“The language of common practice music theory isn’t very subtle with its erotic connotations.”

Matthew Keating chose to dedicate his life to the piano aged nineteen, having started at music school as a vocalist. This is late by any measure; most accounts suggest professional pianists would do better to begin at nine. However, predictions of his failure would only be proven half-right. He worked seriously on the piano for five years, readying for graduate school auditions, only changing course to pursue writing in 2021. He still plays every day, and plays well. More than this, his understanding of the instrument has comprehensively shaped his artistic vision. In his short story “Education,” chosen for my Editorial Fellowship’s Open Call, his background as a pianist is present in every line, in the structure, and in the subject matter. He summarizes the story this way: “A young piano professor meets privately with his student, and in their mutual attraction he sees reflections of his past intimacy with the teacher who shaped him in graduate school.” Here we discuss Matthew’s practice in more detail, as well as our editorial process.

For my Open Call, I asked to see writing that is “attentive to the present.” Yours fits this description, written in a stream-of-consciousness style. I can’t help but sense your musical background helped you write attentively to the present as well, with both music and literature being temporal arts. How do you think the two interact in your work?

The narrative aspects of classical music were part of what drew me to it. Historically one of the central musical forms in Western classical music is the sonata, which for me is an inherently narrative form. You have an exposition where you introduce themes (usually contrasting), a development where you put them under pressure and explore them more deeply, and then a recapitulation where they return having changed. The fact that these mediums, music and writing, exist in time means you can watch them transform, and thus almost comment on themselves, and that’s probably at the root of my interest there. On a superficial level there’s also something structurally similar about writing a novel, for example, and learning a difficult or lengthy piece of music, in terms of the effort and time involved, and the movement from general to specific.

In his Poetics of Music, Igor Stravinsky describes music as “a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.” How do you think desire plays into all this? It’s a prominent theme in your story.

The language of common practice music theory isn’t very subtle with its erotic connotations. We talk about music as being built from moments of tension and resolution, and often the resolution is climactic, and so on. The chord built on the fifth degree in a scale is called the dominant chord, because it drives a lot of this movement. So there’s a sense in which harmony is constantly seeking some release. In her wonderful book Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson talks about how desire is really a triangular phenomenon, consisting of not only the lover and the beloved but the space or “lack” between them, which is the crucial element that electrifies the entire mechanism. She describes desire as transformational, so when I desire someone, what I want is for them to transform me, to give me what I don’t have. In the story there are a number of ways that I think the narrator experiences that lack, and they quickly become entangled.

At the heart of the story is the Vals op. 38, a musical composition that has a halting push and pull to it. The narrator says that it “would be difficult if not impossible to dance to.” As we looked at different drafts of “Education” together, we became increasingly aware of how this piece’s movement was emblematic of the story as a whole, with that same frustrated dance at its heart. What other discoveries surprised you during the editing process?

Something we spoke a lot about was the notion of attraction and repulsion. The story operates on the assumption that the narrator has a strong attraction to his student, Kate, but we also see him recoiling from it and perhaps from her as well. I knew that the narrator has a lot of discomfort with his desires, but it surprised me just how systematic his ambivalence is in the story. It operates on levels I wasn’t aware of. I felt similarly about the resonance of the Scriabin piece that you mentioned. It was humbling to find that the story was consistent with itself in ways that I didn’t, and probably couldn’t, intend, even at the level of grammar. Early on in the process I got worked up about your suggestions to change specific punctuation, which is something I’m really particular about. Even though that was embarrassing of me—I will say I had never been edited before, so my defensiveness was surprising to me as well—the ensuing conversation was very helpful, because it showed me that I was able to justify the choices I was often making intuitively.

What are your influences, old and new? And how have they affected you?

The writers whose work is closest to my heart are Garth Greenwell, Katie Kitamura, Ben Lerner, Javier Marías, and W.G. Sebald. Rhythm is so important to me in prose. Among most of these writers there’s a tendency towards long sentences, which I gravitate towards, in part because they feel representative of how human thought works, or at least my thought. And I’m very interested in fiction from a phenomenological standpoint: how does it feel to be a human subject? For me this means following through as precisely as possible with both the experience of a narrator and what we might consider their objective reality, and then the interactions between these things. I’m also interested in coincidence and in repetition, which are guiding forces for Marías and Sebald, and for Lerner as well, I think. I write a lot about desire, maybe because it’s a theater in which all of these things, perception, coincidence, repetition, become very charged. Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse, “This is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.” I fell in love with the work of these writers because of my interest in these things, but I’m not sure I knew what I was looking for until I read them.