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Saturday, October 25, 2008

Hespèrion XXI: Unreliable Utopias + Unreliable Narrators = Top-Flight Meta-Meta Fiction

D on Quixote,’ Menard explains, ‘interests me profoundly, but it does not seem to me to have been—how shall I say it?—inevitable. I cannot imagine the universe without the interjection of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!’ or without the ‘Bateau ivre’ or the ‘Ancient Mariner’, but I know that I am capable of imagining the universe without ‘Don Quixote’... ‘Don Quixote’ is an accidental book; it is ‘unnecessary’. I can premeditate writing, I can write it, without incurring a tautology... My memory of Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’, simplified by forgetfulness and indifference, is much the same as the imprecise, anterior image of a book not yet written. Once this image has been postulated, my problems are undeniably considerably more difficult than those which Cervantes faced. My precursor did not refuse the collaboration of fate: he went along composing his immortal work a little ‘a la diáble’, swept along by inertias of language and invention. I, on the other hand, have contracted the mysterious duty of reconstructing his spontaneous work. My game is governed by two polar laws. The first permits me to attempt variants of a formal and psychological nature. The second obliges me to sacrifice them to the ‘original’ text and irrefutably to rationalize this annihilation. In spite of these obstacles, the ‘Don Quixote’ of Menard [Savall] is more subtle than the one by Cervantes. The latter indulges in a rather coarse opposition between tales of knighthood and the meager, provincial reality of his country; Menard [Savall] chooses as reality the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’.

Romances y Músicas de Don Quijote’—performed Friday night by Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI with F. Murray Abraham in Kansas City at the Friends of Chamber Music Early Music Series—includes ballads, songs, madrigals and other musical forms quoted and mentioned by the various characters or otherwise described at various points in Cervantes’s book. Each is matched with its corresponding passage from the Quixote text. The majority of the ballads and songs are ones that were preserved in songbooks, and treatises of the period but, in all those cases in which there is no extant documentary record of the music to which the poems were sung, Savall uses a ‘contrafactum’ approach—widely used in Cervantes’s time—selecting melodies of the period that closely match the mood and metre of the poems. All the musical pieces are integrated with the narrative, as recited by F. Murray Abraham, and performed according to the indications given in the novel.

What does it mean to provide narrative history under the sign of Cervantes? It cannot mean to speak from within a reanimated 16^th-Century society with the voice of Cervantes—remember Borges’s Pierre Menard story about the inauthenticity of attempting to write ‘Don Quixote’ as if one were Cervantes. It must instead mean to speak as oneself, as an historically-informed musician/actor, using period instruments and period text, but from one’s own contemporary vantage point.

And that is precisely what Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI and F. Murray Abraham gave to us. There was a constant interplay between an ‘addressive’ mode and a ‘performative’ mode—from narratives about the self and others, to narratives to the self and to others. The mimetic, performative acts of the artists called for corresponding mimetic, performative acts by the audience members. At several points during the performance, Abraham and Savall extemporaneously addressed a young girl in the front row of the audience with her mother, who responded appreciatively. Abraham descends the 1-meter stairs—from the stage set up for the performers in front of the altar, to the floor of the church—and strolls down the aisle into the audience, and then bounds back up on-stage. On several occasions, he emerges from behind the harp and tenor viola da gamba, wending his way to center-stage as he delivers his peripatetic Quixotic recitation. In other words, this is a participatory, improvisatory production, not a recital/reading passively received. Musicians and actor-reader proposing, exposing the Self… selves, patterned after or assimilating qualities and stances of the characters created by Cervantes. Life into story, story into life.

Jordi Savall, photo ©2007 Hans Speekenbrink

[50-sec clip, Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI, 1.14. Primera Parte - Arde La Biblioteca, Capítulos V-VI: Romance De Don Beltrán, ‘¿Los Dolce Pares?’ (Juan Vasquez), 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI, 2.01. Segunda Parte - Llegada Al Toboso, Capítulo IX: Pavana I, ‘Arpa’ (Alonso Mudarra), 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI, 2.20. Segunda Parte - En La Entrada De Barcelona, Capítulos LXI-LXII: Conde Claros / Recitado, ‘¿En Fin, Por Caminos Desusados?’ [In the end, we travel by abandoned/disused roads?!] (Alonso Mudarra / Cervantes), 1.2MB MP3]

Savall’s program notes meditate on the fact that Cervantes’s literary accomplishments brought him little worldly success during his lifetime. Cervantes, thwarted and humiliated, found that the music and the ballads provided some respite; they transported him (and us) to a utopia in which cultural affirmations and myths inspire and encourage us to endure. Cervantes’s narrative, according to Savall, is designed to take us into a magical realm of imagination that goes beyond what can be expressed or suggested by words alone.

The whole of ‘Don Quixote’ is full of exotic illusions of the kind that, during the 20^th Century, Jorge Luis Borges became famous for. It is meta-fiction. In fact, in Savall’s ingenious hands, it is transformed into high ‘meta-meta fiction’: musico-theatrical fiction about fiction about fiction.

Meta? Meta-meta? Well, Cervantes tells us in Volume 1 that the original story of Don Quixote was written in Arabic by some Muslim Moor named Sidi Hamid Benengali, and that Cervantes is merely a ‘translator’ or intermediary rendering it in Spanish. This isn’t true, of course—it was a narratorly ruse by Cervantes. Cervantes tells us that Benengali isn’t the most accurate of historians. But Cervantes does call Benengali an historian—suggesting that Don Quixote/Alonso Quixana was real and that the narrative is a documentary worthy of the regard that we give to things that are real. Later, The story is narrated by ‘Cervantes’—but this time a fictional Cervantes: the meat-world Cervantes’s virtual-reality representation of himself. The SecondLife in-world character ‘Cervantes’ claims he has uncovered the translated manuscripts of Sidi Hamid Benengali and proceeds to tell us the story of Don Quixote, not as Benengali ‘wrote it down’ (because Benengali’s story has errors) but to cure Benengali’s unreliability and fix the errors and fill in the gaps. So by now we have been four times removed from the original author/narrator and nothing—Nothing!—is certain. With Savall’s and Hespèrion XXI’s and Abraham’s added interpretations, make that five times or six times! By this time, Cervantes’s unreliability as a narrator makes us hold in abeyance everything he says; makes us wonder what is reliable, if anything. Click here to have a look at Dissociative Identity Disorder DSM-IV 300.14. Does Cervantes’s familiarity with this psychiatric condition inform the way that he writes what he writes here?

To Cervantes, the world is this multivalent, polysemous, polyphonic, multi-layered, hybridized, impossibly pluralistic thing—very different from the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church at the time. Cervantes tries to link things, to map things (in what some analysts say is a ‘Neoplatonic’ way?)—microcosmos to macrocosmos; explicatio (unfolding) to complicatio ([re-]folding). The ‘Don Quixote’ novel is this way and, musically, ‘Romances y Músicas de Don Quijote’ is this way as well. It is as though it is an early 17^th Century mash-up.

I t has become a commonplace to typify modernity as both intrinsically sociological and reflexive, and to cite modernism’s self-consciousness as one of its direct results... an increased anxiety about what it means to render oneself, and to affect others, narratively. What does it mean to assume (or defy) the responsibilities which storytelling perforce assigns? ... It is the rise of the modern city or the invention of abstract labor by a market-driven economy or the legal and philosophical redefinition of personhood which underpins modern narrative... [In a realist novel] the autonomous individual continues to pursue an idealism he/she recognizes as no longer tenable, positing an immanent ‘return to itself’ in a world permeated by metaphysical homelessness. In contrast, modernist fiction disembeds the self [and substitutes instrumentalizing societal power] and, by abandoning the tempered irony which enables the self to be deployed as a fictive construction in the first place, breaks faith with ‘the only home the novel has ever known’.”
— Adam Newton, Narrative Ethics, p. 31.

The mashup juxtaposes conflicts, contradictions, jokes, tensions, post-Reformation accomodations of authority and defiances of authority. We experience blending of Biblical narratives and traditions of Church Fathers, colliding with Islamic/Moorish concepts and tensions ... with the Jewish Conversos culture of Cervantes’s family, with pagan myths, with humor, with post-Copernican science—and with restlessness as a way of modern life.

What I’m saying is that Jordi Savall et al. have concocted far more than a beautiful, historically-informed musical-theatrical production. This is not your typical ‘Early Music’. They are rendering a multi-cultural, post-modern new-music multi-media mashup that concomitantly is authentic Spanish Renaissance early music ... that is to say, a work that’s positively brilliant as post-modern Web 2.0 culture and, as such, is as fresh and radically ‘meta’ as any artistic work you’ll find anywhere. The literary and musical effect is, much as Cervantes once wrote, ‘exemplary’—the elements juxtaposed in this way enable us to contemplate many thoughts, different interpretations, roll them around in our minds. ‘Exemplary’ fictions, told in a light-handed, exemplificatory, ‘meta-meta’ way—the reader-listener turned out on her/his own, to figure out what to make of the mashup’s meaning.

M enard’s aim was never to produce a mere mechanical transcription of the original ‘Don Quixote’; he did not propose to copy it. His ambition was instead to produce a work that would coincide—word for word, line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes... The initial method he conceived was relatively simple: to know Spanish exceedingly well; to re-embrace the Catholic faith; to fight against Moors and Turks; to forget European history between 1602 and 1918; and ultimately to be Miguel de Cervantes... Shall I confess that I often imagine that he finished it and that I am reading Don Quixote—the entire work—as if Menard [Savall] had conceived it? Several nights ago, while leafing through Chapter XXVI—which Menard had never attempted—I recognized our friend’s style and, as it were, his voice in this exceptional phrase: ‘The nymphs of the rivers, mournful and humid Echo’.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.

Hespèrion XXI’s account conveys this sort of uncertainty and cross-cultural mashup. The theme of surviving culture wars and other adversities through self-reliance—a [post-]modernistic sense of this is well-represented in these pieces. So also is Cervantes’s rejection of doctrinaire superstition and magic while still nurturing hope in things unseen. Savall and the ensemble musicians deliver animated, convincing performances. And Abraham (perhaps best known for his Academy Award for Best Actor in 1984 for his portrayal of Antonio Salieri in ‘Amadeus’) has stage presence and dramatic skills that are magnetic, riveting—ideally suited to this historically-informed production. The poetic urgency of Abraham’s delivery is wholly compelling, especially when evoking the Renaissance Jesuit’s skeptical regard for faith as a way to explain events in the physical world; when evoking Cervantes’s ironies; when rendering his humor and ruses.

We were 100% captivated by this superb performance—diverted by it, yes, but also led to reflect on the ambiguities and conflicts that the elements that were juxtaposed in the meta-meta-mashup conjure … to decide what they mean for us in the audience, and what they signify to Cervantes and to Jordi and his colleagues. [Jordi’s trick faux-encore to surprise Murray Abraham by having the ensemble sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him—before the group did their real encore—was a nice, impromptu touch. Abraham was genuinely moved by this gesture, and so, too, were we in the audience. Bravo!]

T o make the world plausible [the playwright; the composer] has to create someone with a substantial ego, someone who would recognize the existence of many other egos, but subdue them sufficiently by the sheer size of his own generous, charming, overwhelming confidence—someone who would believe himself to be the center of any universe—in other words, an actor. ... Inventing worlds is our stock in trade.”
— F. Murray Abraham, Midsummer Night’s Dream: Actors on Shakespeare, p. 2.

I t seems to me that the situation we find ourselves in today because of fundamental interpretations of religions has steered us into violence, which is what most religions suggest they are against. The point is that it’s not true. If Christians really practiced what Christ suggests, which I believe is great and revolutionary, and if people really followed the tenets of Mohammad, which embraces many religious ideas… But they’re not. … People who are suffering because of religions still cling to their religions. I don’t quite understand that. It’s possible they don’t want to think for themselves. It’s possible they prefer to give over their responsibilities as thinking sentient human beings to some ‘powers that be’, [prefer] to relinquish their responsibilities to their children, their families, their future.”
— F. Murray Abraham, interview in Gothamist, 21-APR-2008.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Bronfman and Everest: Balakirev’s and Ravel’s Virtuosic Fantasies

In the U.S. the new season of DiscoveryChannel’s documentary, ‘Everest: Beyond the Limit’, is currently being broadcast as an ongoing series of television programs. Each episode shows climbers—young and old ones, highly-skilled ones and relative novices—risking their lives trying to reach the summit of Everest. Not surprisingly, the drama revolves around the steepest, riskiest, most hostile parts of the climb. We viewers feel a [morbid?] fascination with the ever-present possibility of catastrophe—a fascination equal to the admiration we feel for the climbers’ endurance and achievements and successes. The spectacle of the natural beauty that’s connected with the pursuit captivates us, too, as does the diversity of humankind when (self-) driven to these extremes——when (self-) driven to accept such suffering and risk, in pursuit of an extreme, world-class goal.

‘Summits’ of a different kind—musical comparables to Everest—are in store when pianist Yefim Bronfman performs on Friday evening in the Kansas City Friends of Chamber Music Master Pianists Series. The program includes Balakirev’s ‘Islamey’ and Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, among other works. The program requires a capacity to play these technically demanding works—prodigious athleticism—but never decoupled from the capacity to play with interpretive skill. In other words (and to paraphrase Stephen Pettitt, music critic of The Times in London), true virtuosity requires as much poetry as athleticism—or so Bronfman implies, in devising a program like this.

A virtuoso is a musician who can play with panache a score of seemingly impossible technical difficulty... The north face of the Eiger has been conquered. The musician has, once again, triumphed over impossible adversity... A significant part of the musician’s craft has to do with the acquisition—through many hours, many years, of arduous, repetitive practice—of a very particular athleticism, one that enables the accurate playing of a large number of notes within a small amount of time while still making a pleasing sound. Virtuoso playing is a high-wire act, and the sensation it delivers to the audience similar. Surely he’s going to fall off at that speed, we think. When he gets to the other side intact we still think it a miracle. … Surely some dark magical force must be at work to enable such superhuman miracles of execution. … Indeed, is what seems like virtuoso playing necessarily that? Don’t misunderstand me. Even if its purpose is simply to thrill its audience, much as a particularly adroit footballer thrills with a piece of consummate skill, there’s nothing wrong with this showy variety of virtuosity. It’s fun to hear — and see — a violinist skate across a Paganini Caprice now and again. Yet it’s hardly a test of the most insightful musicianship. The player isn’t required to see between the notes, because between the notes there lies precisely nothing. There’s no insight into the human condition. No miracle of contrapuntal logic. Just a musician showing off his or her amazing skills. But maybe we should recognise more generously than we do the exercise of the inconspicuous brand of virtuosity... Virtuosity need not be a matter of playing lots of notes brilliantly at all. The truth is that all serious music worth the playing and singing, no matter how physically simple it might seem, requires a certain virtuosity of the mind. … Although the notes in Mozart might come relatively easily, the contextualising of them, the weighing of them, the nuancing of them, does not. Mozart demands such precision of touch, colour and phrase that an interpretation can fail on the slightest contextual faux pas. Moreover, it’s the performer who must find a personal context, since playing Mozart is no more a matter of choosing one correct way than is playing anything else. Control and freedom need to co-exist in perfect balance, so that the mysterious eloquence of the music is allowed to emerge, the player opening a window on to the soul of a miraculously gifted person. That is true virtuosity.”
— Stephen Pettitt.

In 1928, Ravel wrote, “ ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, piano pieces after Aloysius Bertrand, are three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity.” Well, Mozart can be technically demanding, too—the two-part cadenza of the opening allegro of K 466, for example. But we usually think of the virtuosity required for Mozart as predominantly interpretive virtuosity. Similarly tough: revealing the emotion in Chopin without falling into cliché, or articulating the voices within Bach without being stilted and suppressing the emotion or creating a fugue-pastiche. Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ imposes demands that are simultaneously interpretive and technical/athletic——hideously, dauntingly so. Aloysius Bertrand’s prose-poems, ‘Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot’, were published posthumously in 1842 and re-issued in 1895, when Ravel’s friend Ricardo Viñes discovered them and introduced them to Ravel. Later Ravel returned to the poems and was captivated by their grotesque, hallucinatory imagery as an evocative subject for a piano composition.

And what about ‘Islamey’—composed in 1869 by Mily Balakirev, then 32 years old? The first theme is a folk dance from the Caucasus. The prevalent augmented seconds lend a south Asian ‘islamic’ aspect. The central section is lyrical and derives from an Armenian folk song. The slow, exotic middle section contrasts with the energetic outer parts. In the third section, Balakirev reprises the thematic material of the opening, culminating in a pyrotechnical coda. ‘Islamey’ is comprised of variations with increasingly, insanely, demonically complex elaborations. (Maybe we should note that Balakirev had a nervous breakdown in 1872, three years after composing this piece?) So our definition of ‘virtuosity’ gets worse: virtuosity is defiant and risky; it tempts fate; it scoffs at danger. It wouldn’t be virtuosic if catastrophe were impossible. You have to work without a safety net! (Balakirev punched out—became a railway clerk for awhile; worked as a school inspector until 1883; then returned to music as Director of the Imperial Chapel and conductor of the Imperial Musical Society, where he remained until retiring in 1895.)

I n music, no less than in athletics, audiences thrill at witnessing exceptional feats of physiological accomplishment, and they fête and reward those who
afford them such thrills.”
— Jane O’Dea, p. 40.

H e did not appeal to the emotions, except those of wonder—for his playing was statuesque, cold, beautiful, and so masterly that it was said of him, with reason, that he would play with the same care and finish if roused out of the deepest sleep in the middle of the night.”
— Sir Charles Halle, review of Thalberg, quoted in O’Dea, p.39.

In ‘Performance as an Extreme Occasion’, Edward Said writes that the contemporary concert is an extraordinary event, highly specialized and totally alienated from ordinary life. Before the mid-20th century performers were often also composers, and listeners were also often amateur musicians. Today the audience is marginalized. The specialized artist so ‘owns’ the work today! The recital has come to be an occasion for the display of extreme ability—on a level that’s totally alien to the listeners, most of whom are neither familiar with the scores nor play any instrument or sing. Their ‘regression of hearing’ (Adorno’s phrase) is manifested in “the listener’s poignant speechlessness as he/she faces an onslaught of such refinement, articulation and technique as almost to constitute a sado-masochistic experience.”

The audience has become more passive and concurrently we get this spectatorly cult of virtuosity. But why has social power recently captivated the imagination of popular culture—and academic anthropologists as well? Surely it’s not just a consequence of fewer practicing amateurs! Is it instead a society-wide reaction to our diminishing power as individuals? Is it a reaction to the decimation of social cohesiveness by the recent emergence of long-tailed, fragmented, web-based culture? Is it a backhanded way to oppose the ‘colonization’ of our selves—that is, an endorsement of and vicarious participation in demonstrations that individual victory over mass culture is still possible—more than gazing at an athlete/artist’s literal victory over physical difficulty?

Stanley Barrett asserts that the answer can be found in the effect of the past 100 years’ warfare throughout the world; the end of old colonialism and emergence of new forms of colonialism under the guise of multinational corporate globalization; the information and technology revolution, mass culture and cultural fragmentation. “The notion of a homogeneous, cohesive, geographically-bounded local culture consisting of people who share a putative common ancestry is obsolete,” he says. The diversity of distinctive cultures and identities “has become constricted, and ‘culture’ has become the new equivalent of ‘race’: difference-as-inferiority; new structures of exploitation and domination; new relations of power saturated with new possibility of inequality and disparities.”

I hope that hearing Bronfman perform on Friday may shed additional light on these issues. Me, I’ll be listening from a moderate elevation, at ‘Base Camp #3’!

T he question of the relationship of the individual person or subject to domination carries ‘resistance’ to the level of consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, and identity.”
— Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject.

Everest: Cairns (memorials to those who have died on the mountain)

[Mr. Bronfman was born in Tashkent, in the Soviet Union, on April 10, 1958. Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, and made his international debut two years later with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony. In Israel, he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, at the Samuel Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the United States he studied at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute—with Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. He made his New York Philharmonic debut in May l978 and his New York recital debut in January 1982 at the 92nd Street Y. Bronfman became a U.S. citizen in 1989. In 2006, Bronfman partnered with Emanuel Ax in Mozart's ‘Concerto for Two Pianos’ conducted by Lorin Maazel. Early in 2007 he premiered Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto, written for him and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to solo recital appearances, he recently served as the Pianist in Residence with the Berlin Philharmonic and completed recordings of all the Beethoven piano concerti and the Triple Concerto with violinist Gil Shaham and cellist Truls Mork with the Tönhalle Orchestra Zürich under David Zinman for the Arte Nova/BMG label. Bronfman is a “Perspectives” artist at Carnegie Hall during this 2007-08 season.]