july 16, 11:34pm | notes from plane, and from bed

I mostly enjoy listening to non-classical/concert music in my time away from stages. But I like to dip anthropologically into what everyone seems to love, pop music wise, at a particular moment, particularly if it hasn’t surrounded me in public spaces, just to check the barometer of my own emotional relation to it. Anyway, I’ve listened to the new Haïm album and think it sounds like a 21st century processing of Wilson Philips and Tom Cochran.

Came twice on this trip. Neither particularly painful, neither particularly pleasurable.

Gave a total £4 to a series of vending machines, in attempt to get a water before the flight. The machines kept taking £1, and returning the other. Eventually I had no water, and no coins. Three hours later, parched and still wanting water.

It strikes me how, in conservatory I heard certain works every week; Beethoven op. 110, Mussorgsky Picture, Franck Prelude Fugue and Variations. I haven’t heard these pieces live in what feels like ten years.

I often imagine that my sins are broadcast from their moment of committal to specifically whomever might take offense, so if at a particular I haven’t heard from said individual, in my mind I assume that they “know.” And I want to prostrate myself or simply die.

I love Griffes’s music, but 150 pages into his biography I haven’t encountered a single quote or description that endears his to me personally. Maybe even the opposite.

It happens every time I return to New York. I land excited and happy, and in the endless, absurd, agonizing journey from the airport to the apartment, I’m reminded of everything I hate about this place, and then I walk through the door furious.

We went straight to dinner. F cut his hair and looks adorable. A margarita helped me to come of my perch of absolute rage and into mere exhaustion. We returned home and I collapsed onto the couch, immediately falling asleep before dragging to bed, clutching a CPE Bach t-shirt but sleeping naked. Once in bed it took all of a second for me to disappear.

Now at 4am, the jet lag I never experienced this week might finally have stopped by to say hello. Echoes of the recording sessions, visions, postcards, all bouncing around my mind. Successes. Failures. Passagework.

Nearly finished the Griffes biography. In fact, with about five pages to go, I’d almost like to sneak to the other room to finish it now. The book served as my sole occupation on the plane. Never did I even crack open my scores or turn on my iPad. Something compelled me to finish it. Truly one of music’s great tragedies. To think, an “ultra-modern” American composer who the masses embraced as a defining new voice for the as-yet undefined American music, snuffed off the planet at 35 virtually the week of his career triumph. The doors opened to him, finally, and then he died. More tragic yet, we still never, and I mean never, see his name on concert programs, orchestral, voice, even piano. It all still remains unpublished and obscure. American tragedy. And we can, or could, turn it around.