Adam Writes:
The Fragility of Mozart
I’ve been playing that one Mozart piano sonata every young pianist learns when they take formal lessons (Sonata #16 in C major, K.545). Specifically the middle movement. I often have this problem with Mozart (more, I think, than other composers) where most of a piece is… fine. And then one movement is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. I want to play the whole sonata. But I’m not sufficiently interested in at least one or two of the movements to make the commitment.
Maybe it’s me.
My recent labors with this particular andante-movement have taught me that Mozart is one of the people most vulnerable to misplaying. A bit of context. I learned this piece for the first time perhaps 20 years ago and have been playing the middle movement on-and-off ever since. It’s one of my favorite melodies. One of very few pieces that simultaneously feels like it’s floating and like it has gentle forward motion. Like floating down a river.
Mozart’s Deceptive Tranquility
But that tranquility is deceptive. There is that middle section in a contrasting minor key. There is that part in the contrasting middle section where the key switches back to major but it’s not in a key you’d expect. (Maybe YOU would expect F major in a piece that’s otherwise in g minor. I would not.) And there are lots of what my old music teacher Roger would call “crunchy” chords. One of the most interesting (and infuriating) things about Mozart is you never know just how much to emphasize those passing-chords, non-chord-tones, and so on.
I remember learning in school that Stravinsky based his composing style on them. But I don’t especially like Stravinsky. Still, I always want to lean into them like crazy. But in doing so I sometimes feel like a shipper writing fan-fiction. How much of what I’m doing is reading between the lines and how much is just making stuff up that was never there? And how much does any of that matter?
That last one is easy. In Mozart, it matters quite a bit. I will go to my grave saying that Mozart is more difficult to play than Liszt. Just going by the statistics. I have heard many more wrong-headed interpretations of Mozart than of Liszt. Usually the problem is that the player is trying to slow down an Andante-movement too much and the result is that the piece sounds static. The flip-side of Mozart’s great delicacy is that it’s so easy to foist an interpretation on a set of notes that they simply will not support.
What is a Sonata?
I think the problem is one of scale. In the 19th century, a piano sonata was a symphony in miniature; so too, a piano was viewed as an orchestra in miniature, capable of approaching, if not achieving, all of the shades of color and texture. It got to the point where a virtuosic composer like Charles-Valentin Alkan (someone I’ve mentioned in these pages before) wrote a Concerto for Solo Piano in which he designated some of the parts to be played as if by solo piano and some of the parts to be played in the style of an orchestral reduction. It’s a beautiful piece, even if such shades of meaning are lost to me when they don’t outright feel like The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Mozart and his crowd (Haydn, for one) viewed the sonata differently. For them, a professional piano-player’s role was to play concertos and chamber-music (given the size of the orchestra in those days, those two roles could be almost indistinguishable) and sonatas were considered education/preparation for such work. The Classical-era sonatas may be so, so beautiful and graceful. But attempting to infuse them with the grandeur of a Romantic-era sonata just puffs them up to no purpose. Oh, and takes away any charm they might have.
The Best Mozart Piece is by Rachmaninoff. Fight Me.
I don’t want to wade too far out into the weeds on this one but I do want to say that there are pieces of similar beauty and delicacy later composers. Rivaling or even exceeding Mozart. Pieces that strive to be true miniatures rather than striving to encompass the whole world. To the point where it feels like the best works of Mozart were written by people who are not Mozart. Listening to the gorgeous middle movement of Sonata #16, I want to compare it to a Rachmaninoff Prelude (Op 32 No. 5) that has the same sense of inner stillness. The same sense of gentle forward motion. But for some reason it just feels more complete. More beautiful. More of a perfect balance between simplicity and complexity. Maybe more than anything else, it has that sense of ineffable longing that the best of Mozart’s melodies express better than almost anyone else.
I don’t say that about all of Rachmaninoff’s work. I like a lot of his stuff. And I think some of it is too busy. And then there are pieces like this that just feel like heaven. I am not a follower of Valentina Lisitsa’s work, as a rule. But listen to her control of dynamics and the way she brings out the lower voices of this prelude. If this is not perfection then no such thing exists.
I always do this. I always spend a bunch of pages talking about music and then remember that I also want to talk about what I’ve watched and read as well. Ok. I’ll keep the other two short.
I watched (I should say rewatched) this funny video by John Bois. If you look at me and say: he seems like he watches a lot of quirky videos by sportswriters, you should, as they say in Wheel of Time, have your ears boxed on general principle. But I happen to really like this guy. And if you can watch this video about a college football match that was decided 222-0 (yes you read that correctly) without laughing… Well, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.
Wheel of Time: The Path of Daggers
And yes I am persisting in listening to Wheel of Time. I just started Book 8, The Path of Daggers. I’ve noticed my feelings about the series growing quite paradoxical. On the one hand, it bothers me that it feels like it’s all strong personalities all the time.
Everyone has a jaw that could cut glass and eyes that could bore holes through stone and the most you can hope for is a motherly disposition that conceals a granite resolve.
I suppose that given the stakes of the conflict, everyone will have to have a pretty stern resolve. But maybe not. Maybe what bothers me about the story is this idea that everyone has to have an iron will and the martial arts training to match. And that those are the characteristics the narrator consistently emphasizes. To the exclusion of other types of personality, or even of nuance, sometimes. Is that what the apocalypse is going to look like? The more people with an unblinking stare you have on your ‘side’ the more likely you are to win? It just doesn’t feel right. How about I grant you that an iron resolve is important if you grant me that it isn’t always visible in the intensity of the gaze and the set of the jaw.
But I said it was a paradox. And the paradox is that my favorite character is Nynaeve, who is the angriest and orneriest and most jaw-set of them all.
It’s not complicated when you think about it. I’m affianced to a woman whose sense of righteous anger is pretty strongly developed. Like Nynaeve, Anuja is a healer precisely because the idea of people in pain, of people in trouble, fills her with a sense of injustice. She can spend hours playing with her nephew (and who wouldn’t? He is a peach.) And then go right back to being furious about a political-economic issue. I also feel a lot of sympathy for Nynaeve spending the bulk of the series apart from her Intended. Being 7000 miles from my partner for the bulk of the present apocalypse has not been fun.
The reunion between these two characters was particularly poignant for me.
I feel very strongly that fantasy works as a metaphor for communicating emotions that can’t be stated directly. That’s probably why I don’t like to debate the finer points of the world’s mythology. I don’t find such things relevant to my experience as a reader.
The Reunion of Lan and Nynaeve
But let me set the scene for you. Nynaeve’s issue as a character has been that in order to use her magic reliably, she must surrender to it. But Nynaeve doesn’t know how to surrender. So only when she gets truly angry can she circumvent this ‘block’ on her power. This is never a problem for her when she heals someone, because seeing someone in need of healing makes her angry.
But then she is the target of an assassination attempt, trapped in a sinking boat, rapidly using up a pocket of air and trying to summon the anger to break out of the boat. She can’t do it. She can’t find the anger; only sadness. It’s deeply relatable that another person’s pain fills her with anger, but not her own. And yet. She experiences that sadness so thoroughly that she surrenders. And just like that, her block is gone and she can access the magic.
Immediately after this happens; indeed, before she is able to reach the surface, a man’s hands fasten around her and help her to the surface. Her first instinct is to punch him in the face. But she survives, and so does he.
The circumstances and the details are different. But the idea that their separation should be marked, not by tears and embraces but by violence and the violent breaking-down of boundaries is one that resonates with me.
When I saw Anuja in London after about 18 months’ absence, almost her first words to me were: “can you take a shower?” And the number of times we cried in each other’s arms over the next few days was. Well. It was a lot. What I’m saying–and what I’ve said before–is it wasn’t a nice reunion. But it was necessary. And beautiful, in its way.
The point is that I am no more interested in the traditional damsel-in-distress than I am in the traditional tearful reunion. Show me a reunion where the crying goes on way too long until the audience gets uncomfortable. Or where the two lovers reunite not with a kiss but with a slap. I don’t think the latter is especially realistic. But not everything has to be.
Erika Writes:
Florida: Land of Iguanas, Desserts, and the Anti-Gay Agenda
The weather report here has warned of falling iguanas. Yes, I do mean that literally. Iguanas (not native to Florida, btw,) become stunned and fall from trees when the weather drops below 40 degrees. And so I’ve been thinking of iguanas a lot. It’s been a long time since I read Night of the Iguana (I created props for a production of the play many years ago) but I do understand the symbolism of the iguana–the idea of straining against one’s bonds, and the whole theme of being trapped that’s a part of the play. Plays aren’t the easiest thing to read. But if you do like reading them, Night of the Iguana isn’t a bad choice.
It’s either iguanas or the fact that Florida has named an official state dessert… that isn’t key lime pie. And the fact that our legislators spent time debating this and deciding that we already have an official state pie (obviously key lime pie) and therefore the official state dessert could be strawberry shortcake and the official state pie could be key lime pie. I often tout the importance of embracing the “and” but this seems a little beyond, even for me. Especially when we’ve got “Don’t Say Gay” bills proposed in both the Florida House and Florida Senate right now. (For the record, I stand in favor of enjoying both key lime pie and strawberry shortcake and against “Don’t Say Gay” bills. In case you were wondering.)
Do We Really Have to Talk about Banning Books Again?
I’m going to take a moment to get some book-related thoughts out of the way here before I get into what I’ve actually been reading this week.
I’ve written about book banning a couple of times—back in September during Banned Books Week and then again, about a month ago when Maia Kobabe’s book Gender Queer was the subject of a whole lot of news stories and attempts at book banning. Book banning has been on my mind a lot this week. Between “Don’t Say Gay” bills, mayors calling for purges of LGBTQ books, and the removal of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the graphic novel about the Holocaust, because of “language and nudity,” I’ve been really angry about books lately.
Banning books is dangerous. Banning books and the destruction of knowledge has preceded human disasters. Access to books is essential for children to grow into thinking adults who are prepared to deal with changes in the world. There’s been an ongoing pushback against teaching critical thinking skills to children, claiming that it teaches children to question the teachings of their parents—the vision and values that parents want their children to have as adults.
Critical Thinking
When we don’t teach critical thinking we don’t equip children with the skills to adapt, to ask questions and to grow. When an organism fails to adapt it becomes extinct. Furthermore we can’t just drop children unprepared into the adult world without preparing them for how to make decisions using those critical thinking skills, we have to teach it, no matter how scary it can be to let go.
Anyway… go read some of these banned books if you haven’t. Go read Maus and go read Gender Queer and go read Alex Gino’s books. And then read Newberry Honor and Stonewall winner Kyle Lukoff, whose books Adam introduced me to last year, and who has spoken about his own experience with censorship. (I am anxiously waiting for April when his new book Different Kinds of Fruit is released–just in time for a birthday gift for me, too.)
I am the writer and the reader I am, in part, because I had access to controversial books. The kinds of books that led me to places where I could reflect on my own thoughts and feelings and really explore my own thoughts and feelings, and form the questions that have shaped the person I am now. My parents gave me Maus to read when I was a kid. They gave me The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was curious about socialism and communism.
Reading literature about things I was learning, reading literature contemporary to things I was learning was so important in shaping my understanding that things don’t happen in isolation.
It Were Greek to Me
I’ve been getting into Katee Robert’s Neon Gods, a contemporary retelling of Hades and Persephone. I’ve got a ways to go but I’m already very glad that the next book in the Dark Olympus series (Electric Idol, a retelling of Psyche and Eros, is due out next month.) I was captivated by sentences like, “Crossing the River Styx is difficult for the same reason leaving Olympus is difficult; from what I hear, each step through the barrier creates a sensation like your head will explode. No one voluntarily experiences something like that. Not even Zeus.”
Read Rachel Wiley. Thank Me Later.
I was hoping to get to Rachel Wiley’s new book Revenge Body this week too, but I haven’t been able to, so instead I went back to her book Nothing is Okay. I can’t find my favorite poem from the book online for you (“Sleeping Giants”) but “When We Were Kings” may be my second favorite. Go read “Sleeping Giants”–it’s one I wish I could find on YouTube and add to my playlists–and as someone who writes poetry, one that I have read again and again and hope that my own work one day is as moving.
Cello-Binge
Lest you think that all I ever listen to is viola music and pop music, I’ve been on a cello binge this week. A few nights ago, That Cello Guy showed up in my YouTube recommendations with a recording of Faure’s “Pavane.” For all my railing about Romantic music, this piece by Gabriel Faure (whose work bridges the end of the Romantic period and the beginning of the modern period) is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music I know. I watched the video, and before it was even over I’d sent it to Adam.
That Cello Guy also has a really amazing recordings of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio.” And he teamed up with Tina Guo to play Vivald’s Concerto for Two Cellos. That plus all six of the Bach cello suites have made up a lot of what I’ve listened to this week. I enjoyed this discussion about some of the music theory involved in the well known Prelude in G Major, too. Even if you’re not much into music theory, it’s interesting to learn about how it works–it really shows you the genius of Bach as a composer.
Farewell to Meatloaf
On the pop music front, it’s been a few nostalgic spins of Meat Loaf and the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack. I’ve been listening a little bit to The Pet Shop Boys, too. The conversations about music theory brought up “Domino Dancing,” which is a good example of the circle of fifths.
I watched Abbott Elementary this week–all six or so episodes that are out so far. It was good, but painful to watch at the same time. Knowing how teachers are actually struggling with the real issues that the show turns a humorous eye on was hard.
I’ve been watching a bunch of Bon Appetit test kitchen videos, too. One of the things that has been the hardest for me to adjust to with the disabilities is that I can’t stand up to cook the way I used to. And when I am standing, I still need to have my walker nearby. It’s a slow process to adjust to cooking that way and I’m still working on it. I’ll master it eventually, but in the meantime, I’ll get some vicarious thrills online. I dipped back into Adult Wednesday Addams this week, too. The whole series (fourteen episodes, I think plus one or two additional “Ghoul’s Night” bits that are related content,) are a lot of fun. My favorite happens to be “Catcalls”–it’s nice to see someone act out the feelings so many of us have. I’d have a hard time choosing between “Planned Parenthood,” “Babysitting” and “The Job Interview” for a second favorite.
With a few days of cold weather plus what’s likely to be a few days of required rest here (I did a little too much the other day) maybe I’ll find a good movie or two for next week. I’m hoping to get to Shiva Baby soon, but I’d love some recommendations if you’ve got them.
