If there was a time that Nico entered my consciousness it was really this moment in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums:
In several different blog posts I have chronicled the Mendelssohn/Moscheles reconstruction project, in which a collaboration with my friend Michael Cooper went from incomplete rediscovered but incomplete score to reconstruction to live premiere. (This one links all the others.) Previous to that my only involvement in such a reconstruction had been as the guy who (first, I think) played my friend Jeffrey Kallberg’s reconstruction of the early Chopin E-Flat Minor Prelude (not the one that eventually became part of Op. 28), and offering an opinion on the identity of one note thereof. Now, Prof. Kallberg has drawn my attention to an ongoing project involving an incomplete Fourth Piano Sonata by Robert Schumann, and of course there is the Unheard Beethoven site, which has MIDI realizations of a variety of Beethoven fragments, sketches, incomplete works, etc.
What is the attraction of such projects? I can assure that it is not the stupid “undiscovered masterpiece” cliché, trotted out so often when a new fragment is discovered. The recent Mozart violin fragment is one such case, though to the BBC’s credit such a claim was not made in this linked article (though other articles on the subject did not show the same restraint). Undiscovered masterworks are extremely rare; even Prof. Jay Rosenblatt’s discovery and reconstruction of Liszt’s “other” E-Flat piano concerto in the 1980s brought to light a piece that Liszt himself had decided not to revise and thus discarded. No, it is really something closer to the completist’s impulse, the almost obsessive desire to harvest everything from a lost sound world, not just the pieces that the composer, his publishers, and serendipity have managed to pass down to us. In such cases, what is compelling is why—perhaps—the composer decided not to complete the work. Was it that no one was paying, or was it that the work really did not pass muster? The germ might have been good idea, as in the case of the Chopin prelude, but the composer may later have had one he liked better. Was it an occasional piece, something composed for a particular event but for which the composer foresaw no longer future? That would be the Mendelssohn/Moscheles, at least as far as Mendelssohn was concerned. Or, as in many other cases, the composer’s circumstances may just have led him elsewhere, or prematurely offstage, so much remained undone. For the student of musical language and compositional practice, the stone that the builders rejected may not have become the cornerstone, exactly, but it can be highly instructive. The internet now makes such things available to everyone.
I have not yet spend any time with the Schumann site; all I
can say is that the name Frederick Moyer (who collaborates on this project with
Paul E. Green, Jr.) is familiar to me because he recently played a concert at
Mt. San Antonio Gardens, the facility where my father was being treated and
where my mother now lives. From
his website, I gather he’s doing musical life that other way, the way where the artist is responsible for all
his own bookings, is involved with a variety of interesting projects as a kind
of metamultitasker, and does not rely on a day job. Bravo! and Corraggio! to Moyer and Green both, and I look
forward to this work on what Schumann eventually did not manage to finish. More and more work on the aesthetic of
the sketch is beginning to be done, and (as I say) the internet now gives us
the tools to make available much music that never fully made it out of the
Realm Of Becoming.
..in infamy? In any case, I am very pleased and honoured to join Dial M for Musicology today. As my profile says, I'm really a jazz musician and, what's worse, a sociologist, skulking about, as such creatures are wont to do. That said, I do not believe music can be reduced to "society" or political considerations, much less the gender, social class, or, forgive the loathsome term, "race" of the musicians, the audience, or anyone else. So I plan to confine my 2 cents' worth, from the cheaper seats, to matters musical and, in'shallah, constructive.
Cheers,
MWM
Not especially musical, but related to my ongoing obsession with hipsters: the hipster retelling of the Book of Job:
and a little New York Times story from 1944: hipster jive nabs Nazi spies!
At 8:30 PM on 23 July 2009, my father, Samuel Irving Bellman, passed away. The funeral was yesterday, and my older brother Joel and I both gave eulogies, in addition to my Aunt. My son Benjamin read a poem he liked—The Darkling Thrush, by Thomas Hardy; when I had told my father Ben was struck by it he was transformed from a severely ailing man of 81 or so to . . . “Tell Benjamin that he made Grandpa feel as he was floating on clouds! Wonderful! Unglaublich!”
So here are our eulogies: first that of Brother Joel, then mine. No, this isn’t musicological, but I’m doing it anyway. My Dad was such a presence, and had such an impact on what Joel and I became (whatever that is!), that it is only meet and fitting. I present this as heartfelt memorial, without the slightest apology for non-musicological content, nor for sentimentality or lachrymosity.
May his memory be for a blessing.
----------------
From Joel Bellman, the older son (reprinted with
permission):
Samuel I. Bellman, 1926-2009
July 26, 2009
Good
afternoon, everyone. I want to thank you all – our relatives, friends and
colleagues – for joining my family and me on this occasion today.
We’ve
shared so many happy times and celebrations in the past that I hardly know how
to begin these remarks, but let me try.
For
years, there was a kind of a standing joke between my father and me. Every time
I met someone in the course of my work who was famous or in any way newsworthy,
Dad, a university English professor, would ask, half-seriously but all
hopefully, “You tell ‘em about your old man?”
Sometimes
I’d lie and say, “Oh, yeah, I mentioned you.” Other times, maybe feeling mean
or immature, I’d say, “Hell, no! Why would I?” Because what he was really
asking was, “Did you tell them where you came from?”
Now,
with your indulgence, I want to tell you about my old man.
You’d
be hard-pressed to find anyone who was more proud and supportive of his family.
My mom, as many of you know, can fend for herself; she’s from Chicago, as we are
often reminded, and while she may not be as skinny as Obama, she too is tough.
Dad adored her and depended on her utterly. And when it came to his boys, he
was invariably our biggest champion no matter what we were up to.
It’s
hard to imagine two more impractical career aspirations than radio journalism
at the dawn of happy-talk TV news, or classical music scholarship in the
blighted age of disco and heavy metal. But Dad choked back whatever
reservations he had and became our biggest boosters.
What
else can I tell you? When I was 10 years old, he took me fishing at Happy
Jack’s Trout Farm – this son of Lithuanian immigrants who had settled in El
Paso, Texas and opened up a tiny country store in what Dad used to call the
“Christ-forsaken place” of La Mesa, New Mexico. He taught me to ride a bike,
without training wheels, when he himself had never learned how.
He
took us on long summer driving vacations - Lake Cachuma, Lake Isabella, Lake
Elsinore and especially Lake Arrowhead, where I always looked forward to
setting off by myself in a little motorboat with nary a peep of concern from
Dad. Years later, as an adult, I finally came to appreciate how lucky I’d been
to have a father who, because he taught, had most summers off just like I did.
He taught me to drive and let me take the wheel on some of those vacations and
never criticized my driving or showed any anxiety about it – a feat I doubt
very much I’ll be able to manage with my own sons.
He took us on our first trip to San Francisco in 1966 – no, not that kind of trip. Thanks to his friend and Department Chair Bob Morsberger – and his own enterprise in cutting through the academic red tape, we had our first experience traveling to and living in England, during a year-long house swap and exchange teaching visit. This stoked and solidified my lifelong Anglophilia and led to at least half a dozen later visits.
He
took me to my first theatrical movie when I was only five years old
–“Cinderfella,” with Jerry Lewis. And more Jerry Lewis: A drive-in movie double-bill
of Gore Vidal’s “Visit to a Small Planet” and “The Bell Boy.” Later, when like
every other 10-year-old boy I was into the secret agent and spy craze, he took
me to see “The Ipcress File” with Michael Caine, one of the coolest ‘60s movies
I ever saw. Still later, live theater: “Man of La Mancha” with Richard Kiley,
“Fiddler on the Roof” with Herschel Bernardi, ”Othello” with James Earl Jones.
One
time, he saved my brother’s life when, before Jon could swim, he accidentally
drifted into the deep end of a colleague’s swimming pool. Dad jumped in fully
clothed and rescued him – despite not knowing how to swim himself.
To
my mother’s consternation, my dad discovered, and fueled, my appetite for dark
and weird and often age-inappropriate fiction – Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka,
the fantasy, science fiction and horror of H.G. Wells, the corrosive cynicism
of Ambrose Bierce, the tragic fatalism of Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad,
Edward Gorey’s eerie Victorian ghost-story anthology “The Haunted Looking-Glass,”
the collected New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams, morbid and violent old
radio thrillers like The Shadow, Lights Out and Inner Sanctum.
There
was the lighter stuff, too – Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through
the Looking Glass,” the nonsense work of Edward Lear, Max Fleischer’s Betty
Boop cartoons, Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies with cheerful choruses of singing
flowers; his collection of Big Little books featuring comic-strip and radio
serial characters from the 1930s; his L. Frank Baum Oz book collection; and
later, an eclectic and improbable assortment of 60s pop singles ranging from
Ernie K-Doe, Little Peggy March and the Troggs to Joan Baez, Judy Collins and
Peter, Paul and Mary.
Unfortunately,
the world was rapidly changing, and from his standpoint, not for the better. As
a yellow-dog FDR Democrat, he found things more and more politically
intolerable under a succession of disastrous presidencies – that of “Nixie,”
AKA “the anti-Christ;” Jerry Ford and his WIN buttons, too contemptible even to
be graced with a pejorative; Jimmy Carter and his Sunday School pieties, a
nuclear engineer my father derided as the “peanut boy,” Ronald Reagan, “the
Beast” straight out of the Bible’s Book of Revelations; Bush I, who was
“Bushie;” Bush II, who was alternately “the bastard,” “the Illegitimate One,”
or just “The Boy.”
He
was alarmed and offended by anti-intellectualism and tabloid journalism, even
as he occasionally fell victim to both crackpot theories and crank populism.
Prefiguring Philip Roth, my father once informed me that Hitler had a secret
plan to bomb his hometown of El Paso as part of a planned takeover of the
United States. This was news to me – and undoubtedly would have been to the
Third Reich as well – but challenged for proof, he produced a yellowed
newspaper column from the El Paso Times in 1942, speculating that the
anti-aircraft artillery training center at the nearby Civil War-era Army post
of Ft. Bliss might make it a tempting target.
Back
in the early 1970s, he grew enamored with the writings of Erich Von Daniken, a
one-time imprisoned swindler and author of “Chariots of the Gods,” who grew rich promoting the idea that
extraterrestrial aliens – whom my dad reverently referred to as “the Fellas” -
had somehow salted the earth in ancient times with the seeds of the human race.
Several
years ago, he once received a strange package in the mail, bearing no return
address, and opened it up to find a talking Ann Coulter doll. I don’t pretend
to know the actual provenance of this mysterious gift, but I’m pretty sure it
was not, as Dad insisted, personally sent to him by Ann Coulter herself.
The
proliferation of new-media devices – from cell phones to personal computers -
my technophobic father found it increasingly impossible to master. Despite it
all, he remained surprisingly, if obscurely, productive – we’ve found dozens of
essays, poems and articles tucked into every nook and cranny of my parents’
home that I’d no idea he’d ever written.
As
my brother and I grew up, married and started families of our own, he embraced
his three grandsons with the same ferocious affection he’d shown his own sons,
as eager to school them in the fundamentals of scholarship, literacy and the
joys of reading and writing. In the era of the Internet, iPods and video games,
it was increasingly a fool’s errand – but he never gave up.
Oscar
Wilde – another writer Dad introduced me to, through his novel “The Picture of
Dorian Gray” – counseled that we put our talent into our work and our genius
into our life. I guess Dad sort of did – he raised one son who’s a professor
and scholar who teaches and writes for a living, another who writes and
periodically teaches for a living. We both share many of Dad’s crazy
enthusiasms from the most arcane and even disreputable corners of popular
culture to the most respectable highbrow literature and conventional symphonic
works.
With
the passage of time, more and more it’s my father’s face that I see in the
mirror; his voice that I hear when I speak, his values and ethics I hope to
transmit to my children. I am proud to be my father’s son.
That’s
really what I wanted to tell you about my old man.
----------------
From Jonathan Bellman, the
younger son:
Dear Dad,
I guess this means
it will be more difficult for us to visit each other, right?
You told me that
when you were young, a recently departed relative (perhaps Uncle Sol Levenson)
visited three male relatives in their sleep the same night. Your father—Grandpa Max—said (in his
dream), “We sure do miss you, Sol” and he responded “No, Max, it’s better this
way.” Dad, I’m sure it is better, but if you’d like to stop by—while we’re
dreaming, perhaps, or if you would just waft a breeze through our hair or give
a quick kiss on the forehead—please don’t hesitate, even if there are some
tears. Death is unavoidable, but
the separation is a choice, and
you will be close to me eternally.
You used to speak of tribal beliefs that major chunks of parents’ souls
are instilled in their children; as a son I believed it, and now, as a father,
I know it to be true. Whether it
is literally or figuratively true could not matter less. I will always feel you nearby.
One of the last
times we saw each other, you directed me to “keep up the Bellman family
tradition,” and I do: I teach, I learn, I write, I publish—as Joel does, and as
you did your whole life. I go to
school every day, as you did, as your grandsons do, as their children will
do…as we are meant to do. And in the face of life’s losses and
vicissitudes, we—like all teachers—still get to class, because people are
waiting for us, people who need and want what we’re offering. Teaching and Learning—passing it on, in
other words—is the great chain,
reaching back to before Abraham and Isaac, back to prehistory, back to the
animal kingdom even, and it has been our profound privilege to spend our lives as links in that
chain. As you did, Dad, so I
do. We’re still at it, with me
putting my feet in your (bigger) footprints. So as surely as I breathe, I declare: no bond between us
has been broken. Our closeness
remains, and our work continues, as does our family tradition. It will be some time before we see each
other again, but that is the nature of the distance between this world and Olam
ha-Ba, the World to Come.
I miss you, though. Forn gezunt: go well, and fly high and
far, with freedom and joy, with the spirit of the Almighty cradling you and
putting wind beneath your wings.
And I love you forever.
Jonathan
A head's-up: Steve Smith, a Philosophy/Religious Studies guy at Millsaps College, has a blog/chronicle/study of hooks, specifically hooks in rock songs. Smith's project is off to a fine start, and while I admit that our definitions of "hook" differ, it still makes for enjoyable and thought-provoking reading. Just to explain the difference: my idea of a hook has always been an instrumental riff that grabs you by the collar (or something else) and doesn't let go—ever. Obvious examples would be the the opening electric piano lick from "Summer in the City" (Lovin' Spoonful), the closing piano lick from Paul McCartney's "Venus and Mars," the signature guitar licksfrom the Beatles' "Day Tripper" (yes, Clapton did it first in the Bluesbreakers' version of Ray Charles's "What'd I Say," but still), Sugarloaf's "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You," the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man," the Move's "Do Ya" (much superior to ELO's), etc. You know what I mean, right? It's a hook!
Recent Comments