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Ahoy there. It\u2019s been a while! I\u2019ve been busy. It\u2019s a sad fact of life that I have bills to pay, and in spite of the tremendous generosity of some of this podcast\u2019s listeners, a whole year\u2019s worth of donations to In the Hands don\u2019t even cover a month\u2019s rent. So, I\u2019ve been working \u2014 which is not entirely a bad thing: it\u2019s a good job, I like the other people, and I\u2019m working on interesting stuff \u2026 but it\u2019s just amazing how much time a job takes! Forty hours a week is a lot.

Anyway, having settled in to the new schedule of this job, solved my car woes, completed another successful Keys Please, and done some traveling (I went to Qu\xe9bec and practiced my French!), I\u2019m now turning my attention back to my poor, neglected site. To get things started again, here\u2019s an old recording freshly remastered with the new process.

This is a late Brahms intermezzo. (Regular readers know how much I love that!) As I wrote before, it\u2019s a wonderfully ambiguous piece. I suppose 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.

Certainly embracing it is certainly necessary in this piece. It\u2019s hard to say exactly what it is, or what it\u2019s about, or to name how it feels, but the raw experience of it \u2014 if we don\u2019t try to name it \u2014 is wonderful.

\nJohannes Brahms\n
\nIntermezzo Op 117 No 2\n
\nPaul Cantrell,\npiano\n
\n\u266b\nDownload\n(5:23 / 6.8 M)\n

Next up, I\u2019ll be sharing some excerpts from February\u2019s Keys Please, which will be a fun change of pace for In the Hands. There will even be instruments other than piano; brace yourselves!