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When I first saw the sheet music for today\u2019s piece, I was a bit boggled. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever encountered a piece that sounded less like it looked! You might figure it for some sort of virtuosic toccata thing, all flash and texture, but no, it is slow, minimal melody with a lush, dark accompaniment.

The notation makes a little more sense if you think of Bach\u2019s preludes. Do I grow predictable claiming everything is full of Bach? Very well, I grow predictable. This one is full of Bach: the layering; the figuration built out of a series of surprising chord changes, and the sense of counterpoint hidden in those changes; the walks around the circle of fifths.

Really, I don\u2019t know how the twentieth century managed to stay so obsessed for so long with the idea of newness at all costs; all that paranoia about being derivative was really overblown, and I hope we\u2019re growing out of it. The best art, it seems to me, always derives from the past, and escapes imitation through synthesis, not through obsessive novelty.

Learning this, I felt like Brahms was searching in some of the same places I am in my own composition: the piece is perpetually ambiguous and unresolved, yet within that ambiguity is a deep sense of order, an abundance of logical patterns. It\u2019s a powerful tension, simultaneous ambiguity and order. The effect is strongly emotional, but it\u2019s hard to name exactly what the emotion is. I\u2019ll leave that as an exercise for the reader (one with no right answer)!

\n\n\n\n\n\nJohannes Brahms\n\n\n\n\u25b6\ufe0f\nIntermezzo Op 117 No 2\n\n\nPaul Cantrell, piano\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2b07\ufe0f\nDownload\n\n\n(5:23 / 6.8 M)\n\n\n\n

Not everybody might think of ambiguity as being a compliment or a desirable thing, but I do. One of music\u2019s magical abilities is to be ambiguous in the way that life is ambiguous, that the moment-to-moment experience of consciousness is ambiguous. We have a very natural desire to understand music, to try to figure out what it \u201cmeans\u201d and what we\u2019re supposed to think about it. Music, however, doesn\u2019t like to be pigeonholed that way. In real life, we don\u2019t experience emotions one at a time, or in black and white \u2014 we usually make sense of them in retrospect, finding names and narratives only as we look back on experience. Music works that way as well, and gives us a way of distilling and becoming comfortable with all the confusingly multiple moment-to-moment ebb and flow of our minds and hearts. It is a way of looking back on our own experience without flattening it the way ordinary words can. It\u2019s often hard to say even whether a piece is basically happy or sad \u2014 and that is a wonderful thing if you embrace it.

This is the second in a set of three pieces, the first of which was the first piece I posted in this blog. I don\u2019t play the third yet, though I certainly mean to in the future \u2014 it is also a marvelous piece, and the three together are among my favorite music in this world.