The Elgar Sanction

It says up there at the top of the page ‘Learn and become what you are.’ In a surprise twist I love music, it turns out. I’m following the trail of why I’m so captivated lately by watching classical music performances.

I thought the thirty year hiatus I took from playing music after I quit the saxophone in eighth grade meant music wasn’t for me, but now I know different. I just got scared off. I couldn’t succeed by learning the saxophone the way I could learn everything else: by reading. About 98% of my self-worth as a child came from being able to learn things quickly and memorize things readily. But musical instruments don’t work that way. They reward faithfulness over the long term. You can’t learn about the instrument. You have to learn the instrument itself. And you have to learn it with your whole self. It’s my body that practices the banjo, not the part of my brain that I’ve always relied on. Even the parts of my brain that are involved are more like muscles than anything else. Let these fingers do this thing, repeat.

It wasn’t really the saxophone that did it, if I want to be candid. It was an older memory of a little lip-synch number as a kid. I got my blood up to do it, then just lost my nerve at some belittling remark. Later I bombed out on the saxophone. We had auditions and I was afraid I would fail, so I tanked, and then I decided it must be that I was bad at music and so good riddance. Back to things that only involve my head. My body could go elsewhere and mind its own business.

But there is just no way around it. If you want to work toward learning a musical instrument, the two of you are going to be spending a lot of time together. You can pray for it to work like in The Matrix, where you get a hose plugged into your brain and then you have skills, but I don’t think it’ll work. I can’t sit down and wind up my metronome without thinking of an early memory I have of sitting in my room trying to fill a page with perfect handwritten ‘5’s. My father was a confirmed believer in the power of repetition to produce learning, and I had to get those 5s right before I could play. I didn't like it, and I don’t know now if it was a good or bad, just that it was memorable.

Now that I’m starting to log some time focusing on my practice, it’s changing the way I listen to music.

For one thing, I’ve learned that if I want to listen to music it’s best if I watch it. That’s my favorite way to listen: find a performance on YouTube, and watch the musicians play. That gets to the heart of the thing: it’s a musical performance. I understand the quest for perfection that leads to constructions of perfect performances through splicing and editing, but the performance that occurs all at once, that’s the thing that I love to see.

This clip from the GoYa Quartet takes you to the beginning of the third movement in one of Beethoven’s early string quartets. Number one, in fact. They’re very accessible, with just a little bit of context. I knew that Beethoven was famous for the ‘Scherzos’ that he liked to use for his third movements, and when I watched that performance I saw why.

The word ‘Scherzo’ means ‘joke.’ The piece is four minutes of dancing bows and smiling musicians. I can almost hear their teachers reminding them they are the ones who turn those marks on that page into music. If the music dances, it’s because they made it dance. It’s a joke! Make it laugh! And you can see them remembering they’ve got to play it with a scherzo in their heart. They’re a delight to watch. They are the Scherzo.

I wouldn’t feel the same way about that piece by listening only. I like the performance element; the relentlessness of time. The time alone at the piano with a big monster of a score and a recital date circled in red on a calendar. Time starts, and it’s all just going to happen. I think Anna Federova’s famous recital of Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto has my personal favorite three seconds in the performing arts. The moments when she sits and faces the piano, orchestra just out of frame, audience in the background. She herself starts time by hitting the solo opening chords on the piano, and then it’s like a Saturn V rocket blasting off for the next 48 minutes. Good, bad, or ugly, it’s all fixin’ to happen. Tick tock, tick tock.

I think the tension between the public performance and the very private preparation is compelling to me. And then the immense gulf between the experience she is having and the experience the listener is having. Same room, same sounds, yet no comparing their experiences.

And then there’s this. Jacqueline du Pre playing the Elgar Cello Concerto with her husband Daniel Barenboim conducting. I mostly know her story through its mythic telling in Hilary and Jackie, which I know to be controversial. There is no controversy whatsoever about her genius, and certainly no doubt about it in this performance. The time-stamp link wouldn’t work, but if you want to skip straight to the musical equivalent of a sweet action scene, go to about 9:50 or so. You’ll hear the tail end of a quiet section, then a couple of minutes of stuff you can’t understand how she does. I’m completely transfixed by imagining the journey from reading those passages in the score for the first time to executing them perfectly. If you stay until 12:55 you’ll see the smile musicians give after they made it to the other end of the tightrope.

It’s the tightrope-smile. There. It has a name now, if it didn’t already. It’s my favorite smile to see, though it has a tinge of something else. She did not have an easy life, nor an easy relationship with her cello, I don’t think. Her posture catches the eye. She huddles around the cello as if she needs its warmth to stay alive.

When I see soloists perform, I think I respond because I imagine a recital as a kind of emergence. As a moth comes from a cocoon, the pianist comes from a cabin in Siberia, or maybe New Hampshire, where the winters are worse.

I wonder if I’m not as compelled by the image of a lonely girl in her room trying to write a page full of perfect 5’s as I am by a musician practicing the tricky fingerings of a thorny passage.

I want to see myself in these performers. I want to think I’m doing the same kind of thing when I practice Sugar Hill. Look at the amazing grandiosity inherent in me just talking about myself at all with regard to music and these folks, and dragging my poor banjo into it. Well, on the one hand it’s art, and that’s what we’re talking about.

And on the other hand if there were fine print under the tagline ‘Learn and become what you are’ it would say the joke’s on you if you think you’re going to like everything you find. It’s like the Greek poet Sappho wrote, “If you’re squeamish, don’t turn over rocks.” She meant if you look inward toward self-examination, sooner or later you’re going to find out things about yourself you really wish were different. There is a strong desire to gently lower that rock back down and forget those squirming things under there.

I am very squeamish, but I try and turn over the rocks anyway, when I notice them sitting there. I have a lot of narcissism in my psyche to contend with, and so I don’t like a lot of what I find under those rocks. The grandiosity, that’s just horribly embarrassing. But everyone who knows me already knows what I’m like, so I may as well not be the only one in the dark about it.

Grandiosity as a character trait probably gets its start as a response to feeling worthless, or something like it. That seems like a proposition I’d lay a wager on. If I’m more conscious of that tendency in myself and accept that it’s true whether I like it or not, I have a shot at growing and finding my level.

After I go watch some more music...