Poetry, by Holden Mui

A performer's retrospective

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Why play music written by living friends rather than dead strangers?

Well, you can cuss them out to their faces. Honestly, Holden deserved it all. His five-movement piano suite Poetry was twenty-three minutes of his various idiosyncrasies, which often bordered on insanity. I was its first (and so far only!) victim: triple-octave jumps at the tempo marking “≥176”; multiple lines notated in four staves (the standard being two); a five-minute postlude comprising a single pianissimo chord repeated 90 times. Insanity, then, that I loved Poetry as much as I did, that I loved Poetry more than I’ve loved any other piece of music—in part because playing Poetry was the first time I’ve felt real ownership of my art.

Young classical pianists begin with the basics—Bach, Beethoven, Chopin—and the adventurous among us experiment with the esoteric—Saariaho, Takemitsu, Gubaidulina. We first encounter pieces through famous recordings, or if we’re lucky, live concerts. We research historical context and conduct harmonic and structural analyses, all to answer the question how should I play this?, which often flattens into the drier, more academic how should this be played?, or its closest proxy, how do the best pianists play this?

Intellectually, I appreciated the rigor in crafting a “good” interpretation. But emotionally, I grappled with the point. Why spend months and months precision-drilling difficult passages, scouring YouTube to study recordings, driving myself half-mad over this note’s not crisp enough or that chord needs more pinky—all to play a piece worse than any professional would? None of it mattered.

So for many years I believed myself less a pianist and more a plagiarist, realizing amateurish amalgams of renditions I admired, borrowing and blending my idols’ best ideas with but an iota of their talent and technique. 

That’s why Poetry was special. Knowing no one else has done this before fueled me. I learned Poetry more meticulously and intimately than I’d ever learned anything else—music or not. I replaced warm-up scales with slow-motion jumps; scribbled in fingering “solutions” for that four-staff section; and most importantly, texted Holden whenever I wanted to complain. And I did it all without reference recordings, without cultural conceptions of this composer must be played in this way, with confidence that my choices were mine and not the product of conscious or subconscious imitation. What I did mattered.

Music conveys things we don’t or can’t say with just words. I so dearly wish I could staple these sounds, from the Prelude’s delirious dissonances to the Scherzo’s ecstatic climaxes, to my words. I’d tell you listen for how these melodic fragments appear in the bass or it’s crazy how Holden pulls off this transition. I’d gush about those whole-tone scales and thirteenth chords, about how the first movement is a microcosm of the last four in reverse. The right passages would fill your ears and you’d understand why I love Poetry so much—

—but I can’t. And even if I could, some things would still never make sense to you. 

Music emerges from how sound interacts with a listener’s lived experiences, surroundings, and emotional state. Anybody can say Poetry sounds good. Only I can say Poetry was the first piece in my sixteen years of learning piano that made me feel like a real musician. 

So: Last May, at midnight, playing the Postlude in a dimly-lit room, buried under the weight of each and every one of those ninety listless, unsettling, pianissimo chords, enduring that lonely, oppressive eternity—nobody, nobody else will ever know exactly how that feels. 

Most people wouldn’t want to hear those chords for five minutes. But that night I could have lost myself there for five hundred centuries. Most people would think that’s insane. 

I think that’s beautiful. 

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See an annotated version of this essay here.