Have you ever felt a little bloodless, a little clammy and zombified, a little not exactly 100%-here-being-now-carpe-diem-tastic, and then you looked down and realized, "OH, it's because my right leg had completely detached itself from my body, of course, but I didn't exactly notice my lack of limb until I started playing the piano again, at which point my missing leg started to twitch over there on the carpet where it had been lying, unperturbed, for several months but was now deciding to rejoin the main, uh, corpus of me, and it hurt like a bitch when the leg started to merge with my body because suddenly the body became aware of what had been missing, had to re-habituate itself to a full range of functioning, had to re-route its blood supply to a whole new promontory of soft tissue and bone, was kicking itself for abiding for so long in such an impaired state and just accepting that this was the way things were but now LOOK, it will soon be able to run and leap and use the damper pedal"-- have you ever felt like that, exactly like that? No? Just me?
...okay, so the leg metaphor was a bit weird. I acknowledge its forcedness, and I acknowledge that I plucked it from a recent life experience in which I had to perform Schumann's Fantasy-Pieces (of the Cello-Piano variety) on an upright with a NON-FUNCTIONAL pedal-- hey, so it was LIKE my right leg wasn't around to perform its role of pedal-depressor, and as a result the should-have-been-juicy arpeggiated sonorities suffered deplorably from a lack of pedally lubricant-- how pokey, how dry, how unsustained and ephemeral and strangled-- and the result was so painful that the listening audience probably experienced a certain amputation of the spirit: "Why is she DOING that to poor Bobby Schumann? Didn't Bobby suffer enough in life, what with the hand injury and the lovesickness and the eventual batshit insanity-- didn't he suffer enough not to be mutilated post-mortem by some schmoozicologist chick?"
Apart from the Schu-mutilation, however, I have not been playing much lately in any serious capacity-- I have been too busy running all over the boroughs of Schmanhattan and Crooklyn and Spleens, accompanying pre-ballet classes for fussy toddlers and lecturing college freshmen about treble clefs and teaching sullen Park-Avenue-bred teenagers how to play Justin Bieber songs by ear, all in the name of making a few extra bucks so that I may comfortably sit in PhD smart-people-class and circle noteheads and connect them with fancy slurs to other noteheads in order to demonstrate the hidden pretty fractally patterns that apparently govern all music and are thus the Undisputed Absolute Truth, and when I ask if the individual composers actually meant all of this stuff and if we aren't just cherry-picking a little bit, I am Shunned as a Nonbeliever-- SHUNNED! and anyway it all feels terribly far away from the immediacy of making music, an act that, due to all of the aforementioned reasons, I haven't been able to engage in recently EXCEPT for the time that I played Schumann, sans pedal, to the chagrin of everyone involved.
But then I was like "Whoa! Schumann! Where have you been all my life?!" and I couldn't shake the thought. Last year I wouldn't stop yammering about another Schu- guy of the -bert variety-- he of the distilled folky essence and the constant yearning for the Beyond, at once formally rigorous and fluidly spontaneous. We were sympatico; we communed frequently and fruitfully. And yet lately I've felt too flawed and human to entirely relate. Those gorgeous universalities, those things-in-themselves-- I cannot affix to them any particulars, any imperfect realities, any places or faces from my own little web of life. And Beethoven is even worse, always overcoming shit with his infallible compositional logic; he shakes his fist at your wallowing human frailty, the bastard!
Enter Schumann. Check it out, man, his name even contains the word "human", as though it was decided that he should be the one to speak for all of us just as we are, and not as we ought to be. Safe at home, I pulled out the Humoreske in B-flat major, an oddball work, close to my heart-- I had started to learn it a few years ago but it became a casualty of the Alana-converts-to-the-Church-of-Schmoozicology period (there are many such casualties) and I never performed it.
You would think, from a name like "Humoresque," that the piece would be a pithy little ditty. I expected as much the first time I heard it... but then there was pathos, lots of it, big splotches, and these wild insane gallops to the edge of pianistic plausibility-- the music switched between the two modes with no warning-- and then the whole thing should have ended long ago but there was more! more material, more non-sequiturial fragmented ideas, half an hour's worth, how are we still going? and then a mysterious ending that neither triumphed nor succumbed, and then I was sitting there applauding dumbly and wondering what the hell had just happened.
"Humoresque," as it turns out, refers to humors in the classical or medieval sense-- fluids, bile, phlegm, etcetera, and the corresponding moods that they evoke in their human hosts. The piece is a traversal of the humors: they possess, they interrupt, they fight, they wane at a moment's notice. (Oh Schumann, you moody motherfucker, I should have known what you were up to). And so now, reunited with the piece after such a long hiatus, I searched the notes. First I searched for myself, and then I looked for old nineteenth-century Bobby too, and then I looked for everyone who had ever felt as we had both felt, and then I noted forms, recurrent themes, techniques, quotations... and specifics dissolved into universals, subjects into objects, only to re-crystallize at a moment's notice as the intimate details of my own life.
***
I had a birthday recently. Now a lady never reveals her age, but I am only partly a lady (interpret that statement how you will) so I can give you some information to go on. Here are your clues. It starts with the number "2," and it is verging on Lateness but might still be riding out the last phase of the Middle Period. (Did you know that the ghost of Theodor Adorno is hard at work on a groundbreaking piece of criticism entitled "On Late Style in the Twenty-Something Years"? I've seen the manuscript, but most of the textual meaning was sadly lost on me since I have yet to really come into my own Lateness, or alternately because I will probably never understand Adorno at any age). Anyway, I am not morally opposed to the celebrating of birthdays-- TREAT YOSELF! LOVE YOSELF! have a cupcake!, they all proclaim-- but I am wary of ascribing too much significance to a single day, because so rarely does the appointed time seem to actually sync up with a rite of passage or a time of personal growth. See the child who has opened all of the presents, has gorged on all of the confetti-fun-cake, has bid goodbye to all of the classmates, and now begins the chrysalis hour in which the magic will take effect and the shining new era will be ushered in, but when all is said and done the child is still just the child, with the child's same problems and fears and the child's plummeting blood-sugar level because the cake-high has worn off and now the child is crying because it's all over and it did not deliver and it won't happen again for ages and ages and now we return to banality, to the endless ebbing and flowing of days and the inescapability of the self.
You would think that the buildup-and-dashed-expectations way of doing things would lose its appeal with encroaching maturity, but it has an adultish manifestation as well. Case in point: until recently, until right around the time that my birthday struck, I had held onto some subconscious, deeply-embedded belief that the tortuousness of my young life ("tortuous" as in twisting, not "torturous" as in Spanish Inquisition) and all of the stumbling blocks and the false starts and the red herrings and the feeling-so-incongruous-with-the-world-all-the-time... somehow I believed that all of this was just "early penance" for an easy and fabulous adult life that was promised to me. (You know, like a fricking medieval serf who endures suffering on Earth because he/ she is duped into thinking that there is an afterlife awaiting and it is gonna be SUH-WEET).
Something specific would herald this glorious Assumption of mine, something like, "I've decided on a new career path that is absolutely ideal for me," or, "I'm moving to the happeningest city ever, the place that only people who have really made it are allowed to inhabit," or, "I met someone who I really click with and we might even LOVE each other," ... and thereafter, everything would be just PEACHY, smooth glassy seas, oars ahead into the blazing horizon! Right? But no, of course even those landmark occurrences-- ESPECIALLY those landmark occurrences, those Facebook-boastful, "like"-accruing events-- come booby-trapped with a fresh set of opportunities for bodily injury: I will stub my big toe on the myopic drudgery of my chosen field, I will whack my head on the financial implausibility of living in Schmanhattan on a student budget, I will lose my right leg to Love, and then I'll be at the piano again, rooting about in the murky forests of Schumann for solutions or sympathy, thinking to myself that I shouldn't need to do this anymore at my advanced age, that I really should have figured things out by now... and then there comes the dawning awareness that I will always need to be doing this because life is kind of one giant booby trap and it shows no sign of letting up anytime soon.
***
There is one small thing that I may have figured out, though. That ending to the Humoreske, the one that seemed to make no sense-- well, that's exactly it. It makes no sense! We expect that Pieces of a Certain [Romantic] Age should culminate in triumph or transcendence, ultimately undoing all of the musical "wrongs" that were incurred earlier-- quite the redemptive model, sonic translation of Jesus coming down to absolve sins and suffering and to tell you, tell you all that it's okay from here on out. And then some other musical narratives finish in high tragedy, or drunkenly or diabolically: the effect (Affekt!) is still clear and decisive.
But Schumann? What does he do? After all the galavanting through humors upon humors-- the interiority and the impetuousness and so forth-- we come to a passage marked "Zum Schluss" : towards closure, toward the conclusion. The end is nigh! And it's a slow movement. Oh okay, I see how it is, we're going to have one of those starry Schumann finishes that gazes out on the Infinite with longing and rapture. But no, this is weird. What does the music want to be? It's tender, certainly, almost a recitative, almost a love song or lullaby, but then it's shot through with musical signifiers that say "pain" or "disruption" (the fully-diminished seventh chord, the borrowing from the minor mode, the deceptive cadences) and it keeps stopping and starting in fits, overwrought. Soon we understand that two distinct voices are intertwining, dialogue-ing, and then just getting stuck on these knotty chords. This is how it ends? making the same attempt and reaching the same impasse again and again, with no release or resolution? But then the tempo picks up and there are accents everywhere and loud dynamic markings, and now that's more like it! a fitting way to cap off the rambling epic; here's our big brassy coda.
And yet not quite. While the left hand roils with energy and verve, seeming (to me) to recall the Baroque French Overture style-- all pomp and ceremony-- the right hand nods to quite another Baroque idea. It falls repeatedly, it falls by semi-tone over a fourth, three times over: this is a longstanding code for lamentation (almost a cliche). So we have Lament and Pomp together, overlaid, a mixed state! And thus combined, the two modes are no longer pure or straight-faced or entirely themselves, there is joy, still, and there is pain, sure, but above all there is a sense of throwing one's hands up in wry resignation-- as if to say that yes, there is no way of making sense of the preceding fragments, that the shining dream of totality is dashed forever and now everything is infected with a knowledge of fracturedness that can never really be un-known, but go forth and enjoy the ride anyway (because, after all, you signed up for it) and BLESS THIS MESS.
