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:
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
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:
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 thetext and also Blake's engraving itself, which if anything manages to increase the tension in this already tight-strung little "song."
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):
