Variations on a Theme

During the Romantic Era in classical music, roughly from 1800 to 1850 (though it continued to be expressed for decades after that), serious European composers enjoyed displaying their prowess in composing sets of pieces on a short lyric formula. Many of these composers were highly skilled at the keyboard, and during the Romantic period, one of the chief social events was giving an intimate performance to select audiences, during which young impressionable ladies in the audience, overcome by the exalted power of the musical "genius," would swoon in thrall to the outpouring of emotion communicated through the music. This swooning was the metaphorical evidence of the capacity of art to move human emotion, especially love, longing, despair, regret, loss, and intense joy. Young ladies were imagined to be particularly susceptible to such extremes of emotion, perhaps as a consequence of their inherent "weakness" or vulnerability. So much for sexual freedom!  

Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann [1810-56] composed the suite Carnival [1834-5, subtitled Little Scenes on Four Notes, consisting of 21 ordered pieces], inspired by his love for his then fiancé, Ernestine von Fricken. The four notes are codes--for the town where Ernestine was born, the word for carnival in German, the word for Ash Wednesday, and finally for Schumann's own name. The idea of composing a set of variations was by no means a new concept by this time, but the idea of stretching the range of musical styles and extremes was a hallmark of romantic expression, like performing a feat of protean transformations. 

The tradition of the young precocious virtuoso performing magic and majestical feats at the keyboard is alive and well in our own time, and young Evgeny Kissin's performance of the Carnival is a prime example of the trope. The brevity of each piece in the suite belies the seriousness of the musical ideas employed. It's rather like seeing a dancer do 20 different kinds of steps. Sort of a "look, ma, no hands" affair as the audience gapes with astonishment at each masterful incarnation.  Schulman's not beyond making fun of some of the styles; in one, he even parodies his contemporary Chopin, though the sound is so beautiful, you wonder how Frederic wouldn't have appreciated the gesture.  

Too, there's something of the alchemical about using a coded formula as inspiration for an emotional statement. Part divine formula, part secret reference. It places the composer in the position of interpreter of the oracle, receiving inspiration from a set of keys to which only he has access, by virtue of his genius--a very romantic idea.  

The Young Brahms

Music is by its nature rhythmic, and harmonic, but the idea of extending a piece of music beyond the initial rhythmic scheme that defines a work, to longer forms (such as a symphony) didn't really take hold until the beginning of the Romantic period. You can see the difference by comparing an early symphony of Mozart's, to a late one by Beethoven. For the Romantics, a musical idea could be extended into a kind of journey, which might include a number of different tempi, instrumental choices, changing moods etc.  

This quality of journey led to a greater level of abstraction, which is evident in Beethoven, and also in Brahms. But the interest in suites of shorter pieces, as expressions of the progression of a ideas which cohere around a specific theme or inspiration, is also a strong aspect of the Romantic tendency.  The individual pieces are linked into a sequence of versions of the initial theme, which may be concealed beneath improbable inventions, only to re-emerge, slightly altered, in a later part. As the sequence proceeds, the gathering emotional inertia may lead inevitably to a thematic crescendo, summarizing the triumphant fulfillment of the whole. And the variety of kinds of musical styles or types, keeps the listener alert, and refreshed. Unlike in a Romantic symphony, where the musical ideas may get bogged down in long meditations, a suite of variations may create the same sense of satisfaction and pleasure while not demanding the same level of continuous mental concentration.   

Johannes Brahms was a composer I had to grow to love over time. His thick, lush harmonies, and very dense compositional style always put me off as a student of the keyboard, and his passionate sternness didn't appeal to me in my youth. It was years before I heard his Hungarian Rhapsodies, some of which are as light-hearted and playful as anything in the classical canon.  I think I first heard his Variations and Fugue on a Them by Handel* about 30 years ago, in a recording by the late, great tragic pianist Julius Katchen, who died at the age of 42 of cancer. The Handel Variations begin unobtrusively with the simplest quotation from the theme, then proceed through 25 variations, ending in a brilliant fugue. The suite moves easily through varying moods and styles, though the level of skill required to perform it are considerable, taxing the ability of any serious player. Brahms is less playful and tongue-in-cheek than Schumann is in Carnival, but the range of emotional moods is just as various.  

The older Brahms

What is the literary counterpart of a variations on a theme in music? Perhaps a series of sonnets, like Shakespeare's. Perhaps a sequence such as Berryman's Dream Songs. Or Berrigan's Sonnets. Or Spicer's The Holy Grail. Or Creeley's Numbers. There's something show-off-y about running a series of changes in a strict form, without losing inspiration or interest. It's somehow a proof of artistic genius, to exploit a form just for the sake of doing it. I've essayed the form in my poems "The Boat" and "Poem in Twenty Sections" though I'm not very certain of the ultimate value of doing it. The notion of the demonstration of craft is more important to traditionally-minded artists or craftsmen than those of us who like to explore free-form composition. I would never say that doing so is either easier or less fulfilling than inventing a new form, though. 

In music, maintaining a thematic core is a demanding requirement just as it is in language, requiring both flexibility and facility. Which is more difficult, to write a sonnet sequence or a theme and variations for the keyboard?  

______________

*Played here by Murray Perahia, a brilliant performer. 

After the Introductions, but Before the Performance

The apéritif is typically a drink served before a meal, ostensibly to aid in digestion, though to what extent this is really the case is dubious at best. Any handy excuse invented for the imbibing of alcoholic beverages must be viewed with a skeptical eye. But no excuse is really needed to appreciate a good concoction; it's a pleasure in itself, not in need of any artificial encouragements or pretexts.

Here's one that I thought of. The imagination plays a big part in the invention of any kind of taste. The greater your familiarity with how flavors are experienced, the greater the possibility that you may divine the right consummation of spice and mouthfeel. Curiosity also plays a part. 

Sweet vermouth is commonly drunk all by itself as an apéritif, but as a basis for mixing, it has just as much possibility as ordinary spirit goods (like bourbon or scotch). And its inferior strength means it should carry less of a kick, and hence fulfill the notion of apéritif, instead of a regular cocktail.

2 parts Carpano Antica Formula Vermouth 

1/4 part St. George Absinthe Verte

1/3 part Becherovka liqueur

1/2 part fresh lemon juice

slice lcmon garnish

served on the rocks (stirred slightly) 

This one won't chase the ladies away, either, which is always a consideration. 

Narcolepsy

Then there was the story of the guy who had been a speed-freak, who told me that he’d go into these obsessive quests in the city, diving into dumpsters, frantically driven by the intense intuition that he would find, at the bottom of one, under the layers of garbage and discarded detritus, priceless diamonds. The certainty with which he believed this, when in this extreme state of excess fatigue, was such that nothing could deter him, he’d spend days and nights walking through alleys in the city, climbing into huge dumpsters that sat behind apartment buildings or factories. During these seizures of obsession, he’d neglect to eat, or care for his hygiene, and would become black with the accumulated filth of the garbage, like a chimney sweep, but it didn’t matter.  His lust for treasure was overpowering. He also related that when in such feverish highs of speed, he would go into bookstores and voraciously devour whole texts at breakneck speed; he claimed he’d read all of Gray’s Anatomy in a single sitting, though this may have been drug-induced delusion.

Like an O.Henry Story

One guy told me he’d been working as a plastics engineer in Detroit when he developed marital problems. Following his divorce, he'd decided to take some time off, and flew out to San Francisco for the beginning of a vacation.

He was walking across Market Street in broad daylight when he was blind-sided by a taxi, and nearly killed. He was unconscious—in a coma—for a month, and there was some doubt that he’d even live. He’d been a very fit man, a weight-lifter before the accident.

When he finally recovered, he’d been missed back at his old job with General Motors, and was presumed disappeared or dead. After 5 months in the hospital, he was a shadow of his former self, and he decided to stay in San Francisco for a while. Work was hard to come by, he was on general assistance. He took any kind of part-time work he could find. He was hired by the owner of an old apartment building in the city to sit in a dark basement and shoot rats.

After a while, he developed some mysterious infections, which the doctors couldn’t diagnose. It turned out that while he’d been in the hospital, he’d been given blood transfusions, and he’d gotten the AIDS virus. This was in the early days of the disease, and he tried various kinds of medicines, none of which quite worked.  But he persevered, and managed to stay alive.

He’d also been a serious amateur jazz pianist, an interest we shared. He greatly admired Errol Garner, whom he said he heard play several times. He was astonished at how fast and accurately Garner could play octave trills and leaps—one of the hardest feats at the keyboard. He even got a few gigs himself in some dive in the city.

He’d been a polymer physics researcher at GM. He was philosophical about his plight, accepting the hand fate had dealt him. He wondered what might have happened to him, if his wife hadn’t decided to divorce him.

I lost track of him back in the ‘90’s, but always remember how strange and mysterious his life had been. His life was like an O Henry story. 

Feux d'Artifice

There's a famous piano piece, by Debussy, titled Feux d'Artifice (or "fireworks"). There's a nice rendition of it here on YouTube, performed by Marc-André Hamelin. It's vintage Debussy, filled with murmuring vibrations and poly-tonal runs and trills. Mists and vague intuitions float over distant visions and shimmering images. It's from the composer's Preludes Book II. In some ways, music--classical music--was never the same after Debussy, and in the same way we haven't "gotten beyond" the kinds of effects and emotions he was able to evoke through his work. 

Usually, Impressionism in music lends itself best to water effects or metaphors, and there are plenty of those in Debussy's work. He wrote a huge three-paneled work entitled simply La Mer, in which the whole classical orchestra works to create varied impressions of the sea. Fountains are very big in Europe. Sometimes, though, one is not sure whether a Debussy piece is about water, or fire. Feux d'Artifice could be about walking along a dashing mountain stream, as much as about watching a big fireworks display in the night sky. Such interpretive vagaries belong to the ambiguity of our impressions, how certain sounds are perceived by the individual listener, and what they may suggest, given our imaginations and unique experiences. Pure music as opposed to "programmatic" music--it's supposed to be a distinction with meaning, but such definitions are never clear cut in art. 

In any event, here's a new light cocktail mix, which celebrates the light-hearted spirit of French Impressionism. The recipe is for two servings.

2 parts Midori

2 parts Triple Sec

4 shakes of Angostura Bitters

4 shakes of Green Chartreuse

These are mixed together with crushed ice, and then poured into chilled cocktail glasses, to which is added enough bottled Pellegrino water to bring them up to full. 

Its effect is similar to a champagne cocktail, but you don't have to open a bottle of champagne to make this one. Champagne cocktails are a problem because it's hard to justify killing a whole bottle of the stuff just to make a couple of drinks. If you don't drink it right away, it goes flat, and there's nothing less enticing than champagne that's gone flat! This mix solves that problem. 

Spring is coming! [March 19th] So pack away your troubles and indulge in these foolish things! 

   

Oscar Night 2016

One of the great lessons of my life--if I may--is that the way to make people do something is to make them want to do it, instead of making them feel they should do it. Moral injunctions are useful and necessary, and living an ethical life is not only good for you, it's good for society. But persuading people to do good, and to practice it, cannot only involve the embrace of virtue or the jeopardy of doing wrong. 

Taste works in the same way. As much as we might like at times to reward performance or behavior that is correct and fair, how we respond to events and actions in the world is as much or more about our personal preferences and feelings, as it is about duty and obligation.

In the lead-up to the Oscars show this year, we heard a lot about the racial prejudice of the film industry, and how minority actors, directors and so on, have not been treated fairly by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, denying them recognition and rewards. 

I grew up in a severely prejudiced little town in California in the 1950's and '60's. Napa had no blacks living in it, while Vallejo, just a dozen or so miles down the road, had something like a third to a half African American population. In this environment, it was possible to believe that racism was something that happened elsewhere, to see it as a dilemma that occurred in the third person, something in the abstract. This is fair warning: if you want to believe that what I'm saying is just bigotry dressed up as critical rationalization.     

I can distinctly remember watching Sidney Poitier in the movie Lilies of the Field, which came out in 1963 when I was sixteen. It wasn't exactly a "feel good" movie, but it was clearly as safe a part as could be fashioned for the man who was, then, probably the most talented Negro actor, if not the best actor, in the whole film industry. Poitier won the Oscar that year for his part, in the face of stiff competition from Paul Newman (for Hud), and Albert Finney (in Tom Jones). It would not have surprised anyone if either of these two other white actors had won, but I don't remember feeling or thinking at the time that Poitier didn't deserve to win, or that giving him the award signified anything but an acknowledgement of talent and effort that went into his role.  

In 1994, Morgan Freeman starred in The Shawshank Redemption, a prison movie, with Tom Robbins, ostensibly about the travails of a white banker wrongly convicted (a life sentence) for having killed his wife. Though he was nominated for best actor in that role, Freeman lost out to Tom Hanks (in Forrest Gump). Shawshank and Gump were both feel good movies, and both involved important male bonding relationships. I don't remember feeling that something had gone wrong with that award; the award choice didn't seem "racial" to me. Gump was a well-made movie, and Hanks is a talented actor. Had Freeman won, I wouldn't have thought the choice was either politically correct, or based on the moral duty to honor minorities, even if they aren't perceived as having earned what they're given. Freeman was wonderful in the role, and nothing the Academy could have done, positive or negative, could have taken away what Freeman accomplished.  

Shawshank was a painful movie to watch, but also an uplifting experience. People suffer and hurt each other, but at the end, there's a revelatory release in which the two main characters, who've shared years in the hardship of imprisonment, are able to become friends on the outside. You could say, with justice, that their friendship transcends their respective racial differences--both genetic and social--and that it is this feeling, rather than any moral injunction, that is the movie's essential message. In other words, we're made to feel the attractions and values of friendship, instead of being reminded and scolded into politically correct behavior and attitudes. 

Watching the Oscars awards program last night on television, I often felt uncomfortable with all the clammy attitudinizing on the part of the host and various presenters, intent upon scolding us for not being "tolerant" and "diverse" and "representative" in our choices and opinions. It got so bad, that I muted the sound with the clicker several times, as the unctuous invocations were repeated over and over. 

The cinema is an art form. It's certainly possible to teach and to document with movies, but Hollywood is in the business of presenting entertainment for profit. The industry awards exist to encourage the industry to make better movies. Not movies that tell the right message, not movies that make the world better, but movies that entertain people and make a profit. Oscars are voted on by the 7000 filmmakers and film professionals in the industry, so the Oscar selections are very much an expression of the opinion of the industry. 

The taste reflected in the choice of winners in the various categories will always to some extent reflect the general spirit of the times. Over the decades, Hollywood has variously been accused of being too conservative or too liberal, by critics of varying persuasions. Over the last half-century, the kinds of movies that have been made, and the kinds of subjects explored, and ideas expressed, have progressed significantly. Today, movies almost routinely examine racial and ethnic prejudice, sexual difference, extreme violence,  crude comedy, and ordinary suffering. But movies are first and foremost about making money, and determining awards for aesthetic quality and technical acumen is an expression of taste, not political or social equality. 

It's fine to advocate equal access under law, but in the arts, it can't be just, or primarily, a matter of politically correct racial, ethnic or sexual "diversity" or "representation." The point about talent and skill is that it cuts across these divides, often making them irrelevant as guides to judgment or conduct. You can't insist that you automatically deserve to be given extra consideration, simply because you are a member of a suppressed minority. 

Chris Rock may be popular among his admirers, but I find him banal and clueless as an Oscars host. His jokes aren't funny, and he has a poor sense of his audience. Nearly everything he said last night was followed by an uncomfortable moment or two of silence, as if the audience couldn't comprehend whether it was supposed to frown or smile at his remarks. This may have been partly due to the bad script, but Rock seemed remarkably out of place as host. 

The attempt to hijack the Oscar awards night as an occasion to bring about "racial justice" fell with a loud thud. Everyone in the audience understood that this was an embarrassment, as I suspect the "television audience" across the land did. Over the last quarter century, Hollywood has bent over backwards to present itself as "concerned" and "aware" of social and political issues. Last night, it tried to "accommodate" the minority campaign by placing as many African American presenters on the stage as possible, and featuring speeches and remarks that told us how to feel and think about minority representation in the cinema. 

But taste can't be legislated. It's that simple. 

My C Slippers from London

When spouse and I traveled to Scotland in 2005, we stayed briefly in London, so that I could scout the London booksellers, and we could eat at a few choice restaurants there. I'd always wanted to stay at one of London's posh hotels, and we stayed at a few, including the Savoy, the Stafford, and Claridge's. At Claridge's--where we were greeted at the front desk by a veritable team of servants and staff, by name--we chose what the clerk described to us, as the Noel Coward room. (Searching this unit online produces no hits, so I presume it's either something the establishment doesn't/or doesn't any longer advertise. Coward was known to have stayed at Claridge's on occasion, since it was close to some theaters where his plays or musicals were performed, back in the day.)     

The room we were given had a deco feel, with cute green little metal sconces, and a butterscotch and green color scheme. The bathroom was most impressive, with jade green tile everywhere, and a sink with faucets that looked custom 1930's luxury. 

In the closet were matching sets of men's and women's slippers [photo above]--free swag offered to guests. I liked to imagine that the large green "C" on each slipper was in honor of Noel Coward, since we were, after all, sleeping in the "Noel Coward" room (not just at Claridge's). 

While there, we decided to have a dinner at what was then the Gordon Ramsey restaurant inside the hotel. Gordon Ramsey, you will note, is the same Gordon Ramsey we've all seen on Fox Television, in his British productions Hell's Kitchen, MasterChef, and other spin-offs, in which the famous tousle-headed ex-footballer turned dictator-chef judges and rages over restaurateurs and apprentice chefs with scornful disdain, in contests and makeovers. It's less a cooking show than a new kind of reality TV, in which the haughty host gets off hurting people's feelings and generally acting out his short-tempered imperiousness. The meal we had there was really a so-so experience. Neither the food nor the service was top-notch. Ramsey terminated his relationship with Claridge's in 2013, and the restaurant closed. 

Claridge's belongs to a brand of London hotel that flourished during the heydays of the British Empire, when the city was the de-facto center of the world, and anyone who was anyone was expected to stay in posh digs, to parade their cred and bask in the prosperity of decadence. Since the decline of the empire, such establishments are no longer the province of the upper classes, though it will cost you an arm and an ear to stay even a single night at any of them. 

Some people abhor elegance in any form, feeling that it represents some kind of continuing offense against common sense, moderation and fairness. Promiscuous consumption however has always been a component of civilization. To sample the style of life it represents is one small brand of indulgence I'd always dreamed about, which is why we stayed there. I still have those slippers, by the way, which I've kept as souvenirs. I never wore them. If I'd left them at the hotel, I assume they'd have been tossed into the recycle bin. Someday, after I'm gone, someone will probably think they belonged to someone whose name began with "C"--which would be fitting, since I'm Curtis.