Don't want to be all by myself

Most serious pianists have had, at least some time in their lives, a huge crush on Rachmaninoff, I think. Alan was trying to figure out what to play for "the big concerto" his senior year of high school, and while he initially settled on the Grieg, he briefly considered a Shostakovich concerto that I suggested, as well as several Rachmaninoffs.

By the accounts we have, Rachmaninoff was a melancholy artist type, which Alan would have gotten. He required significant treatment for depression during his life. Some of that is echoed in his use of the Dies Irae in so many of his works. There must have been some thought of death in his head at all times. Having said that, his works were full of so much life.

I had been listening to a lot of Rachmaninoff this summer. I had stumbled across his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in my iTunes folder after having heard it on the radio, and decided to look into it more. The theme he speaks of is from Paganini's Caprice No. 24, one of the greats of the virtuosic violin repertoire. Listen to how he works the Dies Irae into it. Certainly the piece is not all dark. There is even a sweet romantic theme where he turns the melody upside-down at 15:27.

This late spring, I finally moved into the house I had bought almost a year earlier. Alan had been living there through thick and thin (mostly thin given all the construction). When Alan's legal problems started, he briefly tried living on his own, but ended up back in the house. After Mom and Dad left just before my birthday in late July, I moved back into the house. Oftentimes, in the evenings, I would close the door to my master suite, and do some combination of finishing clinical notes, watching TV shows on Netflix, taking long baths in my swimming pool sized bathtub, reading Zelazny stories, and listening to classical music, in a variety of combinations.

One particularly tough day, I came home to relax. Isabelle was gone to Canada, Alan was downtown, and I was feeling a bit lonely. I laid down and started some Rachmaninoff playing. The second piece -- his second piano concerto. Fate must have been mocking me because I had forgotten what lies in the second movement:

Yeah, that would be the source for the bridge from Eric Carmen's All by Myself (1:40). Not exactly what I wanted to hear at the time. Maybe Rachmaninoff had a sense of humor.

Speaking of which, probably the fondest Rachmaninoff-related memory I have regarding Alan is the comedy act that we saw with Mom and Dad in Chicago. Alan had watched this musical comedy duo, Igudesman and Joo, on Youtube years earlier (Ed did you show him this?), and I saw that they were coming to do a CSO performance with Emanuel Ax. Um, yes please. I bought four tickets, and we went to the late night show.

In addition to this and other classic bits from their act, they had a great voice-over by Ax himself while he played a piece. In the voice-over, he checks out a woman in the front row, contemplates introducing himself to her ("I'm Manny!"), regrets not having better hemorrhoid treatment, puffs himself up ("I play with Yo-Yo Ma!), and fears screwing up the hard part, which he does.

Now, surrounded by supporting friends and family, I still find myself feeling alone sometimes, longing for another conversation with Alan. I wonder if that is a fraction of how Alan felt, deeply loved, but still somehow all by himself.

From A to Z and beyond?

Okay, this post is a bit different. There's no music. This post is about the other thing we listened to on long road trips: Alan himself. He really liked science fiction, as do I. He would find full text stories and read them to us. Each title below is a link to the text online. I don't know if anyone will actually do this except for me, but try reading these stories out loud and imagine his voice.

Asimov

The Last Question 

In this short story, people ask a computer of their making a question that cannot be answered, or can it? The answer is not 42. Alan read this to me and Isabelle on one of our trips to Wisconsin to see Mom and Dad. This was one of the first.

If you do read it, check out this website.

The Last Answer

This story, published 24 years after the previous story, is about an entirely different question, almost the opposite in fact. Alan read these to us back to back. Despite my extensive Asimov collection, somehow I had missed these gems of his work. Knowing now the questions that were going through Alan's head, I wonder how this darkly humorous take on existence resonated with him.

Nightfall

Read to me and his friend Laura on our way back from New Orleans on our last family road trip. In it, he ponders a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!

Let's just say that's not how things unfold. This was the last story he read out loud to me. The last line haunts me as I hear it in his voice: "The long night had come again."

Zelazny

The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth

Roger Zelazny is my favorite sci-fi author. This is not his best story. For that, you might want to check out A Rose for Ecclesiastes. These two stories were the pre-Space Age sci-fi era's last hurrah, writings about Venus and Mars at the moment just before we knew what was on them (or what wasn't). This particular short story, The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, stretches the definition of short a bit, but bear with it. To get the full experience, try reading it in a variety of mediocre southern accents, with one of the characters sounding remarkably like Cleveland from Family Guy.

For Isabelle and me, this story, in those voices, is a strong memory of who Alan was -- realizing that the character with the thickest southern accent was from the Midwest halfway through the reading, complaining about the spotty 3G/4G internet access on the road, lines alternating between masterfully delivered and awkward due to trouble reading on a phone screen in a moving car.

Beyond?

Frankly, I don't know what comes next. Reading stories has been hard for me since he left us -- too hard to concentrate. I do see irony in Alan's reading speculative fiction about the distant (on not-so-distant) future when he couldn't even picture his own tomorrow. I think Alan would want us all to look forward, though, in that way that he couldn't.