Huberman on Structure

A Beethoven Sonata is like spokes proceeding out of the center of a wheel: it can go any of twenty different ways, based on the decisions made at the beginning, rather like a life or a carnival pinwheel, or one of those spinning colored plastic wheels I used to see outside vacation cottages on Cape Cod in my youth.

    French musicians studiously ignore structure, stressing instead rhythm and melody. German musicians exaggerate form, at the expense of rhythm and line. It is rather necessary to find passion in the structure, to have one's emotions proceed out of the intellect, instead of having the eyes blindly led by the heat of the moment, the mind blinded by the hat of the moment.

    My own thoughts on how compositions are held together by the compromise of promise have been influenced by my extraordinary teacher, Huberman, whose barely controlled anarchy shaped my own, and whose dense conversational style was a cross between Wilde and Wittgenstein. Huberman couldn't be listened to. He had to be read, like poetry.

    Huberman said to me once, your quest, Adrian, always, it seems to me, is the ecstatic in music, and your problem is, as Wordsworth said, to make form of the flux, to formulate that remote sequence, (always remoter and remoter), that layer of patternings, which provides a comfortable sandbox inside which the music can pendulum between, on one hand, the periodic, and on the other, the open. Huberman spoke like that. These contrasts are the balancing act, really, the see-saw of the hand and the brain, not what traditionally falls under the rubric of technique, a stained, dishonored form, but tactile operations of the cortex and the fingers to promote only the most unphysical of discoveries, so that those intermediate extremities, the hands, are constantly in the service of the closest of instincts.

    I don't play with perfect pitch, he would say, unlike many of my students, who know instantly where they are by the sound of it. I play in fact to compensate for the pitch, subcutaneously. The patterns for me are more physical, and so when some complete stranger came up to me after a concert - this was one of the great rewards of the concert - and said, "You really Brailled those keys," it was precisely that empathy with the operations of the form I am always trying to realize, and it is this modus operandi, these modi, muddy operations which I think we might try to unearth in your case.

    Structure in music, Huberman said, must remain rooted like the prow of the Queen Elizabeth looming immense in front of the waves, soaked in the spontaneity of ocean's liquid crystals that reform constantly while the prism through which they glisten remains the same, the prism being the score, the viscosity of virtuosity, and not only virtuosity but the virtuosity of simplicity, not just the whitecaps of melody but the troughs of counterpoint, differing skeins woven tightly into a compelling ocean, as in, say, Rachmaninoff's version of Busoni's Liszt 13th Hungarian Rhapsody.

    A conductor once said to Huberman, "Let's forget about the metrics and play the auras."

    Huberman replied, "But my dear sir, without that metric accountability you so cavalierly discount, that overbearing flagship's prow, you can't have the flexibility." The conductor, of course, had no idea what he was talking about and thought he was mad.

    Huberman believed in not only ships but anchors, those metric flags which tell you where you are in a piece. In turn, that very structure gives you the liberty to vary things within its steel girders, like carpenters walking through the open framing of an unbuilt house. The outlines are there, but the rest is up to you. But without the sleepers and the struts, the carpenters would have nothing to build on.

    Speaking of the Archduke Trio, he said somewhat obscurely to me of his fellow musicians, "Yes, they were more exposed in the Archduke, with nothing to cling to. But when they played the Beethoven concerti, perhaps the very conventionality left them looser, more open to nuance because of all the anchors planted in the ear along the way, points of solidity, while the Archduke is too obscure in its expectations even to allow initial flexibility."

    He also said to me, and I would always write it down so I could dissect it later, "It seems to me the problem you now face, Adrian, is how to effect a disassociation from the forces of accessibility, the temptation to erode the unassimilatable core that makes the music, in an attempt to bring the crowds further along, to superimpose a cheaper, easier identity, but instead reducing the base which draws us towards strangeness, newness, the purity and lack of name that the music means."

    I suppose it is this escape from easy identities which gradually propelled me to the distant, unshaped regions of the world in the hopes its more vital, difficult life would be closer to what the world meant in the beginning.