(Danbury, Connecticut, 6-9-05)

… I left Pleasant Valley for Danbury, Connecticut, the hometown of Charles Ives, whose Three-Page Sonata I placed at the beginning of the recital program. 

As an undergrad at Indiana, I fought tooth and nail to study Ives in a doctoral seminar, and my senior year I gave a lecture on his music before the president of the Ives Society.  Now I’d finally have the chance to meet the composer himself.

At Wooster Cemetery. 

Not knowing where to find the Ives family plot, I rolled through the graveyard’s carefully cultivated hills for nearly an hour, straining my eyes from the driver’s seat looking for just one sign of his name.  

“This is the biggest fucking cemetery I’ve ever seen,” I huffed out loud and began turning the car around to leave Danbury altogether.  And right then I saw it, a large, granite cross with IVES carved into its base.  I clambered from the car to the cross, which was actually for Ives’s grandfather.  This was the family plot. 

 Only a little further back could I see the headstone for the composer, plain and without decoration.  I recognized it from books.  

My heart fluttered as I stood dumbfounded at the foot of his grave, as if I’d just come face to face with a celebrity and didn’t know what to say.

So now what?   

I marched back to the Hyundai and hauled out the big wooden box [my homemade practice keyboard], lugging it over to the plot.  I placed it in front of Charles Ives’s headstone and unsnapped the hinges to its cover, taking it off and exposing the keys.   From the trunk I retrieved Ives’s 114 Songs and opened to the final piece, “Slow March,” a funeral procession that Ives wrote as a child for the family dog.

The piano was silent, of course, but the weight of my arm, the energy in my fingers, everything felt perfect.  I could hear an imaginary baritone singing in my head, and I followed it to the end.  Taking my hands from the keys, I found myself faced with a choice; let this moment remain forever in its perfection - my perfect moment with Ives – or take it further. 

I’d come this far; didn’t I owe it to myself to be the first to play Ives’s music right here at his grave?  And considering I’d memorized the Three-Page Sonata for [this tour], didn’t it only make sense that I also play it here [the morning after the first show]? 

Without further pause, I dropped my left arm into the major sixth interval that begins the piece and that would again and again launch the America 88x50 program.  The music unfolded through the first movement without a mistake.  Then came the second movement, which began fine, but after one forgotten note, and then another, eventually the whole piece dismantled and collapsed.  I was lost.  I took my hands off the keyboard and sat there on the grass, again weighing my options. 

 Start over or pack up?  Either way, I’d ruined the moment.  

The moment?  What moment?

 The tackiness of this whole episode, my “tribute” to Ives, slowly began to surface.  What the fuck was I doing here?  I envisioned the composer, disgraced and helpless in the ground beneath me, his family watching in horror.  I’d embarrassed him, my hero, in the most sacred of places.  And now I had to make it right.  I had to keep playing.  So I started again.

Motherfuck. 

Again, my fingers slipped and my memory failed.  Now disheveled and furious, I started once more, haplessly pounding along until I tumbled into the third movement, and then crashed into the end of the piece.  Fuck.  My pride in a tailspin and dignity in ruins, I tore again into 114 Songs to find another selection, some kind of redemption.

I started playing “Feldensamkeit,” a graceful homage to Brahms that I’d recently arranged for solo piano, but for the life of me I couldn’t even remember how the piece had ever sounded.  And so there I sat, cross-legged and plunking away on the silent keys in total disarray; no imaginary baritone but only my fingers hitting the keys and the empty sound of a piano’s disembodied hammers tapping against wood.  My body felt heavier and heavier with every note, because this moment, this horrible moment — not the concert last night — felt like the true launch of my tour.  My fifty-state tour.

I had to stop.

 The earth seething beneath me, Ives’s grave effectively vandalized, I closed the songbook, the keyboard, and packed everything back into the Hyundai, my head bowed solemnly, ashamed, like I was leaving a funeral.

And as I drove out of Danbury I realized I’d played more for Ives today than I’d ever played for my father.