rain and writing

today is my last day. 

this morning i went down to zentralfriedhof to pay my respects to people much more talented than i am (although, i was suitably impressed by my ability to navigate public transportation yet again...it's so simple, but i feel so triumphant every time i make the switch from, say, subway to tram to walking and then actually GET somewhere). in a fit of....sentimentality, i'll say, i stopped and bought flowers to lay on the graves. two bouquets...one whole one for beethoven, and single flowers for brahms, schubert, hugo wolf, and schönberg. 

it's nice there...very quiet. i was somewhat surprised to see so many other flowers lying on their graves. beethoven's was covered with things people had given to him, huge bouquets right down to really small things. it made me feel much less self-conscious as i added mine to the pile. someone had printed out and laminated a little sign and laid it on schubert's grave: "schubert, ich liebe dich!" but schönberg....no one had given anything to him, so i did. mozart didn't need them, he had quite a few already, and i've grown to understand schönberg a lot more than i did before i came here...i bought a book of his essays at the center, and he is so fascinating. 

i felt weird taking pictures of them there, but it meant a lot to me to be able to remember the trip that way. so i tried not to...exploit....it, i guess. i dunno. it feels weird. i feel kinda stupid, but it was important to me. 

i'm packed and ready to go, but i don't want to go into it, really. i'm feeling a little vaguely sad. 

during my down time on this trip, i've be engrossed in a book my sister gave me for my birthday, daniel levitin's this is your brain on music. as i read, i become more and more stuck by the fact that this is an Important Book. while it may seem imposing at first, levitin takes care to explain the technical terms of music and musical psychology, often taking music theorists and musicologists to takes: "music theorists have an arcane, rarified set for terms and rules that are as obscure as some of the most esoteric domains of mathematics. to the nonmusician, the blobs of ink on a page that we call musical notion might just as well be the notations of mathematical set theory. talk of keys, cadences, modulation, and transpositions can be baffling." 

he also criticizes the critics; "musicians and critics sometimes appear to live behind a veil of technical terms that can sound pretentious. how many times have you read a concert review in the newspaper and found you had no idea what the reviewer is saying?"

most of you know that i harbor a not-so-secret desire to be a music writer at some point in my life, and i can't help but take levitin's comments rather seriously. whenever i write papers on a piece of music, i am almost always struck by the fact that about halfway through, my language dissolves into something that is not satisfying on either a technical or aesthetic level.  they are too poetic to be scientific, and too technical to be emotionally revealing (my personal pet peeve in music writing is the dependence we have on mentioning measure/bar numbers. there's nothing more disturbing to a train of thought than a number that means nothing. and yet, it's almost impossible to NOT include).

i think this book hits very close to home: i hope that if and when i write for a large amount of people, i can manage to get some sort of love of the subject across, as well as technical analysis and artistic evaluation. there are many things i've been working out in my mind about my trip to the gustav mahler library. there's a reason i haven't written anything about it yet....i've started the post three times already, but whatever comes out is either so dry it could be used to aid flood zones, or so sappy laura ingalls could have had her fill of maple syrup candy for a year.