bi-monthly and bi-friendly ;)

This is me when I read:

It’s like a sort of … feeling that the world is bigger than you, and very complicated, and filled with things you’d never expect.  It’s not exactly “skepticism,” and not exactly “humility.”  It’s compatible with having a high view of oneself or one’s intellect, though not with certain versions of those things.  It’s compatible with strong and numerous opinions, too, though not with certain ways of having strong and numerous opinions.

It’s having your most instinctive response to the world be “this is billions of distinct things; this is jeweled chaos; this is a buzzing, blooming confusion.”  And then you make models and concepts to try to make some sense of it.  Sometimes you become quite attached to them.  Sometimes maybe too attached.  But if you become too attached it’s not because you think your concepts are reality.  It’s because you feel you’ll be so terribly lost without them.

When I try to think of the opposite of this temperament I think of those sorts of political or culture bloggers who are never surprised by anything, who always respond to every news story with “oh, look, more of the thing I know about, doing the things I know it does.”  It’s not that these people are too political, or too certain.  It’s that their politics and certainty doesn’t feel like a lifeboat they’re clinging to in a vast roiling ocean.  They give off the impression of not seeing the ocean.

And lots of things follow from this.  You have to find ways of living with this ever-present sense – sometimes dulled, but never gone – that reality is too large, grotesquely large, that you’ll never find your way in it.  So you learn to revel in it a bit, to become an eclectic, an amateur, collecting and admiring little bits of jeweled chaos.  You collect #quotes.  You learn to laugh when you see something you don’t understand, so that you don’t instead despair.

You feel wary about systems, you feel wary about things that are top-down and a priori.  You like data.  But not in the sense of “the data is in”; not in the sense that we have measured, so now we know, and now no one can ever question again.  But you are always worrying that you are missing the forest for the trees, because there are so many trees, too many, too many.  You distrust the single event, the dramatic example, because you know that reality has room for everything, because you have enough such specimens pinned and mounted in your collection to prove any claim or its negation.  You want the species, not the specimen – but you feel deep down that that has to be hubris, because all you see are specimens, and the great whirling confusion laughs at your taxonomies.

Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, first published over two hundreds years ago, is notoriously considered one of the most difficult-to-play piano pieces of all time.

In particular, when Beethoven sent it to his publisher in 1818, he allegedly said, “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years hence!”, and much has been made of the fact that it wasn’t publicly performed in its entirety until eighteen years later, by Franz Liszt himself.

Except that’s a bit of a deceptive statistic. See, when Beethoven published Hammerklavier, public solo piano recitals/concerts weren’t really a thing yet. Symphonies, sure; concertos, definitely. But sonatas were “parlor” music—a thing played by amateurs, often skilled amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless, in little sitting-rooms for a bit of entertainment after dinner, or at private salons with a guest list in the low dozens. (And mostly they were meant to be sight-read! The culture of obsessively polishing a piece to make it “performance-ready” wasn’t as much of a thing, back then.) People bought these things the way they bought novels, and, just as someone might buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses today and enjoy puzzling over the thing, even if they never read the whole thing or feel like they fully “get” it, well… some folks would enjoy sonatas the same way.

So yeah, Hammerklavier didn’t have its first public performance until Liszt played it in the Salle Érard. But also, Liszt basically invented the format of “star virtuoso pianist hogging the stage for two hours” in order to get a public audience at all.

But in the meantime—I think about how wonderful it must’ve been, tooling around on the piano during that 18-year-span where there was no evidence that thing even was playable, or that, if playable, that the thing even made sense. Beethoven was nearly totally deaf by this point, after all, a fact that was publicly known—had he totally lost it? people had to wonder. And the only way to find out would be… well, trying it out yourself!

It has the sound of a gimmick. And I’ll bet it was, at least a little bit—but just because something’s more interesting to play than listen to doesn’t mean it’s failing in its goal. (Though fwiw it is very interesting to listen to.)

It also has the sound of, like, Dark Souls, to be honest. Proto-video game culture. A new game drops and people are asking each other: can anyone beat this boss? can you beat this boss? do you still consider your time on the game well-spent even if you never 100% it?

Biographies generally agree that Beethoven’s metronome markings (which only appear in his later work, and only *some* of his later work) are preposterous—often borderline-unplayable, and certainly not very musical. I couldn’t find a recording of anyone trying to play Hammerklavier at the marked 138bpm tempo, so I got a computer to do it—and burst out laughing at the result because, yeah, 138bpm is fucking NUTS. But whether intentional or accidental, I love the audacity of its being there, like a taunt: I dare you to do more. I dare you to do better. I dare you to try.

Much has been made of how difficulty’s a way of keeping people out—but it’s also a way of inviting people in, I think. It says: do this hard thing and you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in the trying. Because the trying is the thing that makes the music live; there is no music without you.

Here’s an old bit from an interview with the game designer Porpentine:

“The purpose of a puzzle [in a game] is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”

The kingly pig looks taken aback by this statement. "You claim to be 'baiting' our kind?.. A master of it, no less - after all the trust we hsve placed in you?"