No Wisdom Here

Well, well—so here it is, the end of May and, astonishingly, nobody has asked me to give a commencement address. Isn’t that weird? Surely, surely, there has to be some school out there—for dental hygienists or nail technicians, anything, really, will do—that needs to hear my words of wisdom!

Of course, I tell you this since I have just watched Joyce DiDonato address the 109^th graduating class of Juilliard (video below). So that made me think: do I have any wisdom—wanted  or not—to give the world? Could I do as well as Joyce did, which, in a word, was excellent? After all, she covers a lot of territory in her four points, which are (and sorry to be a spoiler):

1.     You’ll never make it (that is, perfection in the arts is unattainable, so do what you do for the journey, not the destination….)

2.     The work will never end

3.      It’s not about you

4.     The world needs you

Point four, in fact, was something that I had just learned from Lucía, the lady who serves me great coffee in exchange for two dollar bills: a trade I’m always willing to make.

“You made me feel so much better last week,” said Lucía. “It was finals at the university and I was totally stressed out. So I just came and hear you play Bach suites, and I totally chilled out.”

OK—I play every day, and guess what? It’s no big thing for me, the sound of my cello is a familiar to me as the sound of my voice. So I don’t have the experience of someone never expecting to find a cellist in a darkened corner of a shop playing Bach from memory. But I frequently get comments like, “hey, that was fantastic,” or, in the case of the high school kid who drifted in and listened for twenty minutes, “hey, you play really well.”

My reaction?

Damned right I do!

There’s no vanity in it, as there would be if I had anything to do with it. Well, OK—I do have to show up, the cello does have to get stuck somewhere in front of me, and yes, I put in the famous 10,000 hours of practice that pretty much will take you where you need to go. But here’s the thing: I have had complete conversations with Lady while playing the cello and not missing a note. So somebody out there tell me: who’s playing?

(Note to Joyce—Hah! Bet YOU can’t do that!)

That, in fact, is another element of point number 2: it’s not about you. Joyce meant, I think, that we’re servants, of the listener, the play-goer, the opera fan, whoever has chosen to reward us with their time and, in some cases, their money. But I think there’s something that every one of us knows: when you’re in a flow—that magical, mystical moment when everything is happening just right—the paradoxical feeling (at least for me) is that I’m not doing anything. And I have had the feeling, by the way, while writing, as well as while playing the cello.

Today, no—flow isn’t something that I can turn on and off. Although it has to be said, it can be courted, lured, coaxed almost. The first thing to do is to decide, it’s OK to have a Piatigorsky day:

Let me explain: The famous Russian cellist played once for Casals, and how did it go?

Terrible.

And how did Casals react?

Extravagant praise and hugs.

So Piatigorsky left, thinking ‘hypocrite.’ And then, a couple of years later, the two met, and Piatigorsky asked the maestro why he had praised the terrible performance he had given.

“You played the triplets in measure 371 of the Dvorak in a way that I had never heard, never even imagined. And as an artist, I have to be grateful for and value every beautiful note or phrase. Let the others count up the mistakes, our job is to count the successes.”

(Note—the above is my, perhaps faulty, paraphrase of Casals’ actual words….)

The point? Having a day when it’s just average, whatever it is you’re doing, is perfectly OK. And that, by the way, is the open door through which flow, well, flows in.

“It’s about showing up,” I tell Montalvo, who has explained that he’s blocked, he can’t write, the muse isn’t speaking. So I tell him: this is what writing is. Then what do I do? Pound an imaginary keyboard on the table.

Montalvo is almost fatally 21 years old, which is by definition “high-risk” time. And Montalvo, having stolen a 3,000 dollar blue macaw, needs to get his act together fast, since he’s on probation, and in a drug rehabilitation program. So I’m doing adventures in paternity, which is a new one for me. So what did I tell him, what were my points of wisdom? What, in short, was my commencement address?

1.     You don’t have to fight every fight

2.     You should think before you speak

3.     You should get a schedule and stick to it, especially if you’re not working

4.     You should do something that enriches you (listening to music, exercise, whatever) the first thing in the morning

5.     If two or more people are telling you something, they’re probably right

6.     “Slow and steady” wins the race

7.     Everybody is the hero of their own life

8.     Nobody, on their deathbed, has ever said, “I wished I had worked harder:” it’s always about love and relationships

9.     That said, what you achieve and what you have are relatively unimportant

10.  If it’s a choice between doing what you “should” do and having fun, seriously think about having fun….

OK—confession: I really had to stretch for ten points. Hmm—could it be that it’s just, as well, this curious lack of invitations to give a commencement address?

Try and Maybe

“Who the hell is playing that Bach suite,” I asked Raf, the excellent gentleman at the café who gives me great coffee. Well, Bach now lives on iPhones—in this case Raf’s iPhone—so he was able to tell me.

“Rostro… …povich.. Some Russian guy…”

Could it be true? I went to YouTube to see, or rather to hear. And yes, the same Rostropovich that could be ardent, heroic, tender, raging, mythic, you-add-your-own-adjective in the Dvorak concerto was not so much playing the Bach suite as assaulting it.

Look, his was an age that knew relatively little about baroque interpretation…well, that’s what I was about to write. But then I looked up Anner Bylsma, who is famous for playing both the modern cello and the baroque cello. And yes, he plays in what is now tiresomely called “historically informed performance,” or sometimes “historically informed style.” And he’s only seven years younger than Rostropovich….

Back up for anyone who didn’t spend time in music conservatories in the seventies or eighties. Generally, students were taught to play music essentially the same way. True, if you were playing Bach, you weren’t supposed to have the lush, rich tone of Rachmaninoff. You aimed for simplicity, clarity, articulation; with Bach especially, you tried to bring out the musical ideas: the counterpoint, the harmonic progressions, the lines and phrases.

Into this picture emerged a new group of players whom everyone accused mentally and occasionally orally of being unable to tackle the technical challenges of the classical / romantic literature. Because let’s face it—the Dvorak concerto is not something you give to a beginning student. However, any kid in high school can saw his way through a Bach solo cello suite. They’re just not that hard.

And so the new group specialized in playing baroque music, learning the historical performance practices, refitting their instruments, using gut instead of metal strings, adopting a convex instead of a concave bow. And in those years, there was a lot still to be learned, and a lot of controversy about what was and wasn’t authentic.

The historically informed performers (hey, let’s call them HIPsters!) tended to bunch together and look down on the rest of us—or so it felt to me at least. And they also tended to play in ways that—however deadly correct—were completely uninteresting and unmusical.

The good news? Most of us grew up, began to listen to each other’s playing, and began to find out ways to make music that was—apparently / supposedly—consistent with what Bach and other Baroque composers might have wanted. But the point was that it was music, not an exercise in historical performance.

Well, I said we grew up, but did we? Because my current feeling is that the “early music people”—as we used to call them—have gone on, learned, and started to create some astonishingly beautiful music. Bylsma, for example, recorded the Bach suites twice: in 1979 and then again in 1992. And while I’ve heard criticism of the recordings from HIPsters, the recordings are out there and should be listened to, especially if you’re in the business of playing the suites.

That said, why was the young conservatory (I presume) student I heard playing his cello in the New York City subway rendering a Bach suite in exactly the same way as did Casals, all those many decades ago when he was championing the works? Has performance practice become fossilized? Are we to go on playing the suites as Casals played them for the rest of all time?

The curious thing is that—reportedly—Casals was never particularly satisfied with his recordings of the suites: he felt, as I recall, that they were all too slow.

For years, I disliked the suites, and felt that they were greatly inferior to the solo violin sonatas and partitas. Still, I played them, since they occupy a central place in the repertoire. And more—they are to cellists as the Bible is to Christians. There are other religious writings, as there are other pieces of music for the cello. But for many of us, a part of every day is given over to Bach, even if we don’t play Brahms or Beethoven on that day.

And now? I’ve started to like them a lot, and only discovered why yesterday. I was in the café, recording myself—but that wasn’t it. I was on a small stage, across from which was a long mirror. I thus had a perfect chance to watch myself play. And what did I see?

‘What was the big deal, for all those years’ was what I thought when I first saw myself. Because there was nothing physically difficult, nothing strained in my arms or neck or torso. My fingers were making funny little movements up and down on the fingerboard; my left hand was making funny little movements sideways with the bow. Wildly, for a moment, I conceived the idea that anyone, anywhere, could be taught in ten seconds to play the cello as well as I was playing. Silly little movements here, silly little movements there—presto, you’re a cellist!

It wasn’t that I made it look easy—it was that it was easy. I could have been playing the fastest movement, and still have given you directions to Plaza las Américas, our largest mall.

That was part of the equation. And the second part? Well, I turned to a clip of the Master himself—Casals—giving a master class to a young cellist at the University of California, Berkeley. The cellist plays correctly, if somewhat unimaginatively; Casals responds simply by playing the same passage as he would play it.

Sadly, however great he was as a cellist and as a musician—he was a bit lacking as a teacher. Yes, any student can hear that his teacher plays better than he or she does: he knows that, that’s not the point. The point is how to get to the level of the Master.

The student was playing the opening of the Brahms E minor sonata—a wonderful, expansive, Brahmsian theme. I heard what Casals was playing, and the difference between his rendition and the students: Casals was being metrically precise, giving each note its proper length, and playing strictly in time. In addition—ever so slightly—he was emphasizing the first and third beats. The effect was to give the passage the feel of a dirge, of something solemn and majestic that drove to a climax.

Casals could play it; he couldn’t explain it. And as I saw myself yesterday, I realized that I had taught myself what I believed about the suites. I had thrown out most of what people had told me, I had played them in wildly different ways in various tempi, and various styles. I had made them beautiful, I had made them ugly; I played them as I might play Brahms, or as I imagined Bach would want me to play them.

I stopped caring, you see. There have been other cellists, who have played them better than I. There will be other cellists, who will play—perhaps—them much better. But you know what? I don’t care, nor do I need to. And in that space, that freedom from the tyranny of teachers or the disapproval of audiences, I made my peace with the suites.

“Oh, no; oh, no!” cried Casals to the student. “Don’t separate the notes at all, don’t separate them at all!”

I winced.

I grew up with a lot of “don’t,” you see—with an occasional “do,” added for good measure.

I now live in “try” and “maybe.”

A Gala and a Controversy

Moral dilemma, here—should I sign the online petition asking for the Metropolitan Opera to dedicate the season’s opening gala to the LGBT community?

Factors in the decision—the season opens this year with a performance of Eugene Onegin, by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Right, so would dedicating the gala to the LGBT be a sharp stick in the eye for Vladimir Putin and the 430 legislators of the Duma who passed a draconian law outlawing even talking about homosexuality, much less getting down and…well, getting down? Somehow I don’t see it.

Nor is the Met’s choice of a Russian opera an endorsement of Putin and his law, given that the law is three months old, and the Met undoubtedly scheduled this years ago. You don’t run out and ask Anna Netrebko, whom the Associated Press called “the reigning new diva of the early 21^st century,” if she’s up for singing next week.

However, there is the fact that Netrebko is Russian, as is the conductor, Valery Gergiev. However, Netrebko came out on Facebook—that’s how it’s done, these degenerate days—with this statement: “As an artist, it is my great joy to collaborate with all of my wonderful colleagues — regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. I have never and will never discriminate against anyone.”

Well, good to know! It may not be a ringing denunciation of Putin and the wretched law, but it’s something.

Both Gergiev and Netrebko supported Putin in the past, but there’s no indication that they support the antigay legislation.

OK—but consider the fact that Tchaikovsky was homosexual, despite a two-and-a-half-month attempt at marriage—which left him drained and unable to compose. And though the Russian government is trying to deny that fact, Tchaikovsky mentions the fact himself in his letters. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

In any case, Tchaikovsky chose not to neglect social convention and stayed conservative by nature.[100] His love life remained complicated. A combination of upbringing, timidity and deep commitment to relatives precluded his living openly with a male lover.[101] A similar blend of personal inclination and period decorum kept him from having sexual relations with those in his social circle.[102] He regularly sought out anonymous encounters, many of which he reported to Modest; at times, these brought feelings of remorse.[103] He also attempted to be discreet and adjust his tastes to the conventions of Russian society.[104] Nevertheless, many of his colleagues, especially those closest to him, may have either known or guessed his true sexual nature.[105] Tchaikovsky's decision to enter into a heterosexual union and try to lead a double life was prompted by several factors—the possibility of exposure, the willingness to please his father, his own desire for a permanent home and his love of children and family. There is no reason however to suppose that these personal travails impacted negatively on the quality of his musical inspiration or capacity.

Well, we have a sad story, here—a gay man living in a troubled time. Russia then, and perhaps now, ran on “understandings,” according to one writer. The laws were on the books, but were they enforced? Well, you came to an “understanding” with whatever authorities you needed to and you were OK—until the winds blew in an unpleasant direction.

Another factor in the decision: the Met is not going onto Russian soil to do this gala—it’s taking place, of course, right at home in Lincoln Center. So it’s not quite like the Olympics, which will be taking place in Sochi, and which is expected to cost 12 billion.

There’s also the question of politics in art. It’s all very well to say that politics and music don’t mix, but in the past they certainly have, at least in some cases. Casals wouldn’t play in Spain for years, in protest of Franco. No one dared to play Wagner in Israel, until Barenboim did it—and he barely got away with it. 

Well, the Met is in an uncomfortable position. Prepare to be stunned, Readers, but opera is to gay men what softball is to lesbians. The LBT community might safely be snubbed, but the G? Tread carefully.

The good news? I’ve decided, no, I won’t sign the petition. But I have listened to the opera, and it’s a knockout….

It's happening, or not

 

 ("Out of Control, the Green Plague")

Damn, I made a lousy monk, and now I’m making a lousy failure.

It all started when I went to print the blook. 

“Do you study iguanas?” said the nice girl—sorry, I’m 55, she’s 25; this is not sexism, just ageism—and I had to say no, I just look at them.

A lot….

“I studied them for two summers, at the University in Humacao,” she reported.

Ah, the failure…or success…had started. Or not.

“We found an alarming explosion in the population,” she said.

I heard Franny snort from Wisconsin, or wherever she is.

“Well I could have told you that,” she said (although only to me, not to the girl.) It was rare that Franny omitted the comma is speech, but occasionally she did….

Second failure.

“So what’s the deal with this title?” she questioned.

She wasn’t supposed to ask. Nor, I suppose, was I supposed to tell her.

See?

It’s about my mother’s life and then her death and then somehow iguanas got mixed up in it all and I was confused and I wrote this thing.” I was a bit incoherent.

She found this unremarkable.  And went on to say that she’s off, soon, to do graduate work in limnology.

“Interesting,” I counter, “You know, my alma mater founded the first department of limnology in the states….”

“Oh yeah—I applied to Wisconsin,” she says.

And I instantly see here there. I leave the store and see the tabloid by the door.

“Plaga Verde” the headline reads. And goes on to completely out-do me in the iguana department. Here, dear Reader, is what THEY know about the iguana.

·      Iguanas can be eaten, mostly their tails, and may indeed provide a growth industry for Puerto Rico. (Well, we need something—our last big hit, Viagra, has its patent or whatever it is expiring soon….) 

·      Iguanas have not only invaded the airport, they’ve also caused several delays in flights, as they had to be swept from the runways (the iguanas, not the flights….). 

·      Not content with travel, the iguanas have also turned to shopping, in this case at the largest mall in the Caribbean, Plaza las Américas. Crossing the electric cables feeding the building as easily as they cross the branches in the trees, they have shorted out the electricity for the entire facility.  

I could go on, but it’s too embarrassing.

Although I will say that our good friend, that hunky Latin professor Rafael Joglar (whom of course they quoted) seems to have withheld some information from me.  (Maybe suspecting that I’m a failure….or, errr, success?)

I immediately go see my shrink (yeah, OK, I had scheduled the appointment a week ago….)

The next day was worse—or better.

This time, it was at the photo shop, as I needed to print the cover, a spectacular work by Taí.  She fails as easily as I succeed, dammit.

Two men are there, with pictures of Casals, and we speak of the great cellist, his mother Puerto Rican, his father Catalonian.  He ended his life in Puerto Rico—oh good, a second misplaced reference (although that’s not the term)—I may be failing after all!  

And there’s a museum of him in Old San Juan.

The gentlemen inquire about the cover, now printed. I explain.

“You know my aunt was terrified of death, and then had a stroke. She lingered on (seems like a redundancy—hmm, things may be looking up….) for two years, each day more fearful. Then she died,” the guy says.

The shopkeeper freezes.

“What?” we say.

“The door just opened,” she says.

OK.  I go to close it.  Turn, and say…

… “Oh, that was Franny—she never could miss a good conversation.”

They accept this as completely normal.

Never knew what a damn effort failure could be….