At the rate I'm working through it, I will finish the book "Pianoforte: A Social History of the Piano" when I'm 67.

The epigraph for the chapter on Beethoven will carry me for several years:

"Beethoven is Lucifer's good son, the demon guide to the last things." -Ernst Bloch

So, some days I want to be the Trout Quintet and some days I want to be Beethoven.

My Absolute All-Time Favorite Liner Notes

This is the last paragraph of the anonymously written notes that accompany a recording of Schubert's Trout Quintet by the Endres Quartet with Rolf Reinhardt:

"It is amusing to note how almost every commentator, severely picking holes in the formal structure of the Trout, abjectly surrenders to its musical charm. In short, Schubert may not have made the greatest intellectual or emotional contribution to music with the Trout Quintet--but he went ahead and composed a work of genius, one that is so spontaneous, so lyric and free-flowing, that criticism remains pedantic and impertinent."


You may guess for yourselves why this analysis is so dear to me, with the italics-added portions standing as your clues.

Message to the World

Please, everyone, please listen to Brahms' "A German Requiem." Take it in segments if you want: one or two movements a day. Turn it up really loud when no one's in the house. Sit on the sofa and stare at the wind-rustled leaves outside.

(I have John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, but only by circumstance; I didn't search out any particular recording.)

Rhymin' Simon and the Bright Colors of Immortality

4 p.m. Thursday. It's real hot. At the traffic light we pull up beside another car with all the windows rolled down, just as the light turns green. I realize music from Paul Simon's "Kodachrome" is spilling out, the frenetic instrumental bridge. I look over and it's two boys, probably about 20, probably Korean. My eyes meet the driver's eyes for the briefest of moments. He doesn't know why.

I can't help smiling.

"That's Paul Simon. Huh," I say to 2, riding in the back seat.

"I thought I recognized it!" she says. There's a pause. "I'm glad they're... I'm glad people play that music you and dad play. I want people to still be listening to it when I'm grown up."


It was a lovely moment and I didn't feel like ruining it with reassurances that if the song has lasted 35 years (for her, 3 1/2 lifetimes), it'll probably stick around for a while longer. I did break the news, however, when she asked me to put the tape on, that I had thrown it away a few weeks ago. It had finally spindled and warped beyond the point of playability.

Subtle Use of Incurable Romanticism

I have been educating myself over at the school of Pandora. I am an appreciative student, having had virtually no education in popular culture and its varieties of music for the years spanning 0 to 1989 and 1992 to 2007.

Yet I'm not sure I approve. Really, the Music Genome Project is to music as lepidoptery is to butterflies.

I type in "Cesaria Evora" and get an entire channel of music sung in nothing but Portuguese; I was looking for music that makes me feel wild with longing for something that's slipping from my fingers, a feeling which is not stirred in me by the Portuguese language in particular.

Or say I want a channel called "Music That Makes Me Weep." Pandora doesn't give me that option. I have to settle for songs with "mellow rock instrumentation," "subtle use of vocal harmony," "use of a string ensemble," "prominent organ" ... wait, that's not what I had in mind. (Pandora has not heard of double entendres, apparently.)

In theory, I despise the MGP for sucking the soul out of music, but I still listen to my Pandora channels. "What will they think of next?"

The Note

Driving the bleak arteries of west mid-town, I hear an installment of "Musicians in Their Own Words" on Morning Edition. Cynthia Phelps, principal violist with the New York Philharmonic, speaks about the role of the viola section in shaping the sound, pace and texture of the orchestra.

Phelps calls herself a mediator. The spot ends with her saying, "I try and create a balanced middle ground. It really resonates with the way I am as an individual."

It's deeply pleasing to hear someone else say this, the same thing I feel about my role as an editor. I had never bothered to imagine that a musician might see herself this way.

Earlier in the piece, Phelps describes the opening of the second movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, in which the celli get the melody but the violas control the pacing and mood. She plays a lick of the cello part, then a recording of the actual piece begins.

This is music that too few people know, a rich swath of velvet melody, really much more singable than the first movement. (This is, I guess, the flashback, the tune you're humming just before Fate knocks on your door.)

So, yes, the celli are perfect, and now I'm listening for the the violas, watching the highway's yellow lines. Concrete walls and exit ramps, the overcast sky--this all is the empty theater for the music. After the opening duet, the full orchestra comes in and still--this is the Philharmonic, of course--the music is just as tender as before. At the last note of the phrase, where the music swells and holds, then drops as lightly as an eyelid, I am done in. I get teary and choked up.

To be honest, this probably has as much to do with my own sense of failure as a musician as it does with the actual music. Still, it's beautiful, and I need beauty. And it's powerful; all music is, the most powerful thing I know.

Phelps unabashedly acknowledges that one of the reasons she likes being a non-melody-getting viola player is that she has control at the base of the music. This control is not a dictatorship, though, because the power of music is a collective power. I think I could write more about this, but I'm not going to now. This post was just supposed to be about that one note.

Little Thoughts on Music

Folk music Music that folks can sing or play from memory.

Folks The down-home people, the people in the cereal aisle, the people with a little hole in the elbow of their favorite sweater.

"Folk music" has come to have a musty smell. It supposedly lives only in church basements on Thursday nights when the banjo players and the singing family from the hills come to town to fiddle around. But I think that, for example, Bruce Springsteen is truly a folk musician.