jwilzewske: July 2007

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

10 July 07

Odds & Ends

I was the laughing stock of inmates on the 4th of July. While they feasted on pancakes and pastries, I stared at a tray containing bread crumbs, twelve lentils, seventeen bran flakes, ten grains of rice, and a small piece of pineapple. Taunts such as, “Ain’t it time you went home on the banana boat you came on,” and “Why don’t you bugger Tony Blair,” could be heard.
Later on, down at Yard 4, Slope, delighted that his plan had worked shouted, “Ya goddam Limey. How’d ya like that tea party?”

I reached a milestone in my short-story career. I received a rejection notice from The New Yorker for my story “Do I Have a Haemorrhoid?” The New Yorker receives over 5000 submissions a month, but it was something I had to get out of my system. Following the rejection, I had a burst of short-story writing. I wrote seven stories in three weeks, all dealing with crime and punishment in Arizona. Heavy on prison violence, rapes, shankings, and gang behaviour. Most of the prison short stories I’ve read were not written by prisoners, so I’m hoping to present a more realistic picture. The stories are based on true characters and events. I sent one of them "Amazing Grace" to Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine Zoetrope All-Story to be entered in a competition judged by Joyce Carol Oates.

The next food visit is on the 18th of August. I received a menu for the New Delhi Palace Cuisine of India from Royo Girl. So it looks like she will be visiting soon. For reasons nothing to do with me, Royo Girl expects to be moving to England for a period of time at the beginning of 2008, and she has agreed that we should meet and hang out.

Thank you to everyone who has sent books from my wish list with Amazon. Not only have you helped me pass the hours, you’ve helped fill the library here, which doesn’t receive many books at all.

Good lookin’ out, dawgs!

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood

Monday, July 30, 2007

08 July 07

The Royo Romance (11)

Click here for Part 10.

“We’re talkin’ about you and Royo Girl. You ain’t reversin’ this on me,” T-Bone said.
“It was worth a try though.”
“Have you been honest with her, told her what your feelings are, your desires are, your aspirations are?”
“I’ve covered it.”
“But it must really come from the heart. Put a little soul into it, brother.” T-Bone pointed to a bird gliding overhead, slowly and majestically, as if it owned the sky. “That’s a hawk. It’s a sign for me that the day’s gonna be alright. I’ll catchya on the weekend.”
“See you then.”
“Tell your family hi from me. God loves 'em.”
“Will do.”

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Rolf Wallin: How to Build an Audience Through More Iconoclasm, Not Less

CMT: ‘Concerning King’ (2006), by the 50-year-old Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin, was performed last week by Attacca Quartet in New York. This Wallin composition originates in a mathematical analysis of serial time-samples of the acoustic frequency spectrum of a recording of an antiwar speech given by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Riverside Church in 1967. Edgy staccato passages, without much lyricism. Challenging to listeners and performers alike!

DSM: Fractious. A long musical exhortation, like the best of King’s civil rights speeches, for the listener to personally do something to make things better in the world.

CMT: Yes. Wallin’s music has the blunt forthrightness, innocence, and stark beauty that are characteristic of a Norwegian temperament and outlook. It’s music that’s insistent in asserting discordant facts, but simultaneously expansive and optimistic. It strongly indicates reasons for hope, if only you will act! Rolf studied in Oslo at the Norgesmusikkhøgskole (Norwegian Academy of Music) with Finn Mortensen and Olav Anton Thommessen and later at the University of California where he studied under Roger Reynolds and Vinko Globokar. Wallin’s music combines an intuitive gestalt with mathematics, such as his use of fractal algorithms in his compositional technique, which results in music that sometimes resembles Xenakis or Berio. In 1987, Wallin received Norwegian Society of Composers Award for ‘…though what made it has gone’. He currently still resides in Oslo.

DSM: With a performance such as the Attacca Quartet just gave, I think each faction of the audience hears what they already knew about. But they can’t help but learn something new, too. And when they leave the performance venue, they are aware of a whole different kind of music; whole new meanings. Older folks like me can see the art, musicianship and virtuosity that are part of new music at its best. This stuff makes you think, but it also makes you feel! Ideally, it may motivate you to Do, rather than just Consume or Experience. The aleatoric and other effects—they just propel and demand a greater degree of listener ‘investment’ in deriving the meaning than more canonical pieces typically do. The balance between the performers and the audience is more like jazz, that’s all.

CMT: And aleatory and electronica didn’t spring de novo from the heads of Kraftwerk or Brian Eno; they grew out of a century of musical experimentation. That’s part of what younger audience members find out in this. Fifty to a hundred years ago, Varèse was searching for, and finding, new sounds long before electronics could provide them. Cage more or less invented industrial music, using found industrial objects. Those and a legion of less well-known and under-appreciated members of the avant-garde. Wallin and others younger than he are merely carrying that banner forward and innovating entirely new banners!

DSM: Reading the New York Times’ reviewer Vivien Schweitzer’s comments, I wonder whether we were hearing the same performance! Attacca’s performance of Wallin was vibrant and thrilling and unsettling, not ‘long-winded’! And it’s seldom that we in the U.S. have the privilege of experiencing this kind of inspired aesthetic cross-pollination. Marketers and presenters are understandably uncomfortable with crossing boundaries and can hardly risk doing anything other than stick their music, and their audience, in easily identified, familiar, sanctioned categories. They dread offending those touchy patrons who will tolerate nothing that is unfamiliar or unproven, nothing that is uncomfortable. So the repertoire gets constricted—regardless how innovative the performances of canonical works may be. But we need more new music and more category-busting events if we are to evolve a new music that is both artful and speaks to growing audiences looking for bespoke ‘experiences’ rather than shrinking audiences looking for uncontroversial balm.

CMT: Outreach programs and ‘Young People's Concerts’ á la Bernstein clearly don’t ‘work’ in terms of increasing audience and paid butts in seats. The London Sinfonietta’s ‘Ether’ concerts do to a degree succeed in bridging the gap between yesterday’s avant-garde and tomorrow’s.

DSM: But much, much more quantity—and much, much more varied offerings than are currently on offer—are needed. In other words, one solution to an already over-crowded classical music market is not ‘less’ product but ‘more’! Just not necessarily more of the same canon.

CMT: One solution is to leverage the famous Chris Anderson ‘long tailed’ distribution—the economical packaging and wider accessibility and ‘push’ marketing of performances tailored to ever-narrower market segments and ever-more-specialized affinities.

DSM: We’ve talked several times in months past in this blog, about the relationship of musical composition and nonlinear systems—Roger Reynolds, Iannis Xenakis, Milton Babbitt, and others. Is Rolf Wallin using things like strange attractors (Lorenz Attractor algorithms) or Mandelbrot sets to generate his motives—surtout dans la phase “précompositionnelle”?

CMT: Well, go email him! Go to Oslo and ask him!

[Wallin, ‘… though what made it has gone’, Hilde Torgersen, mezzo;
Kenneth Karlsson, piano; from CD ‘MOVE’ 1.4MB MP3]

C ette notion que des ‘instructions de travail’ simples peuvent générer une musique imprévisible au niveau des détails, mais qui néanmoins corrèle avec les procédures, m’a beaucoup fascinée, en tant qu’alternative plus ‘liquide’ à la notion d’œuvre, alors que l’œuvre au sens traditionnel est ‘cristallisée’ ou ‘coagulée’.”
— Rolf Wallin.

06 July 07

Lost in the System

Returning from Property, I ran into Slingblade.

“How the hell are you doing?” I asked as I shook his hand.
“Jon,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Are you from England?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Is that where Buckingham Palace is?”
“Yeah. Why?”
He remained silent.
“I’m getting out soon,” I said. “I’d like to see you get out too. What’s going on with your release?”
“I’d like to go to Florida. They’ve moved the Hope Diamond to Florida for me. It was in California.” He then started reeling off the names of famous people he hoped to stay with.
“Look, you’ve served almost twenty-eight years! You were eligible for release three years ago. It’s time you were out of here! You’ve more than paid your debt back to society. You’re stuck in here because you need some help getting your release package filed and processed correctly.”
“But John McCain - ”
“Forget about John McCain! I don’t think he’s gonna come through for you.”
“I wrote to the President of the United States and the Queen of England.”
“The Queen of England!”
“Yeah. She was here two weeks ago. I saw her on the TV, so I wrote to her.”
“To help you get out?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think these people are gonna help you get out. You need an organisation that has some legal expertise in getting prisoners released, and we need to establish a place that will take you. Look, when I post stories about you on the Internet, I’m gonna mention that you’re stuck in here, and see if we can get you some help. Would you like that?”
“Yeah. Do you know my name and number?”
“Yeah. I know who you are. And if nobody helps you, then when I get out, I’ll be able to contact organisations myself.”
“Gee, thanks.”

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood

Friday, July 20, 2007

03 July 07

Odds & Ends

A Lakota Sioux Indian of the Teton-wan tribe was found hung in his cell. At first it was thought he had committed suicide, but now a murder investigation is underway. Five suspects, including Repo, were moved to the hole.

Xena was diagnosed with – shock of shocks – gender identity disorder. He is cellbound and on painkillers due to an enlarged prostrate. He has been scheduled for a biopsy.

Weird Al went to St. Mary’s hospital to get the polyps in his rectum removed. He awoke mid-operation to hear the doctor cracking a joke to a female nurse about Al’s behind. Al interjected some sarcasm and was promptly put under again.

Thanks to our friends at www.lostvault.com (including Don) Frankie has found some romance by way of Cuban Boy, who wrote to me: “I cannot fool myself or Frankie to blurt it out that I love him…I want to spend some quality time with him, and see how it goes…It might be possible that he has plans in store for me, and as I can tell by his letters to me, he has some fucking dirty things on his mind.” He also wrote: “Frankie is doing well under the circumstances. His neighbour is a gay guy, so what more can he wish for.”

The hot weather is adding new dimensions of torture to my workouts with Iron Man, who has a penchant bordering on homicidal for the phrase, "Embrace the pain." He has us doing sprints in the evening, and my heart beats so fast it's hard to get to sleep afterwards. Iron Man insisted I drink powdered milk to help gain weight.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio appeared on CNN offering Paris Hilton a cell at his jail. CNN terminated the interview when Arpaio began to boast about the pittance it costs the taxpayers to feed his inmates. What Arpaio didn't boast about was the millions he is costing the taxpayers due to all of the lawsuits he has generated. Nor did he boast about how the lawsuits are farmed out to his attorney friends, who bill the taxpayers outrageous sums. Nor did he mention the kickbacks he receives from them– including political contributions.

The library was closed because hooch was discovered brewing in there.

I’ve been receiving visits from an inmate who states he likes to hold his urine in for as long as possible - until it hurts. He then basks in relief when he finally lets it go. He keeps insisting I give it a try. I haven’t done so.

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood

Thursday, July 19, 2007

02 July 07

The Eve of Max’s Freedom

“How does it feel to be getting out tomorrow?” I asked Max.
“After eight years and eight months of prison, it feels surreal, like it’s not really happening. I’ve done half my teens and half my twenties in here.”
“Are you excited?”
“Yeah. I’m excited to start living again. I see so many people worried about getting out. What is there to worry about?”
“Not having friends, family, or money.”
“Even if you didn’t, getting out homeless is better than being in this place. I’d feel more comfortable sleeping in a cardboard box at a bus stop than being in here – ain’t nobody to tell you when to eat sleep, and shit.”
“Where will you live?”
“With my mom in Las Vegas. She’s gotta guest house behind her house. I’ll be there for a quick minute.”
“Las Vegas is a wild city. How will you stay out of trouble?”
“I think I can handle being at parties without engaging in illegal activity.”
“So you’re going to be strong minded?”
“Unless it involves debauchery or sodomy. I might overstep those boundaries. I think I deserve that though, dude. I went through puberty in here. The kind of stuff I’m thinking about is: what’s it gonna be like talking to a twenty-five-year-old woman? Will they look at me like I’m smart or stupid? Will I be able to carry on a conversation? I should probably go out and get laid before I go to a pole-dancing joint. Otherwise, I’ll probably fall in love with the first dancer I see: ‘Oh my God, I’ve got fifteen grand in my pocket. I love you. Will you marry me?’ I’m gonna whore around. I’ve earned that.”
“Will you be going places like the Spearmint Rhino or the Green Door up there in Vegas?”
“The Green Door…if I work up the nerve. Actually, you know what, dude, I’m gonna go.”
“What stuff can you do for fun away from the club scene?”
“Skydiving, kayaking, riding the wave runner.”
“What food do you want to eat the most?”
“Adobo. A Filipino dish. Chicken, beef, pork, simmered in soy sauce and vinegar until it melts in your mouth. It’s got bay leaves, peppers, and garlic in it. But as soon as I get to the store, I’m gonna get sunflower seeds, chocolate milk, and a pint of ice cream.”
“I hope you use some of that Indian casino money to further your education.”
“I will, but I’ll probably blow some of it. I need a car and a wardrobe. Mom’s already got me a Kenneth Cole watch, a pair of wraparound Oakley sunglasses, a Nokia cell phone which is also a camera, and a wallet. But I don’t want a wallet, I want a fly-ass money clip.”
“Do you have street clothes already here at the prison?”
“Yeah. Old Navy cargo shorts. A Ralph Lauren shirt with a flower design. A pair of Vans. I got little ankle socks 'cause I got nice legs.”
“Are you coming back to prison? You’re not gonna do a Piggie are you? He’s back for the second time this year.”
“Only if my brother goes to prison. I’ll visit him.”
“I wish you luck, and hope you stay in touch.”
“I’ll be commenting on your blog when I get out.”
“And no more car jacking or scalping people – alright?”
Max laughed, and said, “I’ll try not to.”

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood

Shadows Over Grandeur: Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor, Chaconne

O n one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”
— Johannes Brahms, letter to Clara Schumann.

DSM: Christian Tetzlaff’s new CD is phenomenal! And the Partita No. 2—the Chaconne—is gorgeous. Many virtuoso violinists’ gestures aim to arouse the eye as well as the ear. The use of slight detuning of the strings or oddly difficult bow techniques can draw attention to their skill. But Bach’s sonatas and partitas are not conducive to (or tolerant of) such showiness–which tends to support the argument that Bach wrote them for his own use. Tetzlaff’s interpretation of Partita No. 2 is deeply true to the spirit of this composition—this four-bar harmonic progression with sixty-four variations.

CMT: The length of the Chaconne—about 15 minutes—is interesting in itself. Profundity requires time. The artist has to have enough space to capture the audience's attention, plant some seeds, and let them grow. Tetzlaff handles this nicely. Nothing is exaggerated or played merely for ‘effect.’ It is personal and absorbing, poetical yet natural and unadorned. Tetzlaff captures all the tireless circumnavigations around this single idea, making you wonder at Bach’s rhetoric. In Partita No. 2, Tetzlaff evokes the melancholy beneath the Bach’s tribute to his first wife, Maria Barbara. There is pliancy, grandeur, musical freedom. Tetzlaff’s playing displays no desire for ‘show’ but only the desire to engage with the musical core of this piece.

DSM: Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor follows a ‘da chiesa’ “church sonata” pattern, in which the slow and fast movements alternate with each other. And the Chaconne is not a short story or a novella; it is a full-blown novel! A novel has enough space to support introducing and developing a number of characters. This famous Chaconne is positively monumental in its scope and scale.

CMT: The arrival of every four-bar phrase on D is a striking aspect of the Chaconne’s beauty and poignance. It’s an emphatic eternal return, as though it were a physical “law.” The impression is one of inescapability, of inevitability. There’s also the ‘monumentality’ of the sheer variety that emanates from the solo violin as the performer progresses through the 64 variations that comprise the Chaconne. The music and the soloist become an omnipotent force. The piece evokes a transcendent ‘Other’—the Divine, if you wish.

DSM: The sheer diversity of the 64 variations compels us to acknowledge the Other. The diversity is so enormous as to boggle the listener’s mind and cause the jaw to drop. Boggling not in awe at a virtuosic human performer, but in awe at the mysteries of Life, of the Universe.

CMT: All of Bach’s compositions are, in some way or other, variations on a thoroughbass. With the first statement of the four-bar theme, the harmonies first move in halves and quarters. Then they accelerate to quarters at the cadence. Then they speed up to sixteenths.

DSM: Many of the variations occur in pairs—the second, for example, is similar to the first, but intensified. The opening eight bars comprise the theme and its first repetition, where the first three bars of the second statement are identical to the first. Then it broadens in register and introduces thirty-second-note rhythms. In terms of our cognition, Bach's 'haptic update rate' and the hypermeter of the variations’ cycling are what impart this transcendent quality to the Chaconne. Have a look at Choi and Tan paper in this month’s issue of the virtual-reality journal, Presence.

CMT: This presages the predominant dotted rhythm of the next four variations. The dotted-rhythm variations occur in pairs. The first pair is diatonic; the second pair introduces chromaticism—the descending tetrachord goes from tonic to dominant. And now this! And now this! Layer upon layer! World without end!

DSM: The texture perpetually evolves throughtout the Chaconne as well. As the velocity increases, the texture diminishes from the three- and four-voiced chords at the beginning, to single-line writing later in the piece.

CMT: As the texture becomes thinner, the chromaticism increases—the introduction of F-sharp and E-flat in the eighth statement, for example—and the registral ‘span’ increases, from the tenths in the first two statements, to about two octaves in the eighth statement and beyond.

DSM: This process—where some elements diminish while others grow—adds to the sense that the meaning intended or the theme that Bach is referencing is a commentary on life itself, on Nature, on the Cosmos.

CMT: When the next few variations featuring sixteenths evolve into an ever-expanding array of bowing patterns, wider and wider articulations, my impression is one of galaxies, of a universe that is expanding, of a supernova.

DSM: When runs of thirty-seconds first appear they are slurred (mm. 65-72), then they are separately bowed (mm. 73-76). More and more intensity. More and more and more.

CMT: The changes of mode—to the grand D major and back to D minor—are accompanied by returns to the slower rhythms that we had at the opening of the Chaconne. There is a renewal, another aspect of the eternal return.

DSM: But with each rebirth we have the beginnings again of the growing speed and chromaticism and intensity. Inescapable. Inevitable. Changes of changes. Wheels within wheels.

CMT: There’s a tension—for the performer especially, but also for the listener—between the elements of articulation, tempo, affect, bowing, fingering, and other aspects of technque. The variations call upon these in different ways—increasing the importance of one or another of them and diminishing the importance of the others. This is part of the ‘novel-esque’ character of the piece. Obviously, it's also part of why the Chaconne is such a showcase for virtuosic playing.

DSM: But it would be a mistake to dwell on technique. A technically brilliant performance of the Chaconne may be emotionally empty. Instead, the tension between these demands is the source of a cast of ‘characters’ in the composition.

CMT: These are different voices, I think—not the soliloquy of a single voice. The textures of the four strings, how Bach uses the violin's four strings, are, to me, at least four different voices in this Partita.

DSM: The developments in the Chaconne are logical and yet suprising. Its inordinate novelty—novelty begetting yet more novelty—is the source of much of the piece's profundity.

CMT: There’s an inherent urgency to the Chaconne as well. Something like the remark J. Tillman made upon hearing Josh Bell play the Chaconne in the Washington D.C. subway station last January – ‘the kind of music the ship’s band was playing on the Titanic, before the iceberg.’

DSM: In other words, the Chaconne “knows” that it must end. It is anticipating the end of the universe. In the beginning there was the Big Bang. The Chaconne is showing us the approach of the Big Crunch.

CMT: Yes, this Chaconne is not sticking to the script of Church dogma in the way that Bach’s sacred music does. This Chaconne is agnostic, or even atheist in its view. We feel the finiteness of our existence on Earth and are not exhorted to believe in any life hereafter.

T o prepare for a friend’s funeral service, I had been practicing the Chaconne every day—fussing over individual phrases, searching for better ways to string them together, and wondering about the very nature of the piece—at its core an old dance form that had been around for centuries. After the many times I had heard and played the Chaconne, I had hoped it would fall relatively easily into place by now, but it appeared to be taunting me. The more I worked, the more I saw; the more I saw, the further away it drifted from my grasp. Perhaps that is in the nature of every masterpiece. But more than that, the Chaconne seemed to exude shadows over its grandeur and artful design. Exactly what was hidden there I could not say, but I would lose myself for long stretches of time exploring the work’s repeating four-bar phrases, which rose and fell and marched solemnly forward in ever-changing patterns.”
— Arnold Steinhardt, Violin Dreams.

F rom the grave majesty of the beginning to the thirty-second notes which rush up and down like the very demons; from the tremulous arpeggios that hang almost motionless, like veiling clouds above a dark ravine ... to the devotional beauty of the D-major section, where the evening sun sets in a peaceful valley: the spirit of the master urges the instrument to incredible utterances. At the end of the D-major section it sounds like an organ, and sometimes a whole band of violins seems to be playing. This Chaconne is a triumph of spirit over matter such as even Bach never repeated in a more brilliant manner.”
— Phillip Spitta.

Christian Tetzlaff, represented by Harrison Parrott Assoc.
Big Crunch wikipedia page
Josh Bell in D.C. Metro, L'Enfant station, JAN-2007. Washington Post article
Video of Josh Bell in D.C. Metro, L'Enfant station, JAN-2007.
Beach D. Aspects of Unity in J. S. Bach's Partitas and Suites: An Analytical Study. Univ Rochester, 2005.
Choi S, Tan H. Perceived instability of virtual haptic texture: III. Effect of update rate. Presence 2007; 16:263-78.
Efrati R. Bach: Interpretation of the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Schott, 1993.
Mastroianni J. Chaconne. Damian, 2005.
Schröder J. Bach's Solo Violin Works: A Performer's Guide. Yale Univ, 2007.
Schwenger P. The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. Univ Minnesota, 2006.
Tetzlaff C. Sonatas and Partitas for Violin. (Hanssler, 2007.)

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

01 July 07

The Fifteen Commandments of Xena

I asked Xena to write a code of conduct for Cult of Xena members.

Thus shall Jon say to Cult of Xena members:

Thou shalt not use thy Lady and Lord Xena’s name in vain unless thy art screaming in pleasure with two or more partners.

Thou shalt not murder neither genital or genitilia unless they belie thy identity or cause thee to suffer without pleasure!

Thou shalt not look at thy neighbour without lust.

Thou shalt not steal unless it is tasty and oh so sweet.

Thou shalt never hurt children or animals.

Thou shalt not hate others who are different than thee unless they hate thee first in which case thou shalt smite them with thy wasps.

Thou shalt not become discouraged in bed unless thee feel inadequate in which case thou shalt aquireth anal love beads from the Egyptians.

Thou shalt not become depressed if thee feel inadequate – instead practice with thy love beads.

Thou shalt use thy imagination when having sex.

Thou shall share partners when thy can.

Thou shalt touch thyselves openly amongst thy friends especially when doing so may arouse thy sexual partners or thyself.

Thou shalt explore thy sexual inhibitions unless they involve Commandment Five.

Thou shalt always dress sexy and smell good.

Thou shalt always lust after and think covetousishly of thy Lady and Lord Xena.

Thou shalt always be thyself when out in public especially when being thyself is controversial to the populace.

Questions for Xena – unusual or otherwise – are welcome

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

30 June 07

The Royo Romance (10)

Click here for Part 9.

“How come Royo Girl hasn’t been visitin’ lately?” T-Bone asked.
“She’s found someone else,” I said. “I can’t blame her. How can I be there for her when I’m stuck in here?”
“It’s because you haven’t stepped up to the plate.”
“What are you on about?”
“I forgot, they don’t play baseball in England, they play cricket. You need to stick it in her wicket: tell her how you truly feel about her.”
“When I did that last summer she backed away.”
“And so did you back away. You need to tell her to leave lover-boy alone, and to get back down here so you can give her a bit of old English know-how.”
“I can’t satisfy her needs from in here though can I?”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s fascinated with you. If she’s with someone else it’s just 'cause it’s convenient for the moment.”
“I can’t expect her to put her life on hold for me.”
“She already did, obviously. She’s been comin’ to see you.”
“Yeah, but she’s been keeping her options open.”
“Has she found a yoga expert who can get into positions and ticklin’ her thang?”
“No, but at the last visit she said she’s getting bored with the English accent, and thinking about moving onto the Australian one.”
“She really said that?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s tryin’ to push your button, tryin’ to tell you somethin’.”
“Like what?”
“Step up to the plate. She’s wantin’ to hear it. How many times did she visit you?”
“Maybe half a dozen or so.”
“She’s in love with you then.”
“How do you figure?”
“For her to be messin’ around with a guy in the joint like that she’s gotta be up to somethin’ serious.”
“I dunno.”
“At least you’re not thinkin’ with your thang – but I think you may have stepped on it. Do you love her?”
“In a way. I was ready to marry her last summer.”
“Then tell her.”
“Are you still looking for a woman with a little junk in the trunk?”
“Yeah. One with meat on her bones. The kind that’d shake you off. I’ve got somethin’ to work with see.” T-Bone raised his hands, and held them about a foot apart.
“What kind of mind are you looking for in a woman?”
“Stable-minded. Believes in a one-man relationship. Well-read. Not afraid to do the hump a few times a day.”
“I asked you about minds. See how quickly you reduced it to the hump.”

Conversation to be continued.

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Shaun P. Attwood

Monday, July 16, 2007

The Open-Ended ‘Present’: Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A Minor

I deology seems to pop up precisely when we attempt to avoid it, while it fails to appear where one would clearly expect it to dwell.”
— Slavoj Žižek, in Mapping Ideology, 1994, p. 4.

DSM: This Quartet was written in 1876, when Mahler was around 16 years old . . . when he was a student at the Vienna Conservatory. It was written in A minor, a key Mahler believed symbolized the ‘unconscious anticipation of things to come.’ The melancholy end of the movement is clairvoyant—premonitory of sad things ahead for Mahler, the death of his children, sad things ahead for his country, for Europe, and the world. This quartet is the only chamber piece known to be composed by Mahler. And, as you know, it’s incomplete; only the first movement was finished.

CMT: There’s an intensification of the emotion in this Piano Quartet—an increase in the magnitude of what Žižek would call ‘disturbances of the real.’ The ‘real’ manifests itself in this Piano Quartet as an innocuous cadence whose presence becomes uncanny only when the cadence keeps recurring. Its constant presence disrupts the other motifs and symbolisms, and serves as a continual reminder that these realities are only constructions. The rendering of the ‘real’ seeps into the core of the Quartet, through the ‘leaping’ motif (in the left hand of the piano in this snippet):

which irrupts on the surface again and again, setting into motion the final passage which becomes a materialization of a pure, singular drive. What was abstract in the opening becomes pernicious and concrete motive by the end—a psychological ‘fixation.’ Yes, it’s a ‘fixation,’ monotonously dominating the Quartet. This motive, an empty signifier, represents the kernel upon which Mahler’s modern subject’s reality is grounded. Irruptions of the ‘real’ become an pervasive feature in Mahler’s musical discourse in this Quartet, to the exclusion of most everything else.

DSM: This Quartet may have been written in his young student days, but it isn’t ‘juvenilia.’ It does show some emulation of Dvorak, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. It has a dark consonance that grows denser toward the end. Mahler’s transitions into remote keys occur unexpectedly. This lends a sense of vulnerability and uncertainty to the piece. Uneasiness.

CMT: Look at this tenuto combined with a marcato—a ‘portato’—intermediate note-lengths, detached but not staccato. Accentuated one way or another, more détaché than martelé—it’s played on one bow stroke, but each note is gently articulated, used when a feeling of “carry” from one note to the next is needed. The portati consume the bow—moving from the bow tip back up to the frog, say—running out of time, running out of life. This is emotional writing (violin staff in snippet below).

DSM: The melodic elements sink deeper and deeper into the bass register until all energy is spent and only a quiet malignant evocation of the minor third of A minor is left. Grim pathos here!

CMT: To a certain extent, the Quartet finds its own means of managing and containing the ruptures of the ‘real’ within its constructed musical universe. But with the increase in the size of the ruptures, the ‘real’ affects the Quartet on an more and more ‘pathological’ level. The Quartet’s means of integrating the little piece of the real into the constructed universe is not so pathological. But by the middle of the movement, we have a recapitulation for the sonata form—a kind of ‘payment of symbolic debt’ that brings an end to the pure emotional ‘drive.’ By the end, the emotional devastation wrought by the ‘real’ in this Quartet is catastrophic. The piano’s last two chords are a poignant fatalism. All other meaning has been obliterated by the end of the movement, leaving only an empty husk. In a sense, the Quartet documents an almost complete destruction of the musical universe.

DSM: As such, its drama feels a bit like Barber’s Adagio. But, your qualifier ‘almost’ is important: history is not closed here with those last two piano chords. What was to be a suicide note, a work commemorating something or someone in memoriam, has failed: in the final chords we find that the work is a testament to the author’s, and to humanity’s, resilience and ability to survive.

CMT: Ultimately, the end of the Quartet proves the continued existence of the Quartet’s subjects—the composer; the performers; the listeners—by showing that the subject still remains, despite all that’s happened. So, while the Quartet argues convincingly that catastrophes definitely do happen, the catastrophes don’t bring about a complete end. In Lacanian psychoanalysis no act is ever totally complete: something always remains. For Žižek, there’s always a survivor or survivors, however damaged they may be. As the Quartet pushes towards its final notes, a conclusive End is an impossibility. The End doesn’t come. The exhausted survivors are left to carry on.

DSM: In Lacanian terminology, the survivors of the apocalypse represent the “the excess that cannot be accounted for by any symbolic idealization”—embodiments of the ‘real.’ With the apocalypse, the exhausted survivors, having survived The End, become representatives of a rendering of the ‘real’—they are the ‘ruptures’ in this symbolic reality.

CMT: The devastation pushes Mahler’s apocalyptic narrative to its limit, as the Quartet’s narrative concludes with a catastrophic act. To continue the intensification process of the apocalyptic narrative is, I think, not possible. Maybe that’s why Mahler never wrote other Piano Quartets: how does one write after the apocalypse? How does one compose a sequel to an ‘end’ that does not bring The End?

DSM: Along with the narrative break, there’s also a dissolving of the barrier of the distance created by the apocalyptic trajectory of this Piano Quartet, and a humanizing of the pathological irruptions of the ‘real.’

CMT: I think so. And, in his book, Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin differentiates between the stylized, ‘absolute’ past of the epic and the open-ended, solvent-like ‘emergent’ or continuing reality found in the novel. An ‘epic’ is set in a past that is so distant that the ‘gap’ created is unbreachable. It is a place where everything is “absolute and complete…everything is finished, already over.” It’s a place of unwavering protagonists and narrative trajectories that never divert from the path. The beginnings of epics are “idealized” or “brightened” and the endings are “darkened.”

DSM: On the other hand, ‘novels’—or in this case, novelistic musical compositions—don’t speak to a remote experience but instead address current reality. Epics have one language, an omniscient voice that knows and tells all. In the novel there are multiple languages, a variety of voices caught in the act of development. In short, the epic is a single-voiced discourse; the novel a multi-vocal discourse. Where the epic prophesies, the novel predicts; while the epic must end in death, the novel depicts “a life process that is imperishable and forever renewing itself, forever contemporary;” the epic is closed and complete, while the novel contains “an unrealized surplus of humanness.”

CMT: Following Bakhtin we can think of this Mahler Piano Quartet as a narrative trajectory of an epic form. Its opening begins with stylized innocence, referring to an absolute past. In the middle of the piece there’s a narrowing of focus to the singular (epic) story where no provision is made for varied voices or points of view. The epic distance is solidified at the end of the Quartet as the world of the past becomes completely inaccessible. At the end there is the violin cadenza—a “canonizing of events” that leads up to the catastrophe or apocalypse.

DSM: But, if we continue following Bakhtin, a novel has discursive features that are capable of seeping into other genres, including the epic. What happens at the end of the Quartet is not the end of history but, to use Derrida’s words, “the end of a certain concept of history,” in this case the epic history of the apocalypse. Mahler’s 16 year-old premonition is of modernity itself. That’s what I hear in this!

CMT: So we have a ‘novelization’ of the Quartet’s discourse when a single voice no longer speaks monologically from an absolute, epic past, but instead multiple voices now sound from current reality—life in the aftermath of the apocalypse. The process follows Attali’s notion of innovative music, leading to “a…conception of history…that is open, unstable.”

DSM: The Quartet strikes me as a searing elegy, a dirge where “death chords” are interrupted by laments equal in their emotional force. The individualistic utterances that are set apart from the surrounding music (both physically and emotionally) have their lyrical and harmonic beauty effaced by the irruptions. The ending passage opens the way for the diffuse finale that represents an unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.

CMT: The finale is the longest section in the Quartet, and in it material from earlier movements returns cyclically. The increase in tempo over the five movements combined with the cyclic return of themes, the intensity and sheer length of the finale create an end-oriented trajectory for the work culminating in the final movement that is an exhausting tour de force. The movement is a sonata form in which every section has developmental tendencies and the recapitulation returns themes not only from earlier in the movement, but also the cyclic returns.

DSM: Well, ‘long’ is a relative term. Melissa Rose and her fellow ensemble members who performed yesterday in Kansas City performed this Quartet in 9 minutes and 20 seconds. By contrast, Christoph Eschenbach’s performance with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra last year was 13 minutes. Various other artists’ performances of this Quartet are also 12 to 13 minutes long. So it was a tremendous disappointment to hear Rose compress this piece by more than 30% and, in so doing, extinguish the portato and the emotional drama. The ‘arc’ of the recurrences lacked dignity, and the existential impact that the piece should have was blunted by this interpretation. The last two chords became no more than appendages. Regrettably, it retained nothing at all of the depth that Eschenbach projects:

[30-sec clip, Eschenbach, 2.6MB MP3]

T he dignity of Mahler’s music lies in the fact that it can be understood and understands itself, but eludes the hand that would grasp what has been understood.”
— Theodor Adorno

H ow can an artist expect that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly understood by other people, since he himself feels in the presence of his work—if it is genuine art—that he is faced by a riddle about which he too may have illusions?”
— Richard Wagner, letter dated 25-JAN-1854, to August Roeckel