Sites

THERE ARE PLACES we have visited on various travels that have seemed very special, from a "medicine wheel" at 10,000 feet in Wyoming to the Fontaine de Vaucluse in Provence; from the stone-age city at Filitosa in Corsica to the Canyon de Chelley in Arizona. What all these places have in common is the not-verbally-articulable meaning they seem to offer to our visit: they speak to us, silently, about something we recognize without understanding, without even in any ordinary sense knowing.

I think about these places a lot, under any circumstances; but I've been thinking about them especially recently since I began transcribing my journal of a trip we took through Corsica and Sardinia over twenty years ago, in 1988. Here you have a photo of the spring at Su Gologone, in Sardinia. As these places go, the places I'm discussing I mean, it's pretty well manicured, turned almost into a park, with carefully planted willows and — hmm; what are those white-barked trees in a row? — and stone retaining walls and carefully graded walks contained by concrete curbs.

Turn away from this view, though, and look out across the pool toward a grassy clearing among the trees, and we feel we're looking at a site that's been here relatively uninflected by recent human attention. It might have looked much like this a thousand years ago, two thousand, ten. This may be merely sentimental: even so, the feeling's worth thinking about.

Why does the place seem familiar, though I've never been here before? There are sensations here common to other such places: the calm air within these trees; the sounds of the water; the soft feel of the calm air on my skin. The place conspires to distract me from more specific and immediate issues: the car I've left in the parking lot, the few…

to be continued

Small Concerto

THE EARLIEST PIECES of mine that I still like to think of, Three Pieces for Piano, were written in October and November, 1963, and February 1964. At the time we were living on a small grant from Edith Fitzell, a gentle, enthusiastic widow who took recorder lessons from me, and who volunteered at KPFA, the listener-supported radio station in Berkeley. She sensed my need to devote an unbroken year to musical study, and enabled me to quite my day job. (I was then a laborer for the City of Berkeley, working mostly on the sidewalk crew, breaking up old sidewalks and laying new ones.)

I spent that year studying composition with Robert Erickson and conducting with Gerhard Samuel, and listening to as much music as possible — much of it on the radio, for KPFA broadcast a great deal of new music in those days.

The first and last of the three pieces were written slowly and intuitively, at the piano. They are centered on soft dynamic levels and smoothly phrase lines, and meant to be played very softly. The middle piece was added later, for contrast, pitched on a much louder level, and alternates violent and rapid gestures with ringing sonorities. It uses only pitches omitted in the outer movements; otherwise the composition follows only intuitive principles of structure, not conventional tonal or serial concepts.

Much of the music is essentially unmeasured and meant to be played quite freely, and the third movement ends with a performer's choice between two possible approaches to the close.

In 1964 I orchestrated the music as a Small Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. No new material was added; I simply assigned some of the notes to rather large orchestra, including a harmonium in the wings, a pair of Wagner tubas, and alto flute among the more usual instrumentation. In this form the music was premiered in August 1965 at the Cabrillo Music Festival, with Nathan Schwartz as soloist and Gerhard Samuel conducting. It was the first time I heard my music played by an orchestra: a very delightful experience.

(The solo pieces waited for their premiere until March 1993, when the late Rae Imamura played them at Annie’s Hall, Berkeley, on an instrument tuned not in equal temperament but to Kirnberger 3.)

The orchestral score of the Small Concerto for Piano and Orchestra is available now, either in print (8.5x11, 8 pages, saddle-stapled) for $12 or as a free download, at Lulu.com. The Three Pieces for Piano are available at Frog Peak Music.

Listen to the second movement of the Small Concerto for piano and orchestra

Form is how memory works

FROM THE CODGER in Corvallis comes today an envelope with a number of clippings. He pretends it's his way of cleaning off his desk; I know it's his way of keeping me au courant. In a recent phone call I mentioned my appreciation of Peter Schjeldahl's art criticism in The New Yorker, one of a great number of magazines to which we do not subscribe; this envelope contains a number of recent ones.

Schjeldahl's such a fine, fine writer. A fine critic, of course; a man who really knows how to look at art with his eyes, and then attentively follow the information that travels along his optic nerves back into a brain clearly jammed with experience, trained to consider, and allowed to reflect. You feel, reading his reviews in a magazine my west-coast taste finds often a little frenetic, a little peremptory — a curious pairing perhaps available only to an insecure culture-capital, that he's somehow above and beyond that fray. There's a mandarin ease to his writing, drawing as much from his wide and not entirely uncritical reading as from his first-hand art-looking: in both cases, his own sensibility is speaking, but with authority he's earned by closely studying that of so many others.

His sentences are beautifully formed, tending to stop just a little sooner than you'd expected. Where it is descriptive it is breathlessly, ingratiatingly evocative, and amply detailed:

Sensational colors, in particular, strain the scene of a husky young servant pouring milk, in a careful dribble, from an earthenware pitcher into an earthenware bowl on an odd-shaped table laden with a wicker basket, a loaf and fragments of crusty bread, and a stoneware beer jug.

When it adduces hypothesis it is forthright:

Echt biennial art is critic-proof, because it eschews formal engagement with past art, providing no basis for comparative evaluation.

These sentences develope cogent paragraphs whose purpose is to consider the event of the moment — a Vermeer in New York, a biennial exhibition in Istanbul — within a complex context triangulated by the conflicting, urgent, mindless demands of our own time, the long slow cultural history unfolding since ancient time, and the ample contents and motives of the critical sensibility.

I tend to read these reviews twice: once for their content; once for the sheer enjoyment of the writing. And I'm rewarded by any number of insights, usually at least one per review. The one at the head of today's blog is one of them:

Form is how memory works.

What clearer statement can there be, and what more beautifully self-illustrative? Will I ever forget how to explain the utility of form, the next time a grandchild asks?

One of the powerful engines of Schjeldahl's machinery is his insatiable curiosity as to what art is, how art works.

[Luc Tuymans] told Artnet that in his initial hours of work, "until I get to the middle of the process—it's horrific. It's like I don't know what I'm doing but I know how to do it, and it's very strange."

A lesser critic would have heard this as a comment in passing, perhaps registered it, and moved on. Schjeldahl registers it, considers it, and sets it in parallel with a thought of his own, leading the reader to an insight:

Now, that — uncertain ends, confident means—is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know. It illuminates and justifies Tuymans's eccentric work rule, with its distant redolence of Jackson Pollock's odd decision to paint in the air above a canvas.

In the air above a canvas. Schjeldahl deftly moves his paragraph away from the foreground, while keeping the foreground in view; he lifts the discussion above the present, while keeping it pertinent. His criticism fully achieves Joseph Kerman's memorable, terse definition of the practice: "the study of the meaning and the value of art works." (Contemplating Music: challenges to musicology , Harvard University Press, 1986). And it is elegant.

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Oh: I want to add one thing to the comments on D.H. Lawrence, a delicious comment he makes in Etruscan Places, summing up all his attitude about the evils of Rationalist and Industrialist displacement of the vital, intuitive values of unrestrained humanity:

We have lost the art of living: and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.

The science of daily life. What a great blog title that would make!

Lawrence on Italy

DAMN IT ALL, Richard, you’ve finally got me to read through D.H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy, and finally I see what you see in him — though I must say I see it only through the haze of my own close-held prejudices. Let’s begin with the easiest to overcome, the inadequacy of the book qua book. It’s a gathering of three travel books:

•Twilight in Italy, 1916, recording a trip made a few years earlier, mostly on foot, from somewhere south of Munich to Lake Garda, and impressions of the villages on that lake;

•Sea and Sardinia, 1921, recalling a trip that January from Taormina to Palermo, thence by boat to Cagliari, by train to Sorgono, bus to Terranova, boat to Civitavecchia, train to Naples, and boat back to Sicily; and

•Etruscan Places, 1932, a collection of musings on visits, in 1927, to the remains of Etruscan life found in Tarquinia, Volci, and Volterra.

In the course of those sixteen years Lawrence matured a bit, from the brash, often contemptuous, always opinionated young man curling his lip at the lack of intelligence he finds everywhere, to the informed, still opinionated, occasionally generous fellow who contemplates Etruscan antiquity. It is his judgmentalism, constant in the first book, frequent in the second, that gets under my skin: he’s so quick to insist on his own comfort — good English bacon and tea, for example, even in the mountains of Sardinia — that he only slowly, over the course of those sixteen years, comes to acknowledge the possible appropriateness of the beefsteak and red wine he’s offered in its place.

You’re a Joyce man or a Lawrence man, I decided fifty years ago (and then some), as you choose either Picasso or Matisse, Fitzgerald or Hemingway, Mozart or Beethoven: and I fall on the side of the first in each of those pairings. I can’t disagree with Lawrence’s fundamental points, that freedom and energy and instinct are superb qualities and that they’re in danger of utter destruction at the hand of the 20th century. But I can’t overlook the anger this arouses in the poor Englishman, caught in the misery of being a son of the society responsible for much of that destruction. Don’t take it personally, David Herbert!

I picked the book up to begin a four-month project of reading on Italy, wanting to read English for relaxation; but also in the spirit of New Year’s do-it-it’s-good-for-you resolution; and I’m glad I did. Even the first book, irritating as it mostly is, has its surprising flashes:

It is better to go forward in error than to stay fixed inextricably in the past. (p. 53)

…the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should have been blown out at the end of the summer. For as we have candles to light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the darkness aflame in the full sunshine. (p. 81)

…the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in … is seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steel framework, and the whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between. (p. 165)

References to the paperback edition of 1972: New York: The Viking Press

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Sea and Sardinia was the only book of the three I’d read earlier, a little after our own travels through Sardinia, in November 1988. I’m thinking of this trip again, transcribing my own journal, partly to get into the mood of journal-keeping, partly to satisfy an acquaintance who’s contemplating her own tour of the island in May.
Some of you may know of my own travel musings, “dispatches” I call them; I used to e-mail them out from the road to a number of friends, and have published three collections of them — you can look them up here.

Alas in the last few years I’ve got out of the habit of journal-keeping, as various pocket computers have replaced the notebook and pen. I can re-read journals from the 1970s and ’80s with great pleasure, once again vividly seeing the places and people they describe: but more recent long walks — on the Pieterpad, the Lingepad, across the Alps — are much more sketchily recorded. We’re thinking of a walk in Sicily in a few months, and I’m dreaming of a long walk in Tuscany and Umbria: it’s time to get back to journaling!

Yet Anthony Burgess writes, in his Introduction to this Viking paperback, that

A single week’s visit was enough for him to extract the very essence of the island and its people, and six weeks were enough to set it all down in words—without a single note as an aide-mémoire.

This may explain the feeling I get that Lawrence saw, on his miserable ride across Sardinia, only what his prejudices put in front of him: that is, he continually looks to the people he meets — for he rarely mentions the landscape, only the people, the hotels, the dining-tables — for confirmation of opinions he’s already formed, attitudes he’s already struck.

Sardinian seems open and manly and downright. Sicilian is gluey and evasive, as if the Sicilian didn’t want to speak straight to you. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t. He is an over-cultured, sensitive ancient soul, and he has so many sides to his mind that he hasn’t got any definite one mind at all. He’s got a dozen minds, and uneasily he’s aware of it… The Sardinian, on the other hand, still seems to have one downright mind. (pp. 80-81)

In this book Lawrence is at his best when he does describe the landscape:

The hillsides tilt sharper and sharper… The oxen lift their noses to heaven, with a strange and beseeching snake-like movement, and taking tiny little step with their frail feet, move slantingly across the slope-face, between the rocks and tree-roots…
There is a stream: actually a long tress of a waterfall pouring into a little gorge, and a stream-bed hat opens a little, and shows a marvelous cluster of naked poplars away below. They are like ghosts. They have a ghostly, almost phosphorescent luminousness in the shadow of the valley… a grey, goldish-pale incandescence of naked limbs and myriad cold-glowing twigs, gleaming strangely. (p. 88)

Such is our antipathy, Lawrence and I, that he on his travels saw only that part of Sardinia that I on ours did not, and vice versa; and yet between us we saw nearly every corner of the island. Perhaps that explains Lawrence’s otherwise astonishing total lack of reference to the nuraghi, those timeless, enigmatic, powerful stone towers, some sixty feet high and more, that are scattered almost throughout the island. Many of them were perhaps not yet known at the time of Lawrence’s tour: a magnificent example, Su Nuraxi di Barumini, was only discovered in the 1940s, even though its three-storey nuraghe is attended by an entire village of circular foundations, whether of residences or merely storerooms is apparently not yet fully understood.

What would Lawrence have written about Barumini? He gives us an idea:

This is what is so attractive about the remote places, the Abruzzi, for example. Life is so primitive, so pagan, so strangely heathen and half-savage. And yet it is human life. And the wildest country is half humanised, half brought under. It is all conscious… Wherever one is, the place has its conscious genus. Man has lived there and brought forth his consciousness there and in some way brought that place to consciousness, given it its expression, and, really, finished it. The expression may be Proserpine, or Pan, or even the strange “shrouded gods” of the Etruscans or the Sikels, none the less it is an expression… Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness. (p. 123)

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Etruscan Places is much the shortest of these three books, much the best. Lawrence’s anger, in the face of the destruction of humanity by the industrious society humanity has created, has given way to something more like bitter resignation. Contemplation of the evidence of the utterly vanished Etruscan culture, not to mention the stupidity of the greedy expropriation of the Etruscan remains by those Lawrence considers the chief villains — the British Museum, the Vatican — such contemplation can hardly avoid replacing anger with resignation. It’s there; there’s nothing to be done.

If only we would realise it, and not tear things from their settings. Museums anyhow are wrong. But if one must have museums, let them be small, and above all, let the be local. (p.27)

But there’s something engagingly lyrical about his bitterness, something graceful about the philosophy he's developed to replace, or at least succeed, the incessantly masculine body-worship that (to my mind) disfigures much of his earlier writing. The dialectic between the Etruscans and the Romans who defeated them — and the imperialist 20th-century powers that so readily bring Roman imperialism down to our own period — is the dialectic between a graceful living-in-the-moment, in a society evolved toward an essentially Epicurean adjustment of human life to natural needs and events, and a constant straining-for-the-ideal, in a society geared toward constant growth, development, control, and profit.

In a remarkable passage, Lawrence concedes that we moderns are no longer, like the Etruscans, capable of Etruscan innocence — rather, uniquely Etruscan expression of innocent awareness:

But one radical thing the Etruscan people never forgot, because it was in their blood as well as in the blood of their masters: and that was the mystery of the journey out of life… Man moves naked and glowing through the universe. Then comes death: he dives into the sea, he departs into the underworld. (pp.52-53)

In a striking figure Lawrence considers the dolphin, “a creature that suddenly exists, out of nowhere. He was not: and lo! there he is!” We, however, are merely ducks, warm-blooded, but with no “subaqueous nature”; we dive in, but return to preen. The Etruscans, the reader feels, lived at the moment of awareness of the difference.

Etruscan Places is elegiac, because Lawrence contemplates the lost, and thinks it superior to the present. Throughout these three books he vacillates between admiring intelligence (or at least condemning stupidity) and lamenting consciousness. He attempts a resolution of this difficulty in his admiration for divination.

An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. And you choose that object to concentrate upon which will best focus your consciousness. Every real discovery made, every serious and significant decision ever reached, was reached and mae by divination. The soul stirs, and makes an act of pure attention, and that is a discovery.

The science of the augur and the haruspex was not so foolish as our modern science of political economy. (p.55)

Lawrence has made me more curious than ever about the Etruscans: too bad, as I’ll never know much more than I do now. Further acquaintance with their towns and tombs will only increase this curiosity, not satisfy it. The day will perhaps come when my hunches are proved (or disproved): a fortunate race, they remembered in their cultural subconscious the journey out of Africa, through Asia Minor, to their home in one of the most fortunate climes ever settled, early enough to have escaped the disadvantages of conscious thought, late enough to have music and language and comfort and beauty. One could think of this as a true Golden Age, and a sustainable one too until the invaders came.

Mercè Rodoreda

Christmas surprised me with a copy of Death in Spring, a poetic novel by the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, a writer I'd not heard of until a couple of months ago, when I read a review by Natasha Wimmer in The Nation. It's not the kind of novel I'd normally be drawn to: a little too close to Magic Realism, perhaps. Yet now that I've read it I find much of it oddly staying with me. Wimmer's review will tell you much more than I will, here, about the content of the novel — plot, characters, setting and all that. I think she's a little unfair in calling the book "a clumsy expressionist painting" (in contrast to the Vermeer represented by Rodoreda's earlier novel The Time of the Doves).

Nor am I sure Wimmer's on point referring to Death in Spring as Symbolist. The pages are full of color, literally: birds, butterflies, aprons, leaves; the very dust with which the mouths of the dead are cemented closed; all these colors vibrate with an intensity that brings Rimbaud's vowels to mind. But the book is solidly grounded in elements: wind and water, wood and dirt. And throughout the book the reader's immersed in narrative, as the characters in the book are haunted by and compelled to their own narrative.

Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in 1908, married rather badly, wrote fairly early but retired from publication in her thirties, when she participated in the short-lived autonomous government of Catalonia until the Spanish Civil War ended with the Franco regime, which led to a self-exile in France and, later, Switzerland. She returned to Catalonia in the 1970s; just when, I'm not quite sure.

You won't find much about her in this Wikipedia article, but on a hunch I typed her full name — Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí — into Google's search box and hit the much fuller article in the Catalan Viquipèdia. Here we read of the influence on her writing of such European psychological writers as Woolf, Proust, and Mann "except for the mytho-symbolic works of the last period of her life": but I think there's much of Woolf's most experimental kind of writing in Death in Spring — particularly such short prose pieces as "The Mark on the Wall."

In fact, Death in Spring seems to form a bridge springing from Woolf to Calvino, a span I'd never thought of before — how to characterize the stream below? Perhaps it's like the fatal, violent, necessary river running below the town in Rodoreda's novel, at once a Lethe and an Oceanus; a powerful yet essentially aloof stream Heraklitus would recognize. Perhaps she's a Symbolist after all.

Michener: Caravans (The end of the world as we know it)

BHISHMA'S RECLUSIVE ACQUAINTANCE up in Oregon recently recommended to me James Michener’s novel Caravans, published in 1962 but set in the Afghanistan of the years immediately following World War II.

I read it in the days following New Year’s Eve, when another old friend announced his view — I’d heard it before — that the world as we know it was about to end, if not in our lifetimes, then in those of our children. “Our” children, I type: but this old friend has no children, and it was at first to that that I attributed his pessimism.

Soon, though, another idea occurred to me: “the world as we know it” has ended many times, and will end many times again. It’s always doing that, ending, then evolving into the world as another society knows it, only to end again. The world as the Roman Republic knew it ended, and the world as the Roman Empire. The world as Chief Joseph knew it. The world as two protagonists of this book, Nazrullah and Zulffiqar know it: Nazrullah, a civil engineer who believes in a future Westernized Afghanistan, enlightened and developed and comfortable; Zulffiqar, a nomadic chieftain who knows such an Afghanistan will be attempted, will destroy his way life, and must be prepared for.

I was impressed with another of Michener’s books, Iberia, and am equally so with this. Michener seems at ease alternating between fiction and philosophy, between active participation and objective contemplation. I suspect his books are very different to varied readers. I find reassurance, in the face of my friend’s pessimism, in the constancy Michener finds in human behavior, always alternating between instinct and education, reality and idealism, love (and jealousy) and reason, things as they always are and as they always, we are apparently doomed to feel (though differently, according to the values in fashion at the moment), should be.

Caravans makes me wish I were fifty (and the world eighty) years younger and a good horseman. It made me think, too, of my mother, who in her young and middle years wondered about Tashkent and Samarkand, and in her later years managed to visit them, which I shall almost surely not. And it makes me worry that perhaps my next read will be Frederick Prokosch's The Asiatics or Seven Who Fled — though either would be a real self-indulgence, for I read them over twenty years ago, and there are unread books to visit…

Dostoevsky on stage

WELL, YES, I seem to have left a few things hanging. I'll try to be concise, and catch them up in turn, starting tonight with comments on

A Noise Within

We saw three plays down in Glendale last month, rather an odd set but one nicely showing off the abilities of this repertory company we've followed now for years. We saw an effective if somewhat conventional Richard II, which distressed me considerably for the first few minutes as I was quite irrationally convinced, in the previous few days, looking forward to it, that it was Richard III that was scheduled: a play I very much like. Alas, no: the misshapen villain looked me in the eye and began lecturing about the winter of our discontent and I was in for it.

Four evenings later it was a very different matter: Michael Frayn's Noises Off is a very funny play, fast and funny, about a theater company falling apart during the performance of a fast and not terribly funny farce called Nothing On, whose first act is performed in each of the play's three acts: first as seen by an audience, but in rehearsal; next seen from backstage, where the actors have begun succumbing to jealousy, anxiety and drunkenness; finally on stage again, a few weeks later, when the company is in a state of total collapse. Of course this is a marvelous vehicle for a true repertory company whose actors are used to working together, developing a play through a number of performances over a period of weeks: the performance was superb.

I had looked forward to the theatrical adaptation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment with considerable curiosity. I hadn't read the book in over fifty years, so got down my old Penguin paperback and devoured it in a week. What a book! Absolutely riveting in its suspense; teeming with detail; intellectually and morally provocative. Since my first reading I'd been to Petersburg — Leningrad it was, then — and knew those scents and streets first-hand. ¶ The adaptation, by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, was fascinating, narrowing the plot almost exclusively to the cat-and-mouse between Raskolnikov and the police inspector (Michael A. Newcomer and Robertson Dean, respectively), with just enough allusion to other plot elements to involve Holly Hawkins as Alyona, the old-lady pawnbroker; Dunya, Raskolinikov's sister; and Sonia, the girl who ultimately ... but I won't put any spoilers here. ¶ Newcomer was magnificent, memorably so, onstage virtually throughout the 90 minutes unreleaved by intermission. He'd clearly studied the novel carefully and thought about its implications quite extensively; you could believe his mind capable of quite absorbing both Raskolnikov's careful philosophical deliberations and his intellectual methodology. Dean and Hawkins were quite up to his level; Craig Belknap's direction was thoughtful and balanced; and Michael Smith's design is both authentic in its realism and subtle in its psychological effect. As is everything about this play and the novel it draws on: and, alas, it's all too topical still.

Music in Los Angeles

TWO CONCERTS HEARD last Saturday in the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, have given me much to think about. We were particularly eager to hear Gustavo Dudamel conduct Mozart: he's a known quantity with contemporary music and with big colorful Romantic works, but what would his Mozart be like? The occasion was an intriguing concert on the regular season: the "Prague" and "Jupiter" symphonies (nos. 38 and 41) flanking Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, Gil Shaham the soloist.

It turns out that Dudamel's as fine a conductor of Mozart as of anything else. He seated first and second violins opposite one another, as is certainly right with this repertory, and reduced the strings to 14-12-10-8-6. He took all the repeats and moderated the tempi. He made the music serious, quite serious, minimizing interpretation, clarifying the scores. The "Prague" symphony revealed its essentially operatic, expressive quality, connecting to Don Giovanni and, even more, Le Nozze di Figaro; the "Jupiter" emerged on the other hand as the abstract, architectural masterpiece it is, enjoying its counterpoint as decorative line while revealing it even more as structural fabric.

We sat above and behind the first violin section, slightly skewing the aural perspective but getting a fine view of Dudamel's address to his orchestra — his face as well as his stick technique. For a young man (28) he's remarkably mature, completely assured, yet engaging. In so many ways he makes me realize orchestral music, all the standard Eurocentric concert music, has moved into a new era. There seems to be a relaxed, egalitarian relationship between him and his band (and his scores, for that matter): the work is done jointly; conductor and instrumentalists commit equally to the effort.

There were occasional problems resulting from this: first bassoon tends to rush his quick patter in the "Prague"; upper winds reveal occasional uncertainty as to the precise location of a downbeat. But I only noticed such things four or five times in the entire program; and they were more than offset by the beautifully precise tuning of octaves, the fine balance of dynamics.

The Berg concerto was remarkably detailed. Berg's orchestration always works on paper, but rarely in the hall; he's a sort of 20th-century Schumann in that respect; conductors must study the intent his scores reveal and guide their musicians in rehearsal to a clear expression of the details that make up Berg's complex, sometimes weighty, but always lucid music. Here Dudamel absolutely triumphed: you felt your ears were hearing the printed score as well as the delicious sounds. (Shaham seemed to me a perfect collaborator, playing effortlessly, dramatically, authoritatively, leaving nothing further to be desired.)

What the program finally amounted to was a perfect coupling of Berg and Mozart. Both composers emerged as living, breathing, important, humane, utterly contemporary creators of music that is significant, affecting, brilliant, and intelligent.

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Saturday night we attended quite a different affair, the opening concert of the LA Phil's "West Coast, Left Coast" festival of, well, west-coast new music. The Kronos Quartet opened the late-night concert (it began at 9:30) with a suite of three pieces whose titles were unstipulated in the program booklet.

Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, who perform as Matmos, followed, presenting a loose but steady stream of electronically processed sounds, as often from amplified physical objects as from synthesizers. Suzie Katayama then led a string-and-guitar ensemble through a three- or four-movement piece by Michael Einziger; and then Terry Riley joined Kronos and Matmos in what seemed a group improvisation grounded on a notated structure.

The long evening ended with Riley's solo improvisations at the keyboard of the fine Disney Hall pipe organ, a magnificent instrument. Singing occasionally, Riley moved effortlessly through a global range of musical expression, from blues and barrelhouse to Indian ragas. I had been discouraged by the music that preceded him: it seemed thin, routine, graceless, dutiful. Matmos, for example, seems to repeat mechanically and joylessly the kinds of sounds John Cage and David Tudor found so much more expressive, witty, and graceful in Cage's Variations series, forty years ago.

Riley, though, brings the spirituality, intelligence, and sensuousness of that period right down to the present, because of course he was there. He did in his own performance at that organ just what Dudamel had done with Mozart and Berg, found a way to project everything that's human and humane in music, while casting aside all the merely theoretical and historical and routine.

Dudamel has taken Los Angeles by storm, and tickets to his concerts are extremely hard to come by. I'm grateful to the Los Angeles Philharmonic for providing our seats to his concert.

Gertrude Stein: two plays, part one: What Happened

WE DO LIKE TO GO to the theater, Lindsey and I. We see all the plays in Ashland at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; we see nearly all the plays in Los Angeles (Glendale, actually) at A Noise Within. We catch occasional plays closer to home, in Berkeley or San Francisco or even up here in Sonoma county, in Santa Rosa or Sebastopol.
We like the standard repertory; we like new plays; we like the classics; we like drama originally in other languages. We'll be in Glendale in a week or ten days to see Shakespeare, an adaptation of Dostoevsky, and Michael Frayn's wonderfully funny Noises Off (confusingly, perhaps, at the repertory company called A Noise Within, playing its last season this year in Glendale before moving next season to a new house in Pasadena).

I have a lot of favorite playwrights: Chekhov, Shakespeare, Euripides, Moliere, Pirandello, to name five who come quickly to mind. Behind them come dozens more — I won't go into that now; maybe some day I'll draw up a list of Top Hundred. (I did that years ago for composers, listing them by nationalities; it was an amusing little exercise.)

Right now, though, my irreducible Favorite Playwright is Gertrude Stein. I met her dramatic work over fifty years ago, through Virgil Thomson's setting of her Four Saints in Three Acts. This began an enthusiasm that's never ended — you can read its history in my little book Why I Read Stein. I've set two of Stein's plays as little operas myself, and would love to finish the trilogy if someone would only promise to produce it. (Ladies Voices and I Like It to Be a Play have been produced; What Happened A Play remains to be composed.)

Well. When I heard the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley was producing a number of one-act plays, and that among them would be two of Stein's plays, I was absolutely delighted and made plans to drive down to see them, and Sunday we saw two of the three programs, one with What Happened A Play, the other with Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about what we saw. Each program opened with Eugène Ionesco's Salutations: five actors, hundreds of adjectives, recited in alphabetical order, in two quite different physical productions. The afternoon production continued with Suzan-Lori Parks's Devotees in the Garden of Love in a strikingly beautiful physical production, with impressive acting by Jessica Charles, Kelly Strickland, and Dekyl Rongé, but delivered so stridently (as was much of the Ionesco) that the intelligibility of the lines was all too frequently lost completely.
After the intermission the program promised What Happened. What we got was that play, in all its textual beauty, with interpolations of perhaps improvised, perhaps written-out lines having little to do with Stein's play, sometimes in Spanish, nearly always mundane.
A director's note may explain this:

…I initially intended to clarify at some length Stein's approach towards language and art with the hope of assisting the audience in "understanding" this admittedly challenging yet beautiful text. But, in the end, I realized that such definitive understanding is exactly the opposite of what she intended. Therefore, please just sit back and watch, hear, think, and feel. Sometimes we push too much for a singular meaning.

Scott Wallin is right to reject singular meaning, but wrong, I think, to multiply it unnecessarily. He is particularly wrong, in my opinion, to let his audience assume everything heard here was Gertrude Stein's. Her plays are famously overheard conversation, but they have an integrity, stylistically and theatrically, that comes from a single observer's point of view (far-reachingly intelligent though it be), filtered through a single writer's editorial and expressive technique.

Stein herself discusses this better than I can. (She's as redoubtable a critic as she is a playwright.) I quote from Jason Fichtel's useful discussion 'When this you see remember me': The Postmodern Aesthetic of Gertrude Stein's Drama, posted at time-sense, an on-line quarterly I'm going to have to explore:

I think and always have thought that if you write a play you ought to announce that it is a play and that is what I did. What Happened. A Play. . . . I realized then as anybody can know that something is always happening. Something is always happening, anybody knows a quantity of stories of people's lives . . . everybody knows so many stories and what is the use of telling another story. What is the use of telling a story since there are so many and everybody knows so many and tells so many. . . . So naturally what I wanted to do in my play was what everybody did not always know or always tell.

[from Stein's Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), p. 207]

The Duchamp Opera

I'M THINKING ALOUD, or rather my fingers are, mulling over what on earth I'm going to say for half an hour this evening about my Duchamp opera. Marcel Duchamp worked on his Large Glass, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, for twelve or fourteen years, definitively abandoning the project in 1923. It's two things: 1) a painting on glass, say two meters high, painted in mixed media (oil paint, lead foil, lead wire, dust, varnish) on two panes of glass; 2) a collection of notes, memos, and drawings that accumulated over the years he was working on the thing and was subsequently published in at least three different collections.

One of those collections, The Green Box, was published in a typographical version by the English artist Richard Hamilton, translated into English by George Heard Hamilton, in the early 1960s; this was my introduction to Duchamp. Soon afterward, the first retrospective of Duchamp's work was given by the Pasadena Museum; Lindsey and I borrowed Mom's car and drove down to see it. I was hooked.

two pages of The Green Box

I'd already begun setting some of those notes and memos to music, working right in my copy of Hamilton's book; before long it became clear I was thinking of an opera. The Large Glass seemed to me to be a deep, detailed, resonant and serene landscape, and as Gertrude Stein says landscapes are suitable for only two things, battlefields and plays. We mostly all prefer plays, and I prefer my plays with sound.

That was 1964-1965. Two years later an early version of the music was performed in Berkeley, in October 1967. The next May Duchamp died. I was then working at KQED, and I wrote and produced a 40-minute obituary program, describing the evolution of Duchamp's work from his earliest paintings through to a guided tour of the Large Glass. For that purpose I made a fullsize replica of The Glass, paintings its elements on sheets of acetate.

In the meantime I'd been reading the growing number of books about Duchamp and his work, learning enough French and Italian to handle some of the best, and translating about half of Jean Suquet's Le Miroir de la mariée. And when in the middle 1970s we were able to begin traveling in Europe one of my first projects was to make a sort of pilgrimage of the places Duchamp had lived in, photographing them. On one occasion I even met his widow, Teeny Duchamp: Why didn't you visit us, she asked; I didn't want to intrude on you, I answere; The ones you want to visit always feel that way, she answered.

portable cardboard model stageset

I made a traveling kit of things related to The Large Glass and to my projected opera: a collapsible cardboard model stageset, with flying or detachable set-pieces, some repeating Duchamp's imagery, others things of my own — that's the score to Variations, for harp and percussion, on the back wall stage left. With it of course went the Hamilton edition of The Green Box and my steadily growing collection of manuscript pages and drawings.

In 1980, I think it was, the first scene of the first act was staged in San Francisco, with a young John Adams conducting the Conservatory New Music Ensemble. Somewhere I have a grainy black-and-white video of the event, which was not entirely successful. By then I was teaching part-time at Mills College, and in 1984, there, the entire first act was staged, in a wonderful mise-en-scène by the dancer Margaret Fisher, and the first three scenes of the second act were performed in concert form.

Margaret Fisher's model stageset

We were working toward a complete production, to be given a year or two later at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but the funding was lost.

There exists an audio recording of the Mills College performance, though the original recording was lost in the Oakland Hills fire. The video of the Mills College performance is unfortunately only of archival interest. When the full production in San Francisco was scuttled I lost interest in the opera and turned to other things. I don't know if I'd want to have to work on a complete production, in the unlikely event one ever becomes possible. Some things are best left mythic.
Okay. Get to work on the talk!

Bride concerto

HERE WE ARE again, revisiting old work instead of doing new work. I think it's one of the great drawbacks of technological improvements: the greatly enhanced ability to revisit, review, revise, Lou Harrison's motto was Cherish. Consider. Conserve. Create. Mine seems to have devolved to Revist. Review. Reconsider. Revise.

The project at hand is honorable, though, because it's attached to an event by its very nature retrospective: the Duchamp show in Healdsburg at the Slaughterhouse Space. This installation, which closes November 7, gathers visual work by XXX artists — painting, sculpture, video, installation — in the haunting and endlessly beautiful atmosphere of a former slaughterhouse. (These four photos give only a rough idea of the space.) Recorded music from or associated with my Duchamp opera runs continuously as you investigate the exhibition.