Twice in the past week I’ve experienced the same sense of having a basic insight while in the process of falling asleep. Of course, thoughts that form while the brain is in that transitional state are difficult to communicate under the harsh glare of our ridiculously high waking-life standards for “making sense” and “meaning anything.” But the particular sleepy thought that I had twice this week is actually about thought, and about sleepy thought in particular – and I’ve been able to remember it, unlike most of the brilliant thoughts I have in the middle of the night and then lose forever. So here it is, dressed up as though it’s a poetic thought rather than a sleepy one.

When we’re falling asleep, our thoughts do not necessarily become more muddled or less intelligent, they merely break down into their constituent parts; these molecules of thought become less sticky and float by one another detachedly, combining, if at all, into only the simplest structures. This is a limitation on the sophistication of thought, but it also offers a certain clarity. One thinks of things only insofar as they can be perceived as conceptual atoms, like the indivisible objects on flash cards: rope, apple, ladder, house. The image I had was of a configuration of overlapping straight lines that approximated a curve. In waking thought we think in terms of the illusory curve, but in that crippled state of half-sleep, the mind can see only the straight lines. The curve is metaphor and implication; the curve is the world of half-truth that we live in, and falling asleep I felt wonderfully free of it.

You might well point out that my mind was using a visual metaphor in the course of praising itself for having freed itself of metaphor. Actually, it’s unlikely that you’ll point that out because I doubt that anyone has any idea what I’m talking about here. But no matter; I just wanted to record this while I was still able to recall any of it.

There were much larger implications to the thought, at the time, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to recover them very well. I think – can surmise – that the rest had to do with seeing life for what it is, without trepidation… facing human mortality and insignificance with clarity, freed of the imaginary, implied curves that seem to make them unbearable by day.

My waking-self commentary on all this is that I recognize it as being typically googly falling-asleep thought and, nonetheless, also not untrue. I am moved and grateful to think that there is any moment in my life, waking or otherwise, where I am capable of feeling that I have thought my way into a geometric clarity that dispels the fear of death. You’d be hard pressed to prove that I was “wrong,” after all, so why not?

Also, in a more earthbound connection, I stand by the general observation about the detached/crystallized nature of thought while falling asleep. I have noticed on many occasions that I perceive and parse music with greater clarity and fluency when I am falling asleep, and Beth recently reported the same experience. It’s as though my mind, having given up the task of investigating implications, is freed to devote itself entirely to manipulating the surface of what it hears; I feel particularly ready to grab on to, say, a melody, and recognize and enjoy it as itself. My intuition tells me that this has something to do how my brain is allocating the resources of its linguistic component. I vaguely remember reading some science article long ago about how the sophistication of human visual processing somehow evolved from a part of the brain that originally served a language-related function. Maybe I have that completely backward or maybe I invented it. Anyway, the idea that our visual thought is somehow quasi-linguistic has an intuitive appeal to me, and this feels like a related phenomenon – like the language unit has been given free rein with all the thoughts; or maybe the opposite, that the language unit has shut down and the thoughts are let loose to be themselves. Though, regarding the experience with music, it definitely feels like my brain is reading the music like language and deriving the same sort of immediacy of meaning from it.

Anyway, I thought it would be a nice gift to my falling-asleep brain, who is in some ways a slightly different person from me, to post his thoughts on the internet and thus give him a sort of foothold in the real world. Although he would probably take issue with the patronizing implication that his world isn’t the real world.

But for better or for worse, I get all the mail. This argument seems pretty solid to me. I’ll check in with him and let you know if he has a rebuttal.

Have I just typed something absolutely incoherent? I have the strange snaky sense that I have finally gone and blown my nose all over the internet. But I guess that’s the sort of looseness I’ve been working toward all along here. I feel remarkably disengaged from any kind of shame about this, which is exciting in its way. The question is: in the absence of shame, what will motivate quality-control? I think that I (and others) tend to feel rather invested in vigilant shame as a crucial element of personal upkeep. In my case I’ve finally come around to accepting that it’s more of a hindrance than an asset, but if I’m to become shameless, is there no way to avoid becoming shameless? One wants to establish a mechanism for self-improvement independent of shame. Harder than it sounds. Maybe some shame is a necessity. But, if I’ve really managed to erase it, it’s entirely unobvious where to redraw that line.

The title of this entry, if you hadn’t noticed, has a double meaning. Possibly a triple meaning.

After those first two days of trying to play and post everything that the Sibley library scanned, they really let loose with a whole week’s worth of heavy posting – piano concerti, sonatas, heavy, time-consuming stuff. And I had other stuff to do. So forget that.

But I did end up making one more midi, and so I’m posting it. It’s a full-fledged piano quintet! Of course, I had to start and stop to play the various instruments, and to get things to line up, and to play this nasty, Brahmsian piano part, but don’t let all that fool you – this is still a devil-may-care mistake-ridden rough-through of a piece that I didn’t know. You’ll notice that my tempi are often significantly too fast the first time through a section. On the repeats I usually learn my lesson.

Obviously, all that (plus the fact that midi violins invariably sound absolutely godawful) doesn’t exactly make for much listening satisfaction, but in this case, more than with the previous entries, I actually think these files are legitimately interesting. This is an extremely rare score, never reprinted, of a piece that seems never to have been recorded and, for all I know, has not been performed for 100 years, by a fairly forgotten composer whom I had never heard of before Sibley started scanning his chamber music. And it’s a pretty damn good piece! I certainly got a kick out of it.

Paul Juon (1872-1940)
Quintett für Violine, 2 Bratschen, Violoncello und Klavier, Op.33 (1906)

I. Moderato quasi andante (14:29) &middot II. Molto adagio (6:42) &middot III. Quasi Valse (6:54) &middot IV. Allegro non troppo (6:59)

The piece is one of those sturdy, vigorous Late Romantic sonata-form affairs, and this sort of conservative craftsmanship always pleases me when it’s well-executed. The piece reminds me a great deal of Medtner – one of my favorites – not only in its “Russian Brahms” forms and textures, but also just in its unpretentious conviction; you get the sense that Juon knows exactly what he wants to do and how to do it. It’s the opposite of the Rebikov from the other day, which was more invention than art; there’s no experimentation here, even when the chromatic coloring becomes more “advanced.” Juon is in command of his technique and is working within it.

At some point in the past several years, I realized how much more satisfying I find art made this way – as craftsmanship and taste exercised within standard boundaries. Exploration and innovation is an important part of art, too. But art that accepts a set of terms because they offer promising potential rather than because they are interesting in themselves, and then doesn’t question them – basically, “old-fashioned” art – always leaves me feeling like I’ve encountered something done right, and I genuinely miss that feeling with art that tries to blur or erase the idea of “right,” no matter how intriguing it may manage to be. This is a much much more complicated issue, waiting for the day when I finally talk about the wildly heartfelt anti-modern manifesto I picked up in a bookstore last year, written in the 20s by an aging sculptor of kitschy Romantic monuments, bemoaning the confused mess of pretension and perversity that has killed off the natural meaning of “art.” The upsetting thing is that I think he has a point.

Anyway, there are lots of conservative pieces from the turn of the century in a similar style, but where most of them bore me, this one pleased me because it has flair and drama and a smart, sympathetic sense of what’s interesting. That right there puts it above and beyond your average forgettable Romantic-era chamber work. There’s something broad and clear-headed about the grand Romantic gestures here that puts me in mind of theater or movie music, in a good way, such that even when it’s dripping with dated sentiment, I’m happy to luxuriate in the wholesome old-fashionedness – like watching a charming black-and-white movie; somehow I’m able to genuinely enjoy the content and savor the datedness at the same time.

The first movement has a (to me) thrillingly shameless dark main theme and the whole structure plays out with satisfying strictness. It’s “motivically unified” by that descending 6-note figure, which is a scheme just simple enough to be actually audible. The second movement manages to be both nostalgic-sentimental in a sepia-tinted way and, also, truly unpredictable and odd in its harmonic choices; the overall emotional atmosphere is not what it seems at first. The third movement is a comic waltz-parody thing, with a truly unexpected trio that sounds like it might be a Russian work song. It should maybe all be slower than I played it. The effect is strangely, mysteriously dark, in that indirect “literary” way that I associate with Mahler. The fourth movement is supposed to be one of those energetic folk-tune finales but it gets completely distracted by an outlandishly lavish “love theme” that proceeds to writhe around chromatically in a 1906-ish way. This is my least favorite movement, but by this point I’ve been won over, and the coda makes amends by acknowledging the best parts of the previous movements.

The whole thing has that lovely effect that good classical music can have, of implying vaguely that there is a secret emotional life veiled behind the surface. This is to say that the overall implication of the piece is, to me, darker and more thoughtful than anything that actually happens in it. I think that’s just what good craftsmanship earns you. So maybe the piece isn’t actually the most edifying or brilliant thing out there; so maybe Brahms is more humane and profound, and maybe Medtner’s very similar works are more ambitious and tighter-built. But: it’s all so satisfying and respectable and professional! The existence of music like this, forgotten, unexceptional and also good and well-made, reminds me how high our standards, as audience, ought to be.

I also think this German construction / Russian materials thing just works particularly well for me. Does anyone have any other comparable composers to recommend?