Dial "M" for Musicology

In Praise of Musical Obsessions

Perhaps I have mentioned this before, but among what I consider to be Universal Musical Experiences is the obsession.  The obsession can be a single piece, often a short one, or perhaps a popular song, that simply takes over your very being.  I remember several from my student and early professional years: Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, Brahms’s songs “Sonntag” and “Von Ewiger Liebe,” the F Major Pastorale Sonata of Domenico Scarlatti (“Allegrissimo”).  You listen to them so much that you don’t need to listen any more; they are in your head, and you can play them over and over.  For a larger-scale work, it is life changing: once you are intimately familiar with something like Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of 1610, part of you will forever be in Wonderland; there is no way to walk back through the door to where everything is gray and sepia and people don’t really smile.  You know better, now;  you know the Vespers.  Bliss!

My most recent book appeared in October, and it was devoted primarily to one work: Chopin’s Ballade No. 2.  Of course, it has been an obsession of mine for a long time (and also of certain others in the Chopin community), but really any of the four Ballades will be that way; they are all that extraordinary.  Bach’s Chaconne for violin is another such utterly transformative piece: to venture inside that one is to be, in key ways, mended.  One of the things I really appreciated about Maria Thöne’s work (I’ve probably mentioned this, too) is that, right or wrong, she put forth a really extraordinary explanation for that extraordinary piece—that is was really a tombeau for Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, that it quoted lots of chorales (clearer to some than to others), etc.  Even if she’s wrong, I give her points for aiming long: the Chaconne is, if I’m not mistaken, longer than all the movements of the D Minor Partita combined.  Surely that requires a better explanation than, well, the Chaconne was an optional dance of the time, and including one would not have been impossible, so…no more explanation needed, right?

This all is by way of preamble.  At the recent AMS meeting in Philadelphia, I bought a book I’d been hoping for, then waiting for, for two decades: a sort of life’s-work book by Owen Jander titled Beethoven’s “Orpheus” Concerto: The Fourth Piano Concerto in its Cultural Context.  I read it every evening, almost finishing it before the meeting was over.  Now, Beethoven Four is out-of-this-world extraordinary, and not just because of the solo piano opening.  Donald Francis Tovey simply said, to close his analysis of the work, “The music dies away in the upper ether, which it has never left,” and there is truth to it: this work is probably the biggest pianists’ obsession in the entire concerto repertoire.  It feels ethereal, otherworldly, holy, wholly different from mere piano concertos.  Why?

Jander’s idea, developed in a series of articles (I only read the first couple and wasn’t aware that more followed), is that the concerto is Beethoven’s fairly literal take on the Orpheus myth, especially alive in the culture of the time via opera and other vehicles.  The Orpheus character, for obvious reasons, captivated readers and opera composers alike—a musician of gifts so supreme that nature herself looked on in wonder, a musician so in love that he journeyed to the Underworld to win back his beloved Eurydice from Death, and succeeded (until he disobeyed instructions and looked at her), and who subsequently denied his love to other womankind and was torn to shreds for it.  There are a variety of historical indications that Beethoven saw himself (musically at least) as an Orpheus figure, and Jander goes into very deep context to demonstrate how the concerto can be heard to reflect the Orphic legend.  He addresses various kinds of symbolism operative at the time (iconographic and musical), he goes into a variety of arcane aspects of Beethoven’s biography (such as the composer’s attachment to a particular biographical portrait, rife with personal symbolism, of his grandfather), and provides a very close reading of the concerto’s three movements which, triptych-fashion, he holds to depict three different episodes from Orpheus’s life: Orpheus charming nature with the beauty of this music, Orpheus taming the Furies and winning Eurydice back from Erebus, and the aloof Orpheus being torn apart by the resentful Bacchantes. 

The book does not wholly convince me, I have to admit—Jander waited just slightly too long to put it together and is now, apparently, not in good health, which means that certain tasks were finished by others.  For a start, the proof-reading is pretty shabby: a dropped line here, a random word or punctuation mark there.  I always liked Jander’s work on the second movement, but some of the readings of the third movement seem forced to me, particularly given the homoerotic subtext Jander feels it necessary to posit and stress.  I also tend to be unconvinced by “what could this be but a depiction of” kinds of arguments when the primary reason is that that is what should happen next in his program rather than a compelling musical reason.  In at least one case, Jander draws a variety of conclusions from a cloak slipping off his grandfather’s shoulder in his portrait…but to my eye the cloak does not seem to be going anywhere.  And so on.

For me, however, it is unquestionable that Beethoven’s Fourth is one of those works which require an extraordinary explanation.  Unexceptional explanations—“Well, he wanted to write another concerto, OK?  There are some formal anomalies but other aspects that are true to concerto form, so…what more do you want?  Mozart K. 271 has a piano at the very opening of the first tutti, so now Beethoven is going him one better.  Next week, Berlioz, and remember to study for the midterm!”—simply do not answer the call.  So I am not convinced by every last point, but I am very sympathetic to Jander’s ideas (some very much so), and above all I appreciate that he wrote the book more or less honoring what was clearly a life-long obsession with a superb, utterly bewitching musical work.  Nothing conventional about his discussion of the work; it’s all way out there, and if he overshoots sometimes I will gladly float him the difference.  What to me is the bold step is that he ventured something risky and provocative to explain (to rise to the level of explaining, really) a unique musical work and virtually universally recognized sui generis masterpiece. 

Hats off, even though I’m not with him on his whole journey!  I would love to see more such studies of individual pieces.  Musical works are written one at a time, after all, not as generic groups, ripe for generic oversimplifications.  This is one of the most magical of musical works—I say that without an iota of exaggeration—and I’m grateful to see a treatment this risky.  

Boy, Drummer, Little

Friend Eric sends a link to this Lewis W. Thompson article about “The Little Drummer Boy,” originally from the Los Angeles Times and reprinted on Christmas Eve by the New York Times.  Thompson characterizes the little tune as one of the most loathed songs in history; its incessant Yoda-like syntax and pa-rum-pa-pum-pums apparently symbolize all that is awful about the holidays.  To him, or to other people, or something.  Anyway, the point of the article is that more than one principal involved (the composer, a foundational arranger) have willed their substantial royalties to music schools, so that generations of music students can pursue performance study on the most serious level, at Wellesley and at Yale, all paid for by the Little Drummer Boy.  So, presumably, shut up for once and stop complaining about it!

Per usual, I am not in harmony with prevailing opinion.  First, anything that supports music departments in institutions of higher education better than their usual last-stop-on-the-resource-delivering-line level is fine with me.  Second, I’m  grateful to Thompson for clearing up such matters as the composer (one Katherine K. Davis), the fact that it was written long before a Christmas TV special with which it is often associated, the fact that the composer’s “Czech Carol, freely transcribed” notation was puckish humor (this is the age of Kreisler’s “arrangements” of nonexistent works, remember) and that it was nothing of the sort, and so on.  So there is some solid information here, which I appreciate.

Now: I have always liked “The Little Drummer Boy.”

Save the superciliously raised eyebrows.  If you can stand “White Christmas,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Frosty the Snowman, “Rudolf” etc. you have a far greater tolerance for abject crap than I.  “Frosty” sounds like a Eurovision Song Contest contestant (minus the risk and raw power, of course) and the movie songs give lounge-lizard wimp-chords (a technical musical term, for those keeping score at home) a worse name than they already have.  At least the Drummer Boy has good honest amurrican triads (not major sevenths and twee Jazz 6ths and other devices that adulterate what I at least think of as a Christmas sound).  Moreover, it’s got a beat, which the aforementioned don’t have.  Plus, I’ve heard the Platonic ideal of the “Little Drummer Boy”—a muzak arrangement that seeks to evoke the Robert John version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as closely as possible.  Now, that is wit!

Brother Joel once played me a bootleg recording of Jimi Hendrix playing around with it (going into Scotland the Brave and God knows what else, if I recall; my single listening was more than a quarter of a century ago).  But I hear it with that wailing guitar, and I’d love to hear a creative, patient resourceful rock drummer underneath, keeping the grooves, with just rum-pa-pums to keep the thread, but with all kinds syncopations and fills and crazy stuff over it—maybe with brushes.  Some fifth-doubled, bluesy, by-third root movement in the guitar, maybe, and…

Of course, what I’m hearing in my head is completely out of step with the text—hard to imagine the infant Jesus smiling benignly at a locked-in-the-groove guitarist and drummer, because I’m not exactly conceiving a lullaby, here.  As far as the ox and lamb keeping time, well, I’ll leave that to your imaginations, because mine isn’t up to it.

I’ll trade all future hearings of “White Christmas” for it, though, in a hot second 

Those who celebrate Christmas: have a merry remainder of this one, and stay safe!

Holiday Music: Jump-Off-A-Bridge Edition

Friend Eric (I initially typed “Fiend Eric” by accident and, in fact, almost left it that way) passes along the following: a Chanuka song written by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, someone whose politics, behavior, and self-righteousness I absolutely detest.  Apropos of a conversation he had with Jeffrey Goldberg, a columnist for the Atlantic, he wrote a song for our odd little eight-days-of-light-and-cholesterol holiday.  Goldberg’s—um—heartwarming article is here; or you can cut directly to the song and video. 

The remarks that follow the article provide find a microcosm of Jewish interior life (including the non-Jews weighing in).  They love the song; they hate the song.  Hatch Is A Friend Of The Jews; With Friends Like This Who Needs Enemies.  If He’s Such A Friend Of The Jews Why Doesn’t He Vote With Jewish Values In Mind Like For Health Care; How Dare You Try To Define Jewish Political Values.  And on and on.  I was raised by old-school, provide-for-everyone-but-YOU-work-harder-in-school-and-WHY-AREN’T-YOU-PRACTICING-MORE Jewish liberals, and I’m squarely within that tradition myself, so to my ear the mealy-mouthing about the great respect Hatch has for us is pretty annoying—for a variety of reasons, some of which are best left unstated.  But never mind; that’s neither here nor there. 

What is relevant is the song itself, and anxiety over the dearth and or plentitude and or quality of Chanuka songs.  In the early-to-mid 1960s, at San Jose School in Pomona, CA, we all sang Christmas carols, and the teachers would try to be inclusive (for the six Jewish kids in the school, two of which had my last name and three of which shared another one) and also sing the dreydl song.  Now, Adam Sandler aside, this is a kiddie-song piece of crap, and every musical sense I had would just wither when all my classmates would look inquiringly at me when, after “Lo, How A Rose Ere Blooming” and “Hark!  The Herald Angels Sing” and so on, the teacher would bravely start that damned thing and Jon-with-the-piano-lessons would more or less have to join in.  The sense of “you guys sing…that?” was unmistakable.  Not anti-Semitism, not contempt, not judgment, just honest-to-God little-kid bafflement.  I never blamed them.

So, such crossovers as Mendelssohn’s music in “Hark!” and Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” aside, there is a much anxiety about Jews and Holiday Music.  Should the kids sing it or not, is it participating in society or losing our heritage, how shrilly should we act like “Don’t Let the Lights Go Out” (don’t ask) is as good as the classic Christmas tunes, etc.  The fact is, of course, that Christmas and Chanuka are by no means equivalent holidays (despite the way my incompletely educated grandfather used to speak of them), so it is no surprise at all that a huge majority of those in the western world would evolve a large repertoire of lovely music inspired by one of their two most important holidays while a tiny minority there—to wit, my tribe—would not be as successful doing the same for a minor and, as Goldberg points out, odd and problematic holiday.  Some of the remarks after the article speak to this, and I don’t need to get into the history and theology of it here; suffice to say that the origins and subsequent interpretations (appropriations, really) of Chanuka are complicated and much argued over.   Shall we talk about the music?

From composer Madeline Stone we get poppy minor-key Ashkenaziana (it opens with a  sort of tip ’o the yarmulke to the Yiddish classic, “Khanike, oh Khanike”) produced according to the School of the Eurovision Song Contest—the bouncy beats and paleosynths of the early eighties, it sounds like.  From the uncomfortable-looking Sen. Hatch, we get a couple of verses of the explanatory doggerel typical of Chanuka songs, feloniously compounded with such rhymes as place with days, believe with history etc.  I’m sure Sen. Hatch did this as a gesture of friendship (the bygone Mormon practice of baptizing deceased Jews aside, a lot of Mormons feel close to Jewish religion and culture and so on), and certainly there are let-there-be-peace-on-earth-and-let-it-begin-with-me points to be granted to Syrian-American Rasheeda Azar (of Terre Haute), who does a creditable job singing it.  All that said, the thing still just makes me writhe and wince. 

It is, um, a gesture of something.  It’s no classic; it’s not anything I want to hear again, even.  Why must every Chanuka song lecture, or retell the story?  Christmas songs aren’t Cliff Notes, are they?  Why the neo-shtetl music, for heaven’s sake—how is that relevant in 2009?!  WHY ARE YOU ROLLING YOUR EYES AND RETREATING?  TURN THOSE LIGHTS BACK ON

I gotta grade.

All I Want For Chanuka

Ever heard of Geoff Smith and his “fluid piano”? Dig this article and video.  Now, forget all the experimenting-with-eastern-scales-a-genuinely-new-world-awaits claptrap.  That’s as may be; I’ll leave that to the—um—visionaries.  I’ve got my bona fides, after all; I published an article on Raga Rock once, so I’m, y’know, all cross-cultural and about breaking down barriers and like that.

Not!, but never mind.  What this instrument would be for me is the ideal workshop instrument for experimenting with unequal temperaments and the music of Chopin, which has been an ongoing research project of mine.  So forget (until later) the tuning hammer, the SAT III electronic measuring device, forget all of it.  Just me and Chopin and my ears and his music, and tuning slides that would enable me to change things as subtly as I can, almost instantly, to get his music into focus with what I conceive the exact right tuning to be.  My methodology has been, more than anything else, to tune the temperament to the music (if that makes any sense at all), and though I’ve published a short and very obscure piece on the subject I’ve yet to write it up in more readily available form.  Some of the effects are truly astounding, though.

I don’t, frankly, see the fluid piano as a concert instrument, at least as a classical concert instrument; I can’t tell but I don’t think it has 88 (or even 85) keys, and that lets it out for much of the Romantic repertoire, really.  I don’t know what one of these things would cost, but I’d sure love one. 

Let me finish with the incomparable chutzpah of quoting Wagner: “But will such a prince be found?”

Wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

Philly AMS breakdown

So I'm back from the annual American Musicological Society meeting. As usual I feel like I lived about 3 weeks in 4 days, so where to begin? Maybe with a song.

Consciousness

There was a young man who said "though

it seems that I know that I know, 

what I would like to see 

is the I that knows me 

when I know that I know that I know."

--Alan Watts (I think)

Today in my seminar we're talking about Kevin Korsyn's Decentering Music, many of whose arguments issue from a widespread assumption within cultural studies: that the notion of the centered self, the independent and self-willed self, is an illusion. Many of those arguments follow from psychoanalytic or semiotic arguments, some of them formidably abstract. As a grad student I always had a hard time quite imagining what such a notion could really mean: I'm, like, not me? If I'm not me, then what am I? What might the alternatives be? 

So anyway, everyone in my seminar has been writing questions for up to cogitate upon leading up to today's class. This was my contribution:

In the passage of pp. 42-46 (and elsewhere), Korsyn maintains that the conception of the individual self as developed in the post-enlightenment West, the self of the Cartesian "cogito ergo sum", is a historically- and culturally-specific invention (i.e., not something that is natural and universal), and cannot therefore serve as the basis for anything that might describe itself as a non-ideological, "objective" study of music. So, in a nutshell, your notion of yourself as a separate, bounded, rational individual, a subject who works on an array of objects "out there" in the objective world -- your ego, in other words -- is an illusion. 

OK, we've heard all this before. Now, the question: using only terms and examples drawn from your own experience, and without appealing to philosophy or cultural theory, can you make this understanding of the self plausible?

So, just throwing that out there. What would you all say? I ask the question because (a) the problem of individual identity is such a universal one in contemporary humanities thought, and (b) the point is seldom argued in any but the most abstract way. Usually we just get appeals to the authority of Lacan or Derrida or whomever. But is it something we can experience? If so, what is that experience? I'm not asking that rhetorically. I think the question of the self is real, not just an airy-fairy pseudo-question dreamed up by bored humanities professors who have run out of real things to talk about. But I'm impatient with any purely abstract statement or explanation, and cultural theory, if it is to amount to anything more than some glass-bead game of shuffling abstract concepts around in some airless realm hermetically sealed from human life, should be able to throw light on things that happen to us in our lives. If it doesn't, then what's the point? 

(Well, I suppose you could argue, a la Milton Babbitt, that then it would be like pure mathematics, where theorems are valuable for their intrinsic beauty rather than their practical applicability to life, though that would be a strangely formalistic argument for a cultural-theory practitioner to make.)  

The Dark Within The Dark

At the beginning of my final year—quarter, actually: fall 1979—enrolled at UCSB, there appeared a green, hyper, talkative violist and composer, an odd mix of self-confidence and neurotic insecurity named Gregory Michael Amov.  For reasons never became clear, Greg apparently decided I was someone to know and began to affect certain aspects of my manner: growing something vaguely beardlike, smoking black cigarettes (I smoked Shermans MCDs at the time), shadowing me.   Friends would badger me about it in a good-natured way—“Like father like son, eh, Jon?”—and I did not really know how to respond to them, except that there was something indefinable that prevented me from saying something crushing to him in the heartless way I might otherwise have done.  The only time I went volcanic on him was when he proudly showed me a pendant he’d bought at a head shop—a Jewish star with a coke spoon on it.  That was the last time he misjudged me that radically.

And we went our separate ways when I left Santa Barbara at the end of that year.  We spoke on the phone every few years, though; he called my parents, discovered my whereabouts, and we were able to reconnect.  I pursued the academic-music route, and he went virtual, becoming proficient in an operating system called Pick, which led to jobs and consulting and so on.  My father even asked him, at one point, if he could help me “get started in computers”!  (I was suffering on the job market then, and Greg gallantly assured Dad that he could.)  He was gleeful about the amount of bulletin boarding he was doing, in the days of bulletin boarding, and positively exultant in telling me about his first conversation with Diane, an author who was to become his wife, everything they had in common, how they had already decided on the names for their three children, and so on. 

I began to hear about different kinds of musical activities; ambient soundscape music, how being a rock star was now completely democritized and non-mass media dependent since one could post one’s own music on the internet and have people on the other side of the world respond with riotous approval, and so on.   “And I’ll tell you this, Jon: being a rock star feels GREAT.”  Greg sent me a couple of CDs of his work (though he promised several more I never got): a CD of his own music called The Dark Within The Dark, and a collection of demos by his “band” Systems Theory, a collaboration between (primarily) himself and his longtime friend Steven Davies-Morris.  I twitted him about never having kids—why name them if you end up not having them??—and I remember a lot of laughter on that subject.  And a year or two ago, he shared his “successful” battle against esophageal cancer with me.  All the medical drama, the recovery, the gradual venturing back to work.  My God, I thought.  What did he do to deserve this?  I don’t think his smoking went beyond the occasional Russian Sobranie at UCSB; his music is making him happy, professionally things are hitting a kind of stability…  Then we friended each other on Facebook, and could bounce wisecracks off each other on a regular basis, and all was right with the world.

Recent months, however, saw a diabolically vicious recurrence of the cancer—now in the brain, and other places—and an agonizing but fast tailspin.  Last night, Greg Amov (1959–2009) took his last breath and went on to the Big Soundscape, three says short of his fiftieth birthday.  I have not actually seen Greg since UCSB, and was (unsurprisingly) unable to get back to California during his last days, so—I ask myself—what can I do?

I am listening to the Systems Theory demos and The Dark Within the Dark.  I have never been into ambient music, particularly, so when I first heard it I thought it was nice, and reflected on how far Greg had evolved from playing string quartets…and that was that.  Today it sounds very different.  Now these pieces are rather like distillations of everthing in the air back then, including wisps of Celtic, world musics, drum patterns etc. all interwoven on long sonic canvasses: “The Dark Within The Dark,” “The Cathedral At Ys,” The New Worship Of Old Gods,” “Nightfall On Io.”  Of course, I have no computer chops at all, and so cannot begin to imagine how music like this is produced, realized, and so on.  What is hard to describe is the odd familiarity this music has, as if I can hear the real Greg in these tapestries.  I’d love to discuss these with him 

In some inconceivable dimension, maybe.  Until then—

Forn gezunt, my friend; soar high and far.  Gregory Michael Amov: may his memory be for a blessing.

Guidance, or Not

Phil forwards me a letter from someone who thinks he would like to be a musicologist, and who desires guidance along this rocky road.  Do I want to take a crack at this?  Sure.  For protection of those intimately involved, I will not mention any names.  Here’s the other thing: I apologize if I repeat sentiments offered in previous blog posts, and (contrariwise) I warn you in advance that I’m not going to be offering a bland YOU CAN DO IT message.  So:

Dear Sir,

You write as a dissatisfied 27-year-old, interested in musicology, who (initially) was not accepted for a music degree at Canadian Maritime University I and so opted to attend Canadian Maritime University II in music.  Although you subsequently decided you should have been more persistent at CMU I, you enjoyed your time at CMU II very much, and subsequently finished an English degree back at CMU I.  You are now working on a Music and Culture minor there at CMU I, which you also enjoy, and you tell me that you’ve gotten above 70 in all courses for the minor.  You feel directionless, though; friends tell you to get a government job or something that would use your English degree, but you want to do music somehow somewhen.  Can we help?  What about music librarianship, and do we know any good Canadian universities for that?

What is clear, here, is that you are a young man with regrets.  You left to attend CMU II but should have stuck with, you say, CMU I.  You are not happy with the advice you have gotten from friends—telling you to get a job for which an English major might be qualified, or get a government job.  You inform us that your—ah—love life it not what you’d like it to be.  (However much this is on your mind, you should never volunteer information like this.)  You’re feeling time’s relentless march, but still cling to musical aspirations—you’ve played bass in lots of bands, etc.  And, ultimately, you say: “I am not getting any younger, and without pursuing my dreams, I have found that life isn't much worth living!”  Maybe Music Librarianship, you think, as a middleground between music and writing.  Well, yes, maybe, but what do we know?  And when you mention the musical accomplishments—playing in bands, good grades, etc., a Yank like me really has no frame of reference.  I don’t know what “above 70” means (I’m assuming it doesn’t just mean better than 70%, because that’s not all that wonderful). 

Now look.  It seems me that you have received lots of advice you that you feel has not been helpful, and that you have not been satisfied with a lot of things that have happened thus far.  If I may be so bold: given this impression, who would venture to give you any advice at all, now?  As far as I can tell, you’ve been a student most or all of your life.  Nothing wrong with that, but…sorry, I can’t help but ask: has the government been paying for this?  Even a pro-education liberal such as myself cocks an eyebrow at a government this generous. 

Musicology is something that makes me very happy, as does my job in particular, so I can certainly understand why that would be enviable.  You are 27, have peregrinated from University to University, and are clearly (to paraphrase Shakespeare) out of mirth with yourself.  I don’t know what to tell you about musicology, or music librarianship—the best music librarians command several languages, and I don’t know if you do or not—but it is a fact that if someone gives you advice, and you follow it and it doesn’t lead you to happiness, that becomes another entry on your growing list of regrets.  One thing I am certain about, from your letter, is that it is time to change that pattern.  It seems likely that another course—with its structure of Authorities and Learners, and Assigned-Tasks, Completion-of-Tasks, and Evaluation-Thereof—is (ultimately) well-charted territory, beginning to end, and won’t solve your problem.

My recommendation is to get out in the world—find some kind of job, keep your musical interests up on the side, work steadily on your writing skills and musical knowledge.  What you need right now is to dig deep into your own independence, initiative, ambition, and drive, NOT yet another program.  Perhaps there is a part-time gig available writing program notes, CD reviews for a website, whatever—these are credible things to do when you’re not working.  You mention that you are not getting any younger, and that is true (who is, after all?), but it’s time for some experience Out There, now.  Getting out of the Canadian government-supported education pipeline might, paradoxically, open some doors you are not habituated to looking for, and it might afford you some new tools to use in making yourself happy.

But no, I won’t give any advice about you and musicology, you and music librarianship, you and this or that Canadian university.  It’s down to you, now, whatever choices you want to make, and you might just take a deep breath and make this decision on your own, and then go all out to make it the right one.  Rear up on your hind legs and get something going.  For decades, the people who have become successful are those who have forced it, with weirdly checkered backgrounds, atypical skills, and (above all) prevailing diehardism, as I called it years ago.  Somehow, we squeezed through a crack, or forced out way in.  If you want to get anywhere even remotely associated with music, you need to adopt this mindset and stop asking for guidance.  What is more, prepare yourself for failures, reverses, and disappointments—if you can’t deal with those, music is not a good place for you.  (I’m not saying you have to like failure; just withstand it and learn from it.)

Other choices tend to fall into place and make more sense when viewed from a perspective of motion and activity as opposed to stasis.

Thus endeth the sermon. 

Jonathan

Exercise no. 5: the second seminar game piece

Two things. First of all, friend of the blog David Brent Johnson has done a new show for Night Lights on the 1957 film The Sweet Smell of Success. David interviewed me and James Naremore, whose book on film noir is a favorite of mine. Go check out of the show. You'll learn a lot about a great film and you'll also be impressed by David's editing skills, which were considerably taxed by my, uh, elliptical manner of speaking. 

Second, more about exercises. Are you getting tired of them? I'm not. Last week I devised a new one for my seminar. It was rather more complex than the first one, whose rules were designed to keep the conversational ball in play through time-keeping. For this one, I wanted to assign each student a role based on a characteristic style of personal interaction, so that the conversation would be kept in motion by the dynamic tension between the assumed characters of the seminar participants. So here it is:

Asteria in Boulder

Imagine the Platonic Ideal of a performance of songs about Love—Love incarnated as a poetic idealization.  You might conceive of vocal lines sinuously interwoven with the kind of insouciance born only from total contrapuntal command.  You might imagine performers able to match pitch and timbre to achieve the two-becoming-one and one-blossoming-into-two effects with seeming effortlessness, and you might fantasize that, when short phrases were exclaimed together, the singers would be in such sympathy that breath and enunciation, attack and release were utterly simultaneous, a poet singing in stereo. 

Last night, one of the culminating events at Early Music Colorado’s Fall Festival took place: at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, there was a performance by Asteria, an early music duo specializing in late medieval Burgundian chansons: Du Fay, Binchois, Robert Morton, a few less familiar names, plus other anonymous but gloriously refined works.  The time period was, roughly, the third quarter of the fifteenth century and the context was the wealthy and artistically inclined courts of the Dukes of Burgundy (Phillip the Good and Charles the Bold).  These chansons all have to do with Love, in the prevailing conception of amour courtois, Courtly Love: the despair of love lost, the exquisite pain of love found, the miseries of gossip and insecurity, the poison of suspicion, the exaltation (or thrill of the chase!) of a love affair in full bloom, and so on.  The artistic culture of the Burgundian court centered, at last as far as the secular poetic and musical realms, on love above all else; the repertoire seems to be primarily three-part, delectably elegant music featuring graceful counterpoint, musically realized dialogue, and sweetly expressive lines realizing the middle French poetry.  

Asteria consists of a married couple: Sylvia Rhyne, soprano, and Eric Redlinger, tenor and Lute.  Their performance was surpassingly intimate, from a musical perspective: timbral matching, interwoven lines, and miraculously unisono declamation, when homorhythmic lines called for it.  They also incorporated a certain tastefully theatrical realization to the performance: close physical proximity, gazing into each other’s faces, turning sorrowfully away when the text called for it, singing both to and (seemingly) about each other, and so on.  The concert felt like an ideal courtly performance: performance artistry of the most sensitive and refined kind, conceived for an appropriately sensitive and knowledgeable audience who could appreciate what they were hearing.  So we heard a selection of all-but-unknown repertoire, interpreted with superb musicianship but always proceeding outward from the poetry.  For the encore, Rhyne and Redlinger stepped well outside this repertoire: all the way to the 1530s, for a song by Claudin de Sermisy.  This, too, was stunning.

This is a stellar sort of music making that transforms this repertoire—usually limited to doctoral-exam fodder—to something glistening and vivid.  I find myself wishing that interpretations of this quality (and all Asteria’s live-performance intimacy survives, miraculously enough, on their recordings) could be required listening in undergraduate music history classes.  What the Burgundian art was about and from whom it was produced seem so clear and natural, upon the hearing of it, that the explanation can wait: it bewitches and compels without the necessity of the usual here’s-why-you-should-know-it justifications.  Asteria’s level of musicianship is stellar, the conception of this music profoundly informed, and the presentation an unmitigated joy.  Their music is available on magnatune.com, and the CDs readily available by order.

Really.  You DO deserve pleasure this intense.

Exercise no. 4: Dress badly and become a fascist

I'm dressed badly today. (Worse than usual, I mean.) Everyone in my family except (mysteriously) me has the Swine Flu, so my schedule is off and I was running around this morning and just grabbed whatever in my closet came readily to hand. This is the result:

At one point I had to talk to Peter Burkholder about some department matter and apologized for dressing in a manner unbecoming to a musicologist. He told me that an old professor of his dressed in the coat-and-tie professorial style, but sometimes changed it up with Western wear. Students puzzled over this incongruity and had managed to assimilate it to their collective perceptual framework when the professor changed it up on them again and wore a suit and tie with cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat. 

I like that. It seems like the seed of another exercise:

1. Dress in the style you deem most "professional" for your work environment every day for a long enough period of time (days, weeks, months) for that style to become commonly associated with you. Believe that "clothes make the (wo)man" and style your persona accordingly. Become the person whose image you project. Be sincere.

2. Come to work dressed in a way you only ever do in front of your friends and family. Style your persona accordingly. Be sincere.

3. Come to work dressed in a way that combines aspects of no. 1 and no. 2. (Coat and tie with birkenstocks, for example.) Be sincere. What kind of person are you now?

I suppose the point of such an exercise is (as it is with all these exercises) to mess around with the neural pathways, to break habits and thereby to experiment with being a different sort of person.* What's interesting about this exercise is that it involves self-conscious manipulation of belief. As I've written in "Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica," the very idea of manipulating our own beliefs runs counter to a certain taken-for-granted notion we have about how our minds work. Something is either true or it isn't; we either believe something or we don't, right? Max Black, author of the classic philosophical essay "The Prevalence of Humbug," puts it this way:

How can one hide one’s own disbelief in an intended act of private deception? Is it not absurd to say to oneself, ‘I don’t believe such-and-such and yet I am going to believe it?’ One cannot be an authority for oneself, and nothing that I know that I disbelieve can be a reason for me to believe it. And how can I fail to know my own disbelief?

But as Black goes on to note, we do become our own authorities and hide our disbelief from ourselves. 

As you can probably tell, I've gotten really into these game-piece/event-score/ritual exercise whatchamathings lately. (I sense the possibility of writing something on the subject that covers this ground from a different angle than Liz Kotz, but it's still a bit vague in my mind. More later.) I've started trying to collect as many examples as I can. Daniel Wolf suggested that I check out a book from 1979 called Water in the Lake: Real Events for the Imagination, which is a whole anthology of such things. I ILL'd it and it's pretty neat. That book pointed me in the direction of an anthology of scores called Scores: An Anthology of New Music, edited by Roger Johnson. I suspect there are other such collections out there; any recommendations you might have would be welcome.

Moving away from the specifically aesthetic kind of exercise, I'm finding that there's a number of writers in a vaguely occult/psychological realm who write such things as well. I haven't read anything by Gurdjieff, but apparently he developed a whole repertory of exercises that his followers use. (In researching all this I've discovered that Robert Fripp is the follower of a Gurdjieff disciple named J. G. Bennett. Did Gurdjieff's exercises had any influence on Fripp's guitar craft workshops? I wonder whether Brian Eno's exercise-like "Oblique Strategies" fit into this in any way.) Robert Anton Wilson, known previously to me as a science fiction author, also wrote a number of impossible-to-classify books that fall somewhere in between neuroscience, psychology, occultism, memoir, and fiction, one of which I bought from our friendly local anarchist bookstore today. It's called Prometheus Rising and I've only just peeked at the contents, but it's jammed with exercises aimed specifically at working on our capacity to shift our beliefs at will (moving into different "reality tunnels," as Wilson puts it). Some of them are pretty extreme; I suspect you might go a little nuts if you really went all out on them. I'll leave you with one of the more modest** ones:

Become a Nazi for thirty three minutes. Believe that all politics is a matter of strength, stealth, and treachery: that all liberalism is hypocrisy or folly. Plan a campaign to take over the world by force and fraud.

*Or to test the limits of your employer's patience. This one works best for academia, where people expect you to act weird.  

**Modest in the sense of time and energy commitment: some of them are crazy instructions like "take a course on kung-fu or karate for at least three months, then re-read this whole chapter. You will be surprised at how much more every sentence will mean." Actually, that's pretty cool, but I'm still not going to do it.

The Triumph of the Will to Intuition. . .

  A grimly grand example of political musicology (and musicianship): overhearing the profound connections between Wagner and Mendelssohn. Listening to Midsummer Night’s Dream, it should impossible to miss the resemblances to a score of Wagnerian scores, not only in the flickering textures of the opening (which become the “Forest Murmurs” in Siegfried) and the chorale‑like passages which set the stage for Tannhäuser, but more profoundly still in the movement from idea to idea. The art of infinite transition that Wagner rightly praised in himself was learned from Mendelssohn far more directly than from Beethoven or Weber. Is this art or conception of transition "Jewish" or "German"? It belongs to a German tradition of music, true enough—but further refinements along "racial" lines of what "German" means are not just ugly but plain wrong.

  The egregious self‑deception that Mendelssohn's music is substantively (i.e., racially) different from Wagner's does not make itself audible in performance, however. There is no easy way, and perhaps no way at all, to tell from performances of either composer who does or does not subscribe to this counter‑intuitive idiocy. But that is precisely because the connections are so close. The musical skills of a good Wagner performance and a good Mendelssohn performance are so intimately intertwined that the constitutive moments cannot be pulled apart. Those who pretend that they can are deluding themselves, listening to their own political attitudes and not music.

  (Next time: how differently gendered is Clara Schumann’s music from her husband’s, and her young North German friend’s?)