The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

The Right Key

Previously: "A Little Nightmare Music" 

You have find out sooner or later. Sooner is better. Then if the worst is true, you can pull out and return Preston to normality before you embarrass yourself.

You drape your left arm over the edge of the music stand, and rest your forehead on it with your eyes shut. You lay your right hand on the keys. You hold them there, then firmly press and hold the key under your ring finger.

F4. The tone rings out, and hangs.

Your lips twitch. So far, so good.

Down you drift, via middle finger, index finger and thumb, to C, then swing back up to hold the D. The keys are pleasantly resistant; you are pushing the notes into the air.

Slowly you drive back up to A, make a brief turn back, then ripple up to C before falling back onto the B-flat. You'd intended to stick to the white keys, but your fingers surprised you.

Instinctual improvisation. You're not composing, but you're not noodling either. You're returning to childhood.

Someone else's childhood, it's true, but your mind is now pressing too deeply into the piano for that technicality to register.

Your first teacher, Dr. Giers, had a bizarrely unorthodox pedagogy, and you have never been sure whether it deepened or retarded your musical training. You were seven when you started, and at first Dr. Giers asked nothing but that you run your fingers up and down the keys while learning the names of the notes and how to read them on paper. You could only use use stepwise motion, and only the white keys, one hand a time. You had to keep your eyes shut, too, and he would gently quiz you, when you paused, about which note you were lingering on.

Three months passed, and then he let you put both hands on the keyboard, but still it was only stepwise motion on the white keys and it was still you making the melodies instead of learning ones chosen for you. But he encouraged you to play with dynamics—making it LOUD or soft—and with mixing up the tempos and rhythms. He also encouraged you to experiment with finding which notes sounded good when played together and which ones didn't.

You have now driven the melody up to D5, and now you take it back down to D3 before returning to rest on middle C. With eyes still closed, you drop your left hand to the keyboard to add a second voice to the first: now moving in parallel thirds to the upper voice, now resting or dropping slowly away from the upper line in contrary motion. The notes never clash, but the two melodies have nothing to say to each other. They are like two diners in a restaurant, talking on their cell phones, with no knowledge of the other.

Your teacher gradually added black notes to your set of toys, sometimes while taking white notes away. He also allowed you to add skips of a third, then of a fourth, then a fifth. He made it a kind of game, like hopscotch for your fingers, and while you weren't looking the sounds of the notes and intervals seeped upward into your brain. Soon you could imagine, without playing or even looking, the name and sound of each tone, and the shape of each sequence, and could guide the fingers of each hand separately so that, as they do now, the melodies slithered and twisted about each other without clashing.

When Dr. Giers finally gave you musical pieces to study, they were early church music: the monophonic plainchant of the monasteries, arranged for a single hand. It was hardly different from what you had been making up on your own, so you slid easily into them, and found their patterns already familiar. Then he gave you easy polyphony, first in two voices, then in three, still drawn from the monastic houses of medieval Europe. Still, just as when you were making up melodies on your own—and he still made you to do that—the goal was to feel them sliding through and among and away from each other.

You add a third voice now, the fingers on your right hand twining two of them about each other like pretzels as your left drifts first toward and then away. You markedly increase the tempo, and confidently adding mordents and trills, giving the curtain of sound you're weaving a brilliant, trilling sheen.

Dr. Giers led you then into arrangements of medieval and Renaissance works, in rigid historical order: Binchois and Dufay, Ockeghem and Isaac, Palestrina and Byrd and Gibbons. He was leading you through the history of Western music as it had evolved, so that your skill evolved in parallel with the culture's. He set no wild shifts of styles to confuse you, and didn't ask you to master the roiling chords and arpeggios of the Romantic repertoire one week, and the intricate counterpoint of the Renaissance and Baroque the next. Instead the musics under your fingers accumulated and evolved, acquiring new layers and shedding old ones, just as they had in historical reality, in what felt like a natural and inexorable progression.

And so when you at last met Bach and Handel, Scarlatti and Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven—you were twelve by then—you calmly assimilated them as far distant but recognizable enhancements of the music you yourself had been making at the age of eight. You felt you knew them before you'd even met them, and it only took technique and practice for you to absorb them. They are like parts of your muscles now.

That's when Dr. Giers released you to teachers who would hone and sharpen you technically, and could take you up to and then through the twentieth century.

You are moving very fast over the keyboard now, your hands leaping and your fingers striking as you push melodies out of the strings. You've left your own improvisations behind, and if you're not playing the old Flemish masters, you are embellishing on melodies and rhythms you learned from them.

With a sudden spasm of impatience you stop. There's a slight fluttering in the shallow muscles of your chest.

The training is there. Of that there's now no doubt.

But what about technique?

You peel the Chopin open to another etude, drop your right hand onto a cluster of black keys and rest it there.

Then, as though a switch has flipped in your brain, your fingers are sweeping up and down the keyboard, drumming the keys like the wings of a very angry hummingbird.

Twice you repeat the opening quartet of measures, right hand only, hammering out the triplets, before you start dropping heavy, staccato chords with your left hand. At the end of the sixteenth measure you dart back to make the first of many repeats of that opening section, to violently raise and lower the dynamics with each pass, and to sharpen or dull or move the attacks: banging HERE and then THERE, screwing the energy up or taking it down to a gasping nothingness. You do the same with the last section, cycling through one- or two- or four-measure blocks while hurling new shapes and colors into each repeat.

After five or so minutes of this—a piece that should only take a hundred seconds to play all the way through—you slam out the final chords, then fall back to gently squeeze and pull at your hands. The door opens and your father puts his face in. "Couldn't think of the ending, huh?" he squawks in a put-on Brooklyn accent. "Funny, I couldn't think of anything else!" He vanishes before you can lob a retort.

Okay, the technique seems to be there as well. But what about the music? Ay, there's the rub.

You heart is thumping as you bring up the recording app on your phone. The sound quality will be terrible, but it will be enough to tell you what you want to know.

The Bach D major toccata is one of Preston's—

No! You grit your teeth.

It's one of your showpieces! A competition piece, an encore piece, a piece you flee to when you need reassurance.

But it's a test piece now, for technique and familiarity will not be enough to carry you through it. It's wily, with lots of bare spots and brutal juxtapositions to expose a careless interpreter. Preston thinks of it as a drama with multiple characters, and his job is to intelligibly lay out the story they are enacting.

So you gradually darken and dent the bell-like opening chords as they descend the keyboard—a fall from splendor into purgatory—and let the final chord hang and fade uncertainly before the snake (as you imagine the sequel line) slithers out and coils into a deceptively sunny cadence. The air of falsity continues in the subsequent Allegro, which you play as a chatty monologist—a clever stage wit who is all tossed-off bon mots and empty banter—until the end, when the bass abruptly blackens into the minor mode and with glowering menace begins stalking a now-rattled soprano voice. You linger on the penultimate cadence, then nip at your right hand with your left as it flees upward and away in fright, before bringing them together in a watchful detente on the tonic.

The Adagio is an arid, Beckett-like dialogue between a polite, almost foppish soprano and a truculent, growling bass: a conversation that scratches along vexatiously until—the moment is almost surreal—it turns into a hypnotic double fugue that is like a gavotte for two spiders. But in the brief fantasia that follows, the original characters return to grapple and reconcile in a frenzy of dazzling runs before retiring quietly and gracefully from the stage.

Or so they would but for the exuberant jig that abruptly breaks out: as though a chorus line had swept in from the wings and caught the protagonists up in a sudden, festive dance. Then it's no longer hands or registers conversing, but triple voices helicoptering in triple time. If it were a real dance, neither feet nor skirts would be touching the floor.

* * * * *

You don't need to listen to the recording when you're done, but it confirms your convictions.

It is Preston Spinks—you are confident—who rises from the bench, to stretch and savagely kick the Wuorinen under the piano.

Next: "A Double Concerto of Doubt" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 3)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)"