Rather Amazing

Minus the "rather". This is a miniaturized version of the Karlheinz Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet.

A friend of mine, whose tastes tended towards the eccentric, went out of his way to get a copy of the Adritti Quartet recording. This version, adapted by Virgil Moorefield, is quite spectacular, especially as a video.

Enjoy! (thanks to Sequenza21 for pointing it out)

A Good Day

I have finally managed to cajole a group of scholars to allow me to sup at the Graduate Table. In exchange for what, you might ask? Just cold hard cash - no souls here, we're modern.

This has been a bit of an odyssey for me, but I'm in, and I hope this will mean only good things for this page. The Doderer posts must begin again, as they foreshadow what has become, and some more work on W.F. Bach over the summer.

In other words, this page will remain as uninteresting to everyone as it has for the two years I've been at this!

Juan Muñoz, The Gambler

Chris Miller over at Mountshang has a post on the sculptor Juan Muñoz. It turns out he hated him, although, ever charitable, gives us an example of something he really liked.

I have another suggestion for Chris regarding Muñoz - Gavin Bryars' Man in a Room Gambling. It was a collaboration between Muñoz and Bryars, and it's excellent.

As the linked piece notes, the pieces are 5 minute lessons on card cheating - turns out Muñoz was an amateur magician. This work influenced me greatly - it rekindled my childhood interest in magic, although I must admit that my recently purchased copy of Erdnase's Expert at the Card Table remains relatively unperused...hmmm...perhaps that's a nice summer project, learning to cheat at cards.

With the rise of poker, and my deep hatred of state-run gambling (I'm quite serious, I don't know if there's any other state action outside of sanctioned violence more immoral than state-run gambling), learning to cheat at cards seems like something that could move one up in the world these days, indeed, someone could see cheating at cards to bring down state-run gambling as a kind of noble duty, an act of civil disobedience. Not I, of course...

Back to the music. There is great beauty in the deception presented here. Bryars and Muñoz trick one into thinking they are listening to broadcast segment, and Bryars music seduces the ears away from Muñoz's instruction - I have found it virtually impossible to concentrate - aural misdirection.

I know of no more pleasant way to learn the card sharper's noble art than through this work. In addition to Erdnase and Muñoz, I would also suggest a green felt cloth, and a copy of this Rembrandt to keep you ever in the mood.

And dogs playing baccarat. No poker here at the Transcontinental.

Gargantua and Memory

A quick note - has anyone ever considered the possibility that Rabelais' Gargantua and of Pantagruel is the Ars memoriae made explicit? That the work is just a massive unfolding of his interior mnemonic system?

Just a question, although it would go a long way towards explaining the work...I'm not trying to reduce the work, this is merely something that occured to me while reading it alongside Yates' The Art of Memory.

Adam De La Halle and French Comic Opera

A request for caution on making causal connections. The example seems petty, but its egregiousness sharpens the point.

Just because a 13th Century trouvère happened to write a play that included music does not make his work a forerunner of 19th Century French comic opera. He is not an Offenbach avant la lettre.

Now I understand the impulse to make the connection. Adam spent some of his life on what is now French soil, and happened to write something about Robin and Marion in a language that eventually became part of the Langue Française.

In a related tangent, that Robin isn't the Robin you're thinking about, but there's a chance that the Marion is.

This is the tricky thing about causality. Kripke's moment of baptism plays a role here, and as far as anyone can tell, the earliest composers of French opera derived their ideas not from dear old Adam, but the turn of the 17th Century Italians who invented opera, who, as far as anyone can tell, did not get their ideas from a local troupe doing a revival of Robin and Marion, but skipped all the way back to the Greeks (and it turns out they got it wrong - uh, God bless conceptual confusion).

So although it is nice to say that he was a forerunner to French comic opera, he was no more a forerunner of French Comic Opera than his Le jeu de la feuillee was a forerunner of Waiting for Godot.

These causal chains are very important, and we musicians and musicologists tend to make them ather casually. We shouldn't, in the same way that we shouldn't really assume that the French play French music better than any German would, because to do so is part of a mass forgetting of the sheer cosmopolitanism of western music over the past 900 years.

Does French comic opera really need this kind of pedigree? I'm not so sure, but it does beg the question - why is there this kind of free association in musical circle between the redisovered music of the past and music of the more recent present?

Why do we often look at Adam de la Halle, or Gesualdo, or Matteo de Perugia as heralds of the future, instead of orphans of the past? What does this say about how we talk about music?

And then bigger questions loom, ones that take us out of musicology and into aesthetics - what ensures a style's continuity, and what causes a style to be orphaned?

I think buried these questions is an aesthetics that is nominalist in inclination, but realist in practice. The case of Adam de la Halle is a negative example, which is why it can be taken care of in a blog post, but this, I hope, is only the beginning.

On the Varieties

In the publish and perish world of blogging, it is clear that I am an twitching corpse. To wit, I have been slowly writing a paean to Conrad's deciding to walk away from the magnificent edifice that is the Varieties of Unreligious Experience.

And then the bugger comments on his own blog that he will be returning! So please take the following in the spirit that it was intended, and despite its irrelevance...

I was not surprised to see Conrad go in January. One could feel it in the mood of the blog. We often find ourselves discussing the coldness of online communication, and yet there was something in the air, a stench, that made it clear that the staff had been broken above the head of what is, perhaps, what James Joyce's blog would look like if had turned out to be a patriarch and thus 780 years away from the ground.

In looking over his body of work, especially the older stuff, the first few months, it is amazing to see, in hindsight, just how bloggy Conrad's writings were. Or weren't. He somehow had managed to transcend the constraints of the blogosphere and create what is perhaps the only standing work of art on the net.

An audacious claim? Absolutely. Yes, there are sites devoted to the exploration of electronic media, and yet their self-consciousness somehow distances them from the medium itself - in absorbing their McLuhan, they have missed the whole point. Conrad, in stark contrast, is the message, he is not the hope of promise of blogging, or what people strive for in the online world, rather, his work is the sublimation of the medium itself.

For this reason, I hold Conrad largely responsible for both keeping me in blogging, and keeping me out. I was thinking I would do something on plain language - he's been there. More recently, I was going to talk about Mabuse, and was disheartened to see...he's been there too. His voice seemed to have been everywhere, and this was after 4 months!

I feel bad for not commenting on his blog much, however, what does one do when Conrad so deftly drains his subjects of the very possibility of challenge, or perhaps discussion? Yes, the pedants could nitpick, and I suspect this is part of what he wanted, but comments on his blog often felt like scribbling notes into an illuminated manuscript. And perhaps this is why his earlier post invited more discussion, things were more open, or interspersed with fare that allowed people to discuss. I suppose my biggest problem with him, in this respect,was that I agreed with him virtually all the time, we shared a very similar philosophical outlook, and there was not much more for me to contribute beyond what he was already doing so well.

Tout court, I miss the Varieties. I find myself sifting through its archives, blown away by the sheer volume of it, especially in the first year. And his writing wears well - try looking at some 2 year old conversations on my blog and see how they've aged like an opened bottle of cheap wine compared to his work. Ah well...

I suppose part of my problem is that I have yet find my voice - I am still in my Lehrjahre, it seems. And with Gawain's sporadic posting, things feel rather sparse around here. Hard to explain why. We'll see.

Pudelfrage

This sentence from Faust leaps out to me as something which should be the subject of a painting:

Faust mit dem Pudel hereintretend

Any takers? Or, better yet, has anyone painted Faust with a dog?

Goethe's Faust

I am trying to read it.

In German.

There are some strong reasons for this, some of which will emerge around here in the near future, barring unforeseen circumstances. However, letting you, that guy in Pennsylvania who keeps looking for more Doderer entries, know about that little bit of information will only serve to highlight the absurdity of my current predicament, which is:

Taking into account my current comprehension of the German language, I have roughly calculated (linearly, as I do not know the curve at which my learning German through reading Faust will quicken my reading of Faust) that it will take me 77 hours to read the entire first part of Faust.

So there.

Right now, I’m into the Prolog im Himmel, in other words, barely on my way to hell and back again. And in order to get back to the Demons, I must make a trip with Mephistopheles!

Reviewing the Reviewer

I am reluctant to admit this, but I listen to classical music as a teenager listens to pop. When something grips me, I listen to it over and over again until there is nothing left to enjoy, until it is drained of meaning to me. I then slip the corpse back into its jewel case and look for my next fix, and, god bless the enormity of the classical music recording industry, there's always a next fix!

The music I'm stuck fast to right now is the recording of Claudio Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda by Le Concert d’Astrée and Emmanuelle Haïm. Forsaking the light clear voices of an early-music specialist, she gambles on little-known Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón to sing the role as narrator. Villazón, I am told, is a singer of 19th Century opera, and occasionally appears with other little-known opera performers to, I am told, no small acclaim.

In all seriousness, signing Villazón was indeed a gamble, but not because his glorious caramel tenor isn't up to the task of singing the music, but that his voice isn't meant to be used to sing this music, an opinion derived largely from the performance practice movement. And so here is where the title of this post appears relevant, and I dust off my Foucault doll and do a bit of, uh, discourse analysis.

There's a review of this recording that so completely reflects this state of affairs that it almost seems as though he'd written it just so that I could use it as an example in a blog post. Anyway, here's the review. Go read it and come back here.

Back? OK. It's a good review, I will now offer the disclaimer that I am not really here to criticize the reviewer, the composer Robert Hugill. I am really and truly interested in what he says and trying to suss out why he says it, the logical space he's operating in, because Haïm's decision to use opera singers who sing 19th Century opera to sing 16th Century music is a trangressive act in our musical culture

Hugill sets this very fact out right at the start. He writes:

Emmanuelle Haim seems to have a penchant for working with singers who are not necessarily known for their work in the period performance field. The title role in her recording of Monteverdi’s Orfeo was Ian Bostridge, who is not a singer primarily associated with Monteverdi.

So, like any good writer, Hugill is using a bit of foreshadowing to lay out his main concern with Villazón's singing. He writes:

Villazon is known for his expertise in 19th and early 20th century Italian opera, but his beautiful voice is obviously responsive to other styles and genres. But only to a certain extent... he is only following what are probably the core elements of his grounding in 19th century performance practice. When his voice rises to its upper levels he opens it out in a manner which is entirely foreign to 17th century music. (my italics)

So the concern here is that Villazón's singing is out of joint with the time the music was written. My question is - who cares? As Hugill himself writes, "He has taken on board elements of the style and ornamentation required and his performance is, in some ways, astonishing."

Indeed, the recording is astonishing, and the one place where I really take issue with his review is his criticism of Villazón's word painting. Villazón, at least to my ear, very much brings out Monteverdi's subtle shifts in mood throughout the piece. Indeed, it is Villazón's range, a range of colour and expressiveness that exceeds that of many early music specialists, which makes this recording a triumph.

The tension in Hugill's review is there - the basis upon which he criticizes the performance is not on musical grounds for the most part, but for its failure to adhere to the historical limits placed upon music of this time by the performance practice movement. Hugill himself sums his review thusly:

You get to hear how one of the 21st century’s loveliest voices sounds in this music, providing you can get beyond the vexed issue of performance style.

He knows that this is a major issue, and like any good reviewer, he addresses it, he pays homage to the space our talk about this kind of music works in, even though I bet that he himself really enjoyed the recording, nearly despite the critical infrastructure one is laden with when it comes to music of this period.

My point? That this recording is precisely why the performance practice movement fails to address some of the more basic aesthetic issues surrounding music, by placing historical authenticity, or the archaeological work on our recent culture, the letters and scores and original instruments, the material of history, on a higher pedestal than the quality and emotional immediacy of a work in performance. Or, things before people.

And I must admit here that I've done the same thing as they, just in the opposite direction.

Reviews Well Past the Deadline: Have You Ever Been In Love With A 39 Pound Midget?

When one has nothing recent to talk about, there's always the past...

Last summer, I had an opportunity to catch Soulpepper's production of William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life.

Set in a honky tonk bar on the eve of American involvement in the Second World War, the play meditates on that wonderfully sophisticated popular culture that emerged between the two world wars.

The main character Joe, appears wealthy, and drinks champagne all day, but he doesn't really do much, except guide others along in their lives. A Socratic figure, he espouses a philosophy of not having a philosophy, beyond being kind to others, but in that kindness he attempts to help others recover things they've lost. He is the midwife to the dreams of the many characters who populate the play.

There is an elegaic quality to the work, not merely because of the coming war, but because, the popular culture it depicts and celebrates is, for the most part, snuffed out by the war.

You could see all these strains of American self-consciousness in it – the exuberance, the sad reality of the capitalist dream. However, what made it great was what popular culture was in the play, a attitude towards culture which I do not believe exists in America anymore, or Canada for that matter. But I'm not going to get into that because it will just get me in trouble!

For example, one of the background characters is a poor man who happens to play the piano really well, and he does so for nearly the entire play. There's also a comedian who is not at all funny, but who happens to be able to dance very well.

You see in these characters the inheritance of the whole Vaudeville tradition, as well as a sign of the importance of jazz in American culture at the time. You see it here, just before the war, as it's about to die as the major popular art form in America, where sophistication was still valued over sentimentality, or if nothing else, they could co-exist. After the war, with the rise of rock and roll, this kind of co-existence pretty much disappeared, as popular music came to define itself increasingly against "serious" classical music or jazz.

Saroyan's play unselfconciously captures a slice of history that seems very foreign to us these days in those interwar years of cultural ecumenism and political extremism. That alone made the play well worth seeing.

Sadly, when I went to see this gem, there were tons of seats still available, which was too bad, as I I suspect one of the reasons for the lacklustre attendance was that there were no well known Canadian TV personalities performing. Ah well.