Yearly Archives: 2007

May 12, 2007

Absil: Alternances, Op. 140 (1968)

So bear with me here – I went to the music library and went to the piano section (MU 786.4) and checked out the FIRST score. In shelf order. Still with me?

The first score of the thousands in MU 786.4, at least on Thursday, was Alternances, Op. 140, by Jean Absil (1893-1974).

It’s remarkable, if unsurprising, just how much of the music that has ever managed to get published and shelved in libraries is nonetheless completely forgotten. The fact that 90% of the books in the library are obscure and unloved is less specifically imbued with pathos, for me, than the fact that 90% of the music in the library is obscure and unloved, which is somehow quite moving.

Getting out and playing the alphabetically-very-first score is a typically arbitrary/systematic/arbitrary move on my part, but it’s also sentimentalism: I am likely the first person ever to embrace and consider this score – this piece of art, this expression from a fellow human being! – for its distinction of being the very first volume on the shelf. A meaningless distinction, but an obvious one. One that you’d think would at least partially have saved this one piece out of thousands from being completely forgotten. But it hasn’t at all. But now I’m here, lavishing attention on it.

Jean Absil (1893-1974) was a prolific, fairly prominent Belgian composer of the twentieth century. Prominent for Belgium. Look, they named a school after him. Si ce portrait vous ressemble, vous avez l’esprit “Absil” !

He’s no Truid Aagesen but he’s definitely one of the top contenders in the “first in line” game. In general, Adolphe Adam usually wins that one, his alphabetic predecessors, Absil included, being too obscure for most purposes. If the playing field is big enough to include Absil, he’s also got to watch out for Karl Friedrich Abel – not to mention Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco, though the Dall’ is a wild card that sometimes puts him out of the running altogether.

But this time Absil won, more power to him. Alternances is a late work, written when the composer was 75, but he seems to have been quite productive in his last years, turning out about 50 of his 162 opuses after the age of 70. Fluency of output like that, especially in an old man, seems to have meant, at least in the twentieth century, that the pieces themselves will be seen as statistics rather than known on their own terms. This is certainly the case with the later output of, say, Hindemith and Milhaud, and others who “just kept writing” – I mean, nobody knows the pieces at the bottom of this list. Some of Absil’s earlier output is known and recorded. But not known to me. And this piece, Alternances, so far as I can tell, has never been commercially recorded.

It’s got a lot in common with Milhaud, actually, with whom Absil was friends. As with Milhaud, the overall affect is easygoing and the impetus is generally improvisatory. Or exploratory. The sounds are all familiar and unexceptional Frenchy sounds; all deeply anachronistic by 1968 but I don’t have a problem with that. The piece is a continuous string of very mildly linked episodes, potentially suggesting four movements (Andante/Vivo; Con fuoco; Allegretto; Molto vivo e leggiero) fused together. But the first of these four sections follows a meandering path within itself, and the second one has some problems that I’ll talk about in a second, so the effect is a bit vague, for me, until the second half of the piece. Then things get a bit better. The third section – marked Allegretto but he surely intends something more languid – makes a bit more sense to me. It’s sort of song-like (or flute-solo-like) and has some nice features. And then the finale is a perpetual motion toccata thing, much in the mold of several Ravel finales, with a satisfying 7/8 groove. It has some problems working everything out within the restrictive texture it sets up for itself, but there are several fun effects at the very end and I’m sure it could be sold as exciting in concert.

Many details, as well as the overall sound and formal approach, reminded me of Roussel’s Sonatina (1912), which is, despite being written 56 years earlier by a less mature composer, a more assured and more interesting piece. Absil’s piece is far less muscular and flirts throughout with the danger of being too thin and too loosely knit to hold our attention. Furthermore he seems to have made some miscalculations. On the title page it says circa 14′ but, having played through the whole thing several times, trying different tempi, I cannot for the life of me make it last longer than 12 minutes, and that only by making everything too slow for my taste. The section marked “con fuoco” sounds stupid (totally senza fuoco) played slow – and yet the slow tempo seems to be necessary not just to match the overall duration, but because he throws in a few nasty bars of 16th-notes in the middle of the section that simply cannot be played to tempo unless the rest is slowed down to a drag. Maybe I’m just not getting it. But I think I am.

The weakest aspect of the whole piece is that it relies far too frequently on boring sequential repetition of static material. The sequences are always very short, but still. One of the classic earmarks of second-rate-ness.

The title, I assume, refers to the various figures involving alternation of the hands, which are prominent in several places, as well as to the general alternation of different types of material as the piece progresses (perhaps also alternation of augmented/chromatic harmonies with modal ones, as established at the beginning of the piece and emphasized toward the end).

So on the one hand, I’m saying that this is a mediocre and troubled piece. And I think that’s true. But on the other, let me say that my sentimental side also is touched by the fact that this TOTALLY OBSCURE WORK is far from worthless. The last two sections have their share of genuine charm. More to the point, I had a perfectly good time spending a few hours with the piece and getting to know it.

What does this mean, that even the mediocre isn’t so bad, and that even the better-than-mediocre is doomed to languish in anonymity? Nothing I didn’t already know, but there it is again.

To celebrate its brief time off the eternal shelf, and to nominally offer this sad visitor from the realms of oblivion a tiny chance to live a little more, I here offer up to the internet a scan of the score.

Absil: Alternances, Op. 140

This is a violation of Belgian copyright and I will gladly remove this file if contacted by CeBeDeM, the Centre Belge de Documentation Musicale – or, tell you what, I’ll remove it if I see that more than 10 people have downloaded it. Friends, if you enjoy Alternances by Jean Absil, please purchase a copy – currently on sale for EUR 9,12 (~ $12.30). Plus shipping from Brussels, mind you.

Here is the midi I produced the last time I played it through. As I’ve said before about such things, this is far from a good listen. But it could be a helpful guide to the score. I don’t recommend listening to this UNLESS you’re using it to follow along with the score.

It is possible that my dad will do this, or that he will start it and then stop it because it is boring; it is also quite possible that nobody will do this. But I do not discount the possibility that a complete stranger will listen and follow along, just as I, stumbling unpredictably into the ghost-town-quiet websites of anonymous nobodies, have clicked on their links with genuine interest and sympathy, if not necessarily admiration. And if Jean Absil (1893-1974) benefits from it, who can say that I haven’t done good here.

Alternately – ! – if nobody ever listens to the mediocre thing I offer them, I am in that respect in the good company of Jean Absil, and the whole crowd behind him in line.

absil.jpg

This is the new social reality that the internet puts us face to face with. We the people are like unto the millions of unknown books at the library, shelved alphabetically because any other system would get out of hand. Google can direct us to one another but we no longer can; we are greater in number than our hearts can carry.

Si ce portrait vous ressemble, vous avez l’esprit “Absil” !

This is what I’ve been recently saying to the two people I talk to in real life. I want to write about it eventually; obviously this isn’t the place but all this talk about Absil and websites going unread put me in mind of it so I let out a few cryptic sentences. More to come someday.

Alternances will go back to the library on Tuesday. Wish it well!

Comments (3)
May 11, 2007

Canon perpetuus

The reading-the-western-canon-randomly project is going really well for me, so naturally I thought to apply the same technique to other cultural lacunae.

We had some discussion about doing this for the visual arts but that becomes difficult twice over – 1) because apart from some blatantly commercial “The 10,000 Grrrrrrreatest Paintings Ever!” compendiums, there don’t seem to have been many attempts to articulate an Objective Master List of important artworks; 2) because it’s not clear what degree and depth of exposure ought to be considered satisfactory.

I was coincidentally thinking about this while thinking about jigsaw puzzles. The kind of intimate feeling I get for the geography/personality of a jigsaw puzzle image, while solving it, is a depth of engagement I rarely if ever reach at the museum. Solving a jigsaw engages the analytical/creative side of aesthetic perception – sort of a cheap and stupid way to simulate the process of painting the picture yourself. In sifting and sorting the pieces you end up having to recognize color relations and their significance, formal relationships, proportion, detail, etc. This is not the case with paint-by-number or tracing or any other common crypto-creative task I can think of. Art-school-style copying by sight obviously gives valuable access to the thought and craft behind the painting. But I think maybe jigsaw puzzling, being utterly non-technical, requiring no thought about paint itself, might actually have a more direct relationship to the task of viewing and understanding the finished art.

Maybe not – anyway, so the visual arts are still a bit up in the air.

Movies would be easier to manage systematically, of course – and god knows there are enough lists out there to work with – but 1) I don’t feel like my movie intake needs any kick in the pants like this, and 2) I’m not as convinced as I am in the case of literature that my experiences of “great” “important” movies have been genuinely more valuable to me than my experiences of the lesser stuff. This is odd, come to think of it. With literature there’s really no question that my sense of whether something is “good” and whether I’m glad to have it in my life are basically linked and proportional. Movies I’m less sure. It may simply be that my exposure to “art” movies has been too limited, in proportional relationship to multiple viewings of Back to the Future, to affect my overall sense of what movies are and ought to be.

Also came across this when I was looking into the issue, wherein Paul Schrader says he started to write a film canon book and then got disenchanted with the idea that it should exist at all. Eh. I’m not gonna get into it here, but despite my distaste for Bloom’s idea that his canon is “for real” in any sense, lists are valuable, as my exercise shows, and a well-made list of film worth seeing would be appreciated.

Okay, anyway, so the one that I am, in fact, currently taking on, is music, by which I’m talking about classical music – by which I’m talking about, if you insist, “Western” classical music, which is what you absolutely already knew I meant.

There are a bunch of “canon” type lists out there about classical music, but many of them list recordings rather than works, since these books are written for the “just tell me what to buy” market. As far as I can tell, the only pretentiously high-minded Bloom-style effort is David Dubal’s The Essential Canon of Classical Music, which satisfies me in terms of being both grandiose in its claims and also attempting to be evenhanded in representing the long-term cultural consensus rather than anything snootier. I.e. it includes Carmina Burana.

Of course if you look too close at any such list, the arbitrary nature starts to become apparent. So, having looked it over initially, I’m not going to evaluate any more. I have a list, and it has 750 works on it – which is a nice big round number.

Beth’s joining me on this one, by the way.

The rules are: once a piece comes up, we have to listen to it attentively, in its entirety, at least 3 times. That may seem easygoing but it’s nothing to snort at in the case of Parsifal and the like. But I’ll be honest with you – that’s just there so that Beth can stay in the game and so that I can move on fairly quickly in case of something really desperately unappealing. My actual personal goal is to listen to a piece until I know it and get it to my satisfaction. In my case I’ve found that this generally requires at least 9 listens.

What with ipods and the subway, though, this is actually a snap. Much easier than reading German poetry on the subway, which I have found is impossible.

The first Essential Canonic Classical Musical Work has been completed and will be written about someday soon, now that I got this intro out of the way.

I make a lot of hurdles for myself.

April 27, 2007

The Floating Opera (1956)

2420: The Floating Opera by John Barth.

John Barth (1930- ), The Floating Opera, written 1955, published with the ending changed at the publisher’s request in 1956. Revised edition with the original ending restored published in 1967.

The following block of text comes to you from the past:

I’ve had the good sense, in this case, to write my thoughts as I’m having them rather than some months after forgetting them.

This book reminds me of my writing, not in the usual sense that it reminds me of my aspirations or thought processes, but that it reads like the actual things I write, or at least like the things I was trying to write when I was twenty-four, which is how old John Barth was when he wrote this. That is, more than a little annoying. My own attempts at fiction, as of a few years ago, usually disappointed me – they would spool out in a stream of clever improvisation, and then upon being read would reveal themselves as irritating and limp. Far more busy than they were purposeful. I guess that’s no surprise since I usually had no purpose in mind.

The Floating Opera began by inspiring not just a “yeah, I could write this,” but an “oh, man, this is exactly the sort of annoying thing I might write.” But then after a few chapters it had developed to “I could definitely see slightly-younger-me writing any given annoying piece of this, and even coming up with the plan for the whole, but if I had actually managed to write the whole, which is seeming to me slightly but significantly greater than the parts, I’d be pretty impressed with myself.” It’s an interesting experience; usually in matching wits with a writer as I read, I am either eventually left shamefully far behind (“Once again, I have absolutely no idea what should come next on any level, and thank god I don’t have to write it”) or I win by a landslide (“Gimme a break!”). This time I find myself keeping pace but finding the sensation of distance unfamiliar. You mean if he just keeps up this college-kid gimmicky crap all the way to the end, he’s going to end up in the Western Canon? Really?

So on the one hand, hooray, maybe I could write this, but on the other hand, boo, I don’t think it’s very good. It’s better than what it threatens at first to be, which is a charmless and nerdified imitation of the Tristram Shandy meta-narrative gimmicks, which depend exclusively upon charm to succeed. But it is that, despite what else it manages to be, and the choice to give a wide berth to cute disorder is the hallmark of the young, unpracticed jerk. Someone was complaining about this in Slate, I think, recently, in re: Advanced Topics In Calamity Physics* but also applicable to the whole post-McSweeney’s phenomenon of the “wildly ambitious” “post-modern” potpourri novel with self-referential footnotes and one page that you need to read in the mirror, by some young, unpracticed jerk. I think it’s particularly damning of Jonathan Safran Foer et ilk (and of those reviewers who have gone coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs) that The Floating Opera was written in 1955 and already plays the same game of willful novelty loosely stitched into sentimental shapes. In the 50s it feels slightly ahead of its time; by 1973 when Kurt Vonnegut was writing Breakfast of Champions he had to go overboard to get it to register because the basic gag was old news. Why then are we still so charmed out of our pants by the present day that we think that it, not to mention Dave Eggers or whoever, deserves credit for confronting modern society and coming up with this stuff?

Okay, I probably didn’t deserve “coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs,” but right now I’m trying to train myself to leave in the color rather than assess it out of existence.

If there’s anything we can learn from watching old TV clips on Youtube, it’s that by the end of the 70s (i.e. by the time I was born) both cynicism and post-cynicism had been well established and explored. Better would be “insincerity and post-insincerity.” I feel like post-insincerity has been getting pats on the back for several years now, but, and here’s what I’m saying, that’s the game of young unpracticed jerks, a fact which has been known for at least 50 years if not thousands.

* I tried to parody that title but it resists by pre-emptive snark, which is part of the point here.

By the end, Barth had outpaced me, so I grumblingly credited his book for being better than just a bunch of college-kid stuff. But now, in deeper retrospect, I see it as a bunch of college-kid stuff after all. It just covers its tracks as it goes with more skill than the start leads you to expect. The book manages to tuck in its chin as it dives, making it seem like all the clumsiness at the beginning was just a piece in a well-oiled puzzle. But that itself is just another sort of gimmick.

The book was more or less on the topic of “to be or not to be?” and more generally, “what’s it all about?” That might be “deep” but it doesn’t take much to get there; and, also, anything at all can potentially relate to that topic. It doesn’t really excuse sloppiness for it later to be revealed as part of a well-oiled tapestry of sloppiness, which is meant to evoke that oiliest tapestry of all, life. You can throw anything against that wall and it’ll stick.

But there is talent and ambition here beyond just showing off. The higher aspirations, when they rise to the surface, are similar (in my mind) to what Camus was doing in The Stranger, which I read last year. Barth wants us to notice how things are not in themselves inherently meaningful; that if we do not have a moral relationship to things, their natural state is to have no meaning, no moral value in themselves, and that life itself is potentially just as meaningless. Stated like that it’s old hat. Camus makes the idea haunting through his art; Barth’s art, by contrast, wanders around sniffing at stuff and then, in the end, reaches out and pushes the idea directly on the nose. Honks it, in fact.

The ending that his original publisher made him change – uh, spoiler alert, as they say – is that the protagonist attempts to kill himself and a lot of other people because there’s no reason to go on living, and it doesn’t work, and that doesn’t bother him because there’s no reason not to go on living. Apparently in the version that Barth changed to finally get the thing published, the guy actively decides not to kill everyone, because he sees his baby daughter and realizes that he loves her, or something similar. Hard to find a copy of that version these days.

It was hard to find this one too. I could have bought a new paperback copy but I had a feeling I wouldn’t want to keep this one – unless it was aesthetically satisfying to own. And the current paperback edition isn’t. It isn’t cheap, either. The copy I read as pictured here – first edition of the revised version – was brought out to me from the closed stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library. To which it has since returned.

We could sit here and speculate about why this was on Harold Bloom’s list, but I’ve got better things to do. I didn’t mind reading it; I just don’t recommend it. When the time comes I’ll be perfectly glad to read Giles Goat-Boy or whatever the next Barth on the list is. Interested even. I’ll bet he got better.

Comments (1)
April 6, 2007

Wake Up

That’s hardly an appropriate title for this waltz thing, but there it is.

Trying to fight the speed demons, so I halved the tempo in the final stages of composition and turned it into something else entirely. Before that it was quite a whirlwind.

Now it’s like the last dream before waking. It’s sort of a romantic dream but it doesn’t fully make sense. At the end you wake up.

Wake Up Thing

When I write kooky stuff like this, I think the intended sense – what there is of it – frequently gets lost in translation prior to reaching the listener’s ears, due to my playing and the quality of the synthesizer and, probably, compositional shortcomings. I know that sometimes when I walk away and come back to music I’m writing, it suddenly sounds like just a mess, and I’m unable to pick up the thread of intention from where I left it. Even when I sort of remember the gist of what I had in mind, it can still be hard to figure out what I thought I was doing. And that’s me, so you’re all screwed, I guess.

That’s only sometimes, mind you.

I find this isn’t nearly as much of a problem with the “orchestrated” pieces as with the piano ones. The more timbres there are, the more specific each moment becomes, and so a lot of the listening comprehension is done for you, in a sense. So I’m giving everyone a break on this one with an orchestrated version. You’re welcome.

Wake Up Thing For Full Damn Orchestra

NOW do you get it? Maybe.

Comments (1)
April 6, 2007

Juno and the Paycock (1924)

by Sean O’Casey (1880-1964)

Roll 4: 1418. That’s The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey, but of course I’ve never read anything by Sean O’Casey so I have to go back to the first work under his name: Juno and the Paycock.

Went to the local used bookstore and had several options; I went for a quaintly dirty pocket edition with a weirdly endearing picture of O’Casey on the cover.

When I’m looking for a play, it seems always to be readily available at the first bookstore I try – and this feels reasonable, because: who ever buys plays? Nobody. So of course they’re all still there for me. The same is not true of poetry, however, despite its no doubt being an even slower seller than drama. In that case the problem is, I assume, that bookstores must buy their poetry stock more or less at random. You’re gonna tell me there’s a poetry buff on staff in every bookstore in the country? Not possible.

Am I joking? I think I’m joking.

Anyway, Irish playwright, Dublin tenement, tragicomedy. I’ve been reluctant to write about this play because it went about that fast, and it was months ago. I read it at just under the speed of performance, which is very very fast by reading standards, despite being essentially the “intended” speed of the work. Intended or not, it didn’t make a strong impression. This is a problem with plays, which weigh so much less than novels, and I’m not sure what the solution is for a reader. Seeing the play, obviously, would be better than reading it – though again there are problems with that as well; usually even when I see a play, I still feel underexposed. After the performance I generally wish I could go back and run over certain scenes again (or, if I wasn’t impressed, am happy to let loose a memory hell-bent on fading).

I get that a poem of 8 lines can be “as good” as a novel of 500 pages because of the apples and the oranges, but somehow with plays, the fruit-rating metaphor doesn’t satisfy me. With a play, something about artistic scale always seems actually to be out of whack. How can a play be as serious as a book? A movie, which lasts about as long as a play and is at least superficially similar in presentation, is not a problem for me; I see what movies have that let them “rate” as artistic objects of worth. Why do plays still feel thin?

In a recent conversation it was put to me that plays do not have the same peculiar power to engage that movies have because in a play the people are small and manifestly far away, whereas in a movie, the people occupy enough of our field of vision to call on our social instincts. Faces in a movie appear in our brains more or less at the scale of people who are only a few feet away, and whose actions therefore require not just comprehension but actual emotional response. Speculative though it may be, I find this quasi-biological explanation extremely convincing.

But there’s another reason that plays seem thin, I think, which is that plays are, compared to movies, thin. On content. A movie screenplay might only be as long as a stage script, but the movie itself is enriched ten thousand times over by that other pictureworth of words in every frame. A play is not made of pictures; it’s made of people, clothes, curtains, and stuff, and nobody ever said people, clothes, curtains, and stuff are worth ten thousand words. Understandably. A photograph of a play in some ways offers me more room for the imagination than the play itself; in the moment that the event actually happens, if I’m there, I am unavoidably aware of the actuality of people on a stage, which actually leaves less of my consciousness free for entering into the created world. The live presence of live people is supposed to be the essence of the magic of theater, but if the magic involves a world other than the theater in which those people exist with you, can’t their presence actually dampen the magic?

Theater, unlike film and literature, is openly false. The falseness can be put in the service of “truth,” but the falseness is essential. Yes, I know, fiction is lies, and film is essentially illusion, but lies and illusion are different from falseness. Lies and illusion can be taken for the truth. For the most part theater embraces this falseness, and why not? It’s a pretty steep uphill battle to convince anyone that a stage is anything other than a stage. Better just to offer the audience that it “represents” something else, in the realm of the imagination.

Plays, despite being presented to our faces, take place in the imagination. Movies do not. Books do, but, a-ha my point, books are much longer.

A play bears the same relationship to its script that a musical performance does to its score; a movie, by contrast, is the fungal organic mess that grows all over the rigid planter of the screenplay. Id est, much more complex. The additional complexity in a play is supposed to be in the performances, and in some spark of danger that comes from the live phenomenon – and maybe, like I said that time, in the weird communal temple of doom aspect. To me, though, these things generally don’t balance out the tens of thousands of other words that I might have gotten from pictures, or from a book that includes, literally, tens of thousands of other words.

Which is to say that this play didn’t make a serious impression… and that I’m not sure how to make the next play I read make a serious impression, either.

Some comments about the play itself, to prove that I read it: the tragic and comic elements alternate and mingle and jostle for attention in an interesting way. There’s something potent about having outright vaudeville routines thrown at you in a very grim context, particularly because in this case the intention of the playwright was not obvious. He wasn’t up to any normal showmanly thing: trying to shock or draw a contrast or to offer relief or anything like that. I’m not even sure he intended the juxtaposition to be unusual. I think he was both aiming higher than all of that, and also thinking less about it. The comedy face/tragedy face thing seems like it’s been part of the Irish self-image since well before Sean O’Casey. Melodrama alternating with slapstick was the bread and butter of the popular theater for years and years, too, so in that sense the material was just of its time. But the play also had “realist” aspirations – what with all the social ills! – and that put a weird spin on the broader stuff. In part I think he was doing it intentionally; in part I think it’s just aged a little funny.

If you didn’t notice from its title: this play is one of those “dialect texts” where the author has taken pains to capture the couple of local peculiarities of speech that strike him as significant, every time they occur. Exempli gratia: “I wasn’t in ayther wan snug or dh’other.” This makes for rough reading, though I guess it would also make for rough listening. Anyway, dialect transcription like this can be a sign of either earnest realism or broad comedy. In this case it was both. As with Huckleberry Finn.

I think that the aesthetic impact of these tensions in the material could probably be increased to the point of being very satisfying by a good performance. All in all, this is a performer’s play. Lots of opportunities to make business and life out of it. Like reading a promising sitcom script – I’m not laughing at these words, but someone might use them to make me laugh. Someone might use this play to make me feel something. Then again they might fail to.

In telling someone about my reading scheme, I mentioned that I had read this play, and she said she’d actually seen the play performed. I, curious about what kind of life it might take on in the flesh, asked how it was. She said, “amazing.” That was that.

There’s a whole essay to be written about my problem with people saying that things are “amazing,” but since I don’t plan to write it, I’ll tell you what the problem is right here. It’s this: When I was young, old fogies would sometimes complain that the words “fantastic” and “unbelievable” were being widely abused by airheads, but at that time, at least, you could still take these to be exaggerated versions of “good!” Nowadays, these words, and especially “amazing,” no longer necessarily mean even “good.” “Amazing” frequently means nothing, because people seem to use it when called upon to voice opinions about things they have no clear opinions about. When someone, especially someone I don’t know very well (as was the case in this example) tells me that something is “amazing,” I usually get the impression only that the person wants to align him/herself with other proponents of that thing, not that the person himself has any positive assessment of the thing itself.

On the other hand, I know quite a few people who say “amazing” when they have any strong genuine reaction to a thing. In one sense they are saying that they are amazed that anything in this vale of ennui has the capacity to actually impress. Beth has pointed out with amusement how these people I know – actors, they are – seem to say “it’s kind of amazing” several times per conversation. I’ll admit that in the heat of it all I sometimes fail to notice things like this.

Back to Juno (and the paycock):

Is there a faithful Hitchcock film of this play featuring several of the original cast members? Yes, there is. Why haven’t I watched that yet? I don’t know.

Is there a failed Marc Blitzstein musical called Juno based on this play? Yes, there is. Why haven’t I watched that? You can’t. Not even at the New York Public Library. All right, actually, they have video of this revival but I don’t really want to make an appointment just to watch THAT. Well, okay, maybe I will sometime. Eh.

Juno and the Peacock, by the way, is a tale from Aesop. I didn’t know this previously.

I want to note that this, my fifth Western Canon selection, was the first that I didn’t have to read in translation. It was actually written in English, for a change. Well, sort of English.

Comments (3)
February 11, 2007

Salonen: Piano Concerto (2006-2007)

Esa-Pekka Salonen (1958- )
Piano Concerto (2006-2007)
Yefim Bronfman, piano
New York Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen

[Now with sound clips! Climax? of the first movement]

World premiere! Well, last week it was.

Didn’t really do it for me, nor, I think, for the composer or the soloist or anyone else involved. There was a little interview session prior to the performance and a Q&A afterward, and the feeling in the air was, “The piece isn’t terrific but the commission has definitely been fulfilled.” Bronfman couldn’t be brought to say much at all about the piece – though I thought his performance was strong. I’ve seen him perform once before and heard several of his recordings and have never been particularly impressed, but this time I was. Of course, there was less occasion for him to attain clarity here. Or at least I was less aware of what sort of clarity I could hope for from him.

The piano part certainly seemed to be full of difficulties. Not clear to what end. The piece was imitative of a thousand things from the repertoire and didn’t have much in the way of form beyond the list of consecutive episodes that constituted the composer’s program note. Motivic unity is not form; the fact that one section develops a previous section or is derived from the same material is not a reason for that section to exist. The piece seemed to want to be a guided stroll past a series of landscapes, possibly fantastical ones – several references to sci-fi imagery in the descriptive notes – in other words, a piece that’s going to live or die on the strength of its color and variety and mood, forget form. If that’s the choice you’re making – and I generally have no problem with that choice – then your superficial effects had better be really good, and these were only so-so. It didn’t help that John Adam’s Piano Concerto (Century Rolls) is built on very similar lines (even in some of the particulars), out of very similar materials, and gleams and pops and whizzes that much louder and brighter. And I don’t think that’s his greatest piece. But in the game of superficial panache, he’s just much more practiced.

At one point in the program note he says that something happens “accompanied by a very lightly scored orchestra.” It wasn’t “very lightly scored” at all! Only by the standards of this constantly thick-textured piece, maybe. Trends in both classical and pop music have definitely driven the contemporary composer to believe that a big part of his job is arranging the dense web of the orchestra, and I certainly appreciate a nicely worked-out texture – but actually it takes much more craft and taste to let the the instruments be exposed in their simplest guises. Endless orchestral busywork starts to seem like a way of avoiding the strictures of that craft. Another sign is overuse of tuned drums, which are, to me, just a big traffic sign that advertises “the clamor of modern orchestral music!” and little else.

Salonen had a section he called “Synthetic Folk Music with Artificial Birds” – i.e. an idyll by and for robots – which is a promising enough musical concept. I just didn’t think his synthetic folk music or his artificial birds were particularly striking. Whereas the mechanical nightingale in Stravinsky’s Nightingale – created much more simply and efficiently than this thick-textured thing – delighted me the first time I heard it. Casting off form might seem to be freeing – he talked a lot about the ideal of a piece developing organically – but it actually just places even greater stress on the quality of your musical surface, and more formal import on its subtleties. This surface just wasn’t handled with as much control as it required.

I can now add several more things, because I have obtained, er, a reviewer’s copy of the score. One: that this piece has the telltale signs of having been composed on a synthesizer and then orchestrated to match. Two: that the chords that come off as copies of Scriabin, Messiaen and Ravel are actually spelled all funny, because they’ve been obtained by some quasi-modal procedures, which makes the imitations both more and less frustrating. Less, because they seem not to be conscious imitations after all (as the New York Times assumed they were). More, because what’s happened is he’s set up some pseudo-system to make his piece have its own peculiar “sound-world,” as they say, and then, letting his ear guide him through the chords it produces, has ended up choosing the ones that are familiar from other music. Basically he tried to do the kind of scale-as-harmony-as-melody thing that Scriabin did, but without the extreme rigor or the maniacal quality. But those are exactly what make Scriabin’s music work. Instead we end up with something that sounds like John Adams, but less well-orchestrated and with even more noodling, if you can believe that.

Another thought, thunk both at the concert and again upon study of the score – there are thousands and thousands of ways to deploy the composer’s toolbox to “develop” material, and most of them absolutely unfollowable. To disguise some piece of music such that people can’t recognize it is the easiest thing in the world; in fact it will happen whether you like it or not unless you are very very careful and make only the slightest movements. The contemporary composer’s need to show that he’s done hard work and created a complicated, priceworthy, thing tends to drive him to deploy trick after trick after trick, like a movie progressing from a dream sequence directly to a flashback directly to a montage directly to a movie-within-a-movie. Much harder for everyone is to maintain a narrative that can be followed, and then, when it is followed, reveals something that interests people. Easy, and tired, to say that that’s old-fashioned. It very obviously isn’t, it’s just harder.

I don’t believe that composers, writers or other artists now are less talented or stupider than artists of yore – I just think they’ve been prodded and taunted with a bunch of imaginary nonsense that they spend all their energy trying to duck out from under, and it doesn’t take long for all that twitching to become second-nature; unshakable even after someone points out there’s nothing to duck. I think everyone’s shell-shocked by this phantom idea that some damage has been done to the human spirit that must be given its due. That’s some rather extravagant self-pity modern man has going. Yes, we may have the threat of actual self-annihilation whirring somewhere far over our heads, and there’s definitely something grotesque about the falseness and noise that technology and commercial culture have imposed on the world – but please, this means that wanting to look at a painting is now naive? Unless the painting somehow excuses itself? Who made this up? People who lived through the Peloponnesian War probably said, “I saw so many atrocities; Nothing will ever be the same – no more sculpture of Aphrodite in the garden – we know more than that now, our souls are forever fractured.” But that’s just individuals being traumatized, not society. Plus, society seems to put itself back together pretty fast. Why does this wounded sense of lost innocence have to live on forever in the arts? Sitting in the concert hall, having to think about all the reasons why this piece was what it was rather than one of the myriad things we all know to make sense – I have to say that I felt no communal awareness of the uniquely contemporary absurdity of the human condition – I just felt a weary, dutiful openness to nonsense.

Two anecdotes and then I’ll stop, I’ll really stop. 1) During the Q & A, a guy asked whether he had been right in hearing “Gershwin and American jazz” in the piece. Salonen said that he had two answers, the first being some chat about his experiences with America and L.A., the second being the laugh line: “Why not?” I recount this only to point out that “why not” might be down-to-earth but it’s still on the defensive. The Q & A guy had obviously been happy to recognize Gershwin sounds; there wasn’t the slightest hint of animosity in the room toward the idea of using those sounds in a piece. But that animosity was somewhere, lurking, and Salonen couldn’t help but direct his answer at it. Or, rather, he directed his answer conspiratorially at the audience, as though maybe we were all going to sneak out of class while the teacher wasn’t looking. Who is this teacher?? World War II? World War I? Snap out of it!

2) During the initial interviews, the man behind me, one of the hundreds of aging, practiced orchestra-goers that made up the bulk of the audience, muttered “Bullshit!” angrily under his breath. It wasn’t clear what was being objected to – Salonen was in the middle of saying something about trying to let music grow rather than force it into a form. I suppose the man might have thought that compositional approach was bullshit, or maybe that metaphors in general were bullshit. But I think it’s more likely that he came prepared for some kind of bullshit, was eager to call it by its name, and just jumped the gun a little. This is a perfect example of what happens to criers of “wolf,” e.g. the past 50 years of art. Something something, in a crowded theater, something something. Okay, the end.

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January 26, 2007

Only Problem With People

Been doing a lot of thinking about how to “fix” myself (as in correct, not immobilize) and have reached the conclusion that the only problem with me is the same as the only problem with all people; namely: that the time at which I undertake any action or react to any stimulus is the present, and the present is burdened by having the conscious self in it. Repeated “arguments” with various friends and girlfriends to the tune of “I suck / you don’t have to feel that way / now you’re telling me I’m wrong about that too” – that’s me in the middle voice – have convinced me that the conscious self is too much ITSELF to be persuaded or comforted by things that are not itself. Giving up the self seems worse than resenting it, to the self, since the only alternative is the void of non-self, to which none but the completely broken willingly submits. This is why nobody takes advice; advice is at best, potentially, a virus that regenerates within the self after being forcibly injected. But most selves have better immune systems than to allow that. Otherwise, one can either try to coax another’s self into doing something – which generally requires greater facility with it than either party will ever have – or simply wait for a random mutation in the right direction and then apply the environmental pressures that select for it.

But as I say, this is all a problem only at the point in time that is the present – the addict can plan to quit or regret failing to quit with full clarity because these take place external to the conscious self, the read-head of consciousness that is always present at the current point in time and no other.

Generally, people would do just what they ought to do if only they weren’t themselves. That is, their personalities are such that they would no doubt agree with you about what they ought to do. Of course, they might not at first approach, because their sense of self is so expansive that it will ooze along the timeline all the way to the time at which the issue is being discussed. In trying to change myself I have done the preliminary work of pruning and pruning this expanded sense of self until it exists only at the infinitesimal point in time that is the present. At least as regards the undesirable traits. The idea then, as with the addict, is to somehow stamp it out once it has been reduced to a point. But once holed up in an impenetrable temporal pinpoint of consciousness it is exceedingly resilient. Cockroach-like.

Seems to me this is the only real problem with people. Evil/immorality – and ignorance and whatever else you might throw at people – are just shortcomings inherent to the natural of the creature. It makes perfect sense that people would be a little moral, a little immoral, a little curious, a little incurious. Look around; it all makes sense and isn’t a problem once you know the rules. It can make trouble, sure, but I don’t feel my philosophical self banging and banging away at it with a shoe – it needs to be lived with and so can be. This self-protective infinitesimal non-entity that is the self, though, is a problem. Can’t live without it, obviously. But it’s a downright wrench in the works.

I have been convinced – by parties other than the self, no less! – that it does me no good to consider an audience, when I write here. It just slows me up and ruins everything I have to say. I think I have successfully written this one without consideration for you. Quickly, too, for a change. Gonna try to keep that up. Insufficiently like-minded comments, therefore, may have to be disregarded. Until I get a little more sturdy. Sorry. You’re still invited to respond as you wish but I may just move on rather than take you seriously, if it feels like that will be erosive to what I’m trying to cultivate internally here. I think I’ve put myself through a fair amount of erosion over the past year of doing this. That no doubt accounts for the drastically lower post volume. Let’s try again.

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January 14, 2007

The Cossacks (1863)

by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)

translation of Kazaki into English by Peter Constantine (Modern Library, 2006)

Third roll: 989 – lands me on “Tolstoy: Short Novels,” from whence I bounce back to the first unread Tolstoy on the list, which turns out to be the first Tolstoy on the list, I not having read anything by Tolstoy other than, I think, a short story or two long ago. The first Tolstoy on the list is The Cossacks. A new translation had just come out last year so I was immediately able to pick up a copy of it, again at the Strand Annex, for $6 or something like that. See above for visual aid.

This Modern Library edition dates it to 1862 but the internet consensus seems to be 1863. In any case it was in the works for 10 years or so, presumably started around the time in Tolstoy’s life that it surely represents. It’s a young man’s work about being a young man. A certain type of young man’s work about being a certain type of young man, in fact. To jump directly to my opinion: the book is clearly an effort to have a broader perspective on the foibles of this certain type of young man – the author wants to write as though he is able to look in from the outside and observe truths that just happen to be about who he is, or was. But I don’t think the author was as much more mature than his past-self protagonist as he must have thought. The perspective is lacking.

The book started with a brisk portrait of this kid, Olenin – philosophically curious and reasonably self-aware about how privileged and pampered his life is, but all the same, blindingly self-centered – and I was immediately excited at the prospect that it would have something to say to my generation. Possibly something chastening. Presumably something sturdier than whatever Indecision was saying (with its mouth full). But in the end – skipping to the end – it’s not clear that it was saying anything much. It’s not clear to me what Olenin should have or could have learned. It definitely comes across that Tolstoy, in living among the Cossacks as described in the book, felt that their spiritually and psychologically uncomplicated existences were a humiliating counter-example to his own personality, and that that felt like a significant life experience to him. But isn’t that itself a pretty self-centered way of seeing the world? Yes, and Tolstoy tries to acknowledge that by making the romantic significance that Olenin imparts to the Cossacks seem slightly ridiculous. Yet the book itself clearly believes that their straightforward rurality is indeed a thing of great and significant beauty – he saves his most attentive writing for descriptions of the dirt and the cows and the smells and sounds. In any case, making Olenin’s various philosophical passions out to be “naive” seemed to be the full extent of the higher authorial wisdom. The real intention here was, I believe, to record a setting and a frame of mind that were memorable and intense in the living. It was all right as a fictionalized memoir, limited but still interesting as a character study (and a cultural study), and frustrating as a novel (or novella, really – it’s quite short).

It could be argued that this is a book about a life-changing experience that intentionally leaves the life-changing for after the curtain has fallen. That wouldn’t be a bad idea for a book, and I could be convinced that this was that book. Whatever the intention, though, it doesn’t change the fact that I finished it feeling that it hadn’t given me enough thoughts to chew on about the action. Olenin’s plentiful thoughts don’t count – they are the action. And don’t try telling me that the book was an impartial rendering of events, offered up to us to interpret or not as we like. Please. If it was that, it was only that by default.

Despite its being, as stated, quite short, it still took me a long time to get through this because I was reading it aloud, which always slows things down drastically. We ended up doing this a chapter at a time, and it’s made up of many short little chapters. Peter Constantine did a perfectly fine job making the English readable, but I wouldn’t recommend giving this one that kind of slow and careful attention – the form is something less than taut and it would probably best be read quickly in one or two long gulps. The old Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, which I think was the only English version available prior to last year, seems, on skimming, perfectly acceptable. Yes, it’s a little 19th-century-cated, but so is Tolstoy.

I did come away with a more specific interest than previously in reading Tolstoy’s more mature, more famous works. There were a few ambitious scenes of philosophical revelation in The Cossacks that were intriguing and admirable when taken in isolation, and I got excited about the prospect of seeing the same sort of thing done with greater control. Next Tolstoy will be War and Peace. Whenever that comes up.

Oops, finished, but then I thought of this to say – one section of the book portrays Olenin going, nervously, in the throes of a wicked crush, to a party with a bunch of giggling girls, and then, after the evening plays out, returning home to muse on the fantastic, near-universal significance of everything that has happened. This scene, and others, I thought, were very successful at evoking high school. My dismay, then, was that nowhere in the book did we get to hear from the Daniel Stern voice, so to speak. Without that guy putting it in perspective, high school is just a big mess; we need that guide to help us differentiate our attitude toward high school gossip from the attitude of high school kids. If we don’t think Olenin’s love is as real as Olenin does, what do we think? It depends what happens to him when he grows up. I guess he grows up to be Tolstoy. That would have been an interesting book.

That is, in fact, what all of Proust’s big-ass book is – high school nonsense dissected endlessly from stratospherically high above it all. I loved that. This, by contrast, either had nothing to say yet or didn’t want to let us in on it, and what fun is that?

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January 7, 2007

Tyranny of Things Being Themselves

Author’s note after finishing: This was going to be about my reading project but it veered away, to put it mildly.

Reading several books in a row that all try to take on the big issues – that present a philosophical “take” on the world as seen through (or equated with) a particular aesthetic or emotional “take” on the world – it begins to be clear that none of them can actually be right because they all contradict each other. A sardonic, nihilistic novel and a mournful, spiritual novel can’t both be right.

So you say, “Two books are like two people, not like two arguments; there’s no question of whether a person is ‘right’.” This is absolutely true – worlds in literature are personalities, not realities. But in the course of reading a book that attempts to be a book of substance, don’t you get the feeling that you’re being coaxed and prodded and toyed with, all in relation to the end of believing something that the book believes? Even when the author is leaving us alone, in relation to the subject matter – free to make up our own minds, as they say, though of course we always are – it is still the case that the author is, significantly, leaving us alone, and doing this in relation to a belief. Even when the author does not necessarily believe what the book believes, or even when the author has intentionally crafted the book to believe something that cannot be readily flattened and put into words, nonetheless every book that touches on life seems to believe something about it, and in reading the book we are in negotiation with that belief.

But then, as I say, along comes another book with its own contradictory persona.

Maybe I am peculiar in this but I continue to believe that I am just peculiar in articulating it – I feel, if not intimidated, certainly challenged, implicated, somehow called upon to defend my own particular being, by the very presence of things that are particularly other than me and have any even remotely human qualities. For example – I’ve always thought that when I eventually write about this phenomenon, which seems to be now, I would write about – the ad-copy (really, all-purpose smarmy writer) phenomenon of punchy short sentences with smart-assed periods. Ever read one of those?

You just did.

Boo-yah! To me, the punch in these sentences isn’t just rhythmic, it’s something smug; it’s the intimation that the implicit persona behind the sentence (even when it’s saying “got milk?” or whatever and there’s no explicit persona at all) is… well, something that can’t be put into words because it’s sub-rational. But it plays on my sense of status and worth. I think that’s how it works for everyone.

I’ve just been searching and cannot find a name for the “drawing a zigzag from top to bottom while rocking my neck laterally like a bird” gesture – which at this point has just about transcended racial boundaries – but the intended effect of this nonsense is the “sass” equivalent of what a cat does when it arches its back. The fact that it “reads” at all is, I’m saying, evidence of our propensity to read art – in this case choreography – as persona, and then to feel cowed by it.

I get mad at all sorts of stuff – most often: ad campaigns, the decor in restaurants, people in public with attention-getting fashion choices – and then have to defend my annoyance to the people I’m with. The answer is always the same – that I have been implicitly called to the table by the very existence of these things; that in being, they are also saying “this is how one should be” and that I resent being forced to engage in argument with that. This sounds silly when I’m saying it but it’s the very same phenomenon that occurs with any coherent work of art – the work asserts a personality/worldview that in being perceived must be reckoned with. I talk about books “believing” things because these things are present in the aura of persona, of mind, that surrounds them despite their being ink and paper, and so far as I know there’s no correct way to talk about that aura, the “life of a book,” distinctly from the book itself. But it is distinct; it is the thing we actually encounter, and to me its nature is anthropomorphic and thus has a potential (and potentially antagonistic) social relation to me.

In books, though, the “you’ve made a mistake in not being this” challenge, which so offends me in restaurants, is generally made palatable by the perceivable distance between the maker and the work. If I can be assured that the author offers a book and its belief system as an artifact to be held in the hand and considered, then I feel safe with it. If, on the other hand, the author offers the book as an emanation of (or a conduit for) his own persona, then things become higher-stakes. This is exactly what rubbed me so thoroughly the wrong way about Everything Is Illuminated. And yet it’s still possible for a heartfelt “this is me and why isn’t it you” book to remain a pleasant encounter. All it has to do is be offering its differences rather than reveling in them.

Intolerant decor – there, I found a word for it, “intolerant” – intolerant decor, like intolerant ad copy, is inescapably rude because it has no apparent maker to distinguish from it.

Submitting to the actual experience of a work of art is submitting to the challenge of the essential nature of a thing that is not you. The essentially un-you nature of the thing. The potential consolation of art is that it is open to you despite not being you.

I seem to have wandered into the sort of loopily ungrounded art writing that really bugs me. Hopefully I’ve gotten here by enough degrees that it doesn’t feel loopily ungrounded to you THE READER but since it feels loopy to me THE WRITER then we’re probably in trouble.

To finish with the last bit of thought that needs to go in here somewhere – since people seem to be pleased to take the smirk (or eye-roll) that is readily theirs after I explain that I’m being whiny because I feel tyrannized by some period or other, I have been repeatedly told that this way of thinking is particular to me and should be shaken off. Nonetheless I must continue to think this is not true. I’m ready to concede oversensitivity to these sorts of things and, what’s far more pernicious, an over-willingness to indulge minor annoyances by expressing them – but I firmly believe that all these things I see are imbued with an animistic smugness not just for me but for my fellow man as well… because I see him everywhere climbing aboard, buying that T-shirt, telling people that restaurant is amazing and he loves it there, carrying that book around, preening like the people in that ad – people who never existed… but now they do, because of everyone who lost the argument with the voice of the ad the first time around. It’s like the practical joke that, once shamed by it, one is eager to play on someone else. And yes, it makes me angry when someone plays that joke on me. This is how you look at me, your fellow human being? For shame.

This stuff has been waiting for ten years to get expressed, and I’m doing it, now that I’m here, in part out of a sense of obligation to seize the opportunity now that it has spontaneously arisen. But I don’t really feel this way so much anymore. A good solution to the tyranny of things being themselves is to feel what I like to call “superior to everyone and everything,” which trumps all “but why would you be you?” arguments with a nice shiny “you wouldn’t understand.” I was avoiding this route for many years because I had learned that humility is preferable to arrogance, but in a smug society, humility just means a lot of wrangling with the ego of every damn period. Embracing a vague sense of ill-defined but untouchable superiority whenever possible gives one a nice sense of freedom, say, while walking around New York City, where every goddamn thing thinks it’s better than you.

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