Saturday, August 06, 2005
(11:50 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Piano
I got tired of Chopin eventually and went digging through the archives of all my piano music -- what could I play now? It couldn't be Bach, though I have the whole Well-Tempered Clavier, because Bach requires too much repetitive detail-work, and I refuse to practice "for real" on the electronic keyboard I've had since junior high. I have all kinds of little anthologies of pieces that sound harder than they really are, since I was that kind of piano student, as well as some sheet music for Rachmaninoff's Humoreske -- the last piece my high school piano teacher assigned me before I went off to college, much too difficult to learn through my current method of using the piano as a procrastination tool, and requiring a full 88 keys in any case. There's always the Shostakovich piano concerto that I played with the Olivet orchestra once, but the first and third movements are, again, too much for an electronic keyboard, and the second is beautiful, but doesn't sound right without the orchestra.So: Beethoven. In particular, the Pastoral sonata. I had played the first movement in high school, but I was never one to move beyond the first movement -- but in this case, those are the best parts. I'm particularly enjoying the Scherzo, because it's quick and because it's so unlike the dreary Romantic melodrama that I'm so accustomed to.
I wish I wasn't still so stuck in my high school and early college accomplishments in this regard -- sometimes I sit down to play the same piece yet another time, and I'm just disgusted with myself. I keep doing it, though, playing at the piano every day until such time as I am able to play for real again. Who knows? That may be this fall. Maybe I'll find a practice room somewhere at the U of C and make a regular habit of it. Maybe I'll buy a metronome and pick up some music that others have recommended to me, like Bartok in particular.
And maybe today I'll go out shopping and pick up a couple new classical CDs, since that's another area where I'm still stuck primarily with my high school collection. Or I could get some jazz other than the generic Coltrane and Miles Davis. But over the past several years, I've been living with roomates for whom classical music is, at best, something they feel like they should learn to like. In some cases, I've expected to have the house to myself for a certain period and have thus put on the classical music, and they come home unexpectedly, and it's like I've been caught masturbating. After ten years of piano lessons and almost that many years of band, with many close friends who liked classical music even more than me, I now feel very isolated, among people for whom classical music is primarily something they hear on a diamond commercial or in an upscale retail outlet.
I think there are some people who, deep down, probably don't believe that classical music can be sincerely enjoyed -- for them, it's a status marker, or an "education" marker, and that's basically it. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there are some for whom classical music feels like something they're not allowed to enjoy, something that doesn't belong to them, and that there's a certain perceived duty to listen to particular kinds of music that do belong to them. It's what we might call wanting-to-be-normal -- except that currently there is no overarching meta-normal, no substantial culture against which the various "sub"-cultural groups can be "counter."
I don't think that wanting-to-be-normal is entirely pernicious -- in fact, recognizing the extent to which it's healthy and natural, or at least points towards attitudes and desires that are healthy and normal, would probably help in a lot of ways. I feel like in high school and in college and continuing even now, I have been striving for that meta-normal, however, for the marker of being a "cultured" person. That's right -- I've been striving to be in the cultural elite, but I'm working class, born and raised, and I often feel isolated from my family, from most circles I usually move in, etc., etc. Very tedious. But this very attitude may well be a result of my "cultured" privileging of high literary modernism as the normative standard of all human artistic achievement -- there is this constant sense of becoming-"artistic," becoming-"literary," as though it is a calling that descends upon one vertically from above. James Joyce, for instance, did not make an arbitrary decision based on free will -- he obeyed a command, which made him a sojourner in this world. Not every soul is, or indeed can be, a smithy.
The very fact that I enjoy Kandinsky, that he is my favorite painter, remains a testimony to my low-level teenage rebellion -- as in fact all of literary modernism could be said to testify to a kind of working out of the ultimate consequences of teenage rebellion -- an artifact of a long relationship with a girl my family frankly hated. Even more than me, she had this same striving in her, to overcome the working class thing, to join into this cultured, artistic world -- through art, through music. She brought out in me things that ostensibly weren't there -- a discontent, a frustration, a sadness, a feeling of unbelonging in my family and especially my church. The ultimate example is an evening when I had her over as well as several friends and we did a poetry reading. In the canonical version of the story, it was all her idea, and I felt just as stupid and awkward as everyone else as this domineering and snobbish young woman took things over again. In reality, the poetry reading was my idea, and it seemed kind of cool, and my dad even participated in it, and that was cool, too. The process of canon-formation is always interesting.
I couldn't stick with the good Nazarene girl who went on to become an accountant. I had to go for this more difficult case -- this striving person, unreliable and often infuriating. But as a friend who has known and observed me since high school recently said, laughing at me when I said that I'd like a more calm and reliable relationship, I can't get off the train now. More than "just" in relationships, this general sense of "unbelonging" that I feel, this dividedness -- it is becoming and has to become its own uncanny kind of wholeness, a kind of collectedness and remembering, as I take these pieces that were given to me for reasons that are no longer my own (piano lessons primarily as a way of participating in the church, college education primarily as a means of middle class upward mobility) and turn them against themselves.
