Études & Inspirations: Brian Alegant

For Brian, From Gwen.

I am 19, and I have just left my Music Theory III class in a shroud of ignominy after the teacher invited me to leave (emphasis very pointedly on the italicization). I skip down the second floor of the Bibbins building, defiant, triumphant, and even think I glimpse — can it be? (No, it can’t) — a faint whiff of sunshine falling into the huge glass diamonds of the windows facing Tappan Square.

I’ve always been suspicious of music theory, the way I — all flailing emotional life and flying limbs and fledgling hopes to live out the decades ahead playing bass lines — have always been suspicious of anything neat or tidy, contained or neutral, categorizable, rule-adherent, logical. In my first semesters here, I dissented silently, resigned to the dreariness of it all, sleepwalking through analyzing Clementi sonatinas, pretending I could read soprano clef, getting more than a few assignments back with red Xs marking where I’d carelessly written out parallel fourths. (Imagine the surprise and delight I will feel, decades later, when I notice how many of the composers I love do this: that rules are indeed not rules but patterns people noticed along the way and tried to codify into smaller boxes than they could comfortably inhabit!)

But this semester, I unceremoniously hit my limit when the professor, in the throes of pedantic passion, points at something — a subito dynamic, perhaps, or a mercurial modulation — and looks up from the chalkboard with one of those awful, Oberlin-specific smiles I have begun to recognize: that marrying of the didactic and the stubborn, the ones where willful ignorance and over-erudition live together, those hideous, silvery barracuda smiles that are all teeth and ill intent. He looks up and tells the class that “Beethoven is being manipulative.”

I snap. This is Beethoven we’re taking about — our Beethoven, my Beethoven, as close to a religious figure as I’ve got now and ever will — and I don’t appreciate someone ascribing psychological malice to his pen. I vociferously object, raising my hand (maybe not) and listing all the reasons 19-year old Gwen knows this is bogus: it’s an offensive framing, irrelevant to the music, and anyway — how can he possibly know what the composer’s intent was?

The teacher invites me to his office after class, bares his teeth at me, and says he doesn’t want any resistance in class, and how would I like to study the last bit of the semester’s material on my own? I respond by writing a vitriolic final paper on how no one can possibly explain why the last movement of Op. 109 is so great; and spending the next twenty years asking colleagues to remind me of the other kind of fugue: “Not a real fugue but a…?” When they tell me it’s called a tonal fugue, I laugh and tell them that in my sophomore year at Oberlin, I missed the last few weeks of the class where they taught that.

I don’t know yet that my loathing of this particular class, and my (all-too-) readiness to free up afternoons for practicing Russian declensions, will yield a string of aftereffects that I can’t imagine: that I am about to meet a teacher who will change how I hear, love, and think about music; that in a matter of months music theory will begin to lodge itself in my heart as one of my great lifelong loves. I enroll in Music Theory IV taught by Brian Alegant, since several of my friends insist I will love him, and even though I know I could never love anyone who loves music theory, and even though the class is at 9am, it’s only one more semester, and after that? Well, after that I will never have to think about music theory again.

A week into the class, I am enchanted. Maybe it is that Brian (“BA” to me then, from his e-mails, or “Alegant,” among my friends) is playing us so much music I love: Bartók, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, but all these pieces they wrote that I didn’t yet know, listening (as I did, up til that very moment) only to chamber music. He hands out scores and teaches us how to study them: to use our pencils and our ears to begin drawing connections between what we see and what we hear. And there is so much to hear: he keeps asking us to listen! To listen to music! In music theory class! There never was any music in music theory class, I realize. When he wants to teach us something — when he wants us to learn about row charts, one week — he gives us scores and helps us to see and hear it in the music we are holding: listening, watching, listening again. He laughs with us, does a comic impression (a reenactment, maybe, is more like it) of Schoenberg when someone asks why Arnold had to go so out there with all these rows, why it became such a purely academic thing for him. “It didn’t become an academic thing,” Brian says. “These are romantic melodies! He’s like: ‘I am Brahms!’” And then Brian turns us back to the score of the slow movement of the Schoenberg 4th Quartet, where he shows us how Schoenberg uses the twelve-tone rows to build phrase structures: this piece I’ve loved my whole life, suddenly illuminated. (My heart.) He quickly stops someone in class when they ask what a composer intended: “It doesn’t matter what they intended, any more,” Brian says. “Once it’s out in the world it belongs to us now. We can’t guess what it is they wanted: we can only learn how to read their music and interpret it well.” He basks with us, openly, devotedly, ecstatically, in how great all this music is.

I walk around in a daze, stunned at the idea that I may have been misunderstanding this whole thing all along. What if I had never realized I loved to read because my teachers wanted me to memorize the shapes of the letters, and not the magic of the stories, the intensity of the characters inside them, the miracles of how they were built?

I realize that I love music theory.

I bask first in Music Theory IV, from modes to trichords and back again, from the icy Ohio early-February grey to Oberlin’s explosions into pink magnolia trees and lush greens. I enroll in Analysis & Performance. I love it all, adore it even; though I’m still a little uncomfortable, if I’m honest, at my complete 180 on all this — at the idea that my musical life has taken on a tinge of (my god) the intellectual.

So I test him. “Why does it matter what these sequences are called?” I demand one day. “Why do we have to memorize this?” He’s at the board, armored in a flamboyant dress shirt, trendy sneakers, colorful pants, black hair gelled slick atop his head; his armpits are soaked with sweat, probably from some combination of the overactive heat in the conservatory and the sheer intensity of his teaching — it is a full-body affair, somewhere between a virtuoso gymnastics floor routine and a wrestling match with all the technologies and musical examples he can possibly cram into an hour. His arms swoop over the staff to point at different bass and treble voices and their various patterns, and when I ask this Brian stops writing (he never stops writing) and turns around to look at me. There are probably twenty-five of us in class, but he knows already that I’m the only one who would think that and THEN say it out loud. “It doesn’t matter, Gwen,” he says, stopping to enjoy the drama of the moment. The class gasps (my memory says, winking). “We call them by these names so we can talk about them when we see them in a score, because if you don’t have a name for something you can’t discuss it.” I gape. Someone is finally being honest with me. I nod my head once, and he nods his in response, an unmistakable smile at the corners of his mouth. He turns around to keep writing furiously.

I test him some more. He asks us for e-mails responding to the listening assignments, and I send diatribes about the various recordings he shares with us: why the Rostropovich Bach 5th Suite is bad but the Maisky is worse. (He agrees.) I write to him to say, though no one asked me, that every composer wrote all their most amazing music for string quartet, and cite Beethoven (obviously), Bartók, and Mozart as my unimpeachable proof. (On Ludwig, Brian is willing to agree without a fight; “Hmm,” he tells me, “it’s an interesting notion to ponder,” Bartók’s quartets being his best music; and as for Mozart, well, he says, that one won’t hold up. I’ll think about it, eighteen years later, and laugh that he was right on all counts. I love those Mozarts, love them like my family; but there is, very simply, no end of Act II of The Marriage of Figaro except the end of Act II of The Marriage of Figaro.)

I finally ask Brian to start coaching chamber music with him, which is surely the biggest test any teacher dealing with a now-early-twenties Gwen Krosnick could possibly have. She has a big imagination, a big musical voice; a much smaller technical confidence at the cello, and a smaller-still patience for other people’s ideas. (To come, I promise: with time, therapy, okayness in being herself, Lexapro.) Brian is undeterred, working with me through Brahms and Beethoven sonatas, making me really listen for whether I can understand the fugue subject in Op. 102, no. 2 as it goes by (or if, he points out, “The tempo is playing you!”). One semester I go so far as to (I can’t believe I’m writing these words) ask him to coach me in a bassoon and cello duo, though obviously this ends up testing me far more than it tests him. All Brian does is use it as a workshop to keep making me further understand the shapes and gestures of slurs in Mozart, the texture and topography of good phrasing, the possible meanings of a carrot marking, the infinite ways to listen and listen and listen.

These years at Oberlin, studying with Brian, I find my voice in all kinds of ways; I find the earliest glimmers of my own capacity for patience (by way, it happens, of occasionally managing — at Brian’s repeated beseeching — to put a little air, a little space, between slurs, instead of letting shapes and sentences run one into the next). I find, to my very hesitant optimism, a budding confidence in my problem-solving abilities. I start to see for the first time in my life that if I’m not sure why something isn’t working, there might be other ways of dealing with it than throwing my hands at the cello and hoping for the best. (This proves useful, as it turns out, for a life spent at the cello.)

It is Brian who taught me how to read music: who taught me what it is to really step back — not out of a sense of remove at all, as I once might have feared, but out of respect, observation, hard-earned patience in the process — and bring all my experience, instincts, and knowledge to bear on each score I hold. He taught me how, each time I sit down at the cello, to use my own blend of those elements to build an interpretation that is both intelligent and personal, idiomatic and responsible, subjective and true. Brian’s teaching is still so much a part of all the music-making I do that my colleagues know him by name: my Trio Cleonice friends, in the wonderful eight years we played together, used to talk about high-definition phrasing and hypermeter more than I did! My sweet Cassatt Quartet colleagues, now, all know Brian too, from afar, and together we talk about using his marvelous notion of “negative accents” in especially wild harmonic moments of Op. 18, no. 1; about how to shape and etch so that the form of a piece is truly audible; about how to inflect in melodies, accompaniments, and bass lines with a real understanding of who the harmonies are to each other.

What Brian gave me was very simple: he enabled me to love music more than I did before. His teaching gave me a window and a toolbox aimed at loving music with all of my heart and intellect — my hands covered in dirt from really digging, really exploring, forever finding more. So many elements of what I learned from him are central to my own teaching and chamber music coaching, now, too: most especially the way in which Brian showed me that my musical instincts could be a compass for my analysis; and the way he constantly modeled that analysis as a path for getting more deeply inside the music we love.

I think, sometimes, with some pretty big tenderness, of that 19-year old who walked through the world holding on tight, in love with music but terrified that this love was fragile, afraid that a strong wind might blow it away: that trying to put Beethoven’s pages inside the walls of a classroom and understand them better might cause my whole young woman’s love and life (a Frauenliebe reference, for Brian) to come toppling to the ground. And I think how deeply lucky I am, what a profound, life-giving, life-affirming miracle it was to find a teacher right then who showed me how ferociously strong a love of music could really be. How the nuts and bolts, the concrete and drywall and layers of wood and brick, could yield a whole home for me, the paths lined with pink magnolia flowers and E major themes and variations and a whole joyous world ahead.