Breaking Bad with the Goldberg Variations

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airplane, airport lounge, Albuquerque, bassline, Beethoven, Breaking Bad, Christmas, emotions, epithet, George Clooney, Goldberg Variations, Goldbergs Anonymous, hand-crossing, harpsichord, Honoré de Balzac, Jeremy Denk, manual, pho, piano, Seattle, Tchaikovsky, The Guardian, Toby Saks, Trio in A minor, Walter White

Jeremy Denk

I stopped watching Breaking Bad early in season three for a strange reason: I felt it was bad for my soul. Frankly, I had never been that concerned about my soul before, but when charred plane fragments began to rain down on Albuquerque (fans know what I’m talking about), I felt a dull ache, an unusual suffering, and I decided enough was enough. If you like, Breaking Bad is the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) of misery. How many terrible consequences can Walter White reap from his first bad decision? At least as far as I watched, the show’s approach was exhaustive: a survey of emotional, physical, and spiritual harm. The Goldbergs are also exhaustive, and contingent on Bach’s first fateful decision, on the bassline he has chosen, the parameters he has set forth.

In fact, the Goldberg Variations have caused me more misery than any other piece of music in history, with the exception of the Tchaikovsky Trio in A minor (for totally different reasons). How many hours have I spent backstage fretting, knowing that there will be several insufferable know-it-alls in the audience, with their seven hundred recordings and deeply considered opinions? How many hours have I spent practicing those passages where the two hands climb over each other, then turn around (as if revisiting the site of an accident) and head for each other again?

The Goldbergs, originally for a two-keyboard instrument, become uniquely treacherous when played on just one. There are many impossible crossings, many unplayable moments. You have to decide which hand goes over the other, and practice how to make the switch smoothly; but there is always the possibility you will be on stage, communing with the spheres, and your fingers and wrists will literally tangle – like two dancers who stumble over each other – scattering wrong notes into paradise. You must always also be reminded that the instrument you are playing them on is the “wrong” one, especially by critics.

On top of their difficulty, the Goldbergs are terrifyingly clean. The work clings mostly to the purity of G Major, and its materials are so self-evident: the variation with the scales chasing each other in thirds (horrible memories of practicing scales as a child); the variation with the arpeggios (ditto); the variation with the scurrying passages in one hand and the leaps in the other. It almost like a lesson plan, with modular units, and everyone knows them – they are as well-traveled as a seasoned flier in an airport lounge.

I never wanted anything to do with the Goldbergs, but one day – I don’t know how – my friend Toby Saks convinced me to learn them for her festival in Seattle. She thought it would change my life. With one hasty yes I was committed – you cannot do a program substitution with the Goldbergs; it would be like trying to replace George Clooney. As usual, I procrastinated, and a panicky, cold December and January ensued, a Christmas holiday spent with a piano, wondering why it couldn’t have just been fifteen variations, say, or eighteen, instead of thirty? I broke them into bundles of five, to cope with the project’s enormity.

The day before my first performance, I remember sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant, hunched over a giant bowl of pho (outside fell classic Seattle drizzle), while my musician friends murmured consoling epithets at me – “I’m sure it will be fine” – treating me like a patient who was about to undergo an operation.

The first performance was a bit like a dream, much of it bad, but a few variations had something, I felt. My first taste of Goldberg addiction. Was I encouraged or war-scarred? A second period of obsession began, going over those stubborn variations in order to understand the independence (or lack thereof) of my hands, trying to find the most transparent and loving way to express them. And now, nine years later, with a recording under my belt, I probably belong in Goldbergs Anonymous.

The Goldbergs, insular and obsessed, have all the failings of classical music in general. The piece is a text reflecting on itself, satisfied in its own world, suggesting that everything you would ever want to know is contained within. The variations (by definition music about music) are subject to countless insider discussions in the outer world, to comparisons of recordings like heavyweight bouts, to that annoying word “definitive.” Despite this, Bach’s smile wins through. The piece is a lesson in many things, but primarily in wonder: the way that the tragic variations fuse seamlessly into the breathlessly comic, the way that simple scales become energy, joy, enthusiasm, the celebration of the most fundamental elements of music. This is the kind of beatific happiness that Beethoven eventually tried to attain, after the heroic happiness of the middle period. The last movements of Beethoven’s op. 109 and op. 111 invoke the Goldbergs, and represent a joy beyond achievement.

The copout of Breaking Bad, shared by many great novels and works of art (I’m thinking of you, Balzac!), is to leave us mired in a sea of human degradation. It is often easier to write sadness. And happiness easily becomes a shortcut, or a falsehood; “happy ending” is often a derogatory term. Of course, the ending of the Goldbergs is cut with melancholy (unlike Walter’s pure blue stuff). When the theme returns at the end, you realize this is the last time you will hear that turn into bittersweet E minor (melancholy about melancholy), and also the last time you will experience the chain of fifths with which Bach escapes from it. I’ll admit it always chokes me up, not because the piece is over, not because things are ending, but because of a sense of the completeness of everything that has come before, the rightness, and – if it doesn’t sound too cheesy to say – the radiance of experience. It gives you that rare thing in human existence: a sense that, at the end of something, it has all been worthwhile.

Jeremy Denk – The Guardian

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Economist Jayati Ghosh and Her Music

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Antonín Dvořák, Beethoven, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, composition, Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni, economics, Haydn, Iceberg Radio, International Monetary Fund, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jayati Ghosh, K. Santhosh, London, Mozart, piano, Portuguese, Rachmaninoff, Radio 3, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, The Hindu, The Marriage of Figaro, Trinity College London, violin, Washington

Jayati Ghosh

It may not be music to one’s ears when economist Jayati Ghosh speaks about the financial mess [India] is in, but it is when this professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning of Jawaharlal Nehru University raves about the economy of expression in the compositions of Bach or Beethoven.

When she is not teaching economics, lecturing, writing columns or attending meetings of the commissions of which she is a member, Ghosh is listening to music. She is tuned into BBC’s Radio 3 or Iceberg Radio, listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Or playing records of western classical music of different periods she has collected over the years.

Ghosh, who believes she has inherited her father’s passion for western classical music, is a pianist and has earned various grades of Trinity College, London. At one point, she even thought of being a professional pianist. Till four or five years ago, she practiced regularly, a habit she hopes to revive after her retirement from the university.

Even when she is not playing, Ghosh is in tune with music and has been writing and lecturing extensively on the discipline. “Music retains my sanity,” she says. Her lectures are on themes such as Mozart and love. “Listen to Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte or The Marriage of Figaro, and you will find that Mozart had a cynical view of love. The psychological complexity of the compositions, and the way he builds each musical layer, touches you. The precision is incredible,” she says.

In her younger days, Ghosh listened mostly to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, carried away by the color and the drama, but these days she gravitates towards the intellectual depth of Mozart, of Joseph Haydn and of composers such as Antonín Dvořák. “The connection to a composition is instantaneous, but to go into its depths takes years. Music is simple, yet deep, expansive and esoteric,” she says.

Jayati Ghosh started taking lessons in music at the age of seven in Washington, D. C. when her father, economist Arun Kumar Ghosh, was representing India as the Alternate Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund. A well-known Portuguese violinist was giving advanced lessons in violin across the street from where the Ghoshs lived. “My father, doting as he was, told the master I was an advanced player, whereas I could barely hold the violin. The master’s eyes dilated with horror when he first saw me, but he kept his promise to teach me. I don’t know who feared the classes more: he or I,” she recalls.

One day the master was in an especially bad mood. A close disciple of his, an ace instrumentalist, had just passed away. “On seeing me, he went into a huff, perhaps because I reminded him that he was losing his talented students and was going to have to put up with lesser musicians like me. As soon as I made an error, he snatched the violin from my hands and smashed it over my head. I ran home, crying, and began to complain bitterly to my father,” she recalls.

Ghosh says that she expected her father to sprint across the street and give the Portuguese a piece of his mind, but he did not. Instead, he was unperturbed, and with a smile he said, “Alright, now I will get you an instrument with which you cannot be attacked.”

The next day, Jayati’s father enrolled her in a piano class.

K. Santhosh – The Hindu

An Alternative: Spider Silk Strings

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acoustics, Cornell University, electron microscope, gut string, harmonic series, Jun-ichi Matsuda, Katherine Selby, Nara Medical University, Nephila maculata, nylon string, Shigeyoshi Osaki, spider, spider silk, steel string, Stephen Battersby, Stradivarius, string tone, Tchaikovsky, timbre, violin

Shigeyoshi Osaki at Nara Medical University in Japan has studied the properties of spider silk for thirty-five years. In the past decade he has focused on trying to turn the silk into violin strings, even taking lessons on what was required of a string in terms of strength and elasticity.

Osaki learned how to coax Nephila maculata spiders to spin out long strands of dragline, the strongest form of silk. He bundled filaments together and twisted them, then twisted three of these bundles together to make each string. The thickest of these, the G string, holds 15,000 filaments.

The strings turned out to be tightly packed and strong. The key seems to be that the individual filaments changed shape when twisted: an electron microscope revealed that their circular cross sections turned into polygons, which nestle together more tightly than cylindrical strings.

This came as a surprise. “To my knowledge, no one has observed such a change of cross section. I doubted my experimental results,” says Osaki. The spider silk must be deformed by the twisting process.

“The material is a bit squishy, like twisting plasticine,” says physicist and violinist Katherine Selby at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Osaki tested the new strings by comparing their performance with three established materials: steel, nylon and gut. He says that the spider silk has a unique and “brilliant” timbre, or quality of tone. You can judge for yourself in this snippet of Tchaikovsky, played by Jun-ichi Matsuda on a Stradivarius violin using all four types of string.

The timbre seems to result from a difference in how harmonics – frequency multiples of the main note – reverberate in the spider silk strings compared with other materials. Spider string has strong high harmonics, while steel and nylon tend to be stronger in low harmonics. Osaki does not yet know what mechanical properties lead to this acoustic performance.

Selby is impressed. “What people crave about natural gut strings is a certain complexity,” she says. “Spider strings also have this brilliant sound – even more than gut.”

“It is impressive when you remember these are prototype strings, just out of a material science lab, being compared with commercial strings perfected for years,” she adds.

Selby points out that the high strength of spider silk may give it another advantage: “You could have a thinner string for playing the same pitch, which would be a bit more bendy and responsive – it would hit a note quicker.” The material could be especially suitable for thin E strings, which are very fragile when made from gut.

“Is it something all violinists will like? That’s an open question. It will have some surface texture, like a rope. Some people may find that off-putting as they slide a hand up and down the neck. I think these will be gourmet strings,” Selby adds.

The price will be too steep for most fiddlers in any case, but Osaki is now trying to find a way to produce the strings in larger numbers.

Stephen Battersby – New Scientist