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.)

The church musician part of me has been in overdrive this week, gearing up for Advent, which starts Sunday. I’d be the first to admit I’m a fairly unlikely church musician, all the more so since what I get less of a charge out of the spiritual effects of music than its more complicated, fallible human side. I’ve rationalized this into a virtue: my job (I tell myself) is to make sure the music is performed as well as it possibly can be—if I take care of the nuts-and-bolts end of the music, it provides the opportunity for the spiritual end to happen on its own. (I wouldn’t claim any advantage for this approach; I’ve seen music directors who do the exact opposite, and it works just fine.)

An unfortunate combination of insomnia and the necessity of a lot of driving this week led me to throw a few gospel CDs in to the car; they do a good job of keeping me awake, and having some lady shout at me that Jesus died for my sins tends to make instances of road rage too ironic to perpetuate. Anyway, as of this week, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is now my favorite gospel singer ever. Here she is doing what she did best.



Why does this little detail move me so much? It’s a reminder that Tharpe was a pro first and foremost, and that in order to get at the spiritual aspect of music, there’s an awful lot of worldly work that has to be done first. That’s the work I love. Is it going to save my soul? Probably not. But if I can ever make it look as effortless as Sister Rosetta, it might save somebody else’s.

It seems the idea of a composer has become so vague for many English speakers that the word itself is being co-opted as a sort of discount substitute for composure. (The proper term for this is an eggcorn, coined by the fine minds over at Language Log.) Google turns up the following:

(All the other permutations I tried had at least a handful of examples.)

A number of these come from lyrics to hip-hop songs, but I’m nowhere near cool enough to know whether it’s an actual variant in the urban lexicon or just bad transcription. “Maintain my composer” (30 hits) appeared in an unusual number of NC-17 sources, which I suppose could be considered either flattering of frightening. As far as I could tell, only this was consciously making a pun.

On the plus side, our friend Mark Meyer noted in a comment that his computer’s spellchecker keeps insisting that “Poulenc” should be “opulence.” So there’s hope.

Over the weekend, the Globe‘s Jeremy Eichler looked at Boston, looked at Steve Reich, and asked, “Where is the love?” It’s true, the town I call home (but which will never be my hometown—non-native New Englanders know what I’m talking about) hasn’t exactly been clearing the shelves at iParty in honor of the man’s 70th. Truth be told, though, I hadn’t noticed. In fact, I don’t listen to a whole lot of Reich’s music anymore.

Now, I have nothing against Reich’s music; I liked it when I first heard it, and I haven’t stopped liking it, but I haven’t needed to hear it for a while. I think it’s when I first heard it that’s important. Reich entered my consciousness in my late teens—right around the time, in fact, when I first got hooked on Richard Strauss. Don Juan and Music for a Large Ensemble both got many a spin on my turntable (and lest you think that turntable makes me even older than I am, keep in mind that I didn’t even buy a computer until the late 90’s). I still have my copies of Different Trains and The Desert Music, and like Zarathustra and Sinfonia Domestica, they don’t get a lot of play.

Glenn Gould once divided the world into two camps: those who outgrew their youthful enthusiasm for Strauss, and those who didn’t. The implication was that there’s a certain age at which all listeners (all boys, at any rate) who come into contact with Strauss’s music become infatuted with it, and that age usually falls around late adolescence. Gould was on to something, I think: there’s something about Strauss’s music, a talent for turning the raw materials of nerdishness and awkward enthusiasm into the most grandiose of triumphal statements, that’s irresistable to the teenaged mind. But even more than that, there’s the sense that Strauss had figured it all out, that he had cracked the code, that this was the way music was supposed to sound.

I remember thinking that when I was 16 or 17. For a while, I thought that, like Gould, I would be in that minority that didn’t outgrow their Strauss-o-philia, but my ardor cooled, and now my fondness is limited to his songs. That’s not to say I don’t relish a nice Heldenleben when the opportunity presents itself, but that pleasure is in large part nostalgic: for a little while, I can remember what it was like to blast it through my headphones late at night (the Karajan recording, the one where the trumpets cack on the high note), reveling in the hedonistic glory of a wildly over-orchestrated 6/4 chord.

Reich’s music doesn’t have very much in common with Strauss, with one exception: to my not-quite-adult ear, it sure sounded like he had squared the circle, that this was a way of making music that had worked out all the 20th-century kinks. I don’t think that anymore—I don’t think any less of the music, it’s just that I’ve wised up about things a little—and I have a suspicion that, if I had encountered his music later, when my mind was more attuned to possibilities than solutions, I’d probably hear it much differently (and would have continued to hear it in new ways for a much longer time). But, like Strauss, it was a particular type of music at a particular time, and that initial impression was indelibly strong. I still enjoy a serendipitous chance to hear it; maybe Boston, it its curmudgeonly way, will celebrate Reich’s 71st birthday just to reassure everyone that they’re not jumping on some passing fancy of a bandwagon. If they do, though, some tangle of hard-wired teenaged neurons will insist on making it into a trip down memory lane.

Thanksgiving sure ends abruptly, doesn’t it? We were planning on staying home all day Friday, but as it turns out, we needed this and that, so out we went. And the holiday season seemed to have dropped onto the world en masse as if it were the marshmallow avalanche crushing the EPA guy at the end of Ghostbusters. It’s full-metal Christmas out there, all goodwill and happy thoughts and twinkling lights and reindeer and novelty swag and you name it.

It’s like of some horrible plague! But worry not: our anti-social friend Kid Seditious has the cure. Head over to his MySpace page (zero friends as of yesterday; glad to see he’s keeping up appearances) and click on “Insensitivity (Wishing a Jew Merry Christmas).”

If you’re unemployed or just underemployed….

Pseudoxanthoma elasticum: the Opera! Or maybe Tourette Syndrome. Or possibly Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. UK-based Santé Communications is being coy on the subject, but they’re looking for a composer “capable of penning a 20-30 minute opera (possibly for a few principles, small choir and instrumental accompaniment of sorts) around an extremely medical theme”. Imagine the possibilities: a minimalist portrayal of obsessive-compulsive disorder! An aleatoric masterpiece depicting ataxia! The mind reels—although that could just be a subfrontal meningioma.

On the other hand, if those voices in your head are unremittingly paranoiac, you might just be the person Universal Music Group is looking for to be their new Associate Manager for Digital Rights Management. Requirements: a lack of any sense of irony, an essentially Hobbesian view of human nature, and the ability to see the hardened criminal lurking behind a baby’s eyes. All applicants will be required to submit to a criminal background check and a drug test, even though we already know what they’re going to say, you coked-up little thief.

Speaking of thievery, if those pesky notes are eluding you, how about words? This guy would like you to write new lyrics to a catchy jingle by that mainstay of the charts, Antonio Vivaldi. With a few changes, of course.

As the song is written now, single words are sustained for many notes and I would like it broken up with more words so that it will be easier to sing, and also, so that modern audiences will relate to it better.

So that’s what’s alienating modern audiences—melisma! Somebody tell Norman Lebrecht!

But if you’re really desperate, you could try this.

What I am seeking quite frankly is a mate that is tall, slender, blue eyed. I want to pro-create the blue-eyed human being. This is not hate, just preservation of the vanishing blue.

I am seeking you my darling Goddess. You may look here just for fun, but are now perplexed at this opportunity and are even moved to respond even though you would never do that anyway. Yes this is real. We are the Golden ones. We must be proud and preserve our ways.

About me. Beautiful Blue eyes that can see right into your soul. Young looking. light brownish golden hair. Tantra connection. Tall medium build, strong. Enough income to support babes and us. Extremely knowledgeable in healthy living. Hands on construction and auto mechanics. A ballroom dancer and composer.

Percy Grainger is still alive?

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the US, which supposedly commemorates the Pilgrims and the Indians getting together for a feast in 1621. Let’s be honest: if you know anything about history, you know that the mythology behind Thanksgiving is pretty sketch, and if you live in New England, you know that the people who were here before you were don’t think much of the entire holiday. But I’m not going to bad-mouth Thanksgiving; for most people, it’s just an excuse to get together with family and friends and eat way too much food, and, if anything, the world could use a lot more excuses for that sort of behavior. Now, if you’re a pessimistic sort, you might think that there’s a lot of people out there who have neither friends, family, or food—but that’s just because they haven’t met you yet. So introduce yourself already: click on over to the nearest food bank (around here, it’s the Greater Boston Food Bank; you can search here to find your local equivalent) and give ’em a few bucks. (You’d be surprised how far they can stretch one of those new metrosexual-Hamilton ten-dollar bills.)

And since it’s all about the food, here’s some appropriate dinner music: the DJ Food masterpiece Raiding the 20th Century, the meta-mash-up to end all mash-ups (via UBUWEB). I’ve been listening to this all week. It’s so much fun I can barely stand it.

The missus and I (and Moe, of course) will be mooching of off friends this year, but there’s one thing we won’t share, and that’s a big batch of my Mom’s stuffing.

Mom’s Stuffing

1 lb. pork sausage (like Jimmy Dean)
1 lb. Italian sausage
8 cups unseasoned bread cubes

Sauté the meat in a large skillet, stirring and breaking up. When browned, add the bread. Stir well to mix and let the bread absorb the fat. Remove to a large bowl. In the same skillet, melt:

½ cup butter

Add:

2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 cups finely chopped celery (stalks and leaves)
1 cup chopped onion
2 cups shredded almonds
1 cup coarsely chopped mushrooms
¼ cup finely chopped parsley
¼ cup finely chopped green pepper
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. poultry seasoning
½ tsp. ground pepper
¼ tsp. ground nutmeg
pinch cayenne pepper

Cook gently until the onions are soft. Add:

½ cup condensed beef consommé
½ cup dry sherry

Cook until everything’s hot, then add to the sausage and bread mixture, tossing lightly. (If it looks a little dry, add more consommé and sherry.) Pour into a buttered baking dish and bake at 350º until it’s done to your liking. (Or, cool the mixture and then stuff your bird with it.)