Deceptively Simple

That's where I'll be

Tonight, the Alban Berg Quartett plays its final Chicago concert in Mandel Hall, in merciful walking distance from Chez Geelhoed. (Although, as Steven Wright pointed out, "Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.") Saturday night, the Chicago Symphony reprises Petrushka and Debussy's Images with Pierre Boulez, but not, alas, Matthias Pintscher's Osiris. (The contemporary slot is filled by Berio's Quatre Dedicaces.) That mini-trumpet concerto inspired the first two blog posts from the new blog by Mary, on Utterly Macabre. She promises "Pondering classical music from acquisition to performance," which pretty much covers the entire lifespan of a piece once it's finished, I suppose.

Relocating

The New York Review of Books publishes numerous overlooked novels, memoirs, short-story collections, and so on under the imprint New York Review Books, and announced a Moving Sale yesterday. They're heading to Greenwich Village and are trying to get rid of a nice amount of stock before loading up. Books are marked down from 40 to 60 per cent, and it isn't the lousy stuff they're trying to unload.

Vladimir Sorokin's Ice is $9.48, in hardcover, and they have novels by other DecSimp favorites like Italo Svevo and Stefan Zweig, too. If you buy one book this year, pick up a copy of J.R. Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday, a beyond-sweet and beyond-funny account of courtly Indian life under the Raj. (Make sure to read it, too.) Your life will be better. Not to mention The War of the Worlds illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Satire without (and with) the funny

The Jewish Messiah. By Arnon Grunberg, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett. 2004, translated 2008. 470 pp. Penguin Press.

Ice. By Vladimir Sorokin. Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell. 2002, translated 2007. 321 pp. New York Review Books.

Maybe it's because Americans don't read many books in translation, or maybe it's that readers are too Balkanized today for any one book to grab hold of good-sized chunk of their collective attention span. Or maybe it's that we're all just desensitized to disaster and can't be shocked by much of anything anymore. Whatever the case, Arnon Grunberg's The Jewish Messiah and Vladimir Sorokin's Ice should have produced a seizure in the reading public and the chattering classes by now, but they haven't. It's a bit of shame, since these satirical novels poke fun and ridicule and slander just about everything people hold dear today.

Grunberg's book is the funnier of the two, Sorokin's the darker and the one that weighs heavier on the reader, but it, too, gets its licks in. Literally.

Vladimir Sorokin has generated a great deal of controversy in his native Russia, not for Ice but for a novel whose title translates as Blue Lard. As Jamey Gambrell tells the story in this article ($), that novel tells of a homosexual tryst between Stalin and Khruschev, and a group of far-right Christian teenagers has rallied against both Sorokin and his publisher. Blue Lard hasn't been translated, so I haven't read it, but Ice has, and the its brutality is as punishing as the notion of Communist leaders getting it on is smirk-inducing.

The grim novel unfolds of scenes of a mysterious clan kidnapping a stranger, tying them to a tree in the forest, or a wall in a basement, and proceeding to pound on their exposed chests (women get the treatment, too) with a spectacular hammer until the kidnappers either hear the person's heart "speak," or the person passes out and dies.  The tormentors hope for the best, and wish to hear the heart's voice, but it's no great loss if they don't.

The hammer is no normal hammer, of course, but has a head carved from a special block of ice. This is the mystical ice hammer. It turns out that the ice seems to have crashed into Earth from outer space, and is believed to have special powers. When subjects have had their chests crushed after a bludgeoning with the hammer, they appear to wake up, sternums in pieces, and understand their lives, and feel great contentment. Sorokin takes a grim satisfaction in relating the tales of these beatings, related through a terse and short burst of paragraphs. Here's poor Nikolaeva getting it:

"Nikolaeva whimpered. Tears ran from her eyes. So did her mascara.

Botvin swung back.

'Speak!'

The hammer struck her sternum.

Nikolaeva grunted.

'That not it, hon,' said Botvin, shaking his head.

He drew back. The sun sparkled on the side of the hammer.

'Speak!'

Another blow. The half-naked body shuddered.

Botvin and Neilands listened.

Nikolaeva's shoulders and head trembled. She hiccuped rapidly.

'Close, but no cigar.' Neilands frowned.

[...]

Botvin slowly drew the hammer to one side.

'Come on, luv...spea-ea-k!'

The powerful blow shook Nikolaeva. She lost consciousness. Her head hung limp. Her long blond hair covered her breast."

She gets hit another time, which breaks the hammer and which causes her heart to speak, and suffice to say that if this book of two burly Russians beating a blonde to unconsciousness turns up on the reading list of any presidential candidate, that candidacy is over. (The scene where Nikolaeva is forced to sit down on a wine bottle isn't going to win any undecided voters, either. At least, I hope it doesn't.)

It's grand enlightenment that's the end goal of these vicious beatings, group enlightenment as those whose hearts have been awakened begin to speak together. One by one, as the victims wake up in a hospital, their hearts speak at the same frequency as the person next to them, and both feel incredible peace, a one-ness with the person and with the universe.

Ice's second part takes the form of a science-fiction tale of the ice landing in a forest, its discovery, and the eventual adoption of it as the source of an all-knowing cult. The backstory of the brutality, whose wanton randomness catches the reader with almost as much surprise from page one as it does the victims, is laid out. The ice fell to Earth in the early 1930s, and its fate is charted through the twentieth century, as its followers withstand the post-World War II era, all the way up through Boris Yeltsin's tenure.

It's in Part III where this satire turns especially dark. The barely repressed glee Sorokin displays in Part I at his characters near- and occasional execution turns into an instruction manual. Now the ice is mass-produced, and consumers can strap themselves into a harness which will pound their chests with the ice. Sorokin lays out the method in antiseptic, technical language.

"If you experience any discomfort during the session, press the OFF button, which can be distinguished from the ON button by its rough surface."

It's then followed by several testimonials of people who found enlightenment after being bludgeoned, who no longer trudge through their dull lives, who aren't "opposed to progress" anymore.

But what does it all add up to? Sorokin appears to have no ultimate goal in this savage story, no one person or group he's condemning. Ice is all the scarier for its nihilism; Jonathan Swift at least had a point to his modest proposal. The victims of Ice gain peace, those who don't die, at least, but who or what may stand in for their persecutors in real life isn't all that clear. Hitchcock knew that leaving the audience to imagine the worst was more frightening than anything he could devise, and Sorokin takes us right up to that edge, having terrorized us along the way. It's merciless satire, literally.

Grunberg, on the other hand, creates hilarity out of brutality as his characters unintentionally mock Judaism and modern notions of tolerance as they try to save the world. Xavier Radek, his main character, had a grandfather who was a too-loyal SS officer, and the Swiss boy decides he will comfort the Jews. He isn't Jewish, of course, but this won't deter him. Such is Grunberg's mischief that this clueless adolescent turns up as the prime minister of Israel by the time the book is through.

As he works his way to being the comforter of the Jews, Radek endures a botched circumcision which leaves him one testicle short of a full set, tolerates the attentions of his mother's gay boyfriend, tries to translate Mein Kampf into Yiddish with his best friend Awromele Michalowitz because it hasn't been done yet (so they think), and one of Awromele's teenage sisters is treated as an oral-sex toy by a group of Kierkegaard-loving older boys. (They also beat up Awromele.) Awromele's rabbi father betrays a love of transsexual prostitutes; Xavier's mother makes love to butter knife, which she mutilates her thighs with nightly; and a woman from the Mossad convinces an Egyptian Hamas supporter to become an informer through the power of her lips and tongue, having removed his pants. Oh, and Xavier names his worthless testicle King David, and proceeds to gain strength from it. And Xavier and Awromele are lovers. There really is something here to offend everyone.

Grunberg can get away with it since he tells the story with a panache to rival S.J. Perelman or Woody Allen, and nearly every page has a rejoinder or non-sequitur that catches you off-balance. Taken randomly, and, by the way, Xavier is a reasonably skilled painter:

"One hour before they were to meet, Xavier had launched into a new painting of the mother with testicle in hand. He now had three mothers with testicle, but it seemed wise to him to create an entire series."

A bit earlier, when Awromele explains that he's found a publisher for their Yiddish version of Mein Kampf:

"'I'm very pleased, Awromele, but what kind of a man is he?'

'Who?'

'The publisher.'

'The publisher? He has a background in TV.'"

And later on:

"Don't forget, Xavier, that you have only one testicle. You will always have to do your very best, because other men have two."

That's Xavier's mom.

"Love was something [Xavier] didn't know how to cope with. Fortunately, his parents had never smothered him with it."

I can't claim to have read every satirical novel since Portnoy's Complaint, which took Philip Roth from his lyrical and effusive novelist-self and launched him to being the poster-man of uninhibited male sexual desire in 1969. But Grunberg seems to be every bit as transgressive in The Jewish Messiah, and even more so, what with covering every possible sexual configuration (and I haven't listed all that are included here), as well as Judaism, Fascism, Zionism, and throwing in nationalist stereotypes as if they're as plain a fact the state capitals.

Grunberg presents the Swiss as uptight and so obsessed with their business that they fail to stop and help Xavier as he tries to rescue Awromele after he's beaten in a park, and Xavier's German mother is an apologist for her Nazi father who, she insists, was misunderstood. He only beat people to death because he had too much energy, and after all, they didn't have "jogging" in those days to stretch their muscles. "Sundays, he never beat anyone to death, because he honored the Lord's day. Even under such extreme conditions," says Xavier's mother, who apparently was never exposed to the life and works of Günter Grass.

There were passages of this that I cackled at, in spite of myself, as Xavier takes courage and heart from his lifeless testicle, time after time. Like Ice, though, it ultimately ends bleakly. Xavier has gone out of his mind with power, and has sold nuclear weapons to renegade states the world over, and has started a nuclear war. One of Awromele's sisters has lived her life convinced that the Messiah will arrive in the form of a pelican, which explains the cover image of a pelican depicted as one of those Art Deco eagles the Third Reich was so fond of, and she comforts her children that the pelican will be here soon, just before a bomb smashes into Zurich.

Taken together, the two novels paint satire with black tar and bright primary colors. Sorokin's story will keep you awake after you set it down, and Grunberg approaches serious topics with the gleam you see in the eye of a fierce comic, but both are honest depictions of the hollow, mindlessly cruel world we live in.

Photo of Grunberg: Bob Bronshoff

Music therapy, absurd category

"No one can say I succumb to illusions about myself. I know I have a profound feeling for music, and it is not affectation that makes me select the most complex pieces; however, that same profound musical feeling warns me and has warned me for years that I will never succeed in playing well enough to afford listeners pleasure. If I still go on playing, it's for the same reason that I continue to take care of my health. I could play well if I weren't ill, and I am pursuing health even when I ponder the equilibrium of the four strings. There is a slight paralysis in my organism, and on the violin it reveals its entire self and therefore is more easily treated. Even the lowest creature, when he knows what thirds are, or sixths, knows how to move from one to the other with rhythmic precision, just as his eye knows how to move from one color to the others. With me, on the contrary, when I have played one of those phrases, it sticks to me and I can no longer rid myself of it, and so it intrudes into the next phrase and distorts it. To put the notes in the right place, I have to beat time with my feet and my head, so nonchalance flies out the window, along with serenity, and with the music. The music that comes from a balanced organism is one with the tempo it creates and follows. When I achieve that, I will be cured."---Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience, translated by William Weaver. (NB: Weaver is also a noted writer on Italian opera.)

Opera for all (but mostly kids)

Child's play. Time Out Chicago. February 21, 2008. Soprano Linden Christ started her own opera company, called Opera Play-House, with the notion of it being an outreach vehicle, not a vanity project. Kind of cool.

I promise there will be more posts here soon, and not the one-per-week I seem to be stuck to at the moment. Until then, the Chicago Symphony announced its 2008-9 season yesterday (S-T here, Trib here, Update: Tonic Blotter here, Marc van Bree here with link to the CSO's new online press room [with image library!], official announcement here).

And Intermezzo has a big wrap-up of Daniel Barenboim's complete cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas at the Royal Festival Hall here. Update: Jessica Duchen reports: "[T]he final phrase before the last deep trill of the introduction of Op.111 was a trio of French horns. Don't ask how he does it: I've no idea." My review of Barenboim's complete cycle on DVD from almost exactly one year ago is here, and a clip of Barenboim playing part of the "Appasionata" is here.

The undivine afflatus

 

"Someone once asked me, in a public forum, whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was 'Every day!' But that does not, by any means, imply a passive waiting around for the divine afflatus. That is exactly what separates the professional from the dilettante. The professional composer can sit down day after day and turn out some kind of music. On some days it will undoubtedly be better than others; but the primary fact is the ability to compose. Inspiration is often only a byproduct."--Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music, 1939

Understandably, listeners without musical training are mystified by the performers before them, and the music those musicians play mystifies them all the more. Where did it come from? Who wrote it, how long did it take them, and how could someone have been so inspired to set down their ideas in such a way that it would take exactly this amount of time to get through them? And how did they order those ideas? Audiences today probably have even less training and practical exposure to the ins and outs of music-making than they did when Copland wrote that during the Great Depression, so it's likely they will fall back on the easy rationale of "heroic inspiration," and since movies about musicians give them no reason to think otherwise, they probably think it's true. As any composer or performer or singer can tell you, though, it ain't.

I read those words above when I was 18, and happened to pick up Copland's book in the college bookstore attached to Wheaton College, where I was auditioning for the Conservatory. (I was accepted.) The notion that music might not be attached to acting on inspiration, that maybe there was a little bit of toil involved, burrowed deep into my brain and took root. I'd been devoted to playing trumpet, practiced hard, and all that, but here was Aaron Copland (the Aaron Copland!) saying that inspiration was only a tiny kernel of what really mattered in music-making.

The next time I observed the notion of music-making being an everyday occurrence, and therefore subject to life's pressures, was after a concert when I talked to a disappointed orchestra member. The group had played some big Shostakovich symphony with brass all over the place, and one trumpeter was less than pleased with how things had gone. "I cut the grass this afternoon, and thought about taking a nap afterwards, but I didn't. Maybe I would've had more energy if I had," he said.

The percussionist might've had a fight with his wife; a violinist may have had a babysitter cancel at the last minute; a horn-player may have been running late, and had to grab McDonald's on the way to the concert instead of eating the leisurely meal he'd planned; all of these affect the concert we're hearing. But each of those musicians tries to soldier on through the inconveniences, and is operating on professionalism, not inspiration.

It happens to singers, too. A couple of seasons ago when Lyric Opera was mounting a Ring cycle, I interviewed the heldentenor John Treleaven, who was singing Siegfried in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. He's sung the role around the world, and 'fessed up immediately that there were nights he'd rather not sing. "Some nights, you hit a dry patch, and you think, 'Okay, this isn't going to be very comfortable.'" Now, if someone can admit to singing a role like Siegfried under less-than-ideal conditions, a role that punishes and taxes a singer mercilessly, and in the modern era calls for it to be sung repeatedly, you can bet it's something other than misty-eyed inspiration that keeps him going. (The cynical would say that it's money. Let them.)

As the Copland quotation attests, composers operate under a similar set of restrictions and processes. The work has to be written, but the composer also gets a simple, honest thrill out of creating something, almost every day. This is why composers' eyes (sometimes) light up when you ask them about their next piece following a premiere. The latest thing was great, and brought them a certain amount of joy and money and allowed them to express themselves, but they're already somewhere else, dreaming about how to manipulate other pitches and segments into something that another group of people will hear, and maybe even admire a little bit.

The other composer myth that takes some undoing is that a work unfolds precisely in the order we hear it at the premiere. Bartók may have written Concerto for Orchestra in two weeks, and Shostakovich took two weeks to finish his Fifth Symphony, but there was a lot of tinkering that went into them. Bartók even came up with a new ending for the Concerto, and he was ferociously ill as he composed it. Shostakovich needed only two weeks to get the piano score finished for the symphony, but he still needed a little more time to complete the orchestration, and, like Bartók, he was under some unwanted extra-musical pressure, in Shostakovich's case, emanating from the Kremlin. The point is that they applied themselves and didn't pause and ponder as they took the next step. They worked.

This pushing-up-the-sleeves is my favorite part of working in classical music, as a journalist before and now when I'm basically surrounded by an orchestra and its administration. Every day, there's something being built related to the music, slowly, and it comes together gradually. It doesn't come down in one stroke-Wagner, after all, took 15 years between Die Walküre before coming back to the Ring cycle with Siegfried-but it does come together, and watching those pieces slide up next to each other is fascinating. So the next time you're at a concert or an opera or listening to a CD, think about all the tiny steps that led up to that split-second climax. It's a lot.

Above: The Gleaners, by Jean-François Millet. H/t to Soho the Dog for suggesting this topic.

Um, hi

Tiny tune adventures. A product of the minds of Aaron Travers, Winnie Cheung, Leon Shernoff and Peter Slavin, composers all, the Tiny Mahler Orchestra began its first season last year. Instead of focusing on just contemporary music, or the music of the past that appeals to them, they arrange programs with works from any era that suits them. Their next concert features Stravinsky and Frederic Rzewski, with pianist Thomas Rosenkranz.

And by the way...I don't work for Time Out, just to make this as clear as I can, but am in the employ of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. TOC's lead time is such that articles are written a couple weeks in advance of publication.

Thanks to everyone who's written public mentions of my switching titles. I appreciate them greatly. Although I confess to a little embarrassment, because almost as soon as I finished writing my farewell blog post, a friend emailed Howard Wolinsky's farewell article in Gapers Block about leaving the Chicago Sun-Times after 25 years. By the time I finished telling my stories about warring with TOC's features staff and various other editors, Wolinsky would be just about warmed up.

You know you're at an Osvaldo Golijov opera when...

you see the following posted outside the doors to Orchestra Hall.

"And they wonder why we want to cut arts education."

Classical music is not part of the American cultural landscape the way film and art are. But when musicians speak out about the political world they live in, the world still takes notice, and speaking out is, I think, what every musician of a certain stature ought to be doing. Otherwise, they're little more than robots who have mastered a skill in private, demonstrate that skill in public, and then return to their privacy. Two musicians exercised that duty this week.

Leon Fleisher had misgivings about going to a party at the White House after he received one of the 2007 Kennedy Center honors, and wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post explaining why it made him uncomfortable:

"In the past seven years, Bush administration policies have amounted to a systematic shredding of our nation's Constitution -- the illegal war it initiated and perpetuates; the torturing of prisoners; the espousing of 'values' that include a careful defense of the "rights" of embryos but show a profligate disregard for the lives of flesh-and-blood human beings; and the flagrant dismantling of environmental protections. These, among many other depressing policies, have left us weak and shamed at home and in the world."

It doesn't get much plainer than that. For that statement, he was greeted on Redstate.com with this post's subject line. Classy. Cut arts education so that everyone thinks like me! Can anyone not be mute with fear at such a proposal?

Lorin Maazel questioned the the U.S.'s claim to the right to criticize other countries prior to leading the New York Philharmonic's tour of Asia, with its stop in Pyongyang, North Korea:

"People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw bricks, should they? Is our standing as a country — the United States — is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others."

No matter how bad our history is, I think we're secure enough today to question the human rights abuses of North Korea, and I'd think someone who adapted 1984 into an opera would have something more trenchant to say about totalitarianism. But I'm glad he said it, because it thrusts classical music, with its abstract conveying of meaning and reputation for ivory-tower irrelevancy, into the public sphere. The music gains a richness in the eyes and ears of listeners, and no one can think that it's just a pile of sheet music, gathering dust.

(Welcome to the new DecSimp, which shies away from uncomfortable topics.)

You won't have Geelhoed to kick you around anymore

Today is my last day at Time Out Chicago. I helped launch the magazine three years ago and spent that time creating a section where readers could turn for informed reporting and criticism, and listings that were fun to read instead of a chore. At the launch party, one veteran Chicago journalist asked, "Mr. Geelhoed, what will you write about week after week?"

"Well," I said. "There are lots of chamber groups and new ensembles being formed that have never been written about. So I'll write about them."

"There's only so many of them. What will you do then?"

"I'll find something." I'm proud to say that I've done that for 156 issues. My last article will be published February 21.

I'm joining the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to work on its record label, CSO Resound. My title will be CSO Resound coordinator, and I'll be responsible for working with each of the administrative departments to get the discs and downloads made more cheaply, efficiently, selling in greater quantities, along with helping determine what will be recorded. I look forward to working with and advancing the priorities of a major orchestra, instead of chronicling them.

I'll miss writing, and having a platform to express myself. I'll miss the sense of power that comes from being able to get John Adams and Pierre Boulez on the phone (what I call "the right to pester people"), and I'll miss the minor celebrity of being a young music critic. At the same time, being able to exert some influence over the CSO's recordings is far from negligible , and I think we'll be able to tackle the challenges facing classical albums and devise creative solutions.

DecSimp will live on. It'll take a different tone, with no reviews whatever, and no words that can be construed as the CSO either praising or criticizing another musician. Maybe I'll write more pieces about works of music, and start posting more about running and fitness. I don't know what it will look like, but it won't be dull.

I have some regrets about leaving the magazine. I never interviewed Esa-Pekka Salonen or Yefim Bronfman, and there are still numerous Chicago musicians who have never been featured in Time Out. There are still plenty of stories out there waiting to be written.

I'd like to thank all those musicians who started an ensemble, or put on a concert on an impossibly tiny budget, or sang a recital, and who work so hard to achieve their goals. You made my life deeply enjoyable, and I will always admire performers whose passion is to weave music into the fabric of the lives of others. In a world that cares little about art and less about beauty, you have the courage to make the world a better, more fulfilling, place.

Photo from Time Out Chicago launch party, March 4, 2005. The caption, by Andrew Patner, reads "Clare [sic] and Marc, non-date date."