It is so measured that rising arpeggio, only to fall and rise again in quicker values, through the dominant seventh to the heartache moment of that minor ninth, a very apogee of dissonance. Then it goes higher still to the fifth, holding to that Phrygian harmony before returning to the tonic minor and a measured fall in the bass. This is a deliberate descent to the sub-mediant, and Bach’s touch of magic, the equivalence with the dominant minor ninth. But then he gives us hope: an extended and joyful play through sequences that rise and fall within each bar, to rest finally on the mediant’s echo of that opening, that measured rise and the quickening fall. We have hardly smiled with relief when Bach pulls us back into the insecurity of the dominant of the subdominant, that V of IV acting like a bridge to a long, long discourse in the dominant, a pedal E holding firmly to itself whilst rising arpeggios and falling decorations and sequences pull and pull through innocently related keys. Longer and longer play the rising passages until short motives of imitation interrupt, treble to bass, tenor to alto, until:  a first inversion arpeggio of the dominant seventh measures out the opening rhythm. This happens twice in short succession, as though holding the progress of the music to account. A questioning perhaps before a four-fold sequence asserts the dominant and a chorded caesura. There is a pregnant, though faintly resonant silence as Bach spins the dice of tonality and chooses the subdominant to bring the music towards a waiting Allemande. The music moves through a play of subdominant to dominant, minor to major, the mix of flattened fifth and flattened ninth. It is those intervals that determine Bach as the father of ambiguity in the 20C school of jazz harmony, Arpeggio then a falling scale, and repeat and repeat again, but moving ever higher by sequence. At last five chords – merely a shorthand for closure via the expectation of a right display of the performer’s improvisatory prowess. They prepare us reverently for the tonic minor before the stately Allemande leads the music into the elegant steps of its walking dance.

It was a cold night for a concert. There was frost on the windscreen as we got into the car for the short drive to this city church. We drove because we were going to be late, and it was cold, and would be likely to be colder still when the concert was over. I had wondered if part one would be enough. Could Bach and Rameau be enough? Might the musical appetite cope with Mozart and Beethoven too? Were we about to sit down to a large meal, possibly in the wrong order. Can the cheese course be a transcendental experience I wondered? Bach to begin certainly, a substantial starter with one of the mid period keyboard toccatas and two ‘distant’ preludes and fugues, but then a keyboard suite by Rameau?
 
When I listen to Beethoven though I want to hear a work on its own, unencumbered round about with other musics.  A recent experience of several hours driving to hear a single Beethoven symphony has remained close and vivid, and an experience that brought me close to tears. So I imagine that I might only hear Op.110 to make that opening sequence of chords so ominously special. The introduction seems to come from nowhere and does not connect with musical past, except perhaps the composer’s own past. It is as though the pianist puts on a pair of gloves imbued with the spirit of the composer, and these chords appear . . . and what is there that might possibly prepare the listener for the journey that pianist and listener embark upon?  Certainly not the soufflé of Mozart’s K.332.
 
The audience is hardly a smattering of coats, hats and grey hair. There is another piano recital in town tonight and this is but the artist’s preview of a forthcoming concert at a major venue. Our pianist is equipping herself for a prestigious engagement and sensibly recognizes the need to test out the way the programme flows in front of an audience, and in a provincial church where she is not entirely unknown. I admire this resolve and wonder a little at the long-term planning which makes this possible and viable.
 
Now a figure in black walks out from the shadows to stand by her piano. Coming from stage right she places left her hand firmly on the mirror-black case above the keyboard. She looks at her audience briefly, and makes a bow, almost a curtsey, an obeisance to her audience and possibly to those distant spirits who guard the music she is to play. We will not see her face again until the next time she will stand at the piano to acknowledge our applause after the Bach she is about to play. Her slightly more than shoulder-length hair is cut to flow forward as she holds herself to play; her face is often hidden from us, her expression curiously blank. Perhaps she has prepared herself to enter a deep state of concentration that admits no recognition of those sitting just in front of her. Her dress is long and black with a few sparking threads to catch the careful lighting. Without these occasional glimmers her ****** movement would be unnoticeable. As it is the way the light is caught is subtle and quietly playful, though not enough to distract, only remind us that though in black she is wearing the kind of starry sky such as you might perceive in crepuscular time.
 
Thus, we already sense so much before she has played a note there is a firm slightly dogged confidence and reverence here in her approach to instrument and audience. And in the opening bars of the Bach toccata that is manifest; and not just a confidence born out of some strategy against nervousness, but a ritual of welcoming to this music that now spills out into the partially darkened church. The sonorousness and balance of the piano’s tone surprises. It is not a fine piano, but it has qualities that she seems to understand. There is a degree of attentive listening to herself that enables her to control dynamics and act resolutely on the structure of the music. When the slow section of this four-part toccata appears there is a studied gentleness and restraint that belies any ****** led gesture or manner. Her stance and deliberation at the keyboard remain determined and in control, unaltered by the music’s message. She does not pull her body backwards as seems the custom with so many who feel they have to show us they are stroking and coaxing such gentleness and restraint out of the keyboard.
 
As the final fugato of the toccata flows at almost twice the speed I’ve ever heard it, my concentration begins to disengage. It is too fast for me to follow the voices, I miss the entries, and the smudged resonance of the texture hides those details I have grown over so many years to know and love. This is Glen Gould on speed, not the toccata that resides in my musical memory. I am aware of missing so much and my attention floats away into the sound of it all. It seems to be all sound and not the play of music.
 
In this stage of disengagement I sense the tense quality of her right leg pedalling with the tip of a reddish shoe just visible, deft, tiny flicks of movement. She turns her face away from the keyboard frequently, looking away from the keyboard through the choir to the high altar; and for a moment we see her upturned face, a blank face, possibly with little or no make up, no jewellery. A plain young woman, mid to late thirties perhaps, and not a face marked by children or a busy teaching life, but a face focused on knowing this music to a point at which there is almost a detachment, where it becomes independent of her control, flowing momentarily beyond herself.
 
Then she reins the toccata in, reoccupies it; she is seeking closure for herself and for her audience whose attention for a short while has been, as the Quakers say, gathered. Gathered into a degree of silence, when breathing and the body’s sense and presence of itself disappear, momentarily, and musical listening moves from a clock time to a virtual time. There is a slowing down, an opening out, even though in reality’s metronomic time-field there is none.
 
There is a hesitation. With more Bach to follow, should we applaud? With relief after holding the flight of time’s arrow in our consciousness, just for those concluding minutes and seconds we acknowledge and applaud - the beginning of the concert.

Bach takes a theme.
And Bach takes another theme.
Below, the first theme Bach takes.
Above, together, the themes all make,
A joyous celebration of the theme.
And finally the many voices cadence.
But then. The theme, but in
Another key. Again, the theme
But awkwardly, diminished and
Augmented. The fugal dance,
Around it wraps, until,
A flourishing.
A cadence.
Because when Bach takes a theme.
Bach takes a theme.
And plays it.

Elena receives a secret message from God
"Keep quiet and listen to Bach, kid"it said
She was so cross with God at first,naturally,
"The old man is cold, I won't listen to his
new commandment" she averred
as she wanted to annoy Almighty as much
as, a retaliatory measure.She felt good,
pleased, she fell silent for a long, long while.

Quickly she realized she obeyed His word
and by that time her ranting and raving
had fully come to an end.
                                             "Oh! my God!"
in astonishment she thanked God,
for making her feel better though she was
thoughtless and horribly blasphemous.

"What a crafty old geezer God is"she grinned.
yes,her defiance was intentional,but it was
as God willed,how intelligent His designs are!
"Oh! Bach! she remembered his words
she ran to fetch a record.Hey presto! it's there
right at the top of the heap, as God willed, of course,

while 'Christmas Oratorio' of Bach sweeps her off her feet,
Elena feels elated, as if the hands of devine, embrace her tight.

Today has been a difficult day he thought, as there on his desk, finally, lay some evidence of his struggle with the music he was writing. Since early this morning he’d been backtracking, remembering the steps that had enabled him to write the entirely successful first movement. He was going over the traces, examining the clues that were there (somewhere) in his sketches and diary jottings. They always seem so disorganised these marks and words and graphics, but eventually a little clarity was revealed and he could hear and see the music for what it was. But what was it to become? He had a firm idea, but he didn’t know how to go about getting it onto the page. The second slow movement seemed as elusive today as ever it had been.

There was something intrinsically difficult about slow music, particularly slow music for strings. The instruments’ ability to sustain and make pitches and chords flow seamlessly into one another magnified every inconsistency of his part-writing technique and harmonic justification. Faster music, music that constantly moved and changed, was just so much easier. The errors disappeared before the ear could catch them.

Writing music that was slow in tempo, whose harmonic rhythm was measured and took its time, required a level of sustained thought that only silence and intense concentration made properly possible. His studio was far from silent (outside the traffic spat and roared) and today his concentration seemed at a particularly low ebb. He was modelling this music on a Vivaldi Concerto, No.6 from L’Estro Armonico. That collective title meant Harmonic Inspiration, and inspiring this collection of 12 concerti for strings certainly was. Bach reworked six of these concertos in a variety of ways.

He could imagine the affect of this music from that magical city of the sea, Venice, La Serenissima, appearing as a warm but fresh wind of harmony and invention across those early, usually handwritten scores. Bach’s predecessors, Schutz and Schein had travelled to Venice and studied under the Gabrielis and later the maestro himself, Claudio Monteverdi. But for Bach the limitations of his situation, without such patronage enjoyed by earlier generations, made such journeying impossible. At twenty he did travel on foot from Arnstadt to Lubeck, some 250 miles, to experience the ***** improvisations of Dietriche Buxtehude, and stayed some three months to copy Buxtehude’s scores, managing to avoid the temptation of his daughter who, it was said, ‘went with the post’ on the Kapelmeister’s retirement. Handel’s visit to Buxtehude lasted twenty-four hours. To go to Italy? No. For Bach it was not to be.

But for this present day composer he had been to Italy, and his piece was to be his memory of Venice in the dark, sea-damp days of November when the acqua alta pursued its inhabitants (and all those tourists) about the city calles. No matter if the weather had been bad, it had been an arresting experience, and he enjoyed recovering the differing qualities of it in unguarded moments, usually when walking, because in Venice one walked, because that was how the city revealed itself despite the advice of John Ruskin and later Jan Morris who reckoned you had to have your own boat to properly experience this almost floating city.

As he chipped away at this unforgiving rock of a second movement he suddenly recalled that today was the first day of Epiphany, and in Venice the peculiar festival of La Befana. A strange tale this, where according to the legend, the night before the Wise Men arrived at the manger they stopped at the shack of an old woman to ask directions. They invited her to come along but she replied that she was too busy. Then a shepherd asked her to join him but again she refused. Later that night, she saw a great light in the sky and decided to join the Wise Men and the shepherd bearing gifts that had belonged to her child who had died. She got lost and never found the manger. Now La Befana flies around on her broomstick each year on the 11th night, bringing gifts to children in hopes that she might find the Baby Jesus. Children hang their stockings on the evening of January 5 awaiting the visit of La Befana. Hmm, he thought, and today the gondoliers take part in a race dressed as old women, and with a broomstick stuck vertically as a mast from each boat. Ah, L’Epiphania.

Here in this English Cathedral city where our composer lived Epiphany was celebrated only by the presence of a crib of contemporary sculptured forms that for many years had never ceased to beguile him, had made him stop and wonder. And this morning on his way out from Morning Office he had stopped and knelt by the figures he had so often meditated upon, and noticed three gifts, a golden box, a glass dish of incense and a tiny carved cabinet of myrrh,  laid in front of the Christ Child.

Yes, he would think of his second movement as ‘L’Epiphania’. It would be full of quiet  and slow wonder, but like the tale of La Befana a searching piece with no conclusion except a seque into the final fast and spirited conclusion to the piece. His second movement would be a night piece, an interlude that spoke of the mystery of the Incarnation, of God becoming Man. That seemed rather ambitious, but he felt it was a worthy ambition nevertheless.

A most pious man
whose well-tempered music
brushed the cobwebs
from the throne of God

Evolution was made manifest
across deep time
these lyrical figures
achieve the same purpose
in the space between the morning star
and the dawn

A fallow field
is sewn with pearls
a moonlit beach
illuminated by shadow
every scrape of the fiddler's bow
merges mind with the present
harvests the meaning
in the moment

The composer
that good man
was
for a time
church organist at St. John's
its notable steeple leaning
all askew
as a rebuke against God
or perhaps the drunken architect

A finger of candlelight
plays across the manuscript
a fugue echoes
through the still church

And though no living person
on that still winter's night
shares the organist's solemn delight
the stirring mass of possibility
that is posterity
awaits

big bang? i just call it the: reassertion of φνς; big bang? the bing bang? scientists are creative and artists are prone to rigour? what an "unexpectedly" unoriginal definition to draft the genesis... bangs in vacuum?! that tree falling in the forest trick that only women seem to answer? i'm literally having a limp-**** moment with someone telling me: it began with a big bang! wow (łał)! amazing! you predicted a sound, excavating it from a vacuum, where, apparently, you can't hear one!

most of the time it's like dry laugh, perpetuated by a: ha ha... but then someone becomes drunk and gives the scales to further the impromptu, managing a: ha ha ha ha... ah ha ha ha ha... equivalent to: chasing a fly out of a room... catch the ****** by their *****! catch the ****** by the *****! unlike chasing a mouse... which is fun... more fun than a stampede in mecca for sure... you get to build a labyrinth... you get to catch the little ******... dangle him by its tail for a selfie... then you walk into the corridor of the apartment building you're living in... and what does the mouse do? so traumatißed by the lack of mouse-traps... what does he do? commits himself to suicide... jumps off the stairs into the abyss of paved concrete, and i'm like: i built this theme-park for you, and the best thing you can do is jump to your immediate death? is there another universe handy? i'm not quiet ready to deal with this one seriously.

that's for the intro, but try to incorporate the concept
of *polyphony in writing,
they'll think you're mad... rightly so, most people
love the concept of the paragraph,
just like they love donning eyeglasses -
and they love the linear concept, that "reveals"
a story...
                    they love that ****, give them rotten
cabbage and tomatoes and send them to
the shakespeare globe... to get a proper critique
if the theatre performance turns sour...
         grows fungii and what not.

oh i had a suitcase of verbiage with me...
      but the writing bit is really working on me
to necessitate a fathomable break from... "composition".

etymological pointers nonetheless:
    slav               and e?
   not really, not when you speak the language...
am i ethno-centric? i probably am,
you sort of have to be... comes with the package...
or the: shindig?
                               oh look... i know slang.
anyway...
                            around here i'm the only one laughing,
it's not an idiotic laugh that stresses: nothing or
nowhere...
                   it's the times supplement article:
the new narcissism (harriet walker reports)...
and i can't stop laughing...
   because it includes: taking selfies by the mona lisa
and by the gates of auschwitz...
                and then the n.p.d. complex (narcissistic
personality disoder)...
            and i can't stop laughing...
and i'm thinking: what's wrong with these people?
oh, right... the per se... (giggle)...
                           they're like su dokus you
abandon because you can't relax when solving them...
stray dogs and ****...
                      you whaa'?                  dunno.
i'm actually afraid of people that advertise missing
cats... how horrible do you have to be to
make a cat                       stray?
                             the ****'s wrong with you?
cats are counter-intuitively clingy... there's no leash
on them, and there's no walkies... but how abusive
or just dumb-boring (do you have to be)
                     to make a cat become stray / missing?

... (pending, ding-along-ah-****)...

"artists" made the mistake like philosophers...
                     they think poetry ought to be visual...
they already have the polyphony spectrum there,
the ******* rainbow... and then they think poetry
is all about imitating geometry: cohesion, rigidness...
bunch of ***** in all honesty...
                   Bach invented polyphony, we're going to
talk about it like we might talk about digression...
layering... it's also a geological term for: oh... looky looky
at this piece of sediment!
                     i don't think poets should mingle with
painters, to be honest: i wish they were an
apartheid apart...
                     poetry isn't a visual art-form... based on
the concept of the φνς (that's hebrew for:
hiding your vowels, like the romans imitated
adding stresses to letters)                           ooh! fancy!
is writing 50 years behind painting? (w. burroughs quote)...
don't know... is writing a century behind
                                     musical composition?
that's more likely than writing competing with
painters... why did poets cling to painters in the first place?
φoνoς... you're not painting a picture...
                   oh ******* o'hara, and you tenure
as regent of an art gallery: get hit and die by a beachball.

variants:
in the west the etymology of slav = +e
      well... unless you speak the tongue you can say:
                 zdrowie na budowie - buda! psie / pśιe!
there really is an etymological variant to the anglophone
understanding of stating the noun, indicative...
                but i need to bring the greek iota into the picture...
i.e. it's naked, it has no diacritical marks attached to it...
i.e. ι                      so... now...
lesson no. 1:          slav, in mother tongue   słowianiń -
iota variant?                            słowiańιn   (lazily, just słowianin)
   etymologically speaking, i.e. derived from what?
word... the slavs call it:          słowo.
   literally.
                      germanic peoples of north america can
be so obnoxious that it really does suit them...
    but who the **** would want to marry their women?
probably muslims... and breed a bunch of inbreds,
household peasant people,
                        orangutan down syndrome people;
gonna **** your granny pete?

oh right...

    lesson no. 2:
   i can't stop laughing at this grammatical transgression...
you really have to transcribe the transgender concept...
      ...
           as might have been expected: laughter can really
exhaust you... what i didn't know was:
           to the point where you are lullabied to sleep -
fully dressed - to only find yourself getting up in
the morning: pouring yourself the remains of the ***,
sticking your head out the window and seeing
spring in full swing: two sparrows getting it on...
                                       but gender neutral pronouns?
what, like it?
                                oh hey, here comes cousin it -
huh? i swear the point of pronouns, or at least
the categorical basis for a word to be a pronoun is
to stress a gender of the speaker -
                                        the argument for gender
neutral pronouns: let me put it in analogue form -
you see on the news, daesh destroying ancient
roman temples in syria...
                            world heritage sites protected
by international law... what this transgender movement
is doing to the english language? looks pretty
similar to me (in non relative terms) -
                     but it's sure as **** in being some form
of desecration... it can't be anything else...
the problem would be staggering if appropriated in
poland... where gender feeds into verbs...
                                   if this movement is an isolated
indicdent, that is,isolated in that it's an anglophone
phenomenon (thailand? well... they got into the groove
and didn't perform a real ****** on their sprechen) -
just an example of how gender is incorporated in
the western slavic language...

i.e.
         podniósł (masculine - [he] picked it up...
    the thing being picked up is not specified)

   podniosła    (feminine - [she picked it up...
      ""      "      "           "       "    "    "          ")

could have just written ditto, anyway:
                   but also notice the beautiful orthographic
transition - it's almost a ******* representation
with the acute o (ó = u, well: orthography is not
exactly grammar, but like grammar: it's an aesthetic) -
      pod-nio(h)-sla(h)            - i'm lazy, american
linguistic studies use this form of notation -
                    evidently i'm expecting some puritan who
actually studies phonetic encoding to come up to
me and tell me: no no... it's like so:
                the point is, a transgender movement could
never pick up in the western slavic language:
     well, because a gender specified pronoun
permeates to other words that aren't in the pronoun
category... i.e. as the above - verb category -
                        obviously the above two example are
what they are in terms of gender, but they're
also a past participle attached to them... past tense -
but we are talking about pronouns, aren't we?
   so that has to be incorporated into the example -
evidently a *****-nilly pure verb of the above two is
gender neutral, but it has nothing to do with pronouns.
- like i already said once before:
                compared with german? english is shrapnel.

I can remember starving in a
small room in a strange city
shades pulled down, listening to
classical music
I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife
inside
because there was no alternative except to hide as long
as possible--
not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance:
trying to connect.

the old composers -- Mozart, Bach, Beethoven,
Brahms were the only ones who spoke to me and
they were dead.

finally, starved and beaten, I had to go into
the streets to be interviewed for low-paying and
monotonous
jobs
by strange men behind desks
men without eyes men without faces
who would take away my hours
break them
**** on them.

now I work for the editors the readers the
critics

but still hang around and drink with
Mozart, Bach, Brahms and the
Bee
some buddies
some men
sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in.