Ashland theater season, 2: Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter; Fences

I ADMIT IT: I didn't have high expectations for Julie Marie Myatt's new play Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter, which we saw in Ashland last Wednesday, the third of four plays we saw that week. And in not looking forward to the production I suppose I'm part of that majority of the public that seems fatigued by Iraq and war: it was shamefully wrong to begin with; it's been dragging on too long; there seems to be nothing right that can be done about it. I believe there are historical inevitabilities; Iraq is certainly one of them.

And another lament about the human damage the war is causing didn't promise an evening's entertainment. So why see it? Well, first of all, we've formed the habit of seeing everything the Oregon Shakespeare Festival offers each season. I was brought up to eat one piece of toast without jam before getting one with: you take things as they come. And the point of OSF is that its artistic direction (which passed from Libby Appel to Bill Rauch this year) balances the seasons carefully, offering about fifty percent Shakespeare, the balance well distributed between standard repertoire and new plays, all set on a fairly stable cast of actors, nearly all chosen with an eye for the developing conversation a season's repertoire will generate, among the audiences and among the plays themselves.

Even while watching it, and thinking about it immediately afterward, Welcome Home, Jenny Sutters seemed less a play than a set of character sketches. But the characters are interesting and often extremely entertaining (funny as hell, in fact); and the lack of purpose of course characterizes the entire American adventure in Iraq: purposeless (and mindless, which this play is not) from the start.

Then too, on reflection Welcome Home is an intelligent response to The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, seen earlier (and commented on briefly a few days ago). I suppose the common ancestor is Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by way of William Inge's Bus Stop, both plays about the dynamics that evolve among strangers tossed together in some overwhelming whim of the Fates — and, come to think of it, isn't that Purposeful Plot enough?

In any case Jenny comes home with a prosthetic leg, but in fact doesn't go home immediately. She winds up in an encampment of dropouts and rejects somewhere in the desert, not far I suppose from where Lindsey and I were stalking wildflowers last month. She responds to a gently dazed preacher who lacks a church, a cynical sociopath who lacks cruelty, an aging flower-child still seeking the right man, and a well-intentioned self-appointed shrink. In the end, perhaps, their examples persuade Jenny she has better opportunities at home with her own little kids, whose potential rejection has kept her from returning. At least I think that's what will happen to her next: whatever, she has the strength and resilience and good humor to survive.

If it's a series of character sketches, the play gives its actors a lot to deal with. The acting was in fact superb, the title role brilliantly captured by Gwendolyn Mulamba; Kate Mulligan and David Kelly on the mark as Lou the hippie and Buddy the preacher, and Gregory Linington superb as the laconic Donald. Jessica Thebus directed with accuracy and resourcefulness, and Richard Hay's scenic design was evocative.

---

The next afternoon, last Thursday, we saw August Wilson's Fences, one of the ten plays in Wilson's portrayal of the Black American experience throughout the 20th Century. A play per decade: Fences looking at life in Pittsburgh, PA, in the 1950s.

OSF is right to have engaged this keen cycle of plays, and perhaps right to compare it, if only implicitly, as parallel to other such cycles — Shakespeare's history plays; the Oedipus cycle. I'm not suggesting Wilson's a playwright of that caliber, or even that it's useful or even proper to consider whether he is: it's far too soon. But Fences, like the two other Wilson plays we've seen in Ashland (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; Gem of the Ocean) is a very strong, very rich play, one I'd want to see again a few times, in this production and in others.

August Wilson was a fascinating figure, to judge by his Wikipedia entry: the son of a German immigrant baker and an African-American cleaning woman, he's an interesting man to consider while reading (as I am at the moment) Barack Obama's first book Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance . It is very sad to contemplate the human and societal cost of America's continued "racial" prejudice and bigotry in the century and a half since slavery. Wilson and Obama have a common purpose in their literary work: to convey to the "white" American, and examine with the "black," both the damage this American vice produces and the lie that it is.

What makes Wilson's plays superb is their simultaneous depiction of social and historical issues on the one hand and their interpenetration of an individual's ability to survive and perhaps even flourish within them. Century, country, community, family, self: and then the same in reverse order, continually redistributing the ageless and irreducible qualities of sympathy, intelligence, experience, adaptability.

Fences focuses on a man in his fifties, his longsuffering wife, his two sons (by different women), his damaged brother, and a drinking buddy from his garbage-collection job. Troy Maxson is no Lear, whatever OSF's notes may say, but he's a towering figure, and it didn't hurt my own individual response to the play that he so reminded me of my own father, only a few years younger, similarly damaged by lack of schooling, hatred of cruel father, consequent diminished self-esteem and inability to father his own children. The man is of course analogue of the "race," and the deeper issues of psychology and what I call "mentality" (meaning an individual's more-or-less consideredly evolved address to the context of his life and activity) resonate throughout the play on both the individual and the sociohistorical level.

I can't be too enthusiastic about this production, which left the audience stunned and shaken. Charles Robinson was a magnificent Maxson; ;Shona Tucker grew through her enactment of his wife Rose. Josiah Phillips was a very sympathetic Bono (the buddy). The oracular defective brother Gabriel was played by G. Valmont Thomas with subtlety and finesse. The sons were Kevin Kenerly (the jazz saxophonist) and Cameron Knight (Cory, who escapes his father's cruelty and with his mother offers some hope for the future). Leah Gardiner directed; Scott Bradley designed yet another evocative set; Michael Keck provided the sound and music design.

Ashland theater season, 1: Hedda Gabler's Further Adventures; The Clay Cart

OUR VISIT TO ASHLAND this spring brings us to four plays; we'll see the rest of the season in September. Every year three or four plays run only half the season, so you have to make to trips to see the whole thing — and it's generally a worthwhile thing to do.

Certainly it started out well on this trip, with two plays that gave us plenty to think about. The first was new, having debuted last year: Jeff Whitty’s The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. The idea of the play sounds pretty thin: between her suicide at the end of Ibsen's play and her first-act entrance at its next performance, Hedda Gabler finds herself in a kind of Purgatory reserved for dramatic characters so vivid as to have attained immortality. She befriends Medea, is attended by Scarlett's Mammy, dodges a falling Tosca — and is unfortunately still bored by her husband Tesman, apparently as immortal as she.

But Whitty's play, Bill Rauch's direction, and a fine cast make much more of this idea than a succession of joking allusions to Great Moments in Theatrical History. Free Will and Determination are the framework, but strength of character and make-the-best-of-it are the vital signs. And while there's plenty to laugh at, there's more to admire. I came away fonder than ever of Hedda Gabler the woman, having lost none of my respect for Henrik Ibsen her creator. And in the midst of reading Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, Mammy's soliloquies, after finding herself conversing with late 20th-century black women, summon considerable respect for her point of view — and throw plenty of suspicion on revisionist, politically correcting views of history.

This afternoon's play was considerably older: The Clay Cart dates from the third century CE or so, a Sanskrit play full of sight gags, music, tenderness, young lovers, flatfoot cops, sententiousness, and all the other standbys of Roman comedy, Shakespeare, Commedia dell'arte, and all the rest of it. (Sitcoms included.)

The result was enchanting, colorful, fragrant, diverting. A three-man band (flute, percussion, plucked strings) sat upstage center behind an all-purpose disc-arena; the large ensemble often sat as audience while providing shifts of scene. Stylized gesture and minimal dance, along with occasional song and frequent poetic declamation, curiously mediated between a respectfully ritualistic view of the vehicle and a perfectly straightforward enactment: this play is exotic and distant, but familiar and gripping at the same time.

It too was directed by Bill Rauch: good news, as he is the new artistic director of the entire Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I want to see this production again: perhaps I'll have another chance in September.

The Silver Screen

SO, WHICH TEN MOVIES would you preserve for your old age? Off the top of your head, mind you; and no researching; and list only movies you've actually seen; this isn't a wish list.

In no particular order:

• Last Year at Marienbad
• Beat the Devil
• The Lady Eve
• Scenes from a Marriage
• L'Avventura
• The Ghost and Mrs Muir
• Rope
• Rashomon
• Les Enfants du paradis
• Chelsea Girls

We're just back from seeing Last Year at Marienbad on a big screen in a Portland neighborhood theater: the movie still holds up beautifully. I'm closer to knowing what the hell it's about now than I was in 1962, and I've seen those halls and gardens, and had a few ennuis of my own (none recently, thankfully), so now I can relax and enjoy the sound of the film, the pace, the architecture. It's still an avant-garde thing, I suppose, but its connection to the French Baroque is a perfectly straight line.

A critic migrates further

THERE HAVE BEEN TIMES, perhaps when my state of mind was more confused than usual, when I wasn't sure Phil Elwood and Alan Rich were in fact two separate people. I don't know that both were ever seen in the same place at the same time. I knew of them at the same time, over fifty years ago, in Berkeley; they were voices, commenting on their favorite musics over the radio from KPFA, Phil favoring jazz, Alan The Romantic Art Song.

And I knew of Alan as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley, where Lindsey took a music-appreciation class largely from him; one of her many attractions was her annotated pocket score of an F-major string quartet, Op. 59 no. 1, by a German composer considered important in the course. She was fond of Rich as an instructor, and I think I know why: as well as really knowing his stuff, he was very enthusiastic.

Is enthusiastic; is enthusiastic still. In the years since he's continued in what Virgil Thomson called "the music-appreciation racket" in the same way Virgil himself did, by writing freshly voiced, solidly considered, often memorably expressed commentary on the music he confronted. In the popular use of the word, "criticism": but I prefer the term commentary; I don't see why writing on politics and writing on the arts, when it stems from similar urges and expresses similar commitment to "values," need be called by different names.

For some time I've been putting off commenting here on Alan's book So I've Heard (Pompton Plains: Amadeus Press, 2006) . I meant to write about it together with Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, but my discussion of that book ran away from me last December; there wasn't room to bring the two AR's together. (I find a note I'd written at the time: Ross writes for an audience of himselves; Rich, for the rest of us.) And now I read in Daniel Wolf's blog Renewable Music that Alan Rich has been dropped from the L.A. Weekly, where he's written forever. (More background on this here and here.)

The L.A. Weekly is owned by Village Voice Media; they also own the (New York) Village Voice, which has also dismissed their staff music critic. The good news is, as I read on blogs, that Rich will continue to write on a blog. The bad news is that the print media and specifically newspapers, so handy to read on streetcars and at breakfast tables, continues to turn from engaged discussion of interesting and even significant subjects — the arts, for example — and opt instead for capsule reprints of news-service coverage of political issues, celebrations of the ongoing business of commercial athletics, and intricate wonder at the persistence of crime.

I continue to hear in my mind's ear a comment of Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge, the American patron who did so much for chamber music in the first half of the Twentieth Century: "My plea for modern music is not that we should like it, nor necessarily that we should even understand it, but that we should exhibit it as a significant human document." She was right on target with that remark: the arts are significant; they are the record of the most penetrating and far-reaching human activity, and the society — I started to write "culture," but forgo it — that ignores the arts demeans itself, like a smart well-to-do man who lounges around in rumpled clothes. (Are you listening, Charles?)

Alan, who I know well enough to have trouble calling him Rich, continually "exhibits" the music he runs across: and he runs across a great deal of it. He "understands" it, to the extent that it can be understood, whether it's conventionally analyzable, like that F-major quartet, or is best comprehended simply by considering it in its greater immediate cultural context, like the music of, say, John Cage.

And he likes it. When he gets worked up about something in what might be called a negative mood — which is less often than the contrary — it is because he cares so much about music that he can't bear some momentary stupidity he's run into. He cares about prose, too, as you can see in a review he published back in September 2006.)

A century ago the popular press, as we academics call newspapers, was full of contention and partisanship when it came to coverage of the arts. Newspapers published poetry, of all things, and confronted the arts. (It was the Boston Herald that published, in 1924, the anonymous

Who wrote this fiendish "Rite of Spring"?

What right had he to write the thing?

Against our helpless ears to fling

Its crash, clash, cling, clang, bing, bang bing?



And the to call it "Rite of SPRING,"

The season when on joyous wing

The birds melodious carols sing

And harmony's in every thing!



He who could write the "Rite of Spring,"

If I be right by right should swing!

But I digress, as usual.)

Today, when big-city dailies have often only one music critic, and big cities only one daily, the little commentary that passes for criticism is often pallid and reserved, afraid of being wrong, afraid even of being right, and the fun's gone out of the thing.

For Alan Rich the fun never goes out of it. I hope he continues to write; even as he approaches his middle eighties his voice is fresh and wondering; he retains his youthful enthusiasms for even such as Brahms in a way that almost makes you want to listen to them again, and certainly listen to them if you can borrow Alan's ears. His title, So I've Heard, is resonant; that So means a great deal.

In recent times, apart from his book I've read Alan only by way of forwards from a London friend; I don't know whether Alan will in fact blog his writings; I hope so. If so, another blog to read daily. And I respect the blog; it's a fine and useful thing. (And Clio knows without the resources of the Web, and such other blogs as Wolf's (cited above), my own musings would be much the worse informed.)

But the printed page, the pungent ink on its crisp newsprint, has an in-your-face immediacy no blog can touch; blogs are personally addressed, where the newspaper is inarguably Public Comment. Retiring a writer like Alan Rich — not that there are many such — amounts to stealing public property, and I'm sorry to see it happen. Oh well. Buy his book. He has a nice thing to say about me in it.

Milhaud: Quartets, part four

AFTER THE TERRIBLE BRAZILIAN WINTER — terrible for the thousands of deaths from influenza — came the joy of the Armistice, Nov. 11, ending World War I. Paul Claudel was sent to Washington on a mission; Milhaud went with him. The voyage was on a German vessel that had been sabotaged before its capture, and Milhaud describes a hilarious trip in his memoir Notes Without Music: the trip took eight weeks, and introduced Milhaud, who composed the entire time, to backwoods towns (and their dance and music) in Brazil and the West Indies. After a brief stay in New York he finally reached Paris again, and it was there and then that he composed one if his best-known scores, Le Bœuf sur le tôit, a collage of a number of Brazilian popular tunes. (The piece and its origins are discussed in a fascinating article by Daniella Thompson, "The Bœuf Chronicles.")

Such pieces did not distract him completely from more "serious" composition, and in 1920, shortly after finishing Le Bœuf sur le tôit he composed his Fifth Quartet, Op. 64:

i: Chantant : Much more so than anywhere in the four earlier quartets, Milhaud writes polytonal music here, each instrument in its own key, but the music is so clearly outlined and the instruments kept so far apart in terms of high-to-low voicing, that the result is quite clear, at the same time both "modern" in its discord and "classical" in its balance and clarity. (very polyphonic, fugal)

ii: Vif et léger : frisky but compulsive, in a Schoenberggy rhythm, punctuated at key articulation points by heavy repeated chords.

iii: Lent : here the slower tempo displays intricacies already present in earlier movements. Introspective, the music suggests the studio more often than is usually the case chez Milhaud, and as the movement unfolds the expression is always more innig.

iv: Trés animé : heavy, rhythmic, busily imitative, the finale returns to the mood of the opening movement, thus making this the most conventional of Milhaud's quartets to date in point of form, however progressive it undoubtedly is in terms of its harmonic language.

Milhaud dedicated this Fifth Quartet to Arnold Schoenberg, of all people; I don't know what Schoenberg may have thought of it, but he writes interestingly about Milhaud in a letter to Zemlinsky:

…as to the 'insignificant' Milhaud. I don't agree. Milhaud strikes me as the most important representative of the contemporary movement in all Latin countries: polytonality. Whether I like him is not to the point. But I consider him very talented.

Arnold Schoenberg: Letters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965, p. 80)

(Between the Fifth and Sixth Quartets Milhaud found time for, among other things, rehearsing (25 rehearsals!) and conducting the French premiere of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire: Schoenberg had reason to "consider him talented." Not long after, Alma Mahler suggested a double performance in Vienna, with Schoenberg conducting a performance with the Sprechstimme in the original German, Milhaud conducting the same instrumentalists — different vocalist — in the French translation he had had prepared.)



Two years later, in the spring of 1922 — there had been a new string quartet every other year for a decade — Milhaud composed the Sixth Quartet, op. 77:

i: Souple et animé : opening in a rustic, lyrical solo in the viola, Milhaud immediately announces he is done with the German intellectuality of the previous quartet. The movement's barely two and a half minutes long, fresh in spite of the dark colors of viola and cello, placid in spite of the constant motion and overlapping contrapuntal lines.

ii: Très lent : like the preceding movement, this individuates the four instruments, at first assigning quite different kinds of music to cello, viola, and violins, with slow ostinati, trills, simultaneous discords, and altered timbres (pizzicato, sul tasto, harmonics) occasionally suggesting Milhaud had listened carefully to Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914) — without, however, leaning on them in the least.

iii: Très vif et rythmé : Five-beat rhythm, unusual for Milhaud (I wonder if he demonstrated this to his best-known student, Dave Brubeck, whose "Take Five" sounds occasionally derivative of it). And even shorter than the first movement, making this one of Milhaud's most concise pieces to date — a quality that no doubt infuenced those critics who found such music somehow less consequential: a pity.

Milhaud dedicated the Sixth, appropriately, to his friend and fellow-member of the celebrated "Les Six" "modern" French composers Poulenc, and the contrast between this concise, lyrical, Gallic quartet and its predecessor couldn't be more marked.

It would be not two but three years before Milhaud would get to the Seventh Quartet, op. 87, which he wrote while on extended honeymoon with his bride (and cousin) Madeleine. They had taken ship via Naples, Malta, Athens, and Constantinople to Lebanon, where Milhaud fell so ill with amoebic dysentery they to give up their planned visit to Palestine. He recovered in Cairo, and planned to settle for a while with friends in a castle in Balsorano, a ruined village in the Abruzzi, but

I fell ill again during my stay in Balsorano. The peasant woman who brought me my meals carried up on her head all the furniture we required for our installation. She would come near my bed every day with a murmur of: "Speriamo, speriamo!" It was then that I began to write my Seventh Quartet. For us it will always be bound up with our memories of that journey. As soon as I felt a little better, my friends drove us to Rome, where we were to take the train for Paris. When we stopped at a little village to fill up with gasoline, we saw a lot of ancient bottles in the window of a cafe. Our collector's fever made us buy the lot: Garibaldis, Queens of Italy, Angels, Clocks, and Acrobats. When we got to the Hotel Flora, we had them all taken up to our room, to the great dismay of the porter. He was somewhat mollified when we offered him the contents of the bottles. He soon returned with a large empty vase, into which he poured all the contents of the bottles, regardless of the type of liqueur they contained. "This will be a treat for the kids," he said with a smile.

I quote this at some length, from Notes Without Music (whose online presence I have found again), because the overlapping moods, emotions, locales, languages, and sensibilities seem to me to illuminate, somewhat, the otherwise sometimes bewildering overlappings in Milhaud's music. I have quoted at greater length, in fact, you might complain, than this quite brief quartet itself can convey.

Quartet 7, op. 87, 1925

i: Modérément animé : The close of the opening section recalls the Brazilian rhythms of Le Bœuf sur le tôit, and the center section, in its slower tempo, fades out on a nostalgic note, unwilling to allow the conventional return to the opening tempo.

ii: Doux et sans hâte : The first appearance in his quartets of a trademark Milhaud mood, one I always think of as Domestic, somehow expressing simplicity, tenderness, douceur. (Also the first appearance of doux as a descriptive heading, and looking forward to the more sugary, more excitable sweetnesses that would come ten or fifteen years later in the music of Olivier Messiaën.)

iii: Lent : The mood of the second movement continues, in a different musical language, a berceuse or lullaby, not inappropriate to honeymoon sickbed, perhaps.

iv: Vif e gai : Frisky, again, like the second movement of the Fifth, but entirely Mediterranean to my ear in spite of an occasional irruption from Stravinsky's pungent chordal imagination, or Schoenberg's Germanic cerebration.

Milhaud dedicated the Seventh to the Pro Arte Quartet, who no doubt played its premiere not long after its composition. Interestingly, he had heard them play quartets by Anton Webern in Vienna; he had found them "grippingly interesting." Perhaps they influenced, or at any rate confirmed, Milhaud's tendency toward conciseness in these string quartets of 1922 and 1925.

Milhaud had composed seven quartets in thirteen years; he was now thirty-two years old. For whatever reason, he was not to return to the medium for another seven years.

Milhaud: Quartets, part three

FROM NOTES WITHOUT MUSIC, Darius Milhaud's memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953):

On September 27, 1915, as I was going across the Place de Villiers, I felt an exceedingly acute physical pang, which lasted several seconds. I immediately thought of Leo and feared that some disaster had befallen him. Later I was to learn that I had felt this pain at the very moment of his death. It was at the height of an offensive in Champagne; he had been wounded, but though no longer able to handle a rifle, he refused to be evacuated, so that he might take part in the attack with his comrades. He was mown down by the German machine guns at the head of his company while encouraging his men. His family sent me a copy of his will; he had left me his diary. He had deposited it, together with my letters, in an old wooden chest, an eighteenth-century sailor's trunk; I added the letters I had received from him. Subsequently Dr. Latil [Léo's father] had a selection of his letters and extracts from his diary published by Plon. This supreme testimony of his pure Christian faith and spirit of self-sacrifice was singled out for mention by Barres on account of the nobility of its thought. While I was in Brazil I had a hundred copies of Leo's poems privately printed. A few months after his death, I wrote my Third String Quartet, dedicated to his memory. This consists of two very slow movements, in the second of which I introduced a soprano voice singing a page from Leo's diary, ending: "What is this longing for death, and which death does it mean?" This sentence had haunted my imagination ever since I had read it.

Milhaud's Third Quartet, op. 32, is indeed a very slow, very elegiac piece, and an extraordinary one for its form. The opening movement, Très lent, is slow indeed, in the Quatuor Arcana recording lasting just over seventeen minutes; the second movement, also marked Très lent, runs over seven minutes. The second movement is unusual for including the soprano voice: Arnold Schoenberg had done the same in his Second Quartet, completed in 1910; I've read somewhere that Milhaud hadn't known of that piece when he wrote his Third, but he says nothing about it in Notes Without Music.

i: Très lent : The quartet opens in the lower strings, in low range; when the violins enter they too are low-pitched. The meter is a very slow six-eight, a funereal barcarolle whose overlapping imitations convey slow, regretful, and inexorable motion; yet this is no lamentation: the mood is dignified, sorrowful, but not plaintive. And the music is curiously consonant in spite of considerable use of minor seconds, not always arising as passing discords in a contrapuntal texture.
     Two-thirds of the way through the movement there's a subtle shift of mood, as if regret gives way to resignation: but from there the two moods alternate, and the movement ends — at least in the Arcana recording — in an ineffably slow, quiet, section whose use of harmonics in the violins, over the low-pitched cello, bring Morton Feldman and even John Cage to mind.

ii: Très lent (Poème de Latil) : The voice enters soon, after a short, extremely quiet introduction in the strings, floating out of their texture in a melodic but measured recitative, reminiscent of the quiet declamation Erik Satie used a few months later in his Socrate, and similar to that of Milhaud's own Les Choephores , completed just before this quartet was begun.

THE FOURTH QUARTET, Op. 48, is a very different matter, composed in Rio de Janeiro where Milhaud was posted in 1917 to serve as secretary to the poet Paul Claudel, who had been appointed Minister to Brazil. Milhaud was now twenty-five; his compositional technique had fully developed (partly from intense personal study of harmonic possibilities, partly through sheer quantity of product and lessons learned from repeated hearings of most of his music); and he was intrigued by the new sounds of this exotic country. After the five-movement Second Quartet, and the unique Third composed of its two very slow movements, the Fourth returns to a more conventional form: two quick movements, quite short, surrounding a longer slow one. But the headings of these movements suggest that life and death are still on Milhaud's mind:

i: Vif : Dancelike and rustic, but giving way toward slower, more pensive moods.

ii:Funèbre : The mood of the opening movement of the Third Quartet, somewhat more hectoring in the lower strings' march, lightened occasionally by high harmonics in the violins, but often insistently returning to the funeral. (It is possible this movement was composed during the horrors of the Spanish flu epidemic, when, in Milhaud's words,

…four thousand deaths were recorded daily. The authorities were overwhelmed. In the hospitals the dead were removed from the beds before they were cold, in order to make way for the dying. The supply of coffins gave out, and you constantly saw cartloads of corpses that were thrown into common graves in the cemeteries.

iii: Trés animé : Barely two minutes long, moving forward over a nervous ostinato in the lower strings, this finale doesn't really lighten the mood. It's nervous and intense, ending almost abruptly. The Fourth Quartet may be formally a return to tradition, but it concludes in quite a self-aware manner Milhaud's string-quartet survey of the wartime years.

Milhaud: Quartets, part two

SINCE BEGINNING THIS SURVEY of Darius Milhaud's string quartets a few days ago, I ran across the full text of his memoir Notes Without Music online — but where, I can't say; I copied the text to my computer but clipped the online reference. Before, I was relying on liner notes to the Cybelle LP recordings and my ears; now I'll be adding things found in the memoir. To begin with, in 1904, when Milhaud was twelve years old and already a good violinist, he was asked to join his violin teacher, a professional cellist who taught at the conservatory in Aix-en-Provence, and a local carpenter who played viola, to read through quartets. The next year, 1905, they studied the Debussy Quartet, which resounds throughout Milhaud's first, composed seven years later in 1912.

That year at L'Enclos I finished my first string quartet. When I played it over with the Bruguier Quartet, only my beloved teacher understood what I was trying to say. His wife could not help blurting out: "It sounds just like Arab music!" and Segalas, the carpenter violinist, declared with his heavy Marseille accent: "Good God! This is hot stuff!"

[Notes Without Music, p. 34]

The First Quartet was performed in 1913 in Paris, on a contemporary-music concert:

I played in it, with Robert Soetens, Robert Siohan, and Felix Delgrange. After the concert, at the Salle Pleyel, while I was putting my instrument away and gazing at the old programs adorning the walls of the foyer, bearing witness to so many glorious performances and famous visits one of them even referred to a concert given by Chopin and Mendelssohn I was jerked out of my reverie by a gentleman with a white mustache and goatee who said to me: "I am Jacques Durand, I should like to publish your quartet. Come to see me tomorrow." Next day I signed my first contract.

[Notes Without Music, p. 47. And yet this quartet is not Opus 1, but op. 5.]

And at this point I refer you back to my last post, about that First Quartet, and now get on with it.

Milhaud compose a string quartet every other year from his First, in 1912, to his Sixth, in 1922; and he delayed only three years before getting to the Seventh, in 1925. But the three quartets that followed the First were special. They were composed during the First World War, a terrible irruption into la vie quotidienne in France (and elsewhere); they were composed in the deceptive quiet days before the German march on Paris, during the bleakest days, and during the last months, when the composer himself was safely (and fascinatedly) away from the action in Rio de Janeiro. And they reveal, I think, an absorbing change, within Milhaud's approach to the composition of music, from the fairly derivative, surely influenced youthful work in the First, through a series of intensely and revealingly personal statements in music composed for this most perfect of musical media, the string quartet, poised between the completely soloistic and personal world of the solo sonata and the quite public and audience-oriented world of the Symphony.

In the Second Quartet, op. 18, Milhaud celebrates his friend Léo Latil, and their mutual friendship. There's a friendship here that's hardly understood these days, nearly a century later, when we look for sexual "coding" everywhere. Let Milhaud describe his friend:

Leo… attended the Catholic school [recall that Milhaud was a Jew] and also studied music under Bruguier. We became firm friends. He worshipped music and admired my early efforts with passionate conviction; he made me share his admiration for Maurice de Guerin, and we loved to discover contemporary poets together. I think Leo would probably have become a country priest. The infinite tenderness in his gaze betrayed a tendency to melancholy and a tormented sense of anxiety. He kept a diary that was one long lamenta tion in which spiritual weariness and painfully intense reli gious feeling, dominated ever by a deep spirit of sacrifice and absolute resignation, were interwoven with a passionate love of nature, of flowers, and of the exquisite blue lines of the horizon at Aix. He was a dreamer, in love with solitary brooding, but he accepted my presence. We often went for walks together; he would always take the same direction, toward the Étang de Berre, west of the town, where the softly curving hills merge into the immensity of the plain, on the edge of which stood Cezanne's property, Jas de Bouffan, with its famous row of poplars gently suffused with the colors of the setting sun. We never wearied of walking along between the fields of wheat, blue-green in spring, bordered with almond trees in bloom, dwarf oaks, and pines, through exquisite landscapes, some of which, like the Chateau de l'Horloge, evoked historical memories : according to Chateaubriand, it was in this solid, roomy farmhouse that Napoleon spent the night on his return from Elba. Sometimes we went as far as Malvalat, the Latils' estate near Granettes, a village that took its name from the painter Granet, who lived there; one of his pictures, representing the death of his wife, hangs on a wall of its little chapel…

I quote at length for more reasons than one. First, to display Milhaud's fine prose style. Second, to underline the significance of landscape to his sensibility: the awareness of humanity in its natural context, in the environment, has much to do with the effectiveness, the persuasiveness of his music. Third, of course, to attempt to convey the quality of the friendship between these two boys, alert to Nature, aware of their intelligence and sensitivity, open to their world.

MUSICAL PORTRAITURE

I haven't looked into it in any depth, but it strikes me there's a theme running through French music from Rameau and Couperin down to Satie (and, of course, through Satie to Virgil Thomson). Of course there were German baroque composers who depicted; and Schubert, I think, and Schumann and Alban Berg, certainly, took pleasure (and inspiration) from translating their impressions of friends and lovers into musical terms. But the durable tradition of musical portraiture is, I think, French; and Milhaud took to it readily: in 1914, after Léo had already been mobilized into the war, while Milhaud was waiting

to receive notice calling me up, I remained in Aix and … started on my Second String Quartet. Léo was stationed at Briançon in the Chasseurs Alpins. He looked on the war as a mission, a solution to his personal problems, and got himself sent to the front as soon as he could. Gradually the first bad news filtered through to us: Alberic Magnard shot by the Germans and his house burned down; my cousin Daniel Palm killed before Lunéville his parents were notified the very day their youngest daughter, Suzanne, was repatri ated from Germany, where she had been spending her vacation perfecting her German. When Etienne was called up with the 1915 class, Madeleine and I went with him in the streetcar as far as Pont de l'Arc, the first stop after Aix. We came back on foot along the little river, dark with shadows and lined with richly hued trees. It was the first autumn I had spent in Aix since 1908.

By the next year, 1915, Milhaud had completed the Second Quartet, whose five movements can be taken as a portrait of his friend Léo. It's an engaging piece, open and winning; you'd hardly suspect a war was on.

i: Modérément animé -Très animé : Lively, meaning full of life: animé , as so many of Milhaud's quartet movements would be marked; animated. And there's much busy-work here, expressive of the energy and constant outward-looking curiosity these boys must have had in common. Sweetness, too. Nothing terribly original, or worked-out: Milhaud depends on lyricism and symmetry; perhaps a record of the innocence of his boyhood — the movement ends in a slower, appreciative moment…

ii: Très lent Something prescient here? The rhythm, in the lower strings, is somewhat dirgelike. Très lent is a marking — stipulating not so much tempo as mentalité, state of mind — that will recur often among the quartets to come. I could speculate about the extent to which Milhaud, pastoral, Provençal, was prescient in a Surrealist way avant la lettre, sensitive, through his sensitivity to the present moment and locale, to what is to come. So many things I wish I'd had the wits to ask him!

iii: Très vif Complete innocence, again: a record of those rambles together through the "softly curving hills," the garrigue surrounding Aix-en-Provence. Busy and uncaring: but the four instruments divide cannily the business of this musical energy, even if there is a bit of repetitiveness…

iv: Souple et sans hâte, assez animé et graçieux Supple; without haste; rather animated, and graceful. Enough said.

v: Très rythmé: Pure energy and intentionality; direction always forward. But the close, suddenly, is slower, reflective. Again, there's a presentiment here: I'll continue with this in a day or two.

Be advised: Milhaud's Third Quartet is an amazing leap, looking forward to Morton Feldman.

Darius Milhaud: the string quartets (1)

A FEW WEEKS AGO I ran across a lucky find on Ebay: the complete Milhaud quartets, on six LPs, recorded by two French string quartets. (Of course what I'd really like to have is the integral edition performed by the Quatuor Parisii, released some time ago on CDs on the Naive label, but I can't find a copy for love nor money.)

Yesterday a package arrived, a foam-plastic slab with the LPs carefully packed inside. Curiously, the LPs were in their protective envelopes but outside their jackets; each jacket with its LPs was sealed in its own heavy plastic envelope. I think perhaps the LPs are new and were never repackaged for retail on their being received from the factory. The sound engineering is dated, to say the least, and some recordings appear to be monaural: but what a joy to hear this music — it reminds me that the true descending priorities of music-listening are

Composer

Composition

Performance

Sound (whether live acoustics or recorded engineering)

and it's interesting to think whether such scales apply to the reading of books, or the viewing of paintings or sculpture.

In any case, to the matter at hand, the Milhaud quartets. Ever since the dawn of the string quartet we've been accustomed to think of them as cycles: within European concert music, the string quartet is one of the major cordilleras; within the oeuvre of every composer who has dealt with the form — and that includes most of the most significant — his own cycle of quartets is another major range. So through the history of post-Baroque European concert music we have Haydn, Mozart, B**th*v*n, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Milhaud, Schoenberg, Bartok, Shostakovich; apologies to those I've forgotten; this is blog, not book.

(There is of course a fascinating category of European composers with only one quartet to their credit: Puccini, SIbelius, Debussy, Ravel, Berg, Lutoslawski; apologies to those I've forgotten; this is blog, not book. And note I'm not considering extraEuropean composers at the moment: if I were, Carter's name would be prominent in the previous paragraph, and Cage's in this one.)

Of those great "cordilleras," I suppose the Milhaud is the most neglected, certainly the most unjustly neglected. In 1920, twenty-eight years old, when he had composed his fifth quartet, he told a journalist (for Le Coq Parisien) that he wanted to compose eighteen quartets (one more than Beethoven had managed); in 1951 he completed the eighteenth, quoting his first quartet in its closing measures, and noting on the manuscript "eighteen quartets, as promised." It's an impressive sequence of quartets, whatever you think of the implied competition with B**th*v*n. It was his very facility that led to Milhaud's neglect, I think; people forget that facility does not inevitably equate with the facile. Mozart, Picasso, and Henry James were blessed with facility, leading to impressive quantity which rarely slip when quality is considered, whatever the benchmark.

Milhaud's own a attitude to chamber music, as a medium:

C'est une forme, le quatuor surtout, qui porte à exprimer le plus profond de soi, et avec des moyens limités à quatre archets… C'est à la fois une discipline intellectuelle et le creuset de l'émotion la plus intense…

[It's a form, the quartet above all, that induces expression of the innermost of one's self, and with means limited to only four bows… it's at the same time an intellectual discipline and the crucible of the most intense emotion…]

But to the matter at hand. I've listened so far to three or four of these performances, in the course of digitizing them for my iPod, in the order in which they appear on the LPs — presumably an order determined by durations and, perhaps, a kind of logic that prefers to ignore chronological sequence. I prefer to consider them here, however, in the order in which they were composed: it's fascinating to hear the "development" (by no means logical or necessarily even linear) of Milhaud's interests in the forty-one years he spent on the medium.

The First Quartet, op. 5, was composed in 1912, at the age of twenty. It's dedicated "to the memory of Paul Cézanne," Milhaud's older concitoyen from Aix-en-Provence

The first movement, Rythmique, opens with a simple unison declaration, lively and forthright, brisk and open, occasionally letting up for more lyrical phrases. There's a reference to the opening of the Debussy quartet: the best way to confront influence is to face it openly. A central episode in a slower tempo transforms the declaration into a speculation, expanding on motifs from the basic themes; then a three-beat march heavily gives way to a waltzlike return to the opening theme.

The second movement, Intime, contenu, lyrical and graceful, on muted strings, continues the Debussy mood in a supple , plein-aire piece — so often French music, and Milhaud especially, seems to evoke the out-of-doors, where German music sings of the studio.

The original third movement, Grave, soutenu, is not recorded: in the revised corrected edition of his quartets Milhaud let it stand, but specified that it was there only "pour mémoire," as a memory.

The finale, Vif, très rythmé, is unfortunately perhaps the least persuasive movement of the quartet, a bit repetitive and, in the present performance, hectoring — but, again in a center section, giving way to a more reflective, graceful voice.

Not bad for a first quartet by a twenty-year-old from the provinces working in the shadow of such giants as Debussy and Ravel; and still a pleasant thing to hear today. To composers and string-players much of its effect lies in its skill: Milhaud played in a quartet himself in his youth, and clearly knew the conversational and contrapuntal nature of the medium as well as the fluencies of the instruments. But even more pleasurable in this First Quartet is its role of Janus to the seventeen that followed. I'll write next of the three remarkable quartets that came next, composed during the First World War, and beginning Milhaud's fascinating and complex development of a style that unites personal expression, response to friendships and poetry, and technical discovery.

Gerhard Samuel 1924-2008

…s'il est de certaines paroles qui ne sont que les feuilles d'un arbre, il est de certains silences qui sont ceux de toute une foret.

Jean Biès: René Daumal

It is sad to hear of the death of Gerhard Samuel, of a heart attack, at the age of 83, in Seattle, where he had lived in retirement since 1997.

Gary, as we all always called him, was a mentor to me at first, a casual teacher, my first conductor, and an acquaintance; not only one of the leaves on the tree that led me to my maturity, but one of its most powerful branches; and now I hear in this new silence of his so many notes, so many tones of the music he led me to hear and, ultimately, to find.

I suppose I met him in 1963, the year I studied music, freed from the necessity to hold down a full-time job by the generosity of a patron (Edith Fitzell, a wonderful woman to whom I owe nearly everything of my life). As I wrote in my memoir, Getting There:

Let it be music, then: and I began studies, private lessons with Gerhard Samuel, who then conducted the Oakland Symphony. The first lesson was discouraging for both of us, I’m sure. He went to the piano and played four notes, one after another, and asked me to identify them. I couldn’t. They were G, D, A, and E; the open strings of a violin. Well, no matter, let’s work on them, he said, and before long they were burned into my mind, and we went on to more interesting things. I think he must have known I was not a performer, that I lacked every performing instinct. I would not practice; I didn’t play piano; I hadn’t touched a violin since I was seven years old. But clearly I did have some musical qualities; while he never praised them to me, I heard from others that he’d recommended me to them.

My “studies” with him involved attending all the rehearsals of the Oakland Symphony, listening for balances in every part of the hall, getting to know the music being prepared — not only from the score, which provided the notes and the form, but from the rehearsals, which revealed the importance of situational negotiations on such things as tempo and volume, the prominence of this group of instruments or that, the psychology of communication as conductor, section leader, or instrumentalist — not to mention the composer! — adjusted their various individual takes on the music to the evolving group process by which it came to life, finally, before an audience of two thousand people.

…

The early lessons with Gary were in his home in the Oakland hills, a tastefully furnished “ranch house” he’d named Villa Orpheus. The orchestral rehearsals were in the old Auditorium Theater, a fine small cube of a hall providing wonderful acoustics to an audience of two thousand. The first time I attended a rehearsal I think Gary introduced me to the orchestra, simply by way of explaining a stranger in their midst with no instrument in his hands. I was asked to turn pages for one of the bassoonists, who for some reason was playing not from his own part but from an orchestral score. (I later learned he was preparing to audition for Gary’s assistant conductor.) Awkwardly approaching an empty chair next to him I stepped on his wallet of spare reeds, lying open on the floor in front of him. I’m sure I smashed two or three. He was quite graceful about it, and later Robert Hughes proved to be an enthusiastic supporter of my music, commissioning in fact two of my best pieces — perhaps more because of his generalized enthusiasm for all things new than for the intrinsic appeal of my own music.

Gary invited me to attend the festival he had co-founded with Hughes and the composer Lou Harrison that year in Aptos, a hundred miles to the south, but I declined to go, thinking it too generous an offer. Gary was enthusiastic about and sympathetic to new regional music, and had asked to see the music I’d written by then. He seemed to like the songs — especially a fairly long one, setting Dylan Thomas’s “In my craft and silent art” for voice, recorder, and piano…

One of my first visits to the Berkeley radio station KPFA came in the summer of 1964, when I was asked to join a live-broadcast conversation with Gary in an interview conducted by the then-music director Will Ogdon. The subject was the Cabrillo Festival, which Gary had invited me to attend, finding me housing for one weekend. I was in on the conversation to provide a sort of review of the concerts, and I did that by listing Cabrillo's superiority, in terms of repertoire and performance, over the three-day Ojai Festival I'd heard a month or two earlier.

Comparisons are odious, Gary immediately said, deflecting all talk away from Ojai, and I learned two lessons at once: First, you do not commend one thing by demoting, irrelevantly, another. (I tried to remember that all the years afterward that I found myself working as a critic.) Second, you can draw attention where you want, and away from where you want, by taking a high moral position.

In 1965 Gary premiered my Small Concerto for Piano and Orchestra at the Cabrillo Festival, with the late Nathan Schwartz as the soloist. He'd had the score for some time, and had clearly studied it. He asked me to join him one morning at breakfast and asked me a few questions about it: what I thought of it, what music I liked, what the tempi and textures should be, that sort of thing. The concerto is in three movements, but is small in scale. I'd originally called it Concerto for piano and small orchestra, but he pointed out that I'd called for two Wagner tubas, a harmonium in the wings, English horn (muted!), and so on: the orchestra wasn't really small, but the concerto itself was. So we re-titled the piece.

It ran a little over six minutes, and when the tepid applause had died down he turned to the audience. "Since familiar patterns seem to be more enjoyable than unfamiliar ones and we would like to have this piece something you would look forward to hearing again we're going to play it once more." And they did, and I was grateful. (The piece has yet to receive another performance.)

A couple of years later Paul Hertelendy asked me to take over for him for six months as music critic of the Oakland Tribune, and I asked Gary what he thought of the idea. Don’t do it, Gary said; you’ll be forever marginalized, your music won’t be played, you’ll be seen as a part of the enemy camp. I was surprised at his vehemence and took his comment as strictly a personal expression and decided to give it a try, but in large measure he was right, I think. And he never performed my music again, though we stayed in touch.

The last time I had anything to do with him professionally was when the San Francisco Symphony inaugurated its "New and Unusual Music" series, in 1980, I think. Gary was invited to conduct one of the concerts, highlighted by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati's Credentials, or Think, Think, Lucky, a piece I greatly admired and had studied fairly closely. Composed twenty years earlier and set out in "graphic notation," the piece failed to persuade the musicians, and Gary had a rough time of it in rehearsals; after the performance itself, two or three of the musicians made rude sounds to express their contempt for the piece, or perhaps for the conductor. This produced a certain scandal, particularly when it turned out only one of the critics present realized (and reported) what was going on. Gary was, I thought, philosophical about the whole thing.

Gary's career with the Oakland Symphony ran for twelve seasons, from 1959 to 1971. In that time he continued the orchestra's historic commitment to contemporary music with performances of truly avant-garde work as well as the merely new: he led west coast orchestral premieres of the Ives Fourth Symphony, Terry Riley's In C, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen, and music by Henry Brant and Witold Lutosławski. He led the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra from 1961 to 1971; he convened a few seasons of Oakland Symphony Chamber Orchestra concerts in which he continued to feature new scores; he even led a few operas in the old Oakland Auditorium Theater for school presentations: I remember a fine production of Rossini's La Scala di seta.

He was instrumental in the creation of the Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra, which he handed to his assistant conductor, Robert Hughes; they continued the commitment to new music, culminating in an eloquent recording of Lou Harrison's Second (Elegiac) Symphony. And, most important perhaps, Gary was the founding conductor of the Cabrillo Music Festival, which he led for six seasons, firmly establishing yet another commitment to the performance of new music in presentations that did much to persuade audiences, if not always critics or boards of directors, of the perfectly normal place for such sound in the musical culture of their surroundings.

His programming was thoughtful and intelligent. I remember, for example, one subscription concert that went from Mozart's Masonic Funeral Music to Wagner's Siegfried's Rhine-Journey to Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. And his response to unfolding events was always humane and sympathetic: when JFK was assassinated he asked Darius Milhaud, then on faculty at Mills College, to commemorate the event, and within a few days was able to perform The Murder of a Great Chief of State, a piece which though neglected since quite measured up, I think, to the occasion.

In all this time he continued to compose. The first piece I recall hearing was an expressive 12-tone piece setting poems of Emily Dickinson; later scores turned away from serialism toward the neo-Impressionist collage-pieces that set in during the 1970s. I recall a concert he led as a guest conductor, after he'd left Oakland, when he joined a new piece of his, Looking at Orpheus Looking, to a performance of the Mozart Requiem: the entire concert was thrown thereby into the mode of retrospection — not nostalgia, but a reflective kind of perspective leaving Mozart (and Orpheus) in their own places, but linking those places the more organically to our own.

There are a few obituaries online, from San Francisco and Cincinnati and Seattle to begin with, all places where his presence made a difference to the musical and greater cultural scene. Some of them refer to difficulties his new-music loyalties presented with conservative boards: I myself feel strongly that his lifestyle, gay and liberal, was even more of a problem in the Oakland of 1970: it was notable that a requirement for his successor on the podium would be that he be a married man. Gary was truly a man of many parts, charming and irascible and impatient and generous; and above all a man of his time, of the postwar period reaching its peak in the glorious open-minded 1960s. It is sad to note his passing.

White-Jacket

IT TOOK A MONTH, but I've read White-Jacket, and have reached the longed-for point that finds Moby-Dick next in line.

It's this damned compulsion I have, not unrelated to a certain pedantic quality apparently innate, to read the products of important writers in the order in which they were written — partly in order to trace the apparent development of the minds that made these unique books; partly to assure myself, perhaps, that there is an orderliness in the workings of the human creative mind.

Well. My first reaction was, of the five books of Melville's I've read — Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), and this White-Jacket (1850) — the last-named and most recently read is by far the least consequential. Typee and Omoo are realistic invocations of Melville's experiences in the Society islands, apparently quite fictional though based on his own experience as well as his enterprising reading of other accounts. I read Omoo in 1995, and therefore Typee some while before that, and recall them only vaguely now, but remember the sharp visual details Melville depicts (having visited those islands myself a decade earlier); and the persuasive description of the native Polynesians, and the collisions of their culture and that of the European and American visitors, and, more to the point, the individuals who expressed those cultures. (And it doesn't hurt, or didn't, that I read these books with a special fondness for Pierre Loti's Le mariage de Loti, I can't think when I must have read this, long ago).

Those books are fraught with nostalgia, having been written not that long after the publication of Rousseau's theory of the Noble Savage, and not that long before the awakening, in the 1960s, of the idea that Rousseau's theory might not have been that far off the mark. But beyond their celebration of the innocence, the guilelessness (at least in European eyes) of the Polynesian temperament, they were also both fresh and delightful for their descriptions of these fragrant, green, sea-bound, open-to-the-skies islands, and the similarly open (if, as Gauguin would soon show them, sometimes petulant and bored) strangers.

In his first two novels Melville does all this very well indeed. In his third, Mardi, he goes much further. He begins in a similar mood, apparently fictionalizing his own (or someone else's) experience in the South Sea; but before long turns philosophical. There's something of science-fiction to this novel: speculative, idealism-directed meditations, always grounded on the local-color of the locale — which, however, seems to tilt from the Society Islands toward some sort of fantasy-Japan: or, rather, an updated Laputa. I'm sure Melville had Swift in mind: Mardi is a sort of confluence of the third and fourth books of Gulliver's Travels.

In Redburn Melville tried something new, and, I think, succeeded. His public had lost its fascination for the South Seas, and its patience for philosophical speculation. He turned to a simple story of a hayseed New York country boy shipping out, desperate for funds, on a merchant vessel bound for Liverpool. The result was detailed and continually interesting, if not up to the mark Richard Henry Dana had set with his Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Wellingborough Redburn is a pleasant enough fellow, green and naive but with a speculative bent:

It is really wonderful how many names there are in the world. There is no counting the names, that surgeons and anatomists give to the various parts of the human body; which, indeed, is something like a ship; its bones being the stiff standing-rigging, and the sinews the small running ropes, that manage all the motions.

I wonder whether mankind could not get along without all these names, which keep increasing every day, and hour and moment; till at last the very air will be full of them; and even in a great plain, men will be breathing each other's breath, owing to the vast multitude of words they use, that consume al the air, just as lamp-burners do gas. But people seem to have a great love for names; for to know a great many names, seems to look like knowing a good many things; though I should not be surprised, if there were a great many more names, than things in the world. But I must quit this rambling, and return to my story.

And so on: there are a good many such passages. Nine years after reading Redburn, I turn finally to White-Jacket; and whether the fault is Melville nodding, or my aging, the trick's lost its interest. The observant,, thoughtful young man who signs on to an American navy frigate in Peru, and puts on his distinctive white jacket, however slight the irony with which Melville reports his moods and discoveries, grows tedious in his lectures on the curiosities (and injustices) of life on board the USS Neversink, whose very name gives the game away: there's little poetry in Melville's treatment of his subject, and much haste.

There are marvelous passages, lime this description of a calm off Cape Horn:

Here we lay forty-eight hours, during which the cold was intense. I wondered at the liquid sea, which refused to freeze in such a temperature. The clear, cold sky overhead looked like a steel-blue cymbal, that might ring, could you smite it. Our breath came and went like puffs of smoke from pipe-bowls.

But most of the time Melville, through White-Jacket, seems content with either describing the daily comings and goings on board the frigate, which are not all that interesting 150 years later, or with complaining about the harsh interpretations of the even harsher Articles of War which underlie the law of the ship — and which should interest us, as they apparently haven't changed that much before running our present administration during this "war on terror."

It doesn't help, of course, to read the notes in the Library of America edition, which divulge the extent to which Melville cribbed pages from previously published books for his own purposes. On the other hand, to do him credit, White-Jacket brought the injustices of the naval interpretation of military justice to public attention, and helped to soften it: Melville was an early member of the fine line of American fiction-writers with a sense of social responsibility (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck).

And I suspect that if and when I finally turn to my next Melville novel I'll find that White-Jacket's philosophizings and mullings-over and fascination with the Shakespeare-, Bible-, and Shelley-quoting fulminations of his crew-mates will have led to Moby-Dick itself.

I can hardly wait.

Discursive wit

THE BAD NEWS FIRST: Jonathan Williams has died. A fine obit on Ron Silliman's blog brings this to my attention: one of Ron's many virtues is his care to alert the community to such events, which grow, alas, more frequent.

I really know of Williams through only one of his many books, The Magpie's Bagpipe [San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982], a selection of essays. I bought it (used) in 1985, in Capitola of all places, after having opened it at random and read

The large armadillo-=like lady who rattles her bracelets and clicks her compact two minutes before the end of Das Lied von der Erde is not my friend. It is from her million-headed inattentions and carelessnesses that I have tried to remove myself by going to Carnegie Hall to hear Gustav Mahler's song-symphony. Yes, "I too know that the blackbird is involved in what I know," said Wallace Stevens, and I'll add armadillos, but that is something quite different. The lady, then, must be a friend of John Cage's, who once told me he hated all music except his own, and who now tells me that perhaps the noises of the environment are more interesting…

["Surely Reality is More Interesting"]

Elsewhere:

It was Walter Pater's contention that "all arts aspire to the condition of music." Ezra Pound agreed and insisted that poetry atrophies when it gets too far from musc. Goethe declared that architecture was just frozen music. And Arthur Dove gives us a clarification (and alarming complication) in notes to his exhibition at Stieglitz's the Intimate Gallery (1929):

There is no such thing as abstraction.

It is extraction, gravitation toware a certain direction, and minding your own business.

If the exact be clear enough its value will exist.

It is nearer to music, not the music of the ears… the music of the eyes.

["Some Speak of a Return to Nature— I Wonder Where They Could Have Been"]

And so on. You see from this that Williams rambles; his is a large play-space; he turns phrases memorably. Discursive wit is my ice-cream. Now Williams is gone, though The Magpie's Bagpipe is still up there on the shelf, between Emmet (Sweethearts, Something Else Press, 1968) and William Carlos (various). So Jonathan Williams is not really gone: but I wish I had met him while he was closer.

---

THE GOOD NEWS: To Mills College last night, there to see a solo presentation by Margaret Fisher, dancer, choreographer, video producer, author; stage director of my opera The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even when its first act was produced at Mills in 1984; a strong and handsome woman of immense intuitive intelligence and patient expression. (And, I must add, a longtime friend.)

The Ensemble Room of the Mills Music Building (which is otherwise being extensively reconstructed) was packed, and a number of faces there were familiar from years ago, from the 1970s and '80s. There were four items on the program:

• A silent viewing of stills from the opera: photographs by Margaret and by Larry Neff, with members of the cast in Cynthia DuVal's memorable costumes (see some of these online). Twenty-five years, nearly, since that production: I really should "finish" that opera one of these days! (Why? Duchamp didn't "finish" the Large Glass…)

• Letters of Duchamp, the striking 1994 twelve-minute video record of the live production of that name, a longer three-act strictly choreographic treatment which I suspect was planned for the central scene of the opera, Act II scene 3, but whose music relied only on my first piano sonata (Bachelor Machine, since there's no recording or even synthesization of the rest of the score. Malic molds, chocolate grinder, bicycle wheel, the marvelous Eliane Lust playing a piano on a platform slowly towed across the stage by strongman Jerry Carniglia…

• a new piece, Heaven's Dark Side: the body, a vocalized meditation on etymology, opposition, and resolution. Nearly half an hour long, this featured Margaret mostly unseen on a balcony above the stage (bride-space from Duchamp?) declaiming, in an exaggerated Georgia accent, a text contemplating Light and Darkness, occasionally wandering into a fictionalized birdsong Sanskrit and a "chiselled" quasi-pedantic Latin. I was particularly struck by her fastening on the Latin word caelum, which she divides into two cells -lum, relating to luminous, illuminate and so on) and cae-, relating to caecus, "blind".

This sends me online where I learn (among much else) that

Cælum is a Latin word meaning both "sky, heaven" and "tool with a sharp beveled point, used in engraving or carving stone." (You'll sometimes see this latter definition over-simplified to "chisel.")

and I begin to wander into uncertain fields: the heavens (celestial, cielo, ciel) as caesura between dark and light, blindness and vision; though the skies themselves are in fact dark half the time, or were before the modern invention of light pollution.

The middle of this piece, Heaven's Dark Side: the body, was in fact seen: Margaret stood perhaps ten minutes on her right leg, her left knee bent, her hands and arms dancing in insectlike motions, while she continued her dispassionate but strangely accented sermon, a Yoga Bride-preacher in a celestial (ceiling) pulpit; and then it was dark again, and she continued; we'd been enlightened, and were then returned to our normal state of enlightenment…

• A thirty-minute video, Exquisite Corpse, a "surreal" (for lack of slower accuracy I'll use that word) video-story recounting seven tales spun, exquisite-corpselike, in a Haifa bomb-shelter, with a magnificent score by Robert Hughes. I can't say enough about this piece; in fact I can't say much: I have to see it again, and again. It is intelligent, and fascinating, and enterprising, and rich and deep, and, I think, Important. It has discursive wit, and I want a copy; I hope it finds distribution.

Joshua Tree and environs

BETWEEN TWENTYNINE PALMS AND AMBOY the road runs quite straight, east-west at first, then turning north to rise easily to Sheeps Hole Pass, after which it changes direction to skirt Bristol Lake (dry), finally running due north again to cross it and then meet the old Highway 66.

Somewhere on that first stretch, heading east, we stopped at what seemed a new community park. "Community" seems to me a fugitive notion thereabouts. Every now and then on these desert roads — Amboy Road, or the road to Adelanto — you'll see a cluster of mailboxes, perhaps half a dozen, perhaps twenty; and you'll understand that out that unpaved road into the desert there are houses, or cabins, or prefabs or trailers, hidden by imperceptible rises, lost among sagebrush, old cars and pickup trucks, now and then some aging plastic play apparatus.

Some of these houses are nearer the main road, and newer, and generally surrounded by Cyclone fencing; and you wonder how long it'll be before they in their turn deteriorate into the careless decay of those older shacks which seem unchanged from my first view of such habitations, in the summer of 1944, when we drove through the desert on these roads.

I wonder, too, who the hell lives here, and why. What do they read, what music do they hear. Are they as struck as we are by the fragrance of the desert bloom we've come to see. Do they think about world affairs; do they vote; are they concerned about the economic situation.

In Joshua Tree we stopped at a nursery to ask where Lou's house might be found. A couple in their fifties or so were in the office, lounging and conversing. Thin, tanned, muscular, good-looking desert people. The woman had a faint German accent: she was from Nurenberg, but had "moved to Paradise" many years ago. Their greenhouse had been damaged a week or two ago by a sudden storm, and there would be work to do and repairs to make, but they didn't seem put out about it. They told us where to find Lou's house.

In town we stopped at a Salvation Army thrift store: Lindsey's on the lookout for a roasting pan. The usual evidence of our consumer culture: lots of synthetic-material clothing, worn a few times and then discarded; videotapes and CDs (but not for me); a few banged-up kitchen appliances; dishes, pots and pans whose age suggested they'd been left behind by the dead, the dead who'd died in the full course of their lives. It's nice to browse in such places: we found a rectangular Pyrex baking-dish, long missing from our own kitchen battery, and it'll remind us of Joshua Tree every time we use it.

Lou and Bill built their straw-bale house toward the end of their own lives and fortunately lived to enjoy it. (Not that they didn't enjoy planning and building it.) I wish I'd visited it during their lifetimes; I'd love to see it lived in, with music sounding — the vaulted ceiling must provide wonderful acoustics. As it was, we pulled into the driveway and took a couple of photos, then drove off. A little further up the road, the fellow at the nursery had told us, was another remarkable house, a concrete palace with a roofline that reminded me of the Sydney opera house, perched on the side of a hill and looking out away from the roads.

But we weren't on an architecture tour; we were looking for flowers. We turned up Amboy Road, driving a mile or two north, then via a country ninety-degree corner east. The mailbox clusters appeared less frequently, but before long we came to that improbable community park, a country firehouse next to it. There was a ramada, a thinly planted desert garden, and a miniature half-basketball court, freshly built and apparently yet to be initiated. It even had a desultory three rows of low bleacher benches, in case a crowd ever turns out to watch.

I will wait until tomorrow or next day, though, to continue this. Today, after getting this far here, I spent three or four hours gardening. Unusual for me: perhaps those wildflowers inspired me. Then we went to the gym for an hour. Then, on the way home, we were tail-ended, our car pretty well totaled. Neither of us was hurt. The other driver was drunk, poor man, and marched off in handcuffs. Lindsey rented a car while I escorted our poor Camry home. Tomorrow will be spent on the telephone, no doubt.

And here's Friday's twilight. The Eastside View is beautiful.

Driving down to Victorville

Monday, March 10—

IT'S SO RICH, SO BEAUTIFUL, I exulted aloud, it's such a fabulous, wonderful world, that has the Sibelius Third Symphony in it, that we can hear it, and sing with it, as we drive through the Great Valley. The landscape of Sibelius, so appropriate to a drive like this.

Allegro moderato: How is it I, who am so terrible at multitasking, and who so hate distractions while listening to music, can so easily keep this music in mind while driving 75 miles an hour? Is it because Sibelius has composed so persuasively, maintianing the forward motion but emplacing within it those suddenly unforseen events, openings in the flow for melodicles, changes of texture and apparent timing, exactly corresponding to the changes in this rolling California landscape off to the right, this steady linear landscape to the left, the skies overhead? And the punctuating climaxes — one hesitates to use that word; the peaks in a ridgeline are not "climactic," they are simply events — those events, articulating the movement as do the experienced but unconsidered events in this drive: passing a car or truck we've seen before, a familiar landmark…


Andantino con moto, quasi allegretto: impossible not to begin singing with this insinuating thing, these few adjacent notes in their supple, enchanting phrases, repeating constantly because it is their nature, and their nature is not to be fooled with; Sibelius seems to submit his composer's skills to their own existential undeniability. I think with the violas and cellos, the clarinets and bassoons, and sing with them, and the horns, their two-note punctuations, and the pizzicato basses whose own distinct rhythm expands on three against two, enlarges this compositional technique into a glimpse into the discernible but subtle geological ratios underlying the landscape…

Moderato - Allegro (ma non tanto): Fragmentation; fragmentation. The opening suddenly makes me think of the introduction to the finale of B**th*v*n's Ninth, picking up this idea and that, worrying them, setting them aside — apparently, for nothing's ever conclusive, even inconclusiveness… and this opening is just that, not an introduction but an opening into something, an opening that continues to open… and then that almost willful resolution in a tune as real as the Andantino, a folk-like march that simply strides to its arbitrary stop…

Of course I wasn't thinking like this during the drive; I was hearing and singing and seeing and exulting. We drove for something like nine hours: news, Sibelius, silences; flowers, orchards, fallow fields; stockyards, rest stops, truck stops; plains, valleys, hills.

Lindsey took over a little before Bakersfield, and I looked moodily out at the Tehachapi pass with its clutter of wind-generators, and thought about the change over time: no longer able to see out to the north of the highway, that delicious oak woodland just before Tehachapi. No longer startlingly isolated, that formal cypress grove. The wind-turbines getting ever so much bigger and more numerous. The towns of Mojave and Boron now bypassed: a good thing, I suppose, since we want to get on, but I miss them.

At the four corners of Kramer Junction, the intersections of highways 58 and 395, still an arbitrary and I should think dangerous moment in the desert, we turn south. I study the road atlas, looking at the dashed lines of hoped-for streets gridding the desert off into subdivisions: just whose hopes are these, I wonder, that would destroy so beautiful a landscape? And then we come to Adelanto, City of Possibilites, where the hopes have been realized and the bedrooms-and-garages sprawl far and wide.

And, finally, Victorville, and its Steer 'N' Stein, with its life-size wooden Indian and even more terrifying life-size plastic Cowboy, and waiters carrying alarming armloads of steaks to the overweight diners noisily conversing all around us. At the next table, two women, neighbors perhaps, with four little girls and two little boys between five and ten years old, requiring repeated visits of waiters and waitresses, more sodas, ketchup, doggie boxes and bags and even cups for the extra soda; and just before they finally leave one of the little girls returns to the plastic cowboy, whose legs she'd embraced several times already, and kisses his fly and looks round with shy mischief; no one but Lindsey and I seem to have noticed.

The Travelodge was perfectly comfortable, and I get out my iPod and listen once again to the Andantino con moto, and then read a bit of White-Jacket, and fall into a fitful sleep.

---

HERE LET ME ADD some comments on Sibelius from other sources. First, from Alex Ross, who so admires Sibelius that he devotes a chapter to him in his book The Rest is Noise — without, however, writing particularly descriptively of the music:

…the Third speaks in a self-counsciously clear, pure language. At the same time, it is a sustained deconstruction of symphonic form… [In t]he final movement the listener may have the feeling of the ground shifting underfoot.

Eric Blom, in the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians is more discursive and, I think, persuasive, going quite to the matter of this magnificent composer:

This elliptical manner may disconcert the hearer who expects a certain amount of relaxation into decorative or transitional passages in a symphonic movement, and to him Sibelius may seem almost brutally abrupt and cursory; but familiarity with this compact and pithy style is satisfying to those who can accustom themselves to understand the general statement of a syllogism without the adduction of minor premises and conclusions.

(Dropped from the Fifth Edition, alas, is a delightful paragraph quoting Sibelius as having said "ah, bah" to some inteviewer's comments on his music; I don't recall the details.

Retained, however, is the equally delightful footnote explaining the odd spelling of SIbelius's first name, which was originally Johan.

[The] French form of the first baptismal name was first used by Sibelius when as a youth he found a number of visiting-cards printed for his uncle, the sea-captain Jean Sibelius, who may himself have adopted it because of his international calling. The young musician thought that these cards should be used and, having once adopted this name, he kept it for ever after.

What's in a name, Juliet asked: a great deal, I think.)

Amboy redux

BACK, AND NOT UNHAPPY TO BE SO — this is a pretty nice place too — from a three-day drive in search of wildflowers, as I mentioned the other day. Four quite memorable events crowd out a number of only slightly lesser ones, and I’ll revisit them here, one at a time, now that I’ve uploaded the two hundred photos I took.

Let’s begin with Amboy Crater, which we visited Tuesday (and which I wrote about here that evening). It appears first off to the northwest, as you approach it along Amboy Road driving north from Twentynine Palms. You cross a dry lake, Bristol Lake, and Amboy Road dead-ends into the old Highway 66, the town of Amboy just to the right (“town” is a bit grand, “settlement” might be better), the crater a few hundred yards to the left.

Here you see the cindercone from the turnoff onto the road leading to a parking lot a hundred yards or so in, out of sight off to the right. It’s about a mile and a quarter away, and rises about 250 feet above the desert floor. The footpath from the parking lot is also about a mile and a quarter long to the base of the cone, meandering a bit across sand and scree and taking you around to the other side of the cone, where there’s a natural opening.



Here there’s a bit of a scramble up some loose lava scree, and the footing’s not so easy. Then you’re inside the cone, with your choice of three more scrambles to get up to the rim. (All this is very clearly seen on Google Earth: do a search for “Amboy Crater” and put a slight tilt to the view.)

From the rim, looking north, this is what we saw: you can see the footpath leading north toward the parking lot, and the incredible fields of Desert Sunflowers.



What you don’t see are the other flowers: primroses, desert stars, dandelions, yellowcups, the infrequent stately lily, great expanses of sand verbena, and (perhaps my favorite) the desert fivespots.

You can see them, however, online; where you can download photos sized just right for your iPod or PDA, in case you don’t like carrying field guides. (We do.)

We arrived at the parking lot at one o’clock: the day wasn’t too warm, and there was a pleasant breeze: even with dozens of stops for photographs we were on the rim by 2:30, and the walk back was quick and, once down from the rim, easy. The morning had been eventful enough — I’ll post about that tomorrow or next day — but this was a real highlight. There was one disappointment: the town of Bagdad, six miles west on the “National Trails Highway” (as old 66 is apparently now officially known) has completely vanished, reclaimed by the desert as Wikipedia puts it. But Amboy Crater is one of those sights, and sites, that will always be in mind, from now on.

Amboy Crater

UP LATE, THE MOTEL CLOCK not having been reset for Standard Time; to a locally greatly admired coffee house for breakfast, only to find it closed and for lease between two adjacent (or nearly so) Starbuckses; then on through Apple Valley and to Joshua Tree.

We stopped at the Nat'l Park visitor center, then found Lou's house, a pretty little stucco building with a vaulted roof and the fine thick walls that come only from heavy cut stone or -- as in this case -- straw-bale construction.

I was a little surprised at the setting: the usual scramble of modest houses, too many cars and pickups, plastic bags blowing around, ambition, entitlement, an grit you associate with desert subdivisions.
It's dispiriting; but there it is.

On then to Twentynine Palms, not very interesting, and then the road up toward Amboy. And then, oh good heavens, the wildflowers. I'm not going to try to list them here: I'm writing this (partly as an experiment) on a folding keyboard, and sending it from my pocket Treo; I'm not easily able to consult references or provide links.

Let me just say there were lupins, poppies, five-spots, lilies, salvias, and dozens of things I can't identify. Whites, yellows, pinks, violets (I see I forgot to list the verbenas).

And the scent! You can't imagine the extent to which the scent fills your nostrils, and the car... the closest I can come to describing it is a just-opened honey-jar, sweet, complex, dry, floral, a bit exotic. (At one point I thought of the tree-blossoms in Tahiti.)

We drove on up the highway, over Sheep'sfoot Pass, across the Bristol Dry lake, and then turned west on the old Highway 66, now known locally as National Trails Highway. In less than a mile you come to a dirt road leading in to a trailhead to Amboy Crater, a cindercone we'd been looking at for the last ten miles or so.

At the parking lot we had lunch in one of the ramadas; then hit the trail for the Crater. It's a 3.5-mile round trip, and you climb 250 feet to the lip of the crater.

The entire trip was through fields of yellow and violet. I don't know when I've walked among so many flowers, or so many kinds of flowers. The scent, again, was nearly overwhelming; fortunately, there was a bit of a breeze. (It also helped offset the temperature, which crowded ninety degrees.)

The view from the top of the crater is memorable. Unfortunately my phone camera doesn't do it justice; you see here only a small part of the walk back to the car.

And then the drive up to the dread town of Ludlow, which I always associate with blown tires; and Barstow, and Highway 395, and then a new drive to us, the magnificent Walker Pass highway across the southern Sierra.

We're spending the night in Kernville. Dinner... Well, that will have to wait for a report on the other blog, when I'm home and have the proper software...

On the road again...

DOWN HIGHWAY 5, then, in search of wildflowers. We didn't get away until 10:30 or so, what with one thing and another, and didn't see any flowers to speak of -- excepting mustard, of course, those invasive but attractive fields of yellow -- until we'd rounded Altamount Pass and were heading due south toward Westley.

Then, there they were, west of the highway looking into the sun: subtle but beautiful washes of the California colors, blue and gold, lupin and poppy. They washed up the hillsides like delicate washes of watercolor, lending depth to the green convolutions of the hillsides.

Down past Santa Nella, Harris Ranch, Kettleman City with its stockyards; across to Wasco, through Bakersfield on its freeways, and up the memorable grade to Tehachapi. I always remember the day the Mercedes lost a fan belt, and I had to trudge for help to the Forestry station, and a trucker gave me a lift back, and somehow I contrived to fix the belt, and find some water for the radiator. Those days fortunately are gone.

(There were others: water pump in Barstow; tire in Ludlow; brake cable in the Santa Cruz Mountains... such things don't seem to happen any more. I don't mind.)

I love that country up the grade from Bakersfield to Tehachapi, and always look forward to it. Alas, a dividing wall has been installed between the directions of traffic, and you can no longer see that fine open wooded countryside off to the north, not if you're traveling east, that is. I contented myself, since Lindsey was driving, with watching the railroad as it made its unbelievable circles and spirals uphill to the pass. There was even a freight train, a very long one, tracing the route for me as if I couldn't reconstruct it from memory...

The highway bypasses Mojave now, and Boron, but there's still that awkward stop at Four Corners: and here we turned right, south, to drive down past the eastern edge of the Marine base, finally finding Adelanto (The City of Unlimited Possibilites, its gatepost proudly proclaimed), and then surprising miles of tracts of high-density condos and apartments and bungalows cheek by jowl. So much room here, in the Mojave Desert; yet these ticktacks are jammed together as if they were agoraphobe.

There was an athlete's equipment bag on the floor in the motel office, and a couple of cricket-bats leaning against the all. Cricket, I said, cricket, those are cricket-bats, I can't believe anyone plays cricket here.

I do, said the slender Indian boy behind the desk; I do, and we have three teams here.

Victorville is a city of ninety thousand, he told me; most of them work right here, though some work "downhill," which turns out to be a manufacturing center to the south, just where I'm not sure. Ninety thousand souls, and, according to the World Wide Web, 78 restaurants. We chose the one with the best reviews -- well, review; there was only one -- Steak and Stein. I suppose I was thinking of Gertrude. It could have been better.

No photos: this traveling laptop lacks iPhoto. No Eating Every Day for a few days: it also lacks iWeb. I thought I'd prepared everything. I hadn't.

Melville and Dana on music

Having begun reading Herman Melville's White-Jacket, in the Library of America edition, I see a couple of notes taken while reading his Redburn, nine years ago, on the subject of, of all things, music. One doesn't think of Melville as an author interested in music. But such was the extent to which music was an integral part of ordinary daily life, 150 years ago, that even an author specializing in the South Sea islands, or ordinary seamen's lives on the main, found it both necessary and interesting to comment on it. From the LOA edition, page 273:

Now, music is a holy thing, and its instruments, however humble, are to be loved and revered. Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah o Persia's horse, and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod. Musical instrumentts should be like the silver tongs, with which the high-priests tended the Jewish altars--never to be touched by a hand profane...

And there is no humble thing with music in it, not a fife, not a negro-fiddle, that is not to be reverenced as much as the grandest architectural organ that every rolled its flood-tide of harmony down a cathedral nave. For even a Jew's-harp may be so played, as to awaken all the fairies that are in us, and make them dance in our souls, as on a moon-lit sward of violets:

And he goes on to discuss the possible origins of music's power "that so enters, without knocking, into our inmost beings, and shows us all hidden things", and so on.

And, further on, p.303:

So one night, on the windlass, [Harry] sat and sang; and from the ribald jests so common to sailors, the men slid into silence at every verse. Hushed, and more hushed they grew, till at last Harry sat among them like Orpheus among the charmed leopards and tigers...

THERE'S A MARVELOUS PASSAGE in Two Years Before the Mast (which book incidentally Melville cites approvingly in White-Jacket, when he rounds Cape Horn) describing a songfest ashore, somewhere down near Pt. Mugu I think, with sailors singing their native songs, English and German, French and Spanish, and none so compellingly as the Italians, whose entire sensibility seems centered on song.

Two Years Before the Mast, chapter XX
Leisure--News From Home--"Burning the Water"

After we had been a few weeks on shore, and had begun to feel broken into the regularity of our life, its monotony was interrupted by the arrival of two vessels from the windward. We were sitting at dinner in our little room, when we heard the cry of "Sail ho!" This, we had learned, did not always signify a vessel, but was raised whenever a woman was seen coming down from the town; or a squaw, or an ox-cart, or anything unusual, hove in sight upon the road; so we took no notice of it. But it soon became so loud and general from all parts of the beach, that we were led to go to the door; and there, sure enough, were two sails coming round the point, and leaning over from the strong north-west wind, which blows down the coast every afternoon. The headmost was a ship, and the other, a brig. Everybody was alive on the beach, and all manner of conjectures were abroad. Some said it was the Pilgrim, with the Boston ship, which we were expecting; but we soon saw that the brig was not the Pilgrim, and the ship with her stump top-gallant masts and rusty sides, could not be a dandy Boston Indiaman. As they drew nearer, we soon discovered the high poop and top-gallant forecastle, and other marks of the Italian ship Rosa, and the brig proved to be the Catalina, which we saw at Santa Barbara, just arrived from Valparaiso. They came to anchor, moored ship, and commenced discharging hides and tallow. The Rosa had purchased the house occupied by the Lagoda, and the Catalina took the other spare one between ours and the Ayacucho's, so that, now, each one was occupied, and the beach, for several days, was all alive. The Catalina had several Kanakas on board, who were immediately besieged by the others, and carried up to the oven, where they had a long pow-wow, and a smoke. Two Frenchmen, who belonged to the Rosa's crew, came in, every evening, to see Nicholas; and from them we learned that the Pilgrim was at San Pedro, and was the only other vessel now on the coast. Several of the Italians slept on shore at their hide-house; and there, and at the tent in which the Fazio's crew lived, we had some very good singing almost every evening. The Italians sang a variety of songs--barcarollas, provincial airs, etc.; in several of which I recognized parts of our favorite operas and sentimental songs. They often joined in a song, taking all the different parts; which produced a fine effect, as many of them had good voices, and all seemed to sing with spirit and feeling. One young man, in particular, had a falsetto as clear as a clarionet.

The greater part of the crews of the vessels came ashore every evening, and we passed the time in going about from one house to another, and listening to all manner of languages. The Spanish was the common ground upon which we all met; for every one knew more or less of that. We had now, out of forty or fifty, representatives from almost every nation under the sun: two Englishmen, three Yankees, two Scotchmen, two Welshmen, one Irishman, three Frenchmen (two of whom were Normans, and the third from Gascony,) one Dutchman, one Austrian, two or three Spaniards, (from old Spain,) half a dozen Spanish-Americans and half-breeds, two native Indians from Chili and the Island of Chiloe, one Negro, one Mulatto, about twenty Italians, from all parts of Italy, as many more Sandwich Islanders, one Otaheitan, and one Kanaka from the Marquesas Islands.

The night before the vessels were ready to sail, all the Europeans united and had an entertainment at the Rosa's hide-house, and we had songs of every nation and tongue. A German gave us "Och! mein lieber Augustin!" the three Frenchmen roared through the Marseilles Hymn; the English and Scotchmen gave us "Rule Britannia," and "Wha'll be King but Charlie?" the Italians and Spaniards screamed through some national affairs, for which I was none the wiser; and we three Yankees made an attempt at the "Star-spangled Banner." After these national tributes had been paid, the Austrian gave us a very pretty little love-song, and the Frenchmen sang a spirited thing called "Sentinelle! O prenez garde a vous!" and then followed the melange which might have been expected. When I left them, the aguardiente and annisou was pretty well in their heads, and they were all singing and talking at once, and their peculiar national oaths were getting as plenty as pronouns.

I can't find my copy, so I set the above here from the Project Gutenberg edition. Reading it, I see that Dana goes on to a fascinating description of national types and their languages. All this was apparently interesting enough to strike Dana as worth writing about; but was also normal enough to have been apparent to him. It's odd to think that the United States was more open to this kind of contemplation in the 1830s than it is today, 180 years later, but there it is:

The next day, the two vessels got under weigh for the windward, and left us in quiet possession of the beach. Our numbers were somewhat enlarged by the opening of the new houses, and the society of the beach a little changed. In charge of the Catalina's house, was an old Scotchman, who, like most of his countrymen, had a pretty good education, and, like many of them, was rather pragmatical, and had a ludicrously solemn conceit. He employed his time in taking care of his pigs, chickens, turkeys, dogs, etc., and in smoking his long pipe. Everything was as neat as a pin in the house, and he was as regular in his hours as a chronometer, but as he kept very much by himself, was not a great addition to our society. He hardly spent a cent all the time he was on the beach, and the others said he was no shipmate. He had been a petty officer on board the British frigate Dublin, Capt. Lord James Townshend, and had great ideas of his own importance. The man in charge of the Rosa's house was an Austrian by birth, but spoke, read, and wrote four languages with ease and correctness. German was his native tongue, but being born near the borders of Italy, and having sailed out of Genoa, the Italian was almost as familiar to him as his own language. He was six years on board of an English man-of-war, where he learned to speak our language with ease, and also to read and write it. He had been several years in Spanish vessels, and had acquired that language so well, that he could read any books in it. He was between forty and fifty years of age, and was a singular mixture of the man-of-war's-man and Puritan. He talked a great deal about propriety and steadiness, and gave good advice to the youngsters and Kanakas, but seldom went up to the town, without coming down "three sheets in the wind." One holyday, he and old Robert (the Scotchman from the Catalina) went up to the town, and got so cozy, talking over old stories and giving one another good advice, that they came down double-backed, on a horse, and both rolled off into the sand as soon as the horse stopped. This put an end to their pretensions, and they never heard the last of it from the rest of the men. On the night of the entertainment at the Rosa's house, I saw old Schmidt, (that was the Austrian's name) standing up by a hogshead, holding on by both hands, and calling out to himself--"Hold on, Schmidt! hold on, my good fellow, or you'll be on your back!" Still, he was an intelligent, good-natured old fellow, and had a chest-full of books, which he willingly lent me to read. In the same house with him was a Frenchman and an Englishman; the latter a regular-built "man-of-war Jack;" a thorough seaman; a hearty, generous fellow; and, at the same time, a drunken, dissolute dog. He made it a point to get drunk once a fortnight, (when he always managed to sleep on the road, and have his money stolen from him,) and to battle the Frenchman once a week. These, with a Chilian, and a half a dozen Kanakas, formed the addition to our company.

(Kanaka was the usual name for Hawaiian natives in Dana's day.)

I'm reading White-Jacket now, and it, too, astonishes me with the intelligence — meaning both brain-power and quantity of information — and the sense of communality expressed by the most ordinary of seamen on a navy frigate a century and a half ago. That, and, of course, the durability, the strength and patience. What a long way we've come since then.