Sorry for not writing. For a year and a half. I blame my utter disappointment in my sports teams for the writers’ block.

I am on the other side of the world in Seoul, expectedly jetlagged and sleep-deprived but with a truly content stomach that has been fed my favorite cuisine in the world for a few days. It isn’t impossible to find a bad restaurant here but it is seemingly difficult. While even in New York I hesitate to try an unrecommended restaurant (especially at risk of dropping $50 on a completely disappointing meal), I feel safe walking into any old place on the street here. Even the pre-packaged breakfast on the train hit the spot. Almost every time I pack to come to Korea I wonder why I am putting my body through this traumatic experience. And every time it takes me one meal with friends to remember why I previously agreed to make this trip!

I am playing a concert here in Seoul tonight with my piano quartet-ish ensemble M.I.K. Don’t ask me what the acronym stands for – the party line is that it’s just a name. And if you do your google research and find something that you think it might be, please remember that it was our management who came up with it. MIK has convened about once a year for five years with the intention (and some success) of bringing a passion of playing and experiencing chamber music to the younger generation of Korean students and audience members. This also includes introducing them to newer works; our first CD was of four commissioned pieces of young Korean and Korean-American composers. The other guys in the group are like rock stars in the Korean classical music scene, a world that is even more tightly-knit than in the US because of the size of the country. One member has already starred in a mainstream film, one is a radio host personality and model, and one is among the most prominent professors in the country. I feel like a tag-along. Meanwhile it is a fun ride because the concert atmosphere is so vibrant and charged by the youthfulness of the audiences. The average concert-goer’s age here must be about 1/3 of that in the US, and they are overwhelmingly female. They make a lot more noise here after the piece is done! Interestingly they also make less noise while the music is being played.

Western classical music wasn’t regularly performed here until a little more than 50 years ago, so in that way the music is also young. The Schumann piano quartet that we are playing tonight hasn’t been experienced by the audiences here for 150 years. Perhaps that is also why the pop and classical worlds seem to be (still) interconnected. Much as I’d love for Christina Aguilera to come to my concert and then come out afterwards and sing for a group of friends at a fancy karaoke bar, it is beyond the realm of possibility in New York. Here in Seoul pop singers and actors/actresses are old childhood friends of their classical music counterparts. This adds a bit of a glam factor to the concerts and it certainly doesn’t hurt audience-building.

MIK rehearsals reflect this co-existence of various musical styles. There is, of course, the repertoire that we will perform – from Schumann and Beethoven to Francaix, Murray Schafer, and the aforementioned Korean composers such as James Ra and the noted new-age Yiruma. But these rehearsals are often interrupted by inspired outbursts of tango, K-pop, horrible jazzy versions of Bach, and concerto performances with completely improvised 3-man orchestral reductions. I go from here to playing with Mitsuko Uchida at the Concertgebouw in a couple of weeks. She would probably wince to hear these rehearsals! But there is something wonderfully refreshing about it, reminding me that classical music should not be isolated from the other musical styles of our time. It is all music. Mozart WOULD have rapped, on a level that only Jay-Z could match. Can you imagine the lyrics he would have come up with? They probably would have been unfit for Howard Stern.

I am practicing Messiaen, not by candlelight, but in the dark save for a little desklight. It is a dim enough atmosphere so that the haunting music of Quatour pour le Fin du Temps here in this remote house outside Santa Fe is freaking me out. I keep looking behind me at the stairs expecting to see some archangel with wings spread coming to take me away from this life into eternity. Perhaps I’ve been practicing the final violin solo movement too much, Jesus’s ascension to his father. I sure don’t feel like Jesus ascending while I struggle to hold these eternally long notes in the stratosphere of the violin register. I could use some divine help. Or perhaps this is how Jesus felt and Messiaen intended for the violinist to feel a similar struggle? In which case I shouldn’t practice this at all and so suffer painfully on stage in a very sincere expression of Messiaen’s intention? To grapple with such a sophisticated interpretive question is why I have studied, practiced, and lived all of these years. And yet I have no answer. To struggle or not to struggle? Perhaps I should continue practicing so that at least I have the option of deciding.

On a serious note the Quartet for the End of Time is a remarkably mystical and spiritual piece that you should experience in the concert hall. Messiaen places listeners in a spell with the colors and harmonies representing rainbows reaching up to the heavens and with his otherworldly birdcalls. Other times Messiaen strikes fear into our hearts with the sheer power of sound representing the Apocalypse. And most extraordinary is his representation and manipulation of Time through the varying of speeds of his rhythmic drones and at times the destruction of the regular meter that normally provides us with a comfortable structure. The solo cello and violin movements are the most transcendent of all. In the cello movement the steady 1/16th notes played by the piano slow my heart rate to that of a meditative state. And in the violin movement that closes the piece the piano’s hopelessly slow but steady rhythm creates a timelessness, an eternity that seems to last far longer than the piece’s last sounds.

With Starbucks a close second, my adopted retail home may be Hudson News. I have no idea if Hudson exists outside of train stations and airports. It isn’t a glamorous hang-out choice but thank goodness for Hudson! It nourishes my Blistex/Listerine Pocketpaks/nailclipper (any brand although I find myself most often buying Revlon just because it is there) fixation. My triumvirate of pocket items. Immediately upon discovery I begin a downward spiral of withdrawal symptoms progressing from irritation to frustration to paranoia to self-mutilation. I do not exaggerate about that last part. One of the occupational hazards about being a violinist who plays hours each day is the build-up of callouses on the left-hand fingertips. After a week or so these callouses become so thick that it becomes more difficult for me to feel the string, causing me to press harder down on the fingerboard with those fingers. Pressing harder is bad. So once a week I end up carefully peeling the top layer of these callouses with a nailclipper. If there is no nailclipper the job is done by hand and…it’s akin to doing micro-surgery with a saw. Sorry for the grotesque image. The music may be beautiful but the vehicle for that music doesn’t have to be.

Over the years Hudson has given me Advil, Halls, Tums, Imodium, the beverage of the day, M&Ms, Sudoku, neck pillows, every major newspaper, Sports Illustrated, Baseball Weekly, Tom Clancy. No serious reading on airplanes.

A nailclipper is missing from my pocket. Time for a pre-boarding shopping trip.

I haven’t been completely neglecting the capturing of a few of my thoughts during the past weeks. I just haven’t had time to complete any of those thoughts in a coherent way to present to you. So in the next few days I’ll try to complete those entries posthumously.

I am about to depart for Cleveland to visit my musical mama Mitsuko Uchida, to hear her play the Berg Chamber Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra and another one of my heroes, concertmaster Bill Preucil. As it probably has been for generations of musicians, the Cleveland Orchestra was an incredible inspiration for me. A revelation. The first time I heard them I was visiting Oberlin for a competition while I was still the relative country bumpkin compared to my peers from all of the prestigious prep programs around the country. Boulez conducting Petrouchka. I had the fortune at that age (14) to have played the piece the previous summer at Interlochen - so I had an even greater appreciation for what was happening on stage that night. Cleveland was the first major orchestra I heard live. Just imagine my shock at hearing what many consider the greatest orchestra in the world. They were like the perfect well-oiled machine, the race car gliding effortlessly with ultimate control. No growl in the engine here! The result in Stravinsky on that evening was absurd clarity of colors, textures, rhythm and harmony, bringing out at least as much as the composer could have imagined, perhaps even a bit more. That such a musical experience could exist on this earth was a revelation to me. When I returned to my parents’ home in Plattsburgh I promptly declared that I was leaving for a life in music and I decided to attend the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Fast-forward to September: opening night of the orchestra’s 1995-96 season with Isaac Stern playing Brahms concerto. I was sitting directly underneath him in the second row. He and the orchestra and the music touched me at a depth of my soul that had never been reached before. I was wobbly-kneed; I couldn’t walk after the concert. I sat in my chair for twenty minutes after the end of the concert before I could get up for the short walk home. On that walk I realized what I wanted to do with my life in music. That evening Mr. Stern gave me a reason to live. I dreamt of that performance for a month and obviously here I am still dreaming of it. He inspired me to try to inspire others in the same way. I thought that if I could reach one person in that way then my time on earth will have been worthwhile. After all of the hours of working on tone, phrasing, intonation, rhythm, ensemble, whatever - that performance always reminds me of the ultimate gift that we as performers can and should share with the people for whom we are playing.

I had years more of memorable experiences in their Severance Hall. I’m so looking forward to hearing the orchestra on Saturday.

To my readership of a few I am so sorry about my silence these last few months. I offer no particularly good excuse other than never having time to do even half of the requisite things in my life. But as we all know that is no excuse at all for anything that is not done. Hopefully now that I have the ball rolling again I will keep my compositional juices flowing.

While several people have encouraged me in the last few weeks to return to writing, the ultimate inspiration was my old friend Lisa Ferguson whom I ran into at the Movado Hour performance I gave the other night. As a classical musician who gets around and knows many people who get around I have learned not to be surprised by chance meetings. Anywhere. For example I ran into Doug Didyoung, writer and chef extraordinaire, on the corner of Something-Street and Another-Something Street on the Lower East Side yesterday. I know Doug from his summers working at Marlboro and he lives in Philadelphia. And I never go to the Lower East Side. (I was on a search for great gelato and for that one must go to il Laboratorio del Gelato.) Anyway running into Lisa was no small feat since she lives in Italy.

While seeing Lisa always brightens my day it was an especially meaningful meeting, one where the music transcends its “mere” beauty and becomes hopelessly tangled in the web of our lives, experiences, and relationships. On that evening I was performing Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht, one of the highlights of my entire season because of the colleagues involved. I am not a Schoenberg fan but there is something undeniably moving about this piece. Every once in a while a composer really “nails it” and Schoenberg nailed that one. I still vividly remember being overwhelmed by the experience of performing it for the first time thirteen years ago. Lisa was the second violinist in that performance; playing the second part the other night with her in the room was therefore momentous for me. I realized later that I have seen Lisa several times since 1994 and I have played Verklaerte Nacht many more times since then. But we all experienced something magical thirteen years ago and Friday night was the first time that all three of us had a chance to relive that magic together.