Friday, November 16, 2018

Orphean orphan: rehearsal for dying

I went to the doctor the other day for the checkup that carried me over the threshold into Medicaredom. Which, 55+ senior discounts and 70-is-the-new-40 aside, is as official as it gets: I'm old. [Insert champagne-cork-popping and party-hat-confetti smileys here.]

It was a great success, the checkup. My only complaint was that my hearing is not going gentle into that good night. Going gentle was birdsong: it left when I was very small. As a result there has never been to me any such thing as birdsong. It is the fictitious invention of a dangerous subset of hypersensory people, i.e. the mass of humanity, and deranged as divine revelation.

Not going gentle, on the other hand, is me playing a note on a keyboard and hearing -- instead of a clear, ringing pitch that my voice could hit, dead center, as was heretofore the case -- an amorphous penumbra of jangle that requires a Venusian probe of harmony, solfege, and vocal slide-rule to triangulate. Or when I play an octave -- the first two notes of "Somewhere over the Rainbow" -- and hear an interval that is more like somewhere over a bebopper's wet dream.

Why did the musician leave the unnerving performance? Because it was disconcerting.

In moments of despair I self-medicate by grabbing a 12-oz. plastic soda bottle from the recycling bin, blowing across the top to make it sound, and simultaneously humming. When the hum matches the bottle's fluted pitch, the bottle leaps into vibrating mode in my palm like a pager telling me my food is ready to be picked up. It is the greatest symphony ever.

But this isn't how I complain to my doctor. I complain by talking about a thing I'll never do again -- tune an orchestra to A440 -- and then going off on the tangent that A440 hasn't always been the standard pitch; in fact, back in Bach's day it was more like A415 and the oboes were without keys, more like recorders, but isn't it funny how extinct technology can be re-invented because now early music purists are demanding to hear that music on those instruments at their A415 pitch, which I've only done once back when I took an adult student of mine down the back roads of northern South Carolina to the Atlanta workshop of Harry Vas Dias, where it was actually a baroque oboe d'amore -- an alto oboe -- that Vas Dias put in my hands along with a reed and opened Bach excerpt book to an oboe d'amore duet from the Christmas Oratorio and he said let's play and mirabile dictu (how I love that phrase) I was able to play it thanks to the forked fingerings that I knew from recorder, and man it sounded so good and true, we went on for a whole hour like it was 1734 in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig all over again.

and if that is gibberish to you, well, lots of people say there is such a thing as birdsong.

So I didn't complain to my doctor so much as gush, as wipe out entire communities downstream from a breached TVA dam, spewing tsunamic tales of playing Dvorak and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and my doctor, what does he do? Wiseguy, he goes into librarian mode for the patient who's a career librarian: he recommends a book, and nothing medical or healthcare related, either: a novel. And I don't think he does it thinking or knowing that it's bibliotherapy. I think it's his friendly way of trying to save lives by patching that TVA dam back together.

I immediately go to the public library to pick up my Rx: Orfeo: A Novel, by Richard Powers. And consume it. And enjoy it almost as immensely as a plastic bottle vibrating in the palm of my hand. The plot is good enough to keep you turning pages and wondering where things are headed, and on that basis I can recommend it to anyone intrigued by the crossover implications for music of genetic modification and the security needs of the anti-terror state.

But the best part to me is the writing about music, 20th century classical music in particular. Even though Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven figure to some extent -- Bach especially -- most of the love in this book goes out to Mahler, Messaien, Shostakovich, Reich, and to a lesser extent Cage. I say "love" because of the lengths to which Powers has gone to describe performances of their works.

Describing music in words is necessarily nothing more than a flight of fancy bullshit -- unless a composer has given you the "program" the music is describing. For example, the first four notes of Beethoven's fifth symphony are commonly believed to "be" Fate knocking at the door. It is debatable that Beethoven himself intended any such meaning. It is also possible that he intended only to suggest the song of an Austrian bird, the yellow-hammer. Or he might have intended no meaning at all and used such fairytales as these to fob off busybodies obsessed with meaning in music.

About the only thing that can be said that is indisputable about the opening of Beethoven's fifth is that, in 2/4 time, allegro con brio, there is a silent downbeat followed by three eighth notes on the fifth of the scale of C minor followed by a half note (with fermata) on the third of the scale; these two measures are immediately followed by the same pattern involving the fourth and second notes of the scale.

And there you have the whole of the problem of writing about "pure" music, i.e. music that has no pre-determined meaning: which do you prefer, dry technical jargon, meaningless to the layperson, or some kind of bullshit about Fate singing the song of an Austrian yellow-hammer?


Richard Powers is well aware of this problem and addresses it thoroughly in an extensive interview with arts journal Music & Literature that appeared soon after Orfeo was published. In his response to the question, "Was it daunting to start writing about music, trying to touch upon its effect on people through writing fiction?" Powers says right off "it's something creative writing teachers and those who expound on fiction traditionally warn writers against trying to do." He never took the "prohibition" to heart because, a musician himself, he always related to music in a linguistic way. He says that there are things like timbre and texture that language can't get to, but he found that his affinity to such things as harmony and structure had a parallel in literary composition. Most convincing to me, though, is what he says about music "as the primary subject matter of the novel," and by music he means not so much its sound per se as "the effect of sound on makers and listeners," and as a cultural activity, as a social act, an historical act, a political act."

Thus when writing about performances of pieces by these twentieth century composers, Powers is sure to situate them in a deep bed of context from the composers' (or, in the case of songs, the lyricists') personal lives or times, e.g. the tragic death of young children that produced a feverish bout of grief-stricken versifying and produced the Kindertotenlieder set by Mahler; the concentration camp setting for much of the composition and the performance of Quartet for the End of Time by Messaien; or Shostakovich's quizzical response, in his Fifth Symphony, to potentially deadly criticism of his music by the despot Josef Stalin.

But -- all of the epiphenomena aside -- there is still the actual performance to be reckoned with -- or in Powers's case, the description of it. For the purposes of this excursion there is a good brief example from Orfeo: the first song in Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. If you're not familiar with it and your ears are reliable, it would be worth the 6:02 to listen to it before reading on. (My unreliable ears and inexact memory needed help in the form of a musical score -- ah, the synesthetic marvel of literacy, where seeing is hearing.)

Here is most of Powers's description. The listener whose seance is described is Els, a composer, the main character of Orfeo.
A click on the remote, and the music starts up. And one last time, in the bare opening notes, Els makes out the sounds of a death foretold. The death of a child he spent his life trying to revive. At first there's only a thread of frost spreading across a pane. Oboe and horn trace out their parallel privacies. The thin sinews wander, an edgy duet built up from spare fourths and fifths. The singer enters, hesitant, hinted by a bassoon. She channels a man wrung out after a sleepless night, a father with nothing left to keep safe. Now the sun will rise so brightly. [lyrics translated by Powers in italics] ... The sun rises, but the line sinks. The orchestration, the nostalgic harmonies: everything wrapped in the familiar late nineteenth century, but laced with the coming fever dream. Bassoon and horn rock an empty cradle. Scant, muted violas and cellos in their upper registers enter over a quavering harp. The line wavers between major and minor, bright and dim, peace and grief, like the old hag and lovely young thing who fight for control of the fickle ink sketch. The voice sings, It's almost as if nothing terrible happened in the night! Nerves gather in the broadening orchestra, joined now by clarinet and bass clarinet. Then the killer touch, the daub that Els would have traded his soul to make. The ensemble falls away to two pianissimo strikes on the glockenspiel. Then two more. A child's toy, a funeral chime, a light in the night all rolled into four soft, ringing high D's. ... In the fourth return of the instrumental interlude, the song turns deranged and the twentieth century begins. The orchestra sets off in a frantic ecstasy, gusting through chromatic swells and counterswells, shaking loose of all center, anchored only by a deep, droning pedal point in the horn. The frenzy breaks. Flute and oboe attempt the opening lines again, but they're dogged now by the tolling glockenspiel. A small voice says, A little light has gone out in my tent. The notes set a path where their offspring must go: upward into the light, over the surrender of the strings and hollow harp. But the song stutters and catches. The voice drops out, while the surging orchestra carries the melody forward. Two measures too late, the singer rallies -- Heil! -- to welcome the joyous light of day. The orchestra obliges, pushing toward redemption. But at the last moment it falls back into minor. The last word belongs to the glockenspiel, repeating the singer's final note three octaves higher, throwing off glints from a place unreachable by grief or consolation. [paragraph] At eighteen, hearing these songs while holding Clara's breasts was like graduating from the Crayola eight-pack to the rainbow box of sixty-four. At seventy, alone in the house with an untouched glass of scotch, Els can still make out, in the songs' recesses, the germ of freedom that isn't done with him. Why should the bottomless grief feel so bracing? The day is lovely; don't be afraid. Over the decades, he'd read many theories about why sad music lifted the listener ... Mahler himself expressed pity for a world that would one day have to listen to these songs. Yet the cycle has sweetened Els's life beyond saying. [pp. 34-6]
Els the composer listens intently, affixing thoughts to passing sound: the thread of frost, the parallel privacies, the harmonies at once nostalgic yet laced with the coming fever dream, the rocking of the empty cradle, the derangement of the song and the beginning of the 20th century. The carriers of the actual music are the instruments (our imaginations provide their characteristic timbres) and the singer's words.

The prose here is technically a hodge-podge of information about the composition (orchestration and harmony) taking on by association the meaning Els assigns to grief, Mahler's biography, and the twentieth century. But technically so what. This is very effective writing about music.

It is only when Els breaks into memory of his own life that a jarring, seemingly false note intrudes. I guffawed at the sentence about the breasts and the crayons. But Powers follows this with a matured reflection on a life sweetened by this sad music. Maybe the comic dissonance is intentional, the garish crayons meant to contrast with the aged and the blended: the glass of scotch. Untouched.

In describing musical performance in this way, Powers allows the imagined sound -- in the ear-fueled brain of an imagined listener -- to take the mind where music cannot dependably take it: to the verbal articulation of a discrete, inspired, mystical idea. Another poignant example is this from his description of the end of Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time:
The end of the End, when it arrives at last, comes as a solo violin above piano throb. Pared back to its essence, the melody abides, burnt pure in the crucible of the war. Out of a cloud of shimmering E major chords -- the key of paradise -- the violin hints at all a person might still have, after death takes everything. The violin rises; the piano climbs along toward some final immobility beyond human patience and hearing. The praise wanders higher, into C minor, through a frozen minefield of ambiguous diminished and augmented chords, rising again to another major, then one more in the octave above. From out at the edge of the key- and fingerboards, the line glances back at a lost Earth on a cold night, when there is time no longer. [p. 117]
All that a person might still have, after death takes everything; some final immobility beyond human patience and hearing: Messaien's music -- assisted, granted, by his own descriptive program -- only "says" these things because his use of E major, C minor, and violin and piano ascending into their highest notes inspires Powers to think them and articulate them. The reader can well believe that the listeners themselves -- either the original concentration camp audience or Els -- would have had an inchoate and inarticulate sense of those things rather than the full-fleshed idea. But that is what words are for.

I have a purely personal favorite thing about Orfeo: the high point of Els's career as a composer, and his one real success, is an opera written on the subject of the rebellion and siege of Münster, Westphalia, in 1534-5, during which an Anabaptist attempt to establish a radical City of God went badly awry and was brutally suppressed by Lutheran forces. Powers puts in a bravura performance describing a performance of an opera that does not exist (unless he himself has written it). What possesses me to favor this aspect of the plot is that one of the novels I've written, also about music and its epiphenomena -- Blue Oboe -- uses the same event as the pattern for a similar, ill-fated theocratic adventure in contemporary times in Kingsport, Tennessee, of all places.

The title of Powers's book is of course a reference to the Classical myth of Orpheus, the singer-lyre-player who took his ability to charm nature with his music down to the Underworld to charm Hades into releasing his dead wife Eurydice, which Hades does on the condition that Orpheus not look back on his return journey. This very thing Orpheus does, and back Eurydice goes. It would make for good book club conversation to try to figure how the myth figures in the plot of the book -- I haven't found that Powers gives this away anywhere, and I haven't settled on a favorite interpretation.

But it seems not really to matter because the book's resonance -- particularly with the choices of music -- seems more Judeo-Christian than Classical. The life and death on offer here are metamusical riffs on transcendence rather than the stay of execution bargained by the original myth. The prominent place of the Christian Messaien; the use of Reich's Proverb -- with its lyric lifted from a spiritual Wittgenstein; the assignment of the composer's high point to an opera about an Anabaptist visionary theocracy: all of these seem to fix the vibe well beyond the territory of Hades.

Maybe music is the closest we get to the City of God so sought-after by crackpot, delusional, would-be saints. All of the Judeo-Christian attempts to verbalize that City seem only to collapse to the ironies that the IAMTHATIAM is inarticulate and the Word is inarticulable. But with music we are able to express something along the lines of "We might not understand you, God, but we do feel you, we really do," especially when we have something like Messaien's violin (via Powers as Moses) ascending into the Hint At All a Person Might Still Have After Death Takes Everything.

So that when, like me, you can no longer hear what you once could, except in your mind, it brings you to a place not unlike death and you can start to see what that something might be.

I'll be damned if it isn't birdsong.