The Emotional Alchemy of Music

I heard my first live Shostakovich a month ago and I'm still thinking about it.  On a Sunday afternoon in August  the impeccable St. Petersburg String Quartet gave a riveting rendition of the Russian composer's String Quartet No. 8 in C minor (Opus 110).  The performance was a revelation. By the time it was over, I felt like I knew this man.

A Bit About the Composer

Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)  lived through the Russian Revolution, World War II, and the Stalin holocaust.  His entire life he played a game of cat-and-mouse with the Russian government. The stakes: his physical and creative survival.

In order to please Stalin, and save himself, he knuckled under to pressure to pull certain works, such as his Fourth Symphony, and to write "safer" versions to stay in the government's good graces.  He live an oppressed life.  His fifteen string quartets, which for the most part remained private during his lifetime, became the vehicle for his personal feelings.

Quartet No. 8, Broken Down

The piece is marked throughout by a repressed feeling, a sense of constraint and sense of threat.  In it Shostakovich reveals his own mental and emotional state.

Five conjoined movements comprise the piece, which is played straight through without pause: Largo, Allegro, Allegretto, Largo, Largo.  It's an odd mix with all those slow Largo movements.  For musicophiles, there is a repeated melodic variation throughout using the musical equivalent of Shostakovich's initials, the notes D, E-flat, C, and B.

(Listen to the entire Quartet No. 8 here - 23:02)

1/ In the first movement the four instruments (two violins, viola, and cello) weave a spare, layered sound that is both melancholy and slightly menacing.  The atmosphere created is hypnotic.  I was immediately drawn in and caught, like a fly in the spider's web.

2/ The abrupt launch into the frantic second Allegro (2:52) movement filled me with a panicky breathlessness. My heart beat faster and I leaned forward in my seat. The notes themselves sounded as if they wanted to break out of their dissonant harmonies but couldn't.  This movement appears as number five on a YouTube list of "50 Darkest Pieces of Classical Music."

Composer and author Jan Swaffordwrites inThe Vintage Guide to Classical Music, "... this quartet is a self-portrait of the composer, brooding once more on a scene of devastation.”  This second movement captures that intensity

3/ The jaunty and eerie waltz of the third movement (Allegretto 4:05) is dubbed by some critics as a dance of death.  In it, Shostakovich communicates a sense of inevitability and hopelessness, along with a bizarre carefree quality.  In some ways, this combination made it the scariest movement.

4/ The ominous fourth movement (Largo 4:45) enters with three low notes hammered out, threatening blows.  Swafford writes that,  “… the string quartets ... were all along his private rebellion against his times.” As I listened, I felt the terror Shostakovich must have experienced in his own home as he worked away on his "private music." I felt the crush of oppression, his conflict over the artistic compromises he made with the Russian government, the strait jacket of his survival.  And the fear of the knock at the door, expressed so unequivocally in this movement, signalling who knew what awful portent.

5/ Yet the fourth movement ends with an ethereal, almost pastoral sound, moving directly into the last movement, another Largo (3:40).  This section initially contains more movement and melody.  By the end it dissolves into a slow harmonized melody, a drifting away into the void, a wish for release, perhaps only known through death.

Music's Emotional Alchemy

I have known some scary emotions in my life, frightening ones so huge I felt they could overwhelm me. I have stood on the edge of craziness, fearing for my own sanity.  But these moments passed.  The most difficult circumstances of my life cannot compare to those that Shostakovich experienced, circumstances I can only imagine.

Yet sitting in the acoustically vibrant hall at Music Mountain, listening to the outpouring of this repressed composer, I felt connected to the composer. Music created a bridge across fifty-plus years from the time the piece was written in 1960 to today, a bridge that linked an oppressed composer living in the dark days of Russia to a 21st-century American woman.

I walked across that bridge and I was changed.

Music can do this, both construct the bridge and show the path across it.

Through sound and vibration I experienced the visceral physicality of repression. I was transported to another place, another body, another time. My heart was softened up a bit, and my view of the world expanded.

This is the power of music.  This is the emotional alchemy that can take place in live performance.

For Father's Day: On Eagle's Wings

When my father was dying, I grieved in the car.  As I traveled between piano students’ homes, I cried and wailed, then wiped my eyes before leaving the car. During the lessons, I never could chastise my students for their poor practicing.  At night I woke my husband up, grinding my teeth in my sleep.

My father was diagnosed in 1990. It took two years for the cancer to move from his prostrate to his bones.  During that time I made one of the biggest decisions of my life, one I knew would not earn his approval.

I was 38 and had worked for IBM for twelve years.  He had retired from IBM several years earlier, after a 40-year career. In my favorite photo, he is at work, white shirt sleeves rolled up, papers covering the surface of the desk, smiling, relaxed, in his element. He had helped me find my job there, yet I was always looking for a career that would satisfy a restless need for more meaningful work.  In 1991 the company initiated its first wave of downsizing through a voluntary retirement program.  I was one of the first to enroll.

I waited two months before saying anything.  At 8:30 on a Monday morning, an untouched bagel sitting on my desk, I made the call.  My father picked up, then my mother on the extension.

“I’ve got something to tell you.”

I could picture him sitting up in bed with the breakfast tray beside him on the quilt, her standing in the kitchen, wrapping the phone cord around her fingers.

“I’m leaving IBM.”

Silence.

“I want to teach music – piano.  They’re offering a retirement package.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

More silence.

We said goodbye.  When I hung up, I thought I would feel relieved, but my gut was hollow with disappointment.

The next time I saw him, he said, “Did your piano teacher put you up to this?”

“No,” I said.  Did he really not know me?

Later, my mother said, “Your father’s worried about you, about your future.”  Yes, I thought, the security, the retirement, the insurance, the paid vacation and sick days.  And the part of me that would never be fulfilled in the corporate world.

“I will be successful at this,” I told her.  Her response was a worried look.

What neither of my parents understood was this was not a willful decision.  In fact, I was following the advice on the poster in my office, which showed a cliff, with a quote from Goethe underneath: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”   I took the leap off that cliff because my soul required it.

In elementary school I took piano lessons with a retired music professor down the street.   By age eleven I was playing popular movie themes from “Exodus”, “Camelot”, and “Man of La Mancha”, music that made me feel powerful and known.  Here I wasn’t criticized for being too emotional, a phrase I heard growing up not just from my parents, but also from my three siblings.

When we moved from New York to Connecticut, the piano didn’t come with us.  Perhaps it was too ugly for our new suburban home.  A few years later I told my mother I wanted to play again.

The morning of my sixteenth birthday, I was downstairs when I heard a commotion above me.  When I came upstairs, sitting against the wall was a new spinet piano, walnut brown, with a curved music desk and scrolled legs.

“Happy birthday,” my parents said.  I walked over and brushed my hands across the keys.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

I started lessons, climbing a long set of concrete steps to my teacher’s house, where I tackled challenging classical pieces and lush movie themes. I played Haydn and Beethoven.  My favorite was the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, the most recorded piece of piano music.  It became the music I always returned to when I sat down at the piano as an adult.  My teacher encouraged me to consider music school, but never mentioned it to my parents. Neither did I.

After a year I stopped lessons.

“I’ll still play,” I told my mother.  “The piano will be my therapy.”  I wonder why I thought I needed therapy.

In my mid-thirties, I moved that piano to my new house in North Carolina. In the evenings after work, I played all the music I knew.  It was still in my fingers. I entered a world I had abandoned, a world where the notes on the page answered the need to express emotions I couldn’t find words for, and where the beauty of the sound became a physical space I could inhabit, separate from the world of work. When I relocated to Connecticut a few years later, I found an accomplished teacher and took on beginner students in the evenings.  Then came the offer.

I knew my father was perplexed by my life decisions, and his disapproval was implicit in the lack of comprehension. I dated boys he didn’t approve of, became a vegetarian in college, left school in the middle of my sophomore year, married a hippie musician when I was twenty, and walked out on him a year and a half later for an older man. I jumped from job to job, working as a waitress, a secretary, a vet’s assistant.  As I floundered through my twenties, I wrote my father a letter attempting to explain myself to him.  The letter received neither response nor mention.  I never asked why.

After dropping out of college, I came home to live for nine months. Whenever I needed to think, I followed the steep path behind our house down to the Rippowam River. One Saturday morning my father asked if he could come with me. We sat on a boulder, just south of the arched stone bridge where cars whizzed by on the Merritt Parkway, and watched the skate bugs move across the surface of the water.

When I felt his hand rubbing my back, I tensed.  He rarely touched any of us.  I remember seeing him hug my mother only once.  Now he was trying to reach out to me, his youngest.  I wish I had been able to respond.

When I was twelve, he said to me, "No matter how well you do, there will always be someone better than you.”  Although I'm sure he meant well, at age twelve I took that advice to mean I would never be good enough, especially in his eyes.

One of my favorite childhood memories is of him reading “Winnie the Pooh” to me as we sat together in the wide red armchair, my fingers rubbing the nubby fabric.  He helped me with my homework, and taught me how to drive in his new 69 Volkswagen bug. Whenever he and my mother came to visit me when I lived in North Carolina, where I was finally settled in their eyes, working for IBM and owning a home, before they left he would hand me an envelope containing a generous check.

During his illness, I was living an hour away, and I stayed overnight at least once a week.  Every time I visited I played the piano, for my own pleasure as much as to show them the rightness of my decision.  The last Easter he was alive, a month before he died, most of the children and grandchildren had gathered together.  I flipped through a songbook of music from the thirties and forties, and played some selections I thought he would enjoy.  He sat at the dining room table, watching us, and asked me to play “Thanks for the Memories”.  Everyone stopped talking. Afterward the room was filled with the sense that it would be soon.

I wasn’t present when my father died.  Starting on a Monday, the entire family held vigil, taking turns sitting at his bedside since Monday, as he lay unresponsive.  On Thursday morning the hospice nurse said he had at least thirty-six hours left, so my husband and I headed home.  I stepped out of the shower when the phone call came.  The regret of not being there at an irreplaceable moment dogged me.                

I didn’t touch the piano for three days. Mid-morning, four days after he died, thinking I was alone in our house on the lake, I sat down and played the Moonlight Sonata. 

When I finished, my husband was standing in the doorway, looking at me with a raw expression I’d never seen on his face. 

“Nice Moonlight,” he said, before turning to leave the room.

He’d listened to me play it a hundred times before and had never commented, but that day he heard everything I was trying to say, everything I was feeling, without a word being spoken.  That sums up what music can do: communicate the inexplicable, the inexpressible, and provide comfort and understanding where words fail.  It was then I realized that death and grief saturated this piece, which ends with three minor chords I've come to think of as the death knell. My father’s death was the first I had experienced of someone close to me.  This music helped me to accept it, and to place it in a larger perspective.

At his memorial service a tenor with a rich voice sang the hymn “On Eagle’s Wings”, at my father’s request.  It seemed fitting, for my tall, clear-eyed father reminded me of the nobility of an eagle.

            And He will lift you up on eagle’s wings,

            Bear you on the breath of dawn,

            Make you shine like the sun,

           And hold you in the palm of his hand.

Two years later, I received what the Native Americans call a visitation.  I dreamt I was on a snowy mountainside, shoveling a path.   As I lifted the blade, one of my gloves flew off.  I spotted an eagle above me, and thought he would catch the glove. Instead he flew toward me through the trees and landed on my shoulder.  I could see the vivid contrast between his white and black feathers.  In my dream, I thought, “Oh my God, oh my God”.  As I calmed down, I tuned into how he was seeing the world.  My perception shifted into a deep tranquility. Everything looked the same, but there was a layer of stillness between us and the world.

When I woke, I knew this was more than a dream.  It was an offering from the spirit world, and it was a gift.

The Secret Musicians Know That Can Help Writers

I am grateful that I came to writing after years spent as a practicing musician, where I learned perspectives that make my writing life easier, and I came to understand the core secret behind any creative endeavor. First, the perspectives.

1/Practicing is an act of faith

When I grew frustrated in my piano lessons with Maria, one of my most important teachers, she would say that sitting down every day at the piano is an act of faith.  Some days it goes well, my hands feel great, the phrases come together with ease, and I can stay at my instrument for long stretches without feeling distracted.

Other days, I look down at my hands and wonder who they belong to.

On those days, my fingers feel stiff, I'm fighting the piano, my mind drifts off, and the music seems boring.  But I stay anyway.  I've been in this place before and know that tomorrow, or the next day, or perhaps next week, I will feel connected and fulfilled.  I know that the music will eventually yield to the repeated application of hard work and diligence.

And that if I stop, the ground will be steeper when I return.

2/ Daily time is a necessity

I often tell my piano students, "Even concert pianists practice every single day."  Cellist Pablo Casals said he had to find the E  in first position on the cello daily, a simple task that beginners face.

The difference between writing and playing an instrument is that I write every day for many different reasons, so it is easy to lull myself into complacency because I don't feel a physical disconnection from paper and pen, the way I do from the piano, or cello.  For writing, it's the connection between my hand and brain that needs to be sustained; the connection to my characters and my story that benefits from the consistent attention.  I want to stoke that sense of living in my characters' heads, of hearing their voices, of watching them come alive on the page. They will sulk in the corner if I ignore them, and the music I'm working on does the same thing.

Yes, life sometimes interferes, and I miss a day of practice or writing, but I never think about stopping.  In fact I become irritable when I cannot get to the writing, and the playing.  It's a physical craving that is only soothed by engagement with my art.  I come back to the instrument and the writing, and start again

In my studio I have an engraved stone sitting on the piano.  When a student comes to a lesson ill-prepared because of a skimpy--or non-existent-- practice week, I pick it up to remind them: Begin Again.

Begin Again

3/ The beauty is in the details

Once I learn the basics of playing a piece of music, i.e., the notes, rhythm, fingering, then the music making begins: working out the phrases, refining the sound, working on technique to create the sound "image" that's in my head, experimenting with the dynamics, grasping the inner story and emotions of the piece.

It's the same with writing. Every sentence, every word, is crafted until there is nothing that stops the flow of the words.  I don't know who first said "Writing is revision" because I've heard it so many times, but it is true.  When I came to writing, I never had a problem with this because I know how long it takes to polish a piece before it's "performance ready".  The repetitions required to master a piece of music are like "piling hairs", another teacher told me.  At first the difference is imperceptible, but eventually it adds up.

Bottom line: a first draft is the starting point, not the finish line, just as the first run-through of a piece is the beginning of the journey, not the destination.

4/ The commitment is to something bigger

My teacher Maria once performed the four Chopin Ballades by memory. For those not familiar with piano repertoire, rest assured this is quite a feat.  After the concert, an audience member came up to her, score in hand, and pointed out a few measures where she had missed notes.  I would have been furious.  All she said was, "It just shows us that the music is greater than us."

Whenever I open a new piece of music, I think about the thousands of players who have done the same thing, who learned and performed these notes in front of me. I sense the presence of a long line of people behind me who have learned and loved this piece.  With my writing, too, I am participating in an act that others before me have, as well as others that will follow me.  It gives me a sense of belonging to something greater, a sense of being part of a larger, unseen community of seekers of self-expression and beauty.

When I participate in making art of any kind, I belong to a greater community.

And the secret: Making art is, in the end, an act of devotion.  I give myself over to the mystery.  The commitment is not just to the page, or to the music, but ultimately, to my connection to that sustaining power.

I honor that commitment because I know it's the only path to the treasure.

Music , Beauty, and a Short List of Quotes

 

Music is a wide and wonderful world and there is room for everyone in it.

This is what I tell my students, and this has been my experience in teaching students aged from eighteen months to over seventy.  Whether you play an instrument, peck out a melody on the piano, sing in the shower, rock out in your car, attend concerts, listen to opera, chant in yoga class, or tap your foot while others are on the dance floor, music is a way for us to tune into something universal, something larger than ourselves, something that uplifts us and connects us to each other.

I teach music because I'm in love with beauty and seeking out beauty brings me closer to a sense of the infinite.  I believe in the power of music.  It's good for the brain, the body, the heart, and the spirit.  No moment engaged with music is ever wasted.

Here's a short list of quotes on music's power and mystery.

1. "To be a musician is a curse.  To not be one is even worse." -Jack Daney, Jazz Trumpeter  (from The Late Starters Orchestra by Ari L. Goldman - excellent insight on the challenges adults face when taking on musical study:  click here for a link to the book)

2. "Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything." - Plato

3. "Music speaks to what cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it rest, heals the heart and makes it whole, flows from heaven to the soul." - Author unknown

4. "Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces insides our hearts and souls and helping us figure out a the position of things inside us." - Karl Paulnack (from Welcome Address to Boston Conservatory, an inspiring speech.  Read full address here.

5. "There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." - Albert Schweitzer -  (found in The Nature of Music: Beauty, Sound, and Healing by Maureen McCarthy Draper - a wonderful book, full of ideas on how to integrate music into your daily life, with companion CDs.  Click here for link to the book.)