Tor Aspaas & Per Skalstad Duo: ‘Story’ and ‘Return’ in Norwegian Violin-Piano Miniatures

G   arborg’s novels are profound and gripping while his essays are clear and insightful. He was never inclined to steer clear of controversy. His work tackled the issues of the day, including the relevance of religion in modern times, the conflicts between national and European identity, and the ability of the common people to actually participate in political processes and decisions. Although he was to become known as an author, it was as a newspaperman that he got his start. In 1872 he established the newspaper Tvedestrandsposten, and in 1877 the Fedraheimen, where he served as managing editor until 1892. In the 1880s he was also a journalist for the Dagbladet in Oslo.”

I f you are about to perform a ‘miniature’—or any piece, really—it’s good to first take a moment and re-tell yourself a story that, to you, the piece embodies. “Write it down and clip it onto the sheet music,” my piano teacher told me when I was 8. “If the composer didn’t say what story the music is telling, then you need to make up a story. Or else how are you going to know what you’re going to say, or how you’re going to say it?” Five decades later, I continue to think that that’s a great idea. If a story wasn’t supplied by the composer, then you need to make one up. Make one up, write it down, remind yourself of it each time, right before you begin playing the piece.



    [50-sec clip, Tor Espe Aspaas & Per Kristian Skalstad, Johan Halvorsen, ‘Suite Mosaique, No. 4: Chant de Veslemøy’, 1.6MB MP3]



    [50-sec clip, Tor Espe Aspaas & Per Kristian Skalstad, Johan Halvorsen, ‘Suite Mosaique, No. 4: Chant de Veslemøy’, 1.6MB MP3]

T or Aspaas and Per Skalstad are very good at telling stories. They must’ve had music teachers like Ruth Mapson of my own childhood.

V eslemøy—in morose, poignant, fateful F-sharp minor. Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata is in F-sharp minor... Also, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1... Scriabin’s Piano Concerto and his Piano Sonata No. 3, too. Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Vieuxtemps’s Violin Concerto No. 2... Second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23... Reger’s and Tippett’s second string quartets; Shostakovich’s string quartet No. 7... Two of Chopin’s mazurkas, plus a nocturne... Last but not least, two preludes and fugues in J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier are in F-sharp minor. F-sharp minor carries a lot of ‘attitude’.

F   -sharp minor, although it leads to great distress, nevertheless is more languid and ‘love-sick’ than lethal. Moreover, it has something abandoned, singular, and misanthropic about it.”
  —  Johann Mattheson, 1713.

B ut what about Veslemøy? What do we know about ‘Veslemøy’?

I n Norwegian, it nominally means “little girl” ... a compound of ‘vesle’ = “little” and ‘møy’ = “girl”. But it’s way more than that. This name was used by Norwegian author Arne Garborg for the main character in his epic poem ‘Haugtussa’ [The Mountain; literally ‘heap of rocks’] (1895). Almost certainly this popular Neo-Romantic Garborg poem was the inspiration for Halvorsen when he wrote this Suite in 1898. But the idiomatic compound ‘veslemøy’ was a commonplace way before Garborg even. It connotes ‘fairy’ or ‘sylph’—mysterious; charming and beautiful but creepy; other-worldly.


T he poem is propelled by Garborg’s rural culture and infused with its values and lore. A number of supernatural beings—like the Draug, the Hulderpeople, and other characters from Norse mythology inhabit the epic. A ‘haugtussa’ is originally a female subterrestrial (a woman troglodyte of the Hulder race). But here the main character, beautiful young above-ground Veslemøy, is revealed to be a Hulder and a haugtussa. The 219-page poem is dark and foreboding; it is not for no reason that its sequel, published in 1900, was ‘I Helheim’ (In Hell). More than a stereotypical, ever-cheerful Norsk outlook  :Ѣ  Garborg was rendering Dante-like divina commedia, a long oblique rant against the church and what he felt were deleterious social effects of church dogma and pious blind eyes turned away from real problems in the world—poverty, starvation, indignity, suffering.

V eslemøy (also called Gislaug) is the youngest of three sisters, and lives with her elderly mother near Jæren in rural Norway, south of Boknafjorden and northwest of Dalane in the county of Rogaland. The oldest sister has died, we are not sure how, maybe from tuberculosis, and her other sister has fled some time ago from the countryside to the big city—by implication, that sister has become a prostitute, wild and estranged from her family. So Veslemoy and her old mother are alone.

T hey are dirt-poor and live as tenants on a farm; like characters in a fantastical Haldor Laxness novel, they are harassed to their wits’ end by the local land-owner.

V eslemøy has a precocious natural insight into people and situations. She is savant-like in her surprising confabulations, each story containing enough kernels of truth to have a devastating verisimilitude. Other kids (and adults, too) gather around her to hear her tell stories, or to pose riddles—a famous winter fireside pastime for us fun-loving Norwegians.

V eslemøy habitually makes up stories, stories upon stories. One night, her dead sister visits Veslemoy and tells her that she is endowed with the capacity for ‘second sight’, to be psychic, and to foretell what will happen. Veslemøy’s stories are not entirely her ‘own’, and Veslemøy’s compulsion to tell them is not necessarily hers to control. The sister’s revelation is a great burden to Veslemøy, but she has no choice but to accept it.

G arborg’s point seems to be that it is better to be a ‘seer’—better to be spiritually ‘awake’ in a Zen sort of way or the state of Bodhi awake-ness attained by the Indian spiritual teacher Gautama Buddha and his disciples—than to be stultified/mortified by the oppression of routine day-to-day life and the paternalistic rule of priests. From this point forward, visions haunt Veslemøy, and the netherworld spirits pursue her. She is narrowly avoids being abducted underground by the Hulders. She has also the ability to see what symbolic animal spirit each person around her has behind him or her.

V eslemøy experiences the problems of tweens in any age: crazy first love, almost gets engaged to the kid on the farm down the road. Instead, the foolish boy finagles marrying a rich girl, and the experience of being dumped unhinges Veslemøy. Veslemøy has to fight even harder with her inner demons, who abduct her into the mountains. There, she meets trolls—some who are decent souls and others of ill repute. She commiserates with them about their crappy fate as outcasts, and how they have been deprived of a life worth living. The Haugkall (mountain king) proposes to marry her, despite the outrageous difference in their ages. She tells him No, Hell No [Well, actually she collapses because she sees that he has the mouth of a rat.] and is brought home sick and delirious. At the end of the poem, the dead sister consoles her again, and admonishes her to buck up and to get ready descend into Hell, accompanied by a volve/voluspa/goddess/wizard/witch/wolfwoman who will teach her “through horror, the work which will become your honor”.

H   er ser du Visdoms Volve staa.
Ho vil deg gjeva djupt aa sjaa
og store Røynslur herde.
Ho bèr deg gjennom Helheims Gov;
der skal du skimte Livsens Lov
og gjennom Rædsle lære
det Verk, som vert di Ære.

[Here before you Wisdom—Volve—stands.
She gives you depth of seeing
and lets you hear what big Røynslur hears.
She compels you to go to Hell
where you can’t help but glimpse the Law of All Life
and from Horrors-more-than-Faith learn
that work which must be(come) your Fate-Honor.]
  —  Arne Garborg, ‘Haugtussa’, 1895.

S o Halvorsen didn’t need to write any story or provide program notes or annotations to his music; the notions above would’ve been familiar (from Garborg’s Haugtussa 1895 poem, or from Grieg’s Haugtussa lieder from the same year) to any Scandinavian who would’ve heard Halvorsen’s violin-piano duo in 1898 or the years shortly after.

B ut we need to write the story down and remember it, to make these few notes mean something. For us, Halvorsen’s chamber music—much of it, except, say, for the Passacaglia and Sarabande Duos for violin and viola—might seem sentimental or dated, hence, dismissible, if we don’t bother to find out about what motivated the composer to write it. We need to invest a little energy to find out why it mattered at the time—what the social context was, who the performers and early audiences for the works were, and what they cared about—in order to accurately value the works. In the case of Halvorsen, Aspaas and Skalstad do a wonderful job of reanimating these pieces, entering into them, and reminding us of the characters’ stories—and how being ‘awake’ and engaged matters in present-day society. Fear and absurd suffering as the ‘juice’ for creating meaning and redeeming humankind; theodicy; the eternal return; Neo/TheOne; an 1895 feminist ‘Matrix’, sort of.

S o Halvorsen’s violin-piano duos are nothing like Stravinsky, Elgar, Elliot Carter—any of the works that fill the 110 pages of ‘violin-piano’ repertoire in Hinson’s book. We have wonderful violin double-stopped consonance flavored by piano dissonance. We have haunting, brooding, poignant, elegant, serious recital behavior, not encore bon bons. We have exalting, transcendent phrasing if you are careful and listen for it. The pieces are short. If you blink, you’ll miss it.

B rahms tries to make the violin and piano co-equals; Schumann instead often pitches the violin as a virtuosic protagonist against the piano. But those are ‘big’ works. The small scope and small timescale of miniatures like Halvorsen’s don’t allow for that kind of dramatic development. Instead, we have these mystical, Neo-Romantic microfictions.

T he uneven weight between the bowed and hammered strings does not have time to sink-in or become problematical. The piano roams free in the middle and treble registers, just as a microfiction character would. Listeners’/readers’ minds are obliged to interpolate, to read between the lines. Microfiction will not support any expectation of explicit storytelling. It is all between the lines. It must be so. There are too few lines for it to be otherwise. So, with microfiction (i.e., miniatures like Halvorsen’s), we understand its ground-rules before we begin, and we relish the extra interpretive responsibility that the author/composer places on us.

Y ou might think that miniatures would be ideal for our time—an era of short attention-spans and a taste for sound-bites and web-surfing. But no. The small size actually requires patience and effort.

T he replication 8-8 | 8-8 in this 32-bar piece provides a natural suggestion of reconsideration. Not ‘repetition’ but something more like... like... like Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’ where different chapters are told from the point of view of different characters, whose personalities change as the story proceeds. Veslemøy above ground starts with a downbow, with the mute on (piano-violin duo, with the mute on!), and the Veslemøy underground, bowing inverted now begins with upbow. The violin before, and the violin after. Piano, trans-substantiated; shape-shifting piano. The repetition/reconsideration/return (with the upbow/downbow inversion effects and with properly calibrated subterranean piano pedaling) provides us a chance to get inside each character’s mind and discover each character’s uncertainties—about what is real and what is illusion; about who one is and who one was/will be. Fiction? Hardly!

W e find that each character is receptive to all types of detail. Poetics are found in merely taking a drink of water; magic is found in merely talking to the wolf. Don’t ignore the wolf or pretend like it’s not there. You’d better talk to it.

I f this stuff interests you, please have a look at Kristin Rygg’s nice chapter in Ulla-Britta Lagerroth and Erik Hedling’s book (link below). Clairvoyance, mystical duties, the obligation to give voice to songs not yet born, the symbolic meanings of upbow and downbow.

T or Aspaas was born in 1971 in Røros. Aspaas received his Diploma in Piano Performance in 1996, studying with Liv Glaser and Jens Harald Bratlie. Since 2007 he has served as professor of piano on the faculty of the Academy in Oslo. He is particularly active and sought after as a chamber musician; ensemble performance and accompaniment are also his specialties at the Academy. Besides his concertizing and teaching activities, Aspaas has served as artistic director for the chamber music festival Vinterfestspill in Bergstaden on Røros since 1999.

P er Skalstad was born in 1972. At age 12, he entered the Norwegian State Academy of Music (NSAM) in Oslo, pursuing both piano and violin. Skalstad got his Diploma of Violin Performance in 1995, studying with Stig Nilsson, Lars Anders Tomter and Camilla Wicks. In 2002, he completed his Diploma of Conducting, also at NSAM. In 1988 Skalstad joined the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. With the NCO, Skalstad plays the viola when needed. Per founded the Oslo String Quartet in 1991, with Geir Inge Lotsberg (viola), Åre Sandbakken and Øystein Sonstad (cello). Skalstad was assistant concertmaster in the Norwegian Opera Orchestra from 1993 to 2005, and he has performed as a soloist with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, the Bergen Philharmonic, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and the Risør Festival Strings. In the 2004 Halvorsen recording with Aspaas, Skalstad played on the Halvorsen`s 1705 Rogeri.

Johan Halvorsen Chamber Music

• 6 Stimmungsbilder for Violin and Piano (1890)
  
• Suite in G Minor for Violin and Piano (1890)
  
• Danses norvégiennes for Violin and Piano (1897)
  
• Elegie for Violin and Piano (1897)
  
• Passacaglia in G Minor on the Theme by Georg Friedrich Händel (from Harpsichord Suite in G minor, HWV 432) for Violin and Viola (1897)
  
• Sarabande con Variazioni in G Minor on the Theme by Georg Friedrich Händel for Violin and Viola (1897)
  
• Crépuscule for Violin and Piano (1898)
  
• Suite Mosaïque for Violin and Piano (1898)
  
• String Quartet in E, Op.10 (1901)
  
• Little Dance Suite for Violin and Piano, Op.22 (1902)
  
• Slåtter for Violin Solo (1903)
  
• Miniatures, 5 Easy Pieces for 2 Violins and Piano, Op.29 (1910)
  
• To serenader for Violin and Piano
  
• Norske viser og danse for Violin and Piano
  
• Concert Caprice on Norwegian Melodies for 2 Violins

J    ust knowing the dream, just knowing the song,
the tune will hold fast in your mem’ry—
seductively beckoning the whole day long.”
  —  Arne Garborg, ‘Haugtussa’, 1895.

• Tor Espen Aspaas website
  
• Per Kristian Skalstad website
  
• Oslo String Quartet website
  
• Johan Halvorsen page at Wikipedia
  
• Johan Halvorsen, Suite Mosaique score at IMSLP
  
• Aspaas T, Skalstad P. Johan Halvorsen Violin-Piano Duos. (2L, 2004.)
  
• Daverio J. Crossing Paths. Oxford Univ, 2008.
  
• Faulkner W. As I Lay Dying. Modern Library, 2000.
  
• Hinson M, Roberts W, eds. The Piano in Chamber Ensemble: An Annotated Guide. 2e. Indiana Univ, 2006. (section on Duos for Violin & Piano, pp. 3-119, omits Halvorsen)
  
• Hinson M. Essential Keyboard Repertoire, Vol. 8 (Miniatures). Alfred, 2006.
  
• Loft A. Violin and Keyboard: The Duo Repertoire: Volume II: From Beethoven to Today (1970). 3e. Hal Leonard, 2003.
  
• Neuhaus R. As I Lay Dying: Meditations Upon Returning. Basic, 2003.
  
• Rygg K. Mystification through musicalization & Demystification through music: The case of Haugtussa. in Cultural Functions of Intermedial Exploration. E. Hedling & U-B Lagerroth, eds. Rodopi, 2002. pp. 87-102.
  
• Veslemøy Vråskar, photographer in Olso

Slings and Arrows of Fortune: Benjamin Bagby’s Beowulf & Epic Chamber Music

H    wæt. We Gardena in gear-dagum
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Literal tr.:
What! We of the Spear-Danes in old days
of the people-kings the power heard
how the princes their brave deeds did.

R. Liuzza tr.:
Listen! We have heard of the glory in bygone days
of the folk-kings of the Spear-Danes—
how those noble lords did lofty deeds.

S. Heaney tr.:
So: The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had
    courage and greatness.
We have heard of these princes’ heroic
    campaigns.”

M edievalist Benjamin Bagby performs the epic Anglo-Saxon poem, ‘Beowulf’, in his one-man drama on Saturday evening in Kansas City. Bagby performs on an historically-reconstructed six-stringed harp, part of which comes from remnants recovered from a medieval gravesite. The poem is the oldest extant complete poem in Old English, a narrative that tells the story of the chieftain, Beowulf, who defeats the monster, Grendel, in battle. The epic/mythical qualities of it are not unlike other Northern European epics, such as the Norse Eddas (sagas) or Kalevala.

B agby hails from a Germanic clan that emigrated from Jutland to northern England in about 630, and subsequently to colonial Virginia a millennium later. In addition to his activities as founder and director of the early music ensemble Sequentia, Benjamin writes about historical performance practice and teaches at the Sorbonne and North America. In 2003, Bagby developed the program ‘Chant Wars’ with Katarina Livljanic at Harvard. Bagby was educated at Oberlin College and at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. Bagby and Glagolitic chant scholar Katarina Livljanic were recently married.

T he ‘auspiciousness’ of the narrative of Beowulf is wonderfully portrayed by Bagby—whether you see him perform ‘live’ or on the excellent 2006 DVD. Having the work performed an old, old stone cathedral with hewn timbers for beams, and minimal central heating on a cold winter’s night helps to reinforce the momentousness of the epic. Beowulf aims to convey something of import to each contemporary listener, clan-member or not. Having the scary, decrepit manuscript projected in front of us adds still more.


T he Grendle ‘fight scene’, I suppose, is what gets the most attention, in almost any casual reading of the text. The mechanics of story-telling and drama: these are what English teachers tend to focus on when teaching Beowulf. The sheer exoticness of a text so old as this tends to limit the serious consideration of why it is the way it is. The ambiguities in the manuscript itself offer prodigious challenges to translators, never mind interpreters or theorists or ordinary readers/hearers.

B ut as we hear Bagby render this in performance today—in this time of widespread terrorism, regime-change and unplanned succession; amid conflicted amity, globalization and disputed sovereignty—what strikes me most is the theme of unrelenting confrontation—the necessity and inevitability of it. The human condition is perilous, no end in sight, and victories are always mixed, pyrrhic ones. Glory is the harbinger of doom. This mortal coil is in fact and above all else a coil—a chute that leads precipitously to our unbidden shuffling off it. No one gets out of here alive.

C    oil  — (n.) a spiral; tumults, troubles; a noisy disturbance, fuss, ado; the bustle and turmoil of this mortal life; (v.t.) to cull or sacrifice; to thrash; to lay in rings or spirals; to turn; to mound up; to stir.”

T    he meaning might be: ‘when we have unwound and worked off this spool of mortality’.”
  —  Schopenhauer, ‘Parerga & Paralipomena’, Volume 2, §232a.

I n Bagby’s wonderful delivery we hear vocal/musical and stylistic elements of these confrontations. Nothing sung/said is merely a formality. Not all of it is ‘consequential’. But all of it is confrontational. Hwæt! No ‘arrival’ lacks a ‘departure’. What comes in must go out; what goes up must come down. Beowulf ‘confronts’ any and all who would cling to wishful thinking or self-delusion. The end is not ‘tragic’; it just ‘is’.

W hy are there four funerals in Beowulf? Some people make a big thing about thematic repetition and the rhetoric of ‘aftermaths’. Yes, well... As a person descended from Scandinavian ancestors and as one who has read the Eddas since I was about 15, these epics and skaldic ‘lays’ and so on are just profoundly weird. At 3,182 lines length, its epic-oid length does lend to it something of the status of holy scripture—something more canonical and purposefully-structured than a clan fable.

B ut the monster slaying and fight scenes are playful—not unlike modern fantasy lit, if you ignore the extreme agèdness of the manuscript.

T he repetitions in Beowulf might be thought to be driven by the poetics or vocality of the thing. But the repeats have meta-linguistic effects, too. There is a normative fugue-like texture—which makes us notice the variations or ‘counterpoint’. These come alive in Bagby’s performance, whereas they are likely otherwise to remain mute on the printed page. You have to experience the thing ‘live’ to really ‘get it’.

T he epicness of Beowulf is conveyed by many aspects of its style—for example, the namelessness of many of the speakers. We don't know the messenger’s name; we don’t know the name of the mourning woman at the end of the poem; we don’t know the names of the retainers who ride around Beowulf’s funeral pyre. We’re not meant to know them; their names aren’t important to the story-as-epic. In fact, selective anonymity is part of what makes us know it’s an ‘epic’.

T he poet’s point of view is one recalling some much earlier time—and Bagby’s performance, a reenactment of that recall. He brings that recalled world “forward”, into the Present, just as the poet did into his own Present.

I  ask myself, ‘Why?’ Why would anybody want to do this, as a performative sort of social or collective memory? For what purposes? What good would it do?

F or the poet, this wasn’t a clannish or courtly entertainment—nor, for us, is it some minor amusement to be consumed quickly and forgotten. It has real substance—weight. It’s a timely political statement—according to John Hill. He notes that the medieval world was “institutionally more complex... church and clergy, king and court. It was socially stratified for different levels of nobility and landholdings, including slavery, and was economically organized for both mundane and prestige trade... Wessex and Mercia and other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are in a world of sometimes-hostile arrivals and departures, of aetheling tensions and assassinations... Perhaps the narrative pulse of Beowulf ... might be taken by Anglo-Saxons as a model, for their times, of good customs, heroic/fame-enhancing behaviour, and great kingship in at least two forms: the two-generational Danish model and the Beowulfian model of sovereignty, enlarged to include broader kinship amity.”

A    rrivals, especially unanticipated ones, are electric with possibilities—with unexpected surprises ranging from the pleasant and desired, to the tense and potentially dangerous, to the terrible and unwished-for... Departures are often auspicious, full of promise and hope, although they also signify terror's monstrous flight... Each human departure involves an enlargement of possibility, with Beowulf's departure from the Danes being the most expansively promising one in the poem... In those moments, either positive or negative outcomes are possible, indeed sometimes intertwining or sometimes just lurking as potential. They inform the social action of the poem even as the many arrivals and departures create its overall and variable narrative pulse.”
  —  John Hill, p. 5.

I n comparable fashion, the globalized world of 2009, torn by conflict and economic recession as it is, is institutionally still more complex. More complex, even, than just one year ago. Traditional governance and sovereignty are seriously disrupted in several parts of the world—including, so it seems, here in the U.S. Regulatory institutions seemingly have been co-opted by the very people and organizations who they were intended to regulate, with catastrophic results.

I n other words, Beowulf is way more than a ‘creative anachronism’ or medieval ‘curio’ or museum-piece. It’s a parable for—oh, say, now.


K ennings’ are a significant feature in Beowulf. They’re evocative phrases that stand for everyday things. They’re not cute euphemisms/amphilogisms, nor are they comedic sarcasms. They’re not coy ways to avoid saying an ‘unlucky’ word—like ‘death’—thereby to avoid inadvertently inviting the thing-that-shall-not-be-named into your midst (as the Tlingit and other traditional peoples believe).

Y es, the kennings are alliteration- and meter-appropriate “fits” for the contexts where they occur in the text. But they’re far more than that—and it’s ‘cool’ to hear Bagby perform these gems and pour into them their real, full-blown meaning.

F or example, the skald calls the clan ‘Spear-Danes’—evoking a bellicosity that maybe Danes aren’t so famous for anymore. He calls the sea a ‘whale-road’—this evokes a liveliness and interspecies danger that we scarcely think of anymore, in the era of modern ships, and commoditized human-centric seaway-as-inanimate-resource, and GPS nav. A king is called a ‘ring-giver’ or, at other times, a ‘breaker-of-rings’—evoking not only autocratic privilege but merit-based social generosity and, alternately, unjust/capricious renunciations by those who wield power. The king as ‘guardian-of-hoards’ suggests not only personal wealth and power but a devotion to the public interest and the commonweal—far more public-centered than current or recent notions of a ‘Strong Unitary Executive’.

• Sleep-of-the-sword—Death
  
• Mighty-wanderer-of-wastelands—horror, Death (Grendel)
  
• Raven-harvest—battle-field corpses
  
• Battle-sweat—blood
  
• War-friend—sword
  
• Mind’s-worth—honor, valor
  
• Horse-of-the-whale-road—ship
  
• Foamy-necked-floater—ship
  
• Gold-friend—retainer, loyal knight
  
• Gannett’s-bath—sea
  
• World-candle—sun

T here are these many fantastic kennings in Beowulf. To me, the devices seem less ‘formulaic’ or prosodical or circumlocutory than they are ‘out-of-the-box-thinking-compelling’. Benjamin Bagby confronts us and helps us to constructively absorb this deeply disturbing tale and derive new contemporary meanings from it. Beautiful performing art, yes, it is that. But, in the same spirit as J.R.R. Tolkien once argued that Beowulf is the poet’s elegy for (and warning from—) a culture long-gone, Bagby exhorts us to hope and strive in order that our own cultures survive the epic challenges that we presently face.

T    he dyers of the wolf’s fangs
squandered the Reddened Swan’s meat;
The hawk of the sword’s dew
fed on the heroes of the field—
The serpents of the Geats’ moons
fulfilled the Will of the Irons.
   ... by Egil Skallagrimsson, warrior/embedded-journalist at Brunanburh.”
  —  Jorge Luis Borges, The kenning. New Yorker, 26-JAN-1976.

• Bagby performance of Beowulf, Kansas City, 28-FEB-2009
  
• Bagby page at L'université Paris Sorbonne Paris IV UFR de Musique et Musicologie
  
• Bagby website
  
• Bagby page at Aaron Concert Artists Inc
  
• ChantWars page at Harvard Divinity School
  
• Sequentia medieval music ensemble website
  
• Beowulf at Literapedia
  
• Beowulf resources at Heorot.dk
  
• BeowulfTranslations.net
  
• Old English epithets at ORT.org [1MB pdf]
  
• Anderson S, ed. Beowulf: Longman Cultural Edition. Longman, 2004.
  
• Bagby B. Beowulf. (Koch Vision, 2006.)
  
• Crownover A. Wealtheow: Her Telling of Beowulf. Iroquois, 2008.
  
• Ford J, Gummere F, ed & tr. Beowulf in Old English and New English. El Paso Norte, 2005.
  
• Frantzen A. Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from ‘Beowulf’ to ‘Angels in America’. Univ Chicago, 1998.
  
• Fulk R, Bjork R, Niles J, eds. Klaeber's Beowulf. 4e. Univ of Toronto, 2008.
  
• Gaiman N, Avary R. Beowulf: The Script Book. Harper, 2007.
  
• Heaney S. Beowulf. Faber & Faber, 2000.
  
• Hill J. Narrative Pulse of Beowulf: Arrivals & Departures. Univ of Toronto, 2008.
  
• Hinds G. Beowulf: Doom of Glory. Comic, 2000.
  
• Kiernan K. Beowulf. Univ Michigan, 1997.
  
• North R, Allard J. Beowulf & Other Stories: A New Introduction to Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures. Longman, 2007.
  
• Orchard A. A Critical Companion to Beowulf. Brewer, 2004.
  
• Ringler D, tr. Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery. Hackett, 2007.
  
• Risden E. Beowulf for Business. Whitston, 2007.
  
• Shrader R. Beowulf's obsequies and the Roman epic. Comp Lit 1972; 24:237-59.
  
• Shippey T. Beowulf: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1998.
  
• Tolkien J. Beowulf and the Critics. Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, 2002.
  
• DSM. Bagby’s Beowulf: Musicological Sci-Fi, or Sound Historiography? CMT blog, 20-JUN-2007.

Chamber Music of Charles Ives: Authenticity Of, Necessity Of, Aberrancy Of

L   ong before his death in 1954, at 80, Charles Ives seemed less like the father of American music than an eccentric uncle whose antic behavior and uncensored opinions at birthdays and funerals conscript his relatives into manufacturing an endless series of apologies and disclaimers... During the past decade, the picture of Ives has metamorphosed from eccentric uncle into cagey impresario and entrepreneur, a process explained by Gayle Sherwood Magee in her aptly titled ‘Charles Ives Reconsidered’... Magee’s book is a model of contemporary musicology—sympathetically sober in its judgments and interdisciplinary in its methods… Ives may have experienced every sound he perceived and every emotion attendant upon those sounds … as music. If we imagine this differently-eared, alternatively-wired Ives, a lot of what critics have found problematic about his music and career falls away. He probably possessed an acute and unaccountable impulse to use sounds expressively. As he matured, he had to balance the need to acquire skills through musical education against the preservation of this impulse.”
  — David Schiff, review of Gayle Sherwood Magee’s Ives biography, ‘Charles Ives Reconsidered’, in The Nation 05-JAN-2009.

W   hy do I work in this way and get all upset over what just upsets other people? No one else seems to hear [the music] in the same way [that I do]. Are my ears on ‘wrong’?”
  — Charles Ives, response to violinists’ criticism of his Violin Sonata No. 1.

T he current issue of The Nation has a wonderful review by David Schiff, of the Charles Ives biography/musicological analysis by Gayle Sherwood Magee. Magee’s book is a delight. Schiff’s review is a delight as well.


A t its best, good criticism genuinely returns the [Foucault-ian/Adorno-ian] ‘gaze’ of the subject whose work is reviewed. Not content to merely be constructive in explaining or characterizing what the work is/was, the best criticism is deeply original in its own right. It is no way ‘derivative’ or predictable or fashionable, nor does it parasitize the reviewed work by way of using the review as an occasion to massage the egos of others.

F  ashion is fraud.”
  — CrimethInc, Recipes for Disaster.

D avid Schiff’s essay is a wonderful example of excellence in criticism. He commends Gayle Sherwood Magee for her musicological scholarship and explains in detail the merits of her new book and the rationale for his judgment. These are not so much features of a distinctive authorly ‘voice’ but of an engaging authority—the friendly and well-tuned mind behind the voice.

W   hat has been lost [in journalism in recent years] is the authority of the critic - his/her strength of voice. In an age where every opinion is valid, there are no more great critics in the mould of Bernard Shaw, Tynan, and Toynbee.”
  — Mark Ryan, former Director, Institute of Ideas, London.

W   ell, only if you ignore the work of David Schiff, Arthur Danto, and quite a few others.”
  — DSM.

S chiff goes (in the last page of his essay) well beyond the idioms of ordinary ‘review’ or criticism to reflect on the problems of doing biography and biographical musicology, including the vagaries of elusive personalities—subjects who [deliberately, cagily] left fragmentary and conflictual evidence, as a means of manipulating their own legacies and public personae. He poses additional novel possibilities that might account for Ives’s unusual career(s) and compositional output—stimulated in part by David’s recollections of his own father’s idiosyncrasies. He suggests entirely new avenues for medico-musicological exploration. He does this casually, in a three-page review, with a conversational style that reads like a letter from a friend or a transcript of a conversation in your living room.

In other words, Schiff’s review starts out reading like an excellent-but-conventional piece of criticism but gradually takes on some of the qualities of a Borges short-story—with conjectures that may or may not be feasible to pursue but are nonetheless captivating in their intriguing ‘No rules! Question everything!’ possibilities.


    [50-sec clip, Bekova Sisters, Ives, Piano Trio, ‘I. Moderato’, 1.2MB MP3]

Ives pallido ci dice di iniziare ‘ma deciso a non mollare’ ... Okay. We begin playing decisively but mezzopiano then, as instructed, and without ‘letting go’. Wow. What an amusing notation in the first bar!

Ives’s 4 violin sonatas (1908, 1910, 1913-?14, 1906-?16) and 3 piano sonatas (1905, 1909, ‘Concord’ 1915) are well-known. There are good recordings of them; the pieces are relatively often performed—more often in conservatory recitals maybe than other programs or concert series, but still... The San Francisco-based Ives Quartet and Blair String Quartet do regularly perform Ives’s string quartets, as do others. The Miró Quartet will perform Ives’s Quartet No.1 on Friday 23-JAN at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie in NYC...

T   he Second Quartet is Ives in his early maturity, written between 1911 and 1913. The perplexing and sudden conjunctions, conflations, revelations, quotations and miasmic cuts are all firmly evident. But the somewhat tersely romanticised opening doesn’t quite prepare one for the fulminous writing to come: unceasingly powerful chromaticism. Here the quotations abound in tense, often hallucinatory rapidity... The [Blairs’] playing is involved and involving and conveys Ives’s journey from late Romanticism to modernism with conviction.”
  —  Jonathan Woolf, Musicweb International, FEB-2007.

B ut Ives’s piano trio does not receive so much attention as it deserves.

A nd if your taste runs to the exotic or experimental, then there are other pieces of Ives’s chamber music that you may like to be aware of. Ives’s throw-down Fugues in B-flat and D; his bombastic Fugue in phrygian, hypolydian and dorian modes; his contemplative Largo for violin, clarinet and piano, for example.

O r his ‘Largo for piano quintet’, subtitled ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’? Quirky finance inspiration for an insurance-man-cum-composer! What the heck does that sound like, I wonder? Go to the Yale University library and check out a copy and find out! Or go to PeerMusic Classical who publish these unusual Largos Risolutos Nos. 1 & 2.

I   ves in his last works finally regained his undiluted, uncompromised, uncontentious, and un-ironic compositional voice—the voice of innocence that he had left behind so long ago.”
  —  Gayle Sherwood Magee, Charles Ives Reconsidered, p. 162.

S chiff exposes impolite tastes, judgments and ideas for what they are. He lets the reader infer how unjust or ill-founded our received prejudices may be. In Schiff’s elegant 3-page essay, the indeterminate nature of Truth is laid a little barer than it has ever been, barer even than Magee has done. Without doubt, bare, original Truth is more beautiful than pretty verisimilitude. It is especially beautiful and surprising to find such beauty in a short review/criticism article in a publication for a general audience. Bravo!

M agee’s efforts to debunk the medicalization/psychiatrification of Ives’s emotions are praised and synopsized in Schiff’s essay. But [‘It takes one to know one’] composer Schiff goes still further in normalizing Ives’s experimentality within the diversity of mainstream-composer personalities. To Schiff, every last one of us has his/her own unique ears and inspirations and obsessions, each her/his own skills and gifts and blind-spots. Not one of us is exactly like Ives, Schiff says, but neither was Ives any more aberrant or less aberrant in the spectrum of humanity than any of the rest of us is, lest auld acquaintance be rudely forgot.

H appy New Year! Peace!

D   on’t pay too much attention to the sounds, for if you do you may miss the music.”
  —  George Ives, remarking to son Charles about the proper way to conduct hymns at a revival meeting.

• Schiff D. Ives’s ears. The Nation 2009; 288:30-3.
  
• David Schiff at Reed College
  
• David Schiff website
  
• Magee G. Charles Ives Reconsidered. Univ Illinois, 2008.
  
• Gayle Sherwood Magee at Univ Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  
• Journal of Music & Meaning website
  
• Music & Politics journal at UCSB
  
• Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology Online (DDMO) at Indiana Univ
  
• American Musicological Society website
  
• Empirical Musicology Review
  
• Blair String Quartet webpage at Vanderbilt
  
• Blair String Quartet at Vanderbilt Univ
  
• Blair String Quartet. Charles Ives: String Quartets. (Naxos, 2004.)
  
• Bekova Trio. Ives and Clarke Piano Trios. (Chandos, 2000.)
  
• Bekova Trio website
  
• Critics’ role in creating the artifacts of ‘history-as-exchange-economy’
  
• Ives Catalogue at Yale Univ
  
• The Charles Ives Society
  
• Adorno T. The Jargon of Authenticity. Routledge, 2006.
  
• Danto A. Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life. Columbia Univ, 2007.
  
• Roth M. Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Duchamp, and Cage. Routledge, 1998.
  
• Schiff D. The Music of Elliott Carter. Faber & Faber, 1998.
  
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• Smallman B. Piano Quartet and Quintet. Oxford Univ, 1996.
  
• Tuttleton J. A Fine Silver Thread: Essays on American Writing and Criticism. Dee, 1998.