If there is one thing I wish I could talk with someone about in my life it has been piano music. I don’t think I know any subject matter as exhaustively as that. It is the only thing I ever went to school for. While I consider myself a person of many interests it’s kind of amazing how little I’ve shared or felt comfortable talking about piano music. Some people take offense at the subject matter itself, assuming I am some kind of snob about it, and that I look down on people who don’t know much about it — as if they are ignoramuses.
There have only been two people in my life who are not musicians and who actually enjoyed hearing me talk about piano music. One woman said she actually got aroused by it. She was, in a word, cerebral. Another woman just liked to sit and hear me play, though I guess our conversations were pretty one-sided.
Of course I’ve known plenty of other musicians, pianists most common among them. A problem with those folks is that if they are professional performers then they either tire of the subject matter or else they are unable to talk about anything else. I am not actively in touch with any fellow musicians, at least not at a point where I could just open a dialogue about my new discovery of Xaver Scharwenka’s piano music, which I’ve been devouring today. His suite of Polish Dances comprises one perfect jewel after another, and they are remarkably not too difficult technically. I have no aversion to playing difficult repertoire but it’s a bonus when you find satisfying music that does not bust your knuckles. Maybe it just seems easy to me because it seems as if the music flowed so easily from the composer’s pen. He is working in dance forms, which tend to be pretty ready vessels that any composer can easily fill, so long as they are not eccentrics when it comes to messing with the form.
I had another amusing incident yesterday that a true pianista might understand, but one would also have to be pretty familiar with “The Etude” magazine, which I collected for a number of years. The music in those magazines tends toward the very safe and traditional. Music of composers unfamiliar today fill the pages of “The Etude”, but these obscurities typically fall safely into the salon or dilettante category. There was only one publication in “The Etude” of a work by Charles Alkan. That only surprised me because Alkan was distributed in the U.S. by Theodore Presser, the company that also published “The Etude.” They made no secret of promoting music from their catalogue in “The Etude”, and Alkan could have used the publicity. Alas, the one piece they did publish (can’t think of what it is offhand) was not something to inspire further interest in Alkan.
The amusing incident yesterday came when I was playing through some of the puff pieces that fill the pages of “The Etude” when, amazingly, I turned a page and was looking at Karol Szymanowski’s 2nd Piano Sonata. I was like, “seriously? ‘The Etude’ actually published this?” That sonata is dissonant and tough going even by today’s relatively open-minded standards. When I saw it I figured they would have just published at most an excerpt from that Sonata. But it kept going on, page after page, until I realized that I had somehow switched documents. I rarely use paper scores any more. Almost everything is scanned and converted to PDF, which I read through a piece of software designed for this sort of thing. Somehow I had reached the end of “The Etude” scans without realizing it, moving on to another score in the queue. So “The Etude” did not, in fact, publish a lengthy Szymanowski score. But the possibility that they had was utterly astonishing and hilarious to me, in a way that I don’t think I know or ever have known anyone who would understand.
Last week I rediscovered Ives’ “Concord” Sonata, which I played in college. I was thinking of Ives again after I happened to spot a new-to-me recording of Ives’ Fourth Symphony on Spotify. It was edited by someone I knew in college, someone whose sole purpose in life when I knew him was to advocate the music of Charles Ives, in particular his Fourth Symphony. I was friends with that individual, until that fell apart some time after college. I harbor no bad feelings toward him but man, he could be pretty rude. That, at least, is my context-free memory of how things went down with us.
I was happy to see that he stayed true to his calling, and edited the Fourth Symphony in a way that significantly departs from earlier efforts.
More to the point, as I plowed through the mighty “Concord” Sonata I found myself asking “Did I really play this?” It is so fucking difficult in places, and just not any kind of “normal.” There have been analyses of this work which claim it can be poured in to a traditional sonata form. That does not surprise me, though I wonder why anyone would take pride or satisfaction in doing that with such an anti-traditional work.
I think where I had my moment of clarity with Ives was when I understood his take on counterpoint. His was not fugal or question-and-answer in format. His idea of counterpoint was having one orchestra play over another one, or one tune or motif jarringly juxtaposed against its antithesis. He was trying to recapture the chaos of hearing music in the real world, where a church carillon could ring against the sound of a marching band passing by. Both musical entities exist independently but in their cohabitation they form something new.
I think one of Ives’ great strokes of genius was his use of microtonally tuned pianos. To most western ears that stuff sounds excruciating, the strings of one piano intentionally tuned a quarter tone sharp or flat from the other piano. Why did he do this? He was not trying to be funny or annoying. He was recreating the sound of his local church musicians, who did not know an out of tune piano from an in-tune one, and whose musical gifts were conspicuously lacking. That amateurism was the sound of American music to Ives. Singers could not sing, string players could barely scratch out a melody even remotely in tune, and multiple ensembles played all at once in abject cacophonies.
Going back home. At the Bakeway where, almost as if by plan, someone is absolutely screaming as loud as he possibly can.
