jwilzewske: religion

Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Gene Pritsker: William James and Pluralistic Consciousness Beyond the Margin

T he new recording of Gene Pritsker’s ‘William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience: A Chamber Opera’ is beautiful—musically and dramatically.

W illiam James was fascinated by what he termed our ‘selective interest’—our harmoniously adjusting ourselves to things seen and unseen. In the sea of evolving, conflicting stimuli in which we are immersed, we pay attention to a small subset of things... mostly things that match our predispositions and expectations: our interests and beliefs. A renowned psychologist and pragmatist and empiricist philosopher, James in the late 19th Century set about to assemble evidence that could reveal whether and how experiences that are gated by interests and beliefs in things unseen can catalyze positive changes in people—especially when people attach symbolic or emotional/spiritual importance to the experiences. “Explore the peculiarities of this attitude... All our attitudes... are due to the objects of our consciousness... the things we believe to exist. We feel a presence in the room... definitely localized... coming suddenly, and suddenly gone... I felt myself to be the less ‘real’ of the two...”

I n VRE (p. 55), James says “so far as religious conceptions are able to touch this reality-feeling [of objective presence of the Other] they would be believed in spite of criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable... even though they might be such non-entities in point of ‘whatness’...”

Gene Pritsker, guitar
Greg Baker, guitar
Dan Barrett, cello
Larry Goldman, contra bass
Lynn Norris, soprano
Chanda Rule, mezzo soprano
Marc Molomot, tenor
Charles Coleman, baritone
Chester Layman, narrator
Kim Pritsker, narrator

D elicate, taut, and incisive writing. Beautiful interplay between instruments and voices, between the rhythm/melodies/harmonies and the text. ‘Synaptic’ guitar picking; a really elegant solo improvisation on Track 5.

T he guitars-cello-bass instrumental ‘presence’ pervades the whole—this fact plus the fact that the voices in the foreground are so crisp and tangible make it seem as though the instrumental parts must collectively be ‘God’. But then the timbre of the voice changes, and I’m doubting that my sense of that was right. Maybe this is sonic evidence for some sort of pantheism? Everything is divine... everything that’s not being deceptive, anyway.

P ritsker’s ‘William James’s VRE’ is not a contemporary event-centric historical opera per se (not a “headline opera” about a famous historical figure and a famous moment in history, a la John Adams’s ‘Doctor Atomic’, on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb). Sometimes event-centric works feel too self-referential—‘program music’ or a suite of ad hoc ‘concept’ compositions that are too overtly seeking adherents.

T his chamber opera is not like that. It’s far too unpredictable! It does, though, share with historical operas an attractive ‘topicality’ in terms of (a) dramatizing interrelated subjects (spirituality; religion; multiculturalism; tolerance) that have plenty of currency these days and (b) grounding these in the life of one well-known historical protagonist.

I really admire the judicious excerpting of William James VRE texts for this libretto! Attention to the unbiddenness of how we recall things: verses, that bubble up in our minds, contrary to our ambitions or plans.

M any passages from James’s book (VRE) are dense and literary: the sentence structure was meant to be read by readers of 100+ years ago. When spoken aloud in this opera, these words engage our minds in provocative ways that highlight the finiteness of our attention as well as the alienness of the century-ago culture that produced the notions in VRE. Our relation to the music that is being performed while the voice-over narration is going on is altered, far more than happens in ‘conventional’ opera.

W hat’s more, some of the narrators/texts are more ‘reliable’ as narrators than others. Each is clearly earnest in his/her own way, and yet some of them make statements that are more accessible or less accessible to us, given our own beliefs and style and inclinations/disinclinations to share our feelings in ways that resemble what the narrator is doing. Listening to these different narrators/singers, we’re led to recognize more of what we ourselves are doing: selectively filtering, giving and getting, allowing and forbidding.

T he opera and the ‘arc’ of the 8 tracks of the recording ably convey dramatic tension of setting out on a journey to explore the diversity of spirituality; of encountering many instances and types of experience; of empirically assessing each of these; and finally integrating and summarizing what we’ve found out.

T he 43-min performance time is just sufficient to develop the ideas and the ambience and characterizations, and bring things in for a satisfying “landing”.

T he sound has warmth and intimacy throughout, perfectly matched to the subject and content. Beautiful performances by all, plus excellent engineering and production values on the recording.

I ’m uplifted by this new Pritsker CD—impressed by the authenticity of music that “had to come out”, had to be composed, had to exist. There is a wonderful ‘meta-meta’ aspect to the work as well. It is as though Pritsker has created a sonic picture of ‘William James’s Red Mood’ (see Arthur Danto’s famous book of 30 years ago, link below)—plus a further picture, an abstract minimalist exemplar of geometrical art which happens to be lush and sensuous and red and pulsating—plus yet a further picture, a metaphysical painting based on the fact that James knew the Nirvanic and Samsara orders are identical and that the Samsara world is fondly called the Red Dust by its deprecators.

J ames near the end of VRE says “Religious mysticism... is much less unanimous than I have allowed... It is dualistic in Sankhya and monistic in Vedanta” (VRE p. 336). He maintains that, rather than being adversarial or conflictual, the varieties of spiritual experience can in fact be harmonious with each other... there can be rapproachment between individuals and religions that hold what appear to be incompatible ‘over-beliefs’. James says that this can be done by looking to everyday feelings and to everyday acts—however unplanned and discordant with ambitions and ideologies as they may be—looking to these as comprising the essence of real religion (VRE p. 397).

T his opera by Gene Pritsker honors that Jamesian notion. The opera—and this recording—are a welcome invitation to self-discovery, to mutual respect and tolerance for the spirituality (or lack thereof) of others, and to joyous, mindful living in community. Look for the CD when it’s released in February. Very worth your listening!

Saturday, June 18, 2011

¡Sacabuche! Matteo Ricci: His Map and Music

J ust as western countries have never heard the teaching of the sages of China, so we Chinese have never heard of the books of their ancient sages. Both now enlighten each other; both benefit one another.”
— Feng Yingjing, acquaintance of Fr. Matteo Ricci, 16th-Century China.

S acabuche! is an ensemble of Chinese and western instruments and voices directed by Linda Pearse. Sacabuche! performed a series of concerts and workshops in Beijing, China, in December, 2010, and yesterday at BEMF in Boston offered a multimedia performance of their work about the Italian Jesuit priest (and mathematician, scientist, cartographer, and all-around polymath), Matteo Ricci, whose decades spent in China in the late 16th century resulted in the first map in Chinese. Ricci’s detailed map, completed and presented to the Wanli Emperor in 1602, showed the entire world—eastern and western hemispheres—surprising and edifying both the Chinese and the Italians.

I U Jacobs School of Music faculty members Stanley Ritchie and Wendy Gillespie contributed to the collaboration, as did University of Minnesota professor of History, Ann Waltner. The performance combined historical readings with early music from both sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and China, along with new compositions by Oberlin/Juilliard-trained now-New-York-based composer Huang Ruo, commissioned for the Sacabuche! project.

T he multimedia performance reanimates the seminal political and cultural exchange between Italian Jesuits and Chinese literati in 16th/17th-century China and unifies (1) Italian music of Ricci’s Italy performed on period instruments, (2) Chinese music of Ricci’s China performed on traditional Chinese instruments, (3) Huang Ruo’s new music, (4) dramatic readings, and (5) historical imagery, including a projected digitized version of Ricci’s map (an old original, James Ford Bell Library, U of M) Chinese paintings and calligraphy and other artworks.

Linda Pearse, artistic director & sackbut
Ann Waltner, co-director, speaker, author of program notes/script
Qin Fang, speaker
Yang Yi, guzheng
Carrie Tsujui Chin, sheng
Eunji Lee, piano and organ
Sarah Barbash-Riley, Ray Horton & François Godère, sackbut
Martie Perry & Janelle Davis, Baroque violin
Wendy Gillespie, viola da gamba
Elise Figa, soprano
Andrew Rader, countertenor
Benjamin Geier, tenor
Huang Ruo, composer
Cathy Barbash, producer

T he thoughtful selection of 16th-Century Chinese imagery alternating with Italian Baroque Catholic Church imagery was accompanied by short descriptive and poetical Chinese and English texts read by Qin Fang and by Ann Waltner, respectively, interleaved with the Chinese and Italian Baroque music. The pace and the variety of sonic textures were really exciting—informing those of us who do not know very much about Chinese or Jesuit history; capturing and holding our interest throughout; and inspiring our expanding wonder about what the decades-long contact that Fr. Ricci and his Chinese hosts had with each other really entailed.

H uang Ruo’s “Fisherman’s Sonnet” is patterned after kun opera but includes a number of exotic orchestrations of Chinese and western instruments that have probably never been heard playing together before (sackbuts! viola da gamba! Baroque organ! with sheng and guzheng!).

C arrie Tsujui Chin’s sheng playing and Yang Yi’s guzheng were masterful and incisive—at times forcefully and at other times poignantly and delicately contrasting with the rest of the ensemble’s Baroque Italian harmonies.

Huang Ruo – Fisherman’s Sonnet
A. Gabrieli – Benedictus Dominus Deus Sabaoth
A. Gabrieli – Ricercar
A. Gabrieli – Alla Battaglia
Anon. – Tianfeng huanpei (Jade Pendants of the Immortals)
G. Palestrina – Quan pulchri Sunt
G. Nanino – Amor m’ha posto; I pensier so saette
G. Palestrina – Nigra sum, sed formosa
Bartolomeo de Selma – Vestiva i colli
G. Palestrina – Vestiva i colli
Anon. – Gaoshan liushui (Lofty Mountains and Rolling Waters)
A. Gabrieli – Ricercar arioso
G. Palestrina – Surgam et circuibo civitatem
Huang Ruo – My Promises are Above

T he readings were graceful and passionately delivered. Some of the readings are excerpts from Ricci’s diaries and letters—poetical in their own way and manifesting not so much the worldview of a missionary of the Roman Catholic Church as the personal and good-hearted expressions of a human being who is deeply and continually interested in other people and how they live, continually interested in learning, and in Life. Over his 30+ years in China, Ricci was fluent in writing and speaking Chinese and came to be highly regarded by the local Chinese scholars with whom he came into contact.

R icci [Li Xitai] … there is not a single one of our books that he has not read… In a noisy gathering of several dozen people with everybody speaking at once, the arguments he is following do not disturb him at all… [Other people] err through an excess of either inflexibility or compliancy… they are all inferior to him.”
— Li Zhi, letter to a friend regarding Ricci, 1600.

I f one totes up the durations of the various segments of the performance, the Chinese texts and music occupy considerably less time than the Baroque western music and Ricci texts. This is, after all, a production about Ricci and his activity and travels and his map. But the Chinese material is not merely ‘context’ or ‘backdrop’ for the Ricci saga; it is aesthetically and expressively as strong as the rest. The guzheng and sheng music is, if anything, revealing of a greater depth of existential reflection and contemplation on the part of the Chinese—of a great intellectual openness and spiritual preparedness to receive whatever insights a new experience [with Ricci, or with others] might offer—contrasted with the still-transcendent-but-more-constrained conceptions of Gabrieli or Palestrina. From the performance, we get the strong message that the illustrious Chinese Ricci encountered and whose writings survive were extraordinary human beings, every bit as much as Ricci was extraordinary.

T here are, naturally, other, less sanguine perspectives on Ricci and his accomplishments (see some of the books linked below). Indeed, some of Huang Ruo’s music conveys the diversity of Chinese opinion about the Jesuit(s) in their midst. Ricci’s chronic reluctance to forthrightly state what his or the Church’s purposes and intentions were in China evidently wore thin at times—graciousness has its limits, and there has to be an acceptable bilateral flow of value, or convincing and ongoing prospects of future value flow, for the relationship/exchange/intrusion to be sustainable. Huang Ruo’s music and the ensemble’s playing provide a balanced and empathetic, speculative account of this cross-cultural give-and-take. This is not surface-level alternating now-Chinese-now-Western-sacred-music collage or ‘documentary’; instead, the dramatic tension of the work derives from the fact that the sequence of compositions does recreate this diversity, this give-and-take, complete with the politics and misapprehensions in it. Not inscrutable! Quite the opposite.

M any thanks to the IU and U of M for producing and performing this beautiful and exciting work! International Relations par excellence!

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Kari Johnson & Robert Burke: ‘Unity’ Concert

M any things to be enthused about last night, regarding Kari Johnson’s and Robert Burke’s KCeMA performance at Unity Temple.

Christopher Biggs – The Ends of Histories (piano, electronics, and video, 10-min)
Peter Swendsen – Nothing that is not there and the Nothing that is (instrumented bass drum and electronics, 8.5-min)
Jeff Herriott – Velvet Sink (piano and electronics, 13-min)
João Pedro Oliveira – Liquid Bars (vibraphone and electronics, 12-min)
Scott Blasco – Queen of Heaven (piano and electronics, 23-min)

C hristopher Biggs’s ‘The Ends of Histories’ for piano, digital video and audio represents ideas regarding how history must end—any history, all Histories—including religious ones, socio‐political ones, geological histories, all of them. A primary-color-heavy, apocalyptic video of watery scenes and splotches of color is displayed on a screen adjacent to pianist Kari Johnson. The high-contrast, posterized quality of the video’s color palette adds to the non-human, bichromatic wolf-vision, Terminator-vision, Predator-vision, insect-vision viewpoint of the camera/cameraperson. The piano part is full of sforzando emphases, a hyper-percussive quality that is meant to mate with the punctate, unforgiving synth and cosmically abject waveform-samples on the digital audio tracks. Ms. Johnson provided a spirited, empathetic reading, flawless.

T he materials represent the following conceptions of the end of history: (1) a polarized religious End Time whereby everyone either ascends into a Pleasant World or descends into Fire—a prophetic, spiritual, transcendent End that has appeared in many forms throughout history and is currently represented by the idea that there will be some kind of cataclysm at the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012; (2) a sociopolitical End in which capitalist democracy supplants all other ideologies...; and (3) ‘scientific’ Ends... mass-extinctions.”
— Christopher Biggs, composer.

P eter Swendsen’s ‘Nothing is not there and the Nothing that is’ for miked/instrumented bass drum and electronics draws its inspiration from violent forces of wind and weather. Forces of Nature are the architects of the sonic space and textures, and humans are compulsory respondents to natural events that are not of their choosing. The majority of the piece consists of canticle-like ‘verse-and-responsory’ segments, each about one minute in length. The human percussionist (Robert Burke) is entrained in Nature’s mesh (electronics, plus waveforms captured by mics—his own playing, digitally processed, delayed, pitch-bent, filtered, and replayed through monitors adjacent to him on-stage). The piece is written in such a way that the performer becomes progressively more mindful of the sonic consequences of each gesture, each mallet stroke, for what the future will become—and we in the audience experience this sense of the long-term impact that we have, on each other, on other species, and on the planet as a whole. Burke’s finesse with extended mallet techniques—including inducing aeroelastic drum-head vibrations with his hypothenar eminence and including wiping a stick fitted with a red silastic scrubber on the drum-head to evoke wild-animal growls and anguished roaring—were ‘Never-heard-anything-like-that-before!’ breathtaking.

A long the coast, this collision is a constant negotiation: the land and sea changing back and forth; the clouds that hover near the shoreline. In the interior, however, wind and weather do not negotiate.”
— Peter Swendsen, composer.

J oão Pedro Oliveira’s ‘Liquid Bars’ delivers sonic textures that marry live marimba/vibraphone with the electronically-processed signals from two large dynamic ribbon mics positioned at approximately mid-resonator-tube height on the left side and right side of the instrument. The electronically-processed sounds mutate spontaneously under software control, modulated by the mallet strikes. The increasingly complex polyphonies and polyrhythms are fascinating and unnerving—almost like interviewing a person whose acute psychiatric problems have landed the person in your Emergency Room in the wee hours of a Saturday night. The notion of ‘self’ is called into question, not only who the self or ‘selves’ are—the one(s) in front of you—but also whether the whole assumption that ‘who’ any of us are is stable and ascertainable is faulty. The composition has ketamine-like psychotropic properties. Gee, should FDA and DEA regulate this music as a Schedule II pharmaceutical? Powerful! Robert Burke’s 4-mallet technique is superb...

L et us imagine a Marimba who can produce sound... Let us imagine that the Performer and the Marimba would each have the possibility of dividing themselves into two or more instruments and performers—and imagine that all of these play against each other.”
— João Pedro Oliveira, composer.

J eff Herriott’s ‘Velvet Sink’ is a piece that explores the possibilities of the piano through both extended performance techniques and the use of digital audio. I worry that technical obsolescence tends to make works like these short-lived. Several works realized on the IRCAM’s realtime audio processor 4X, for example, can no longer be performed, because the equipment and operating-system become obsolete so fast and cannot readily be ‘refactored’ and ported to new configurations that can render the same effects as the old ones. There are maintenance problems even with well-structured software. Pieces for ‘tape’ survive: the process of recording will always be ported to more recent technologies, such as CDs, DVDs, and hard disks. Here, though, Herriott’s Max/MSP scripts and Peak and ProTools elements are fairly portable and are likely to withstand the technology changes of this decade and the next. Kari Johnson gives tactile, delicate treatments of the keyboard passages. Repetitive eighth-note patterns, very insistent, have undulating up-down microtonal bends applied to them, until the patterns feel like waves, a gentle-swell aquatic envelope—the sonic surface is a kind of ‘minimalism-built-out-of-complexity’, sort of oxymoronic jumbo-shrimp. Then she stands up, reaches into the piano and begins plucking strings with fingertips and fingernails; hammering piano strings with percussion mallets; modifying the placements of rubber erasers between strings, prepared-piano-style—at times music-box-like, at times chime-like.

S amples were recorded using both a baby grand and an out-of-tune piano-harp from a destroyed upright piano. Some of these sound snippets were then processed and patched to generate longer sound files that were, in turn, reconfigured with ProTools. Others, notably the plucked gestures in the third movement, sound in performance much as they did during the recording. Ultimately, a unique Max/MSP patch is used in performance to control the playback of the recorded material.”
— Jeff Herriott, composer.

S cott Blasco’s (b'79) Queen of Heaven, composed for Ms. Johnson and premiered last night, consists of five movements, each conceived as [a religious—] icon, concerning itself with a single idea, turning it over and over, meditating on it from different angles. ‘Queen of Heaven’ is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, “a source of comfort and inspiration to Christians from the earliest years of their history,” in the composer’s words. Blasco’s composition, informed by his Master’s degree in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and degree in Composition and Music Theory from Calvin College, is a highly personal exegesis. The angels’ ‘greeting’ the Mother of God in the first movement conveys more of a confrontation—as in Awed and Struck Dumb—than a ‘greeting’. Sonority and terror appear linked in other of the movements as well, enough to cause most to have second-thoughts about the appeal of the Pearly Gates.

W hen I write music, I’m not writing it ‘for me’ per se. I see it as holding out an olive branch to my audience, and offering praise by mirroring the Creator.”
— Scott Blasco, composer.

K ari Johnson is a DMA student at UMKC Conservatory where she studies with John McIntyre. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy from the University of Central Missouri, a master’s degree in Piano Performance from Bowling Green State University, and a master’s degree in Piano Pedagogy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ms. Johnson has won or placed in competitions throughout the Midwest, including the MTNA Steinway Young Artist Competitions in Missouri and Illinois and the Venetia Hall Concerto Competition. An active performer of new music and chamber music, Ms. Johnson’s recent performances include collaborative concerts at the University of Central Missouri and Pittsburg State University, UMKC’s “Carter and Messiaen at 100” festival, and the CMS Great Plains Chapter 2009 Regional Conference. In the coming year she will perform at the 2010 UCM New Music Festival and the 2010 SEAMUS National Conference.

R obert Burke is also a DMA student at UMKC Conservatory. He has enjoyed an eclectic carrier performing, studying and teaching throughout Canada, The United States, Japan and Europe. He is originally from Alberta, Canada although for the last decade has hailed New Orleans as home. A strong advocate of new music, Mr. Burke has commissioned and performed countless solo percussion works in recital and held member ship in New Works Calgary, Syncronia (St. Louis) and Conundrum New Music Ensemble. He has also been a regular member of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, The Calgary Philharmonic and The Louisianna Philharmonic. As a drumset player, Mr. Burke has performed and toured with a remarkable number of recording artists in clubs and festivals throughout the United States and Europe, including Brian Lee, Johnny Sansone, Preston Hubbard, Frankie Ford, Cyril Neville, Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas, Peter Nero, Marvin Hamlish, and Robert Goulet. He holds degrees from University of Alberta and the University of Calgary and has served on the faculty of the University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, the University of Missouri-Columbia and Central Methodist College.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Chanticleer: Orlando di Lasso’s ‘Optics’

Mielich – Lasso leading ensemble of chamber singers, 1573

C ultural acts, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms, are social events like any other; they are as public as a marriage and as observable as agriculture.”
— Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System, p. 87.

T he program notes for last night’s chamber performance by Chanticleer of works by Orlando di Lasso mention the paintings of Hans Mielich, including the one above from about 1570 which depicts Lasso leading an ensemble of chamber singers and other musicians.

Psalmus Poenitentialis ‘Miserere mei Deus’ LV 727, Ps. 51
Laudate Dominum de caelis LV 954, Ps. 148
Laudate Dominum in Sacris ejus LV 953, Ps. 150
Missa ‘Tous les regretz’ LV 626

E ach beautiful and each iconographically very different, all of these seem intended to assert specific assets of the singers and of the composer and the patrons: good will, generosity, purity of intention, piety, and nobility.

A ccretions from centuries of use and custom must have constrained the mass; here in this missa and laudates and other pieces, Orlando di Lasso’s flowing vocal arcs are freed-up, liberated like sunbeams, spreading light and exposing minute details... inviting the Divine to examine in detail the hearts of those who are offering these sounds. The shiftings from major to minor and back again, again and again—these evoke an ‘optical’ quality not unlike 16th Century Flemish and French and Venetian paintings or even German art like Dürer’s. Individual voices are drawn with truth and utter simplicity. Chanticleer members’ voices ascend in the spiral sanctuary, permeating it, inhabiting it by dint of truth and simplicity.

A Jan van Eyck painting from the same period shows Canon van der Paele, canon of the Church of St. Donatian in Bruges, Belgium (not far from where Lasso was born) kneeling before the Virgin and Child, next to St. George and St. Donatian. They are in the dark interior of the Bruges cathedral, illuminated by a light source coming from the upper left.

T he canon’s manuscript and eyeglasses—a narrative indication that van der Paele has quit reading from his book and turns his attention to Virgin and Child. The canon’s illuminated manuscript and eyeglasses parallel the props held by Christ and His mother—a bouquet and a parrot. To 15th Century viewers these must’ve been symbolic. But it is clear the props are also incidental; transitory; ‘of this world’. The singing of Chanticleer is ‘of this world’ as well, but it propels our minds and hearts beyond it.

T he interweaving voices activate colors and tones—the counter-tenors pick up the gold threads of St. Donatian’s brocade; the tenors catch glints from St. George’s shining armor; the baritones and basses reveal the draping and textures of the rich fabrics—as they are reflected, re-reflected, and refracted from different surfaces... In the painting, just so with the sound in this peculiar architecture.

T he frames of van der Paele’s eyeglasses cast shadows onto the book. The refraction of the lenses distorts the text underneath. Chanticleer 4-, 5-, and 6-part harmony... parts refracting against each other, at times shadowing or occluding each other; with beat-frequencies among the pitches and re-reflections and meta-refractions against the texts.

T he visual intentions of the painting and its descriptive language control or inform our interpretation of symbolic meaning. The sonic intentions of these pieces and their descriptive language similarly control or inform how we parse their symbolic meanings. Minimalist/literalist interpretations hold that, when normative explanation for an object is sufficient to explain its presence, symbolic meaning is both unnecessary and improbable—an application of Ockham’s Razor. But hearing these tunes and reading these eyeglasses in a literal, nonsymbolic way runs counter to the way in which this painting and these Orlando di Lasso compositions encourage us to recognize far more fluid relationships between objects of this world and symbolic, transcendent ideas. This was a winter evening to remember... really wonderful.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Renée Fleming Sings Brad Mehldau’s ‘Rilke: Book of Hours’

R enée Fleming’s performance last night in Kansas City was excellent.

[50-sec clip, Renée Fleming, Brad Mehldau, ‘Rilke: Stundenbuch’, ‘Ich liebe dich, du sanftestes Gesetz’, 2006, 1.8MB MP3]

T he singing was gorgeous. The piano accompaniment by Bradley Moore was superb.

I had not previously heard the Brad Mehldau composition, “Songs from Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Book of Hours’.” The ‘Love Sublime’ CD on which these were recorded was released in 2006. A disturbing thing for those familiar with Rilke’s poetry is the Anita Barrows-Joanna Macy Rilke translation used by Mehldau for these texts. Barrows and Macy convey mainly adulation and bended-knee piety, and strike out Rilke’s struggling with the problem of theodicy and anger towards a God who allows/causes suffering.

I n the first song (Mönchischen Leben #18, ‘Ich liebe dich, du sanftestes Gesetz’), Rilke’s God as ‘the [maleficent] forest from which we never escape’ is transmuted by Barrow and Macy into a uterine ‘forest that always surrounded us’.

T hroughout Barrow’s and Macy’s “translation” there is wholesale, highly-politicized editing going on. They delete major portions of some stanzas (?where they find that Rilke’s original text does not jibe with their own church’s teachings or their own personal religious views), as in the second song (from Pilgerschaft #3, ‘Ich bin nur einer deiner Ganzgeringen’). Likewise in the third song sung by Fleming last night (Pilgerschaft #31, ‘Und seine Sorgfalt ist uns wie ein Alb’). The fourth song (Pilgerschaft #32, ‘Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehn’) completely renovates Rilke’s sense of God as an insurmountable, lethal burden... into a maniacal, martyrous masochist-terrorist’s self-immolation ritual, suicide-bomber-style. Yikes!

Rilke, Stundenbuch, Mönchischer Leben, #18

L ike all good art songs, Mehldau’s writing affords the vocalist wide latitudes for rhythmic phrasing and melodic interpretation, and Fleming does not disappoint. Her ear ‘colonized’ by the buggy Barrows-Macy translation, she is compelled to become a ‘medium,’ clairvoyantly assaying what Rilke meant. She takes the words she is given, and turns them musically into something far closer to authentic Rilke. To hear her sing this is like hearing an alchemist at work, changing base metals into gold.

O f course, there can be no ‘last word’ in translation or poetical hermeneutics, and, equally well, there can hardly be a ‘first word’ either. Hermeneutics is a process, an ongoing reaction to questions about the subjectivity and finiteness of understanding. Mehldau’s composition, then, amounts to an elaborate invitation—to the singer, to the pianist, and to the audience—to (re-)examine the text and decide for themselves what it means, or whether this account of what Rilke wrote is authentic or not.

M any years ago, Gadamer came up with the term ‘philosophical hermeneutics’; here, Mehldau leaves it to Fleming and to us to resolve. Faced with an English translation so very far from what Rilke actually wrote, Fleming concentrates on the question of what happens to us when we ‘understand’. Suffice to say, very few singers are up to a challenge of this sort...

W hat I mean by all this is: hearing Rilke ‘in his own voice’ is important. An honest and genuinely gifted translator can achieve this, even with poetry. It is an altruistic act, this setting aside of one’s own prejudices and temptations in devotion to a poet’s own unique (and sometimes disagreeable—) expressions.

A translator should never be an ‘editor’ in the way that Barrows and Macy allowed themselves to be, co-opting a text and bollocks with the truth. It’s about ‘transparency’.

W hat else? Mehldau offers an imaginative, dramatic, and widely-varied use of sound and silence, which Fleming takes full advantage of. Some links below, on sound art and acoustic ‘territories’ as compositional devices, may interest you in this regard.