Rock & Bach

I spent an hour last Thursday discussing a passage of If This Is A Man with a very bright student, and since then I find myself thinking about this beautiful little paragraph whenever I’m driving. It’s the passage in the first chapter where Levi notes, with characteristic precision, that the impossibility of perfect unhappiness is parallel to the impossibility of perfect happiness: “The obstacles preventing the realization of both extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it, for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief.”

Flaubert and Beckett saw this too, this odd conundrum of not knowing enough and knowing all too well. Beckett’s characters are typically immobilized and unencumbered with all but a few possessions, the better to protect against the encroachment of dubiety. Nothing is assumed and everything is accounted for, as in Company where the merest descriptions of environment and condition have to be verified: “A voice comes to one in the dark…To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again.” Such scrupulousness, and to little avail - the man in the dark is still plagued by uncertainty as to where this voice is coming from, whose it is, whether he himself hasn’t simply invented it for the sake of “company,” and whether the memories the voice speaks of are his own or someone else’s.

Flaubert’s characters chart the opposite course: they begin unknowing and hopeful (about love, learning, society, etc.), and end with the cold certainty of disillusionment, of noticing stupidity and finding it intolerable. As Hugh Kenner says: “…the dimmest novel cannot compete, in obviousness, with middle-class life itself, middle-class life in which people exchange responses a Flaubert can calculate with Newtonian precision, and exchange these under the impression that they are making conversation, by which man is distinguished from the brutes.”

Bouvard and Pecuchet are sympathetic characters to me precisely because of their incompetence; in their pitiable constraints I see my own. Speaking is difficult for me because it entails overcoming the feeling of having nothing to say: do I know enough to say anything about anything? In this I’m grateful for the succor uncertainty provides - it makes me feel better to imagine that I might some day be less narrow and more capable; you never know.

http://kangmin.muxtape.com/

A professor once told me that translation is the hardest thing in the world to do well, and I never agree more than when I listen to Kim Min-Ki’s songs, which offer up one startling phrase after another that I couldn’t hope to convey in English. Part of the problem is cultural: Kim’s lyrics are deeply heartfelt and deftly ironic, which is a contradiction in terms to the American who thinks of irony as “I’m saying something but I don’t really mean it” instead of “I’m saying something and it means more than one thing.” American irony is univocal – it assumes that the meaning of something in its unironic guise is beyond dispute; e.g., everyone has to agree that caterpillar mustaches are unfashionable for them to function as ironic signifiers. What is generally agreed upon (mustaches are unfashionable) is exactly what is conveyed (mustaches are unfashionable). So it can be hard to explain to such an earnest bunch why a simile linking dew drops to pearls is ironic, or why it makes perverse sense to compare the formation of droplets to the atomization of a person’s sorrows.

Achim Isul is known to every Korean the way Danny Boy is known to any Irish-American. It was taken up as a rallying cry during the democratization struggle of the 80’s (the video shows footage of a funeral procession for students killed in clashes with government forces), and it retains its status as an unofficial anthem, belted out hoarsely by drunken salarymen in Noraebangs and played over speakers in malls and cafes:

The high school choir I accompany is working on some really cool music, like Vivaldi’s Gloria and Piazolla’s Libertango (the altos sing that beautiful cello line):

It’s neat to see how four-part harmonies get put together, and the kids are a lot of fun. There’s one boisterous girl who keeps me in stitches with constant running commentary on the music (“Ms. Nichols, you love this song huh? It make you happy inside? You crazy.”); on classmates (“Pull your shirt up nasty. Why you gotta show everyone your chi chis?”); and on whatever else she happens to be thinking about (“Whitney gonna come back strong now that she done divorced that crackhead Bobby!”).

The teacher is a genial woman who responds to all this and their general adolescent indifference with her own salty humor and unfailing enthusiasm. Her tastes are broad too: the day before spring break, she put on Beat Street for the kids after an hour of slogging through the Cum Sancto Spiritu from Gloria. (“Why we gotta sing in this messed up language?”). I stayed to watch the awesome break battle where Crazy Legs literally dances himself right out of his shoes:

I once asked a German-speaking friend to translate for me an interview with Friedrich Gulda where he discusses Chopin. She listened intently for a few seconds before taking out her earbuds and looking up at me quizzically: “It’s something about how this music goes well with champagne and currants or something. I don’t know, he has a funny little Southern accent and he’s really odd.”

All of us who play music have musical heroes with whom we feel a kinship, and Gulda is one of mine – I like to think that he’s the musician I would be if I were a master instead of a plodding tyro. I love his enthusiasm, his natural way with Mozart, his salutary disregard for all musical taxonomy. I also love that he never let his pride get in the way of his curiosity; a lesser musician would have had too much self-regard invested in his niche to venture out of his comfort zone so compulsively (“technically I could play anything, but as a jazz player I was a nothing”). I think of Gulda as the musician’s equivalent of the Buddhist monk who labors painstakingly grain by grain over those beautiful sand mandalas only to sweep them away when they’re finished. All that effort and training, all that acclaim, only to play in a disco band and give Beethoven concerts for stoned teenagers? Yes!

There’s a timeline in Mapping the Mind that charts Schumann’s periods of hypomania and depression along with the dates of his compositions. As you might expect, the opus numbers pile up impressively during manic phases and dwindle precariously during periods of depression. In 1854 he tried to call it quits by throwing himself into the Rhine, and had to be fished out by a passing angler and subsequently institutionalized. The whole sorry episode completely wrecked poor Brahms, who was a good friend of Schumann’s and had apparently fallen in love with Schumann’s wife Clara. It was around this time that Brahms began sketching out his First Piano Concerto - he was barely into his twenties at the time, and the Concerto is a young person’s expression through and through, full of drama and passion. The massive octave passage at 4:22 – I can’t listen to that without my teeth clenching reflexively, it’s such a rush!

I have this routine in the morning where I go to the piano as soon as I wake up and try to play the first thing that pops into my head. Yesterday it was Weary Blues From Waitin’ and this morning it was Flashing Lights, which is no surprise since it’s been playing nonstop on the radio. I went through this phase last month when I couldn’t get enough of Emil Gilels’s recording of the Hammerklavier Sonata and would put it on every time I got in the car, but I had to cut that out because I kept missing exits and once even rear-ended someone on the 110 (miraculously no damage!). So it’s radio now when I have to drive, and that Kanye song is all over it these days. It’s sort of an unusual track for him: with Kanye half the fun is how obvious and shameless the samples are, and he almost always cuts choruses completely intact (like Puffy, only with a better ear), but this song has no samples and an awesome original chorus. The video is completely insane:

Speaking of completely insane, my Hammerklavier phase had me listening to the thing at least twice every day for almost a month and I still can’t get enough of it, especially the fugue. After so many listenings I can hear the structure a bit better, but it’s still irremediably weird, and I think that’s part of the fun with this piece – it’s just damn weird, and no amount of analysis however insightful will make it seem more normal. I’ve never liked masterclasses and can’t get used to the spectacle of a musician getting nitpicked in front of an audience, but when the teacher is as brilliant as Daniel Barenboim, and the piece is as difficult as the Hammerklavier, I can sort of see the point. Insights like his should be shared with as many people as possible - performers and listeners alike - even if it means some brave soul (Italian pianist Alessio Bax here) has to sweat it out for the rest of us:

One of my students has an unbearably cute baby brother who sometimes barges into the room in the middle of a lesson, arms held straight out in front of his little torso like a pair of divining rods. Typically he homes in on a stuffed animal of some sort, clutches it into his chubby arms and toddles out smiling beatifically.

So far all of my students are younger than me, and I like them all - even the teenagers who can’t be bothered to pay attention and treat me as something of a nuisance. I’m still young (and very childish), but I think I’m old enough to understand why older folks like being around kids; it’s something to do with failed aspirations. Sometimes during lessons I can imagine that I’m glimpsing a parallel universe where I’m some other person - a solid, dependable sort with a vocation and a family and a faith. It’s nice to think about, if only for an hour or two.

On a different note, I can’t stop humming the song Perfidia since hearing a guitar and bass trio play it at a Mexican restaurant on Sunday. There’s this gorgeous Xavier Cugat arrangement that Wong Kar-Wai uses in a few of his movies:

And there’s this rendition by bolero ranchera legend Javier Solis. What a voice this man has!

I don’t know anything about video games, but I still really enjoyed The King of Kong and found myself identifying with the gamers and their heroically pointless striving. I also liked the interaction between the gamers and the saner people in their lives, like the little girl who treats her record-seeking father with perfectly sensible derision: “I never knew the Guinness Book of World Records was sooo important.”

I think I understand why people get so into video games. Occasionally someone will ask me what I want to do with music and I have to tell them I don’t know. I do know it’s something I love, and something I can rely on to keep boredom and lassitude at bay. Because boredom is a scary thing – left untreated it invariably turns into something more serious and less treatable, like addiction or marriage. Finding something that will keep you occupied indefinitely is surprisingly difficult. In this mathematicians and scientists probably have a leg up, but we have to take that on faith, since most of us are incapable even of grasping just how ant-like and insignificant the average mathematician or scientist might be.

Such disparity doesn’t exist in music because it’s open to anyone with ears that hear and a mind that remembers. A listener’s experience of the Missa Solemnis is his own, even if that experience happens to be falling asleep on the shoulder of the listener next to him. One of the nice things about the declining cultural capital of the arts is that people can feel free to enjoy what they like without looking over their shoulder. There’s no “getting it” or not; there’s simply liking or not liking. A similar claim by a scientist or mathematician would be absurd, but that’s the nice thing about being a music lover – it’s all of the engagement with none of the anxiety, provided you don’t let the pedants interfere with your enjoyment. Pianist Earl Wild says it best: “Taste is such an ugly word.”

Beethoven wishes you a happy Ash Wednesday:

Something I miss about student life is being around professors. Not the young ones - who are ambitious and dull just like any other young people – but the tenured old timers who are long past their prime and are unwilling or incapable of keeping up appearances. I was at a comedy show last week where the comics were clearly inexperienced and having a hard time of it. Mostly I felt bad for them, but I also found myself thinking that their effort was unnecessary, since even the best stand-up is only so funny. Comedy is customarily used as a medium for virtuosic cerebration – it’s a way to show people how quick and agile your mind is under duress. It’s just one of many versions of the same dreary two-step of wanting to be liked and needing to do something about it.

It’s probably unrealistic to expect people to break out of this routine in youth, when even churlishness is calibrated with esteem in mind. But what seems costly in youth is inevitable in old age, and with mounting incapacity and approaching senescence, people become really, really, genuinely funny. Like the literature professor who, when someone mentioned the Adrian Lyne adaptation of Lolita, grew pensive before thoughtfully venturing, “Don’t you think Jeremy Irons makes a perfect pedophile?” Or the legal history professor who would non-sequitur his way through every lecture: “Caleb and Hepsebah are in the frontier. He tends cattle, she churns butter. What do they do for fun? I don’t know, sex, I guess. Doing the nasty. Why do we still use the Socratic method? I mean, what do you know? Like nothing, basically. You know, the Japanese have an extraordinarily violent history. I mean, think of all those grunting samurai.”

To me, this sort of don’t-give-a-fuck is what Op. 111 sounds like, with the joyous, frankly goofy third variation that suggests nothing so much as a person who’s finally managed to break free of social awareness, skipping about clumsily to the horror of better-regulated bystanders. Even in music instances of such unadulterated bliss are rare. I think of those long outros in My Bloody Valentine songs that give you the illusion of being trapped in one ecstatic moment forever – all of a sudden you really could care less about anything and all concerns seem ridiculous and petty.