The Tripadvisor site for Turtleback Mountain boasted many reviews similar to the one listed above plus a 4.5 star rating. Additionally, the travel guide I borrowed from the library featured a romantic photo of windswept grassy knolls overlooking the San Juan islands and Pacific Ocean beyond. In reality, the trail was a relentless 10 foot wide white gravel utility road devoid of any shade. With the sun out, the experience was blinding. Light reflected off the loose gravel baking our poor souls like rotisserie chickens. Sporadic footpaths branching off the main gravel road led to ‘vistas’. The views were meh at best… actually, they were memorable for how awful they were… like random views of the ubiquitous smooth orange barked madrono tree or some uninspired glimpses of the ocean.
“peaceful with very few other hikers” was a euphemism for “unpopular for a reason”. When you commit to something and it starts out bad, you keep thinking it must get better. Like when you encounter a pad thai made too sweet, but you keep eating it hoping somehow the flavors work out. I kept thinking a trail so highly rated with hundreds of glowing reviews could not possibly be so inedible.
Inevitably, K started criticizing the trail. The kids began trudging at slower and slower paces thus stretching out the misery while ensuring we could not possibly make it to the peak within a reasonable time frame.
I kept explaining that the trail guides pics and reviews were amazing.
“This sucks” they replied. “we’re getting sun burnt and bitten by black flies.”
“We’re almost there” I replied.
Their chorus of criticisms then got personal. “You good for nothing weasel. You’re the worst trail picker. What were you thinking? Did you crosscheck your recommendations on other websites?”
“Yes,” I lied. “In fact the pictures in the guidebook are incredible…. Just keep walking and maybe we will find the one footpath that leads to the stunning panorama advertised in all the trail guides.”
After 2 miles up the hill, I finally admitted defeat. I stopped defending the shitty trail. I concluded only the locals come here… For them it’s a place to walk their dogs, scoop up their poop into tiny plastic bags and discard it at the trashcan by the parking lot. This is not a place that you fly across the country and take a ferry for. Just the day before, we had hiked a spectacular 4.5 star Moran state park moss-lined cool temperate rainforest trail with ancient redwoods weaving through mountain lakes and waterfalls. It left a terrible taste in our mouths that we allocated our precious remaining hours on Orcas island to this highly rated trail only to be disappointed with a subpar experience.
Ever since that Turtleback trail fiasco, I’ve learned to manage expectations. Now, I generally tell my family not to expect much from their hiking experiences… in fact they may be rather crummy. That way, when the trails are deficient, they’re not disappointed. If it’s mediocre, we’re okay with having driven 2 hours to the hike. There is nothing is worse than anticipating a great trail only to walk on a steep gravel road.
The other lesson of Turtleback is a realization of the limitations of language in conveying the feeling of a hiking experience. The only way to divine the real worth of a trail is to experience and hike it for yourself… a study of the Tripadvisor platform is a study in the futility of language. The usual hiking review post discusses factual characteristics like the trail’s length, topography, level of difficulty, and whether it’s overridden with ticks and mosquitoes. People with kids tend to focus their reviews on the trivial logistics of the site like the cost of parking, nearby restaurants, and hours of operation. Some weirdos get fancy and describe the underlying geological foundations which impart the site with its unique character then talk about all the corresponding flora fauna it hosts and how historically the indigenous people lived in harmony with the land. Some people get extra fancy, and write poetry like Edna St. Vincent Millay “The wind in the ash-tree sounds like surf on the shore at Turtleback. I will shut my eyes . . . hush, be still with your silly bleating, sheep on Shillingstone Hill . . . They said: Come along! They said: Leave your pebbles on the sand and come along, it's long after sunset! The mosquitoes will be thick in the pine-woods along by Long Nook, the wind's died down! They said: Leave your pebbles on the sand, and your shells, too, and come along, we'll find you another beach like the beach at Turtleback.”
At this point, you may be wondering like me, what does this family hiking disaster and Tripadvisor review analysis have to do with Beethoven? Simple. Picture yourself as the musical genius, Ludwig van Beethoven. You live in Vienna. Your hair is unkempt and wild. It’s early 1800’s. Every morning, you wake up at the crack of dawn to start work. With great care you fastidiously count precisely 60 coffee beans, to brew the perfect cup of coffee which you’ve calculated to provide the optimal dose of caffeine for your daily operations. Around 2 PM, you go walk to the forested valleys of Vienna with pencil and some sheets of music paper in hand. There, you jot down some musical sketches and poetic odes to nature. At nightfall, you stop at a tavern, read some newspapers, drink some soup and have a glass of beer and a pipe after supper. You go to bed at 10 pm at the latest.
In nature you find traces of musical themes. The brooks, trees, and birds sing to you. you notate the sounds. You think of all your childhood trips with your father along the Rhine. Scribbled by the musical annotations, you write grandiloquent poems like “Almighty One, In the woods, I am blessed. Happy every one, In the woods. Every tree speaks Through Thee. O God! What glory in the Woodland. On the Heights is Peace,— Peace to serve Him”— (This poetic exclamation, accompanied by a few notes, is on a page of music paper owned by Joseph Joachim.)
Later, when you’re too ashamed to socialize with people because of your increasing deafness, you start thinking it’s a waste of time to wander the forests deaf, let alone continue to live. At age 29 in 1802, you pen a secret “l shall meet thee bravely…. farewell” suicide note to your brothers describing your despair over your hearing loss, but you thankfully never send it. Amazingly, over time, you realize your loss of hearing doesn’t hinder your composition powers.
In fact, you discover by maintaining afternoon walks as part of your daily routine, you somehow optimize your creativity and dampen your anguish. You find refuge in nature and write poems like this “My miserable hearing does not trouble me here. In the country it seems as if every tree said to me: ‘Holy! holy!’ Who can give complete expression to the ecstasy of the woods! O, the sweet stillness of the woods!”(July, 1814; he had gone to Baden after the benefit performance of “Fidelio.”) “How happy I am to be able to wander among bushes and herbs, under trees and over rocks; no man can love the country as I love it. Woods, trees and rocks send back the echo that man desires.” (To Baroness von Drossdick)
Remarkably, in future generations, many notable composers prove walking daily to stimulate their musical creativity is not mere coincidence. Mahler was known to take a 3-4 hour walk after lunch stopping to jot down ideas. Britten said his walks is where he planned out what he was going to write in the next period at your desk. Satie would walk 6 miles into Paris, socialize at the bars and cafes, then miss the last train out to the suburb and then return to his house by foot at 6 Am only to repeat this cycle. Tchaikovsky was particularly ambitious and would walk for 45 minutes at 8:45, then a 2 hour walk after lunch. His brother noted “somewhere at sometime he had discovered that a man needs a two hour walk for his health, and his observance of this rule was pedantic and superstitious, as though if he returned five minutes early he would fall ill and unbelievable misfortunes would ensue. He would often stop to jot down ideas that he would later flesh out at the piano. Schubert on summer afternoons often went for long walks in the Vienna countryside and then enjoyed a glass of beer or wine with friends. John Adams used to walk his dog in the morning and so on and so forth…
Moreover, future Stanford research psychologists experimentally probe and confirm that creative powers are indeed enhanced by daily walks. They find a person's creative output increases by an average of 60 percent when walking as opposed to sitting. Even a person walking indoors on a treadmill facing a blank wall produced twice as many creative responses compared to a person sitting down. Apparently, walks after a work sessions, no matter how dull, opens your brain to new ideas and playful thinking so that when you go back to work, you have new perspectives and fresh ideas. It seems walking induces a sort of dream state where your brain processes vast amounts of acquired knowledge unconsciously and helps find solutions previously unseen. It’s no wonder from Aristotle and the Greek philosophers walking and philosophizing peripatetically to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg convening walking meetings, creative innovators like you have incorporated walking as part of their routine.
When you return home from the forests around Vienna you empty your right pocket of rhapsodic poetry and stack it on a pile of papers in the corner of your studio. If you were born in the late 1800’s you would be living confirmation of Oscar Wilde’s quote “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling”. Luckily for humanity, you take out the musical sketches from your left pocket and start synthesizing and developing them into pieces like Opus 90 Sonata in E Minor. Just like a conventional Tripadvisor review, your music is the product of a hike. But instead of saying something mundane like “the hike was a terrible experience on a white gravel road”, you somehow manage to compose music which the world has never heard before and your deaf self will never hear…. music that is so provocative and other worldly that 250 years after your birthday, pianists all around the world celebrate your work by playing recitals and discussing their insights in your work. One such pianist is HKC.
To listen to HKC explain Beethoven sonata while he plays it on the keyboard, is like being led by a wise sherpa up Everest. Whilst Himalayan sherpa Kami Ruta has hiked Everest 25 times all different ways and guides you around every dangerous crevice and points you to every advantageous shear faced foothold to be aware of, HKC has hiked and contemplated all the Beethovenian sonatas over the past 50 years and is able to articulate all the subtle nuances, harmonies and points of interest.
“Opus 90 opens with phrase that leads the listener into the space. But with an unexpected harmony he signals there is something mysterious to follow….” HKC says while playing, “Listen to Beethoven. It’s almost like he’s saying to us “I wonder how you feel?” And the music is a wonderment.”
In HKC’s playing you feel the song in his hand, heart, and body. With every note is a transition to the next, an micro-alteration in realtime like a sailor adjusting his masts out on the ocean. The angles of the fingers, the space between the notes, and his ability to stretch and release the space between notes demonstrates a fluidity only attained from years of practice and mastery.
As HKC dives into the next phrase. “See... we have to journey with Beethoven’s music. Pretend you’re walking the woods with him. I suppose that’s what he asks us. Don’t just play it.” Beethoven says “Come with me. Feel it. Feeling is unlimited. Experience it with me.” Unlike a Mozart piece where piano legato slurs are limited to a violin bow’s worth of notes, Beethoven’s music occasionally calls for pedaling 15 bars at a time. The legato is piano specific… not configured to the bow, but to the imagination.
HKC’s pedaling creates a complex soundworld where he sometimes pedals with the note, or soft pedals after 2 notes. HKC is always renewing his understanding of pieces. His is always finding new directions for the sounds. He plays the same chords in connection to the next, adding certain voices in, taking away other, adjusting the vibrato in the pedaling. If one thing doesn’t work, he takes a long time to put the piece back together.
As HKC cascades down a Beethovenian line, “This is unbelievable. Exuberance… It took me a long time before I could understand a quintuple. A quintuple is rhetorical. It’s something authoritative. But before that… it was a joy… an overjoy.”
Beyond the valley, HKC points out, “Listen to the juxtapositions. If it’s in the same register, one doesn’t sense it so much. But this exponential passage ascending the top says “come with me, experience it!”
On the misty mountain top… “You know this measure is like Schubert’s C Minor. An Echo. This would have been at Athos mountain. You shout out… yodel at Athos mountain and the notes answer you. Or maybe it’s someone in the bush answering you,” HKC laughs “It’s an incredible invention…..”
When the piece ends, HKC becomes more cerebral in discussion…“you know, Opus 90 was written 5 years after his previous piano sonata Opus 81 “Les Adieux” which was dedicated to Archduke Rudolph in 1809. After Opus 81, it seemed Beethoven didn’t have anything new to say in the sonata piano format. Additionally, it was an extremely difficult period for Beethoven. He was engrossed writing his opera, Fidelio, dealing with deafness, financial troubles, the death of his brother and custody battles over his brother’s surviving son, Karl. Only when he had gathered enough strength and aspiration to say something new did he set out to write piano sonatas again. Opus 90 E minor is dedicated to Count Lichnowsky the brother of Prince Lichnowsky, one of his great patrons.”
“Beethoven’s close friend, secretary and biographer, Anton Schindler, says Beethoven told him the sonata is about the Count’s girl troubles. The count romanced a young stage actress many years his junior and then married her despite his family’s objections. The first movement of Opus 90 is a battle between head and heart. The second movement is a conversation with the beloved. But you can’t place too much trust in Schindler because he forged entries in Beethoven’s conversation books to construct a tidy narratives of Beethoven’s music.” (conversation books = books Beethoven carried around to communicate with people. Since he was deaf, he would have people write their questions to him so he would write his replies in real time. Schindler = man who went down in history as the douchebag who forged a deaf person’s conversations. Me = dude who’s going down in history for bringing down the douchebag who forged a deaf person’s conversations).
Suspicious of dubious narratives, HKC does however pay close attention to Beethoven’s wild chicken scratch writing scribbled on the original score of the piece. “What is peculiar about this Opus 90 piece in particular was that Beethoven was no longer satisfied with Italian instructions for phrasing and dynamics. Instead of using the usual Italian annotations, he used this German description for dynamics and tempo: “Mit Lebhaftigkeit und durchaus mit Empfindung und Ausdruck”. This literally means “with liveliness and throughout with feeling and expression”. In Italian it could be translated into something like “Vivace or Con Brio”. Immediately this note stood out as a very human instruction. Not some official generic vague Italian jargon. But something more human… something that we can feel.”
“Beethoven was a German patriot. A deep thinking musician. At this stage in his career, he thought Italian was not sufficient to give meaning to his thoughts. In a simple way, Empfidung means with deep feelings, feelingful, expressive at the same time with feeling. In Opus 101, he scribbled this word again on the score.”
“Most people, when people hear this, they say “I understand… I understand Empfidung.” But do they really? The first time someone brought Empfidung to my attention was my first German piano teacher. Hans Leichoff. In a very casual manner he told his students, “There’s a lot more to this word than people think.” And that was it. He never explained it further. But this remark left a very deep impression on me. I was about 15 years old. I felt compelled to find out what empfindung meant.”
HKC now turns into forensic linguist on the hunt for meaning. “If we turn it to a reflexive verb, it means to “To sense it or to sense”. Empfinsun as an adjective means “Very sensitive”. People use it to say that person is overly sensitive. So what is the importance of the word that means deeply feelingful? Fortunately, philosopher Kant did write something about this word “Empfindung is the action of being sensitive”. It turns out to be a rather important word in psychology and philosophy. It plays a role on the opposite side of intuition. The verb of it, Empfisun, implies an experience. Well, that turns everything you know about this piece upside down… If Beethoven writes this… well you need to pay special attention to it and experience the piece. That means you better sit back, and play it, and absorb it before you express it. You have to find a way to sense it take it all in and then express it. That’s the magic of music and art. It’s the feedback and synthesis happening at the same time simultaneously.”
“And so what does this mean in the practical sense? What does it take to sense? What are we supposed to sense? One of the most important elements that we can easily sense is harmony. Not just in sense of structural, but in the sense of feeling tone, color. What does it feel like? Then from harmony to harmony how it progresses. There is an underlying Intrinsic logic. So when that works out, then the music comes alive. Beethoven with these words encourages us to look beyond. Look deeper into the notes. Go beyond and find the life that is hidden in it.”
“Regarding color and tone, my brother-in-law, E was the one who introduced me to the role of harmonies. He was a well decorated composer having won the equivalent of the Pulitzer prize in France. His music was strictly modern style. I couldn’t understand a thing he wrote. He composed music using mathematical formulas. Insert a variable into the equation and according to the result, compose it. It was quite a popular method of composition when I was in school. The most popular thing people wanted to discover were musical equations based on the Golden ratio. Everything had to do with it golden ratio. Even though he was so mathematically oriented, he was very very human. In his spare time, he listened to Schubert, Bach, and all the things I swear my classmates wouldn’t bother listening to. He would be sitting there and just really enjoying it. It was much different from people just casually reading books or reading music.E would close his ideas and be completely enraptured in the music. He’d lean over and tell me, “That’s magical.” He would tell me how it’s composed… he was the one who first told me harmony is not like the roman letters. Harmony is how you react to it and how you respond. At that time I was 18 years old. I had no clue about response. My response to harmony was elementary. These foreign ideas raise your curiosity. You want to learn about it.”
“E introduced me to harmony when we were down in Provence in southern France attending the Stockhausen Festival. He was hanging out there because he wanted to meet with one of my sisters. He was in love with her. There was going to be a meteor shower in August and he said “Let’s climb up the mountain” We were in Paul Cezanne’s hometown. Right behind the town is the subject of his paintings, Mount St. Victoire. It’s quite smooth. Not steep. But it’s beautiful. E bought a bottle of red wine and I carried 2 glasses.”
“We climbed up to the summit. In Provence… it’s a dream. On the roadside there were herbs… the most prominent of which were marjoram and sage. The fragrance was pretty strong. We lied on the marjoram and sage bush and drank glass after glass of wine and counted shooting stars. I was in such a delirium. I was thinking “O my god. When facing the milky way universe above us. You look up and get inspired. It’s limitless. You can imagine harmony’s limitlessness. Each harmony can give you a good number of different responses. As humans will have one response to harmony. You will respond to a harmony favorably right away. Because that’s you and your chemistry.”
“It was there I started to cultivate my understanding of harmony. I followed my teacher’s advice on developing as a pianist. “You have to cultivate, cultivate, cultivate!” Meaning, you nurture and develop something you know you won’t see result for a while. Cultivating a bed of vegetables or cultivating special grapes takes time. It takes a few generations before you’re in a position to select the best offerings of the plants. At first it was laborious thinking about harmonies. There isn’t a right or wrong. Deconstructing harmonies became a predominant obsession. I broke down scores and looked at every single moment and then the music literally stopped and died like it choked it. It died and I had to resuscitate it. Over time I learned to abandon a few harmonies and treasure a few others. That’s when I developed the notion of focal point. That is, identifying what the composer was proud of in his piece. Beethoven was always striving to find something unique. It’s very hard to find the same thing in 2 different Beethoven pieces. With the same element and imagination he created a lot of variations. The same process led Balanchine to create variations of traditional elements in abstract imaginative ways and Prokofiev to use triads in different ways. People love his music cause it’s easy to listen to; everyone can relate to it.”
HKC then pauses to reflect on this idea. “I’m always curious if all composers anticipate exactly what they write or was part of it new to them or ambiguous when they conceived it? I suppose if I was a composer and I wrote a piece, I wish to think it would be played in endless variations. That it can be reinvented. That it doesn’t stay stale. This is contrary to some composer’s stance of course.”
“About 15 years ago, I played 2 piano piece swith my sister by Ligetti which was very difficult. We spent a month rehearsing getting it up to tempo. We performed it at the Rudolph Steiner center in Switzerland. It was quite successful. And afterwards we were greeted by a young composer in the audience.”
He said “I don’t suppose you were at Damstadt this summer?” It’s the famous center of modern music. It’s a meeting place where composers exchange knowledge.
““No. I didn’t because I live in the States,” I said.”
“Well. This piece was performed there by 2 electronically controlled programmable self-playing Busendorfer zoog pianos. Ligetti’s piece was performed automatically. After seeing the show, Ligeti was so happy and so satisfied by the performance that he told the audience afterwards “since my ideal the music itself as he wished to hear it, and the way he composed it… if this is how fantastic automated instruments can perform my music, then in the future humans are not needed.”
“This was quite a shock to my sister and me. We were shocked. We stood there worthless not knowing how to respond to it. We just spent quite a lot of time trying to decipher and think of ways to make it exciting. I suppose our work figuring out how to play this composer’s music was not really necessary.”
“Now in Beethoven, we do have a composer that wishes we exercise our participation. Who takes our participation quite seriously by saying mit enfindung un ausdruck.” Beethoven himself was a gifted improviser according to his pupil Ferdinand Ries. “His extemporizations were the most extraordinary things that one could hear. No artist that I ever heard came at all near the height which Beethoven attained. The wealth of ideas which forced themselves on him, the caprices to which he surrendered himself, the variety of treatment, the difficulties, were inexhaustible.” His playing was not technically perfect. He let many a note “fall under the table,” but without marring the effect of his playing.”
In describing his playing style, another of his students, Carl Czerny said, “In rapidity of scale passages, trills, leaps, etc., no one equaled him,—not even Hummel. His attitude at the pianoforte was perfectly quiet and dignified, with no approach to grimace, except to bend down a little towards the keys as his deafness increased; his fingers were very powerful, not long, and broadened at the tips by much playing; for he told me often that in his youth he had practiced stupendously, mostly till past midnight. In teaching he laid great stress on a correct position of the fingers (according to the Emanuel Bach method, in which he instructed me); he himself could barely span a tenth. He made frequent use of the pedal, much more frequently than is indicated in his compositions. His reading of the scores of Handel and Gluck and the fugues of Bach was unique, inasmuch as he put a polyphony and spirit into the former which gave the works a new form.” From these descriptions of his improvisation talent and interpretative imagination of other composers work, you would expect Beethoven would embrace interpretations of his own music.
“Now he’s starting to use these words Enfindung un Ausdruck to express the spiritual mental physical and devotional aspects needed to bring opus 90 to life. Beethoven started to use these words not because of a turn of events or a new turn of musical direction but because he finally decided it was really necessary for his music. We can learn a lot of about Beethoven’s late period to enhance our understanding of his early period. In the late period, Beethoven became real master of his craft but all the desires and aspirations were always present.”
“One has to play with heart and soul when you play Beethoven. The way people play his music today, Beethoven’s often treated like dried cracker without toppings,” HKC laughed. “Breathing life into Beethoven’s music, is different for each and every pianist. First, we all have to hone our craft. Good craft is something you can always use. But that’s not enough. In Boston, I used to have a lot of fancy workshop tools in the house but the hardest part for me was figuring out what I wanted to build with the tools.”
“I tell students that thinking about how to play a piece is like picking up a white blank page and drawing on it. You have to decide what you want to draw, and then you have to decide where you start drawing on the page and the style and everything. I learned this from my high school art teacher. He handed students a piece of white paper and pencil and said “start”. At that time I didn’t want to draw familiar things. I didn’t want to draw people. I was inspired by Franz Marc’s Blue Horse. That picture stayed in my mind as so impressive. How could Marc know how to draw horse that’s blue in such an abstract way?”
“The same thing happens when you have a score in front of you and there’s a melody. It’s sort of blank. Just because you see the melody and count its measures doesn’t mean it will come alive. Whether it’s 6 measures of 8 measures it doesn’t matter. Unless you’re Schubert or Mozart are born omniscient musical abilities and can compose the most amazing music before 30 years old, you’re a mere mortal like me. As mortals, we need time to develop cultivate and appreciate ideas. Many of my thoughts about the piano I remember thinking about them when I was 15 or 16 years old. The difference was back then, all the ideas were in pieces. There were hints here and there. But by being awake and preceptive you realize when new epiphanies show up and you can piece them together.”
“When I started out, I played, but didn’t have any feedback. I would feed but not receiving anything back… There was an actor in an interview who revealed how he studied his craft despite not attending drama school. he would observe people on the subway, on the platform, in the supermarket. He would observe each character and see how they reacted, their circumstances, their feedback. At home he would go home, and review what he observed and mimic their expressions. His acting was based on observing humanity. Piano playing is similar. You won’t get better by just going to lots of concerts. You learn by being observant. By engaging active feedback.”
“When my hand was injured in 1991, I could not play the piano for several years. Looking back. It was a wonderful experience. I made a point to go to the forest every day for 2 hours. In the deep forest, that is the time I actually came in touch with nature and learned everything from nature. I remember taking my father there. He didn’t know anything about nature. I told him, “Look at this, look at that”. Oh I remember how he giggled. I’ll never forget that. He would not leave. He would stay there mesmerized.”
“For the 5 years I spent in New England Conservatory before I came to Juilliard, I told all my students to go to the Arnold Arboretum. It’s a huge garden by Olmsted, the same designer of Central Park. Only one student on mine ever took my advice and went there. He came back and reported what he saw. It was a little depressing. Students didn’t take my advice seriously.”
“Like Beethoven, my time in nature is one thing I cultivated. I went not only for the woods and the trees but also observed the birds. I learned the sounds of leaves very early on in my ventures into the forest. In the deep woods, past midnight, in pitch dark, I listened to the different sounds different trees make when the winds blow. It was very satisfying to hear the crescendo and decrescendo and all the iterations when the wind blows in one area gusts to another area. There in the forest I would get lost in the long distance conversations between birds.”
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| Original Opus 90 Score |
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