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.