Death by Boot Butter

The life of a road warrior is surreal.

It becomes distressingly easy to forget what city you are in, and all hotel rooms look the same.

Certainly all hotel bars look the same.

And it's isolating. Even when I was married, the only person who ALWAYS knew where I was, was my assistant. And he or she would be the only person I would speak to for days at a time (not counting the people I was trying to con into buying whatever I happened to be selling).

But I was a road warrior back in the day when cell phones were the size of refrigerators and blackberries were just a fantasy.

It's still isolating now, but at least you have a steady stream of emails and texts (preferably from friends, not colleagues) to help you feel at least somewhat connected.

I used to talk to Gorgeous Hunk O' Man (JF) once a month or so. But now that he's taken a new position (a road warrior position), I'm hearing from him almost everyday. And I reply back, as instantly as I can. Entertainment is sorely needed, and he's a friend in great need of it. There's a reason most of the road warriors I know are raging alcoholics. JF is currently in Tulsa, considering ending it all. Not that I blame him. Tulsa? *shudder*

JF: I'm in Tulsa for three days and thinking of shooting myself repeatedly. I mean a) Oral Fucking Roberts University is here and b) there is something in my bathroom called BOOT BUTTER. Jesus God.

me: Boot Butter? Stick it in your bag RIGHT NOW. And don't shoot yourself, darling. Not in Tulsa. You should go gently into that good night while in a bathtub in Paris, an empty fifth of vodka rolling on the bathroom floor and a drugged out hooker on the bed. On second thought... I think that's been done. OK, will fly down to meet you and we can shoot each other.

JF: It's in my bag. Trust. And I'll give the front desk your name so they'll give you a room key. Every fag should go out with his hag.

me: I'm imagining the news coverage when they discover our bodies:
"Two unusually attractive people were found shot to death in a hotel room in downtown Tulsa. Initial findings suggest that they shot each other while fighting over a container of Boot Butter."

JF: I live for you, I really do.

And I have no idea why this has suddenly popped into my head: I REALLY need to visit my music school one Saturday. And soon. I'm feeling terribly nostalgic for the days before I realized that I could drink like a 250lb man, and when all that mattered was my love affair with a piano. Any piano. As long as it was in tune.

But first, I have to give JF some more attention. He's now wondering if he should rub boot butter onto his face and asking if it's possible that boot butter could become the new La Mer. And oh - he's planning our joint funeral. Mozart's Requiem Mass and something about hiring professional mourners to wail theatrically.

*sigh*

Chanel N°19

It's not even 6PM and it's dark dark dark.

This only surprises me because somehow I completely missed summer.

I'm taking a short break from work right now and listening to my favorite movement from my favorite symphony: Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 in E minor, the Largo movement.

I remember the first time I heard it - at music school. My string-instrument friends all played in the orchestra so I went to a performance. Students, you say? You are probably imagining something awful. It wasn't professional, certainly, but re-tune what you are no doubt hearing in your mind's ear. Their performance was surprisingly good. So much so, that I remember "forgetting" where I was. Instead of sitting on the edge of my seat out of nervousness for my friends on stage, I sat back and closed my eyes.

If you've never listened to it, do.

It's beautiful. It's complex overall, simple in parts, and sweet and triumphant and sad and wistful and happy. I listen to it frequently, but most especially in the winter. Maybe because it was winter when I first heard it.

I have this belief that innocence has a surprising ability to remain untouched. (Of course, I'm precluding all manner of dark innocence robbers from this statement). For example, you can tell a dirty joke - if it's understood, then you were hardly the one to mar that particular innocence. If it's not, well then, it's not, and innocence remains.

I was always a voracious reader. I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on. Which meant that as a small child I was reading books that would be considered shocking for adults. (Let's ignore the fact that my parents' library contained such variety). But what didn't make sense to me, simply didn't. And it was only upon rereading those same books when I was much older that I thought to myself "WTF?!?"

But this piece was different for me. And I'm not relying on memory here. I read it in one of my old journals the last time I was visiting my parents. When I first heard it, I was 14 years old. And I wrote, later that evening, that listening to it made me "feel... grown up, as if I had been in love - not just having crushes. And that being in love hadn't always gone well. And although I was sometimes sad, everything was still... ok."

Yes, laughable. Nothing is quite so pretentious as a young teenager.

But the thing that struck me as I was rereading that journal, was that I WAS struck. Not just because the music was "pretty" or "sad." It made me think outside myself and my experiences to date. Which I suppose all art is intended to do. So maybe it's just me, and that during a certain period of young adulthood, I had a surprising ability to remain unmoved, untouched by what happened around me. Except for the first time I listened to this piece of music.

Oddly, I'm now thinking of Chanel N°19. It had me at the first whiff. But I've never worn it because I decided that I wasn't yet complex and interesting enough to do so.

But maybe one day, I'll wear it and go to the symphony and see if listening to a world-class orchestra performing this piece makes me think of being absurdly young, as if life were just about having crushes and playing my piano and reading books I don't understand.

Sentimental Journey

One of these days I have to make a pilgrimage to my music school. It shouldn't be that difficult, it's in NYC, for cryin' outloud. I should be able to find a random Saturday when I have nothing else to do.

And it would make me happy.

On Memory

Certain abilities, when it comes to music, might seem almost magical, especially to those who appreciate and covet them.

Perfect pitch, for one.

I don't have the best ear. But with years of training and excruciating effort, my relative pitch became almost... ok. I did well enough in my ear training classes, but that had very little to do with my ear, and almost everything to do with my understanding of music theory - because theory is something readily memorized and learned.

The typical exercise in my ear-training classes was this: our professor would play a short (no more than 8 measures) piece with four distinct lines. For my benefit (since I was the only person in the class without perfect pitch), he would tell us the key that it was in. And then our assignment would be write it all down. He'd play on the piano it four times, ostensibly so that we could focus on listening to each line at a time.

For my classmates, this was the easiest thing in the world. They didn't need to be told what key it was in. They KNEW all the pitches. It was as if someone had just read a short sentence to them in their native language and they jotted it down.

For me, it was as if someone read something in a language I had just started learning. Some of the words I recognized, but many, I didn't. But while my vocabulary was awful, I understood the grammatical rules. So I'd piece it together by what I knew of the grammar... For example, in Japanese, sentences are anchored by the verbs, so I knew that the end of every phrase was most likely a verb. I knew where the adjectives should sit in relation to the nouns. If I heard the word "if," then I knew to use the subjunctive form of the verb. I usually understood enough of the words, here and there, to figure out the meaning of the sentence. So what I produced was grammatically correct, contextually correct, but generally not a perfect transcription. And it would always take me the entirety of the hour-long class to work my way through the assignment - in contrast to my classmates who spent 45 minutes chatting with each other and looking at me fondly because it was due to my slowness that they got their free time.

But what my classmates could do - that always astonished me. As if suddenly they could suddenly sprout wings and fly.

So I tried to understand it. I did enough testing to learn that "perfect" pitch is not always equally perfect. A few of my classmates were extraordinary, they heard and recognized the pitches in car horns, in taps on a wall, in the clinking of glasses, and I tested and verified this independently. Others were limited to overtly musical notes. Others still were limited to the range of notes produced by the instrument(s) they played.

And I questioned them about WHEN they "discovered" their perfect pitch.

And this is what I realized: perfect pitch is memory. They REMEMBER the pitch in a sound and as soon as they learned to associate that particular pitch with middle C, for example, then they KNEW it, and could REMEMBER. It's the same kind of memory that allows the rest of us to recognize a voice. It's not different in kind, only degree.

But while perfect pitch is intimately intertwined with memory, it needs an association, to put it into context. Which I suppose all memory does.

Like perfect pitch, and related to perfect pitch (although not necessarily requiring it), is the ability to play something by ear.

"Playing it by ear" is advice that I both give and receive from time to time. Problem is, I'm horrible at it.

What does it mean, exactly, to play something by ear? Well, at the simplest level, to play without the written sheet music. It requires confidence, knowledge, memory, imagination. I'm not talking about listening to a piece once and then flawlessly replicating it. I'm talking about starting to play something, perhaps with only the beginning of a chord progression, or a snippet of a melody, where you don't know how it will develop, whether it will modulate into a different key, or how it will end. That requires a certain flexibility and a willingness to let things develop at its own pace, its own rhythm, its own melody and harmony.

For most of my life, my preference for and skill in following a plan has generally worked for me, except, of course, when it completely didn't. And so the thought of playing ANYTHING by ear, is more than a little distasteful and even frightening.

But I tell myself, that just as perfect pitch is really just a manifestation of better memory, not different memory, playing it by ear represents greater uncertainty, not a new, absolute uncertainty.

And that sometimes, when the outcome is important to you, you can't try to control it.

Now that's not a novel sentiment. The cliches are plentiful. But rather than quote from Sting's "If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free," I'll look to Bach. Because while Bach is famous for the mathematical precision of his work, it is easy to forget that back in the day, Bach was known as a world class improviser. He was the Charlie Parker, the Miles Davis of the 18th Century. It's just that his in-the-moment improvisations have been meticulously transcribed, allowing the rest of us try to recreate at least the playing of it. Of course, codifying that kind of magic diminishes it.  And I know I spent much of this post discussing that it isn't actually magic.  But when it's done right, doesn't it seem to be?  Especially when you remember how it all started, and most especially, when you know you can't ever fully recreate it. 

Shhh....

My guitar teacher played a Bach Gavotte for me today. We all know what that means... I started getting all tingly.

MG is perplexed by this thing I have for Bach - she asked me, "Bach is so mathematical, what about Debussy, or even Satie?" I don't understand it either. Perhaps it's because I'm Asian and therefore find math sexy? I did have a little crush on my algebra teacher back in the day...

Well anyway, my guitar teacher believes I am a musical genius, and is awed by my near "magical" ability to instantly master both technique and music theory, often before he has completed the explanation.

I may have neglected to mention 5 years of music school and 12 years of piano lessons and the teensy little fact that I learned to read music before words.

Let's keep that between us.

For Mrs. Tossoff

Fame was on TV this morning. I saw it the first time on the big screen - 1982, I think it was. I remember thinking that the fictional New York City High School for the Performing Arts was very different from my own music school. My music school was more... what's the word? Oh yes, ASIAN.

I only caught the last 30 minutes of Fame this morning and it wasn't until the final scene - the graduation concert where the entire Scooby Gang performs I Sing The Body Electric that I saw her, and remembered her for the first time in many years. My voice teacher, Ilse Sass. She played Mrs. Tossoff, and when asked about the movie, she always expressed mild annoyance that her speaking lines had all been cut.

About 5 years ago, I looked for her unsuccessfully. Google presented me only with countless sites referring to Fame. When I called my music school, I was informed that she no longer taught there and that they only keep records from 10 years back.

This morning, however, with her image fresh in my mind, I tried Google again and found this:

The New York Times Obituaries, published: November 21, 1992

Ilse Sass, a pianist and voice teacher, died on Wednesday at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. She was 84 years old and lived in New York City

She died of a pulmonary embolism, said her sister, Leine Seligmann.

Miss Sass was born in Cologne, Germany, and studied at the music conservatory there. She taught piano for many years at the Henry Street Settlement and taught voice for 20 years at Juilliard and at the Manhattan School of Music.

She gave concerts for the blind and worked with blind singers. She also appeared as a piano teacher in the movie "Fame."

Her sister is her only survivor.

Miss Sass had an astonishing gift for transposition. Her hands were always cold, heavily veined, and when not at the piano, she always wore knit gloves. She was convinced that I was a coloratura soprano and bullied me into pushing my upper range ever higher. She was the one who first told me that Mozart loved his sopranos. No matter how horribly I sang a piece, she would let me finish my first run-through before then breaking it down. She had me sing lying flat on the floor so I could feel and hear the effect of posture, she made me sing at a candle flame to learn control. She loved Paganini, had a bust of him on the mantel of the fireplace in her teaching studio, and being childless, she saw all of her students as her family.

When I was in Hong Kong, I took voice lessons from MH, my first vocal coach since Miss Sass. This was after more than a decade of attempting to retrain my voice to better suit that 3-pack-a-day sound so desired by a cappella singing groups. MH pronounced me an Alto and that was the end of it, except for one day when he had me doing vocal exercises and he heard something he didn't expect in my upper range. "Do that again, and let's keep going higher," he said to me.

"Were you once trained, REALLY trained, as a soprano?" He asked me, with surprise.

That pleased me; Miss Sass had left a recognizable mark on me.

I start my fast this weekend, but tonight, when I am out with my friends, I'll toast to Miss Ilse Sass. She should be remembered.

And she will be.

Imperfection

Still thinking of music school, so I sat down at my piano today and painfully worked my way through pieces I had played effortlessly when I was nine. Oddly enough, I was feeling frustration and enjoyment - odd, because I usually derive pleasure from my own sense of competence. But this was all about acceptance of compromise - and that reminded me of something I had learned in theory class...

The piano as we know it is a relatively new thing. The tuning, or temperament, wasn't always the way it is now. Often, the tuning was maximized for music written only in a certain musical key.

This is the issue: perfect intonation cannot be achieved for all the notes on a keyboard. Musicians, bear with me, or skip ahead. If you have a piano or a guitar, try this: bang/pluck on a key/string. The note will sound, and as it begins to fade away, you'll hear the overtones, different notes that are fainter and higher in pitch. (Rather like the dry-down of a perfume, but in reverse). For simplicity's sake, those other notes you are hearing create consonant (nice sounding) intervals with your original note you just banged or plucked.

However, on a piano keyboard, there is no way of tuning the twelve pitches so that every consonant interval is "just" or "perfect." If you were to try, you would not return to where you started, which is what you need to do every 12th note (except one perfect octave higher).

And if you were to try, you would end up with an instrument on which you could play music only in a certain key - which is NOT the wonderfully versatile piano that we all know and love today.

So to make the piano what it is today, almost every note is slightly "bent", ever so slightly out of tune, tempered.

Bach's Well Tempered Clavier is a collection of piano pieces, each written in a different key, demonstrating the ability of a single instrument, in tempered tuning, to play in ALL 24 keys.

I like to think of it as the celebration of something not often celebrated: the beauty of imperfection.

Suzanne Somers, Cellist

I have been thinking of music school a great deal lately.

One day, we had a substitute teacher for our ear-training class. He was a cellist and very handsome, so the girls stayed after class to flirt with him. He asked if we knew what was most important for cello mastery. We eagerly awaited his answer:

"The grip of your thighs."

We swooned.

The More Things Change...

The summer after I graduated from college, I visited my old music school. Feeling terribly grown-up and worldly, I wanted to revisit a place of my Youth And Innocence.

I went to the fifth floor and walked down the hallway to pause at the spot where I had thrown up after having eaten a bad hamburger.

I went to the third floor and sat outside the practice room where a boy had tried (quite nearly successfully) to woo me by humming Bach's Piano Concerto in D Minor in my ear.

I went to the cafeteria to sit at the table where we had gotten drunk one lunch-time on some cheap wine someone had smuggled in.

I walked by the sofa on which JL had cried and cried her heart out upon learning that Simon Le Bon got married.

I left my music school that day feeling quite smug that I was so much more sophisticated and mature than I had been as a child.

One day soon I'd like to go back and do that tour again. But I suspect that this time I'll walk away with the realization that I haven't changed at all.

97 Keys

When I decided to move back to the US from Hong Kong, I chose my neighborhood in part because WC told me that I would need to live on her subway line if I ever wanted to see her. (Although I've noticed that she suddenly has no problems trekking to the east side of town to see her BF, but hey, I understand - he possesses attractions which I lack.)

But I also chose this neighborhood because someone I once knew lived here.

When I was 16 years old, attending music school on the weekends, I cut my afternoon theory and composition classes one Saturday to go to Patelson's Music House. I was comparing two different scores of Beethoven's First, when I got that familiar tingly sensation on the back of my neck. I turned to find myself watched by a frighteningly elegant older woman. She asked me, "Are you a musician?"

My response was something like this, "uh... well... I take lessons... but... uh... you know... uh...."

She placed a perfectly manicured hand on my arm to cut short my eloquence, and said, "So, you are a musician."

There was something both challenging and reassuring about how she made that statement. So I took a breath,  threw my shoulders back and said, "Yes, I am."

I never learned that much about her. The sum total of our "relationship" was that I would go to her townhouse on the occasional Saturday afternoon and practice on her Bosendorfer grand piano while she read or typed or even talked quietly on the phone. Often, she wasn't even in the same room.

The Bosendorfer was astonishing. Sweeter than a Steinway - and with those extra keys on the bass end which I never quite knew what to do with, but was terribly pleased to see there.

I remember once I decided to take extreme liberties with a piece so I could take advantage of the extra keys and that was the only time she ever commented on my playing. She told me to stop and just play it as it was written. I must have looked crushed, because then she added, more gently, that when I got more skilled, I would figure it out. That was also one of the longer conversations she and I ever had.

Then I went to college and never saw her again. But I've wondered about her and I've written her story in my mind a number of times. But it always goes back to a simple question: "Why?" To my chagrin, I am nearing the age she probably was when I met her and I ask myself what would drive ME to "befriend" a young music student?   I've explained it to myself that she was a music lover - but then why spend the time listening to a student practice when she lived in a city where you can't swing a cat on the sidewalk without hitting a gifted, professional musician?

I've pored through my journals from when I was 16 and 17 looking for clues, and while I documented copiously detailed accounts of the boys I liked and the calories I consumed on a meal by meal basis and countless drafts of college admission essays, there is nothing more than the barest of references to this woman. I never even wrote down her name. Certainly not her address. Apparently I thought that this was a secret I should keep - even from myself.

Sometimes I think I'd like to find her to talk to her and tell her that while I've never figured out when or how to use those extra keys, I think I've learned when not to. But then I always decide that I would leave her in peace, even if I could find her again.

Sometimes a moment just passes and you should let it do so.

But that doesn't stop me from walking down a tree-lined street of townhouses in my 'hood and peering into the windows, looking for a Bosendorfer.