the enchanter

I have completely exhausted myself.

This morning as we were rehearsing the second Brahms symphony, I realized why Brhams waited so long to write symphonies. His ideas are so rich and complex and his ideals so high and refined that even after waiting all his life he could not yet put into context everything he meant to say through the music. Pieces such as the second cello sonata are so compactly and masterfully written to the finest degree yet even in the slow second movement of the second symphony, which in my opinion is perhaps even more cohesively written than the first movement, there is so much left unexpressed and repressed that is like an undercurrunt of the overwhelming desire and frustration which Brahms obviously felt as he tried but did not quite succeed to bring everything out. It is a solid piece of work with much painstaking effort put into it, yet there is so much that is left bare, ambiguous, and perhaps not quite refined in this symphony which results in a certain emotional vulnerability on the composer's part that can in return be sensed by the listener.
Reinhold Brinkmann, in the introduction to his analyses of the second Brahms symphony, Late Idyll, compares the piece to Lake Stechlin, which is an ancient Branndenburg lake in north of Berlin:

Lake Stechlin looks "enigmatic, like a dumb person with
an urge to speak. But his tongue is tied and refuses to
obey him, and what he wants to say remians unspoken...
He is one of life's aristocrats, entertaining great relationships."

Now, I did not really understand this when I first read it around the time when we started rehearsing the piece, and I did not particularly hold it in my memory after reading it. Today, however, this was exactly the sentiment I experienced as we played through the piece. Maybe it was because it was the first time we played the entire piece in continuation since our very first reading and I could better sense the piece as a whole.

Brinkmann says that "Dauerhafte Musik, "music built to last," was the avowed moral and aesthetic goal of Brahms's compositional work - work which, for all the assurance and solid craftsmanship, for all the skill in the "right articulation," was marked by self-doubt and skeptical questioning, and in the symphony of all genres." I view Brahms as one of the most ambitious and meticulous composers, and I think he might have overwhelmed himself in his endeavour to write the masterpieces of his life, in the form of symphony.

Again, when I was reading the quoted passage above I was having a conversation with a friend and not paying too much attention, partly due to the fact that the cafe where I was reading was closing in a couple of seconds, and I did not quite make the connection between such statements and the piece; but today, for some reason, such were the exact thoughts and feelings that I had throughout our rehearsal. The amazing ways in which your unconscious mind works. I was also trying to listen with a composer's ear, trying to hear the piece "from the inside" and to imagine what Brahms must have been hearing as he was writing this piece - this inspired from a conversation with Sung-Hee two days ago about analyzing a piece of music in ways particular to its composer, approaching it from the composer's view point and within the frame of his ideals and intentions. It was a very different experience for me, and I don't think I have been impressed by so much genius and joy in such a short amount of time as when I was doing this. The conductor said in the middle of the rehearsal, after having played the entire piece through, that among all art forms music is the most ambiguous and perhaps the most difficult to interpret. Now, there is much room for argument in this statement, yet I feel that it is very true. Music - you can't see it, you can't touch it, and it is completely intangible in that it exists only while it is played. Each note is already passed into nothingness the moment it has been played. Sound, the sensation caused from a certain combination of sounds creates a certain atmosphere, creating a different world, reality, present and holds the audience in it. There they live a moment of a different life, in a different place, perhaps discovering emotions they do not frequently encounter in the hectic reality of everyday life, or being touched by familiar sentiments. It literally transports them into a different world; which is why music is such a powerful art. At the same time, however, it is entirely dependent on each listener's memory, because as soon as a note is played it is already a memory; and each listener has a different aural, perceptive, emotional memory of it based on his past experiences and personal traits- experiences I mean his musical knowledge and training, his life experiences, and personal traits his emotional sensitivity and so on. It is an art of the present - which is both the beauty and the curse of it; this is probably what I meant when I said that music was so beautiful that I wished to be music and its flowing existence itself. And this is why the fate of a performing artist is one of both exalting thrill and constant trial.

Another interesting phenomenon I experienced in today's rehearsal:
I have always felt that this piece reminded one very much of water (my description of life being like running water probably came out of this image as I have been playing this piece lately), but today each movement came alive as different kinds of bodies of water - the first movement alternating between a gigantic river with a slow, majestic flow and a small brook with intimate chatters; the second movement the huge river that starts out so calmly and clearly and then turns muddy as it goes round a corner then plummets down sloped landscape, then again to return to its calm and poised state; the whole of the third movement back to a small brook with birds and trees around it, and so on.

After that, I had a piano lesson, music theory class, then a cello lesson. All in all, a very musical day indeed. Yes, I think I am getting pretty intensive training in music here. Wow. I don't usually realize it but this is really way too much music and nothing else.. despite the fact that music consists of much more than just music - or, that music cannot exist by itself in the first place.