I’ve been letting myself think with the moon changes a lot recently. I recognize that my enthusiasm, ability to focus on tasks, interest in things, etc. it’s all quite variable. There are weeks when I feel really engaged and happy with what’s going on and others where I feel stuck, and in feeling stuck, I also feel like I’m sliding backwards, drowning, not keeping up, running out of money, those sorts of things. Without some sort of regular system to think through these changes in attitude, they all feel quite overwhelming. Shifts in mood can feel totally invalidating of the emotions, aspirations, desires felt in other moods. And then there’s a super-ego-ish persona looking out at all of this and shaking his head, saying, look it really doesn’t matter all that much what you’re feeling, we have a consistent image to present to the world, and you’re not going to feel the same in a few days anyway, so burry all that and lets just keep something consistent going that won’t be confusing and cause complications.
This is really how it feels a lot of the time; there’s some more nuanced state that I’m aware of if and when I have the time to really think about what’s going on internally, and those experiences arrange themselves more or less around a central more consistent image of myself that I try to maintain for the outer world. Actually, it’s not just for the outer world. Really, it’s more so that I’ve recognized all this changeability and I need some central reference point. Which assures me that there is some consistency in myself, even if it doesn’t always feel like that moment to moment.
Like, two weeks ago, I was really into these two Mozart piano sonatas, no. 14 and 15. I would listen to them on the way to and from the studio. No. 14 is a pretty well known C minor sonata that had a huge effect on Beethoven and is played a lot. I hadn’t really listened to no. 15 much before this. I was listening to the Glen Gould recordings. No. 15 sounded really strange, intentionally awkward. This listening was also before it started staying below freezing in Atlanta, so I was doing this listening while walking barefoot to and from the studio and thinking generally about awkwardness.
One of the ways theoreticians analyze classical music, especially the music of Mozart’s time is through a system called Topic theory, in which theoreticians look at the styles being referenced within the structure of a piece. Does this melody that Mozart is using sound like something you’d hear in church, in a bar, in a big government celebration? Classical music, like contemporary art now, would pick freely from the entire sonic culture that surrounded it and recombine those elements in its distanced and observational space of music which served no social function except to be listened to (as opposed to being for something like religious ritual, court dancing, celebration, etc.)
I was thinking about this sort of loosely with the 15th sonata. The main theme for the first movement has two things about it that really stick out. The first is that it sounds very contrapuntal, like it would be used for a fugue. That gives the piece a seriousness. Imitative counterpoint, which is what fugues use, happens in religious and academic music. Especially by the time Mozart is writing this piece. So it has a sort of serious tone. But that’s more from the overall shape of the melody. At the same time, it’s quite unbalanced, the first half of this melody moves almost entirely downwards and by step, the second half leaps all the way back up to the beginning register in large jumps.
I couldn’t help but associate this piece with Glen Gould himself. Gould was a reclusive Canadian pianist who spent most of his career recording, never performing live. He had a way of playing that was entirely unique among pianists who have had big international careers. He played sitting very low in a chair that he carried with him everywhere and which he referred to as a family member. He leaves much more space between notes than most other performers, he sings uncontrolledly while playing. There was no standardization of the sustain pedal at Mozart’s time, but most performers use pedal when playing his work because (I’m generalizing) it makes sense to them and to our contemporary ears. Gould didn’t use the pedal though. I don’t think it was for the sake of historical accuracy strictly speaking. He uses the pedal sometimes when playing Bach. I think the dry, detached way he plays this and the other Mozart sonatas is purely his own aesthetic preference. That sort of character is how I’d describe the character of the 15th sonata.
It feels awkward, a bit pompous and a bit reclusive. Much of the accompaniment is quite simple with clear topic references to innocence, and childishness. These qualities also feel like they apply to Gould. Classical music is an artistic space that has such an intense need for a deep and somewhat conformist respect for tradition. I know that sounds a bit extreme, but what I mean is that the musicians are spending immense amounts of time from a very young age alone with these works of music and trying to learn how to play them. They are influenced by lineages of teachers and by the recordings and performances they can listen to. There is a premium placed on individuality but within a very small window of expressive orthodoxy.
Gould sits very much at the corner of that window. So much so that most of his playing outside of Bach isn’t listened to much. There are little phrases classical music people will use like “oh, he’s an excellent interpreter of Bach,” “x has a real sensitivity to…” I guess there really isn’t anything all that wrong with that. It shows that most of how people make their careers and their identities as pianists is focusing on a specific era of music. Which also makes sense technically since the keyboard changed over all this time and while playing Bach and Liszt aren’t totally incomparable, the technique is definitely different and it’s be a stretch to hold those differences in one pair of hands.
Or maybe that’s more of a historically aligned way of putting it. That emphasizes the importance of the respect for tradition, the pedagogical model in which performers are getting inside the sensibility of the composers they are performing. Even when historical performance isn’t a focus, this is something that most performers would say they try to do at some level, to access the sensibility of the composer and to convey what that composer was trying to convey in the work.
Maybe Gould would say he’s trying to do that as well. Probably he would. But he manages an individuality, a refusal to go along with the performance tradition as it existed at his time, which is really remarkable. Leonard Bernstein accused Gould (in a sort of friendly way, in front of the audience, directly before a performance) of completely disregarding what Beethoven had written. He agreed to perform with Gould but under the condition that the audience knew that, while he was intellectually interested in what Gould was doing, he didn’t want to give the impression that he in any way agreed with the interpretation of Beethoven that he was participating in as a conductor.
The 15th sonata, in the Gould performance has this sort of insistence. It feels instantly awkward, but it takes itself seriously in that awkwardness. It starts with an unbalanced theme trying to be religious and somber but supported by an innocent and childlike accompaniment.
I started going back and forth between Gould’s recording and Mitsuko Uchida’s. I love Uchida’s playing, but I was really surprised listening to this Mozart. She made things make sense. The awkwardness turned into a gallant stateliness. Maybe it still sounds a bit ridiculous, but in a courtly, Rococo way: certainly far more at ease with itself than the Gould version.
And yet, the performance isn’t more enjoyable for that ease. There’s a smoothness to Uchida’s interpretation that is far closer to what is conventionally expected of a world class pianist. She gives the piece a character and makes that character seem gracious and at ease in its surroundings. Gould stops at making a convincing character.
This was a really long tangent on something I didn’t necessarily want to talk about all that much. I don’t really feel that I’ve said all that much worth saying or that fully expresses the connections between this sonata, my emotional swings, walking barefoot, and the cycles of the moon.
The original point I was trying to get to was that I am really not drawn to this music currently. The emotional strength that it had over me two weeks ago isn’t there at all. I can see that at some level I still really care about it, because I go on tangents like these, but really, I have very little desire to listen to the music itself right now, and it’s only that mediating, long-view internal voice that is able to point out: “see, you do still care about this thing.”
The growth period of the moon from new to full has taken place over these last two weeks. At the new moon, I felt like I’d retreated deep into a shell. A lot of childhood thoughts were coming up in a safe internal way. As a young person listening to classical music, I really idealized Gould’s life. The idea that someone could just play an instrument in front of recording devices, that seemed amazing to me. I was a pretty social kid, but I definitely had a loner side that came largely from feeling uncomfortable and not in control of the task of self presentation. Classical music helped in some ways with that because it provided a set of archetypes for how to act which I felt more or less comfortable with. And within this, there was also space for varied and robust emotional expressivity, through interpreting pieces of music and through the personality tropes associated with being a classical musician, a flutist, a composer. I’d say that practicing a piece of music can be similar to the experience of emotional volatility mediated by the central super-ego-ish voice. In this case the super ego is informed not only by personal history and a need to make self conform to self, but the history of the piece of music, the stylistic assumptions of the period: an awareness of where the light shines in from that small window of interpretive orthodoxy.
Sunday was the full moon. I’ve treated this whole stage of the cycle as the time when the overall projects that will define the month are becoming clear. What are the throwing challenges in the pottery to look out for, how am I going to continue to set up the studio itself, when am I going to fire, what are my glazes? Those have been the major questions these past few weeks from a logistical standpoint. Emotionally, the cycle is not nearly so goal driven. I’ve been focused on thoughts and feelings of vulnerability, awkwardness, encrusted layers of socialization and their calcification around my sense of self. In the dark shell of the new moon, a very young and impressionable version of myself was made comfortable and, I think, that young version has felt bold enough to keep on coming out of the shell for the full waxing of the moon. But that then shows the incompatibility of some of that childishness with the needs, desires, practicalities of adult life. Glen Gould was not a happy child in his recording cavern in Toronto. I’m sure there were moments of happiness in there, but really looking at his life, there’s a deep desire to be seen, to engage with the outside world through more than just performance which never seems to have been fully satisfied.
But, Gould was able to discover and maintain a voice as a pianist that was relatively untouched by the performance conventions of his peers. And this was likely partly because of this isolation, which was both painful and claustrophobic and incredibly permissive and safe. It isn’t a simple question of the art justifying suffering, the suffering is more or less inevitable, though its violence may be more or less sanctified by society at large. The suffering of social ostracism is readily acknowledged and feared by most. But equally painful can be the polishing away of difference required by much of functional social life.
I wonder what it would be like to have a whole generation of pianists who somehow had the technique of Uchida but who had no reference for what Mozart was supposed to sound like. Or if there were simply no reverence for tradition and the score was treated more as a basic building block than as a sacred text. How many more widely varied interpretations could we have? How far could the score be stretched? Instead of stretching, the tradition we have buries into detail along a pretty singular, slow-changing and well trodden path.
There’s suffering either way, beauty, and the silence of what is left undone.