It was like Dorm 2: The Sequel, and if the first one was a manic preparation for an onslaught of life events the sequel is about digesting them.

A piano lurked in the corner of this large dining room, far enough away that I could ignore it mostly. My mother, however, may have let slip at some meal or other that I was a pianist, and after three or so free meals at the dining room, the head honcho of the place came over. “I hear you’re a pianist,” the honcho said. “I guess,” I replied. She looked me over, said the obvious-for-her: “What do you do?” I was mystified. “Well, you’re not a professional pianist any more are you?” and I realized in a flash that at my age she considered music not something to be done any more; music was an indulgence of youth.

As a side note, let me just say that I arrived in town somewhat unexpectedly, and had not packed for a long journey, and so my only pair of shorts on arrival were a pair of gym shorts, which my mom immediately referred to as “Fancy Shorts” which they decidedly were not and which could only mean “really terrible shorts” and so I quickly headed out to Old Navy to pick up some cheap shorts to wear in the New Mexico sunshine, which I wore all week, with the result that I looked like the sort of person who waited until mid-October to buy the cheapest possible on sale shorts at Old Navy and never laundered them.

“Yes, actually,” I said, slightly gritting my teeth, “I am a professional pianist, believe it or not.” She went away.

Later she sent another representative, and really only a person with a coal-black heart could refuse to play. They wanted me to check the piano to see if it was good enough; it was an electric Baldwin masquerading as a baby grand.

For the rest of that week I did not think very much, I’ll confess, of my debut at the Golden Mesa. In fact, I was a bit blasé about the whole thing, I even was practicing and lost track of time, and therefore arrived a bit late for the starting time, which itself had been miscommunicated, so I was nearly a half hour late to begin; there was a silent and large group of waiting people there, arranged in a rough semicircle, possibly disgruntled, and I was still wearing the same shorts believe it or not because in that glorious New Mexico sunshine I could not bear to put on pants.

The first problem is that the piano was not set to be a piano. It emitted trumpet-ish bleats. I tried to explain to the crowd, sweating a bit, that the pianos I usually play on are actually pianos. They did not seem impressed. A blind man named Everett in the front row was the only one who seemed to understand, “You’re a brave man,” he said. The first button I pressed set off a deafening bossa nova. The staff of the facility rushed in to try to help, but I think at last after five minutes of struggling, I was the one who “fixed” it, randomly hitting at buttons that seemed important. Out of the instrument came something sampled from an actual piano somewhere.

As I sat at the bench, a cold terror crept over me. I realized I really had nothing to play for this situation. My mother had strictly forbidden me to play anything too 20th century in exactly the same voice as she would forbid me to stay out past 9 pm when I was fifteen. So, with a song in my heart, I just launched into the Goldberg Variations, planning to stop when someone screamed or … The action of the instrument had an interesting unpredictability, that is, it made a nice soft sound up to a certain degree of pressure, and then suddenly became incredibly loud, with a bit of distortion for good measure. It whispered or grunted. I stayed in the loud dimension, kept adjusting the volume tab on the left, realized I should certainly have done a sound check … I distinctly heard someone say “that piano sounds terrible.” Yes, there was something collegiate about their frankness as well.

After the tenth variation I just stopped. Middling acclaim. I decided the next thing in my repertoire I could try was “The Alcotts” from the “Concord” Sonata. I saw my parents slap their foreheads in the back of the room. It was a disastrous choice, but brief. The imitation piano had no discernible color palette, and the piece therefore made absolutely no sense. It was 5:10ish, dinner wasn’t until 5:30. Twenty empty minutes to fill. What would I do next? The piece I had recorded most recently was Op. 111 of Beethoven, but to play that piece on this piano would be a sin against humanity. I realized whatever I finished with had to be propulsive, impressive, I didn’t want my parents to have to hang their heads in shame in the corridors of their new home.

I launched into the first movement of the “Waldstein.” This was better. The rhythm was a crutch against the piano’s failings. I ripped a page out of my score in the excitement, it drifted off towards the door, hoping to escape I suppose. I heard someone say “he’s so angry.” If I could have drifted out of my own body! Me madly being expressive at this inexpressive electric thing was something of a spectacle, something unusual, a kind of tragicomic masterpiece. But the best humiliation was yet to come. I had deftly timed the work to end promptly in deference to dinner, but the staff did not know this. I was just rounding the corner of the coda, I’d gotten to the moment where Beethoven is tiptoeing on the dominant:

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And in perfect balletic correspondence, as if having analyzed the score and understood its most exposed moments, one of the staff tiptoed up to me, whispered in my ear, “Dinner’s in five minutes.” I say whisper, but it was audible in the next county, perhaps even in Albuquerque. There was a murmur of approval in the crowd, “that’s right,” someone said. They didn’t know the piece was just about to end; when I thundered out the final cadence

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… it must have seemed as though I tacked it on. I stood up, received a relieved ovation. Another honcho came up, submitted me to the crowd. “We would love to have him again?” he asked with a mixture of hearty enthusiasm and hesitance. The crowd applauded somewhat, there were no audible dissents. But I must have looked at him strangely. He said to me, confidentially, ”We’ll pay you.” I wasn’t offended that they gave me the dinner hook, but the idea that I was holding out for a paycheck … well it hit me the wrong way. Samuel Beckett says “against the charitable gesture there is no defense,” but there is, there is. I had to put extra consolatory hot sauce on my quesadilla. My father’s assessment was on the mark: “I don’t think they’ll lower our rent,” he said, “let’s hope they don’t raise it.” We all laughed.

–

In this account of an ignominious debut I have failed to express the sun-swept week that surrounded it. Friend E was there, she will tell you, there was never one cloud, only light light light, and every morning we stopped at this place BurgerTime where they serve the most perfect breakfast burritos although they unerringly screw up your order, and every morning there were no customers, just us in the car blinking at the sun and the sound of sizzling chorizo behind a screen. Then we would drive around town doing simple errands, raiding grocery stores, evaluating shower curtains, refilling coffee pods, then returning to my parents to play cards or eat or discuss the man in the dining room who loves to rearrange the chairs. For lunch there’s a different burrito place with the magic green chile melting together with shredded beef, and the girl at the counter with that soothing New Mexico accent, both somehow linkable to the way each evening the sunset makes everything purple. We walked around the house I grew up in, surveyed the Christmas trees from my youth, now grown into mammoths; who knows what the new owners will make of these improbable pine trees towering over the cacti? And one day a real treat, driving over the pass to White Sands, lying in the vast whiteness in the vast valley, a story of a lake that used to be but evaporates continuously feeding a vast lake of gypsum; a story made real, of sand that moves and swallows; of the mice with white eyes who live there; we lay on the dunes, light light light, I thought of all our helplessness in the face of the sun and the sand. In the thick of time’s erosion, in the center of its sandblasting workshop, the incredible beauty of things wrapped change in gentleness. The next day, one last visit to BurgerTime. Amazingly, suddenly, there were customers coming out of the woodwork, five cars in the drive-thru alone; E and I looked at each other meaningfully, hopefully, and then laughed; if you take omens from your burritos you have been in New Mexico too long.

I fled Twitter. It was a depressing stream of people saying how wonderful their last concert was, that they just loved playing with so-and-so, etc. etc. It’s not that I don’t want people to be happy, I’m just allergic to the eternal electronic happy-face. At times, I’ve overcompensated with meditations on misery–which is taking the other easy way out. But, I suppose I have a rationale: first drain the glamour of the musician’s life, dim the halo, then let the glamour of the “music itself” shine forth!

Hypocritically however, I just can’ t help gloating what a fantastic, splendiferous week I had playing Mozart with the St. Louis Symphony led by Nic McGegan. I loved it, loved them. They played with such openness and elation: that’s what certain Mozart tuttis are about, don’t you think, a kind of elation, celebrating the appearance or resurgence of the themes? (The pianist finishes a cadential figure, trilling, and the orchestra chimes in: yes yes, all that and more.) A very short and smiley violinist from the orchestra said, “It’s all about the possibilities of C major, what C major means” and she was so right: the thrilling ascending sequences, the crunch of certain intervals, little bumps but a lot of things that are just plain, standing in front of you, in other words no “black keys” of complication.

She and I geeked out about Mozart, blissfully, over a basket of homemade potato chips with a pot of beer and cheddar sauce which my doctor would sincerely prefer I not eat.

In other words, everything would have been perfect if some [expletive] program note author hadn’t started off thus: “K 415 is something of an odd bird, and has suffered abuse from various musicologists [unnamed]” then proceeded to list these anonymous complaints, and then—naturally—compared the work to the more sublime late Mozart. Sometimes that word sublime really bugs me. I swear, if we knew more about Mozart’s complexion, we would compare the sublimity of his zits.

Poor me! From the moment I walk on stage, I have to defend the work from the abuse of the program annotator. The listeners feel from the get-go they are getting a lesser meal, and they have not come to The Symphony to eat McDonalds.

It’s ridiculous and sad and stupid to have to defend a piece of such freshness and beauty. If the PNW (program note writer) had only managed to mention the very first entrance of the piano, for God’s sake. (Excuse me while I go beat my head against the wall.) My theory is that the piano is an instigator. Look at various entrances in classical concertos: there is often something “wrong” about them, something afoot, they come in too soon or too late, they take an awfully long time about something or they rush into things, they’re too simple, too innocent … There’s almost always a wink, a trick, a leap in there somewhere, something teasing, as if the orchestra were a big brother to be slightly mocked.

Maybe you begin to feel the orchestra has been going on too long? The tutti finishes off often a bit pompously, with a fanfare or two. The piano punctures pomposity. The piano’s a thief come to steal boredom.

In 415 the piano-instigation begins right away: with two trills, syncopated, troublemaking against the beat …

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Awfully close together, mildly complex to play, a bit hyperactive … twittering “D goes to C, D goes to C” … These compressed, quick trills with their kinetic energy generate a leap up to G:

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Marvelous: but what to do with this G on the weak beat? The answer is fairly predictable, gravitational, we fall back down to the C we started with:

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Fine. But heads up, here comes the fakeout:

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Ha. Which of course is the reversal of the trills. You thought D went to C, well now C goes to D, with a naughty C# in the middle, boldfacing the joke: Mozart is laughing with you, at his silly game of do and re. At this exact moment, the left hand leaps into the situation, leaving its Alberti station … creating a sudden rush of events in the place where the phrase “should” be demurely resolving. Naughtiness filling what should be a polite piece of punctuation.

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Even if the PNW can’t bring himself to put into words the infectious mirth of the piano opening, this distilled essence of Mozart, the ONE thing you simply CANNOT neglect to mention about the first movement, the defining oddity, the magic-making curveball, is the SECOND THEME. (Beating my head against the wall again, sorry.) This theme doesn’t appear in the orchestral tutti, for the simple reason that it is not by nature “orchestral”: it belongs to a more intimate realm, it’s an idea for one person, not a mass. And unless you are a heartless person, PNW, you must take notice, somehow give homage to the way this theme gets slightly trapped in E minor, like a fly in the flypaper of melancholy:

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… one of Mozart’s most beautifully artless themes. The structure is just 2 + 2 + 4, the simplest symmetrical thing in the world, but the first 2 bar bit drifts into E minor and gets marooned, leaving us to stare at E minor in bars 3 and 4. Then the second half of the theme … simply, beautifully, gradually, in the breadth of its four bars, with an arching melody, wakes us up and out…

Although this theme is in G major, it is “C major-ish” in its lack of concealment; it stares you right in the face; it subjects itself easily to dissection, but thereby loses none of its mystery or power. There’s no elision, there are no hidden joints, no inner voices concealing their subtle workings from us: just these phrases plain as day, doing what they do, the play of E minor against the “real key” … a cloud passing over G major and burning off again.

What’s more, this theme affects the “emotional structure” of the whole exposition …

                1) charm of the opening, wit, laughter
                2) passagework moving us to new key
                3) sudden melancholy, lyricism, bittersweetness
                4) passagework laughing the melancholy off.

Call me a hopeless Romantic, PNW, but I feel that the melancholy of the second theme infects or flavors the laughing surrounding material. I feel you can view the whole exposition at once, in a flash, seeing all the disparate emotions—and from this vantage point it hits you … that the comic material revolves around the seriousness of the second theme, as a center from which it takes profundity and pleasure.

One last thing that the PNW should definitely have mentioned, the single most important thing. As I arrived at the bar with the not so healthy potato chips, a very nice person I know ambushed me: “that last movement, it’s not really Mozart, right?” she said, with savage emphasis on really, as if, come on. I couldn’t help feeling she was emboldened by the PNW to talk this way, to presume to know what’s “really” Mozart. Grr. There I was in my world, where this movement was the most Mozartean thing imaginable, and there was her world across the beer-laden table: where transgression makes it “not Mozart.” The word really kept echoing in my head, unhappily.

She was upset by the Adagios in the last movement, which is the most marvelous weird thing that the PNW didn’t even find time to talk about. The rondo is just bouncing along, rollicking even, when Mozart interrupts these messages (his own messages!) to bring you an emergency announcement. Fermata, sudden slam on of the brakes, silence of suspense. Out of the blue: a lament in C minor, the piano in full diva over a lost love or something or other. Now, it’s patently ridiculous to have a depressive attack in the middle of a frolic; what Mozart is writing, therefore, is a joke tragedy. A giggling lament. It’s just beautiful enough that you might for a moment be seduced by it, drawn into its spell, briefly forget that we are in the rondo.

To write sadness satirically, with a twinkle in your eye, is truly wicked. Naughty Mozart!

This Adagio rings twice, like the postman. Once near the beginning, and again near the end. After this second minor episode Mozart pulls out a double whammy of genius, piling weirdness upon weirdness. Let’s just point out that each and every phrase of the rondo theme ends with a little blip, tag, suffix:

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… which of course is quite charming and silly. Out of this silliness comes Mozart’s master stroke: the last time we hear the theme, after this second tragic Adagio, suddenly this suffix multiplies itself, takes over, becomes an obsession, distributes itself through the orchestra, aww hell, let’s let some Brit explain it:

this fragment, tossed between piano and orchestra and multiplied ad infinitum, sails though the whole coda like a flight of fairies in a darkening wood …

Well put, Cuthbert Morton Girdlestone! The blip goes bananas, becomes a murmuring, a continuous laughter, and fragments of the theme echo, ever quieter, ever quieter …

A more beautiful joke could hardly be imagined. After the ridiculous lament comes the most serious, meaningful laughter. So often in the classical composers, the profound thing comes through the deflation of a false profundity, a pomposity punctured …. no not this claptrap, Beethoven says, but if I change one thing about it, slightly alter the proportions, sabotage the usual harmony somehow … there it is. Here too, Mozart directs our attention away from all kinds of normal possible endings, away from the Adagio’s temptations, away from convention itself to the transcendent possibilities of an idiotic suffix. Allowing the laughter to vanish into nothing, Mozart gives the feeling/illusion that it continues forever, eternally. A mirth that overcomes everything—lament, melancholy, fanfare–with its more profound insight, its fleeting permanence. And that, my friends, is really Mozart. Now hand me another potato chip before someone gets hurt.