SassyBlonde

As of today, I have exactly 31 days until D-day.

Every so often, I get the chance to do a seriously personally gratifying performance of one of those pieces every musician dreams about-- one of those works on my personal goal list that I feel would be a major accomplishment to get to perform in public. Well, exactly 31 days from today I'll get to check another one of those works off the list: John Adams's clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons.

This is one of those pieces that I've dreamed about playing for years, ever since I heard it in my third year of college:

Adams' most personal and cathartic work, Gnarly Buttons is a memorial tribute to his father, using the clarinet, his father's instrument, to trace and salute his father's pervasive influence upon his own life and career. It opens with the scales his father taught him to practice, and then alludes to Benny Goodman (whom his father revered), the marching bands and community orchestra in which they played together, and the emergence and development from such roots of Adams' own eclectic musical style. It ends with the confusion, pain and vulnerability of his father's final dementia (during which he became obsessed that someone was trying to steal his instruments) and a brief, peaceful elegy. A curious mélange when heard in the abstract, Gnarly Buttons becomes acutely poignant in context. --ClassicalNotes.net

See, deep down underneath all the cynicism and masochism, this is what I believe good music is about. It tells a story, not in explicit words and images, but in aural colors and visceral brushstrokes of sound that grab you by the soul and shake you to the core. The first time I heard this piece, I had no frame of reference or explanation, but I was enraptured through the first movement, laughed out loud during the second, and found my eyes full of tears by the end of the third for no reason I could explain. What was even more odd was that it had nothing to do with it being a clarinet piece-- it could have been any other instrument but my own and I would have felt the same. (For those of you who have never met me in person, it's also important to note that I don;t gravitate toward listening to classical music for fun, so the fact that this struck such a chord is extremely unusual.)

A year or so ago my conductor brought up the piece as a future concert idea, and I jumped at the chance. And read Johns Adams's program notes. He doesn't state it as explicitly as the above quote does, but I began to see where why the piece stayed so much in my heart and mind and made such an impression. It's a love poem to his father and the relationship they shared, warts, pain, and all, and like a handmade quilt, stitched into the structure is so much emotion that it can't help but move the people listening even in a small way.

31 days from today I get to bring this beautiful sound painting to life. I'm equal parts excited and terrified, because this piece means so much not only to me, but to the composer, and I want to do it justice. I've written here before about the pain of practice, but I have a tangible experience of joy to look forward to, so the necessary practice becomes and exercise in anticipation and happiness itself. Thirty-one days to get it right. Thirty-one days.