Music in the time of plague

 I love these videos now available of musical scores you can follow along as you listen to the music.

Here's one of Brahms' Variations on a theme by Paganini.

What they do for me is remind me of the magic that takes place when an artist takes the written medium and transforms it into the actual sound it is intended to capture or generate. The two mediums are in sharp contrast and you feel the gap, as you do between the written word and the spoken word. We take it for granted that the connection is there, but we forget that somebody had to create the system in the first place. What a contribution to civilization the systems are for writing things down.

Secondly, following a musical score reminds me of my own limitations, how little I actually ever accomplished with piano lessons. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would spend less time patting myself on the back for what things I did accomplish and more time contemplating the work necessary to make this magic happen. I don't blame my mother and father for not tying me to the piano bench, but I do appreciate parents and teachers who know how to motivate kids to persevere when they get tired or distracted.

I couldn't disagree more with people who say too much analysis ruins a good thing, that one should simply sit back and enjoy art and not pick it to pieces. For me, the picking to pieces only enhances my respect for the effort necessary to produce the visual or auditory art we tend to enjoy holistically. Child prodigies are wonders to behold and they raise questions you might otherwise not ask on how it is that some of us are born with a natural talent for music (or other form of art) and others of us, no matter how much time and effort we give to trying, never achieve the results that come to these kids naturally. 

When you read the histories of great pianists, it's almost always the case that the talent shows up early on, and if the kid is lucky, and is born to parents who recognize their talents, and have the means to foster it, the world benefits. I can think of no better argument for music and art in the schools. Cutting these programs out as "extras" removes from kids, especially those born into poverty or otherwise unlucky circumstances, the possibility of escaping these conditions. It's something a compassionate society should come to automatically, if we define the role of government as the fostering of the well-being of us all.

Because of the lockdown, I spend far more time than I ever did before listening to music, and because I had a good musical grounding as a kid in the piano, I am naturally drawn to music written for the piano. I've recently started taking notes on the composers and the artists I gravitate toward naturally. I love the discovery, at my advanced age, of things that have been sitting there on the shelf all along, that I never paid much attention to before. Or new discoveries, like the Russian-born German pianist, Igor Levit, who turned me on to Beethoven, many people's idea of one of the best composers of all time, but one I had decided for some reason, was not my cup of tea. Levit accomplished this with his lockdown concerts in Hamburg.  

He's an example of what I'm talking about, a child prodigy with a talented musician for a mother. And what luck. He's long been among my favorites, but now he's doing a job way above and beyond that of an ordinary concert pianist: he's showing the power of music to lift us up in hard times. He represents much better than I what I've discovered in the last year, that I can survive the tragedy of watching the results of America's surrender of its democracy to the least admirable among us, those who are inclined to follow an egomaniac into one folly after another and those enabler politicians who give him the lemming support he needs to keep it going. And I can survive the pandemic and the economic destruction the lockdown has brought about. Music saves. Or at least keeps us going until something else can save us.

For some time now I've followed the career of a young Russian boy, Alexander Malofeev, who came to the piano at age 5 and was already concert-ready three years later and at 11 was already turning heads.  He has gone from the kind of adorable towheaded cutie you just want to wrap your arms around and protect to a teenager fighting the trials of puberty to an accomplished young man - he's now 19 - you know you'd be proud to be associated with - or maybe move to Moscow so you could attend all his concert performances. 

One of my favorite performances of his is the one in which he shares the stage with another young prodigy, Sandro Nebieridze, in a performance of Poulenc's Concerto for two pianos and orchestra. Another is one in which he is clearly ill and sweating profusely, sweat dripping onto his hands as he plays. I wanted to rush in and grab him off the stage and scold his mentors for not keeping him in bed. But he represents the extraordinary efforts by these very special people who will spare no effort to put on a musical performance, who make you appreciate it that some people rise way above the crowd to reveal the best that is in us. Watching this performance goes a long way to counter the nefarious political shenanigans of our so-called leaders and the tragedy of our dumbing-down in recent years as a society. There are reasons why people tear up and sometimes even start sobbing in the presence of beauty. I do. Death and sadness rarely bring me to tears. But beauty does.

I don't want to make comparisons, don't want to talk about my favorite composers or musicians - singular. Instead I want to make sure I know who's out there in the world making music. I recently sat down and made a list of people who have written and performed piano concertos I've been lucky enough to become familiar with. I limited the list to piano because it would be too much to handle if I included the violin and the cello, my other favorite musical instruments, or if I just listed the best singers of opera and Lieder, two of my other favorite forms of classical music. I spend a lot of time with these, as well, and recently I've been listening to a lot of music sung by countertenors. But it's the piano I always come back to for grounding when I need to remind myself of reasons for not seeing the glass as half empty. 

I came up with five categories, starting with my favorite composers of all time who were also good at the keyboard: Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff (listen to Yuja Wang playing Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto in C-minor) and Mozart.  I make no argument for one over another, and no claim to having an exhaustive list of greats - these are simply my favorite seven. There are so many more - like Tchaikovsky and Robert Schumann, but I'm listing my heroes of the moment, not my heroes of all time. I also love reading their personal histories for insights into their lives as real people. Consider, for example, the speculation about how Schumann's bipolar disorder and madness brought on allegedly by mercury poisoning from the treatment of the syphilis he contracted - again allegedly - from his father's maid, as a youngster. I'm not into speculation, as some are, over whether the bipolar disorder affected his later compositions - I lack the aptitude for that kind of analysis, and don't know if I would go there even if I could. But I do sit up and take notice of the fact that something drove him to excel against severe handicaps.

Secondly, I have a category for the two greatest pianists who performed during my lifetime, Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubenstein, both of whom died in the 1980s, after setting the bar almost impossibly high.

Third, there are another twenty or so greats who are also no longer alive, but who left us with some magnificent performances. Won't list them all. They include Van Cliburn and Glenn Gould. Then, I've got a list of thirty or so greats who are still alive and performing, whom I rush to listen to as soon as I hear they've given another concert. These include Martha Argerich and Yuja Wang, Evgeny Kissin, Fazil Say and Mitsuko Uchida, and again I mention only those whose names come first to mind, and not people I lift above other greats, necessarily. 

There are an unusually large number of greats living and performing today, in my opinion. They are the reason I think we should be cautious about any indiscriminate limitations on what the social media giant corporations put out. I'm thinking of YouTube in particular. YouTube is the mechanism for bringing these people into my life at the cost of paying only for ad-free access. Much as I enjoy live concerts, I also enjoy watching the fingers fly over the keyboard in close shots, and the sweat on the brow and the nervous tension resolving into smiles as the performers get caught up in their own skill for bringing notes on a page into a vivid reality.

Finally, there are the up-and-coming - and arguably already great, like Alexander Malofeev and my most recent discovery, the wonderfully creative Hayato Sumino, who goes by the curious name of "Cateen." To get a flavor of this guy and his talent, listen to these two pieces of his: "7 Levels of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"  and his "Happy Birthday to you" in all twelve major keys and tell me you don't think he should be included in any encyclopedia entry on "musicianship."

Don't give up.

It's a new year.

Young people are coming into their own.

The world can get better.