jwilzewske: love

Showing posts with label love. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Remembering Peter and Lorraine Lieberson: True Love as a Practice for Awakening the Heart

O ihr Zärtlichen, tretet zuweilen
in den Atem, der euch nicht meint,
laßt ihn an eueren Wangen sich teilen,
hinter euch zittert er, wieder vereint.

O ihr Seligen, O ihr Heilen,
die ihr der Anfang der Herzen scheint.
Bogen der Pfeile und Ziele von Pfeilen,
ewiger glänzt euer Lächeln verweint.

Fürchtet euch nicht zu leiden, die Schwere,
gebt sie zurück an der Erde Gewicht;
schwer sind die Berge, schwer sind die Meere.

Selbst die als Kinder ihr pflanztet, die Bäume,
wurden zu schwer längst ; ihr trüget sie nicht.
Aber die Lüfte ... aber die Räume ...

[O you Tender Ones, you will walk, persisting
Through the cold breath that was not breathed for your sake,
Your heedless cheeks oblivious to its trembling.
Blowing as it does, the wind coalesces behind you after you've passed, without trace.

O Blessed Ones, healthy and whole though you be now,
Who seem to be enveloped and self-sufficient, the epitome of life and the heart's beginning.
Bows are there for each conceivable arrow and a target for all arrows:
Logical correlates of the perpetual brilliance of your pulsatile smile.

Fear not the pain and sorrow and stillness that will inevitably come,
Consign all of that back to the heavy Earth who knows good and well what to do with it:
Heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

Even as a child, you planted these trees:
Already they are awfully heavy, beyond belief really.
Despite this persists the pervasive space ... the ubiquitous breezes ...]”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, VI.

P eter Lieberson died of sepsis, a complication of his lymphoma and treatment for lymphoma last Saturday, at age 64. Lieberson gratified our ears not only with composerly talent but with a humor and warm personality that do not require atmospheric ‘soft-focus’ photos like the one above to convey the inner gentleness.

P eter’s wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, died of breast cancer at age 52, in 2006. She was a mezzo-soprano, known for her dramatic power and raw virtuosity as well as her artistry performing Baroque era and new compositions. Her career path to becoming a singer was unconventional. Formerly a professional violist, Lieberson changed her full-time focus to singing when she was around 30 (1985 and beyond). As violist she played in the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music in Boston under conductor Craig Smith and later sang in the chorus. For a time, she was also principal viola in Berkeley Symphony.

I n re-listening to recordings I have of Peter’s later compositions, Lorraine’s influence on Peter’s soul and heart becomes evident… how she provided him with insights and renewal. This is an undeniable element in Peter’s writing after 1997. Lorraine’s influence is diaphoric, trans-illuminating—an emblem of spirit-in-matter. Must be why he fell in love with her… good reason why anyone would fall in love with anyone.

[50-sec clip, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson & Peter Serkin, Peter Lieberson, ‘Rilke Songs’, ‘O, ihr Zärtlichen’, 1.6MB MP3]

L ieberson was expert at syllabic setting and pitch repetition: the vocal part centers on particular notes for considerable proportions of passages. These songs are predominantly recitative. They have suspended accompaniment and rubato manifestations of the singing part.

W hen I was growing up, my mother, whose first language was German, would often quote lines from Rilke. I have been drawn to his poetry ever since. Rilke evokes feelings, states of being that are at the edge of awareness, mysterious but close to the heart. One can’t always understand exactly what he means. I believe this is a deliberate elusiveness in order to provoke our intuition. The Rilke Songs were written for my wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. I think of them as love songs even though the poems themselves are not overtly about love. They are about being childlike and open in ‘O ihr Zärtlichen’; in ‘Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!,’ they are about the breath being a complete exchange between our own essence and the universe. They are about how the breath seems to go out into space like our wandering son; the mysterious way in which we might transform ourselves: ‘If drinking is bitter, turn yourself into wine’ (‘Stiller Freund’). To me these Rilkean insights are a gift of love..”
— Peter Lieberson, program notes.

K atherine Kelton maintains that Peter Lieberson “learned about the complexity of the human voice and the multitude of intricacies of which it is capable” through Lorraine. “Much as Robert Schumann’s love for Clara Wieck inspired him to compose in a genre he had previously disregarded,” so too Lorraine propelled Peter in directions that were, up to then, unfamiliar.

M aybe this is so; maybe a ‘push’ theory is right.

B ut it is also possible (and, I think, more likely) that it was a matter of ‘pull’, of natural attraction. In fact, it is hardly plausible that the diverse nuances of the voice could have been novel for Peter in 1997. If anything, his many years leading Shambhala sessions led him to develop acute sensitivity to myriad manifestations of ego/self and selflessness. And there was Lorraine, an eager collaborator, able to animate a composition so as to lead to discoveries for both, on the part of both.

L orraine’s performances of Peter’s compositions evoke what Mircea Eliade once called ‘dialectique du sacre’ and ‘hierophanies’. Sacred portrayal is realized as an individual creative act—one that embodies both spiritual insight and sensual perception. The relationship ceases to be merely ‘of-the-world’. It achieves transcendence, a dimension of sacredness. That, I believe, is what we hear in these wonderful recordings. The feeling conveyed is one of consummate ‘hereness’, ‘thisness’—a kind of presence, of living entirely in the present.

I think of my Rilke Songs as love songs even though they are not overtly about love. They are, for example, about being child-like and open, as in “O ihr Zärtlichen;” about the breath being a complete exchange of our own essence with the universe in “Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht;” about the mysterious ways in which we might transform ourselves in “Stiller Freund” . . . To me, these Rilkean insights are gifts of love.”
— Peter Lieberson, program notes to ‘Rilke Songs’.

T he act of singing... when my voice is feeling free and soaring... it is a wonderful, healing experience.”
— Lorraine Hunt, interview with Terry Gross, NPR, 1996.

T he spelling sgra bla (‘la of sound’) found in the ancient texts as a matter of fact is based on a very deep principle characteristic of the most authentic Bön tradition. Sound, albeit not visible, can be perceived through the sense of hearing and used as a means of communication, and is in fact linked to the cha (the individual’s positive force, the base of prosperity), wang tang (ascendancy-capacity), and all the other aspects of a person’s energy, aspects that are directly related with the protective deities and entities that every person has from birth. Moreover, sound is considered the foremost connection between the individual himself and his la.”
— Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, Drung De’u and Bön, translated by Adriano Clemente, Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1995, p. 61.

T o me, Peter Lieberson’s later compositions embody Shambhala texts that reveal and test our relationship to the “material world” and our sense perceptions. They teach the practice of enriching presence—the ability to instantly envision the inner wealth within oneself.

T o compose ‘Neruda Songs’, I responded to the words and to the emotional tone of the poem. I heard notes when I read the words. Generally I like the tactile feeling, the sensual feeling of being at the piano, so I compose there. I listen very, very carefully to the words, and the harmony is very intuitive. The great period of jazz, that’s how I learned harmony, Bill Evans and Miles Davis. That was my ear training. Orchestrations come easily to me, and I often hear which instrument should be playing. It’s constant responsiveness; it’s somewhere between improvising and strategizing.”
— Peter Lieberson, interview with Pierre Ruhe, 10-JUN-2010.

T here is, to me, a cinematic quality to the songs—as though the composer were a cameraman.

C amera placement distinctly influences our perception of the world that’s portrayed and the characters in it. Shooting down at a seated character can diminish her presence and stature; it may make her seem submissive or even supplicative. Filming up at a character provides a sense of the figure’s power and command. By contrast, in Rilke Songs it is as if Peter Lieberson’s ‘camera’ is placed at eye-level, making the perspective like what we would see while sitting across from Lorraine having a conversation. The character isn’t ‘owned’ by the camera/cameraperson nor is she sensationalized by it.

C ombien qu'a nous soit cause le Soleil
Que toute chose est tresclerement veue:
Ce neantmoins pour trop arrester l'œil
En sa splendeur lon pert soubdain la veue.
Mon ame ainsi de son objiect pourueue
De tous mes sens me rend abandonné,
Comme si lors en moy tout estonné
Semeles fust en presence rauie
De son Amant de fouldre enuironné
Qui luy ostast par ses esclaires la vie.

[Much as the Sun causes each thing
To lie so clearly before our eyes:
To linger too long in its splendor
Is to be suddenly made blind.
My soul and its object
Now abandoned by all my senses,
As if, within me, and to my great surprise
Semele were ravished in my presence
By her Lover [Zeus] who, with his thunderbolts,
Snatched her life in a flash of light.]”
— Maurice Scève, Délie, v.443.

T here is an interview that Lorraine did with NPR’s Terry Gross back in 1996, in which Lorraine confides her fascination with identity-bending, gender-bending roles—the journeys of self-discovery and transcendence that are made possible through these. Beyond angle, camera placement also affects the view that we have onto the action and the resultant meaning we can derive from a shot. On the surface, the Rilke Songs setting of several Rilke poems celebrate the then-undersung life and burgeoning talent of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. That her belated decampment from viola to singing was what vaulted her to international fame was an oddity: here was the soul and and the propensities of a string player inhabiting an operatic singer’s body.

P eter leveraged Lorraine’s enthusiasm for transcendent experiences to honor her. In Rilke Songs, it is as though composer Peter were a filmmaker choosing to shoot in a long profile ‘take’. The placement of the voice-leading/camera here and the accompaniment there; the choice to let the ‘shot’ play out as it does; these reveal the nuanced components, not only of composition but of microphone placement and physicality that Lorraine so deftly crafted in the use of her vocal instrument. No other ‘camera’ position and mic position could have permitted such insight into her craft, nor into the craft of the composer who created this vehicle for shared expression.

E very 24-hour day is a tremendous gift to us. So we all should learn to live in a way that makes joy and happiness possible. The first miracle of mindfulness is our true presence—being here, present, totally alive. If you are really here, the other will also be here. Loving? It is recognizing the presence of the other with your love... Dear One, I am here for you... A human tendency is to see spirituality as a process of self-improvement—the impulse to develop and refine the ego when the ego is, by nature, essentially empty. The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh.

N o atmospherics or sentimentality in this long ‘take’. Her delivery is straightforward and expository, articulated calmly and directly to the listener. Knowing as we do that these performances were sung—the compositions were composed—when Lorraine was already afflicted by breast cancer, the récits produce a kind of uncanniness; produce narrative convergences between Peter and Lorraine; they embody a tantric, elliptical concentration; they are an Unheimlichkeit, a Verklärung, eine Vorahnung.

T hese wonderful specimens of humankind will be deeply missed.

The Heart of Warriorship
Level I: The Art of Being Human
Level II: Birth of the Warrior
Level III: Warrior in the World
Level IV: Awakened Heart
Level V: Open Sky
The Sacred Path
Great Eastern Sun
Windhorse
Drala
Meek
Perky
Outrageous and Inscrutable
Golden Key

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Party of Two? Valentines, Chamber Music & Health

I n writing a successful quartet, composers have to turn inward and look for their most personal musical message. So also do the performers. There is no room for deception—nothing to disguise it and make it superficially attractive. Seduction or manipulation will be obvious and will fail. Everything in quartets and other small chamber forms is about honesty and mutual discovery.”
— Saul Bitran, violinist, Cuarteto Latinoamericano.

T he only way to reanimate these pieces is to play them with friends... When you’re ‘on’, not only are you breathing together, but you are also feeding off each other. You’re playing with someone who does something spontaneously and you respond, also spontaneously, which takes your performance and experience together to another level entirely.”
— Kathryn Selby, pianist, Macquarrie Trio.

C hamber music, besides being very intimate, is substantially concerned with understanding the other performer(s) on deep levels—doing this in an open and undirected way—and concerned, too, with being generous and responsive to the significant other(s) and creating valuable and meaningful things together with them.

I n that regard, almost any piece of chamber music might be considered to be coherent with the values celebrated on Valentine's Day. Almost all chamber music nurtures a sense of closeness, immediacy, and anticipation.

Y ou want something that is already at least slightly familiar and known to be pleasurable to and enjoyed by your partner—so there will be low risk of disappointment and the greatest probability for delight.

T o heighten the anticipation, an experience that is already familiar can be the subject of hints or other gestures to plan for the experience and savoring that experience. But in order to be worthy of anticipation, the thing hinted at must also be novel in some way, not routine.

B ut there are side-effects each piece can have—inherent objective, physiologic consequences (unintended or otherwise) that accompany the music’s subjective emotional/cognitive/inspirational effects (see Lemmer and other links below). A little quickening of the pulse and transient high blood pressure is what you are after. What I had not expected is how long (many hours) it lasts!

Understand distinctions between history, entitlement, and managerial theories of the self and the significant other.
Avoid defensive, self-protective ‘Model I’ patterns of interpersonal interaction that blame others and limit learning.
Emphasize shared goals, fearlessness, and equality—mutual influence in relationship.
Emphasize modesty of proportion, pleasure of execution, resiliency in the face of set-backs, and durability of vision and passion.
Love is an organization—one that is deserving of deliberate, rational, caring management.
Love is an organization that, like any other enterprise, has explicit and implicit processes—and denying this or neglecting the processes can only but lead to chaos, low client satisfaction, and investor disappointment.
Communicate and critically test each other’s assumptions and beliefs openly and often.
Combine mutual advocacy with inquiry.
Combine shared exertion with shared relaxation and a minimum of irritability and aggression.

Lemmer, Rat Valentines, Hypertension, & Ligeti Quartets

M ozart’s and Haydn’s music had only a slight reducing effect on the heart rate of the spontaneously-hypertensive (SHR) rats, and the blood pressure remained unaffected. The normotensive WKY rats showed no reaction at all. Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 2, on the contrary, caused a massive increase in SBP of around 20 to 30mmHg in the SHR rats which remained discernable over more than 10 hours. The WKY rats also reacted to Ligeti’s music with a raised SBP.”
— Björn Lemmer, Institut für Experimentelle und Klinische Pharmakologie und Toxikologie, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

I am not saying to eschew the Ligeti in favor of Mozart or Haydn for Valentine’s Day—not at all; far from it. In fact, the Ligeti may be precisely what you two will prefer on that adventurous intimate occasion. You are looking for a string quartet whose climax is like the last lines of a poem that choke you up a bit; focus the mind and heart, so to say. Sort of like catching sight of the sea—unexpectedly; together. Twenty or 30 mmHg of higher blood pressure for a few hours is precisely what you two are looking for...

C oming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon’s list—of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it’s radiant; a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum—a concise way that includes them all, implies them all.”
— Chris Marker, Sans Soleil.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Sociotropic Provenance of Liszt’s Mid-Career Piano Works

The santa indifferenza of Liszt is the ‘holy indifference’ advocated by St. François de Sales and other spiritual writers in the Catholic mystical tradition. And this in turn is obviously identical with the non-attachment advocated in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions... Needless to say, ‘holy indifference’ is not at all the same thing as plain, unholy indifference, and is fully compatible with intense concern for goodness, beauty, and Truth.”
— Aldous Huxley, letter, 26-OCT-1961.

Eezek a darabok példái annak, hogy a romantika korszakában hogyan tudott megszólalni egy-egy szonett, bármi is, észre a következmények. A romantikus Liszt érzékenységének köszönhetően a versek hangulata, mély mondanivalója jut el a mentálisan zavart befogadóhoz, okoz a további kárt.”

A ttended an excellent concert tonight, given by pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in the Harriman-Jewell Series.

Liszt—Consolations, S. 172
Liszt—Années de pèlerinage, troisième année, ‘Les jeux d’eaux’, S. 163
Liszt—Venezia e Napoli, ‘Tarantella’, S. 162
Liszt—Ballade No. 2 in B minor, S. 171
Liszt—Deux légendes, S. 175
Liszt—Isolde’s Liebestod, S. 447
Liszt—Polish Songs (after Chopin), ‘Meine Freuden’ S. 480

A esthetic experience is a kind of access to psychic reality, both our own reality and the reality of others—that much is certain from hearing these pieces. Aesthetic experience and creativity not only aid our recovery from ‘bad psychological states’, they are also valuable for understanding and distinguishing internal reality and external reality. I listened to Thibaudet’s sensitive and highly-animated performances of these Liszt pieces, and as I did so I wondered more and more about the circumstances of how they were composed. Liszt’s major keys (all except S. 171) are like they have “something to prove,” no, more like there is someone whose mood they are emphatically meaning to elevate or tranquilize, like they were conceived with a particular patient and a therapeutic purpose in mind?

N ote: in recent days I’ve been working on health services research involving mental health and measures of quality and access to care for mental and behavioral conditions. This recent focus of my attention no doubt ‘primed’ me to respond to this concert in the ways that I did.

I n that regard, the importance of including ‘patient-intended’ criticisms and ‘partner-perceived’ criticisms and the parallel importance of examining gender differences in models of exchanges of criticisms between partners and depression of one or both partners—these are discussed in an excellent paper published last summer by Kristina Peterson and David Smith (link below) at the University of Notre Dame. Of course, Peterson’s and Smith’s study focused on members of the general population, not couples who are elite artists/composers/writers/celebrities.

Liszt’s illness was prefigured by depression, which was, in part situational... [He] began to drink cognac heavily and was warned to decrease his intake by his physicians. He also smoked a lot of [George Sand’s?] Havana cigars.”
— John O’Shea, 1995.

S o, gee, these pieces were written roughly in the aftermath of Liszt’s relationship with Marie d’Agoult and the recurring encounters occasioned by family events involving their children (Cosima; and until their deaths in 1859 and 1862, respectively, Daniel and Blandine) and also through Chopin—more or less between 1841-1867, from when Liszt was about 30 to 55 years old.

T his must’ve been stressful and awkward… Sociotropic process, the psychic equivalent of a semi-permeable membrane, which selectively and through passive transportation or active transportation allows some emotional ‘molecules’ to pass through the membrane but prevents others from passing. The emotional brew contained several types of dissolved ‘solute’ molecules, in a family chamber—multiple compartments now separated by thin semi-permeable membranes with pores, and sealed... (Seated in Row #2, in close proximity to the piano and Thibaudet in-charge, it is natural that one’s imagination will run wild.)

S ome small emotions crossed Liszt’s semi-permeable membrane, like small molecules cross dialysis tubing, in their attempt to reach equilibrium. Bigger emotions, bigger molecules, not so much...

Y ears of Pilgrimage’... this conceit implies a wanderer in search of truth, and, one can only imagine that the title is, in good measure, Liszt’s autobiographical reverse-osmotic self-mythologizing.

Because Marie broke with both Liszt and George Sand, she has been given a ‘bad press’ in biographies of both of those celebrities... What was the private life of a woman like this? A woman who left her great love (Liszt) after five years and returned to Paris, not to her husband who would have taken her back, nor to her family, but to an independent life... One of the first things one must ask about any independent woman in the 19th Century is: Where did the money come from; how did she support herself? ... Posterity has reproached Marie d’Agoult for not having loved Liszt’s art sufficiently to sacrifice herself to it.”
— Phyllis Stock-Morton.

O ne might question whether Liszt was really as cultured as Marie presented him in her memoirs... he quoted famous authors indiscriminately—St. Augustine, Petrarch, Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Hugo, the Bible. Although he seemed avid to read and represent himself as a reader, it is not clear that he had digested much or developed any critical abilities. Even in the springtime of their romance, Marie, always a precise thinker, criticized not only some [trashy, sophomoric] books he liked [Bande Dessinée comic strips] but also the [purple] language of his letters.”
— Phyllis Stock-Morton, p. 24.

W hether or not the Charismatic Hungarian was literally searching for Truth truth, he was surely searching for audiences receptive to his preferred, dramatic, truthy historiography—part of which we heard in these emphatic works that Jean-Yves performed. Years later, Marie, too, in her writings prevaricated, denied, revised, glossed, hid…

W hat were Liszt’s sources of support, emotionally? How lonely was it, “at the top”? How much of a mutual “nightmare” had Franz and Marie been to each other, I wonder?

M arie d’Agoult’s nightmares, especially in Italy, in Venezia e Napoli, were unrelenting. Not much is known of these—what the subjects or imagery in them were, and so on. There is only the evidence of a few letters, and even less is objectively known about the quality of Franz’s sleeping. Not much detail is known about Marie’s suicide attempts; their frequency, their seriousness, her moods and ideation in between them...

H oly extra-marital stress-diatheses! What, if any, mental health services did Liszt avail himself of during the years of these compositions? Was Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein any help at all to Liszt in the years subsequent to Liszt’s break-up with Marie, or was Carolyne instead mostly a hazard, a hindrance? Was in fact Liszt’s music-making the only ‘therapy’ he received, self-administered? Alan Walker’s books don’t have anything to say about this. But that is what I wondered, more and more, as Jean-Yves’s recital progressed...

A s for Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, what modest amount is known of her emotional condition during those years is gathered together in Phyllis Stock-Morton’s recent book (link below). Well worth your look if you’ve made it this far in reading this blog post...

N either Liszt nor d’Agoult was continuously the more forceful personality, I suppose. Both were likely self-propelled multivalent ‘causes’ and ‘effects’, both Forces of Nature to be reckoned with. There were pressures, one upon the other; interpersonal dynamic equilibria; inescapable sociotropic osmosis...

W e are grateful, of course: very grateful to have these beautiful, vivid pieces today—we who are hardly aware of what pressures and emotional costs were associated with their composition. We are grateful, too, to Jean-Yves Thibaudet for reanimating them in the way he was able to do last night with such insight and consummate skill. Through the music, we might learn something about ourselves, even if we shall never be certain of the truths between Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult.

J ean-Yves was born in 1961 in Lyon to a German-born mother and French father, both amateur musicians. In addition to diplomatic duties, Jean-Yves’s father taught history and geography at the University of Lyon and was a good amateur violinist. His mother, an accomplished pianist, taught German language and literature at the University.