Michael Weinstein

I can never quite comprehend the fact that I live next to the Jerusalem Academy of Music. It’s weird to me that my neighborhood, which seems (to me at least) more like an Austrian suburb, is right in front of the city’s main highway, and that it’s just a bridge crossing from there to the university campus.

It was weird, on 29 June 2023, that I rushed from a rehearsal in the Weisz hall on foot to home in about 20 minutes, got showered, dressed and then went out with my mom for the performance with a suitcase, for a further journey. It was similarly weird on 27 June the following year, after the performance, when I realized that the only thing I needed in order to go home after everyone left, was simply to cross the bridge and walk for 15 minutes.

It will probably be weird, when I’ll come to conduct in the Jerusalem Theater, either with the JSO or even my own orchestra, that I performed in that hall as a hack percussionist in 2025. It will surely be weird knowing that my high school, as well as my conservatory, is just a 3-minute-walk away (at least for the former). Sometimes the distance between lowest low and highest high isn’t so great.

It can definitely be weird knowing that to get back home from your heights as a performer is just a few moments on foot. I wonder what it’s like for IPO members or audience-goers who live right next to the Culture Palace. I wonder what it's like for those in America and Europe who live close to their concert halls.

Thank god there isn’t a concert hall in my neighborhood, otherwise I would be psychologically lost!

The Clairmont Hall at BMSM fulfills many functions: orchestral rehearsals, orchestral concerts, choral concerts, chamber music and contemporary music performances, graduation recitals. And at every function, despite the fact that there is always some unmovable percussion at the back of the stage, the hall transforms itself into something new, without even doing much. Similarly, Targ Hall, switches from lecture room to choral rehearsals to chamber music to contemporary music without much of a wink.

"The night has arrived, and it's quiet now.

Longing has arrived, to see and hug you

What goes through me, is more than can be put in words

There's everything here but you're not here.

You are going through tough days once again

How do you keep going and how are the smiles

What do you think it's difficult in words

There's everything here but you're not here.

We will meet together and we will feel good

It will be soon, soon

Both of us together we will feel good

Don't worry, it's close, close.

What to tell you and this is only a letter

What to depict for you and how to interest you

What to tell you – I can't find you

There's everything here, but, you're not here.

We will meet together and we will feel good

It will be soon, soon

Both of us together we will feel good

Thank god I can type in English. I was about to lose face. Currently I’m stuck, with nothing else to do except confess, for what I did or not, and then simply get stuck into a coma. I really wish it. I want to do nothing with my life except eat, drink and sleep. Not even thinking. And besides I’m starting to suck at eating and drinking anyway, along with everything else, so how about we call it quits. To get myself being able to type in English was absolutely excruciating. My mouse is defective, and the touch is only partial. So here I am, typing, with defective function, hoping that this reaches someone, while a lightbulb above dangerously flickers with the reality that life and light, the repressed, continue.

I live for nothing, except my fantasies, and when my practical and careerist ones fade, the sexual ones will need to try to suffice. I live only for these few women, who probably can’t even do the mary sue deeds, but I’m convinced in my hyper-id that they can, and splendidly. Just the thought what they can do with their lungs, lips, tongues and cheeks gets me calmingly excited. Otherwise I waste my time. And even more so today. Like what consolation does the funrun bring? Absolute nada. Discord is decent, but isn’t as exciting as it was 8 months ago, when there were more friends one could be confident with. instagram is the usual cesspool, and youtube is living hell. Doing all those presto classical calculations is an insanity I should’ve stopped long ago, and then didn’t. Reading blog posts and reviews are secure nails in a coffin.

All music is futile. Everything, from the renaissance to the memes, is lost. Bach bit the dust, Beethoven and Schubert rot silently, Wagner rules musical politics rather than music, Mahler lost his charm over this world, Berg chain-smokes, Shostakovich and Schnittke have been sadomasochistically abusing themselves. Vaporwave doesn’t rule the world anymore, Regietheater productions do, and even Dudu Faruk struggles to keep up with the market. Scriabin and Satie don’t have anything better to do than send each other mystically toxic and pornographically infected postcards, Boulez and Stockhausen quarrel all day long.

Only art and poetry can save us, but they’re far from it. Klimt, Schiele, Musil, Kraus, Schnitzler, Tzara, Breton, de Chirico, Beckett, Genet, Hausmann, Schwitters, Grosz, Dix, Dali, Tanguy, Masson, Miro and the rest are all focusing on themselves rather than the world. They are tragically paralyzed by their own misery.

I restart the lightbulb a third time, to see if it might settle. There is a low chance for that, however, considering the way I know things.

The past 10 days was a period of prolificness rather rare. I created memes, even wrote a cadenza for a virtuosic clarinetist, made a Vaporwave single, and another is in the works. But all this time there was malady. I’ve been all this time inside home. The pandemic spread across my family, and I eventually had to get it and I did. Nothing really, felt more like a usual drip. But basically my routine was messed up. So I woke up every morning with my fantasies, eventually realizing them physically in a lame manner. Then I had to destroy my self-confidence even more by doing my daily sacrifices to the funrun, instagram and youtube. There are never enough sacrifices as far as they’re concerned and I do my best to comply. Eventually around 9:30 (after nearly 2 hours of wakefulness) I hit the shower, then I spend another hour or so sacrificing further rituals, whether in my robe or partially dressed, and only then do I fully dress, while continuing to serve my “sanctimonious” duty. (The lightbulb hasn’t settled, it’s completely fucked up, and I turn on the big indirect lamp.) Only then can I serve the commandment: “Thou shall wake up in the morning and eat lunch”. And things have screwed up themselves multiple times over that I’m basically unable to eat anything. I put my entirety into a 230 gram burger, then give half of it to the self-regarding pooch bitch. Thus I burn my time, with barely any munchies until it’s time for supper and I don’t have any idea what to eat. Who thought that letting 17-year-olds having their final year of being supervised at this stage of their lives in that age?

"The world turned me into a prostitute, and I will turn it into a brothel". - Friedrich Dürrenmatt

In his later years, Franz Liszt was the musical revolutionary you never heard of. He apparently wrote a book-plan (now unfortunately lost) titled Sketches for a Harmony of the Future, in which he proposes a new system of composition very similar to Schoenberg's 12-tone technique. His pieces never actually use the 12-tone technique, but he does in fact go even further into hyper-chromaticism (or, if you're like Dave Hurwitz, "chromatic sludge") and atonality than Wagner ever did. And mind you, Wagner composed Parsifal in those years, a work which is soaked in hyper-chromaticism to its bones, maybe even more than Tristan. And yet Liszt surpassed even that with just one piano. His pieces in those years are remarkably brief (not withstanding the big cycles such as the 3rd year of the Années de pèlerinage and the Via crucis). His slow works are actually somewhat reminiscent of the music Erik Satie would compose in his Rosicrucian years, and above all Liszt prefaces that legendary pianist-composer-mystic, Alexander Scriabin. It's probable Bartok would've known some of the pieces, since in Budapest he might have been taken more seriously as a composer? Debussy knew some of this, as certainly did Busoni. I haven't been able to find how much Schoenberg did indeed know of this music, but he might have found it cool as shit. Even if Liszt doesn't really resemble Schoenberg in his musical language, he certainly does in some of his more outspoken pieces resemble the natural wish to provoke. The same drive that in the past led Liszt to show off his technical and transcriptional skills, now he was using to punish this same audience with very short, austere pieces with big uncertainty and depression lying behind them (he had become more depressed as time went on, and in 1881 he suffered a serious head injury that quite destabilized him for the next 5 years). And no late Liszt piece is quite as austere, provocative, and depressive as the Bagatelle sans tonalité, among the last works he ever composed (the date isn't exactly known, but it's supposed to have been composed around 1885).

But first, some extra background. Up to this point, Liszt was the quintessential Faustian musical polymath, or as another famous musical polymath (perhaps also quintessentially Faustian) put it: "Well what is this? You can't have everything! And yet he seemed to". Appropiately enough for this icon of the Romantic era, he was quite obsessed with the Faustian myth itself, especially its relatively recent dramatic version by Goethe. Liszt was so enthralled by the Faust legend, that he composed a gigantic Faust Symphony, a Mephisto Polka and, semi-famously, 4 Mephisto waltzes. The first one dates from around the time of the symphony (that is the late 1850s). It was originally an orchestral counterpart to another orchestral tone poem, also based after Faust (but after a different version by Nikolaus Lenau), and it was later arranged for the piano as the 1st Mephisto Waltz. All the others are piano works dating from the 1880s (as does the Polka). Now here is where the Bagatelle comes in. Apparently the 4th Waltz was left somewhat incomplete at Liszt's death, and since around that time his pieces were so short that they could be considered sketches, there is a chance that the Bagatelle was the actual 4th Mephisto Waltz, especially as it contains the words "4th Mephisto Waltz" as the title of the manuscript, and "Bagatelle without Tonality" is actually the subtitle.

This bagatelle is quite bananas, which is why I love it with my dear heart (it's also why it was so important to me after such a long and tough day). Liszt was quite of a sex symbol at the peak of his fame, around 40-55 years before the piece was composed, and he had a Mephistophelean air around him, especially considering his incredible abilities (and not just his techincal pianistic capabilities). What this Bagatelle does is that it has the Mephistophelean energy completely devoid of motivation, or even origin. It isn't a good or bad power, simply hopelessly and fatally neutral. This is the goodbye to the aesthetic of the early 19th century, more than any Wagnerian pamphlet. The ending, a series of arpeggiated diminished triads and tetrachords stopping snap shut, is among the shocking I've ever experienced in music. It reaches confrontation levels of late Shostakovich, an odd association at first glance, but one that becomes more understandable due to their highly depressive natures at that state in their lives.