Recently in classical music Category
I'm glad to tell you that I still stumble haltingly through them, but a little faster these days, and I stumble haltingly with more confidence and assurance, if that makes sense. Things like this take a long time, and I often think of that exquisitely cruel haiku by Issa, "O snail, climb Mount Fuji, but slowly, slowly." When it comes to the piano, I know how that snail feels.
But even as you slowly, slowly progress, there are compensations. One of my baby books is Anton Diabelli's Op. 125, "The First Lessons on the Piano." Just now I was playing the last piece and at the end there's a moment of real lyrical sweetness. It's simple stuff, but still affecting, and for a moment I had a reverie where the player and the listener in me became people from another world. There was a middle-aged man, a middle-class fellow somewhere in mid-19th-century central Europe, and it was mid-morning, so he was dressed in vest and frock coat and the whole deal. And his little daughter was playing the piano, and she got through the whole piece that I had just played without a mistake and turned to him and smiled. And he smiled back, and thought to himself that if only such moments could last forever, that would be all the heaven he could ever ask for. It was all imaginary, there was nothing going vaguely like that, it was just me, sitting at the piano in T-shirt and sweat pants, and the cat looking out the window with the sun rising above the rooftops to the east. But the gentle, melting tenderness of the music still hung in the air.
And I suppose that's a roundabout way of saying that if the snail climbs diligently, it will certainly notice that with a year's effort behind it, the view has improved quite a bit. It's the kind of thing that keeps you going. And now I'm going to have a bite of breakfast and get back to that piano.
Well, later on I heard that this Cortot was an enthusiastic collaborator with the Nazis. Eeew! But, being a calm fellow, I didn't take the discs out and burn them, although that's what the Nazis would have done with me if they could have gotten their way. I'm really pretty compartmentalized about these things, for the most part. Maybe he was pretty compartmentalized himself—Cortot's wife was "of Jewish origin," as Wikipedia rather vaguely puts it, and he was related to and friends with Leon Blum, the first Jewish prime minister of France.
Wikipedia basically throws up its hands and says maybe he admired the Teutons because of the music and all. We're all human, are we not? Subject to little biases here and there? And France was a bit muddled and directionless in the Thirties, so maybe he thought that anything—a takeover by the Nazis, even—was a step in the right direction.
After the war Cortot got some heat, but not much, for his supporting the Nazis. But I'm listening to his music at this very moment, and the music is very nice. I guess my feeling is that people have strengths and weaknesses. Alfred Cortot was good at playing the piano and bad at deciding who ought to run the world. Lots of people are bad at the second thing and can't play piano to save their lives, so I feel like I can let Alfred Cortot slide on this. It helps a lot that the Nazis lost the war, but still. I mean, look that the man—are those the eyes of a person whose political opinions are soundly reasoned? I don't think so either. The Nazis would have done what they did whether Alfred Cortot supported them or not. But he played the piano well. I'm willing to leave it at that.
My sightreading of classical music improves daily, I'm happy to say. I owe that in large part to my current teachers, who are all stone dead but quite helpful nevertheless. See, what I'm doing is buying all the instructional books for children I can find by classical composers. My favorite of these composers is to the right there, Carl Czerny. Doesn't he look friendly? His music for children is friendly too, and when I play the little exercises he wrote for beginners like me I seem to feel his kindly presence. I bobble a passage, frown with frustration, and he just smiles. "You see zis quarter-note rest here?" he asks, pointing. "Zat is so you can move your hand here—ja, like that—to be ready for the new melody. Offen when you see a rest like zat at the end of a passage, is to help like dis. Soon you will notice without even tinking about it. Try again. Much better! Is easy, no?"OK, I should say that I don't actually think he's sitting there, saying those things. But doesn't he look like he'd be a good teacher and a nice fellow? You'd want to do well, because you liked him. The spectacles, the gentle, faraway smile—he looks like he's calm inside. Serious about music, though—he was a child prodigy, actually, and one of his teachers was Beethoven. He enjoyed being a piano teacher himself, published lots of instructional books, and one of his own students was Franz Liszt. That worked out well—Liszt was famous as a pianist—and as I say, I'm coming along myself.
It's not that easy to learn an instrument after childhood, but I sure tried. I practiced all the time, and took lessons. One teacher was a phenomenal musician, but as time went on I came to have some doubts about his approach to teaching, and I wasn't so sure about his approach to life either. The teaching was pure technique, no songs or anything. Scales, chords, sight reading, lots of other elements of music, but no actual music. I asked him when I'd start playing songs, and he thought about it, and said in about two years.
It was hard to argue with him—he was a prickly, irascible person. We were talking in his driveway one day—he lived with his parents—and the family dog came cringing up to him, and he kicked it hard. It stayed by his feet, whining. He looked down—there was some of the dog's fur stuck in his sole. "F---er got hair on my boot," he said. And kicked the dog again.
For sight-reading practice he gave me a book from Bela Bartok's beginning piano series "Mikrokosmos." I'm no expert on musical theory, but from what I've read, Bartok didn't care much one way or the other about tonality. Beethoven and Mozart are tonal, and so is almost every form of music people actually like to listen to. After hearing a Bartok chamber piece one time, I remarked to a musician acquaintance that I just couldn't figure out how to enjoy the piece. He furrowed his brow, thinking. "I don't think it's meant to be enjoyed," he said. He didn't elaborate, but I supposed that he meant the music was an intellectual exercise to which we were to listen in respectful puzzlement. Atonal music provokes that response among most people, if it gets listened to at all. If you haven't heard anyone going around lately whistling tunes by Anton Webern or Alban Berg, believe me, there's a reason for that.
Anyway, I hated the Bartok stuff. It might as well have been random notes. I didn't enjoy it, certainly, and it wasn't all that great for sight-reading practice because I literally could not be sure I was playing the right notes. I said so, and the teacher predictably snarled at me: "Ya want me to give you baby stuff?" I said no. But one day I called him and said I didn't want to take lessons from him any more. He sounded like he was going to cry, said I had a strong attitude toward practicing, but we parted company. A friend saw him in a bar afterward and said the teacher was calling me unpleasant names. Not long after that I was told that he had dropped dead of a heart attack. I sifted my feelings to see if I felt bad about it, and I didn't. I kept learning, and eventually I was good enough to play in Top 40 bands. We'd play jazz for the dining crowd. I spent six nights a week for a couple of years in bars, but eventually the raffish fun of it wore thin and I got out of the business—I realized that I was wasting my life playing bad music for bad money for bad people. But I kept a piano at home.
Life went on, and for long stretches I wouldn't sit down and play more than three or four times a year. But in the past couple of years I've been playing a lot more, practicing every day, and it's coming along. I get together with a bass player friend and people don't run out of the room or anything when we play. And lately I've been practicing my sight reading with easy classical music, because I like the classical at least as well as jazz.
Yesterday I went out and bought more easy piano books, the easiest I could find. Baby stuff, in short. It's what I need to sight-read. You need practice in seeing groups of notes at a time, and reading ahead of what you're playing, and seeing the patterns so you're not trying to read individual notes.
And the music is pretty. This isn't the made-up stuff from the instructional books, you know, "Dance of the Leprechauns" and so forth. These are simple melodies with simple harmonies, but they're also original music by Mozart and Beethoven and Haydn and that gang. Pretty little melodies, and it's nice, awfully nice, to sit down and actually play them. They're like music-box tunes—some cheerful, others wistful, all pretty. And if you really listen, there's something about it, something profound. Haydn, for instance, wrote lots of pretty little tunes. But if you read about him, you'll see he had a pretty hard life, with much that he could have chosen to be bitter about. But instead of kicking the dog, he made pretty music. Baby stuff, some call it. But it's charming. There's delicacy and tenderness in it, and often a trace of poetic sorrow. It's fragile. vulnerable, and your heart goes out to it. And it's meant to be enjoyed, at least, and I do.
The cat came down and installed himself on my lap. The oracles murmured their cryptic phrases, smoke swirled in the crystal ball. And some music started playing in my mind, and if memory served it was one of Bach's two-part inventions. Stately, beautiful, as real and right as the stars in the skies. It's a good thing to have this in my mind, I thought. And I thought of a night two and a half years ago:
6/14/06
A Hole in the Head
My excuse for not blogging yesterday? Sinus trouble. I know, I know, there've been people in iron lungs who composed 67 symphonies and so forth and so on. But I just felt run-down and draggy. Today I'm a bit perkier, and thinking about the concept of "tastiness." Certain musicians will describe another musician's performance as "tasty." The one word connotes a great deal: crispness, economy, effectiveness. A tasty solo, let's say, is played with clear articulation and good rhythmic drive, it's done with confidence, and it uses the most effective sorts of musical phrases to generate an emotional response in the listener. Tasty stuff is often up-tempo—the adjective is rarely applied to minor-key, sad songs, no matter how effectively done—but typically it's not a display of lightning speed, and pointless displays of technical prowess are the opposite of tasty almost by definition. Tasty works, in a word.I was thinking about this because I saw a musician named John Pizzarelli at a jazz festival last week, and I really enjoyed him. Didn't know much about him, just that he's the son of the famous father Bucky, and when he started up I thought maybe he was a cynical sort, because he did a number of swing-style tunes and I thought he was capitalizing on the swing-dancing fad of some years ago. (See below for how much of a trend-follower I am.) But he was good. And the solos, all of them, were tasty. As his set went on, I became more and more impressed. He was smooth, well dressed, practiced patter, all that. But he cared about the music, and about its communicating effectively, far more than many of the other acts who pretended to a greater seriousness and dedication. If music doesn't make you feel something, if it's just the same styles that were fresh 30 years ago that you're rehashing decades later with no real inspiration, well, that ain't tasty. Pizzarelli and crew made you feel something. He did a lot of Brazilian music toward the end of his set, and it just washed over us all, sitting there on the grass in the city park, the night sky overhead and the buildings surrounding us. You just felt a little closer to Rio, for a few minutes, and when he finished I joined the rest of the crowd in honestly clapping and cheering because I wanted him to know he'd done a great job. He acknowledged the applause, of course, but just before he left he looked up, away past the park, where the moon was rising over the buildings to the east. He seemed lost in thought. "Music is good," he said pensively—into the microphone, of course, because we heard it, but mainly, it seemed, to himself.
Warm night, then. Cold night now, the town still sleeping, the cat still on my lap. There's a piano at the other end of the sofa, with books of music on it. I've been playing a lot lately. As Mr. Pizzarelli says, music is good, winter or summer. You wake in the night, your heart not entirely at ease, but if there's a nice little cat on your lap, and snow lies on the lawns and rooftops and sidewalks, and Bach melodies pipe in the background of your mind, somehow your own circumstances otherwise don't seem to matter as much. Ups and downs, like the weather. Music is good, and life is beautiful. It just is. And that's the news from Lake Wobegon, gang.
I'm getting a little sidetracked. Here's the first movement of the "Waldstein," played super-fast by that wacky Friedrich Gulda (who faked his own death in 1999, among other wackinesses). I'd prefer another version, but the first movement is 11 minutes long, so you can't have the whole thing on YouTube at a normal tempo. The Gulda version is fine, but go buy Radu Lupu's. It'll make an excellent Christmas present, btw. But not for me! I already have it. I'd prefer cash.
BTW again, do any of you remember the Infamous W.? She of the notoriously bad judgment in matters great and small? She sent me a newspaper story about how the recession is affecting prostitutes in Las Vegas, and called it a "blogging opportunity." It doesn't seem that remarkable to me. The higher-priced prostitutes are doing fine, and the lower-priced ones are doing extremely well. The midrange models? Not so well. It kind of figures, if you think about it. Personally I prefer to think about Beethoven. Small minds think small thoughts, Infamous W.!
I was never so sure about it; it sounded overly emotional, embarrassingly histrionic, and once I compared Brahms to a "crying drunk." But I've been softening in this view. Just recently I listened to a piece and it seemed to reflect exactly a situation I lived through five years ago—incredible tenderness, then dark, tangled emotions, and then all that clearing like a fog and breaking through to the tenderness again, richer and deeper. (I'm talking about the Radu Lupu version of the Intermezzo Op. 117, No. 1 in E-flat, from an album that Alex Ross calls one of the most beautiful piano records ever made.) So I sent that version to the friend, and she was suitably enraptured. It was nice to let her know I'm coming along in appreciating the chahms of Brahms, and to share that version legally for a buck was pretty convenient. So. Anyway. Crying drunk. I think the problem was the same as when you have a problem with your parents or children because they're exactly like you. I'm sort of an irascible person with a huge vein of sentiment flowing inside like an underground river. I wish Brahms would come back and we could get plastered and have a good cry about things. Here's Wikipedia on his personality:
Brahms was fond of nature and often went walking in the woods around Vienna. He often brought penny candy with him to hand out to children. To adults Brahms was often brusque and sarcastic, and he sometimes alienated other people. His pupil Gustav Jenner wrote, "Brahms has acquired, not without reason, the reputation for being a grump, even though few could also be as lovable as he." He also had predictable habits which were noted by the Viennese press such as his daily visit to his favourite "Red Hedgehog" tavern in Vienna and the press also particularly took into account his style of walking with his hands firmly behind his back complete with a caricature of him in this pose walking alongside a red hedgehog. Those who remained his friends were very loyal to him, however, and he reciprocated with equal loyalty and generosity.I don't walk that way. And I'm not a historic genius at music or anything else. But some of the rest of that fits.
So when you have troubles you're in a different place for a while, and you acquire new friends, and I guess one of them is, more and more, Brahms. So be it. I'm also reminded of the TV show King of the Hill. (Bear with me on this.) In one episode a young girl becomes, shall we say, a woman, and her mother is consoling her about the upsides of PMS. The mother contrasts with the native Texan characters because she's an upwardly striving Laotian yuppie, intensely irascible herself, so she's showing a rare tender side when she talks about this benefit: "Make sad movies truly excellent! You watch "Titanic" on the right day, it blow you away!" I guess that's how I've been lately about Brahms.
Saturday I emerged from my cave like a hungry bear and spent a night on the town. Philadelphia is about 30 miles east of here, and it's a fine city with lots of good stuff, including reasonably priced Italian food and the Philadelphia Orchestra, which was what was on the agenda. Long-suffering readers of your poor servant's blog will perhaps remember a phase in which I developed a man-crush on Radu Lupu, a Romanian pianist who's simultaneously obscure and famous. He's won a clutch of international piano competition prizes, including the Van Cliburn, and won a Grammy here and there too. He's known for playing musically, a strange term that I can only explain by saying that with some players you may say, "Wow! What spectacular piano playing!" and with others you won't say anything at all, because the music is so beautiful that you're rendered speechless, and feel a vague urge to cry for happiness. Lupu is the second kind. He's been called "holy man" and "poet" fairly often. But many pretty knowledgeable music lovers have never heard of him, because he doesn't tour or record all that much.
I saw him at the old Academy of Music 10 or 12 years ago, doing a Beethoven piano concerto. He was scheduled to come around again this past week, doing Beethoven again, so tickets were procured well in advance. He's grayer now, but still plays the same way—he plays the music with tenderness and delicacy and depth. The second movement was, I have to admit, poetic, and everyone woke up from their trances with the third, which is a happy piece of music in which the melody tumbles over itself like a bunch of puppies running up a hall. I came away with a renewed reverence for the guy. It's somehow a tribute to the human race, that people learn to play that way. But if there was any temptation to see him as somehow more than human, some divine being come down from among the angels, there was a moment near the climactic ending where he became a human again. The piano was silent for a number of measures, and Lupu just sat quietly, waiting to play. And then at one point as the music sounded triumphantly through the gleaming concert hall, the poet and holy man slowly raised an arm and scratched his left ear. I loved him for that. And it reminded me that although people who play at his level deserve a wagonload of credit for their work and insight, if there's poetry and holiness going on, it's in the music. Anyway, here's a sample of his playing from years ago:
