Adam Tendler's Blog, page 17

sixteen

I took Swahili my freshman year in college as a foreign language. Less a matter of cultural curiosity and more personal insecurity, I had taken Spanish for a couple years in high school but two years had lapsed since, and doing the same foreign language in college that I did in high school seemed very boring. Meanwhile, if I took French, which I would’ve liked to do, I envisioned myself on the first day buried in information and concepts familiar to everyone else, who had likely taken it in high school, but foreign to me. So Swahili it was. No one at Indiana knew Swahili. And over the course of the year, I got pretty good at it.

I don’t remember anything now. Well, that’s not true. I remember leading the music for a cultural evening. I remember the nine or so other people in my class. I remember my very kind instructor, his breath, his clothes. I remember that “ninataka” means… I want? I have? I’ll check.

And I remember one day we had a guest speaker. She began her talk by asking a rhetorical question, or maybe not a rhetorical question? Either way, she directed it at me, pointing and asking: “You, how many languages do you think are spoken in Africa?”

“I don’t know,” I said. 

“No really, just guess.”

“No, thank you.” 

I thought that might be it, but she continued.

“Just any number. How many languages?”

“I have no idea!” 

“Any number.”

I already felt that this had gone on long enough. “I know what you’re doing” I said, surprised by my own tone—but freshman year was rough, and often I felt raw, tired, and irritable. I didn’t want to take a foreign language, period. I wanted to practice. “You want me to give you a number that I couldn’t possibly know, then I’ll be wrong, and you’ll tell us all some wildly different number that’s way higher to prove a point. I get it. But I don’t want to do this. I’m sorry.”

“Whatever number comes to mind.”

We had reached a stalemate. So I thought hard, took my time, and finally answered what I thought was indeed a reasonable answer: “Sixteen.”

“No, really,” she said.

“Sixteen,” I repeated and shrugged. “I think it’s sixteen. Really.”

“As many as two-thousand,” she said with an animated whisper to the rest of the room, eyes wide and spirited. Then, with a told-ya-so head nod, she looked back at me and said, “See?”

forseeable

it’s an odd cocktail of a feeling, one i’m still digesting a week later, after the contact person of a series at lincoln center emailed me that she couldn’t imagine presenting me in the “forseeable future.” those words came after a compliment about my so-called creativity, and then closed with “thanks for your understanding,” as if i’d written a complaint to the cable company and not a concert proposal. i’ve performed professionally for about 20 years, and indeed most of my ideas meet rejection, but never once have i heard those words: “foreeable future.” forseeable as in like, as far as the eye can see? unimaginable? a friend told me i should be encouraged that she even wrote back. i wish she hadn’t. 

I’ve spent the last month and a half memorizing John...

I’ve spent the last month and a half memorizing John Cage’s Cheap Imitation. It has felt almost like a spiritual practice, including requisite moments of enlightenment, doubt, and total frustration. But I’ve taken the score with me everywhere and it has felt, ultimately, really good. The first time I might even perform the piece is this spring, and getting from beginning to end is step one of a million other steps, but I guess I wanted to share that it happened, which is a miracle that I wasn’t sure was possible in August. We all have these lovely little miracles, right? And even as sometimes the world feels pretty hopeless, I’m still grateful to live and work in a community of artists, and I want to know their miracles, too. In a way, I miss my friends and resent this chapter of history for hijacking our minds and our communication. Anyway, it’s a great piece. I hope to play it for you sometime.

So i’ve spent the last month and a half memorizing John...

So i’ve spent the last month and a half memorizing John Cage’s Cheap Imitation. It has felt almost like a spiritual practice, including requisite moments of enlightenment, doubt, and total frustration. But I’ve taken the score with me everywhere (*everywhere*) and it has felt, ultimately, really good. The first time i *might* even play the piece publicly is this spring in LA, and this is step one of a million other steps, and i’m embarrassed to even post this, but i I guess i wanted to share that i did sort of ‘get it,’ and that’s a miracle i wasn’t sure was possible in August. We all have these lovely little miracles, right? And even though the world is completely insane, and sometimes everything feels pretty hopeless, I’m still very grateful to live and work in a community of artists, and I want to know your miracles too. In a way, I miss my friends and resent this chapter of history for hijacking our minds and our communication. Anyway, it’s a great piece. I hope to play it for you sometime.

the magic of you

yesterday i congratulated a young student on his work and he said: 

“well, that’s the magic of you.”

for jasper johns

i’ve spent the bulk of my free time during this semi-staycation reading about jasper johns. throughout, i keep thinking of the moment last year when i met him for about two seconds after playing the memorial for ellsworth kelly at the philadelphia museum.

a friend (of mine, and of his) shuttled me to a closing elevator door with johns behind it, literally stopping the door with a waved hand. he introduced me as the pianist who had performed earlier. i shook his hand and think i said, “it’s an honor.” i don’t remember what he said— maybe “it was very nice.“ 

now, having read about everything he’s done, created, seen, touched, experienced, i’m not sure i might have even mustered those three words at the time. i might have stood paralyzed before the man who, with rauchenberg, produced cage’s 25 year retrospective concert in 1958. not attended, but created. the man who talked as a colleague with duchamp, who calls warhol "andy” and rauschenberg “bob.” i knew about the flag, and i knew the name—iconic and seductive in itself—but i knew little more. 

or perhaps, knowing then what i do now, i might have leapt into the elevator and let it seal us there, though in this fantasy i still remain mute. but i at least stay with him for awhile until his eyes take me into that sacred space, stored alongside the other objects and people and places he’s seen but probably never totally forgotten.

Tantric Detail III (1981), Jasper Johns 

screen

i wish you could see the way our tattered, ripped screen hangs and sways in the wind right now. i think it has ripped more and more over the years, because i’ve never noticed it like i do today—shards hanging and bending and bowing and dancing gently in every direction. as we prepare to move into a new home, a new construction, new everything, i want to remember this ripped screen and the faded white, chipped wooden window frame propped open by a large vase, letting in a breeze. we will leave this apartment because we can’t afford to fix it.
i tried to take a picture but it didn’t really come out. my eyes see the ripped screen much bigger than my camera, which sees things objectively. the eye zooms, just like the ear filters.

walking on a beach in hawai'i with my friend nick, he prepared me for the sudden appearance of a grounded ship just off the shore of ‘shipwreck beach’ on lanai. “but,” he said, “i should warn you that it doesn’t photograph well.” and he explained that the eye zooms, but the camera sees things objectively. so the ship looks huge in person, but tiny in a picture. and he reminded me that we hear this way, too. filtering and prioritizing. i’d never really thought of that.

i wish you could see the way our tattered, ripped screen hangs and sways in the wind right now.

dishwashing thought (or, "very fine people," or "example #13,497 of how trump has hijacked my brain when i should be on vacation")

imagine if you wanted to see the best-ever, most life-changing production of wagner’s ring cycle, but in order to see it you had to walk one block alongside nazis, people chanting racist, homophobic and anti-semitic language, waving nazi flags, holding torches, and threatening violence. but you’re a very fine person, right? you simply like wagner, right? this administration would say ‘go for it,’ because you’re a very fine person.

atrophy

every august for at least a week i don’t practice. this typically coincides with my husband’s vacation, which in turn becomes my vacation. a sort of atrophy happens in my hands. i feel them stiffen, or at least they seem to stiffen. i stretch and massage and crack and contort them in all sorts of ways, at all hours, and they seem to change in their makeup. i rationalize this feeling as a kind of yogic savasana at the end of a busy summer, season, year (though last summer’s vacation came later, and followed busier weeks).

something else happens, like what occurs when one does a fast or a cleanse or an elimination diet, when (not to get gross, but) weird stuff just comes pouring out of the body, like the digestive walls peeling the wallpaper of a million meals, and it’s like, “woah, where did that come from? and where did that come from?” during a so-called cleanse or elimination, sleep changes, too, its depth and its dreams.

so do my dreams change when my body goes on practice break. for consecutive nights now, my dreams have purged varying performance nightmare scenarios—arriving unprepared, playing poorly, beginning late as a restless audience waits (a few of these). every night, a variation on the same theme. my subconscious, in the face of physical practice inactivity, seems to have taken the opportunity to purge its nightmares, my insecurities.

in the meantime, i feed something inside, reading bout visual art (researching for an upcoming project) and planning and plotting for the season ahead. i enjoy this stuff. on vacation, away from practice, i finally have the chance to think, to remember, and ultimately to miss the act of connection with an instrument.

conflicted though, because unlike last year when we found ourselves in africa, this year we find ourselves at my parents’ house in vermont, with a piano just upstairs. so the whole thing feels very much like a choice, a guilty choice maybe. actively ignoring. hence perhaps the dreams. i could, after all, just go and touch that instrument, the one i grew up playing. my first.

one by one

“When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas - all are there. But as you continue, they start leaving one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” John Cage to Philip Guston in the 50s, as recalled by Guston’s daughter in 1988