On January 16, A Golden Wire returns for an evening of Elizabethan music and verse celebrating the warmth and glow of the season’s turning. Moving from Twelfth Night to Candlemas, consorts and lute songs will celebrate the quiet wonder of Epiphany in Tudor England.
Friday, January 16 at 7pm at The Church of Saint Luke in the Fields in the West Village. All are welcome to join us after the concert for a reception in the parish hall.
The organ at church has been on the fritz off and on for a little while. Perhaps to the titillation of my microtonal oriented colleagues, the digital portion of the organ has been tending to overcorrect town to A432 (thanks to a faulty temperature sensor on a 4’ principal pipe) while the pipes have been hovering around 438 or so, rendering unspeakable beatings and effects that even I find a little hard to stomach when trying to play a hymn for the congregation. The silver lining of consulting the technician about the repair is that I learned of the instrument’s capacity for manual alteration of pitch and temperament. That’s right: while the pipes on the organ can sit at normal concert pitch (or something approximating, depending on the weather), I myself can take matters into my own hands, crank up the digital stops to say, A455, set the temperament to meantone and zone out with some seicento music therapy on a Friday afternoon. Why? Well the sounds of wildly tuned sharps make certain triads feel like expansive spaces of discomfort, longing to be stretched out before falling into a consonant harmony, making good the etymological root of word “cadence” (in Latin, cadere, “to fall). The bumps in pitch make one stop and pause from time to time, as those perpetual endless lines which seem malicious and endless on a piano become naturally disjointed and independent.
The last few weeks I’ve been focused on reviving the Goldbergs on the pedal harp as I’m set to play them for in mid-December in New York and West Palm Beach. It’s an interesting exercise this time around as I’ve not really touched them for two and a half years. They seem to fall off the fingers (the kinetic memory is still there) but naturally I’m wanting different things from them now. Once upon a time, I had liked making them precious and careful, but lately I’ve been into applying Occam’s razor to allow myself to step on the gas and get on with it. It’s perhaps not totally surprising. My activities in hardcore early music (on period instruments, in temperaments, replete with fussy ticks and pauses) have wound down as I’ve focused more intensely on chamber music and new commissions. I’ve also been traveling a lot more to perform and becoming increasingly focused on reliable reproducibility and ironing out inconsistencies. Performing was already tiring, and I was tired of being tired when I played.
Existential corrections are perhaps on the horizon. I’m presently mellowing out (with wine) to 80’s French synthwave, yesterday I had some spicy Machaut bleating through my headphones at the gym. As for this morning, I practiced some Buxtehude continuo on my baroque harp before meeting a presenter about pulling together a program of Bach and Frescobaldi for 2026. The idea was to highlight Bach’s return to the seicento and his longstanding affinity with Frescobaldi’s Fiori Musicali late in life (if Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach’s testimony about his father’s musical journey is to be believed). The evidence is strong: Frescobadi’s techniques of treating Gregorian chant quotes as foundational micro material for fugues turn up all over Bach’s music; hexachordal fugues recall the extended Fantasias on Frescobaldi; the open score format of the ricercars in The Musical Offering, nod towards the Frescobaldi’s own publication conventions; and even the form of the Clavier Übung III seems to mirror Fiori Musicali, in devising an entire mass (be it Lutheran in this case) for a solo organist to perform in dialogue with sung liturgical music. Arnie Tanimoto and I have our work cut out for us showcasing the connection in a way that’s tangible and audible for the audience.
After the meeting, I was kind of eager to get back into the Frescobaldi and see what was there, but I was also looking for an excuse not to head back to the harp and practice any number of pedal changes and ill-suited fingerings, or generally confront the fact that the modern pedal harp for all its beauty, makes Bach unnecessarily more difficult to play. Counterpoint is especially prone to muddiness, and at times it feels as if there’s scarcely time to focus on the canons, as the bravura movements have to played with the the customary 8 fingers which harpists use (as our pinkies are too short when the hands are set up and pivoted toward the thumb). Indeed, I have memorized the Goldbergs but cannot seem to make it through the final variation, the famed Quodiblet, without consulting a score. The two folk tunes layered on top on one another always feels to dense by that point in the performance, by which point my brain and arms are fried after 30 movements/60-ish minutes of G major (with the occasional foray into the minor).
Today in the organ loft, I would say that I was happy as a clam, except that I was in fact borderline clapping like a seal as I revisited the astonishing material embedded in Fiori Musicali. Whereas the organ was at one point in my life the workhorse and the harp was the therapy instrument, the tables have turned a decade after my decision to divert career paths. The harp is now the tool for practicing, while the organ is for relaxing. I flip to the back of the volume and find the Bergamasca, Frescobaldi’s one of only two pieces that is unattached to the liturgical material that makes up the rest of the volume. It also bears striking resemblance to one of the folk tunes which Bach sets in his Quodiblet in the Goldbergs.
And what’s more, is that motivic material from La Girolmeta (which appears just after the Bergamasca in Fiori Musicali) is used as the secondary melody.
And to boot, they are both in G major (as are most settings of the Bergamasca, such as that of Bach’s teacher Dietrich Buxtehude, who himself composed 32 variations on that very theme).
Apart from being confronted by my procrastination, I’m also confronted by yet one more Easter egg left behind by the great master. For while Clavier-Übung III contains no extra little movements at the end, Bach has seemingly saved them both for one at tale end of the Goldberg Variations – originally published as under the title Clavier Übung IV in 1741 (an apt year for publication one might say, as Bach’s own copy of Fiori Musicali dates from 1714.)
I don’t like being trite, but Bach renders me a sap. Over and over, you can find these wonderful reminders in his music that no journey really ends, but seemingly gets extended in different forms time goes by, with elements of our past gently rearing their head to remind us not only where we’re headed, but where we’ve started.
(But also that I should go practice.)
* * * * *
What I’m reading:
Napoleon the Great /Andrew Roberts (reading currently)
Bismarck’s War / Rachel Chrastil (just finished – great account of the plights of civilians during a short but intense war.)
Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914-1945 / Victoria Harris (reread prompted by a conversation recently about the sexual practices of SS officers in the 1930s.)
I have a new office. Not in the “I have a new site-specific gig which I call my office” sense (as classical musicians tend to post on social media when they play in recital halls or other concert venues), but an actual office under lock and key, replete with desk, several harps, some furniture, and an air-conditioning unit. For the first time in a while, I have a dedicated place to keep most of my things and rehearse. Sure, my harpsichord is in Cleveland and one of my harps remains in Paris. I’ll sort out the former in the coming weeks, while the latter is preferable as I’ve got to scoot back to Europe now and again for rehearsals and concerts.
Indeed, my office is not in Paris, but in Queens, just one stop from Grand Central on the 7 line. A church position came open, the likes of which I had before Covid. I play the liturgies, yes, and am thus afforded the luxury facilities so as to keep my head down, work on the artistic projects, and be afforded some financial stability that doesn’t involve playing in an orchestra. At present this little oasis is a mess. Metro cards from 5 cities are piled up next to my passport and a customs form on one side of my desk, while the other side boasts two iPads and a decrepit MacBook Air whose tortoise-like speed reminds one of the 2 train crawling uptown on nights and weekends. The sofa boasts a velvet harp case, a yoga mat, and two empty Amazon Prime packages. The floor is strewn with ripped-up pieces of cardboard, miniature hair clips and dreadlock cuffs in preparation for a little workshop tomorrow with composer Hannah Kendall (whose solo I’ll be playing in just a few weeks in Utrecht).
The morning has been spent trying to optimize how to hang hairclips off of harp strings. It’s a delicate balance trying to secure their position on each string (so they don’t fall off when I pluck) while maximizing each of their potential for engaging a bitone (an effect whereby a string can produce two clearly audible tones simultaneously). The dreadlock cuffs need to wrap around strings securely enough so that their metallic materiality can be heard without choking the string and stifling their resonance. A strip of cardboard torn from a Costco shipment box of Tide detergent is weaved through the wire strings on the harp. I’ve now gone through four strips, trying to remove layers within the cardboard so as to reduce the density just enough so that when it’s threaded through the strings, it allows multiphonics to sing without creating too great a thud. The latest incarnation is bright orange with a picture of two pink roses towards the end, just below a reminder of the bottle size reading “101 Loads!” (Happy belated Pride, everyone.)
I have notes, but they are not to be used to set anything in stone. The harp I’ll be playing in the Netherlands will come with its own acoustic idiosyncrasies and manners of behaving when prepared – all part and parcel of the process of presenting contemporary music that intentionally incorporates random elements and improvisation. When one takes it upon themselves to work in contemporary music with an unwieldy instrument, a lot of time is spent preparing for the processes of preparation. Logistics with harps are not tiresome, but they are not simple either.
Take my entire program I’ll be playing for the Gaudeamus Festival in the Netherlands.
(1) Saad Haddad – Tasalsul II
(2) Janet Sit – And then they woke up (for harp and electronics)
(3) Kennedy Dixon – and around we go
(4) Hannah Kendall – Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2
(5) Lucy McKnight – when I among the trees
The assignment was to ensure that an hour-long program could be filled, all with relatively new works by young composers (with an eye towards EDI in the repertoire selection).
(1) requires a light scordatura (a fancy word for an alternate tuning system), but it can be adjusted in a matter of seconds.
(2) requires no retuning or preparations but only amplification, and a face mic.
(3) requires no scordatura and no preparation, BUT does require that external devices be used on the strings as well as a face mic.
(4) requires preparations but no retuning.
(5) requires extreme preparations, retuning, amplification and a face mic.
Now this program was arrived at based on the harps that I could reasonably get a hold of. One harpist would allow preparations on their harp, but not scordatura. Another would allow light scordatura, but no preparations for fear of damaging the strings (which are costly). No local harpist would allow their harp to be used for the piece (5), as the extremity of preparations increases stress on the soundboard by as much as 15% and requires the instrument to be placed in a close setup with pots, pans, and other external instruments. The risk of cosmetic and structural damage is actually not as high as one might think, but that’s easy to say when it’s not your harp.
The rehearsal process for all of these pieces entails getting to know the preparation schemes well enough to reduce the margin of error as far in advance as possible. After all, I fly to Paris on a Monday. I retrieve my own harp Tuesday and rig it up. I drive it to the Netherlands on Wednesday. I source a second harp on Thursday morning in advance of a 4-hour tech run in the afternoon. I source a third harp on Friday morning in advance of the three-hour dress rehearsal in the afternoon for the 5 o’clock show. Strike-down is at 6, and all three harps have to be out by 7.
Hours are spent sorting all this out on the computer. It’s not just processes dealing out flights, rental cars and parking accommodations that one has to make time for, but extra hours spent with music notation software to make things more legible on the fly. What the composer and harpist want to see are sometimes very different things, and it’s not out of the ordinary to create bespoke editions to ensure things go smoothly. Checklists for packing are essential; for instance, one of the two suitcases has to sport a complete set of strings, a drill, a harp regulation kit, a collapsible music stand and a folding harp trolley, as well as all the various charges and electronic accouterment necessary for hopping from the US to set up shop (albeit temporarily) in the EU.
No, none of this is practicing. And to this day, a specter of anxiety hangs over me about it. In conservatories, we’re taught that in order to prepare, our asses need to be in the practice room. At Oxbridge, the humanities tripos makes it clear that we should read as much as humanly possible. And yet, I cannot recount the number of times I’ve heard old classmates from Cambridge tell me, “I wish I had read less and just thought about the material more and reorganized it on my computer.” Likewise, my colleagues in the music world all increasingly speak of how organization and planning supercharge the practicing process, allowing time for essential slow practice that can’t be replaced and eliminating the fussy hours spent dealing with ill-formatted editions, writing unsuited to the instrument and fealty to the printed page.
Technology has supercharged our efficiency but it has also increased our expectations of what we can achieve. And it is thus that I don’t particularly like to watch the Olympics. Years of preparations, countless injuries and vast sums of money go into events where athletes have to contend with the idea that it might not work. And for the audience, that’s part of the thrill. An old classmate from Juilliard remarked that classical music isn’t so different, offering that the Goldberg Variations are sublime, but more audiences are turning up to see the wire-walk and that fantasy that it can all go wrong. “People pay money to see you fuck up.”
It’s hard to explain how these words stuck with me over the last few years, as I’ve done everything in my preparation processes to hide any sense of loss of control from audiences. Last June, I gave a concert in Paris in the first week of my struggle with ulnar tunnel syndrome. I had smacked my elbow a week before on a wooden music stand and had lost sensation entirely in the ring and pinky fingers on my self hand. The piece I was principally on stage to perform was one I had worked on for five months straight, following on an intermittent workshop process spread over two years. But the sense of terror about performing it was not as unbearable as my colleagues finding me after saying, “You looked so relaxed and in control.”
Another toxic trait of the classical music education system is that the practice room is like a confessional, a space intended to be secretive. It’s supposed to sound bad, sure, but nobody is supposed to know about it or learn anything about it. Sharing the realities of what goes into making something good is considered vulgar or exhibitionistic. Personally, I discovered this on day one at Cambridge when my sponsor flew from the East Coast to walk with me on the lawn at King’s straight after my matriculation ceremony to tell me one thing: “Your job here is to make it look easy.” The idea isn’t to fake it, but rather to feign it. Competency is not what’s at stake, but rather a Victorian addiction to poise.
I personally find it stifling, as I secretly love knowing about what goes into making something nice, even to the point of dissecting a process to the point of vulgarity. When I’m in Paris, I return over and over again to Gustave Caillebotte’s Floor Scrapers at the Musée d’Orsay, which show undignified process of stripping a floor of its varnish. They’re half naked, working in the heat and window is closed. There’s a bottle of something present, but only one glass (perhaps the voyeur). The scraper in the middle has made more progress than the other two. There is enough incongruity to counter the classical perfection of their bodies and a significant undertone of homoeroticism. The revelation of such crude labor poses as many new questions as it answers.
While performance anxiety wanes over the years for any musician, the generalized anxiety about keeping up the pace tends to grow, especially in the face of the reality that our bodies can’t do what they once did when we were teenagers or in our twenties, bashing our heads against the wall as we practiced for up to 6 hours a day. There’s no solution, really. One literally has to fuck around to find out if it works and increasingly just be at peace with the fact that – contrary to our teachers’ admonitions that the outcome of all performances rest solely in our realm of responsibility – all we can do is our best, and that for every solution we find we will undoubtedly find five more problems in need of solving.
Of course, we’re going to push ourselves. That’s never been a question. And we don’t need to exude stress as we perform or prepare. But we can treat all that we do with humor and anticipate that the things that will go wrong can be funny if we let them. After all, I’ve given world premiere with an audience member carried out by EMT services (and yes, I was instructed to keep playing). I’ve played an outdoor concert where my harp slipped in pitch by a quarter tone in half an hour. I’ve had to transpose an entire work down a tone in performance when the singer came in in the wrong key. I’ve had to move a harp in NYC gridlock during UN week, taking seven hours to get from the West to the East side of Manhattan for a rehearsal. Sure, I played my best, but fate had other plans.
The chaos in my office is not whimsical, but portentous of the chaos that will ensue when I hop on a plane in a few weeks. I expect a delayed flight, traffic jams and an inability to find parking. I look forward to seeing whether or not the harps will cooperate and that if tech run will take much longer than anticipated. Without a doubt, my hotel room will not be able to fit a harp (much less three). I am under no illusions that any serious practice or rehearsing will take place in the five days leading up to the concert. Time is now being spent making sure that when all of it happens, that I can try to have a good time and ensure that in the event if things go wrong, the relaxation isn’t feigned.
Greetings from the road, en route to Pittsburgh. I was very glad to talk with Debra Nagy, Zachary Wilder and Nicholas Russotto to talk about… well, you’ll see.
And a little announcement! Golden Wire is now being sponsored by Fractured Atlas. Translation: we can accept tax-deductible donations! So if you like what Arnie Tanimoto and I up to, lend some support. More info about projects soon to come.
I repeatedly hear how lucky I am to have landed on my feet in Paris, how the quality of life must be unimaginably higher, and how my relocation must have significantly improved my access to culture. Such was the case last night as I sat on a couch in Fort Green at a most excellent old-fashioned gay boy birthday party. Deviled eggs, meatballs, and expensive cheese nourished a motley assortment of struggling musicians and actors (including three token heterosexuals, one of whom now lives in my old room in BedStuy).
I heard a host of well-meaning assumptions about what life in France is like. “Free healthcare” came up numerous times (I should note that while healthcare in France is cheap, it’s certainly not free, especially for those making a lower/European income); “kinder to culture” was thrown around (to an extent, this is true, but only for specific varieties and brands of culture as locally defined by the powers that be); better food (French food and pastries, absolutely but I’m afraid the Indian and Mexican restaurants leave me wanting); “political consciousness” came up (even though Europe’s activists all now look to the American BLM movement and institutional commitment to EDI as the gold standard to a certain kind of progress); “anti-American” mentality was a more curious one, as indeed life in France looks very different from life in New York, while every French person I have met has expressed admiration for the typically American nihilism of work addiction and refusal to accept things for what they are (after all, the French are whiners while the Americans are doers, according to conventional wisdom).
One companion on the sofa told me that for all the gratitude I expressed gratitude, I was surprisingly forthcoming in shedding light on what was wrong with the place — or, at the very least, to ensure everyone that it wasn’t perfect. I suppose this is a place where I am still a New Yorker, in that while I find perfection appealing as a classical musician (obsessed with the minutæ of performing), I find it unspeakably dull as a person.
I recently traveled to Switzerland, which is arguably a paradise, as the quality of life and the average GDP are both astronomically high. But the unimaginable thrill I got from attending a political rally in Basel for the election of a public official was fantastic. It was there I heard perhaps one of the most excruciating musical sequences of my life, watching 25 or so frumpy Swiss gauchistes (replete with dreadlocks and terrible clothes) attempt to sing numbers from Paul Simon’s Graceland, led by a woman dressed like Dionne Warwick on a spaceship (singing about a quarter-tone sharp). They concluded their set, at which point a group of about 15 city officials walked on stage with drums and piccolos, playing military tunes with a level of inaccuracy that tickled me in the Summer Heights High region of my lower abdomen. At last, the cleanliness of the streets and the beauty of the architecture betrayed a total lapse in aesthetic awareness, allowing me to bask in 20 minutes of music that can only be described as “you had to be there to understand” level shit.
In Gstaad, the natural beauty was overwhelming, as was waking up every day to step out on the balcony and take a deep breath of Alpine air or heading home in the evening to see the snowy mountains of the Saanen Valley glow in the moonlight. Again, I’m grateful the place is not perfect, as an assortment of 1% inhabitants (and wannabes) make for some of the most bizarre dinner companions imaginable. Like in New York, no conversation can avoid the topic of money, but the commodities sought with vast sums of capital at one’s disposal are notably archaic (chalets, priceless art, old cars, concertos for famous soloists, etc.).
This week, I’ve returned to New York for three months for concerts, and for the first time since the pandemic, I feel at peace with New York’s imperfections. It’s snowing today in Boerum Hill, where the peaceful sight of the powder lining the Brownstones is complemented by the sounds of honking, the presence of yellow snow, and the knowledge that everything is going to take longer and that your clothes are going to be useless by tomorrow.
But, it should be said, I’m also unstressed about the musical engagements I have coming up. In Paris, I’m acutely aware that my practicing routine is sacred and leads to bouts of anxiety and hyper-fixation, cured by the ability to take a walk on the Places des Vosges, grab a pastry from a grotesque and decadent patisserie, and maybe pick up a cheap paperback to see if (1) I can understand what I’m reading and (2) if I wish to continue.
I’m split between two lives in two cities and two modes of being, which (for the moment) serves me fine. I’m presently contented to sit at an infuriatingly anonymous (and overpriced) coffee shop in Brooklyn and procrastinate on practicing while I blog and decide how I’ll structure my afternoon of:
Practicing.
Conducting an interview for a magazine.
Pay surge pricing for my harp to be moved in an Uber from the West Village to Boerum Hill and eventually practice.
I’m also supposed to put the final edits on some program notes for a concert I’m performing in a few weeks. Purcell’s music is the meat of the program, and I’ve been thinking of ways to contextualize his music without creating a program that is either essentially a musicology thesis or themeless/amounting to a random assortment of songs for a colleague to sing. I spent the bulk of the notes talking about what exactly Purcell does in The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation, a song I have vivid memories of hearing the first time when Elin Manahan Thomas gave a recital at my boarding school in the UK as I turned pages for the pianist.
Purcell has a fantastic talent for soliloquy and intertextual allusion. Songs like Music for a While feature an ominous and chromatic ground bass to show how music doesn’t have to make us feel good but satiate and stupefy feelings of unease and jealousy. In it, the fury Alecto lays in waiting to take vengeance, though not too soon.
More comedic songs like Mad Bess of Bedlam use comedy and slapstick to illustrate the ravings of an inmate in an asylum. Triple meter dances and rapid pattering of text are sung by poor Bess, who thinks of herself as a contented Eurydice (though not by name) left behind in the fields of Elysium after her lover fails to rescue her.
But in the Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation, a persistence of recitative reveals the chronically worried mind of Mary, whose son has been missing for three days. Like in Mad Bess, she never mentions herself by name or that of her son. But again, context offers clues: she fears the wrath of Herod again (which forced her flight into the Egyptian desert, a place “safer than a tyrant’s court”); she recalls how the Angel Gabriel informed her of her pregnancy and was heralded as a mother of God. And yet, it is not enough. Her sense of doom is summed up in the final sentence:
Itrust the God, but oh! I fear the child.
The song ends without direct reference to its actual conclusion. After three days, she and her husband Joseph find him teaching in the Temple:
… sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers. So when they saw Him, they were amazed; and His mother said to Him, “Son, why have You done this to us? Look, Your father and I have sought You anxiously.” And He said to them, “Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?”
Mary and Joseph find their son, only to be rejected by him, being informed that he has another true parent. The story continues
But they did not understand the statement which He spoke to them. Then He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them, but His mother kept all these things in her heart.
Hence, Mary’s soliloquy not only details her distress at losing Jesus but hints at the perpetual sense of isolation she will feel for the rest of her life: that of being barred from passing further into the realm of motherhood.
The song is heartbreakingly beautiful, but perhaps more so if one knows the story – or, indeed, any of the stories that constituted the cultural knowledge bank of Purcell’s day. I am generally underwhelmed with most program notes, as they usually only provide biographical information about the composer or how the piece was published. Similarly, I struggle to engage with programs that only seek to situate music in a particular context as it relates to other musical artifacts that smell like one another but bear little in common regarding thematic or textual material. I much prefer to find ways to liberate music from a certain set of assumptions, and instead relate the stories and set up a common framework between the listener and composer as much as possible, not to show how the same stories turn up repeatedly, but to display how differently a poet or composer might interpret them over time, and how emotions themselves can be subject to historicization. Sure, that means more talk about books, classicism, the Bible, etc. – artifacts of culture from which art music cannot be isolated. When I take this approach, I generally find out that context is messy and uncomfortable and ultimately more interesting as it doesn’t fit the musicologist’s addiction to citing names, dates, and places. Is it a perfect historical account? No. But it stands a greater chance of getting a listener to engage with the content of the music rather than the simple phenomenon of the fact that it’s old.
**I suppose this is where I offer a shameless plug for a concert or two. If you’re interested in hearing a bunch of Purcell and some music of his forbears and colleagues, come to Manhattan on Feb 8.**
I gave myself a 1500-word goal for today’s blog post, with no pretensions of composing anything worthy of publishing anywhere other than where my friends come and read about what’s on my mind (even if that means spewing a stream of consciousness).
In the last year, I’ve once again attempted to “leave” New York. And yet I’m sat on the corner of Waverly and Gay in the West Village, writing in exactly the same spot where this slightly disastrous blog began. My harp lives on the Upper West Side (as harps are fairly easy to source in Paris), my stuff lives in a storage unit in Brooklyn, I pay rent in Paris. My billing address for my online subscriptions seems to alternate between three or four legal addresses I’ve had in the last 5 years. My life is scattered, chaotic and I increasingly answer the question “where do you live?” with the honest answer “I don’t know.”
What I do know is that I’ve “checked out” of New York to a certain degree, or rather I’ve come to experience my old haunts without any feelings of baggage. I stood on the corner of 72nd and Columbus for a while today (where I’d lived with an ex) and I struggled to find those emotions which had made even going back there so hard once upon a time. I noticed which businesses had changed, which dogs were the same, which of their owners had gained weight. I looked into my old office on West 69th Street and I was happy to see that it was no longer mine. There was different art on the walls, better lighting and a new inhabitant (an old colleague in fact).
I’ve been told in times past that such feelings are a result of age, and that the process of returning becomes easier and more lighthearted. “Checking out” isn’t giving up; it’s resigning oneself to the reality of change and the inability to control where life goes, and learning to enjoy where it takes you in the process. The twists and turns, be they mundane/unnoticeable or unexpected/jarring are increasingly navigated with poise, ease and a realization that they are what makes life interesting.
If there’s any way in which I’ve checked back in, it’s returning to a place where I see life reflected in music. The personal upheavals of Covid were such that I intentionally insulated my musicianship from my life experience, trying to avoid seeing metaphors in my music making or transplanting my own issues into a practice session or a collaboration. Everything was too uncertain, so I gave up trying for a while. I’m glad to say that such has changed as I’ve started teaching again, attempting to find ways to communicate to students about how minutiae and minuscule changes in a piece of music are not to be overlooked, but to be devoured as they are breadcrumbs left behind by composers we’ll never have the chance to meet.
In a recent masterclass, a student played a transcription of Debussy’s En bateau from the Petite Suite. Everything was more or less in place: fluid technique, an even sound, a sense of sweep in some of the gestures. What lacked was a sense of direction – or rather, a demonstration of constant wavering between stasis and motion which gives the sense that one is in a boat, adrift and subtly out of control. One might call it the absence of direction.
As much as any teacher will try to avoid it, the opening bars of a piece become the obsession point in a masterclass, and I’ll own up to not working with the student on much else. Debussy gives us the Barcarolle arpeggio in G major, but it stops in midair. What next? It repeats in the next bar in the relative minor, with the melody line leading the listener into a reiteration of the first bar back in G major before heading back to e minor for another go. How many times is he gonna do this? There is some relief, as we hear a D in both the melody and the bass – a dominant chord, finally… except that it’s a D minor chord which repeats itself not once, twice or even three times, but FOUR times before giving way to a modulation to C major.
The piece is in G major, but that key relationship between D major and G major has not yet been exhibited at all, as not a single chord has included that absolutely essential F-sharp which should resolve to a G. It is in C major that we are given that initial satisfaction, the point at which we also hear that barcarolle arpeggio go and and then come back down again, reinforced by a plagal cadence (indeed, more F natural in a piece in G major) after.
Bar 12, the F chord becomes an F-sharp diminished chord. There’s hope. Might G major’s rightful place might be yet established? Nope. That F-sharp becomes a dominant in disguise and we are treated to four soupy bars of B major, which trail off into literal nothingness.
A tertiary relation drags us back to G major and the material from the beginning rears its head again. Or does it? The melody is now in thirds. And that E minor chord now has an ugly D-sharp in it, which nevertheless gives way to a Lydian C major, though a little earlier than before. At last, at bar 23, Debussy gives us what we want: D major and G major harmonies. An A minor seven chord gives us a lovely modal secondary dominant, and a C natural to connect to a D Major 7 chord – but with a melody in the bass to almost give us what we want: a perfect cadence.
The more I’ve been teaching, the less I’ve become focused on dealing with students’ hands, their tone or their “sound” (whatever that means). Instead I’ve become obsessive with trying to show students that the infinite details left behind by composers, the false returns, allusions to memory and constant denial of the expected isn’t for nought: all of these infuriating lost illusions are the very building blocks for drawing an audience in. They are in fact gifts which composers give performers to hold audiences in the palm of their hand and transport listeners out of themselves, their own lives and indeed, their own expectations.
Once identified, these subtle details pose the questions that we have to answer. What speed? How do we suspend the ideas in midair? How do we breathe on an instrument that resonates into infinity? How do we pose the questions to the audience that only we can solve?
Seeing beyond the score also comes with age and experience. The finger patterns, the anxiety over accuracy and dogged attention to making things as black and white as they appear on the page isn’t just unappealing, but rather simply impossible. We also learn that when we sit down to play, the slight human variations in volume, warmth or depth have to be accounted for, welcomed and responded to. Perhaps a chord was played too deeply. How can you compensate for it in the moment? How can you go with the flow and recalibrate?
I admit to loving the overwhelmed looks I receive from students, as perhaps I haven’t yet recovered from the 15 years of studies I undertook with Ur-pedagogues who handed me fingerings, tempos, phony aural traditions and a sense of authority which aimed to instill competency, though little more. One teacher assured me we ought to see a work from “Debussy’s standpoint,” which in fact meant just using a fingering that she’d been handed by her own teacher and maintaining a metronomic pulse. I asked her jokingly if I could have Debussy’s mobile number and ask him myself, as she appeared to know him quite well. (She didn’t laugh. The lesson ended early.)
Of course, students have to be shown standards, but what of the standards of giving students a glimpse as to how they will have to make the decisions for themselves? What of the reality that once we’re out of school, we’re on our own (thankfully) on the water, be it on the sea or up shit creek without a paddle? That our technique has to keep with it? And our tone? And our sound? What of the glorious and exhilarating relief that we all feel when we return to a piece years to find that it’s different, charming, and even liberating to play? And what of the utter terror they will face in looking at a student one day and telling them that making decisions will be harder than any one piece they master at school?
The downside of a last minute flight (and a cheap one, no less) is the possibility of an awkward layover. In my case, instead of running to catch a connection, I found myself with 9 hours to spare in Munich. Before meeting up with my friend Groble (fellow Obie, who I hadn’t seen since the before times), I made the mistake of wandering through Munich in the heat of the day. (Note: I’ve only ever been to Munich in the summer and yet am surprised each and every time about how hot it is.) And so I headed somewhere with air-conditioning and a lack of people.
The Glyptothek is notably austere, with brick and stone walls which complement the sculptures, almost all of which are notably white, without an ounce of color left on them at all. Once there were 19th Century frescoes as commissioned by Ludwig I, but they didn’t survive the Second World War (and indeed, the museum was originally built with marble before it was bombed). Likewise there were once objects from the Near East, but they were moved into the Egyptian Museum across the square.
The experience is dramatic, as the sculptures are elevated out of their context into a fantasy of antiquity. The erotic Barberini Faun sits in a spotlight when one enters, but there is almost nothing around. The tightening of the muscles, the ecstasy of the body is a pose, frozen, without any implication of movement. The sculptures from the Temple of Aegina are raised up off the ground, but they are still too close to the human eye. It’s impossible to take them in all at once, except from a side angle. If you face the front, one is confronted by a certain lack of refinement that is a matter of warped perspective. A more distant proximity would allow the eye to see all the figures at once as the neck strains to point the face upwards. Walk further, and there is the room of Alexander the Great surrounded by the busts of Plato, Aristotle and the Homer, presented as prophets attending the arrival of Hellenic and Classical cultures’ culmination.
History books remind me over and over that sculptors were not artists, but rather artisans, and that sculptures were functional objects. It’s fitting then that the sculptures continue to serve a purpose in a curatorial model, albeit it to whitewash the past. The museum’s present tabula rasa is likely preferable to previous curatorial models. There are no active comparisons between the Greeks and ordinary everyday Aryans as there were in the Third Reich, nor active comparisons between the athletes of the present and the past. One could argue that the current pretense of presenting an historical overview is relatively benign (after all, the bar is low). But I’m struck by the contrast with the archaeological collections I saw just days before in Greece, which focused primarily on objects from Macedonia. Visceral poses, a panoply of color and a shitload of gold are what characterize the Macedonian visual landscape, as well as the collection of objects from the East (with which to adorn their own houses, temples and public spaces, regardless of their original context, naturally). The closer one gets to the sites of provenance of an artifact, the more one’s preconceptions of its past are naturally challenged.
Further north, the Alte Pinakothek possesses an enormous collection of Old German Masters. If you’re a Grünewald or Cranach fan, it’s a point of pilgrimage as one can get to see pieces like the Saint Erasmus and Saint Maurice. I can’t get over that you can see Erasmus’ entrails wrapped around the wooden instrument in his right arm, a teaser as to his martyrdom in which he was disemboweled. The racial differential between the two figures is also striking (as Maurice is black, being the leader of a Theban Legion under Emperor Diocletian) and offers a window into the history of a black diaspora in Europe which predates modern colonialism. Of course, once upon time, the painting was considered too controversial and removed from display under the Third Reich (though interestingly, without any public comment) as Grünewald had amassed a cult following as a national symbol from since the era of the Franco-Prussian War. (For instance, upon the capture of Alsace, the Isenheim Altarpiece was promptly removed from Colmar and taken to Munich for renovation and installation. It was there that that wounded soldiers would come not just to witness the famously disfigured body of Christ, but in fact venerate the painting, with priests holding masses in front of it.)
The faces of figures in many of the Old German Masters are not particularly artful, as more attention is paid to the symbols in the painting, the musculature of an arm or a leg, and color used to create stark contrasts of light and shade. In Hans Baldung’s Nativity, the round plain faces of Mary and Joseph are contrasted by dramatic gazes of the cow and the ass. At the bottom of the scene, white light emerges from the manger casting shadows around crèche. The full moon offers no light at all, and but is the same shade of crystal white as the baby’s luminescence and that of the angel in the background, illuminating a heard of sheep with their shepherd.
A nice layover, yes, though too short. There was an extension, but only due to a flight cancellation necessitating stop overnight at a Marriott near the train station. It gave me some time to do some reading on some fairly interesting sites:
I am vacationing in Thessaloniki, which in all honesty can hardly be described as a tourist destination. A friend of mine was back visiting his family, and he wrote to me to offer a few days’ respite in the Balkans. Airline miles are a wonderful thing, and so here I am, in an ugly city with a fascinating history.
A few art deco structures are left, though largely overshadowed by hideous apartment buildings with exposed wiring dating from the 1950s post-war housing crisis. Ottoman neoclassical mansions and administrative buildings are around, their gardens unkept and paint peeling. What few buildings are left from either the Roman or Byzantine administrations are largely in ruins, or remarkably austere in the successive changing of hands between religious groups. The Rotunda of Galerius feels like a mausoleum, yet has the seeming emptiness of a mosque, as well as echoes of its use as a church as exercises in the removal of plaster reveal stunning fragments of frescoes. (But alas, only fragments.)
Situated halfway between Venice and Constantinople, the city has a logistical convenience that has repeatedly been its downfall. Sacked by the Venetians, then the Ottomans, destroyed by fire, decimated by the Nazis, the city is successively built on its own ruins. The walls of Theodosius look like the painted desert in the American Southwest, where successive periods of history can be seen in the materials used to refortify the center of the town. Marble from antiquity supports disorganized layers of stone and brick, the inconsistencies leaving crevices where fig branches emerge.
And so, what few artifacts that remain intact appear all the more astonishing. Walking into the Church of Osios David, my friend showed me a mosaic of the Vision of Ezekiel. The mosaic is famously in the shape of an eye, with the Christ Emmanuel sat in the Iris. He is neither child nor priest, but an adult, though notably without a beard. He’s hard to recognize as first as he’s sitting on a rainbow, hand raised in salutation. Habakkuk looks on thoughtfully and Ezekiel astonished, dichotomizing the rational and emotive responses to the sight of the Christ. The Iris is supported by Cherubim in guise of peacock feathers, from which emerge the four creatures described in Ezekiel’s vision: a lion, a cow, an eagle and an angel, each bearing a red book, studded with jewels. The ends of their bodies can be seen in the Iris, though in a lighter shade and out of focus. The rainbow is not a symbol of covenant, but rather an indicator that Christ is encased in a piece of glass – that “terrible crystal” through which light refracts. And yet there is none of Ezekiel’s fire or cataclysm: no spinning orbs, no aura of terror. Ezekiel seems to sit in a rock before a quarry (latomio), with a city in the background – perhaps that of the neighborhood of Ano Poli, where the Monastery of Latoumou sits up the hill from Osios David. Habbakuk sits alone on a mountain, foreshadowing the arrival of Byzantine monasticism. Emmanuel is not in linen, but plain, imperial clothes.
Down the hill, the museums of archaeology and Byzantine Culture exhibit other fluid passages from Ptolemaic inheritance into Christian practice. The cults of Isis and Osiris hover in the tombs of the early Christians, who continued to be buried with coins on their eyes and ornaments on their ears, beckoning their prayers to be heeded by the guards of the afterlife.
Religion remains an economy here. Driving from Thessaloniki out to the beaches of Halkidiki and onto Mount Athos, one can buy an ikon at a supermarket while waiting for a coffee. Further up the road, one can purchase a small prefab chapel while shopping for a clay bbq pit. (They’re made by the same guy.) And yet there are almost no mosques, and virtually no trace the Jewish community that formed the city’s majority until the 20th century. It has become emblematic of the modern nation state, an institution at odds with the Mediterranean’s characteristic diversity seen in its port cities.
I’m a bookworm, but there is no substitution for seeing a different place up close and in person. For all I’ve learned, I feel all the more ignorant and am itching to return to the region as soon as possible.
And yet, travel is now a part of my life as I’m entering a new period of itinerancy and over the next year or so. I’ve started picking up travel journals which I’ve neglected to read, in hopes that it might remind me to keep my eyes peeled when I’m on the road. This week, I finally started with Goethe’s account of his travels to Italy, in which time he wrote about things other people seemingly cared little about and visited places and sites overlooked.
And, of course, his first fellow traveler (albeit for a brief period) is none other than a harpist and his daughter.
“We shared another cheerful prospect as well : she assured me we would have fair weather, because she carried a barometer with her- her harp. When the treble string went sharp it was a sign of good weather, and this had happened today. I accepted the good omen and we parted gaily, hoping to meet again soon.”
