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Sitting on my piano at the moment, waiting for the arbitrary moments I sit down, open up a score and play pages at random, are the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues, Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, and my frequent go-to music, the complete Schubert piano sonatas. Recently, for the first time, I’ve been spending time with the D major sonata. As happens with Schubert, as much as I generally love his work, he occasionally deeply disappoints, marring an otherwise wonderful work with singularly uninspired music. At the encouragement of my friend Karen, when running across such music, I’ve taken to writing letters to the dead – and who knows, maybe there will be an answer!

Dear Franz,

First and foremost, I want to express my deep gratitude to you for all of the wonderful music that you left behind. It is my pleasure to report that the world has made amends, by giving your great music the attention it deserved, but failed to receive in your lifetime. Your glorious melodies and harmonic adventurousness have been recognized by the world and your music is performed everywhere in concert halls and on an invention you may or may not appreciate – the radio.

Over the years, playing through your collected piano sonatas has been a great source of pleasure and solace for me. Of late, I’ve been reading through your D major sonata, which for inexplicable reasons, I hadn’t previously read. The second and third movements are, so far, my favorites and are fine examples of your great talent. However, I am stumped at the last movement rondo, and despite repeated tries, can’t get through it without closing the book with a deep sigh, wondering, what you might have been thinking. Without overly criticizing, it simply isn’t a match for the preceding movements. It has scattered moments of beauty, but these don’t overcome the overall lack of any meritorious ideas. I wonder what might have been going on in your life at the time you were working on it. When abandoned by the muses, why not wait for their return before committing pen to paper?

I realize that you are still busy writing glorious music, so don’t feel obliged to write back – but if you should find a moment, it be delightful to hear from you.

Sincerely,

Stanley Grill

There are always wars, declared or undeclared. If I had my way, I’d just make a declaration of peace, and stop right there. Continuing with my usual obsession, just got to the last bars of my own “Declaration of Peace” for chamber orchestra. Now it needs to rest, tweaking to follow. A single movement, 12 minutes, scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.

Finishing touches done, and scores/parts now posted, of Les Roses, setting four poems from Rilke’s French set Les Roses. Composed in response to not being able to get the sound of Hana Blazikova’s soprano accompanied by Bruce Dickey’s cornetto out of my mind. The songs are set in two versions, one with accompaniment by chamber organ, and a second with a treble viol.

I’m not sure for what reason, perhaps the turmoil of our age that preoccupies me, but of late, I’ve been drawn more than usual to the idea of the invisible world around us. Never of a religious bent, yet, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to thinking about the unseen world that is all about us. It was Blake who said it most simply – to see a world in a grain of sand – and Rilke, who to my mind, comes always the closest to evoking a sense of the swirl of life all around us that we don’t see. Such thoughts have also drawn me to reading (without much understanding) so many books about particle physics, as it pleases me to imagine the countless particles streaming invisibly through the universe – through me – and passing through all matter without obstacle. And, music, it goes without saying, is the medium that I believe best communicates these feelings. Overtones, for example, with their simple physical explanation, will yet always seem magical, the invisible world at work in the visible (or audible) world. Although never evident to our senses, it is all that is real, and the everyday nonsense that so arouses everyone’s passions that is illusion. It is this hidden world that I seek to convey, to the extent of my ability, with my music.

It must be going on 50 years ago when I first read anything by Rilke, sometime in my late teens or early twenties. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and selected poems. I didn’t understand him at the time and it made no great impression. It was only many years later that I rediscovered his works – and then, having arrived at a different understanding of my own life – and life in general – it left me thunderstruck. And still does. His poetry – and I can think of no other voice than his that does so in such a convincing way – manages to depict the reality of an inner, ephemeral world that is a true reality. He doesn’t look at things and describe them. He shows us the meaning behind the appearances. Lacking his gift, my attempt to describe what I see in his words falters, but it has something to do with the realization that nothing we perceive reflects reality. That is an evident fact, although one that is all too easily forgotten. Nothing we perceive through our senses is the real thing, because it all comes to us as a translation. We only see what our brain interprets from the signals that arrive from the outside. Other than indirectly, we cannot perceive the swirls of energy and particles that surround us, fill the world with energy, and are the foundation of our being. Other than Rilke, there is, perhaps, William Blake, who wrote “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” but, somehow, Blake’s strange imagery never spoke to me, nor does he, to my mind, hit that invisible mark so consistently as to reveal its secrets.

Rilke’s poems sing to me and I’ve set many of them to music. My favorite of many volumes is “The Poetry of Rilke” as translated and edited by Edward Snow. It was working from that volume that I composed my cycles of Rilke Songs, Songs of Loss and Remembering and selections from the Sonnets of Orpheus, not daring to attempt the Duino Elegies (maybe one day).

But the Snow edition only includes his poetry in German and it was only recently that I’ve begun devouring his French poems, having not previously realized that, after descending from the mountain of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, he wrote over four hundred poems in French. I am now threading my way through the labyrinth of “The Complete French Poems” as translated by A. Poulin. The volume begins with “Les Roses” in which, over the course of 27 poems, he explodes the image of the rose into a metaphor for, well, everything. Worlds lie within the folds of this many-petaled flower. Yesterday, I set the 2nd poem to music –

Je te vois, rose, livre entrebaîllé,
qui contient tant de pages
de bonheur détaillé
qu’on ne lira jamais. Livre-mage,

qui s’ouvre au vent et qui peut être lu
les yeux fermés…,
dont les papillons sortent confus
d’avoir eu les mêmes idées.

Such images, of petals like pages in a book of wisdom, opened by the wind, out of which emerge stunned butterflies…

More songs to come, but I haven’t yet decided on the instrumentation. Any of you out there who sing – and want to sing these songs to come – write back.

Then, after roses, come windows!

Last night, I attended a concert by Sonnambula, an early music consort, at the Cloisters. Their program was built around works by Leonora Duarte, one of the few women composers from the period whose music has survived. The music aside, the focus on Duarte added layers of thought about her life, the Jewish diaspora, the nexus of cultures that flourished in Antwerp during the 17th century. And then, of course, one wonders, with her talent, what her life might have been like were it not for the limitations imposed on her because of her sex. Instead of the world visiting her in her father’s household, she would have been out and about, visiting the world.