"The Space Between the Notes"

On Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk

At one point in Every Good Boy Does Fine, pianist Jeremy Denk’s wonderful memoir about his years studying the instrument, a professor mentions the old Claude Debussy chestnut, “music is the space between the notes.” I’ve heard the line before, it’s entirely possible you have too, but something about the context here caused it to click.

There are a few competing interpretations of Debussy’s sentiment. One of the most common understands it as advocation for minimalism (not Minimalism, that didn’t exist yet): write as few notes as possible. Emperor Joseph II would certainly appreciate that parsing. “The space between the notes” can be thought of as the literal space on the paper. If we take this as correct, Miles Davis was getting to a similar point when he said that music is the notes you don’t play.

That interpretation serves composers well, but it doesn’t do much for performers. The other interpretation, the one the professor was using at the time, relates to the lateral and temporal distance in between notes. He was talking about the pulse, about rhythm and phrasing.

After reading that chapter, the way I was listening to classical music changed dramatically. I went from passively hearing and appreciating moments of rubato—when a performer stretches a note for longer than indicated by the sheet music—to actively seeking them out. They have suddenly become the key to understanding something bigger. While only time can tell if this fever will settle in for the long run, at the moment I think of the application of rubato as the heart of classical music performance, if not classical music itself.

Look at Krystian Zimerman’s astonishing rendition of one of Franz Schubert’s Impromptus. This has been one of my favorite recordings for nearly a decade now. It is impossibly moving. Zimerman’s technique is impeccable. He is able to separate the voices, the melody and the accompaniment, completely. You would almost believe there were two pianos at work here, one simply plonking out the melody while the other quietly works away. That’s all masterful, sure. What makes this recording sublime, ultimately, is his use of time.

When Zimerman heads for a melodic climax, he milks it. The music slows ever so slightly. It’s almost too much, frankly. Music with too much rubato either becomes camp or, worse, ceases to be coherent. He pushes the freedom of Romanticism right to the edge, but never over. The music breathes. You could play the same passage with identical technique to a metronome, and it would be lovely, but it wouldn’t feel the same. This is the difference between describing a feeling, and embodying it.

Take a listen to Denk’s own recording of the Goldberg Variations. Pay particular attention to those first two measures, and how that music looks on the page. Notice how the left hand notes, the bottom row, always fall squarely in line with a note in the right hand.

There are many, many recordings of Bach that follow that timing with zealotry. Lord knows I do when I fumble my way through the Aria. With Bach in particular, there’s a pressure to be sehr genau, for everything to be exact. That’s not how Denk plays it, though. In that second measure, he brings in the left hand just a hair, almost imperceptibly, earlier than the right. As a result, the melody pulses with subtle life, a life missing from many otherwise excellent recordings.

To be a performer is a strange thing. You express yourself through the works of others. You have to balance your thoughts, your opinions, and your instincts against their intentions. The space between the notes is the most immediate, and personal, mode of expression musicians have. “Rubato can’t be planned,” a friend of mine said. “That’s the point.” It is an immediate, urgent expression of feeling. In those moments, the boundary between the musician and the sound vanishes.

Every Good Boy Does Fine is an excellent memoir. If you are a music performer, or interested in performance, it is indispensable. It has changed the way I listen to music. Now, the space between the notes is all I can think about.

The Iron Claw

I don’t mean to alarm or surprise you, but The Iron Claw is not a happy movie. From stem to stern, there is little but the pain, cruelty, and suffering inflicted on the Von Erich boys by their patriarch. Fritz (Holt McAllany), a professional wrestling mogul, is a real son of a bitch. Without emotion, empathy, or care beyond his own ambition and success, he throws his children’s lives, one after the other, at the industry that may be the only thing he loves. If he even loves that.

Though cruelty is often what’s on display, The Iron Claw has settled in as a film about love, concerned with its absence and the ways it perseveres in spite of obstacles, a flower through concrete. The brothers love each other deeply, and that love is evident.

I keep thinking about an early moment, when middle brother Kerry (Jeremy Allan White) returns home from Olympic training. The Carter Administration’s boycott of the Moscow games put an end to his chances of escaping the Von Erich black hole. In retrospect, this is the moment everything goes wrong.

When Kerry gets off the bus, the family is waiting for him. For some reason, I was struck by the lack of friends or neighbors. There is no one outside the family unit. In this movie, there seldom is. Fritz comes up first, and shakes Kerry’s hand. Father makes no motion to comfort son. There’s no indication that these two have ever, in their lives, hugged. The first words Kerry says are, “I’m sorry, dad,” locking eyes with Fritz and accepting, somehow, a responsibility that isn’t his. “I’m sorry, too,” Fritz answers.

Then, Kerry is mobbed by all three of his brothers. Instantly, they are laughing, smiling, and hugging each other. Now that I think about it, that hug, which I think is the only time we see the four living brothers embrace (a fifth brother died as a child), is mirrored by the end of the movie, when Kerry meets and embraces his three deceased siblings in the afterlife.

The happiest moments in the film—the only happy moments in the film—happen away from the family house, away from the wrestling ring, and away from Fritz. When youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons) is denied permission to play at a college party with his high school band, all four brothers sneak out. At the party, we see them relax into full people. Kerry is a born partier. Kevin (Zac Efron) has sex for the first time, with the woman he goes on to marry. Mike sings and plays guitar in his band, who are pretty good. All four brothers can still find joy in the world. You think about that scene later, and you wonder what would have happened to all of them if they’d simply never gone back home.

There’s a pretty good lyric in the song Mike sings, by the way. “I’m a roman candle, waiting for the 4th of July.” Something like that. The Von Erich brothers could have been other people away from all this. Wrestling is all they’re allowed to know, rather than all they want to know.

Much of The Iron Claw is claustrophobic, shot with tight framing. Even when the wrestling matches do go to a wide, the boundaries of the ring feel like the end of everything. The movie is about space and the absence thereof as much as it is about love. Another way to say that: the movie is painfully aware of how those two things are related.

After David (Harris Dickinson) dies in a hotel room in Japan, on the night of the funeral, Fritz flips a coin to see which of his sons will take over David’s odyssean task, winning the World Heavyweight Championship. Kerry is not only selected, but succeeds, in a match that’s kept off screen. We aren’t invited to the joy or triumph of the accomplishment. We find out late at night, when Kerry is back home, sitting at the kitchen table with his belt and a beer. “I’m having a hard time coming down,” he says. He gets on his motorcycle and rides off into the night. Even the open road is shot claustrophobically. It doesn’t lead anywhere. It stretches out ahead infinitely, a narrow corridor, bound in on both sides.

In the final scene, with David, Mike, and Kerry dead, Kevin starts crying as he sits in the yard with his two young children. He’s sold the family business, in spite of Fritz’s wishes, and gotten away from wrestling. The boys ask what’s wrong. “I used to be a brother, and now I’m not a brother anymore,” is his crushing answer. His sons climb into his lap, “We’ll be your brothers,” and give him the first group hug he’s gotten since Kerry’s homecoming. The camera lifts up on a crane, and a subtle dolly zoom adds depth to the surrounding forest. Suddenly, there is space in the world. You can see beyond the edges of the ring.

Home After Dark and The Vision

            I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last week or so thinking about a thread between David Small’s Home After Dark: A Novel, and Tom King’s The Vision. On the surface, these two comics don’t have much in common. Home After Dark takes place in the 1950’s, and follows a young teenager, Russell Pruitt, as he and his father move to California. The Vision is set in the contemporary suburbs of Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and shows the titular Marvel hero’s attempts to settle down with a family of his own creation. David Small works in India ink, the artwork more concerned with capturing the underlying psychology of the events than full, realistic renderings. The Vision, primarily a collaboration between King and artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta, exists within the typical framework of superhero comics: bright colors, sharp lines, and everything looks (relatively) realistic. Home After Dark is a Bildungsroman, while The Vision is, fundamentally, a thriller.

            What they have in common is a fascination with 1950’s Americana. In the case of Home, the story is set there and then. With Vision, the fascination is mostly subtextual, though the book is littered with visual cues to place the reader firmly in that space. Fundamentally, they’re working with the same clay. Yet Home After Dark is a cruel, grueling read, while The Vision is revelatory. Why is that?

            Home After Dark wants to deconstruct our cultural memory of the 1950’s. There is no other reason for this bleak, miserable book to exist. Beyond the kindness of a pair of Chinese immigrants, the book exists only to say, “It was a dark, violent, awful time, just like any other.” In the age of Make America Great Again, that may have more value than I am instinctually willing to ascribe to it. But I grew up watching Pleasantville, I’ve seen the films of Todd Haynes; that the 1950’s were awful underneath the veneer is old news. All it can do to prove its point is show acts of violence, of cruelty, of bottomless malice. The Vision, on the other hand, is about a ‘man’ who is trying to create that perfect hermetic environment, and what that pursuit can do to you, and to the people you force into that mold. The Vision is interested in the psychology of the cultural baggage that still exists, in the need to create a perfect house and a perfect life with two children, a dog, and a picket fence. Home After Dark tells us what we already know. The Vision confronts us with the fact that we still want what we know was never real.

apparition in the woods

I have more or less come to terms with the fact that I will die. That used to be a problem for me, literally keeping me up at night, but I've made peace with it. I hope it’s rather a long way off, but I accept that it is coming.

What still makes me profoundly uncomfortable is extinction. Serious contemplation of the sun burning out, the food supply drying up, or the universe snapping back in on itself like an over-stretched elastic, can and will send me into spiraling bouts of depression. I can end, and that's alright, but there must be something that continues. There must be life.

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I recently finished rereading The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross's 2007 survey of 20th Century music. It is a wonderful book, impeccably researched, and written in such a way that you can feel Ross' love and passion for the music radiate off the page. The majority of the chapters chronicle a specific musical era or group of composers. It begins with a chapter on Mahler and Strauss, and proceeds more or less chronologically. Ross has a gift for writing about music, and here he manages to illuminate the works of the century's great composers with the cultural and personal context in which they were written.

For my money, the best chapters in The Rest Is Noise are those that concern themselves with a single composer. The chapter "Apparition in the Woods," about Jean Sibelius, is far and away my favorite. Sibelius had much success in his life; he was a living National Treasure of Finland, he was well-known throughout the world, and his works continue to be performed by orchestras everywhere. Despite all this, he had the misfortune of coming to prominence during a time when a large group of composers were willfully and blindly rejecting tonality in the name of creating The New. He never received the respect of his peers, certainly not during his lifetime, and he was rarely truly happy.

One of the most famous pieces in Sibelius's canon is his fifth Symphony, a work of both profound beauty and quiet innovation. The final movement is astonishing, the orchestra struggling in the last three minutes to reach a summit that is unlike anything else in music. Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 puts the lie to the idea that it is incredible someone so unhappy could make something so triumphant and beautiful; to the contrary, it would be impossible for anyone who has not known the dark to turn on such a powerful light.

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Currently, I am reading Dave Eggers' The Wild Things, the novelization of his cinematic adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. The protagonist, Max, is about the same age I was when I first asked my mom what death is. Last night, just before going to sleep, I read a chapter in which Max's science teacher mentions that humans will eventually be extinct, through some means or another. To Max, this is a revelation. The world makes little sense to him as it is, and this doesn't help. Eggers makes getting into Max's mind look effortless, and handles all of this with clean, simple, effective prose.

As I read, I could feel the depression creeping up. It always starts in my stomach, and spreads from there. It makes it hard to breathe, and harder still to think about anything other than the end of the world. Of course I know that one day the sun will burn out, and when it does, it will likely scald the Earth. And I know that human beings will have gone extinct well before then, likely through our own doing. But I live, day to day, without those thoughts in my head, because I wouldn't get anything done otherwise.

I finished the chapter, and reached for my headphones. I turned off the light, put on the final movement of Sibelius' fifth, and listened. In those final moments, as the orchestra attempts to build, pulled back again and again by the darkness, finally emerging triumphant, it was telling me that as long as there is beauty like this in the world, it is worth existing. You are here, it says. That's all that matters for now.