Glorious organ sounds

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

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

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.