Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, When first the shaft into his vision shone Of light anatomized! Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
Poetry by Marianne Moore
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us—that we do not admire what we cannot understand. The bat, holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base— ball fan, the statistician—case after case could be cited did one wish it; nor is it valid to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the autocrats among us can be “literalists of the imagination”—above insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion— the raw material of poetry in all its rawness, and that which is on the other hand, genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
Yesterday Penguin published Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems: 1961-2023 by Margaret Atwood. This generous—624 pages!—book begins with Double Persephone, a 1961 chapbook by the then little-known Atwood. Famous, of course, for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, you’ll find the same feminist mythmaking in the course of her poetry career. There are three “Previously Uncollected” sections of new poems which will enchant Atwood’s poetry fans. The final of the three of these sections contains the title poem and gives a call to poetry’s necessary reach. And Paper Boat contains her classics like this:
Cassandra Atherton is Australia’s prose poet extraordinaire. As both expert practitioner and charismatic evangelist, Atherton has worked for over a decade to elevate the profile of the prose poem on the local and international stage. Along with co-editing two anthologies (Anthology of Australian Prose Poems and Dreaming Awake: New and Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom), she recently co-wrote the first book dedicated to the form, Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020), tracing the history and evolution of the prose poem, and discussing the work of some of its most notable exponents.
In a 2022 interview with Nin Andrews on this blog, to the question “Why prose poetry?”, Atherton answered in part: “I love prose poetry’s compression and the allied sense of breathlessness it so often conveys. Where lineated poems tease the right margin, the prose poem embraces it.”
The poems in Exhumed, her 2015 collection published by the excellent Grand Parade Poets series, do more than just embrace the right margin, they seduce it and then fasten ardently to it. Atherton’s lines move towards their margin like a slightly manic lover moves towards the object of their affection: charged with desire and susceptible to razor-sharp changes in register and mood. It makes an Atherton poem a veritable Pandora’s box of text: secure (and seemingly innocuous) within its defined borders, but once opened—entered—all kinds of mischief is let loose upon the reader. Terrance Hayes’ description of the American sonnet as “part prison / Part panic closet”, “part music box, part meat / Grinder” could easily be applied to the Atherton prose poem.
It is interesting to think of these poems in terms of boxes or caskets in light of the collection’s opening epigraph, which is taken from a 1869 letter by D.G. Rossetti. In it, Rossetti describes digging up a book of poems he had interred in his wife’s coffin. Exhumed in turn digs up dozens of works of literature, art and film (there are references to 13 different works in the opening poem alone, from Emily Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” to Nabokov’s Lolita) and embeds (or reburies) them into the lives of the poems’ speakers. The distinction between art and life becomes vague as each begins to reflect, and imitate, the other. It is a remarkable way to celebrate the fact that, for many of us, our favorite poems, films, paintings, are more than just artefacts, they are experiences we absorb into the deepest parts of the self, to take with us throughout our lives—experiences that can have a profound influence on us and that we can continue to draw upon to make sense, or light, of the world.
Vertigo
She loves the romance of a rooftop. Something about being closer to the stars. There's clarity in the air and the strange movement of light across the sky. The answers to the universe float just over the edge. She can see them, but they are beyond her outstretched fingertips. The stained concrete is cold through her dress, but she edges forward. And that's how he finds her. Lying on the edge, her neck reaching out like a gargoyle; her arms embracing the silence. He grabs her by the ankle like an anchor. Or a shackle. She whispers into the void. He wants to believe it's his name.
Making Out with the White Rabbit
Long after he has gone, I have him. Still. On the tips of my fingers. I don't want to eat, wash my hands, brush my teeth. I shouldn't talk. I want to be swaddled in Gladwrap and slowly suffocate in his scent. Draw arrows on my neck pointing to his teeth marks. I delight in the marks he leaves on my body. But he is always late and I'm never his important date. So I set my watch to Daresbary time and wear it to bed. I dream I'm eating marmalade on toast and solving Pillow-Problems. When I fall out of bed I'm swallowed by a rabbit hole. Distorted hands claw at me as I fall. I see a glimpse of his waistcoat forever ahead of me. The tick of a pocket watch grows louder until I wake up. Alone. I won't cry when he leaves me. I'll know it's because I have outgrown him. As he always said I would. I won't argue when he closes the door behind him. We will have come to the end. I knew that we were temporary. He told me long before we started. I won't follow him when he leaves me. I'll just watch him leave and scurry down his rabbit hole. Back to Alice.
Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books
for Amy Baillien
Your new bookshelves are driving Deweyites mad. Spinner wheels in hand, they ache to enforce the decimal classification system on your vertical timber. Pragmatist systemisers, it doesn't matter which Dewey you prefer: Melvil, John, the library cat or even Huey and Louie's brother, they all believe in shelf diagnosis. So, choose your own system, but ask yourself: Is Emma inappropriately touching Moby Dick? Is Don Juan pressed up against Clarissa or lying on top of Jane Eyre? Don't put Madam Bovary and Anna Karenina too close to the edge and remember that given half a chance, TheBrothers Karamazov will lean on Little Women. Whatever you do, make sure you keep American Psycho in the plastic wrapper. Frankenstein can bring some life to your Gothic collection but keep Dracula away from The Monk and keep Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in separate sections. Don't worry if you lose The Invisible Man, Voss will go looking for him. I suppose you could order your books by the colour of their spine or the birthplace of their author, but that kind of Creative Intelligence is, in the end, just Experimental Logic.
Almost exactly 10 years ago, I decided to create a website devoted to the New York School of poets and artists and name it Locus Solus, after the legendary little magazine that briefly served as the movement’s house journal. Even at the time, I knew it was swimming a bit upstream to launch a blog just at the very moment that the blogging era seemed to be crashing to a close. But I did so because I’d long felt the need for a place to find commentary, news, reviews, and links related to a movement that I found endlessly fascinating and that others seemed to as well. As I noted on the fifth anniversary of Locus Solus, back in 2018, I didn’t have a clear picture of what this site might become or what kind of audience it might find – and had no idea that I might write about 350 posts over the next decade! — but was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was both fun and rewarding to do and that others seemed to find it useful and interesting too.
To mark the occasion of this anniversary, the Flow Chart Foundation (the wonderful organization devoted to the legacy of John Ashbery) and the critic Mandana Chaffa have generously invited me to have a conversation about the blog, its mission and history, and the New York School more broadly, which will be held virtually next Wednesday, 6/15. You can find more information about the event and how to register here. Please join us for the conversation!
Over the past five years, I’ve continued to chronicle the New York School’s ongoing influence on poetry and its legacy in contemporary culture, track the rich critical conversation it continues to provoke, and comment here and there on poems, books, podcasts, and performances. It’s almost impossible to keep up with all things New York School-related – from new art exhibits and books, sightings in the broader culture and surprising cameos in music and television, and the sad news about deaths and losses and the passing of a generation or two.
If you’re curious about the range of topics and types of things I’ve posted about here over the past decade, click on the “Categories” and “Archives” drop-down menus on the right side of the screen and browse around. (And to keep up with new stuff, some of which doesn’t make it on to this blog, be sure to follow the “Locus Solus” Facebook page and my own Twitter account, as well as this site, to get timely updates and information and links about the poets and artists of the New York School).
I have been consistently surprised and heartened by the broad and vibrant community of readers and writers that the New York School continues to inspire. It’s been wonderful to hear from so many fans, fellow scholars, poets, and interested readers, and I appreciate all the tips, suggestions, questions, and enthusiastic responses that have come my way — please keep them coming.
Thanks, as always, for reading and for visiting this site. As Ashbery writes at the end of “The System,” “The past is dust and ashes, and this incommensurably wide way leads to the pragmatic and kinetic future.” Onward!
The woman hailing a taxi in the rain who is almost crushed by another taxi and next by a third taxi and then at last when she almost flags down a taxi she is nearly run over again— I think about this stranger often and feel something like uncorrupted love for her and I think about how the next taxi drenching her and nearly running over her foot veered and I thought then: that is the way to live, to be like the last taxi driver knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet but stopping anyway and yes she’s in the back seat puddling away and she is laughing and I thought that is the way to live— to keep trying to catch what speeds past despite even the street lifting up to insult you and aren’t you like all those taxis, the way your heart keeps skidding around? And let there be someone waiting anxious to see the taxi driver and the woman riding, someone who says convincingly: It’s all right, all of it, we’re all going to get somewhere.
-Lee Upton Published in Triquarterly July 15 2024
Lee Upton's comic novel, TABITHA, GET UP, was launched in May 2024 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Her most recent book of poetry is her seventh collection, The Day Every Day Is, winner of the Saturnalia Books Prize (2023). Another novel, a literary mystery, Wrongful, is due out from Sagging Meniscus in 2025, and a third novel,The Withers, set in a near-future world where organ trafficking threatens families, will appear in 2026 from Regal House Publishing. A sequel to Tabitha, Get Up, is forthcoming in 2026: Tabitha, Stay Up. Her New & Selected Poems will appear in 2027. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Southern Review, and three editions of Best American Poetry.
Lee Upton’s frenetic and enlightening “The Great Adventure” shares its breathlessness with Frank O’Hara’s famous “Poem [Lana Turner] has Collapsed” in which chaos is general over Manhattan as “it started raining and snowing” and “the traffic / was acting exactly like the sky,” and a final clarity leaps from chaos: “Lana Turner we love you get up.” But the woman in Upton’s poem is not a headline, but someone directly observed, caught in the rapids of traffic:
The woman hailing a taxi in the rain
who is almost crushed by another taxi
and next by a third taxi
and then at last when she almost flags down a taxi
she is nearly run over again—
This woman is behaving foolishly and dangerously, we think. She is lucky to be alive.
The poem’s next lines recall an O’Hara title, “Meditations in an Emergency”:
I think about this stranger often and feel something like
uncorrupted love for her
and I think about how
the next taxi drenching her and nearly running over her foot veered
and I thought then: that is the way to live,
to be like the last taxi driver
knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet
but stopping anyway
So much is happening: the “uncorrupted love” that makes us think of all the forms of love that don’t qualify for that description, that demonstrates it’s possible to love a stranger on the strength of ordinary actions; the run-on line that hits us with serial misfortune halted with the small verb “veered,” the astonishing conclusion, “that is the way to live,” which we think applies to the woman but instead to the beneficent driver “knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet / but stopping anyway.” Upton’s phrasing is as direct and practical as the driver’s thoughts must be, but then comes what we have given up on, praise for the woman, “and yes she is in the back seat puddling away /and she is laughing”:
and I thought that is the way to live—
to keep trying to catch what speeds past
despite even the street lifting up to insult you
This sentiment recalls William Blake’s “He who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in Eternity’s sunrise”; the multivalent “insult” like W.H. Auden’s “nights of insult,” both injurious and unkind.
Then, in a turn sudden as a careening cab’s, the speaker asks herself “aren’t you like all those taxis, the way / your heart keeps skidding around? Upton has, we find, O’Hara’s skill at bringing life to the inanimate city, joining it to herself and our selves.
A final surprise is the valedictory “Let there be someone,” asking that there be a human destination to bless the confusion and its aftermath and provide a simple, reassuring comment on the human condition:
And let there be someone waiting
anxious to see the taxi driver and
the woman riding,
someone who says convincingly: It’s all right, all of it,
we’re all going to get somewhere.
Upton modestly makes way for another “someone”—a voice that can soothe her, too, with the promise that frustration will give way not to happiness, but something more bland, capacious and possible: getting “somewhere.” At the beginning of Lee Upton’s generous and generative poem, we may patronizingly think the woman lucky to be alive. At its end, we think the same—not in complaint but in mutual affirmation. – Angela Ball
I am always fascinated by the questions poets and writers are asked in interviews and at readings about how they write--as if it's a mystery, or as if there's a recipe. At the same time, I love some of the answers poets and writers give to the question. I like to imagine a student going home and doing whatever these famous writers were said to have done.
BALA CYNWYD, Pa. — American Jews are buying guns more often. They’re going to Shabbat dinners and synagogues more often. They’re debating about Israel and antisemitism — topics many had set to the side in recent decades — more often.
A year ago, Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israelset off war in the Middle East. In the United States,the surprise assault and Israel’s countering invasion of the Gaza Strip prompted mass protests on city streets and at colleges across the nation. For many of the nation’s 7.5 million Jews, the year has led to concerns over whether they are securely woven into the fabric of American life. In the intense anger directed by protesters at the Jewish state and in some cases at Jews, many of thenearly three-dozen American Jews interviewed by The Washington Post sawantisemitism they thought had long ago subsided or at minimum wasn’t acceptable to voice.
Phoebe MacAdams was born and raised New York City, but has mostly lived in California, moving to LA in 1986. With the poets James Cushing, the late Holly Prado, Harry Northup, and Jeanette Clough, she is a member of Cahuenga Press, which published five of her eight books, including in 2016 her new and selected volume, The Large Economy of the Beautiful. In 2017, Beyond Baroque published Every Bird Helps: A Cancer Journal. She taught English at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights until her retirement in 2011. She lives in Pasadena with her husband, Ron Ozuna. [Author photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.]
Only until this cigarette is ended, A little moment at the end of all, While on the floor the quiet ashes fall, And in the firelight to a lance extended, Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended, The broken shadow dances on the wall, I will permit my memory to recall The vision of you, by all my dreams attended. And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done. Yours is a face of which I can forget The color and the features, every one, The words not ever, and the smiles not yet; But in your day this moment is the sun Upon a hill, after the sun has set.
Esthetically, Atelier de Paris most often chooses the intriguing performance over the done thing. Participating in the country-wide Season of Lithuania (and keeping an oar in culture exchange with east Europe over the long term) – featuring not just dance and performance but also visual arts – is doing the right thing. With its emphasis on un-narrative and immediate experience, intimacy and diversity of expression, dance performance is a powerful tool for cultural dialogue.
Atelier featured two premières by creators Lukas Karvelis, She dreamt of being washed away to the coast and Vilma Pitrinaitė, When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, who have been in residence since last year. In addition, Atelier’s Open Studio conference featured WIP by choreographers Liza Baliasnaja, Greta Grinevičiūtė and Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, all active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene.
Taken together, I couldn’t detect anything specifically “Lithuanian” about the work of these artists. But then, I think “nation” is a political framework built higgledy-piggledy around a human networking tic, something like the one that makes for that famous six degrees of separation or simultaneous language change and learning in widely separated groups.
As individuals, then, all five, it seems to me, are focused on the now and future of dance performance and society generally. Even more perhaps than in France these days, “identity” suggests individual, not “national”, identity; “diversity” suggests gender and LGBTQ+ inclusion more than “culture” diversity.
For instance, both She dreamt of being washed away to the coast, which according to the play notes, references a national folktale, and When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, which references the Ukraine liberation struggle, suggest an intersection of national and personal identities. But performance experience drives the reference out of mind. Karvelis’ piece is an absolutely absorbing performer tour de force of leg-work and balance. Pitrinaitė’s is pure contemporary danse d’auteur: edgy, emotional… personal, personifying.
Presenting a new performance titled Chiaroscuro, on the social dynamics of fear, only Liza Baliasnaja’s biography – she has a Jewish heritage from parents who came from Russia to Lithuania at some point in the post-war period – suggests issues of national identity and belonging or historical trauma. Her broader issue is to explore how history, politics and social conditions shape contemporary identity; that certainly has resonance everywhere in the world, not just in her neck of the woods.
Baliasnaja is currently working on the “shield/protector” aspect of a “victim-shield/protector-victimizer” nexus for multi-part choreography. Though she may be referencing Lithuania’s history, her concept applies pretty neatly to recent American experience of populist grievance movements and I expect the piece is meant to have a more or less universal application. Otherwise, Baliasnaja is an ardent promoter of her country’s contemporary dance scene, complete with the Europe and international connections the Season of Lithuania is looking to strengthen: she’s an alumna of Theresa de Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S dance performance school and currently works from Cologne, Germany.
Describing herself as an independent contemporary dance performer and choreographer, and certainly very Lithuania-centered in education and work, Agnietė Lisčkinaitė co-founded her BE COMPANY dance group with Greta Grinevičiūtė, a long-time friend and frequent work partner, also much present on the Lithuanian scene. Lisčkinaitė has been president of the Lithuania Contemporary Dance Association since 2020 and performs with the AIROS and Vilnius City Dance Theatre LOW AIR dance theaters. She is perhaps the most issues-oriented of the group, throwing herself into the local movements for gender and LGBTQ+ equality and democratic resistance in Belarus.
Still, I would like to say that Lisčkinaitė’s concerns are extensions of her focus on dance performance rather than the other way around. From first to last her remarks had body movement and use at its core; at one point she asked us to reflect on how raising the arms affected our bodies and later asked if we had observed how often “arms-high” (or “hands-in-the-air”) figures in protest?
Lisčkinaitė is performing Hands Up! at Théâtre de la Ville, ruminating the space between surrender and resistance in the same gesture and using it as a platform to ask how we should view protest: symbolic aggression or symbolic liberty?
The general universalist perspective of these artists, I think, finds its clearest expression in Greta Grinevičiūtė, who has a very ingenious approach to the experience and observation of the things of her immediate environment.
As already noted, Grinevičiūtė’s very active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene: in addition to co-founding BE COMPANY troupe with Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, she produces contemporary dance and interdisciplinary performance, notably, with Vytis Jankauskas Dance Company and the AIROS theater and she’s one of a collective of active creators at Vilnius City Theatre Art and Science Laboratory. Her WIP, which stretches back to 2018, explores the construction of memory (both experiential and genetic/generational) in her work, which consists of a human object/subject (such as a “parent”) and an (associated? transitional?) object from ordinary life.
Dance for a washing machine and a mother, produced at the Vilnius Art and Science Laboratory in 2020, is the second part of a (so far) four-part project which began with Dance for a vacuum cleaner and a father and will include currently WIP-pieces “Dance for and object and child” and “Dance for a cigarette and best friend”. Each piece envisions the sense and role of object/subject and object in “memory”. I suppose Grinevičiūtė should have got me thinking about a dance performer, but, instead, she got me thinking about musician Frank Zappa, his mix of erudite and ordinary and his interest in Erik Satie*: how does music fit into life, into the fabric of modern life? Zappa was one of those individuals who, by being themself, somehow represents everybody else. So is Greta Grinevičiūtė.
In Genesis 18 when God told Sarah She would have a baby she laughed Since she was an old lady (90!) and When she denied she had laughed God said, "No, honey, you did laugh," Because he wasn't angry about it;
However in Daniel 5:4 Belshazzar Mockingly laughed and a hand wrote
Mene mene tekel upharsin (?!?!?!) On the wall and Belshazzar's loins Were loosened (meaning what?) Followed by the attack of King Darius Who was sixty-two years of age. (But we don't care how old he was!)
<<< The Observer and the poet Lawrence Joseph, two Detroiters living in New York, were talking in a café in Battery Park City.
“You asked me about the connection between Detroit and New York,” Mr. Joseph said. “Detroit is the great modern city. And it becomes metaphorically the great industrial city. Céline writes about two cities when he comes to America in Journey to the End of the Night: New York and Detroit. Why? In 1932, when he writes perhaps the first great international novel of the 20th century, why does he choose New York and Detroit? What are your central metaphors internationally in 1932, when you’re going into a Depression? The center of the United States was Detroit and New York.” He slapped the table. “And I’m aware of that. Is Detroit still the center? It doesn’t matter. Detroiters will tell you that it is. And the world seems to think it’s pretty important.” >>> For the rest of this New York Observer interview, click here. From the archive, first posted September 28, 2011.
Poetry Forum: Lydia Davis, author of Varieties of Disturbance: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: finalist for the 2007 National Book Award), and Almost No Memory. Davis has won many of the major American writing awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship for fiction, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. She has translated Proust and others from the French and has written six collections of original work.
Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.
Best American Poetry 2008 edited by Charles Wright
Thursday, September 25
7:00 p.m., free
Tishman Auditorium, Johnson Building, 66 West 12th Street
David Lehman, series editor of The Best American Poetry and poetry coordinator of the New School’s MFA program, will introduce poets chosen by Charles Wright for the 2008 volume, the 21st edition of the acclaimed annual anthology. Readers include John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Ciaran Berry, Laura Cronk, Richard Howard, D. Nurkse and Meghan O'Rourke.
Monday, October 27
6:30 p.m., room 510. $5.
Poetry Forum: James Tate and Dara Wier
Pulitzer Prize-winner James Tate (who served as guest editor of the Best American Poetry 1997) is the author of a new book of poems, The Ghost Soldiers. Dara Wier’s most recent book is Remnants of Hannah. Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.
Wednesday, November 5
6:30 p.m., room 510. $5.
Poetry Forum: Ed Ochester, author of Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New, and editor of the anthology: American Poetry Now. Ochester is the long-time editor of the celebrated Pitt Poetry Series. Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.
Wednesday, November 19
6:30 p.m., room 510. $5
Poetry Forum: Vincent Katz, author of Black Mountain College: An Experiment, is a poet, writer, art critic, and translator. Katz will read and comment on the poets of Black Mountain School, such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan.
Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.
Wednesday, December 10
6:30 p.m., room 510. $5
Poetry Forum: Andrey Gritsman is the author most recently of the book of poems Picese and is the editor and publisher of the on_line international poetry magazine Interpoezia. A native of Moscow, Gritsman lives in the New York City and works as a physician. Gritsman will read his translations of Pasternak, Akhmatova, Blok, and Tsvetaeva. He will also read Mayakovsky’s “Brooklyn Bridge” in the original and David Lehman will read his translation. Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School Writing Program.
Yesterday Graywolf Press published Hold Everything by Dobby Gibson. When I first read the book’s title I thought it referenced the movie of the same name from the 1920s which featured one of my favorite songs ”You’re the Cream in My Coffee.”
While I was wrong, the book does have a wonderful coffee connection. The title poem is a stunning sonnet sequence, each of which was drafted during the time it took Gibson to finish a cup of coffee. There is a breeziness, a caffeinated energy, as the poet engages with the pandemic, the frightening world news, and the death of his friend Dean Young. The quick-witted voice never sacrifices the close attention to image, the wisdom in zooming out to see the big picture. Here’s an example:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Happy birthday, Lew! from "The Seven Most Meaningful Compositions That I Will Love Forever" by Lewis Saul (BAP blog,July 17, 2010):
<<< One day during my short stint at Juilliard, the composer Milton Babbitt came to guest lecture one of my composition classes.
Mr. Babbitt gave us all a nice lecture on 20th century music and how serial music (12-tone) was here to stay and it shouldn't be "our" problem if people don't enjoy it or "understand" how to react to it...
I recall that my friends and I were horrified at such elitism. Although I had learned a great deal of serial technique my senior year in high school at IAA, my own personal inclination led me to reason that music should always sound interesting and should completely engage an audience. Certainly, we all toyed around with trying to write "interesting" 12-tone music.
And then one day ...
**
I heard this piece. Actually, Berio was one of my professors, but alas, I had only one session with him and he barely spoke three words to me (he was still working on the Fifth Movement, which not completed at the premiere). I was only at Juilliard for 14 days before I was nearly killed by a drunk driver ... the premiere with the just-completed Fifth Movement was premiered eight days before my accident.
If you have been reading my previous posts, you will recall that I had the honor of performing Mahler's Second Symphony at IAA. So naturally, this piece had an extra added meaning for me:
**
Allen B. Ruch has written such a wonderful description of this piece ~ I could not do better. I hope you will read it.
Because the oversized score is so huge, it will not fit nicely into my scanner, I can only provide the first page (above).
Take a look at what the Swingle Swingers are singing! Just varied vowel-sounds -- pppp -- which quickly morphs into a frenetic text by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss from Le cru et le cuit ("The Raw and the Cooked").
By the way, Berio (may he rest in peace) could be a real asshole:
"[Y]ou know that Berio used The Raw and the Cooked in his Sinfonia. A part of the text is recited, accompanied by the music. I admit that I did not grasp the reason for this choice. During an interview a musicologist asked me about it, and I answered that the book had just come out and the composer had probably used it because it was at hand. Now, a few months ago Berio, whom I don't know, sent me a very disgrunted letter. He had read the interview, several years after the fact, and assured me that the movement of this symphony offered the musical counterpart of the mythical transformation I was revealing. He included a book by a musicologist ... who had demonstrated the fact. I apologized for the misunderstanding, which was, I said, the result of my lack of musical training, but I'm still baffled." (Wikipedia article)
The Second Movement's text is simply a name, broken down into its tiniest components of vowel/consonant-sounds: MARTIN LUTHER KING.
The Third Movement is perhaps the reason why this piece achieved such universal acclaim. Berio did something so unique and interesting that it would be impossible not to simply sit back and admire it:
He re-orchestrates the Third Movement of the Mahler in his own style -- although it is clearly distinguishable amidst the sometimes cacophonous explosion of sound and fury which is layered in and around the Mahler quote.
In addition to the Mahler symphony, Berio has inserted "quotes" (reorchestrated and carefully and cleverly inserted into the flow):
Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, fourth movement (violent opening scale played by the brass)
A brief quotation of Mahler's Symphony No. 4 (Mahler) just before.....
Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, third movement (the only quotation that is ongoing)
Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, flute solo from the Pantomime
Berlioz's idée fixe from the Symphonie Fantastique (played by the clarinets)
Ravel's La Valse (orchestra plays octave motif with piccolo playing a chromatic scale)
Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (the "Dance of the Earth" sequence at the end of the first tableux)
Stravinsky's Agon (upper oboe part from the "Double pas de quatre")
Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier (one of the waltzes composed for the opera)
a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach
Alban Berg's Wozzeck (the drowning scene late in the third act)
Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony, second movement (melody stated with the clarinets)
(Schoenberg segment quoted again)
Debussy's La Mer, second movement "Jeux de vagues"
Boulez's Pli Selon Pli, very first chord of the entire piece from the first movement ("Don")
Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen for three orchestras (during the introductions of the vocalists near the end)
***
The eight vocalists are not soloists! They are meant to be integrated into the mix as Berio says: "a vocal group among instrumental groups" (score).
The Fourth (and later Fifth) are meant to be sort of codas to the earlier movements. They quote previous material, including bits of the First Movement and the whole-tone feel of the Second Movement.
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I am completely baffled as to why there is not a CD of the premiere recording, with Berio conducting the NY Phil. It is still available on vinyl (used).
I own every CD available of this piece. None compare to Berio's premiere, which I consider to be a major artistic tragedy. These two are pretty good, although I am astonished that Boulez failed to follow Berio's instructions regarding microphones and mixing. Much of the textual (and occasionally musical) details are either buried deep in this mix, barely audible, or missing entirely.
I actually attended a performance by this orchestra with Boulez conducting in Paris in 1972. It suffered from the same type of problems.
Boulez/Swingle Singers/Orchestre National de France
Eötvös/Göteborgs Symphony
Eötvös, on the other hand, gives a unique interp which is unusually intimate. Quite different from the Berio, but much more thoughtful than the Boulez...
**
Thank you, David Lehman, for giving me the opportunity to share these musical passions of mine. I enjoyed sharing my ideas and I hope some of you enjoyed some part of it.
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
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