I have no secret Romantic desire to die young. Some artistic types do, at least in a half-hearted way, but not me—and it’s not just that I’m greatly looking forward to being old and crotchety. The problem is, if you die young, then initial historical judgement is passed on you by your contemporaries, and often they can’t get past their initial impression of you, no matter how misleading.

I was thinking about this after playwright George Hunka posted a link to this page, where the Canadian Broadcasting Company has streamed a bunch of excerpts from Glenn Gould’s radio documentaries. If you’ve never heard these before, you’re in for a treat—Gould’s programs (on mostly non-musical subjects) are still ahead of their time, and entertaining as all get out.

Now, Gould (who died at the age of 50) is primarily remembered as a pianist and an eccentric, and often the latter more than the former. That’s because his posthumous reputation was shaped by people whose opinions were no doubt colored by memories of his first major public appearances in the 1950’s. Gould must have seemed like an alien—he came more or less out of nowhere, with a fully formed style that owed little to any existing school, and a collection of physical mannerisms that no doubt nearly upstaged his music-making. But his astonishing radio work (not to mention his engaging writings, as well as his film and television work) is a reminder that Gould was the real thing, a genius and a conscientious workaholic whose eccentricities were really the least interesting thing about him. Gould would have turned 75 this year, an age at which many musicians are still fully active; no doubt he would have had the opportunity to enjoy being a hero or a villian to at least a couple of subsequent generations. (And here’s one to think about: you know he would have had a blog.)

Here’s another example. My church choir just started rehearsing one of our Christmas favorites, “There shall a star come out of Jacob,” by Felix Mendelssohn. I’ve mentioned my love for Mendelssohn’s music here before, and this is no exception. I could talk volumes about this chorus, but I’ll just point out this short passage at measure 73, which might be one of the most perfectly realized tonal cadences of all time.


The D that the tenors linger over in 77 is an absolutely masterful stroke, coloring an otherwise textbook cadence with a lovely string of rich dissonances.


It’s remarkable enough out of context, but in context, it’s a catharsis of subtle but unmistakable power; Mendelssohn has spent the entire chorus preparing us for this moment. We’ve had fully-formed contrasting A and B sections, including a development where the melodies of both are ingeniously combined and played off of each other. The A material is soaring and lyrical, the B material darker and more violent, and it’s only at measure 79 that the lyricism wins out. And we know it, because it’s the first full V-I cadence in tonic since measure 10, and only the second one of the entire piece. (That’s long-range planning.) But that’s not even the true genius of this moment. The true genius is that it’s not the end of the piece. Mendelssohn has engineered this cadence to be but an exquisite curtain-raising for the coda: a simple but luminous harmonization of the old chorale tune “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.”

In other words, this is the work of a composer at the absolute top of his or anybody else’s game, writing music that unfolds its considerable glories with an effortless sure-footedness. This chorus, of course, is all that we have of Mendelssohn’s planned oratorio Christus, left unfinished at his ridiculously premature death. Every time I hear that cadence, hear Mendelssohn at the point where his craft will finally let him do whatever he wants to do, I can’t help thinking about the fact that it was, unwittingly, the end of his career. And you know what? I don’t feel sadness, or regret, or wistfulness: I’m downright pissed, pissed that he didn’t live to produce a normal life expectancy’s allotment of music, pissed that he didn’t get to let his imagination fly on the wings of his technical mastery, and pissed that he came to be remembered as simply a prodigy who had a certain flair for melody but somehow lacked the mettle and inner strength (you know, because he was a Jew) to excel in the “larger forms” that seemed to be the only criterion anybody knew how to apply in those days.

Which is why I fully intend to move heaven and earth in order to maintain my grip on this mortal coil. On the off chance that I actually get to the point Mendelssohn did, I want to be able to enjoy it for a while, and stick around long enough to supersede anyone’s indelible memory of me as a callow youth. And if I never reach that point? You can call me a failure, but you’ll have to do it to my wrinkled face.

Most Dances Properly Conducted until Liquor begins to take Effect
All the investigators report that up to about eleven p.m., generally speaking, the dances are well conducted; the crowd then begins to show the effect of too much liquor. Men and women become intoxicated and dance indecently such dances as “Walkin’ the Dog,” “On the Puppy’s Tail,” “Shaking the Shimmy,” “The Dip,” “The Stationary Wiggle,” etc. In some instances, little children—of whom there are often large numbers present—are given liquor and become intoxicated, much to the amusement of their elders. Many of them are forgotten by their parents in the excitement of the dance, and play upon the filthy floor, witnesses of all kinds of degradation.

—Louise de Koven Bowen,
The Public Dance Halls of Chicago
(Chicago, 1917)

All I can say is, if I ever write an homage to the Bach suites, I know what each movement will be called.

I was poking around the National Archives the other day, and I came across this:


If you ever needed proof of federal indifference to the musical arts, there you have it; that is the most overcooked canned lima bean of a propaganda poster I’ve ever seen. Music inspires… what, exactly? Gazing into the sky? Greek revival fashions? And is that woman having a hallucination of a marching band? Good heavens.

Frankly, I expect more from our government fearmongers. For the taxes we’re paying, they ought to be able to scare a few composers:


And singers:


And audience members:


Ahhhh… being frightened into conformity is so comforting, isn’t it?

Maybe Greg Sandow is trying to liven up his comment thread. Maybe he’s being satirical. Maybe he’s deliberately exaggerating to make a point. I hope so, because I’d hate to think that he actually believes this:

I’ve been reading the new translation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. And that book, classic as it is, doesn’t have half the thought or emotional depth of Casino Royale.

I don’t hold any particular brief for old literature just because it’s old (Bulwer-Lytton cured me of that), but Dumas is magical in a way that I don’t think any movie can even come close to. (Lawrence of Arabia maybe. Maybe.)

So what gives? I mean, Greg’s not a dumb guy. I rather suspect that he’s unwittingly reflecting the modern bias that only dark and serious things can be profound, that unless you heavily underscore a character’s conflicted and troubled soul, your characterization is shallow by virtue of the sin of omission. The Three Musketeers is most definitely not serious or dark; and yet it is also deeply thoughtful and profound. The problem for modern readers is that Dumas (with his ghostwriter, Auguste Maquet) is pulling a masterful bait-and-switch from the very beginning. Here’s how he opens the book:

On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of The Romance of the Rose was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it.

We may not be familiar with the siege of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle, but Dumas’s readers would have been. It’s like he’s comparing the town to Stalingrad in World War II. Stern, serious stuff, in other words. So what’s everybody worked up about?

It was a Bearn pony, from twelve to fourteen years old, yellow in his hide, without a hair in his tail, but not without windgalls on his legs, which, though going with his head lower than his knees, rendering a martingale quite unnecessary, contrived nevertheless to perform his eight leagues a day. Unfortunately, the qualities of this horse were so well concealed under his strange-colored hide and his unaccountable gait, that at a time when everybody was a connoisseur in horseflesh, the appearance of the aforesaid pony at Meung—which place he had entered about a quarter of an hour before, by the gate of Beaugency—produced an unfavorable feeling, which extended to his rider.

Dumas is undercutting the swashbuckling surface of his story from the get-go. He name-drops both a masterpiece of Medieval literature and one of the most dramatic military spectacles of French history in order to stage-manage the entrance of a funny horse. This style permeates the book: the most quotidian details are put in high melodramatic relief, while the most telling observations are nonchalantly tossed off. The horse belongs to the young D’Artagnan; his father has entrusted the beast to him with the instructions to always keep it and treat it as a member of the family. Here’s what happens:

[D’Artagnan] then drew two crowns majestically from his purse and gave them to the host, who accompanied him, cap in hand, to the gate, and remounted his yellow horse, which bore him without any further accident to the gate of St. Antoine at Paris, where his owner sold him for three crowns, which was a very good price, considering that d’Artagnan had ridden him hard during the last stage.

Your modern psychologically astute novelist would have underlined the hell out of this scene, reminding us of the father’s promise, making the buyer more mercenary, probably throwing in a poignant portrait of the old horse to boot. Dumas doesn’t even bother to give the event its own sentence. He just shrugs: young people—whaddya gonna do? But he knows that we know, that we’ll pick up on this little detail, that D’Artagnan’s journey from the impetuousness of youth to the bittersweet wisdom of adulthood is now set up as the main engine of the book.

The other thing about Dumas that throws off readers accustomed to Bruckheimer-esque narratives is his sheer leisureliness. Once all four protagonists are off and running, the most thrusting action scenes are rendered at a casual gait, with plenty of attention paid to the verbal and emotional byplay between the actors. That’s because the main plot is not the action or the treachery or the historical import, it’s the friendship among D’Artagnan and the three Musketeers. In a way, Dumas is writing one of the most non-adventurous adventure novels of all time, and that’s the whole beautiful point. He gives you plenty of action, and then reminds you that adventure is only important in that it gives you something to remember with your friends; he paints his background of a grand historical epic solely to assert the unimportance of grand historical forces compared to the everyday pleasures of companionship and trust. Good and bad things happen all through the book, but Dumas keeps the focus squarely on the humanity of the characters. The cruelest blow is often met with flippant humor, the most trivial insult becomes a full-out duel. Those we admire are occasionally infuriatingly ignoble, those we are meant to hate he gives moments of kindness and integrity. That’s deeply unsatisfying by modern narrative standards, where we want consistently stereotyped characters (not stereotypes per se, but characters whose motives don’t change), not to mention “deep” explanations of why those characters are the way they are. Dumas knows, though, that the way people are changes from situation to situation, and even from moment to moment. (After all, the way people are is a pretty slippery concept.) He lets that happen, and it’s why the book feels so comfortable and true.

There’s a musical analogue to this, and it cuts both ways: both the atonal use of local dissonance and the tonal use of large-scale dialectical conflict and resolution can be read as playing to the modern preference for only finding profundity in sharp-edged conflict and the darker corners of the soul. But I’ve always had a soft spot for music that seems to be built on consonant progressions, but always frustrates your expectation of resolution. Poulenc, with his lush chords and enigmatic trick endings, is particularly good at this, as is Morton Feldman in his late period. Ligeti has a bit of this quality, as does Elliott Carter. (I once heard Carter explain the whole concept of metric modulation as a way to make the upbeat into essentially the entire piece, which is sort of like what Dumas is often trying to do.) It’s the same sort of shift of focus that The Three Musketeers is all about. Things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to; people don’t always behave the way you expect them to; justice is not always poetic; life is most often messy and confused. But we still get up every morning and go through that life, and that’s wonderful enough to warrant a bit of art.

Spanning the globe, etc., etc.

Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego has found that your native language affects the way your hear music. Patel has been doing some of the most entertaining research into nationalistic tendencies in music as of late, coming up with a methodology that lets one correlate the patterns of a given language to the music of its corresponding country of origin. His work can be perused here, including the classic paper “Comparing the rhythm and melody of speech and music: The case of British English and French,” which is pretty much a Monty Python sketch waiting to happen. The one avenue Patel hasn’t yet pursued is a sort of reverse-engineering application of a given dialect to pre-existing music: what would the Enigma Variations sound like with an Australian accent? Die Meistersinger with a Yiddish accent? “Fair Harvard” with a Southie accent?

Speaking of nationalistic tendencies, Nepal has a new national anthem. (They needed something that conspicuously avoided mentioning the monarchy.) Now all they need is a tune. Compose it, and maybe you’ll get your own memorial plaza! Hey, it worked in China.

Opera Chic, an invaluable link to all operatic news out of Italy (you know, where they actually give a damn), notes an interview with Riccardo Chailly, in which the maestro promulgates the theory that Verdi packed Aida with musical codes based on the number three, seeing as how he was a secret Freemason. And of course, everyone knows the Freemasons run everything in tandem with the Illuminati, don’t they? No wonder Alagna’s getting cold feet.

Anybody lose a trumpet in Czechoslovakia?

Finally, if you’re one of those types who breaks away from the tour group to see how the natives really live, Oberlin College is offering a course in “Vocal Folk Traditions,” but I fear that the instructors need to be disabused of a few notions:

The two leaders said that both Georgian and shape note music was true music from the people: “It wasn’t as if some trained composer from a conservatory sat down and wrote this music,” said Book. “They’re all by normal people.”

Hate to burst your bubble, guys, but if somebody put those notes down on paper, then, by definition, they’re not normal. Sorry.

Music, too, plays an important role because it uplifts man’s spirits. It does so without speaking in man’s language, which complicates the business of distinguishing between a good and a bad piece of music. Sometimes you turn on the radio, listen to something, and say to yourself, “Who wrote this junk?” Then you find out it was written by Tchaikovsky or some other famous composer. Then again, sometimes you turn on the radio and hear the same music, only this time you think it’s beautiful—all because you’re in a different mood.

That’s Nikita Khrushchev, from Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, edited and translated by Strobe Talbott (out of print, but you can probably find a copy here). He also tells a fascinating story about the political calculation behind giving Sviatoslav Richter permission to travel:

I told our collective leadership that I was in favor of allowing him to go abroad, They reminded me there was a chance he wouldn’t come back. “So what,” I replied. “We’ve got to take certain risks…. He may very well come back after all, and that would be good propaganda for our culture and our regime.”

Khrushchev, who was an opera fan (his son-in-law was director of the Kiev Opera, in fact) had a predilection for risk worthy of Don Giovanni. And like the good Don, it did him in; ousted in a bloodless coup, he spent the last seven years of his life under essentially house arrest. He probably would make a good operatic character—earthy and sutble, charming and brutal, with a soul that ran the moral gamut from light to dark.

(Illustration from Hans Muller’s Communist Zoo, also out of print. I found the image on a discussion board for comic book collectors.)