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.

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!

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.

by John Guare
at Signature Theatre Company
directed by Michael Greif
opened March 28, 2006

I participate in theater when I can but I don’t see so much of it. It seems like whenever I do I end up thinking, “oh yeah, theater is really weird.”

Live performance is, in theory, more exciting than film because it is present and happening; at any given point in a play, the next moment has not yet happened (unlike with a movie, where it all happened months or years ago and has since been filtered and processed many times over), and our fear of the future comes into play. Which is indeed thrilling. Though I think probably too much of my mind is devoted to things like “what if they forget their lines? what if it all comes crashing down on them?” But a milder, more general version of that anxiety imparts a spark of danger and thus relevance to everything in the theater. It’s real. Also, they can see you; they the actors can see you the audience. You’re all in this together. It’s a ritual that needs to be upheld… for the gods of the theater, I guess. Everyone needs to do their part, and if the performance is a success, you, as audience, are party to that.

This stuff is all a gamble, of course, and it can come back to bite you. We saw this play with an audience of cane-walking coughers who weren’t amused by the laugh lines and occasionally had to repeat things to themselves to make sense of them. At least the woman behind me did. Also at one point she felt compelled to say “this head is in the way,” possibly referring to the head I have been working on all these years. She may also have been referring to the head of the man in front of me, which, for what it’s worth, was in the way for me as well. But I didn’t say so – nor did I say anything else out loud. Nor did I bring cough drops in crinkly wrappers and unwrap them, after coughing for twenty minutes, and then continue to cough. But to each his own. All I mean to say is that in the grand ritual we were supposed to perform, Lili Taylor and I were teamed up, on this occasion, with a crowd of amateurs, and so unfortunately it was one of those times where the “live performance” gamble doesn’t pay off and you start to wonder why anyone would be so foolish as to put on a live show, which can so easily be ruined. Films are immune to indifference. If you show a film of a tree falling, in a forest, with nobody around… or… if you show a film of a lumberjack with a saw, in a forest… no… if you put a tree falling in a forest on stage… oh whatever.

I try my best to see past this sort of thing but it’s hard. This play didn’t really mean too much to me. I think if I had seen it with a really well-rehearsed audience, and they had been participating in the rally of the production, and I had felt that sense that we’re all rooting for the same cause, we’re all trying to chant the same chant and conjure the same magical fiery ball of artistic experience – this is an 80s special effect, I’m describing, glowing blue and animated, hovering over the audience – I would have found my way to believing in that ball. But nobody in the audience was chanting anything and I felt that sense of the performance dropping back to its lowest-common-motivator: why are we doing this? It’s our job to say and do these things. You paid for us to perform the script of Landscape of the Body (1977) by John Guare and here it is. We put together some sets and costumes and stuff to go with it, hope you like it.

I’m saying that if I had been made to feel – via social suggestion, I guess – that we were part of it and the performers had felt that we were part of it, maybe it would have meant more to me. But I’m not sure. Maybe it was just the script. In fact, maybe I went to this place in my head because the script did not invite me to be a part of it, or to have any particular kind of experience, as far as I could tell. It was its own thing, a piece of weird sculpture. It probably would have been that even without the cough drops. It was very odd, an artifact of something I’m not going to claim to understand entirely.

But did the playwright? Did anyone?

On the ground level you can say, crankily, “Well, those people would never say and do those things. I don’t even think those people could exist. And this and that speech was just poetry from the playwright, not the thoughts of the character. And this and that event didn’t seem likely or sensible.” But – and I’m already venturing away from what I can be absolutely sure of – I’m pretty much certain that the play knew all that. It clearly wasn’t an attempt at verisimilitude. It was, rather, as one review I just read put it, “freewheeling.” It was a fantasia. It felt improvisatory. Implicitly it said, “Don’t think that it matters too much whether events cause one another or whether these are ‘real’ people – just take in the flavor of things, consider the texture and tendencies of what I’m showing you – that’s the message.” And so in retrospect it was one of those box-of-goodies artworks, wherefrom we get a sense of the artist himself, more than anything else, by seeing what kind of stuff he likes. I don’t know any other John Guare plays – no, really, not even Six Degrees of Separation, which everyone on Earth seems to know because it was a movie, and no, not even House of Blue Leaves even though they did it when I was in college and everyone said it was good – but I get the sense that for the most part we’re not into the same stuff. Of course, this was written back in 1977, so maybe that’s to blame. But this box of goodies had a “can you believe this it’s a severed head onstage” severed head in it, and a man in a gold dress being gunned to death, and a coke-snorting porn star, and a crazed ice-cream man, and Groucho glasses, and a kid freaking out poetically and then being killed in slow-motion with a wrench, and some other stuff, and I guess I felt a little like I was supposed to think it was “wild,” – either “delightfully wild” or “unnervingly wild” or both – and I didn’t really feel that. That stuff isn’t in my box of goodies; neither was I shocked by it. It was just someone’s assemblage of stuff.

I found it hard – or at least not natural – to think in any way that could move me about issues like the fragility of life and the inevitability of loss, dreams and regrets, memory, love, and other stuff that I think the play was about – because I didn’t feel like I was in a world of real people, and those are real people issues. Nor was I in a world of philosophy. Somewhere behind the goings-on onstage was John Guare, pulling the strings and making weird stuff go down, and somewhere behind his words were his thoughts, and somewhere back there, no doubt, was something human and maybe even touching or bittersweet or funny. But it was not hovering overhead like a special effect. Again, though, that may have been the audience’s fault.

Lili Taylor and Sherie Rene Scott and the cop and the guy in the dress, and yeah, even the kids, all did a fine and admirable job. So too did the couple of people in the production that I knew – the reason I ended up seeing a play at all. I find plays difficult. I also find them expensive. Maybe if they were cheaper I’d see more and get better at them.

But in college they were cheap and I hardly saw any then. But I’m a different person now, at least insofar as my hunger for cultural experience is a stronger force in my life than my sense that I am surrounded by an endless field of portentous and untameable social possibility which can only be escaped by staying in my room and waiting for everyone else to fall asleep, and then going down to the dining hall at 4 AM and videotaping myself eating several glasses of dry Cracklin’ Oat Bran. So take note, theater producers, and lower those prices.

I should point out that I’m not complaining about these tickets, however. The Signature Theatre Company had some kind of corporate help and was able to offer $15 tickets to this show. I’m all for that. Way to go, Signature Theatre Company, and keep it up. I’ll come to the next cheap show, I promise.

These were my thoughts on seeing the Andrew Wyeth exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They have not been coordinated with one another and definitely don’t constitute a “review.” I typed them in short note form right when I got back from the exhibition, a couple weeks ago, and have been putting off fleshing them out enough for a general audience. Now I’m done.

The audio tour introduction contained a quote from Wyeth along the lines of “People who don’t look at my work think of me as a painter of old oaken buckets. I’m anything but that.” This was preceded by something straight from the curator to the same effect – “we hope you’ll discover that Andrew Wyeth isn’t about what you thought he was; there’s more to this work than there might seem.” To which I wanted to ask: why do exhibitions always need to claim that they are going to change your mind about something or reveal secrets? It reminds me of the sort of formulaic thing kids (I) do (did) in writing high school essays to create the effect of being thought-provoking, by contriving to make compatible things seem incompatible so as then to reveal them as compatible. “Paradoxically, many of Shakespeare’s plays are about the rich, yet he wrote them for an audience of the poor.” This is like a magician telling you he has some linked rings in his bag, then pulling out — ta-da! — two separate rings! So anyway, why do museums have to stoop to this sort of thing? Why does an exhibit have to “accomplish” anything other than putting worthy works on display? It seems to fit in with an aspect of 20th century art-world thought that I hate, the idea that art theory and art itself are close relatives.

There’s also something dishonest and (it seems to me) motivated by a sense of inadequacy more than anything else, about this desire to claim that art isn’t just what it seems to be. I could imagine that Wyeth’s comment about the old oaken buckets is also a form of defensiveness. Because whatever else he may be, he most certainly is a painter of old oaken buckets. And what’s so wrong with that? Somewhere, the unvoiced opinion that it is “naive” or “trite” is ringing in the air, and the artist, the curator, and the reviewer are all scrambling to distance themselves from it.

It is a lamentable state of mind, to believe that the claim that art has value needs substantiation but the claim that art lacks value does not. When someone accuses something of being naive or embarrassing, it takes guts to stand up for it and say that it isn’t naive – because you might look naive in the process – but when someone “accuses” something of being great art, there’s no risk involved in saying that they’re wrong. Except the risk of looking cranky, but crankiness and sophistication are perceived as compatible, whereas naivete and sophistication are opposites.

I should have said, it’s a lamentable state of mind to believe that the claim that art has value needs more rigorous substantiation than the claim that art lacks value. The looming unspoken criticism, that Wyeth’s work is insubstantial sentimentalism, is not, in fact, self-evident. The exhibition seemed to believe that it was, which could only stem from the fact that the works were being defended in somewhat bad faith by an institution that actually fundamentally agreed with the criticisms. Any era’s art culture is made up of various biases – but either they’re saying that we should forget our biases – which they weren’t; these were not paintings of old oaken buckets, they told us; those would indeed be trashy – or they’re saying that our biases don’t concern these works, which is either an easy case to make or else simply isn’t true. Instead, what they chose to say was: those biases do concern these works, but not enough to convict. You probably thought these works were guilty, because they do look guilty, but we’re going to spring them on a technicality, and won’t that be exciting. This was, to me, distasteful.

The review in the New York Times of this exhibit more or less dismissed the body of it as being just so much magic romanticism and singled out a recent painting of the interior of Wyeth’s private jet as the most interesting in the show, because it reveals that Wyeth’s actual life is one of wealth and privilege. This strikes me as cynical to the point of offensiveness. The curation made convincingly clear that Wyeth’s paintings attempt to be about memory and death and the nature of experience, and the like – this in the end is the gist of the “not just buckets” comment. The idea that the painting that reveals him to be rich is more interesting than the paintings that don’t is, it feels to me, contemptuously far from trying to take his work seriously. “Yeah yeah, the mystery of life, sure – what would you know, gramps? Why don’t you just buy yourself another fucking yacht and shut up already.” This infuriates me just like all the reviews of mainstream Hollywood movies on IMDB that say “what a bunch of whiny white people!”

Despite all sorts of macho/curmudgeonly insinuation to the contrary, I still cannot see any situation in which empathy is a mistake or will lead to weakness. Lack of empathy may not be anything to be ashamed of, but it is most definitely nothing to be proud of. Sticking sociological Cheetos on it (“bourgeois,” “white,” “entitled”) and trying to pass it off as incisive criticism really offends me. Yes, some artists might well be white and rich, and if from your point of view that’s depressing or distracting, that’s probably something worth talking about – but it’s not the same thing as the art itself.

Yeah yeah, contemporary theory would say they’re inseparable. Well, not gonna talk about it right now but I already touched on this at the end of this entry. Inseparable doesn’t mean indistinct.

The curatorial texts on the walls and the audio-tour talked all about how Wyeth used symbols, parallels, conceptual abstraction, design, and other visual elements to indicate psychology, drama, the flavor of experience, personal significances etc. etc. as though these were the choices and ideas that made his work deep, valuable, and distinctive. But… that’s what painting is! I wasn’t sure whether the fact that baby-talking curators were spoon-feeding us these many-century-old basic premises of the painter’s art – the premises underlying most of the other art in the museum – was a reflection of the educational/outreach spirit of this intentionally crowd-drawing special exhibit, or of the fact that the art that contained all those elements, which I would call “painting,” is as an institution long dead. I think it’s both. It just struck me as odd that the same people who had walked through the museum and looked at all sorts of paintings without help were now being acknowledged probably to have had no clue or reason to care about them.

The exhibit narrated its way through A. Wyeth’s apprenticeship to his father N.C. Wyeth, giving some idea of the rigorous, traditional craftsman’s training he received. I liked that part, and I liked that aspect of the work as a whole. Respect for craft always pleases me. Isn’t craft such a huge part of the effect and value of a painting? I’m still impressed to the point of being moved by the fact that skilled painters can make paint look exactly like real things. Am I supposed to be embarrassed about that? You can say it’s a superficial thing to care about, if you must, but isn’t the irritating thing about craft-less contemporary art exactly the “my dog could do that” syndrome? I for one take great pleasure in seeing things that I couldn’t do. They’re more impressive, which is to say more likely to make an impression on me.

Wyeth’s work is more or less all about the specific quality of the craft, to me, but that’s hard to talk about so the curation simply didn’t. How does he make a lot of dead grass seem like memorable, romantic dead grass? It’s all to do with brush strokes and color mixing; that’s why he’s in the museum. The actual notions behind the paintings (“this rock symbolizes his father”) are just the framework, and notions are a dime a dozen. I know it’s hard to talk about technique, at least in a valuable way… so instead here’s the audio guide leading us down some other, pointless path, because it can.

A drawback of craft-oriented art is that, like out-and-out craft, it can start to seem monotonous; it’s more about the work as a whole than about any particular piece. It’s no wonder that only a few of them stand out as superior, but why should they have to? 60 works at once is too many for anyone. If there was a single Andrew Wyeth hanging in the diner down the street, you can bet I would have noticed it and thought it was pretty great. Of course, maybe that’s not the best way to think about it. Or maybe it’s exactly the best way to think about it.

I was standing there looking at some painting of a window, and next to me are a couple of average-looking late-middle-aged touristy guys looking at some painting of a window. They’re reading this paragraph on the wall about it (“Wyeth draws us through the window into the space beyond…” or something), pressing #141 on their audio guide and listening, and then looking again at this painting of a window, trying hard to get it. Why am I looking at this? we ask, and the museum tries to tell us and we try to agree. I don’t know, it seemed so absurd. Somehow these guys had entered into a contract wherein they would pay money to look at a picture of a window, and having paid the money, they were going to look at it and look at it good. Did they care? Did I care? Isn’t this what everyone ends up thinking about at a museum?

Working one’s whole life toward a single aesthetic goal is more of a thing to live than to a thing to see all at once. I think sometimes I try to be a completist because it seems like this is what’s wanted of me by the creators of things that fit into complete sets, or by the sets themselves. But those sets are just the result of the constant creative functioning of the artist, and don’t form an artistic whole to be enjoyed in the form of its completeness any more than the artist’s life itself. So maybe we never need 60 paintings all at once.

The exhibit included long sequences of preliminary studies for two paintings. They were interesting because they revealed some aspects of the technique and the process – but shouldn’t that be like bonus material rather than part of the main attraction? Again, the museum was opting to be about art study rather than art itself.

I’m not sure but I think maybe N.C. was the better artist.

written by R. Kelly
directed by R. Kelly and Jim Swaffield

I’m not up on these things so I hadn’t heard of this prior to seeing it, and I think that was probably for the best, because it meant the impact was maximized. It seems like this has gotten sort of popular among non-R. Kelly fans because of how phenomenally, shockingly goofy it is. I enjoyed it. Briefly, for those of you who, like me, have absolutely no clue what’s going on in the world of pop music (or whatever this counts as): R. Kelly wrote this meandering thing for one of his albums, wherein he sing-narrates a scatterbrained quasi-story full of “surprises” over an endless, oddly emotional vamp. Then they filmed it exactly, creating a fully-produced world in which R. Kelly’s voice is coming out of everyone’s mouth while they go through the motions of a dreamily arbitrary series of events. The short attention span and stunted imagination of the writer are apparent at every turn; his effort to create a seamy, melodramatic world of deception and tension is tangibly hopeless – the characters pace around a small set agonizing over incoherent nonsense, caught in the grip of some idiot god, while the slow-mo poignant dream vamp rolls on underneath them. The overall effect is unique, and in the first few minutes I was thinking “Wow, this is a new, powerful weirdness.” Not least because there was obviously an element of utter trash at work, but it wasn’t clear at what level – was it all some kind of irony? The intensity of my initial response was in great part because it wasn’t clear how weird the thing was intended to be – did they or didn’t they know what they were doing? Without a sense of the mind behind a work, you’re forced to engage with the surface as it stands, and in this case the surface was really weird.

But after watching all 12 episodes it became a lot clearer where it was coming from, and I know what to compare it to – it was like reading the stories in the yearly compendium of student writing from my elementary school. It was clearly assembled with all the distractable gusto of a fourth-grader, the type who likes to punctuate his crazy stories with characters saying “this is crazy!” And really, what’s the craziest thing there is? R. Kelly or any fourth-grader can tell you that it’s a midget. Yes, there’s a midget. But it’s something apart from and above fourth-grade writing because a) it’s sung, lazily, and b) it’s a fully realized production on DVD!

On the “behind the scenes” feature(tte), we see R. on set getting worked up about how exciting the whole process has been, and saying that he just made up all this shit and now here he is and there’s an actual midget there! So true; watching it, we’re all equally blown away.

Another thought – the darkly sentimental quality of the musical vamp wraps the whole thing up in its sound and makes it seem as though it should be coming from somewhere, with something human to say. I think it’s the tension between that promise and the overwhelming inability of the material to justify it that makes the thing compelling. R. Kelly, as the vaguely tortured protagonist – or, when he forgets that he’s the protagonist, as the narrator (a second R. Kelly pops out of another closet in order to justify the switch to third person) – personifies this yearning, implicit in the music, to overcome the utter idiocy of, essentially, himself. The terribleness of the material manages to seem like an existential riddle, and because of the rolling waves of the music, R. Kelly seems, in a distant vague way, to be aware of it. But I’m sure he’s not. From the extra features on the DVD, he seemed like an out-and-out moron.

In writing this I realize that I’d actually LOVE to see attentive, faithful productions of stories written by fourth graders. Maybe that would make a great opera. On which note: I know R. thought this had some relationship to opera, but it didn’t. Its closest musical kin was the self-narrating improvised nonsense song that lots of people spin out in indulgent company, or more often, when they’re alone.

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)

Prometheus
The Poem of Fire
for large orchestra and piano with
organ, chorus and light keyboard
Op. 60

~23 min.

This may be the most unnerving piece of music I know. I mean that as a good thing. I’ve been listening to it a lot recently because I like the way it’s unnerving.

Enjoying it requires investing some time in listening repeatedly – it’s not particularly “easy” – but it’s well worth the effort. The three main reasons that it’s not “easy”: 1) The crucial melodies/motifs are rather eccentric and aren’t likely to “catch” too firmly on a first listening. 2) The piece is long, with many distinct episodes, but the form isn’t clear, so it’s easy to feel structurally lost. 3) What the piece is famous for (well, one of the two things): it’s made up almost entirely of variants on a single chord (“The Prometheus Chord”), which means there are very few clear harmonic guideposts to help the listener. The harmony is in fact handled brilliantly, but on the first several listens the sense of homogeneity will probably be numbing.

Once you’ve gotten on its wavelength, these things all end up being really marvelous characteristics of the piece. The strange little melodies are, I think, some of the best in late Scriabin. They’re more cleanly carved than a lot of his other melodies, at least to my ears. He had a fascination with fragmentation that I think undermined the listenability of some of his other works from this period, but in Prometheus, the fragments are bold little molecules full of character, and once you know them, the whole thing sings continuously. There are four or five very short ideas that make up most of the material in the piece, and two or three less important ideas that account for the rest of it. It’s actually not that much to learn, but because they are so short, it takes some listening before you can hear them and remember them as melodies.

As for the form: the long, ambiguous course of the piece is still a little confusing to me (and I’ve been spending a lot of time with it these past few weeks), but the overall flow is compelling once you have a rough sense of the landscape. I never like it when liner notes describe a piece as “building to a series of climaxes,” because I think it’s a worthless description; that said, this piece builds to a series of climaxes, and now that I know the particular character of each of those climaxes, I feel comfortable enough following the piece’s progress even though I can’t see any clear scheme that governs it.

The reason the form of the piece is so difficult to map is probably because, like several of Scriabin’s other works, it has an explicit – and yet totally abstract – mystical program. As I understand it, it’s about man’s place in the cosmos; man as a rebel who steals the power of creation from the eternal gods (hence the title). Some of the musical motives have to do with the life and efforts of man; some of them have to do with the universe/the eternal/nature/god. The solo piano is man, sort of. The chorus that joins toward the end is all mankind. Scriabin may have been a bit of a nut, but I’m willing to take this stuff moderately seriously.* But without more specific play-by-play information, I can’t use it to help me make sense of the overall structure.

Nonetheless, the really remarkable thing about this piece is that it actually sounds like a piece about man and the cosmos. At times it sounds like it’s about something even more awesome and unthinkable than that. Frankly, I think it’s absolutely terrifying. I’ve heard people say that Scriabin’s music is sexual, or spiritual, but for me, the strongest connection is with horror. I’m talking about heavy-duty horror of the unknown, “cosmic and uncanny” in the Lovecraftian sense. Several times while listening to the piece and getting a creepy feeling of supernatural discomfort, I’ve been reminded of Arthur Machen’s The White People, and in particular this passage:

“Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil. We attach such an enormous importance to the ‘sin’ of meddling with our pockets (and our wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.”

“And what is sin?” said Cotgrave.

“I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

“Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.”

Scriabin’s late works, like horror of the Machen variety, have some of that power of overwhelming one with a sense of something being profoundly wrong, something weird and sour in the center of your mind.** Some of the strangest, most pungent sensations I have ever experienced have been tiny flickers of weirdness, neither smells nor sounds nor textures but reminiscent of them, that every now and then pop into my head, particularly when I’m exhausted or sick. I’ve compared notes on this experience and I know that at least some of my friends have occasionally experienced something similar. Scriabin’s best music reminds me a bit of those weird, wrong, not-quite sensations. He takes some peculiar, gooey little idea – usually containing a single chord-change and a temperamental melodic fragment – and then obsesses over it. The weirdness never explains itself, it just is; over and over and over, looked at from every point of view, built in to all sorts of different configurations, but never evolving into anything other than itself, like a creepy Magritte man who turns around to reveal that his head is continuous back, but no face. There are some very beautiful moments in Prometheus that induce in me a kind of exquisite nausea.

I get some of the same creepy-crawly uncanny-beauty feeling from Tristan und Isolde, actually, and I think it’s part of the experience that one is expected to have with that piece (it’s certainly part of the experience you’re expected to have with the faux Tristan score to Vertigo). But Wagner’s idea was to delay resolution at great length, to create a heightened sense of striving and yearning. At the end of the opera, famously, the resolution comes as promised. Scriabin’s music, too, strives and yearns, but not for any earthly closure we can anticipate. Prometheus certainly creates a sense of expectation, but it’s hardly the expectation of resolution. It’s more like the expectation that the fabric of reality will tear open. Or, to put it another way, the expectation that the universe will end and all creation will be reunited with its creator in transcendent, incomprehensible flaming oblivion.

Which is indeed what happens.

Programatically speaking, of course. It happens in the form of a terrifying, tremendous, world-destroying chord; quite possibly the loudest in all music. By contrast, the piece Scriabin was working on when he died, Mysterium, was meant to actually end the world. Seriously. Luckily for those of us who like the world, he didn’t manage to write very much of it.***

The real climax of the piece a few minutes earlier, an enormous flaring ball of overwhelming awe, never fails to give me goosebumps. It could kick Daphnis et Chloé‘s ass.

Scriabin commissioned a special cover illustration for the score from fellow wild-eyed mystic Jean Delville, who had concidentally already painted this on essentially the same exact theme. Delville’s work in general seems to me to be a very good match for Scriabin, albeit much inferior – there’s something trashy and overbearing about a lot of it, like fantasy-novel covers. But there’s no question that he too had his finger on something inexplicably terrifying. I’m never clicking on that link again. I think I’m gonna have nightmares.

Anyway, Delville’s Prometheus cover is really amazing and a perfect, perfect match for the piece. Sadly, it hasn’t been reproduced very often or well since the first editions. I have the following lovely scan courtesy of the Sibley Music Library at the Eastman School of Music. The clipping at the top and right side apparently occured during binding, long ago. Oh well.

The end of the piece sounds exactly like that picture.

That’s actually the cover from the original two-piano reduction by Sabaneyev, a ridiculously dense, viciously difficult arrangement that’s nonetheless a convenient way of studying the score. And you can (quite legally) download a pdf of the whole thing here!

Here’s a smaller scan I found online of the unclipped cover as it appeared on the full score, plus the title page from the original pocket score (first issued somewhat later).

Koussevitzky’s publishing house, the Edition Russe de Musique, had offices in Berlin as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I get the impression that the different locations sometimes issued different covers for the same scores – French for the European market and Russian for Russia. Hence the rather different cover designs seen here. That’s my guess anyway.

Recordings: I’ve heard several recordings, and none of them really struck me as perfect. Nobody seems to want to take Scriabin’s melodies seriously – conductors and pianists just revel in the harmonies and textures and don’t properly deliver the actual rhetoric of the piece. Everyone also plays everything a lot slower than Scriabin marked it. I’ve read reviews saying that Ashkenazy’s performance is the best and I haven’t heard that one. I’ll let you know when I do. Because of the excellent sound quality and instrumental polish, the one I’ve been listening to is the recent Gergiev/Toradze recording. But I’m sure the piece can be done better.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is the second of the two things for which this piece is famous: the “light keyboard.” What is a light keyboard? It’s an imaginary instrument; you play it like an organ but instead of sound it produces light. There’s a part for it in the score; certain notes correspond to certain colors. Has it ever existed? No. But people talk about this ambitious, nutty idea a lot more often than they talk about the music itself. You can bet that absolutely any discussion of “visual music” will eventually touch on Prometheus.

The reason I haven’t talked about it here is because for most intents and purposes, it isn’t part of the experience of listening to this piece. Some live performances attempt to realize the light part in some form or another – read all about it – but Scriabin himself never saw it performed with lights. I know I certainly haven’t, and I still like it.

I’m also putting off talking about the light thing because I’ve got a little multimedia presentation in the works but it’s not done yet. Stay tuned.

Addendum 11/05 – Okay, now it’s done!

*In college I took a seminar on 20th-century music where Scriabin was discussed. After distributing a handout containing outlandish quotes from Scriabin about the relevance of mystico-sexual energies in his life and work, the professor furrowed his brow and tentatively said, “I think we should try not to just dismiss this.” As I recall we didn’t live up to his request and he didn’t really know what to say either. I respected his attempt, though.

**I’ve read that John Ireland composed several works explicitly in relation to Machen’s writing. I’m certainly curious about those, though I suspect they’re more “mystical British pastoral” rather than “world-rending horror.”

***I’m not sure why this hasn’t been made into a sci-fi/occult movie, yet. I mean, we’re talking about actual madman-style end-of-the-world plans, here! The story would start with someone discovering a previously unknown complete copy of the score, and then it would get stolen by a mysterious group of villains, and our hero has to find them and stop them from performing it. The movie would be called Mysterium, obviously. Someone needs to tell Jerry Bruckheimer about this. Or Dan Brown, or Neal Stephenson, or some other jerk.****

**** Addendum 1/06: I have been roundly encouraged to take this ridiculous suggestion seriously (along with some other related ridiculous suggestions), so as of now, that other jerk is me. Hands off, everyone! Don’t worry, I’ll keep you all posted regarding the movie rights and the tie-in CD. Boffo, Lenny! Socko, Lenny!