HarpingOn

It’s my first full day at Avaloch Farm Music Institute, a place which can be described simply as a musician’s paradise. Rural New Hampshire’s isolation offers both seclusion and quietude, and the immediate proximity of practice studios to one’s bedroom and dining hall offer the opportunity to focus and work with as much or as little interruption as you wish. A Grove Dictionary of Music sits at one end of the barn, a sign that one has the time and space not only to practice, but to satisfy any sudden curiosity about a composer or piece. To get to the lake, one walks through an apple orchard where one can pick a snack off a tree (though the home-cooked food here fills and satisfies dozens of New-Yorquinos who might normally be precious about their Phad Thai or almond latte). For those seeking some animal therapy, there’s ample time to commune with Jessie, a large German Shepherd who often appears at mealtimes along with her owner Fred Tauber, Avaloch’s godfather and spiritual leader.

There are broadly no restrictions here, yet the atmosphere engenders a positivity which tacitly enforces one golden rule: don’t spoil it. There are new and familiar faces alike, but no cliques. Though there are discussions about life and work in New York, they somehow don’t revolve around the MTA’s existential state of dysfunction or the price of real estate (subjects of roughly 40% of Manhattanite conversations). Vulgarity is seldom heard. Exhibitions of resentment or negativity are absent. One gets the feeling that this is what summer camp was supposed to be like when you were a kid, had it not been for inhibiting factors such as homesickness, puberty or adolescent low self-esteem.

All of us are here are working on new music in some form. This week, the resident ensembles include several string quartets, a brass group, a jazz ensemble as well as some soloists collaborating with composers on fresh pieces. Having brought my baroque and modern harps up with me from New York, I’ve met up here with composer/violinist George Meyer and mandolinist/composer Tom Morrison. Having worked with each other in various capacities at Juilliard, we decided to see what we could create if we put ourselves and our instruments together in a room.

This morning’s session started off with the first movement of Bach’s Trio Sonata in E-flat, BWV 525. While the exercise was to collaboratively create a unified sound, the process was one of personal humility. Finding ways to feed off the combination of three different instruments, we took opportunity to listen to the correspondence between bow strokes and mandolin plucks, and pay close attention to how the sounds we produce might accidentally sustain over another instrument. String instruments, be they bowed or plucked, are incredibly noisy and fussy. For instance, an expressive scratch on a bow, perhaps ideal for Brahms or Franck, can cover up a mandolin’s phrase or arc. A boomy line from the harp’s mid-range can turn a refined texture into baby-foody mush. Thus, we worked on the initial attacks of individual notes, only then determining the color and spin of the subsequent production of tone. Introducing one’s presence in the texture becomes a humbling enterprise, so as to ensure that one isn’t obfuscating the mellifluous line of another instrument. This is the joy of chamber music: a process whereby happiness can be derived not just from playing with others, but in witnessing how you can lend encouragement to your colleagues so that they might reveal the best of themselves.

From there we took a break and started improvising, simply to enjoy what might evolving out of some free collaborative chemistry. Initially, Tom and I figured out how to make the combined texture of the harp and mandolin line up, so as to give a wide and flexible base for George to work with. (For those who don’t know George’s playing, it’s really fun to play with. He’s to switch between classical and fiddling styles with incredible virtuosic ease, transforming a downtown minimalist vibe into a soundscape from middle America.) Starting with two note-cells and then moving one by one to 4 or 5 note groupings, we found a common language that would allow the other voice to emerge clearly though seamlessly. As George started playing, patterns of implied harmonies started to take the small melodic shapes he would feed us, and in turn all three of us started to learn each other’s go-to ticks and instincts – the tools we use to get messages across. Before long, a structure took shape, and with each miniature jam session, more would be loosely notated.

The morning and afternoon sessions flew by, both insanely productive, so after dinner we decided to have the evening off. As George and Tom headed down to the basement to play ping-pong with members of the Momenta Quartet, I returned to the studio for some time alone with the baroque harp. Lately I’ve been working through the toccatas from Girolamo Diruta’s Il Transilvano, a collection of pieces not only by Diruta, but by several of his Venetian colleagues, such as Claudio Merulo and Luzzasco Luzzaschi. Diruta’s curatorial project offers insight into how organists and keyboardists were taught in the late 16th century. But more importantly for me, it also offers insight into how harp music started to take off in the same period. Though baroque HP nerds talk about the “Italian Baroque Harp” colloquially, much of it characteristic identity as a florid scale and arpeggio machine is derived from a group of composers in Naples who travelled north to study with the likes of Luzzaschi and Merulo. Since Avaloch is a space for exploration, I decided to start from the source and see what harpists and harp composers were being handed by their keyboardist progenitors.

Throughout Il Transilvano there are scales upon scales upon more scales throughout the manuscript, initially encouraging an impassioned Liszt-like frenzy. Fortunately, Diruta’s accompanying treatise on playing the organ itself offers a key piece of advice early on, telling students that even if they wish to play with force or agility, that they ought to maintain a supple hand, “as if handling an infant.” Luzzaschi’s Toccata del Quarto Tono grants a particular challenge in balancing the sweet with the virtuosic. Because of the huge amount of acoustic ringing that goes on beneath a harp’s sounding board, calculating the proper velocity of attack on the strings takes an anally high level of of care and treatment. For instance, the scales have to pass seamlessly between hands – one has to ensure that the two hands are moving the strings the same amount so that there isn’t a sudden bump when there’s an exchange. The scales themselves also have to sound at an appropriate volume level so that the level virtuosity doesn’t cover up the implicit harmonies. Conversely, one has to accept that there are things that will inevitably not be as clear as on the organ or the harpsichord (confronting the harp’s idiosyncrasies realistically is the flip-side of the coin). The exercise prompts an internal conversation between your hands, the music and the instrument. Each has an equal say in the process, but your hands and sensibilities cannot become constricted or forced.

Sitting in bed, I’m overwhelmed by the care that goes into a space like Avaloch’s. For the first time in a very long while, it feels as if innocence and humility can truly sit side by side with intense and high-pressured creative processes. As my generation’s musical mentors and trailblazers continue to disappoint us in the ongoing revelations of the #MeToo era, a space dedicated to honest and open creative enterprises are more important than ever, as they don’t simply foster musical innovation but emotional restoration. I find myself asking what more I could be doing with my own approach to music this week, as I continue to transport organ music to the harp bench. Organists spend so much time alone, that a week spent with a collaborative mindset is still jarring to the sensibilities. Organists are a notoriously proud breed, isolated by their sincerity yes, but perhaps by a misplaced solemnity which translates into pride. Here at Avaloch, the scenery is too beautiful, the accommodations too comfortable, and the people too honest for any expression of pride. My residency here has already proven to be a humbling experience.

While I have many faults, there is one which comes up every time I head to an art museum: no matter what I’m looking at, I will likely end up drawing a parallel between the artwork in front of me and a piece of music I know. Blends of colors and indeterminacy in impressionistic paintings always lead me to one or another piece of Debussy. The balance of strict proportion and high ornamentation in 18th Century portraiture will lead me to C.P.E Bach or Gluck. Medieval paintings of courtly love mingled with the divine parable of human sacrifice correspond to the motets of Guillaume de Machaut.

It’s hard to say whether it’s a filter, a means of translation or a tendency to apply some complementary historical context. More often that not, there’s little direct historical or constructive correlation between art and a piece of music I see. It’s all very vague, general. There are similarities between art and music, admittedly, but often the difference between the physical phonomena of light and sound often render the two mutually exclusive. Take ornamentation for instance. A musical ornament strikes me as spontaneous, and even superfluous to a musical performance. A musician can leave it out, lengthen it, change it. But an extra flower, a touch of gilding or any other small addition in a painting is usually seen as a product of something far more willful. Once it’s on the canvas, it’s done (though presumably the artist may have changed his mind several times in the process).

It’s often the case that performers tend to think of process of music as an action executed in real time, while a painting is often seen as a finished product of a past action, somehow immutable. Such distinctions are arguably false, as the composition of music is a process unseen (though often less glorious than painting), and the very processes of how a painting was constructed can be divined through some careful gazing. It’s really a matter of where you want to position yourself when you look at a piece of art or listen to a piece of music. That’s why I love getting to see a piece of art or music that challenges you to sit in multiple time spaces at once.

In visiting Francisco de Zubarán’s (1598-1664) paintings of Jacob and his twelve sons at the Frick, I was struck by their sheer size. Each is not just life-size, but larger, close to seven feet tall. And yet, despite their size, none seemed unsubtle or overblown. Every detail about the sons’ clothing, posture, and possessions bore to me the significance of the blessings bestowed upon by their father in Genesis 49.

Some like Issachar are more conventional and obvious.

Issachar is a strong donkey,
Lying down between the sheepfolds;
He saw that a resting place was good,
And that the land was pleasant;
So he bowed his shoulder to the burden,
And became a slave at forced labor.

Benjamin, Jacob’s youngest son, is dressed as a dandy. His duplicity can be seen not just in his posture, but in the occlusion of half of his face, starkly contrasted against the Carvaggio-esque green paleness of the half left in the sunlight.

Benjamin is a ravenous wolf,
In the morning devouring the prey,
And at the evening dividing the spoil.

Asher has more layers. Carrying a loaves of bread and sporting an emblem on his garb used in Zubarán’s Adoration of the Magi, he prefigures Christ as the final incarnation of Melchisedech.

Asher’s food shall be rich,
And he shall provide Royal delicacies.

But in Naphtali, there was something different. He’s sporting a shovel. Why?

Naphtali is a doe let loose
That bears lovely fawns.

His stance is also oddly commanding compared to that of his brothers. In looking at the Frick’s informational plaque, it said that this particular study was based on a depiction Naphtali’s by Jacques de Gheyn’s II (1565-1629) prints of Karel van Mander I (1548-1606). In particular the rhetorical shape of the hand is very similar. It’s open, though not relaxed. The face in van Mander’s is based on a woodblock of Christ’s apparition to Mary Magdalene by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Christ’s garb and sporting of the shovel however, are seen explicitly in Zubarán’s later painting. Dürer’s? On an engraving of Saint Bartholomew by Martin Schongauer (1445-1491).

Immediately, the music of organist and harpist Antonio de Cabezón (1510-1566) came to mind. In 1570, his son Hernando published a volume of what he described as “mere crumbs of his father’s achievements.” The collection included some of the larger and more popular keyboard works that Antonio had composed in his lifetime, transcribed by his son due to a near total loss of his sight. The volume contains a work entitled “Stabat Mater I” and another, “Stabat Mater II.” Containing the same harmonies but with different variations and ornaments, they stand out because the cantus firmus (that is, the fundamental melody) doesn’t align with any contemporary liturgical chant setting of the Stabat Mater.

At the Cross her station keeping,
stood the mournful Mother weeping,
close to her Son to the last.

Can the human heart refrain
from partaking in her pain,
in that Mother’s pain untold?

Indeed, it turns out that they are both embellishments of Josquin des Prez’s (1455-1521) monumental setting of the hymn, which uses not a Gregorian chant as its basis, but a secular melody taken from composer Gilles Binchois (1400-1460). Binchois melody was originally set to a text also about the sorrows of a woman.

Like a woman most distressed,
more even than all the others,
with no hope of being consoled on any day of my life,
weighted down by my misfortune,
I desire death, day and night.

The trick in performing Cabezón’s piece however comes in deciding a tempo. There are phenomenal number of notes, indeed too many to play on a keyboard at once.

There are several possibilities (all conjecture, mind you). Perhaps that the work is intended for the harp, where the natural sustaining quality of the strings allows you pluck a note and leave it. Alternatively, maybe all the notes aren’t meant to be played – much music of this period was written down for the purpose of showing people how to improvise themselves, rather than be performed directly from the score. But supposing that decision is made, what speed to we play it at? There are roughly sixteen of Cabezón’s notes in scales for every half note beat of Josquin’s motet. Is the piece meant to go at a speed similar to which it’s supposed to be sung? Or is it “its own thing?” Indeed, in teasing out how to perform the work, you’re subconsciously determining primacies of authorship, based on pure aesthetics and gut feeling.

I look at Zubarán and I can’t help but wonder if these are really “his” paintings? We know his students’ hands are on them, and we know that the emotive symbols that make each of the characters individual are borrowed from earlier masters. While I can see Zubarán’s genius in bringing all these elements together, I can’t help but also see the beauty in the accumulation of symbols and influences across centuries. In the end, authorship or attempts to divine a scheme of construction dissipate the more you look. It’s as if the artist – or artists – fade away. These are paintings intended to showcase not the self, but the divine – that is, something untouched by time.

If you go to church, you’ll know that your organist was somewhat occupied last week. During Holy Week, the standard schedule of one or two services per week is upended entirely. There are perhaps two services on Maundy Thursday, a long service on Good Friday (lasting up to three hours or more), a service late Saturday evening, and as many as three services on Sunday morning (the earliest of which may well be at six o’clock). On top of that, there are extra rehearsals for the brass, some hand-holding sessions to teach your sopranos innumerable hymn descants, and a lot of conversations with the clergy to reassure them that nothing about this year’s music will come as a surprise to the parishioners who only attend church on Christmas and Easter. It is in this week that organists become miracle workers. They are exhausted.

Compared to other Episcopalian organists across the country, my own Holy Week was relatively light. At Christ & Saint Stephen’s, I managed to get away with only one extra rehearsal, as I only had to play and conduct one service per day from Maundy Thursday to Easter Sunday. Other perks: we had no brass on Easter morning (my trumpet player fell ill), nor did we have any hymn descants (as I despise them).

Most of the musical energy this week went into Good Friday, not to ramp it up, but to wind it down. In years past, it’s been customary for the full choir to provide a series of large-scale meditations to accompany the Passion story. This year, the forces were much smaller, comprising two sopranos, a viola da gamba and a baroque harp. The austerity was fitting. Just the night before, the church had been stripped of all ornaments and decorations, depriving worshippers of any visual reassurance. The ensemble performed portions of the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah as set by François Couperin. Though it speaks of desolation, abandonment and misery, the music never gives in to the extreme emotionality or pain of the text. There is often a steady tempo throughout, and a sameness in affect for the duration of the work.

The harmonies tend not to wander terribly far. The voices tend to stay in consistent registers. As if suffering is a matter of fact; the lack of extreme external expression of sadness beckons listeners to fill the emotional gap themselves. It is fundamentally music designed to evoke a sense of distance from your surroundings.

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!

She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.

She is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude: she dwelleth among the heathen, she findeth no rest: all her persecutors overtook her between the straits.

Couperin’s preface to the Lamentations informs the performers that the work can be accompanied by an organ and/or a harpsichord. In using neither, I admit to openly admit to ignoring the composer’s intent. But for Good Friday, I wanted to use acoustic stringed instruments. The harpsichord, though it decays, is too loud and clunky. The organ, though soft, does not naturally decay but sustains until the finger is lifted out of the key. In short, these are not “expressive” instruments in the manner a harp or a lute might be—they don’t whisper or naturally expire in the way a human might. Neither breathes and dies.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was lutes, gambas and harps that were often used to materially compliment the story of the Crucifixion, because like the cross, they were made of wood. No example is more famous than Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, in which the gamba accompanies the haunting aria “Komm, süsses Kreuz.” But more than that, the tension of gut strings and the sheer stress placed on the instruments themselves more graphically mirrors the physical process of crucifixion: as the body lies on the cross, the chest muscles and rotator cuff are extended to the point of hypertension, prompting death not by exsanguination, but by asphyxiation.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.  (George Herbert, 1633)

Baroque harps have three rows of strings, lending the player an ability to play harmonies twice over in quick colorful succession. But the sheer number of strings (92 total) allows for a long natural resonance and decay. Since getting my new baroque harp, I’ve had a bit of fun learning to improvise and get the instrument sound extravagant. But this week, allowing the instrument simply to sound and die was enough. The strings curiously don’t have to be plucked to sound. Just providing sympathetic vibrations helps the harmonies bloom, take shape and fade.

Once Easter services had ended and I’d taken a nap, Richard and I went to the movies to see The Death of Stalin, a fictionalized account of the days after Stalin’s demise, comprised of countless anecdotes from the span of the dictatorship. But, my expectations of escape were somewhat foiled by the manner in which the film is set up. The film begins with a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, in which a last minute repeat performance has to be arranged so that comrade Stalin can have a recording. The situation in the film based on the true events of 1944, in which pianist Maria Yudina had to repeat a performance of the concerto and record it for Stalin.

The story is most famously recorded in Dmitri Shostakovich’s memoirs:

In his final years, Stalin didn’t let anyone in to see him for days at a time. He listened to the radio a lot. Once Stalin called the Radio Committee, where the administration was, and asked if they had a record of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23, which had been heard on the radio the day before. “Played by Yudina,” he added. They told Stalin that of course they had. Actually, there was no record, the concert had been live. But they were afraid to say no to Stalin, no one ever knew what the consequences might be. A human life meant nothing to him. All you could do was agree, submit, be a yes man, a yes man to a madman.

Stalin demanded that they send the record with Yudina’s performance of the Mozart to his dacha. The committee panicked, but they had to do something. They called in Yudina and an orchestra and recorded that night. Everyone was shaking with fright, except for Yudina, naturally. But she was a special case, that one, the ocean was only knee-deep for her.

Yudina later told me that they had to send the conductor home, he was so scared he couldn’t think. They called another conductor, who trembled and got everything mixed up, confusing the orchestra. Only a third conductor was in any shape to finish the recording. I think this a unique event in the history of recording—I mean changing conductors three times in one night. Anyway, the record was ready by morning. They made one single copy and sent it to Stalin. Now, that was a record record. A record in yessing.

Soon afterward, Yudina received an envelope with twenty thousand rubles. She was told it came on the express orders of Stalin. Then she wrote him a letter. I know about this letter from her, and I know that the story seems improbable; Yudina had many quirks, but I can say this—she never lied. I’m certain that her story is true. Yudina wrote something like this in her letter: “I thank you Iosif Vissarionovich, for your aid. I will pray for you day and night and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before the people and the country. The Lord is merciful and He’ll forgive you. I gave the money to the church that I attend.”

And Yudina sent this suicidal letter to Stalin. He read it and didn’t say a word, they expected at least a twitch of the eyebrow. Naturally, the order to arrest Yudina was prepared and the slightest grimace would have been enough to wipe away the last traces of her. But Stalin was silent and set the letter aside in silence. The anticipated movement of the eyebrows didn’t come.

Nothing happened to Yudina. They say that her recording of the Mozart was on the record player when the leader and teacher was found dead in his dacha. It was the last thing he had listened to.

By all accounts, everything about Yudina’s musicianship and performances was bound up with her faith, even to the point of fanaticism. She would perform publicly wearing large crucifixes, or read poems by banned poets such as Boris Pasternak before sitting down to play Bach, enduring numerous periods of blacklisting because of the outlandishness of her… piety? In Yudina’s recording and interpretation of the concerto, she’s cool as a cucumber. In particular, the second movement is totally devoid of emotion, empathy or sensitivity. It’s almost deadly.

If we’re to believe pianist and musicologist Robert Levin, such an interpretation arguably flies in the face of Mozart’s own intentions. Slow movements were the musical zones for musicians to take off, improvise and demonstrate their technical fluidity. Furthermore, Levin tells us that “When improvisation regains its former position at the center of classical music making, perhaps the gap between composer and performer, between old and new music, between vernacular and art music, and between classical performer and audience will narrow.”

Until last night, I would have said that I agree with Levin 100 percent. But intimacy between performer and listener is not always the choice means of communication. If one is perhaps accustomed to outlandish or “external” performances, a cool or distant performance can prompt a different sense of confidentiality: by creating as much distance as possible, the listener has to fill a gap themselves, look inside.

Yudina was atypical in her approach to the instrument. In listening, I don’t hear any of the hallmark muscularity or flat-footedness associated with mid-century Soviet pianism. In her time and place, it was relatively radical musicianship, though now it would be seen as passé or old fashioned. I’ve had Yudina’s second movement on loop for an hour or so now, and I’m admittedly mesmerized. In a month or so, when I’m in a different place, it will likely have less meaning to me. But at the very least, her recording is a testament to the ways in which any interpretation can be meaningful, regardless of its attitude towards history.

Those of us in historical performance spend a great deal of time dressing things up: we improvise, we ornament, we play with extreme tempi, etc. It’s exhilarating or moving in its own right, but I admit to having gotten tired of it as of late. There’s only so much affectation one can add before it becomes an empty convention of its own. If one isn’t careful, the best intentions to “draw out” the past in music can override the music itself. It becomes less a matter of historical performance, but rather historicism performed.

As ever, reading the news these days causes me to cringe. Empty protests over gun control walked through our streets, demanding gun control for citizens, though not for the police forces who wage violence on the nation’s most vulnerable. The gap between the political activism and the motivations behind the activism itself continues to grow, and I fear that no significant political change will result. It’s as if the act of screaming has come to override the reasons for which we raised our voices in the first place.

I’ve done my best to stick to the New York Review or Times Literary Supplement to get my news. In a recent issue of the TLS, I came across a wonderful quote applicable to our time. In a letter to Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini posited:

I wonder, dear Alberto, whether this angry anti-fascism vented in the piazzas these days, when fascism is no more, isn’t actually a weapon of distraction the ruling class uses to tie up the dissent of workers and students.

Like an over-ornamented performance of Couperin or Mozart, the delivery or packaging of our politics can detract from the matters at hand. While the Russia probe drones on, Obamacare is being dismantled, piece by piece. While we are talking about 7,000 annual gun deaths, thousands more are dying of opium overdoses. As we decry a negligible increase in interest rates, it has become clear that many Americans’ investments in the Chinese economy may have been wasted. I know I’m a grouch, but America is simply getting distracted.

Like politics, music has the potential to be derailed. It can get off track, become too eccentric and lose sight of what’s at the core. But a trademark of a highly trained classical musician is that of extreme focus, and the ability not just to concentrate on matters of execution but of what the performance will have communicated by the end.

Folks, the midterm elections are coming. Voters are not exempt from the rules that beset politicians and musicians: they too can stay focused and cut out the noise, the excess, the ornaments. They can stop yelling, and start thinking.

Interfaith coupledom has entered a new phase. Friday night, Richard and I headed up to B’nai Jeshurun on 88th Street a little after 6 o’clock. Having become accustomed to relatively poor church attendance rates in Manhattan, watching a room and balcony fill up with congregants was a jolt to the system. People talked enthusiastically before the service as the oud and clarinet tuned up in front of the bimah. Within ten minutes there was singing with dancing soon thereafter.

Unfamiliar with the proto-Mediterranean music, the order of service or the essence of what being there ought to be about, my only point of reference were correlating elements with the Anglican tradition. Preparation for Sabbath begins with the 95th Psalm, the same Psalm which constitutes the Venite, the first appointed canticle for the service of Matins. Much like Evensong, Psalms are essential to getting the service going. Far more was sung than said in the service. And even more was read privately than sung.

I admit I had never thought of reading as having a physical embodiment until Friday. Fellow congregants read psalms, prayers or other texts at their own pace, partaking in a middle ground of public performance and private devotion that doesn’t exist in the Anglican Eucharist. One might have near silence at points, or low level muttering and chanting of psalms, as well as occasions when the congregation is singing portions of the psalms in unison.

I realized that Anglicanism’s Catholic heritage has provided somewhat of a zero-sum game when it comes to participation in the service. Either you are watching, or you are sitting/standing/reading/singing exactly the same thing as your fellow congregants at the same time. Recited sections of text are often short, memorable, easily reproducible. The theatrical nature of Catholicism is beautiful, yes, but it’s built on the dark historical reality of illiteracy. Indeed the Eucharist has become beautiful over the centuries, but perhaps only due to necessity. After all, for hundreds of years, Christian children with intellectual promise were relegated to lives of celibacy in the church. Literacy did not pass from parent to child, but from cleric to novice.

I suppose I identified most with the very end of the Sabbath preparation and the singing of the L’cha dodi. It tells of anticipation for the arrival of God’s bride in the Sabbath, but also in awaiting Jesse’s son of Bethlehem, the foretold Messiah. In the final verse, the congregation turns to face the entrance to the synagogue, welcoming in the Sabbath as she enters as well as expecting the Messianic arrival.

Richard came to church this morning. It was a good morning for it, musically speaking. While I’d like to think every Sunday in front of the choir is a good musical occasion, Advent is special and weird. Think about it: it’s a season of waiting for something that we already know is coming. We get to be bleak, but it’s one that’s fairlt insincere. Christ isn’t not going to be born, and Episcopalians don’t really believe in hell or consequential divine intervention, anway. In this sense, there’s a dramatic element to the swathes of fire and brimstone, wailing and penitence, lying in the knowledge that there will be a release of the tension come December 24. We can’t un-remember that Christmas is coming – it’s kind of essential to the whole Christianity thing.

With little exception, I’m guilty of doing the same music every year for Advent. It’s simply not Advent without Byrd’s setting of words from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, utilized in the second section of the Advent Prose.

Civitas sancti tui facta est deserta. Sion deserta facta est, Jerusalem desolata est.

Living under the reign of Elizabeth I, William Byrd may have been more familiar with desolation and general bleakness than many composers throughout history. The English Reformation was still not over, and the fate of English Roman Catholics was unsure. Byrd’s Canciones Sacrae of 1589 were composed and compiled in a period of relatively violent period. There are at least eight martyrs officially recognized by the Catholic Church who died in 1589 for their faith. The relatively small scale of its contents point to the extent to which Roman Catholic liturgy had been diminished. Gone were extravagant and lengthy anthems for the English Marian liturgy, the likes of which were found in the Eton Choirbook. Byrd’s works instead hearken back to the smaller anthems compiled in the 1575 Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur, such as Thomas Tallis’s In jejunio et fletu.

In jejunio et fletu orabant sacerdotes: Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo, et ne des hereditatem tuam in perditionem. Inter vestibulum et altare plorabant sacerdotes, dicentes: Parce populo tuo.

(In fasting and weeping the priests prayed: Spare, O Lord, spare thy people, and give not thine inheritance to perdition. Between the porch and the altar the priests wept, saying: Spare thy people.)

If anything from this period could be seen in a Dickensian light, it would be the Byrd’s and Tallis’s Reformation era Latin works. Like Dickens’s prose, the counterpoint speaks fluently of depressing matters.

In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically called ‘the Hands,’ — a race who would have found mere favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs.                                                                                  (Hard Times, Charles Dickens)

One gets enjoyment out of reading Dickens, as the landscape and environment are so equally detailed in their descriptions. The interaction between space and the lives of the characters in Hard Times keeps the reader wondering if there really is any way out of Coketown.

Like Dickens, Byrd has way of getting at a similar sort of dramatic claustrophobia. Byrd’s situation of Civitas Sancti in a major key is deceptive. If one listens to the harmonies alone, without text, one might hear tones of comfort or sentimentality. But the middle section, Sion deserta facta est, is in pure homophony, total stagnation.

And yet the counterpoint tells a different story. Throughout the course of the anthem, the thematic material takes a interesting journey.

Each of the themes contain elements of each other. “Jerusalem” and “Civitas Sancti” use the same melodic descending third. The first “desolata est” and “facta est deserta” share the same rhythm.

They both come together however, in the final thematic iteration of “desolata est,” containing the same melody of the opening theme with the rhythmic impetus of the second.

The piece has travelled and at the same time the music has not. Though time passes, the listener is in the same place as when the piece began. Desolation may entail some vague expectation of improvement, but it’s also a confrontation of that which is in front of you. Otherwise, it will just remain the same. There is no hope without the preceding hopelessness.

The Jerusalem declaration did not go unnoticed at either B’nai Jeshurun or Christ & Saint Stephen’s. How could it not? The historical importance of the city draws the eyes of the world week after week, year after year, though solutions seem far away. But both congregations were told that while Jerusalem is important, it’s but a preparation for that Jerusalem which is to come.

But that doesn’t negate certain realities. Whether you like it or not, the State of Israel has made Jerusalem its political capital, irrespective of Donald Trump’s symbolic act of recognition. The status quo remains the same. The silver lining of Trump’s actions is perhaps the fact that we are asking ourselves about what the alternatives really are to the last 50 years of American policy in the Middle East. What are we anticipating? Is Advent – or indeed, are our lives – spent in confrontation or expectation?

I’m back in Oberlin. After a few hours’ organ practice, I headed up to the third floor of Mudd Library to sit in a “womb chair” and read. I try and get here as often as I can, as the depth of these rotating sofa pods work in conjunction library’s designated quiet zone to lend the same sense of isolation I can normally only get in a practice room. They feel protective.

Since interviewing Alice Goodman by phone a few weeks ago, I’ve been working my way though Paradise Lost. It’s the 350th anniversary year of the poem’s publication, so I suppose it’s as good a time as any to have grabbed a fresh copy. For certain, it makes more pleasurable reading than the countless mind-numbing books on the political revolutions wrought either by Donald Trump in 2017 or Martin Luther in 1517 (men equal in their social charms, from what I gather).

The last time I read Milton was as an undergrad, so I’d since forgotten the little chuckle that one has upon reading the introduction to Paradise Lost. Milton makes it clear that you’re about to embark on a mega-poem adventure with no rhyming. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. It is, apparently, “barbarous,” “troublesome,” “unnecessary,” “restrictive,” and apparently no longer used in Spain or Italy. But with Milton, you don’t need syllabic symmetry. That which is poetic lies in Milton’s gratuitous conjuring up of images to evoke aural sensations. It’s not surprising – he was blind, after all. And yet the sheer number of constant references to the Bible, Dante, Virgil, Ovid, and anything Greek and mythological feels astounding. One can almost imagine Milton working through a checklist of myths and legends about heaven and hell, one by one, variation by variation. While each idea feels familiar, every presentation feels fresh or spoken anew. One starts to hear voices of characters that seem close, real, tangible. Indeed, in encountering the band of fallen angels gearing up for war in Book I, one can’t help but be but drawn in.Whence the chaos, torture, brimstone, lava, colorings of red and black? It’s clear that these aren’t demons or fork-tailed devils that we think of when we think of hell? They still seem angelic.

But why flutes? While Paradise Lost is an epic poem, Milton doesn’t look back to Homer, but to the historian Thucydides’ account of the Battle of Mantinea (418 BC).
Milton’s reference is pointed: Of the many battles of the Peloponnesian Wars, Mantinea was Sparta’s battle of pride after being barred from the Olympic Games by the Athenians in 420 BC. It might seem trivial at first, but Sparta’s isolation was not merely symbolic, as the Olympics constituted a religious ceremony on Mount Olympus, the dwelling place of the god Zeus. To be barred from the Olympics was to be cut off from Zeus entirely. Both Thucydides’ Spartans and Milton’s angels thus march to sounds of flutes so that they might regain an audience with God, and not simply to return to the place from which they were expelled. The flutes inspire order and stoicism, as the Spartans and fallen angels fight not for revenge, but for dignity.

Milton also says that they’re playing in a “Dorian mood.” It’s a clever play on words, referring at once to the modal system in music, as well as the moods that beset the soul upon hearing certain musical keys or tonalities. In The Republic, Plato declares some modes as useful and not useful: the Lydian mode was too relaxed and melancholy, supposedly “not even fit for women” (yikes); and the Phrygian mode is energetic and lively. But when he gets round to the Dorian mode, Plato is often quoted as talking about militaristic affect. But the longer quote actually reads:
The Dorian mode is that of assertiveness, sure, but also that of last resort even. It’s not aggressive. It’s as if the fallen angels are somehow trying to shake off their sense resignation.

The references back to Thucydides and Plato in just ten lines of poetry feel dense and profound. But I see a glaring problem: the flute generally signified something very different in Milton’s day. It doesn’t quite line up with, say, Shakespeare’s famous lines about the recorder in Act III of Hamlet:

Hamlet’s paranoia is in full swing by this point in the play: he’s putting on a play to tap the conscience of his uncle Claudius, depicting a fictitious king being poisoned in the ear. Recorders here are no instruments of war, organization, or resolve, or of anything really; they are but reflections of those who breathe life into them and maneuver them – instruments to move the souls of others. Such a notion was set forth beautifully by St. Augustine:But Augustine’s erudition is Hamlet’s pain. Hamlet feels himself a pipe, and his father’s ghost the piper. Here flutes have no perfection, no phalanxes. They don’t serve to organize. They sing to move, to discombobulate.

And what of modes? What of the moods they inspire? Especially if the ancient Greek Dorian and Phyrigian modes known to Plato were not known to Milton. The modes of Milton’s day were Church modes, which over the course of centuries inverted the Phyrigian and the Dorian.Milton’s Dorian was the same as our own today. If you sit at a piano, it’s just a scale which starts on D and works its way up the white notes. It’s wistful, but also somewhat duplicitous. When you get to to the sixth note, B, it’s always higher than you’d expect. It feels like you’ve started a minor scale all over again on A, as the last four notes mirror the first four notes of the scale. One gets the sense that two sad keys sitting side by side in the same scale. It’s what gives Simon and Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair that peculiar  edge of melancholy when they sing “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” the first time round.

Conversely, Plato’s Dorian mode is the same as our Phryigian mode. It’s the one that’s a bit of a drag. If you head over to your piano, start a scale on E, and work your way up, it’s the second note that sounds too low. When you head back to home base or your home key, there’s no avoiding a certain depressive quality to that single too-low note.

I’ve kept returning to that passage over the last few week, wondering exactly how it is the fallen angels are moved in that passage. As I write, I ponder if the distinctions are arbitrary – it’s such a small difference. But as I read and reread, I have trouble hearing Thucydides and Plato. Shakespeare and Purcell are somehow engrained in my musical sensibilities. I can’t “unhear” them.

                                                                                                                               

Alice Goodman got me back into reading Milton while talking to me about The Death of Klinghoffer in an interview for VAN Magazine. She’s republished her libretto in its entirety without any cuts.  In some ways she’s a real hero of mine, as the libretto of Nixon in China puts me on edge every time I hear or read it. But the questions I have after talking to her are ones that only time will answer. I wonder whether people will be able to “unhear” John Adams’ opera. After all the fuss, the protests, the sheer noise, I wonder if people will be able to hear Alice’s when they read it. It’s as if we now have two operas: we have “Klinghoffer” as it’s referred to colloquially, and we have The Death of Klinghoffer, a work of poetry embedded in Alice’s new book, History Is Our Mother. 

https://van-us.atavist.com/silent-valley

After having her little operation on Monday, our new Corgi puppy has been recovering at the puppy shop in Chelsea (yes, you are welcome to judge me for getting a dog at a puppy shop). In the mean time, R and I have been visiting her every afternoon and indulging her passions for fashion and anatomy as she chews on his arm, my hands, his pants, my bag, his shoes, my socks, his nose, my ears, an Australian exchange student’s brunette ponytail. (She really is very well-rounded.)

Smitten as I am with my own puppy, I admit I find it hard to focus on one dog at a time in the shop. On the one hand, the barking, the crowded cages and the constant smell of cleaning products makes me uneasy, but also after a few days, I’ve started to recognize some of the other dogs’ odder traits and habits. There’s the escape artist Husky who jumps out of the playpen at every opportunity in order to greet the entire store; the indignant Pug and her dozy French Bulldog companion who both gaze upon you expectantly from the display window; a Pomeranian that literally pees everywhere, without fail, whenever it sees a human (while the shopkeeper isn’t supposed to assign names, he nicknamed this one Geyser); a stalkery Shiba Inu who tends to stand up and stare at the nearest human from within his cage, while he prarie-dogs a turd in and out of his anal sphincter. My dog may be gnawing on my big toe, but I can’t help but continually lock eyes with this hypnotic Shiba with poor bowel control, who somehow looks into my soul, sensing my discomfort, doing his very best to make it worse with every clench and release of his anus. I’m transfixed.

Of course, my own dog doesn’t notice. She’s attending to important matters (at this point, I think it’s my left shoe). I can’t help but see irony in the fact that that despite being two months old, she has the ability to focus on chewing intently without being watched or judged by the other dogs, while I, a 25-year-old human, really just want to get away from the Shiba-shitter at all costs. The initial idea is that we’d name her Brünnhilde, only natural for a strong, persistent female Corgi (R rejected the idea of naming her after Elizabeth Warren). However, we realized over the course of a few days what it took most people about 5 seconds to figure out: a Corgi named after a Wagnerian opera heroine is a tad pretentious. Coupled with the fact that she is in fact two months old, has two dads and lives near Lincoln Center, it would just be downright precious. (Also, to my slight disappointment, when she barks, it in fact does sound like “bark, bark” and less like “ho-yo-toh-hoe.”)

So, what to name her? Let’s talk aesthetics. Corgis are adorable, right? Their feet are too short, their bodies are too long, they can’t really run all that fast, they can’t really climb up on to the couch before pre-adulthood or post-arthritis, etc. Their utility is rather, um, stunted. Usefulness aside though, they are really only recognized as being cute because Corgis are some of the stupidest looking dogs on earth. Some think they look like loaves of bread (thanks to the square, tailless, wiggle-butt), but ours is a bit more tubular in appearance. Some say they look like bats, but they’re a tad too long for that. Really, ours just looks like a bat-eared salami.

*Ta-da!*

Readers, allow me to introduce the latest addition to our household. Her name is Lunchmeat.

R and I took a couple of days to go and hear a rarely performed opera in L.A. Having never visited previously, the hour spent in traffic to get the Dixie Motel in West Hollywood (complete with an enormous painting of Lucille Ball on my door) made it feel like a “real” trip to Los Angeles. But the trip was a really lovely occasion, as director Yuval Sharon directed a performance of Lou Harrison’s Young Caesar which sold well over 2000 seats in Walt Disney Hall.

If you don’t know Lou Harrison or his music, a good starting place to trust your initial observation that it’s bananas and you should just roll with it. A west coast composer who was self-immersed in non-Western music, Harrison has come to occupy an uncomfortable territory of integrative genius on one hand and cultural appropriation on the other. Harrison is perhaps known for his works for Javanese Gamelan and South-Asian instruments, including a Suite for Violin and American Gamelan.

Young Caesar is no different in this respect. In Disney Hall, the orchestra pit was crammed with Japanese traditional instruments, a Gamelan, percussion, strings, a harp, a harmonium and a prepared piano. But while Harrison remained true to form in musical content, the dramatic content is what really sets the opera apart: the presentation of Julius Caesar as “gay.” Recently, sites like Opera Wire and others have heralded the dawn of gay operas in the last ten years, celebrating a performance of Peter Eotvos’ Angels in America at Lincoln Center and applauding the announcement that New York City Opera will be staging Charles Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain next season. And yet prior to the performance of Young Caesar in L.A., there seems to have been little direct recognition of an opera about two men in love that wasn’t composed anytime recently, but in 1971.

In Harrison’s opera, Caesar is in late adolescence/early adulthood, starting his initial ascent into the imperial Roman hierarchy. Being sent to the kingdom of Bythinia to fetch ships and military supplies for the Roman Army, he starts an affair with the King, tragically cut off by Caesar’s sense of duty to the Empire and to greatness (and his mother?). The story is not totally ahistorical – sexual fluidity was more common among Roman men than it is among American politicians (unless, of course, it’s in airport bathrooms), but the story doesn’t conform to the norms of what we think of in history. In a way, what makes Young Caesar interesting is the fact that an opera about same-sex relationship is still marketed as a “gay” opera. Harrison himself was openly gay and a pretty vocal proponent of gay rights for sure, but the opera doesn’t really differ too greatly in dramatic content from many other historical dramas discussing love and duty.

In essence, there’s no “gay cause,” no instance of gay-bashing, a struggle with homophobia, etc. Similarly, there’s no real conjecture about the sexuality of Caesar and the King or an insertion of sexuality into an event that might not have such an element to it at all (the historian Suetonius makes the nature of the relationship very clear). It differs, say, from Max Klinger’s interpretation of Caesar’s assassination, which I saw in Leipzig just a few weeks back. On one level the painting is historical and academic (“realist” some might argue), showing the toga-clad politicians with Roman noses posing over Caesar’s cadaver. But the presentation in someways is phenomenally symbolist and even homoerotic, equating presentations of beauty with those of rightful vengeance. The assassins aren’t young in their faces, but the muscularity and definition of their bodies tell otherwise. On the other hand, Caesar, though freshly murdered, appears to be months into his decomposition. It’s not just just a triumph justice or will, but the supremacy of youth and beauty over age, a familiar theme in gay art.

The opera is beautiful, and Sharon’s production was truly exquisite. What I ponder is whether the appeal of such on opera would stick. As many gay films and books focus on very real issues of disease, social alienation and violence, it was strange to see an opera where none of those elements were directly related to the presentation of sexuality on stage – I wasn’t sure I was consciously witnessing a “gay” opera, despite the manner in which was advertised and billed.

Does the opera occupy one edge of the spectrum for “gay” opera? Is it tame? Is it realstic? Was it even sanitized? Was the age discrepancy between Caesar (supposedly 16 or so) and the King (presumably middle-aged) down-played? Were it more explicit, would it engender negative attitudes towards the frequency of inter-generational gay relationships? Whence the time honored pathology of the worship of youth in gay life and homoerotic art for thousands of years? Is it more similar to Klinger than I thought? Or was this just a stab at one a more normative representation of gay life (be it with not-so-normal characters) on an opera stage?  I think only time will tell, but I hope to see another production of Young Caesar very soon.

On West 121st Street, just behind Columbia’s main campus, stereo beats from of a Friday night party are floating up from the parish hall at Corpus Christi Church. While generally neither problematic or untypcial for a weekend in an Upper Manhattan, a large stereo and the screams of 150 teenagers can make a continuo rehearsal a bit more of a challenge.

In baroque ensemble music, the harpsichord, along with a couple of theorbos and a viola da gamba are, for lack of a better term, the rhythm section for a group. They establish the harmony and provide a rhythmic impetus, working from bass part upwards (not too different from an electric bass and drum set in a garage band). Harpsichords and theorbos can pack a punch to make themselves more forceful: they can add lower notes, build more notes on top in between beats and physically create more sound to increase intensity. And yet, in rehearsing Giovanni Battista’s Giona, they’ve proven to be no match for a well-equipped stereo. Within a few hours, as Jonah is inside the whale’s belly, the continuo section was being swallowed by the quinceañera downstairs.

Chi mi sveglia? Dove sono? Son in mar? E che farò?   (Who wakes me up? Where am I? Am I at sea? And what am I doing?)

Where am I, indeed? I’m on the Upper West Side.

Prague is nuts. The old city is one of a thousand spires, sure, but also a city of a thousand hen parties and stag do’s. The outlandish and garish ornamentation of the baroque churches and classical buildings is ironically matched by the alcoholic behavior of several dozen British and German grooms-to-be, staggering with their groupies from restaurant to bar, strip club to sex shop, gafawing at the resilience of their livers. It’s perhaps the trashiest, most beautiful tourist trap I’ve ever seen.

My vacation is nearly over. Sunday is Pentecost, one of the major feasts in the Church’s calendar. As such, I’m leaving early so I can head home and be present on Sunday morning. Though I only have 18 hours to be a tourist in Prague, I’ve managed to cram in the big important sites in a few hours. Like Paris or London, every location seemed to have inspired or be associated with some great work I had encountered. Walking from Wenceslas Square I remembered Milan Kundera’s reflections on 1968. As I crossed the old town center and over to the Charles Bridge, lined with the huge creepy statues, I thought of all the kitschy vampire films of the 1920s set in Central Europe. I saw the castle, which is in fact a not just a single structure, but a complex of palaces, churches and administrative buildings surrounded by a wall, much of it used for sets in Amadeus. I took a detour over to the Vyšehrad, finally seeing the inspiration for the famous harp cadenza in Smetana’s Ma Vlast. 

But as usual, I wore out after a few hours and decided just to wander until I found coffee and a place to read. I usually take books with me, and upon leaving NYC a week ago was in the mood to take something French and nihilistic about the human experience (after all, I had just finished a degree Juilliard). On the recommendation of a friend, I had picked up a copy of Flaubert’s Salammbo to take on the trip. It’s not what I signed up for in the least. Contrary to realist novels like Madame Bovary, Salammbo is an exercise in lavish ancient historical romanticism – think “sex and violence in ancient Carthage.” I made it only about 10 pages in, when the heroine appears, flanked by 12 eunuchs armed with harps. She sings a lament for Carthage, in all languages and none, conveying to the belligerent foreigners the desolation of her home, a sort of morbid Pentecostal episode. But she finishes her song and drops her harp. All falls silent. 

I admit I still haven’t touched my harp since my graduation recital a few weeks ago. It’s been almost a month, but harp-overload kind of set in towards the end of semester. I suppose I went on vacation to get away, but instead got a fresh perspective. Seeing the Vyšehrad gave a new context to my recital, having played a transcription of the Smetana’s Moldau, the culminating episode in Ma Vlast. Though supposedly about the river itself, at the end of the movement the harp’s theme returns: an apparent reminder of the greatness that lies not just with rivers, but with the cities and fortresses that line them. Smetana’s harp theme illustrating the Vyšehrad is inescapable, a constant in the work. Unlike Salammbo’s harp, it can’t be dropped or silenced. 

I’m at the train station now, waiting for my boyrfriend to join me for our last night together on vacation. I should be sad that vacation is over, but really Prague has made me want to start practicing again. The city is saturated with music, from the constant stream of concerts of Mozart to the names of the train lines in and out of the city. Richard will be arriving on the “Mozart” train from Vienna, and will be heading out on the “Brahms” train to Berlin in the morning. The train is arriving is arriving now, heralded by several bell chime arpeggios and the melody sol-do-si-sol. No, it’s not Mozart. It’s the Vyšehrad, naturally.