Life is a Dream

What Learning to Play Bach Preludes in the Pandemic Revealed About Patience, Creativity, and Hamlet

By Steven Leigh Morris

That Piano

Piano in a forest: through the looking glass

The last time that piano – a 1930s Mason and Hamlin baby grand — had been played was at the January, 2018 Ovation Awards, a particularly splashy theater ceremony at the Ace Hotel Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. Music director Christopher Raymond, who played on it for the show, found its touch to be perfect for his jazz stylings. (It requires a forceful push on the keys to produce a sound.) My late father, a jazz musician who’d also played on that piano, found the same. My older brother Michael, however, who was virtually self-tethered to different pianos during his childhood, said that he found the force required to sound a note on that piano to be challenging, if not annoying. (Michael is gifted – he says cursed — with perfect pitch, and became quite accomplished interpreting classical pieces and, before Covid, sang in a church choir in Washington D.C. where he currently lives.)

Program for a piano recital in Petaluma, California, 1964. Third artist is my brother, Michael.

I played it too, on occasion, at my parents’ house in the Hollywood Hills, where it resided for years. Having received a remedial music education in childhood, I played it without much of an opinion of its attributes. The sound it produced seemed to me pleasant enough. You press a key, a nice sound comes out.

One point to this story is that when you’re exposed to the arts in childhood – theater, music, dance, painting – the exposure lasts a lifetime: The quality of life for my mom’s brother, my Uncle Frank, was uplifted by his lifelong passion for music. In his later years, he mastered the harmonica, making studio recordings and giving concerts throughout the south of England (where his family still lives).

The Internet is saturated with stories of dementia patients with musical backgrounds being shown a piano; they may not remember the names of their own friends and relatives, but those formative songs come pouring back along with the ability to play and sing them.

In my tribe, the indoctrination into music started early.

This photo is not dated, but I must have been about five years old.

For my brother’s 11^th birthday, my mother fashioned a birthday cake, the likes of which I’ve never seen since – it was a marshmallow, crème-flour-and sugar-shaped replica of a grand piano, with the lid raised! — every key molded with either white frosting or dark chocolate.

After my dad died in 1990, the Mason and Hamlin baby grand, that piano, sat quietly in a corner of my parents’ living room, next to floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows tempered by foliage outside. That piano had been my mother’s gift to him for one of their wedding anniversaries.

Near the end of her life, some 25 years later, she played it haltingly for piano lessons with an instructor, an experience she described as tortuous. She was embarrassed by the missed and wrong notes, though her teacher stressed that mistakes provided the road to improvement, the road to perfection – an unlikely destination but the journey was the point. That said, she never played in public. 

After she died in 2015, I made only one claim to all of the possessions in their home – that piano. I placed it in storage somewhere in South LA until I could ready a place for it in my mountain home in Idyllwild, a two-and-half hour drive (at least, depending on traffic) from LA. I imagined a variation on the piano-moving challenges in Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano, which followed a similar instrument relocated from Scotland to be unceremoniously dumped on a New Zealand beach, then hand-carted to its new home.

I was running LA STAGE Alliance in January, 2018 – the organization that produces the Ovation Awards for stage productions across Southern California — and a last-minute crisis emerged when a piano for the show, thought to be confirmed, was for some reason not available. And that’s when I proposed bringing that piano out of storage and onto the stage of the plush and cavernous art deco Ace Hotel Theatre. The beast was tuned and it performed, and was performed, up to all of its potential. And from there, following the Awards ceremony, it finally winded its way, aboard a large truck, up Highway 243 to a mile-high village nestled near the base of Mount San Jacinto.

And there it sat in a corner of a new living room, a precarious existence threatened by a raging forest fire that roared up over Idyllwild’s south ridge before aircraft drops of fire retardant stopped the inferno in its tracks. That piano went un-played for the most part, though it was frequently dusted and admired.

Until Covid. March, 2020. My teaching jobs went online, giving me back hours per week in unused commuting time. And for a reason I don’t fully understand — other than the availability of newfound leisure time which I could have used in countless other ways – I lifted the cover to the keyboard, and hammered out a few basic chords, then accompanied them with some simple improvised melodies which echoed and bounced across the house’s wooden crossbeams. The forest squirrels stopped in their tracks for a moment, I imagine, not having heard such sounds. In the top of a dusty chest nearby sat a manuscript of 18 short preludes by Bach – the first manuscript I picked up — and I resolved from some arbitrary reason of “destiny” (this was the book at the top of the pile) to master these preludes, at least to the best of my rusty abilities.

To be clear, this was not some nostalgic impulse. I had never played nor heard these preludes before. This was not some return to childhood through the resonances of sound. This was to be a new adventure, summoning old skills such as dexterity in the fingers, physical coordination, sound association, concentration, musical memory and the art of reading and interpreting black dots on a page lodged within and around staffs of five, parallel lines — old skills applied to, what was for me at least, an uncharted manuscript.     

Re-Creation

Leonard Berstein introduces pianist Glenn Gould to a national television audience in 1960, comparing a manuscript by Bach to the script of Hamlet

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Sound. Because the meaning, the truth, doesn’t lie in the words or the notes, but in the sounds. The cadence, the timbre, the attitudes.

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Actors probably know that there’s a sequence, a ritual, to the art of interpreting dots on a page designed by somebody else, who is often a ghost at the time of re-creation — some playwright, some composer, from a century or more gone by. Bach, like Shakespeare, gives so little guidance for interpretation. Allegro. Piano. Fast. Soft. Trill here. Right, thanks.

Shakespeare says not a word about the set or the costumes. Or how Bernardo looks or is supposed to sound at the top of Hamlet. Or how Hamlet is supposed to sound throughout. Or anybody else.

Sound. Because the meaning, the truth, doesn’t lie in the words or the notes, but in the sounds. The cadence, the timbre, the attitudes.

Offering so little help, nothing but dots on a page, Johann Sebastian stands over my shoulder in Idyllwild, saying nothing, acting as though he doesn’t really care, and I’m certain he doesn’t. These are just exercise pieces after all. The guy was a Kapellmeister for God’s sake – no, really, for God’s sake, composer of some of the most skilled and inspiring and comforting theological music of the ages sung in multi-tiered interweaving fugues, in soaring chapels, by choruses of a hundred. These preludes in my book are just secular goofs that Bach probably whipped up while thinking about something else.

And so it starts. The first two measures. Treble clef only. Plunk. Plunk. Halting. Repeat. Plunk plunk. Third measure, fourth and fifth and plunk, plunk. Ouch, that was supposed to be flat. B flat. Missed the flat. Check the key signature. Right. And so on. Add the bass clef. That slows down everything. Agony. Child’s play. Start again. Hmmm. It’s a bit smoother. Just get the notes right. Worry about the sound later. As my brother used to quip: “I got all the notes right! — just not in the right order.”

Through the repetition, the tortuous repetition, hints of melody and harmony start to emerge. And when I go to bed that night, I hear those melodies and harmonies in the land between waking and sleeping. They’ve become lodged, enlarged. What it should sound like, I can hear it almost in my dreams. And that’s the musical memory part. Knowing what it should sound like makes it easier to practice the next day.

The weirdest phase, as it must be for an actor, is the phase of getting “off book.” Of committing the notes to memory. Of leaving the manuscript behind. That part seems to take forever, sometimes weeks of practice, but once accomplished, the music flows ever more rapidly, like water starting to flow through a once frozen pipe. It’s a kind of thawing.

Ours is a cold house in a cold winter. When my fingers are cold, they simply don’t glide and dance across the keyboard the way they must to bring these preludes to life. So I go for walk, or soak them in hot water for 15 minutes. Circulation. And when the fingers are warm, dexterous, they land on one key at a time, as they should, rather than fumbling in the space between two notes. The swift runs down the staircase of scales that conclude the first prelude are suddenly part of some jubilant dance when the fingers are warm. And you’re in a zone, where from the clutter of necessary error and apprehension, music starts to emerge.

The key, I slowly discovered, is not to force the newly acquired knowledge, and skill, and memory, but to slow down, relax, admit the mistakes, the dropped notes, the dropped lines, repeat them, repair them, iron them out, in such a state of calm that the music, and the ability to play it, simply emerge from the subconscious. And that’s when you land in the zone, fleetingly at first, where the conscious meets the subconscious, and the music becomes a part of you.

Tatiana Nikolaeva plays the Bach preludes

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It’s a dance. Add a crescendo for no other reason than it sounds right. And a decrescendo. A rise in volume for accent, a withdrawal into softness. A tender sequence of notes that seems to cry out for the sobriety of an elegy. Rises and falls. Repeat a passage in slow motion, the one played last time with the pace and fury of dogs chasing a rabbit. Same notes, opposite meaning. Just like in Hamlet.

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And the final aspect to all of this is the art of concentration. When I was an actor in college, I found myself on the stage with fellow actors, reciting lines yet not hearing them, because I was taking in the glow of the fresnels, the energy coming from the audience, the expressions of my fellow actors – not because those expressions were part of the dramatic action propelled by my lines, but because I had recited my own lines and heard the replies to them dozens of times before, in countless rehearsals, and I was bored to death and outside of myself, looking in, from a distance. This is the worst possible stance for an actor, and I knew this even then, which is why I resolved that I would never be a good actor. I lacked the fortitude and the capacity to remain within the confines of any character I portrayed.  

It took a Herculean effort to avoid the same trap when learning to play Bach in Idyllwild. There were passages I knew were coming, and indeed they arrived exactly as I’d anticipated from the countless times I’d played them before. And so, I found myself playing the notes while, in my head, replaying an argument I’d had with my sister, or ruminating on my garden. And then, crash. I couldn’t remember the next note. I had no idea where I was, because I was everywhere, and nowhere. I’m sure this is common in our age of perpetual distraction, but even these preludes, characterized by their child-like simplicity, have a certain rigor to them, and that rigor demands that the pianist actually be present while playing them. It helps to watch the keys as fingers roll over them, and to permit no diversion from that visual and spiritual focus, to remain in the moment, entrenched in the world of that music – not such a bad world as these things go.

The sound of music builds confidence for the interpretation of that music, the mordant trill that yesterday was throwing everything off because it was an intrusion that interrupted the memorized spatial relationship of fingers to notes. But now, in the zone, however tenuous, it’s a dance. Add a crescendo for no other reason than it sounds right. And a decrescendo. A rise in volume for accent, a withdrawal into softness. A tender sequence of notes that seems to cry out for the sobriety of an elegy. Rises and falls. Repeat a passage in slow motion, the one played last time with the pace and fury of dogs chasing a rabbit. Same notes, opposite meaning. Just like in Hamlet.

The Meaning of Hamlet, of Bach, of Life

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This is exactly why Shakespeare’s plays rings so true. Not because King Lear is like Donald Trump, or because the Duke of Cornwall is like Ted Cruz, or because Falstaff is like Tucker Carlson, but because corruption and ambition propel the plots, and, for the most part, people are operating on false information, presuming they know more than they do. Just like the rest of us — especially after watching fairy tales like “Cinderella.”

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In a brilliant, sardonic lecture at Case Western Reserve University, Kurt Vonnegut creates a “scientific” graf for the shapes of the stories we consume. The most popular entail a lowly character’s rise from poverty to eternal happiness – “Cinderella” – contrasted against the fall of say Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, who starts out on a low ebb and then turns into a cockroach. End of story.

Popularity, however, has little bearing on the enduring masterpieces that tell us who we are and how little we know about life. The distinction Vonnegut makes is between the narratives in which we, the audience, know the difference between good news and bad news, as in “Cinderella,” the kind of stories of which we never tire (and which, according to Vonnegut, lead us to believe that we know more about life than we really do), contrasted against those stories in which there is simply a Candide-like sequence of events, which at the time, bear little relation to any character’s ascent or decline, or to whether those events represent a good outcome or a bad one.

For example, the ghost of Hamlet’s father tells him he was murdered by his brother, the younger Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius. There are no witnesses to this conversation – to the ghost, yes, but not to the conversation. So is this revelation good news or not? Even Hamlet knows he doesn’t know. What kind of storytelling is that?

Even Hamlet, in the midst of it all, realizes that sprits can be, well demons, shapeshifters, pretending to be one thing while being something quite different. Pernicious spirit, leading him down a rabbit hole? Or someplace deeper?

To be, or not to be? Well, that depends on what comes after death. Hamlet says he doesn’t know that either.

Does anybody know anything for certain in this play? Do we?

And so, to test the trustworthiness of the ghost’s intel, Hamlet puts on a play-within-the-play to reconstruct the ghost’s story on a stage, so Hamlet can watch the reaction of the accused. And what does Hamlet learn?

Nothing.

His accused uncle is clearly vexed and storms out of the theater after the murder scene in the play-within-the-play. And what does that prove?

Nothing.

Does he storm out because he’s guilty, or does he storm out because he’s offended by the suggestion that he’s guilty? We don’t know until later, when he confesses his crime to God, but never to Hamlet or to any of the other characters.

If anybody were to ask him, he’d probably lie. Ninety percent of Claudius’s lines are either lies or machinations. Barring Horatio, almost everybody lies throughout Hamlet, as throughout the bulk of Shakespeare’s tragedies and dramas. With the possible exception of the soliloquies where, for example, Hamlet lets on that he’s depressed and that he doesn’t know much. These are the truest sentiments in the play.

Uncle Claudius spends the play lying, then plotting treachery, then lying about it. Polonius yammers platitudes (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” – so much for the global economy, then and now), for which he’s rewarded, by Shakespeare, with a dagger in his guts for being a “foolish, prating knave.” His son, Laertes, yells a lot, largely on the basis of misinformation. Laertes’s sister, Ophelia, loses her boyfriend, loses her father, loses her mind and then loses her life. Hamlet loses his father, loses his mind, loses is girlfriend, and then loses his life. And so on.

Nobody know much what is actually going on, except that the world is steeped in greed, lust, and corruption – that much is clear, and not much else. Thich is exactly why Shakespeare’s plays rings so true. Not because King Lear is like Donald Trump, or because the Duke of Cornwall is like Ted Cruz, or because Falstaff is like Tucker Carlson, but because corruption and ambition propel the plots, and, for the most part, people are operating on false information, while presuming they know more than they do. Just like the rest of us — especially after watching fairy tales like “Cinderella.”

After my father died, my mother remarried a man with strong political convictions. He’d engage is diatribes against the hypocrisies and George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, the Koch Brothers, and so on. These would manifest in rants fueled by indignation and cemented in certainty. After one of his rants wound itself down, my mother looked at him and with her best Cockney dialect, and in a world-weary tone, she said, “And you was there, Charley?”

In Shakespeare’s sewers swim a small cluster of good people, faithful friends who speak truthfully – such as Horatio, Cordelia,  the Duke of Kent – wherein lie faint glimmers of hope and nobility – even if these people are vanquished for their virtues.

But Shakespeare’s sequence of events is largely removed from the characters’ destinies. Near Hamlet’s start, Laertes goes off to France, for little dramatic purpose except that he can come dashing back after hearing news of his father’s death. He could just as easily have come roaring back from some Elsinore suburb. Hamlet gets sent off to England, part of Claudius’s plot to assassinate him. Then Hamlet returns. This is not entirely random, since his return further galls his uncle, but nor is his departure to England entirely necessary. Hamlet’s murder of his would-be assassins, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, could easily have been accomplished on Danish soil rather than on the high seas – if we’re going to apply the ancient Greek, Aristotelian standard that locations should be limited. Shakespeare had no interest in that. Stuff happens, he seems to say, at least from the way he structures his plays — stuff that’s almost random. Terrible stuff, good stuff. And sometimes we can’t tell whether the stuff is terrible or good. That’s the shape of life. That’s also the shape of later plays by Calderon and later novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where life is a dream.

A dream-state also lies in the shape of Bach’s music, even those 18 short preludes I’m working through. With as much rehearsal and repetition as I require, one really gets to know the music, phrase by phrase. And then comes the realization at the end of any particular motif, there are ten ways Bach could have continued on to the next motif. And that the one he chose is largely arbitrary. Or seems so. That’s not a flaw, that’s the beauty, the mystery of it. You don’t quite know what’s coming next, or why. It just flows like a stream in a direction of its own choosing. As in Hamlet. As in life. Anything is possible.

Mozart’s later works are almost entirely predictable, like press releases. Their purpose, their technique. Not so, Bach. The shape of the melodies settles at the end, almost always into harmony, though sometimes in an off-centered way, say, in a minor key, but the road leading to that harmony comes filled with contrapuntal divergences and weavings, tension and harmony, war and peace. What comes next? One can never be certain. It’s as though the music is finding its way as it goes, like us in our lives.

Centuries after he breathed his last breath, Bach left us dots on a page. Scribblings. As in Shakespeare, their meaning lies not in the dots themselves, but in the capacities of ourselves, and future generations, to interpret them. It’s not that different from reading tea leaves.

And in the worlds of Bach, of Shakespeare, and of the 21^st century, where nothing is certain, including whether we, or even our grandchildren, will be able to live out our natural lives, one thing is certain nonetheless.

Almost nobody is telling us the truth. About anything. Shakespeare’s plays, like the worlds we inhabit, are filled with liars. You can’t attach meaning to words and keep your sanity. The meaning comes from the sounds, the combinations. The resonances. The vibrations. The timbre. The zone. The meeting of the conscious with the subconscious, where the music becomes part of you. With the knowledge that nothing is certain. And in that humble way, Shakespeare tells us the truth. Bach tells us the truth. They’re among the very few who do so. They’re worth hearing. 

One last thing. Sometimes I hit a combination of notes in a prelude – a combination so enticing, I have to stop and say, oh, that’s really nice. It’s like walking in my local meadow when the sun is melting the snow through towering pines, and a coyote dashes off in one direction, and a family of deer in the opposite. That much rustling triggers a flock of quail to take flight. It’s just a moment when you say, oh, that’s really nice. Or, when walking the dogs, a neighbor shouts out your name cheerfully and waves, and you say, oh, that’s really nice. A collection of such moments is a kind of photograph album to be brought out when things get too arduous. And through the clamor of a pandemic, the cacophony of lies, the babel, the losses, the disappointments, the disgust with hypocrisy, you can still find some fleeting snapshot, some snippet of music, and say, oh, that’ really nice.