("The Instrument at Tanglewood" - photograph by the author)"See, I have engraved you On the palms of My hands, your walls are ever before Me." (Isaiah 49:16) "Why (you ask) should anyone want to be here, when (simply by pressing a button) anyone can be in fifty places at once' How could anyone want to be now, when anyone can go whening all over creation at the twist of a knob'"It is remarkable that Edward Estlin Cummings (Harvard '15) spoke those words in 1952 - in the second of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, in Sanders Theatre - such a long time before the Internet came along and made his biting observations so much more true. In the immediately previous breath - in that same talk, during his notably ambivalent return to Cambridge - e. e. cummings accused, en masse, the mostly young Harvard audience eating from the palm of his poetic hand, "You haven't the least or feeblest conception of being here, and now, and alone, and yourself."I'd say he sold undergraduates, and particularly freshmen, somewhat short there - but I'd also not mistake the corresponding actuality for delight, in the experience of most, or underestimate its terror. Amid the vaunted quest for Self that is College (noting with some irony the tension between the first of those terms and the second's etymology) very few ever wish to be alone and peculiar. In the Torah this week, on the verge of entry into the Promised Land, our Israelite ancestors are instructed to be unlike the others they will find all around them. And, at the same time, with regard to having a distinctive story and destiny, they are admonished against thinking, "My strength and the might of my own arm have done all this for me." It is the Divine, says Moses to the people, who makes the path of the nation. We Jews have some considerable and millennia-long training in being unusual, as anyone who has ever experienced being the only Jewish family on a block, or the only Jewish person in a Harvard entryway or suite can attest in personal terms. It may be this predisposes us in some measure to originality. At the same time, as Jews, we have a considerable legacy and ethos of collectivity. "Do not separate yourself from the community" is a strong and frequent Talmudic principle - and one need only picture a mass of swaying prayer-shawls, or the concentric circles of a large hora dance to appreciate (for all the upsides of those phenomena) a pressure of conformity. Yesterday evening, out at Tanglewood, I listened rapt and marveling as pianist and musical thinker Jeremy Denk played some twenty-five pieces he had carefully chosen, flowing from Binchois (1400-1460), Ockeghem (1410-1497) and Desprez (1450-1521) to Schoenberg (1874-1951), Stockhausen (1928-2007), and Philip Glass (b. 1937). Denk played each of the two halves of the night's program - Machaut to Bach, and then, after an intermission, Mozart to Ligeti - without breaks for applause between the selections, so that the whole was like a series of variations, a grand opus, linked not by a common theme but by a persistent and propulsive question: "Having been there, what can happen next'" In the program notes, Denk analogized this aural sightseeing tour, so to speak, ('whening,' as Cummings might say, through centuries of Western music) to an exercise in time-lapse photography. But, somewhat contrarily, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the breathtaking experience for the listener was a remarkable absence of choppiness from frame to frame, or, put positively, a beautiful continuity - and that, of course, had to do with all of the pieces being every bit Denk, as much as they were so many different epochs and composers. Denk himself seemed to affirm the wholeness, and the his-ness of the whole, musically, by ending the sequence with a re-playing of the 14th century piece with which it began. (This is what we get, I suppose, like a 'gift with purchase,' from Denk's having spent a recent stretch of months in large part with Bach's Goldberg Variations, as those who know that work - of Aria, 30 pieces, and Aria again - will understand.) In the New Yorker a few years ago, Denk wrote about idolizing one of his virtuosic teachers, and of falling into imitation of that pianist's playing of Beethoven's "Eroica" Variations, and then being scathingly upbraided by that teacher, "You need to learn the difference between character and caricature." "The room went silent, absorbing this elegant, lacerating remark," writes Denk. "It got worse. Variation after variation, he demonstrated how I had converted high humor into low slapstick. In a manner that I now recognize as distinctively European, he seemed to blame me for my enthusiasm for his own ideas. People patted me on the back outside afterward, hugged me, as if I had been the victim of an assault. I was stunned."It was a key moment in Denk's becoming virtuosic in his own right.All of this is to say that it is possible to take part and to be part of a history and a tradition and a legacy and a somewhat prescribed potpourri - which is also to say, even in a college such as Harvard - while yet being and becoming one's own self. (It is even possible to do while ascribing the glory of it to the Divine.) But it's not easy. It is not something I can promise glibly or truly every one of you will do. And I think it requires - so I warn you - something of an artist's courage. If you are going to do it that way (your way, and discovering what that is) - even if you have, as I hope you will, the best of friends - you will sometimes be by yourself. "There's the artist's responsibility; and the most awful responsibility on earth," as Cummings said in his Norton 'nonlecture,' as he called it. "If you can take it, take it. If you can't, cheer up and go about other people's business; and do (or undo) till you drop."You can tell which I hope you will do; and my job is to be here for you - and to make sure there is a welcoming and inspiring Jewish community here for you - as you do it. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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