Writing a blog about writing
Welcome to this blog from a long-time conductor and rookie novelist.
A brief self-introduction. I’m in year forty-six of serving on the faculty at Princeton University where I conduct the University Orchestra, direct the Program in Music Performance, and teach a variety of performance courses. During that time, I’ve also worked in symphony and opera in some fine organizations—but Princeton has remained home for decades.
So, how does a conductor my age come to write a debut novel? Since I’ve been asked that several times, I thought I’d address it in the first blog installment.
The first fundamental (and personal) matter in the novel is the primal power of music in the way it affects our nervous systems directly, with no mediation from thought centers. Our first intake of music is through the gut and spine, not the mind. We feel it. Feeling music has been at the center of my being from my first memories of listening to my sister practice the piano from underneath the soundboard when I was a toddler. I didn’t choose to do it for my life’s work, it chose me, and I was and am still helplessly thrilled in its presence.
Alex Ross of The New Yorker, one of the champion music critics of all time, writes about the “Oh my God” moments in music (he was writing specifically about Mahler, but the phrase covers more ground than that). These are the moments that overwhelm us, utterly transcending any sense of self, sending us into speechless, ecstatic awe. Ross cited the ppp entrance of the choir in Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony. But all the canonic composers with whom we first fell in love take us to that extraordinary place.
The Copyists centers around the life and music of Mozart, and his OMG moments. Mozart’s OMG moments are in the musical language of his time, so no 200 voice choirs, or orchestras with eight French horns soaring to heaven. His OMGs are within an unbroken bubble of radiant beauty. About that beautiful cocoon the commentator Charles Rosen wrote that Mozart’s greatest music has a constant current of “sublimated eroticism”. He chose whatever would yield the most sensuous beauty: the shapeliest melodic curve, the most luscious harmonic sequences and modulations, the most shimmering orchestration and textures. I would disagree with Rosen only insofar as using the word “sublimated”; I think there’s nothing sublimated about it. Mozart’s greatest music is laden with sexiness, especially when it’s tragic. He is the greatest seducer of all composers.
These OMG moments, of any composer, can be problematic for the performer, for s/he must always keep in contact with other performers and the technical challenges of the music. One can’t start blubbering at the searing climax of a piece. Yet most musicians have had the rare experience of merging with the musical/emotional matrix, to the point of complete transcendence of any sense of duality. No separation between the player and that which is being played. Just the music exists. It is that “shudder of awe” of which Goethe spoke.
It is not a leap at all in comparing this power of music to the experience of physical intimacy between two people who share deep love. Of course, those feelings are rarely simple, but at its purest it too is an act of the transcendence of duality. The two lovers are one, at least for a few seconds. And for me, the transcendence between two lovers and that of a musicians merging with a slow movement in a Mozart piano concerto are in essence the same.
Of course, I’m not just putting these things together for the first time at this point in my life. I’ve known this in the margins of my consciousness for years. But there’s knowing and there’s deeply realizing. The latter came for me recently, after several years of serious medical problems. Upon emerging from them, things seemed simpler and priorities clearer, including how lost I would be without music and love. My increased capacity for love came hand in hand with hearing deeper into the music that I have adored all my life.
Another issue that I wrote about is the many barriers, both in the late 1700’s and currently, that are faced by women trying to make careers in music. Things are certainly far better in 2024 than in 1785, having improved dramatically in my own lifetime. Yet memories are still fresh of videos of great professional orchestras in which one cannot see a single double-Y chromosome. In this vein, I have always wondered about Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna, or Nannerl as she was nicknamed. She was part of the concert road show that Papa Leopold Mozart took with his prodigious children, and she was as highly praised as Wolfgang, often receiving top billing. Yet she was dropped from the tours when she neared the age for what were then the real concerns of womanhood—marriage and children. Mozart wrote his Concerto for Two Pianos in E flat KV 365 for himself and his sister. The writing is up to the highest standards of virtuosity of the day, yet in their sparkling dialogue the two pianos are equal in weight; he was not writing down to his sister in the least. We know from letters that she composed, but those works are lost. Yet, if she had been male, we might today celebrate two geniuses named Mozart.
The next blog will look at another subject in the pages of The Copyists—what life was like for performers in Mozart’s day.
MP