Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Mingfang was not intimidated by her son’s talent, but she was concerned about the ramifications of being called a prodigy and made him try other skills he couldn’t master immediately. “I can’t take credit for his talent,” she said, “but I can take credit for his being humble.” As his music progressed, she became concerned that he was missing the best opportunities to develop in his art. “A prodigy in Champaign, Illinois, might be not a prodigy somewhere else,” she said. So when Conrad was nearly five, his mother took a sabbatical, and the family moved to Chicago; a year later, they moved again, to New York, where Conrad was accepted as a student by Veda Kaplinsky at Juilliard. The piano went into its own small, soundproof room. “People say he doesn’t have the concert-hall feeling, but it’s good if we can enjoy our life, too,” Mingfang said.

  They encouraged Conrad to forgo competitions “because they are sad,” his mother said. “If you win, you feel sorry for your friends who lost, and if you lose, you feel sorry for yourself.” Conrad explained it differently, though with a similar sensitivity to others: “I already have quite a few concerts to play. Many others don’t, and if I enter, I’m taking the chance to perform away from them.” Mingfang admits that theirs is not the typical Chinese attitude. “If I had stayed in China, I might have wanted my son in every competition, and I might have given him less love if he failed. But I’ve been Americanized. Now I believe that if you don’t have calm in your heart, you can’t really produce beauty.” In her own view, Mingfang is a hybrid mother, too open-minded for the Chinese standard and too firm for the American model. Conrad is ambivalent. “I don’t want to push the Asian label away because that feels really self-hating to me,” he said. “But being classified as a Chinese-American child-prodigy pianist, that’s already too many labels. My parents are actually much more appreciative of freedom than some Americans I know, because they didn’t grow up with that. They’re more appreciative of music because they didn’t grow up with that. And I’m the beneficiary.”

  Conrad is doing independent study because his concert schedule became too complicated for regular school. He concedes that he doesn’t have much of a social life, but school wasn’t so great, either. “Everyone thought I was a smart-ass, and I can’t dispute that,” he said. Veda Kaplinsky worried that if he pursued a liberal-arts education, he might lose focus for his music, but Mingfang encouraged him to enroll at Columbia while continuing his studies at Juilliard. “Music is like the climate—it’s a huge system with an infinite number of variables,” Mingfang told me. “Conrad’s work is very much like mine; it’s about figuring out structures to make sense of what appears to be chaos.”

  One’s own intelligence has novelty value when it is newly awakened, and at fifteen, Conrad was in that particular innocence. He said, “I think that the world has just as much to teach me as Veda, and so do people I don’t know. Books have a lot to teach me. Films have a lot to teach me. Art, life, science, math, anything has a lot to offer. I’m a sponge. We live in a postmodern era, where kids hear every style of music and want to play it all at the same time while text messaging. I’m one of those kids.” New audiences, he believes, must be cultivated. “I’ve always mourned the fact that indie rockers are more receptive to experimentation than the classical community is.” He sighed. “My views on music change every week. I’m a teenager, prone to hormonal imbalances. I try to expose myself to as much as I can. Being a politician means that you can take any argument and turn it to your favor. I can’t do that; I’m an artist, and I can only argue my point of view.”

  • • •

  The gap between classical and popular music keeps widening, and the first approach to that problem has been for classical composers to try to move into that gap with music that speaks to both audiences. “There’s always been a kind of DMZ between the pretentiousness of one and the amateurishness of the other,” Justin Davidson said, “but no matter how aesthetics may have merged, you’re dealing with a capitalist, commercial world on the one hand, and a not-for-profit world on the other. It’s hard for two such different economic models to meet.”

  Fearful that their language appears to be dying and eager for widespread acclaim and the financial rewards that come with it, composers and performers have entered a mainstream they might once have disdained. Lang Lang appears in popular ads; Joshua Bell plays crossover music from movie themes to bluegrass; Conrad Tao sees part of his job as producing an audience for his music. Young composer-performers such as Christian Sands, Nico Muhly, and Gabriel Kahane strive for a music of wide appeal that soft-pedals the differences between classical and pop. They are fighting to save their own identity from erasure.

  • • •

  Christian Sands grew up on gospel, jazz, and pop. He won first place in the church talent show when he was three, after only a year of piano lessons; at four, he won a local composer’s award in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Sylvester, worked a night shift at Cargill, so Chris was at home nights with his mother, Stephanie. “Music made me feel safe, so music was the way that he and I coped with having to be strong,” she said. When Chris started kindergarten, the teacher told Stephanie that her son was incapable of sitting still and seemed to be on some other planet. Stephanie said, “He’s not on another planet; he’s just composing music in his head. He’ll stop squirming if you let him play a lullaby or something for the other kids before naptime.” Chris’s room was next to his parents’, and after he went to bed, when it was too late to play the piano, they would hear the clicking of his fingernails on the desk, as if it were a keyboard.

  From the outset, Chris would improvise. “He could mix a little thing from Chopin right in the middle of his Bach,” Sylvester said. When Chris was seven, his teacher said he should switch to a jazz teacher. “I could make things up, and nobody would say, ‘Don’t do that,’” Chris recalled. “I used to think my hands had their own brains. I call them ‘the little people,’ because each finger just does a different thing when it wants to do it.”

  Chris’s teacher arranged a gig for him at Sprague Hall, the large concert venue at Yale. “It was a trio,” Chris said. “The bass player is sixty-five, the drummer is maybe fifty-eight, and I’m nine, and I’m the leader. I didn’t pay attention to the audience. It’s almost, like, when you’re a child and you’re playing with a toy, and your parents have company; you don’t even care if they’re in the same room with you; you’re just making your train go or finishing up your tower of blocks. The piano was my toy, and I was in my own world that I created.” Chris received a standing ovation. His parents found him backstage, lying on the floor in his tuxedo and reading a book.

  The invitations started to pour in. By the time he was eleven, Chris’s music was airing on the radio, and he was selling homemade CDs. The next year, he played a special concert for all fifteen thousand sixth graders in the New Haven school district. He was asked to entertain at a cocktail party at Skull and Bones, a Yale secret society. One of the guests was Dave Brubeck’s physician, who subsequently arranged for Chris to take lessons from Brubeck. At fifteen, Chris met Dr. Billy Taylor, who produced Chris’s first major recording. In high school, Chris was playing as many as four gigs a week.

  Chris’s modesty slyly invites a little awe. He’s handsome and affable and likes to pretend that even hard work is easy. When a friend complained that Chris was never available for socializing, he replied, “You are my friend, but music is my love, and it will always come first.” Stephanie said, “He has to isolate himself, even from us. That could be painful. He’s always been the one steering the boat, and we’re just making sure it’s not sinking.” Sylvester said, “We told him, ‘Pray before you play, and use your gift for the people, not for yourself.’” Stephanie described watching talk shows about young celebrities and trying to extrapolate how to be a parent to Chris. “I don’t know if I ever understood the giftedness, but I understood that if you don’t give him the piano, you might as well just not give him any air.” All the same, his parents di
dn’t want him to forfeit the usual pleasures of youth. During the breaks of his late-night concerts, they’d sneak out the stage door to play tag and roughhouse.

  In 2006, at seventeen, Chris was invited to perform at the Grammy Awards for the legendary jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. He had been warned in advance that Peterson would be onstage in a wheelchair. Chris began to play Peterson’s tune “Kelly’s Blues.” “Right in the middle of my second chorus, I hear some applause, and I’m thinking it’s for me,” Chris said, “and all of a sudden I heard a chord and I thought, ‘Wait, I’m not playing that chord,’ and I looked up.” Peterson had pulled himself out of his wheelchair and made it over to the other piano onstage, and they began something halfway between a pianistic dialogue and a duel that ended the show exultantly.

  Chris went on to the Manhattan School of Music, where, Sylvester said, he learned the names for what he was already doing. When I asked his parents what role each played in the development of his musical sensibility, Sylvester took credit for certain harmonies he favors, and Stephanie said she had shown him how to shape a story. When I visited the Sands family at home, Chris was twenty-one, and in the middle of writing an opera, half jazz, half classical, loosely based on his romance with a mezzo-soprano from Dubai. “Her story’s as weird as mine,” he said. “So my opera’s about my doing jazz when everyone else was doing sports, and her doing opera when everyone else was doing shopping and Islam.” He laughed. “Do I want to make operatic music, or do I want to do cutthroat, in-your-face jazz, or to be Afro-Cuban, or to use this new Latin style? From the dawn of time, man put sticks over here, berries over here. It’s been like that forever, so everything is categorized, and that’s why there’s so many genres and subcategories. My music is a new beast, and it’s untamed, and it’s running rampant through the streets of New York.”

  • • •

  Music education has been eliminated at most public schools, but people are not merely ignorant about classical music; they are often educated away from it. Paul Potts, pudgy and morose, sang Puccini’s “Nessun dorma” on Britain’s Got Talent in 2007 and received a staggering ovation; the YouTube clip of his performance has had nearly a hundred million views. His fans responded to the beauty of Puccini’s music despite Potts’s distinctly amateur, if poignant, performance. The same thing happened a few years later when eight-year-old Jackie Evancho sang Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” on a similar American program. Admittedly, Puccini was a populist; nonetheless, these phenomena suggest that many people who never contemplate listening to classical music are capable of being blown away by it.

  Paradoxically, as general education about classical music is vanishing, the education of actual musicians remains ossified. “Conservatories, essentially, haven’t changed since the Reign of Terror,” Robert Sirota said. “You need iconoclasts who are willing to reexamine the repertoire, to reexamine what a concert is, to reexamine how people hear and listen.”

  • • •

  Bunny Harvey and Frank Muhly married by default. Bunny’s ex-boyfriend had been kicked out of Brown and asked his square buddy Frank to look after her. Bunny, who worked part-time as a go-go dancer, was in a relationship with a woman. “But something perverse in me decided to take him on as a project,” she said, “and it backfired, because I fell in love.” Frank dropped out of graduate school and has led a life untouched by career ambition, working on occasional films and other freelance projects. In 1974, Bunny won the Rome Prize in painting and they moved to Italy for two years.

  When they returned home, she and Frank decided to have a child. “I didn’t know what it took to be a parent,” she said. “Now I think it’s like art: you have the material and you deal with it in the most creative and loving way you can.” Nico Muhly was born in Vermont; at nine months, he was mimicking bird sounds and soon identified a red-tailed hawk by its cry. During the winters, the family was based in Providence, where one of Nico’s fourth-grade classmates sang in a choir. One day he invited Nico to come along. In Elizabethan choral music, Nico found himself immediately at home. “Downtown Providence was dead,” he said. “Right in the middle of it was this old, grand High Anglican church, run by a bizarre, incomprehensible man, who programmed the most interesting music.” A few months later, Bunny took Nico to Trinity Church in Boston, and the music director asked Nico whether he liked the organ; Nico sat down and played a Bach prelude and fugue from memory. Bunny burst into tears. “How could he even reach the pedals?” she said. “I knew he’d been singing, but I had no idea he’d learned the organ. This amazing thing had been hidden from me.” Later that day, at a café in Harvard Square, Nico began composing a kyrie on a paper napkin. He had suddenly figured out what mattered to him.

  “It was like birdsong—something triggers it and it comes out fullblown,” Frank said. Bunny started bringing home CDs and scores from the Wellesley library, and Nico became seriously obsessed. “One day it was Messiaën,” he said. “The next, I was like, ‘I want to know everything about the marimba.’ Nothing from the nineteenth century, ever. Early, early, modern, modern. That music just made me so insane and happy, like it was a narcotic.”

  Bunny returned to the American Academy in Rome as a guest artist when Nico was twelve. Nico attended Italian public school. A composer’s studio was free at the academy, and one of the scholars agreed to take Nico as a piano student. “At home, he’d been an unusual child in a normal situation, but there, everybody was peculiar, and he could somehow be a normal child in this unusual situation,” Bunny said. Nico said, “The whole thing felt very enchanted. Everyone humored me as much as they could stand to. And I became a musician.”

  Back in Providence, Nico directed all his high school musicals, inserting bits of Stravinsky and ABBA into Bye Bye Birdie. Meanwhile, the financial strains at home were considerable. Nico began to develop OCD with a strong depressive undercurrent. When he was fourteen, he won a place at Tanglewood’s summer music program, where he met young composers, many of them students in prestigious programs: for the first time, he was immersed in a completely musical environment. While Nico lacked their training, he had other experience that made him feel their equal. “I was worldly. I could book a train ticket to Naples. A lot of kids were on a very tight rein; their parents in Korea would call the dorm twice a day.” Nico went on to enroll in both Columbia, for a double major in English and Arabic, and Juilliard. “I entered a manic fugue,” he said. “I had all the self-destructive behavior that you would expect, except it was never going out and fucking guys in the park; it was writing music. I would get up in the middle of the night and hide, turn the monitor brightness to low. It felt like secret eating or something. Then I realized that I could stop obsessing if I drank too much. Which is the worst. So I went to this ridiculous shrink and sorted myself out.”

  Nico is aural and Bunny is visual, but they share the language of food. Bunny is a spectacular chef who grows her own vegetables and can slaughter and dress animals; shortly after I met Nico, he sent me a favorite photo of her holding half a pig carcass. Her French mother was an impeccable housekeeper who owned two duck presses and candied her own violets; when Nico moved into a Columbia dorm, his grandmother sent him a truffle mandolin. Nico claims that he didn’t know you could buy mayonnaise in a store until he went to college. “I think I’m most proud of the fact that he likes that about me,” Bunny said. “I always hoped he would find happiness in something. Music is that. But I’ve given him a sense of playfulness and security about making things and making mistakes and just playing in the kitchen, and it’s good for him and his music.” They resolve their occasional rifts by e-mailing about food, Nico said. “She’ll write me twenty paragraphs about her Swiss chard, and it’s all okay again.”

  You can feel in everything Bunny says an almost fanatical struggle for honesty, while Nico is a fabulist for whom truth is an unshiny thing. They like and grate on each other accordingly, but share a commitment to process. “Inside the music, even if you can’t hear it, t
here’s a little machine that does the thing it’s meant to do,” Nico said. “Some pieces, that’s incredibly laid bare. Other pieces, it’s buried, even erased.” His second album, Mothertongue, includes a simple, pretty melody. “Even though it’s a folk song, there’s this huge piece of math that I figured out, structured my piece around, and then completely forgot about. There’s a commitment to a subnarrative of creation in everything.”

  Nico has been commissioned to do ballet for American Ballet Theatre, an opera for the Metropolitan, arrangements for Björk. Some critics feel his music is too seductive. The composer John Adams, who has been an important influence on him, said, “I am not sure it is a good thing for someone so young to be so concerned with attractiveness of sound.” In Nico’s view, the idea that brilliance cannot be lovely is a vestige of the musical brutalism of post-tonality. “There exists a lingua franca of modern classical music that is indiscriminately ugly,” he said. “Speaks Volumes is very pretty on purpose, just to say you can do this and still have it be meaningful and have emotional content. If there is emotional depth to my stuff, it is from repetitions lulling you into a sense of security and then taking it away, a perversion of what you expect; or something being so pretty and saccharine that you wonder if it’s witch’s candy.”

  Nico usually has two computers on and can compose while playing Scrabble and writing e-mail. “I have no ambition,” he said. “I only have obsession. There’s never a forward motion to it.” He acknowledged that people conflate his exuberance with not yet having found a unique voice. “The whole conversation is made so much easier if you just confess to what you lifted. So if they say my work is derivative, I’m, like, ‘I’ll show you exactly the bar I’m copying from.’” Yet he is ambivalent about the role of language in describing music. “I know people who will not shut up about the nature of art. You’re like, ‘But your music’s bad to listen to.’ If you go to a concert, you shouldn’t struggle to understand it. Honestly, I think part of it is, I’m not an asshole. I want to give people pleasure. Music is a food. You have to consume it. I love the phrase preferable to silence. Is this piece of music preferable to silence? We’re in the business of art, but we’re also in the business of entertainment, and spiritual and emotional nourishment. You have to carry that with you.”