Deceptively Simple

The boys in the quarterly magazines

Apropos of nothing, really.

"With the Governor unavilable, I sat down in New Orleans to await his return and meanwhile try to build up a frame of reference, as the boys in the quarterly magazines would say. Politics is to the conversation of Louisiana what horse racing is to England's. In London, anybody from the Queen to a dustman will talk horses; in Louisiana, anyone from a society woman to a bellhop will talk politics. Louisiana politics is of an intensity and complexity that are matched, in my experience, only in the republic of Lebanon. The balance between Catholics in southern Louisiana and the Protestants in northern Louisiana is as delicate as that between the Moslems and the Christians in Lebanon and is respected by the same convention of balanced tickets. In Louisiana there is a substantial Negro vote-about a hundred and fifty thousand-that no candidate can afford to discourage privately or to solicit publicly. In the sister Arab republic, Moslem and Christian candidates alike need the Druse vote, although whoever gets it is suspected of revolutionary designs."---A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana, 1961.

R.E.Memory

In the course of reviewing Oliver Sacks's recent Musicophilia in the New York Review of Books, the philosopher Colin McGinn, taking stock of how the music we hear nestles deep inside our neurological pathways, wrote that "[M]usical memory connects with our sense of self, since musical taste and experience are closely linked to personality and emotion. The music we remember is, without exaggeration, part of who we are." It's strange and a little unsettling to think of our personalities being shaped by the music we listen to, and yet, as I sit here effortlessly calling to mind the slow horn chorale near the beginning of Mahler's First Symphony, I know that it's true.

But as easily as that is conjured up, it's there, in my brain, without a lot of associations tied to it. I remember the different times I've heard it live, and the cities I was in, but when the piece starts it doesn't send me back to the first time I heard it. I sometimes wonder if this is what people really mean when they say that classical music is "timeless." It exists in a state that isn't fixed, that isn't final, and that performers are always trying to capture. Mahler's First Symphony doesn't live on an mp3 or a CD, despite what the CD's cover says; the symphony only exists when it's actually being played. The notes in the score symbolize Mahler's thoughts, and every performance is the orchestra's best attempt at realizing it. It's "timeless" only to the extent that, if orchestras still exist in 200 years, they will be no closer to giving an entirely true performance of the piece than at the premiere in 1884.

Contrast that history with my ongoing relationship with R.E.M. I can pinpoint my exact location for each time I first heard one of their CDs, which brings back, say, the smell of my first dorm room, or who I was with when I bought the CD. What's more, every time I listen to one of those discs, the associations come back with great intensity, and it's as if I'm 16, or 18, or 23 and living in Muncie, Indianapolis, or Bloomington all over again.

I bring this up because R.E.M. released Accelerate in March, and I of course went out and bought it.
It got me thinking back to when I was traveling with my dad through Illinois on a college visit. We were driving home, it was dark, and we stopped at a McDonald's. He dashed in to grab the food (I don't know why we didn't use the drive-thru), and I got out of the car with my Walkman. I had Out of Time in the machine, and "Country Feedback" came on. That twangy, relentless song, with Michael Stipe calling out "It's crazy what you could've had/I need this" with more remorse than I thought was possible at that age, did such a number on me as I contemplated my future, staring out into the dark night overlooking a cornfield, that I was basically speechless when my dad came back to the car.

I won't surprise anyone with the banality of this observation, but "Everybody Hurts" will always have a special place in my heart. About that consoling anthem, guitarist Peter Buck wrote that "This song doesn't really belong to us anymore; it belongs to everybody who has ever gotten any solace from it. The reason that the lyrics are so atypically straightforward is because it was aimed at teenagers." It got me, and it got me good, and it helped me get through high school.

Where it starts to get interesting is that Buck wrote those sentences in the booklet that accompanied the 2003 collection In Time. A now-ex bought that for me - in the deluxe version, sweet thing that she was - but the effect was incredibly jarring. With all the songs gathered from several different albums, I was whipsawed from reminiscing about one album to another with every single track. The matter was confounded by the second disc, which consists of remixes (remices?) of other songs, so that the effect on a die-hard R.E.M. fan is to listen to the new versions while running a tape in your head of the original, and then you start thinking about what the original actually is, if it's what came out on CD, or what they play in concert, and before long it's on to the next track and all the accumulated memories you've piled on to that one. Someone will probably tell me that this is much easier to take with the aid of drugs.

This is a self-serving way to talk about music, I know. But it is how I listen to this band, and how they've become a part of my life. This isn't necessarily timeless the way that my experience with the Mahler was; it isn't that way at all, actually. R.E.M. serves as bookends and benchmarks in my life in extraordinarily specific ways. (The place I bought Up? The Barnes & Noble on the north side of Indianapolis.  The first time I remember listening to Document? Driving back from a high school swimming meet in Indianapolis.) I remember individual performances of my favorite classical works, and I vividly remember the first time I heard the classical artists whom I admire. But the music that they played and that I heard doesn't seem tethered to the experience in the same way. Maybe it's not that it is timeless, so much as out of time.

 

Harvey, not Fierstein

A warm blogospheric welcome to Harvey Sachs and his ArtsJournal blog Overflow. Sachs wrote the only book on music in Fascist Italy, appropriately titled Music in Fascist Italy, in the late 1980s, and has a clutch of other important musical titles to his credit. I dreamed of displaying my fine memory by linking to Andrew Patner's interview with Sachs from March 5, 2007, here, but it doesn't seem to be online. But proof that it happened is right here, just scroll down to that date. Music in Fascist Italy is well worth tracking down in your used-book store travels (that's not just me, right?) to figure out how those Respighi tone-poems jibe so well with Mussolinian rhetoric.

And if anyone has written a history of music in Fascist Italy since Sachs's, please let me know. As I wrote while discussing The Rest Is Noise, that period is one that deserves more historical exploration.

Ringed with doubt

I was tagged by the Mun.

The rules of the meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The nearest book? Paul Griffiths's Penguin Companion to Classical Music, which Joseph Kerman says in the current edition of the New York Review of Books ($$), "belongs in every musician's library."*

"Leopold Nowak, in charge of the new collected edition insituted in 1951, preferred to treat the versions as separate entities. But many questions remain about the quality of Bruckner's investment in his own and his friends' second, third, and fourth thoughts. His music, seemingly so confident, so firm, is ringed with doubt."

Bonus fourth sentence:

"Pfitzner seems to have been responsible for the view that he wrote the same symphony over and over again, and indeed there were models of sound and structure to which he was repeatedly drawn: the soft, tremulous opening over which an extended melody launches itself, in a return visit to the place where Beethoven's Ninth begins; the ostinato, whether used to make a static background or, in the characteristically bounding scherzo, to generate a corporeal rhythmic energy; the solemn adagio; the orchestration in distinct layers, with no unusual instruments except the Wagner tubas added from No. 7 onwards; the interruption of silence, within which the music seems to reverberate within the space it is creating; the climactic contrapuntal superposing of themes; the chromaticism, an effortless link from the Renaissance to the world of Schoenberg."

Bonus bonus quotation here, from the book's preface, which should be read and reread by every musician.

I tag Bryant Manning, Zac Thompson, Scott Smith, Michael Miner, Whet Moser, and Molly Sheridan. Six people, because I cheated with extra quotations. Deal.

*Luckily for this post, this book was two inches closer than Using Microsoft Office Excel 2007: Special Edition.

Modern rising

Renzo Piano's Modern Wing for the Art Institute continues its progression to completion, as we can see below. Click on the pictures to enlarge.

Here is the North-facing facade of the building along Jackson Boulevard, complete with fashion-forward tourists.

And here we can see the facade head on. Frank Gehry's stainless-steel sails from the Pritzker Pavilion are reflected in the middle-tier windows.

The Nichols Bridgeway, which will connect Millennium Park to the Institute's Modern Wing, is still very much in progress, but I'm fairly certain it will rise at roughly the angle I drew below.

And will connect to the Art Institute where the red arrow is pointing. (Helpful orientation of Orchestra Hall written on the picture by a child, apparently, for those of you who need it.)

When it's completed, the view will be something spectacular through those glass windows, several stories above this shot, but looking in the same direction.

Previously: A Bridge not Too Far, when ground was broken on the Nichols Bridgeway.

"The teacher is the detonator."

The Guardian ran an extended profile of Pierre Boulez over the weekend, and Boulez fired off a few of his trademarked spiky observations. (Via) The most hard-line is probably this one about audiences:

"20 per cent are very interested in new things, 50 per cent can be persuaded and 30 per cent are in their coffins before their time."

Also up in there is a reference to Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones as emblematic of popular culture. Someone will assume that Boulez is out of touch by making such a remark...until you account for the fact that the Rolling Stones brought in $139 million on their last tour. That's emblematic of something.

"Put the hot TV stars in bed together."

"And shoot it from above. And use white sheets." So said the commissioning editors, I assume, of both the May 16, 1996 Rolling Stone cover* featuring X-Files stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, as well as the April 28, 2008 cover of New York magazine featuring the stars of Gossip Girl. The first image was taken by Denis Montalbetti and Gay Campbell and the second by Jessica Dimmock.

*About the time MG graduated from high school. Remember Hootie and the Blowfish?

Fitful love lives of the romantically unfulfilled, Vol. 1, No. 1

"No, no, I'll tell it."

"But you always tell it!"

"I tell it better! I should know, since we've been together for 10 years."

"Fine."

"So, she's standing there reading the back of a bag of Trader Joe's frozen eggrolls. She's really into this nutritional information, or something."

"I just wanted to know what was in them. I didn't see it on the front of the package."

"I thought, 'Anyone that into eggrolls must be sensitive and intelligent.' Our eyes met, sparks flew, sparks big enough to start forest fires, and not those California fires, of trees that are really dry. These would be forest fires that consumed the most alive trees known to man. But sensitively, giving the monkeys a chance to escape.

"I imagined our life together, hangliding through the Himalayas, surfing off the coast of Hawaii, rafting down the Amazon. Her burnt umber eyes caught the florescent light coming off the plastic bags in the frozen food aisle, the peas casting an especially attractive glow. Her slender fingers cradled the eggrolls with exquisite delicacy. You would have done the same thing, had you been there, in my shoes."

"Stop it."

"I went up to her, sheepish grin on my face..."

"No, I'm serious, stop it."

"What?"

---

That's who she's here with? He's wearing pleated khakis. Dude dresses like he's 45 years old.

(h/t Paul Simms)

It don't get better than this

Faced with a concert in a hall whose acoustical properties he had no knowledge of, Bernard Holland still pulls the rabbit out of the hat as he conflates the building's history with the concert program in this remarkable sentence in today's New York Times: 

"Although the armory is designed for soldiers not of the onward Christian variety, the program was deeply religious."

A small clutch of words with a somewhat stilted, formal delivery, and he manages to conjure the age the Park Avenue Armory was built (the late 1870s), the persons who used it in its original guise, and the musical content of the program. "Although the armory is not designed for soldiers of the onward Christian type, the program was deeply religious," just doesn't sound right, does it?

Department of Spoke Too Soon

I predicted yesterday that I would not be surprised by machete-wielding elephants on the North Side, so I was caught off guard by my bed being shaken at 4:30 this morning by (wait for it) an earthquake. That was a surprise. This makes for an adventurous cougar and an act of God, which means that the plague of locusts can't be far behind. I will be slaughtering a bull (name: Chuck) on the steps of the Art Institute at 2:00 today to offer sacrifice to our vengeful God in hopes of showing a willingness to atone for our iniquities.

I will also be driving to Cleveland, Ohio, next weekend to hear Pierre-Laurent Aimard play Bartók's Second Piano Concerto and Peter Eötvös's new Concerto for Two Pianos with the Cleveland Orchestra, and it's my hope that Chicago has not been visited by, say, mudslides and/or flesh-eating zombies between now and then.