As time passed, I listened less and less to Brahms and more and more to later composers like Poulenc, Elgar, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev. I loved his symphonies and concertos but never ventured much beyond them, certainly not into his solo piano music. I mean before I ever attempted to play anything he wrote. But all I do at the keyboard is maintain a familiarity with the waltz in A minor and the first part of a polonaise I learned by heart when that composer still absorbed most of my attention.īrahms and I have had an on-again off-again relationship over the years. I continue to play the bit I did learn of him, and I still listen to Yulianna Avdeeva’s Chopin with great pleasure. After a while, though, his moods began to cloy: too much adolescent angst, too much of the same tale of death and unrequited love. I intended to learn all his music I could.

A few years back I did care a great deal about almost anything by Chopin I could manhandle. To put things simply, I just don’t care about that sonatina enough. It doesn’t resonate in a way that makes it infinitely repeatable. Why? Because, I think, it doesn’t speak to me as other music does. I’ve invested too much time and effort to set it aside entirely, but I’m not motivated enough to put in the time required to make it my own. There’s a Beethoven sonatina I’ve been hammering away at forever. I’ve labored over a simple menuet by Krebs or Pachelbel and breezed through a technically more difficult waltz of Chopin. Whatever that something is, it has nothing to do with an individual composition’s difficulty. When it comes to music, I feel I can afford to be choosy, fickle, even undisciplined.īut I’m becoming convinced there’s something besides self-indulgence that determines whether I stay with a new piece or put it aside after a couple weeks. I’ve completed more than a dozen novels plus scores of short stories and all manner of non-fiction. There are good reasons for not finishing a novel. If I begin a novel I generally finish it. I play for my own pleasure, not to make a living or because music is my profession. In all but a handful of cases I’ve put them aside. I’ve taken up dozens of compositions with the full intention of doing justice to each before moving on to anything else. What is it about some music that holds our attention and continues to move us, while other music charms us for a while but then loses its allure? I’m speaking not just of heard music but of music we play ourselves, or try to.

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