Bard Music Festival. Is it 1999? or 2004? Are we listening to Shostakovich or Schoenberg? I don't remember. I simply remember being asked "but can you hum it?". Whatever it was that we had been listening to on that particular afternoon, the answer was "probably not". I wanted to respond that "you can't really hum Beethoven's 5th Symphony either" or at least I can't, at least not large parts of it. But I worried that perhaps that was just me. Perhaps I still worry, worry about whether I am forgetting, or if I truly never paid attention.
This memory comes to mind because my friend Patti asked me a question over dinner, before we attended a recital featuring Paul Barnes at Roosevelt University, a recital featuring the music of Philip Glass, including the new (2018) Piano Quintet. Patti asked me if I could describe the quintet, and I am embarrassed to say I could not. I could not describe the Beethoven either although I know it intimately, almost as if it resides in my bones. I knew I wrote about the Piano Quintet last April, and although I may have described the work, at least partially, I probably mostly referred to its emotional weight and resonance simply because this is what draws me into music. I am more interested in the way listening to music feels, the way the experience of listening shapes and alters space and perception and the emotional resonance of the conversation between musician and artist. And because it seems to me that each experience is unique, I am reluctant to read that blog post before writing this post as I fear it will alter my memory and understanding of what I heard.
Nonetheless, I was startled by my simple inability to describe the music itself. I felt I had fallen short, and I wondered why I bother writing about music at all, if I cannot remember it, or describe it, or hum it. I wondered if my memory has become so flawed, or if it was always thus. I wonder if it matters. I admit I've intentionally been trying to let go of the critical aspects of memory, the critically-comparative way of "so and so played x in a particular way, and since you do not you are not good enough" side of listening with my head instead of my heart. I wonder then, if I've lost something, and if so, if I have gained something else in return?
Then, later that same evening, with the opening notes of the quintet, memory came flooding in and I remembered the entire piece, as if I had just stepped into a deeply familiar well. All my memories descended and filled me up. I could hear the entire piece swirling around me, before it was played on stage and as it was played on stage, like a familiar old friend. And the music, this music, this performance, pulled me into its own space, the same sense of being enveloped in a space that was both simultaneously inclusive and expansive, the same feeling I had during those first two performances. Of course even as my head acknowledged that the music was the same, the conversation was different. Nothing, certainly not performance, is ever the same twice, and this performance, in this hall, with a different group of musicians, was not the same as my first experience of the piece. Yet it was equally satisfying. I heard the music and felt lifted and engulfed in open arms. And yet, in this hall, which was smaller than the Lied Center, the work took on a more brooding and meditative feel, similar to the feelings evoked listening to the rehearsal before the concert in Nebraska, and yet somehow more rounded, more comfortable with its own edges. The strings of the Chiara Quartet had sounded lighter and brighter to me, more airy, as if I was being lifted on wings, whereas in this performance the music felt closer. Once again I felt enveloped and carried upward, wrapped in cashmere and released into the light rather than carried on wings of air.
Barnes' playing was at once familiar and new, as it should be in a different setting, and I was once again entranced. All these things were running through my mind and my heart, but my thoughts were also at least partially shaded by a painting I had seen earlier in the afternoon, a painting by Jay DeFeo, a painting titled "The Annunciation" just as Glass's Piano Quintet is titled "Annunciation". During the brief intermission, I sat in the concert hall, reveling in the memory of the music, and thinking how wonderful it was that here I was in a concert hall on the first night of Passover, on Good Friday, the opposite end of the Christian calendar from the event called the Annunciation, and yet experiencing this confluence of art and music. I am sure that my reaction to the painting influenced my reaction to the music, just as I am sure that the way the first notes of the quintet resurrected my memory, wrapping me in its own cloud-like layer, also influenced my reaction to music I was hearing. I am not sure we can separate these things out of our experiences, nor that we should even try, every performance is a complexly layered conversation between artist and listener, of art, impulse, understanding, and experience, and it is this very layering that makes music, well, art.
So I suppose I no longer feel bad about not being able to describe the music. My ability to describe things may be poor. But my interest seems to remain solidly in the realm of feelings evoked, rather than the details of the thing itself, and apparently my head has limited capacity for things. Until I started writing this piece the music that most came to mind was the song of the birds when I stepped outside my door this morning. That Friday in Chicago, the music that filled my soul before the visit to the concert hall, before the museum, was the lilting sounds of high school students in the hotel restaurant and the sound of the street: wind and cars, tenor and bass, whispering altos, and the ringing high call of the wind. It is enough. I continue to be more interested in the conversation with the music, the bubble of space-time that music creates, than in the actual notes themselves. Ah yes, you may say, I am obviously not a musician.
The rest of the concert was wonderful as well. I had not heard any of the other pieces before, or at least if I had I did not remember them. But I think I had not. This has always been a struggle, describing something I have only heard once, and this time is no different. Through repetition my initial reactions are revealed and I become more invested in the music. In that sense, listening is like writing. I don't really know what I think until I write it down. I don't really understand what I heard until I hear it again, until I find a pattern in which to organize my own understanding.
Even though I thoroughly enjoyed the entire concert, the only other part of the concert about which I can really say anything was a piece from 2008, Four Movements for Two Pianos, the last piece. Perhaps I recall it as much because I was fascinated by the musicians, the intstruments, and the way these three aspects — music, artists, instrument — combined in distinct ways to produce something that seemed satisfyingly whole and beautiful. As for the music itself, once again I can't describe exactly what I heard, only that the music felt very introspective and personal to me, not so much music inspired by an idea, as in the Annunciation Quintet, but as music simply for its own sake. The two pianists, Winston Choi and Paul Barnes were completely different in the method, style, and temperament of their playing, and simply watching them play was fascinating. The instruments also were quite different: The piano played by Barnes was bright, sharp and clear, and he made the piano sing with a dancing lyricism. The other piano had a softer timbre, a more rounded and rolling sound to its tones and Choi elevated its sound into an alternating dance of harmony and melody with Barnes. It seemed like music of opposites, of contrast merging into one single voice. Old and new, soft and sharp, round and jagged. Harmony.