Tango Smackdown! Part 1

(A follow-up to Five Little Pieces)

* * *

Having rung the bell, I wait for Grisha to answer.

He opens the door. I follow him across the small studio.

A handful of CDs cases clack in my bag.

Heh-heh.


* * *

Grisha makes tea while I put on my shoes. I am always losing my blood sugar, and tea thick with honey brings it back fast.

Shoes on, tea made, Grisha asks, What would you like to dance to tonight?

Well, I say, reaching for my bag …

* * *

In my practice time, I have been experimenting with Baroque music. Grisha says it is the kind of music that is closest to tango. Something about the complicated structures.

I don’t hear it. I hear only that Germanic beat, so regular you could set an atomic watch to it. After a while, it wears on my nerves. I don’t see how you can dance tango within that four-square, tyrannical beat.

I enjoy Baroque music. I know it well--the greatest hits anyway. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. These are the kinds of pieces you play when you are doing double duty as a violinist and viola-ist in the eighth grade chamber music ensemble, cobbled together from the stragglers left behind when the rest of the orchestra moved on to high school.

Our little band of string-sawers played like nobody’s business. This Bach was fun stuff: easy and quick. Our conductor dug up a harpsichord, brought it to school. She let us look under its hood. She played it with us. We were brilliant!

It was the best season of my six-years-too-long violin career. I was an orchestral cross-dresser, a viola-ist trapped in the violin section. For one brief, shining moment I lived the dream. Then I too moved on to high school, where there were already plenty of viola-ists, including my sisters, and I was busted back to violin.

I digress. But before we leave this point forever, let me just say for the record that, when at the age of 10 it was time for me to progress from piano to strings, had my mother not dreamed up the hare-brained though possibly accurate notion that I was being a little sister idolizing the older, viola-playing sisters when what I needed was to establish my own orchestral identity (though I love the low notes and hate the spotlight, which makes me a good candidate for viola all around) and had she not given me her own hard push into the violin section--where I languished happily because no one challenges the very last chair of the second violin section for her seat (a challenge being an instrumental duel played out before the whole orchestra, all eyes and not a few snickers on the combatants as each in turn plays a piece of music never seen before, the conductor declaring the winner and sending the loser down the row of chairs, this challenge business being how you work your way up the ladder of chairs until you are the First Chair, or Concert Master, and get to help tune up the orchestra before the concert begins and wear to the Christmas concert a bow tie that lights up, even if you are Jewish, and piss off the conductor, who not only gives you detention but busts you back down to last chair of the second violins [thus bumping the girl in the last chair up to the second-to-last chair], where you promptly begin your climb up the ladder again, challenging that girl who looks scared of her own shadow and has a crush on you to boot)--I would have willingly practiced.

Tonight, I am challenging Grisha.


* * *

… I brought some music to dance to.

Grisha’s hand, enroute to the computer, screeches to a halt. He has anticipated my usual demur and is about to queue up the first song.

Not so fast, Grisha. You said, “Challenge me.”

Game on!

After weeks of picking through my CDs I have chosen

Boccherini’s Minuet from String Quintet in E Minor
Bach’s Minuet and Badinerie from Orchestral Suite 2
The Enchanted Lake scene from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake

Set Swan Lake aside for the moment. I aim to hit Grisha with my best Baroque shot. Boccherini it is.

I pull out the CD out of my bag.

Uh-oh.

Not until this moment does it strikes me: I have made a serious tactical error.

Grisha is a Real Musician. Classical guitar, concert performances, international competitions, college instructor, web site, CDs, high-culture groupies at the stage door. Oh yeah, he’s all that.

The CD I am pulling out of my bag is called Weekend Classics: Light Hits. It’s part of a six-CD set, the kind you find under the Give the Gift of Music! sign in the discount stores at Christmas.

Light Hits means excerpts made famous by their use in TV commercials and Bugs Bunny cartoons. Immortal art for the postmodern crowd.

This was a brilliant plan when I came up with it. After all, you can’t dance tango to a full classical work.

Take Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: 44 minutes. Of those Four Seasons, take just one, Spring. At 11 minutes, that’s not a dance, that’s a tanda!

Or take my favorite, the Brandenburgs. All together: 2 hours. Take just my favorite concerto, number 3: 18 minutes. Take just my favorite bit of number 3, the allegro: 6 minutes.

You’re better off with the Bugs Bunny Boccherini at 4:14.

Grisha looks dubious. I think he is judging this CD by its cover.

I turn it over, show him the playlist. Boccherini is number 1. I doodle-do a few notes.

He turns away.

Bach, he says decisively.

It’s a piano piece, very pure. One by one the notes fall in line. No chords. No fancy fingerings. No straying from the beat. Schoolroom music. This is what I loved to play as a child, loved its soothing regularity, the purity of putting one finger here, then here, then here. Was there sound, too? It did not intrude on my pleasure. I was enrapt in the pressing of keys.

And now the feet pressing. The steps fall into place one by one. Grisha is keeping it simple. I want to enjoy this, but I am not in the mood to dance simple.

The song ends. We step out of the embrace. Grisha looks over with a “How about that?” kind of look.

I shrug. It’s no Boccherini.

Grisha heads back to the computer. He is not giving up. He is determined to make his point.

He peers at his screen, scanning a playlist with thousands of songs.

He says the words “Bach” and “cantata” and “African drums.”


…to be continued

… as soon as I come to my senses