After reading a healthy chunk of The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson, I realized it should be added to the few sparkling events that make up my own constellation of insight into the African-American experience, a constellation I freely admit has only been seen somewhat like a little boy and his first gaze through a telescope. The other three events are: summer employment as a teenager working along-side African American men and women in motels, assembly lines, and warehouses; reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; and witnessing Kara Walker’s art exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York sometime in 2007-2008 (and buying and studying the book capturing the exhibit, Kara Walker: My complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love).
I could write a dissertation connecting these four experiences, not suitable for a blog. Isabel Wilkerson’s book subtitle says it all, “The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” We’ve all been exposed to the American immigrant experience in its many ethnic flavors, the American migrant experience, the calamitous exodus of the Native Americans from their lands, but this migration/exodus of Southern blacks to the Northern Cities has been less explored. It involved six million people and changed the south and north in ways that become obvious after you read! While I could never do this book justice in this space, I will say it is beautifully written narrative non-fiction. Ellison’s book made me understand not only the oppression of the African American by white communities north and south but black on black oppression and violence as well. I’m not sure how I’d describe Kara Walker’s art, other than to say you will come face to face and become intimate with the brutality of the southern slave culture, the co-dependence of masters and slaves, the underbelly of the relationships between owners and their slaves, and the particular violence and trauma against women – all this delivered in ways you never expect, such as through the perspective of pornography.
I only mention my summer employment because it was the only period in my life I’ve ever had any direct and sustained interaction with African Americans (this was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, not the deep South but bordering on it), working side by side with other men loading boxcars, drilling screws into Modern Maid Stoves, working machines in a metal fabrication plant, and pulling dirty linens from motel room cleaning carts all pushed by black women. Yet I can’t say I learned anything really meaningful from those experiences because the interaction was expressly to get labor done, and after it was done, no interaction. That in itself, however, says a great deal, I suppose.
So any insights were vicariously absorbed. I suppose I could add seeing the 1997 movie, Amistad, by Stephen Spielberg, but that was not about the African American experience per se (in their “freed” state) as it was the depravity of mankind and its institutions in buying, selling, and transporting human property.
Well, one day I would love to write an essay on this subject. But Kara Walker, Ralph Ellison (I know, he’s gotten lots of attention but still), and Isabel Wilkerson deserve far more attention and respect from far more people in this country, beyond the borders of art exhibits, literary fiction, and scholarly research.
Tagged with: Amistad • Invisible Man • Isabel Wilkerson • Kara Walker • Ralph Ellison • Stephen Spielberg • The Warmth of Other Suns
I thought A.M Homes’ Music for Torching (late 1990s, I think) was one of the funniest contemporary novels I had ever read. For me, it was like watching a backyard barbecue from an upper-story home down the street turn into a blaze engulfing the entire neighborhood – and laughing all the way through it, even while it scorched my own suburban sensibilities. I mean, it was literary scorched earth. I recommended it to several friends, all of whom were more interested in throwing it on a figurative book-burning pile. I’ve been waiting for Homes to surpass that achievement so I could once again annoy my novel-obsessed friends.
I’ll now be recommending May We Be Forgiven to the same friends and family, and others as well. The main character is a Nixon scholar. Need I say more? Okay, I will. This book reads like literary stand-up comedy, which makes sense now that I’ve learned Homes took courses in stand-up comedy. Many novels continually surprise the reader with what I call the unexpected inflection points. Reader expects character A to turn left. She turns right. Then for several chapters, character A is on a journey to the right. Homes does this several times on a page. On each page. Or so it seems. Imagine being in a demolition derby (for those of you that did not grow up in places like the Tennessee-Georgia border, this is a unique auto “race” during which drivers ram the crap out of each other, the winner is driving the last car that still runs) blindfolded. You just don’t know what’s going to hit you next, or where you’ll end up. Homes’ makes sure you never leave the confines of the pit.
All the while, though, the story has momentum and is clearly moving towards a vanishing point. This is the genius of the work. This poor Nixon scholar pretty much deserves what’s coming to him, based on how the story begins (he beds his crazy brother’s wife, his crazy brother discovers, and his crazy brother kills his wife, after he kills a few others in a car wreck), but redemption, 450 pages later, is a thing of beauty, as he becomes head of a family, caretaker for all the kids who suffer because of his behavior and his brother’s. Along the way, Homes sucks up more bits and pieces of American culture, life in these United States, today than a twister taking its revenge on the New York metropolitan area.
Is there a novelist Homes echoes? To me, perhaps Tom Wolfe, with Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. The back flap mentions John Irving, The World According to Garp. I would bet that Homes would still be the last car running in the derby, though. The others could never match her quick acceleration page for page, ability to deflect, and keep such crazy occurrences, most surprisingly of all, within a boundary of sanity for the course of the story.
I can’t wait to hear what the friends and family have to say this time around.
For whatever reason, I’ve been “into” Asian novels lately. I guess I am just trying to bust out of that Western literary tradition. I haven’t been all that enthusiastic with what I’ve read so far. I almost checked out Haruki Murakami’s latest, 1Q84, when I was at the library a few weeks ago, even though two stalwart readers told me they couldn’t get through it. Then I thought, hell, I’ll be at this for a few months (the novel comes in three volumes, to give you an idea) and I don’t have that kind of time or patience these days. Lying next to it, somewhat misplaced on the shelf, was Kafka on the Shore. A more modest single volume work, it not only appeared digestible, I knew it had received much acclaim since publication around ten years ago. If I had actually noticed the cover art, the kind of image that shows up at five in the morning, somewhere between the last bit of Rem sleep and the alarm clock, and so scares the crap out of you, the alarm is superfluous, if I had noticed, I would have probably let out a yelp that’d cause the librarian to wonder if the after-school crowd was let in early. If I could explain the image, I would. All I really knew about the novel was that the author was supposed to be one of those magical realism types.
This is a remarkable novel. And I grappled with why. I read lots of novels. I’ve read half a dozen since the start of the year. Why does this one stand out?
It stands above, I’ve decided, because it has an unnerving amount of energy but Murakami controls it, effortlessly, it seems, even as it emanates from four principal sources.
- Story energy – at the elementary level, it’s a coming of age novel. It reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye, one of the seminal coming-of-age stories of the last century, but kind of in the sense that an apple reminds me of apple pie. (Pie is the only food I will not share, just to give you a clue what I mean by that analogy). And I loved Catcher in the Rye! The fifteen-year old narrator who runs away (he’s two years younger than Holden Caufield) has similar experiences that make a man out of him. I thought Holden got to do mature things for his age, like stay overnight in Manhattan in a hotel and get roughed up by a pimp, but this guy, Kafka Tamura, well, let’s just say he manages to check himself into a library several hundred miles from Tokyo and that’s where his adventures start. He has the mountains to climb and the oceans to cross, but Murakami never belittles his quest with false heroics or manufactured outcomes.
- Archetypal energy – a great novel in the literary tradition has to artfully include those universal symbols common to all other great novels (“The river is life”). Kafka on the Shore has plenty of them. Not one of them hits you over the head reminding you how intellectual you are reading this.
- Spiritual energy – this is perhaps the novel’s greatest strength. The feeling I got reading it was this: We humans, as we float in the ether of our lives, hope that we are anchored to some larger purpose, something eternal, something universal. Kafka on the Shore makes you know this, not just hope it. And yet I can’t say that it’s a novel of redemption or salvation. Never does it drift into the fantasy that life has a purpose that is fathomable 24/7 or, for that matter, ever makes itself fully apparent.
- Mythological, psychological, philosophical, and pathological energy – there’s incest, family rivalry, father-son and mother-son issues, adolescent dreams and fantasies, talking animals, prophetic simpletons and simple proletarians, abandonment, genetic and familial oddities, and strange coincidences reminiscent of Kazantzakis, Homer, Shakespeare, Kafka, Marquez, Swift, Faulkner, and many others no doubt I can’t name off the top of my head.
One way Murakami keeps this energy from exploding is through the novel’s structure. There are two primary interwoven stories, with parallel main characters. One is told in present tense using Kafka as the first-person narrator. The other is told in past tense using a third person limited or omniscient (sometimes hard to tell) narrator. Another technique is having the main characters connected back to a single event in the past, a tragic but bizarre incident that occurs towards the end of World War II. The anchor location for the story is a small library far from Tokyo in the hinterland of Japan, more of a research institution, funded by a wealthy landowner. What better place for a literary masterpiece to take place than where great stories ultimately reside for the rest of their lives? Can I tell you why structure and place keep the thing from exploding? No.
Does it have flaws? Probably. The only one I can think of is that the story is male-dominated. There are only two female characters and one, on reflection, seems like she could have been axed in rewrite, were it not that she heightens the overtones of incest, and the other almost seems a stand-in for all women-kind, a generic life-mother, an object of male sexual desire, the mythical librarian who is ravishing when she takes off her glasses, and so on. Then again, that’s something else I love about this book. Murakami employs these subtle and not-so-subtle references to popular culture and popular stereotypes that ground the story in everyday life, as mundane and unfortunate as that might be considered out of context.
In the end, I can’t really explain why I loved this book. It’s wonderfully balanced. What does that tell you? Nothing. It doesn’t stretch the credibility of any of its literary licenses, e.g., talking animals, a truck driver who learns to love Beethoven and philosophy, fragmented time sequences, a fifteen year old runaway mature beyond his years by a decade or two. Does that help you? Probably not. See if this helps. There’s something called the triple point in chemistry. It’s the combination of temperature and pressure at which a substance can exist as a solid, a liquid, and a gas. How many books have you read, will you read, that comfortably exists at the equilibrium of reality, dream, and imagination? To me, this is that sort of novel.
Strong Men Need Not Apply: Richard Ford’s Canada
By jmakansi On February 3, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature
Like most of Richard Ford’s books, all of which I have thoroughly enjoyed since reading The Sportswriter back in the 1980s, Canada is first and foremost about how events, small or large, out of our control shape our lives. The events or situations in Canada which would be the main course for most other authors and readers – murders, robberies, deviant behavior, ripped apart families, etc – are side dishes or even left in the kitchen. Ford isn’t so interested in the inflection points themselves, but how they shape the characters from that point onward.
But here is what I find most fascinating about Ford’s novels (and Canada is no exception): So often the events are experienced as out of the character’s control, but they really aren’t. For the most part, his characters don’t make decisions, and hardly make an effort to take control of their lives. They just bob on the surface of life. They take what comes and leave what goes, few questions asked. For the most part, they are spineless and weak human beings. And they are fascinating under Ford’s pen.
The main character in Canada, Del Parsons, is only fifteen so we can more easily forgive him for not making decisions that could more positively affect his life. He’s not mature enough. As the narrator (fifty years later than the timeline of the story), he even tells us readers this in so many words. But as with Ford’s adult characters, especially the men, should we really give Del a pass?
Here’s a minor but excellent example. Del wants to go to school but can’t because he has followed blindly what the adults have planned for him after he is separated from his parents. He learns of a school near where he is forced to live in Saskatchewan. He rides his bike there to check it out. It’s a girls school run by nuns. Two girls come to the fence he stands at and taunts him. Then the nun comes over and shoos him away. We know that Del desperately wants to go to school, it’s his obsession, but this is the sum total of his effort to do so.
He doesn’t, for example, even ask the nun or the girls where boys in the area go to school, nor does he ask the adults he lives with. Of course, we also know he is scared – his living conditions are at the ragged edge of hostile. But still. He makes no effort.
While most readers would throw up their hands and wish Ford would send his characters to assertiveness training, I see it differently. Ford novels reflect American society’s problem with boys and men. Political and cultural trends of the last forty years – you can read about this in countless articles – favor girls over boys. Men, or at least traditional males (whoever they are), are being “hollowed out.” Of course, this is highly controversial and probably doesn’t get much support from one entire gender.
I’m not making the argument for or against men being hollowed out here, just the observation that Ford brilliantly captures this cultural ethos in his novels. Even more so in Canada. Del’s sister and fraternal twin, Berner, takes matters into her own hands when faced with the separation from the parents (and from her twin), even though, ultimately, life punishes her for it.
Canada exemplifies once again Ford’s concern with the white space around events. His writing is meticulous, excessively detailed, but emotionally restrained, or even bereft. Some will find it lugubrious, rather than exuberant. But know this: His characters may let life control them, but Ford has a white knuckle grip on his narrative and the characters who populate his stories.
Boat People
By jmakansi On January 26, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature
I just read Ship of Fools, circa 1963, Katherine Anne Porter. Strangely, the book I read just before it was Mosquitoes, circa 1927, one of William Faulkner’s earliest novels. Even stranger, the book Ship of Fools reminded me of the most is Death on the Installment Plan, circa 1952, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. All three take place on a boat. Well, at least the first part of the Celine work – I read it in college. It’s a great technique, stuffing everyone on a boat. The author can focus on the characters and their interactions. You can’t go very far on a boat. There’s only so much to describe. Not much to do (none of these are today’s luxury cruise liners). Water is water. Minimal setting. Minimal plot. What’s left, in terms of the story? Characters.
And they don’t look look very pretty. In fact, Ship of Fools is probably the most despairing look at social human interaction I’ve ever read. You won’t find a good egg in this carton. It’s a deep dive into prejudice, social and economic status, class boundaries, ethnic hatred, disconnecting family bonds, and gender wars. The passengers have all boarded in Mexico and Cuba, bound for the Germany of the late 1930s. While the book was published in 1963 (some parts of it earlier), it was the first major work of Porter’s in twenty years. Obviously, she must have spent a lot of time brooding over the human catastrophe that was Nazi Germany. The novel offers an imagined glimpse into the behaviors and attitudes that presage a holocaust. The reader of today can easily extrapolate the attitudes of Porter’s characters and arrive at what happened in Germany, what happens in countries today, and the simmering disdain different classes of humans seem to have for each other. Perhaps what is most horrifying is that the portrayal, to this reader, feels universal, inevitable.
There are no heroes on Porter’s ship. The Europeans hate the Latins (especially the gypsy dancer/acting troupe). The young American couple torment each other. The one Jewish man (who sells Catholic Church furnishings!) barely tolerates the other Jewish man (or maybe he’s partly Jewish and his wife is Jewish, I can’t recall), and neither has any use for the Christians. A son hates his father (for hoarding his money even when he’s almost dying). In fact, it’s easy to imagine that the victims of the coming ethnic cleansing could have been any one of the groups represented, perpetrated by any of the other groups represented. Perhaps this is Porter’s raison d’etre – we are forced to confront the notion anyway that all of us have these little voices of hate in our head, since no character manages to sing above their background noise. All of us create “others” in our minds, and/or act out against these others in real life. No one is absolved. We all carry the potential for depravity even if most of us (hopefully anyway) manage to refrain from making it kinetic.
Death on the Installment Plan, at least the beginning passages I recall, also depicts utter human depravity, with a physical manifestation as well (the boat is tossing and turning and people are puking everywhere). But the difference is that the depravity is cut with humor. It’s so depraved, it’s funny. We tell ourselves this can’t be real. You can’t get through Ship of Fools thinking this is anything but visceral, vivid real life. Think of a Hudson School painting (Thomas Cole, for example, one of my favorites) turning subtly and slowly over the course of the book into a Bosch painting of hell. Of two quotes preceding the start of the novel in the version I read, one uses the word comedy and the other the word humor. I derived none of either.
But I loved this book, even though I needed an infinite tank of oxygen for this deep and disturbing dive. Maybe it’s more appropriate to read as an exercise in social psychology rather than fiction. The only quibble I had with it is the number of characters, so many in fact, it borrows from the gargantuan Russian novels and lists them in the front.
The characters in Faulkner’s Mosquitoes, as the title implies, are pests. They aren’t depraved – they all are similar in social status, if not economic – but that doesn’t stop them from being hostile and mean to each other. But their hostility stems from boredom. They are the gentility. With nothing better to do, they snark at each other behind backs, but at least they keep up appearances. Porter shows hostility and hatred in the raw, laid bare, intimate, every hair in the brush making its mark in every stroke.
The takeaway: Being confined to a boat brings out the worst in the human condition. Think about that next time you gaze into an advertisement for a cruise.
Tagged with: Death on the Installment Plan • Katherine Anne Porter • Louis Ferdinand Celine • Mosquitoes • Ship of Fools • William Faulkner
I’ve heard Chamber Project St. Louis a half a dozen times now in various venues around St. Louis, most recently at the Schlafly Tap Room downtown. What is remarkable and admirable about these four young ladies is that they are also managing their own business affairs – marketing, sales, website, rentals, venue arrangements, piano rental, and much more I am sure. It is difficult enough to eke out a living in classical music and the arts, but to do it all on your own is quite a challenge. Most musicians launch off an existing platform, an institution; these ladies are creating one.
But even that’s not all: They are bringing chamber music to new venues. How many times have you heard a violin, viola, flute, and harp in a bar? By doing so, they are undoubtedly attracting new patrons, young patrons, patrons that don’t need to drape their mink coats or Burberry overcoats over the back of their chairs. Imagine being able to sway and move, or even tap your foot to the music you are listening to! If you don’t like sitting for an hour, you can stand in the back. I heard them in the Spring at the Tavern of Fine Arts in the Central West End, over a glass of wine (or two) and a cheese and bread plate (and other choices). Chamber music is awakening, morphing into entertainment with options for how you experience it (not that I don’t love going to traditional concert halls, too)
The program last week at the Tap Room featured a harp, and music that spanned two and a half centuries. The Song of the Lark for flute and harp was the first piece, by Charles Rochester Young, a contemporary composer. It was followed by a Mozart (late 1700s) Duo for violin and viola, a harp solo by G Donizetti (early 1800s), and finished with Petit Suite by the French composer A Jolivet (mid-1900s). Just getting to see and hear a harp up close was treat enough! During the first piece, the harpist did something to her instrument to make it sound like a snare drum. To me, this was a stunning effect. She played it in spots like a guitar. Or at least it sounded like one to me. The piece itself reminded me of Debussy’s Prelude to Afternoon of a Faun. One thing about a Flute and a Harp: Both can run up and down the musical scales lightning fast and fast runs were certainly featured in this work. I’ve also never seen a harp string break, but one did (it hung there like a child being punished in the corner), and the players recovered marvelously.
The Mozart piece, I have to say, was typical in the sense that the viola was slaved to the violin. I’ve been a struggling viola player at various times in my life and have an ever so tiny chip on my shoulder. And not that I could ever have played hard, solo parts if they were ever written for me. But still. Anyway, the piece came across as lovely and, again, just so enriching to hear Mozart in a bar with huge tanks of beer and ale one floor below. He probably would have liked that. Finally, by the third movement, it seemed that the viola had parts equal to the violin, as they seemed to do a question an answer type of dance between them, exploring something deep.
During the Donizetti, we really got to see the harp up close and personal. The movement of the arms off of and onto the strings, and the shoulders as an extension of the instrument, is a thing of splendor.
The final piece, the Jolivet, also led my mind to Faure, Debussy, and Ravel and the impressionistic music of France and Europe in the late 1800s. This piece flowed off the stage deliberately and with great sensuality, and in the third movement I think I detected fragments of Middle Eastern musical themes, and different rhythms. In the last movement, the flute player switched to a piccolo and the piece ended playfully, as if there was dancing on board a ship, wherein the harp sounded to me much like a piano.
I guess I have a sentimental reason for hoping Chamber Project St. Louis achieves lavish success. When I was a teenager, playing the viola in the Chattanooga (Tennessee) Youth Orchestra, I formed a chamber group with some friends and we played a few “gigs” around town. We even got paid when we played at the Jewish Community Center, to this day the only time I have ever made a dollar with that instrument (five dollars to be exact!). Our group was a little lopsided. We had three or four violins, one viola, and I recollect that we had a cellist, and maybe even another instrument or two. We booked our own gigs too. I suppose our parents helped. But I think about how much fun we had giving it a go.
These ladies of course are trying to make a living adding new dimensions to the chamber music experience in St. Louis. Plan to enjoy their next gig and support them when you can!
Tagged with: chamber music • Chamber Project St. Louis • Charles Rochester Young • Schlafly Tap Room • St. Louis • Tavern of Fine Arts
On November 2, St. Louis’ Arianna String Quartet performed Passport: Latin America in their “house” (The Touhill Performing Arts Center at University of Missouri-St. Louis), a program consisting of works from three contemporary Latin American composers and including a flute player. In addition to reveling in the new compositions Arianna continues to bring to our metro area, I was struck by their courage in having a program of all new music, music from a part of the world we don’t tend to associate with “classical” music.
You know, whenever you go to hear a major orchestra or chamber group, if they include a contemporary work (usually a big if), the organizers invariably sandwich it between two known and popular works, or at least recognized composers. I’ve always speculated the reason they do this is because if it’s scheduled first, many people will show up late, and if it’s scheduled last, many patrons will leave early. It’s like you have to put the bitter pill inside a scoop of ice cream to get patrons to swallow it!
The first piece, Quartet No. 1 by Osvaldo Costa de Lacerda (Brazilian) was playful, almost like a pop tune, but somber as well, and seemed balanced among the different instruments. I have to confess, I didn’t “feel” any Latin rhythms, but maybe that’s just me. I didn’t take any notes on the second piece.
The third piece, Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout (2001), by Gabriela Lena Frank (Peruvian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Jewish, and born in Berkeley, California), well-exemplified for me what the flutist, Alberto Almarza (Chilean), called a “layering of cultural realities…a reflection of the society” during the lecture preceding the program. This piece began with tribal-like percussion, guitar-like strumming rhythms, then glissando from the violin and high energy-tremelos. The second movement featured pizzicato (plucking the strings) and strange bowing I’ve never seen before, almost as if the music was not really mean for these instruments. I detected Latin dance and rhythms for sure in this piece, and even some tunes I’d more associate with Hollywood westerns. By the end it was rip-the-strings-off pizzicato! In the third movement, the players had to endure playing harmonics measure after measure – I say “endure” because harmonics are really hard to play right (at least they were for me, when I played viola). A blend of western United States and Mexican Mariachi band type sound began the last movement, which ended with bouncing bow strokes that reminded me of a horses’ clappity-clap on the high prairie.
To me, the point of hearing contemporary music for the first time isn’t necessarily to like or not like the music but instead to experience a different context, a new way of putting notes together that borrows from convention but also reaches for something new, to challenge our ears and our brains. Almarza said during the lecture that composers don’t invent anything, they open windows to a library of sounds from around the world. I would courteously contest that statement in general, but certainly see how it applies here.
The Arianna String Quartet continues to bring variety, sophistication, energy, and contemporary innovation to the St. Louis chamber music scene. They deserve our support!
Most of the contemporary composers I’ve listened to are already known and significant entities in their field. Their works get air time on radio, or their selections are part of orchestral performances I’ve attended.
This weekend, I heard a lecture by composer Adam Schoenberg (sponsored by the Washington University Department of Music) and, the next day, a performance of his work, “Finding Rothko,” performed by the Washington University Orchestra. He’s young (late twenties, early thirties, I’d guess), the composer in residence for the Kansas City Symphony, has the kind of academic credentials one would expect (Oberlin, Julliard) of a “leading composer of his generation,” has been described as “stunning, bold, open, and optimistic” (whatever all that means) by the critics, and considers himself a “21st century composer.”
What he means by that last phrase is that his music is differentiated by the full use of computers and technology. His process, for example, is to start with “sketches” written by hand, after being drafted up on the piano, then he transfers those sketches to a computer program called Finale. It was truly fascinating to hear during his lecture an orchestral piece in electronic form (the MIDI version) and then a recording of an orchestra performing it. Just the little snippets he showed about what you can do in the software was mind-blowing to a neophyte. He talks of orchestration in terms of palate, color, and texture.
When Barack Obama was elected, Schoenberg was so overwhelmed he felt like he had to “return” the gift he felt he (and presumably the rest of America and the world) had been given. In words from his website, Schoenberg felt what is was like to be an American. So he wrote an “American” symphony. Regardless of your politics, surely anyone would consider that a pretty damn cool thing to do.
He acknowledged the courage it would take to label a symphony “American.” Maybe that’s where the adjective “bold” comes from in his reviews. He also noted, for general interest, that he considers Aaron Copeland’s Third Symphony the “quintessential” American symphony. Schoenberg was also commissioned to compose a 21st century Pictures at an Exhibition (the Mussorgsky piano piece later orchestrated to great notoriety by Ravel), although why anyone would subject a composer to that challenge, or at least one described in that way, I’m not sure (maybe that’s where the adjective “open” comes from).
Another part of the “process” of bringing orchestral music to life is that a composer gets very little time with an actual orchestra. You are lucky if you get more than two or three run-throughs before the actual performance. While this makes sense, on reflection (orchestra time = money), it was humbling for me to think about. For example, much contemporary orchestral music is rhythmically complex. Just getting the rhythms down, to say nothing about the notes, interpretation, nuance, etc, seems like it’d take days if not weeks. Schoenberg lamented the fact that orchestra players spend their careers in effect practicing the old war horses (Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky, Mahler, etc), while contemporary works don’t get the equivalent of a New York minute.
The performance of “Finding Rothko” was moving, in the sense that the composer was right there, I understood from the lecture that the players probably had little time to get intimate with the piece and they were students to boot. Plus, it was parents’ weekend at the university so a sizable crowd was present. Critics have labeled Schoenberg’s work “mysterious” and that certainly fit.
My own take is that the piece (in four movements but I never detected any pauses between them) graduated from stirrings, swirling, swelling, and finally swarming. The beginning was very atmospheric, much like listening in a forest active with birds and wildlife. Then more energy was injected, and musical fragments began swirling around each other. They seemed to find each other in a latter section that I found to be of more traditional harmony and melody. Then came the finale with big brass, even bigger bass drum, somewhat atonal, and the swarming ensued. It backed off to let the tune through and then finished with a pleasant sweep of lush, melodious strings much like Barber’s Adagio for Strings except hopeful instead of hopeless (maybe that’s where the adjective “optimistic” comes from?). All of it was not only rhythmically complex, but exhilarating.
While I enjoyed every moment of this experience, this analytic glimpse into the process of composition and the mind of the composer followed by reward of a performance, I wasn’t sure “Finding Rothko” ultimately managed to tie those rich musical fragments together into a narrative arc. However, that may never have been the composer’s intention so take comment as an observation, not a critique. Plus, as Schoenberg stated, the work is based on four paintings by Rothko to which he had a “visceral reaction” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. However, my observation did make me curious whether another facet of 21st century composition might be fragmentation, disjointedness, or attention deficit disorder captured in music, a product of a hyper-connected, always on, multi-tasking society. When everything is supposed to be connected, maybe less really is?
In testing that hypothesis informally, I hope to discover more work from composers like Adam Schoenberg. If contemporary composers are of interest to you, you might want to read an earlier blog post of mine on Barbara Harbach.
It was annoying enough to be diverted while flying, land at an unintended airport, wait out a storm, and then arrive home three hours late the evening of September 7. But I was also missing the season’s first performance of the University of Missouri-St. Louis’ (UMSL) Arianna String Quartet. It was especially disappointing because, as someone who plays a viola, I was really looking forward to the world premier of a quintet written specifically for Arianna violist, Joanna Mendoza.
Now here is where I was redeemed by social media. At the Arianna Facebook page, someone posted a comment about the performance and I casually responded that I had been waylaid and was so sorry I missed out. How welcome it was, then, that Joanna herself messaged me (it’s not out of the blue – I took lessons for a few months from Joanna several years ago, so she does know who I am) and offered me a CD of the performance. How could I refuse?
As lovely as the first pieces were, Haydn String Quartet, Opus 33 No. 2 (“The Joke”) and the Shostakovitch String Quartet No. 3, it’s Kenji Bunch’s “String Circle” I want to tell the world about. The composer, a violist, joined the quartet.
The concert was labeled “celebrations” and indeed, this piece fulfilled that word to a t (and a l and a b and all the other letters). I would describe it as a amalgam of Americana themes and styles including jazz and rockabilly (walking bass lines), southern mountain music (hillbilly), American West (Marlboro man), Americanized Irish jig, Aaron Copeland, Broadway musical, what I heard as television sitcom themes (e.g., Mary Tyler Moore, Andy Griffith), and even rock n roll. Like alchemists, the players spun a golden tapestry out of what might at first appear disparate fragments.
I heard train whistles, fiddles, dulcimers, mandolins, crows cawing, and the whispers of a sad broken old man comically crossing the Western Plains on his mule, as if he was in an episode of the Road Runner cartoon. The third movement was somber, elegiac, like residents were waiting for the last light to go out in their dying Midwestern town, and then the walking bass line in the cello took us into the grave. As percussive as the fourth movement begins, then growing playful, perhaps a horse trotting up to a saloon, it has a big finish. And the final movement is rhythmically complex (more like the Shostakovitch).
It’s gratifying when something I write agrees with something in the liner notes I haven’t yet read. At the beginning of the fourth movement, heavy on the pizzicato, I wrote down “gathered meeting.” I’m not sure what I meant except that this phrase, among other things I’m sure, refers to how, at a Quaker Meeting (what they call their Sunday service), the comments people make as they contemplate life in silence are related by a common theme. Bunch’s composition wove together so many familiar sounds from contemporary America, some as embedded in our consciousness as iconic images from film (think Hitchcock or Gone with the Wind), but a common experience unites them all. In the advance program notes, Ms. Mendoza describes String Circle as “the sounds of old friends coming together. And who are old friends but people with whom we have many common experiences?
As thankful as I was for the CDs, the one common theme running through my head as I listened was that this was no substitute for the live performance. Especially with chamber music, you are one not only with the music but the emotions, the expressions, and the movements of each of the players.
The Arianna Quartet is a treasure. And now, I believe they have released a new CD of the Janacek quartets. Check their website . And catch their next performance.
I’m taking a graduate level sociology course, Graduate Research Methods. I am learning all the different ways to “design” a research program in the social sciences. What strikes me is the degree to which much social science research strives to look and feel like “real” science (i.e., the physical sciences) by making it quantitative, usually through the use of statistics. While it is true that interest is growing in “qualitative” social science (ethnographic studies, oral histories) research methods, the quants still rule the roost, for the most part, says my professor. It is impressive how hard social scientists work to make their research quantitatively relevant.
For my purposes here, I call this getting from words to numbers. For example, social scientists use surveys, interviews, and often large sample populations to solicit their raw data. Then they analyze the narrative responses with numbers.
Most of my career has been working in the reverse, numbers to words – that is, explaining hard-core engineering and technology in narrative form – magazine articles, face to face presentations, books, and the like. Most engineers and scientists (and lawyers, I heard from the head of the writing program at my daughter’s Alma Mater) lack good communication skills. Fortunately for my career (and paying my kids’ tuition bills), I am educated as a chemical engineer but I love to write and ended up combining the two into a satisfying career in the energy industry.
I’ve been somewhat obsessed by mathematical and computer models these days – models used in financial engineering, global climate change, environmental assessments, economic development, and many other endeavors. I hope my next book (proposal currently with an agent seeking a publisher) will be on this subject. While models are essential, called in an article published recently in SIAM News (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) the third pillar of science, they also can be abused easily. More critically, most people, educated or not, have little understanding of how these models work or how they impact our decisions, opinions, and those of our political and cultural leaders.
We are talking about MODELS in my class as well. This week, I had an epiphany. Whether you are designing a survey to ferret out some aspect of social behavior, handicapping the presidential election, forecasting what stocks and equities will do, or assessing future impact of climate change, everyone working with a model has a similar root problem: the quality of the data, the accuracy of the measurements, the utility of the raw material that is fed to the “model.”
In a survey, how you phrase a question has everything to do with the nature of the response, as well as a host of other signals, like body language, attitude and cooperation of your subject, and many others. In more quantitative models, the accuracy of your data (temperature measurements, e.g.) and the validity of your assumptions have everything to do with the quality of your output.
garbage in is always going to result in garbage out, qualitative or quantitative. For the most part, models are developed to explain the past and then make some forecast, prediction, or statement about the future (social behavior, consumer prices, inventory, weather patterns, economic growth, etc).
When we are forming an opinion about world events (our internal “models” of the world), conducting a survey for social science research, or trying to forecast what the economy will do in the next months and years, all of us should pay more attention to the quality of the raw data regardless of whether we are converting words into numbers or numbers into words. It’s hard enough to forecast under the best of circumstances. But it’s damn near impossible if the data you’ve collected about the past is suspect.
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