Shakespeare in Ashland

Ashland, Oregon, July 26, 2012—

ROMANCE; TRAGEDY; HISTORY; three of the four major categories of the Shakespeare canon, seen within thirty hours, on two of the three stages maintained here by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And seen in productions of varying degrees of success, in my opinion. The problem, as always in this country — I know nothing of Shakespeare productions elsewhere — is the degree of comfort the producing team has with the presentation of these plays to these audiences. How is Shakespeare relevant, or approachable, or (let's face it) marketable in 21st-century United States of America?

Harold Bloom has his own comment on the problem of Making Shakespeare Approachable:

Most commercial stagings of As You Like It vulgarize the play, as though directors fear that audiences cannot be trusted to absorb the agon between the wholesome wit of Rosalind and the rancidity of Touchstone, the bitterness of Jaques. I fear that this is not exactly the cultural moment for Shakespeare's Rosalind, yet I expect that moment to come again and yet again, when our various feminisms have become even maturer and yet more successful. Rosalind, least ideological of all dramatic characters, surpasses every other woman in literature in what we could call "intelligibility."

Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 209-10

The summer of 2012 is not yet the cultural moment Bloom has in mind, not to judge by this year's production of this great Romance; and it was again partly the fault of a single character, Touchstone — here directed to sitcom comedy (like the Romeo Nurse, overwhelming the "rancid" subtleties. All of Shakespeare's romances depend partly on comparisons, contrasts, and collisions of class; but it is what each class representative has to say about the others that is informative and interesting and ultimately useful. In broad attempts to use these contrasts primarily for their entertainment value this informative value is lost.

Too, the language suffers. Too often the actors seem to take little pleasure in the marvelous poetry they are given (even, in Rosalind's case, in prose), as if they're self-conscious about it. Lines are thrown away, or mumbled, or mouthed, or made difficult to register because of absurdities of aural scale caused by the shrill yet bland music in this production, or the alternation of shouts and murmurs. Like Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It contains scores of lines whose beauty brings tears to the eye, even though they're familiar as clichés: today's actors need to trust the poetry, whose familiarity is due after all to its power, not merely the repetition across the centuries which is testament to that power.

The whole first half of this production labors to overcome its unfortunate opening, with a banishment scene made to look absurd rather than cruel. I almost left at intermission. Afterward, though, as would be the case the next afternoon, the production settled in, and Shakespeare shouldered directorial Concept aside. Bloom is right, I think; Rosalind is a magnificent creation. She could converse wittily with Hamlet and Prospero, and the conversation would be rewarding for its substance. Jacques, too — the role set on a woman actor in this production, and why not? — has a mind far subtler and more meaningful than is often thought to be the case (even Bloom seems to neglect her), and is beautifully portrayed here, almost as if to apologize for the overblown Touchstone.

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It doesn't help my present mood, on the subject of these productions, that I've just read David Crystal's engaging book Pronouncing Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2005), an account of his work preparing the cast of the London Globe Theatre for a series of performances of Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare's own language, Early Modern English, at it was most likely pronounced in London at the turn of the Seventeenth Century. The book strikes me as most interesting and useful to anyone concerned about the plays, the author, the productions, and the performances; I'm sure most professionals in the area are familiar with it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had been read fairly closely by Laird Williamson, who directed the performance we saw yesterday afternoon.

One of Crystal's points, in his short and entertaining book, is that the "authentic" reproduction of the sound of Shakespeare's English does not render the play more remote to today's audience. (I set "authentic" in quotes, but Crystal writes persuasively to explain just how we can know how the language may have sounded.) In today's London, four hundred years later, the linguistic climate turns out to be remarkably similar to that of Shakespeare's day: lots of accents, lots of languages, all present simultaneously, influencing one another at times, revealing differences in ethnic, class, economic, and geographical background.

Williamson's production of Romeo and Juliet transposes the action from early Renaissance Italy to California in the 1840s, when it was in its sad devolution from a Mexican state to annexation by the United States. The Capulets and Montagus are feuding landholding families, the Prince is a U.S. Army general in command of the area. You hear the familiar lines in mostly modern English, with Mexican, Spanish, Afro-American, and east-coast educated accents; often Juliet's father lapses into Spanish when talking to his wife, daughter, or various servants.

The play survives the transposition well; I think it likely does make its relevance to our own time and place more immediately clear to contemporary audiences unfamiliar with Shakespeare. (Not with the story, of course: what tragic love story is better known?) Where West Side Story brings the play to our own context — successfully, I think — this production mediates Shakespeare's setting and our own context through this clever Californification, paralleling the playwright's secondary purpose — his examination of societal mores as they defeat their own intentions — by training the same examination on both our own time and one in the recent past centered on many issues again in the public moment (class, ethnic background, pride, gangs…).

But the playwright's primary purpose is not to instruct, but to entertain, and here this production, like too many productions of Shakespeare, is too often exaggerated, out of scale. No question that the Nurse is often a comic role; but she has serious things to say: in this production the audience is early trained to think of her as little more than a stereotype, and she's rarely taken seriously. Mercutio should be talkative, deft, mercurial; here he's mainly loud.

Fortunately, Mercutio doesn't survive into the second act (there is only one intermission in this production), and after its irresolute opening the production settles into its directorial concept and Alejandra Escalante's portrayal of Juliet becomes more complex and more attentive to the book. In general, it's as if the cast begins to take the text more seriously, as offering real and thoughtful material for them to convey to the audience. And the close, as always, is poignant and affecting.

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We come now to Henry V. I do not like this play, as Bloom does not like The Merchant of Venice, so I'll admit to an inability to see or discuss or think about it rationally. I know there's a case to be made for an ironic intent behind it. Henry V is like Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony: its tone must be destroyed in its performance if its real meaning is to be conveyed. You would think, then, that a company used to damaging the tone of Shakespeare's plays would find a brilliant approach to this history: but this summer that doesn't really happen.

The play centers on the young king's successful invasion and seizure of much of France, the result of the pivotal Battle of Agincourt, and in its conclusion on Henry's arranged marriage to the trophy princess Catherine of Valois. There are, God knows, memorable events and moments in the early scenes, but in this production, presented out of doors in the Elizabethan Theater, they were uniformly grey and unappealing, as if the intention were to rob war of any glamor. The frivolity of the French court, a running joke among the British, brought the only moments of light and deftness, and the graceful humor attending Hal's courtship of his dubious "Kate" seemed to offer a civilizing note to what had until then been relentless and glum.

These three plays were undoubtedly chosen with ensemble in mind. England seizing France; the U.S. seizing California. Generational conflicts and commentaries. Spanish, French, Scottish and Welsh accents. Finally, the civilizing effect of romantic love, which resolves conflict by giving in to biological urgency. There is always so much to contemplate here; it hardly matters that irresoluteness and economic realities momentarily blur the perception of Shakespeare's immense and complex landscape.

As always, I deny any attempt here to "review" these productions; there are plenty of reviews on the Internet. Casts and credits are also on line, along with performance schedules:

• As You Like It: Elizabethan Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, Oregon; closes October 14.
• Romeo and Juliet: Angus Bowmer Theatre; closes November 4,
• Henry V: Elizabethan Stage; closes October 12.

Bachelor Machine

IF YOU'VE VISITED this blog before you're no doubt aware of my long-running infatuation with La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même, the chef-d'oeuvre Marcel Duchamp abandoned in 1923, which has since attained the status of legend within the annals of Modernism. He had worked on it for ten or twelve years; I worked on it longer, ultimately to an even greater degree of futility.

One of the by-products of this infatuation, in the category of musical composition, was my first piano sonata, composed mostly in 1983 and 1984 while working on the opera I was slowly finishing up. A long ballet dominates the middle of the second act, the center of the opera: it was conceived as representing the mechanical workings of the Bride and her Bachelors, with solo material given, respectively, to violin and piano.

This sonata is the piano material, lacking all other music (solo and choral singing and orchestral accompaniment) but fleshed out slightly with additional notes. (The violin material went into a concerto, about which I recently posted here.)

There are two intentions in this sonata: to make an extended, somewhat virtuosic piece of music for solo piano, and to retain the arbitrary, quirky, stiff characteristic of Duchamp's conception. The part of the bachelor apparatus that is most present is the "chariot" or "glider," a contraption that comes and goes in a reciprocating movement, sounding its "litanies" ("slow life: everyday junk: onanism: buffer of life") and actuating an elaborate train of machinery which ultimately fails to strip bare the bride.

The three movements are called Cadre, Desires and Frustrations, and Action and Inaction. I wouldn't mind finding an English word for the title of the first movement, but nothing quite does what the French cadre does: framework, context, grouping...

The music of the Sonata can also make a fairly substantial Piano Concerto, a Big Concerto to complement the Small Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, but it hasn't yet been notated, except as part of the Duchamp opera. Perhaps one day.

Sonata: Bachelor Machine was first played by Eliane Lust, July 25, 1990, in San Francisco, on a wonderful program also including Debussy's Hommage à Rameau, Bartók's Sonata, 1926, and Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze. What a night! You can watch the incomparable Eliane play one movement of the sonata online.

I've finally prepared what I think is a fairly decent edition of the score of Sonata: Bachelor Machine, available at Lulu.com: click here to order a copy.

Also online: you can hear and purchase an mp3 of the sonata, as synthesized from the score. (At that same site, you can now buy tracks of various pieces of chamber music; more about them in the future, perhaps…)

Tony Judt: The Memory Chalet

Last month I read the massive, discursive, utterly fascinating Thinking the Twentieth Century, an extended conversation in which Timothy Silverman assists the tragically mute and paralyzed (Lou Gehrig's disease) historian-intellectual Tony Judt to reflect on the world which he is about to leave as it has been left in its turn by the dismal failings of the century in whose middle he'd been born.

I can't write about that book here: it's too big, too complex, too important — and not at had: I made the mistake of reading it in a library copy.

After recording those conversations, though, later transcribed and edited into the final version, Judt produced one more book, a memoir in a series of self-described feuilletons called The Memory Chalet (London: Penguin Books, 2010). The title refers to his method of composing these essays, which accumulate steadily in depth and importance: in his long wakeful nights he composed them, organizing their paragraphs and mentally stowing them at this site or that in a country hotel fondly remembered from his youth; then the following days retrieving them, one by one, and dictating them to an amanuensis.

The writing itself is always graceful, rather conversational, informal, yet elegantly contoured and distributed. (It reminds me of other work similarly made: for example, the paragraphs of Alberto Moravia's first novel Gli indifferenti, or — very different — the visions recalled and re-stated in Sam Francis's lyrical, light-filled paintings.)

But skillful, artistic as his expression is, it is Judt's substance, concepts, insights that make his work in these books so significant — imperative, I would say. His observation is detailed and retentive; his intellectual organization of the results is careful and logical; his conclusions, it seems to me, both inescapable and utterly persuasive.

His training was the result of a fortunate confluence of opportunity and ambition, tempered by a healthy amount of typical adolescent male curiosity and adventure; and much of The Memory Chalet is a dying man's retrospection on the luck that made his career. Central: the conviction that meritocracy and social democracy, which underlay his own development, represent the best possible organizing principles of contemporary society.

Literally central to his book: Meritocrats, a chapter describing his education at King's College, Cambridge, in the 1960s, where John Dunn

broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history, He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect.
   That is teaching. It is also a certain sort of liberalism: the kind that engages in good faith with dissenting (or simply mistaken) opinions across a broad political spectrum.

It is in discussions like this — listening and responding — across positions, even mutually exclusive ones formed by individual awarenesses based on conflicting allegiances, that enlightenment can occur. Such conversation is at the heart of social democracy, which can only obtain in a context subordinating partisan doctrine to greater collective good.

Before King’s College, Judt was a youth influenced by Marxism and Zionism; King’s cured him of those enthusiasms by introducing him to greater responsiveness to observed historical fact and keener analysis of the means by which specific political objectives might be achieved. He concentrated first on issues of French political history as it responded to Marxism, studying at the Ecole Normale. One thing and another led him to lectureships in the United States, at Davis and Berkeley among others. A “mid-life crisis” was met not with the purchase of a sports car or the acquisition of a trophy wife but with the determination to learn Czech, and he investigated the fascinating, sobering political and philosophical history of Eastern Europe later in his career, which ended in the pages of The New York Review of Books, among other publications, where he was by the early years of this century a public intellectual, avoiding partisan allegiances in order to take reasoned, pragmatic positions on the great issues of our time.

There are many ticks in the margins of my copy of The Memory Chalet. Let me simply quote out a few of the passages:

• On education:

Universities are elitist: they are about selecting the most able cohort of a generation and educating them to their ability—breaking open the elite and making it consistently anew. Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are not the same thing. A society divided by wealth and inheritance cannot redress this injustice by camouflaging it in educational institutions—by denying distinctions of ability or by restricting selective opportunity—while favoring a steadily widening income gap in the name of the free market. This is mere cant and hypocrisy. (page 145)

• On words:

The “professionalization” of academic writing—and the self-conscious grasping of humanists for the security of “theory” and “methodology”—favors obscurantism. This has encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib “popular” articulacy: in the discipline of history this is exemplified by the ascent of the “television don,” whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when fellow scholars have lost interest in communication.” (p. 152)

• On America:

For Milosz, “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” This is doubtless so and explains the continuing skepticism of the East European in the face of Western innocence. (p. 180)

• On “Captive Minds”:

Milosz studies four of his contemporaries and the self-delusions to which they fell prey on their journey from autonomy to obedience, emphasizing what he calls the intellectuals’ need for “a feeling of belonging.” (p. 175) “Fear of the indifference with which the economic system of the West treats its artists and scholars is widespread among Eastern intellectuals. They say it is better to deal with an intelligent devil than with a good-natured idiot.” (p. 176)

• On failure of western intellectuals to dissent from, e.g., Bush’s “hysterical drive to war just a few years ago”:

Few of them would have admitted to admiring the President, much less sharing his worldview. So they typically aligned themselves behind him while doubtless maintaining private reservations. Later, when it was clear they had made a mistake, they blamed it upon the administration’s incompetence …they proudly assert, in effect, “we were right to be wrong”… (p. 178) … “Just as the hapless British Labour chancellor in 1930-1931, Philip Snowden, threw up his hands in the face of the Depression and declared that there was no point opposing the ineluctable laws of capitalism, so Europe’s leaders today scuttle into budgetary austerity to appease “the markets.” But “the market”—like “dialectical materialism”—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). (p. 179)

• On identity politics:

Substituting gender (or “race” or “ethnicity” or “me”) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large. (p. 189)

Judt sadly shakes his head at the increased attraction of abstraction, the diminished concern for pragmatics, among journalists, academics, politicians, and the public at large. Unthinkable things happened throughout the Twentieth Century because of that confusion of social values. For a few years after the end of World War II, chiefly in western Europe, it looked as if a meritocracy of social technocrats might prevail, but the end of Communism, in 1989, gave way not to Social Democracy but the return of “free-market Capitalism.” Judt died, of ALS, very soon after completing The Memory Chalet; it stands as a fond, generous, often funny appreciations of the good events of his life and mind, but also an elegy on the premature relinquishment of the power to further such events. Ut tempora, ita homo.

Hoffmann; Frankenstein

TO THE THEATER three times last week, with results pondered ever since.

First of all, were we really at the theater. In fact we were at the Rialto, in nearby Sebastopol, one of those big bland shoppingmall movie-theater complexes (though this one is not really in a shopping mall). Is the room in which you watch moving pictures projected onto a two-dimensional screen, accompanied by unnaturally close, loud, and equally two-dimensional sound, really a theater? Theater implies space and spaciousness. Literally, of course, since it descends from θέατρον, "viewing place," the word's correctly used for movies. But still.

Especially when the thing viewed is, as was the case last week, a video recording of a live performance on a stage. I generally dislike these filmed-for-your-remote-delectation efforts, as I've noted here in the past:

In the end, I don't think I saw legitimate theater. The performance may have been real-time, but on the screen, whether in close-up or depicted on the full stage, the look of the characters is flat. Further, there's a confused sense of audience: you're aware of the live theater audience, but much more aware of the real people around you in the cinema. Worse yet, you're aware the actors are completely unaware of you: you're eavesdropping on a theatrical dialogue between actors and their own, real audience, more privileged because actually present before the stage.

But last week the repertory trumped media-determined objections, and we went to the Rialto. (And why are movie theaters so often named "Rialto"? Another distraction.) A play based on a favorite novel was one of the items; a favorite opera was the other.

We saw both versions of thew National Theatre production of Nick Dear's play based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the great 19th-century novel on the ethical implications of human intervention in natural creation — implications eternally central to the problem of human nature. The play is necessarily smaller than the novel: it omits Shelley's masterful framing device (though of course the theater itself, surrounding the performers, makes a substitute), and the geographical nature of the distance between Geneva and Ingolstadt, where young Victor Frankenstein produced his Creature, is utterly lost. (So, too, the distance between the classes is lessened, though Dear makes up for this by enlarging the role of Elizabeth's maid.)

And we saw this filmed play twice, because the leads, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, alternate in the roles of Frankenstein and his Creature. This was a brilliant concept of Danny Boyle, who directed the production with a good deal of his own genius, integrating Dear, Shelley, his principle actors, and Mark Tildesley's fine sets (and Bruno Poet's marvelous lighting) into a thoughtful, deep, yet gripping work which managed to be as arresting on the second viewing as it had been only two nights earlier.

Interestingly, Cumberbatch made the Creature overpowering and magnificent in revenge; Miller made Frankenstein sympathetic and likable in his quandary: and when the roles were reversed, so were the effect, and the Creature became the victim of the tragedy, the Doctor the evil perpetrator. I'm sure Shelley intended this dual reading, which emerges readily enough from her novel; and I'm equally sure both versions of the play must be seen for that point to emerge from the theater — pointing out the greater richness of ambiguity (or, better, complexity) on the page than on the stage.

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Between those two filmed presentations we saw the Metropolitan Opera production of Jacques Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, an opera I've dearly loved since first encountering it in the early 1950s via Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's movie version, which impressed an adolescent greatly and irreversibly. It's quite unfair how the memory of many details of this film production, perhaps inaccurate since I've not seen it in sixty years, has often heightened inadequacies of staged productions seen over the years.

This Met version has so many triumphant notes that its few inadequacies are the more unfortunate. Most of them are attributable to the director, Bartlett Sher, who seems too influenced by (and devoted to) production values more characteristic of the contemporary Broadway musical than to those of the opera stage. Both the Olympia and, especially, the Giulietta acts were drowned in fussiness and detail, almost swamping Hoffmann, Offenbach, the profundity of their creation, and worst of all perhaps the triumphs of the central actors.

Those were, first, Joseph Calleja, whose tenor voice was accurate and expressive and whose physical acting was very persuasive in the title role. Secondly, to my taste, Kate Lindsey, a remarkably effective Nicklausse/Muse: in this production the role is elevated to a central, motivating position, fully projecting the opera's deep insight into the profundity of Hoffmann's tales as they probe recesses of human psychology.

If you want a review of the production, I suggest Anthony Tommasini's from the New York Times of a few years back, when this production was filmed. In that review, Tommasini mentions the sorry uncertainty any production must present of a score Offenbach died before ever hearing. In a later column he discusses the approach the Met's music director James Levine (who conducts this production magnificently) took to the problem.

I'm not persuaded by the result, but I left the, um, theater thinking we'd seen/heard as good a version as we're likely to ever in this life — greatly, I think, because of the intelligent prominence of Kate Lindsey's portrayal. Les contes d'Hoffmann is a deep, rich, complex, meaningful work of art, one of the greatest operas in the repertory, the product of a rare moment when observation, expression, and artistic means converge in examination of what it means to be human. It may be that the sixty-three years between Mary Shelley's 1818 novel and Offenbach's 1881 opera (odd that they should be numerical anagrams!) represent the lifetime during which such examination was so intriguingly possible.

It may also be meaningful that the beginning of that "lifetime" should have been the product of a nineteen-year-old young woman, and that its end should have been that of a crippled, dying man. Shelley's novel, it seems to me, represents a perfect mediation between the Rationalist observations of Jane Austen and the psychological probings of Henry James. E.T.A. Hoffmann's writing of course defines a central expanse (and a fascinating one!) of Romanticism. Offenbach — well, what to make of this curious man, perhaps the Erik Satie of his time.

Violin concerto

I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED eccentric violin concertos, by which I mean those somehow standing aside from the standard repertory. Mozart's, of course; and the Sinfonia Concertante. Harold in Italy. The neglected ones by Schumann, Dvorák, Goldmark, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Lou Harrison; the familiar but still fascinating ones by Sibelius and Berg. In many of these concerti, it seems to me, the soloist stands somewhat apart from the orchestra, the composer's (and the performer's!) strategy for dealing with the differences between the collaborators in terms of dynamic and tonal range and, especially, potential weight. One doesn't like to attribute too much "meaning" to music, but it's hard to escape the thought that the soloist-orchestra dynamic recalls that between Self and Society, or — better, in my opinion, and certainly more representative of my own attitude — Self and Nature.

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From the middle 1960s forward for about twenty years I was absorbed in an operatic "version" of Marcel Duchamp's great painting La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même. The painting, on two sheets of glass, measures about nine feet high by nearly six feet wide, was begun in 1913, and was abandoned ten years later. (It's currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where, the last time I saw it, many years ago, it seemed to need a fair amount of restoration. Several replicas have been made, and are in collections of museums in Tokyo, London, and Stockholm.)

Marcel Duchamp: La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même

Duchamp preceded the actual laying-out of the painting, on its sheets of glass, with fairly elaborate verbal notes and drawings. The most elusive of these was a full-size drawing done in pencil, as I recall, on the plaster wall of an apartment he was living in in Paris in 1912 or so; it has disappeared. Others, though, on various scraps of paper, were carefully retained, and have been published in several editions. Of these perhaps the most important was the Green Box,translated in 1957 by George Hamilton and published three years later in an elegant small-format edition which I bought at the time and began making my own notes in, setting various pages to music. (I've written about all this in a lecture, How I Saw Duchamp, available as a booklet from Frog Peak.)

I was fascinated by La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même for the same reason that years before I had been fascinated by James Joyce's marvelous last novel Finnegans Wake, currently in the news thanks to a fine first-person reader's account by Michael Chabon, published in The New York Review of Books. Both of these masterpieces of Twentieth-century Modernism took their authors years to produce, and were even before their undertaking themselves products of further decades of what you might call internal preparation, in terms of contemplation of the position of man (and Artist) in the context of that epochal time.

And both La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même and Finnegans Wake have grown, since their creation, considerably beyond even that, incorporating huge amounts of critical commentary and subsequent work (in many media) by artists they have influenced. It's as if they — and other similar masterworks — were originally the product of some kind of fertile, prolific mycorrhizal organism. Or, to consider a less alarming, inorganic analogy, as if they were regional testimony to very extensive geological formations, only occasionally becoming visible through such surface evidence as hills and valleys, watercourses, presence of characteristic vegetation.

Man Ray: Dust Breeding

The Nazca plain

(Indeed, Man Ray's photograph of a section of Duchamp's painting, Dust Breeding, treats La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même as precisely that sort of phenomenon: the glass, onto which Duchamp had been gluing lead wires outlining the Chariot region of the work, had been stored flat under his bed, gathering dust; the resulting photo suggests an aerial photograph of the Nazca Lines in the Peruvian desert.)

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MUCH OF MY CONCERTO was composed in Europe: we used to spend a month or two there in alternate summers, taking leaves of absence from our jobs, sometimes touring by car or rail, on other vacations renting a house for a few weeks, or house-sitting when we got the chance. In the late 1970s we spent a couple of weeks on the Ile d'Arz, in the Gulf of Morbihan, near the alignments of Carnac, and there I spent a lot of time thinking about the center section of the opera I was writing to Duchamp's painting. At the center of the opera would be a long ballet, with some singing, which would in some way "depict," or at least somehow comment on, the actual workings of La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même, as Duchamp described (or at least considered) those workings in the notes published in the Green Box.

At the back of my mind, too, was Alban Berg's wonderfully eccentric Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and thirteen wind instruments. I knew I wanted the dancers in this ballet to move among musical instruments. Two wind quartets and two string quartets would be on stage; also the piano. The lower half of Duchamp's painting — the "Bachelor Region," with its prominent central "Chocolate Grinder" — was probably the inspiration for my imaginary mise-en-scène; the Grinder suggested the piano.

Above, the painting represents the "Bride Region," with the Bride's "Halo" along the top, surrounding its three empty squares, and the "Hanging female thing" at the left. The lowest part of this Pendu femelle irresistably suggested a violin bow: very well: a violinist would be somehow levitating downstage center above the piano and its surrounding accompanying quartets, the rest of the orchestra in its pit between stage and audience.

Bride: violin; Bachelors: wind instruments; Grinder: piano.

The two concertos would be interleaved, movement by movement, only occasionally superimposed. A fair amount of the music was sketched that summer on the Ile d'Arz and elsewhere, and in 1985 I extracted the violin concerto component from the opera score so that it could be performed separately. Unfortunately, the first movement of the violin concerto, which depended heavily on two wind quartets whose music was notated graphically, resisted all my attempts at a conventionally notated realization, so it is omitted from the stand-alone version, and the second movement has been broken into two sections to provide the conventional three movements of the concerto form. (Perhaps one day I'll solve that notational problem.)

(As for the Piano Concerto, it has yet to be extracted from the opera score. The solo music for the piano has been, however: it's available as the Sonata: Bachelor Machine, completed in 1989; one movement of the piece can be seen, performed by the estimable Eliane Lust, here.)

In 1987, I think it was, the Cabrillo Music Festival approached me asking about any not-quite-finished orchestral pieces I might have, and I mentioned the Violin Concerto. Fine, they said, they'd like to see it. I handed it in, as it then stood, not quite filled out, and the original first movement still missing. After a few weeks I heard that they were intrigued by its "spareness," and that they wanted to give it a concert reading on a program devoted to new pieces perhaps not yet quite finished.

I had heard the San Francisco violinist Beni Shinohara, who had been playing chamber music with Eliane, and had been greatly impressed with her musicianship, tone, and intellectual curiosity. She agreed to take the project on, and somehow persuaded a friend, the pianist-conductor Joan Nagano, to help, by improvising a condensation of the orchestral accompaniment for solo piano, thereby extending the concerto's mycorrhizal network into a sonata for violin and piano — which I have neither seen nor heard.

The Cabrillo connection suggested a little joke to me, and I incorporated the snare drum part from Lou Harrison's Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra into my own score. Lou was a fixture at the Cabrillo Festival; I admired him and his Koncerto, as he preferred to call it; and it had itself been inspired by Alban Berg's violin concerto. So I lifted the snare drum part, exactly as it sounds in his concerto, at the original tempo and loudness and pacing. (This of course required my completely re-notating and thus considerably complicating Lou's original "spelling" of the music.)

Beni played beautifully, and it didn't hurt that she looked splendid, too. Much of the actual concert was a mess, with inept conducting and inadequately prepared orchestral parts, not to mention uninteresting composition. Daniel Carriaga referred to all this in his review in the Los Angeles Times:

…Saturday afternoon, five works from the California Composers Project were unveiled by the Festival Orchestra.

The players' patience was sorely tried with this event. Only Charles Shere's spare but gloomy Concerto for Violin and Harp, Percussion and Small Orchestra (1985) deserved such a showcase.

Shere's brooding and intense concerto, an essay in small, telling musical gestures, occupies its 15 minutes engagingly. It was performed sensitively by violinist Beni Shinohara, solidly accompanied by the orchestra led by Ken Harrison.

Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1990 (retrieved July 7, 2012)

For my concerto, though, the violist and assistant conductor Ken Harrison had accepted full responsibility, had learned the score perfectly, and conducted gracefully and effectively. The orchestra, too, seemed intrigued and appreciative. I remember the first trombonist, for example, thanking me for writing for alto trombone, an instrument far too neglected. (Its solo injections, i.e. at m. 35 in the second movement, owe something to Ravel's Bolero, to continue the thread of musical cross-pollination.)

After the performance Beni asked me what the piece was about. I'd refrained from any such discussion while she was preparing it, but was willing enough to hint at things now. The violin is Duchamp's "sex-wasp," I told her. I was a little embarrassed: well, it’s about the Bride being ready, and the Bachelors never quite engaging. I thought it was something like that, she said. (Beni's husband Katsuto is a respected urologist, who some years later, coincidentally, I was to meet in a professional capacity.)

I ran into Lou, too, who seemed intrigued by the piece, and I confessed I'd stolen the snare drum from his Koncerto. "Better you'd have lifted the violin part," he replied.

I wish I could share with you the recording made from the radio broadcast of the concert. The piece has not been performed since its premiere — all too often such premieres are in fact dernieres as well. I've finally got around to publishing the score, though, and you can now buy it online, and perhaps, if you're very clever, synthesize another performance — or even convince another orchestra to schedule it. I'll supply the orchestral parts!

The post office

THE POST OFFICE BUILDING is for sale.

The sentence seems absurd, ungrammatical. How could a post office building, ordained and constructed and maintained for a century by The People, as valid a res publica as any item in the Constitution, be "for sale"? It's as if you were to say the Washington Monument is for sale, or the Mississippi River, or the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Constitution provides for the post office. Article I, Section 8, paragraph 7: "The Congress shall have power to establish post offices and post roads." (The establishing of an army and a navy comes a little further down.) I don't see anything in the Constitution granting power to disestablish post offices.

The Post Office I'm concerned about at the moment is the one in Berkeley, a fine Beaux-arts monument to civic pride. I have a particular fondness for it, I suppose, because I worked there for a couple or three years, in the late 1950s. I remember thinking at the time that the Postal Service was in a way the federal government's way of subsidizing creative artists and intellectuals; many of us clerks — I can't speak for the carriers; I never associated with them — were perpetual students, or closet novelists or poets, or musicians, painters, philosophers, content to work at a humdrum job, sorting mail and cancelling stamps like automatons, the hands and eyes busy but the mind free to roam.

I worked the face-up table, where several men stood around the perimeter of a huge polished-steel table whose long edges were bordered by troughs with fast-moving belts at their bottoms. Mail fell onto the table, dumped from an invisible source above, and as quickly as possible we grabbed up envelopes, two at a time using both hands, and dropped them into the troughs, stamp down and to the left, sending them at great speed to the cancelling machine.

Envelopes to thick to pass through that machine were quickly thrust into overhead pigeonholes, along with "flats" — large envelopes or the occasional magazine or newspaper — and any small package that might have found its way into the mix. The job was dusty and noisy, the cancelling machine clattering away. I never was able to let my mind wander at the face-up table; rarely even able to lift my eyes from the constant supply of envelopes to enjoy the sight of the physical dance of all those hands and arms grabbing, turning, flipping or dropping, suddenly shooting upward to the pigeonholes.

When the mail had all been faced and cancelled, though, and we returned to our cases, then the mind could wander. We sat-stood on high tilted stools, one foot on a footrest, the other steadying our stool, grabbed a cancelled envelope from the right end of the tray in front of us at waist level or a little lower, quickly glanced at the city named in the address, and shot the letter into the correct pigeonhole. The several "zones" of Berkeley were centered on our cases: Thousand Oaks, Downtown, Station A, North, Temescal, and of course the University. Just surrounding them were the nearby big towns like San Francisco or Oakland or Richmond; more distant or smaller cities were distributed around them; in the far corners were remote destinations, or catchalls: Arizona, or San Diego, or Portland, or Chicago. "Speedies" — Special Delivery letters — we put in on edge, so we could tie them to the top of a bundle.

When a pigeonhole was full, too full to slap another letter into it quickly, you pulled out all the mail with your left hand, grabbed the end of the twine that fell from a spool above you, and wrapped the mail once lengthwise, again crosswise, tied a quick square knot, and cut the twine with the little knife-ring on your little finger; then you tossed the resulting bundle into a small bin.

Those bins went to the Postal Transport Worker, who had a similar job except that he sorted bundles of letters, or flats, not individual pieces. He faced a rack of canvas sacks bound for different destinations: by truck to Richmond, or San Francisco, or Oakland, or beyond; or by rail to various points on the Coast or Valley trains; or — if it were a bundle of Air Mail — into an orange nylon pouch which would soon be sent to the Airport Mail Facility, where I'd also served a stint, from 1958 into the following year when we moved to Berkeley.

I remember a few of my colleagues fondly. Kenji, small and Nisei, who ran the cancelling machine. Austin, ponderous and sober, a specialist on Russian liturgical music. Charles, black and scholarly, who introduced me to Negro bars. Charlie Dorr, ancient, bent, and good-humored, a constantly optimistic leftist. We didn't associate with the carriers, who sorted mail to Berkeley addresses over on the Cityside cases.

As a Postal Transport Worker I had never learned the assignment of mail by carrier routes, so I never had to go Cityside. My expertise was in the Stateside "scheme": I'd laboriously memorized the locations — and, more important, the means of supply — of all of California's post offices. (Lindsey's help was inestimable, quizzing me from flash cards, as she'd quizzed me in Latin when I was cramming for finals — at about the same time, come to think of it.) When there was no other mail to sort, I'd be sent to the basement to sort parcels.

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The Berkeley Post Office looms big in my memory for other reasons than work, though. It, the YMCA, the Library, and J.F. Hink and Son formed the public center of my awakening civic and social consciousness when I was a boy. Shattuck Avenue, with its sleek F Train and its rattling traffic, was Business and Excitement; Hink's was the ultimate expression of this attractive though somewhat forbidden aspect of mysterious adult social life. The Library was still social, but allowed for introspection and daydreams. The YMCA was for handiwork and weight-lifting and swimming classes.

The Post Office was quite a different slice of public adult reality. Here people were engaged in transactions, consigning personal matters to an unseen but very perceptible collective and public network. Even as a small boy I was aware that transportation and communication stood behind this network, enabled it; and that if this was possible it was only because men — I didn't think of women being involved in this sort of thing — had agreed to work together, all across the land, for a common good. Not simply for individual livelihood, like the Jewel Tea man who brought tea and coffee and spices to the front door every now and then; not for a Store like Hink's, as the elegant, slim, remote Mrs. Shirley did in the knitwear department downstairs: this was something more like the Fire Department, but on an unimaginably grand scale. Maybe even like the Army and the Navy.

I don't know when I began to think of the Building. I mean the Main Post Office, of course; but I also mean the Library, my grandparent's Church, ultimately the buildings on campus. Whenever that was, that was when I began to think of such buildings as standing for something beyond mere physical shells housing public or civic or social institutions: they were also both symbols and rally-points.

Societies ordain and construct public buildings as metaphors of public agendas. This has been going on since the Pyramids, the Greek temples and theaters, the great Mounds in the American midwest. Such buildings are a testament to the indispensable civic qualities of stability, permanence, capaciousness, propriety, foresight, care.

I am certain this was clear to me when I was a little boy, though of course never stated or formed in any articulate verbalization. You didn't read about such things; grownups didn't talk to you about them. They were truths you absorbed through observation and example, through repeated rites, as regular and unremarkable as the newspaper delivery — or the twice-daily mail. They were neither internal, part of your own secret or at least inexpressible growing consciousness, nor purely external, known but of no concern: instead they were the cement, or part of it, that bound your own internal life to the society beyond family that you knew instinctively you were a part of.

Well, hell: these days, it's all for sale. These days the only language seems to be Economics. Our society has become like that fellow who Oscar Wilde said knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Letters are sorted by machine; it's more efficient; never mind that scholars of Russian liturgical music, or students of English literature, or unreconstructed leftists will have to fall back on waiting tables, or making espressos.

Not that there's anything undignified with that. But I wonder what will happen to bonhomie, and civic awareness, and the cement of personal-societal interface.

And I wonder if the politicians who decide to sell the post office buildings, which they do not own because it is we the people who own them, can't be reminded that they have sworn to uphold a Constitution which empowers them to establish, but not to destroy.

Read about the sale of the post office here.

Outhouse

WHEN WE BOUGHT our place here on Eastside Road, hence the name of this blog, we found twenty-eight acres, a horse, three sheep, a blue two-storey house built in 1872 by Lindsey Carson (Kit Carson's brother, an itinerant carpenter who seems to have built the same house on a number of Sonoma county locations), two and a half barns, an oil shed, a machine shed, a chicken house, and a long-since disused outhouse.

The last item was early on converted into a doghouse of sorts, or perhaps the intent was to make it a playhouse. I'm not sure. I didn't participate in the conversion, which was effected simply by shortening the building, probably by turning it on its side, on blocks or sawhorses, and cutting off the bottom three feet or so, and then setting it up in a new location.

After it had served its new purpose we dragged it onto the El Camino and hauled it up the hill to the site of the new house I was building for Lindsey and me. (Until then we'd occupied a room in the big house, where our oldest daughter lives with her husband and, until they grew up and moved out, their two daughters.)

Ten or twelve years ago my brother Timothy and I set it up on blocks, and since then it's served as a casual dumping place for twogallon gas cans, the string trimmer, a bucket of wooden stakes, a family of rats, a big plastic bag full of big empty plastic bags, a box of grapevine cuttings for the grill, and whatever else drifted in.

On the corrugated-iron roof, fourteen or twenty iron T-posts left over from an early fencing project, a plumber's snake, a couple of lengths of iron pipe.

It was an eyesore, of course, and not particularly useful. Lindsey was not happy with it. So for the last week we've been working at a project of architectural restoration. I set a couple of posts in the ground, and added a couple of concrete piers on the downhill side, and built a floor with redwood two-by-fours and half a sheet of plywood.

Then came the tricky part: how to restore the bottom third of the building? I settled on three two-foot panels of plywood screwed to two-by-fours extending beyond, which met the stubs of the corner posts in the shed, and scabbed them on with extensions, also two-bys. Then it was a question of setting the thing upright onto the floor.

We did that the old-fashioned way, levering it up until it reached a tipping point, then swiveling it on the floor until correctly oriented. More recently I've been installing shelving. Later we'll cover the plywood sheathing with scrap weathered redwood siding from the fallendown barn, and add a door.

It'll be a good place for poisons, sprays, gas cans, and garden tools. It'll still look like an outhouse, of course; not much we can do about that. Well, maybe that's okay. Maybe one day the septic system will fail here, and I'll have to readapt it to its original purpose.

Music for the mind

Ojai North at UC Berkeley, June 13, 2012: Janáček: String Quartet 2, "Intimate Letters" Reinbert de Leeuw: Im wunderschönen Monat Mai Ives: Piano Sonata no. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860   Norwegian Chamber Orchestra;   Reinbert de Leeuw and Marc-André Hamelin, pianos;   Lucy Shelton, speaker

CAL PERFORMANCES, the performing-arts booker at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, engaged this summer to bring the Ojai Festival north from its annual May schedule in its bucolic setting in Ventura county, between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

There, for a number of decades now, contemporary and standard-rep music, for orchestra and chamber ensembles, has been performed in an outdoors shell in a park by the tennis courts which provide one of Ojai's other tourist attractions. Stravinsky performed here; I heard Boulez conduct here forty years ago; once I even performed, reading one of John Cage's lectures with violin and percussion collaborators.

I've always thought that events like these should tour. California's a big country, close to Italy in size; it's a shame to let the work of producing such festivals be spent all at one location only.

I'm not sure the second week of June is the best time to present such concerts in Berkeley, though. School's out; people are away; the weather's glorious; apparently most people have find even the superb acoustics of Hertz Hall less attractive than competing possibilities.

We too are staying away for the most part: the hundred-forty-mile round trip is just too much to repeat next day, and there's too much work to do at home to stay away for three whole days. But yesterday's double concert was too attractive to ignore.

I like the idea of the schedule: two short concerts, one at seven in the evening, the next at 9:30. And the programs! As Christopher Hailey's lucid, intelligent program note was headed, this is music "between then and there, here and now"; individual pieces which generate among themselves a musical conversation about things both personal and historical, conceived by composers of unusually deep and penetrating minds.

The Janáček quartet was played in an adaptation for string orchestra (6-5-4-4-2 in this configuration), with solo players occasionally bringing strategic moments further forward from the ensemble. From my seat centered in the last row — my favorite spot in this hall — the sound was marvelous, both full and focussed. The dynamic range was amazing: pianississimi barely audible, recalling Berg's frequent direction wie ein Hauch, "like a breath." (Except that such silences are breathless; they force you to suppress all activity in your total concentration on the moment.)

At the other end of the range, full-throated fortissimi, almost taking the instruments beyond the range of musical sound into that of noise. Janáček's quartet is "about" his illicit love for a much younger woman, an obsession that found its final musical outlet in this late piece. He was 74 when he wrote it, in the last year of his life: it is in many ways a valedictory. Themes and instrumental assignments are identified quite directly with himself, his ardor, and the young woman; but the piece is also "about" larger, more general matters than personal experience: life and death; age and youth; release and control.

And beyond these matters, which can be individuated within the score and its performance, there is the uniquely musical component, perhaps most easily identified in the transitions — from solo to ensemble, soft to loud (or the reverse), note to phrase, phrase to section. Janáček was famously concerned with finding musical equivalents of speech, specifically the urgent rhythms and crisp consonants of his native Czech language (born in Hukvaldy, near the Polish border, he was Moravian); and his melodic style is given to short thematic outbursts, repeated motives, nervous pacing, all now and then contributing to a longer, fuller statement. Listening to Janáček, you can't help thinking his music is telling you something; and frequently he — and his performers — seem as frustrated as you at the fact you can't tell exactly what it is.

You could tell exactly what it is Reinbert de Leeuw was "talking" about in Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, his cycle of twenty-one (three sets of seven) mediations on well-known Lieder by Schubert and Schumann, setting poems by Heine, Müller, Goerthe Eichendorff, and Ludwig Rellstab. He was telling us what these marvelous songs mean — to him, to us, to the world; and what they meant at the ardent time of their first hearing, when both poem and setting were dashed off, apparently so quickly and unsuppressibly.

And so once again we were confronting age and youth; but now the age of our present postmodern condition and the youth of German Romanticism. On the one hand, by pushing the material of these songs to dramatic extremes, de Leeuw almost succeeds in making what T.S. Eliot would have called a contemporary "objective correlative" of them, not only restoring the youthful, almost adolescent freshness of the original songs through the heightening of their musical expression, but also creating a new, contemporary equivalent of them, by linking Schubert and Schumann (and thereby Heine and Goethe, who after all have lost, for most of us, the surprising immediacy and presence they must have had for their contemporaries) to the long arc of musical and poetic culture their work generated, nearly two hundred years ago.

So de Leeuw not only suggests Mahler and Brecht-Weill and Schoenberg; he also suggests — especially through his technical means — the world of cabaret and rock opera. The American soprano Lucy Shelton, billed on the program as "speaker," certainly speaks some of these lines: but she also sings, and shrieks, and "sprechstimmes" in the manner of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (which she performed two weeks ago in Glasgow), always using a body microphone, alternately standing, turning her back to the audience, facing one or another of the instrumentalists, sitting dejectedly, or stalking about the stage, wearing a black vaguely Biedermeier sheath with a dramatic gold wrap, boldly decorated with what seem to be abstract Klimtian roses or pomegranates, thrown over her back and shoulders. She was ingratiating, seductive, sorrowful, boisterous, reflective, defeated, exhausting, magnificent.

De Leeuw played piano, occasionally beating time or indicating entrances, upstage center, six wind players (flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn) at his left in an open arc toward downstage left; six strings (two each violins and celli, viola and double bass) symmetrically disposed to the right of the harpist who sat on his own right. Fourteen musicians; thrice seven texts.

De Leeuw is of course Dutch, born in 1938 in Amsterdam where in 1974 he founded the Schönberg Ensemble, and since then seems to have been more active as pianist and conductor than as composer. According to Wikipedia his last composition was written for them in 1985; "Since then he has only made adaptations and instrumentations." But if Im wunderschönen Monat Mai is any indication these "adaptations" are full-fledged new compositions in their own right, and this one a particularly significant one, endlessly rewarding and persuasive for its strictly musical content, and meaningful and provocative for what it has to say about the philosophy of music and history.

De Leeuw is a fine pianist — his recordings of Satie are among the finest I know. We last heard him in November 2010, when he provided the music for Hans van Marien's ballet Without Words — playing the piano accompaniments to Hugo Wolf's Mignon songs, the dance alone providing the normally sung component. He played then, as he did last night, with taste, care, and restrained passion: he is a thoroughly admirable example of intelligent, artful restraint.

He is also the co-author (with J. Bernlef) of the important Dutch monograph Charles Ives (1969: De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam), where he writes of the Concord Sonata

In het kolossale stuk worden, misschien als in geen ander, de kwaliteiten van Ives' muziek verenigd. De schitterende paradoxen, de onverwachte associaties, de stilistische vrijheid worden samengevat in een geheel, waarin bij wijze van spreken een eeuw muziek wordt samengevat en daaraan tegelijk een niuewe inhoud geeft. (op. cit., p. 228)

(In this colossal piece, perhaps as in no other, the qualities of Ives's music are united. The stunning paradoxes, unexpected associations, stylistic freedoms are summarized in a single unity, in which in a manner of speaking a century of music is at once summarized and given a renewed meaning.)

Ives, in this great sonata — Lawrence Gilman, writing in the New York Herald Tribune after its 1939 premiere, called it "the greatest music composed by an American," and I could argue that it remains that — is inspired by his long and deep contemplation of the lives and work of four forces of the New England Enlightenment: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau.

He "depicts" these subjects, and the site-specificity of the Concord in which they lived, with musical concepts and procedures. This isn't tone-painting, at least not often; you won't hear sound-portraits of carriages or steam-trains (though Thoreau's flute is portrayed realistically, wafting in quietly from offstage during the final movement). Instead, cultural associations most of us have been led to form with known musical sources — patriotic songs, hymn-tunes, Beethoven's Fifth, ragtime — are woven into a texture whose nearest artistic equivalent, I think, may be Molly Bloom's very different stream-of-consciousness soliloquy at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses.

De Leeuw quotes Lou Harrison (from the essay "On Quotation", published in Modern Music 23, Summer 1946) on this:

His aim is amazingly close to that of the best Chinese poetry (wherein observed fact is more expression than referred likeness) and of Chinese painting which is concerned with observation of nature, human nature as well as 'natural' nature." (Een opvatting die dicht staat bij de bekende uitspraak van John Cage: "to imitate nature in her manner of operation".) (op. cit., p. 145)

(A formula that recalls the well-known one of John Cage:)

The resulting sonata has the depth, luminosity, inevitable near-nostalgia of the great late Schubert sonatas, in which the huge Understanding of ineffable experiences and matters, so valiantly attempted by Beethoven in his own late sonatas and string quartets, manages to be expressed without the distraction of personal heroics or suffering. There have been other great piano surveys of huge vistas — those by Pierre Boulez come to mind — but no one else, that I know of, manages to train such explorations on specific (though panoramically specific) terrain. Perhaps only a man like Ives, between Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, and on the margin of the European art-music tradition, could have achieved it.

I thought Marc-André Hamelin's performance, while persuasive and fluent, lacked passion. It seemed, well, bloodless. This in spite of a marvelous dynamic range, a careful attention to such details as the barely-heard "wrong-note" overtones hanging out of chords and clusters, and what seemed a perfect command of the (memorized) score. I didn't have mine on my lap, so I can't swear to it, but he seemed to have played every page, with perfect authenticity, an achievement I've rarely heard (if ever) even from pianists who had the pages in front of them on the rack.

A French-Canadian, born in 1961, he has recorded Haydn, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Alkan, the Brahms, Shostakovich, Shchedrin, Reger and Strauss concerti, and his own cycle of études in the minor keys, as well as jazz-inflected music by Swiss and French composers… all suggesting that his interest in Ives is logical as well as personal: perhaps the half-full Hertz Hall, or the relatively late hour, had something to do with what seemed to me a softened edge to an otherwise commanding performance.

Four Harrison songs

AND NOW, MARVELOUS how much time is gained on fast days, here are four more songs, written more recently, only three years ago…

IN THE SPRING OF 2009 the tenor John Duykers asked for some songs on the subject of planting, and a number of poems from Lou Harrison’s book Joys and Perplexities came quickly to mind. I first met John in 1976, when he sang two songs of mine, “The White Hunter” and another whose title I forget, in a recital at the Oakland Museum, part of the Bicentennial celebrations. Ten years later he took on the demanding role of Heldentenor in my opera The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, when it was workshopped at Mills College, also in Oakland.

I met Lou Harrison earlier, in the middle 1960s, and saw him off and on in the years following, at Mills College where we both taught, at the Cabrillo Music Festival where for years he was genius loci, and on increasingly frequent visits in the early 1980s, when I was working on a biography of him, never to be completed. Lou was of course a wonderful composer and a valuable poet; more than that, he was, as Virgil Thomson wrote, what the French called une grande Nature, a force of Nature, an extraordinarily cultured man with a fine intelligence and a photographic memory. He was also an anti-Modernist, by which I do not mean a Luddite — he enjoyed gadgets as much as anyone — but a person who celebrated and participated in life and humanity throughout the entire range, from the cosmic and biological principles governing our existence to the pleasures and perplexities issuing from the flowering of the human mind and imagination.

Lou, John, and I have one thing in common: Though we travel internationally, and enjoy the benefits of international correspondence and experience, we are Californians resident in a rural context. We value silence and the presence of Nature relatively unmodulated by industrialization. Such a life naturally suits a contemplative mind, the sort Lou evinces in his poetry.

Two Rakosi Songs

SOME LITTLE WHILE ago, in July 2007, I wrote here about Carl Rakosi's poem "Cenozoic Time," and Michael Kincaid's book Solar Margins.

The other day we visited an old friend not seen for years, a singer, and I took her some old songs also not seen for years. On getting them ready I discovered the file for one had become quite corrupted. Fortunately I have a recording of it, and was able to reconstruct the score to "Riddle" by listening and transcribing.

Here, then, is the score to my Two Rakosi Songs, composed in 2003. You can listen to the first song, "Cenozoic Time," here; and you're welcome to download the score for nothing, and print it out if you like, and perhaps even sing it, or give it to someone to sing.

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Last time I said I'd post my farewell column from my days on the Oakland Tribune here. It's occurred to me, though, that I really ought to ask permission to do that from the newspaper, and the person I need to talk to is apparently on vacation for another week, so that matter is going to have to wait. Sorry.

What is Being, as Carl asks.

Critics and criticism

A FRIEND POSTS, via Facebook, Sibelius's famous remark about criticism:

"Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been put up to a critic."

I commented: "Yes, well…", having spent a few years working as a critic of art and music. Whereupon another friend, still on the Facebook thread:

"Enlighten us, please, Charles, on what the best and brightest can contribute in their refections on the world of music."

I've always been impressed by a seemingly off-hand description of the nature and purpose of criticism that I read in the mid-1980s:

Criticism — the study of the meaning and value of art works

Joseph Kerman: Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology, p. 16

And here's a lengthy report I ran across while looking for Kerman's quote, written 32 years ago, but perhaps still interesting:


What music critics say about themselves
September 28, 1980
By Charles Shere
Tribune Music Critic

Something like 100 music critics were in San Francisco at the opening of Davies Hall ten days ago, gathered not only to see and hear the San Francisco Symphony's new concert hall but also to convene the annual meeting of their Music Critics Association. Most of the events of the meeting were significant only to those in the trade, but a few matters came up which might interest the layman — particularly the layman who reads music criticism.

At one panel, in which four composers made pleas for more responsive criticism of new music, Andrew Imbrie made the enlightening observation that while others in the music business may overestimate it, music critics seem to underestimate their own influence.

The truth is, we don't like to think out our influence much. It makes us nervous. We tend to think it shouldn't matter that much: we know what we think of most of the criticism we read, and hope that no one will take most of it very seriously.

We're leery of Nicholas Slonimsky's famous "Lexicon of Musical Invective," which is full of critical judgments, no doubt ignored in their own time, surviving only because they're so far off the mark. Make one mistake and you'll go down in history, but most of the time we seem to have very little influence on the direction music takes.

It's probably just as well. No one sector should determine the course of so important a part of the culture. On the other hand, the short-run influence we can exert is dismaying. Perfectly intelligent people form opinions of orchestras and opera companies, of composers and performers, of music itself on the basis of reviews read in only one or another of the area's many newspapers. They'd never dream of making political opinions, or shopping decisions, in a similar way.

The two most appealing items in the three-day meeting, then, were those which considered short-term influence by opening communications between critics and other parties among the musical scene — a panel on ethics and the composers' panel.

The ethics panel began out of concern for such nuts-and-bolts matters as libel and slander. (That's not properly a matter of ethics all, but of litigation: what has legal accountability to do with the moral standards of a profession?) It soon moved into two more public areas, however: "conflict of interest" and general competence — and those areas need to be discussed, publicly, a great deal.

"Conflict of interest," which seems to be a uniquely contemporary preoccupation, is in the air this month because of a remark Edo de Waart made in an interview published in the September KQED program guide. The conductor of the San Francisco Symphony was interviewed last April, just after a particularly negative review in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"It is too bad that this city, which deserves better, has a composer like Heuwell Tircuit writing reviews," de Waart told Alan Ulrich (who has the music desk at the San Francisco Examiner). "Somebody who gets frustrated because we don't play his works."

The fact is that each of the three major dailies has a composer working as music critic: Tircuit on the Chronicle, Michael Walsh on the Examiner, and this writer. There's plenty of precedent for this, going back to such eminent critics as Robert Schumann and Hector Berlioz.

"It would have been too bad to have lost such fine critics (as they,)" Michael Steinberg pointed out to the critics. (The San Francisco Symphony's artistic advisor was himself a widely respected critic when he wrote for the Boston Globe.)

"Not that composers or critics of such quality are necessarily in evidence today. But I must admit that there's something about composers doubling as critics that makes me uneasy."

Harold Schonberg, until recently the chief music critic of the New York Times, confirmed that; that newspaper has an absolute policy against composer-critics. The danger, presumably, is "trade-offs": favorable press in return for performances.

But can't corruption take other forms? Isn't a non-composing critic as open to bribery, or as immune to it? What about picking up extra money writing program notes, giving lectures? What about the free seats themselves?

The real danger is that the public will suspect "trade-offs" where none exist: that's what's likely to happen as a result of the de Waart-Tircuit affair. And that because of a proto-paranoid fear of "conflict of interest" we may lose something much more important, namely community of interest.

About the critic's competence the issues are even more vocally expressed. Richard LeBlond, president of the San Francisco Ballet, raised the critic's obligation to be properly trained, to have background in the discipline he discusses.

He cited a music critic who admitted that lacked familiarity with the basic vocabulary of dance and that he felt it irrelevant to his reviewing ballet. When asked if he felt he could review a symphony without knowing something about classical music he refused to answer.

(LeBlond is particularly sensitive to this, of course: there's a long tradition of sending music critics to review dance, even though the two arts really have little in common. Would you send a blind man to review dance?)

Another of LeBlond's challenges to the critics — "You have the obligation not to be bored, not to be lazy" — tied in directly to the comments made by the composers at their panel.

"Listen for what will come next, not just the predictable expectation," Robert Hughes pleaded.

This challenge focuses on the double function of the critic. The traditional public role has been that of evaluator, arbiter: the writer who ]istens for the false note, the lapse of memory, and who totes up the hierarchy of great and lesser artists.

We do have to do all that, but it's basically a sideline activity. Our real function is to figure out what's going on — whether in individual reviews or collectively, in the anthologies of critical writing which develop over the generations.

Our assignment is to figure out what's going on, to see and hear it, perhaps to help others see and hear it, and only then to hook it up to something to make sense of it.

Before coming to the judgment (although perhaps simultaneously, since listening to music can stretch the present instant), we must respond to the intuitive quality of the moment, on its own terms and for its own revelation.

We work, as all musicians do, in a curious mode, neither analytical nor not analytical. We hear sounds and we hear them hooking up to other sounds; we listen to them only for themselves and at the same time as part of the context, the flow or language of sounds.

That's not as esoteric as it may sound. It's a common interpretive process — what simultaneous interpreters do at the United Nations, what mature parents or lovers do when responding to their intimates, what artists themselves do when mediating, somehow, between their sources and their work.

It doesn't work at all in a climate of suspicion, and it doesn't work very well in a polarized, us-and-them kind of adversary relationship. For the process to flourish it needs to operate as publicly as possible, even with public response to the critic. There are signs that organizations like the Music Critics Association are facilitating such publicity: We're beginning to talk to one another.

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In another seven years, though, I'd had enough of practicing criticism — partly through discouragement in the wake of another Music Critics Association meeting, where the majority of the assembled "professional" critics seemed of questionable use. Next time here I'll post my final column from the Tribune.

Long walk to Fort Ross

Fisk Mill Cove, Sonoma coast

SATURDAY, JUNE 2: GLORIOUS weather, fine terrain, good company — only the pace, a little slow and far too often halted, detracted from a first-rate long day's walk.

The event was planned and organized, admirably, by Jeff Tobes, who has led similar history-oriented group walks on a number of previous occasions. This was in fact the eighth annual 25-mile walk produced for the Sonoma County Historical Society, and Jeff got more than he'd bargained for this time, as 130 people eventually signed up for the day.

Most of the walkers boarded big yellow school buses in Santa Rosa, but Thérèse and I opted for the closer departure point in Forestville. This allowed me to get up at 3:15 am rather than 2:30. I can't recall when I've got out of bed so early in the morning: but we were rewarded by a rare sight, the almost full moon about to set, huge and eerily apricot-colored, in an otherwise pitch-black sky.

About quarter past four the bus arrived for us. It took us out River Road, through Guerneville and Monte Rio and Jenner, then up Highway 1, Meyers Grade Road, and Seaview Road to the parking lot at Fort Ross School — about thirty miles from Forestville, but a slow slow grind; some of the roads were hardly wide enough for the bus, and the turns were tight, the drop-offs scary.

We arrived at the parking lot, still dark, about five-thirty, grouped for a count and instructions, did a few stretching exercises, and waited for our six o'clock departure time. I suddenly realized I'd forgotten to wear a hat: at 3:30 am, a hat was the last thing in my mind, and I'd neglected to set it out with my pack the night before. Oh well: I've done without before.

We set off almost on schedule just a few minutes past six, daylight by now well on the way. The morning sun was glorious through the tall firs and redwoods, and we walked past a few dooryards surprisingly tucked behind fences — you never realize how many people live out here in so apparently remote a place.

When I was in high school, in the early 1950s, the few students whose families lived out here usually boarded in town — Sebastopol — during the winter months. My mother taught a few years at Fort Ross school, and after only a few weeks realized she'd have to live out near the school; the commute from Hessel, 45 miles away, would take a good two hours in fair weather, much longer in heavy fog or rain. (She always had a chain saw and a shovel in the car.)

We walked three and a half miles up Seaview Road, then turned onto Kruse Ranch Road for another half mile, to Plantation. I knew this from the old days; Mom and my two youngest brothers lived here for a few months — I think they were boarded by school families by turns during her tenure: Fort Ross School, Plantation, Salt Point, Timber Cove. (Finally she found a place of her own, near the north end of the bridge over the mouth of the Russian River near Jenner, in a little two-room shack that disappeared long ago.)

In those days Plantation was a rather run-down boarding school run by the Crittendon family. Now it's a much more polished looking farm camp; I can imagine it would make a fine summer experience for kids needing to learn the basic skills of hard work and healthy living.

The sun was slanting down brightly over the gleaming white dormers of the main house, and we all gathered around outside the restored Druids Hall, where volunteers cooked a welcome breakfast for us — scrambled eggs and bacon, beans, rice and salsa, tortillas, and cases of fresh peaches and strawberries; best of all, plenty of good hot coffee — and, of course, the possibility of a pit stop.

I was impressed with Plantation. Improbable as it seems, it was a working resort a century or so ago; people rode up on stage coaches. By 1871 there was a saloon and a stage house nere and that same year a school was organized. The Druids Hall went up in the late 1870s — people needed their society in those days — and a post office followed at the turn of the century.

After half an hour or so we resumed the walk, continuing on Kruse Ranch Road, then on narrow trails through fairly dense forest in Kruse Rhododendron State Natural Reserve, where the native rhododendrons, lanky and a bit past their peak, still showed blue and purple high among firs and redwoods.

In the understory, at our feet at the edge of road and trail, among the ferns, we saw lilies, orchids, iris, and a number of other flowers — Khloris knows I am no botanical expert; I'm content to enjoy the imponderable generosity of their mere flowering existence.

By now, of course, we were descending at a pretty good clip; Plantation was about a thousand feet above sea level; we were headed for the coast. (Our starting point at Fort Ross School was the highest point of the day, at 1285 feet.)

In the dense forest my trail-mapping app lost sight of the GPS satellites it needs, but on a walk this long I think the resulting margin of error is acceptable. (You can download the .kmz file of waypoints for the entire walk from my website.)

After about three hours' walking, not including the breakfast break, we hit sea level at Stump Beach, downcoast from Fisk Mill Cove, which looked to me like about the one-third point on the walk. This part of the northern Sonoma coast, from Jenner at the mouth of the Russian River up to Sea Ranch or so, is studded with coves, most of which were used for loading lumber onto schooners in the sixty years or so after the Gold Rush.
Fisk Mill Cove, Gerstle Cove, Ocean Cove, Stillwater Cove, Timber Cove: we skirted all of these, sometimes on trails in parks, sometimes bushwhacking across fields, a couple of times marching three or four abreast in one lane of Highway 1, when twice it was restricted to one-way car traffic just to accommodate us.

The flowers were truly extraordinary. Reds, orange, yellows, blues, most of the blooms quite small of course — these plants have to be thrifty on their windswept, salt-sprayed bluffs. At times we came to groves of low mounding beach cypress; our trail even entered these mounds at times, and we found ourselves in dark, fragrant caves.

At Gerstle Cove we headed inland, climbing through fairly thick forest to cross the highway and head for the picnic grounds at Woodside Campgrounds in Salt Point State Park. Sadly, because of the California state deficit, many of the state park facilities are closed; but these campgrounds are operating — though curiously empty at the moment. The Fort Ross Store provided sandwiches, milk, and juice, and we sat at a picnic table, Thérèse and I and an interesting woman who joined us.

photo: Thérèse Shere

Among these 130 people there were few solitaries. Most seemed to be in pairs, some in larger groups, families perhaps, or walking buddies. Most seemed pretty well geared, many with hiking sticks and backpack-canteens; and though Jeff had cautioned us against carrying backpacks — and offered "sag wagons," cars that convoyed along and met us at strategic locations, to carry any packs, coats, extra shoes and the like for us, still nearly everyone had a day pack or a fanny pack or something of the sort. (I wore my hiking bandolier, which carries a one-liter water bottle, my iPhone and a couple of external batteries, a handful or two of dried figs and another handful or two of salted nuts, a notebook, sunglasses, and the like.)

By now it was past two o'clock, and I began to wonder how we'd ever manage to arrive at Fort Ross by six. We headed back to the coast, skirting Ocean Cove by walking on the highway for a quarter-mile or so, then returning to the trail along the edge of the bluff, southeasterly to Stillwater Cove. Here we took a detour up the Stillwater Ranch driveway, past its handsome stone house and its annoying peacock, and into Stillwater Park, one of Sonoma County's regional parks, where I was surprised to find the one-room Fort Ross schoolhouse — so surprised that I didn't think to photograph it, even though it was the building my mother taught in half a century ago — before it was declared surplus property, given to the state, then abandoned to the county's care, occasioning its relocation in this historically irrelevant place.

Oh well. From Stillwater we head westerly, away from the coast, up a pretty steep trail and through a private homeowners' association reserve — the sort of thing that can only be done by special permission, one of the reasons it made sense to walk in this group. This being the county historical society, and our leader being a retired history teacher, we took a short detour to ring a historical bell.

Before long we reached Timber Cove Road, whose quite steep, dead straight descent south to the coast was probably my least favorite part of the walk. Downhill on asphalt, after twelve or fifteen miles on the trail, is hard on toes and calves. We kept to the soft edge alongside the road where possible, but it was pretty narrow.

But soon enough we were at Timber Cove. I stepped into the Timber Cove Inn and phoned home to arrange for a pickup at Fort Ross, as we'd decided not to ride the bus back — it was going back via our start-point at Fort Ross School, and would take a long time, on twisty roads in the dark, right after dinner: not an attractive prospect.

The other 129 walkers were out in the parking lot, where the sag wagons and the trailer with its two portable toilets were steadying the troops. We were within shouting distance, only three miles or so, of our destination. But first our leader wanted to show us Beniamino Bufano's Madonna of the Expanding Universe, a 93-foot obelisk in the sculptor's characteristic naive-deco style which often strikes me as simple-minded, but occasionally attains considerable strength.

This particular piece, probably unfinished, takes a lot of thought if it isn't to be dismissed (or for that matter accepted) too glibly. There's no denying its seriousness of intent, and any work of art with so much thought, work, and intention behind its creation deserves reflective appreciation.

I won't describe it; you can read about it here. You must know, though, that it is the property of the State, and placed in a state park, the second-smallest in California — just big enough, we were told in an interesting and very enthusiastic little lecture by the park ranger, to contain it should it topple, which Poseidon forbid.

(The smallest state park contains Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, in Los Angeles: the two parks, and the two works of art they contain, make an interesting symmetry: the product of compulsive idealist outsider artists during the peak of Modernism, with foreshadowings, ironically, of the most intellectual conceptual art that would seem to displace them utterly in the history of 20th century art.)
We single-filed away from the Madonna on what struck me the most dangerous part of the walk, a dozen feet on a tight path that skirted a drop of fifty feet or so to the rocks below. At one point I stumbled on my own shoe and caught hold a branch hanging over the void: it would never have held me, but it steadied me, and I didn't attract any attention that I noticed…

After a half-mile or so on the highway, again protected by flashing red lights at each end of the stretch, we turned once again toward the coast, walking through first a private campground, then someone's side yard — amazing, that people can privately own territory at the very edge of the continent. We stepped through a private gate, walked through another enchanting field of flowers, and then surprisingly trod a hundred feet or so of ice plant, the succulent leaves breaking and weeping underfoot.

Another grove of cypress, another stretch of roadside trail, and then we came to a board gate at a fence. In a ludicrously clumsy ballet 130 of us laboriously hauled ourselves over the boards, our toilet-truck standing by in case of emergency I suppose; and then we set out again through a long final field, some of the most difficult footing of the day, a cow-pasture full of gopher holes, molehills, and hidden pools and runnels. This led to a second set of board gates, and here I actually had the sense, after watching a few people climb over them, to find the sliding bolt, draw it back, and open the gate for the others. (Of course, not being that smart, I'd already laboriously climbed it myself.)

photo: Thérèse Shere

By now the light was changing; the wind had come up; we were all ready to end the walk — and the fort still lay a mile or so off. All discipline was gone, 130 walkers were scattered across the cow-pasture, many toiling along a track, others of us heading on our own ideas of a more direct route to where we thought the fort must lie, teasingly out of view.

And then there we were. An asphalt road led underneath an overhanging cypress; beyond, the school buses were parked, and the sag wagons, and there was fragrant smoke in the air. We walked past the Call house, then through the stockade gate. I hadn't been here in years, not since the last big earthquake caused a lot of damage, and Highway 1 was routed away from the site, and the old Russian church was restored, and more recently a replica was built of the imposing Magazine, which I hadn't known about at all.

photo: Thérèse Shere

Another crew of volunteers were cooking up rice, beans and chicken in huge iron pots over an open fire. There was an array of what I think of as Oklahoma funeral salads: potato salads, macaroni salads, olive-and-sweet pepper salads. The rolls had been donated by Franco American, and took me back sixty-five years when they were a family favorite in my childhood; and the butter was churned on the spot from cream donated by neighboring milk-cows. Plenty of coffee; plenty of fresh fruit; delicious Russian cookies. It was cold, an hour and a half later than we'd planned, and we hunched over our plates.

Then came our reward: a quick lecture on the history of the site, and a cannon salute. Walkers volunteered for the five-man crew: Tent the vent! Clear the piece! Fire in the hole! Our leader set a match to the fuse; we covered our ears; a fine loud satisfying POP! roared across the champs-de-Mars, and our day was over.

It was l'heure bleue, and the full moon had climbed to the tip of a windblown cypress east of the stockade. Lindsey was waiting for us in the parking lot, we thought; soon I'd be home, perhaps with a celebratory Martini.

Of course it wasn't quite so simple. Unsure of our exact location, and concerned that we hadn't shown up in the parking lot, she'd driven off — to Fort Ross School; to Plantation; to Timber Cove, where she messaged me. Alas, there is virtually no cell phone coverage out on that coast. Ultimately we found one another, of course, after we'd walked another mile or two between parking lot and stockade. A long day; a strange day; a tiring day; a glorious day. I realize, just now, typing these words, I'd do it again.