Night Music

I'm taking a Fiction Workshop at Manhattanville College this spring. We're reading five books that develop setting especially well.  At our first class, we discussed the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, a unique literary novel that describes imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.  Khan implores Polo to describe the cities of his empire that he has seen, but the conversation ranges far beyond that, into philosphy and consciousness. A fascinating read.

Then, as common in writing classes, we did a free-write, with the prompt of creating our own invisible city.  We read them aloud. My classmate wrote about Mozartina, a city where the children drill their piano exercises, and the work is all drudgery.  The adults in Mozartina understand that someday, although unhappiness will come to each student, the "night music," a play on Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music - you know the catchy theme, it was used on Nickelodeon) will carry them through.  

Music is invisible when it's performed, and its effect is mostly invisible, too.  Yes, there are written notes on the page, but the actual sound can only be caught in the moment.  Music was the perfect choice for building an invisible city, and, to be honest, I wish I'd thought of it it.

That week after class I kept thinking about what my classmate had written, how the drudgery and repetition involved in piano practice described in Mozartina was true for my own piano students.  The students' parents and I work together to keep their child engaged.  I find myself saying to my students, "You'll be so glad you stuck with it," even though I know they dislike hearing it almost as much as I dislike saying it.  It's something, at their young age, they cannot possibly understand. 

A few days later, I remembered the words on a piece of artwork that hangs in my studio waiting room.  The piece, called Night Demons by Brian Andreas, was given to me by a teenage student years ago, after she failed her college music audition.  

Although this student's ambition exceeded her talents, by age seventeen she understood the most important aspect of music: its power to soothe, elevate, and expand.  She had experienced the way it can shift the invisible inner landscape, and strengthen her ability to face her life.

I felt in giving the art to me, she recognized herself in the piece, that she'd learned her own night demons could not help but sucuumb to the beauty of music, having "no stomach" for their work after hearing her play. 

Things Fall Away

We streamed into Ozawa Hall as the summer evening cooled and the sun lowered behind the lush lawns of Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts. The wood-lined, shoe-boxed shaped hall, designed for prime acoustics, reminded me of a ship, and the audience members passengers embarking together.  My friend and I sat alone in our row on the first balcony, hovering over the stage. As the ushers closed the doors, we faced the front of the vessel and waited for our captain to arrive.

        Pianist Garrick Ohlsson walked onstage, tall and substantial, dressed in a white tux jacket and black pants.  Described by reviewers as “a gentle giant in the service of Chopin,” Ohlsson’s reputation as one of the finest Chopin interpreters began in 1970 when he won the Gold Medal at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, the only American pianist to ever do so. 

An Odd Coupling

        For this performance, the last in his season as 2017 Koussevitsky Artist, Mr. Ohlsson chose a solo program of Shubert and Scriabin, one he described in the program notes as an “odd coupling.”  He found a thread between the two geniuses in the imagined career of Shubert if he had lived past thirty-two.  

            A pair of Shubert sonatas bookended the program, as they bookended the last five years of Shubert’s life.  Diagnosed with syphilis in 1823, he died of the disease, likely compounded by typhus, in 1828.  These two sonatas express the beauty and anguish of his personal battle. The handful of Scriabin selections, some quite a bit more than a handful for any pianist, included etudes, a prelude, a tone poem, and the roller coaster ride of his Fifth Sonata.  Placed between the Schubert, they proved to be a perfect counter point, opening a door to the musical future that the composer never lived to see, nor exert his significant influence on.

            From our seats we couldn’t see Mr. Ohlsson’s fingers on the keys, but better yet, we could clearly see his long, kind face.  More than once during the recital, he looked right at us.   Between one of the pieces, my friend whispered, “I feel like we’re his muses, as if our attention matters.”  We felt within his circle of energy, if you can imagine one radiating from a musician of both greatness and humility, one whose powerful stage presence is the result of a long and successful career, a sweeping knowledge of the piano repertoire, and a transparent access to the emotional depth of the music he plays arising from his strength of spirit and intellect.  His arc was wide and generous, fueled by his gift for penetrating, gently, of course, our emotional defenses.  He calmly guided us to a place on the night ocean where one can lose sight of the familiar shore, a place where music can meet soul.

The Program

          The first Schubert sonata, No. 14 in A minor, expressed the composer’s torment when first diagnosed with syphilis, a terminal diagnosis at the time. Being Schubert, he could not help but offset the disruptive quality of the music with gorgeous melodies woven throughout all three movements, as if he was calling to him the beauty of life before he would leave it.  This is most present in the third movement, where the melodies are interrupted again and again with disturbances in both tempo and tone.  

           The Scriabin set spanned much of the composer’s artistic life.  The pieces moved from the wandering dissonance of "Etude Opus 65, No. 1," to the jazzy, rhythmic flavor of "Etude Opus 8, No. 10."  "Prelude, Opus 59, No. 2," marked “Savage, Belligerent,” lived up to its name.  The painterly dreaminess of "Poème, Opus 32, No.1," was followed by the hair-raising ride of Sonata No. 5, Opus 53, which closed the set and left the audience ebullient in their appreciation of Mr. Ohlsson.  Schubert’s last Sonata, No. 20, filled the second half, showcasing in four varied movements Schubert’s talents for lyricism, structure, harmonies, and counterpoint, as well as foretelling the direction toward modernism he would have taken if he had lived.  Three curtain calls brought us three encores of short Scriabin etudes.

           I closed my eyes--I wasn’t always serving as muse, after all--and sank into the music.  Infusions of sound and vibration entered my body at what felt like the cellular level. A thought crystallized in my mind: things fall way.  I wasn’t thinking about Schubert at that moment. I wasn’t actually thinking about anything. I experienced a sense of release, as if locked-in patterns of emotional imprisonment were dropping.  The image of four walls collapsing outward, as in a magic act, rose in my mind. This brought a deep, mysterious healing, one I cannot articulate or grasp the effect of, and left me with the sensation of being filled up, and lighter. 

          I remember my piano teacher Maria Cizyk telling me about an audience member who sought her out after a performance to thank her.  The woman said, “As I listened to you play, something inside me healed, something I didn’t know needed healing.”  In Ozawa Hall, I understood what she meant.

A Distant Shore

          That night in Ozawa Hall we were passengers on a journey, guided by our trusted captain.  Our price of admission was the willingness to be transported to an unknown place, to lose sight of recognized lands, and to allow unneeded things to fall away.  Under the sure hand of Mr. Ohlsson, we arrived at the unseen shore, different people than when we set out.

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 Eighth Quartet here. 23:02)

1/ In the first movement (Largo 4:33) 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.

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.)