I wanted to repeat my climbs in the Himalaya with a piano for a book I was writing. (Some of the photos from those climbs can be found in my eBooks.) But politics change, and it seemed safer to do it in America. Most high mountains are in wilderness areas where you can’t fly a helicopter, but the Chugach are in a National Forest, right next to where they film the Valdez extreme ski movies. We scouted eight locations, and picked the one which remained calm enough to fly out of eight hours later.

The Steinway technician in Anchorage had a client who was moving a piano to California, so it was already crated. We flew it up to nearly 13,000 feet with one copter while filming it with another. As avalanches poured down on both sides of our pinnacle, we set up, filmed, and re-crated the piano over eight hours. Mickey Houlihan came dangerously close to the lip of the cornice, and his son Sean hung below the helicopter filming, because Mickey told him not to. The tuner finally admitted that we were all crazy. The Alaska papers carried the story, and NBC called, but we wanted to be more serious than the news would be.

Taylor Fraser later edited the Houlihan footage into an exciting film with the inspired choice of the Egmont Overture. I recorded the voice-over “on the fly” as I watched the films the second time at Mickey’s studio in Boulder, trying to match what I was saying to what I was seeing.

Yetronome

Here the Yeti intrudes discovers a piano on a mountaintop and throws its metronome in the snow.

Sometimes before dawn, everything is clear as snow. The light thickens. The sky is filled with diamonds. The universe hums with wind and sun. The solar wind is magnetism, gravity, neither of which we understand. The world is driven in the end by all the things we don’t understand. Like the yeti, words reduce monsters or miracles to names. Words hide the real dark. Words mask space like fog, which holds the sky together. Existence is a walk, a direction. Every note predicts every other note. One sun is all you need to predict a world of suns or a path. A footprint predicts a plot. A metronome shaped rock is exposed in the snow. A fingerprint is all you need for a future. Like a Beethoven sonata, a new world is built from the first few flakes of snow. In its beginning is its end.

The piano is unaware of the attack of the eddy. You can see a metronome at the bottom. A metronome is the symbol of time, time which structures our lives as children at the piano, as virtuosity in the concert hall. Piano legs are upside down obelisks, from which the ground of the piano is projected into space. An obelisk is frozen time, a ray of sun descending from the clouds, a sun pillar inscribed with hieroglyphs, which are a manual for the music of the spheres.

“And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.”

That’s T.S. Eliot’s (The) Four Quartets

The yeti sees itself in the music stand. Pianos hold a mirror up to ourselves. We see ourselves reflected in music. The whole of the world hides in its parts. Piano is a secret, not easy to open.

Pianos descend from the coffin family. Half of music is the silence that surrounds it. Like an obelisk, the stick and the lid rise to the sky. A metronome is also an obelisk, the symbol of all learning of ancient Egypt, of George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, or Sax Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch-Queen.

It’s tempting to worship the confines of time, the bars of our cage. How do you release the atoms of time? Open the door simultaneously to the past and the future.

As Auden says in his poem, As I Walked Out One Evening…

“But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.”

Obelisks are handbooks of the heavens. The obelisk reminds us we’re fallen from the stars. Music is the manual, the fingerprint behind which is the hand of heaven. Time is a path, but time is also a prison. Time in the end is just an excuse for killing time. Time is a blurry description of what happens. Like any cheap plot guide, time substitutes ticking for truth, cliches for revelations, captions for lives. Reality isn’t about time. Reality is timeless.

Zarathustra

As it was in 2001: A Space Odyssey, here is the beginning of the world told in music by Strauss (which is played by the Yeti.)

In this very short piece, Richard Strauss wants in one minute to create the entire world, the evolution of man. Out of the rumble in the base, the primordial sin comes man, theocratic man, worshiping gods. Moving towards the heavens, the tragedy strikes a minor key. So man tries again, and now, more powerfully, man becomes democratic man, worshiping himself. But really, that isn’t enough.

What Strauss and what Nietzsche, who wrote the book on which Also sprach Zarathustra by Strauss is based, what Nietzsche wanted was the transcendence through art of the human condition.

And by writing this piece, by writing Nietzsche’s book, he brings man beyond the tragedy of the human condition, beyond World War I, beyond all of the problems of our time, into the music that Strauss has written and the book Nietzsche has also written.

Finally, the C chord survives.

Man has been created.

Man has evolved.

Parnassus

A small Yeti morphs from an awkward young beginner into a more polished artist in one short piece that Debussy wrote to show his daughter that practice makes perfect.

In 1908, when Debussy’s daughter was 3, he decided to imagine her at the piano playing her scales, this is a scale like passage. And he thought he imagined her growing out of the rote and repetition of an obvious and simplistic footpath to being a pianist into the immense monastery of technique which you have to have to unravel miracles.

This is the second stage of his daughter, Chouchou’s evolution. Suddenly, it’s a complex scheme which imitates the synapses of the brain, the veins of the body, the magnetic quarrels of the solar wind, the endless scaffolding on which the matriculations of the Gorgon gas of technique rests.

Chouchou dreams in this section of the melody. It’s very impressionistic the way Monet and Manet painted, Debussy composed.

And suddenly the third stage of the piece is reached with this now, G, C, E, G.

Chouchou is transformed into the skies of technical precision, speed, of intermelodies and through music transcends her 3-year-old self to become the daughter that Debussy hoped she would be.

The entire chord of C is revealed here and goes then backward, down the chord of C to the bottom of the piano where the very last note is the proof that Chouchou is the pianist.

Q.E.D

Quod Erat Demonstrandum, it is proven.

Schumann’s Clara

The great composer Schumann loved the young Clara Wieck, and put the simple theme she wrote into all his music (see the podcast, “Robert Schumann’s Clara Theme”.)

This romance by Robert Schumann, written in 1839, is two things. It’s an elegy to Vienna, to life, to love. It’s a sad farewell to all the things we care about. It’s a slow walk around the bandstand, the way children dance in the fading summer light in Austria and everywhere. It’s also a love song to Clara, whom he’d loved since the day he saw her.

He moved into her father’s house 5 years earlier to be near her. But when her father found out what was going on, he forced Schumann out, and he sued him to keep him from marrying Clara until she turned 21 when he couldn’t prevent them from being together. They were together their entire lives.

Schumann, unfortunately, went mad. And Clara became the greatest woman pianist of her age, popularizing both the music of Schumann and the music of Johannes Brahms. Schumann was both a writer and a composer. And so he put into each of his pieces this theme, the Clara theme. Four notes, sometimes more descending down the keyboard. Here it is again. They weren’t in all of his pieces, but he had different themes for different friends. And his pieces were filled with, musical, clues, with motifs.

Brahms also fell in love with Clara when he met her. And of course, things became very complicated. But at this time, 5 years after they met, it was the Liederkreis. It was Schuman’s year of song, when he wrote 168 songs out of the joy of finally being able to be with Clara for the rest of his life. But in some ways, artists intuit the future. They have a kind of ESP. And there’s also a very sad farewell to the world as if he knew he would go mad that their love wouldn’t last forever because he would die so young. As if he knew the loss of civilization, thus Vienna would suffer, the loss of humanity, that the world would suffer. So in a way, here is the last Clara theme. So in a way, it is just a farewell to all his greatness, to everything he’s loved.

And so we hear this very slow waltz spinning slowly in the dust muds of the amber sun of the Viennese evening. Fading away.

Brahms's Clara

The great composer Brahms also loved Clara, and raised her children while she concertized. Unfortunately, he left her. To make up, at the end of their lives he put the theme she wrote into this beautiful Scottish ballade.

This is a love song to Clara Schumann, but not by her husband Robert Schumann, by Johannes Brahms. You can hear the Clara theme. Four notes descending, and in fact, there are, in the beginning, an entire 8 notes that descend the entire octave. It’s also a Scottish sheepherder song, which Brahms transfigures into this extraordinarily seraphic moment. And there is the Clara theme again in the left hand. So Brahms has both his Clara theme disguised as the Scottish song, which also crops up in the music, that Frederick Lowe wrote for the Lerner and Lowe musical Brigadoon.

Brahms had met Clara when she was 20 and on the spot, as Schumann had, conceived an immense passion for her. But when Schumann died in 1856, Brahms who’ve been talking during Schumann’s madness of running away with Clara and loving her and helping her and supporting her when they were free, Brahms instead deserted her.

Brahms spent his youth playing background music in Hamburg brothels. And in some ways felt that he couldn’t make love to women whom he loved. That sex was reserved for prostitutes. So Brahms had a problem, and he ran away. He was under too much pressure, whereas Clara Schumann was devastated. And in turning to concertizing to ease the pain and to support herself, she became the greatest pianist of her day, publicizing both the music of her dead husband, Robert Schumann, and of the unfaithful Johannes Brahms.

Here, Brahms deconstructs his melody in a more modernist way, but there’s the Clara theme always breaking through. Try as you will to forget her in the piece. Clara is only a few notes away. And now you hear the Clara theme descending 4 notes down the keyboard, the 3 notes and then 3 notes. Once again, the piece repeats with these gorgeous melodies based on the structure of the Scottish folksong, but always returning to the Clara theme.

We started sending Clara these intermezzi, which were all based on this Clara theme, which you hear now. In 1879; This is the one of the most famous of the intermezzi, the E-flat intermezzi, written 53 years after Schumann wrote his Clara romance. Here is the Clara theme, and now it breaks into this transcendent melody up in the skies. And then it goes upwards. First, it starts descending as you say, and then it ascends. So, it’s an inverted Clara theme, as Schumann also did in his romance.

So this was an apology. All of the intermezzis, the intermezzi were apologies to Clara for having abandoned her. And really, you have to say, it’s inadequate, although it’s genius. It’s inadequate compensations for his behavior as human being. And it probably didn’t compensate Brahms or Clara, but at the same time, may have preserved all of that unrequited, unfulfillable love and pain forever. Listen to the beauty of bad behavior. And here is the last gasp of the Clara theme in a very Irish or Scottish end to the folksong. Here is the Clara theme going down one last time. Immense beauty intermingle with immense personal anguish.

Moonlight

Beethoven wrote the Moonlight Sonata upside down, with the melody in the low notes and the accompaniment in the high notes. The Yeti plays the first movement at a life-or-death speed.

There are different ways of talking to angels and finding the ground that roots us in understanding how we can transcend the human condition. One way, to listen to Beethoven, is to understand how he wrote the Moonlight Sonata. If you can understand why this very well-known piece stems from the first couple of measures of the piece and why the entire Sonata, in the second and third movements, just simply vary those first measures. You can then understand how Beethoven thought, how he derived from the simplest of melodies the most transcendent of compositions. How can you take nothing and make it into something? This is what Beethoven does with the glory of the Moonlight Sonata. Of course, he didn’t call it the Moonlight Sonata, simply for him it was the Sonata quasi una fantasia. Almost half a fantasia, a fantasy.

Beneath the accompaniment is actually the melody. Those descending notes which you hear
are actually the melody. Although they’re in the left hand of this piece, they become in the right hand of the second movement and again in the third movement they stay in the left hand. So ironically, he’s reversed it and put the accompaniment into the top hand and the melody into the left hand.

The great German musicologist Heinrich Schenker had a way of breaking down pieces into their fundamental structure, stripping them of their rhythm and their superficial ornamentation, their foreground in other words, in order to get to the truth of the music, to the background. Schenker believed that meaning lay in structure rather than the superficial impositions on the music by the Romantic imaginations of performers. So rather than Moonlight here, it’s really the left hand that Schenker exposed, and this became the guide for an entire new generation of German musician, resulting in a more minimalist and technically clean approach to classical music.

In some ways, you could say that in Beethoven, his end is in his beginning. And of course, the end, the ultimate end of his music, is maybe the beginning of it.

T.S. Eliot said in the four quartets, in East Coker, No. 2 of the four quartets, in my beginning is my end. In succession houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, are removed, destroyed, restored. Or in their place is an open field, or a factory, or a bypass. Old stone to new building, old timber
to new fires. This is true in Shakespeare also. All of his plays are contained in small in their first
Scenes. And so, T.S. Eliot wrote, in my beginning is my end. He ends the poem with, in my end is
my beginning.

Credits:

Camera Operators: Mickey Houlihan, Dae Houlihan
Location Sound: Mickey Houlihan
Video Editor: Taylor Fraser
Audio Mastering: Gus Skinas
Transportation: Alpine Air Alaska
Location Manager: Deb Essex, Keith Essex
Piano Tuner: Dan Elrath, AlaskaPiano.net
Package Design: Susan Wasinger
Producers: Peter and Cathy Halstead
Pianist: the Yeti
Location: Middle Marcus Baker Mountain, Chugach Range, Alaska
April 18th, 2011
Elevation: 12,850
Music: Beethoven, coda to the Overture to Egmont, Op. 84 (1810)