Writer’s Note: I’m not sure it makes sense to write on music without hearing it: it’s like raving on the compositional merits of a photograph without physically seeing the thing. Sometimes we don’t have a choice — due to copyright — but I think it’s paramount for when we do. So, enjoy this article with my rendition of Debussy’s Sarabande; listen to the linked audio snippets as you read, because to play music is to feel in a way words can’t quite communicate.
I’m sitting down at a public piano in East Quad.
An old piano professor of mine, when I was first learning this piece five years ago, once mentioned that “Sarabande” from Pour le Piano was actually Debussy’s favorite composition, more so than “Clair de lune” or “Rêverie.” I agree: I think it’s his most intimate piece, and whenever I am playing it I feel like I am having a conversation with the piano instead of a proper performance, with listeners almost unnecessary.
Performing quiet works like this are deceptively difficult, as the intense legato the piece seeks throughout requires the utmost finesse within each fingertip; a mistake made here rings out, bare, whereas similar errors in faster, busier compositions become disguised under its frenzy.
But wait, here comes one of my favorite parts. Pay mind to how the murmuring D# on the second beat approaching rises into a pleasant E. Listen.
Did you hear it? Did you feel, maybe, your shoulders drop a little, or a soft, quiet exhale? That right there is the soul of Western music. Let me elaborate further: come take a little detour.
Western classical music is a form of applied mathematics. It’s built on a framework that revolves around harmonic tension and release, expressed fundamentally as ratios between the frequencies of two notes — a musical interval. For example, a third (listen below) is defined as a ratio of 5:4, meaning that if the bottom note’s frequency is 440 Hz, the top note’s frequency will be approximately 550 Hz. This translates to an A to a C# on the piano, which happens to be three steps apart, hence the interval’s name.
More importantly, feel how that interval sounds: it’s at peace, whole, even, beautiful. Physically, it’s because the sound waves between those two notes constantly align — due to the simple ratio between them — which produces a pleasing effect neurologically.
Now listen to a diminished second. It sounds restless, furtive, like it doesn’t want to exist. Its ratio is 128:125 — the two sound waves in the interval are constantly slightly out of phase with each other, which the auditory cortex picks up on as this discordant sound.
Western music weaves these psychological responses into a coherent sense of tension and release, which is at the root of our emotive, visceral response to music. It traditionally does this through the dominant and tonic chord movement. Listen to it below and feel that tension simmer down, the rise and fall, and your shoulders release. Feel how the top note of the first chord wants so desperately to rise into a chord that’s more tonally serene.
And that is the engine behind classical music. Western harmony revolves around this tension and release, and all the different ways to achieve it. Listen for that movement and you can hear a variation of it everywhere: The first notes of Bach’s “Symphony No. 5,” every pop song ever, from Franz Schubert to Philip Glass to Phoebe Bridgers.
Regardless, back to the Debussy piece.
Debussy engages with tension differently than normal in this work. Instead of traditional harmonic structure, he opts for progression through how each chord sonority resonates, creating an effulgent, flowing texture. Listen for harmonic emphasis on the second beat and for the intrinsic feelings each chord evokes instead of cadential progression. Let the notes float through you.
Oh, and listen to me eat shit on this next arpeggiated chord.
I apologize. I’m out of practice.
I don’t know if I’m holding up my end of the bargain as the performer. When I started writing this article, I thought I’d simply relearn the piece and communicate how evocative playing the piano feels to me. I’d touch on how music theory functions and leave you, the reader, with a newfound appreciation for classical music. I’d let the music invoke the right emotions and everything would be fine. I wouldn’t have to talk about myself. I didn’t know how vulnerable this would feel. I thought this article would be easy to write.
I don’t remember when the pain started. I felt a dull ache in my wrists one day after a particularly long practice session, and from then it grew worse and worse, Icy Hot to physical therapists to steroid injections to unrelenting, unforgiving pain. Intersection syndrome, the physician told me. Inflammation in the wrists.
I used to want to be a piano player and attend music school, because — I don’t know — it just felt right to me in a way nothing else did: in a way nothing else does. To make it in the music performance world, one has to practice — relentlessly. Playing piano is honest like this. No matter how many god-given talents you have or how brilliant of a person you are, you still have to practice, for two to four hours a day, for the rest of your life. My old piano professor said that playing piano was a terribly lonely thing because of this fact — and because we spend so many hours a day in front of our instruments, ruminating over sheet music, we barely have any time for anyone else. She’s right, but I never did think playing piano was lonely, at least not in a bad sense.
But to practice for two to four hours a day meant shooting pains in my wrists, meant constantly throbbing hands, meant reaching a point where I physically couldn’t play anymore because it hurt so much, and this wasn’t going to work — because if I couldn’t practice, I couldn’t play.
So I stopped playing seriously. It’s my greatest regret, but I don’t know if I had a choice.
A piano performance is a practice in ephemerality. Yes, you can listen to the recording, but it lies to you; it is done in bad faith, because you are not there in East Quad with me and you can’t feel how the air resonates from the 230 piano strings in the dark. A piano performance doesn’t linger like a photograph. A true pianist is at peace with death, because to perform on the piano means accepting impermanence, that we will be forgotten, that those notes will fade away and the only person to truly remember them is you. The pianist doesn’t get to have the body of work to define their legacies in the way that almost every other artist does. They leave nothing except for their imprint in memory. To record a piece and say it is a performance in this way is wrong.
Certainly none of my recordings sound right, because I know when a microphone is turned on I will be able to hear every mistake I make with excruciating, horrifying detail. This is the paradox with musical performance, because a chord and a musical phrase demands perfection in a way our imperfect biomechanical limitations cannot support. Musicians are insane people because we spend all of our time chasing the perfectly voiced note while knowing full well that it is impossible to do. We are spending every waking moment trying to solve an unsolvable problem and we have the audacity to be happy while we are doing it.
There are times in my life where I cry so fiercely, where tears flow in all the wrong ways, that even as a person who might want to make writing their living and sentences their artform, words fail.
In those moments, nothing will cradle the broken pieces of your own self quite like a Debussy sonority. Nothing will let you soar like this, nothing will fill your body with electricity like this as to when that D# major chord hits and when the world inevitably feels right again in a way it does not anywhere else.
To be honest, I’ve always had a choice.
Injuries in the music performance world are more common than we might think: for every tennis elbow there’s a cello shoulder. Playing an instrument is a full-body experience. My own wrist pain, fundamentally, was from my playing posture. To fix it would’ve meant to relearn, entirely, how to play in a different way — and maybe a wrist surgery that most can’t justify paying for — but it’s certainly not undoable.
I just didn’t.
I did get into the music program of my local university. My former piano professor, who teaches there, wrote to me: “Hey, Darrin, excited to see your name on the incoming class list and excited to keep working with you!” and I never replied, committed to the University of Michigan, got in a car bound for Ann Arbor and didn’t look back.
I wanted to “make money” and have a “stable career” and “go to a prestigious university,” but mainly I was terrified, terrified that I couldn’t ever fix my posture and that I’d need surgery but most importantly that I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t have enough innate talent and I was going to fade out, to disappear from this world. Playing piano is a very vulnerable thing, and I just wasn’t … ready to be judged like that.
To fully see a piano piece through means to commit with your entire psyche, your entire being, to this music and to hold the vulnerability of your bare self out for the world. To do anything else and keep those mental barriers up is disingenuous: people can hear, even if they don’t realize it, when the notes, or brushstrokes, or words don’t come from a vulnerable place. Sometimes the chords do not reverberate in the way I want them to — certainly not through the iPhone’s microphone — or I constantly hit wrong notes, or the melody is voiced rather poorly. But I hope this is enough. I hope I am enough.
And there it is, that final chord, the ultimate resting point, root, of this whole composition. Every note has led up to here. It feels, resoundingly, at home.
For an inexplicable moment, the world becomes overwhelmingly ordered, and everything in your consciousness flows around those sonorities. For a moment, I am no longer terrified to be on this world, because all the meaning I’ve ever sought lies in how this piece of music moves — finally, I feel at home. For a moment, I feel like a child again, and everything will be okay, and we’re all in this together, and for a moment, words fail as that tonic chord fades into the background, and life slowly rushes back, but slightly more mystical, just slightly more beautiful.
And maybe when I die it will be like that, my coffin lowered into the ground, dominant to tonic, five to one.
Statement Columnist Darrin Zhou can be reached at darrinz@umich.edu.