Here's the extended version from 1973, all ten minutes of it:
the studio version:
1959:
with thanks to Rick Winston
And if you can, listen to Bruce Adolphe and Fred Child on NPR's "Great Performances": they may just take a Berlin standard ("Cheek to Chek," say) and have it performed as if it were a Mendelssohn piano concerto.
One day, a year or so ago, Oliver said to me, in passing, “I need to read some Baraka.” When someone, especially someone close to me, says something like that, I leap into action. I leapt to my keyboard and ordered him The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris with input from the author. Published in 2009 by Basic Books, the Reader does not cover the last fifteen years of Baraka’s production, but, at close to 600 pages, it certainly covers the early years, from the late 1950s through 1999.
To supplement this, I recommend SOS: Poems 1961-2013, published by Grove Press in 2014. This volume, edited by Paul Vangelisti, shows the scope of Baraka’s poetic achievement and is especially surprising in its final section, titled “Fashion This,” which covers the years 1996-2013. Here, we see the poet at his most unguarded. Many of these poems have not been previously collected in book form. They maintain the same senses of urgency and outrage that animate Baraka’s poetry throughout, but they are tempered with a lightness, a delicacy at times, that can be shocking and disarming.
I’ve shied away from Readers as they focus on a consensus of what an author’s best work is, or someone’s assessment of that, leaving out much interesting peripheral work — but the LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka reader feels essential. Partially that has to do with Baraka’s participation in the selection, but mainly it’s because the man was so prolific, something the Reader makes clear. He published poetry, music criticism, fiction, and was a successful playwright from his early days on. He was also a significant editor of literary journals — first of Yugen, with Hettie Jones, and then, with Diane di Prima, of The Floating Bear. Baraka always had a voice.
I’ve often wondered what it is that catapults a poet into a wider consciousness, and I believe much of it has to do with prose writing. While poetry remains a particular province, prose, if it is well-written and timely, can reach a much larger audience. In Baraka’s case, his two books on music, Blues People, published in 1963, and Black Music (1968) did precisely that. The first was composed as a study of the origins of jazz and has the subtitle The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It. The second book was composed of articles and reviews previously published in DownBeat, Kulchur, and as liner notes for such artists as John Coltrane and Sonny Murray.
Selections from these seminal studies are included in the Reader, along with a fantastic, often hilarious account of a trip to Cuba in 1960, originally published in Home: Social Essays (1966). There is much more in the Reader, including a selection of at-the-time unpublished works. One of these returns to Malcolm X, a seminal figure in Baraka’s movement from downtown bohemian to uptown Black Nationalist in the late 1960s. In the ‘70s, Baraka adopted an explicitly Marxist ideology, elaborating and expanding his views on race. In the Reader, this is referred to as his Third World Marxist Period. In one of the last pieces in the reader, “Malcolm as Ideology” (1995), Baraka critiques Spike Lee’s interpretation in his 1992 biopic.
I am powering through the Reader, and it has been a supreme education for me about a lot of things, mainly about Baraka himself. His framing of stories and his furious outbursts, the rage and neurosis he lays bare on the page, stem directly from the condition he eloquently describes, in many different genres and styles, throughout his life. He made the decision as an artist to leave all that visible on the page.
He didn’t sugar-coat, and he didn’t try to cover up the nastiness of some of his feelings. Ultimately, though, in his poetry especially, he comes to moments of pure bliss, when he seems to feel at home, to have located himself finally in his culture, and there he has written some of the most tender verse of our time. Much of it can be found in the final 130 pages of Vangelisti’s book, poems mostly unpublished during Baraka’s lifetime.
Here’s one:
“Note to AB”
I became a poet
Because every thing
Beautiful seemed
“poetic” to me.
I thought there were things
I didn’t understand
that wd make the world
poetry. I felt I knew
who I was but had to
Struggle, to catch up
w/ my self.
Now I do see me
sometimes, a few worlds
ahead, & I speed up, then,
put my head down,
Stretch my stride out
& dig
There me go, I scat &
sing, there me go.
Photo credit: Mignonette Dooley
___________________________________________________________________
Bad Girls Album Cover
By the time I was seven, I knew I would like sex, knew
I would be good at it. I practiced lying on my back,
knees bent, hairless prepubescent folds angled up to the air.
I knew nothing of actual sex. The only penis I had ever seen
was by accident—opening the bathroom door on my father’s
friend. But this was the time of Donna Summer. Under a
streetlamp’s maraschino cherry glow, she posed—wet black
ringlets framed her light brown-sugared face, pouting lips
slick in shiny scarlet gloss, high heel perched on the lamp’s base
plunging the slit of her dress back to reveal a black lace stocking
a garter as garnish—so naughty, so beautiful. Why wouldn’t I
want to be like her—up front about being wanted?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union (The 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize) and Haint (2017 Ohioana Poetry Award). She is the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize winner and the poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Lawrence Joseph is the author of seven books of poems, most recently A Certain Clarity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). His other books of poems include So Where Are We? (FSG, 2017), Into It (FSG, 2005) and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973 – 1993 (FSG, 2005). He is also the author of Lawyerland (FSG, 1997), a nonfiction novel. He is Tinnelly Professor of Law (emeritus) at St. John’s University School of Law and lives with his wife in New York City.
I corresponded with Mr. Joseph via email about poetry as an access to viewing and comprehending “the inner lives of a culture,” the language of law, and the power of musicality to jolt us into new worlds. We also discussed the writing of poems as a “prayer for illumination and perfection.”
What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?
I write poems because I need to. Making poems is an integral part of my sensibility, of who I am. Poetry, for me, is human language in its most charged, distilled form, deeply infused with emotion and feeling, intellect and sensuality. A poem is an aesthetically composed object, an expression of the poet’s interior and exterior worlds. Robert Hayden described “the writing of poems as one way of coming to grips with inner and outer realities,” as “a spiritual act, really, a sort of prayer for illumination and perfection.” I wholeheartedly agree.
What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course?
Poetry helps us make sense of, and see, the realities of the worlds that we individually and collectively live in. It shows us the inner lives of a culture. At any given time it is the common voice with in us.
Your most recent book of poems, A Certain Clarity, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March of 2020. Described by the publisher as “passionately driven by an acute awareness of a deeper order in which beauty, love, and justice are indistinguishable,” the work presents selections from your six prior books of poetry. The New York Times calls the book “a major work of American art.” In your perception, is there an inquiry or exploration that unifies this newest collection? An underlying intention? And what do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?
Each of my books has been written as a book, not as a collection of poems. My intention was that A Certain Clarity also be read as a book in itself. From the beginning — my first book, Shouting at No One, was published in 1983, and included poems written back to the mid-70s — my poems have addressed the power structures of American imperial war-making, finance capital, racism, misogyny, and ecological destruction, revealing the vicious hatred in America of the poor and weak. But, also from the beginning, I’ve set against these worlds of cruelty, violence and subjugation deeper truths — for me, the most human truths — of beauty and love — truths which, first of all, I believe in, and are, ultimately, what in my work I wish to leave my reader with.
You are the Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law in New York City, and — writing as an attorney — you have published on the subjects of employment, tort and compensation law, labor, jurisprudence, and legal theory. John Ashbery once called your work “poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness.” Is there a place in your vision where your legal and poetic fascinations meld, like tin-lead alloy wires becoming solder? Or are these professional threads necessarily distinct — two independent filaments of your mind’s tapestry?
In the United States the language of law covers every social, economic and political issue. During my forty-five years professionally as lawyer, I’ve practiced and taught this language, written critically about it, know it well, and have used it in my poetry. When Wallace Stevens, a career-long practicing lawyer, was asked about writing poetry and being a lawyer, he replied: “I don’t have a separate mind for legal work and another for writing poetry. I do each with my whole mind.” I feel the same way.
What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?
I’m writing my next book of poems, which will pick up where my last book, So Where Are We? left off, in early 2016, before Trump’s presidency and the pandemic. I’m also working on several prose projects, in various forms and genres.
Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?
I’m always learning my language, the American language, which, of course, is constantly changing, as America itself is constantly changing. Over time, I’ve created my own tradition. I look for poets and poems that jolt me into their worlds. I take apart poems that I love on every level of form and content that I can imagine and try to write poems that will have the same effect on a reader that these poems have had on me. And music, sound — poetry is, above all, sound. Be as attentive to the sounds of your words as you are to what your words say.
As soundtracks go, it's hard to beat Ennio Morricone's for Once Upon a Time in America:which incorporates the immportal song "Amapola":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaZFLkR6fVU
Two excerpts from "The Man Who (Re)made Sinatra: The Riddle of Nelson" by Terry Techout in Commentary (July / Augusty 2021
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Nelson Riddle was, perhaps, the greatest of all the arrangers who worked on the Great American Songbook, primarily because of the work he did in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra. The two men were brought together by Capitol Records in 1953 in the hope of updating Sinatra’s singing style, which still recalled his youthful crooning of sentimental ballads. Within a matter of years, Sinatra had recorded his two finest albums, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956) and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958), on which he emerged decisively as a mature artist, in part because of Riddle’s sympathetic backing. Riddle also wrote arrangements of like quality for Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Peggy Lee, and Dean Martin. Riddle’s innovative work defined the predominant postwar style of arranging, which may be the defining sound of the American century. Such an artistic force is deserving of a first-class full-length biography. Alas, Peter Levinson’s September in the Rain (2001), though full of illuminating detail about his life, is musically uninformed, while Geoffrey Littlefield’s newly published Nelson Riddle: Music with a Heartbeat, nominally co-written with Riddle’s son Christopher, is a vanity-press disaster, besmirched by factual errors and even more musically ignorant than Levinson’s book. Still, September in the Rain does let us see how Riddle developed as an artist, in the process enriching our understanding of the life of the chronically melancholy man and his uncomfortable relationship with the greatest popular singer of the 20th century.
>>>
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Today, Riddle’s style, especially as documented in the albums he recorded with Sinatra, is universally acknowledged as the high-water mark of postwar vocal arranging. Their making was a nerve-racking process for Riddle, who confessed to finding Sinatra terrifyingly mercurial: “Frank contributed a lot to the orchestral part of his own records, just by leveling a hostile stare at the musicians, with those magnetic blue eyes! The point of this action was to make me, or any other conductor, feel at that exact moment as if he had two left feet, three ears, and one eye.”
But the resulting tension, he admitted, was “a positive factor that found its way into the record,” and it brought out the best in Riddle. More than a half-century later, their albums sound as vital as ever—and his ability to overcome his fear of Sinatra and rise to the occasion is a large part of what has kept them so. >>>
For the entire article, click here. For the record, many Frankophiles consider "In the Wee Small Hoirs" an even better album of ballads than the great "Only the Lonely." Teachout is absolutely correct when he says that song arrangers are underpaid, underappreciated, and sometimes unacknowledged. Other Sinatra arrangers worth more than a mention include Billy May, George Siravo, Gordon Jenkins, Don Costa, Axel Stordahl, Quincy Jones, Neil Hefti, and Johnny Mandel.
/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/Richard-Wagner-troubled-legacy-flash-631.jpg)
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If you’ve ever hummed “Here Comes the Bride” (from Wagner’s Lohengrin) or seen Apocalypse Now (the “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter assault), you have already sipped at the well. Those who have immersed themselves in [Richard] Wagner’s full operas—lengthy and demanding, yet flowing and churning like a great river of thought and feeling—often experience a sense of awe. “It's so rich and deep—it's like a drug sometimes. If you give up and let go, it really drags you into a mysterious world,” Jonas Kaufmann, the celebrated German tenor, said on NPR in February.“His music is like nobody else’s, emotionally,” says Janet Ciriello, a member of the Wagner Society of Los Angeles who has attended the Bayreuth Festival “six or seven times” since 1985. “It grabs you, and you have to stay with it. Whatever the issue is—greed, or power or Eros—he somehow manages to encompass everybody’s feelings.” Adds her husband Nick Ciriello: “I love Donizetti, Mozart and Verdi, of course, and Puccini. All of these people stir you and grab you, but Wagner picks you up and slams you against the wall. You are in his hands. He’s the grand sorcerer.”
>>>
Click here for the rest of Jamie Katz's Smithsonian piece (from July 23, 2013) about the least likeable but arguably most gifted of the various Wagners (Billy, Mayor, Mayor's Pop, Honus as well as Dick).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-brilliant-troubled-legacy-of-richard-wagner-16686821/
It was forty years ago today ...
No, that can't be right -- it just sounded nice! But it was like 39 or so -- and it was Paris -- a Montparnasse cafe in fact and it was raining lightly (probably) and I knew a poet (definitely) who expressed his unreserved enthusiasm for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Op. 125 -- particularly the final movement, the "Ode To Joy," where Beethoven unleashes all the forces at his disposal, including vocal soloists and chorus.
I tried to explain to this poet how Beethoven -- using only the simplest and most basic harmonic structure (think two-chord rock 'n roll) -- spins the earth around with powerful orchestration and unbelievablly brilliant variation in color and temperment ...
... but the best part was that this particular poet taught me the meaning of the German words which I had never really taken the trouble to learn.
Muß ein lieber vater wohnen means a lot more to me now thanks to this wonderful poet friend who turned me on to James Joyce, playfully informed me that Joan Miró was not a woman -- and had the good sense to bring Frank Zappa along as the soundtrack to our local hysteria ...
**
Much like his musical output as a whole, Beethoven’s 17 string quartets can be divided into three convenient periods: Early, Middle and Late.
Early: Opus 18, Nos. 1-6, all written between 1798-1800;
Middle: Opus 59, Nos. 1-3 (1805/6); Op. 74, the “Harp” (1809), and Op. 95 (1810);
Late: Op. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135 (1823-26)
I cannot recall when I first heard a Late Beethoven quartet. It must have been my senior year of high school at the Interlochen Arts Academy, where my composition teacher had pointed me towards the microfiche machine and a few spools of microfilm which contained the Complete Works of Beethoven! How I used to pour over those beautiful scores, surfing the microfilm the way we do the net today -- carefully studying these (mostly) unfamiliar scores.
After thoroughly absorbing the Late Quartets, I began to feel a particular fondness and appreciation of Op. 131 -- not that the others are not equally brilliant and exciting, world-shaking music -- but 131 became a focal point for my idea about what it means to write for these four stringed instruments …
~~
HOW I BECAME SUCH A HUGE AMADEUS FAN
I have 15 or 20 different recordings of the string quartets. The Amadeus Quartet recordings from the 1960’s -- recently reissued on CD -- are my favorites, by far!
I still have the original 10-LP DGG set and listen to it often, marveling at how much better analog vinyl sounds than squeezy-thin dynamic range and contrast CDs. I’ve never heard better performances -- particular the Late Quartets.
Unlike most quartets with a famous name, who routinely replace departing players (“Juilliard,” “Tokyo,” “Turtle Island”), The Amadeus Quartet had always agreed that “ … if any member could no longer play, for whatever reason, the Quartet would not continue” -- and when Peter Schidlof, the violist, died in 1987, The Amadeus Quartet disbanded.
I had the good fortune to hear the Tokyo Quartet play this here in Tucson in April of 2008. My review of that performance is here.
HOW FIVE BECAME SIX AND OTHER DETAILS
Op. 133 (“Grosse Fuge”) was originally the last movement of Op. 130. Shockingly, Beethoven listened to reason and his publisher and agreed to replace the mammoth movement with a light dance movement (one of the very last things he ever wrote!), which now stands as the Finale to Op. 130.
Op. 133 was published separately -- although more and more quartets today are playing this as the Finale of Op. 130, a strange historic reconstruction …
What makes these late quartets so special?
First of all, if you are familiar with the Ninth (Op. 125) and/or the Missa Solemnis (Op. 123) or the Diabelli Variations (Op. 120), you already know that his style and perhaps even his fundamental musical language had changed dramatically from his output of the previous decade or so.
But the string quartet being the intimate, ultimate form for any composer (true today, methinx), Beethoven seems to have deliberately set out to not only “change” music -- but to revolutionize it!
Briefly, the other Late Quartets:
Op. 127 (Eb Major). The “Eroica” (or “heroic”) key! The quartet begins with massed tonics (seven or eight notes played by four) going to dominant seventh chords in -- respectively -- second and third inversions -- all leading to a quick transition to a delightful, slippery Allegro trip in ¾ time, which ends simply. The second movement is an astonishing series of variations on a simple, rising theme in Ab Major. The notes become blacker and blacker (faster rhythms) as the movement progresses, modulating to E Major a few times, before a beautiful ending; simplicity itself. The third movement (“Scherzando vivace”) is the usual jocular Beethoven, but in this Late period, the joke is a bit bizarre and otherworldly -- particularly in the Trio, which sweeps by like a witch on a broomstick. The Finale is a regular rondo-type 4th movement -- but the theme has a very bizarre (“Late”) element to it -- the Ab changing to an A-natural after two repetitions:
Op. 130 (Bb Major). Not only did Beethoven search out new sounds and explore novel harmonic territory, but he obviously felt constrained by the typical four-movement form (Op. 127, for example). Here he burst forth with six separate movements!
I. Adagio - Allegro. A wonderful example of beginning with a fairly typical sonata-form type of exposition and quickly changing key and mood (there are some major seventh chords in this section which are astonishingly beautiful for 1826 or anytime!)
II. Presto. A thrilling fun ride. Beethoven screws with your head as he jumps from duple to triple meter;
III. Andante. Gradually increases in intensity until it fairly busts apart at the end!
IV. Alla danza tedesca. A light joyful dance -- four voices in perfect balance;
V. Cavatina -- Adagio. This short movement is rightfully proclaimed a mini-masterpiece. The middle section (Beklemmt [“anguished”]) is positively 20th-century sounding!
VI. Finale. A bouncy happy replacement for what used to be a massive double-fugue (see below).
Op. 132 (A Minor). Beethoven makes do with only five movements in this soul-shaking masterpiece. That he opens with a low G# (the “leading tone” to A, the tonic) on the cello was in itself a revolutionary thing to do -- but Beethoven pushes the form to its limits in these quartets. Here -- as in 130 and many other late, and even early and middle works -- he moves back and forth between slow and fast. A Minor is a “dark” key -- and he ends the movement with the first violin sawing back and forth on the same E on two different strings. The second movement (A Major, ¾) also begins on a G#! The trio uses the first violin’s A string to make a bagpipes-type sound. Then follows the famous “Lydian” hymn of thanksgiving, a march and a dazzling ¾ Allegro appasionato to close things out.
Op. 133 (Bb Major). This massive double-fugue which must be heard to be believed. There is a massive amount of ink, virtual and real, spilled over this masterpiece. One of my favorites is here.
Op. 135 (F Major). Famously, Beethoven “prefaced” the music with actual musical notation (which does not appear in the actual work itself) from a goofy canon he had written several months earlier. (Beethoven wrote many such canons. Some are very funny.)
Thus, we are given an unusual visual clue to what was on Beethoven’s mind! The final movement literally explodes with these questions. Must it be? Yep? Etc.
OPUS 131 in C# Minor (39:17)
1. Adagio, ma non troppo e molto espressivo -- attacca: (6:58)
2. Allegro molto vivace -- attacca: (3:05)
3. Allegro moderato -- attacca: (0:56)
4. Andante, ma non troppo e molto cantabile -- Andante moderato e lusinghiero -- Adagio -- Allegretto -- Adagio, ma non troppo e semplice -- Allegretto (14:17)
5. Presto -- Molto poco adagio -- attacca: (5:27)
6. Adagio quasi un poco andante -- attacca: (2:04)
7. Allegro (6:30)
No one had ever written a string quartet in seven movements before!
The word “attacca” means that the players proceed directly to the next movement without pause. Therefore, a listener with no program might conclude that the piece is in two very long movements! (The only pause occurs after the fourth movement).
In fact, the quartet is really in five moments -- Nos. 3 and 6 are really just short introductions to Nos. 4 and 7, respectively.
1. Adagio, ma non troppo e molto espressivo -- attacca: (6:58)
A fugue of unsurpassed beauty, intensity, majesty -- and of course, inventiveness! The first violin (notation above) opens with the dominant note (G#) which lands on the leading tone (B#), followed by the tonic (C#).
The fourth note (the first beat of the second full bar) dips down to the submediant (A) and is held for three beats -- almost like a divine sigh -- before it continues on its way towards the second entry in the second violin, played a fifth lower. The texture thickens magnificently as the viola enters back in the tonic and the cello follows, again a fifth lower. With much typical fugal imitation, the music continues along, moved steadily by the quarter-note pulse, surging towards something.
Using an enharmonic (D#/Eb), he modulates to six flats; nine bars later to G# Minor (eighth-notes are introduced), and then to A Major, where we then encounter the First and Second violins in a delicious duet:
Soon, the pulse picks up again (more eighth-notes); the theme is heard in various disguises; and then the sun seems to set:
This gorgeous, peaceful ending is actually no ending at all!
Beethoven immediately repeats the octave skip, but a half-step higher, as he moves to D Major for the
2. Allegro molto vivace -- attacca: (3:05)
second movement -- a delightful romp in 6/8. Beethoven at first holds back a bit with a fermata and ritard, but eventually the quartet shouts out a slippery bit of off-beat sforzandi in unison much of the time -- until the music simply dies away …
3. Allegro moderato -- attacca: (0:56)
This quick transitional movement features a wonderful run in the first violin:
…
and ends on a nice loud dominant chord.
4. Andante, ma non troppo e molto cantabile -- Andante moderato e lusinghiero -- Adagio -- Allegretto -- Adagio, ma non troppo e semplice -- Allegretto (14:17)
This massive theme and variations begins with a theme which speaks to simplicity itself. There is barely anything to it.
A long passionate section follows and transforms itself with dotted rhythms and a sweeping lick (a 16th and two 32nds) until concluding with a light flurry of 32nd notes leading right into a 4/4 march variation.
A perfect example of Beethoven’s extraordinary creativity presents itself here. As he keeps the quarter-note march pulse going by giving a beat to at least one instrument, it finally dissolves into a falling cascade of octaves on A and E:
… but he immediately launches right back into the march on the very next beat!
The next variation (Andante) combines duets between viola/cello and the two violins into a mass of bizarre trilling and offbeat sforzandi. A stately Adagio follows (rudely interrupted by loud pizzicato double- and triple-stops!). This creeps up to a beautiful Allegretto featuring 8-note chords:
From there to a long 9/4 Adagio, with anguished chords, voiced for orchestral-type timbre, and accompanied by a silly little 16th-note figure in the cello:
Eventually, things get moving with rolling arppegios and trills, until finally the original theme is heard again, distinctly. Beethoven plays with it as if he were a cat pawing a toy. He cuts it off in mid-phrase. He passes it back and forth (as he did with its initial statement!) … and finally ends on a gently plucked A Major chord.
5. Presto -- Molto poco adagio -- attacca: (5:27)
This exciting music is nearly impossible to describe. You must hear it to believe it! The tempo should be extremely fast -- so fast, in fact, that the bars are counted in “one” instead of “four” because they go by so quickly.
Later, Beethoven indicates Ritmo di quattro battute -- or “count it in four” -- but he does not mean four beats per bar, he means that the players should count four consecutive bars as a four-beat phrase!
Finally, after many repetitions, Beethoven presents the bouncy theme in an entirely new way -- the strings play sul ponticello, or “on the bridge.” If done correctly, it produces the most delicious, eerie sound -- and frankly, I have never heard it done as well as Amadeus does it! Note the da capo per l’ordinario, or “back to playing normally.”
After three loud E major chords ends the movement, Beethoven repeats the three beats with unison G#’s -- the dominant of the final movement, in the tonic C# Minor …
6. Adagio quasi un poco andante -- attacca: (2:04)
Plenty of double-sharps for the players to negotiate in this short transitional movement …
7. Allegro (6:30)
… which is announced with a ferocity that is hard to describe. It bites at you with its jagged rhythm.
However, Beethoven soon offsets this marching fury with a plaintive, truly heart-breaking motif in the First violin. Look at this carefully:
Read it backwards, skipping what would be note #2 and putting that as note #4; i.e., G#/B#/C#/A -- our old four-note friend from the first movement fugue!
Perhaps Beethoven knew he was dying. When I listen to this movement -- having been properly prepared by a brilliant performance of the previous six -- I feel as though Beethoven is showing us the long, unfolding road through town or path through forest which leads to that famous “undiscovered country” we all know nothing about.
But when the above “sighing” theme interrupts the march, I feel that Beethoven must have been an optimist at heart. There is something hopeful there, something that feels eternal, immortal, divine ... otherworldly ...
Can Beethoven truly have been a human being, then? [Insert smiley face here.]
As the "march to death" winds down,
it is suddenly interrupted by several very surprising bars (marked non ligato, above) which seem to throw everything out of balance and into chaos …
… but using the “backwards” theme (see above), Beethoven forges his way towards the coda. The cello grumbles; he interrupts himself one final time (Poco Adagio) before a massive C# Minor blast from the strings, which The Amadeus make sound like a full orchestra!
III. Mahler: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor
from the archive: first posted July 11, 2010.
Louis Armstrong was born on July 4, 1900 if you believe him or August 4, 1901 if you believe your lying eyes. Let's assume the latter as astrologically valid. A Leo, then, with Aries rising, Aries in his moon, New Orleans as his native city, and a lot of moon in his chart, and what you get is a born performer and, with significant celestial activity in Capricorn to keep him grounded, an entertainer who will never lose his popularity because he knows his public and regards himself as an instrument through which the Lord expresses his moody blues and swinging jazz. Music is supreme in his soul and his rejection of be-bop must be understood in this context. He shares a birthday with Shelley. Whom did you think that poet was evoking when he wrote, "Be through my lips to unawakened earth / The trumpet of a prophecy"? Not Dizzy or Miles, I can tell you that, but the old cornet player from the Back O' Town section (Jane Alley) in N.O. Also born on August 4 was Barack Obama. Make of that what you will.
Satchmo should be on anyone's list of great Philo-semites. Just read "Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family," the keynote piece in Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words, Satch's selected writings (edited by well-named Duke professor Thomas Brothers and published in 1999 by Oxford UP). Others on the list of great Philo-semites are Nabokov and Emile Zola and. . . somebody please help me complete this sentence.
Louis loved the Karnofsky family that gave him his first job and encouraged his study of music. "I had a long time admiration for the Jewish People. Especially with their long time of courage, takin So Much Abuse for so long. I was only Seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for." Notice the idiosyncratic and very deliberate use of italics and caps, his favorite emphasizers. Louis was a writer; he took his punctuation seriously, he took his typewriter wherever he went, and he was always going; he loved typing even more than swimming. He also loved Jewish food, including matzos. The Karnofskys operated a mobile rag and bone shop, and Louis played a little tin horn on the junk wagon. "When I reached the age of eleven I began to realize it was the Jewish family who instilled in me Singing from the heart." He wore a star of David around his neck.
The blues came naturally to him. The best recording of the Arlen and Koehler standard, "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," is Armstrong's, with voice and with trumpet. Listen to "West End Blues," "St Louis Blues," "St James's Infirmary," "Basin Street Blues" as performed by the Hot Five with Earl "Fatha" Hines on piano. You listen and you know why "saint" is in the title of so many blues. At the same time -- and here's where Louis's Leo stands up and takes a bow -- he (voice, trumpet) makes happiness real. And after embodying Jazz as a style, a phenomenon, and a musical idiom in the 1920s -- I mean "Cornet Chop Suey," "Potato Head Blues," "Struttin' with Some Barbecue" with Lil Hardin on piano, and "Knockin' a Jug" with Jack Teagarden on trombone -- Louis went on to swing the American Songbook: "On the Sunny Side of the Street." "Jeepers Creepers," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," the amazing sides with Ella. The meaning of swing is in the lovelight burning in his heart. In 1967 he concludes a heartfelt letter to a jazz-loving Marine in Vietnam by typing out Hammerstein's lyric for "You'll Never Walk Alone." I once heard Louis recite the words of this song from Carousel, not sing them, just recite them, with the melody playing softly in the background, and there was not a dry eye in the house.
He loved gage and smoked it every day. He thought "gage," "Muta," "pot," or "some of that good shit," were better names for the heavenly stuff than marijuana. It was, he said, "a thousand times better than whiskey." He could write a whole book about it, he added. A day without Gage was a meal without wine. He also spoke eloquently of "the Genuineness of Asses." He loved his wife's (Lucille "always had the Choicest Ass of them all") but didn't see the point of denying himself the pleasure of "whaling" on the road. "Kissing will lead to fucking every time." One time at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas he "Grined" a lady he called "Sweets" -- "Struck Oil" -- and "planted a cute little baby." Jazz meant sex. Man, he felt alive. He was performing 100% of the time. But the horn redeemed the world. "I Can tolerate Anything, as long as it doesn't interfere with my trumpet."
Now I will play "Stardust," "Pennies from Heaven," "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Cutting up with Crosby on the set of High Society. Mixing with Sinatra on TV, "The Birth of the Blues." And then back to the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of "Weary Blues," "Potato Head Blues," "No (Papa, No)," "Tight Like This," "Weather Bird."
Like Phillip Larkin, Armstrong detested be-bop: "Mistakes, that's all rebop is. . . .New York and 52nd Street -- that's what messed up Jazz. Them cats play too much -- a whole lot of notes, weird notes." He saw it clearly, Jazz reduced to a form of chamber music that the devout would listen to breathlessly if uncomprehendingly in darkened shrines. "You've got to carry the melody," he insisted.
During the Little Rock crisis in 1957 he sent a telegram to Eisenhower urging the president to send in troops to assure the safety of the "little negro children" at Central High School. He called Ike "Daddy" and said that if he "personally" came "along with your marvellous troops please take me along. O God it would be such a great pleasure I assure you." Should the president wish to respond, he was advised that he could do so through Satch's "personnel manager," Joe Glaser, in New York. He signed off "Am Swiss Krissly Yours Louis Satchmo Armstrong."
There was no way you could dislike Louis Armstrong. Now close your eyes and pretend it's the first time you're hearing the opening cadenza of "West End Blues." -- DL
from the archive; first posted 2011
Marianna and I are at a summer retreat.
I am five years old. I have a wooden recorder
with me, a block-flute. I blow out melodies.
My parents left – they have some urgent matters.
What urgent matters could there be during the summer?
I play my flute. Igor is here with us.
He is a genius, a chess prodigy who has won
chess games against the former world champions.
He is my brother, and he has very long legs.
When Igor walks, I must run after him like a dog.
I quickly get tired. Igor puts me on his shoulders.
I imagine myself as an eagle, a stormy petrel, a seagull.
Igor runs; I fly after him – I am the wind.
The wind plays the flute. Grownups lie.
I know – my grandma, Musenka, is dead.
That’s why my parents left.
I will never see her again. Ne-ver.
“Iga, do you know?” I ask, landing my flight.
“No,” he answers seriously.
Igor is almost an adult. Grownups lie.
(He Knows)
The Embrace EverythingTM podcast series was created and is hosted by award-winning radio producer Aaron Cohen. It explores and celebrates the music of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) by taking a journey through his symphonies. Using interviews with leading Mahler interpreters and scholars, readings from the letters of Mahler and his contemporaries, commentary from Mr. Cohen, and the sounds of the symphonies themselves, each season of the series guides listeners through one of these landmark works in the orchestral repertoire.
https://www.theworldofgustavmahler.org/
What would it sound like if a book of poetry had its own musical score, like a film, written specifically to match the poems line for line and word for word?
So begins the liner notes booklet that comes with poet and critic Ernest Hilbert’s LP, Elegies & Laments, which was released in a limited-edition pressing of 100 copies back in 2012.
Ernest, Ernie, is a good friend. We are both South Jersey boys, both went to Rutgers-Camden, and are both poetry and music nerds. Ernie’s a a real renaissance man, a rare book dealer, and bon vivant. To hear Ernie hold forth about metal metal bands of all varieties—hair, death, speed, thrash, parody, glam—is one of my life’s immense pleasures.
It wasn’t that big of a surprise, then, to hear from Ernie about his plans to put out a record to go along with Sixty Sonnets, his 2009 debut collection from Red Hen Press.
[https://open.spotify.com/
What was surprising? The production value. This is not just a recording of Hilbert reading or performing poems. This is a music and poetry collaboration, produced by Dave Young and Marc Hildenberger, with orchestral composition by Christopher LaRosa. Sixteen poems feature over the course of four tracks, backed by the band Legendary Misbehavior and several string players. The record itself, a beautiful white-colored disc, sounds beautiful through my Technics 1200 turntable.
Part One, “Failed Escapes,” features a kind of overture of famous spoken word and poetry snippets—Sylvia Plath, others—under a bed of transistor radio squelch sounds, and leads into the first four Hilbert poems. The remaining tracks pull off similar experiments, and even feature guest readers Paul Siegell, Quincy R. Lehr, and Kristine Young.
One question, when it comes to music combined with poetry performances, is if the music will overpower the poetry. There’s always the chance the music will drown out the vocals in the mix, or the music won’t really complement the poetry itself. Or, frankly, the music is more interesting than the poems. In Elegies & Laments, the music and poetry work together magically well, miraculously well. It’s a legitimate collaboration. The photos inside the liner notes show Hilbert drinking a beer at a studio console, watching the musicians lay down bass and guitar tracks, and smoking a cigarette on a rooftop with the Philadelphia skyline in the background.
As with many things related to Ernie, I’m jealous I didn’t think of doing something like this first. Rounding up musician friends and colleagues to put together a musical score for a poetry book? It sounds like such a simple idea, at least now that Hilbert has done it. Here’s hoping more poets experiment with music with their poetry. And please: put out a vinyl record, so I can fill my house with more records.
Today is July 21. Hart Crane was born today, so I reread his “Chaplinesque,” a poem inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Kid. Crane recognized Chaplin as a kindred spirit on an artistic mission like his own. The “we” in the poem stands for the two of them: “We can still love the world, who find / A famished kitten on the step.” In a letter Crane makes it clear that the kitten stands for poetry, and what the poem appears to be saying is that the redemptive nature of modern art makes it a Romantic enterprise, a secular version of a spiritual project.
These are magnificent lines: “We have seen / The moon in lonely alleys make / A grail of laughter of an empty ashcan.” The key phrase here, “a grail of laughter,” is a great example of a poetic image that defies logical analysis, for we instinctively grasp it as a figure of the sublime, though we know that a grail cannot be “of” laughter in any conventional sense. It is a poem I have read many times, and on one of these it dawned on me that Crane’s first name was a hidden subject in the stanza of the poem in which “you” may or may not stand for the world:
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.
I am not sure how to construe these lines regardless of whether heart refers to the organ of the body associated with sentiment and romance or to the artist in general and Hart Crane in particular. Why would “blame” attach itself “to us” in either case “if the heart live on”? Who are “you” that we – the artist as embodied by Charles Chaplin and the poet in their separate realms – can evade? It is a difficult poem -- most of Crane’s are -- but then again, conventional meaning is not necessarily what one prizes in Crane’s poetry. Rather it’s the promise of a new meaning, ambiguous and elusive but full of possibility, as exemplified in such a triumphant phrase as “a grail of laughter.”
Poetic logic works in unusual ways, and it’s no accident that several of Robert Frost’s signature poems take place on cold winter nights, or that Hart Crane depicts the heart as inescapable and enduring, or that in a Rodgers and Hart song you can’t be in love unless your “heart stands still.” When Larry Hart writes, in My Funny Valentine, “you make me smile in my heart,” is there a clue here about the nature of the love Hart felt for Rodgers, which the latter could not reciprocate? (Here’s how Frederick Nolan concludes chapter two of his biography of Hart: “Poor Larry,” one of his close friends said. “What a shame he had to fall in love with Dick.”[1]) Could the song’s “unphotographable” but lovable individual, whose “looks are laughable,” be Hart himself? Picture Hart in the splendor of his wit and the sadness of his being the next time you listen to "With a Song in My Heart" or "My Heart Stood Still" and see if it makes a difference.
[1] Frederick Nolan, Lorenz Hart (Oxford UP, 1994), p. 19.
"You can't cancel me. I'm Superman."
<<<
Superman
is just a flash in the pan. . .
I've been around the world in a plane,
Settled a revoltuion in Spain,
The North Pole I have charted,
But I can't get started with you.
On the golf course I'm under par,
Metro Goldwyn wants me to star,
With queens I have a-la-carted,
But I can't get started with you . . .
>>>
(from "Can't Get Started," music Vernon Duke, lyrics Ira Gershwin; you'll hear it in the background of Chinatown, which has a world-class soundtrack from Jerry Goldsmith.)
Lee Wiley (1908-1975) was the greatest girl singer you may never have heard of. Try her interpretations of these tunes:
Let's Fall in Love
O! Look at Me Now
Manhattan
Street of Dreams
Soft Lights and Sweet Music
Time On My Hands
Looking at You
More Than You Know
My One and Only
Ghost of a Chance
How Long Has this Been Goiung On?
I've Got a Crush on You
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Glad To Be Unhappy
--DL
Radio
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
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
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