Let's Play a Careless Rhapsody

Or, An Introduction

I can hear your questions — no need to yell them. Yes, I started The Titan’s Breakfast a while back. Yes, I gave it a proper introduction at the time. And no, you don’t get to read it. Because it’s wrong, and I only want to lie to you for fun and profit when it serves a broader goal.

As ad man Rory Sutherland likes to point out, the evolved purpose of something is usually pretty different from its intended purpose. Bookshelves used to be for storing things you read; now they’re for flaunting what you hope to read, y’know, when you have the time, someday. Gunpowder was invented en route to an immortality potion, whereas now it, well, gives people immortality. Or take the Secret Service: it was established to prevent counterfeiting, evolved to prevent presidential assassinations, and now watches people take potshots at El Presidente so they can be extras in the photo op.

I originally sent this blog into the world with a topsy-turvy piece about how Yelling My Thoughts Into The Void is good because it “facilitates human connection.” Which, on second thought, is ridiculous; let’s face it, odds are you’re reading this to avoid dealing with people. And so this hapless blog stood, introductionless, exposed to the maelstrom of one thousand sweeping misinterpretations.

But now that we have a few essays under our collective belt, I think it’s safe to say this site, for better or for worse, has an ethos.

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I.

Let's play a careless rhapsody,
And let's set the music free.
I'll touch your heartstrings to make the tune clearer
And you'll be nearer me.

I’m not against British Invasion tunes — I’m really not. Believe me, I’d like to be under the sea in an octopus’ garden as much as the next guy, but for your sanity and mine, stop pretending that it was the first time Americans started buying someone else’s blue jeans and listening to someone else’s pop music.

“Duh, Americans have imported Brit Lit and Parisian fashions since, like, the Bronze Age.” Well, yes, but those were hegemonies — I’m talking about an invasion. Like the conga wave of the early 1940s, when a new genre swept in from Cuba on the tails of Desi Arnaz’s film career. Or the same era’s Trinidadian calypso invasion, led by the aptly named Lord Invader. But we can go earlier.

Such as the 1910s, for instance, when the U. S. of A. — just a fledgling Great Power, mind you — found itself hopelessly surrounded on the classical-music front, with violinists streaming in from the then-teetering Russian Empire.

The watershed moment came in 1917, when a sixteen-year-old violinist made his U.S. debut playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall. Nineteenth-century players had generally been warm and schmaltzy: they slid into notes, they took liberties with the tempo, and they measured their tone by its richness. This youngster, on the other hand, beelined for intensity, with fast tempos and sharp vibrato — not to mention his flawless technique, which almost sent the greatest virtuosos fleeing into the viola section. The concert not only trebucheted this young violinist — Jascha Heifetz, if you were wondering — into his career as a violinist, but also set a radically different standard for what defined a good performance:

You might be tempted to think this was a demographic revolution, with Russian-Jewish wunderkinds crowding out the homegrown competition. But this isn’t 1920s Ivy League admissions: instead, the battle was mostly between Heifetz and other Russian-Jewish violinists. In fact, the reigning champion of the Old Style was one Mischa Elman, who had studied with ur-professor Leopold Auer ten years before Heifetz. Elman was seated in a box with pianist Leopold Godowsky for Heifetz’s premiere; at intermission, he turned to Godowsky and asked, “It’s getting hot in here, isn’t it?” His compadre replied, “Not for pianists.”¹

The watershed — at least in the States — generally divided older from younger Auer students: Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, and Toscha Seidel on one side, Heifetz and Nathan Milstein on the other. But the solo violin scene wasn’t some monolith, of course: it also had Russian Jews who didn’t study with Auer, like Juilliard-educated Sascha Jacobsen.

As the Gershwins put it, in their 1922 ditty "Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha:"

Temperamental Oriental gentlemen are we:
Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha, 
Fiddle-lee diddle-lee dee
Shakespeare says, "What's in a name?"
With him we disagree:
Names like Sammy, Max, or Moe
Never bring the heavy dough
Like Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha,
Fiddle-lee diddle-lee dee.

Ira Gershwin later remarked that “whenever any of the violinists mentioned in the song attended a party in New York, someone would infallibly play it.” Which sounds fun, until you realize that all four of these guys had to listen to someone plunk out a D-tier Gershwin tune anytime they left the house.² But I digress.

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II.

Maybe a careless rhapsody
Will soon teach us both to care.
Strike all the chords that our fingers can find us,
Chords that will bind us there.  

Actually, “digress” is an understatement: truth be told, the violinist we’re after wasn’t even from Eastern Europe.

I won’t make you trudge through the rest of the song — if you’re really craving a Gershwin party-circuit tune about classical music, there’s always “By Strauss.” But the last verse of “Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha” merits a second look:

Temperamental Oriental gentlemen are we:
Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha, 
Fiddle-lee diddle-lee dee
We give credit when it's due,
But then you must agree
That outside of dear old Fritz,
All the fiddle concert hits
Are Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha,
Fiddle-lee diddle-lee dee.

“Dear old Fritz,” if you were wondering, is a certain Fritz Kreisler — who, you’ll notice, needs no introduction to the Gershwins’ audience.

Fritz Kreisler, for all his interwar fame, was thoroughly a nineteenth-century violinist. Unlike the Russian Jews of Auer’s studio, Kreisler was… still Jewish, but the Viennese kind that got baptized. And Vienna was the right place to be: Little Fritz was the type of prodigy that gets other prodigies’ parents filling out adoption paperwork. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory from ages 7 to 10 as its youngest-ever student — his mother had lied about his age — and went to the Conservatoire de Paris for the next two years. At twelve, he took home the coveted Grand Prix de Rome, even though the other 40 contestants were at least 20 years old — as for his stature as an adult, solve for the equilibrium.

Kreisler was also at Heifetz’s premiere in 1917, where he commented that “We might as well take our fiddles and break them across our knees.” Luckily, he didn’t follow through³ — and, almost uniquely among his generation, he had nothing to fear from the young upstart. For the next 45 years, Fritz was the premier Old Style composer-violinist: he slid into notes, he took liberties with the tempo, and he measured his tone — sweeter than a sachertorte — by its richness. Yet Kreisler, ever the free spirit, was no mere manservant to dated habits; his technique was impeccable, his vibrato brimmed with excitement, and his short bowstrokes lent the music a shocking vitality. Or, in the words of überpedagogue Carl Flesch:

Kreisler’s cantilena was an unrestrained orgy of sinfully seductive sounds, depravedly fascinating, whose sole driving force appeared to be a sensuality intensified to the point of frenzy.

Of course, we can’t forget the phrasing: you can’t hear a Kreisler recording without noticing the personality in his playing. Kreisler’s style, especially with his own compositions, has an inventiveness — a sense of discovery — that makes each note spring to life, as if he were improvising the piece on the spot:

Oh, and did I mention he didn’t practice?

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III.

When you are the theme,
Oh, it's wonderful,
And I'll make that theme
Reach its greatest height,

Granted, everybody has a motive for downplaying their time in the practice room: there’s a reason that musicians learn to start their small talk with “Dude, I didn’t practice even close to enough this week” when they’re still in diapers. It’s the perfect gambit: if you play badly, you have an excuse, and if you play well, it’s even more impressive because your fingers were allegedly underpracticed.

What’s fun about Kreisler is that he meant it. And not only for himself, but as a general principle:

I never practice. In the accepted sense of the term, in the formal use of the word, I have never practiced in my whole life. I practice only as I feel the need. I believe that everything is in the brain. You think of a passage and you know exactly how you want it. It is like the soldier — he doesn’t practice before a battle.

These [holding them up] are fingers. Nothing. All you have to do is put them in hot water and they are pliable and warm. The great men I knew practiced very little. They thought and thought. Ysaÿe played more beautifully than anyone and yet he let many notes fall on the floor. He thought only of the greatness.

Fritz Kreisler, instead, held that “technic [sic] is truly a matter of the brain.” The Kreislerian practice was a mental exercise: a violinist needs to study the score, find challenging spots, and explore possible interpretations before picking up the instrument. A train-ride’s worth of concerted thought is far more useful than plucking out bow-hairs for twelve hours over some godforsaken arpeggio; muscle memory is just a cheap excuse for, well, actual memory.

And — at least for him — it worked. In 1941, while crossing the street in New York, Kreisler was hit by a truck; the accident fractured his skull, and he spent over a week in a coma. Yet once he left the hospital, our eccentric virtuoso picked up the violin again:

I never dreamed that the time would come when I would have to be put to the most severe test of my belief… My wife was so worried! I looked at my fingers. They were stiff. They hadn’t been used. But my desire was so intense and I told myself, these are fingers. These are my slaves. I am the general. I order them to play, and I will them to action. You know, they played!

Not that you should try this at home, of course. Rule one of advice-taking: when a naturally-talented person tells you to coast on natural talent, make sure you’re pretty damn talented before trying it. It’s no coincidence that dear old Fritz didn’t teach:

I had one pupil, only one, many years ago. She came from Philadelphia. She wasn’t very good when she started with me, and though I really don’t like to admit it, she was much worse when I discontinued my efforts to teach her!

But it’s also no coincidence that Kreisler’s playing sounds the way it does. Go back to that quasi-improvisatory Liebesfreud recording you skipped and listen to it, like, totes for realsies this time. It’s a delectable performance — you can almost taste the spontaneity — but good luck finding anyone who can sound like that after three weeks in a practice room. They might let fewer notes “fall on the floor” — and that does matter — but for what? Kreisler doesn’t sound like Kreisler despite his bizarro-world practice habits, he sounds that way because of them.⁴

No, the point here is not that everyone should just coast on talent (though it’s nice work if you can get it), but that Kreisler’s knowledge of his instrument bought him room to experiment. Because of Fritz’s control over his arms and his arms’ control over the violin, he could decide on a whim to hold a note for a fraction of a second too long, or to soar up the next run just a bit too quickly, without worrying whether his technique could accommodate the change. Thanks to his ability — and, probably, quite a bit more muscle memory than he let on — Kreisler could take the risks he needed to breathe life into the music.

Or, to generalize: mastery enables freedom.

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IV.

So let's play a careless rhapsody
Deep into the night.

Oh, you want examples? I take precious time out of my day to bring you this hand-spun pearl of insight, and you ask me to spoon-feed you its applications? You’re way too old for this, but whatever, grab a bib:

1. Music: It isn’t just performers who experience this. Felix Mendelssohn’s best works (e.g., his first piano trio) sound dramatically more natural than those of most other Composers Who Follow All The Rules; of course, as a former child prodigy, Mendy was well past the “does this follow the rules?” stage and could focus on conjuring up breezy melodies.⁵

2. Painting: Have you seen Monet’s early work before Impressionism took off? Or Picasso’s oeuvre pre-Cubism? And Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 may not be a traditional painting, but it was much closer to the prevailing Cubist style than to a literal urinal. While some experimenters’ early pieces (see: Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters) may not be too Salon-friendly, all of these early works show that their creators understood The Rules through and through, allowing them to later break them in ways that were still aesthetic and/or interesting.

3. Theatre Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim didn’t mince words about earlier lyricists — in fact, he attacked several of them mercilessly for their reliance on “rhyming poison,” sloppy syntax, and unnecessary melodrama. Instead, his ideal lyric stood out for its stark realism; its voice was that of the character, rather than of the lyricist trying to sound clever. Yet Sondheim not only could be clever when he wanted, but he could also ape his predecessors to a tee: his mock-1930s score for Follies has spot-on lyrical impersonations of Noël Coward (whose lyrics he called “condescending”), Cole Porter (“camp”), Ira Gershwin (“clenched”), Yip Harburg (“word-drunk”), and Irving Berlin (“banal”).⁶

4. Football: The 2014 NFL season was something of a turning point. Old-school titans Peyton Manning and Tom Brady faced off for the AFC Championship: both had famously stellar throwing arms, but both (especially Manning) were usually stationary on the field. Meanwhile, the up-and-coming quarterbacks for the NFC Championship, Russell Wilson (lol) and Colin Kaepernick (rip), were running quarterbacks. While Wilson’s now better remembered as an overpaid quarterback and Kaepernick as an overpaid non-quarterback, the running is here to stay — though it goes without saying that not even the finest runner has any hope of getting the job (or, at least, keeping the job) without a good throwing arm.

Now, before you start telling T-Swizzle to go work on fugues and four-part chorales, I’m not claiming that people need to put in their ten-thousand hours and submit a literature review before daring to try anything. In fact, being an outsider can often be preferable. John Dalton revolutionized chemistry, and Alfred Wegener geology, despite both being meteorologists — largely because as outsiders, they could ignore The Established Wisdom in favor of frameworks that made sense. And, yes, this can happen even in music: Hector Berlioz arguably invented modern orchestral writing by virtue of not being a pianist.⁷ Yet all of them, in some broader sense, were masters of their craft: Dalton and Wegener already knew how to weigh evidence against a scientific paradigm, and Berlioz had nothing if not an ear for orchestration.

The question, then, isn’t whether you need to know everything that’s been done before experimenting. Rather, it’s about knowing The Rules for experimenting: only with mastery can you be confident that your screwing around will get somewhere. A vision’s just a vision if it’s only in your head, but if you know your craft, it doesn’t have to stay there.

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Coda.

“Mastery enables freedom” isn’t the point of this ‘stack. In fact, nobody should have a Substack to explain that; I just did it in, like, fifteen minutes. The point of this blog — really, its conceit — goes a step further: mastery doesn’t just enable freedom, it demands it.

The fact is, we’ve all been honing our writing since elementary school: it’s one of the Three Rs, according to someone who clearly never checked “reading” off their list. Which is not to say that we can spin out prose like Gibbon’s or verse like Swift’s⁸, but chances are that most of us can say something of substance without agonizing over the style. Which means we have a responsibility to screw around — both in substance and in style — and see what happens.

In practice, I’ve ended up Writing What I Know to some extent — hope you like game theory, verse book reviews, and 1930s musical theatre — but the goal of this site is not to pour out decades’ worth of erudition. Otherwise, I would have waited decades and developed erudition. Yet, funnily enough, experimentation has always been the purpose of essay-writing. For those of you civilized enough not to know French, an essay is an attempt: not necessarily a first stab at a topic, but certainly not the last. And, after all, only with a starting point can we hope to make any progress.

So, without further ado — Dames and Fellas, Geese and Ganders, Ladies and Gentlemen, Hebrews and Shebrews, not to mention children of all ages — welcome to The Titan’s Breakfast.

And let's play a careless rhapsody
Deep into the night.

1. Elman was right to sweat: while he had a long career ahead of him as “the violinist with the golden tone,” his fame never reached its pre-Heifetz peak.

2. More motivation to stay inside and practice, I guess.

3. For his finances’ sake if nothing else — Strads ain’t cheap.

4. Nor was Kreisler’s playfulness restricted to his playing. In 1938, he revealed that 16 or so Baroque pieces in his repertoire — including Pugnani’s Praeludium and Allegro, Francoeur’s Sicilienne and Rigaudon, and a full Vivaldi violin concerto — were actually forgeries, written by none other than Fritz Kreisler. The critics were about as happy as you’d expect — not that it mattered, since our merry prankster had caught them pants-down.

5. “But he wasn’t a radical!” Have it your way: Arnold Schoenberg, whose music was so radical it caused riots when it premiered, was not only well-trained in old school composition — he literally wrote the book on it.

6. To be fair, it’s not all insults. Sondheim has no shortage of compliments for most of these people — except Coward, he hates Coward — but those are much less fun.

7. And opium. Lots of opium. But that’s for another essay.

8. The other Swift this time — calling him J-Swizzle somehow felt wrong.