Two Kinds of Desolation

Schubert: Moment Musical No. 2 in A flat

The hollow chords echo from the walls of my family's house in Fremont, CA. It is one of a row of identical buildings in a vast suburb, glistening like rows of shiny teeth, built in a hurry for the waves of immigrants, like us, who settled in Silicon Valley. It was our American dream achieved – an empty victory. We never really dwelt in it. We lived with one eye on the property value, cleaning and renovating it not for ourselves but for some mysterious future buyer, who will one day enjoy the spaces we never did. The walls and tabletops had a clammy, hostile feeling, a layer of cold slime clung to them no matter how many times we wiped them.

This house instilled in me a hatred for all that is settled, domestic and cozy. As a teenager I would climb out the window of my room every night. The windy Bay Area night exhilarated me. I spent hours wandering the empty suburban streets, listening to the underground rivers rushing in the sewers, lying on my back on strangers' lawns, buying cigarettes at all-night gas stations. It was my world where I could do whatever I wanted: sing, dance, laugh, cry, all the things that were forbidden during the day. But at the same time, I felt was moving further and further from the rest of humanity.

I don't know if Schubert had the same experience. In Charles Rosen's book he associates the second Moment Musical to a record of a dream, which Schubert wrote down:

“I was a brother to many brothers and sisters. Our father and mother were good. I felt deep love for everyone. Once my father took us to a feast of pleasures. My brothers were glad but I was sad. My father came up to me and ordered me to eat the expensive entrees, but I could not, whereupon my father flew into a rage and banned me from his sight. I turned my steps and, with a heart full of love for those who despised it, wandered in faraway places(...) There I felt the greatest love and the greatest sorrow tearing me apart. Songs I sang these long, long years – and when I wanted to sing of love, it turned to pain before my eyes, and when I wanted to sing of pain, it turned to love. So love and pain tore me to pieces(...)”

The first section of the Moment Musical No. 2 is made up of static chords, the second section made up of restless rolling triplets and a song-like melody that floats over them. The first section represents the bourgeois home, where one is safe and surrounded by loved ones, but also stifled by them and unable to sing. The alternating section represents a nomadic life full of loneliness, where one can sing – yet only sing of pain.

A Dent in Silence

Gulls and Herons Forget Scheming, played by Wu Zhaoji

The credits read: “Soaring aloft between sea and sky, the seabirds mix their hearts with the elements and forget all calculation. This piece has a deep resonance and, if played at night, opens the heart and lightens the spirit.”

As much as I love the great work of European classical music, I always feel like someone is lecturing me, especially when the said works are Really Great, like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Bach's Mass in B Minor. Someone is yelling at me "Stop what you are doing, and listen to me! This is much more important!" And I have no choice but to obey and be overwhelmed by the vastness of the universe, in contrast to which whatever I am doing at the moment seems insignificant.

But there is more than one way to show the vastness of our lives. You can fill the space with a thousand elaborate creations, or you can simply point to space – the pluck of a string attached to a piece of pine wood, reverberates in the furthest reaches of the universe. So now we can afford to relax and stretch our bodies out on a bamboo mat, like those loosely clothed sages in the paintings, who are often seen with the instrument under their arms. Each note of the guqin is a tiny dent or ripple in silence, which immediately smooths itself, before the next ripple arises. In terms of musical logic it is hard to say how each note relates to the next. Maybe we are all alone, and this is ultimate freedom. You can't trace the music, and it is difficult to hum. It never gets stuck in your head no matter how many times you listen to it. It is like clear water running through the ears, "wiping out the traces / of the people and the places that I've been." (Kris Kristofferson) It nourishes the wilderness within.

Going Astray as a Path

Schubert: Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959

Who was Schubert? Can he be said to have been a person at all? All he left behind was his music, and he is not to be found even there – at least not in the way that Beethoven is found in every one of his works, shaking his fist and shouting, “I am Beethoven!” Schubert is shadowy and shapeless – like those figures in Chinese landscape paintings with their backs turned to the viewer, whose only purpose is to show the scale of their surroundings. The self is shown as not the creator of its environment, but inextricably embedded in it. By exploring the contours of the emotional landscape, Schubert reveals a different vision of humanity – not the humanity that demands its rights and dignity, as in Beethoven, but the humanity of which most of us are ashamed in the West – the fleeting experience of living in a body made up of unquenchable fears and desires.

Schubert's provocation is that going astray is itself a path. Life needs no purpose and we are not here to accomplish anything in particular. He veers away from the straight and narrow logic of Western music and carves his own wayward, winding path through the wild. This path digresses deceptively, curving around to find the shortest way down into the depths. The A major Sonata moves by this pattern of deception and digression, constantly undermining our expectations. It does not develop from within, driven by a continuity of purpose, but constantly opens itself to strange new vistas. There is no ground to stand on. This constant alternation is what is so disturbing and at the same time liberating about Schubert's music.

The A Major sonata begins with a wall of sound, an impenetrable, seemingly solid rocky cliff. A trickle of water seeps from its base. A few pebbles come loose. The trickle turns into a stream, into a network of streams. Cracks open in the hard wall and the whole facade breaks apart in pieces, carried away on a roaring flood. But the flood soon runs dry and we are left again on parched earth. At the end of the first movement's exposition Schubert adds a tiny little flourish onto the end of the secondary theme, seemingly a frivolous ornament. But this ornament becomes the pattern for the whole development section, as if, walking in the mountains, we are distracted by the sound of water, and following it, we see a whole undiscovered valley in bloom through the cleft in the rock. The first movement paints the splendor and chaos of the emotions as a riveting landscape, strange yet familiar.

Yet by the second movement, all this richness seems like a delusion. A homeless man is trying to find shelter under the freeway. His steps echo in the vacuous night. The middle section depicts the convulsion of a body abandoned to unspeakable loneliness. This is the dark side of individuality – unspeakable loneliness in a world where everything cold, metallic, dead to the touch. The only logical response to such a world is madness.

The third movement is dancing on broken glass. It carries an echo of the madness from the second movement but maintains a jumpy, precarious balance.

In the last movement, the turmoil is not so much overcome as bypassed – in Schubert, there is no need for resolution, since everything happens and exhausts itself in the moment. Walking and singing are seen to be the thread that ties a life together. The ambling, song-like melody persists through endless harmonic and rhythmic shifts, at times light and ethereal, at times diving into jagged, dark regions, reappearing in different variations, yet staying true to its original pulse. There is finally a sense of “normal life” that gives continuity amid the unpredictable turns of life. Yet even this is undermined at the end – the melody finally thins out like a worn fabric – silences appear in between its phrases – it hesitates, then throws itself into overwhelming chaos. There are no conclusions to be made about life.  

Form is Emptiness

Beethoven: Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 111 (Played by Artur Schnabel)

The two movements that make up Beethoven's final torso, represent two different views of life. The first, from Beethoven's signature, stormy C minor mode, sees life from the midst of the struggle, where one never has enough time; one is so eager to finish that nothing ever gets done, and fate snatches the coveted prize again and again before us, no matter how fast we run toward it. The crude, ungracious three-note motif blunders through a series of disasters, comic and tragic at the same time, before time literally runs through our fingers in the coda. All that speed and aggression has been for nothing. "This is it? Not more?"

Yet the second subject of the first movement already offers a brief glimpse of calm, and in the midst of rage and bewilderment, hints at another way of looking at things beyond happiness and tragedy, success and failure. In the silence between the two movements, all bewildering desires are extinguished. The second movement begins in the coldness of outer space. Yet out of this cold distance a warmth emerges, a delight in the world of appearances divorced from personal fate. Life from now appears from this distance in its entirety, as an effortless, circular dance of light, which grows more dazzling and complex as we approach it, before vanishing on contact.

The long second movement begins as a set of variations, each twice as fast as the previous one. The first variation is still, the second a sentimental stroll, the third a gentle canter and the fourth a frenetic dance. The increasing richness and energy culminates in the fifth variation - where the sheer speed of molecular vibrations is shown as the same as stillness. Matter itself is revealed as a pure shimmering. The method is brutally simple, like the investigations of Buddhist sutras - a rigorous logic that leads us beyond logic, to the inseparability of form and emptiness. As in certain trance practices, where the increasing tension of focus finally releases one into a state of deep relaxation, Beethoven now discards the variation form altogether, and the rest of the movement is a free-form fantasia, which takes us to the outermost reaches of space before depositing us back on earth, with a new appreciation for our place.