Back in May, I had the pleasure of recording Beşyol, a fantastic new work for harp and electronics by Christopher Trapani with the folks at INA grm and France Musique.
Over the course of next week, two minutes of the piece will be broadcast each day in succession, as well as various interviews and perspectives shared by Chris and myself (with rather appalling French on my part, so apologies in advance).
Huge thanks to Anne Montaron, Pierre Charvet, Allison Ascrizzi and Elsa Biston for putting it all together. Huge thanks also to Camac Harps and the guys at Espace Camac Paris for making a wonderful Canopée available for the performance.
And of course, enormous gratitude to Christopher Trapani for the neat piece.
Tune in / stream at Création mondiale – Alla breve, sur France Musique, Monday – Friday at 12h55 and 22h25.
The organ at church has been on the fritz off and on for a little while. Perhaps to the titillation of my microtonal oriented colleagues, the digital portion of the organ has been tending to overcorrect town to A432 (thanks to a faulty temperature sensor on a 4’ principal pipe) while the pipes have been hovering around 438 or so, rendering unspeakable beatings and effects that even I find a little hard to stomach when trying to play a hymn for the congregation. The silver lining of consulting the technician about the repair is that I learned of the instrument’s capacity for manual alteration of pitch and temperament. That’s right: while the pipes on the organ can sit at normal concert pitch (or something approximating, depending on the weather), I myself can take matters into my own hands, crank up the digital stops to say, A455, set the temperament to meantone and zone out with some seicento music therapy on a Friday afternoon. Why? Well the sounds of wildly tuned sharps make certain triads feel like expansive spaces of discomfort, longing to be stretched out before falling into a consonant harmony, making good the etymological root of word “cadence” (in Latin, cadere, “to fall). The bumps in pitch make one stop and pause from time to time, as those perpetual endless lines which seem malicious and endless on a piano become naturally disjointed and independent.
The last few weeks I’ve been focused on reviving the Goldbergs on the pedal harp as I’m set to play them for in mid-December in New York and West Palm Beach. It’s an interesting exercise this time around as I’ve not really touched them for two and a half years. They seem to fall off the fingers (the kinetic memory is still there) but naturally I’m wanting different things from them now. Once upon a time, I had liked making them precious and careful, but lately I’ve been into applying Occam’s razor to allow myself to step on the gas and get on with it. It’s perhaps not totally surprising. My activities in hardcore early music (on period instruments, in temperaments, replete with fussy ticks and pauses) have wound down as I’ve focused more intensely on chamber music and new commissions. I’ve also been traveling a lot more to perform and becoming increasingly focused on reliable reproducibility and ironing out inconsistencies. Performing was already tiring, and I was tired of being tired when I played.
Existential corrections are perhaps on the horizon. I’m presently mellowing out (with wine) to 80’s French synthwave, yesterday I had some spicy Machaut bleating through my headphones at the gym. As for this morning, I practiced some Buxtehude continuo on my baroque harp before meeting a presenter about pulling together a program of Bach and Frescobaldi for 2026. The idea was to highlight Bach’s return to the seicento and his longstanding affinity with Frescobaldi’s Fiori Musicali late in life (if Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach’s testimony about his father’s musical journey is to be believed). The evidence is strong: Frescobadi’s techniques of treating Gregorian chant quotes as foundational micro material for fugues turn up all over Bach’s music; hexachordal fugues recall the extended Fantasias on Frescobaldi; the open score format of the ricercars in The Musical Offering, nod towards the Frescobaldi’s own publication conventions; and even the form of the Clavier Übung III seems to mirror Fiori Musicali, in devising an entire mass (be it Lutheran in this case) for a solo organist to perform in dialogue with sung liturgical music. Arnie Tanimoto and I have our work cut out for us showcasing the connection in a way that’s tangible and audible for the audience.
After the meeting, I was kind of eager to get back into the Frescobaldi and see what was there, but I was also looking for an excuse not to head back to the harp and practice any number of pedal changes and ill-suited fingerings, or generally confront the fact that the modern pedal harp for all its beauty, makes Bach unnecessarily more difficult to play. Counterpoint is especially prone to muddiness, and at times it feels as if there’s scarcely time to focus on the canons, as the bravura movements have to played with the the customary 8 fingers which harpists use (as our pinkies are too short when the hands are set up and pivoted toward the thumb). Indeed, I have memorized the Goldbergs but cannot seem to make it through the final variation, the famed Quodiblet, without consulting a score. The two folk tunes layered on top on one another always feels to dense by that point in the performance, by which point my brain and arms are fried after 30 movements/60-ish minutes of G major (with the occasional foray into the minor).
Today in the organ loft, I would say that I was happy as a clam, except that I was in fact borderline clapping like a seal as I revisited the astonishing material embedded in Fiori Musicali. Whereas the organ was at one point in my life the workhorse and the harp was the therapy instrument, the tables have turned a decade after my decision to divert career paths. The harp is now the tool for practicing, while the organ is for relaxing. I flip to the back of the volume and find the Bergamasca, Frescobaldi’s one of only two pieces that is unattached to the liturgical material that makes up the rest of the volume. It also bears striking resemblance to one of the folk tunes which Bach sets in his Quodiblet in the Goldbergs.
And what’s more, is that motivic material from La Girolmeta (which appears just after the Bergamasca in Fiori Musicali) is used as the secondary melody.
And to boot, they are both in G major (as are most settings of the Bergamasca, such as that of Bach’s teacher Dietrich Buxtehude, who himself composed 32 variations on that very theme).
Apart from being confronted by my procrastination, I’m also confronted by yet one more Easter egg left behind by the great master. For while Clavier-Übung III contains no extra little movements at the end, Bach has seemingly saved them both for one at tale end of the Goldberg Variations – originally published as under the title Clavier Übung IV in 1741 (an apt year for publication one might say, as Bach’s own copy of Fiori Musicali dates from 1714.)
I don’t like being trite, but Bach renders me a sap. Over and over, you can find these wonderful reminders in his music that no journey really ends, but seemingly gets extended in different forms time goes by, with elements of our past gently rearing their head to remind us not only where we’re headed, but where we’ve started.
(But also that I should go practice.)
* * * * *
What I’m reading:
Napoleon the Great /Andrew Roberts (reading currently)
Bismarck’s War / Rachel Chrastil (just finished – great account of the plights of civilians during a short but intense war.)
Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914-1945 / Victoria Harris (reread prompted by a conversation recently about the sexual practices of SS officers in the 1930s.)
I have a new office. Not in the “I have a new site-specific gig which I call my office” sense (as classical musicians tend to post on social media when they play in recital halls or other concert venues), but an actual office under lock and key, replete with desk, several harps, some furniture, and an air-conditioning unit. For the first time in a while, I have a dedicated place to keep most of my things and rehearse. Sure, my harpsichord is in Cleveland and one of my harps remains in Paris. I’ll sort out the former in the coming weeks, while the latter is preferable as I’ve got to scoot back to Europe now and again for rehearsals and concerts.
Indeed, my office is not in Paris, but in Queens, just one stop from Grand Central on the 7 line. A church position came open, the likes of which I had before Covid. I play the liturgies, yes, and am thus afforded the luxury facilities so as to keep my head down, work on the artistic projects, and be afforded some financial stability that doesn’t involve playing in an orchestra. At present this little oasis is a mess. Metro cards from 5 cities are piled up next to my passport and a customs form on one side of my desk, while the other side boasts two iPads and a decrepit MacBook Air whose tortoise-like speed reminds one of the 2 train crawling uptown on nights and weekends. The sofa boasts a velvet harp case, a yoga mat, and two empty Amazon Prime packages. The floor is strewn with ripped-up pieces of cardboard, miniature hair clips and dreadlock cuffs in preparation for a little workshop tomorrow with composer Hannah Kendall (whose solo I’ll be playing in just a few weeks in Utrecht).
The morning has been spent trying to optimize how to hang hairclips off of harp strings. It’s a delicate balance trying to secure their position on each string (so they don’t fall off when I pluck) while maximizing each of their potential for engaging a bitone (an effect whereby a string can produce two clearly audible tones simultaneously). The dreadlock cuffs need to wrap around strings securely enough so that their metallic materiality can be heard without choking the string and stifling their resonance. A strip of cardboard torn from a Costco shipment box of Tide detergent is weaved through the wire strings on the harp. I’ve now gone through four strips, trying to remove layers within the cardboard so as to reduce the density just enough so that when it’s threaded through the strings, it allows multiphonics to sing without creating too great a thud. The latest incarnation is bright orange with a picture of two pink roses towards the end, just below a reminder of the bottle size reading “101 Loads!” (Happy belated Pride, everyone.)
I have notes, but they are not to be used to set anything in stone. The harp I’ll be playing in the Netherlands will come with its own acoustic idiosyncrasies and manners of behaving when prepared – all part and parcel of the process of presenting contemporary music that intentionally incorporates random elements and improvisation. When one takes it upon themselves to work in contemporary music with an unwieldy instrument, a lot of time is spent preparing for the processes of preparation. Logistics with harps are not tiresome, but they are not simple either.
Take my entire program I’ll be playing for the Gaudeamus Festival in the Netherlands.
(1) Saad Haddad – Tasalsul II
(2) Janet Sit – And then they woke up (for harp and electronics)
(3) Kennedy Dixon – and around we go
(4) Hannah Kendall – Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2
(5) Lucy McKnight – when I among the trees
The assignment was to ensure that an hour-long program could be filled, all with relatively new works by young composers (with an eye towards EDI in the repertoire selection).
(1) requires a light scordatura (a fancy word for an alternate tuning system), but it can be adjusted in a matter of seconds.
(2) requires no retuning or preparations but only amplification, and a face mic.
(3) requires no scordatura and no preparation, BUT does require that external devices be used on the strings as well as a face mic.
(4) requires preparations but no retuning.
(5) requires extreme preparations, retuning, amplification and a face mic.
Now this program was arrived at based on the harps that I could reasonably get a hold of. One harpist would allow preparations on their harp, but not scordatura. Another would allow light scordatura, but no preparations for fear of damaging the strings (which are costly). No local harpist would allow their harp to be used for the piece (5), as the extremity of preparations increases stress on the soundboard by as much as 15% and requires the instrument to be placed in a close setup with pots, pans, and other external instruments. The risk of cosmetic and structural damage is actually not as high as one might think, but that’s easy to say when it’s not your harp.
The rehearsal process for all of these pieces entails getting to know the preparation schemes well enough to reduce the margin of error as far in advance as possible. After all, I fly to Paris on a Monday. I retrieve my own harp Tuesday and rig it up. I drive it to the Netherlands on Wednesday. I source a second harp on Thursday morning in advance of a 4-hour tech run in the afternoon. I source a third harp on Friday morning in advance of the three-hour dress rehearsal in the afternoon for the 5 o’clock show. Strike-down is at 6, and all three harps have to be out by 7.
Hours are spent sorting all this out on the computer. It’s not just processes dealing out flights, rental cars and parking accommodations that one has to make time for, but extra hours spent with music notation software to make things more legible on the fly. What the composer and harpist want to see are sometimes very different things, and it’s not out of the ordinary to create bespoke editions to ensure things go smoothly. Checklists for packing are essential; for instance, one of the two suitcases has to sport a complete set of strings, a drill, a harp regulation kit, a collapsible music stand and a folding harp trolley, as well as all the various charges and electronic accouterment necessary for hopping from the US to set up shop (albeit temporarily) in the EU.
No, none of this is practicing. And to this day, a specter of anxiety hangs over me about it. In conservatories, we’re taught that in order to prepare, our asses need to be in the practice room. At Oxbridge, the humanities tripos makes it clear that we should read as much as humanly possible. And yet, I cannot recount the number of times I’ve heard old classmates from Cambridge tell me, “I wish I had read less and just thought about the material more and reorganized it on my computer.” Likewise, my colleagues in the music world all increasingly speak of how organization and planning supercharge the practicing process, allowing time for essential slow practice that can’t be replaced and eliminating the fussy hours spent dealing with ill-formatted editions, writing unsuited to the instrument and fealty to the printed page.
Technology has supercharged our efficiency but it has also increased our expectations of what we can achieve. And it is thus that I don’t particularly like to watch the Olympics. Years of preparations, countless injuries and vast sums of money go into events where athletes have to contend with the idea that it might not work. And for the audience, that’s part of the thrill. An old classmate from Juilliard remarked that classical music isn’t so different, offering that the Goldberg Variations are sublime, but more audiences are turning up to see the wire-walk and that fantasy that it can all go wrong. “People pay money to see you fuck up.”
It’s hard to explain how these words stuck with me over the last few years, as I’ve done everything in my preparation processes to hide any sense of loss of control from audiences. Last June, I gave a concert in Paris in the first week of my struggle with ulnar tunnel syndrome. I had smacked my elbow a week before on a wooden music stand and had lost sensation entirely in the ring and pinky fingers on my self hand. The piece I was principally on stage to perform was one I had worked on for five months straight, following on an intermittent workshop process spread over two years. But the sense of terror about performing it was not as unbearable as my colleagues finding me after saying, “You looked so relaxed and in control.”
Another toxic trait of the classical music education system is that the practice room is like a confessional, a space intended to be secretive. It’s supposed to sound bad, sure, but nobody is supposed to know about it or learn anything about it. Sharing the realities of what goes into making something good is considered vulgar or exhibitionistic. Personally, I discovered this on day one at Cambridge when my sponsor flew from the East Coast to walk with me on the lawn at King’s straight after my matriculation ceremony to tell me one thing: “Your job here is to make it look easy.” The idea isn’t to fake it, but rather to feign it. Competency is not what’s at stake, but rather a Victorian addiction to poise.
I personally find it stifling, as I secretly love knowing about what goes into making something nice, even to the point of dissecting a process to the point of vulgarity. When I’m in Paris, I return over and over again to Gustave Caillebotte’s Floor Scrapers at the Musée d’Orsay, which show undignified process of stripping a floor of its varnish. They’re half naked, working in the heat and window is closed. There’s a bottle of something present, but only one glass (perhaps the voyeur). The scraper in the middle has made more progress than the other two. There is enough incongruity to counter the classical perfection of their bodies and a significant undertone of homoeroticism. The revelation of such crude labor poses as many new questions as it answers.
While performance anxiety wanes over the years for any musician, the generalized anxiety about keeping up the pace tends to grow, especially in the face of the reality that our bodies can’t do what they once did when we were teenagers or in our twenties, bashing our heads against the wall as we practiced for up to 6 hours a day. There’s no solution, really. One literally has to fuck around to find out if it works and increasingly just be at peace with the fact that – contrary to our teachers’ admonitions that the outcome of all performances rest solely in our realm of responsibility – all we can do is our best, and that for every solution we find we will undoubtedly find five more problems in need of solving.
Of course, we’re going to push ourselves. That’s never been a question. And we don’t need to exude stress as we perform or prepare. But we can treat all that we do with humor and anticipate that the things that will go wrong can be funny if we let them. After all, I’ve given world premiere with an audience member carried out by EMT services (and yes, I was instructed to keep playing). I’ve played an outdoor concert where my harp slipped in pitch by a quarter tone in half an hour. I’ve had to transpose an entire work down a tone in performance when the singer came in in the wrong key. I’ve had to move a harp in NYC gridlock during UN week, taking seven hours to get from the West to the East side of Manhattan for a rehearsal. Sure, I played my best, but fate had other plans.
The chaos in my office is not whimsical, but portentous of the chaos that will ensue when I hop on a plane in a few weeks. I expect a delayed flight, traffic jams and an inability to find parking. I look forward to seeing whether or not the harps will cooperate and that if tech run will take much longer than anticipated. Without a doubt, my hotel room will not be able to fit a harp (much less three). I am under no illusions that any serious practice or rehearsing will take place in the five days leading up to the concert. Time is now being spent making sure that when all of it happens, that I can try to have a good time and ensure that in the event if things go wrong, the relaxation isn’t feigned.
Greetings from the road, en route to Pittsburgh. I was very glad to talk with Debra Nagy, Zachary Wilder and Nicholas Russotto to talk about… well, you’ll see.
And a little announcement! Golden Wire is now being sponsored by Fractured Atlas. Translation: we can accept tax-deductible donations! So if you like what Arnie Tanimoto and I up to, lend some support. More info about projects soon to come.
I repeatedly hear how lucky I am to have landed on my feet in Paris, how the quality of life must be unimaginably higher, and how my relocation must have significantly improved my access to culture. Such was the case last night as I sat on a couch in Fort Green at a most excellent old-fashioned gay boy birthday party. Deviled eggs, meatballs, and expensive cheese nourished a motley assortment of struggling musicians and actors (including three token heterosexuals, one of whom now lives in my old room in BedStuy).
I heard a host of well-meaning assumptions about what life in France is like. “Free healthcare” came up numerous times (I should note that while healthcare in France is cheap, it’s certainly not free, especially for those making a lower/European income); “kinder to culture” was thrown around (to an extent, this is true, but only for specific varieties and brands of culture as locally defined by the powers that be); better food (French food and pastries, absolutely but I’m afraid the Indian and Mexican restaurants leave me wanting); “political consciousness” came up (even though Europe’s activists all now look to the American BLM movement and institutional commitment to EDI as the gold standard to a certain kind of progress); “anti-American” mentality was a more curious one, as indeed life in France looks very different from life in New York, while every French person I have met has expressed admiration for the typically American nihilism of work addiction and refusal to accept things for what they are (after all, the French are whiners while the Americans are doers, according to conventional wisdom).
One companion on the sofa told me that for all the gratitude I expressed gratitude, I was surprisingly forthcoming in shedding light on what was wrong with the place — or, at the very least, to ensure everyone that it wasn’t perfect. I suppose this is a place where I am still a New Yorker, in that while I find perfection appealing as a classical musician (obsessed with the minutæ of performing), I find it unspeakably dull as a person.
I recently traveled to Switzerland, which is arguably a paradise, as the quality of life and the average GDP are both astronomically high. But the unimaginable thrill I got from attending a political rally in Basel for the election of a public official was fantastic. It was there I heard perhaps one of the most excruciating musical sequences of my life, watching 25 or so frumpy Swiss gauchistes (replete with dreadlocks and terrible clothes) attempt to sing numbers from Paul Simon’s Graceland, led by a woman dressed like Dionne Warwick on a spaceship (singing about a quarter-tone sharp). They concluded their set, at which point a group of about 15 city officials walked on stage with drums and piccolos, playing military tunes with a level of inaccuracy that tickled me in the Summer Heights High region of my lower abdomen. At last, the cleanliness of the streets and the beauty of the architecture betrayed a total lapse in aesthetic awareness, allowing me to bask in 20 minutes of music that can only be described as “you had to be there to understand” level shit.
In Gstaad, the natural beauty was overwhelming, as was waking up every day to step out on the balcony and take a deep breath of Alpine air or heading home in the evening to see the snowy mountains of the Saanen Valley glow in the moonlight. Again, I’m grateful the place is not perfect, as an assortment of 1% inhabitants (and wannabes) make for some of the most bizarre dinner companions imaginable. Like in New York, no conversation can avoid the topic of money, but the commodities sought with vast sums of capital at one’s disposal are notably archaic (chalets, priceless art, old cars, concertos for famous soloists, etc.).
This week, I’ve returned to New York for three months for concerts, and for the first time since the pandemic, I feel at peace with New York’s imperfections. It’s snowing today in Boerum Hill, where the peaceful sight of the powder lining the Brownstones is complemented by the sounds of honking, the presence of yellow snow, and the knowledge that everything is going to take longer and that your clothes are going to be useless by tomorrow.
But, it should be said, I’m also unstressed about the musical engagements I have coming up. In Paris, I’m acutely aware that my practicing routine is sacred and leads to bouts of anxiety and hyper-fixation, cured by the ability to take a walk on the Places des Vosges, grab a pastry from a grotesque and decadent patisserie, and maybe pick up a cheap paperback to see if (1) I can understand what I’m reading and (2) if I wish to continue.
I’m split between two lives in two cities and two modes of being, which (for the moment) serves me fine. I’m presently contented to sit at an infuriatingly anonymous (and overpriced) coffee shop in Brooklyn and procrastinate on practicing while I blog and decide how I’ll structure my afternoon of:
Practicing.
Conducting an interview for a magazine.
Pay surge pricing for my harp to be moved in an Uber from the West Village to Boerum Hill and eventually practice.
I’m also supposed to put the final edits on some program notes for a concert I’m performing in a few weeks. Purcell’s music is the meat of the program, and I’ve been thinking of ways to contextualize his music without creating a program that is either essentially a musicology thesis or themeless/amounting to a random assortment of songs for a colleague to sing. I spent the bulk of the notes talking about what exactly Purcell does in The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation, a song I have vivid memories of hearing the first time when Elin Manahan Thomas gave a recital at my boarding school in the UK as I turned pages for the pianist.
Purcell has a fantastic talent for soliloquy and intertextual allusion. Songs like Music for a While feature an ominous and chromatic ground bass to show how music doesn’t have to make us feel good but satiate and stupefy feelings of unease and jealousy. In it, the fury Alecto lays in waiting to take vengeance, though not too soon.
More comedic songs like Mad Bess of Bedlam use comedy and slapstick to illustrate the ravings of an inmate in an asylum. Triple meter dances and rapid pattering of text are sung by poor Bess, who thinks of herself as a contented Eurydice (though not by name) left behind in the fields of Elysium after her lover fails to rescue her.
But in the Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation, a persistence of recitative reveals the chronically worried mind of Mary, whose son has been missing for three days. Like in Mad Bess, she never mentions herself by name or that of her son. But again, context offers clues: she fears the wrath of Herod again (which forced her flight into the Egyptian desert, a place “safer than a tyrant’s court”); she recalls how the Angel Gabriel informed her of her pregnancy and was heralded as a mother of God. And yet, it is not enough. Her sense of doom is summed up in the final sentence:
Itrust the God, but oh! I fear the child.
The song ends without direct reference to its actual conclusion. After three days, she and her husband Joseph find him teaching in the Temple:
… sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers. So when they saw Him, they were amazed; and His mother said to Him, “Son, why have You done this to us? Look, Your father and I have sought You anxiously.” And He said to them, “Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?”
Mary and Joseph find their son, only to be rejected by him, being informed that he has another true parent. The story continues
But they did not understand the statement which He spoke to them. Then He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them, but His mother kept all these things in her heart.
Hence, Mary’s soliloquy not only details her distress at losing Jesus but hints at the perpetual sense of isolation she will feel for the rest of her life: that of being barred from passing further into the realm of motherhood.
The song is heartbreakingly beautiful, but perhaps more so if one knows the story – or, indeed, any of the stories that constituted the cultural knowledge bank of Purcell’s day. I am generally underwhelmed with most program notes, as they usually only provide biographical information about the composer or how the piece was published. Similarly, I struggle to engage with programs that only seek to situate music in a particular context as it relates to other musical artifacts that smell like one another but bear little in common regarding thematic or textual material. I much prefer to find ways to liberate music from a certain set of assumptions, and instead relate the stories and set up a common framework between the listener and composer as much as possible, not to show how the same stories turn up repeatedly, but to display how differently a poet or composer might interpret them over time, and how emotions themselves can be subject to historicization. Sure, that means more talk about books, classicism, the Bible, etc. – artifacts of culture from which art music cannot be isolated. When I take this approach, I generally find out that context is messy and uncomfortable and ultimately more interesting as it doesn’t fit the musicologist’s addiction to citing names, dates, and places. Is it a perfect historical account? No. But it stands a greater chance of getting a listener to engage with the content of the music rather than the simple phenomenon of the fact that it’s old.
**I suppose this is where I offer a shameless plug for a concert or two. If you’re interested in hearing a bunch of Purcell and some music of his forbears and colleagues, come to Manhattan on Feb 8.**
I gave myself a 1500-word goal for today’s blog post, with no pretensions of composing anything worthy of publishing anywhere other than where my friends come and read about what’s on my mind (even if that means spewing a stream of consciousness).
In the last year, I’ve once again attempted to “leave” New York. And yet I’m sat on the corner of Waverly and Gay in the West Village, writing in exactly the same spot where this slightly disastrous blog began. My harp lives on the Upper West Side (as harps are fairly easy to source in Paris), my stuff lives in a storage unit in Brooklyn, I pay rent in Paris. My billing address for my online subscriptions seems to alternate between three or four legal addresses I’ve had in the last 5 years. My life is scattered, chaotic and I increasingly answer the question “where do you live?” with the honest answer “I don’t know.”
What I do know is that I’ve “checked out” of New York to a certain degree, or rather I’ve come to experience my old haunts without any feelings of baggage. I stood on the corner of 72nd and Columbus for a while today (where I’d lived with an ex) and I struggled to find those emotions which had made even going back there so hard once upon a time. I noticed which businesses had changed, which dogs were the same, which of their owners had gained weight. I looked into my old office on West 69th Street and I was happy to see that it was no longer mine. There was different art on the walls, better lighting and a new inhabitant (an old colleague in fact).
I’ve been told in times past that such feelings are a result of age, and that the process of returning becomes easier and more lighthearted. “Checking out” isn’t giving up; it’s resigning oneself to the reality of change and the inability to control where life goes, and learning to enjoy where it takes you in the process. The twists and turns, be they mundane/unnoticeable or unexpected/jarring are increasingly navigated with poise, ease and a realization that they are what makes life interesting.
If there’s any way in which I’ve checked back in, it’s returning to a place where I see life reflected in music. The personal upheavals of Covid were such that I intentionally insulated my musicianship from my life experience, trying to avoid seeing metaphors in my music making or transplanting my own issues into a practice session or a collaboration. Everything was too uncertain, so I gave up trying for a while. I’m glad to say that such has changed as I’ve started teaching again, attempting to find ways to communicate to students about how minutiae and minuscule changes in a piece of music are not to be overlooked, but to be devoured as they are breadcrumbs left behind by composers we’ll never have the chance to meet.
In a recent masterclass, a student played a transcription of Debussy’s En bateau from the Petite Suite. Everything was more or less in place: fluid technique, an even sound, a sense of sweep in some of the gestures. What lacked was a sense of direction – or rather, a demonstration of constant wavering between stasis and motion which gives the sense that one is in a boat, adrift and subtly out of control. One might call it the absence of direction.
As much as any teacher will try to avoid it, the opening bars of a piece become the obsession point in a masterclass, and I’ll own up to not working with the student on much else. Debussy gives us the Barcarolle arpeggio in G major, but it stops in midair. What next? It repeats in the next bar in the relative minor, with the melody line leading the listener into a reiteration of the first bar back in G major before heading back to e minor for another go. How many times is he gonna do this? There is some relief, as we hear a D in both the melody and the bass – a dominant chord, finally… except that it’s a D minor chord which repeats itself not once, twice or even three times, but FOUR times before giving way to a modulation to C major.
The piece is in G major, but that key relationship between D major and G major has not yet been exhibited at all, as not a single chord has included that absolutely essential F-sharp which should resolve to a G. It is in C major that we are given that initial satisfaction, the point at which we also hear that barcarolle arpeggio go and and then come back down again, reinforced by a plagal cadence (indeed, more F natural in a piece in G major) after.
Bar 12, the F chord becomes an F-sharp diminished chord. There’s hope. Might G major’s rightful place might be yet established? Nope. That F-sharp becomes a dominant in disguise and we are treated to four soupy bars of B major, which trail off into literal nothingness.
A tertiary relation drags us back to G major and the material from the beginning rears its head again. Or does it? The melody is now in thirds. And that E minor chord now has an ugly D-sharp in it, which nevertheless gives way to a Lydian C major, though a little earlier than before. At last, at bar 23, Debussy gives us what we want: D major and G major harmonies. An A minor seven chord gives us a lovely modal secondary dominant, and a C natural to connect to a D Major 7 chord – but with a melody in the bass to almost give us what we want: a perfect cadence.
The more I’ve been teaching, the less I’ve become focused on dealing with students’ hands, their tone or their “sound” (whatever that means). Instead I’ve become obsessive with trying to show students that the infinite details left behind by composers, the false returns, allusions to memory and constant denial of the expected isn’t for nought: all of these infuriating lost illusions are the very building blocks for drawing an audience in. They are in fact gifts which composers give performers to hold audiences in the palm of their hand and transport listeners out of themselves, their own lives and indeed, their own expectations.
Once identified, these subtle details pose the questions that we have to answer. What speed? How do we suspend the ideas in midair? How do we breathe on an instrument that resonates into infinity? How do we pose the questions to the audience that only we can solve?
Seeing beyond the score also comes with age and experience. The finger patterns, the anxiety over accuracy and dogged attention to making things as black and white as they appear on the page isn’t just unappealing, but rather simply impossible. We also learn that when we sit down to play, the slight human variations in volume, warmth or depth have to be accounted for, welcomed and responded to. Perhaps a chord was played too deeply. How can you compensate for it in the moment? How can you go with the flow and recalibrate?
I admit to loving the overwhelmed looks I receive from students, as perhaps I haven’t yet recovered from the 15 years of studies I undertook with Ur-pedagogues who handed me fingerings, tempos, phony aural traditions and a sense of authority which aimed to instill competency, though little more. One teacher assured me we ought to see a work from “Debussy’s standpoint,” which in fact meant just using a fingering that she’d been handed by her own teacher and maintaining a metronomic pulse. I asked her jokingly if I could have Debussy’s mobile number and ask him myself, as she appeared to know him quite well. (She didn’t laugh. The lesson ended early.)
Of course, students have to be shown standards, but what of the standards of giving students a glimpse as to how they will have to make the decisions for themselves? What of the reality that once we’re out of school, we’re on our own (thankfully) on the water, be it on the sea or up shit creek without a paddle? That our technique has to keep with it? And our tone? And our sound? What of the glorious and exhilarating relief that we all feel when we return to a piece years to find that it’s different, charming, and even liberating to play? And what of the utter terror they will face in looking at a student one day and telling them that making decisions will be harder than any one piece they master at school?
Of course, though neglecting my blog, I have been writing elsewhere. I’ve been very pleased to be preparing pieces for Early Music America Magazine, which you can find below.
First, there is one on William Lawes’ Harp Consorts, an assortment of pieces written for harp, violin, theorbo and viol in the early 17th century. They’re beautiful, whacky and weird, but rarely done because they present any number of performance practice issues – including questions of what kind of harp we ought to use. (Read more here.)
When I first moved to New York, Bob Craft’s death was on mind of a few new acquaintances, especially those who knew and worked with him. It was only in the last few years that I came appreciate the impact he had on the scene in New York, especially in getting Gesualdo’s music into the ears of the classical music listener. Many things have changed since then, so I decided to take a crack at asking some questions about how Gesualdo’s music might be undertaken with an eye towards historical information. (Read more here.)
Next, a slightly bitchy article, but there we are. I adore playing and performing music of the past, but I fear that the term HIP has become vacuous and little more than a code for certain types of playing that have little or nothing to do with historical inquiry. In fact, in my mind, it’s become a new form of gate-keeping. (Read more here.)
And lastly, I spent a few hours on Zoom with harpsichordist Lillian Gordis, who has quite a lot to say about the experience of being a harpsichordist. (Read more here.)
Seven years ago, I started this blog with the intent of writing about what I want. My confidence grew, and eventually got to the stage where I was writing pieces that other outlets wouldn’t publish. But for various reasons, I fell off. It’s the New Year, so there’s no better time than to return to where I started by nerding out for a very select (boutique, niche, etc.) audience.
Like everyone else, I had some newfound spare time in March 2020. It was that year that I learned to read and enjoy the ability to consume dense literature without any sense of urgency or distraction. In late February, I had just finished a tour with Apollo’s Fire. Not long after we played our final concert in Chicago, the lockdowns began and I stayed put for several months, staying in the empty apartment of an old professor of mine who generously allowed me to squat. I called my roommate to pull out of my lease (which was fortunate, as her fiancé had to leave his student accommodation and move in). I had my harps, a suitcase of clothes, and only a few books: Stendhal’s Italian Chronicles, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (please chuckle at the irony), Roth’s Radetzky March and Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. The last of these would initially occupy me for nearly a month and fundamentally change how I thought about mythology and, in turn, music.
Calasso’s central thesis is simple: when taking in the cumulative sweep of Classical literature, – that is, from Hesiod right up to late Roman scholars (and even early Byzantine critics) – one sees that each fable or tale of morality is but a repetition or reference to another story. In the opening chapter, Calasso repeats the question “but how did it all begin?”
Europa is abducted by Zeus, disguised as a bull.
But how did it all begin? Golden basket in hand, she is picking flowers, as Persephone did before her, before being taken by Hades; or perhaps like Thalia, who wandered among the flowers on the mountainside, before being whisked away by Zeus disguised as an eagle; or even Creusa, who picked saffron flowers by the Acropolis before being kidnapped by Apollo.
But how did it all begin? Europa’s golden basket is a family heirloom, made by Hephaestus and granted to Libye, who passed it to Telephassa, who bequeathed it to Europa. It is embossed with a Golden bull resting on the waves. Not Zeus, but Europa’s great-grandmother Io. Not the Aegean, but the Nile.
But how did it all begin? Io was saved by Zeus. Having fled to Egypt after being transformed into a bull, Zeus finds her in Egypt. He skims lightly skims his hand over her. She becomes mortal again.
Calasso concludes: “as Europa walked down the flowery meadows near the sea, what Europa was carrying, embossed in precious metals, was her destiny. As in a piece of music, her own tune was the melodic inversion of her ancestor, Io’s. A bull would carry her off from Asia toward the continent. A bull would carry her off from Asia toward the continent that was to be called Europe, just as years before the desperate sea wandering of a young cow who had first grazed in Greek pastures was to end in Egypt with the light touch of Zeus’s hand. And one day the gift of the golden basket would be handed down to Europa. She carried it along, without thinking.” (Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony)
On and on the book goes likewise, each page containing paraphrases of the collected interpretations of mythology, from the Homeric Hymns right up to the Early Christian critics. The key point however is not that it is about classical literature, but that the revisitation of this material carries on the tradition of reinterpretation. After all, the reader is party to the knowledge of all those things which the mythical characters do not know and cannot know. We are like Argus, having many eyes, able to see each and every folly without being able to predict the fate that will befall us.
“Everything repeats itself, everything comes back again, but always with some slight twist in its meaning… And there is always some tiny territory untouched by the anthropologist’s fine-tooth comb that survives, like an archaic island, in the modern world: thus it is in antiquity we come across the emissaries of a reality that was to unfold more than two thousand years later.” (Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony)
Calasso touches on a lot of things: the philosophies of history, on the warning signs the Classics might even give us about totalitarianism, gender, sex, remorse, etc. Sadly, music is largely absent. But in this little book, I found the most fantastic blueprint for thinking about our myths about music in the theogony. And so, I started reading more and more, accessing Loeb translations online and starting with the story that musicians (especially harpists) know best: Orpheus.
Orpheus marries Eurydice, but soon after she dies, having trodden on a snake. She’s taken to Hades where Orpheus tries to fetch her. He plays the harp for Charon, and is allowed into hell. He’s allowed to take Eurydice back from Hades so long as he doesn’t look behind. (There is no Chekhov’s Gun quite like a contract meant to be broken.) He turns around, and she is lost. In grieving, he forswears women. The women of Thrace get angry, flay him alive, and tear him limb from limb.
But an amazing thing will happen to you, Orpheus: you now charm wild beasts and trees, but to women of Thrace you will seem to be sadly out of tune and they will tear your body in pieces, though even wild beasts had gladly listened to your voice. (Philostratus, Imagines 6)
As with every myth, any number of things can be latched onto in the Orpheus myth. One could speak of the symbolism of the Styx, the trope of the dead woman and the male gaze, or even the snake that killed her. But what if a key to understanding Orpheus had nothing to do with Orpheus, but with the instrument he had in his hand?
Before Orpheus, there was famously Apollo. But where did it all begin?
“Leto’s all-glorious son goes to rocky Pytho, playing upon his hollow lure, clad in divine, perfumed garments; and at the touch of the golden key his lyre sings sweet. Thence, swift as thought, he speeds from earth to Olympos, to the house of Zeus, to join the gathering of the other gods: then straightway the undying gods think only of the lyre and song, and all the Muses together, voice sweetly answering voice, hymn the unending gifts the gods enjoy and the sufferings of men.” (Homeric Hymn 3 to Pythian Apollo)
But the skill of Apollo was once put to the test. Though it is not known why, he was challenged a musical contest by the flute player Marsyas, a satyr. Apollo not only played, but sang and even turned his harp upside down. King Midas, the umpire was impressed and Marsyas forefeited both the contest and his life.
“The Satyr Marsyas, when he played the flute in rivalry against Apollo’s lyre, lost that audacious contest and, alas! His life was forfeit; for, they had agreed the one who lost should be the victor’s prey. And, as Apollo punished him, he cried, “Ah-h-h! why are you now tearing me apart? A flute has not the value of my life!” Even as he shrieked out in his agony, his living skin was ripped off from his limbs, till his whole body was a flaming wound, with nerves and veins and viscera exposed.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 6)
Marsyas’ body would serve as an example.
And so Apollo defeated Marsyas, bound him to a tree, and turned him over to a Scythian who stripped his skin off him limb by limb. He gave the rest of his body for burial to his pupil Olympus. From his blood the river Marsyas took its name. (Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 165)
But where did it all begin? His harp came to him via Hermes, who stole two cattle from Apollo and flayed them alive. In his anger, Apollo tried to punish Hermes.
“Apollo twisted strong withes with his hands meaning to bind Hermes with firm bands; but the bands would not hold him, and the withes of osier fell far from him and began to grow at once from the ground beneath their feet in that very place. And intertwining with one another, they quickly grew and covered all the wild-roving cattle by the will of thievish Hermes, so that Apollo was astonished as he gazed.” (Homeric Hymn 4 to Hermes)
It is Argus who ameliorates. He sees Hermes’ harp on the ground, and begins to fumble on its strings to distract Apollo. The archer is entranced, plucks the strings as if it were his bow, and demands to take the harp for himself. Hermes tells him,
“ ‘…as it seems, your heart is so strongly set on playing the lyre, chant, and play upon it, and give yourself to merriment, taking this as a gift from me, and do you, my friend, bestow glory on me. Sing well with this clear-voiced companion in your hands; for you are skilled in good, well-ordered utterance.’ (Homeric Hymn to Hermes 4)
All of Apollo’s cattle are now Hermes’, in exchange for harp?
When Hermes had said this, he held out the lyre: and Phoebus Apollo took it, and readily put his shining whip in Hermes’ hand, and ordained him keeper of herds. The son of Maia received it joyfully; the glorious son of Leto, the lord far-working Apollo, took the lyre upon his left arm and tried each string with the key. Awesomely it sounded at the touch of the god, while he sang sweetly to its note.” (Homeric Hymn 4 to Hermes)
But where did it all begin? But does Apollo not know? Hermes not only had a harp, but invented it. After finding a tortoise near his dwelling in the mountains, Hermes is shocked but also delighted. It is in mirth he mutilates the animal to see what will happen.
“Living, you shall be a spell against mischievous witchcraft; but if you die, then you shall make sweetest song.’ “
“Thus speaking, he took up the tortoise in both hands and went back into the house carrying his charming toy. Then he cut off its limbs and scooped out the marrow of the mountain-tortoise with a scoop of grey iron. As a swift thought darts through the heart of a man when thronging cares haunt him, or as bright glances flash from the eye, so glorious Hermes planned both thought and deed at once. He cut stalks of reed to measure and fixed them, fastening their ends across the back and through the shell of the tortoise, and then stretched ox hide all over it by his skill. Also he put in the horns and fitted a cross-piece upon the two of them, and stretched seven strings of sheep-gut. But when he had made it he proved each string in turn with the key, as he held the lovely thing. At the touch of his hand it sounded marvelously; and, as he tried it, the God sang sweet random snatches, even as youths bandy taunts at festivals.” (Homeric Hymn to Hermes 4)
But where did it all begin? Argus picks up and saves Hermes, not knowing that Hermes will betray him. Argus (of 100 eyes) appointed by Hera to kidnap and guard Io, who was transformed into a heifer when Zeus found affection in her.
Yielding obedience to such prophetic utterances of Apollo, he drove me away and barred me from his house, against his will and mine; but the constraint of Zeus forced him to act by necessity. Immediately my form and mind were distorted, and with horns, as you see, upon my forehead, stung by a sharp-fanged gadfly I rushed with frantic bounds to Kerkhnea’s sweet stream and Lerna’s spring. But Argos, the earth-born herdsman, untempered in his rage, pursued me peering with his many eyes upon my steps. A sudden death robbed him of life unexpectedly; while I, still tormented by the gadfly, am driven on from land to land before the heaven-sent plague.
“Oh, oh! Aah! Aah! A gadfly, phantom of earth-born Argos is stinging me again! Keep him away, O Earth! I am fearful when I behold that myriad-eyed herdsman. He travels onward with his crafty gaze upon me; not even in death does the earth conceal him, but passing from the shades he hounds me, the forlorn one, and drives me famished along the sands of the seashore. The waxen pipe drones forth in accompaniment a clear-sounding slumberous strain. Alas, alas! Where is my far-roaming wandering course taking me? . . . I cannot discern how to escape my sufferings.” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound)
Fearing for Io’s life, Zeus sends Hermes to fetch her. Hermes lulls Argos to sleep with his flute and voice and kills him.
So Hermes joined him, and with many a tale he stayed the passing hours and on his reeds played soft refrains to lull the watching eyes. But Argus fought to keep at bay the charms of slumber and, though many of his eyes were closed in sleep, still many kept their guard. Argus asked too by what means this new design the pipe of reeds, was found. Then the god began to tell the story Pan. But the story remained untold; for Hermes saw all Argus’ eyelids closed and every eye vanquished in sleep. He stopped and with his wand, his magic wand, soothed the tired resting eyes and sealed their slumber; quick then with his sword he struck off the nodding head and from the rock threw it all bloody, spattering the cliff with gore. Argus lay dead; so many eyes, so bright quenched, and all hundred shrouded in one night. (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1)
For all of Argos Panoptes’ ability to see, his ears can be deceived. After he dies, Hera takes his eyes and preserves them in the feathers of the peacock, the loud, shrill guardians whose cries cannot be ignored.
But where did it all begin? Hermes has a new flute, yes, but so did Athena once. Pausanias tells of a statue of Athena striking Marsyas for taking the flute that was to be cast away for good. For though she invented it, we know she hated it.
On flute playing: Athena for foundress and Apollon for patron, one of whom cast the flute away in disgust, and the other flayed the presumptuous flute-player, Marsyas. (Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades 2)
(After all, like Hermes’ harp, it is fashioned from slaughter.)
Minerva is said to have been the first to make pipes from deer bones and to have come to the banquet of the gods to play. Juno and Venus made fun of her because she was grey-eyed and puffed out her cheeks, so when mocked in her playing and called ugly she came to the forest of Ida to a spring, as she played she viewed herself in the water, and saw that she was rightly mocked. Because of this she threw away the pipes and vowed that whoever picked them up would be punished severely. Marsyas, a shepherd, son of Oeagrus, one of the satyrs, found them, and by practicing assiduously kept making sweeter sounds day by day, so that he challenged Apollo to play the lure in a contest with him. (Hyginus, Fabulae 165)
But where did it all begin? Athena was not the last to forfeit her instrument. Hermes gave his harp to Apollo, yes, in order to continue to search for Io. But after slaying Marsyas, Apollo would repent of the evil he had done and resign his instrument.
Hermes also introduced wrestling-schools and invented the lyre out of a tortoise-shell after the contest in skill between Apollo and Marsyas, in which ,we are told, Apollo was victorious and thereupon exacted an excessive punishment of his defeated adversary, but he afterwards repented of this and, tearing the strings from the lyre, for a time had nothing to do with its music. (Diodorus Siculus, Library 5)
Hermes lust for contest would return. It is Linus who would find the instrument, and teach it to his brother Orpheus, but also Thamyris and Heracles.
Linus who was admired because of his poetry and singing, had many pupils and three of greatest renown, Heracles, Thamyris, and Orpheus. Of these three Heracles, who was learning to play the lyre, was unable to appreciate what was taught him because of his sluggishness of soul, and once when he had been punished with rods by Linus he became violently angry and killed his teacher with a blow of the lyre.
Thamyris, however, who possessed unusual natural ability, perfected the art of music and claimed that in the excellence of song his voice was more beautiful than the voices of the Muses. Whereupon the goddesses, angered at him, took from him his gift of music and maimed the man, even as Homer also bears witness when he writes.
There met the Muses Thamyris of Thrace and made an end of his song…But him, enraged, they maimed, and from him took the gift of song divine and made him quiteforget his harping. (About Orpheus, the third pupil, we shall give a detailed account when we come to treat of his deeds.) (Diodorus Siculus, Library 3)
Now, back to Orpheus. Is he really innocent? Or does his grief turn to pride? Jadedness?
But having gone down into Hades because of his wife and seeing what sort of things were there, he did not continue to worship Dionysus, because of whom he was famous, but he thought Helios to be the greatest of the gods, Helios whom he also addressed as Apollo. Rousing himself each night toward dawn and climbing the mountain called Pangaion, he would await the Sun’s rising, so that he might see it first. Therefore, Dionysus, being angry with him, sent the Bassarides, as Aeschylus the tragedian says; they tore him apart and scattered the limbs. (Diodorus Siculus, Library 3)
Did he not learn from the example of Pentheus, who likewise refused to worship Dionysus, and was ripped apart by Ino and Autonoe, while his mother Agave looked on?
His mother, as priestess, began the slaughter, and fell upon him. He threw the headband from his head so that the wretched Agaue might recognize and not kill him. Touching her cheek, he said : ‘It is I, mother, your son, Pentheus, whom you bore in the house of Ekhion. Pity me, mother, and do not kill me, your child, for my sins.’
But she, foaming at the mouth and twisting her eyes all about, not thinking as she ought, was possessed by Bakkhos, and he did not persuade her. Seizing his left arm at the elbow and propping her foot against the unfortunate man’s side, she tore out his shoulder, not by her own strength, but the god gave facility to her hands. Ino began to work on the other side, tearing his flesh, while Autonoe and the whole crowd of the Bakkhai pressed on. All were making noise together, he groaning as much as he had life left in him, while they shouted in victory. One of them bore his arm, another a foot, boot and all. His ribs were stripped bare from their tearings. The whole band, hands bloodied, were playing a game of catch with Pentheus’ flesh.
His body lies in different places, part under the rugged rocks, part in the deep foliage of the woods, not easy to be sought. His miserable head, which his mother happened to take in her hands, she fixed on the end of a thyrsos and carries through the midst of Kithairon like that of a savage lion, leaving her sisters among the Mainades’ dances. She is coming inside these walls, preening herself on the ill-fated prey, calling Bakkhos her fellow hunter, her accomplice in the chase, the glorious victor–in whose service she wins a triumph of tears. (Euripides, Bacchae 990)
With each answer, a new question arises. The question “where did it all begin” asks how, but also why, over and over and over again. Stories of tragedy are foretold ahead of time, either in their own lives or the lives of ancestors.
Eventually the search stops. Both an innocent party and a guilty perpetrator are identified. Ovid identifies Marsyas’ hubris as the source for his demise, and focuses on the pain felt by those who grieved his death. Hyginus focuses on the fact that Apollo won by deception, turning his harp upside down. (Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Ovid came from wealth, whereas Hyginus was a freedman.)
And when Marsyas was departing as victor, Apollo turned his lyre over, and played the same song, which Marsyas couldn’t do with his pipes. And so Apollo defeated Marsyas, bound him to a tree, and turned him over to a Scythian who stripped his skin off him limb by limb. He gave the rest of his body for burial to his pupil Olympus. From his blood the river Marsyas took its name. (Hyginus, Fabulae 5)
Indeed, the image of his innocence has endured. For Plato, it is Marsyas to whom Socrates is compared.
The way I shall take, gentlemen, in my praise of Socrates, is by similitudes. Probably he will think I do this for derision; but I choose my similitude for the sake of truth, not of ridicule. For I say he is likest to the Silenus-figures that sit in the statuaries’ shops; those, I mean, which our craftsmen make with pipes or flutes in their hands: when their two halves are pulled open, they are found to contain images of gods. And I further suggest that he resembles the satyr Marsyas. Now, as to your likeness, Socrates, to these in figure, I do not suppose even you yourself will dispute it; but I have next to tell you that you are like them in every other respect. You are a fleering fellow, eh? If you will not confess it, I have witnesses at hand. Are you not a piper? Why, yes, and a far more marvellous one than the satyr. His lips indeed had power to entrance mankind by means of instruments; a thing still possible today for anyone who can pipe his tunes: for the music of Olympus’ flute belonged, I may tell you, to Marsyas his teacher. So that if anyone, whether a fine flute-player or paltry flute-girl, can but flute his tunes, they have no equal for exciting a ravishment, and will indicate by the divinity that is in them who are apt recipients of the deities and their sanctifications. You differ from him in one point only—that you produce the same effect with simple prose unaided by instruments. For example, when we hear any other person— quite an excellent orator, perhaps—pronouncing one of the usual discourses, no one, I venture to say, cares a jot; but so soon as we hear you, or your discourses in the mouth of another,—though such person be ever so poor a speaker, and whether the hearer be a woman or a man or a youngster—we are all astounded and entranced. As for myself, gentlemen, were it not that I might appear to be absolutely tipsy, I would have affirmed on oath all the strange effects I personally have felt from his words, and still feel even now. For when I hear him I am worse than any wild fanatic; I find my heart leaping and my tears gushing forth at the sound of his speech, and I see great numbers of other people having the same experience. When I listened to Pericles and other skilled orators I thought them eloquent, but I never felt anything like this; my spirit was not left in a tumult and had not to complain of my being in the condition of a common slave: whereas the influence of our Marsyas here has often thrown me into such a state. (Plato, Symposium 215)
In reading and rereading Calasso over the last few years and obsessively pouring over Classics translations online, I feel as if I’ve started seeing Marsyas and the extended family tree of musical violence everywhere. In Bellini’s The HolyAllegory, the Virgin Mary sits under a canopy, on the top of a small set of stairs. She looks upon elderly Job and Saint Sebastian, shot with an arrow. A frieze on the side of the staircase depicts Marsyas’ death at the hands of Apollo. A cross can be seen in the distance, though it looks as if it’s but a shadow. The crucifixion is indeed implied by those stories which foretell and echo it at the same time.
I wandered the Met Museum the other day after being shown the Tudor exhibit by its curator. I didn’t get very far, as when I got into the rooms of vases, I spent an hour in total awe that all the minuscule connections in literature also appear in living, visual artifacts. Athena looms over the flute players, and Apollo over the Citharodes. Olympus is haunted by his dead lover, and Apollo by clever Hermes. Heracles’ toils are illustrated with lyre players in the foreground, at once telling his deeds with the art of his teacher Linus, who he killed in anger. There is no image without a moral. There is no harp without its violent inheritance. There is no music without memory.
As I keep reading, it’s my hope that I’ll keep sharing thoughts on what I discover. Needless to say, I’ve found some material to reinvigorate the urge to write.
Enough time has passed since my last visit in 2019 that I have forgotten early spring mornings in Cambridge. Take your first steps out into the front court at King’s, and a gentle moisture envelops your face and hands without any biting or harshness. The chapel and the Gibbs Building glow in the early light to the point where it feels like midday. The only sounds are that of birdsong everywhere and a few bicycles creaking towards the few and faithful coffeehouses open before 8am. (Naturally, they are populated at that hour by US expats such as yours truly.)
Since my arrival, I’ve been practicing gently through the jet lag and getting acquainted with the harp I’ll be performing and recording on over the next week. Dinners and drinks are spent with Nico Muhly, a celebrity/familiar face in Cambridge. He emerges from the room next door dressed in solid black, that musician’s uniform which somehow seems innocuous in Manhattan but totally conspicuous in Cambridge. (Full disclosure: I’m not doing much better. Having been on a Club Monaco spending spree in December, my minimalist fag packing choices for this trip included patterned trousers which indicate I’m about to get cocktails in Flatiron at 3pm on a Tuesday or golfing in Boca Raton in 1973.) We imbibe and discuss what all people discuss in Cambridge: college, education, memories of development, the past. What did we read? Who taught us? What characters did we meet?
Old universities, be they Ivies or Oxbridge, have this bizarre self-conscious rigor in maintaining tradition, attracting eccentric and precocious undergraduates, who will either fly the coop into one or another greater cosmopolis or remain and become the eccentric professors who you can tell haven’t ever left. (In Cambridge, they dress in tweed, poorly tailored shirts or dull sweaters – signifiers of a chic frumpy austerity which seems never to change.) And yet, despite being in a scholastic paradise, the undergraduates one meets are hungry to know what awaits them on the other side. They inquire with alumni about how to get out, form a bridge into the real world, ditch the tweed and get into the city. It is then that one remembers that these universities, even big ones, are really very small places with a highly specific purpose: education. They put up paradoxic fronts of changelessness and authority for students, most of whom who will ultimately have an ephemeral existence here of only three or four years. The buildings, the clothes, the birds, the sunlight all remain the same, surviving the ages. It is we who are just passing through.
The other question students love to ask is “what is it like to be back?” For me, the only correct answer is “weird.” No alum is the same person as they were as an undergraduate. In my humble opinion, if misgivings arise, that’s ok. Before coming to the UK, I was driving my parent’s car through Tennessee listening to an excellent interview with writer Ocean Vuong. One thing in particular he offered resonates with me this week. He apparently tells his students that if they hate a story or an essay they wrote even month before, they should be congratulated. It means they’ve grown. Fortunately for me, feelings of regret or foreboding are fleeting, as there are a great many wonderful and beautiful things to do and see, which not many people care about unless you’ve studied here or have some romance with others have passed through. Here one can commune with any number of Saints, or at least with the imprints of their embryonic existence as students.
When I come back to King’s, I slip back into a routine. I sneak into the library, climbing two flights of stairs and grab a ladder to a row of tattered choral octavos. I grab a copy of Handel’s Israel in Egpyt and look on E.M. Forster’s signature in the front page. I peruse Messiaen scores with Sir Andrew Davis’ markings in them. I head downstairs to find volumes in the history section which (according to local lore) are filled with Salman Rushdie’s notes in the margins. I grab my running shoes and run through Coe Fen, the slightly overgrown bog past the Fitzwilliam Museum after which my old school’s favorite hymn was named (which includes the fabulous lines “Ten thousand times ten thousand sound Thy praise; but who am I?”). I work my way towards Sheep’s Green and into Grantchester. I stop at the church and sit before running past Rupert Brooke’s onetime abode before stopping again at Byron’s Pool, eavesdropping on a group of undergraduates talking about an article. Then it’s back over to Grantchester Meadow and zipping past Newnham College, reverse tracing Virginia Woolf’s treks to have tea at the Orchard. Grange Road takes me West Road. I pass the history faculty where I went to lectures and checked out stacks of books I know I’ve read but can’t remember reading. I run into the back of King’s and into front court. It’s no longer quiet, as the organ scholar is practicing Liszt at full throttle.
It’s funny that with the exception of grabbing a harp, I haven’t been back into chapel. But whenever I walk by, it seems as though the organ scholar is always practicing (which is likely the case). I know why I don’t go in to listen. I know full well the absolute sense of horror I would have felt if another ex-organ scholar came in to listen, even if for pure enjoyment. The pressure is always on. For as wonderful and easy as communing with the dead in Cambridge, somehow doing the same with the living is terrifying. Eminent alumni, musicians, Nobel prize winners and famous writers are on every corner, striking awe into the hearts of undergraduates either with their brilliance or perhaps their quickness in overturning your ideas with a simple question in a tutorial or seminar. They attend concerts too, they smile, they applaud, and yet it’s unfathomable that their critical faculties ever shut off. After all, they spend hours telling you to get your brain into high gear and to engage it as much as possible. How could it be any other way?
Ancestor worship in Cambridge is a weird and shitty way of coping with the pressures of self-expectation. When you’re a student, all those feelings get supplanted onto worries about the exams, the intellectual rigor, the teaching style (and evensongs and voluntarues), etc. As a result, it’s easy to look to the Immortals of Cambridge Yore to witness that there is life on the other side. For me, I latched onto the Bloomsbury Group, seeing a gaggle of misfits with wild ideas who somehow lifted themselves out of the self-imposed restraints that the atmosphere in the college somehow enables. In particular I devoured Forster and Woolf, being a pretentious literary queerling who had yet to figure a host of things out about what my sexuality meant (which in the end was very little, but at least the depressive book binges were good).
Back in the States, my friends will tell you that since the pandemic started, I never shut up about Hesse. As Time has passed, I’ve steered towards his novels about getting out of one’s own head, rather than the melancholy wallowing which one finds in Mrs. Dalloway or Orlando, or the strange moralistic smugness of Maurice or Howard End. At the end of one of Hesse’s more famous novels, music obsessed protagonist (The Steppenwolf) is guided through hell by Mozart, who invites him to look on at Wagner and Brahms slaving away and laugh at them as they travail in their aesthetic ideologies. It’s then you realize the entire novel is about one man’s realizations that all our chosen ancestors were not all immortal at one point, but human. Likewise, our isolated existences and identity formation see us come emerge from our shells, transforming our wolf-like, self-protective tendencies into softer, more human impulses.
“I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket . . . I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being. One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.”
If anything, I’ve not laughed as much at Cambridge as I have the last few days. The town’s love affair with the tradition is beautiful but comical. There is no reason that walking on a patch of grass (a privilege reserved for Dons, alumni and ducks) should have the same thrill as unprotected sex (or any other shot of adrenaline). Punting (rowing a boat in a shallow river using a 12 foot pole) is a fundamentally stupid and inefficient means of getting anywhere. That one bell-tower that peels thirteen times at noon is ridiculous. And yes, it is comical that there is in fact a phantom-like creature practicing the organ at such a volume that it can be heard in the street on a busy afternoon.
Returning is complicated but freeing, as one gets to see the other side – the peace of some unforeseen transcendence. The conditions of my return are something I actually could not have imagined a decade ago. If someone had told me undergraduate self that in a decade, I’d be (1) living splitting my time between New York and Cleveland, (2) playing the harp for a living and (3) hearing Mozart emanating from Nico’s Muhly’s room next door, I might tell you that you were out of your mind, or else wonder if its another expectation which needed achieving in order to “live up” to the magnanimous and imposing aura of my chosen university. Time heals, but laughter is the best medicine. (Try as I may, I can’t describe how great it is to be back.)
NOTE: this blog is supposed to be about music. I swear I’ll get back to it… eventually.
