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Hmmmm
...
Well.
Is there appropriate music for
something like this?
And actually, as I try to
search history, there is nothing "like this." There are, of course,
volcanos and tsunamis and earthquakes. But they are things without villains,
without fiends, without human monsters. Though thousands scream and flee in
terror, to the planet itself, they are just normal stretching and yawning and
belching.
I have a special interest in the
revolution and explosion of music in Europe that followed the catastrophe of
World War I. This body of music is fascinating, startling, often mesmerizing.
But very hard to call beautiful. The intellects and emotions of these composers
were in shock, reeling from carnage and madness -- "the peace of unburied
dead" as a line in a science-fiction movie puts it.
The major key was dead, and even the
minor key failed to begin to express what they felt. They had to invent entire
new tonalities and dissonances to reflect the high explosives and the machine
guns and the collapse of every truth and comfort that European societies had
taken for granted before the Great War.
Yet even this strange, startled music
to reflect horror and collapse -- the musical accompaniement to Edvard Munch's
"The Scream" -- seems inadequate this week.
I suspect that for most of the
thoughtful and sensitive people on this list, the Old Forms -- the hymns, the
requiems -- will do best for the challenges our hearts face. I will be seeking
solace in some of it myself and hoping for the best.
But when I have the courage to move
beyond the obvious, I suspect I will cautiously and gingerly seek different and
more modern forms of Western music.
First, from some of my dearest
experiences, I think I will ask Charles Ives if he has anything for my aching
and confused heart and nervous system. His genius seems to have taken up the
challenge of the collision between the Old Forms -- "The songs our fathers
loved" -- and the shock of the New. He wrote his music in a little shed on
a farm in the New England countryside. But every workday he took the train into
Manhattan, where he was a captain of American industry, a creative pioneer in,
of all things, insurance (as was the poet Wallace Stevens). Some of his
symphonic music soothes, some of it weeps, some of his songs curse violently and
damn modern greed and toxic pollution and political corruption ...
O the
People
NOT the politicians
--
Goddam
thieves!
(to the tune of "Columbia, the Gem
of the Ocean")
Ives's music had the capacity to
consider villains and fiends and scoundrels, and to put them in their place, and
then to consider and praise and celebrate courage and endurance and survival and
beauty and triumph.
I have a suspicion it may actually be
up to the impossible task of making some sense of this ghastly
week.
A couple of weeks ago, some lovely
person brought the unique contemporary music of John Zorn to F_Minor's
attention, a repost of someone who was bringing GG to the Zorn list's attention.
Zorn's music -- or whatever you want to call it -- I think is up to the task not
perhaps of any healing, but of standing up to villains and fiends and perverts
and terrorists and fighting them, loudly, harshly, violently, to defend music
and community and human beings -- he most typically performs his evolving
musical experiments live at NYC clubs.
The terrorists wanted to drag us back
to the stone age. Zorn violently defends our aspirations and our needs to crawl
forward with art and thought into the future. I think I'll ask John Zorn if he has any music --
lately he's been experimenting with Klezmer -- for these strange times. He
certainly has the heart and guts and ferocity.
And I think I'll be listening to a
startingly unique orchestral work, "Apocalypse," by John McLaughlin,
his Mahavishnu Orchestra, Michael Tilson-Thomas, the extraordinary violinist
Jean-Luc Ponty, and I think the London Symphony Orchestra. Despite the title, it
is not about destruction. It is, I think, about the birth of creation out of its
intimacy with destruction, the equation of creation and destruction. If our
familiar perspectives falter this month, maybe we can profit from the Hindu view
of life and the universe, perhaps this ancient civilization has something to say
and give to us. I can't recommend this richly musical and richly spiritual piece
highly enough under these dreadful circumstances.
I'll be listening to a lot of Billie
Holiday. I know of no artist so adept at turning torment, sadness and oppression
into spiritual flight -- her astonishing alchemy to turn the unbelievably bitter
into unbelievable sweetness.
And if I don't unwisely take pains to
filter them out, imbedded in her earlier albums are a surprising number of songs
of laughter and playfulness, and of deep love and romance. I could use some of
that.
The best music can do, I think, is to
be an important but only partial salve and unction for our sad travels through
this week and through the months and years to come.
Jost just reminded me of Thornton
Wilder's play, "The Skin of Our Teeth." I hate to say this, but what
will get us all, we who have, thank God, survived, from this dreadful moment
into our future will be our sad but remarkable nature to endure and survive
anything. Fiends. Villains. Psychos. Volcanos. Sabre-tooth tigers. Lions and
tigers and bears.
For those of us wondering why this
happened, and what it means, and why Them but not Us, there is also Wilder's
strange, original and deeply moving novel, "The Bridge of the San Luis
Rey."
Bob
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