“A sadness that glows with understanding”
A few months ago, I read Alex Ross’s essay in the New Yorker on listening to Brahms’s music while mourning the death of his mother. It was one of the best pieces of music writing I’d read in a long time, and it made me feel as though I was waking from a stupor of not knowing why I was bothering with listening to music or thinking or talking about it. In late March, a few weeks into the lockdown in New York City, it was refreshing to read something honest, for once, about the supposed comforts of music:
I’m not proposing that this or any music should be used as a palliative. We rob the art form of its dignity when we treat it as a utility to manage our emotions. Philip Kennicott, in his new book “Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning,” speaks my mind: “I bristle at the idea that music is consoling or has healing power. It is a cliché of lazy music talk, the sort of thing said by people who give money to the symphony and have their names chiseled on the wall of the opera house.” It is also a cliché of the digital age, which routinely subjugates music to life-style needs: individual creative voices are bundled into playlists designed to help us wake up, focus, zone out, make love, and fall asleep. Kennicott continues, “Music, if anything, makes us raw, more susceptible to pain, nostalgia, and memory.”
Later, Ross describes Brahms as “the great poet of the ambiguous, in-between, nameless emotions,” and I found the characterization instantly recognizable. Coincidentally, even before I’d read the essay, I’d already started frequently listening to recordings of Brahms’s piano music while stuck at home by myself; there was a week in March when I listened to practically nothing else. I had my own murky reasons for this, vaguely in the domain of “pain, nostalgia and memory” but nothing so definite and searing as the death of a loved one. What it came down to was that Brahms’s music reminded me, at the start of the lockdown, of a different time when I felt restless, isolated, and lonely.
When I was in college, there was one particular summer when I was involved in a variety of things that were all doomed for one reason or another. When I started sensing that something might be doomed, I would throw myself into something else that was equally doomed. I was doing some unremarkable research, putting in very few hours per week, and still entertaining the possibility of going to grad school, and I was dating a boy whom I would break up with a few months later. Most strangely of all, in retrospect, I was playing the piano again after a gradual loss of interest as a teenager, and had been taking lessons for a year. In fact, I was even practicing for a scholarship audition.
When I think back on this time, I mostly remember being very alone. The person I was dating was on the other side of the country, and my idea of mathematical research involved spending a lot of (mostly fruitless) time by myself. Playing solo piano music, in particular, is inherently solitary, and it was through this that I was trying to extract virtue from solitude. I’d joined a choir in college, but it was tempting to think that with a piano at my disposal, I could be the whole choir and the whole orchestra. I’d read a quote about how the Well-Tempered Clavier or the Art of Fugue or some such highbrow Bach work was music for the pianist, not for the audience, and I latched onto the idea that music could exist for this purpose. Most tellingly, I had a tortured analogy in my mind that pianists were to “the music” (that is, the score) what readers were to books. The music and I could coexist, self-contained: I could enter into the music with my mind and the music could enter into me, with no audience needed or desired. Other pianists were engaged in the same activity on parallel tracks (or, worse, were competitors).
At the same time, I was having my first sustained contact—lurking, in isolation, as these things often go—with internet trad Catholicism, for reasons I mostly don’t remember. It was then that I first encountered the term “intrinsically disordered,” referring to the Vatican’s stance on homosexuality. The doctrine doesn’t have any hold on me now, but it had its own kind of perverse appeal, and the phrase rang a bell. I certainly sensed that there was something disordered going on: I didn’t want to do any of the things I thought I wanted to do (research, practice, leaving my room). I was, mortifyingly, in love with my middle-aged piano teacher. There were too many things I was trying to not think about. A sense of shame had accreted on everything. Could I really become “ordered” by sticking to a regimen of sacrifice? I remember that I’d signed up for a service online that would charge me for not practicing, as a way to impose order by “incentivizing” myself to practice, as a form of accountability with no human contact, and had consequently lost quite a lot of money through refusing to examine my own reluctance in any way. The desire to run away from internal disorder was all-consuming.
I wanted to impose some order on the external world, too. Every field and discipline, to me, consisted of a canon to assimilate, master, and tame. Mathematics and physics and the piano were mountains to scale and conquer, and every year I was conspicuously falling farther behind. At this rate I would never read Landau and Lifshitz, and I would never play all the Beethoven piano sonatas. But it always felt good to make a little progress, and to get closer to being the kind of person who does these things: to be a pianist, rather than to play the piano.
So, on some level, I liked Brahms as a matter of course: Brahms the thinking man’s composer, Brahms the classicist who knew his place in the tradition, Brahms the agnostic who could quote the Luther Bible, Brahms who loved Clara Schumann who was 14 years his senior, Brahms the cranky old man. It also just so happened that I was preparing the Rhapsodie in G minor, Op. 79 No. 2 for my scholarship audition. To me, that piece feels like quintessential Brahms: It’s basically in sonata form, and the heart of the piece is the long, unstable, disintegrating development section, where the propulsive theme that begins the piece rapidly dissolves into something static and shimmering, with the low bass rumbling underneath. After what seems like an eternity of false starts and constantly shifting harmonies, gradually fading to a low dominant D major chord, the recapitulation never seems to fully dispel the gloom. I spent a lot of time listening to recordings of Brahms’s piano music that summer, and that undercurrent of gloom—in Op. 79 and in the late works—was a constant companion.
Sometime in March of the present year, I saw a post on social media suggesting that the reader go listen to a Brahms intermezzo in order to feel better about the world, which seemed like such a nice, quaint way to “take care of myself” that I immediately started feeling a sense of obligation to do it. Like most obligations, I put it off for a few days. Finally, on what happened to be my birthday, I decided to finally put on one of Murray Perahia’s Brahms recordings while working from home and sitting on my couch. I went with that album (containing the Handel Variations, the Rhapsodien Op. 79, and the Klavierstücke Opp. 118 and 119) based on a vague memory of liking it in the past. What I didn’t expect was to be instantly transported back to that summer in college. I had a big desk next to a west-facing window, and there were afternoons full of sunlight when I’d listen to that album on repeat and do very little work and feel, if not acutely then at least chronically, miserable.
There’s a part of me that doesn’t like it when hearing people explain their strong emotional associations with a piece of music purely in terms of having listened to it in a difficult time. I can’t listen to this song anymore because I listened to it too much when I was depressed. I don’t think my negative judgment is fair, and in any case most of that annoyance is directed inward: I’d like to be a person who emotionally responds to music in ways that are purely rational and ordered by knowledge. Why would you (or I) talk about being depressed when you (I) could talk about Brahms?
I’ll be convinced that it’s possible to do both when I find a way to describe how it actually feels to listen to a beloved piece of music that’s been through the sad playlist wringer, but I find this difficult. One thing I’m convinced of, though, is that we don’t have to describe the experience of listening to music in difficult times as either a source of hope and healing, or a flat mirror to our unpleasant emotions and experiences. While music can exist for all sorts of people in all sorts of circumstances and contexts, it doesn’t exist for me, and I find this obliquely comforting. When I reach the moments in Brahms’s piano music that I find wrenching to listen to, it’s usually due to some amalgamation of simple nostalgia—yearning for a time when I yearned for certain things—and what I hope is a real sense of receptivity to beauty, beauty that has an origin external to me, even if that sense is necessarily shaped by particular ideas about tension and resolution and what yearning sounds like. I loved those musical passages then and I love them now, and part of what’s startling about reencountering music that has settled into my (mostly unreliable) musical memory is being able to recognize myself in the past by what I thought was worthwhile.
Maybe this is too obvious to even mention to everyone who isn’t me, but these moments of emotional extremity when hearing extraordinary music, tied up with all kinds of extra-musical baggage, aren’t actually subject to order or reason. They interrupt the linearity of music-listening, and of life more generally in a small but meaningful way. All of a sudden, you’re looping back on your own history; all of a sudden, you’re missing the words and the analytical faculties to contain the music. In the Handel Variations, there’s a minor-key pair of variations near the beginning which have a perfect dark, crystalline delicacy, and they make me feel unbearably tender when I hear them—tender both in the sense of feeling sympathetic, to a younger self who also heard something in this music, and in the sense of feeling easily bruised. It’s not a wholly unwelcome feeling. All of a sudden, you’re not a mind interpreting sensory input, but rather a person having aspects of personhood refracted and reflected back at you.
For what it’s worth, after that summer in college, my audition went horribly, my piano teacher moved to a different city, and I went through a breakup and a horrible process of extricating myself from my living situation. Thus ended my attempts to play the piano. Not at all coincidentally, my ex was a much better pianist (and mathematician, singer, and all-around musician) than I ever was, and I gave him all my piano scores as a gesture of goodwill when I moved out of my dorm. Life got both worse and better after all that. The last time I heard any of this music played live by a real person, which will probably be the last time for a very long time, was when I overheard my godfather practicing both of the Rhapsodien Op. 79 in the church basement last year. I went downstairs to talk to him, and learned a bit about his own history with this music. I don’t entirely remember what I was thinking at the time. Oh, my old audition piece! I like it a lot—it’s beautiful.