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I swear, I will never drink again. Our summer party was a good one but I have the Britten Suite to get up for Sunday and 10,000 beer cans to remove from the garden, bath, stairs, cats, etc.
Else in the news my father wrote a poem in memory of John Mayer, so I have added it to my July post.
Proper posting will follow after a fried breakfast and seven hours of Britten practice.
Still on my practicing binge (as usual, the little piece of J C Bach is taking miles longer than the complicated virtuoso Ibert, because one rough note and you've had it), so little time for blogging, although I am enjoying Pete Hamill's Why Sinatra Matters in preparation for an Artsblogging post as soon as.
Slumped in front of the TV tonight after a hard day at the rehearsal face, watching Britian fail to win Olympic medals, I was enouraged to read this halfway through Dryden's Alexander's Feast Or, The Power Of Music; An Ode In Honour of St Cecilia's Day:
"The Praise of Bacchus then the sweet musician sung,
Of Bacchus ever fair and ever young:
The jolly god in triumph comes;
Sound the trumpets: beat the drums;
Flush'd with a purple grace
He shews his honest face:
Now give the hautboys breath: he comes, he comes.
Bacchus, ever fair and young
Drinking joys did first ordain:
Bacchus' blessings are a treasure,
Drinking is the soldier's pleasure:
Rich the treasure,
Sweet the pleasure,
Sweet is pleasure after pain."
More soberly, after Dryden I found myself leafing through Oscar Wilde's De Profundis:
"I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which sould and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals...Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask...Other things may be illusions of the eye or appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain."
I am currently on a Greg Sandow-esque work binge, necessitating practicing in the evening as well as during the day (although not yet hitting my all-time practice record of 11 hours when I had to get up 3 Wagner operas, the Debussy Dances, Spohr's C Minor Fantasy, Salome's Dance, the Tchaik cadenzas and Aida in a fortnight, thank goodness. By the time I got on the plane I was so relieved not to be playing the harp at that moment in time I couldn't even be nervous). I have to learn the Ibert violin, cello and harp Trio for Sunday - not as hard as everyone seems to think it is, but certainly enough to keep you at it for four or five days - and then have a solo recital and a violin and harp recital the week after. A fortnight would be loads of practice time for all this, but I am working on several days and on Monday is our annual summer party, where we fill the bath with booze and the cats apply to be adopted.
Nonetheless I am really enjoying both returning to some meaty solo pieces and discovering the Ibert, which is a great piece. I have always rather dismissed Ibert, as I only knew his lighter Six Pieces for solo harp. I wonder if it is common for these early-twentieth-century French composers to oscilate between rather run-of-the-mill romantic French fodder and greatly more virtuosic, harmonically inventive and brightly coloured work. Marcel Tournier is another example, where the simple Quatre Preludes and the Etude de Concert: Au Matin are a world apart from the four books of Images, each even more difficult than the last. Circumstance has a lot to do with it in Tournier's case, as he was writing for his harp students as well as professionals, for example, hence the easier works, but I don't know about Ibert. There is the most suprising hike in the difficulty of his harp writing from anything I have played of his before, so I wonder what might have happened to cause this.
Yesterday I read Pablo Casals' Joys and Sorrows, a wonderful account not only of his musical life but his political convictions and how he has aligned the two. In light of this, and some embryo music/politics posts on Artsblogging, and because Bayreuth is now safely yesterday's news and I am always behind the times, I would like to read a good book about Wagner and the Third Reich.
Could anybody recommend one? There are so many I am rather at a loss, although the one entitled Penetrating Wagner's Ring made me laugh so hard I had to leave Borders.
I am reassured to read this on a wedding harp website:
"Contrary to popular belief, the harp is a mentally and physically demanding instrument to play. "
Here in Berlin, I have come across an interesting article in the Berliner equivalent of Time Out, about the Schlingensief Parsifal. Alex Ross recently objected to this controversial production, and predicted that, despite loud booing, criticism would be swept under the carpet in the German press. The high level of public opera funding, and greater government interest in ticking the "progressive" box than supporting fine art, would ensure Schlingensief's survival.
Anyhow Tip Berlin certainly admits the stomach-churning gratuitiousness throughout the production: a long list, from rubbish through to "eine fette, nackte Frau, im Hauptberuf Sexarbeiterin in Hardcore-Pornos" (a greasy, naked woman, whose main job is a sex worker in hard-core porn movies). It admits, too, that there is little obvious coherence).
In fact, the madness is so extreme, Peter Laudenbach suggests it goes beyond the gratuitous: "Statt des kalkulierten Schock-Appeals: ein langsam abhebendes Delirium der Assoziationen, Bilder und Referenzräume und eine Drehbühne, die die Inszenierung langsam in Trance versetzt." (instead of calculated shock-value, a slowly intensifying delirium of association, pictures and references, and a turning stage, which slowly presents the action through a trance."
The crunch of Laudenbach's article comes with a comparison between this incomprehensible madness, and the position of Parsifal to a modern audience. What could be more strange, argues Laudenbach, than Wagner's attempt to meld art and religion, by seeking Christ-inspired redemption through the power of the opera form. And it is this modern confusion, unable to comprehend what Parsifal is trying to do, that has pissed the Catholic Schlingensief off so much (I bloody hope I understood this correctly. It's one of those terribly long German sentances):
"Was könnte einer entzauberten Moderne fremder, inkommensurabler and schwerer zu entschlüsseln bzw. zu ertragen sein als Wagners Versuch, Kunst und Religion, autonomes Opernkunstwerk und christlich inspirierte Erlösungssehnsucht zu verschmelzen. Und genau diese Fremdheit, das Rätsel (condundrum) "Parsifal", hat der gläubige Katholik Schlingensief inszeniert."
Laudenbach compares the recent Bayreuth audience reaction to Nietzsche`s dislike of Parsifal. Nietzche felt the opera was essentially ungerman, wierd and gruesome. In the tenor Endrik Wottrich`s condemnation of the production as gruesome and ungerman, Schlingensief found his own Nietzsche. So, Schlingensief has re-created an important reaction that the opera experienced at its outset.
The final question, this article concludes, is who has f*cked whom over: Bayreuth Schlingensief or Schlingensief Bayreuth:
"So dass die Frage, wer jetzt wen gefickt hat, Bayreuth Schlingensief oder Schlingensief Bayreuth."
I´m not defending the production by blogging this - I didn´t see it, and it sounded both unpleasant and textually unaware - but it´s an interesting example of the German press. I don´t think it makes excuses for the production, but I do think it identifies what Schlingensief is trying to do. He must be trying to do something. Whether it´s art to recreate Nietzsche´s opinions is one for the philosophers.
Tom just phoned me from Vienna, full of beans because he has been chatted up in a cafe.
He said: "I've still got it!"
I hope T is not so busy resisting temptation that he forgets to buy me a little bust of Mozart.
Over on Artsblogging there is a discussion about the need to have a broad range of artistic and cultural reference, beginning with my post about the range of blogging versus traditional journalism; George observes that art forms inform each other; and Jessica articulates some sophisticated connections between narrow-mindedness and our Zeitgeist:
“a reaction against the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, perhaps, or part of the tendency through the late 20th century towards isolation? Or just part of our ever-busier lives, battling against lousy transport systems, the onslaught of appalling TV, noise pollution, family break-ups and the rest. Do we no longer have the time or energy to examine anything beyond our own familiar territory?”
I hope George is feeling gratified that within the first three substantial posts on his new blog a fascinating issue has been reached, and one that I myself have only just become conscious of in my reading today.
I have had orchestral calls all day, which if you are a harpist requires a good book, even if you are playing both harp parts simultaneously in a chamber arrangement of Das Lied von der Erde. So I have been reading Paul Morley’s Words and Music (a virtuosically written history of pop), and Deryck Cooke’s Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to his Music. Contrasting material, but also with enough common ground to make me feel I learnt something new about what music and maybe art in general is about, which makes me feel good about the day.
This is a long post, but I shall work hard to write clearly.
To start coherently I quote the blurb on the back of Words and Music:
“HAS POP BURNT ITSELF OUT? Inspired by the video for Kylie Minogue’s hit single ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, acclaimed rock journalist Paul Morley is driving with Kylie towards a virtual city built of sound and ideas in search of the answer. Their journey bridges the paradoxes of twentieth-century culture, as they encounter a succession of celebrities and geniuses – including Madonna, Kraftwerk, Wittgenstein and the ghost of Elvis Presley – and explore the iconic and the obscure, the mechanical and the digital, the avant-garde and the very nature of pop itself.”
Throughout his journey through twentieth-century culture, Morley has as a focal point Kylie’s intensely synthetic, uber-polished, ultra-produced “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, and Alvin Lucier’s 1969 experiment in the relationship between the purely acoustic human voice and the manipulations of it recording can produce, I am sitting in a room. He does this because of the contrast between the two works:
“I am sitting in a room is a natural sonic sculpture. ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ is synthetically tuned pop art.”
Simultaneously, the songs are similar:
“Kylie’s song, a lovely little drama about love and loss, a mesmerising observation of obsession, is certainly a pop piece, but there is art to it as well. It can be satisfying mentally as the Lucier piece, as tantalising and as mysterious for all its aggressive, even cynical, commercial glitter. Lucier’s piece, not a song, aches with artistic intent, but it is also, in its way, about love, loss, obsession, and is as satisfying physically as Kylie’s song.”
What can be perceived from this at once difference and similarity, Morley argues, is a layered reality, more subtle than the familiar concept that each has his own reality. Two very different pieces of art can meet in the mind of an individual, and do so through the dialectic between what they have to say that is original, and what is referential – clichés, perhaps, or everyday images:
“I can hear the music develop in my mind as I think about it, I can feel its weight, and understand its magic. It has a magic that is to do with time, and how you find time, and how time finds you, and what happens when you meet, time and you, and you, in the middle of nowhere, timed to meet, timed to perfection, from time to time, time stops, in the middle of music, which is all about time, and the way that time and timing is everything, and music is time itself turned into form, time is the past and the present turned into content, form and content connect to float across time, time for thought, time to listen, time to feel, time to end this sentence”
So – music has magical power because it sounds so many different resonances deep within us and the worlds we inhabit. Different eras, for example – Morley is conscious of the temptation to listen to “rebellious” rock bands who no longer constitute rebellious rock music, but who were when you personally were feeling rebellious aged 15 back in 1987. And to refer to one time and be in another is also a manifestation of fluid realities:
“I was becoming less real in a world that was becoming less real, and at the same time I was gaining in reality, the reality of being able to live across time zones, across cities, across space.”
When you look at classical music, too, there is a constant and shifting scheme of reference. Take Das Lied von der Erde, which I was playing today. On the basis of one 120 page guide and my own ears, here are some of its references. Chinese poetry; German translation; Mahler’s own words at the final coda. Passionate love of life, and awareness of inevitable death. Romantic hope for the transcendent potential of mankind through art; modern consciousness of sordid, beastly humanity (it is Mahler’s popular, burlesque, vulgar inclusions that distinguish him from other Romantic composers. Much of Das Lied is spent rolling drunk). Das Lied’s last movement, 'der Abschied', is full of cross rhythms, and rubato within the rhythms, creating a shifting sound for the music’s programme: a bittersweet personal farewell, where the individual must die, but the lovely earth blossoms in Spring and grows green again eternally. At the end, it is Mahler’s ability to perceive more than one reality that allows him courageously to face out his untimely death:
“Waking from his vision of mankind redeemed to find himself in the valley of the shadow of death before his time, what could he now set against the ‘spirit that denies’? The vision remained valid – for humanity, but it was no comfort for the individual faced with disintegration. The affirmation of vitality of the First and Fifth Symphonies was impossible; the faith of the Second, Third and Fourth ungraspable; and the nihilism of the Sixth unthinkable. Spiritual defeat stared Mahler in the face. He was forced back on his one indestructible possession – his intense love of living.” (Cooke)
Granted, Romantic music is intensely interested in issues outside the musical – the ascent of man, the expression of something (feeling, for example), and the links of art with the divine. As Jessica notes, there were and are many profound reactions against this supremely reaching reference in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But to react against something, often you have already been shaped by it – Debussy never escaped Wagnerian influences. Other very different musics lead by their very existence to new realities and new references, such as minimalism. Take Morley’s citation of Cage, on performing Satie’s eighteen-hour Vexations (840 repetitions):
“The experience over the eighteen hours and forty minutes of those repetitions was very different from the thought of them or the realisation that they were going to happen…I had changed, and the world had changed.”
How on earth are we to keep music apart from other art, and the experience of living,if we are ever even to feel we understand what it is, what it's for, and why we are writing about it in the first place?
I have been playing away (in a strictly virtual sense) with a post on Artsblogging, George Hunka's new blog.
"I think you have to run the risk of looking an idiot, otherwise life just wouldn't be interesting."
Paul Morley, Words and Music
