Lost In The Music

I had to pick out a relatively easy piece. I only had a month and a half to learn it. That should be adequate time for a lot of the classic canon but not the way I do it (five minutes every third day until two weeks before performance). Several Chopin waltzes fit the bill and I picked one out and started hacking away.

Plenty playable if you could tell what the notes are, but that seems to be a closely-held secret. This one is in the key of Doesn't Matter, because he plans to change keys every half page or so (in musical terms, "on a whim"). And not necessarily from the major to the relative minor, which would be a sensible thing to do if you simply must mix it up. That's something we're used to. You start out sunny and then slide into the relative minor to demonstrate depth of character. It shows you are capable of entertaining morose thoughts without fear and redeeming yourself and humanity later. Or the other way around, if you prefer to be thought of as complicated and dark. Sometimes he lurches from E major to A flat minor and straight into the Spanish Inquisition, which nobody expects.

There's something about Chopin's key changes that makes me suspect he did it whenever he was warding off a seizure.

So there we are putzing along in some respectable key and building toward some kind of climax and all of a sudden we have slid into an entirely unrelated trough of a key and there's no clambering out. And after two or three measures, when he thinks you've recovered and can find your way around, he starts heaving in accidentals. (An accidental is a note that is not a member in good standing of the most recently applied scale. And they are called accidentals because we don't know if the composer meant to do that.) There are double-sharps and double-flats and other such things to trip over in the dark. The goal here is to make sure that none of the notes in the score appear at first glance to correspond to the ones he wants you to play.

And then he puts in some note--some individual note--that bears so little relation to any of the other notes on the page that you have to study it sideways. You check the history of recent key changes searching for clues to its true paternity, and conclude, ultimately, it really is D double-flat natural ("K," or "bastard").

Yes, he really does want you to play that note that sounds perfectly horrible with all the other notes. And he's a right genius to do so. But you won't know that until you get the sucker up to speed and the note is just a fleeting thing, passing quickly, leaving behind an almost imperceptible but rewarding jarring of the senses. His accidental has become incidental. It's a drive-by.

When I was young, Chopin used to drive me crazy. I'd struggle with every note making sure I had the right one and not just something in the vicinity. I thought he wrote like that just to piss me off. Now I'm a better reader and don't take it so personally. I even appreciate him. I've already outlived him by 26 years, poor guy. I don't know that they've really pinned down what did him in. Consumption, probably, with adult onset preciousness and flare-ups of artistic temperament, but we can't rule out homicide.

Learning To Write From Chopin

When I was a kid, I figured Chopin was just mean. It seemed like enough of an imposition on my new skills to load up the key signature with flats and sharps, but then, just to mess with me, he'd flat the flats and sharp the sharps so that the page looked like it was all croutons and no soup. I took it personally. "If he wants me to play an E natural," I whined, "why doesn't he write that instead of making it a double-flatted F sharp?" People get mad when they feel stupid. Which, of course, is kind of stupid.

Well, you get over it. You grow and sharpen yourself up and realize that Chopin liked to hover and flit and dip on the black keys, which are actually easier to play, and was, if not affectionate, not overtly hostile to you at all. But he had eccentricities, and those became your problem. It's one thing to learn how to play three notes in the right hand to every two in the left. Or eight to six; or some other mathematically comprehensible challenge. You can get the hang of that pretty fast. Chopin likes to lull you into complacency and then slide in eleven notes in the right to six in the left. Then in the next measure, twenty-one notes in the right to the same six in the left. Or pi. Or some other thing with no gazintas in it. It's irksome. Everything's going along great and then all of a sudden a bazillion little notes flock in like birds on a wire, and you have to somehow jam the whole chirping mass into a little box without losing any.

First thing you try is to figure out roughly where some of the notes should line up, but it won't work. They won't go. The only way you can do it is to allow part of your mind to come loose. At first it's like a race, and your left hand keeps winning. But finally in one blessed moment of grace your mind lets go and quits trying to make sense of the thing, and there it is, your 21 notes flapping into the sky and back again, and that much more beautiful because Chopin has taken away your sense of control over the music. He's going to slay you with unpredicted beauty.

That moment when it falls into place is exquisite, like a miniature enlightenment, when you allow your mind to court chaos. It's like looking at those 3-D dot-pictures until something gives way and the image assembles and looms, and you can't imagine not being able to see it. It's a little surrender, containing its own relief. And it's something that gets easier with practice. In fact, my problem is not in letting part of my mind come unstrung but in keeping the whole damn thing from kiting away. I want all parts back together and home in time for dinner. I had to quit smoking pot years ago because I couldn't trust my mind not to stay out all night. It's a worry.

Or a jay, or whatever you happen to have on hand.

So for some things, a supple mind trumps a sharp one. The ability to play a screwy passage in Chopin is the same ability that makes writing possible, when it's done right. A writer stretching her thought-muscles tends to look, to an observer, a little distant and dim. But that's the price you pay for metaphor. If I want to describe something by means of something else, I have to cut my mind loose to bob about in experience and sensation until something chinks into place, and when it's right you can just about hear it snap together. You can't force it. I once read an article about writing in which the author said "writing humor is tough. It's as tough as a chicken-fried steak," thus making her own point. She wasn't cutting her mind loose. She was playing Family Feud. "Things that are tough: Survey SAYS?" Bong! Here are your top five answers, including Chicken-Fried Steak. Pick one and stick it in your sentence.

It's the difference between plunking a pigeon with a shotgun and sending a falcon out after it. The falcon will return to you, but you don't know where it's going. You gotta trust the falcon.

No point in trusting the falconer, though. She may be nodding in all the right places, but she looks a little distant and dim, and probably hasn't heard a word you said.