Good Grief

Adam Tendler's dead dad and the music of too-much-gentleness

Reviewing has one advantage over suicide. In suicide you take it out of yourself; in reviewing you take it out of other people. — George Bernard Shaw

Tonight, instead of killing myself, I’m going to review the Adam Tendler concert that happened at Lincoln Center Saturday night.

Here’s the deal. The whole thing was an album release concert for his record, Inheritances, that came out on Friday from New Amsterdam Records. Tendler, a pianist with the arms of a lumberjack, commissioned every piece on the record from composers who are his friends. Timo Andres, Christopher Cerrone, Missy Mazzoli, Darian Donovan Thomas—that kinda crowd. He paid them with money that came from a surprise inheritance he got from his father when he died in 2020. It wasn’t much, he told the audience from the stage; the money’s already run out. But it was enough to reach out to a star-studded roster of composers like Laurie Anderson and Nico Muhly. Anderson, Muhly, Devonté Hynes, Ted Hearne, inti-figgis vizueta, Scott Wollschleger, and Pamela Z were absent on Saturday, but Andres, Cerrone, Mazzoli, John Glover, Angélica Negrón, Mary Prescott, Marcos Balter, and Sarah Kirkland Snider each spoke about their piece before Tendler played it. Thomas spoke, too, but as a mock-therapist to Tendler, prodding him with questions as he noodled on the piano and half-sang responses. There was a lot of love in the room.

All these composers are well-versed in the art of making soft and sad music, even if it’s not all they do. So they’re perfect picks for an album about grief and Tendler’s fraught relationship with his father. The last time they talked, he said, was Father’s Day 2020. He died the following October. It was one of the few times a year they spoke. They saw each other in person maybe once a year, according to an op-ed Tendler wrote in the New York Times. His father was into conspiracy theories and aliens. He lived in New Hampshire. Their relationship was warm, but they had trouble getting themselves to stay in touch. There seems to have been a fundamental lack of understanding between them. Nevertheless, Tendler clearly loved his father. It was just that, to paraphrase the poetic title (it’s the kind of thing that could have been written by Emily Dickinson) of Darian Donovan Thomas’s piece, they didn’t need to tend the garden of their relationship; it was wildflowers.

I’m really sorry Tendler’s dad died. It must suck. I haven’t had a parent die yet. Maybe if I had, knock on wood, the words of Tendler and his friends and the music would have helped me find the vocabulary and sounds to express my own uncertain feelings about my grief. But if I could relate directly to Tendler’s experience, I’d like to think I’d still have the same criticism of this project, which is that it’s a very limited exploration of grief. Tendler’s sadness and nostalgia were front and center as the primary manifestations of his grief. The moods, textures, and messages of the compositions mirrored these emotions. With one notable exception, each piece was characterized by gentleness. It led me to think, as I walked out of The David Rubenstein Atrium, “Is this really all there is to grief?”

The closest thing I can think of in my own life to Tendler’s experience is the death of my grandfather, Papa Vinny, in 2019. Most of what I knew about him was through my own father, who I’m close with. The two of them were estranged for much of my childhood. Before his Alzheimer’s got bad, I’d talk to him on the phone sometimes, me in Massachusetts, him in Wisconsin. What I remember most is him saying, “Is that all you can say? ‘Oh?’, ‘Yeah?’”, mocking me in response to my frightened, one-word answers to whatever he was saying (which I can’t remember). When he couldn’t take care of himself anymore, we’d visit him at the VA Hospital in Wisconsin. He had totally lost his mind by then, but I remember being nine or ten and playing Gershwin for him—some beginner-level reduction of the themes from Rhapsody in Blue—on a dinky upright piano in the common area and him enjoying it. Except that was the same day my cousin and I were waiting for my dad and aunt to bring the car around to pick us up from the hospital when Papa Vinny turned to my cousin, said he looked stupid wearing the hat he had on, and called him a “roach.” Back in the day, he taught himself trumpet and piano to entertain the family. He was a natural showman. He died listening to music—must’ve been Sinatra or Dean Martin or somebody—through his earbuds. He wasn’t so scary then.

Other than that, I’d hear stories about how mean he was, his infidelities, his ability to say one thing offhand that could be devastating and hurtful to someone—a superpower which I’ve unfortunately inherited, although I’ve never called anyone a “roach.” But I also heard about how entertaining and funny he was, a TV repairman whose shop at 76 Henry St. in Brooklyn Heights was a favorite hangout for writers like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, who both lived around the corner. They’d come in, crank the radio, dance around a bit, likely gossip about the playwright Norman Rosten (another customer) and his probable affair with Marilyn Monroe. At home, the family would beg him to “do the airplane, Vinny, do the airplane!”, after which he’d proceed to take a chair, plop it on the floor, and pretend he was hand-cranking an airplane propeller, making ridiculous noises, and then he’d sit down and mimic flying the plane. He’d have my family in stitches. Hysterical. He thought he was Sid Caesar. I inherited the entertainer gene from him. As well as the “bit” gene—everything is a bit, nothing matters. One time, in 1960, he and my great-uncle made up fake press passes, pasted them on their hats, and snuck into a scene where two planes had crashed in Park Slope (after colliding in mid-air) just because they wanted to get closer to the action. Fake it ’til you make it. I inherited that, too. What the hell am I even doing, writing right now, if not that? I didn’t inherit any money from him, but he’s deep in my DNA.

When he died, I really wanted my dad to feel relief. I had this fantasy that he would come out of his shell, be like a new person, social, happier. It always felt like Papa Vinny was a weight on his shoulders. Without him, he’d be free. But I never saw such a clear change in him. Whatever it was was much more subtle. But I think I changed when he died. I think I got more interested in family in general. And I felt this need to defend my family, our name, our legacy, whatever. Especially after the Irish priest who conducted the funeral rites—attended by just my dad and me—made an Italian joke during the eulogy, which we were just heartbroken by. Part of me thought Vinnie deserved it. A commensurate lack of kindness for all the years of abuse he dealt out to my aunt, father, and grandmother. But I also felt bad for him. I loved him despite all that. And I thought the priest would, too. I mean, he didn’t even know the guy; he had no reason to insult him or our last name. I felt sorry that, even at his grave, Papa Vinny couldn’t be in a loving space. Even at his grave.

Now, I get angry at Papa Vinny. I think about the way my dad is and how he never got any encouragement from his father, only dismissal and degradation. Maybe it’s a Gambuzza thing. Maybe my great-grandfather, Corrado, was like that, too. Maybe I’m doomed to be like that. Maybe I shouldn’t even have kids for fear that my son will turn out like that. But these thoughts are all uncertain and these outcomes are all conditioned and can be changed. Nothing like this is preordained by genetics. My dad is, after all, the total opposite of Papa Vinnie, a loving father to the point that you gotta ask, where could he have possibly learned it? It’s like a miracle. And yet it makes me think, “Hah, take that, Papa Vinnie. He got there despite you. No help from you. How does that make you feel?”

What I’m trying to say is something very obvious: Grief isn’t just sadness. It’s anger, resentment, frustration, confusion, delusion, denial, and whatever else Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said. Violent emotions, not just nice emotions. And what bothered me about Tendler’s program was that the compositions seemed to stop short of probing this side of grief. It was like the composers had begun at the last stage of grief, acceptance, scooted to depression a couple times, and returned to acceptance. If these pieces had been composed this year—four years after Tendler’s dad died—then maybe I’d buy it. But when these were composed, in 2020 or 2021, had Tendler really already reached this stage of grief? Where is the violence?

Take Timo Andres’s piece, An Open Book, which began the concert but which comes later in the actual album. Andres prefaced the performance by saying that, one day, in conversation with him, Tendler called himself “an open book.” Andres later wrote down the phrase to use as a title or inspiration for a composition that he’d write for Tendler in the future. I love Andres’s piece mainly for its pianism. As he and I discussed when I interviewed him on The Best Is Noise in September, Andres is very much equal-parts pianist and composer. This means that, unlike most (all?) of the other composers on the album, Andres really knows how to write for piano. This was evident mainly in the contrapuntal quality of the piece, which was the first thing I noticed and the thing that stuck with me most. The piece sounds modern enough, but this equality of voices throughout most of it gives it a classic feel, one rooted in just the right amount of tradition. Its transition into a Debussy-like homophony of big chords around the middle and its dissolution into George Crumb-like disparate voices in many registers toward the end clinched its status as a piece composed by a pianist, for pianists. (Buy the sheet music here if you want.)

Little did I know at the time, though, that the placid mood of Open Book would run through almost every other piece. Fine, I thought, this is an appropriate way to begin a concert about grief: with a sad piece. But, surely, sadness isn’t the only thing we’ll hear tonight, right? The emotional range of Andres’s piece is rather narrow. Its calm sadness seems to me like the valence electron orbiting around the furthest layer from the nucleus of an atom. This is what sadness is, to me, relative to grief: the most visible manifestation of it, but far from the deepest, most complex, and closest-to-the-heart (and the subconscious) expression of it. The closer you get to the nucleus, the more opaque the sub-feelings of grief get. That’s where you find the uglier things.

Marcos Balter’s False Memories was next, a glacial and sweet elegy with the harmonies of a Poulenc improvisation and the voicing of a Schoenberg Klavierstücke. Then came Christopher Cerrone’s deep, dark, lulling, and abruptly-ending Areas of Refuge, followed by In The City of Shy Hunters, another quiet piece, this time by John Glover, who, to my ears, composed it in a shockingly similar style to Cerrone’s. It was at this point in the concert that I was thinking, alright, come on, let’s pick up the energy a bit, it’s starting to feel a little sentimental. Devonté Hynes’s woodsy, avian Morning Piece didn’t help with this, but Missy Mazzoli’s Forgiveness Machine did: a perpetuum mobile with twinkly repeated figures and syncopations, a machine struggling to stop, finally coming to a halt on a welcome Picardy third. The momentum continued with Angélica Negrón’s erratic You Were My Age, which I want so badly to describe as a “dislocated toccata.” Mary Prescott, in What It Becomes, Sarah Kirkland Snider, in the plum tree I planted still there, and Nico Muhly, in Eires, Sones, all fell into the same trap as before: placid, sad, static, lonely, reserved.

Good grief, where’s the grief?!

“Gesture without communication,” is what comes to mind when I think about these pieces. This isn’t my idea. It’s George Grella’s, my editor at The Brooklyn Rail. He commented on a recent post of mine pointing to his “general disappointment with new American music that comes out of the academies: the composers can’t tell the difference between gestures and communication. Pärt and Copland communicate, [Gabriella] Smith and [John] Adams did not for me [in this particular concert].” Inheritances is not full of music that “came out of the academies,” so maybe this is a problem with new American music in general, full stop. What, exactly, are these composers trying to communicate with the gestures I’ve described above? They use disparate solo voices at the high end of the keyboard, underlaid by polytonal pseudo-bluesy chords (often rumbling) and gentle dissonances, and they relish the subsiding of notes, valuing their dissipation over their attack, resulting in a sound that is dreamlike, hesitant, and airy, but not quite digressive. If there is one thing you can say about these compositions, it’s that they’re all tight. It’s just that what’s contained in them, what we’re to get out of them, isn’t clear. I just don’t know what they’re trying to say. Like a bottle without a message in it.

Counterexample: inti-figgis vizueta. Their piece, hushing, was a message in a bottle. And it seems to be the one that Tendler had the most fun with, too, or at least was most affected by. The physical effect on his body was unmistakable. It begins with rumbling octave tremolos in the bass. Then, one note in the middle of the keyboard pierces this foreboding, oceanic hum, a lightning bolt shot through black clouds. The rumbling continues, major seventh chords meander over it, a major third emerges like a clarion call, the chords get angrier, the tremolos metamorphose, ascending slightly and descending again; rain falls, high notes glittering from the top of the keyboard. Now it sounds like every note is sounding. It’s scary. A home video reel plays behind him—Tendler as a toddler. Pleasant memories made violent by the physical weight of the piano; you can feel how heavy it is in the sound that’s coming from it. It’s huge. I’m on the edge of my seat. The mic Tendler’s been using keeps rotating on its stand, floating closer and closer to his head, which is moving furiously. He pushes it away, it comes slowly back again, he pushes it away, striking an unplanned balancing act between technical difficulties and a wall of almost-out-of-control sound. He stands up, seems to almost punch a note, sits back down, stands up again, winds up his muscular arm, makes a fist, grimaces at the piano, almost punches another note, but restrains himself, like he’s sparing a guy he fought on the street. He does this several more times as the pleasant memories play behind him. As the mic floats closer again. As he closes his eyes and shakes his head and bangs the keyboard. As he misses his father, even as he seems to want to kill him, regretting the fact that he’s already dead. To have done it himself. I’m sweating writing this.

This is what the nucleus of grief sounds like. vizueta communicated this clearly. They made the gestures that every other composer was using live and breathe. They ceased to be mere gestures and turned into almost verbal expressions of frustration, anger, resentment, love-despite-everything, and that feeling of, “AHHH, GOD!, WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DIE?? FUCK YOU.” This is what it means to “speak through music.” I felt it. It was real.

Inheritances is a collection of Charakterstücken—character pieces, in the tradition of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces (1867-1901). With both, it’s apparent from the titles of the compositions that they’re trying to communicate some mood, feeling, or idea: false memories, safety, forgiveness, nostalgia, etc., for Tendler, “Melancholy” (Op. 47), “Vanished Days” (Op. 57), “Thanks” (Op. 62), “Gone” (Op. 71), etc., for Grieg. It has always been impossible to establish a clear item-by-item, 1:1 ratio between absolute music (music without words) and the specific feeling or inner emotional narrative it’s trying to convey. What notes mean what feeling? How are we to interpret, for example, the melancholy middle section of Grieg’s “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen,” which is bookended by celebratory dancy passages? The section is in G major and B major and its main melodic unit is a descending sigh of four notes, usually a sign of despair or longing (think of the basso lamento). And yet the piece is about the composer’s wedding. Does this represent his longing for youth? The fading memory of the wedding itself? A long-lost love who’s not his wife who he misses? It feels like all of these and more. Why the sadness? We’ll never know. But the crucial thing is that I can even come up with these in the first place. And that’s largely because I’m comfortable with Grieg’s harmonic language.

I think what’s going on with this gulf between gesture and communication, about how I couldn’t exactly imagine what many of the composers on Tendler’s album were trying to express, is about our unfamiliarity with new and weird harmonic dialects. I love Grieg, but besides his obsession with chromaticism and his gift for melody-writing (though not at the level of Tchaikovsky), his Lyric Pieces aren’t radical; they’re tonal, diatonic, and they have direction, and thus narrative. I think it’s this narrative quality that makes it easier to figure out what a composer is trying to say because in some odd way, our emotions aren’t orbs of feeling, they are tied to things that happen in our life, and things that happen in our life always happen in succession, and a succession is always a narrative, so emotions are a product of narrative. It’s very hard to know what to feel when a composition is static. This is the problem that Inheritances (and maybe a large portion of new American music in general!) has: an uncertainty about the role of narrative in evoking the audience’s emotions—to the point that composers seem more concerned with expressing themselves than with giving expression to what the audience can’t articulate, but which nevertheless they yearn to be articulated.

With all music, we want someone to speak for us in addition to to us. If Tendler’s composers had done this, they wouldn’t have had to preface their pieces with words. If this is missing the mark, then forgive me; to paraphrase Shaw, unfortunately I do not always arrive at solemn concerts in the frame of mind appropriate to the occasion. Shoot me.