Cotton Vitellius A. xv. is a collection of handwritten manuscripts complied into two books and ultimately bound together in the 17th century to rest in the British Library. The second of these books contains five otherwise unrelated items: between the third, which is "Alexander's Letter to Aristotle" and "Judith," which is the fifth item, is the only surviving copy of Beowulf.
One of the earliest and most significant poems in the alliterative style, Beowulf tells of a hero who comes to rid Hrothgar's kingdom of a monster named Grendel. John Gardner (1933-1982) wrote a book that tells this epic story from the monster's prospective.
Many readers encounter John Gardner, as I did, through his book "Grendel."
Grendel is cast by Gardner as a monster with a sense the absurd and a rough sense of humor.
A nihilist by (from) nature, Grendel is suddenly struck by deep musical experience: he overhears an incredible series of performances, and improvisations in the epic performance tradition that would have led, much later, to the written notation of the Beowulf text itself. We are allowed to imagine the formation of the surviving text, in a context that emphasizes its origin in song.
Grendel, while hiding, hears the blind shaper singing:
"with the harp behind him," wrote Gardner, "twisting together like sailors' ropes the bits and pieces of the best old songs."
This is the oral tradition at work. Grendel overhears the legend of his own unnatural death and finds a strange beauty in it. The shaper sang;
"of an ancient feud between two brothers which split all the world between darkness and light. And I, Grendel, was the dark side, he said in effect. The terrible race God cursed.
"I believed him. Such was the power of the shaper’s harp!”
Grendel is convinced by this musical inevitability and yet knows that it is is lies; most of it anyway. How can this be? This is not the supernatural power of music used by Orpheus to control nature, but instead the power of music to resonate (in)human nature.
Grendel ponders:
“If the ideas of art were beautiful that was art’s fault, not the shaper’s. A blind selector, almost mindless: a bird. Did they murder each other more gently because in the woods sweet songbirds sang?
"Yet I wasn’t satisfied. His fingers picked infallibly, as if moved by something beyond his power, and the words stitched together out of ancient songs, the scenes interwoven out of dreary tales, made a vision without seams, an image of himself yet not-himself”
The transformative power of music, the ability to create "a vision without seams, an image of himself yet not-himself," is like the symbolic dream-image of Nietzsche in section 5 of "The Birth of Tragedy" played on Wallace Steven's "Blue Guitar."
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
Vitruvius; Musical Training to Tune Catapults
In this image from an edition of his book published in 1684, the Roman engineer Vitruvuis (c.80 BC-c.15 BC) presents his book "De Architectura" to Augustus. The image imagines the very moment in which Vitruvius became a legend, author of a book widely read for more than 700 years.
In the opening of "De Architectura" Vitruvuis indicates which subjects and skills should be acquired by architects. Among them is the study of music.
Musical training has a very practical application:
"Music, also, the architect ought to understand so that he may have knowledge of the canonical and mathematical theory, and besides be able to tune ballistae, catapultae, and scorpiones to the proper key. For to the right and left in the beams are the holes in the frames through which the strings of twisted sinew are stretched by means of windlasses and bars, and these strings must not be clamped and made fast until they give the same correct note to the ear of the skilled workman. For the arms thrust through those stretched strings must, on being let go, strike their blow together at the same moment; but if they are not in unison, they will prevent the course of projectiles from being straight."
Tuning perfect unisons requires that one can hear the absence of beats. This is a skill that becomes much easier after having musical training. One also imagines that the specific pitch of the strings was also important as a gauge of the correct tension of those massive strings. People are going to hurt if the strings are stretched to the point of breaking!
For the concept of using musical skills as a means of destruction one must thank a Roman.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
John Gardner on Mahler 5
John Gardner (1933-1982) wrote about music as an insider. He experienced first-hand the powerful sense of community created through performance of music in common circumstances. Musicians and musical thought permeate his work, and are used with currency and force in the webs of interlinked and associated ideas that invigorate so much of his fiction. These musical encounters and meditations are consistent and powerful, poetic and vast.
The first story in his collection called "The Art of Living," is called "Nimram." In it, a conductor named Benjamin Nimram is sitting next to a sixteen-year-old girl who is terminally ill. They are flying into O'Hare airport and the following night Nimram will conduct the Chicago Symphony. The girl and her parents buy tickets at the last minute and drive in from La Grange. Because they arrive late, "after the Water music, with which he had opened the program." Gardner intensifies the experience in a single, long paragraph, cutting across it to end the story with three short gestures like staccato tapping:
"She had never before seen a Mahler orchestra—nine French horns, wave on wave of violins and cellos, a whole long row of gleaming trumpets, brighter than welders’ lights, another of trombones, two rows of basses, four harps. It was awesome, almost frightening. It filled the vast stage from wingtip to wingtip like some monstrous black creature too enormous to fly, guarding the ground with its head thrust forward—the light-drenched, empty podium. When the last of the enlarged orchestra was assembled and the newcomers had tuned, the houselights dimmed, and as if at some signal invisible to commoners, the people below her began to clap, then the people all around her. Now she too was clapping, her mother and father clapping loudly beside her, the roar of applause growing louder and deeper, drawing the conductor toward the light. He came like a panther, dignified yet jubilant, flashing his teeth in a smile, waving at the orchestra with both long arms. He shook hands with the concertmaster, bounded to the podium—-light shot off his hair—-turned to the audience and bowed with his arms stretched wide, then straightened, chin high, as if revelling in their pleasure and miraculous faith in him. Then he turned, threw open the score—-the applause sank away—-and for a moment studied it like a man reading dials and gauges of infinite complexity. He picked up his baton; they lifted their instruments. He threw back his shoulders and raised both hands till they were level with his shoulders, where he held them still, as if casting a spell on his army of musicians, all motionless as a crowd in suspended animation, the breathless dead of the whole world’s history, awaiting the impossible. And then his right hand moved—-nothing much, almost playful—-and the trumpet-call began, a kind of warning both to the auditorium, tier on tier of shadowy white faces rising in the dark, and to the still orchestra bathed in light. Now his left hand moved and the orchestra stirred, tentative at first, but presaging such an awakening as she’d never before dreamed of. Then something new began, all that wide valley of orchestra playing, calm, serene, a vast sweep of music as smooth and sharp edged as an enormous scythe—-she had never in her life heard a sound so broad, as if all of humanity, living and dead, had come together for one grand onslaught. The sound ran, gathering its strength, along the ground, building in intensity, full of doubt, even terror, but also fury, and then—amazingly, quite easily—lifted. She pressed her father’s hand as Benjamin Nimram, last night, had pressed hers.
Her mother leaned toward her, tilting like a tree in high wind. 'Are you sure that’s him? she asked.
'Of course it is,' she said.
Sternly, the man behind them cleared his throat."
Sir George Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, 1986.
The first story in his collection called "The Art of Living," is called "Nimram." In it, a conductor named Benjamin Nimram is sitting next to a sixteen-year-old girl who is terminally ill. They are flying into O'Hare airport and the following night Nimram will conduct the Chicago Symphony. The girl and her parents buy tickets at the last minute and drive in from La Grange. Because they arrive late, "after the Water music, with which he had opened the program." Gardner intensifies the experience in a single, long paragraph, cutting across it to end the story with three short gestures like staccato tapping:
"She had never before seen a Mahler orchestra—nine French horns, wave on wave of violins and cellos, a whole long row of gleaming trumpets, brighter than welders’ lights, another of trombones, two rows of basses, four harps. It was awesome, almost frightening. It filled the vast stage from wingtip to wingtip like some monstrous black creature too enormous to fly, guarding the ground with its head thrust forward—the light-drenched, empty podium. When the last of the enlarged orchestra was assembled and the newcomers had tuned, the houselights dimmed, and as if at some signal invisible to commoners, the people below her began to clap, then the people all around her. Now she too was clapping, her mother and father clapping loudly beside her, the roar of applause growing louder and deeper, drawing the conductor toward the light. He came like a panther, dignified yet jubilant, flashing his teeth in a smile, waving at the orchestra with both long arms. He shook hands with the concertmaster, bounded to the podium—-light shot off his hair—-turned to the audience and bowed with his arms stretched wide, then straightened, chin high, as if revelling in their pleasure and miraculous faith in him. Then he turned, threw open the score—-the applause sank away—-and for a moment studied it like a man reading dials and gauges of infinite complexity. He picked up his baton; they lifted their instruments. He threw back his shoulders and raised both hands till they were level with his shoulders, where he held them still, as if casting a spell on his army of musicians, all motionless as a crowd in suspended animation, the breathless dead of the whole world’s history, awaiting the impossible. And then his right hand moved—-nothing much, almost playful—-and the trumpet-call began, a kind of warning both to the auditorium, tier on tier of shadowy white faces rising in the dark, and to the still orchestra bathed in light. Now his left hand moved and the orchestra stirred, tentative at first, but presaging such an awakening as she’d never before dreamed of. Then something new began, all that wide valley of orchestra playing, calm, serene, a vast sweep of music as smooth and sharp edged as an enormous scythe—-she had never in her life heard a sound so broad, as if all of humanity, living and dead, had come together for one grand onslaught. The sound ran, gathering its strength, along the ground, building in intensity, full of doubt, even terror, but also fury, and then—amazingly, quite easily—lifted. She pressed her father’s hand as Benjamin Nimram, last night, had pressed hers.
Her mother leaned toward her, tilting like a tree in high wind. 'Are you sure that’s him? she asked.
'Of course it is,' she said.
Sternly, the man behind them cleared his throat."
Sir George Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, 1986.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Thinking September with Tchaikovsky; the Summers farewell
The Russian magazine "Nouvellist" commissioned Tchaikovsky to write twelve short piano pieces inspired by the each of the twelve months. The corresponding music appeared in each publication in 1876.
The editor chose subtitles that set the mood for each month. September was inspired by the hunt. An additional epigraph was given based on a phrase from a poem by Pushkin:
"It is time!
The horns are sounding!
The hunters in their hunting dress are mounted on their horses;
in early dawn the borzois are jumping."
September is set in fanfares and blazing sound.
The theme appears first in the bass. Its excitement is set in conflicts: measures cast in triplets alternate with measures in duple rhythms. Harmonies in inversion surprise where one would expect to hear root position. "It is time," says the poem, and this is music in motion.
A restatement is given with the melody set an octave higher [0:15]. An E-flat surprises us with bright augmented color in the left-hand that remains no less startling as it resolves to D. Energy scatters and reforms as the hands are set against one another [0:22]. One final octave transformation leads the melody into a grand fanfare [0:32] that is also restated [0:38] before culminating in a passage of reflections.
The central section of September [0:58] is more development than other central sections we have heard over the last several months. It allows the triplet gestures to be placed together in longer strings, first heard as a bass passage [1:14] and later as melodic figuration [1:18].
The final section [1:44] is an echo of the first modified only for the final two chords. September is focused, deliberate, and intensely active.
"It is now September," wrote English writer Nicholas Breton (1545-1626), "and the sunne begins to fall much from his height, the medowes are left bare, by the mouthes of hungary cattell."
His entry, from "The Twelve Moneths," talks of preparations: "Paper, pen & inke are much in request [...] Coales and wood make toward the chimney...In briefe, I thus conclude of it, I hold it the Winters forewarning, and the Summers farewell. Adieu."
The editor chose subtitles that set the mood for each month. September was inspired by the hunt. An additional epigraph was given based on a phrase from a poem by Pushkin:
"It is time!
The horns are sounding!
The hunters in their hunting dress are mounted on their horses;
in early dawn the borzois are jumping."
September is set in fanfares and blazing sound.
The theme appears first in the bass. Its excitement is set in conflicts: measures cast in triplets alternate with measures in duple rhythms. Harmonies in inversion surprise where one would expect to hear root position. "It is time," says the poem, and this is music in motion.
A restatement is given with the melody set an octave higher [0:15]. An E-flat surprises us with bright augmented color in the left-hand that remains no less startling as it resolves to D. Energy scatters and reforms as the hands are set against one another [0:22]. One final octave transformation leads the melody into a grand fanfare [0:32] that is also restated [0:38] before culminating in a passage of reflections.
The central section of September [0:58] is more development than other central sections we have heard over the last several months. It allows the triplet gestures to be placed together in longer strings, first heard as a bass passage [1:14] and later as melodic figuration [1:18].
The final section [1:44] is an echo of the first modified only for the final two chords. September is focused, deliberate, and intensely active.
"It is now September," wrote English writer Nicholas Breton (1545-1626), "and the sunne begins to fall much from his height, the medowes are left bare, by the mouthes of hungary cattell."
His entry, from "The Twelve Moneths," talks of preparations: "Paper, pen & inke are much in request [...] Coales and wood make toward the chimney...In briefe, I thus conclude of it, I hold it the Winters forewarning, and the Summers farewell. Adieu."
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