This guy’s a rare bird. Long a respected concert pianist, he’s also become a notable writer, appearing recently in the New Yorker and the New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Jeremy Denk, piano
Charles Ives, Concord Sonata (excerpt [“The Alcotts”])
Live, New York, 2012
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lagniappe
reading table
My Ives addiction started one summer at music camp, at Mount Holyoke College. I was twenty and learning his Piano Trio. There’s an astounding moment in the Trio where the pianist goes off into a blur of sweet and sour notes around a B-flat-major chord. I knew the moment was important, but I wondered, was my sound too vague or too clear? (A recurring interpretative problem in Ives is discovering the ideal amount of muddle.) I was also puzzled about where this phrase was going. I’d been taught that phrases were supposed to go somewhere, yet this musical moment seemed serenely determined to wander nowhere.
After posting the Peter Brötzmann clip and the AOL headlines, I drove a hundred miles to see a client serving a life sentence at the Pontiac Correctional Center, then stopped at a nearby restaurant for a mid-afternoon lunch, where I overheard the cook ask a patron: “Did you see where that guy was killed by a swan?”
The keyboard is the stage on which the fingers dance.
Sviatoslav Richter, piano
TV performance (CBC, Toronto),* 1964
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lagniappe
reading table
even grass and vines
don’t part willingly . . .
lantern for the dead
—Kobayashi Issa, 1822 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
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*Johannes Brahms, Intermezzo in E Minor, Op. 116, No. 5
Sergei Prokofiev, Sonata No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 14
Maurice Ravel, Jeux d’eau, Alborada del gracioso
What better experience for playing with the Velvet Underground, whose mentor, Andy Warhol, once observed “the channels switch, but it’s all television,” than to appear on I’ve Got a Secret?
I’ve Got aSecret (Garry Moore, host; John Cale, guest), 1963
The piece he plays at the end, Vexations, was composed in the early 1890s by Erik Satie.
Music doesn’t care who you are, where you come from, what you know. It asks only that you pay attention.
Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), Piece in Three Parts for Piano and Sixteen Instruments (1961), Peter Serkin (piano), Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (Oliver Knussen, cond.)
Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire.
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I never feel that my music is sparse or minimal; the way fat people never really think they’re fat. I certainly don’t consider myself a minimalist at all.
Last week a record store in Dupont Circle announced that it was closing. The immediate cause of its demise—it had outlasted national and regional chains—was Price Check, Amazon’s new idea for exterminating competition. It is an app that allows shoppers to scan the bar code on any item in any store and transmit it to Amazon for purposes of comparison, and if it compares favorably to Amazon’s price, Amazon’s special promotion promises a discount on the same item. In this way shoppers become spies, and stores, merely by letting customers through their doors, become complicit in their own undoing. It will not do to shrug that this is capitalism, because it is a particular kind of capitalism: the kind that entertains fantasies of monopoly. For all its technological newness, Amazon’s “vision” is disgustingly familiar. (“Amazon is coming to eat me,” a small publisher of fine religious books stoically told me a few weeks ago.) Nor will it do to explain that Amazon’s app is convenient, unless one is prepared to acquiesce in a view of American existence according to which its supreme consideration must be convenience. How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.
WHEN MY FRIEND at Melody Records told me about the death of his store, I was bereft. This was in part because he is my friend—after my father died, I received a letter from the Holocaust Museum informing me that he had made a donation in my father’s memory—and now he must fend for himself and his family and his staff in the American wreckage. But my dejection was owed also to the fact that this store was one of the primary scenes of my personal cultivation. For thirty years it stimulated me, and provided a sanctuary from sadness and sterility. “Going to Melody” was a reliable way of improving my mind’s weather. The people who worked there had knowledge and taste: they apprised me of obscure pressings of Frank Martin’s chamber music, and warned me about the sound quality of certain reissues of Lucky Thompson and Don Byas, and turned me on to old salsa and new fado. They even teased me about my insane affection for Rihanna. When they added DVDs to the store, my pleasures multiplied. (Also my amusements. Not long ago Marcel Ophuls’ great film arrived in the shop, and the box declared: “Woody Allen presents The Sorrow and The Pity.” Beat that.) Of course all these discs can be found online. But the motive of my visits to the store was not acquisitiveness, it was inquisitiveness. I went there to engage in the time-honored intellectual and cultural activity known as browsing.
IT IS A MATTER OF some importance that the nature of browsing be properly understood. Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon what flaneurie is to Google Earth. It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations. On Amazon, by contrast, there are no accidents. Its adjacencies are expected and its associations are probable, because it is programmed for precedents. It takes you to where you have already been—to what you have already bought or thought of buying, and to similar things. It sells similarities. After all, serendipity is a poor business model. But serendipity is how the spirit is renewed; and a record store, like a bookstore, is nothing less than an institution of spiritual renewal.
When that happens, this is one of the things I turn to—it never fails.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Suite No. 3 in C major for Unaccompanied Cello, 4th Mvt. (Sarabande); Pierre Fournier (1906-1986), cello
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lagniappe
reading table
[O]ld age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
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After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself. Decades followed each other—thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty—and then came my cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying—in the supermarket, these old old ladies won’t get out of my way—but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.
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Whatever the season, I watch the barn. I see it through this snow in January, and in August I will gaze at trailing vines of roses on a trellis against the vertical boards. I watch at the height of summer and when darkness comes early in November. From my chair I look at the west side, a gorgeous amber laved by the setting sun, as rich to the eyes as the darkening sweet of bees’ honey. . . . Out the window, I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown again under bare branches, until snow falls again.
—Donald Hall, “Out the Window,” New Yorker, 1/23/12
music clip of the day 