A sort of equipoise of contradictions

And so, a year and change later, on a particularly damp night in May, I was slumped on the the living room couch, where I typically landed when I found myself working too long. Whenever I had kept the bass thumping for hours, with the analog graphics dancing across the screen eventually looking like nothing a but a bundle of jerking, tousled striations, like a lie-detector needle gone wild — that's when I'd drop down there to rest. Sinking into its leathery depths, which comfortably embraced the whole of my body, felt like connecting to a brain-clearing machine; I got a soft calming sensation that let me review the fruits of that day's work, then joyfully, even impatiently, greet the prospect of doing it all over again upon waking the next day. 

But this time, I was there to temper palpitations brought on by too much coke. 

— from Superstars, by Ann Scott.

Sometimes I wonder about the '90s. That decade coincides with my 20s. I drank a lot. Although many of those years are a blur, I didn't quite achieve the carefree abandon I strove for. I lived alone and asserted my independence (until I met a man and settled down, and didn't). I started to travel (until I met a man, and didn't). I had a government job, until I quit because I thought I could do something more interesting, like I deserved something less soul-sucking.

I sidestepped the grunge scene. Instead, I explored my roots and listened to Polish crooners. I explored the world and listened to fado, ranchera, gypsy, klezmer. I explored inwards and listened to Leonard Cohen and Carlos Gardel. I sidestepped the Spice Girls too. Occasionally, we smoked pot.

I went to just one bonafide rave (it was early days still, was it even actually 1990 yet?), boarding a bus to a secret warehouse location. But house parties with DJs (acid house parties?). And somehow, I knew what clubs to go to. (Even in Lisbon, in Paris, somehow I knew what clubs to go to.) And still, I went to shows: from Psychic TV (1990) to FM Einheit (1998). 

At decade's end, I was working in advertising. We drank martinis in lounges and listened to Moby. It would be another 20 years before I tried MDMA.

I feel like there was another 90s, a secret 90s, a bigger, fuller, sexier 90s, I caught glimpses of it through the grunge, but I didn't give the right password, I couldn't find the right door.

Maybe now, the 2020s, maybe this is my rave era. The books and the movies. I want to rave in sunlight on THC. I want to rave with Harry Styles (DJs don't dance no more, they sit) and with Bjork during an eclipse.

Superstars, by Ann Scott, (published in French in 2000,) recounts the rave days of turn-of-the-century Paris through the eyes of a 30-ish-year-old electronic DJ, who sometimes regrets having set aside her rock-and-roll bass-guitar days and the boyfriend around which they revolved for a queerer lifestyle. It's a litany of unoriginal bad girl behaviour. (It came as no surprise to learn that Ann Scott once shared an apartment with Virginie Despentes.) 

A shattering burst of Aphex Twin's laughter exploded once, twice, and then abruptly dropped out, catching everyone by surprise, a tremendous surge of percussion, with a single cry rising from the crowd, the sudden realization that this was going to kill. The strobes came back, accelerating the movements all around me, instantly altering my perception of how far I was from everyone else. My feet were keeping time, my head following the sound. Loops overlapped, unfolded, weaved all kinds of structures, infinite trails, and my brain wanted follow them all, one after the other. One second the accent was up, and the next the accent was down. The inversions jolted me, twisted me around, brought me back up. On giant screens, spirals morphed to match the sonic whirlwind. I looked at my undulating hands as they opened and closed. My arms were now extensions of the rest of my body, first up and then down and then up again, whipping like cables, and my eager eyes were soaking it all in. Everything around me seemed a little clearer, a little more dazzling. Twinkling eyebrow rings, nose rings, earrings, beads of sweat on foreheads, water drops from drinks pearling on chins, gazing deeply, unbridled, into all their faces. All ecstatic to be there, in this strange place that they'd invaded for one night only. All transported by the magic of Total Music, by the lights and the crowd,

There's a lot of drugs. There's a record deal advance, so even more drugs, and other financial irresponsibilities. A lot of petty jealousies and emotional immaturity, all heightened no doubt because of the lack of sleep, and all the drugs. The characters spend more time anticipating the raving and enduring the aftermath of raving than actually raving (maybe this is how it is in real life). It's mostly chaos and self-destruction.

It took me a long time to find the rhythm of this book, to care what happened, to get past the unlikeable narrator. I was well past the halfway point when I gave myself over to it — like when you're dragged to a party with no way home, just have a drink and enjoy the music (of which there was very little). Although the narrator, surprisingly, demonstrated some emotional growth, the end could not come quickly enough for me. Superstars documents a precise moment in space-time with a particular drug-fuelled energy, but it's not stellar prose. 

(Ann Scott in interview sounds set in her ways, with some archaic views on sexual consent, and definite opinions about the boring state of literature in France. Millennials aren't writing books, she says. Maybe it's true. However, literary experimentation is dead thanks to capitalism, she says — this I believe.)

Behind, above, around: enormous now, the supremacies of sound had risen up, giant machines, bigger than a person, that shot thunder through to his insides. He looked up, nodded, and felt like an idea borne of the boom-boom-boom of the beat. And the immense boom-boom said: one one one —

and one and one and —

one one one —

and —

cool cool cool cool cool...

He saw Hardy and Leksie, faces and eyes, hurtles, scrambled, shoved, shaken in the midst of the rhythm. Saw broken and blessed, trusting and tender, myriad signs, quick, terse, plain, each blotted out by the next in waves of sympathy. He looked and danced and saw beauty.

From the margins came legs and light, feet, flashes, paces and bass, surfaces and murmurs, equivalencies and functions of a higher mathematics.

He himself was the music.

Then there was a quick cascade of steps, almost tumbling, somehow, from within the  rhythms and sounds.

A cascade of nouns,

pertaining to the curtailment and velocity of thoughts correlated to music, with that feeling of contrary facets in aggregate, with the total mental perspective in this moment of simultaneity and the solace of the automaticity of internal processes.

In this direction there would —

A sort of equipoise of contradictions, which without —

And overwrought —

So time, processes, remained intact then. And the conceptual union of opposites: like how before the creation of the world, the so-called spirit of God...

But that, alas, is unthinkable.

And he saw that it was good.

— from Rave, by Rainald Goetz. 

In contrast, Rave, by Rainald Goetz, (published in German in 1998,) feels like drugs. Not in a "can't put it down" way. Goetz's prose magically mimics the experience of being on drugs. It is not always a pleasant experience, it is often confusing and overwhelming, an overstimulating barrage of words that are simultaneously noise and texture and philosophy. Time passes and stands still. It's a testament to his craft, I would stop midsentence, midparagraph, and let it roll over me, I would roll in it, I was rolling, in awe.

Rave was exhausting and beautiful, but possibly pointless. Interestingly, I found there to be more familiar cultural markers in Goetz's German setting than Scott's French one. Rave's narrator is self-reflective and philosophical, aware of the context he finds himself in, alert to the cultural moment.

The difficulty was a fundamental one: how would a text about our lives have to sound? I had a sort of inkling of sound inside me, a bodily sensation that writing had to articulate.

a kind of: Ave —

[...]

You couldn't get the text by just starting with the meaning, it had to be conceived differently, through prayer, through the endless iterative pronunciation of the words with the mouth, becoming as it were part of the words oneself by speaking.

The language is playful; situations are funny, and how the drug-addled mind processes them is funny. The critique of Kraftwerk's stage presence is funny. This review indicates layers of sonic references and suggests why a reunified Germany might be ripe for this musical subculture. "The others were dancing their acid-truth-dance on the alp."

Rave excerpt. 

Reckless as it might have been, at the same time this experience was yearning to understand itself. And yet wanting at the same moment to forget itself again, to destroy understanding, to have some new experience reveal that understanding to be nonsense invalidated through novelty, tumult, coolness.

I approached both of these works more as artefacts than as entertainment. Part of me hoped for some insight into the what life looked like for a handful of acquaintances and peers who hail from Western Europe. (How mainstream was rave culture? Do I gravitate toward hedonists?) Mostly, these novels have confirmed the rave experience as something distant and foreign and not nearly as cool as it ought to be.

Below, the men sit and smoke. Above, the young women stand there with their faces.

Music will still do to people what it does to us now

"Songs do not change the world," declares Jasper. "People do. People pass laws, riot, hear God and act accordingly. People invent, kill, make babies, start wars."

Here's a novel that's mostly fun, if a little long (what is it with men shamelessly throwing hundreds upon hundreds of pages of their excess verbosity upon you?). Utopia Avenue, by David Mitchell, is the name of a fictitious British band in the late 1960s, fusion folk psychedelic rock 'n' roll, their struggles and adventures.

"Songs like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time. Who knows where they'll land? Or what they'll bring?" [...] "Where will these song-seeds land? It's the Parable of the Sower. Often, usually, they'd land on barren soil and not take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready. Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy. Assurance. Cathartic sorrow. The idea that life could be, should be, better than this. An invitation to slip you into somebody else's skin for a little while. If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world."

We get to know three of the band members quite intimately, while the drummer remains aloof. Each of them standouts in their fields, the manager brought them together with the goal of forming a genre-spanning supergroup. So it was a little less than organic, but on the whole, they're hardworking, decent people who make respectably good music; they pay some dues but find some level of success. And they at times succumb to the lifestyle excesses that come with the job.

The guitarist's story thread veers off into the paranormal. This makes me roll my eyes a little, even if I can't turn the pages fast enough; it's also classic Mitchell territory and fodder for late-night weed-fueled conversations about life, the universe, and everything.

The characters do not get equal airtime, and this felt unbalanced to me. The manager also stars in a story a two, but it's impossible to ignore the cameos. David Bowie, Brian Jones, Leonard Cohen, Syd Barrett, Janis Joplin, and others. Gimmicky to the point of tiresome. It irked me that Cohen mentions Toronto but not Montreal. 

"Once, I took the elevator up there." Leonard nods at the Empire State Building. "I looked over Manhattan and was seized by an absurd desire to take it. To own it. Do we write songs as a substitute for possession?" 

"I write songs to discover what I want to say," says Elf. 

"I write 'em 'cause I just bloody love it," says Dean. 

"Maybe you're the purest artist here," remarks Lenny.

Cue music. It just feels a little cheap.

Although, I thoroughly enjoyed the extended scenes with Francis Bacon, one of a few non-musicians on the London scene at the time to make their way into this novel, but likely I responded to that only because he's been a topic of conversation around here lately, his art grim and eerie and visceral. His art is not on stage here, only his lifestyle.

These walk-on parts add nothing to the story. But in a sense, they are the story. This is Mitchell's love letter to a bygone era of music that I can only assume played a significant role in shaping him.

"In fifty years," said Jasper, "or five hundred, or five thousand, music will still do to people what it does to us now. That's my prediction."

So, what does it do to us now? Music is our balm, our panacea. It can encircle you with your people, it can shut out the entire world. I think it is used more often as a distraction than as a connection. It blares everywhere, but who really listens? 

Hundreds of people pass by. Reality erases itself as it rerecords itself, Elf thinks. Time is the Great Forgetter. She gets her notebook from her handbag and writes, Memories are unreliable . . . Art is memory made public. Time wins in the long run. Books turn to dust, negatives decay, records get worn out, civilisations burn. But as long as the art endures, a song or a view or a thought or a feeling someone once thought worth keeping is saved and stays shareable. Others can say, "I feel that too."

It transcends language and creates an illusion of oneness; one person responds to a beat, another to a melody, another to the story the lyrics tell, but it taps a harmony of being. It's much more complex than a shared feeling.

Utopia Avenue is not about music, it's about its creators. It explores the inspiration for the music — love, loss, drugs, schizophrenia, otherworldly experience. Sometime the art comes about because it's a better option than not trying to make art. Sometimes it pays the rent. Art can come equally from hard work or divine luck or happenstance.  

Super entertaining and full of flavor (though some not always to my taste), but a little short on substance. It took me to some unexpected places, dramatically speaking, and it was not a terrible way to spend midsummer evenings on my balcony. Even if I can reel off better band names in my sleep.

New Yorker: What Happens When David Mitchell Writes a Rock Novel?

Excerpt.

Singing myself into stupidity

"Scientists have even begun studying the chants," said Frère Sébastien, "trying to explain the popularity of the recording these monks made. People went nuts for it."

"And have they any explanation?"

"Well, when they hooked up probes to volunteers and played Gregorian chants it was quite startling."

"How so?"

"It showed that after a while their brain waves changed. They started producing alpha waves. Do you know what those are?"

"They're the most calm state," said the Chief. "When people are still alert, but at peace."

"Exactly. Their blood pressure dropped, their breathing became deeper. And yet, they also became, as you said, more alert. It was as though they became 'more so,' you know?"

"Themselves, but their best selves."

"That's it. Doesn't work on everyone, of course. But I think it works on you."

Gamache considered that and nodded. "It does. Perhaps not as profoundly as the Gilbertines, but I've felt it."

"While the scientists say it's alpha waves, the Church calls it 'the beautiful mystery.'"

"The mystery being?"

"Why these chants, more than any other church music, are so powerful. Since I'm a monk I think I'll go with the theory they're the voice of God. Though there's a third possibility," the Dominican admitted. "I was at dinner a few weeks ago with a colleague and he has a theory that all tenors are idiots. Something to do with their brain pans and vibration of the sound waves."

Gamache laughed. "Does he know you're a tenor?"

"He's my boss, and he sure suspects I'm an idiot. And he might be right. But what a glorious way to go. Singing myself into stupidity. Maybe Gregorian chants have the same effect. Make us all into happy morons. Scrambling our brains as we sing the chants. Forgetting our cares and worries. Letting the world slip away." The younger man closed his eyes and seemed to go somewhere else. And the, just as quickly, he came back. Opening his eyes he looked at Gamache, and smiled. "Bliss."

"Ecstasy," said Gamache.

"Exactly."

"But for monks it's not just music," said Gamache. "There's also prayer. The chants and prayers. It's a potent combination. Both mind altering, in their way."

When the monk didn't say anything, Gamache continued.

"I've sat here for a number of services now and watched the monks. To a man they go into a sort of reverie when singing the chants. Or even just listening to them. You did it just now, just thinking about the chants."

"Meaning?"

"I've seen that before, you know. On the faces of drug addicts."

— from The Beautiful Mystery, by Louise Penny.

It's one of few memories I have of my father. I was 4, and he took me to church. My mother must have been not feeling well, it was just him and me. I'm sure I fidgeted; I was a good kid, but even then I remember not believing in God. A stern look from my father was enough to still me. But what I remember is him, afterward, amused, telling my mother that I hum along with the priest's chanting. The chanting – that was the only reason I tolerated mass.

I've been self-conscious about my humming ever since. It's stronger than me, the instinctive urge to hum along with almost any type of music. Humming, chanting, is weirdly both physical and spiritual, whether I'm practicing yoga or blissed out on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

Home sick in bed for a couple days last week, I glutted on Louise Penny, downloading whatever my library had readily available. In brief:

The Beautiful Mystery is set in a monastery in Northern Quebec, completely removed from the village of Three Pines and its inhabitants. Featuring a small, reclusive order of monks once thought vanished, the rule of silence is lifted so that the brothers can help the investigation into the murder of the choirmaster, who was responsible for the recording of chants that brought the order out of obscurity. Although they indulge in chocolate-covered blueberries, Chief Inspector Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir wrestle with powerful personal demons in this one. Monks, music, and manuscripts — this book was heaven for me.

The Long Way Home, on the other hand, is dependent on some familiarity with the cast of regulars in Three Pines. Gamache's wife plays a larger role than I remember in other books, but this is only natural as she is now a resident of the community, the couple having decided to retire there. While the cast travels first to Toronto and then across Quebec to the stony mouth of the Saint Lawrence, the story journeys into the heart of Quebecois art, with a layover at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation.

The Hangman is disappointing. You need to know that this story was written as part of a series designed to encourage adult literacy. It's simplistic, not nuanced at all. It has the kernel of a good story, but the plotting and characterization are thin. Chronologically the events of this book fall between numbers 6 and 7 in the Inspector Gamache series, but it hardly matters, as there are no developments in the greater character or story arcs. It's short, easy to read, and still compelling, and therefore suitable for its target audience, but you won't miss anything if you skip this one.

If I had a cottage, I'd be sure to stock its shelves with a complete set of Penny's books.

Close your eyes

Close your eyes

Close your eyes
Rest your head on my shoulder and sleep
Close your eyes
And I will close mine

Close your eyes
Let's pretend that we're both counting sheep
Close your eyes
This is divine

Music play
Something dreamy for dancing
While were here romancing
It's love's holiday
And Love will be our guide

Close your eyes
When you open them dear
I'll be near by your side
So won't you close your eyes

— from Duet, by Doris Day with André Previn.

I sang this song over and over, night after night, to my baby. Because love would be our guide. Thank you, Doris.

An abstract music of galactic desolation

Electronic music had just begun to appear at that time — Pierre Schaeffer, Klaus Schulze — an abstract music of galactic desolation that enraptured me. I wanted Karin to hear it too, but I should never have played that record. I explained that this was a new thing they were experimenting with. "Now just listen to this," I said. "It's like the pulsing of the spheres in space. Don't you think?"

"Quiet," said Karin. "I'm listening."

We listened together. The room seemed to throb electronically. Karin had gone pale and sat utterly motionless.

I jumped up to turn off the music but Karin yelled, "Don't! This is important to me!"

I should have remembered this was the moment when Dante descended into the Underworld and was met by the cries of the lost souls.

"I know," Karin said. "This is it. Now comes the voice of God."

And it came. How could she have known!? A deep, sorrowful bass that cut through the music with incomprehensible words and vanished into the galaxy amidst vibrations that finally lost themselves in silence.

"Forgive me..." I said. "You understand, this is a new kind of music they've just invented."

"No," said Karin calmly, "it has always existed. The lost souls are with us always, I know them. It's like a grey wave — any time, any place, on the street, on the train — obliterating everything. They cry for help and we sink in sin, theirs and our own. Can you play it again?"

But I didn't want to.

— from "My Friend Karin" in Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson.



Sometime in the 80s, my brother discovered Klaus Schulze, and it was much like the times he discovered Kraftwerk and Beethoven. He rushed into the house, headed straight for the stereo, repositioned the speakers so the sound would roll over the dining table. Late for supper, again.

This was before trance music, before rave culture. This is how he would share with us his newest, his latest, religion. "Listen to this. Can you hear that? You can hear... Don't you get it?!"

Who shall I say is calling?

A time for weeping...

Who by Fire?

And who by fire, who by water,
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
Who in your merry merry month of may,
Who by very slow decay,
And who shall I say is calling?

And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
And who by avalanche, who by powder,
Who for his greed, who for his hunger,
And who shall I say is calling?

And who by brave assent, who by accident,
Who in solitude, who in this mirror,
Who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
Who in mortal chains, who in power,
And who shall I say is calling?

— Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)

I'm a tree that grows hearts

"One day, I found a big book buried deep in the ground. I opened it, but all the pages were blank. Then to my surprise, it started writing itself."



Björk Digital offers 5 virtual reality experiences, a musicological education space, and a cinematic screening of a curated program of music videos.

It should be no surprise that Bachelorette, a metafictional book-themed video, of a song with lyrics written by Icelandic poet Sjón, is among my favourites.

You don't have to be a fan of Björk's music to appreciate the show, but it helps. I for one hear a very hopeful and positive tone in her songs, even when they're imbued with melancholy.

The highlight of the exhibit is definitely the virtual reality aspect, through which you're guided in a set order. But I would happily spend more time in the wider exhibition space; the video program itself runs for about 2 hours and the hands-on learning app is fascinating — also immersive in their way. The context pushes you to view the music through different lenses — from mathematical to spiritual.

Björk Digital is on view in Old Montreal until November 12.

A personal anecdote of longing and regret

It's a relaxed morning, the kid's away, and I'm feeling good. Heading to work in my Gucci sunglasses. The scarf I got at a Paris flea market, only one cigarette burn hole in twenty-five years.

Through the park to the metro it's dog walkers, joggers, and a juggler. A ruggedly handsome juggler. He's mesmerizing. The path I'm walking shifts trajectory to follow my gaze. I have to keep correcting my course. Three balls, red white blue, red white blue, under the leg, he's juggling with his foot now, red white blue. I'm staring. He drops one, finally. I'm smiling.

"Beau sourire," he calls out.

And in a millisecond I imagine several possible responses, not excluding allusions to his dexterity, and all potential outcomes, most of them variations of lusty abandonment. But the voice of "reason" drowns out the murmurs: what is he doing juggling at the park at 9:30 in the morning?, he can't possibly have a job, when you start planning to vacation together in Turkey next year who's going to pay for it?

I'm passing him now; I turn slightly and give him a thumbs up. (What the fuck does that even mean?) He laughs, and I walk on.

************

I take a seat in the metro and open my novel, In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano. It makes me melancholy.

I took the envelope from my pocket and I pored over the pictures for a long while. Where was she now? In a café, like me, sitting alone at a table? Doubtless the phrase he had spoken earlier had given me this idea: "It's all about trying to create ties." Encounters in the street, in a Métro station at rush hour. We ought to shackle ourselves to each other at that moment. What connection can resist the tide as it carries you away and diverts your course?

************

The busker is strumming out Wicked Game; I hum along. He sings more like Barry Gibb than Chris Isaak; it feels purer this way, less animal, but more tragic. I walk the long tunnel out to the exit, imagining myself clinging to Sailor's snakeskin jacket. I miss being twenty.

************

Why did he laugh?

************

"Maybe he's a dentist," one friend suggests. "They work odd hours."

"Independently wealthy. He's just always wanted to master juggling. What's wrong with that?"

"Cirque du Soleil, obviously."

"Lots of people take Friday off."

Some of them call me an idiot.

************

We ought to shackle ourselves to each other at that moment.

I can't wait for Monday and the walk through the park on my way to work. True story.

Missed connection w4m, Parc Laurier, May 6, 9:30 am.

What steals your memories?

"Do you know what steals your memories?"

I look at him. Because it is a strange question, one that has no answer and many answers. The river of sleep take memories down in the murk and silt. Night and the darkness take them. Waking takes them. Or our own sadness. Or maybe it's the forgetting is like a spore of blight inside each memory itself, and the two cannot ever be separated.

The Chimes, by Anna Smaill, is about memory and about music.

It's poetic and mysterious from the outset. A little Dickensian, but it's not bustling with life so much as buzzing in your head.

The jacket description explains some of the Chimes world, but it's not till I was well past a third of the way through that the world became clear.

Simon keeps his memories close. It seems people have a hard time keeping memories in their heads; they transfer them to objects. Simon can access a memory by examining an object. If you lose your objects, you're in trouble.

When Simon comes to London, the gang he runs with uses music to navigate the city, the tunes describing the paths they take, helping them to find the objects of their hunt as well as helping them find their way home.

He sings and time stands still, as if he is walking on water. His voice is stark and true, and in it there are stretches of empty skies and a bright rime of salt.

It's common wisdom that with the right music, you either forget everything or remember everything. The Chimes takes this aphorism to its dystopic extreme. Personal music links closely to memory, but the public music of the Chimes issued by the Order has a dulling effect, to keep the masses in line.

The language of The Chimes is punctuated with musical terminology; movements are subito, lento, presto. The poetry of "the sunlight's pale violence" drips off every page.

On my palm is a nugget of Pale. About three ounces, and shined with soapy, idle gleam in the thin light, as beautiful as anything I've ever seen. It pulses with silence.

At times I wished it were a little less beautiful. The evil at the heart of this dystopia is clouded by the beautiful language. But maybe that's the point: the musicality can obfuscate the reality.

See last year's review in the Guardian.

All time is unredeemable

When I was 17, I would ride the bus up to the university. For art and culture. By myself. I'm not sure why I thought that would be a cool thing to do. Certainly I enjoyed it, but I suspect it was something I felt I ought to do, in order to become the person I thought I wanted to be.

I didn't tell any of my friends. I don't remember what I told my mother — she would've been supportive of the endeavour in theory, but horrified that I was going alone. I must've lied.

So I was 17 when I first saw Jean-Luc Godard's Prenom: Carmen. Which I'd wanted to see because I liked Carmen, the opera, the story. What did I know?

So I was 17 when I first heard Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, when I first heard it in a significant way. In that movie.



I was 17 when I studied T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and wrote a response.

I was 19 when I first encountered the Four Quartets. When I met David. When he brought me Beethoven's Late Quartets.

Last weekend I saw the Emerson String Quartet perform No. 15 in A Minor at Bourgie Hall. It was perfect.

It's one of the sexiest pieces of music I know, the way it breathes with exquisite anticipation.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

Bug music

With dusk begins to cry
the male of the Waiting-insect; —
I, too, await my beloved,
and, hearing, my longing grows.

— from Kokinshu, by Tsurayuki (~900 AD)

Graeme Revell (once best known for fronting industrial band SPK, now probably more readily recognized for his soundtracks) produced The Insect Musicians in 1987. (I listened to a lot of experimental music in the mid 80s.)

This orchestral wall of sound consists entirely of modulated insect sounds.



I owned and loved that album, and shared it and it was lost. (All praise the Internet, restorer of lost treasures!)

The liner notes summarize Revell's concept and describe the techniques used in transforming insect "noise" into "music."

To me this album signified a world of (alien) beauty at our feet, if only we cared to look, listen.

Insects feature in Consumed, by David Cronenberg, inhabiting the left breast of the woman who as the novel opens is found apparently to have been murdered and cannibalized. The book embraces entomologists and state-of-the-art hearing technology. So this music formed the soundtrack for my weekend reading.

Space opera

Solaris, the opera, has just premiered in Paris, music by Dai Fujikura (sung in English), based on the classic science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem.



However, it seems to have been not particularly well received (verdict: boring).

Interestingly, it seems this isn't the first time the story has been set to music. Detlev Glanert's version was staged in Germany in 2012 (and I'd go see that, given the chance).

We are going to another disco

I'm in New York City for a few days...

Strange things did happen here

We took the girl out this weekend to celebrate her 12th birthday with a few friends: a movie matinee and then wood-fired pizza. Hunger games, indeed.



Yes, we saw Mockingjay, and we loved it. Only we saw it in French, so really we saw La Révolte. (I admit I dozed off a couple times, but that was just the French short-circuiting my brain.) Because: Revolution!

One of the best things about the movie is the song, the anthem for the revolution.

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Where I told you to run, so we'd both be free.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.

It sounds like an old folk song, but it's not. Turns out, Suzanne Collins wrote the lyrics, and it was set to music specifically for the film.

Not having read the books, I was particularly interested to learn how the song was woven into the story for deeper significances. (See What Is the Origin of Mockingjay’s Haunting Song, "The Hanging Tree"? for more background.)

Beethoven!

I love Beethoven!

There's a new book out, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, by Jan Swafford, which seems to be striking a chord with the public. I may need to check it out.

NPR's interview with the author covers how the Eroica symphony revealed his personality.

The New York Times also covers the book:

Swafford's voice is genial and conversational, that of a friend who loves to tell you about his fascinations: the foibles of court life, logistical problems of the musician. He supplies a generous chapter on the German Enlightenment, connecting threads of the 1770s and '80s, opposing currents of rationalism and expressive release: Schiller, Kant, Goethe, the American Revolution. He nods toward Beethoven's unhappy childhood, but emphasizes "the golden age of old Bonn's intellectual and artistic life" and "the town's endless talk of philosophy, science, music, politics, literature."

An excerpt is available online.

Music is hard to write about, and the Times includes an example of "silly": a sonata "begins with a couple of can't-get-started stutters followed by sort of a sneeze." But I think that sentence is rather evocative. And if the MOOC I took earlier this year (Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas) is anything to go by, musicians actually talk that way. We can't all be poets. How else can you describe music if not by the noise it makes?

I include here for your entertainment the essay I wrote for that MOOC. Students ranged from serious experts in music theory and performance to music fans who wanted simply to explore a different genre (I fall somewhere in between). Truly, one got from the course what one put into it, and it's one of my favourite MOOCs to date.

The assignment was to choose one of nine stated sonatas, "imagine that you are hearing this sonata as a contemporary work or that you lived when it was a new work," and write a review, and to: 1. Refer to concepts covered in the lecture, including at least five historical and stylistic questions, and 2. Describe what you heard and how it made you feel, with two specific examples.

Without further ado...

Six Keys in Search of a Composer (with apologies to Pirandello)

A review of the Fantasia for piano in G minor, Op. 77, by Ludwig van Beethoven. Written 1809, published 1810. (Performed by Dino Ciano.)

Ah, phantasie. Some kind of cruel joke. A full ten minutes of unmusical noise mixed with show-offy flourishes.

"Fantasy" is the only appropriate categorization for something so unreal wrought of an unholy imagination. It is carnivalesque, bordering on grotesque.

It is a curious phenomenon that Beethoven should produce a fantasy at all. As of the publication of this phantasie, Beethoven has only once before dabbled with this "form" [issue 1], and given his propensity for structure it seems out of character to eschew it altogether.

It is striking in that it is a single-movement piece [issue 2], and it is the first time Beethoven embarks upon such a proposition [his only other single-movement composition, a polonaise, will be published in 1815].

It does not resemble, in its form or its content, anything else [issue 3] this reviewer has ever heard, in Beethoven's repertoire or that of anyone else. In its singularity, one may surmise that it was conceived as a companion piece for something that is yet to come, though what oddity that may be is difficult to imagine. The bulk of the piece is in B major (but more on this later) — so uncommon a choice my ears are barely attuned to it.

The whole of the approximately nine minutes it takes to perform this piece gives the impression of improvisation [issue 4]. It is highly involved, but with an adventurous spontaneity – Beethoven is intent on keeping us in the moment, with no glimpse of the future.

It seems not composed for human fingers, as if anticipating its performance on some autopiano. This phantasie must require inhuman preternatural skill to play, of which Beethoven has a full store, perhaps harboring in his soul a multiarmed creature both fanciful and monstrous. Beethoven's musical vision must be distorted by a blight he carries within. He must be seeing things, or hearing things. Or not hearing things.

There is an absurdity in naming this work as one in G minor – it starts in this key and stays there for all of twenty seconds. It wanders through several keys [issue 5] before settling on an organizing principle, strange though Beethoven's choice of B major may be.

Yet the atmosphere carries with it some ironic knowledge. Just past the two-minute mark, Beethoven plays allegro con brio [example 1], for almost a minute. I imagine this music accompanying some dastardly rogue villain as he ties a despairing damsel to the railroad tracks, her fate to be consummated by an oncoming steam locomotive, a hostage in his scheme; he twirls his moustaches and winks with a glint as if at an audience.

It is without a doubt a new kind of metamusical narrative. It conveys an awareness of itself, with self-deprecating wit, and an awareness that everyone (that is, everyone who matters) is aware of, and in on, the joke.

This has become music about music, lightly mocking musical tropes. The music is self-referential not just within a piece (as Bach so mathematically exemplified), but between works. Beethoven may be the father of metamusic.

The passages of villainy are followed by harp-like runs. They are disconnected form what comes before and what follows. At about three minutes, where again Beethoven slips into adagio, there is such a run in the fifth bar [example 2] that marks our entry into a different landscape – we have crossed the threshold from chaos to calm. And yet another series of runs in the opposite direction lead us back into presto.

The up and down, back and forth, disorients but also unifies: the runs are the connectors between the disparate, contrasting parts.

Although musically jarring, these runs serve a narrative function, to draw a curtain between the frenzy and calm, dream and nightmare – between fantasy and reality. But which is which? Despite the disorientation, they are in perfect balance, the yin and yang, wholly necessary to each other [issue 6].

With this phantasie, Beethoven has ventured into absurdity. It is illogical, yet logically so. Its search for structure has become its own structure. In a Hegelian manner, Beethoven’s musical dialectic becomes fundamental to its nature. It is in its becoming.

He anticipates an existentialist stance, while maintaining authenticity. One feels in his music the existential despair of the human condition, brought to the brink of the yawning void of meaninglessness. Beethoven heralds modernity, in an already postmodern way.

Certainly Beethoven has taken Kant's words into his head and his heart:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence.

Beethoven continues to connect our finite existence to the infinite.

The fantasia is a bizarre composition, disturbing upon first hearing, but surefooted in the path it forges. Intended for ears strong enough to bear music's schizoid future.

Good for the needy

I've been off-grid for a few days, which meant missing Jack White at Osheaga.

In recompense:


Literary connections:

• Jack White, musician, now publisher, launches Third Man Books
• In That Black Bat Licorice, "Good for the needy, like Nietzsche, Freud and Horace."

Transcendence of form

Beethoven's music is Hegelian philosophy: it is at the same time truer than this; i.e., it contains the conviction that the self replication of society as something identical is not enough, indeed, that it is false. Logical identity as the esthetic and produced domination of forms is at once practiced and criticized by Beethoven. The seal of its truth in Beethoven's music is its suspension: the transcendence of form, through with form for the first time achieves its inner meaning. The transcendence of form is for Beethoven the portrayal — not the expression — of hope.

— T.W. Adorno, as quoted in Hegel — Purpose, Results and the Philosophical Essence, by Scott Hornton, in Harper's Magazine.

I've just finished another online course, this one exploring Beethoven's piano sonatas. I've learned quite a bit about the structure of Beethoven's music, and about the historical context for all the rules he was stretching to breaking point. And I've come to some understanding about some of the elements that attract me, about why I love Beethoven so much (even though I wasn't especially familiar with his sonatas before taking up this course).

I got to realizing just how modern Beethoven is, and it got me thinking about Kierkegaard and the crisis of modernity, and I started drawing connections, and recognized an ironic stance in Beethoven's work, how self-reference can only come from self-awareness, how he could be said to be composing metamusic. Beethoven of course precedes Kierkegaard, but Hegel would've been all the rage, and Kant: "The moral law within us and the starry heaven above us!" — which Beethoven had scrawled in a notebook. The music is becoming. And Beethoven is infinite.

And in writing my final assignment, I found scattered across the internet evidence that others have thought as I have. A reassuring thing.

And I am reminded to pick up Thomas Mann again. I must read Doctor Faustus.

I am resplendent in divergence

The end is the best part. After the stop. I love the end. Sometimes I start chanting that bit spontaneously. "I am resplendent in divergence." It's a holy thing.

I've been looking for this song forever, because upon a time I owned it, on vinyl, and I think of it often, every time I encounter a new ism. Surely my vast knowledge of isms can be traced back to this song. I learned more isms than any 12-year-old ought to know. I developed a weird interest in the Great Schism, and also the teachings of Nestorius. I think solipsism may still be my favourite, though, because it was my first.

Sometimes when I hear bells, I say, out loud, "Bells! I can hear bells!"

Nobody ever gets the reference, though, with my chanting, or the bells, or the diction of various isms.

Having seen Divergent this weekend with my daughter, I am now, of course, resplendent in it.

Thank you, Internet, for restoring this divergence to me.

The strife of love in a dream

This weekend I saw the exhibition Splendore a Venezia.

It was lush and overwhelming, probably very much like the times it was meant to depict. It aimed to explore the interrelationships between the visual arts and music in the Venetian Republic, from the early sixteenth century to the fall of the Serenissima at the close of the eighteenth century. Ambitious.

In fact, it's several exhibitions rolled into one. I for one could do without the filigree and flourish; you can keep your Venetian School paintings. I was perfectly enthralled by the instruments of the era, musical manuscripts (a first edition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons), and other texts.

Some specific things I learned:

• Venice was a republic. Despite many hours of Assassin's Creed gameplay, the nuances of the political structures and relations of the time eluded me.
• Venice was a great publishing centre. This was in part owing to the standardization of musical notation; the local music industry created many printing opportunities — scores, libretti, programs.
• Venice enjoyed a thriving tourist industry several hundred years ago. This is evidenced by bound albums of commemorative woodcuts of public ceremonies and other occasions.

Thanks to this exhibition, I now have several new favourite things (and/or obsessions)...

Standing Man Playing a Viola da Gamba, by Paris Bordone (1500–1571). Pictured here. A small chalk sketch, to my eyes a gem among the oversize oils. "The composition anticipates the poetic depictions of mythological subjects that became popular in the mid-sixteenth century."

Sonata in G minor, for cello and basso continuo, RV 42, by Antonio Vivaldi. The piece was included in the audioguide of the exhibition, and this version was much lighter than any other rendition I can find on the internet.

Viola d'amore, which somehow looks wrong yet beautiful, flat-backed and with too many strings. Sympathetic strings, it turns out. This one had a scroll that, looked at head on, formed a heart.

Hypnerotomachia di Poliphilo, attributed to Francesco Colonna, and translated into English as The Strife of Love in a Dream. There wasn't much of a description, just publication details. It's only with further research that I learned it incorporates many languages into a tale replete with Roman gods and goddesses, exquisite architecture, trysts with nymphs, and hidden messages. The book lay open; latinate text and a woodcut image, nothing special at a glance. What was noteworthy, however, is how clean it was for a 500-year-old book — trim pages, crisp text, clear lines.

Ah, Hypnerotomachia! This is just the beginning.

O'er the hills of snow

Christmas Freilachs, by the Angstones.

Pretty much my favourite Christmas medley ever, capturing the chaotic spirit of the season.

I bought this cassette single back in... I dunno, some 20 years ago or so. And in 20 years of Internet, I haven't found an easy way to share it, but finally I found a link.

It never fails to put a smile on my face. Hope you're smiling too.