1.
“Game of pearls,” my teacher said. “Play the notes like a game of pearls. That’s the well-known term for the sound you want. Jeu perlé.”
My ideal piano moment is after dinner: a few glasses of wine, and then some easy Chopin mazurkas (with soft pedal to protect the neighbors). I call these inebriated experiences the end of time.
2.
My Mason and Hamlin baby grand is a minor angel of devastation: against the apartment’s eventless hush (punctuated now by a police siren), the instrument asserts the percussive clamor of a Rachmaninoff prelude. Its opening passage makes no sense to me; it reminds me of a loud, public cough, without a touch of the lachrymose, only of the interruptive and the contagious. I can’t master the coughing phrase, but I like to impose it on my living room, to hurl it against the white walls as an aggression or a proposition: take me up on it! The passage also reminds me of cranking an old-fashioned ice cream churner, its inner chamber surrounded by rock salt.
3.
Playing the piano is a supremely lazy occupation, and yet it mimics a dutiful form of mechanical diligence—a chore, like mowing the lawn, folding laundry, counting pennies, or typing a form letter someone else has composed. When I play the piano, I am doing nothing, but I am also working—a treadmill, a task never completed, like writing in a diary whose pages I burn after finishing them.
4.
Later I will systemize my impossible subject, but for the moment I want to enjoy a tentative movement between its different chambers. I am not certain which are important and which are extraneous. Nor am I certain whether this topic is one that I have the strength to pursue.
Just as every piece I play has already been played by someone else, every fragment I write in this essay is something I have already written. I have been secretly composing (or avoiding) this meditation for over twenty years. Long pauses frame its tentative articulation.
5.
I have a French sound. That’s what I choose to remember a teacher saying. Perhaps he said, “You have a sophisticated sound.” I don’t drop my weight naturally to the bottom of the key. Instead, afraid of uncontrolled deposits, I suspend weight in my elbow.
6.
In an unsettled 1933 performance of the first Chopin prelude, recorded by Alfred Cortot, a Frenchman who later became a collaborator with his country’s occupying enemy, he moves forward in agitated waves but then backtracks, self-consciously retracting his rash upheavals.
Looking at my score of the preludes, I find a few handwritten notations. Above the opening phrase of the “Raindrop” Prelude, twenty-seven years ago, my teacher wrote in red pencil one simple, enigmatic word: “tone.” She meant: make a pleasant, rounded, singing sound. Toward the end of the fourth measure of another prelude, she drew an arrow in red pencil and wrote, “don’t stop.” I still have a deplorable tendency to arrest phrases before they are completed.
At the top of the next page, my teacher wrote, in black pencil, “weight transfer”—one of her favorite terms, and one of her most mysterious. It meant: don’t attack each note of the melody separately, but distribute the hand’s gravity evenly from finger to finger.
7.
If I were to play the piano now instead of continuing to write this essay, I would begin with scales, up and down the keyboard, four octaves. Today my fingers might be in the mood for F-sharp major, and then for F-sharp minor. F-sharp minor sounds harder than it is.
Next, arpeggios. My lazy thumbs hesitate to tuck under, and I’m no good at rotation.
After warming up, I’ll make a cup of tea and stare out the window at the gas station, or, because my hands are cold (on the verge of hysterical immobility?), I’ll immerse them in hot water, à la Glenn Gould.
I, too, have a command of things contrapuntal, though my counterpoint is psychological—one thought pushing against another, interfering, cooperating.
Fugal subject: should I play the piano or do something constructive with my life?
I step into fog when I play. I begin with a clear intent: let’s attempt the Paul Bowles sonatina! And within fifteen minutes the familiar haze descends.
8.
Occasionally I intend my writing to be comic—to offset the melancholy, and to mute the maledictions. Unfortunately, there is little humor in this essay—unless we step back from the voice of its narrator, and imagine him as a character, a foolish, fearful, adamant man, gripped by a misconception.
I demand wisdom from my fingers: at least they must sound human, and not like spoons and forks! The piano, however, is not a human being. It lies halfway between a friend and a rock. More responsive than a rock. More predictable than a friend.
9.
At the moment I am preoccupied with two discords in “Corcovado,” a tranquil dance from Darius Milhaud’s technically undemanding suite, Saudades do Brasil. In the opening measure, a G in the left hand meets the piquant interference of an F-sharp in the right hand; and in the next measure, a C-sharp in the right hand, passing quickly, confronts a D in the left hand. These dissonances don’t linger long enough to sound provocative, negative, or rabble-rousing, but they make my fingers complicit with a tiny revolution in taste.
10.
I should suddenly talk about sex in order to draw the reader’s attention elsewhere, just as my attention is always distracted—by the view out the window, by the fantasy I forgot to describe, by the thought in front of the thought I am in the midst of trying to explain.
11.
Here is a miniature novel.
After suffering a memory lapse and nervous breakdown, Rosanna Duvette, an American debutante, travels to Sicily to recover. There she finds a ground-floor apartment in quaint Noto, and rents an upright. At lunch she sits beneath a lemon tree and broods about her wealthy parents. An American artist is also living in Noto. “Frances Churchweather” is his alias. Later she discovers his real name is Francesco. He wears a bead necklace, and has muscular, hairy legs. He tells her, when they are lying in bed, “See these soccer-playing thighs? I come by them naturally, from my dead father.”
12.
In the future I may write an essay on the tradition of the piano morceau? Especially about how my mind drifts while I play waltzes? Perhaps also an essay on the madness and pleasure of two-part inventions?
Soon I plan to venture into bitonality: two keys at once, superimposed, no attempt at reconciliation.
All my efforts to make sense of bitonality are doomed by my ignorance of tonality’s rules. What are the principles of voice leading? I can’t remember what a “dominant” is, though once I studiously marked up the score of an early Beethoven sonata with the appropriate symbols for modulations and tonal relations. Another time, as if under heavy sedation, I made inscrutable structural notes on the first movement of a Schubert quartet—“Death and the Maiden.”
13.
Pretend I work in an edge-of-town bordello as a “mood” pianist entertaining customers with Chopin waltzes as they wait for their ladies. No strain, no bravura: my technique, careless and “musical” (my first piano teacher’s highest term of approbation, though it is redundant to call a musician “musical”), smuggles into my apartment an imaginary atmosphere of prostitution, the floppy comfortable bodies of bawds and johns.
Satie wrote “furniture music.” Everything I play becomes, in my slack hands, “apartment music”: hedonism, hookahs, harlots, the bliss of being a transvestite on the brink of unconsciousness, adrift on out-of-tune album leaves.
Playing the piano for myself, in an apartment, in a tumultuous city, where there are so many more fashionable and productive things to do, proves that I am sliding downhill, and feels like gently but decisively biting human flesh.
The keys go down three-eighths of an inch. That’s not much. A true pianist would say: the ecstasies. Untrue pianist, I’ll say, instead: the ambiguities.
14.
Why can’t I manage, ever, to sit alone, slightly drunk, in churches, listening obediently to claviers? Maybe I should become a Quaker. Quakers believe in silence. Perhaps I should devote time to “green” causes.
15.
Some favorite piano records, from youth:
Best beloved was a live recording of Vladimir Horowitz’s return to Carnegie Hall after twelve years without performing. (Some critics considered him neurasthenic.) I limited myself to half of the four-sided affair: I listened to the Bach-Busoni Toccata in C (side one) and the Schumann Fantasy (side two), but I ignored the Scriabin “Black Mass” Sonata (side three) and Chopin’s G minor Ballade (side four). I esteemed the way Horowitz teased inner voices away from their ordinary bourgeois surroundings, and the way he tended to play notes not simultaneously: he broke and staggered them, deliberately tripping them up, or spreading them into a peacock-feather fan.
Second beloved was Dame Myra Hess’s recording of Symphonic Etudes by Schumann, who tried to drown himself in the Rhine: certain notes evaporated the moment she played them. I admired her humility: she knew how to subordinate her artistry to besieged wartime England, and to muteness.
Third beloved was the last B-flat major Mozart Sonata, recorded soon after World War II by Artur Schnabel, famous, in my eyes, for his warm-toned perfectionism: the disappearance of some notes signaled a decorousness beyond the pale, as well as a hyper-showmanship, the virtuosity of diminuendo-unto-nothing. That has always been my unreachable ambition: to show off moments of diminishment, to prove to a rapt audience that I, too, know how to curve backward into emptiness.
Fourth beloved was Rudolf Serkin’s recording of the knotty Brahms D minor Concerto. (Serkin himself meant little to me: he was merely the vehicle for Brahms.) I revered the chunkiness of the chords, each resting on what seemed the wrong foundation (the sixth, rather than the tonic?). When I first heard the trills at the beginning, I thought, “Ugly.” They sounded like unmitigated, antisocial racket. Then I listened to these tremolos a few more times, and found them, eventually, beautiful.
Fifth beloved was Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s performance of Chopin’s B-flat minor Scherzo. (Here is what the liner notes say of Mr. Michelangeli: “His own personality is so perfectly expressed in his piano playing that his private life outside music, together with any somewhat bizarre or puzzling features which might be known or alleged to mark it, seems completely unimportant.”) I worshipped his flirtation with disappearance—in the soft passages, the melody stood out, appropriately, while harmonic filigree fell back into one undifferentiated sea. Slavishly, this background forgave the tune its arrogant impositions. I appreciated servile accompaniment, a left hand that minded its own business.
16.
I plan to compile a useless roster of every piece I have ever performed, in however humble, juvenile, and unprofessional a venue. This list will be very brief.
Another futile list I hope to compose is all the chamber music I have performed or attempted: this list will be even briefer.
A final list will include every word I’ve written—or that a teacher has inscribed—in every musical score I own. I will annotate—gloss—each enigmatic indication.
However, I don’t want to be Blanche DuBois, praising a phantom, bygone Belle Reve. Harboring few illusions about my piano past, I care exclusively about this current life of desultory, incremental practicing toward no goal.
17.
Of course I may be exaggerating my affection for this reclusive activity. For twelve years, a period of willful abstinence, I stopped playing. Piano disappeared. Eventually it may disappear again.
18.
Poets disappear: Arthur Rimbaud stopped writing poetry when he was nineteen, and his disappearance is an important part of his extant work. Silence provides a resonance chamber for the lyrics that preceded his defection from words. According to critic Wallace Fowlie, after Rimbaud quit poetry, he “enlisted in the Dutch army,” “deserted,” “worked for a while on the island of Cyprus,” “worked for an export company, dealing principally in coffee,” and “sold guns to King Menelik of Choa.”
Soon it will be evening, and I will allow myself to stop writing and to approach the piano. First I will do scales. Then, a wordless Poème (1913) by the underrated Russian mystic composer Scriabin, who, soon after composing it, died of an infected boil on his upper lip. This piece is marked en rêvant, avec une grande douceur: dreaming, with a grand sweetness.
In my hands, the piano is a grave occupation: without jokes, without sexuality.
19.
While playing, I silently give myself musical advice, with the intensity of a pharmacist describing side effects. A recent, wordless, internal lecture concerned the importance of correct rhythm. I decided I didn’t need to inject expressivity into the piece; my duty was simply to count the beats and to keep the polyrhythms (five against three) in perfect order.
I don’t listen to these lectures, and I never write them down for further consideration, so today’s adages disappear by nightfall, and tomorrow I must begin again, trying to figure out, from scratch, how to play.
20.
Last night I dreamt that a former teacher, an important critic, asked me what I wanted to write about. I hemmed and hawed: I wanted to say, “Nothing!” But I needed to come up with a respectable answer. So I said, “Genre and utopia.” I knew this was hot air. But I also meant it. The teacher scoffed: “Genre and utopia? Some people shouldn’t be allowed!”
21.
A music teacher once told me that I occasionally revealed a sophisticated attention to details but that my basics were bizarrely out of place. Fact: the one time I performed the Chopin G minor Ballade, in a difficult passage my left hand simply stopped for a measure. Confused, the fingers retreated, gave up. A decent pianist would never skip four beats of the bass, impoverishing the harmony, leaving the right hand alone with its contextless declaration.
22.
Playing a piece for a listener, I race toward the finish line, panting, out of breath, as if unattractively flailing my arms. No time to notice beauties, or to observe simple rules of musical prosody: enunciation dissolves in a flurry of missed notes, punched-out figures, rushed gestures.
Problem: when the piano suddenly seems too loud, I clumsily resort to the soft pedal, as insurance against impoliteness.
The few times I’ve heard a tape of myself performing, I’ve been horrified—more so than when catching my bespectacled reflection in a shop window.
“I play” is one of the working hypotheses undergirding my existence. That supposition, however, is hobbled by an unfortunate adverb: “I play badly.”
The pathetic, too, demands anatomization; failure is as genuine a subject as success. Playing pathetically interests me as much as playing well.
23.
If in a few years I come down with arthritis or another crippling hand disease, then I will look back at this present time, this period of grousing about my mediocrity, as an opportunity squandered: “All those years he had a fully functional physical mechanism, and he did nothing but complain!”
As a teenager I had a crush on Misha Dichter, a handsome Shanghai-born Jewish pianist with a shock of dark hair, like a delinquent in a ’50s “social problem” film. (Dichter is German for “poet.”) As I saw him play the first Liszt concerto’s final octaves, he half-stood, hovering, raising his butt a few inches above the bench, strength moving from his shoulders down to the keys. This feat impressed me: rising gave him immeasurable power to state an ending.
(2001)