Nicholas R. Jones: The World As Museum

Tallis Scholars

2012-02-18T09:59:00.000-08:00

Heard this wonderful group on Wednesday. Only thing that would have made it better is to be an old church by candlelight. I'm glad I didn't live in the Renaissance, but, oh, the music! Makes me want to sign up for the Tallis' Scholars summer camp in Seattle -- or maybe the one in England?

They sang the whole of Gesualdo's wonderful Tenebrae: dark, gnarly, full of lamentation. I've got to get the CD of this!

If you are intrigued, here's my review from Cleveland Classical.

Here's one clip I found on YouTube.

Listen to the strange patter of rain on the roof at 0:32 "viri justi tolluntur" (the just people are taken away; and no one notices). And the modulation at 1:04..."et erit in pace": the memory of the just will be in peace.

Cross-platform

2012-02-16T19:04:00.001-08:00

What a great job I have! Today I got to re-read poems by Keats and Wordsworth for a class on literary theory, which I got to lead on front of Oberlin's fascinating Diebenkorn painting.

Only problem, I decided tp kneel on the floor while we discussed, and my knees still feel it. The first graders that passed by looked amused, or was I just projecting?

Later I got to go to a video and sound installation of three colleagues about Antarctica. Barely walked out, it was so moving.

and after, I got to talk with the brilliant students in Oberlin's Historical Performance program ( early music, that is) and two of my wonderful colleagues about Italian madrigal texts. I learned so much, and I think they might have, too.

Unfortunately, I have no smarts left to translate Cicero for the Latin class I'm taking, which meets tomorrow at 9 am. Oh, we'll, or as the magrigalists would say, oime!

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Bronfman, Brahms, Cleveland Orchestra...

2012-02-12T16:31:00.000-08:00

The finale of the Cleveland Orchestra's Brahms concerto series -- the Violin Concerto, the 2nd Piano Concerto, the first... I only caught the last of them...

http://www.clevelandclassical.com/020512tcofeb2rev

Music marathon

2012-01-23T14:40:00.000-08:00

The Rubin Institute of Music Criticism has been going on this week at Oberlin College. It's a new creation of the Conservatory of Music, funded by Holt publisher Steve Rubin, bringing undergraduate aspiring writers about music, nationally-known big-paper critics and regional critics together around a quartet of big-name performances. It's a strange mix, a competition (for pretty big money) combined with a writers' workshop and a music festival. Not all blended in the wintry bowl, but for me it's been more tasty and substantive fare than the upcoming Super Bowl. I have to say, though, that I'm not happy about teaching students to write by dangling a big ($10,000) prize in front of them. I'm not wild about the prize performance competitions, either, but they're well established in music circles.

The students, 10 of them, have been studying music criticism this fall at Oberlin with regional critics, Don Rosenberg of the Plain Dealer (and president of the Music Critics Association of North America) and my colleagues at ClevelandClassical.com, Dan Hathaway and Mike Telin. This week they were joined by visiting critics and writers: Alex Ross (New Yorker), Anne Midgette (Washington Post), Heidi Waleson (Wall Street Journal), John Rothwell (formerly New York Times) and Tim Page (Annenberg School at USC).

The content of the week came in two flavors (three actually, but I didn't go to the afternoon panels): lectures by the visiting critics and major concerts each night, part of the venerable Oberlin Artist Recital series.

The students' reviews of these concerts, due at 8 am the next day, were published next day on the Institute website, and was a pleasure to watch them work in the hot light of public scrutiny. You can read their work online. There was also a prize for the best review from the audience, and the best of these were posted as well.

As readers of this blog know, I like to write about music. In fact, I review concerts regularly for ClevelandClassical.com. I'm not officially involved in the Institute, and I'm not reviewing the concerts individually, but I do have some thoughts about the music after this unusual experience of three concerts in a row (there were four, but after spending Saturday afternoon at the MET HD "Enchanted Island" [about which more in another post] I couldn't manage getting to the fourth, which may well have been the best: the contemporary ensemble ICE).

I heard, on successive nights, a very large orchestra (Cleveland), a solo pianist (Jeremy Denk), and a baroque band (Apollo's Fire). What follows are two possibly grumpy maxims about programming music.

1. Program for the hall you're playing in. Here, the hall was Oberlin's Finney Chapel. It holds 1376 people. The acoustics are warm and pretty consistent through the hall.

Cleveland (led by Welser-Möst) played pieces that packed the stage: the first three parts of Smetana's Ma Vlast, "Orion" by Kaija Saariaho, and Shostakovich 6. (The picture, by orchestra photographer Roger Mastroianni, is of another concert of the orchestra in Finney, with, I'd guess, about 80% of the forces they had on Wednesday. It already looks pretty full.) The Saariaho used quadruple winds and tons of percussion, and of course the strings were at their usual dozen or so per section. What were they thinking? After 45 minutes of Smetana's unabashed and unrelenting Big Sound, we got some 20 or 25 minutes of the even bigger sound of the Saariaho (which was an interesting piece, by the way, full of haunting moments). The effect, in Finney, was ear-numbing. There aren't a lot of nuances in the Smetana, anyway, but by intermission, it was almost impossible to think of nuance. Severance Hall is larger (2100 listeners) and the stage is much more capacious: in both respects, it handles the Big Sound and makes it cycle around the hall. (My cousin the acoustician could explain this much better than I). Fortunately, Shostakovich works in smaller acoustic units -- a few winds here, a few brass there, the violas alone . . . and he works by counterpoint, which I'm not sure Smetana ever thought about, and with counterpoint you get two or three different things to listen to, each at a more reasonable volume than the Moldau rolling its romantic waves through your skull.

Apollo's Fire needs a smaller hall for many of the nuances to be heard. The size of the hall seemed to push Sorrell and her players to play at the top of their dynamic range pretty much all the time, with the result that there wasn't room for relaxation of the sound. Jeannette Sorrell also wrongly chose to play her harpsichord version of Vivaldi's "Summer" which was barely audible even in the twelfth row. Violins carry: she should have asked concertmaster Olivier Brault to play it. (Oddly, you can hardly hear the harpsichord in the video of this piece on AF's website.)

It will sound too much like Goldilocks to say that Jeremy Denk on the big Steinway was just right, so I won't say it.

2. Program a concert that you care about and make sure we know why you care about it. Let's start with Jeremy Denk. He opened with two Bach Toccatas, and it was clear from his playing and from the program notes (written by Peter Laki but apparently channeling some of Jeremy's own concerns) that these were meant seriously, as introductions to a program that explored several things: the "toccata" nature of piano music -- the intentional touching of the keys; the intricacy and unsettling quality of Bachian counterpoint, whether in Bach or later composers; and the almost guilty joy of virtuosic intricacy. Those concerns and explorations opened up further in the pieces that followed, three pieces of increasing depth: Beethoven's Eroica Variations; Ligeti's Etudes, Book 1; and the Beethoven Opus 111 sonata. Denk gives the listeners lots of ways of understanding what he cares about, among which are: his seriousness and focus at the keyboard; his articulate comments during the concert (only once, but very apt in helping us understand the Ligeti and its place in his thinking about piano music, Bach, and Beethoven); and his wry and insightful blog (Think Denk).

It was helpful that Apollo's Fire gave us a program note that suggested why the tempest theme was important. Sorrell wrote that she is interested in the possibilities of explicitly transgressive Baroque music (storm scenes, chaos descriptions, madness) in opening up performers (listeners, too?) to "transcend the confines of the notes on the page." Excellent! it's something we all should do. "This repertoire," she continues, "is fertile ground for all of us in challenging ourselves to play sentences, phrases, gestures, and emotions -- not to play notes." (I question whether, apart from reading the note, listeners caught this theme and this intention.) Disconcertingly, for this challenge, Sorrell also programmed a pretty sentimental modern "Baroque" style piece on the nineteenth-century hymn, "For the Beauty of the Earth"; if you are exploring and specializing in Baroque style, you might well stick with Baroque style.

The Cleveland Orchestra program notes suggested little that would help us see what these pieces meant to Welser-Möst, or what he thought they might mean to us. Nor did his conducting, which as many noted, was detached and almost aloof. The conductor doesn't need to be Dudamel in order to cue us to at least some of what he cares about.

An opera on Il Postino

2012-01-02T21:09:00.000-08:00

I have always loved the 1994 film Il Postino, about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, in exile (fictionally) on an Italian island. The film romantically ducks most of the struggles of the pre-Pinochet years (Neruda died only a few days after Pinochet seized power). It's a fantasy, a little like The Tempest, a film about forgiveness and metaphor on an island remote from political intrigue. It deals in words and desire, not least the desire of the postman-figure, a naif who learns the power of metaphor. It's a simple plot, really, a male-bonding movie with a twist -- here the Italian postman longs for the attention of the about-to-win-a-Nobel Prize Chilean poet; he loves, he loses, he finds love again. . .

Tonight we watched a Great Performances show we taped off NPR of an opera, Il Postino, based on the film. A Mexican composer, Daniel Catan, who died this past year, wrote the opera for Placido Domingo -- one of the first serious operas in Spanish to be performed by a major US opera company (LA, in this case). Catan's lush music is like Puccini, accessible, emotional, through-composed but with big aria moments -- largely, the poems of Neruda and the poems that he inspires from the postman. The postman's love-interest, Beatrice (yes, Beatrice, and Dante and D'Annunzio are both cited as sources for this improbably literary romance) gets some great tunes, too. But mostly, it's a love-duet between Neruda and the Postman -- when do two tenors ever get to sing like that together?

It was played without intermission -- maybe two or more hours. We sat and watched without a break. It was beautiful. Now I want to reread the book: Ardiente paciencia by Antonio Skármeta.

Daniel Catan died less than a year after the opera was premiered. Massimo Troisi, who played Neruda in the film, died just days after shooting the film. Let's hope Placido Domingo is spared. Here he is as Neruda.

Some scenes from the opera are on YouTube.

Rembrandt in Detroit

2011-11-25T12:56:00.000-08:00

I just went to the new Rembrandt exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, that incredible treasure of a museum in the center of a city of abandoned factories and foreclosed homes.

The exhibition brings together a remarkable series of studies of a single young Sephardic Jew by Rembrandt and the other painters working under his tutelage in Amsterdam, and shows how this unnamed young man becomes the model for Rembrandt's moving images of Jesus.

The greatest painting brought to Detroit by this exhibition is the Louvre's great Supper at Emmaus. Here you can see the same pose as the above study, these dark reflective eyes, the tilt of the head, so differentiating the resurrected Jesus from the obviously still very alive disciples and servant, who recognize him as he breaks the bread. The more you look at this, the more you realize how tight is the composition: the line from the disciple's head on the left to the attentive servant on the right, passing right through the radiant head of Jesus, is just one of the multiple points of composition.

In a Poussin, say, one would first notice compositional geometry like this. But here, I didn't. In the context of the exhibition, with its focus on Rembrandt's interest in a Jewish Jesus, and his familiarity with the large Jewish community in Amsterdam, it is the way these figures seem grounded in a real world that struck me most of all. That world of brown and red shadows, of fabric and flesh, of bodies above all, is suddenly invaded by a figure -- Jesus resurrected -- who is at once the same and different. Unmistakeably human in his sad and powerful presentness, he is also part of another world, radiating from inward, almost transparent as if light shone through his rose-hued clothes as well as in his face. This is a human being who has been through terrible things. It is not survival of sorrow, but transfiguration of sorrow, that I see in him.

There was enough sorrow in 1648 to go around, according to the exhibition catalog. The Khmelnytsky Uprising in the Ukraine, for one, had loosed both Cossacks and peasants onto the Jews; some lucky few managed to get away to places of relative safety and even tolerance like Rembrandt's Amsterdam. They must have brought with them memories and signs of unspeakable horrors. Are those also part of the haunting melancholy of this painting?

Baroque in Cleveland

2011-11-21T19:38:00.000-08:00

A great concert by the master Ton Koopman with the Cleveland Orchestra... My review from ClevelandClassical.com

http://www.clevelandclassical.com/111811tconov17rev

The Cleveland Orchestra. Severance Hall, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2011. Ton Koopman, guest conductor. Music of J. S. Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F major, BWV 1046; "Wedding" Cantata, "Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten," BWV 202, with Teresa Wakim, soprano; Sinfonia in B minor from Cantata 209, "Non sa che sia dolore," BWV 209; Sinfonia in D minor from Cantata 42, "Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats," BWV 42; Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068.

Nicholas Jones

While Bach is primarily known as a composer of music for the church, there is more to that multi-faceted genius. Thursday evening, under the spirited direction of guest conductor and baroque specialist Ton Koopman, the Cleveland Orchestra gave us the secular Bach, a playful and inventive composer free from the restraints of the weekly church service, writing music by turns courtly, sensual, introspective, and exuberant.

Bach's well-known Brandenburg Concertos are miracles of the use of a limited number of instrumental resources: each of the concertos creates a unique sonic world. For these concerts, Koopman picked the first of the six concertos, filled with a rambunctious energy. It features a virtuosic solo violin, two horns playing at strenuous passages at a fearsome pace, and the stunning reediness of three solo oboes, as well as the usual band of strings and continuo. The mood was one of restless enthusiasm, the horns and oboes contributing their off-to-the-hunt energy to a string ensemble already eager to gallop. Especially memorable were the dance movements that end the piece -- a brilliant trio for two of the oboes with bassoon, a jaunty Polacca, a second trio for the horns and oboes, all framed by a lovely recurring minuet (the minuet at each repetition sounding like a new piece as Koopman brought new colors out of the orchestra).

Another exuberant piece followed on the heels of the Brandenburg. This was Bach's secular "Wedding Cantata," full of spring, flowers, fields, and -- of course -- love. Mr. Koopman conducted this cantata from the harpsichord, adding his well-known flair for improvisation to the texture. The cantata has no chorus, the vocal line being entirely sustained by a single soprano through five arias and intervening recitatives. The soprano was Teresa Wakim, a familiar figure in Boston-area early music venues and more recently in the Netherlands as well. Ms. Wakim brought to the part an expressive stage presence and a lovely middle range, though in the subdued opening movement her lower register did not effectively cut through the complex texture, and in general her high notes lacked the open, free quality that would have better projected the joyful nature of the arias. The arias are accompanied by a basso continuo and obligato lines in the solo cello, violin, and oboe, virtuoso parts beautifully rendered by members of the orchestra. (A side note: it would be helpful of the management to name orchestral soloists in the program when their parts are this prominent.)

Two Sinfonias followed the intermission. These were originally orchestral movements that Bach wrote as introductions to two cantatas, but here lifted from context. The first, a haunting and thoughtful piece, featured an expressive flute solo. The second featured angular and expressive lines in the strings, complemented by energetic and fascinating work from the wind soloists, two oboes and a bassoon. It was a pleasure to hear these rarely-performed segments, but I found myself wishing that we could have heard the rest of the pieces to which they served as preface.

Finally, three trumpets and timpani joined the others for the third Orchestral Suite in D, a grand piece for a (relatively) large ensemble. Mr. Koopman’s tempos were brisk and energetic -- except of course in the famous "Air on the G String," which was at once lyrical and energetic in its own way. Here Mr. Koopman's gift for expressive phrasing brought out little sighing motifs that hauntingly play off against the long melodic lines. In the faster movements, the timpanist, with his dry and powerful phrasing and his expressive rolls, was the presiding spirit over this exuberant and moving rendition of a great piece. The third suite is secular Bach at his very best, the work of a master who knows how to use the ordinary (in this case, lowly dance forms) in ways that surprise and delight, and to exalt the soul as much with this secular material as with his church music.

Mr. Koopman's presence as guest conductor this year and last has started to shape the Cleveland Orchestra as a serious site of baroque historically-inflected performance. Vibrato is considerably subdued, bow speeds are swift, phrasing has moved away from the long romantic line and added empty space where appropriate. All this has significantly improved their performances of early music, and quite clearly the orchestra loves playing with him, and responds with energy and precision. Even so, playing early music at the concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra inevitably involves giving up some aspects of historical performance. Among them are the intimacy of smaller halls, the chamber-music ensemble of smaller bands, and the “period sound” of historically authentic instruments, the woodier sound of baroque oboes, the piercing clarity of natural trumpets, and the gutsy power of valveless horns.

A final note about placement: the orchestra was appropriately reduced in size for this concert (I counted 28 strings, considerably fewer than the usual). Given the extra stage room that reduction gives, more thought could be given to rearranging the forces so that soloists can be physically positioned close to each other. At times, the brass and woodwinds playing at the back (as usual) were at a considerable distance from other important voices, such as the soprano and the solo violin, a distance that interfered with ensemble.

A snapshot of music in New York

2011-10-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

A weekend is, it goes without saying, a blip in the musical spectacle of New York City. But sometimes a blip is better than nothing. It signaled to me the excitement -- call it frenzy? -- of that stream of classical events that can be heard there. How do the natives figure out where to choose?

Friday, after flying in from Ohio, we walked to St. John the Divine (we were staying near Columbia).

This was ostensibly a non-musical part of the trip, but then inside that mammoth space, was an orchestra rehearsing (perhaps for a recording?) a klezmer influenced clarinet concerto. I'm not sure who wrote it or who was playing it. It was by turns swingy and schmalzy (which wasn't altogether bad) and it was being superbly played. One of the reasons we went to St. John was to see that space we had heard in broadcasts of the winter solstice celebrations there, with the eponymous Paul Winter in charge--a space so obviously absorbent, reverberant, such a powerful presence in itself.

Later that afternoon, we went to the Morgan Library to see the drawings from the Louvre (and some from the Morgan), by French masters from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Those incredibly active lines of charcoal and pen, those portraits, for the most part lovingly rendered if sometimes unflattering. Ingres, David, and Delacroix -- all very different were the stars. Music? well, if we had planned more time, we could have heard, in the Morgan's auditorium, the Orchestra of St. Luke's.

But we didn't. We had tickets to the Met, Donizetti's Anna Bolena. We had thought it would have Anna Netrebko in the title role, but she had moved on to something else. Just as well, given Alex Ross's idiosyncratic assessment of her singing, which didn't agree with others we talked to. For us it was Angela Meade (famous for her part in that documentary about the Met competition, The Audition. Her Anna was by turns proud and vulnerable, a combination that I especially heard in her high notes (B flats, maybe? C's?) that she would begin with the most delicate pianissimo -- and yet with presence even when it was barely heard. She'd hold that quiet for so long -- until you realized that in fact it had been growing in dynamic all along, and suddenly you were at a clarion call fortissimo! As if the character, unsure of herself at first (as well she might be in that hellhole of intrigue that Donizetti makes of the Tudor Court) remembers her own power and calls it out to whoever's listening. Who is, of course, us.

Our seats were in a wretchedly cramped but wonderfully positioned box, the most extreme on the right side of the stage. The view was sometimes blocked, and disconcertingly we could see stagehands off in the wings; but the nearness to the singers was thrilling. It also gave us the full sound and view of the orchestra, and I could really understand why some say it is the best orchestra in the nation. Too bad so many of them (the violists) have to play offbeats all the time in Donizetti. They were great offbeats, though. The clarinetist, who I take to be one of the two principals, and by elimination probably Jessica Phillips Rieske, was spectacular. It was obvious that the clarinet was Donizetti's color instrument (except in the last "mad scene" where it was the English horn), and there were lots of colors there.

Saturday and Sunday, I was spending my days at Teacher's College at a recorder workshop organized by Amherst Early Music. There, I joined a sequence of ensembles -- changing every 75 minutes, dizzyingly -- playing Josquin, Schütz, Marenzio, Bach, Dufay. . . . I had never played recorder ensembles at the high level that these were: the participants picked up bass recorders and played them like altos, put those down for a soprano or a tenor, moved in and out of medieval polyphony and Renaissance madrigal and baroque fugue (even, though not in my group, swing and Arvo Pärt!). As always, it was the thrill of chamber music: how to feel rhythms together and against each other, how to assert your line and listen to the others. Altogether serious music making. And a lot of fun. Picture: class with Larry Lipnik of the ensembles Parthenia and Lionheart.

Saturday evening we met old friends at the Metropolitan Museum (a great show of the amazing modernist collection of Alfred Stieglitz). In the hall, I ran into my cousin from Cambridge and his wife, who were going to the first of a series of concerts at the Met by the Pacifica Quartet -- who had played in Oberlin last year, and are now doing the entire Beethoven series at the Metropolitan. We went to the Stieglitz instead and then, famished, had dinner in the sculpture café -- to a jazz trio playing My Funny Valentine too loud.

More music Sunday afternoon, at the church of Corpus Christi across the street from Teacher's College. The series is called Music before 1800, and it certainly was: it was the four-woman group called Anonymous 4, singing 13th century music from a MS from the convent of Las Huelgas, a remarkably independent, if not feisty, group of Cistercian nuns, who seem to have not only administered the sacraments but also mastered medieval polyphony. Anonymous was joined by our friend, the great vielle player Shira Kammen, who with the drummer Peter Maunde improvised, accompanied, bridged between songs, and generally added oomph to the otherwise somewhat even texture of the Anonymous. Great concert, though, all around, well balanced and fascinating. As always,experience experience to hear music where the interval of the third was NOT the expected resting-point, but a moment of crunch before the cadences on fifths and octaves.They have a CD out of this program: here's the publicity and a few samples.

No more music, unless you count the odd pre-recorded "Happy Birthday" being sung in some South American pop style at a Peruvian restaurant Sunday evening. Just as well: Enough's enough.

Listening to Handel and Vivaldi

2011-10-14T14:54:00.000-07:00

Just wrote a review on Cleveland Classical of a concert by Apollo's Fire, Cleveland's baroque orchestra. It featured the wonderful singing of male soprano/countertenor Michael Maniaci. See a sample of that singing!

Jenny Lin

2011-10-11T19:46:00.000-07:00

What a fabulous recital I just heard at Lorain County Community College! Or, to be honest, the first half of the recital, as I had to leave to get some work done. Jenny Lin, a very charismatic pianist, played three "triplets," as she called them: interveavings of works by Shostakovich and Bach, selections from those composers' Preludes and Fugues.

It turns out that Shostakovich, inspired by a recital in Germany of Bach, went home to dash off 24 Preludes and Fugues a la Bach, apparently not in the chromatic order that Bach did them, but obviously derived from Bach's manic sense of cyclicity.

She, Jenny, obviously loves these works, and was trying to get us to see the 1950s Soviet writer in the same framework as the great 1730s (?) German. If Bach invented modern music, as a friend of mine asserted this morning, this Shostakovich was a worthy consequence to his invention.

The Shostakovich pieces were warm, funny, biting, passionate by turns. The great revelation for me, she saved to the last, the Shostakovich Number 24 (the last in his cycle, apparently), a passionate prelude followed by an incredible fugue with a disarmingly simple subject of open fifths, almost childlike in its repetitions, but then... amazing in its potential for development. It seemed to me as if the fugue went through all the keys; as if saying farewell to the project of the Preludes and Fugues, which, at least in Bach, set out deliberately to do just that, go through all the keys. Here's a video of a pianist named David Jalbert playing it. You'll notice that the same theme that in the Prelude is heroic becomes the simple fugue theme.

Playing Mendelssohn

2011-10-09T19:59:00.001-07:00

Last night the orchestra I play in performed at Lorain County Community College. We played Schubert (fifth symphony), a new piece by a friend and double bass player in the orchestra (Dan Schell, a vigorous Bartok-reminiscent concerto for orchestra), and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.

Playing the concerto was a musical high point for me, a peak experience.

Why? Perhaps one reason was that I was coming off a cold and feeling new life, so anything fun was good.

But more deeply, it had to do with the soloist's approach. Andrea Belding is a great young collaborative violinist (that term, "collaborative," is usually applied to pianists who know how to groove with another player). She's out there as a soloist, playing big or hushed as needed, leading the gig as a soloist needs to do, but she's also constantly checking in. If we look, she's moving in the tempo, if we listen, she's setting us a rhythm or a figuration that gives us a new energy.

So there I am in the second violins, trying like heck to finger the hard parts and hush up when I need to, and be there for the important moments, and suddenly I realize, she's connecting with me... And with the clarinetist behind me, and the cello section, and the conductor, of course. For a split second, she and I play an eighth note in sync, and I know she knows that we did.

It's chamber music: that nerve-tingling sense of connection. It's not the composer dictating what we play; he just wrote the notes. It's we who figure out, here and now, how we play them.

And that's the gift of chamber music, even in an orchestra of forty players, that we're each involved.

In the ideal world, it always happens. In practice, I sometimes (often?) forget to notice.

Last night, I noticed, and for me it made all the difference.

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Location:Edgemeer Pl,Oberlin,United States

Another blog to follow

2011-09-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

These days, I am pretty occupied with teaching and college work. My Oberlin course in The Electric Age: Romantic Literature in England has a blog that readers of the World as Museum might be interested in. Check it out. It will have my work and that of my students, between now and December.

War and Peace

2011-05-26T18:18:00.001-07:00

I am just finishing Tolstoy's massive War and Peace. I read it as a teenager, then in a course on the Russian novel about which I remember far too little. Then, both times, I believe it was in the classic Constance Garnett translation.

Now I've been reading the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It's like reading a new novel. Of course, I am rather a different person from the teenager/college student, so that might have something to do with the novelty.

Two big themes are surfacing: one, that enormous historical events like the Napoleonic wars are not the product of one man. It's an anti-Romantic novel in that sense, against that Romantic sense that the genius (composer, poet, general, emperor) creates sublime outcomes. In this novel, the general/Emperor is at the mercy of chance, history, the crowd, geography. Napoleon took Moscow because his soldiers saw the chance to loot it. Not because it was part of his grand design.

The other theme: people actually do grow up; time and suffering changes people and they become tolerable human beings, even good ones. Three protagonists (if you're going to do a 1,000-page novel, you have room for that): Natasha Rostov, a young aristocrat; Pierre Bezuhov, a "seeker after truth"; Andrei Bolkonsky, a landowner/soldier. Two survive, one dies. They all do unpleasant things and yet we like, respect, understand them.

Is it long? well, I asked for it for Christmas two and half years ago and am now finishing it! Is it worth it? absolutely!

Here's a color photo of Tolstoy:

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Edgemeer Pl,Oberlin,United States

Cleveland Orchestra: Adams to Beethoven

2011-05-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we went to the Cleveland Orchestra and I reviewed it.
The short version: Emanuel Ax played Haydn and Stravinsky with elegance; the orchestra played a wonderful meaty piece by John Adams; and they ended with a Beethoven 8th that was not terribly well rehearsed.

Bernard Greenhouse (1916-2011)

2011-05-17T19:08:00.000-07:00

The cellist Bernard Greenhouse died this week at the age of 95. You know him from his years with the Beaux Arts Trio, perhaps. A direct link with the great Catalonian master Pablo Casals (he studied with Casals right after World War II), he was a founding member of the Beaux Arts Trio, the group that showed how piano trios can be as interesting and profound as string quartets.

He was a player who believed intensely in the give-and-take of chamber music. Here's a video of the Beaux Arts playing the gorgeous slow movement from the Schubert B-flat trio. You'll hear what I mean.

Until a few weeks before his death, he practiced the cello every day. (An inspiration: can I practice the recorder; write a poem; walk a mile. . . every day?).

Source Code

2011-05-15T16:56:00.001-07:00

For this blog, I'm working with my grandson Jordan Meek. He lives in Illinois and he loves to go to the movies. So this weekend we went to the movie called Source Code. It was kind of hard to understand at the beginning. It right away took you into the train where a bombing happened. Sean Fentriss is the hero, and he is a history teacher and he suddenly is in this alternate world where somehow, a Captain Goodwin, is making him find out who the bomber is.

The best part was in the middle when he was beginning to ask people what they were doing because he thought they looked suspicious. Capt. Goodwin gave him clues as to where to look, and how to look at people.

He finds the bomb, but the mission was really not to find the bomb but to find the bomber. We're not going to tell you what happened, but we give it 4 stars (Nick) and 4.5 stars (Jordan).

We're going to find a good snapshot of this thriller. If you like trains, by the way, with a little twist, you'll like this movie.

The gulbenkian collection

2011-05-06T11:53:00.000-07:00

In Lisbon, there is a wonderful art museum founded by oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian, who if I remember right, opened up the Baku oil fields and then moved to Paris and started to collect art, seriously.

Since Lisbon welcomed him during the war, and London saw him as a suspicious character, the National Gallery lost out. portugal's gain, for sure.

The museum is beautiful, but the collection is even better. (except perhaps that he went overboard on 18th century French furniture and Corots)

What I especially liked about the collection was how it gave a sense of the man who bought all this art. Judging from the art he was a man who loved beautiful, vital, character-filled people and who bought art that had those kinds of qualities.

How wonderful is this Ghirlandaio portrait?

Or this St. Catherine and St. Joseph? Thoughtful, human...

And this? What faces, expressions!

German Romantic Music at its best

2011-04-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

I went to the Cleveland Orchestra's concert last week with Kurt Masur -- what a master! Here's my review of the concert, from ClevelandClassical.com. Don't forget to sign on with ClevelandClassical if you like it!

Listen to Masur talking about Brahms' fourth symphony here. I had not heard this when I wrote in my review about "heart-stoppingly beautiful" moments; this makes that metaphor more real than I had intended, thinking about the work as Brahms' own meditation about dying.

Embodied opera

2011-04-23T15:08:00.000-07:00

I just saw Strauss' great last opera, Capriccio. Two and a half hours straight, no intermission, live in HD from the Met. What an experience of music, words and theater!

The plot is almost nothing: a debate among three men who represent that troyka I just wrote: composer, poet, impresario. Which of their art forms is the best?
The opera doesn't allow any resolution, but it also doesn't shrink from the struggle, which is itself the heart of the piece. Each of them gets their powerful moments of assertion; and none of them wins. But in the meantime, we realize more about how we experience opera: torn among these three poles, blown now by the powerful winds of orchestra and melody, then working our way through the ironies and positions manifest in the words, then throwing ourselves into the theatrical paradoxes of illusion and reality.

At the center of it all is the soprano, of course. Today she was Renee Fleming, coy, passionate, clear and beautiful. All the men in the opera love her. Two of them, the poet and the musician, explicitly court her, demanding that she choose one of them. Whether she's supposed to choose on aesthetic or erotic grounds is never very clear; both are in play through the whole opera.

In fact, art and sex are made pretty much the same in Capriccio. If at the end, the Countess refuses to choose either man as a partner, she also refuses to decide between words and music. She will not say, in the terms of the "plot" (if you can call it one), how the opera is to end.

So after singing her way through her irresolution, she shrugs and goes off to supper. We don't shrug!

Check out just a few minutes of these videos of Renee doing the twenty-minute-long last scene. You'll probably get hooked, too. Will you be hooked on the music, the words, the theater, or the countess, or all of them at once?

Gypsy Music

2011-04-21T10:09:00.000-07:00

My review of Cleveland's Apollo's Fire and recorder virtuoso Matthias Maute:

http://www.clevelandclassical.com/041911afgypsiesrev

A Sentimental Education

2011-04-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Flaubert's novel A Sentimental Education, and once again I am baffled by French literature. Published in 1869, it's the story of a young man. Frédérick, who is "sentimental" -- more than wise, practical, focused or ambitious, he seems to be at the mercy of his feelings, mostly for women. I think he's in love with four different women, often in overlapping periods of time, through the book. So, yes, it's sentimental.

In what it depicts in his feelings, that is. But in narration, it seems alternately cynical and detached. IThe book as a moral presence never seems to come to terms with the material that it narrates. People fall apart in front of our eyes and the book -- the narrator -- seems to have no reaction. Fortunes are made and lost, people are shot on the barricades, sexual betrayals by the dozens occur, and the book never quite registers them. My only guess is that in French fiction, we are supposed to handle that as readers. Only I couldn't quite.

Young Frédérick bombs at almost everything he does. A revolution (1848) occurs in Paris and, astonishingly, he and his then-lover (or one of them) go off to Versailles to visit the royal palace, as tourists, while people are shooting each other a few miles away. The scene is like one of those soft-focus love scenes in the old (70s) movies (eg., Elvira Madigan -- see image). And yet the book seemed to have been interested in politics.

The scene that I gather shocked everybody when the book first cam out is the final scene. After all the love affairs have run their course, the book fast forwards about twenty years to nearly the present (of the writer, that is). Ferdinand meets with his former love, Mme. Arnoud, with whom he has never consummated his passion. She's now white-haired; they meet, and part forever. (Like in Eugene Onegin, but without Tchaikovsky showing us what the feelings are). But that is not the end of the book. At the very last pages, Frédérick takes up again with his long time friend (male), whom he has alternately helped and betrayed throughout the novel, and they reminisce about the good old days. Their final warm and fuzzy memory is of a visit to a quasi-Turkish brothel.

"That was the happiest time we ever had," said Frédérick.
"Yes, perhaps you're right. That was the happiest time we ever had," said Deslauriers.

End of book. With speech tag, no less ("said Deslauriers").

OK, I've been reading Dickens, and that's made me too cynical about cynicism like this (if that's what this is). Dickens wouldn't leave us like that. "It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before. . . " (Tale of Two Cities).

But I know lots of people love A Sentimental Education, so I am almost certainly missing something really important. Maybe someday I'll get what Flaubert and French fiction is about.

Musica Catalana

2011-03-25T15:16:00.000-07:00

We went last night to an extraordinary early music concert. We're on holiday in Barcelona, and we found that Jordi Savall, the great viola da gamba player and founder of Hesperion XXI, was giving what we think was the first performance in 400 years of a 1611 Barcelona Vespers!

The concert had us a little confused -- we went to the wrong venue, but got to the right one in time to settle in for the concert, though not in the best seats. It was in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Mar, where the seafaring Barcelonans used to hope for safe trips and give thanks on coming home. It's a gorgeous, austere, Gothic church from the 15th century, I think.

The concert was the Vespers of the feast of St. George (San Jordi, in Catalan), from 1611, which Savall, I believe, transcribed and arranged for choir and wind and viol bands, from a manuscript. St. George is the patron saint of Catalonia (the district/nation of whcih Barcelona is the capitol). Here we were in Catalonia, with a program booklet in Catalonian (we are just learning to read Catalonian, which is like looking at French through a Spanish glass), hearing a Catalonian piece from a MS in the Catalonian National Library, performed by great Catalonian musicians!

The piece itself reminded me of Praetorius: some homophonic elements, a lot of cool dance rhythms, and vigourous polyphony: clearly past the the quieter styles of Vittoria. Sometimes there were even "hymns" like the Germans might have written. It wasn't Monteverdi, no solos, no duets, not the "second pratica" of soloistic music that Monteverdi had brought in about the turn of the century.

I'm writing this on my new iPad in Barcelona, so I'm sorry the picture is too big: I can't quite figure out all the options!

There were wonderful rhythmic instrumental interludes, the two bands and the harp/organ continuo vying for control of the sound. The whole series of concerts, by the way, is called "El So Original" -- the primal sound, I think.

There were also wonderful percussion, drums, and either chimes or (I think - we were way far back) handbells.

Perhaps the most amazing thing was what the acoustics of the church did for and with the music. I usually prefer clean, crisp acoustics, but this was amazing. The church's space towers above the singers and instrumentalists. The reverb time is probably five full seconds, certainly three full tactus beats. So when the cadences happened, and the cornetto played a cadential trill, the trill notes sustained themselves all the way to the cadence on the tonic> The final chord, then, undulated, pulsed with dissonance while the overtones worked their way through the church spaces. There was no incense in the church, but this almost seemed an acoustic incence, a kind of smoke that blessed the sound, made it more complex, purified it through its dissonances until it finally settled in. Again and again. (BTW, the cornettist was the fabulous Basel-based Bruce Dickey, whom we met last year in Oberlin at the Baroque Performance Institute).

Opera and scale (again)

2011-02-27T05:22:00.000-08:00

Today we went to the cineplex to watch the latest Met HD Live broadcast: there are five more this spring! Thank you, Peter Gelb! This one was Susan Graham and Placido Domingo in Gluck's amazing opera, Iphigénie en Tauride, or Iphigenia in the land of the Scythians (my translation). Graham and Domingo both had colds -- they called it a NYC epidemic -- but they sounded pretty darn good.

For me, coincidentally, this opera, which Gluck adapted from a little-known Greek tragedy by Euripides, came on the heels of four wonderful lectures at Oberlin by Toronto classicist Victoria Wohl, about how strange Euripides' plays are, and how that strangeness can clue us into their political and ideological messages.

This is a strange opera, to be sure. And I'd love to know what its messages about friendship, sibling love, revenge, and barbarianism might have meant in the court of Marie Antoinette.

Whatever it meant there, it was not sung in a hall like the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. And that aspect of scale must have been part of what it meant.

In the Met, the singers' voices have to be BIG. In the HD simulcasts, you get to meet the singers backstage. Here were Graham and Domingo, both obviously struggling with colds, talking to us and host Natalie Dessay, perky as always. Domingo almost sadly gestured to the microphone he was holding for the interview, and commented "we don't get to use these onstage."

Well, that's probably just as well, or La Bohème would end up sounding like Rent (the two are in repertory here in Northeast Ohio, at Baldwin Wallace, the Puccini acoustic, and the other amplified: here's a review from ClevelandClassical.com: if you're in NE Ohio, check this out!).

So, if I've managed a ticket to the Met (never mind getting to NYC), and say I'm in the nosebleed seats, then I'm going to really want the stars to be in full voice. (Amazingly, they were!) I need to hear them in the back of the hall.

But that's, strangely, not where I was today. I was in the very front of the hall, and for only $20 (senior rate at my cineplex) to be in the front at the Met... well, "priceless," as the ad has it).

So what I saw, and more important, what I heard, was close-up and personal. That was great (except when some cranking big camera came down in the frame and I thought it was some weird mythological harpy descending on the poor protagonists). It was great: I see all their expressions as I could never afford to at the Met; I hear the subtleties of their voice; I even see Susan Graham desperately hyperventilating between strophes to get some oxygen in her blood.

But it was not Gluck.

He wrote for a court audience. I don't know how many would have attended a performance, but I'll bet it was in the hundreds, not the thousands. It was, oh dreaded word, an elite audience. I don't want to return to that hyper-precious elitism; Marie Antoinette, his patron, was about to suffer the fate of Hosni Mubarak, after all.

But: what about the music? With all the best intentions and artistry, these singers sang too loud, too forcefully; the Met orchestra was reduced, but not enough to let them move down into the middle range; all was over-blown. It had to be, because they were singing in the Met, and their voices had to reach every one of its 3,800 seats. That cavernous auditorium responds to force, not subtlety.

I first heard Gluck (the great Orfeo ed Euridice) in the tiny Asolo theater in Sarasota, Florida. Ringling, who knew really well what made a great show, had bought this 18th-century opera house and moved it to Florida. It seats 265 people. Now that was a place to experience those delicate and passionate (but not Wagnerian-scale) sounds of Gluck's then-radical acoustics! It's probably about the size of the stage at the Met.

I have complained before about the size of venues like that used by Opera Cleveland: otherwise fine productions are lost in the vast Palace Theater (seats 2714 and puts many of them under a voice-sucking balcony). Opera Cleveland has now gone dark for a year for restructuring, caught in the opera-bind: get a big hall in order to get a lot of ticket revenue; play to empty seats because the patrons can't hear the opera the way they want to).

These are the extremes: too large for nuance, too small for power. Where do we find the happy medium, acoustically? economically?

Though I am delighted at having the HD series bring me these performances, in the suburbs of Cleveland, for $20 a pop, they are not the answer, either. I get the experience of an intimate theater, more close-ups than Marie Antoinette would have had at Versailles in 1779. And I get the full sound, probably more balanced and full than for anybody in the actual Met audience (the microphones, of course, are hung in no-man's-land, high above the actual patron's seats). But I can't really put it together because the singers have to sing at full voice.

It's a constant disjunct, so constant that as with lots of stage conventions, I stop thinking about it. But it's there, deep in the experience: I seem to be a few feet from these singers; they share their most intimate expressions with me; and yet they are singing their parts at such a volume that, if I were actually there, my ears would be blasted away.

I'm interested in looking again at (listening to, that is) film productions of opera -- real movies, not just recorded stage performances -- to hear how they manage the acoustics: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's Cosi, for example, or the great Ingmar Bergman Magic Flute. More about this anon!

Scores online

2011-02-23T06:31:00.000-08:00

I have been using the IMSLP.com recently, the International Music Score Library Project. Thousands of scores (85,000 and counting) of classical music have been scanned and cataloged and are available for download. A disclaimer makes me acknowledge that I'm aware of copyright issues; it makes no claim that these are copy-right-free documents.

The project is described in today's Times.

I used it most recently to remind myself of the fourth movement of Beethoven's string quartet, opus 18, no 1, for a review I was writing for ClevelandClassical.com. What a great tool! Does it rip off the publisher? I don't think so: I'm generally of the opinion that the more we have out there, the more we'll want out there: that is, the more is available for free study and practice and, yes, even performance (the Borromeo Quartet uses digital scores), the more demand will increase for printed scores and parts.

What do you think?

Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T07:03:00.000-08:00

Last night I read with others from Oberlin at the Slow Train Cafe, the theme being, of course, love poetry. This time with a twist: love poetry and translation. So we had a "great feast of languages" -- Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Japanese, Urdu, Hindi, Shona, Greek, Portuguese, Latin, German, Lithuanian, and I'm forgetting some. What a treat to hear so many different sounds. Oh, and Welsh; what an amazing sound that has. Being a "Jones" I should learn some. Retirement project.

I read from Italian poems by G. B. Guarini, 16th century poet and writer of lyrics for some of the greatest songwriters of his day. Here are the two poems I read (in my translation):

It is no use
to ask me for a song.
If you are deaf, I'm mute.
Hearing your voice,
I lose my own, and make
only a harmony of groans.

If you won't hear
my sighs, look at my face:
there in my tears, you'll find my song.

It's no wonder, I think, that at least 18 composers set this song to music in the early 17th century!

Here's a little happier one:

Once in a while we talk of love,
just she and I.
She says that love's a little sprite
that wanders where it will, and can't
be touched or seen.

But I see love,
there, in her eyes.
I cannot touch it there, only
on her soft lips.

Shakespeare, Opera, Struggle: Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet

2011-02-12T07:58:00.000-08:00

This blog post is to accompany a paper about the 1868 opera Hamlet, by Ambroise Thomas. I have written it for the Shakespeare Association of America, where I'm participating in a seminar on "Shakespeare and Opera" in April. The main function of the blog is to allow readers of the paper to see and hear parts of the score and recordings. The paper itself is much longer (and, I hope, clearer). You can download it at the end of this blog, if you'd like. Here I'll just give the very rough outline.

Read on, or just enjoy some clips of this beautiful opera!
The argument
The paper's premise is that there's a struggle in Shakespeare opera adaptations between:

the urge to see the opera as a performance of the Shakespearean original (so, we'd think: how faithful is it? did they get Shakespeare's Hamlet right? how could they possibly have left out Fortinbras? and so on); and
the urge to see the opera as a thing in itself, not a dependent on what happens to be "the greatest work" by "the greatest poet," and so on.

I believe that this is a real struggle; that is, we can't just end it by coming down on one side or the other, dissing the opera for not being Shakespeare, or ignoring the obvious, that it IS Shakespearean. In a way, it's a struggle over "voice" -- does Shakespeare have control over what's voiced on stage (he did write the original words, after all)? or do the singers? the conductor? the composer?

Noticing that struggle over voice, really being aware of it as we see the opera, can make us notice some related struggles that are both exciting and meaningful in that very complex experience of watching opera. That is, opera proceeds by struggles over the voice: who's going to get to sing the role? a soprano, or a mezzo? the famous star, or the newbie? (that's up to the producer, I guess) when does she get her big aria -- first act? third? IS there one? (that's pretty much up to the composer)? How much "airtime" does she get? what does the orchestra do while she's singing, or between songs (think the "Meditation" from Thaïs, which "signifies" the soprano's conversion from courtesan to convent)?
What key does she sing in, what meter, what pitch range? does she sing words, or vocalises?

Implicit in all these questions are the alternatives-- NOT getting airtime, being unvoiced, being upstaged. I'm interested, then, in seeing how the struggle for space, time, tonality, attention plays out in the opera. I think, to repeat myself, that that kind of ongoing struggle (as you'll see if you go further, I think it happens moment-by-moment in a good opera) is the electric excitement of opera. And, to close the circle, that it keeps us aware of that exciting struggle for performance rights between the opera and "Shakespeare."

Hamlet
OK, now a little about Thomas' Hamlet. You can see more, as always, at Wikipedia: there's a pretty good article and summary.

It's grand opera, of course: five acts, big orchestra, big roles. Hamlet, a baritone, really seems to love Ophélie (in the play, we're never quite sure, but this is opera); the king is a slimebag through and through, though he does get some repentence time; the queen, Hamlet's mother, is implicated in the murder (in the play, that is not clear). Lots of the same things happen as in the play -- a kind of coronation/wedding scene; the ghost's call to revenge his murder; "To be or not to be" (only, it being French, it's "Être ou ne pas être"); the play-within-the-play; the closet scene; the madness and death of Ophélie; a comic gravedigger; the eventual murder of the king. There are lots of things that don't happen: no Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, or Guildenstern; barely a Polonius (but, important, he's in on the murder, too, which, when Hamlet finds out, sours him on Ophélie); no pirates. And lots is changed: Ophélie and Hamlet have a love duet; Hamlet sings a drinking song before the players do their play; Ophélie goes mad in the meadows before a chorus of villagers, not in the court (the picture is of a late-19th-century singer named, wonderfully, Mignon Nevada, as Ophélie); and -- horror for Shakespeareans -- Hamlet does not die (at least, not in the French version; Thomas wrote an alternative ending for Covent Garden to assuage the English).

The opera was very popular, in part because its first Hamlet was Jean-Baptiste Faure, a spectacular baritone (Thomas had envisioned a tenor in the role, but Faure was too good to pass up, so it's a baritone role). Here's Manet's painting of Faure in the role.

On to some details. . .

Act 4: Ophélie's mad scene
Here is the score of Act 4

In my paper, I'm asking us to think about how we could see a relationship -- a dialectic, maybe -- between the first part of this act, and the second. The first part, is a 20-minute ballet of villagers, frolicking and singing in the meadows; this part is often seen today as totally silly, a vestige of Paris opera convention (apparently, you HAD to have a ballet). The second part is Ophélie's madness and death, which is stunning singing, coloratura virtuosity that knocks everybody out even today. How to see these two as part of one thing? Clearly, they are in conflict. My premise, simply, is that the ballet sets up a mode of music against which Ophélie has to work: she has to get the attention of the chorus and the dancers, she has to "pull" the orchestra away from the trivial dances into her ballads. She has to assert herself against what has been pre-scripted for the act. Just as Thomas has to assert himself against Shakespeare. . .

I'll post an mp3 of the ballet music if and when I can figure out how to do so. . .

Here are two videos of Natalie Dessay doing the mad scene, from the Keenlyside/Dessay DVD. This production, like most, eliminates the chorus of villagers, so she just sings to the empty stage. But then, she's mad, right?

Act 5: Hamlet's revenge.

Here is a score of Act 5.

In the paper, I explore the tragic elements of the ending. The problem with calling it "tragic" has always been that in the play (as you know), Hamlet dies after killing the king. In the opera, he lives; there's no duel with Laertes, no poisoned sword or cup, and no Fortinbras. The ghost comes back in Act 5 (he does not in Shakespeare) to command Hamlet to live and take the throne. Many have said this is an example of how grand opera (and the French) bastardize Shakespeare and miss the point of the tragedy. But I think the ending, even with Hamlet alive, is still tragic: he's haunted by the memory of Ophelia, whom he knows he betrayed (even while he also knows that her father, Polonius, betrayed him by conspiring to murder his, Hamlet's, father). He wants to die, but he has to reign. That compulsion to become king, by the way, probably has to do with the very unstable government of France in the mid-nineteenth-century: the opera premiered just two years before the political upheavals of 1870.

The only video clip of the end of the opera that I can find is from the same production as the ones above. It uses the alternate ending, the so-called "Covent Garden" ending in which Hamlet does die of the duel with Laertes. For the way the Paris audience would have seen the opera, I think you have to go to the score or the CD.

Even so, it's a pretty exciting ending. The part I discuss in the paper begins just before 7 minutes into the clip.

The drinking song

I don't deal with the drinking song in my paper, but it too is probably the part of the opera that "Shakespeareans" revile the most. What! The thinker Hamlet getting drunk? It was conventional to have such a song in operas -- called a brindisi. But it's also a pretty great song, and it actually sets up the very exciting and dramatic climax of Act 3, in which the wild (and drunk? or is he just acting drunk?) Hamlet brings on the players to present "The Murder of Gonzago," infuriates the king, and accuses him of regicide.

Here's a clip of the drinking song, with Robert Merrill, from 1957:

Lute, voice, cover

2011-02-09T07:51:00.000-08:00

My latest review at ClevelandClassical is of Mignarda, a duo of lutanist Ron Andrico and mezzo Donna Stewart. Along with the usual lutesong material, which they didn't perform Sunday, but which they do very well, they perform "intabulations" -- arrangements of polyphonic motets for lute and single voice. It's haunting, different, a definite early-music version of a "cover." Here's an example, which you'll probably recognize, and which was their encore Sunday:

Here's an example of them doing more standard lutesong from the great John Dowland:

The concert was in the beautiful Gothic revival Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Cleveland, which I'd never been in before.

When I started thinking about "covers" to songs, this wonderful Stevie Wonder version of the Beatles came to mind:

Gilbert and Sullivan and Cole Porter

2011-01-30T15:48:00.000-08:00

We went to hear a cabaret show by a small touring group from the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players last night at the community college. They were performing a review called “I’ve got a Little Twist” (a witty take-off on “I’ve Got a Little List,” of course), which segued in and out of Broadway and G & S. Their take on it was that G & S were the real founders of Broadway musical theater, and they showed us nice parallels: maybe the best was the connection of the patter song (“I am the very model of a modern major-general” from Pirates of Penzance) with Broadway numbers like “Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little”, from Music Man. Here’s a video from the opening number of “Twist” that will give you a better sense of it.

The show was fun--lively, flexible, full of broad humor and a few lovely musical moments. Its premise, though, got me to thinking not so much about the similarities between G & S and Broadway -- “Twist”’s theme, really -- but the differences. You might think first--I did-- that we’d say G & S is: old, a little stuffy, elitist, too “classical” to be really popular; and that Broadway is the opposite--modern, popular, connected to its audiences, definitely anti-“classical.” I can’t differ with G & S being old and Broadway more modern. But listening to these songs together made me think that G & S is actually closer to popular music than Broadway is.

That’s a little extreme, of course, and I can’t say it works all around. Ruddigore, with its literary allusions to Gothic romance; Patience, with its witty reworkings of the wit of Wilde . . . these are not essentially populist elements. And certainly Broadway tunes like “Doe, a deer” or “Oklahoma” are pretty popular. But a lot of Broadway is musically difficult, sophisticated, “modern” like the difficult classcial modernists (Copland, maybe?). Last night, David Auxier sang Cole Porter’s remarkable “Every Time We Say Goodbye.” Yes, a great tune, a moving one, but try singing it yourself. Not quite so easy, with its complex harmonies and perilous intervals. Here’s Annie Lennox singing it (from the quirky Derek Jarman film, Edward II). Is this really popular music, deriving from the people and accessible to the people?

It struck me that G & S had a deep connection to the 19th-century British popular musical traditions that Broadway had lost: parlor music. Parlor music: the singable, playable tune that an amateur can handle. Take “Ah, leave me not to pine.” Here’s a clip with Jude Law singing the song, not well, but convincingly as part of a Victorian parlor scene (he’s playing Oscar Wilde’s love interest, Lord Alfred Douglas, in the film Wilde).

Patter songs might be beyond the range of most parlor-music amateurs (though of course Physics professor Tom Lehrer made one of the greatest of all in his elements song). But the ballads -- call them arias if you like -- that Sullivan was so good at are still singable, and tunes that people can remember and produce on their own. Can we do that with, say, “Soliloquy” from Carousel?

I think if we went deeper, we’d probably add two other traditions that G & S and their audience shared -- and which are not part of the musical culture of Broadway: church music (the hymn, the motet, the anthem, the weekly practice of singing together in harmony and polyphony) and the music hall (the patter song again, the topical satire, the off-color number ducking just under the censor’s pen).

Cleveland Orchestra: Bartok thoughts

2011-01-30T15:45:00.000-08:00

Originally posted Jan. 22, 2011

Four thoughts -- more than tweets and less than essays -- about this weekend’s Cleveland Orchestra Concert (Hokusawa, “Woven Dreams”; Bartok, Piano Concerto #2 and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta).

"Woven Dreams" delved into the motion that is at the heart of all music -- vibration -- from its first long held note. But that motion seemed always held in a state of non-motion, suspended. To be sure, there were fast passage-work and percussive articulations (the bells and gongs, especially) that implied the beginnings and ends of motifs and episodes: that is, there were some of the standard motion-forms of classical music. But overall, the music subordinated speed, change, variation, and difference, and privileged stillness. "Woven Dreams" -- the unsubstantial motion of dreams spun into thread, dyed, stretched, warped and wefted to a fabric of shimmering

stillness.
Bartok's Piano Concerto, by contrast, was a display of motion: notes move up and down the scale to form motifs; motifs move through changes in modality and key to form variations; instruments and sections of the orchestra change their function as they imitate each other, moving from accompanying others to taking on the lead voice; colors change, appearing and disappearing. Always the music was in motion, revealing either in the moment or in hindsight that it had somewhere to go and a path by which to get there.

The first movement of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste, was a fugue played by the strings, drawing us again and again into a strange cone of sound created by the layering of a peculiar motif that moved constantly and yet seemed to go nowhere. The string sections were distributed around the center of the orchestra (piano, celeste, not yet playing) so that the usual five-part sonic geography (2 violin sections, viola, cello, bass) became far more complex. When the violas played, it would be sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right. The effect was like hearing Bach sung by one of those great choirs in which the members of each section mingle with singers from each other section, so that a tenor entrance, for example, is not located in one corner of the stage, but interwoven amongst all the other lines of music.

Listening to Bartok is like hearing the excesses of late Romanticism (Tchaikovsky? Mahler?) turned upside down: the tunes still come in and out; the piece still has a beginning, a middle, a climax, an ending; the music still seems to evoke a world outside itself -- a hero, maybe, or a forest; and yet -- all that, which Romanticism perfected, is now cast into a new mold of modernism. Excess of passion has become other kinds of excess: of thought? of structure? of color?

Pathétique

2011-01-07T08:39:00.000-08:00

A man sits mournful,            his mind in darkness,
so daunted in spirit          he deems himself
ever after          fated to endure.

This Anglo-Saxon poem (titled "Deor," and here translated by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney) meditates on the recurring sorrows that strike in human life. Deor is a minstrel-poet, a bard, who's been "let go" from the service of his lord; in the feudal society of Anglo-Saxon England, he is essentially exiled from all that made life worth while.

One can only imagine, from our brightly-lit world, how vivid would have been the metaphor of "darkness" in the winter night of a 10th-century village. Or does Deor mean real, not metaphoric darkness? perhaps he sits alone in literal darkness, excluded from the mead-hall and its torches, with only his songs and tales for company.

These Anglo-Saxon poems are full of the wintry, the sleet, the long cold nights of the northern island. The darkness is full of the melancholy old myths, the saga-tales about those who "suffered woe" -- a soldier getting old, a king turned into a wolfish tyrant, a woman sick for love.

But the darkness holds more than sorrow. It also holds the passage of time, and time changes those sorrows as it may change the sorrow of today. Deor says again and again:

That passed over, this can too.

Sorrow seems to "winter" in these men and women, to "banish sleep," to "shackle us in sorrow" (all these metaphors are from "Deor"). But with time the sorrows "pass over." They do not disappear: they are transformed. Into what? Perhaps into the endurance that Deor sees as his fate. Perhaps into that quasi-Christian stoicism that the Anglo-Saxons often asserted:

   how throughout the world
the Lord in his wosdom     often works change --
meting out honor,     ongoing fame
to many, to others       only their distress.

Or, perhaps into art. Deor is a poet, leoþcraeftig, "skilled in song." In his hands, in darkness, grief is crafted into song, into metaphors, which are not the same as reality.

The "shackles" of sorrow are different from the shackles of slavery; the "banishing" of sleep is different from the woes of exile; the "winter" of sorrow as cold and dark but not as painful as the stinging sleet of January.

A modern analog: the great symphony of grief and endurance, Tchaikovsky's sixth and last, the "Pathétique." Last night -- in the bright hall, with outside the swirling snow of an Ohio winter night -- the Cleveland Orchestra played this.

Tchaikovsky, tormented and soon to die, was, like Deor, "skilled in song." Melodies of passion, exuberance, energy and almost unbearable sadness, transforming grief into the vitality of musicians' collective breath, beat, swing, and soul.

That passed over, this can too.

______________________________________
The Anglo-Saxon poems are from the newly-released book, The Word Exchange, ed. Greg Delanty and Michael Matto (W.W. Norton).

The Tchaikovsky was performed at Severance Hall, Jan. 6, by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi.

You can listen to the amazing final movement (Adagio lamentoso) played by the NHK Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hiroyuki Iwaki (it's in two separate YouTube videos).

Review: Pagliacci and La Voix Humaine

2010-11-18T18:52:00.000-08:00

Opera Cleveland: Pagliacci & Voix Humaine at the State Theater (November 13)

by Nicholas Jones
At the end of Pagliacci, we hear the chilling line “La commedia è finita” – the play is over. So, sadly, is the opera: with this weekend’s double bill, Opera Cleveland — at least in its present form — goes into a period of hiatus for re-structuring and re-imagining.

Somber in tone and tragic in outcome, these two very different operas made an evening of passionate and memorable celebration of the artistic success that Opera Cleveland has achieved in recent years.

The evening opened with Francis Poulenc’s one-act opera, La Voix Humaine. The libretto comes from a pre-war play by avant-garde poet Jean Cocteau. The premise is deceptively simple: a Parisian woman speaks on the telephone with her former lover for almost three-quarters of an hour. The situation, though, is complicated: we struggle to sort out her complex mixture of lies, self-deceptions and manipulations, even while we sympathize with her pain. She’s barely hanging on, literally by a cord, the single telephone cord that connects her with her ex — at least, at times (the post-war phone system in Paris was notoriously unreliable, so the call is interrupted often).

Poulenc’s strange opera draws its appeal from an age-old truth: we enjoy watching the display of suffering. I kept thinking back to the great lament of Dido in Purcell’s opera of some 300 years earlier: “Remember me, but, ah! forget my fate.” Like Dido, Poulenc’s nameless Parisienne expresses her sorrow with a mixture of foolishness and dignity, and we listen in with guilty pleasure. Dido had no telephone, but modern technology solves none of the tragedies of desire.

Soprano Robin Follman carried the role with extraordinary skill. Dramatically focused, she wove across the stage (a stylish thirties set with beige and brown toned furniture) with an old bakelite telephone; her gestures were economical and full of powerful expression. Above all, she gave us Poulenc’s thorny musical lines with a variety of coloration and tonality that brought to musical life the vagaries of this tortured conversation.

The other protagonist was the orchestra, masterfully led by Dean Williamson. Among many wonderful moments, I’d note the glockenspiel as the ironic ring of the telephone (promising connectivity, but rarely delivering) and the chilling ending with a dry cymbal roll followed by a terribly mordant pluck on the double basses (who played an unusually dramatic role in the entire opera). Unfortunately, an epidemic of coughing in the audience (nervous? bored?) plagued the performance.

After intermission Opera Cleveland gave us a passionate Pagliacci, radically separated from its usual partnering with Cavalleria Rusticana (“Cav and Pag”). In my ear, the modernist opening to the evening made the blatant emotionalism of “Pag” even more engaging. The production focused, rightly, on the heartfelt music (though I could have done without a couple of superfluous and unscripted mimes in the prologue and at the end). A tight 90-minute drama in the verismo style, Pagliacci delivers a powerful punch to the emotions: desire, jealousy, bitterness, revenge.

Especially powerful was tenor Gregory Carroll as Canio — the tormented clown whose great aria (“Vesti la gubbio” – better known as “Ridi, Pagliacco”) has been for a century an icon of tragically dissonant emotion. Against him — in many ways — was Robin Follman’s Nedda, the wife whose fidelity Canio rightly suspects. Coming off her Poulenc performance, Follman hardly seemed to need intermission to change modes: her Nedda was brilliantly mercurial — by turns lyrical, taunting, uncertain, furious. She showed once again that what makes for operatic impact is the ability to change color on a dime, to play the moment to the max.

Nedda’s lover, Sylvio, sung by Eric Dubin, lacked the flexibility and nuance to match Follman’s vitality. His portrayal was undercut by an absurd directorial choice to have the illicit lovers suddenly lie down to embrace on the stones of the piazza (in public in Italy?). The embittered Tonio, who lusts for Nedda and betrays her to her jealous husband, was chillingly sung by Michael Chioldi.

In the indeterminate interim before we hear another Opera Cleveland production, I hope that the artistic leadership and the board find ways to maintain the elements of their success — generally fine lead singers, a top-notch chorus, an excellent orchestra, and stimulating productions — while finding new approaches to meet the problems of financial stability. While of course large audiences are crucial for many reasons, I would suggest that a somewhat smaller and more acoustically friendly venue than the cavernous State Theater might be a part of the future.
Photograph: Eric Mull

Les Delices

2010-11-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

Les Délices: "Mirages and Monstrosities" at the William Busta Gallery (October 30)

by Nicholas Jones NB: This appeared in ClevelandClassical.com
Opera dominated the world of the French baroque, delighting court and capital with its strange combination of the fantastic, the noble, the grotesque, the beautiful, and the expressive. The theatricality of opera permeated this weekend's Halloween-themed presentation of "Mirages and Monstrosities," the opening concert of the fifth season of concerts by Debra Nagy's group "Les Délices," which specializes in music of the French Baroque. With its mastery of baroque style, the group delivered a program of instrumental music that needed no sets, no singing, no costumes to transport us to the strange world of the French 18th-century imagination.

The opener was a suite from Rameau's noted opera Platée, which tells of a love that was a mirage (Jupiter, it seems, for some devious marital scam, pretends to make love to a water nymph named Platée; the poor girl, not very beautiful, is fated to be left at the altar). Nagy and her group gave us a dramatically emphatic rendition of Rameau's lithe and startling music, filled with the sounds of the frogs and insects of the water nymph's boggy home and the slippery deceits of Jupiter (I assume the latter was represented in the overture's lush and sliding suspensions).

Supporting Nagy here and in the other concerted pieces was a small band comprised of the fine violinists Julie Andrijeski and Karina Fox, and a continuo section (Josh Lee, viola da gamba, and Michael Sponseller, harpsichord). The ensemble was strong, the three treble instruments working with and against each other and the continuo like the best jazz musicians. The group plays at French low pitch (A = 392), considerably lower than even standard Baroque pitch; the resultant sound is rich and mellow, without any loss of sparkle, perfect for an intimate space.

Saturday's performance was hosted by the William Busta Gallery, inaugurating brand-new gallery space next to Busta's former galleries on Prospect. The new space holds a good-sized audience — a little more than a hundred, I think — and is an excellent venue. It was a joy to hear such intelligent and scintillating chamber music surrounded by the kind of serious and compelling visual art that Busta consistently hangs — the colorful, dripping abstracts of Matthew Kolodziej, fascinating acrylic night and city-scapes by Timothy Callaghan, and the haunting fiber-paintings of Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson.

As Nagy explained, the group likes the joy of discovering something new: in this case, an almost unknown "symphony" – more like a quartet – by François-André Philidor, a member of a musical dynasty in the baroque and (according to the program notes) the finest chess player in Europe at the time. In a more classical mode than the Rameau, this piece was also more graceful, and should not remain neglected. Its gorgeous opening phrases, led by the oboe, reminded me of Ennio Morricone's haunting pseudo-Baroque music from the film The Mission.

In the breaks between ensemble pieces, the continuo players became soloists. Harpsichordist Sponseller gave us a whirling world of fantasy in the unaccompanied harpsichord piece, Le Vertigo, by Pancrace Royer. His playing is at once forceful, witty, and intelligent. Gambist Josh Lee took center stage for one of Marin Marais' masterpieces, Le Labyrinthe. This long, virtuosic solo (with unobtrusive harpsichord accompaniment) seems to represent the journey of a single protagonist, whose simple "walking" motif, a little ascending and descending scale figure, appears again and again. Is he in the labyrinth of the Minotaur, or — as Lee suggested — the courtly gardens of Versailles? We can't know, but the music makes it abundantly clear that in his journey he encounters some pretty strange and creepy sights. I couldn't decide whether I was most reminded of Pictures at an Exhibition, Disney's Fantasia, or Harry Potter. Lee played with great expressiveness, sometimes spooky, sometimes easy and unconcerned, sometimes almost heartbreakingly sad and lyrical.

Les Délices gave us one piece that could never have been put on the 18th century operatic stage – Marais' bizarre depiction of a gall-stone operation, played by Lee and Sponseller and narrated in spine-chilling French by Nagy herself (without oboe). The viola da gamba follows the operation step-by-step with brief representations of what must have been a harrowing experience in the absence of anesthetic — the patient's shudder of fear at seeing the operation table; his determination to go through with the operation; the tying down of his legs and arms; the incision and removal of the stone; the flow of blood; the exhaustion at the end. The piece can be performed as a mere quirk, a kind of ghastly joke. But the intensity of Lee's playing here made it something more than that, a reflection on medicine and mortality.

"Mirages and Monstrosities" ended with a little piece by Michel Corrette, a Concerto Comique, that appropriately dissolved all these serious and grotesque concerns with a bit of courtly baroque fluff, exquisitely tossed our way by this stellar group.

We have reason to be thankful for the concerted and complementary work of training and encouraging such performers and entrepreneurs, at the Oberlin Conservatory, at Oberlin's Baroque Performance Institute, and at CWRU. Who would have thought, twenty years ago, that today greater Cleveland would have such a wealth of early music ensembles?

Early music and silent film

2010-09-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

Today -- just a link to my latest music review featuring the divine Sarah... Ohioans, don't forget to subscribe to Cleveland Classical!

After long silence

2010-09-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

The beginning of fall, the beginning of September, the beginning of the school year. My school-teacher dreams of being in the wrong place, in the wrong subject-matter (always math), at the wrong time. The leaves drying on the ground, the day turning cool despite the sunshine. The wind blowing fresh from the north west across Lake Erie, the waves scudding towards the shore.

The memories of so many times looking at water, at times of enormous change. This near shore of Lake Erie after a death, the far expanse of San Francisco Bay absent of airplanes in the days after Sept. 11. The sense that everything changes, and that water is one of the great metaphors for that change.

And to find that sense of change to be at the center of the book I choose to read just now. Allegra Goodman's beautiful and moving novel about time, change, philosophy, and (ah!) cooking: The Cookbook Collector. A book to read in the fall, when those perfectly ripe peaches are ready for the eating.

What can I do in this time but turn back to Keats? There he was, almost 200 years ago, in the sun outside the old town of Winchester, thinking about his brother's death and his own tenuous hold on life. And watching the fruit ripen, perhaps he dared to eat a peach, and above all putting process, change, transience, into words. Just the first stanza for now. You can find the rest here. What about those bees, finding more and more flowers, lulled into thinking that it all will last, and yet knowing better?

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Elizabeth Hoover Norman

2010-07-22T06:22:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog about a year ago, I called it "the world's museum." I meant to evoke in that phrase the curious and thoughtful looking that I associate with museums, the way we pause, admire, critique, ask questions, try to remember objects that the museum presents us. What if the world were a museum, then? What if we, walking across fields, reading a book, looking at a garden, visiting a new place, thought of what we were seeing as cared for by curators, as "framed" to invite us to contemplate, the time we spend there precious and significant?

I came this way of thinking from many others who seem also to know this, from my father, my friend George Allen, my wife, my brothers and sisters-in-law, cousins, teachers, students. This week I lost one of my dearest museum companions, my cousin Elizabeth Hoover Norman, who died Tuesday.

Elizabeth was the daughter of my father's youngest sister, who followed him from southern Georgia to Cambridge, Mass. There they roomed together and she studied Shakespeare with the G. L. Kittredge, who was my father's dissertation advisor. And he introduced her to Herb Hoover, not the president, but a young architect from Idaho. He built a collection of stunning modernist homes in Lincoln, Mass., including his own home. No wonder that Elizabeth, and her twin Lucretia, and brother Harry, grew up wanting to talk about art -- and music, and books, and mountains -- as if these were part of a vast museum.

Elizabeth, like her sister, studied art history at Oberlin, using the same wonderful art museum that I now teach in and write about. Later she took an MA at Harvard -- while I was an undergraduate there, and I would visit her at the Fogg. When she married John Norman, she moved to England with him and taught art history at several places, most recently at Hallam University in Sheffield. She finished her PhD at Leeds just a few years ago, in her late 60s!

What she most loved was public art, art that doesn't hang on the walls of a real museum, but occupies public space in cities or in fields. She took us a couple of years ago to the Yorkshire Sculpture Garden on a blustery November day, full of energy despite her cancer, bounding across fields and paths to find the next Goldsworthy.

I loved visiting England's historic homes with Elizabeth. Last fall we went to Haddon Hall, an Elizabethan house that I had never seen. We lingered -- despite the freezing cold -- in the courtyard, the great hall, the chambers, the galleries, talking all the time about the architecture, the furnishings, the people who had lived here, above all just trying to evoke for each other the sense of the wonderful patina of the place, its layered historicity. John gave up after not too long and went ahead to watch a video about the re-creating of a sixteenth century banquet in the hall.

Just weeks before she died, Elizabeth went to London to give a talk about public art at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was about a project she was passionate for, the "Fourth Plinth" project in Trafalgar Square. There are three big plinths occupied by statues; the fourth has been empty for most or all of its time. The artist Andrew Gormley devised a plan to fill that plinth not with images of famous people, but with actual ordinary people, all day and night, all summer. Elizabeth signed up to be one, and was delighted to be chosen in the random drawing process. Late one night, at one am, she was put on this plinth by cherry-picker and proceeded to spend an hour doing her Indian Club exercises. We and others watched by streaming video as she deliberately paced off the area, swung the clubs in wonderful great arcs, and her amplified shadow followed her, projected by the arc lights onto -- where else? -- the front of the National Gallery. The indoor museum as a screen for the outdoor museum! Here the link to her part of this event -- you can actually watch her swing the clubs!

Elizabeth was an exceptional curator of that world's museum that she and I shared.

Burchfield at the Whitney

2010-07-13T18:12:00.000-07:00

In NYC for a wedding, we went to the retrospective of Charles Burchfield at the Whitney. As an Ohioan -- no, a northern Ohioan! -- I had known of Burchfield and have seen his watercolors before. But THIS exhibit: what an eye-opening set of rooms!

Burchfield makes of watercolor -- normally a pastoral medium -- a stage for the tragedies of nature. His trees are vital, scary, independent of humans (as I guess he might have been as well). They have their own agendas.
This little back yard is so fraught with danger and with life! Look at the little buzzy verticals above the bush: I think they represent insect songs.

I can't find images of most of the pictures I saw. One was a swamp in the afternoon (he loved swamps, apparently). What watercolorist would position himself IN A SWAMP, in the AFTERNOON, looking INTO the sun! but here was the sun, glowing, its super-nuclear fires evident in the normally-placid medium of watercolor: the medium that in Burchfield's hands, vibrates with fear, anger, awareness...

He did attend to the great depression, though he really loved nature, and produced a great body of realist, regionalist work about the thirties. Here's his image of an equinoctial storm -- nature beating down on shabby workers' houses as it did on the bald head of King Lear.

One particularly bizarre piece: the front of a house stands alone, a movie-facade, while builders take down everything behind it. It is ONLY the front, nothing else.

He wrote about one piece: "Astonishment and wonder are the keynotes of hte picture -- Eliminate all else." What a mantra for an artist to live by!

This is an Orion picture -- December Ohio sky. Aren't these stars and these trees astonishing and wonderful???

I think of the great American poet Theodore Roethke -- like Burchfield, he grew up in the midwest (Michigan) -- and knew the connections of nature's insistence and the soul's obsessions. His father ran a greenhouse -- who better to know of how nature's pressures are to grow, and grow, and grow?

Here's Roethke's famous and wonderful poem about the roots in a root cellar. I think I knew these roots when I was 13 years old, too.

Root Cellar by Theodore Roethke
Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

One last Burchfield: he called this "Decorative Landscape," but like Roethke's roots, these are far from decorative. He must have been a great ironist!

Review: Apollo's Fire: 'Come to the River'

2010-06-22T14:36:00.000-07:00

What an endlessly inventive group is Apollo's Fire! Their current offering, "Come to the River," billed as "An Early American Gathering," combines drama, personal recollection, American musical and religious history, and a corncrib full of music. Baroque meets bluegrass, and gospel, and shaped-note, and Celtic, and . . . .

Somewhat changed from last year's sell-out version, this is a show that clearly delighted all ages (kids, oldsters, and -- gasp!-- even teenagers). At the matinee at Huntington Playhouse, the revival gathering may not have converted any souls, though Lake Erie's beaches were at hand for a baptism if it had been needed, but it won a bunch of hearts, judging from the foot-tapping, hand-clapping, and vigorous audience sing-along at the end.

Jeannette Sorrell's stamp, as with all of Apollo's Fire, is unmistakable here. It's she who frames the collection of fiddle-tunes, gospel songs, ballads, and other surprises around her own experiences as a teenager playing piano for a revival church in the Shenandoah Valley. Being an accomplished historian of music, as well as performer and impresario, Sorrell has researched the roots of the tradition in Appalachian barn dances, frontier shoot-em-up songs, shaped-note hymns, and those incomparable American melancholic tunes like "Wayfaring Stranger" and "What Wondrous Love."

This being Apollo's Fire, what might be called corny is also highly accomplished. The artfulness of the performances is evident even while the performers and the audience are having great fun. Watching the stunning cellist René Schiffer stagger to the ground as the two-timing Wild Bill Jones is a hoot; it's quite another thing, though, to hear Schiffer play his own variations on "Old Virginny," as a reflection on Scott Mello's heart-rending rendition of the beautiful sad ballad.

The barn dances that begin the show are simply wonderful: varied, expressive, full of the rhythmic energy we have come to love in Apollo's Fire performances. Tina Bergmann plays the dulcimer with a combination of the early American and the new Celtic sound; baritone Paul Shipper -- also a wonderful "preacher" -- does a stunning rendition of a 1609 English lullaby; flutist Kathie Stewart leads a set of traditional Irish dances with a melancholy sound full of the Emerald Isle.

Even the harpsichord -- not unknown in early America -- plays its part in a set of dances from New England and Ireland; here, as in many of the sets, the soloist (Sorrell) claims the stage for a solo and then subtly hands off the energy to others who join her. The eventual ensemble playing, with running bass lines, obbligato roulades on top, and a relentless percussive energy, made up for the fact that we couldn't actually get up and dance in the aisles.

Sopranos Sandra Simon gave us a number of songs; one of the most memorable was her "Fox on a Chilly Night," accompanied only by Sorrell on the bodhran, sung with such articulation and delivery that no one needed the printed text to understand what the story was. She was joined by tenor Scott Mello and soprano Abigail Haynes Lennox in a gripping lullaby, "Nobody but the Baby," from a field recording by the great folkmusic collector Alan Lomax. Fiddler Rachel Jones was collaborator with Lennox in a very moving "Wayfaring Stranger."

Apollo's Fire has taught us in their baroque concerts how corporeal baroque music was. In this program, the barn dances and fiddle tunes were given real "body" by the very accomplished body-percussion artist Matthew Olwell, whose fast-moving feet, hands, chest, arms, and even mouth, were his tympani and his marimba.

A great moment in the second half, which centers on a revival meeting, was Apollo's rendition of "Hold On," the great civil rights gospel song that Mahalia Jackson and Pete Seeger sang. Sorrell and Schiffer let loose with a bass line that made us think there might be an electric guitar in the wings.

The series of shaped-note hymns in the second half was the least convincing part of the program; the singers seemed a little glued to their part-books, with this unfamiliar and fascinating style. Even so, I loved hearing these modal harmonies, and the set provided a welcome reflective period in an otherwise high-energy afternoon.

Bravo to the group for finding such varied venues, and for traveling around Northeast Ohio to bring this music near to us. And bravo for having the spectacular and vivacious juggler Aaron Bonk (whose card lists him as "Object Manipulation Specialist") on hand to greet us and to give a show at intermission.

(performance June 20, 2010; review published in ClevelandClassical.com)

Italy: a complex space

2010-06-06T12:23:00.000-07:00

The Piazza San Marco, at the center of Venice, is a complicated and wonderful space: history built on history; structures gilded and decorated; religious and civic and hedonistic functions competing for space in this compressed city space.

One edge, to the right on this picture of the basilica of San Marco, struck me as especially complex. It is called the "piazzetta," the little piazza, and it stretches from the basilica to the waterfront in the long direction, and from the Palace of the Doges (the dukes) to the Biblioteca (library) Nazionale Marciana on the short side.

Here's where travelers to Venice in old times would have gotten out of their galleys and entered the city. They would have seen on their right the Duke's Palace (here on the left of the picture) -- a long marbled and pillared building speaking worlds about the power of the republic and its oligarchy.

Then at the end of the square, they would have seen the side of the basilica: again, covered in marble, laden with the spoils of Constantinople, a brilliant facade to the voluminous chiaroscuro of gleaming and dark inside.

And on their left as they made their way to the basilica, the Renaissance arcades of what is now the library -- and was even then, a storehouse of Greek and Latin humanism. (see my former posts on this blog)

What I wonder, is whether the architects of this space imagined the other component to this mix of civic, religious, scholarly treasures? That is, the entertainment that fills it today -- and has at least since the 18th century. We know that because Canaletto's sparkling pictures show us people having a great time in this tourist town, which has been a tourist town longer than we can imagine.

After hearing mass and choral music in San Marco, we came out to the square, and what? brilliance after darkness, joviality after solemnity, schmaltz after Gounod's sanctus and Franck's Panis angelicus:

Italy: an old library

2010-06-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

The library I was in yesterday -- see the previous blog -- was the working end of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice -- the National Library of St. Mark. It's in the old mint, called the Zecca.

Today we went to the showy end of the same library. Here's a library to beat all libraries.

It was the poet Petrarch who had the idea of a library for Venice, in 1362.

The library got started a century later, when the humanist Cardinal Bessarion (they had humanists in the Roman Catholic church then) donated a thousand "codexes" -- or books in MS. -- and some "incunabula" -- early printed books to the city of Venice. These included the main sources of Homer's poems for the modern world.

About another century passed and the Republic of Venice built this gorgeous library to house the books. Three hundred years later, or so, Napoleon ended the Republic and annexed the library to his new palace, which blocked off the end of the Piazza San Marco and generally annoyed the citizens no end.

The library is decorated with paintings around the walls and ceilings, of course. This is a movie with a 360 degree view.

The decoration includes about a dozen pictures of philosophers -- some by Tintoretto, others by lesser artists. They are burly, strong men, mostly, men whose strong thinking seems to have gone into their bodies as well. (I can't pull a picture in here, but try clicking here for Tintoretto's Aristotle).

These scholars and scientists are uncomfortably crammed into niches, torturously turning to get themselves into the available space. They are focused on books, thoughts, geometries, inward. Great figures for a library in the Renaissance: think about the world, they say, in the broadest possible way; but do it in your body, in the space that's given to you. It's not going to be easy.

Italy: old books

2010-06-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

This morning, I walked down to San Marco, in Venice. By ten, the crowds were just starting to gather, the families speaking all kinds of languages, laughing, listening to the bands at the expensive cafes. I love watching the crowds in Venice.

But today, instead, I turned in by one of the cafes to go into the national library in Venice. I am working on the poems of Guarini, a poet from about 1600. I had found that the library had three editions of his poems, two of which I hadn't seen, so I went to look at these. Happy sounds filtered in from the cafes and the crowds as I worked with these old books.

One thing it taught me was that Guarini was pretty popular. In one year alone, there were at least five reprintings of his poems -- and that in a day when every reprinting meant laborious type-setting and expensive paper. The fifth, interestingly, was a little pocket-size edition that told me he wasn't just a coffee-table poet.

The first edition, though, was pretty fancy: bound in soft calf leather, with a fancy title-page like this one (here's me in the library with this book). Most luxurious of all, it gave a full page to each poem, some of them only seven lines long. The Venetians knew how to do things right, even then.

Guarini was popular with ordinary readers, but also with composers, which Venice abounded with. Those days, most music was sung music. Composers looked for texts that were expressive and gave them a chance to put in lots of contrasts: I'm in love/I hate being in love; I'm so happy/I bet I won't be happy very long; she's so cool/she's too cool to me.

The composers loved Guarini's poems. So I thought I would look at some of their work. I called up three collections of "madrigals" -- each with about 15 songs in them, one by one Gesualdo, and two by Monteverdi, who had been music director right across the piazza from where I was, in the basilica of St. Mark. (Here's Monteverdi)

In those days, you bought music in parts; that is, you saw only your own part; there was likely no "score," no collected representation of all the parts together. So, that's what I saw too, only parts. The Gesualdo only had two of the five parts, the others were missing. These were thin little books, that would have sat in front of a singer, each sitting around a big table.

One of the Monteverdi collections was well used. Someone, in pen, in a 17th-century handwriting, had made some notes. He or she was interested in where the texts were from, so there were notes on the poets. Also, the music had been performed; there were corrections to some of the wrong notes. One of them was especially interesting -- a little piece of paper, about an inch long, floating in the tenor part, with a music staff, four notes, and some words of text. I couldn't figure out where it had originally gone, but surely it was exactly what I do now when something's wrong and I want a readable part -- I write it out corrected and paste it over the wrong notes. Only the paste hadn't lasted four hundred years.

I didn't really need to look at these first editions of music: these are famous pieces, and they've been edited in modern, scholarly editions and I can see them in Oberlin. But I'm glad I did. It let me touch the work of these Venetians as that work had first seen the light of day, held by people who used them then.

Italy: pictures on the walls

2010-05-29T00:07:00.000-07:00

So many beautiful old pictures in this old country are firmly, almost irrevocably part of the walls.

All over Italy, we are seeing the records of the middle ages and the renaissance in fresco : that difficult mode of painting that involved drawing on the wall in sepia chalk, then marking off just enough of the drawing that you could paint in a day, mixing fresh plaster, putting it over the drawing, and then remembering the drawing while you put your paints onto the wet plaster. When it dried, it was there for as long as the wall lasted.

Mostly, these frescoes are in churches (see the previous post). But some aren't. Since we have been going to a lot of the courts of the Renaissance princes, many of the frescoes we've seen have been part of the palaces these dukes built or renovated out of old fortresses.

In room after room -- banquet halls, ducal reception rooms, private quarters (as private as a 16th century duke could be) -- the ceilings and the upper parts of walls are filled with frescoes. These bring into these often vast rooms a vivid sense of color and light. And a kind of human record: the rooms are often bare of furniture -- it's been sold off or stolen long ago -- but here, way above our heads, are strange reflections of the life these princes thought they wanted to lead.

Myths dominate in these palaces: the life of the gods, leisurely and naked.

Sometimes we actually see the owners of the places themselves, fixed in this plaster. (This is the Gonzaga family, who ruled Mantua).

Whatever is on these walls pretty much stays there. Maybe the water drips in from the roof and ruins it, but otherwise it's part of the decor. What happens with a new owner?

Sometimes when tastes change, one fresco is plastered over, the new on top of the old, like this fresco in a church that changed its mind about what people needed to see.

In times when they actually believed in these images, only one image would have shown at one time. But we in our historical, archaeological age -- having no particular beliefs -- pry out the sequence of layers and show as much of the interweaving of periods as we can.

We saw in one set of frescoes, handy at shoulder height and a little removed from the eyes of the sacristan, vistors' names carved in to the plaster -- some from the 20th century, some (here) from the 15th! The fresco stays on the wall, mutilated or not.

In the museums in Italy, you see an incredible number of painted canvases, oils of saints and crucifixions and martyrdoms, that have been lifted off the walls of the churches they were painted for. They end up on these strange walls -- strange, because museums are so out of context for what these paintings meant in the first place.

Wonderfully, you can't do that with frescoes, or only with great difficulty. Where they are is where they were meant to be, whatever happens to those spaces.

Italy: a monastery chapel

2010-05-27T23:51:00.000-07:00

"Infinite riches in a little room," wrote poet John Donne at about the turn of the 17th century. Many meanings -- primarily, in the poem he wrote, about the beauty of his mistress and how it filled the bedroom they were in together. But with his sensibility about how all things work together ("no man is an island"), he had in mind other ways of packing experience into a single room, a place where we might not expect it.

We walk through Ferrara on a sunny morning, through lanes of old, old houses, brick and stone and tile roofs. Some are inside watching TV (we catch snatches through the shuttered windows next to the sidewalk -- if there is one); many must be off at work or doing the shopping. It's a very quiet morning. Only an occasional bike, and a very occasional car rumbles along these one-lane cobbled streets.

Then a gate near the edge of town, and a small garden of grass and an old tree and some red rose bushes growing the way I'd love to have mine grow at home-- tall and full of blooms. An old portico, and some monuments, and a door that creaks open, opened by a small woman in a nun's habit. She's a Benedictine nun, we know, only because we have read the guidebook about the Monasterio di San Antonio. In Italian, without a pause, she greets us and starts in: we're here to visit, yes? to see the frescoes? follow me.

We walk through a hallway into a chapel. It's not a large room by Italian church standards, and simple. The main ornament are some plaster elements suspended from the ceiling. But there's none of the baroque curlicues, stucco decorations, enormous crucifixion paintings we're used to by now. Mainly white walls, bare floor, and some wooden stalls where the nuns worship. And a dulcimer: one of the nuns must be into new age Catholic music.

The frescoes are in three chapels at the east end of the chapel. The nun shows them to us, narrating them in a quiet voice, almost like a prayer. She tells us of Jesus on the cross, and Saints Benedict and Catherine watching; of the flight to Egypt, with Joseph carrying the baby on his shoulders, and Jesus reaching back to his mother who rides on the donkey; of martyrdoms, St. Stephen patiently being stoned to death, and of the innocents in Bethlehem silently massacred by two fierce Herodian thugs. And with just a little inflection in her almost unwavering recitation, she proudly shows us the wonderful crucifixion where Jesus climbs brave and strong up the ladder set on the cross, a hero rather than a victim.

All I think about convents is overturned here, in this room. This quiet nun, away from the world, is also part of the world. The place itself, unadorned in so many ways, functional for these religious women who pray for the world, is also part of the world. The frescoes make it so: a brutal, tragic, difficult life for people like Joseph, Stephen, Mary, Jesus, exists here too. It is so humanely rendered -- with little touches of humanity and ordinariness -- that the heroism of these stories is more accessible in these small and unassuming chapels than in the grand cathedrals.

I think for a moment of Shakespeare's great play about life in and out of a cloister -- Measure for Measure -- with its intrusion of hypocrisy, lust, and betrayal on a novice who at the start of the play just wants to leave the world behind. (Here in William Holman Hunt's 19th-century painting of Isabella, the novice, with her brother, whose imminent execution is what pulls her out of her isolation). This being (in a strange way) a comedy, it turns out to be a good thing for her that she abandons her incipient vows and moves towards an apparently richer life (she marries the duke). But we know all the way through the play, that in the convent, too, is infinite beauty in a little room.

Italy: Bergamo and the layers of history

2010-05-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

I like how geography -- so baffling when you first arrive in a place as a stranger -- yields up ideas after a few hours of your putting yourself into it.

We stopped in Bergamo, in the foothills below the Italian lakes. It's a medieval town on a hill, still surrounded by its original walls. It is preserved because the modern town developed on the flat land below and basically left the old town intact. By the 18th century, there wasn't much defensive potential to being up on a hill behind medieval curtain walls, so the point of settling uncomfortably up there was gone. Modern towns needed roads, canals, railways, and room to grow.

The old town is criss-crossed by little streets, no more than alleys, tight canyons of masonry faced by unrevealing little windows and well-locked doors. But then you turn a corner and you're in a piazza; space opens up, maybe just a little; and the buildings open up, too.

You realize, walking these old alleys, why piazzas were so important for the Italians. In the streets, you can't really communicate with more than a couple of others; in the piazza you have room for a crowd. You can throw a party.

The Piazza Vecchia in Bergamo is fairly big, and very communal. On the north are the porticos of the public library; on the west, the entrance to the old university (Bergamo struck us as a pretty studious and serious town). On the east are cafés; we ate lunch at the Caffé del Tasso, "since 1476" (what would they have served then? not espresso, for sure).

On the south, the piazza is bordered by an interesting building, the municipal hall, or Palazzo del Ragion. Above, this is essentially one large room, an amazingly wide and high room with complicated medieval trusses, apparently the place for town debates, policy meetings, banquets, etc. Underneath, at piazza level, is an open portico. Thus you can look right through the building to a smaller piazza beyond. The piazza is both enclosed and permeable at the same time.

What you reach by going through the portico is the religious center of town -- the Piazza del Duomo, with its cathedral as well as a very large Romanesque church of Sta. Maria Maggiore, baroque-ified inside to beat the band. Literally next to this is a third church, a chapel that holds the tomb of Bartolomeo Colleoni, a Bergamasque mercenary mostly working in the pay of Venice. ("Bergamasque" is the adjective form of Bergamo, and became used for a famous Renaissance dance.)

So beyond the portico lie two big forms of organized power - church and army. But back in the big piazza, power seems much more diffused: library, university, commerce, city government with its traditional neighborly squabbles.

In the portico itself, where the city council used to hold hearings, there's a nice reminder of how history changes. In the late 18th-century, some scientifically inclined citizen created a complicated sundial (an "analemma") on the floor, in inlaid pieces of marble. It doesn't tell the time, but the days of the year. Each sunny day at real-time midday (not noon, but apparently 12:21), the sun streams past the cathedral to shine through a hole at the top of one of the arches, and hits a long line in the pavement at some point that tells you what date it is. Aside from being a useful check on the less-than-reliable calendars of the day, it's a visual reminder of the tilting of the earth: in summer, close into the front since the noon sun is high in the sky; in winter, a ray stretching some hundred feet into the portico, since the sun's down near the horizon even at noon.

History layers itself: Medieval (a town walling itself in for its own life in a fierce environment of marauders); Renaissance (Colleoni putting his energy and guts -- sprezzatura, he'd have said -- up for sale to the Venetian Republic); Enlightenment: a rationalist creates a visual emblem of the predictability of Galilean planetary motion.

Italy: the lakes

2010-05-21T13:45:00.000-07:00

As we flew south from Dusseldorf to Milan, the thick clouds broke over the Alps, just as we must have passed over the high point of the range, maybe over Piz Bernina. It was stunning to see these peaks, below us but not very far below. The ground, so far away when we were up in the lowlands of the Rhine and Dussel valleys, was suddenly rising to meet us.

The plane followed a valley south from the high peaks, narrow and twisting and with what probably was a torrential stream in the center of it, then gradually widening and including some farmland. We were probably in Italy by then; in a moment we started seeing on both sides of the plane the Italian lakes -- Lago Maggiore and Lago di Como. (I'm writing this on the roof garden of our hotel on Lago di Como, looking north at sunset to the still-glowing Alps.)

Then, as we approached Milan's northern airport, the land flattened dramatically. It was that rich farmland of Lombardy, fields squared off with lines of those dark Lombardy poplars, rich old tile-roofed barns. The fields were flooded: we guessed that it might be the rice fields where that wonderful smooth arborio rice grows that we use for risotto.

Now, spending two days in the lakes, I've been thinking about the relationship of the mountains, the lakes, and the plains. Here is a mountain range that is practically impenetrable, until modern days: where the trucks now cross the St. Bernard pass on an autostrada, until very few years ago there were only winding roads. When Wordsworth walked across the Alps in 1792, there was only a track (and he got lost).

The Alps are the great defense of Italy -- along with the sea that surrounds the rest of the peninsula. They are the divide of the continent, Italy becoming the "Cisalpine" -- below the Alps -- region of Europe.

Then there are the lakes, long north-south lakes carved by the glaciers. They remind me of the other north-south lakes I've been around -- the Finger Lakes of New York, our Lake Dunmore in Vermont, Windermere and Wast Water in the Lake District of England. Going about here in the past two days, I've realized how wonderful they are as highways. Driving around them here is terrible -- narrow roads, suddenly made one-lane by jutting-out corners of houses, twisting and dangerous. But on the lake, in a ferry, you're on the level and in the wide-open spaces.

It's in The Last of the Mohicans that the north south lake of Oswego figures so strongly -- the canoes sweeping down from the north onto the barely-tenable fort at the south end (if I remember it rightly). My image may be wrong, but every time I look up a lake like this of Como to the north, I imagine boats paddled by folks who would rather that they lived in the place that I currently inhabit.

Lake Como is y-shaped like Lake Keuka in New York. At the crucial juncture is the town of Varenna, across from Bellagio where we are staying. Above Varenna, a pretty fierce half-hour climb for us (the guidebook called it "a brisk 20 minutes"!) is the Castello di Vezio: a fortress to defend this lake-highway against marauders. Sometimes thought to be Roman, sometimes Longobardian (that is the name of the post-Roman migrants who settled this area, now called Lombardy after them); certainly it's medieval in the form we saw it, with crennelated battlements, a high watchtower-keep, and curtain walls.

So the Alps, I was thinking, are a great wall to the north. But the lakes are highways that -- if you could breach that wall -- take you right down to the goodies to the south: fields, factories, river power, ports. No wonder you work hard to build a fort like that: you need to keep the access control.

And I was thinking, too, about directionality around here. Does the threat come from the north, usually? I was thinking about Napoleon coming down from Paris to "liberate" Italy from the Austrians (they welcomed that, for a little while). I was thinking about the Emperor Charles V, I think (I don't have internet access, so I can't fact-check very well), rampaging down to sack Rome in the 16th century. And the Germans in the mid 20th century, moving south when their incompetent partner Italy folded, to fortify the Appenines against the Allied advance up the peninsula from Sicily. Maybe even Hannibal, who brought his elephants around from Carthage (through France?) and crossed the Alps south to attack Rome.

Where the threat comes from probably depends on where you are at the moment. If you were a Gaul in 40 BC, you probably saw the threat coming north from Rome in the form of Caesar's army.

Italy: mapping our flight

2010-05-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

During the night on our flight to Dusseldorf, we hit some rough air and the pilot took us up to 39,000 feet. When the sun came up, i opened the window and saw the curve of the earth, bending down in front of us and again behind us. . It was a gentle curve, not like the beachball rotundity that the astronauts see, but a curve nonetheless. I'm not sure I'd ever been up that high. It made me feel a long way from the ground. (the picture is one from 90,000 ft up, not mine).

As a map fanatic, I like to know where we are while I'm flying. It gives a (fictitious) sense of groundedness, of connection to the real earth, while my suspended life consists of this bizarrre cigar-shaped polystyrene cabin shared with a few hundred others including the screaming 2-year-old in front of me.

Earlier in the flight, while we were still over North America and the sun had not set, something went wrong with the plane's entertainment video system. That meant not only that I couldn't watch episodes of Friday Night Lights, but also that the cool flight map that some flights give you was not working. So, with a lot of cloud cover and only intermittent views of the ground, it was harder than usual to figure out where we were.

At one point, we were launching out over lots of water, with a curving peninsula to the south of us that I thought might be the Gaspé just where the St. Lawrence River meets the North Atlantic. Then the clouds hit again; an hour or so, later we saw ground again that was obviously still the farmland of Canada. The water had been, I'm guessing, Georgian Bay, off Lake Huron. Oops.

Knowing where you are on the map is nice, but the accuracy of that "knowing" really doesn't make any difference, except for the folks in the cockpit.

Eventually, the mapping system was working again, as we ate breakfast over the Irish Sea and started sloping southeast across England. I watched it of course, while also hunting for breaks in the clouds to corroborate what the map was telling me about where we were (as if it could be wrong!).

I love that instant mapping screen. For one thing, I love the stolid repetitiveness of its numbers: distance to destination, 3,204 miles; a few minutes later, distance to destination, 3,125 miles, our inevitable progress (we hope) plotted in sequential announcements, like the daily sextant readings in a China clipper's log book.

I also love the way the screen flips through various views, from local (maybe 500 miles) to regional (maybe 2,000 miles) to global (our plane, a tiny dot, on its trajectory across a screen that flattens the earth, a great ice cap on top and bottom, continents and oceans striping vertically across, and the big waveform that indicates night finally running away from us at 1,000 miles an hour or so.

And I love even more the grounding that comes when I turn from the screen to the window, glance ahead of the wing, and identify the curve of the Norfolk coast as we head across the Channel. [again, not my picture, but it is Norfolk].

Yes, I know where we are! And yes, apparently so does the pilot!

Glorious organ sounds

2010-04-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

Last night we went to a recital at Oberlin's Fairchild Chapel, where Italian organist Francesco Cera played gorgeous early Italian music. Entering this chapel is already like going back in centuries -- stone, austere shapes, a rounded apse in front, a sense that the electronic "media" world has been completely shut out.

For a little over an hour, we heard the music you might have heard in a (probably more ornate) church in Mantua or Bologna from about 1540 to, say, 1620. The music had a grandeur and precision that seemed to sharpen my senses.

Even the names of the pieces engaged me, because they kept me coming back to the process of creating : "toccata" -- that which is made by touching; "ricercar" -- that which asks you to seek, and seek again; "fantasia" -- that which asks you to use your imagination; and "canzon" -- that which calls on you to sing. And finally, amazingly at the end of a profound and spiritual Organ Mass by Frescobaldi, a "bergamasca" -- a boisterous dance from Bergamo, which in those times was an Italian Hicksville. Like putting country music at the end of a concert of Beethoven! Nothing seemed fixed, nailed down. It was being created at that moment, four hundred years after first being conceived.

I love it when concerts take us past what we are used to. The regularities of Mozart are pretty engrained in my ears at this point. But these were different. Was it the tuning of this organ, which I gather is in a different temperament than I'm used to? or the skill of the organist, who combined steadiness with flexibility? or the writing, frankly different from what we mostly hear today? Certainly VERY different from a standard diet of Bach, great as his music is!

What I especially heard were suspensions and runs. Suspensions -- the held notes that suddenly become lucious dissonances when another close note sneaks in from somewhere. And runs -- the fast sliding intricacies of scales, up and down, underneath a held chord, like the curlicues of a Baroque church made alive and given color and movement.

Here's Cera on a different organ: I hope you enjoy as I did last night!

Oberlin at the Metropolitan Museum

2010-04-08T06:27:00.000-07:00

Oberlin's art museum is closed for renovation, and in the meantime works are at Akron, Cleveland, and now, just opened, in a show at the Metropolitan in NYC. "Side by Side" puts 20 Oberlin works in the galleries of the Met with their own (incredible) collection.

I went last week and loved the show. It didn't hurt that Central Park was buzzing with blossoms and bicycles as well.

I loved especially how the paintings that I have worked with for years at Oberlin now take on new meanings when they are in a new context.

Oberlin's museum has its own blogsite, so I wrote a piece for that -- this click should take you there. Here I am in front of one of my favorites:

Weeds and Peepers

2010-03-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

So I'm taking something of a vacation from research today, and blogging is part of that vacation. So is biking. I took a picnic and a book, and my camera, on my bike, pedaling west to the little farm town of Kipton, 5 miles from Oberlin, on the old railroad, now bike trail.

What to report?

Clouds and jet trails blowing east in a stiff breeze above the old Town Hall.

A chorus of spring peepers in a little swamp next to the bike trail.

The noon sun slanting through trees on the bridge across the Vermilion River.

And weeds. . .

"Spring and all," by William Carlos Williams, one of my favorite poems. It sounds gloomy on first look, but it's not. It's about tenacious life, like the peepers. Williams was a doctor in New Jersey; the contagious hospital was part of his rounds.

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind.  Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter.  All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens:  clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them:  rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Thinking about the 1790s

2010-03-19T07:26:00.000-07:00

The Takacs quartet came to Oberlin last night -- well, actually only three of them. They played two duos and a trio, and though I'd been hoping for string quartets, the concert was pretty great. The duos were a Mozart for violin and viola (a chance to hear string music without the cello, an airier listening) and a Kodaly for violin and cello (the cello was essential, inspired, and characteristically celloistic).

The trio was the first in Beethoven's Opus 9 set, written, according to Peter Laki's notes, between 1796 and 1798, in Vienna. This piece, even though it was no quartet, was a next-best thing. It's virtuosic, demanding, exciting. Especially live, especially with these players -- lots of horsehair on the floor of the stage; lots of rhythm; the bows sometimes soothing, sometimes pounding on the double-stops that Beethoven wrote in to make the trio sound closer to a quartet (thanks to first violinist Edward Dusinberre for demonstrating).

Afterwards, I was thinking about two aspects of that decade, the 1790s, since I have just finished a draft of a chapter of my book about paintings and poems that focuses on London in that period:

Beethoven started writing and publishing his chamber music then, and as far as I can see it instantly raised the bar for performance standards. These trios are HARD to play! The piano trios that he labeled "Opus 1" are, as well. And while some of us amateurs can manage facsimiles of performances of his first set of string quartets (Op. 18), they are pretty demanding, too, even if there are fewer double stops than in the trios. It seems to me a watershed moment in dividing amateurs from professionals. Haydn can be played by amateurs, though there are tough parts and the first violinist has to manage a lot of notes. But Beethoven... can be played, but it's a different ball game. Last week a friend came over to play with us, and I pulled out some trios by someone named Crémont from a few years later, helpfully labelled "leichte" -- "easy"! They weren't easy, but I'm guessing he was intending them for the amateurs who had been left high and dry by Beethoven. Is it a good thing that Beethoven raised the bar? Sure, it gives us great music to listen to now, by great quartets like the Takacs. But it also meant the end of the intimate connection with the top music of the day that comes when music lovers are also performers of the music they love.
When I saw the date of the trio in the program notes, I was excited. These same years in London saw the work of the great early Romantic writers - Coleridge, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft and Blake in particular. In England, these radical poets were responding to an incredibly tense moment in history, as the English government simultaneously declared war on the new French Republic (the revolution only a few years old and immediately seen as a threat) and clamped down on liberal/radical thought at home. Comically, the government's spy who followed Coleridge on his walks reported that he kept talking about someone called "Spy-Nosy" (Spinoza); more seriously, critics of the government or of the existing patriarchal order were in danger of being silenced or jailed. As a result, the work they were writing was tense, fraught with the contradictions of their situations, not unlike the US in the Vietnam war era. So, back to the concert and Beethoven: here was this trio, from the same period, the 1790s, and it was -- exciting, flamboyant, showy -- but for my ears at least, not tense the way I feel tension in, say, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It's a complex issue, I know, but I'm interested in how we might explore that difference: How was Vienna different from London? how was Beethoven different from Blake or Coleridge? How is music different from poetry?

One of the great poems I've been reading from the 1790s -- and short enough to fit in a blog -- is Blake's "London," from Songs of Experience. Here's the text and also Blake's engraving itself, which if anything manages to increase the tension in this already tight-strung little "song."

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry

Every black'ning Church appalls;

And the hapless Soldier's sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot's curse

Blasts the new born Infant's tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

Space, time and music once again

2010-02-21T08:43:00.000-08:00

Music, like life, matter, and energy (as well as that Golden Record that we sent up on Voyager in the 1970s to make interstellar contact) exists in time and space. It comes fully alive when both of those parameters are active. That "aliveness" is what makes live music irreplaceable.

These days, recorded ("non-live") music is amazing. On a CD, I can study music carefully, going backwards and forwards, stopping and starting, shutting the rest of the world out with my headphones. Because it's miked so carefully, the inner voices in a string quartet are as clear and accessible as the violin and the cello, so I can hear them clearly. Notes, lines and structures are so wonderfully articulated.

But compared to live music, the CD almost always seems flat. It's like that Golden Record compared to life itself. "Hello" in 55 languages doesn't add up to much of the complexity of language or the interconnectedness of life on Earth.

I keep thinking that in live music, it's the "liveness" of time and space that matters. Space demand that the music be embodied in real people. Performers, unlike their avatars on a CD, can't occupy the same space in real life; they are articulated, positioned, individualized by the laws of physics and biology. So their sounds come from different places, are "engrained" (made distinctive, vital: I'm thinking of Barthes' essay on "The Grain of the Voice" here) by their locations in space.

And there's time, that strange fourth dimension that, unlike the other three, has no reversibility. We can't go backwards in time the way we can on the CD. We have the one chance, performers and audience in the very same moment, to catch the music. One of Blake's strange "Proverbs of Hell" "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

Two case studies from this week:

Listening to the lutenist Paul O'Dette play Bach. There were a lot of people in Harkness Chapel at Case Western University, and the lute is a very quiet instrument. The space was large, the instrument small. But as the music started, you could hear the hall contracting. The intensity of his playing and the intensity of our listening made the space alive. The hall became centered on the intimate touch of his fingers on the strings. (An unsolicited endorsement: he was brought to Cleveland by the excellent series Chapel, Court, and Countryside at CWRU. If you live in NE Ohio, subscribe!). Here's Don Rosenberg's piece with much more about this concert.

Singing Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium. I was honored to be a guest in the alumni reunion for Oberlin's Collegium Musicum, celebrating twenty years of musical leadership by my friend Steve Plank. Tallis's piece is written in forty distinct vocal lines (the score is about as big as a card table) divided into eight choirs. It is a piece you don't get to hear, or sing, often. For me, it made the irreversibility of time totally visceral: the inexorable tactus passes on, each of us singers hanging onto the one precious moment of each of our entrances into the cosmic soup of polyphony. The harmonic rhythm, too, passes by, chord to chord, almost every new entrance shifting the harmony slightly until the next tonality shows itself. And then, the space! Eight different choirs, each its own sonic center, the music enchaining itself around these stations, passing itself towards a new center, living in it a few bars, and passing on to another. It is paradoxical in a blog about live music to reference a video, but here it is. This is five of the King's Singers recording Spem in Alium (overdubbing: the electronic equivalent of acoustic space):

Opera and the unreal

2010-02-07T07:26:00.000-08:00

We dug out from a big snow yesterday and drove to the mall to watch Simon Bocanegra on the Met HD Live. An unreal experience, or rather one that shapes its own reality. (A little like Avatar, perhaps?)

Unreal: the darkened room, the cushy seats -- we are barely aware of others in nearby seats. These theaters eliminate the outside world, the icy roads, the to-do lists, the constant chatter of reality. And these days, we seem to remember to turn off our cell phones.

Unreal: the live feed on HD. Here we are in Strongsville, Ohio, but the sound and screen are in Manhattan. The New Yorkers we see in the onscreen audience read the synopsis just as we do, chat with their neighbors. Only they're dressed rather better than we are, and they are hundreds of miles away. I know this kind of "live from the White House" occurs on all 625 channels all day on TV, but I don't watch much of that, so this feels a little new. And it's so intense: the large screen, the audience chatter in surround sound, and of course the opera itself take me out of Ohio.

Unreal: the plot. 14th-century Genoa, politics and coups, lost orphan daughters, poisoners and hooded revengers out of an Elizabethan tragedy. Yes, you don't go to the opera for the plot, people say, but even so, it's important. During the opera, I can't keep asking those nagging questions about the reality of what you're seeing: how did the orphan girl end up as the ward of her father's enemy? who just freed the tenor from prison, and why? Even while I know that the plot is absurd -- so absurd that I have to read the synopsis ahead of time, and how unreal is THAT? -- I keep trying to find the real in that unreal web.

Unreal: the backstage. In the Met HD Live, you get to go backstage, before and after each act. The singers have just finished an amazing trio, the curtain comes down, and before you know it you're behind the curtain, watching a sweaty Placido Domingo walking towards you; he takes a hand-held mic and Renee Fleming is talking with him about how you sing Verdi or how you age yourself 25 years between acts (disarmingly sweet: he says it's not hard, he just takes off the young-man makeup and looks his actual age). We see the stage sets being wheeled around on their enormous trolleys, banks of lights already attached to them to shine through the windows with the illusion of Italian sunshine. All that breaking of illusion; the fourth wall is there one minute, and gone the next. And even so, when the opera's on, all that disappears: the fake sunlight is real, just as the absurdly fabricated plot is real.

Unreal: the singing. No, not the usual thought about how people dying of poison don't usually sing their farewells. Rather this: that the singing is so extraordinarily good, so out-of-this-world, that it seems unreal even while it moves me. I'm drawn into the emotions and the situation in ways that realistic drama can never do.

Unreal: the whole gestalt. It takes so much--talent, money, conviction, leisure, work-- to make it happen: top stars, the best-paid orchestra in the world, a scene shop to die for, a master composer. . . . And it takes hours to pull it off. Where in life do we find all these things together, and the time to let it go, at its own pace?

Unreal: the musical score. In one of the between-the-acts interviews, Kiri te Kanawa spoke about her role upcoming in La Fille du Regiment, in a non-singing part. Without the music to time her responses, she said, she was having to improvise, invent her own timing -- as actors do all the time in realistic drama. She was missing that central unreality of opera: the wonderful, strange convention that plot, action, thought, emotion are all governed by a musical score in which time is predetermined.

An afternoon in Strongsville at the Met: as unreal as the Super Bowl, and at the same time much more real than tonight's ritual contest will ever be.

Shelley's Avatars

2010-02-02T08:47:00.000-08:00

Avatar, which I finally saw last night, reminds me of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Both are beautiful and flawed, high in inventive imagery and low in organization. We are deluged with a host of gorgeousness, a vitality unparalled, and we come away not quite sure what has just happened.

In Avatar, we get wonderful visions: those night scenes in the forest, with plants glowing and fading; the seeds of the sacred tree that float like jellyfish through the air, pulsing with life; the wild flights on those dragon-beasts, scooping in and out of the hanging mountains or the surf. The premise is that all life is interconnected: a plant is not inert but vital, and it's an act of reverence to delight in the vitality of life, of air, of water. I love my garden, but I usually fail to notice the life-filled gyrations of the tomatoes or the aspirations of the raspberries.

Shelley, a foe of established religion, was looking for a way to put reverence back into the world. Sometimes he did it by writing for civil rights - exposing the tyrants of the world (there were plenty then, too) and giving us instead the life of the workers and the common people. He was a democrat almost before that could be imagined. He would have been glad to see the populism of Avatar. He was a pantheist, using his poems to show us how life and spirit intermingle in all kinds of forms. One poem celebrates "The Sensitive Plant," which takes joy in everything around it. Here's a stanza that especially reminds me of the film:

The plumed insects swift and free
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odour which pass
Over the gleam of the living grass. . .

He wrote a wonderful poem in the voice of a cloud, not much read anymore but startling in a pre-aviation age. Like Avatar, he is forcing science on us: the cloud appears tangible, but is in fact only vapor; it vanishes; it appears again. It is a process more than a thing: it dissolves and is born again. It is fierce, gentle, cruel and nurturing at once. Here's the ending of the poem; notice how fully the cloud is made into a strange, self-transforming life-form [a "cenotaph" is a memorial that does not contain a body]:

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die--
For after the rain, when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of Air--
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again.--

One last example from Shelley: the end of Prometheus Unbound. It's written as a play, but is entirely unactable. The last act is an apocalypse: life as we know it -- nasty, brutish and short, and dominated by tyrants -- has ended, and the world blends together in a feast of love marked by beautiful sounds, colors, and emotions. If we were ever to act this (and we might, now that we have CGI), it would be something like those night scenes in Avatar:

Peace! peace! a mighty Power, which is as Darkness,
Is rising out of Earth, and from the sky
Is showered like Night, and from within the air
Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up
Into the pores of sunlight -- the bright Visions
Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone
Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night.

This great, if messy, poet died, sailing in the Mediterranean, when a storm arose out of nowhere and swamped his small sailboat. His body was found days later. He had a volume of Keats' poems in his back pocket. Byron and another friend built a great bonfire and burned it on the Italian beach. Byron saved only Shelley's heart, which was later buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (where Keats too is buried), with the epitaph "Cor cordium" (heart of hearts).

Holmes and homage

2010-01-18T08:15:00.000-08:00

I saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie yesterday. As one who watched the Basil Rathbone films long ago, and read the Conan Doyle stories even longer ago than that, I wondered whether I might object to the liberties this one takes with the iconic fiction of Holmes and Watson. A lot of ink and talk had already been spilled about how unfaithful this film is.

Robert Downey, Jr., doesn't much resemble the Holmes of popular memory, and --oh, dear -- Holmes and Watson (Jude Law) seem to have a thing going for each other, which would have been improbable for Rathbone and his Watson of old (Nigel Bruce).

Who cares? Not I: if I want fidelity, I'll read the stories. Which I may do, again, now. Nothing is so boring to me as a movie that plods piece by piece, scene by scene, through a novel (like the dreary Merchant/Ivory Howards End of some years ago). Some call it "paying homage" to a book to treat it faithfully: I'd say we ought rather to pay bail to get it out of the prison of fidelity.

(WARNING: Spoilers may follow!) This version, directed by the little-known Guy Ritchie, is fortunately free of tasteful homage (in academia, we like the French version of words like this). Rather than trying for fidelity to some consistent view of the past (whether to the original stories, say, or to the settings, habits, and costumes of nineteenth-century London), Ritchie's film shamelessly borrows. It borrows from all over: shots of St. Paul's cathedral in the smoke, reminiscent of wartime photos, jostle with a boxing match echoing the grittiness of Scorsese's Gangs of New York (featured last night on the Golden Globes); restaurants and interiors have a certain plush Western-brothel-Miss-Kitty look; the scientific apparatus seems to be drawn directly from Branagh's bizarre Frankenstein rather than any effort to echo Victorian actuality.

Robert Downey handcuffed to a bed is more Sade than Sherlock. And, as you can tell from the image even if you haven't seen the movie, it's funny. Just as Downey himself is amused by his own appearance, so is the film.

One example: a big scene involves a shipyard, with the hull of a gigantic ship being built. Holmes and Watson are trying to escape a hammer-wielding seven-foot French-speaking bruiser (why French-speaking? who knows? he's more like a thug from a Bond film--mabye Dr. No?) who knocks out all the poles supporting the ship one by one, and breaks the big chains holding her on land. Why she doesn't fall over, don't ask. In a massive, noisy, exciting scene, she rumbles down the slip into the river. The funniest part is the end of the sequence: we watch a great distance, from inside the shipyard, as this massive hull -- now a tiny model in the center of a CGI river -- settles slowly into the river, tips up its bow, and sinks. It's James Cameron's Titanic, of course, but this time without an orchestra and in the muddy waters of the Thames, and totally unpopulated and without consequence.

The movie's effects, of course, are computer-generated-imagery (CGI). London streets, the House of Lords, an ambassador in flames leaping through a stained-glass window -- they all have the excitement and the curious unreality of CGI effects. As the Batman movies have a hard-edged, armor-like quality to the surfaces of Gotham, this one has a stage-set, scrim-like intangibility to its London. Its settings are not so much gestures to reality or history as allusions to other representations, to theater, art, and film in particular.

And its plot -- though plot is not why you go to see this movie -- acknowledges that appropriation and allusion are at its heart. (Again, spoilers follow!) The plot hangs on (literally, since hanging is central) a Da Vinci code ripoff. Conan Doyle purists rightly scoff at the implausibility and the cheap coat-tail allusion to a twenty-first century potboiler. But the film actually knows what it's doing. The rituals turn out to be a sham, the invention (or rather, appropriation!) of none other than Holmes' arch-rival, Professor Moriarty.

All the hoodoo (crosses and pentagrams and ancient books of curses) has been produced by Moriarty. It's he, the shadowy presence whose face is never seen (and whose name, like Voldemort, is evil itself) who has seen Dan Brown films (how? go figure) and Batman films, and Dracula (the villain of the movie is an English lord who looks strangely like a certain Transylvanian). The evil Moriarty has studied, not old curses, but contemporary culture, and he uses his dastardly knowledge to generate a scenario of world domination. No wonder he's a professor: not a Harvard symbologist like the Tom Hanks character in Da Vinci Code, but maybe an English/Cinema Studies/Cultural Studies professor at a small liberal arts college somewhere in the midwest. Uh oh: worse than that, he has also invented that dreaded device of evil, the TV remote!

Stop the clocks...

2010-01-13T08:22:00.000-08:00

We went to the movies Saturday afternoon to watch Der Rosenkavalier on HD Live from the Met in New York. It's a bit like one of those banquets you read about in novels -- four and half hours of very delicious and rich delicacies.

The plot -- like most -- is impossible to recount; the very existence of such a ridiculous plot is just one of the many wonderful artifices that make opera, like good cooking, a cultural activity worthy of writing about. Things don't happen this way in real life, we might well say. And a good thing, too. It's the differences from reality that matter. One of those differences is in the magical way opera has of stopping time: those freeze-time moments when nothing happens while everything (under the surface) sorts and re-sorts itself.

One utterly ridiculous man, Baron Ochs von Lerchenau, is the nominal center; at least, he likes to think he is. It's a great bass part, comic, lyrical, abusive, egotistical. At the end of Act Two, exhausted, he stops chasing the chambermaid and bossing the bourgoisie long enough to have a moment of quiet. An old song pops into his head, and, it being opera, he sings it. "Ohne mich..." -- "without me." It's ego, but sweet, a country-type waltz that is the right place for this bumpkin to be. For a little while, time stops.

Romantic music always stops time when people fall in love. Here (again, the plot is absurd), a young aristocrat, Octavian, presents a young woman, Sophie, a rose on behalf of his boorish cousin Ochs. Never mind why. What matters is: first, Octavian is a boy, but he is sung by a woman, and dresses as a woman twice in the opera; and second, the two fall in love during the presentation of the rose. Here's a concert performance of the scene; at about 2:00, you'll catch what I'm talking about. Notice the beautiful high chords in the orchestra, like stars twinkling on a New Year's night. And the incredibly beautiful high notes of the two women, holding time away...

The opera not only stops time at these key moments, it embeds the stopping of time in the fabric of the story, the characters, and the music. At the real center of the opera -- Baron Ochs only thinks he's the center -- is a beautiful and privileged woman (the Marschallin), for whom time is running out. "You have made me an old woman," she says to her hairdresser; she knows, though, it's not he who has aged her. It is she who most articulates the theme of the opera: while we can make moments of beauty and love, time will always win out.

(In tragedy, we can't get to the end soon enough: death is better than life; but in comedy, the happy endings are often saddened by the difficulty of maintaining equilibrium: "The rain, it raineth every day.")

At the end of Act One, the Marschallin sings, "Time is a strange thing," and recounts to her young lover how sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night and goes about the house stopping all the clocks. You'll hear the clocks striking (13 times). . .

Strauss's Vienna in the Rosenkavalier is of the ancien regime, with wigs and lace. But it is also the Vienna of Freud: "If youth knew; if age could."

Fires beneath the surface

2010-01-01T06:59:00.000-08:00

Just before Christmas, we went to Bellevue, WA, where the Bellevue Arts Museum had an exhibition of Robert Sperry's ceramics. Sperry taught for decades at the University of Washington, and evolved from a fairly standard ceramicist (teapots and vases) to a funky and then a profound abstract expressionist. He died in 1998.

Ceramics are hard for me to appreciate, but I'm trying to learn. How to appreciate randomness, for example? Some of Sperry's transitional works were raku, I think: at any rate, they had that rough texture and almost random coloration that wood ash gives to Japanese pots. As you can tell from this blog, I tend to like order in art -- I think I might actually be still living in the Enlightenment period -- but here I started to see why the randomness matters.

For me, the connection is fire. I love watching, tending, feeding fires. . . . the smoke, the swirl of flame, the transformation of neat logs to ash that clings to surfaces. So now when I see the finished pots that come out of such fires, I try to re-imagine the flames. The cold pot starts to glow with a fantasy heat; the museum (God forbid!) starts to fill with eye-watering smoke. And ceramic, I realize, becomes a liminal thing, a threshold piece, between our safe world and the dangerous fires beyond.

In Sperry's last pieces, the fire matters, too, but with a different aesthetic. These are abstract plates, big in scale, useless as household objects. They are massively crinkled, the glaze and the slip broken in deep gullies. There are blobs of clay, often at the center, sticking up from the plate surface. The upshooting blobs eat into the space of air and coolness around these plates, dangerous vestiges (or sacred orifices) of fire. They ooze with a deep pigmented blob around them, as if lava or blood were coming up out of the center. There is a pent-up energy in these pieces that is belied by their cool abstraction, the neatness of their circular outline and the coolness of their white glaze. Like manuscripts overwritten, they hold vestiges of the energies that have both created and wiped out, that have written, erased, rewritten, torn, and poked through the surface of meaning.

Gerard Manley Hopkins knew about fires beneath the surface: the end of his wonderful sonnet on "The Windhover" -- a bird of prey, turning from calm soaring to a steep dive, like a coal in the fire suddenly falling open:

. . . and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Or, in a more elegiac vein, Shakespeare, in his sonnet about growing old:

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie. . .

(Interesting that in both poems, the verbs for these fires are "g" words: "gall," "gash," and "glow." Does anybody know what that might mean about language?)

More on space in music

2009-12-14T07:38:00.000-08:00

Music needs space to live and breathe. Last night, I was singing Messiah in the choir loft at First Church in Oberlin. This historic meeting house is a big rectangle; the choir is at one end, about two thirds of the way up to the ceiling. A lecture I heard cornettist Bruce Dickey give last week talked about his experience playing in Italian churches, often from the organ loft: the sound makes sense when it's played from up there, he said.

This seemed true at First Church, too: the church gave back to us from that wonderfully mostly empty space in which the sound does its wonderful movements.

Too many concerts put the performers in only one place, I think. Last week I was in Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland for the Apollo's Fire Christmas concert -- they were performing a mostly Praetorius concert. Great variety, energy, and color in the music: but disappointingly, very little use of the space. I know it's hard to keep space-separated groups in sync, and precision is what you gain by keeping the performers on one stage. But for one final number, they spread out around this mid-size Gothic hall, and the music started to expand.

When the choir and instruments are together in one space, I as a listener am focused right there, intent on where they are and what they are doing together (at least, I try to be). When they use the space differently -- an offstage brass choir in Mahler; trumpets at the rear of the cathedral; cornetti in the organ loft -- I too have to open up as a listener, darting with ears and mind around the hall. The myth of focus -- which is of course an illusion, as you can't pay attention to all things at once, even when the performers are close together -- the myth is shattered, and for good effect.

I was playing Bach's Magnificat last week, too. The text comes from the gospel account of Mary's response to the incredible shattering of her life in the angel's announcement of her pregnancy. The hymn she sings is all about the changing of space that the birth meant for her and the world. "My soul doth magnify the Lord" -- magnificat: her soul and body have together become a space that "magnifies" -- resonates -- with God. Through this birth, the hierarchical spaces of power are going to be overthrown, since, in her prophecy, "He hath cast down the mighty from their thrones" -- Deposuit potentes. And again the spaces of the body itself: the womb, the stomach: "He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away." Bach sets that radical emptiness -- the Latin word is inanes -- by ending that part of the piece with a single, low pluck in the cellos; a pluck that resounds through the hall.

To end with, here's a link to an incredible example of music in space: horn player Willie Ruff playing Gregorian chant alone in St. Mark's in Venice.

Time in Arcadia

2009-11-30T19:21:00.000-08:00

In the never-never land of Arcadian pastoral, a shepherd loves a sea-nymph. She returns his love, but a one-eyed giant, a cyclops even, also wants her. Annoyed by the giant's attention to the nymph, the shepherd gets angry, and challenges him to a duel. It's not going to be an even match, obviously.

Another, wiser, shepherd warns him against the duel:

Consider, fond shepherd,
How fleeting's the pleasure
That flatters our hope
In pursuit of the fair.

The joys that attend it,
By moments we measure.
But life is too little
To measure our care.

This is an aria in Handel's delightful opera Acis and Galatea, which we heard this weekend in Boston.The aria warns about how strangely time works when we are in love. There are two schemes for time, one that we can measure and that gives us pleasure (notice the rhymes); the other that is sorrowful, and that is completely unmeasured. He implies that if the lover pursues his rival in anger, time will become unmeasured, chaotic. Something will happen that will take him from a sequence of happy moments to an eternity of care.

Of course, he's right. The giant heaves a big rock and kills the shepherd. Happy moments are now an eternity of nothingness for Acis. Just before he dies, the others simply acknowledge, "Gentle Acis is no more."

In a genre like baroque opera, which is itself so measured, to be "no more" is to be completely extinguished. How deeply opera depends, and especially this older eighteenth-century opera, on holding on to a measured, sequential existence. Arias famously extend themselves by the "da capo": the return to the beginning. Arias were written with an A section, a contrasting B section, and at the end of the B section, the singer reprises A, usually with more decoration. When we are bored the "da capo" can be a dreadful moment: more singing, no chance for action, when will we get home? But when we're engaged -- as we were Saturday night in Jordan Hall -- these are chances to extend that measured life, the pleasure of love and music that the shepherd warns is "so fleeting."

This moment before Acis dies is so excruciatingly beautiful. It makes me think that art, too -- opera, poetry, photography, architecture, and all -- is an attempt to extend the pleasure of moving IN time, against the threat of the chaos of unmeasured movement. Dante's Paolo and Francesca, murdered in their love, are blown endlessly in the winds of passion in Inferno.

The Boston production made reference to the great, strange painting by Poussin of shepherds deciphering the inscription on a tomb (at the top of this post). "Et in Arcadia ego," it says. It may mean, "Also, I, Death, am in Arcadia," though it is not so explicit: that is, even as you think all continues in measured pace to the last syllable of recorded time, it does not; I cut it off.

Is art the suspending of that dreadful cutting off?

Symmetry and comedy

2009-11-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

We went last night to Mozart's Cosi fan tutte at Oberlin! What a great opera! And what a great job these students did!

Here's one of the many wonderful things. To figure this out, I have to do a little of the plot. Two sisters are in love with a couple of guys. They (the guys) are persuaded by a slightly nasty friend, Don Alfonso, to test their lovers' fidelity by leaving and then coming back in disguise as Albanians to court the girls. One guy succeeds, and we watch him courting and the girl responds, pretty joyfully. Then, obviously, we have second guy.

Classical music is so formally constructed that of course what we expect is another scene where guy #2 courts girl #2 and succeeds. It doesn't happen that way: he pleads, and she not only resists, she completely changes the kind of opera we are watching. She (and, yes, she does have a name: Fiordiligi) sings an aria that should be in a tragic/heroic opera, full of immense leaps of the voice, intense phrases, and self-recrimination that doesn't belong in comedy. This is a woman, and an opera, for which decisions have consequences.

Here's a YouTube video of Liah Persson singing the aria.

And of course that's completely averse to comedy, where there are (almost) no consequences. The opera ends that way: the guys in disguise have won over the girls. Everyone has pretty much been a jerk, testing their lovers (no one should do that!), falling for some clowns that appear unannounced and unnamed (not a good idea)... But at the end the music just takes over. The opera's ending, so of course we need to resolve things. There's really no time to make the resolution come out of their characters, or histories, so it's just imposed.

Why not? A memo to myself (who tends to believe in symmetry and consequences): Does everything have to work predictably?

Blake's power

2009-11-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

William Blake was so many creators: poet, engraver, painter, mystic, prophet. You probably know the great poem "Tyger, tyger, burning bright" from Songs of Experience. Here you can see the poem not just in its printed version, as we probably learned it in high school, but in one of its original magnificently colored and intricately lettered forms. I just saw this at the J. P. Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where there's a wonderful exhibit of Blake's original prints and paintings, images that are amazing in the original.

What a strange poem this "Tyger" is: contemplating creation as the work of a blacksmith at his anvil, hammering iron to create the sinews of a great tiger. That tiger is surely the French Revolution, striking terror and hope into Europe as Blake was creating these poems. It is also the poem/print itself, etched into copper with acid as biting as the rhetoric of Revolution and Terror. And yet -- how doubly strange -- this tiger is depicted as no fiercer than my cat. It is easy to forget how these poems of "Experience" -- bitterness, struggle, sometimes despair -- were paired by Blake with his lovely, pastoral "Songs of Innocence": "Little Lamb, who made thee?" The tiger and lamb may be, as he said, "contraries," but they are inextricably bound to each other.

This image is "Job Rebuked by his Friends." For Blake, the bible was a series of poems, texts he read not for fundamentalist truths, but as windows into the strange workings of the spirit. Here is Job, covered in boils, having lost his wealth and family, in misery, all because of Satan's dare to God: let me test your righteous servant, he proposes, and God agrees.

Here Job is visited by his "friends," who assert that he must be a sinner: God only punishes those who break His commandments. These friends are hateful figures of accusation, terrible, and terribly wrong: Job is righteous.

And yet these rebukers are beautiful, powerfully expressive (look at those hands!), and in some ways they are right. Job's righteousness has blinded him in some way; it has in itself been his failure. As Blake read the book, Job worships a God he has essentially created out of his own soul: a God who is like him, righteous, exacting, strict to the law. He needs to be awakened to a different divinity (a lamb?), and these horrible accusers (these tigers?) are doing just that. It's a revolutionary reading of that great book of the bible. There are 22 prints in all in the Job series, each a miniature masterpiece.

For a wonderful novel about Blake in his London and revolutionary contexts, I recommend Tracy Chevalier's Burning Bright. The exhibition is William Blake's World: "A New Heaven Is Begun" and it is on until Jan. 3.

Wild Things?

2009-11-06T07:55:00.000-08:00

Where the Wild Things Are is, as most have said, haunting and beautiful. But the final return home is not necessary (Max eating a late dinner with his mother wordlessly gazing at him).

It's hard to end a story, and the demands of the journey motif -- home; leaving; island; return; home -- must have been too hard to resist; but the film would have been better if we had been left with the anguishing Carol howling on the beach as Max sails away (not quite this image, but it's the closest I could find).

The story's about growing up, yes; and so the ending brings Max home to indicate that he's learned about civilized life from his venture into the wilderness (that is, grown up). But I think it would have been better to let us stay in the realm of the imagination. For me, the film was about the imagination: about how a child -- a human -- uses storytelling, fort-building, games (even violent ones) to understand life.

Keats' Nightingale ode is a place I go back to, to remind myself of the imagination. It begins, like Max's story, in melancholy -- "Here, where men sit and hear each other groan." This grieving poet -- his brother recently dead, his own life deeply uncertain -- "runs away" from home to join the singing of the nightingale, the imaginative power that cuts across time, limitations, categories. He revels in its joyful abandon: "Already with thee! tender is the night. . ." But, as with Max, escape into imagination is no simple walk in the woods; it takes the melancholy and intensifies it until the dark woods become almost a grave:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess . . .

"Darkling" -- in the dark -- he listens, "and for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death." All vision gone -- that most rational of senses -- the imagination "guesses" at truths that the conscious mind doesn't find. Time ceases to mean anything, the seasons blend together, the generations meld with each other, until windows open on another, strange land:

. . . magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

This could be Max's island with its "perilous seas" and its deeply forlorn creatures.

Keats wrote in a letter once about how Milton put the imagination to reality in Paradise Lost: "The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth." But at the end of the nightingale, Keats is far less sure of that truth: he wakes, not to truth, but to doubt, back from the bird's song "to my sole self," to that rational curse of consciousness and identity. "Fled is that music." Maybe in all romance narratives, we have to return from the quest, come home, wake up; but hopefully we can remember the journey, the island, the bird's song, that deep "ecstasy" -- or "wild rumpus" -- that reminds us of the transforming power of the imagination.

A medieval house

2009-10-26T02:25:00.000-07:00

The heron pulls slowly off the corner of this still moat, flying over the chestnut and sycamore trees in a nearbly copse. I watch as she flaps slowly past the tall Elizabethan windows of the hall, its Cotswold stone glowing in the shallow late-October sunshine. The flowers in the garden are mostly past, leaving it looking as old and weathered as the house itself.

This place is new to me, old to itself. In itself it holds the memories of the early medieval hall, but they are hard to find because on it has come the layers of changes, many of them Elizabethan (the windows, some panelling, some attempts to make the house lighter and warmer), some Jacobean (a room carved out for King James to stay in), some Georgian (a flamboyant plaster ceiling for the hall), some contemporary (a striking modern bed; new curtains incorporating, strangely, the hair of the family dog).

I have never been here, but it seems familiar as well as new. I have studied it in a big volume on Greater Medieval Houses of England, volume 3. I have pored over the house's website. And I have read an evocative book by a young man who grew up there, about his growing up and about his difficult older brother, a severe epileptic. This is William Fiennes' The Music Room. Read it if you have an interest in old homes, in the way the brain works, and in how writers pull on their memories and make them interesting to people who don't actually know them.

The house is called Broughton Castle, in Oxfordshire, England. Go there. I want to go back. My picture of it is just a teaser, mostly because my camera battery ran out while I was there.

(Coincidentally, Joseph Fiennes, William's cousin, danced here as "Will Shakespeare" in Shakespeare in Love.)

Dovedale

2009-10-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

The layering of history in England is neither more nor less than the layering of history anywhere in the world, I know. But in England, I'm more acutely aware of it.

By layering, I mean the way one can sense the years and centuries underlying the surface of life: the way the road very occasionally gives up its manic curves and straightens out for a few miles, and you realize that it's following one of the roads cut efficiently and uncaringly across the landscape by the ancient Romans.

Or, going even deeper, the way the crags here in the Peak district show those long-past sedimentations, heaved up in the incline from southwest to northeast in geological time; that happens all over the US, too, but here an extra layering brings them to consciousness, for they are the evidence by which Lyell and the other 19th-century geologists propelled the world from biblical theo-history to geological evolution theory.

(I hope soon to read Tracy Chevalier's new book about the English fossil hunter Mary Anning -- not yet released in the US, I think).

I walked in Dovedale yesterday. It's a famous place in England, a Yosemite on a tiny scale, only 3 miles long. I came because I love walking with my cousin Elizabeth and her husband John, and because I wanted to see a place where the geology tells so much about the layering, and where poets and artists that I'm trying to know more about have come in the past.

Here was Wordsworth, a kid walking (yes, walking) home from his freshman year at college, stopping by to see the valley. He wrote a little "blog" entry about it, too, storing up his impressions for some future use.

Here was Joseph Wright, the painter of Derby, who loved light so much. He must have walked this valley late at night, and he painted this beautiful picture that now hangs in Oberlin's museum and that I take my students to see.

Here was Miss La Roche, in the 18th century, who picnicked by the river Dove, and then climbed on a horse with the elderly Dean (cathedral Dean, not academic) to climb out of the valley. Near the top, the path became too steep, the horse slipped, the Dean fell to his death, and the young lady survived to write to her mother about the event.

And here was I, at one moment in time, a fold in the strata of history, gratefully balancing on the stepping stones planted two hundred years ago across a river that still flows today.

Northeast Ohio in fall

2009-10-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

It's been a gorgeous day, half sunny and half not, the ground wet from days of rain, the sky half full of clouds that stretch the eye past the horizon. The soybeans have lost their green; when the sun's not out they are a wonderful dull brown matte; when the sun shines on them, they are golden like the dry hills of California. The sky is an intense, light-filled, watery blue; I don't know how to make pigments, but I'd want to grind up all the lapis lazuli I could find to paint it. The blue of that sky is channeled into the tiny, unobtrusive, glowing flowers of the Michaelmas daisies.

Keats again in my head: "To Autumn," that rich poem about patience and ripening --

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue...

Or maybe John Clare, with his great eye for details and his strange moves into transcendence, is an even better poet for this. One of his autumn poems evokes the way light changes how we see and reminds us that seeing is a relationship, not a fact.

The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

Hill tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.

The pictures I took today with a new camera! What a treat to be able to do so.

Bach and space

2009-10-08T06:34:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we heard Apollo's Fire (Cleveland's vibrant baroque orchestra) perform a couple of well-known works, Vivaldi's Gloria and the first half of Bach's B Minor Mass. (The picture is Jeannette Sorrell, conducting from the keyboard, from Apollo's Fire's website).

The Vivaldi was exciting and varied: quick-paced at times, at other times lingering as in the gorgeous second movement, Et in terra pax, where the multiple, cascading suspensions seemed to evoke the longing for peace that the text denotes. But despite that almost timeless movement, the whole experience was contained, bounded, a series of movements with clearly defined beginnings, endings, contrasts. (There's a clip on YouTube of the group doing Vivaldi's Spring last year). It reminded me of those wonderful colored stone inlay tables from 18th century Florence: crisp, exciting, but not something you'd stake your soul on.

The Bach was something else: grand, spacious. It did not hurry, though the notes were sometimes fast; it seemed hardly to have beginnings and endings; the music and the silences before, between, and after, were like one. It seemed to absorb time into the counterpoint, first one voice and then another, till all five were in on the theme; and yet when that happened, some were on a countertheme that we hadn't noticed at first. If one tune left our ears for a while, there were others just coming up out of the inside textures. Though I've sung this piece several times, the opening Kyrie always surprises me: the choir, without any orchestral introduction, in a b minor chord singing "Kyrie" (Lord). Three great chordal cries of "kyrie" are interwoven with moving lines of "eleison" (have mercy): four bars of complex, rich material. As if it were almost too rich, Bach startlingly drops the choir after those four bars, giving the orchestra 24 bars at Largo -- almost a lifetime -- to lay out a fugue, which the choir will rejoin. The lines are long, liquid, intertwining, as if they were outlining some vast architecture.

Where did Bach find that sense of space? From the Bible, certainly: "O God of our salvation, who art the confidence of all the ends of the earth, and of them that are afar off upon the sea" (Psalm 65). From Milton, perhaps (did Bach know his work in translation?):

Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant. . . [Paradise Lost, Book I]

Or from the architecture of the Baroque, the soaring domes and intricate patterns of a Bernini?

Or from the new science, the Galileos, Keplers, and Newtons who had expanded the scale of the heavens?

When I listen to Bach, I hear how Newton had seen the relationships of time, motion, mass, and space, and given to his age -- an age in intellectual crisis, like ours -- a new sense of order and understanding.

Fanny Brawne recreated

2009-10-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

Jane Campion's new film, Bright Star, is a gutsy and wonderful film. Among many courageous and beautiful things she does for the story (the love of John Keats and Fanny Brawne), here are three:

She trusts the poetry. As the credits roll at the end, Ben Whishaw (as John Keats) speaks "Ode to a Nightingale" in a quiet voiceover. When it began, I doubted whether the film would dare to give us the whole 80 lines of the poem, but I was wrong to doubt. For those who stay for the credits (admittedly, those who, like me, love film and poetry), the poem is given voice. We need that kind of immersion to remember why Keats is great and why we still read these poems. (Unfortunately, the poem is also underlaid by a wordless choral melody that distracts from its power.)
She trusts the details. For me, biopic is a genre often marred by a grandiose historicity, constantly waiting for the big, known moments in the life of the central figure -- despondency, love, breakthrough, maybe success, certainly death. In so many biopics, fatality drags the picture down into tedium punctuated by those cameo historical appearances of famous people whom we recognize. Here, the film embraces the small sounds and sights of life in a London house in the 1820s more than it brings out the big organ tones of Keats' impending death. Nobody famous (besides Keats) makes an appearance. The textures of everyday life -- cloth, wood, paper, rain -- carry us along into seeing the story as happening now.
She trusts the "bright star." Fanny Brawne here is far from the standard flirt of Keats biography, teasing him and distracting him from his real pursuits. She is passionate, smart, creative enough to be the love of this young poet. She is a craftswoman, a designer of beautiful clothes that become the visual counterpoint to Keats' intricately sewn stanzas. Though ignorant of poetry as the affair begins, she sets out to learn how to read and appreciate it; and by the end, she has internalized Keats' poems. Not the flirt, she is also not the Muse, silently inspiring him. She becomes instead the instrument by which these poems carry themselves into history and into our own appreciative ears. She survives him, and after his death we see her walk out into the heath, grieving by speaking aloud the title poem, "Bright Star." In that poem, Keats hopes "Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath." He cannot -- "to that high requiem become a sod" incapable of hearing -- but we, the world, history, the future, hear her, a real woman, voicing them. The fantasy of an "ideal reader" of poems sometimes dominates our thoughts of how they mean and live in the world; this Fanny Brawne, instead, is a real reader, as we ought to be.