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Music

Reinterpretations

Sometimes I find myself fascinated by ideas that artists have without necessarily liking what they do with them. Or, perhaps more precisely, without being able to relate to the resulting art in ways that I had thought I would.

Often that happens when the artist, the idea and the artwork are all enclosed within an identity that I have little access to. I’ll deliver examples in a moment, but generally I think it has to do with my lack of knowledge about specifics that sustain the art. Then again, I often fall completely for art I know nothing about, can’t grasp, couldn’t explain, but love, love, love. Hm. One more mystery in this universe.

Here is a fascinating project by a gifted musician, Judith Berkson, a composer and performer steeped in Jewish cantorial music who teaches at CalArts School of Music. About a decade ago she wrote an opera, The Vienna Rite, based on the collaboration between composer Franz Schubert and the Viennese cantor Salomon Sulzer during the 19th century. Sulzer often performed with Liszt and was a close friend of Schubert’s. He tried to integrate Jewish liturgical tradition and Western European art music, pushing boundaries in a society that was not too keen on these efforts. Sounds like a perfect set-up for something riveting that transfers music-melding into a modern realm, I thought. I usually like music straddling borders, for example the late Frank Zappa compositions (Perfect Stranger) performed with Ensemble Intercontemporain, commissioned and conducted by Pierre Boulez, mixing up elements of rock, jazz and classical music.

Berkson’s opera, however, was not particularly well received. A NYT reviewer, who had previously liked Berkson’s solo album Oylam and who had written a very encouraging piece while the opera project was in gestation, voiced disappointment bordering on scorn. Here is an excerpt of The Vienna Rite, but must admit I found the opera hard to listen to (before having seen the reviews.) Maybe I had expected recognition of classical themes, or traditional melodies. Maybe the cantorial echoes were indecipherable by an ear not exposed early to that music. I simply didn’t “get it.” Trying hard to “understand” something unfamiliar perhaps interfered with taking the music in.

For today’s music, then, I offer a different Berkson composition that is rather beautiful and familiar. The V’shamru is a prayer sung at the beginning of Shabbat pointing to the responsibility to protect and/or observe the day of rest, celebrating the covenant with G-d. The music captures both the intensity of the obligation and the joy associated with reciprocal protection within such a relationship.

The second, also unusual idea comes from a completely different corner. I stumbled across Taylor Mac, a theatre artist, when exploring some recent performances of Walt Whitman’s poetry. Just reading the performer’s “bio” (linked above) was an experience that brightened my day considerably. Its essay length was matched by the length of the listed awards and honors :

“the International Ibsen Award, is a MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Tony nominee for Best Play, and the recipient of the Kennedy Prize (with Matt Ray), the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, the Herb Alpert Award, a Drama League Award, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, the Booth, two Helpmann Awards, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, two Obie’s, two Bessies, and an Ethyl Eichelberger. Its wit, as bios go, seems unmatched.

Leave it to me to have never heard of the performer before.

Mac performed a compilation of Whitman poems out in nature during a residency in the Lower Hudson valley, in full drag, make-up, and a level of facility and abandon that this old woman can only dream of. I could not tell if the poet, one of the heroes of the gay community, a forbear who did live as much as express his longings, would have wanted to perform or hear his work performed like this out in the fields and woods – the bovine audience seemed unfazed. I was utterly unsure what to make of it for myself. Is access to the poetry helped by the reminder of the underlying sexuality or hindered by distraction through the sensory overload provided by the visuals and voicing? Is it ok to drag the poet out of the closet in which he tried to hide increasingly with growing fame, censuring his own writings? Was it the high-brow rule to avoid mixing “serious” art with spectacle that dampened my delight? Deep down embarrassment at my own complex reactions to drag?

Maybe I was still influenced by Sam Kahn’s recent essay about art that shocks – a thoughtful look that compares the classic function of art either as protective or subversive of the sociopolitical order, with art developing a taste for shock largely for its own sake in the 19th century. All the transgression and boundary pushing we have seen in the last century led to people suddenly being out of ideas Kahn argues persuasively, fully opposed to using shock.

Do watch the Whitman link above and gauge your own reaction!

It certainly made me more interested in learning about Whitman, and the controversies surrounding not necessarily his queerness, but his distinct longing for (and seduction of) the under-age set. Which biography to choose???

If you have the time, here is a smart video of the performer explaining the project and the motivation behind it. Worthwhile.

Photographs today are from the Vienna Central Cemetery where so many composers are buried. I am also adding some images of the Jewish part of the graveyard, not much visited by the sight of it and wildlife in it….who knows, Salomon Sulzer and his family might be buried there.

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Sonic Spectres

Let me add to the lot of mind-boggling concepts I introduced this week – Fontana’s sound sculptures made of environment-specific noises, Hoyt’s Afro-Sonic Mapping, the Caretaker’s musical representations of the slide into dementia – one more maven who is a game changer with communicating ideas by means of auditory output: Kristen Gallerneaux.

To call her a renaissance woman is likely an understatement. She is a sound-based artist, curator, and sonic researcher with a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History (UC San Diego), an MA in Folklore (University of Oregon), and an MFA in Art (Wayne State University), as well as the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she is in charge of one of the largest historical technology collections in North America. She writes for a variety of scholarly and popular journals, and her 2018 book High Static, Dead Lines was well received.

One of the most fascinating aspects of her explorations is for me the fact that this highly educated, scientifically versed woman does not shy away from topics that might elicit eye-rolling at best and ridicule at worst among her academic peers: the pursuit of sounds associated with a paranormal culture, the possibility of sonic spectres, the idea that objects have a life of their own beyond their relationship to humans (object-oriented ontology.)

I don’t care where unusual interests get started – in her case perhaps with the confluence of upbringing in a Spiritualist household, the lasting damage done to her hearing by badly treated childhood diseases that led to sound-distortions or – generation, or an immersion in folklore and/or narratives from her Métis ancestry (the folks from intermarriage between the first French settlers and the indigenous populations of her native Canada.) I do admire when those interests become passions, ignoring academic head winds and/or popular approval while searching for answers for tricky questions. And I gladly expose myself to unusual topics when they are offered in an approachable way, with clarity, directness and lack of pretensions, as her work does in spades, writing and compositions alike. Plus how can you not be curios about an artist who answers the question of whether she believes in the supernatural with this gem:

“…as for the question “Do you or do you not believe?,” I usually find myself citing one of my particularly witchy academic mentors, who once said, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve met them plenty.” It perfectly summed up my noncommittal, gray-zone syncretic beliefs.” 

One of my favorite examples of her work is a sound and video exploration of a phenomenon called The Hum. Perhaps acoustic, perhaps psychological, it is a consistent, low-pitched noise or vibration, experienced by a small percentage of people across the world (often plagued by subsequent dizziness, headaches and insomnia) – in Auckland and Taos, in Bristol and until 2020 in Windsor, Ontario. You can find a worldwide map of reports here. Most dispatches come from urban areas, which suggests it might be industrial or urban low frequency noise pollution. Except it isn’t. There are not many scientific studies of this experience, but the ones that we have exclude natural sources (aurorae, lightning, meteors, volcanoes, waterfalls and ocean waves) as well as radio waves or microwave equivalents. Acoustic sources are unlikely, because if you bring multiple Hum experiencers into a room they all match the Hum to different acoustic frequencies. People are now exploring internal neurological processes for lack of satisfying external signal explanations, but here and now we simply do not know what’s going on. One might, of course, ask why should Auckland, for example, have a higher percentage of people with internal neurological quirks than, say, Sidney? Or why does the Hum disappear when industrial steel mills cease operations (like they did last year in Windsor, Canada?)

In any case the black& white video about the Hum is a terrific example of being open to variable explanations and pursuing them with intellectual rigor as well as visual tricks that allow us to believe in gray zones, after all.

For once, let me run with a wild fantasy. Let’s assume we organize a scéance and Gallerneaux is willing to attend. She might want to call on communing with Caroline Furness Jayne. Who, you ask? Jaynes is the author of a 1906 book on string figures, found globally. Known to us as cat’s cradle, they come in immense variations, and are apparently developed completely independently across world cultures. We know little about Jayne (bios are padded with info about her more famous parents and/or son) other than that she was interested in ethnological studies, a consummate traveler, dead for unknown reasons at age 36. Inspired by anthropologist Frans Boas, she researched scientific papers on string figures and published an anthology with places, names and instructions on how to generate these complicated cat’s cradles. You can find the book and the drawings here. And Gallineaux recently released music (Strung Figures, a terrific album) based on the book and those string figures, at the artist’s band camp site.

Surprise! Not Jayne, it is Harry Everett Smith who appears. (I’ve never attended a scéance, so give me some slack in making this all up.) Who he? Come on: The Magus with a magpie mind, as someone once called him, compiled the six-record collection Anthology of American Folk Music. But he was also declared to be an “anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, abstract painter, experimental filmmaker, and full-time eccentric. Smith’s interest in exposing unseen connections — his own form of artistic alchemy — drew him to create artwork that brought together diverse elements in new and exciting combinations.”(Ref.)

Sounds like a soul mate to Gallineaux, particularly when you now add that he was deeply interested in all things occult and worked with string figures. Here is a sampling from an exhibition of his string figures in Brooklyn, 9 years ago. Smith left an unfinished thousand-page manuscript on the practice, with some plainly false claims, I’d add, having skimmed some excerpts. But I’m sure he and today’s sound artist would have a lot to talk about.

Except that he, eschewing academics, might not grasp the mathematical connections to knot theory, and pictorial topology. I bet the bank she would. And, more importantly, be able to teach all of us about it in ways that we can grasp. In the meantime, let’s go dance to Finger Catch from Strung Figures.

Photographs today from fields of dried grass, windswept, where the only noise other than the occasionally lowing cow was the rustle when the breeze appeared. How could it not remind me of visualized sound waves?

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Ghost(s) in the Machine

The phrase Ghost in the Machine was coined by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe the mind/body dualism of Descartes and later philosophers. Ryle picked apart the notion, held since Descartes’ time, that the mind is separable from the body (the ghost and the machine, respectively.) I’m not going to detail the philosophical debate here. I was just reminded of this when thinking about how the mind’s deterioration is based on the body’s (f)ailing in cases like dementia. They are inextricably linked, although we are not yet able to pinpoint the exact mechanism that cause Alzheimers or other forms of dementia. The thoughts were triggered by a work of sound art that has had me reeling over the last week, in all its ghostliness – and its compassion, a musical rendering of the stages of dementia.

What do we know about illnesses like Alzheimer, a specific form of dementia? It is a disease that affects memory, cognition and behavior, eventually interfering with crucial functions in everyday life. It gets progressively worse, with people sometimes living up to 20 years with the condition. There are genetic predispositions (assumed to be present in about 70% of all cases,) but also environmental factors that increase the risk of developing the disease. They include inorganic and organic hazards, long-term exposure to toxic metals (aluminium, copper), pesticides (organochlorine and organophosphate insecticides), industrial chemicals (flame retardants) and air pollutants like the smoke we inhale these days from the fires (particulate matter.)

Brain neurons are killed off, leading to irreversible loss in a process that we have not yet fully understood. We do know, however, that certain changes in the brain are associated with the disease, signs of it. These include two abnormal structures, plaques that are deposits of beta-amyloid protein fragments, and tangles that are twisted fibers of the tau protein. Scientists speculate that these two somehow block communication between neurons and disrupt processes that are needed to keep neurons from withering.

Also on the scene are inflammatory processes, as destructive here as anywhere else in the aging body. It is assumed that neuro-inflammation – the activation of the brain’s resident immune cells – is not merely a consequence of disease progression; rather, it is a cause that actively spreads the pathologically misfolded proteins in the brain.

Treatment options to date are limited and not particularly effective, despite the noise in the news that celebrate every new option as a break through – until it isn’t. Drugs target the plaques and tangles, trying to prevent them from being formed or to destroy them when present. Vaccines are tested to protect against the fiber twisting associated with Tau. Reduction of inflammation is a target, as is the way the brain is vulnerable to shifts in insulin or hormones during menopause (so far, proposed drugs in both categories turned out to be duds.) There is a lot riding on new approaches to heart health. It might be that drugs that combat high blood pressure may reduce the risk of developing dementia. Life style choices – steady exercise and healthy food, living in clean environments, a choice many poor people don’t have – here as everywhere can make a difference, but are no guarantee to resist this scourge.

We can read all this, recognize it intellectually, shudder. Try to forget about it because it is so frightening, no pun intended. We can read stories of individual defiance and positive attitude, and still be overwhelmed by the thoughts of what dementia implies – particularly if we are in an age group where every misplaced key, forgotten shopping list, inability to recall the name of a beloved authors, gives rise to anxiety if something more dire is lurking in our brains.

Yet we can also find a deeper, more empathetic understanding when listening to (some of) the sound scape I want to introduce today. Everywhere at the end of time has generated a lot of attention since its final release, including complaints about psychological upheaval, which I get. But it is also a thing of beauty, on many levels. Created and produced by British electronic musician Leyland Kirby, under the alias the Caretaker, it was released from 2016-2019 in 6 installments meant to reflect the specific stages of the disease. The young composer delved deep into research about the progression of the disease and found ways to represent the process that seem plausible to this listener.

I suggest that the curious listener tap into the segments that designate the stages in which the disease progresses. Spoiler alert: it gets progressively more disjointed, upsetting, and challenging across its 6.5 hour duration. It ends in the very last segment with a strange rendition of a Bach’s chorale (BWV 246, Lasst mich ihn nur noch einmal küssen,) that highlights the centrality of human connection and, when severed, ultimate loss. The subsequent silence and release somehow provides intense comfort.

It cannot have been an easy task for the composer, across so many years, and surely required courage to face the details, since none of us is exempt from the potential to develop dementia, the musician included. As it turns out, the work was not just successful with professional music critics but had a large following, spiking last year, among truly young listeners who engaged with it and each other in emotional, empathetic reactions during a challenge on TikTok.

A full description of the music with analysis can be found here. It is a thoughtful essay by Luka Vukos on Headstuff, a collaborative of creative souls who sift the internet for interesting art content and put it all in one bucket for us to sample. The author points out a parallel to our own experience outside the realm of disease:

“With instant reproducibility and the digital recall of information, it can often feel like we are extricating ourselves from things which might linger for longer than we’d like. We conceive of memories, and of life, as information units, rather than as living things within our heads. Things get deleted with almost no trace, and it’s almost like we’re giving ourselves dementia in a way. But, in this regard, the great paradox of The Caretaker’s body of work rests in his marrying of the earliest form of musical reproduction (the vinyl record) with the most contemporary modes of digital recall and manipulation.

I have listed the title of the tracks below that gives you a thematic progression. The music is characterized by manipulation of old ball room tunes that Kirby found in the record bins of junk stores, then manipulating them with particularized computer programs. The ball room orchestras are first displayed in full, if scratchy with record player needles, but then morph into very different forms. The manipulations are as representative as the mood coloring of classical music of yore, if unfamiliar to those of us not used to listening to experimental music. Any refusal to be dragged into fear or sadness by listening to this marathon is perfectly understandable. But if this work of art has reached just one soul to be more willing or able to change their approach to Alzheimer patients in their current state of being shunned and neglected, has created true empathy, it has made the world a better place. Art, again, as a mediator.

And now I am going to listen to We, so tired of all the darkness in our lives, also by Kirby….

Here is the original Bach aria from the Lukas Passion. With English translation below the heading.

Photographs today are of nature’s fading, due to drought and time of year.

STAGE 1

No.TitleLength
1.“A1 – It’s Just a Burning Memory”3:32
2.“A2 – We Don’t Have Many Days”3:30
3.“A3 – Late Afternoon Drifting”3:35
4.“A4 – Childishly Fresh Eyes”2:58
5.“A5 – Slightly Bewildered”2:01
6.“A6 – Things That Are Beautiful and Transient”4:34
7.“B1 – All That Follows Is True”3:31
8.“B2 – An Autumnal Equinox”2:46
9.“B3 – Quiet Internal Rebellions”3:30
10.“B4 – The Loves of My Entire Life”4:04
11.“B5 – Into Each Others Eyes”4:36
12.“B6 – My Heart Will Stop in Joy”2:41
Total length:41:23

STAGE 2

No.TitleLength
13.“C1 – A Losing Battle Is Raging”4:37
14.“C2 – Misplaced in Time”4:42
15.“C3 – What Does It Matter How My Heart Breaks”2:37
16.“C4 – Glimpses of Hope in Trying Times”4:43
17.“C5 – Surrendering to Despair”5:03
18.“D1 – I Still Feel As Though I Am Me”4:07
19.“D2 – Quiet Dusk Coming Early”3:36
20.“D3 – Last Moments of Pure Recall”3:52
21.“D4 – Denial Unravelling”4:16
22.“D5 – The Way Ahead Feels Lonely”4:15
Total length:41:54

STAGE 3

No.TitleLength
23.“E1 – Back There Benjamin”4:14
24.“E2 – And Heart Breaks”4:05
25.“E3 – Hidden Sea Buried Deep”1:20
26.“E4 – Libet’s All Joyful Camaraderie”3:12
27.“E5 – To the Minimal Great Hidden”1:41
28.“E6 – Sublime Beyond Loss”2:10
29.“E7 – Bewildered in Other Eyes”1:51
30.“E8 – Long Term Dusk Glimpses”3:33
31.“F1 – Gradations of Arms Length”1:31
32.“F2 – Drifting Time Misplaced” (titled “Drifting Time Replaced” on Kirby’s individual YouTube upload for Stage 3)4:15
33.“F3 – Internal Bewildered World”3:29
34.“F4 – Burning Despair Does Ache”2:37
35.“F5 – Aching Cavern Without Lucidity”1:19
36.“F6 – An Empty Bliss Beyond This World”3:36
37.“F7 – Libet Delay”3:57
38.“F8 – Mournful Cameraderie”2:39
Total length:45:35

STAGE 4

No.TitleLength
39.“G1 – Post Awareness Confusions”22:09
40.“H1 – Post Awareness Confusions”21:53
41.“I1 – Temporary Bliss State”21:01
42.“J1 – Post Awareness Confusions”22:16
Total length:87:20

STAGE 5

No.TitleLength
43.“K1 – Advanced Plaque Entanglements”22:35
44.“L1 – Advanced Plaque Entanglements”22:48
45.“M1 – Synapse Retrogenesis”20:48
46.“N1 – Sudden Time Regression into Isolation”22:08
Total length:88:20

STAGE 6

No.TitleLength
47.“O1 – A Confusion So Thick You Forget Forgetting”21:52
48.“P1 – A Brutal Bliss Beyond This Empty Defeat”21:36
49.“Q1 – Long Decline Is Over”21:09
50.“R1 – Place in the World Fades Away”21:19
Total length:85:57

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Sonic Mapping

One of the pleasures of writing an independent blog is the fact that I can cover topics I know absolutely nothing about, simply because I find them fascinating. You, of course, have a similar choice: you can explore new territory or decide to skip it, since it might involve some effort to listen in new ways. And listen it shall be: this week I am introducing a number of different artists who employ sound in order to map aspects of our world as linked to the past, present and future, or to capture ephemeral processes.

What they all have in common is that they are art – devised as sound sculptures in some cases, associated with visual images (painted, sculpted or digitally created) in others, or plain compositions using sound collected from the environment or electronically generated. I cannot tell if I am more fascinated by some of the underlying ideas, or the art works that result from the ideas. I guess it varies.

Today I will start with two artists who are about the present and the past. Wednesday’s segment will introduce two artists who explore the linkage between sound and psychological processes extending into the future. The two installments are meant as a package, examining working with sound from four different angles. I don’t expect anyone to listen to any of the links in full – that would cost a lot of time – but a bit of sampling will give you a taste of what’s out there and maybe instill curiosity for more.

Composer Bill Fontana is one of the pioneers of sound art in the U.S. with a career spanning five decades and taking him to international acclaim. He collects site-specific sounds and generates sound configurations from those recordings that reflect aspects of the site and are intended to shape our visual interaction with the site or visual surrounding. Working with acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural/material sensors (accelerometers) that sample the environmental sounds, he creates “sculptures” with the input, musical transformations that are centrally experienced by the listener.

For example, he has composed subtle variations of the music of the Golden Gate Bridge, a live audio/video installation created for its 75th anniversary in 2012, now in the collection of SF MOMA. Here is a link to some of his acoustical visions – the bridge piece can be heard in the third segment.

Another sound sculpture can be found in Rome, in the entry hall of the National Museum of 21st Century Art. He connects Zaha Hadid’s architecture of the building with the acoustic, harmonic and rhythmical qualities of the water that has run in Roman aqueducts since time immemorial. Well, since Roman times. Ok, 2000 years.

You can hear the sculptural sound and the underlying source here.

Miami Beach at Night

And here is a link to one of his most recent projects, Sonic Dreamscapes that connects sounds of the Miami seascape under threat of climate change to our auditory cortex, making the listener aware of the fragility of our world. This multimedia installation was installed in Miami Beach in 2018.

The installation cycle begins during the day with individually recurring auditory recordings answering each other from different spatial points in SoundScape Park. By afternoon, the “musical vocabulary” will grow as additional sounds are added to the repertoire. As the evening approaches, environmentally inspired abstract videos will emerge on the video wall, allowing visitors to experience a myriad of floating sounds and meditative images.

Where Fontana is about connecting us to the sound of places with an eye on change across time, Satch Hoyt is a sound artist concerned with the sounds of people, their movements across space in the past and preserved echos in contemporary music. In addition to actual sculptures that interact with sound installations (link here, scroll down and click on the strips below the images to get to the sound,) Hoyt has an ongoing multi-media project in the works, Afro-Sonic Mapping, which traces specific traditional African music from centuries ago to the contemporary musical styles of the African diaspora.

Street Art in Berlin
Remembering Colonial Times….

The project connects archival recordings of African music from Congo and Angola, collected by European anthropologists of the late 1800s and found in Berlin’s ethnology museum, to the urban music in the suburbs of large contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian cities. Turns out, the musical patterns transmigrated to today’s urban music, linking Luanda, Lisbon and Salvador da Bahia, or Dakar, Cali and Lima. With examination of aural histories, interviews and musical exploration with local African musicians to whom Hoyt brought the old recordings, and with collaboration with modern musicians across continents, he re-imagined the sounds, rhythms and melodies, rarely recorded in bygone periods of colonialism and slave trade.

Two years ago the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin offered the first large presentation of the project. Paintings, lectures, videos and 2 concerts attracted big crowds across a full week. Here is some of the music interspersed with an explanatory interview with the artist. The focus was on the lusophone triangle, between the large Portuguese speaking regions of the word, Portugal, its former African colonies (Angola, Mozambique) and Brazil, mapping the sounds, back and forth. I am not sure that Hoyt’s goal to “bring back the music to the places of origin where it was recorded and create some kind of sonic restitution in a postcolonial world, a transformation,” can be accomplished, I certainly would not know how to judge that.

But I find the idea of mapping the network of historical pathways of rhythms or melodies which were, other than language, the only things that could be brought and kept during torturous migrations, fascinating. Musicians acting as archeologists, digging out old artifacts under layers of later civilizations. Sounds of spaces or historical sounds, recorded and re-coded for us to sharpen our listening, to form connections – art as mediator.

Photographs today are of San Francisco, Miami and Berlin, respectively; the Democratic Republic of Congo has to wait for another life time….

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Cross Fertilization

In truth, what I was looking for was simply some justification to post pictures of the crows that have joined the squirrels, doves and sparrows on the rainy balcony. Poe came to mind, his famous poem about the Raven. Before you know it, I was sucked into essay after interesting essay of Poe’s influence on French artists, in particular Ravel. The composer claimed many times over that Poe’s Philosophy of Composition (which describes the process of creating the Raven in meticulous, almost mathematical ways, and can be read in full in the link) was a key influence on his own principles of composing.

Just as the Anglo world despised Poe (Henry James wrote that “an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection,” Paul Elmer More thought Poe “the poet of unripe boys and unsound men,” Yeats thought “The Raven” to be “insincere and vulgar,” and Aldous Huxley thought it “shoddy and slipshod,”) the French thinkers and artists embraced him, Ravel, Debussy and Baudelaire among the biggest fans.(Ref.)

Apparently there is debate how seriously Ravel meant it when he said that his own work in composing was built on Poe’s methods, with some convinced of it, and others claiming that he was the eternal trickster, pulling off pranks and maybe luring people in wrong directions. Unclear if their shared interest in being Dandies forged a bond. I wouldn’t know. Nor do I care.

I do care for the music and everyone agrees that some of Ravel’s compositions are in direct reference to some of Poe’s writings. “A Descent into the Maelstrom” was among them, an inspiration to La Valse in 1920, for example.

What is also established, and that is interesting to me, is that Ravel refused to be roped into the rising French nationalism and its focus on ancient and regional French music. He was open to trans-nationalist influences, and looked outwards for inspiration, borrowings, and appropriations from international sources. A good role model in times, then and now, when tribalism, insularity and traditionalism try to constrict art and education on all fronts.

In 1928, Ravel’s extended, successful concert tour of the U.S. introduced him to Gershwin who took him to hear jazz in Harlem. He also visited New Orleans. The harvest of those encounters can be found in his later compositions, the Piano Concerto in G among them. It includes some jazz elements that are profoundly beautiful. Well, the whole piece is. Played by one of my heroines. (Alas, video has ads in-between movements. My favorite is the third movement, if you have only so much time.)

For a detailed biography of Ravel’s life, sexuality, artistic output and philosophy one can turn to Benjamin Ivry’s biography Maurice Ravel – A Life, reviewed here, or Roger Nichols’ Ravel, the most recent one.

Or one can simply listen to his music, with its many layers just like the crows feathers.

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Beauty as a form of care

Today is all about music, a new album that I find singularly graceful, or, more precisely, full of grace.

The real thing, in all of the word’s connotations: smooth, elegant movement, thoughtfulness, and the favor extended from up high. Not that I know much about Sufism’s relationship to Allah, beyond the definition that “it is a mystical Islamic belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God.”

Vulture Prince was released a month ago by singer, composer and producer Arooj Aftab and has been finding its way into my soul. Labeled as neo-sufism, it creates modern versions of age-old Pakistani music – classical or semi classical ghazal, thumri and qawwali music – none of which I am familiar with. Of course I do not understand the language either, some of which uses words from 18th century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib and 11th-century Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī. It speaks to the universal power of music, and the gift of this particular artist, that it is nonetheless impossible not to get what is expressed: longing, seeking, devotion, grief and love.

Aftab has Pakistani roots and came to the US to study music and engineering at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. She now lives in New York City, having published her first album in 2015, and since also recorded together with brilliant jazz musician and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer and bassist Shahzad Ismaily in a jazz trio called Love in Exile. Here is how Iyer describes their working relationship:

“Music can be a way of holding and being held by other people, and that’s how it feels like when we play together,” he says. “She has this deep reservoir of emotion that’s coming from a haunted place. She makes something beautiful, but it’s not just beauty for its own sake. It’s actually beauty as a form of care.”

I wish I had thought of that sentiment, that formulation, it is perfection.

In her mid-30s Aftab has already experienced the recent death of her younger brother and a close friend. That grief permeates some of the music, but the best analogy for the experience of listening to her that I can come up with can be found in the translation of the artist’s name: Rising Sun. Shrouded in lingering darkness, feeling swallowed by these hard, dark times, we nonetheless are gifted light, inevitably, every morning, the first rays bringing a semblance of hope. Color unfolding. Restoring a waning belief in grace.

I have tried to find a collection of samples of the variety of her music, and the growth curve from her Bird under Water album all the way to Vulture Prince. I can even tolerate the use of harp, an instrument I do not particularly like.I hope this unfamiliar beauty eases your way into the new week.

Lullaby

Photographs of vultures from Sauvie Island some years back. And here is a poem by Mirza Ghalib, one of the great poets of the Mughal empire. His ghazals, many set to music and sung by the most popular South Asian vocalists, were part of Aftab’s childhood – and used on her new album as well. This was one of the few I could find in English translation.

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All Human Beings

Today the text is the music and the music is the text. The words of the 1948 UN Human Rights Declaration, in their demands for and implicit belief in humanity – the vision of a better and fairer world that is within our reach if we choose it – remind us that we still have a long way to relieve the trauma that millions of people undergo everyday, imposed by cruelty, greed and injustice.

Eleanor Roosevelt, credited with its inspiration, was the chair person of the UN Committee that drafted the document. She referred to the Declaration as the “international Magna Carta for all mankind,” and considered the 30 Articles of the Declaration as her greatest achievement. It was adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. Here is Roosevelt reading the preamble.

Composer Max Richter put her words to music, incorporating her reading of the preamble into a piece called All Human Beings from his new album Voices, to be released by the end of July. He then crowdsourced hundreds of readers of all ages who repeated the words in various languages, interwoven with the music. They are the voices of the title.

Here is an interview with the composer about his approach to music as a conduit for political or philosophical thought and here is a play list of his works broadcast on NPR.

Photographs today are a variety of finches, gold finches, house finches – the male plumage still intense for mating, to produce a second clutch of eggs. Their color comes from pigments in the food they eat, and so varies depending on the quality of the food. The better quality food, the more intense color, the more likely to be chosen as a mate by Ms. Finch….

I chose finches because they range across the entire world – in tune with the United Nations mission. Bunting, canary, cardinal, chaffinch, crossbill, Galapagos finch, goldfinch, grass finch, grosbeak, and sparrow classify as finches.

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Of cows and reharmonization

Today I am indulging myself and those of you who care deeply about music with a string of videos all either created by or depicting Jacob Collier, a young musician of – and I say so unhesitatingly – genius.

I was alerted to him by my firstborn with whom I frequently exchange musical discoveries, more successfully so in one direction than the other, but still…..

He sent me this video of Moonriver, created way before the pandemic hit, employing techniques of editing multiple, really hundreds, of videos, together and re-harmonizing with the arranger’s own vocals. It is not a song I am particularly fond of, but I was impressed by the arrangement.

Off I went to check the kid out – 25, looking 15, with a proclivity for strange hats, cow-patterned socks (thus today’s photographs) and t-shirts and, man, a musical brain to die for. Grew up and still lives in a musical household in London, with a single mom and 2 sisters, encouraged to be an autodidact regarding his musical education, even though the mom works as a classically trained musician and is a professor of music.

A documentary filmed at MIT, Boston, where he did a residency as composer, conductor, arranger, performer of both multiple instruments and vocals, made it very clear we are not just seeing a gifted producer of pop ballads, or jazz, or whatever you want to call it, but some serious classical moves given that all is specified, if only in the moment when he interacts via computer programs with his supporting musicians. If you have 30 minutes, do watch it, you get to experience a flow of bridging in his composition Hideaway that is mind boggling (with full orchestra in the documentary.)

If you don’t have the time for the documentary, just listen to some of his music. Here is Hideaway done solely by him. (You can read a description here.)

I was present when she was born!

I recommend looking at the videos for a bit just to enjoy his performer’s antics and enthusiasm, but eventually, listening is best done with eyes closed and headphones. I chose a random collection, from more acoustic music (NPR Tiny Desk concert) to singles from his 4 album creation Djesse. The music transports you.

It even makes the cows smile!

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Speech, Sung

“I’m working on human speech [and] I’ve arrived at a melody created by this speech. I’ve arrived at an embodiment of recitative in melody”. – Modest Mussorgsky

We ended up this week with words, didn’t we? Wells’ written words, Hildegard von Bingen’s invented words and now words transformed into melodies. Mussorgsky (1839 – 1881) was interested in realism, by which he meant setting the sound of the spoken Russian language to music. His leanings towards progressive politics and the fact that he was an atheist was evident in the way he selected speech of particular Russians. He set the poetry of Pushkin to music, as well as folk tales and many varieties of ordinary speech – nannies, mothers, children, soldiers. On stage he preferred his evil characters (like Rimsky-Korsakov’s) to be witches, devils, and magicians, as a way to avoid censors.

The music was all about natural rhythm and Russian history, incredibly creative, ahead of its time. Do yourself a favor and listen to what I am attaching below – it is revelatory, particularly if you, like I, were fed on a diet of The Dance of the Bumblebee or Boris Godunov. Slavic tunes, pride in national heritage and a preoccupation with his view of the depth of the Russian soul all colored his compositions in addition to the focus on expressed speech patterns.

The composer, like many of the others (Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, Mily Balakirev and César Cui) in the group of artists he belonged to, known as the Russian Five, – the Moguchaya Kuchka (“The Mighty Little Heap)  – died prematurely. Poverty was one of the reasons (in his case alcoholism was another, he was self medicating for his life-long depression) – there was never enough money earned by performances. The Tzar and his court controlled the musical market and Mussorgsky did not have personal sponsors or foreign fairy godmothers who would provide a regular, sufficient allowance.

And yet, he created such beauty – judge for yourself.

I’ll spare you the sadness of his Sunless song cycle, given that I want you to enjoy a sunny weekend. For similar reasons, you’ll be deprived of Songs and Dances of Death – too much of that on our mind. Then again, for the true music lovers, here is a stellar performance of the latter….. couldn’t help myself.

And I had meant to post NO bumble bee music, just bumble bee photographs from yesterday, taken while weeding under my single blueberry bush in bloom, the impetus for thinking about the composer. But I relent there as well, for the sake of the miraculous hands of Evgeny Kissin.

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Happy Birthday, Paul Meyer

One of our dearest friends was born on Easter Sunday 1925 – and his 95th birthday coincides this Sunday with Easter again. I am dedicating today’s blog to him since flowers, visits, presents, are all taboo on the grounds of the pandemic.

And anyhow, who wants to blow out 95 candles…..

I had the joy to attend his 90th birthday party where he was feted in style. I wish I could remember all the speeches honoring him, but you know my brain… cousin to a sieve. Luckily we can hear the man himself – here is a recent interview that describes his involvement with the founding of the ACLU of Oregon and his trajectory in life.

Paul is a Yale-educated attorney who has been actively involved in the fields of civil liberties, progressive politics, city government, opera and chamber music groups and numerous Jewish organizations. He served as a machine gunner in the infantry during WW II (70th Oregon trailblazer division from 1943-1046 and was wounded in the last battle of the bulge in Alsace Lorraine in January 1945 (he received Purple Heart and bronze star for his valor.) Well, that’s the official description that you can find if you look for the announcements of awards, too numerous to list here.

My personal description is that of a Mensch, deeply rooted in the Portland community, a man who delights in story telling and jokes, can roar with laughter and melt you with his smile. When I learned that he was born as one of three brothers in St. Louis, Mo., I immediately associated the bridge of that city with his inclination to build bridges, both in his work and in his civic engagement.

Daughter Andrea
Daughter Sarah

During the time that I got to know him it was clear that family means a lot to him – not just as an idea, but in close and actively pursued relationships, with his children (sorry David, did not get a picture of you two ever,) his brother Roger, who died in 2013, and of course his beloved wife, Alice, who makes it ALL possible, forever has.

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I met Paul and Alice around 2005 at the Oregon Jewish Museum, an organization that they have strongly supported since its inception. Friendship grew fast, and shared places – living in New York, his formative experiences during his WW II time deployment in Germany, a love for the beaches of Manzanita – and shared subjects – from politics to the law – were the focus of many of our conversations.

One topic we more than agreed on: not only do we both have a passion for music but we know it is at its core more than passive listening – it is a communal art, at its truest in shared enactment. Paul sang late into his current age and, I may add, singing his heart out. Whether he joined the traditional Boarshead procession and chorale at Reed College,

or sang in the core chorus for Jacob Avshlamov’s Messiah, he s a n g. Well, what do I know, maybe he sings just as much today, in preparation for Happy Birthday (or for timing the ritual hand washing of these times…) I was told that he was also a guest conductor at the Portland Baroque Orchestra on his 75th Birthday, conducting the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. Before my time in the Meyer household, but I would have loved to have heard that.

I have taken many portraits of Paul over the years, but here is one of my favorites of last summer. Don’t let the softness of the face fool you about the steely intellect underneath, or the laugh wrinkles about the determination to pursue some of his main goals in life: justice, fairness and civil liberties. The wistfulness in his gaze encompasses true caring for humanity.

Here is my musical selection for him on this day: Paul might have actually sung it in high school with Paul Robeson, who also has a birthday this week. It is a message of unity that found a receptive ear in 1940. Sounds like a birthday wish for our own times to me!

Happy Birthday, dear Paul.

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