Rock & Bach

In Search of Lost Time is one of these books that don’t really end, and not just because it goes on for over 3,000 pages. I remember finishing it for the first time some six years ago and saying to myself, “Well, there’s no way around it. I guess I have to read the whole damn thing again.” It isn’t until Time Regained that you find out how the thing gets written in the first place, which is (strangely enough) what the book is about. My second time through is taking much longer: it’s true that I no longer have pop quizzes to keep me diligent, but it’s also because I can’t help wanting to read it backwards - everything and everyone in the book undergoes such incredible transformations that it’s nearly impossible to remember what they were like when you and Marcel first encountered them. You can almost feel yourself forgetting as the pages mount.

Brahms does things in reverse too: the first movement theme of the G major violin sonata never really sounds the same once you’ve heard what happens to it in the third movement. You go back to the first movement to hear what you remember and find that it’s no longer there.

The summer I spent in Boston I worked with a Harvard Law student who was an accomplished flautist and a ranter of the first order. I remember one particularly funny diatribe about jockish brass players and their endless talk of “chops” and “nailing” difficult passages, usually in works denoted by a digit instead of an ordinal number - “Dude, my teacher’s got nasty chops bro! He totally fucking nailed that shit in Mahler 5!” I don’t know any brass players, but anyone who’s been around piano players is familiar with this sort of thing - Prok 2, Rach 3, treacherous jumps, murderous tempi, jaw-dropping octaves, killer Feux Follets, insane 25-6, 10-1 in a minute flat, etc etc. It’s as though music were an extreme sport of some sort.

It’s sort of funny for me, since I’ve spent a lot of time around rock musicians on the opposite pole, people for whom technique is a four-letter word and musicianship means Yngwie Malmsteen:

Does it have to be like this? A lot of music I love doesn’t require a high level of physical dexterity (like Hank Williams) but a lot of music I love can’t be made without it (like Beethoven’s Op.109). I do know that for those of us who aren’t spectacularly dexterous, it’s well-near impossible to learn a difficult piece unless you really really want to, unless you love the piece so much you absolutely have to play it. I’ve been working on Op. 109 for months, but the one time I tried learning a Liszt etude I gave up inside of an hour.

Rachmaninoff liked to say that every piece of music is structured around a point of culmination, a moment that should arrive with “the sound and sparkle of a ribbon snapped at the end of a race.”

I could see this approach working better in some pieces than others - where would this moment be in the Hammerklavier sonata for example? Maybe the very end? I once saw a DVD of Alfred Brendel where he catapults his arms over his head and shakes his fists triumphantly upon finishing the fugue. It’s really comical but I guess it’s reason enough to celebrate, making it through a live performance of the Hammerklavier with your sanity and ligaments intact.

These moments do actually happen for me sometimes. In Proust it’s the party at the Princesse de Guermantes’ in Part Two of Cities of the Plain, with poor sickly Swann taking Marcel aside and asking him if he’s ever felt jealousy (he hasn’t yet, but boy will he ever).

In Days of Being Wild it’s the scene at his mother’s house in the Phillipines. I’ve watched this scene so many times I’ve memorized the voice-over:

On April 12, 1961 I finally arrived at my mother’s house. But she didn’t want to see me. The maids told me she no longer lived there. As I was leaving, I could feel a pair of eyes watching me from behind. But I was determined not to turn around. I just wanted to find out what she looked like. Since she wouldn’t give me that chance, I wouldn’t give it to her either.