Female Ambitions

  Every good student of western classical music has read Charles Rosen. He grew up with a Juilliard shaped spoon in his mouth, opted not to major in music because he "already knew more" as a freshman teenager than most of the postgraduates in the music department at Princeton. He was a brilliant guy and wrote textbooks that sit on my shelves still.

In fact I pulled one off the shelf this week as I am preparing a recital of piano sonatas. His book Sonata Forms beckoned to me as I am trying to define in my own mind how Scarlatti, Berg, Beethoven, Barber and Mozart sonatas are all the same species. Like Poodles and Doberman Pinschers are both dogs, along with Shar Peis and Dalmatians, somehow a sonata is a sonata is a sonata.Which is a vague term at best, meaning "sounded"from the Italian sonare, I suppose to point out that there were no words. Which was kind of an interesting concept, that music could be abstract and still have something to say, with that something being up to the listener.

I am taking this week off of my paid work in order to practice for longer chunks of time than I am normally allowed. Ass to piano bench, I traverse the centuries, 18th to 20th. My dog Zoe prefers Mozart and Beethoven to Berg and Barber. But she is very critical of the Beethoven, often just staring at me while I play the fugue of opus 110, her cataract eyes boring into my soul. If she could write, she would write like Charles Rosen, one hundred percent sure she was the smartest Golden Doodle in the room.

I have been running this week too. My streak is over. The two days I took off after 366 in a row were harder than the streak itself. But I feel pretty much back to normal now. I can start obsessing about some unreachable PR in the half or marathon again, without the excuse of just running for the sake of running. Meditative spirituality is again shelved, the purity of my self-righteous daily run replaced by faster times on my Strava feed.  I shall strive to drive my aging legs into submission without contrition.

Nah, I don't mean it. I am just a 49 year old woman trying to find my way in this world. I like running and playing piano an awful lot, and am fortunate enough to be able to take a week off to concentrate a bit more on my non-physician parts.

Charles Rosen notes that sonatas were really quite the thing for the female amateur musician. In fact I nearly choked on my coffee while reading this in Sonata Forms one early morning this week, while waiting for an appropriate time to start hammering the keys without completely destroying the lives of the teenagers in the house.

This is near the start of the book, and though I have read this book before as young music student, I somehow did not remember this  part. Of course music school is full of male music professors mansplaining Mozart, Haydn behind their thick spectacles, their representative white maleness just the tip of the ice Berg. I imagine the footnote in the passage above was the result of some female in his life choking on her own coffee and saying, "really, Charles?"

Living while being female is problematic.

Sonatas are abstract, which means to "draw away, divert, detach." Wordless sounds that pull one away from whatever tethers. Scarlatti unmoors as completely as Berg, across the divide of two hundred years and under the fingers of quite a few kick-ass female amateur and professional pianists. We use our womanly powers to distract, to interpret the secrets of long dead composers and cast our spell on unsuspecting men who think the world is exclusively about them. They think I am entertaining myself in my parlor, playing simple sonatas, she said with an evil laugh.

If sonatas were dogs, my recital would jump start with a Jack Russell Terrier (Scarlatti),  sashay to a Standard Poodle (Mozart), then proceed to a Pug (Berg). After a break, behold the Border Collie (Beethoven) and, at last, the All-American Mutt (Barber). Here is the program:

1. Busy and energetic
2. Prissy and intelligent
3. Weird and dramatic
*intermission-please take your sonata out for a walk*
4. Overly smart and obsessive
5. Will do anything to impress you and likes to kiss you square on the mouth

What I learned in music school is there is no way to perfection but ass on bench.
What I learned from medical school is to use all my senses to abstract disease.
What I learned from running for a year is to never leave the house without running gear.
What I learned from my dogs is we are less likely to get into trouble when we exercise every day.
What I learned from growing up as a woman in this miserable world is it would be better to be a man.

Nah, I don't mean it. I just hope Kavanaugh does not get confirmed.

Now excuse me while I go practice sonatas, an acceptable outlet for my female ambitions.