Tears and Traditions

My father is 82 years old and he cries easily. I’m not the only one who’s noticed. The other day I got an email from my brother Gene urging me to buy a recording of Anne-Sophia Mutter playing the Carmen Fantasy. “Dad cried when he heard it,” he said. “But I guess that’s not saying much.”

My Dad’s stride piano playing has always been full of emotion, and I remember him crying a few times when I was a kid. But now his sensitivity – or his willingness to show it – has increased. I find this refreshing. It’s as if he’s been liberated from the social mask of appropriateness. So now a beautiful musical piece, a play, or even a heart-felt toast might set him off. Both of my parents, in fact, have revealed new depths of presence and compassion as they’ve aged gracefully into their 80s.

With the unique gifts of old age on my mind, I saw three performances by elderly artists this season in New York: the legendary, 87-year-old Indian Sitarist, Ravi Shankar; the Broadway star Barbara Cook, celebrating her 80^th birthday; and the classical pianist, Alfred Brendel, 77.

When a student invited me to see Ravi Shankar at Carnegie Hall last October, I wasn’t expecting much. I figured his fame had more to do with his Beatles association than with his musical mastery. When I arrived the crowd was a buzzing mix of aging baby boomers, Indians (some in traditional garb), and hip kids. But as I took in the aura of excitement in the hall at a few minutes before 8:00, I wondered how much of it had to do with the music itself.

Carnegie concerts often make me nervous. Maybe because of my own experiences playing piano in formal settings when I was a kid, I tend to project performance anxiety on the performers and worry about them. But when Anoushka Shankar, Ravi’s daughter, came on stage in bare feet to open the concert, smiled at us, and sat on the floor to begin playing, I immediately relaxed and thought to myself with a grin: if I ever perform at Carnegie Hall, I want to do it in bare feet!

The playing by Anoushka and the whole ensemble – tablas, tamboura, and Ney flute – was similarly unadorned. It was tonally and rhythmically complex, but without pretense, and I was struck by the degree of interactive emotion among the performers.

After intermission, Ravi Shankar’s diminutive 87-year-old figure padded lightly downstage center, escorted by Anoushka. The other musicians immediately rose and approached him to touch his feet respectfully, and the audience, also rising, seemed swept up in the emotion. We celebrated with our attention and applause the man who had played such an important role in bringing Indian music and culture to the West. While Shankar’s presence evoked the emotion, we were also honoring the lineage of Indian music and the flow of history. 

 Opening with the typically slow, meditative Alap of the Indian classical style, his first note evoked a universe of its own, filled with such beauty, tenderness, and humility I was embarrassed I’d ever questioned the depth of his artistry. How could a single note carry so much? This was music beyond any technique or analysis – it was a direct expression of the man’s being – or of something beyond him. Although his physical vulnerability added poignancy to the whole affair, his playing became vigorous, exciting, and joyful. I understood he was a master.

Next month at Avery Fischer Hall, a friend took me to hear Barbara Cook, backed up by the New York Philharmonic, at her 80^th birthday concert. The audience, mostly white and over 50, seemed less diverse and more rarified than the one at the Shankar concert. They knew the Broadway repertoire - which roughly spanned their lifetimes – backwards and forwards, and they gasped with audible excitement each time Cook announced a well-known Sondheim song.

What most struck me about Barbara Cook, besides her impressively lithe movement and the evident strength and breath power in her voice, was her emotionally direct delivery. She seemed to embrace the idea songs are actually about something, not merely a vehicle for an emotional pose. There was humor in her presentation, but no irony, gratuitous vocal displays, or over-played nostalgia. The power of expression was in the music and lyrics themselves -- how each song captured something essential about human experience – and in the quality of her delivery.

Did her class-act have anything to do with her age, I wondered, or was it simply characteristic of her generation’s mode of expression – or that of any great artist? I wished my high school students had been there.

In February I was back at Carnegie Hall, this time with a different feeling. Lucky enough to get last minute, on-stage seats, I sat about twenty five feet from the Steinway Grand, close enough to hear Alfred Brendel’s off-key humming and to see his hands tremble before they hit the keys. Looking out at the hall from the stage and eager to hear the iconic Brendel give his farewell Carnegie performance, I remembered the excitement of my own performances as a kid and young adult.

Carnegie Hall is like a cathedral, a giant space housing the values and human aspirations of another era, when humans had longer attention spans and strong longings to place themselves within a lineage -- an art form, or a religion – greater than themselves or their generation. I realized how deeply connected I still feel to the Western classical tradition, and I was thrilled, that night, to feel it’s still alive.

 In an era when music is probably more often regarded as a form of rebellion, or at least as a way of distinguishing one generation from the next, it was refreshing to me to hear Brendel’s unabashed rejoicing in his connection to the past. His renderings of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert were exciting and revealing. During pianissimo passages he looked upwards and appeared transported to an inner world.

He offered Bach – the slow movement of the Italian Concerto – for his first encore. What better way to say goodbye than to go back to the beginning of the modern classical tradition? Not only the sounds emanating from the piano evoked emotion that night, but the context – my personal piano-playing memories intermingling with the collective memory of a musical and performing tradition hundreds of years old.

When I was in India, recently, I immersed myself in the ancient roots and current practice of a different, though equally inspiring, musical culture. For ten days I sang microtones in unusual modes and struggled to pronounce lyrics in Hindi and Sanskrit while coming to terms with India’s poverty and squalor.

Waiting for my plane to take off at Varanasi airport, I reviewed the riches of my adventure – sound files I’d collected on my digital recorder: my teacher, Silvia, leading a vocal meditation – Shanti Om; Ritwick, another teacher, correcting my intonation in the Phrygian (Bhairavi) mode; flipping the tracks backwards, a group of men I’d recorded early on, singing in parallel fifths one morning on the banks of the Ganges; and then, two teenage girls singing a haunting melody with a harmonium.

Immersed in the “rasa” – taste – of India, I kept flipping and was startled to come upon a track I’d forgotten about. It was the sweet, jazzy sound of a melody turning around the circle of fifths as a piano bass line gently rocked the beat. It was my father playing “Georgia on My Mind,” just after Christmas, a few days before I’d left for India.

I listened with a smile, tasting the sweet rasa of American music and thinking with gratitude back to my deepest musical roots, to a lineage closer to my heart but presently halfway around the globe, and I knew I was ready to go home.