Wine and Chocolate - Part 10

I arrived at my aunt’s house 30 minutes late. She offered me vodka when I first got in, but I declined because I was wearing plastic braces and didn’t want to brush my teeth again. She told me to lighten up, “vodka is disinfecting, you can’t get cavities drinking vodka.” We were meeting to brainstorm ideas to write a book. She had lofty ideas about writing a treatise about piano playing, aesthetics, and philosophy... I had ambitions of using the words fucker and douchebag. She flashed her phone voice memos showing hundreds of recordings of lectures by HKC and other piano teacher luminaries like Vardi. Where to start? I told her I wanted to follow Steven Chu’s process of immersion learning. Instead of reading a dry textbook, I want to dive deep into the subject and then spread my tentacles laterally to learn organically about classical music and my uncle. I asked her to send me the most interesting lecture to start my journey and we could organize the book around stories and viewpoints of musicians.

At 10 pm my uncle returned home from a long 13 hour teaching day. He placed a black plastic bag with a couple bottles of wine on the counter. My aunt encouraged me to start asking questions while he cooked. Up to this point I had developed stories about him in talking to his students, his wife, and family members, reading Rilke letters, listening to his concert and looking at his master classes. Like peeling an onion only to find another layer within, each narrative provided me a different perspective of the man. he was hungry and preparing dinner before me. Opening the refrigerator door, scanning for ingredients, he promptly proceeded to cut ginger and tofu slices, and chop greens in the sink to sautee. He talks to musicians all day, so I felt nervous asking stupid obvious questions about music... he was hungry and tired, how do I barrage him with my douchebag questions? I just jumped into the deep end of the pool and started my line of inquiry by asking him if he could give me a sense of the main idea of his performance of opus 106, since his disciple had such difficulty in explaining it to me.

He started his response by quoting Mahler. “What is tradition? When something is misread, it is interpreted in a new way and something is innovated. if three people misinterpret something then it becomes a tradition. The problem with pianists these days is that they blindly follow traditions laid down years ago by 3 guys sitting in a cafe. Pianists nowadays get masters degrees in music. It’s ironic, none of these players are 'masters'.” I got the sense he just wanted to blow off some steam after a long day teaching. My aunt chimed in, “It’s like kids slavishly filling out coloring books. how is that creative if you're painting within the outlines? But kids defend their efforts by responding “in the end you get an amazing image.”

“in germany, i hung out with so called composers. there are composers... and then there are ‘composers’. i got a little glimpse at what they were doing. i also taught 3 students at  university who were weak intellectually, artistically and aesthetically. It was depressing. these were people who called themselves composers. First, they were not qualified. the problem was most of their education was about right and wrong. But music is not about multiple choice. art is not about multiple choice or right and wrong.... when i play music like opus 106, i create a being. it's like taking a composer's music and bringing it to life. each performance is like creating a child. sometimes it's a juvenile delinquent, sometimes it's bright, sometimes mischievous... each child is unique. instead of thinking right and wrong, when i play a piece, i go left and i go right. when i go left i try to show the listener something in the music they might not have seen, and so on.." relating his musical journey to real life wandering, awareness, and reflection he continued "just the other day, i was walking down the street and the sun was setting exactly on axis at the end of the street and i wondered how long it would take to go down. i walked to the end of the street and observed it took 8 minutes."

I hadn’t intended to structure a conversation about opus 106. two weeks ago, I had never heard of this piece. Now I was talking to a pianist that has played it for my entire lifespan... 45 years. "what’s the difference between when you first started playing opus 106 and now?" “When I first played it, it was like a tree. It had a branch and some leaves on it and that's it. i was very happy. i got its notes. the first stage of playing was wanting to play everything 'correctly', which is a duty of being a student. i grew up in germany where musicians are supposed to be the slaves or 'musikants'- just players." 

i was persistent in my questioning, prospecting for interesting responses. i struck gold. "he was deaf when he composed opus 106, do you think Beethoven is giving a perspective in music that's different because of that?" "before i learned it. i heard this piece live only once by a student in the same class. i remember it was just so long. it didn't draw my interest. i didn't know what the heck it was. it just went on and on and on. do you know how it happened i played this piece? i was turning 16. i've told this story maybe 50 times. PHC challenged me (HKC's older sister and concert pianist herself) . “karlheinz stockhausen claimed he learned this piece in 2 weeks.” so i sat down. went to my room and memorized and learned how to play it in 2 weeks. it was plain and simple. from my sister's point of view. it was a challenge. from my point of view i wanted to see if i could do it. i had no other interest. and i did it. case closed. it was during that time PHC was traveling and playing a lot of concerts. when she was traveling a lot she would give me a key to her practice room which was in a garage. i could practice there 24-7 without disturbing anyone. i would spend late nights playing in that garage. in the slow movement there's one spot i played and played and played and i felt an out of body experience that transported me to another world. that was so beautiful unique and fascinating. i was a little shocked and surprised. i came back to myself. that's when i gave up the idea of becoming a scientist. i told myself. "i bet science will never take me there, but music would. that's when i decided i wanted to become a pianist. so it was this opus 106 piece that made me realize i wanted to become a pianist. i never told PHC about it. I just thought it was amazing."

I knew my uncle and his older sister went to Germany to study music, but till now, I didn’t know anything of their relationship. so now i asked some basic questions about my family. “how much older is PHC than you?" "she's 8 years older than me." "did you go to the same school?" "yes... so anyways i wanted to find out more about this piece. people were talking about the joan of arc story. i looked into that. the 1st movement would have been the winning of the war and victory. and then the slow movement was about how she was jailed in the tower in a cell. the last movement would've been the execution. so when i learned about that. i was really fascinated. back then, people around me weren't that inventive. i had enough material to imagine."

"beethoven modeled this after joan of arc?" "no. later i found out that beethoven was going through a very tough time while he was writing opus 106. his brother died. and he wanted file for custody for his nephew. he was winning the fight in court. unbeknownst to a lot of people, he was wealthy. he wrote these pieces and got paid handsomely. he was living well whereas his brother's wife didn't have a job. so he had the upper hand until the last day of the trial. the magistrate asked him "well, once you get custody of your nephew, what school would you send him to?" beethoven had no idea. he never went to school himself. he wouldn't know where to send anybody. and then the magistrate suggested most of the nobles' families send their kids to a certain school. he questioned beethoven whether he hailed from a noble family. because his name sounded like 'von', people assumed he was noble. but beethoven was dutch. so 'van' didn't mean noble. the magistrate's question caught beethoven by surprise. obviously he wasn't ready to answer the question and he was exposed as not being a noble. he lost the custody battle. but what was worse is that he lost a lot of friends. up to this point he had paraded around the upper echelon of society. people thought he was a noble. but now he was a fraud. and it hurt him that he was found out. he had a very hard time. he had hidden his identity for such a long time... and in a cruel twist of fate, he went from the edge of a custody victory to public shame and disaster. going through this ordeal, he had to come out of hiding and face himself as a common man, not a noble. this event could have something to do with the writing of opus 106"

"what is there to prove it?" "Well... beethoven was deaf for his last 10 years. to communicate, he used a book to write out his words to ‘speak’ to people. within this book, at the time of opus 106's writing there is one sentence.. "a house, all so small." just one sentence. but this sentence indicated his state of mind. he felt he was in such a small place... walled in by himself. there it is. in this slow movement i played in the garage.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydpacGfBUd0 it caught my attention and changed my life. and i identified myself with that music. living in germany in a very small room. everywhere i went was small. my sister's practice room was the the back part of the garage. in the front, there was a parked car. the back little section had the piano. i had nowhere to go."

my aunt reaffirmed the town HKC grew up in, stadhagen. was really bleak. "imagine a rough school and rough kids... and here's this small chinese guy. when he first arrived in germany, the princial said "wie geht's?"(how goes it?) and HKC had no idea what it meant. so middle school aged HKC had to spend 3 months in elementary school to learn German before going to middle school. he only wore flannel shirts because my grandfather got a deal and bought dozens of them for the family.

now I was curious about the details of his time in Germany. In my mind I had imagined a fancy conservatory where my aunts and uncle went to attend... not some random suburban wasteland town west of bumfuck Hanover with industrial prefab houses and pianos crammed into garages. i asked a german i work with if there are any stereotypes about hanoverians to get a sense of the area. like in america, all the progressive free thinkers are on the coasts, and all the retarded inbreeding trump xenophobic zealots live in the south. she said hanover is so insignificant it doesn't even have a stereotype. people from hamburg in the north are called fish heads because they're by the sea, people where she hailed from between munich and the black forest are known to be stingy homesteaders. "who chose the school?" "PHC. the school was near where she lived. 4 houses down the road from the school. i lived with an old lady. all the houses were the same. prefabricated. the old lady was a widow that came from oslo."

"how did PHC end up there?" "PHC went to germany because my father knew Germany was great for music. this was my father's idea. he discovered that my sister would respond to the vendors on the road. in taiwan, when the vendors sell something, they carry their goods over their shoulder and sing. they would sing a song kind of like how an icecream truck plays a song to announce their arrival. without electricity people would sing a song. one of my father's colleagues gave PHC a small piano. it had 5 notes. so when vendors passed by and sang a song, she would play that tune on the piano. my grandfather noticed it, and you know.. he was very observant. "that's something special" he thought. so he knocked on people's doors looking for a teacher. he found the right person. chiang kai shek's personal doctor's wife. she had spent 2 years in the shanghai conservatory. she came from zhejiang, the same province that my father came from. he brought my sister over to the wife's house and she immediately found out she had perfect pitch. "you know how rare that is?" she said to my grandfather, "you must have her learn the piano." that's how PHC started playing the piano. my frather was so curious. when any foreign performers came to play in taiwan, he would take her there and make her play there in front of them. the performers were completely astounded. "this child is a genius" they would exclaim.  some of these people were reknowned so my father believed them. HL, who was a surgeon was in the midst of moving to germany. my father made a recording of PHC and had HL take it to germany. HL happened to find  a professor of a piano department in the town where he was working and said "this kid is 8 years old". the chair said, "she's a genius and we must have her."

"did your father take her to germany?" "no, HL did." i responded with a funny story. "i saw HL in germany with my cousins. we were teenagers. he had all these probes in his doctor's office. we kind of just stuck these suction cup probes all over our bodies and goofed off playing sick patients and 'taking measurements' in his office. i didn't know who HL was. Up to this point i had known HL as the nephew of my grandfather who hopped on a boat to go to taiwan with my grandfather's family... now in writing i was learning he became a surgeon, saved my grandmother's life during HKC’s birth, and played a pivotal role in guiding his younger cousins to germany for music. At the time of my visit he was an old doctor with dyed black hair with a bunch of funny equipment that left circular suction cup marks on your body.

getting back on topic, i asked HKC "how has your interpretation of opus 106 changed over time." "it grows with me. when i look back in hindsight. i recognize my path of growth. in my musical development at first i was observant. then i was accurate. i was a super good student. then i became fanatically accurate - a specialist at a musicologist level. these are all just stages. i'm still going through stages. i already look back 1 week after i played the concert at Yale. today i spent 2 hours on it. i realized what level i was last week. now i'm going beyond that. everytime i touch those pieces i'm at another level. i don't go back. this piece reflects my stages and growth. some people don't stick with a piece for a long time. By playing it, i get to see how i grow. each time i play it. i don't care for a vast repertoire. that's unimportant. i always go back to my pieces. i get to see my stages, what i've passed thorugh, abandoned, what i saw so valuable that is no longer valuable to me. i have new things always. a year ago i played the schubert cycle... his last three sonatas. it was very hard. those pieces taught me so much. everyday i couldn't wait to go to practice. every day was a lesson. i kept growing and growing. after i stopped playing schubert i thought i became a very different pianist. i became curious i wondered how my beethoven would be affected now that i'm a different pianist. playing beethoven is a completely new game after the lessons i got from schubert. i renew myself everyday. there's no stagnation. so now when i do beethoven i'm always finding new ideas... nurturing a child. these pieces are children. i believe each one is a complete being. as each one starts to grow and mature into its own. then you can imagine they will have a multiplicity of aspects about them. just like a human being, if you look at it this way, it looks different than if you look at it from a different angle. your view depends on the angle you look at it. it's completely alive. i have created something when i play it. and i can change it. i'm completely flexible. that's the fun part. you've created something. under my hand i can take what a composer's written and bring them to life. the creativity lies right in there."

"how do you bring life to them?" "that takes dedication. in my profession. most of my colleagues are very proud of their knowledge. they're very well read. they have opinions. but if you listen to them play, there's no life. i had a teacher who told me "when you perform, the audience doesn't have a checklist in front of them. the audience doesn't know if you're doing the right thing. they're just sitting there. you have to really know what's in the music. if you make a mistake it doesn't matter. just as long as the expression is right. you have to bring the music to life.... famous piano teacher adele marcus from juilliard said "you have to throw your audience a bone. like they're dogs." so what are you going to present? you're going to present an incredible being. you show all the many children of beethoven. no two are alike. they're all individual. as a pianist, you're dedicated to making these creatures."

at this point, my aunt, who was burrowing her face in flowers joked the tulips on the dining table felt like lips. she was just relishing the feeling. "good, i'm replaced" my uncle joked. their dining room table top was white nestled against a book shelf in an alcove behind a grand piano overlooking a terrace that opened up to the southern manhattan skyline. the table was so small it had space enough for just 2 table settings. i could imagine their intimate nightly conversations held close in this space with the backdrop of books and flowers.

HKC continued his train of thought. "i'm not a servant. i'm a creator for that particular life and the blueprint was given to me by the composer. different people can create different beings. basically a composer specifies 2 eyes, a nose, a mouth, and ears. it's supposed to be human so it won't turn out to be a dog. each day i try to go through as many of the pieces as i can. each time i create a differnet being. it's never one being. the beings are not set in stone. the beings are eternally morphing."

"why did you play so many sonatas in the yale concert?" "i attempted to lock the audience in. they can't leave. if i played in an ordinary way, then it would have been really boring. people would go to the bathroom. but i'm playing my own specific way where possibilities exist. my approach is unorthodox. i'm locking them the audience in. with enough of a dosage i can show the audience the possibility of several children of the composer. it takes some time to understand. if you're not concentrating, you're just window browsing. i wanted to show the audience beethoven... not the dogmatic... not the schoolmaster but the revolutionary. beethoven was 120 years ahead of his time. people of his time couldn't understand all the dissonances. they thought they were mistakes, but actually they were completely intentional."

at this point, i noted the similarities between architecture and music. I don't see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely. "in an architecture sense if you make a building with one function, they don't come alive. if the materials are not handled well, they will not be rendered alive. have you been to fort worth?" "yes" "you know lou kahn's kimbell museum? it's so alive. the way he rendered his concrete, the way he integrated landscaped courtyards and views to the lawn, the way light comes in... he breathes life into the building. across the street, tadao ando's fort worth modern is technically very correct. it's made with flawless concrete, but it exudes no life... it's dead. as an architect, you give a set of instructions for a building... but the care you give to the design, the way you let light in will help make it come alive. if you give it enough foresight in design, you can do many things.... my  favorite architecture is central park. made in 1860's it was planned with enough foresight to anticipate the advent of baseball and car. the crossing roads, rolling landscape, loops, and pathways follow a strong logic. it can host many activities that are so alive.  The grades in the park are very gentle. Always curvilinear, you feel them slip into the park. They never seem to end, curves always round hills or mounds so you never know where they lead. A light green patch of sunlit grass draws you in, before you know it, there’s a meadow overlooking skyscrapers, or a playground, or a collection of boulders. The effect of this large human intervention is to create such a natural fluid environment that frees people for activity, contemplation, discovery and delight. it makes one think why unsuccessful parks are so different and so dead. sometimes you can design a building perfectly on a grid. but when constructed, it's dead."

here HKC mused about life and falafels. "the first few years i was at juliard. i would go to halal stands to get my falafels. there are 3 falafel guys around juilliard. 65th street, 66th street, and a spot across from ABC studios. i checked them all out. each taste is slightly different. all 3 are owned by egyptians. the one on 65th has this guy who is more curious and always looking around." here he started miming a big guy looking around his falafel truck. "when your aunt comes to him he says 'i like your husband, he always gets a falafel!" he's very active. when i ask him to please cook a falafel twice as long and tell him i'll be back, he says 'sure boss' and i come back in 10 minutes it's extra cooked ready for me. this guy is very loose. a great character. the stand across from ABC studios has the best business ratings on yelp. there's always a long line for their food. they're fast and productive. you always get the same falafel. they offer consistently high quality falafels. they never run out of falafel. whereas the first guy runs out quite often. the first guy will apologize for running out. the second stand operates like a machine. the third stand is one street over. it's run by a lonely guy. every now and then,  i go there to support him. he gives me the largest falafel ball. and they're good and nutritous but not the best tasting. every time i see him think i'm going to help him out give him a little business. this is how it is. they're lively. it's so different. i go to central park on the weekend. nature attracts me. in spring time. i have to be there. in the spring i like to see new leaves. multitudes of colors. i remember taking my father to the forest with a magnifying glass. he could not stop laughing after seeing buds on the branches magnified. we go to rambles where there are only a few people. the birds have their gatherings. we like to catch them and see what they're doing. it's incredible. i discover things everytime i go to the park. just the other day, i saw some bark on the road. where did it come from? that kind of bark did not come from any of these nearby trees. i wonder how it ended up in the road. it's fascinating. there are always hidden gems to discover."

the conversation now veered back towards architecture. "what's the most interesting architecture you see now" my aunt asked. "the most exciting thing for me is landcape. urban space is becoming more 3 dimensional. the highline is raised so it's exciting for people to see the city in different ways. plazas were typically flat... now they're becoming 3 dimensional. when you get to the vessel, the stairs bring you up to platforms, and you see the city through the oculi, and see people in action. it's a great 3 dimensional lattice of an urban space. just like the idea of central park propogated around the world. the idea of highline is going around world now: reusing infrastructure to rebuild cities."

my uncle asked, "do you think geometric ratios in space affect people?" i don't know why i brought up kahn so much, but he designed buildings at yale where my uncle teaches, and a museum where the van cliburn competition is held, fort worth. out of all the architects i thought about, i believed kahn's modern interpretation and mastery of ancient notions of proportions, material, and light was akin to my uncle's artistic sensibilities... and his dedication to his art and teaching and deferred success in life mirrored kahn's professional trajectory. "yes. louis kahn was a master of this. you can see the proportions in kimball museum were derived from his studies of ancient proportion in rome. the yale art gallery looks like simple plan. but every wall in relationship is figured out precisely. they all relate to the golden rectangle and human proportions. kahn came out of the great depression and could not find much work. he was a teacher at yale when he got his first big commission at 52 years old. after he won the rome prize, he met anne tyng who inspired him to really look into geometry. his ideas started crystallizing. within the last 21 years of his life he designed so many gems... the salk laboratory, exeter library, kimball museum, british art gallery etc... at yale you have the yale art gallery, his first building across from one of his last buildings, the british art gallery. at the british art gallery, the concrete looks massive but it is hollow. through the hollow areas, the air and water course through the building weaving together a lot of flows in a very sophisticated. it is very simple, yet very well thought out. when i was in school, his son screened his movie My Architect in the British art gallery theater.  Kahn evidently had 3 wives at the same time. Kahn didn't know how to drive so he would take taxis to women's houses..." keeping on this topic about messy life, i told a funny story about work, "went i went to a job site yesterday, and we drove past floyd bennet air field. my boss told me charles lindberg flew out of there. there was a documentary about him where his children spoke of what it was like growing up a lindberg. one child recounted lindberg would always fly away for a couple months at a time. he had 6 kids with his wife and another 6 kids among 3 other mistresses (2 of which were sisters). apparently he used his piloting skills to go from family to family..." at this point my uncle offered one of a few glasses of montepulciano red wine. it went very smoothly with the chocolate covered ginger balls. it was well worth taking off my braces and an extra tooth brushing. 

to get back to the topic of music i made one last quip, i was amazingly persistent with my questions. my aunt laughed each time i asked another. "so beethoven said it would take 50 years to understand opus 106... but the life expectancy back in his time was only 30 years... so 50 years was beyond a typical life span. do you think we have to convert 50 years to modern lifespan? do you think it will take 100 years nowadays to understand opus 106?" wine was now producing silly questions and theories and serious responses. "beethoven died at 57. it was a strange but amazing statement he made saying it would take 50 years to understand his opus 106. people say "oh that's just metaphoric statement". but i think there was some truth in it. i hope in 5 years i'll have  a greater understanding of the piece. it's hard to play opus 106 fifty years. first you have to start playing it young, because if you start to late, when you get old, it's hard to summon the stamina to play it. secondly, most people don't keep playing it. in the world now there are probably 30-50 pianists now who will play it for 50 years. there were a few things that beethoven said that give us clues about his musical insights. his first clue was about tempo. the metronome was invented by Maelzel shortly before beethoven started marking tempos on his scores. Maelzel turned out to be the guy who also invented the hearing horn. beethoven was very curious with the metronome and marked the time for each movement opus 106. it is the only sonata he tried to specify the tempo.. he sent his manuscript with tempo markings to publisher in london. the publisher didn't get it. he wrote a letter back to beethoven to ask if could send another copy. by the time the second set arrived, the first set arrived. confusingly, the tempo markings were completely different. the publisher asked "which one should we use?" beethoven responded, "this is totally useless. if somebody doesn't know how the music goes, this pure metronome number will not help." that was a huge clue. it's very important to know the tempo. first thing he asked after someone saw a performance of his music was not "did they playwell?"... rather it was "what tempo did they play?" if the tempo was correct, then he would ask if the musicians played the music well. at different tempos the music has a completely different expression. for the 9th symphony scherzo, when beethoven attended a rehearsal even when he couldn't hear a thing. he told the conductor it was the wrong tempo." the conductor told beethoven, "that's your tempo on the sheet music, 126." "no no no...." beethoven replied as  he crossed out the 126 on the score and revised the tempo to 80 beats per minute. the tempo was 30% off! that was a huge problem. after that confusion, beethoven said "if the person doesn't know how the music goes, then forget it." fortunately all his symphonies got metronome markings. those tempo markings was a huge insight into beethoven. he was the first modern pianist. he didn't  play blandly like other pianists. his music is full of emotion and strength." at this point, our talk diverged further into life. my uncle would retire to sleep within an hour, i kept speaking with my aunt till 2 AM. she told me they were going to film a session about the ideas of opus 106 at their piano in a week. i rode my scooter into the cold dark night thinking of all the stories that had transpired and the exciting prospect of delving further into opus 106.