Quick Takes: Playground Procrastination Edition

1. After promising radio silence yesterday, here I am back again. Remembering how I blogged my way through my dissertation calls to mind how tempting distractions are when deadlines loom. So, in the interest both of feeding my procrastination jones and of trying to get some real work done during naptime, this will be dashed off in the form of quick takes.

2. Many of the playgrounds in my new city and its environs are beautiful in the sense that the equipment is new and top-of-the-line, and some are very nicely landscaped into the surrounding parks. Many of these parks, though, are bordered on all sides by expressway overpasses, busy roads, and dive bars, which gives you a jarring feeling when you look up from spotting your toddler and remember where you are.  I've written before about the weird emptiness of the playgrounds here and the metaphysical loneliness they call forth. Sometimes, however, we're not alone when we go to play. It depends on the hour and the weather. There is one park in particular where I often see children who appear to be participating in supervised visitation with a non-custodial parent. You can tell this because there will be a bunch of children with a feckless-looking dad, long sleeves covering his arms even in summer, and a woman who appears to have no relation to the family wearing a name-badge on a lanyard around her neck; she will later take the kids away in a mini-van, while the father rides off on a bicycle too small for him.

3. Sometimes in the playground I'll see a young mother sitting on a bench, her head bent over her hands, which are working rapidly before her. I'll think, "Oh, a knitter!" and have a warm rush of nostalgia for playgrounds in certain neighborhoods of New York, as well as for graduate school, the subway, and other places where women, including me, would knit when we had the chance to sit down. I move closer to see what she's working on, but as I come nearer, I realize that the mom in the playground is actually texting. It's a small reminder of the fact that very few people in our culture make things with their hands now, and that we spend inordinate amounts of time on the fleeting and the evanescent.

4. It's hard not to think of my new city as a troubled place. I don't mean just in the obvious economic sense shared by so many post-industrial cities in the Rust Belt; it also seems to me that people are unhappy here. The other day I drove to CVS to get a jug of milk, and parked my car next to another that was blaring hip-hop through the open windows. Inside were a preschool-aged white girl in a car seat and a dreadlocked black man clearly not her father. When I got into the store, I picked out the mother right away, in fleece pajama pants with her hair pulled back severely. Why is this an emblem of unhappiness to me? Because of the obvious rupture in the little girl's family of origin. Because so many poor women are on a chronic lonely search to find a man who will love them and their children, a man who will stay, and because that search so often proves fruitless. Because their children bounce from school to school as the women move in with boyfriend after boyfriend. Because this happens all the time here.

5. I want to bring something good to this troubled place, but I don't know how. In spite of the fact that the music I spent most of my career performing is intimate, beautiful, even healing, and in spite of the fact that I believe people here truly need that kind of beauty as a tonic for the soul, I'm also quite sure that no one here wants to hear it. So instead I'm writing this book that I've been asked to write, which a few people will read, but not the right ones somehow.

6. Nonetheless, I think about my book contract. I think about my children. I think about my house. I think about the fact that I can drive a car, which is no small feat. I think that, had we remained in New York, these things would all look, and indeed be, very different. We certainly wouldn't have Jude.

7. But still, I would like to give something beautiful to this place.

Book News

I've been quiet here lately because of the big project that I mentioned a while back. That project was a book proposal, and the result (hoped-for, of course) has been that I've been offered a book contract, which is naturally an even bigger project. It's not the sort of book contract that some people maintain blogs in the hopes of landing (those people, of course, don't generally blog anonymously); it's a scholarly book on an obscure theoretical topic in music and cultural studies. It will be published in 2014 by a well-respected academic press, but it's extremely unlikely that I'll ever see any profits from it. In fact, I would be very surprised if, after its publication, more than a hundred people ever read my book, though I hope some scholars might find it useful.

Anyway, all this to say that I will be maintaining some kind of intermittent blogging routine over the next several months, since I will be working against a deadline, have a lot of research to do, and have limited windows of time in which to do it. There are lots of things I would like to write about here -- quietly, anonymously -- but for the most part I'll have to make use of my free time to work quietly and virtually anonymously on this other project.

Love to all in the meantime.

Jesus Christ the Apple Tree

Here's some more British choral singing for you Anglophiles. I could not embed the video here, but do click over to it; it's lovely.

My first gig in England, about ten years ago, was a recital of the specialized repertoire in which I had built a modest reputation, at Saint John's College, Cambridge. I learned there that the choirs from the various Cambridge colleges compete with one another; Kings College, whose choir sings this performance, is certainly the most well-known, but my hosts assured me that Saint John's was better. My hosts also brought me to Sunday night evensong at the Saint John's College chapel, where I marveled at the impressive discipline and concentration of the little boys, evidenced also in the video linked to above. I was assured that the children were perfect devils in rehearsal, but you would never know it.

Epiphany and Manifesto

Yesterday was my son's sixth birthday. We started the day with a birthday tradition of wild dancing in the kitchen to Brahms's Hungarian Dance no. 5 in F-sharp minor (above; the sound quality is poor, but it was one of the few performances on Youtube that I actually liked. The one we use for wild dancing -- and the one I love am bestsen -- is the solo piano version by the great but sadly-short-lived American Brahms proponent Julius Katchen), and then it was time for school.

One of the things I love am besten is taking brisk walks in the cold, and school is good for that. It's about three-quarters of a mile in each direction, and on the way back I have time to look around and think. The combination of Brahms and the cold early-January weather, though, is a poignant one for me, bringing up memories of countless cold walks in the desolate post-industrial neighborhoods of the wintry Bronx, walks that were nevertheless wonderful and full of all kinds of interior riches influenced by the bleak exterior landscape.  Here there's none of that. But there's still Brahms.

Brahms's music dominates the inner landscape of my life.  His music is so inextricably woven into the warp of my earlier life, from my childhood listening to my mother's LP of Glenn Gould playing the Op. 117 and 118 Intermezzi, to my earliest days of performing his art songs as an undergraduate voice major,  to later and more mature performances, including a turn in the four-soloist version of Liebesliederwalzer when I was still a soprano, and, most recently, the solo version of Ziguenerlieder in my last recital for my Doctor of Musical Arts degree in voice performance. (We had a three-recital requirement, and I made sure to program Brahms into each one. In the first of these recitals I performed George Crumb's song cycle Apparition for voice and amplified piano, based upon excerpts from Walt Whitman's elegy on the death of Lincoln, When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, which was truly one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. I also sang a short group of Brahms songs early in the program, and one of my best friends -- a non-musician but no stranger to twentieth-century music -- said afterward, "The Crumb was just astonishing . . . but I loved the Brahms.")

I think now that if I hadn't had access to the kind of order and beauty that the practice of classical music has allowed me to take hold of, I would have fallen apart even more in this place where there is no discernible order, and not so much beauty, to my everyday life.  We left New York when I was just finishing my doctorate, and I was teaching music, studying music, writing about music, and performing music with my esteemed instructors and colleagues. But here, my practice of music is largely solitary. I still have a few gigs a year, nearly all of which involve travel, which means that what I work on at the little piano in my living room does not ripple out into the community at all, and essentially has no effect upon the place where I live, and is brought instead into other marketplaces and other communities, and I wonder why it is that the people and places that most need beauty that have the least access to it.

I have been thinking of A., too, whose life is lived minute to minute as she attempts to meet her own and her children's basic needs with the scanty survival skills she's learned in a hard place. The beauty of Brahms's music, and the music of so many others, has scarcely been short of salvific for me: it shines light upon the soul's darkness; it converts the tattered rags of a wasted day into a rich tapestry. I've always thought of this music as having not only real form, but also real, tangible substance, as if it were something that you could actually erect standing structures out of, something you could build with. And perhaps you can: as misshapen as my inner self might be, it was trained like a vine around the trellis of music (in other ways, it could be said, though certainly hyperbolically, to have been stretched like a tortured body upon the rack of music). In any event, the discipline of music gave order to my life where there was none, and gave me all kinds of mad coping skills in the face of crumbling chaos. But A. has never heard it, and perhaps never will.

My son's wonderful violin teacher came with his quartet from Budapest to New York City in the 1960s. He has told me about playing school concerts in the inner city ghettos, and about how well-prepared and attentive the children were. Their teachers knew, then, that their young charges needed this music -- as who doesn't? But many teachers and educational theorists today reject that notion, believing instead that students, especially disadvantaged students, need forms of cultural expression that speak specifically to their circumstances. I don't deny that there is a place for particular, time-and-place-specific, vernacular art. But to say that each subculture should be sequestered with its own small and particular and self-referential art forms is to deny -- again to speak hyperbolically, even Beethoven-esquely -- the universal brotherhood of man; it's parochial at best, and bigoted at worst.  All people, and especially all children, deserve to learn and to study and to know the great soul-strengthening and spiritually-deepening works of the great wielders of the highest forms of artistic expression of our culture, which, for all of us living here, is western culture. And they deserve to learn and to study and to know these things not because they make you smarter or better at math or better at sports or whatever the hell, but because they are beautiful, and they speak to the essence of what makes us human.

Where that leaves me, I don't know. It's still cold out, and I'm still listening to Brahms. Happy Epiphany, everyone.

The Hidden Life with McGillicuddy

Last year, my son started taking violin lessons with a local Suzuki teacher.  I was not interested in creating a prodigy, though naturally I believe that proficiency at music, if one has any opportunity at all to gain it, is something that should be encouraged in both children and adults. As for my son, he had been wanting to play the violin since he was two, and used to cry because we didn't have one. Around that time, he ran up to the altar after Mass one Sunday and hollered, "Jesus! Please have a little violin!" So, when he was three, I got him a cheap Chinese 1/16th-size violin, which he promptly named "Cutie."

The local Suzuki teacher kicked us out after four lessons. My son climbed on the furniture and commando-crawled across the floor during lesson times (though, when he practiced at home, it was clear that he had somehow absorbed the content of the lessons).

One of the handful of high-level classical musicians here then told me about V., an old Hungarian violinist who had somehow washed up in our crumbling Rust Belt city many years ago, when there was still a viable living to be made as concertmaster of the local small-town symphony, and when there was still a philanthropic class to support such genteel endeavors. By now, V. is making his living teaching the best violin students in the area out of his crumbling Victorian house in the shadow of the ghetto.

At our first lesson, it was clear that V. "got" my son. V. could see his innate musicality right away (my son could match pitch at two months old, and learned all of my dissertation recital repertoire along with me when he was two, finishing every line of Beethoven's "Adelaide" and "Maigesang" in German with me while I practiced). My son responded especially well to having a male teacher, and has come to love him. And, pace Suzuki purists, V. taught my son to read music, which I realized was the right thing for him.  My son needs and craves discipline, structure, and a formal framework. I could see that learning to read music would open up entire worlds for him, as it had done for me.  He practices diligently every day, and memorizes a piece as soon as he's learned it. The by-rote pedagogical approach of the Suzuki method would be, for him, too intangible and too inchoate.

And my son's lessons with V, for me, are like coming upon a well of fresh water in the desert. As I pieced together his history, I learned that V. had been a member of an acclaimed chamber ensemble which settled in America in the 1960s before splitting up.  We talk about music, about art, about discipline. Occasionally, V. brings out and plays live performance recordings of his ensemble, and the hair on my arms stands on end when I hear the enormous, wide-open, long-phrased sound that the ensemble had in Schubert and Brahms. This group was truly remarkable; I can attest that no American chamber music ensemble today plays like that, which is a great loss.

The problem is that, when I start to talk about music, art, and discipline, I start to get a little crazy, and probably even foam at the mouth a little, because I feel as if I'm stepping into the fresh green world that is a parallel universe to this one, the world of beauty, the world which, once I found it, provided the framework around which, even as a miserable young girl, I was able to heliotrope my life.  Music was the fertile world which gave me food, water, shelter, and air. The daily world, on the other hand -- the world that has no part in it -- is parched and withered, lonely and gray.

When my son plays a wrong note in his lessons or at home, I flinch involuntarily. Part of it is my auditory hypersensitivity, which has only gotten worse without the constant background thrum of New York City; but part of it is because of the heliotroping of my life around that musical framework, a life in which, for so long, all nourishment and all nurturing went towards perfecting a demanding craft, the practice of which costs so much, not only in treasure but also in human relationships. A wrong note causes me pain, because music is the image of perfection.

I suppose I'm something of a Tiger Mother when it comes to practicing. It's entirely non-negotiable with me. In fact, the thought that a day without practicing might, in some circumstances, be permissible is bizarrely taboo (I remember how, when an undergraduate voice major colleague of mine told me that she didn't practice on weekends, I thought she was making it up). I travel often on the Greyhound bus with my little son to spend time with my very ill mother, and his violin (no longer Cutie, but a 1/8th-size instrument inexplicably called McGillicuddy) travels with us. Yes, I know that I'm neurotic. But at the same time -- it is music, which was my oxygen for so long. It is the thing that for so long made me know that God existed.

I still don't know what it might look like to have a life as a musician while living the quotidian life here in northern Appalachia. I've become very interested in and concerned with the lives of the poor mothers I meet here.  My pastor has offered to sponsor me to become the Creighton Model instructor for this region of our sprawling diocese, and it's crossed my mind that to do so might be a way to help some of the women I encounter here, whereas teaching a music-appreciation class might not.

Yet I hate to think that the art that I love -- the holde Kunst -- is a locked fortress to so many in my midst.  As William Carlos Williams wrote:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Music and Memory, Part 23: Auf dem Strom

Warning: if you dislike reading about poop, venture no further.

My son, whom his preschool teachers call "brilliant," scores in the mentally-retarded range on IQ tests because of his near-total non-compliance.  He can memorize a book or a song after a first hearing, but our daily violin practice sessions are fraught by my continual redirection of his efforts, and by my own efforts to quell my frustration at his insistence on "playing it my way."  I picture myself jumping to my feet and shouting, "This is MUSIC, dammit! This is only the single most important thing in the created world!" but I manage to restrain myself, because he's five years old.  (I was going to write, "because he's five years old and has special needs," but his ability to comprehend the importance of music is not one of them.)

Yesterday we were having one of our frequent bathroom struggles, in which he refuses to poop, swears he doesn't have to, flings himself to the floor and lashes out, screams and cries, has to be physically transported to the toilet, and then sits meekly and finishes his business.  The process is generally quite demoralizing to me. Yesterday, after having plunked him down on the toilet, I went into the other room to catch up on some ironing, and thought maybe I could snatch a few minutes to practice before he needed me to help him wipe.  The motion of the body in ironing, it seemed to me, would pose no obstacle, and might perhaps even by an aid, to working on certain vocal technical issues.  Singing, after all, is a physiological process that involves the fluid motion of the entire body, usually enacted in subtle movements which audiences do not see.

As I stood ironing and singing, however, my focus was interrupted by other concerns. I thought of a poem I'd read in college by Tess Gallagher:

I Stop Writing the Poem

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.

And, for some reason, a totally unrelated piece by Schubert came rushing into my head, a piece I've never sung because it's for tenor or high soprano, the little chamber scena "Auf dem Strom" (On the River).  (I do not have time to write my own translation, so I am copying someone else's of the poem by Ludwig Rellstab.)

 Take the last parting kiss,
 and the wavy greeting
 that I'm still sending ashore
 before you turn your feet and leave!
 Already the waves of the stream
 are pulling briskly at my boat,
 yet my tear-dimmed gaze
 keeps being tugged back by longing!

 And so the waves bear me forward
 with unsympathetic speed.
 Ah, the fields have already disappeared
 where I once discovered her!
 Blissful days, you are eternally past!
 Hopelessly my lament echoes
 around my fair homeland,
 where I found her love.

 See how the shore dashes past;
 yet how drawn I am to cross:
 I'm pulled by unnameable bonds
 to land there by that little hut
 and to linger there beneath the foliage;
 but the waves of the river
 hurry me onward without rest,
 leading me out to the sea!

 Ah, before that dark wasteland
 far from every smiling coast,
 where no island can be seen -
 oh how I'm gripped with trembling horror!
 Gently bringing tears of grief,
 songs from the shore can no longer reach me;
 only a storm, blowing coldly from there,
 can cross the grey, heaving sea!

 If my longing eyes, surveying the shore,
 can no longer glimpse it,
 then I will gaze upward to the stars
 into that sacred distance!
 Ah, beneath their placid light
 I once called her mine;
 there perhaps, o comforting future!
 there perhaps I shall meet her gaze.

I recalled how, in the 1990s, my teacher A.B. had had a famous coloratura soprano in his studio.  She lived in California and flew to New York for her lessons, and my knees would invariably turn to jelly and I would inevitably choke up when, having the lesson time after mine, she would open the studio door while I was working.  One day, A.B. remarked to me that she was performing "Auf dem Strom" in a famous summer music festival.  "Oh, I love that piece!" I gushed.  He laughed me off, explaining that it was dreck.

Oh no, it was not dreck.  How could A.B. and his prominent pupil gang up on "Auf dem Strom" like that -- on the gently-resigned opening melody in the french horn, drifting down, as it were, from a distant rise on the other side of the river as the speaker's small boat is already picking up speed in the current and bearing him away; on those lovely, arching vocal phrases, so full of longing and loss, but also of hope?  No, the piece was beautiful, was true, even. It was, quite possibly, even healing.

Yesterday, as I stood there ironing and waiting for my son to finish in the bathroom, I realized that I hadn't heard it or thought of it in years, but the delicate phrase, repeated in the coda, "Ach, bei ihren milden Scheine/Nannt' ich sie zuerst die Meine" (Ah, beneath [the stars'] placid light, I once called her mine) flooded into the ear of my memory, and I thought that perhaps  I too, one day, might be able to greet music once again as an old friend, might even be able to take hold of her as a balm for the healing of myself and others.

Music and Memory, Part 22: Improvisation

The main reason that I was hired to do the translation I mentioned in the post just below this one was that the author of the original piece, who is not a musician but a scholar in another field, wanted someone who could translate from the Italian and who was also familiar with the terminology of free jazz.  I was his girl because, notwithstanding my training as a classcial musician, I am familiar with that terminology.  One of my brothers is a successful jazz player, in the sense that he's only ever made his living from gigging (although, in recent years, he's supplemented it with teaching).  Another brother started as a jazz player, later moving into music composition and criticism.  My two brothers schooled me early in the idioms of jazz, and as a teenager I wanted to make my career in it, too.  It was a boyfriend back then -- also, incidentally, a jazz player -- who suggested that, since I had a "real voice," I should continue my classical work and see where it took me.

Working on this demanding translating job has brought faded bits of my apprenticeship as a singer floating up like scraps of paper stirred up into miniature vortices by the wind on street corner. I thought of life with M., who, although he was a conceptual artist, always maintained that his greatest influences were not from other artists but werein fact from free jazz players.  The essay I translated dealt with the metapsychological bases for improvisation, and quoted several of the players M. (and my brothers) had admired, including Ornette Coleman, Henry Threadgill, and Steve Lacy.  As I worked late into the night to meet the publisher's deadline, I thought about my old life, which, though not perhaps influenced by free jazz to the extent that M.'s and my brothers' were, was yet marked by improvisation in just every one of its emanations.

Before I met M., I was rolling with a crowd of free-living theater and performance artists.  I had decided that the jazzer boyfriend who pushed me toward the classical style was hopelessly dull, and I eventually ditched both him and his advice.  I had become convinced that classical singing had no real meaning or place in contemporary life, and that I was called to do something more meaningful.  Toward this end, I planned vaguely to make theater pieces based on a fixed vocabulary of words and gestures, which would be determined by an aleatory system.  I actually started to make a deck of cards -- heavy paper on which I pasted various pictures culled from old Sotheby's auction catalogues, dried leaves, photos of friends, and images cut from zines --  that I was going to invest with a vocabulary of words, sounds, gestures, and meanings and use to create my pieces.  I never actually got around to doing this; instead, I met M.  He came to see me in a performance art piece at a downtown gallery, and thought it was silly.  "Why don't you just sing?" he wondered.  So, because he wanted it, I did.

I observed the way he worked at his own art.  He worked at a bread gig during the day, making just enough money to live on, and then painted far into the night.  He drank whiskey and listened to Steve Lacy and the Art Ensemble of Chicago while doing so.  He read art theory and experimental novels.  If I ever got sick (which I did rather frequently in those days, since I was poor and badly nourished) and couldn't sing for a few days, the whole world would become black for me; but M. advised me to work on my craft in other ways instead:  to translate my pieces, for instance, and to do harmonic analyses.  Cheered by this advice, I did, and I also created my own regimen of discipline that went far beyond these suggestions; I began to think about diction, and to ponder not only the sounds of the sung languages, but even the meanings of the sounds themselves.  I read my scores as if they were novels, and began to understand music on a new level as I teased out the answers to the questions of why the composer set each word the way he did.  I barricaded myself in the Lincoln Center Library's Rogers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound on Saturdays, where I would listen to every recording I could find of the pieces I was working on, the older the better.  After I went back to school, I read seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century treatises on vocal technique and pedagogy.  In short, I immersed myself in my art and learned everything I possibly could about it.

All of this changed me.  I was no longer an experimental hanger-on from the Lower East Side.  I was a serious artist.  As I became a good singer, and, later, as I began to get work in my field, I started to think about the greater implications of my craft.  What had been an individual discipline -- in some ways, a discipline that saved me from myself, and kept me from completely falling apart when life was at its worst -- became a key to something greater than the individual and her unique hardships.  What I wanted more than anything was to reveal the beauty of the created world and of the human spirit in the music I sang, and to do so in a way that would bring audiences with me to a profound experience of our shared humanity.  The further I went in my profession, the more consistently this shared experience was an outcome of my performances.

As I neglected my home and family last week to finish the translating job, I began to wonder how I found myself there, sitting at my desk in Northern Appalachia with three different Italian dictionaries open around me, striving to turn Italian academic writing, which even at its very best is almost never good, into readable English. What had happened to my world of beauty, I wondered, and why had God put me here, in a place whose ethos I still don't understand, and where beauty and connection have so often been replaced by loneliness and strife?  I googled a few of my old art-world friends; they seem for the most part to be doing quite well and working steadily, though none will ever be famous.  I wondered at that, since I feel that I am making myself more and more obscure and unknown in every way.  I'm sure this is something necessary for my salvation as a semi-reformed diva bitch, but nonetheless, if God has given me the means and the tools to reveal beauty to those who are hungry for it -- who need it -- and if the pursuit of that revealing nourishes my soul as well, then why must I be so far from the former life, in which that pursuit made up the greatest part of my hours and my thoughts?  Beauty is so elusive here; other values, in this place, crowd it out.  Nonetheless, I believe it can be found, dug out, mined from any ground, and that in the place where I now live it is thirsted for more desperately, so I plod on desultorily, and try to put myself in its way.

Music and Memory, Part 20: The Matrix

Last weekend I had a visit from A.B. -- my former mentor, the most important voice teacher I've ever had, and the generous donor of my autoharp -- because he happened to have business in a Northern Appalachian town not too far from here.  We went to a hippie café that is often frequented by my family because of its surprisingly good draft beer selection and the cheerful tolerance of the staff toward little children.  Although our pupil-teacher relationship ended badly in the mid-nineties (he ordered me out of his studio one day when I told him his instructions were confusing me, which was really only the culmination of many months of growing tension), after a few years passed we were friends again.  In my doctoral program, I studied voice with his best friend, who was on the faculty, and A.B. was a frequent audience member at my New York-area performances, as well as a thoughtful and provocative critic.

At the hippie café, I showed him the repertoire for a concert I have coming up, and we talked about it. The concert's theme is childhood, and the music includes, among other things, pieces by Charles Ives and the three "Heimweh" settings of Johannes Brahms, one of which, A.B. opined, was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful songs ever written.  A.B. is one of the most brilliant musicians I know, one of the rare souls who deeply understand the elusive language of music and are able to interpret it in subtle, powerful, and nuanced ways, and, when I have the opportunity to talk music with someone like that, I'm in my supreme happy place: the place where -- to quote Brahms himself, out of context and with inappropriate self-aggrandizement -- I start to feel as if "straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God."  And this makes me wonder.

It makes me wonder, because my supreme happy place -- the nirvana achieved through strenuous periods of talking about music, performing music, researching music, studying music, reading about music, teaching music -- was all I ever wanted, from childhood onward.  Once I discovered classical music, it was as if a series of doors opened one upon another, and kept opening in my mind, and as if something shifted into place in my being with a loud sort of thunk.  I was about eleven at the time, and from that point, the everyday, experiential world became like a dream to me.  Music was what I wanted, music was my real world, and everything else was the Matrix. I think the reason I was so happy in graduate school was that the time I got to spend in Musicland exceeded the time I spent in the Matrix, and everything that I did in the Matrix served what I was striving for in Musicland.

But we are all cast out of Paradise at some point; for some of us it happens sooner, for others later.  I think a clear-eyed observer of my life would see an overly-sensitive and romantic girl, who, perhaps not atypically, found a form of escape from an unstable home situation and the anxieties of daily life, in a neurotic striving toward a Bacchic transcendence that can be gained only through an Apollonian rigor.  Indeed, my self-imposed work ethic superseded that of practically any singer I've ever known, but the oblivion I found in practice and study was topped by the bliss I found in being able, after many years of hard work, to make music say what I wanted, and use it to express the deepest emotions of my soul.

And of course, my allegiance to this striving, this oblivion, and this bliss turned everything else around me to shit.  I can only credit the mercy of God with the fact that I'm still standing, still able to have relationships, still able to function with some degree of effectiveness as an adult.  But I'm rarely, these days, in my supreme happy place, the lost paradise that Brahms's "Heimweh" songs are all about. The most beautiful and most famous of these songs, the one that A.B. praised, is the first song in the video below.  The great scholar of German Lieder Eric Sams has written that in this song, called "Heimwh I" or "O wüsst ich doch den Weg züruck," Brahms "is overcome by a personal feeling that goes far deeper than the regretful words, into real tragedy."


(The text is a poem by Klaus Groth, translated here by Leonard Lehrman:

Oh, if I only knew the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
Oh, why did I search for happiness
And leave my mother's hand?

Oh, how I long to be at rest,
Not to be awakened by anything,
To shut my weary eyes,
With love gently surrounding!

And nothing to search for, nothing to beware of,
Only dreams, sweet and mild;
Not to notice the changes of time,
To be once more a child!

Oh, do show me the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
In vain I search for happiness,
Around me naught but deserted beach and sand!)

I spend most of my time in Matrixland now, where I feel like a stranger who hasn't mastered the language, and I wonder if I ever will.  And what Telly notes mournfully after this classic performance with Itzhak Perlman on Sesame Street -- that it will never happen again -- is true not just of all musical performance, but also, of course, of all human endeavor, and is the final response to Brahms in his fruitless quest to return to Kinderland.

Town and Country

 Years ago, I used to take the train upstate in the summer to visit family.  Passing through the crumbling cities of the Rust Belt, I would fantasize about leaving New York City to move to one of them.  That abandoned warehouse hard by the train station:  what a great cultural center it would make!  Studios for artists, a performance space, workshops, community outreach, a coffee bar . . . I supposed that grants to arts organizations in areas like that could be had for the asking.  But it never turned into anything more than one of the many idle get-rich-quick schemes of a slightly-out-of-the-mainstream and rather-increasingly-jaded young opera singer.

A few days ago, I gave a concert in my new town, which is very much like those crumbling Rust Belt cities that I used to see from the window of the Amtrak Maple Leaf, only possibly slightly less cosmopolitan and slightly more crumbling.  The genesis of this concert was a phone call a few months ago from a colleague of mine, a wonderful bass who now teaches at a large Southern university; he told me he wanted to come up to do a concert with me.  He needed more performances for his tenure file.  So I contacted a few people and arranged for us to do a concert in what may become a regular salon concert series in a beautiful space with a fine piano.  I also arranged for him to teach a master class to the local university's voice students.  I planned and thematically programmed the repertoire -- all chamber music from nineteenth-century Italy -- made translations, and spoke to the audience about the music.  And, as with all gigs, no matter how small, I practiced as if it were the most important gig of my life.  We also enlisted a gifted young local tenor, a popular favorite, to sing with us, and there my troubles began. 

I think there's a reason that some of the best twentieth-century British comic novels are set in the provinces.  My tenor, who I emphasize could be monstrously good, has never made the break to New York, partly because he's well-loved here, and partly because it's cheap enough to live here that he's able to spend a good part of his day taking long baths, watching old movies, and drinking martinis, which doesn't happen much for young tenors in New York, most of whom are office temps by day and/or waiters and bartenders by night.  But who can blame my tenor?  I'd be drinking a martini in the bath right now if I had some gin on hand.

I gave him the music I wanted him to sing -- all pieces that have rarely been in the past hundred years or more, possibly never performed in this locale at all, and unrecorded (which meant he wouldn't be able to take the lazy man's way out and learn them from CDs) back in October, but he learned it (sort of) three days before the performance.  My bass colleague was slightly appalled for about five minutes, but quickly assured me he'd seen this sort of situation, and this sort of tenor, before: the gifted local favorite whom much is forgiven on account of his personal charm, and who never develops the skills that would afford him a career outside of the provinces.  "It's too bad," my colleague said, "because my manager needs a tenor, and I would have recommended him if he weren't so unprofessional."

The moral of this story is that there are no low-stakes gigs.  You never know who it is that you may be working with or performing for.  I'm not saying that I've never turned in a bad performance -- I have -- but it wasn't because I hadn't learned my music.  In fact, I have a recurrring nightmare, as I'm sure most singers do, that an important gig is looming and I don't know my part.  I couldn't understand why my tenor would willingly put himself through such harrowing stress, if it weren't that he knew he'd be forgiven any offense by an adoring audience who wouldn't notice his mistakes anyway. I'm trying hard to find this attitude forgivable, for to me it shows contempt for one's audience, for one's colleagues, and for the music itself, which we are privileged to be able to sing.

Our pianist -- who is local and truly excellent -- was chagrined.  She had recommended him.  She has some connections to New York, has played there, and feels a sort of provincial insecurity around artists from there.  "Pentimento," she kept saying me, "when did you last experience this sort of thing?"  Well, never, actually.  But it's not because singers, or people, in New York are better.  It's just that they're different.  They're hungry; they're driven.  There are hundreds of people auditioning for the same job.  There are thousands of opera singers in New York, of varying degrees of success and ability, who have come there from all over the country and the world because they believe they have the relentless discipline and stamina to survive and triumph in that brutal, cut-throat climate.  They aren't always better singers than my local tenor, but they are better workers, and in the end, I will aver with my dying breath, that is the thing that matters most of all.

I'm not knocking the life of a small-town artist.  I can understand its appeal to a certain sort of person.  But I see that it has a lot to do with adoring dowagers and martinis in the bathtub (though not at the same time), and very little to do with art, because you can never really get to the heart of the beauty, the truth, the compelling intimacy, or the healing that is inherent in the music if you haven't bothered to really learn it.
 
When we went out to a bar after the performance, I told my bass colleague that I felt like a light had gone out in my life since we moved here.  "Well, turn it back on, Pentimento!" he roared at me.  "Make your niche here!  I'm going to call you every day and kick your ass until you do."

It may happen.  My autoharp-procuring mentor, unbidden by me, has pledged a fairly substantial sum to fund a vocal chamber music collective in this area founded and directed by me.  His idea.  I may be writing more here at some point about music-making in the provinces.  In the meantime, straight up with olives, please.

(Above:  a scene from "Red, White, and Blaine," the show-within-a-show in that great film parody of community theater, Waiting for Guffman.)

The Accompanist

I loved today's poem.  Especially the line "it's partly/sexual but it's mostly practice/and music," which is true about classical music praxis too.

Don't play too much, don't play
too loud, don't play the melody.
You have to anticipate her
and to subdue yourself.
She used to give me her smoky
eye when I got boisterous,
so I learned to play on tip-
toe and to play the better half
of what I might. I don't like
to complain, though I notice
that I get around to it somehow.
We made a living and good music,
both, night after night, the blue
curlicues of smoke rubbing their
staling and wispy backs
against the ceilings, the flat
drinks and scarce taxis, the jazz life
we bitch about the way Army pals
complain about the food and then
re-up. Some people like to say
with smut in their voices how playing
the way we did at our best is partly
sexual. OK, I could tell them
a tale or two, and I've heard
the records Lester cut with Lady Day
and all that rap, and it's partly
sexual but it's mostly practice
and music. As for partly sexual,
I'll take wholly sexual any day,
but that's a duet and we're talking
accompaniment. Remember "Reckless
Blues"? Bessie Smith sings out "Daddy"
and Louis Armstrong plays back "Daddy"
as clear through his horn as if he'd
spoken it. But it's her daddy and her
story. When you play it you become
your part in it, one of her beautiful
troubles, and then, however much music
can do this, part of her consolation,
the way pain and joy eat off each other's
plates, but mostly you play to drunks,
to the night, to the way you judge
and pardon yourself, to all that goes
not unsung, but unrecorded.

"The Accompanist" by William Matthews, from Foreseeable Futures. © Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work . . .

A Chinese-Canadian pianist friend of mine from graduate school drew my attention to this article.  Once I got over my initial shock, it made me think two things:  one, that my mother must be secretly Chinese; and two, that some people are right there on the same page with me about the ethos of relentless practicing, if perhaps not about other things.

Coffee Break with God

(My title is shamelessly mooched from a book I've never read, and has pretty much nothing to do with this post.)

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, because I know from long experience that they tend to be swept out with the eggshells and coffee grounds sometime around the end of the first week of January, and I like to save myself the embarrassment that my own broken resolutions cause me.  Sometimes I toy with various resolutions, however, trying them on and then, more often than not, rejecting them.  Here are a few that I'm idly considering this year:

1.  No longer swearing like a truck-driver, if only inside the echo-chamber of my own head.  I almost never swear in front of my son (not in English, anyway, though I have to admit to having said some really gutter things in Italian at times, when I've stepped on a Lego, say, or given myself a paper cut), and I've been very relieved that he's never yet, to my knowledge, said a curse-word (at least not in English).  And yet, we now know that swearing is much more effective at relieving pain and frustration than consciously resorting to blithe euphemisms; the real words just seem to work, and are so much more satisfying emotionally, perhaps because of their taboo status.  I often take myself into another room alone so I can swear out loud in English, but mostly those four-letter bombs are just dropping in the quiet of my mind as I face the frustrations of the average day.  And yet, for all the silence of my cursing, it still doesn't seem . . . seemly to even think those words.  So perhaps I'll silently substitute some corny-sounding euphemisms in my inner monologue in 2011.  Or perhaps not.

2.  Giving up coffee. I consider undertaking this heroic feat every so often, and even went so far as to make it my Lenten sacrifice a couple of years ago, an intention which lasted one solid day.  The truth is, I sometimes go for whole weeks without drinking coffee, but I have no wish to put it away from me forever.  Not only do I love the taste -- it's one of my favorite flavors, the darker and bitterer the better (no sugar, and lightened with half-and-half or cream; if only milk is available, I will forgo the coffee altogether) -- but I also love the idea of coffee.  There is something so companionable about it.  Two mothers having coffee together while their children play are engaging in a kind of conspiracy of community, it seems to me.  Tea, though I drink it, seems insubstantial and a bit fey in comparison, and herbal tea is something I dislike and generally avoid unless there's a medicinal reason for taking it.  (It's crossed my mind once or twice that if I gave up coffee, perhaps I would be able to conceive again; I've heard the anecdotal notion that coffee suppresses fertility.  But the truth is that I was drinking coffee all the other times I conceived; I believe God intends for us to add children to our family through adoption; and the possibility seems strong that conception wouldn't occur, and then I would have . . . given up coffee.  Is this a foolish, fetishistic, fatalistic line of reasoning?  Perhaps.  Maybe I will give up coffee after all, though it will be with great reluctance.)
  
3.  Being more patient. My son, who's quite advanced in some ways, is quite delayed in others.  He doesn't draw (though he is very specific in directing his parents and teachers to draw according to his designs), partially because of his fine-motor delays, and partially because he's intensely perfectionistic, and melts down completely when he attempts to draw something that doesn't come out as he'd envisioned.  Today I was helping him draw a tugboat puffing smoke.  He was trying to draw circles for the smoke, but, as he said, his circles had tails.  He flung himself down in tears, and didn't want to continue.  This brought me to tears too, because I felt that he had to.  The ability to practice a skill until it virtually becomes ingrained into the sinews of the heart, and the ability to love that relentless practice, are probably the most important capacities I've cultivated in my life.  But how can I teach a volatile, neurologically-puzzling preschool boy to love practice, to love discipline?  I was stymied.  With him, I realize that I will have to take many deep breaths and work very slowly on the same basic skills over and over again, when I want him to dance, to leap, to fly, as the ethos of intense practice has allowed me to do.  He is the sort of child who, I believe, will fly eventually; he is very bright, musical, and imaginative.  But I am so attached to the idea of self-discipline as the means to becoming skilled and independent, and to the notion of becoming skilled and independent as the means to intellectual and artistic freedom.  I suppose that, in 2011, I should resolve to learn how to slow down my own wild thinking and imagining.

Which, to sum up, is why I love this ad from the 1980s.  It suggests that, when you're hitting the wall in your ethos of relentless practicing, and especially if you're a musician whose work is starting to sound like sh--,  you need . . . coffee.  I guess the shadowy forces of the coffee-industrial complex figured, back in those pre-Starbucks days, that Americans just weren't drinking enough of it.