landing gear

have you ever been in a plane that circles the airport waiting for ground control to clear it for landing? that’s been my summer professionally with a handful of projects, and complete with commensurate landing-related panic. why aren’t we landing? we usually land just fine. there’s something wrong. there’s something they’re not telling us. and of course: we’re all going to die. i try to remain calm and appear cool to the other passengers, and immerse myself in a variety of distractive coping mechanisms, some healthier than others. 

one of them has been scales. lots of scales. scales up and down. and every inversion of every arpeggio in every direction that you can conceive of. this was the sort of technique k-hole i used to fall into at conservatory from 6am to whenever classes started, and that i promised i’d never go back to again. and yet here i am. but this is in part because (i did perform a piece this summer with a lot of scales, and) the one thing i hate more than wasting time doing nothing is wasting time doing something for no reason—like spending hours each day working on a program or piece that might capriciously get dashed upon the appearance of an email in my inbox. 

so, scales. 

but another such directionless activity i’ve indulged in while waiting to drop my landing gear is learning john adams’s phrygian gates. the piece has absolutely no home yet for me in any future concert, but since june i’ve nibbled on it with the kind of calculated focus i give only to music i love. that is to say, a slow marinade. 

scribbling fingerings and hints everywhere, each day i might work on a page, or even just a couple systems, or just a single harmonic or choreographic pattern, a “gate,” as adams calls it. i want to really know what’s going in a single section, and sometimes this takes days. and as is my custom with pieces i care about (besides experimenting with memorization, which i started here, abandoned, and would like to return to eventually) i work on it backwards. so i started on the last page, and for three months have dug methodically toward the beginning. 

and today i reached page one, the title stamped firmly at the heading. i have arrived at the starting point in every conceivable way, and it feels kind of great.

this literally means almost nothing with regard to someday performing it. but it’s a definite chapter in my love affair with the piece, and a fitting end to this particular summer fling in the twilight hours of labor day weekend, as my plane continues to circle the airport and i look longingly to the ground below.