Poetry Reading

This month I've been trying to get back in touch with my creative side, with, shall we say, mixed results.  I've been writing some poetry, and this one was inspired by the Brahms G Major string quintet, one of his last compositions and one of the most uplifting chamber works in the repertoire.  Give it a listen if you're unfamiliar.  And try not to judge too harshly, blowing air through a metal tube is my main gig...

After all, for Brahms it was enough.

G Major was the lifespan, the cell, the nebula

Of love and warmth and dignity

And it was enough.

All the dissolved self, the needless chatter, the daily life that requires

Swallowing the chalky bland wafer of fear

And speaking the words eroding your throat 

as you suck on the marbles of another human’s irises, 

as you straighten that extra bend in the river of your spine,

as you gather your internal organs to that underground spring of

no longer caring.

-All that is refreshed by G Major.

Refreshed by the very idea of Johannes Brahms

so depressed he can’t get out of bed, but so in love

with the blades of grass

that he dips his pen one more time into the well of G Major,

and sighs deeply.

Not refreshed like your internet browser, the same pixels

Loaded again and again into a cyber-cannon of loneliness.

(I don’t know hell, but I know Facebook on a Friday night.)

Refreshed like racing your dog across a field that still smells like rain,

Head down, feet disappearing as soon as they appear.

Losing the race, to be sure, but also losing

the unwaxed dental floss that constrains our limbs

And keeps our tongues from flapping in the wind.

Refreshed like loss.

Like losing that thing, that everything, that precious thing,

That thing that symbolized your human thing among all other human things.

But then you forget that thing.

Your mind pinches its pie crust of memory over that thing.

And when you hear G Major, you hear that thing

But you also hear the lightness and simplicity

of non-thing, of nothing.

G Major refreshes

Overthrows

Like a coup d’etat in the kingdom of your skull

Where the tyrannical consciousness-

who in all fairness pulled herself up by her cerebral bootstraps from the humblest roots,

the very stem of the brain

-reigns no longer.

G Major kicks over her throne, knocks over the palace walls of understanding

For just one moment.

Or three.

Or forty-seven continuous moments of realization

That the geographic center of the kingdom isn’t your gilded palace

But a split tree trunk on the horizon.

No, past the elegant horizon

to the jagged, unfinished horizon.

That’s where G Major lives.

And if you’re refreshed enough to bushwhack into that terrain,

leave the self behind it’s too heavy to carry all that way,

You will find the infinite pool of G Major.

And Tolstoy

And Einstein’s notebooks

And true listening.

And if you can pay the exorbitant price of your attention,

you will find the source of imagination,

cold and clear.

Don’t try to pilfer it, slinking back to your frontal lobe fortress.

It will slide through your fingers and harden like wet cornstarch.

But you may return to this pool, to this refreshment, if you wish.

Hell, take surly taciturn Brahms as your guide.

Return.

Breathe deeply.

And pay up.

The Power of the Ahhhhhtz

"All other composers seem to be writing novels, but Bach writes non-fiction."
 That's a good line, Jeremy Denk.  Wish I had written it.

Today I don't feel much like blogging about horn-related topics, mostly because I'm frustrated, near-disgusted, with the limitations of my instrument.  I've spent a leisurely Sunday morning listening to the Goldberg Variations, and without fail, that piece always sends me into a French horn funk.  How can I possibly confront the limitations of time, nature, and God with a one-toot-at-a-time metal tube pressed into my face?  But that's a topic for another day...

So today I want to discuss the warmer, fuzzier topic of falling in love.   More specifically, (stealing from Oprah here) my Aha! Moment with the arts, when I had a realization of what the arts can do for humanity and for me as a person.  While I'm absolutely sure I had a give-my-heart-to-music experience, or else why am I doing what I do, I can't actually conjure up that memory.  Nor for visual arts, dance, and theater, though I'm also sure I fell in love with those artistic disciplines when I was a kid.  But I can recall the exact moment I understood what good writing can do.  And it was in 6th grade silent reading class when I stumbled upon this poem by Langston Hughes, entitled "A Christian Country":

God slumbers in a back alley
With a gin bottle in His hand.
Come on, God, get up and fight
Like a man. 

Now, as has been mentioned in previous posts, I was a precocious kid and though I had no taste, loved anything serious and intellectual and "above my reading level."  But this poem just knocked my teeth out.  Given my socio-economic status and hometown, I'm absolutely sure I would not have actually known what gin was nor when and where Langston Hughes lived, nor would I have probably ever seen a back alley, let alone been in one.  But these four lines made me feel sad, scared, and confused all at the same time and called into question my weekly Sunday school relationship with God.  I couldn't stop re-reading them, I couldn't get them out of my head.  And now, so many years later, I still can't get them out of my head.

Up until that point, I had thought of literature as entertainment, a chance to try on someone else's life for a change.  But reading that poem, I began to think about the notion of a writer- some guy who sat down at a desk, looked out a window at an urban landscape, and chose those specific words to elicit that mixed-up, angsty emotion inside my upper-middle class elementary school classroom.  Wow.  It just changed everything for me.  I understood the immense power of the art of creative writing.  Sock you in the gut, Cassius Clay power, not to be taken lightly.  And not to be tortured in my English classes at school.  As a result of that moment (and the fact that my mom is a lit-hoarder and I grew up in libraries and book stores), I am a lifelong lover of words, poetry, literature, and books.

Ummmmmm dream home.

So now the question is, what particular set of circumstances allowed me to fall in love in that moment?  And more importantly for my work with under-privileged high school students, can I create similar conditions so they too can have an artistic Eureka experience?  Was it just sheer coincidence that my scrolling eyes chose that poem at that moment in my intellectual and emotional development to lead me into a literary life?  My gut tells me yes, it was just a random happy-accident, but the statistical demographic breakdown of artistic audiences tells me...no.  It is just a fact that children born to higher-income parents are more likely to enjoy classical music, art museums, ballet shows, poetry readings, etc.  I am grateful for that step up in life, but goddammit, I want every single one of my students to experience what I experienced in that Langston Hughes poem.  (And geez, the Harlem Renaissance might as well have been on Mars for me, so maybe it'd be even more potent for a 16-year-old kid in Harlem...)  And I want them to experience it in classical music even more.  But that memory of mine is so personal, so individual, I wonder how I'd even incorporate that into a classroom.  In fact, that's what makes that moment memorable, the fact that this poem was revealed to me alone, not to my classmates or my sisters or even my teacher.
But I do think there is a way to communicate love, to communicate the esoteric purity of a work of art using the tools of teaching. In the open-ness of my unadulterated nerding-out, maybe some kids will find a path into the complex labyrinth of the arts.  Or just ceaselessly mock me.

P.S. If you don't know, the title of this post comes from this Youtube gem.  Also the reason I want to yell "Guten taaaaaaag!" every time I step off a plane in Germany.

The Wheel of Chance

Dis my jam.

Book club time! Recently I read a book called The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.  Mostly, it was about the history of probability theory and how people really don't understand the concept of randomness.  So, mostly it was a nerdy math book for nerdy math dweebs like myself who think Pascal is the bee's knees. 
But the final chapter of the book ventured into unexpected territory about how society judges success based on performance.  The author discussed hedge fund managers, baseball players, and major CEOs who have either been lauded or damned for their "streakiness".  It turns out, though highly counter-intuitive, that generally people perform about the same year in, year our.  Statistical anomalies, such as a hot streak or a bunch of tanked failures, are rare but not that unlikely given everyone's average performance in a given field.

Of course, in my day job, there is no better probability calculation than professional auditions.  With the field narrowed down from 100 to 8 to 3 to 1 (or none, in most auditions these days....), you have some serious roulette wheel action happening.  And once you take more than about, say, three auditions you start to realize how fantastically idealistic the audition process is.  There is a huge component of randomness not only in how particular musicians perform but in how the committee listens and reacts to certain players.  That's not to say that you aren't in control of your own performance; there are a gajillion practice strategies, mental training activities, and weird food and drug recommendations that enable you to combat the grueling firing squad of an orchestral audition committee.  But I don't believe that as an auditioner you are in control of your own destiny; not even a little bit.
There are certain individuals, and I'm friends with a couple of them, who are amazingly consistent auditioners.  But even consistent auditioners lose about 90% of the auditions they take.  It's depressing from a statistical point of view, but the optimistic other side of the coin is losing an audition puts you in pretty good company.  And at this point, my field is starting to evolve to appreciate the fact that auditions are not the only indicator of artistic success.

Sometimes internet memes speak the truth.

So really, we're all in this cesspool of random dice tosses together.  And you just can never predict which statistical anomaly will be your statistical anomaly!  That may just lead to something awesome like, ya know, stable health insurance.

Feel the (moderate) burn!

While visiting a good friend of mine and fellow horn player last week, I was whining/fretting about the fact that, though nothing catastrophic has happened yet, I feel like my endurance is less than stellar lately.  For me to get through a demanding chamber music program, like I had to recently and have to again in the very near future, I have to be totally fresh, have barely played that day or even the day before ideally, and feel really warmed-up.  But in the big professional world of NYC, that's not an option with dress rehearsals and sound checks and gigs the morning of.  Girl's gotsta pay the bills. 
So my wise and cheerful friend who has extremely demanding chamber programs of his own, gave me his secret to endurance success: practice a lot.  Like, really a lot.  (For brass players).  Like 5 hours a day for the week or two leading up to the performance.  This really hit home for me.  I mean, I practice very consistently and a decent amount for someone who's no longer in school: usually 2-3 hours.  But 5?  That's a whole 'nother ball game.  A ball game of serious muscle. 
(Speaking of muscle, my friend even does straight-up face pilates, basically stretching and stasis exercises for the embouchure muscles.)

Though I missed the boat on the whole two weeks before the big show intensity cuz I was too busy eating ice cream for breakfast and having beer for lunch with afore-mentioned friend,

"Practicing's just a crutch for the talentless, right?"

I have been trying to pump it up this last week and a half.  And I gotta say, though it sucks cuz it hurts and cuz I sound OMG bad by hour three, it also feels good.
So much of my relationship with music has become intellectual in the last few years- mental practice, detailed analysis, trying to verbally explain something to a student.  It feels good to just think about MUSCLES.  I'm like an athlete in training!...for something extremely nerdy that very few people will watch. 

Though I have mixed feelings about the raw-egg smoothie before concerts.

The only downside is, for brass players in general and yours truly in particular, there is quite a small distance between feeling strong and powerful and ready to take on any long tone you throw at me, and feeling exhausted and weak and like I just want to soak my lips in a bathtub of hot chocolate.  But I'm headed for 30 hours of rehearsal of a not-easy piece in the next five days, so at this point, it's just a matter of trusting my muscles (and rocking out to "Eye of the Tiger" at every rehearsal break).