The Best American Poetry

Marilyn Monroe as Chanteuse [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday it is) sang -- and sang well. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. (They shouldn't have dubbed Ava Gardner in Show Boat but that's another story.) See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or fighting with her beau in Bus Stop, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Mitzi Gaynor, and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all.  

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as Berlin's "Heat Wave" ("she started a heat wave / by making her seat wave") are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. You can't keep your eyes off her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice. And wait till you hear her sing the same songwriter's "Lazy" and “After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It.” Sublime.

Listen to her rendition of "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.

Compare her version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.

Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and forbids Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses.

Ed. note: All BAP blog posts by David Lehman are copyright c David Lehman. All rights reserved.

From My Diary No. 3 – February 2020

 

Inner Voices – Oil on Canvas by Lera Auerbach

(1.)

I think of the mountain from Rafael's childhood.
Once upon a time, there lived a woman.
Her name was Soledad.
Nobody lives on that mountain now.
Nobody is left who remembers Soledad,
only Stella (Rafael's mother) and Rafael.
She's also in my memory.
And if you are reading this, she's now in your memory, too.

You may forget about Soledad as soon as you finish reading this.
Or, perhaps, I may make her a bit more memorable
or bring her name again later, so if you forget her now,
you will remember when you see her name later on.

Soledad was 82 years old when she died.
The house, high in the mountains, had no electricity,
and each morning, she would milk cows and look around for snakes.

Snakes loved the sun and would come out to lie on the stones.
Some of the snakes were poisonous, but they only bite if frightened.

Nobody knows how Soledad appeared and from where she came.
She was always living with Rafael's family, although she was not related to any of them.

Soledad never married.
Every night she would make bread in the oven,
enough for the whole family.
She would drink coffee all day long,
and her hands smelled of coffee, bread, and milk.

When we moved to our house in Florida, Rafael bought a machete to protect against the snakes.
He never used it, and the machete was lost,
just as so many things tend to get lost and never found again.

(Where do all these lost things go?)

 

(2)

Before coming to the Mayo Clinic, I was preparing to perform my 'Arctica' with the Oslo Philharmonic.
In my hotel room in Rochester, I had a piano, and after long days of tests and doctor's consultations,
I would return and practice for the upcoming concert.

Very few people knew I was at the Mayo Clinic. One of them was Enric Sala.
Enric is an explorer with National Geographic and my partner in the "Arctica" project.
Enric encouraged me to put my health first and not to postpone the surgery.
I don't know if I would have the strength to cancel my performance in Oslo without Enric's support and perspective.

Fortunately, the presenters found another pianist who was able to learn the solo part in time.
The performance in Oslo went on as scheduled.
I felt like the captain who abandoned the ship, yet the ship miraculously sailed on,
while the captain was left alone on the reefs, bruised and confused.

Each day in the hospital, some part of me was in Oslo, rehearsing with the choir,
rehearsing with the orchestra, practicing alone.
Another part of me was back in the Arctic, listening to its silence (which is never silent)
and trying to grasp the enormity of its solitude.

Arctica – the fragile giant, the North of the North.

Only a small part of me, the least real one, was in the hospital,
trying to walk around my room (ten steps in each direction)
while holding onto the IV stand.

I also used the IV stand in my symphony as a musical instrument –
it is how "Arctica" starts – with the sound of drops falling from an IV stand.
Sound of time passing, ice melting, seconds and droplets melting away.

(Sound of a hospital, of a medical emergency, of life passing or life renewing itself.)

 

(3.)

Generally speaking, quarantines need to be continuous –
since at any time in any given place, there are plenty of contagious illnesses.
One quarantine should melt into another.

Quarantines shouldn't be limited to viruses.
For example, when there is a spike in fatal crashes while driving,
there should be a few days per week when driving is forbidden.
Or at least limited to certain hours.
Let's say one would be allowed to drive between 2:00 and 5:00 AM at night
when nobody drives, but not during rush hours.
It would certainly balance things and improve statistics.

The researchers at the Mayo Clinic explained to me that Cushing disease
has only a 30% success rate of treatment by operation in Germany,
while in the USA, the rate of success is 100%.

"How could it be?" I asked.

"We operate on healthy people," the researcher explained. "In Germany, they wait
until you are damaged by the illness. Healthy people have a 100% recovery rate."

Statistics are a powerful thing.

For example, if there is a spike in divorces, let's freeze all marriages for a while.
Fewer marriages result in fewer divorces.

It's not a bad idea to quarantine all children; they seem to get ill much more often.
Healthy children equal healthy nations.

And definitely forbid people from gathering.

(Let's approach life in a way to improve statistics.)

 

(4.)

Why would anyone want to gather anyway? I never understood that.
Much better to stay at home and read good books.

Or you can listen to orchestral music using noise-cancelling earphones.
Noise cancellation is vital because this is how audible viruses (for example, news) get in.
The earphones don't fully protect you from noise, so when you are not listening to symphonic music,
you should wear earplugs with noise-cancelling earphones on top of the earplugs.

If someone asks you a question, just nod in response.
Nobody expects you to listen anyway.
Nodding is similar to clicking likes under social media posts –
you just add your support to the ego-boosting activities of your friends.
Nobody expects you to actually read their posts or click on their links (unless they contain cute animals, of course.)
After all, if you start reading and clicking on all posts of all your friends, most of whom you have never met,
you will never live to be 82 like Soledad, who lived alone in the mountain and never owned a computer.

The other positive side of a continuous quarantine
is that the Apocalypse loses its edge after a while.
One can scream, "We are all doomed!" only until one loses one's voice.
After a while, it's no longer believable.

But I'm worried about my parents. They are 82 like Soledad.
They don't fully understand the weight of the impending disaster, even though they have a computer and television and other viral spreading news outlets. They still venture outside and are reckless enough to visit various doctors wherein the waiting rooms they wait for sick people to spread more germs around.

Their refusal to quarantine themselves saddens me.

I have quarantined myself from everyone long ago, for that's what a writer must do anyway.

(It comes with the territory.)

 

(5.)

Can poetry and music, serious music, still be written?
In times when people have forgotten how to listen,
how to keep silent, how to remain still?

Perhaps I am starting to sound depressive.
As my doctors have warned me, cortisol deficiency can take its toll.

Every week, I receive a questionnaire from the Mayo Clinic.
The questionnaire is always the same.
It compares my attitude and feelings before and after the surgery.

I don't think my answers have changed so far, but I do not know for sure
since I did not keep my previous answers.
Probably, researchers may find my data disappointing.
They would like to see a graph. A graph is when lines go up and down.
Flat graphs are boring. Flat graphs are unremarkable.
Like rubber ducklings in a bathtub of a polar bear hunter.

Keep it together, I say to myself.
But I am worried that I may not be able to keep it all together
and may turn into a soundwave or break into tiny particles
that no longer make any sense and can't be reconstructed.

(I wish I could go to that mountain and meet Soledad,
who never, I am sure, worried about becoming a soundwave.)

 

 

On the Street Where You Live [by Robert Wrigley]

 

                        “Love takes time to overcome.”--Confucius

Certain love songs beloved by men are listened to with something like derision by women.  So I have been assured, by a woman, and I wonder about that.  I don’t doubt it, but I wonder.  I have known for many years that most of the canonical American songbook “torch songs,” for example, were written by men but in their classic versions sung by women.  Imagine Sarah Vaughn singing “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry.”  We are to believe she would never get over loss of the man for whom she carried forever “a torch.”  Right. 

But I would like to consider a song almost diametrically the opposite of a torch song.  I mean “On the Street Where You Live,” jaunty and upbeat, its lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, from the musical play My Fair Lady (Frederick Loewe wrote the music), first staged in 1956, when I was five.  The film version, which I saw in a theater in St. Louis with my parents and sister, appeared in 1964, right about the time I crashed face-first into puberty.  I remember being resistant to the improbable fact that the handsome young Englishman was standing on the street and singing, with orchestral accompaniment, but I also remember thinking that such a feeling as he expressed (turns out the actor was lip-synching; someone else did the expressing), that that feeling might be—I didn’t know—real.  I suppose I wanted it to be.  Why wouldn’t I?  He seemed so happy, so thrilled, that young man, and the lyrics of the song represented his happiness very convincingly, even to, or perhaps especially to, a thirteen year old boy. 

Somehow, I’m sixty-eight now, a year older than Alan Jay Lerner was when he died in 1986 of lung cancer, impoverished, owing the IRS over a million dollars, and unable to pay his medical bills.  Lerner was married eight times.  He said once, “All I can say is if I had no flair for marriage, I also had no flair for bachelorhood.”  (Something in that quip and its delivery is in his best lyrics too.)  It seems that Mr. Lerner might have felt the exhilaration his song expresses a few more times than anyone ought to. 

The character who sings the song in My Fair Lady, one Freddy Eynsford-Hill, is lost in infatuation with Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl taken in by Professor Henry Higgins, after she comes to him seeking elocution lessons.  The play, of course, is adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.  Professor Higgins wagers with his friend and houseguest, Colonel Pickering, that he can turn Eliza into a passable young “lady,” one who can, with his lessons, function in the upper social caste of which he and Pickering are a part.

The scene in which Freddy falls for Eliza takes place at a gathering of exceeding privilege and decorousness, at a race track.  Women in gowns and elaborate, even outlandish, hats; men in tophats, tails, and spats.  The musical number in the scene is “Ascot Gavotte” (also known as “Ascot Opening Day”—its opening lines: “Ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here/Ev’ryone who should be here is here”).  Eliza does quite well among the hoity-toity until, in the midst of the race’s final stretch she can stand it no longer and with all her suppressed Cockney fervor bellows at her favored horse, “Come on, Dover! Move yer bloomin’ arse?”  The vocal intro to “On the Street Where You Live” includes Freddy remembering, and repeating, Eliza’s unfortunate (or fortunate) ejaculation; it even suggests that that ejaculation may be what, beyond Eliza herself (played in the film by Audrey Hepburn), precipitates his headlong fall. 

Soon thereafter Freddy arrives at Professor Higgins’s house with flowers.  Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza are having dinner.  The maid takes the flowers and invites Mr. Eynsford-Hill in, but he declines and at the bottom of the stair, back on the street, sings his song.

The plays, both the musical and its Shavian model, are fraught.  Shaw took as his inspiration an ancient Greek myth.  Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with one of his statues, which—presumably so deeply and intimately loved and, much more importantly, so perfectly created—comes to life.  In Lerner and Loewe’s version, Eliza is matter, medium, raw material fashioned by a man into an acceptable, respectable, lovable, and cravable woman—made so, created even, by a man.

To say that the gender issues in the movie went right over my head at thirteen is accurate and predictable and an understatement.  Although one might also say that the issues went over a lot of heads:  both the plays and the film were enormously successful.

But Freddy seems head over heels for a fully-formed woman, as far as he can tell, one who is just enough like but not at all like the other women in his circle.  Something about class is involved in it too, of course; Eliza’s sudden coarseness is electrifying.  Who knows what it might suggest to Freddy?  But what I’m curious about is this: could “On the Street Where You Live” be one of those love songs beloved by men but derided by women?  Does the man’s infatuation seem, well, fatuous?  The word “love” is never spoken in the song.  Does infatuation really have anything to do with love?  (One might ask something similar about music or poetry.)  Freddy has seen but hardly even met Eliza—just once—but he is intoxicated by her, the possibility of her.  He’s smitten.  Is it Freddy’s smittenness itself that is suspect?  Is the very act of feeling smitten by another person suspect?  In the hetero-world, in and out of movies, it’s usually the man who is smote, so to speak, and his condition, in terms literary and historical—and in reality—is all too often dangerous for the woman.  Think of Daphne and Apollo, Zeus and Leda.  The list is endless; it is added to every day in brutal stories in the news.  Vastly more women are killed by obsessed lovers and husbands than by infatuated strangers.

Is Freddy’s smittenness a form of potentially dangerous, power-mad insanity?  Probably not.  He seems too callow to be a monster.  Shaw resisted the “happy ending,” with Eliza and Higgins in love and together; the musical, not so much.  Higgins seems to realize his love, or his loss (though of what, exactly?  His dejected song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” is another of the musical’s long-lived chestnuts).  But then Eliza returns.  The happy ending is at least implied.  As for Freddy, when Eliza leaves Higgins earlier, she tells him she’ll marry Freddy because he, at least, is one who loves her.  But in the end, that doesn’t matter.  She comes back to the man who, as it were, made her what she is. 

This is an excerpt from Nemerov's Door: Essays by Robert Wrigley
(Tupelo Press, North Adams, MA)

Paper $19.95

https://www.tupelopress.org

For Saint Patrick's Day: The Gaelic Symphony by Amy Beach (September 5, 1867 – December 27, 1944)

To find out more about this gifted composer, go here. 

-- sdl

Marlene Dietrich, The Original Blonde Venus [by David Lehman]

Blonde Venus

In his latest Talking Pictures column for The American Scholar, David Lehman considers the enduring allure of Marlene Dietrich, whose seductive voice and androgynous style commanded screen and stage for more than half a century. “Marlene’s eyes say she’s seen it all and a lot of it was lousy,” he writes. “She holds an unlighted cigarette between forefinger and thumb, waiting for you to light it with your Lucifer. And you will.” Read More ➢

Berio's "Sinfonia" [by Lewis Saul]

One day during my short stint at Juilliard, the composer Milton Babbitt came as a guest lecturer in one of my composition classes.

Mr. Babbitt gave us 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 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 piece 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 Mahler'a 2nd Symphony (the Resurrection) 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). Here's the complete list:

• 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.

***###

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.

Thank you and I wish it would rain already.

Lewis Saul

Ed. note: from the archive; first posted on July 16, 2010, as the seventh in a series in honor of the seven orchestral pieces the author vows to love forever. 

Most popular funeral songs [by David Lehman]

In the age of sabermetrics, they ("they, they who are known as they," as Kenward Elmslie has it), have tallied up the songs (and versions of same) most popular to play in funerals. Click here for a full run-down, or take away these teasers.

-- Sinatra leads the pack with "My Way." 

-- Both Richard Rodgers and Harold Arlen are represented in the top ten, though the most popular version of Arlen's "Over the Rainbow" is said to be by Eve Cassidy rather than the star of "The Wizard of Oz" -- and people would apparently rather hear Gerry and the Pacemakers sing "You'll Never Walk Alone" than, say, John Raitt.

-- Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" comes in at number ten.

-- -- Vera Lynn's "We'll Say Goodbye" makes the list, which reminds me that the song puts in an appearance at the end of "The Singing Detective" -- which makes exceedingly smart use of songs popular in the year of the action, 1945: "Peg o My Heart," "Accentuate the Positive," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "It Might As Well Be Spring," "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" . . .but I see I'm digressing into a different list. 

According to Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann, authors of the celebrated biography of Willem de Kooning, say that the painter would have liked to have Sinatra's "Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night in the Week" to be playing at his funeral.

As for me, I'd have an orchestra play Arnold Newman's "Street Scene" as the funeral goers arrive. In a ceremony I would play a recording of Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time" as sung by the song's lyricists (Betty Comden, Adolph Green) with Nancy Walker as a third voice. I think that recording is from 1960. As the ceremony ends, I'd like "Goodbye" played by Benny Goodman and His Orchestra. An instrumental. But at a party in someone's apartment later, people will play Sinatra's vocal from the 1958 album, "Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely."

Meanwhile, I think of the wit of Larry Rivers, the painter who started out as a jazz musician and loved playing his saxophone to the end of his days. Larry arranged to have his own recording of "Everything Happens to Me" to cap his funeral. For Sinatra's memorial the choice was inevitable: his signature song on radio and TV, "Put Your Dreams Away."  

from the archive; posted March 17, 2013.

The Importance of Martin Guerre, part two [by Joe Lehman]

Ed. note: Part one of this discussion of "Martin Guerre" was posted here on February 12.

I have been poring through the lyrics of the various songs from Martin Guerre the musical. The moment that has most directly affected me emotionally, is where Arnaud takes the stand in court and proclaims:

I'm a Protestant, yes
Of this I am proud
But to bring down your lives
This is not what I vowed
I vowed to love the Lord. 

I won't stand and see destroyed
the precious times we've all enjoyed…

I could easily substitute “Zionist” for “Protestant” to describe my own identity and how it has become seen as heretical to many of my friends and acquaintances on the Left. “I’m a Zionist, yes. Of this I am proud…” has a welcome ring to it. Imagine, then, a young Jewish adult obliged to proclaim his conviction in the belief of individual rights and freedoms, while simultaneously defending the existence and prosperity of the State of Israel, only to be turned away and called a racist pig, by the same progressive-minded individuals who lay claim to ownership of the belief of individual rights and freedoms.

The character of Guillaume is the consummate prejudiced demagogue of the show. He certainly has the most forceful lines:

Stand up and be counted, rise above the crowd
Say this in their memory, I will make you proud
Look around, can't you see what the world has become?
It is time we were cleansed of this Protestant scum!
By the blood of the martyrs, we will take up the sword
We will root out this cancer in the name of the Lord!
Everywhere is chaos, everywhere is doubt
Everywhere are heretics, the time has come to burn them out!

There are an infinite number of madmen throughout history, and if I follow Godwin’s Law, I could easily make an analogy to Hitler and Nazi Germany but it is just too easy a thing to do. (Ed. note: According to Godwin’s Law, if an argument goes on long enough, someone will surely compare someone else to Hitler.) Guillaume, as he is portrayed, can easily represent both a follower and a leader of a bigoted movement. He extends an appeal to lower-middle class resentments and desires:

I was born a poor man, just like each of you
Born to sweat and suffer as the poor must do
Working like a cart-horse, slaving in your field
Till my back is breaking I will never yield.

Furthermore, he exhibits a false paternalistic benevolence by reminding the fellow Catholic villagers of his roots in the community:

Baptiste, I knew your father
Albert, I knew yours too
Men who stood for decency just the same as you.

Finally, he assumes an air of traditional piety by resorting to religious exclamations:

Here I stand before you, bloody and unbowed
By the sword of Jesus
I will make you proud!

The conclusion of the show, where we have the final showdown among Guillaume, Martin, and Arnaud and Bertrande, is most illuminating. Enraged that he has no chance at winning over Bertrande’s affection, now that she is legally bound to Martin though still in love with Arnaud, Guillaume concocts the convoluted idea that it was both Martin’s and Arnaud’s plan from the start:

Right from the start, keep out Guillaume!
Keep him away, far from Bertrande, keep them apart!

All I did Bertrande, I did for you!
So true, so pure...I knew you deserved much more

(he lets Martin go and grabs Bertrande)

A Martin Guerre better than them
A Martin Guerre much more like me.

It would seem that “Martin Guerre” has become representative of both elevation and salvation -- for Arnaud, who is pure of heart, and for Guillaume, who is bitter and aggrieved. Guillaume is about to kill Martin with his knife, but Arnaud, who recognizes he has no place left in the equation except as the martyr, shields Martin and is stabbed to death in his place. He dies in Bertrande’s arms. In the melee, Guillaume too is killed, when another side character springs in and bludgeons him. Everything has come full circle.

It is Bertrande who voices the lesson to be learned from the entire experience:

When will we all learn?
We lived our lives in fear...
We say we love the same God yet there's blood on every hand!
Let him die for peace
Can't you understand?
If all we ever love is hate...
Will we ever hear?

Intolerance has indeed led the people of Artigat down the pathway to hell, from which the only recovery is reconciliation between the Catholic and Protestant factions.

Here, in 2021 America, there has been a lot of talk in the news from the Biden administration about finding unity between the various competing factions that fall under the aegis of Republican and Democratic parties. But it is still early, and the future remains terribly uncertain. I only know that I, as an individual, can strive to be, and continue to be, a better person. Perhaps I take after Bertrande:

 I will carry on
till the fear has gone
till the day I find
There's someone who will hear!

There’s someone who will hear.

Ed. note: For part one of this discussion, click here.

The Importance of Martin Guerre -- Part One [by Joe Lehman]

"Martin Guerre: Now and Then; Then and Now" [by Joe Lehman]

PART ONE

“Land to last, as it's passed, man to son, when it's done as planned. Then we'll pray it will stay as good Catholic land.”

After the experience of living through the past four years, this lyric sounds a lot like Make America Great Again. At least, that was the thought that came to mind when I listened to the music of Martin Guerre in the summer of 2018.

I had the privilege of attending one of the original performances of the short-lived musical Martin Guerre when visiting London, England, in late December 1997-early January 1998, when I was fourteen. It has had a troubled existence; rarely has it been revived. I don’t believe it has ever opened on Broadway. As I was so young when I saw Martin Guerre, I didn’t appreciate its meaning. Twenty years went by, and in a dream one night, the memory of the musical came to me. The next morning, I purchased the soundtrack of the original cast recording. The musical, and the story behind it, has held a great significance for me ever since.

The tale of the sixteenth century French peasant Martin Guerre and the imposture conducted by his army buddy Arnaud du Thil was resurrected in the 1982 French-language film The Return of Martin Guerre, as well as in a nonfiction book with the same title by historian Natalie Zemon Davis. Subsequently, the story has been immortalized as a continuing trope in many incarnations, including the 1993 movie Sommersby, starring Richard Gere and Jodie Foster, where the story is transported to post-Civil War and Reconstruction-era Tennessee, and the titular character and his imposter are veterans of the Confederate Army. It has even taken the form of satire in an episode of TV’s “The Simpsons,” where the Vietnam veteran Principal Skinner is revealed to be an imposter, a former comrade-in-arms of the ‘real’ Skinner.

It is in Martin Guerre the musical that the story is placed most prominently in the context of bigotry, nativism, and religious intolerance. The history of Catholic persecution of the Protestant Huguenots figures heavily. The setting is the provincial village of Artigat. Strangely, for reasons unknown to me, the word “Huguenot” is never uttered in the show. What is known is that Artigat is populated by a Catholic majority and a Protestant minority. Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols are betrothed to marry at an adolescent age, so that their families will merge in attempt to keep their shared land under Catholic ownership. But Martin is unable to perform sexually and in a fit of wanderlust, finds the only way available for French peasant to gain upward mobility: He leaves the village and Bertrande, and joins the Catholic army.

Seven years pass and when Martin is seemingly felled in battle, Arnaud du Thil travels to Artigat and almost accidentally assumes his identity, his land, and his wife Bertrande, who, despite being the one who knows about the fraud, falls in love with Arnaud, and together they clandestinely convert to Protestantism. Guillaume, an anti-Protestant fanatic who is also a jealous former suitor of Bertrande’s, discovers the truth and becomes Arnaud’s main accuser. Arnaud is arrested, brought to trial, where he continues relentlessly to insist he is the real Martin Guerre. The members of the courtroom are divided across Catholic and Protestant lines, in Arnaud’s favor and against it. The surprise witness who is able to provide the ultimate evidence of Arnaud’s imposture is Martin Guerre himself, who reappears to testify to his true identity. The musical sees Artigat burn down in an orgy of violence and Arnaud murdered at Guillaume’s hands. This version differs from the historical record. In fact, Arnaud’s case was tried, appealed, and tried again before he was found guilty and executed by hanging, while Bertrande was returned to her legal husband’s custody. I can only surmise that this modification was made for dramatic purposes. The show ends with the villagers contemplating the consequences of their hateful actions and praying for forgiveness.

French historian Philippe Erlanger in his book St. Bartholomew’s Night chronicles the bloody history of France during the turbulent century of the Protestant Reformation:

The world was changing at a bewildering pace. The old order was giving way. Men had once placed all their hopes in heaven: now they were beginning to look for happiness here on earth again.

 Erlanger describes the atmosphere of the Reformation and the Renaissance:

A society which for a great while had been preoccupied with local quarrels suddenly beheld the horizon torn wide open before it; and at the same time, it became conscious of curiosities, doubts, and wild irrational beliefs.

It seems to be a constant throughout history that with the coming of liberalization and modernization of people and civilization, comes a reactionary backlash equal in force. Erlanger writes:

Intolerance bred intolerance. Fanaticism increased in the same measure as the struggle for liberation of the minds of men.

Erlanger could very well have been describing the political and racial tribalism and its ensuing chaos that exists in present-day America, where the Proud Boys battle Antifa and Black Lives Matter in vicious street confrontations.

Ed note: this is part one of a two-part article. For part two, click here.

It's Roy Eldridge Day [by Sean Singer]

Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill, Minton's Playhouse, New York, N.Y., c. Sept. 1947

    January 30th is Roy Eldridge Day. Eldridge was a major innovator in jazz trumpet, and his concept shows how jazz developed. He was born in 1911 in Pittsburgh, an industrial city with an important jazz history, into a middle-class / upper-middle-class African-American family, and he was the key figure in the development of jazz trumpet between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. He died at 78 in 1989.
        Notoriously competitive, and ferocious on his chosen instrument, Eldridge was nicknamed by Ellington’s saxophonist Otto Hardwick (pronounced with a long O sound)— “Little Jazz” because of the juxtaposition of his ferocity and size. Because he was a major Swing Era figure, who nonetheless was a stylistic precursor to BeBop, Eldridge is sometimes thought of as a transitional figure between stylistic eras (not unlike the transition between Romanticism and Modernism in poetry); however, he was his own thing.
         Eldridge was a child prodigy, beginning as a six year-old on drums (who buys a six year old a set of drums?) and though he dropped out of high school, practiced trumpet as a teenager between eight and nine hours a day, and was playing professionally from 16. He moved to New York in 1930 and played in many Harlem dance bands. His rhythmic power and virtuosity in the upper register of the trumpet made him a star. In the 1930s he joined the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, and recorded, with the tenor saxophone specialist Chu Berry “Christopher Columbus”
        He made some important recordings in 1935 with Billie Holiday and the pianist Teddy Wilson such as “Miss Brown to You”, also a glorious example of Holiday at her peak powers or “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”.

        In April 1941, though he received many offers from white big bands, Eldridge joined Gene Krupa’s Orchestra and made some recordings with the vocalist Anita O’Day. They can be seen in a short film known as a “soundie” singing their infectious, novelty duet, “Let Me Off Uptown,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8yaW6BluwY) perhaps their most well-known effort.
Although he was the featured soloist in these big bands, the racial segregation in the apartheid South created many terrible racial incidents that affected him. Artie Shaw, for example, said: “Droves of people would ask him for his autograph at the end of the night, but later, on the bus, he wouldn't be able to get off and buy a hamburger with the guys in the band.”
        After Krupa was arrested for marijuana possession in 1943, Eldridge tried, albeit unsuccessfully to form his own big band where he recorded “Heckler’s Hop” which shows how he influenced the development of BeBop. In the post-war years he joined Norman Granz’s tours of the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, toured France with Benny Goodman, and led a band at Birdland in New York City.
        In 1960 he joined the Jazz Artist’s Guild, a group that briefly existed in Newport, Rhode Island, and was formed by the business and musical partners Charles Mingus and Max Roach, and they recorded “Mysterious Blues” with the Newport Jazz Rebels. In the 1970s he performed regularly at Jimmy Ryan’s club on West 54th Street, but after a heart attack in 1980, he stopped played altogether.
        Roy Eldridge’s competitiveness and sticktoitiveness made him more than just a precursor to Dizzy Gillespie, and the revolution known as BeBop; he was an effective transmitter of his own style and personality during a the Swing Era, the time when jazz music was the most popular form of entertainment in the United States.
    In terms of poetry, the question of how to get one’s own voice across, particularly when emotional intensity and technical skill are valued, is especially anxiety-producing. In other words, how can you be more like yourself, and less like everybody else? Maybe some close listening to this music can steer us in the right direction.

Starting tonight at midnight and continuing all day tomorrow, Jan. 30th, for 24 hrs. it's the Roy Eldridge birthday broadcast on WKCR.

Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; and Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015)

Silent Music [by Lera Auerbach]

Leitmotifs Photo by Lera Auerbach

 

 

At the Marlboro Music Festival, returning home at night –
my door was covered by moths. I opened the door quickly
as not to let them in, but at least twenty managed to fly in –
into the light of the dining room's lamp.

 

Today I found them dead all around the entrance,

dried angels, almost transparent in their fragile death

with the powder – angel's dust – still on their wings.

 

I think of them while listening to Chopin's mazurkas –

so fragile, so transparent, immortal in their captured beauty.

I gently lift the dead bodies of white&gray moths
from the floor – sliding them into an old glass jar.

 

There they shall rest. They look alive.

Most have their wings open, as if in flight.

My fingers are covered with the powder from the wings.

Their silence is music too.

 

When I wake up tomorrow morning

– they shall still be here, under the glass,

frozen in their death, as in a dream

hearing the music only they can hear.

Lewis Saul on Beethoven's String Quartet in C# Minor

BEETHOVEN, Ludwig van: String Quartet in C# Minor, Op. 131 (1825)

 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 unbelievably brilliant variation in color and temperament. . .

. . . . 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!

1. 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!)
2. 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!

1. Alla danza tedesca. A light joyful dance -- four voices in perfect balance;
2. Cavatina -- Adagio. This short movement is rightfully proclaimed a mini-masterpiece. The middle section (Beklemmt[“anguished”]) is positively 20th-century sounding!
3. 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? 

As the "march to death" winds down.

from the archive; first posted July 11, 2010. Click here for the entire article, of which this is a mere excerpt.

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2010/07/the-seven-most-meaningful-compositions-that-i-will-love-forever-ii-beethoven-string-quartet-in-c-min.html

The Bob Dylan Entry in the "Oxford Book of American Poetry"

We repost this piece, which first appeared on 8 / 9 / 08, eight years before Dylan won the Nobel Prize. The questions raised remain worth asking. It never fails to amuse me that the lines about Eliot and Pound in “Desolation Row” were analyzed at length by one of the premier close readers of our time, who may have vastly overestimated the extent of Dylan’s knowledge about Eliot and Pound.

Milton Glaser's portrait of Dylan is reproduced on the left.

<<<
Bob Dylan is represented in the 2006 edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry with "Desolation Row" and this head note. We're curious to know how readers react to the inclusion of Dylan's work, the specific choice of "Desolation Row," and the statements made in the head note below. -- DL

Bob Dylan, b. 1941. The songwriter and singer was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, and spent much of his boyhood in Hibbing, near the Canadian border. He named himself after Dylan Thomas. The lyrics in three of his record albums from the mid-1960s –– Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde –– particularly reward close analysis of the sort given to demanding examples of modern poetry. Read on the page, independent of musical accompaniment or vocal delivery, "Desolation Row" may be his finest lyric. The critic Christopher Ricks, who had previously written books about Milton, Keats, Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, and Samuel Beckett, devoted a lengthy volume to Dylan’s Visions of Sin in 2004. Ricks analyzes a stanza in "Desolation Row" –– the one in which Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are "fighting in the captain’s tower" –– in relation to Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'' Archibald MacLeish once complimented Dylan on the same lines. "Pound and Eliot were too scholastic, weren't they?'' MacLeish said. "I knew them both. Hard men. We have to go through them. But I know what you mean when you say they are fighting in a captain's tower.'' Recalling MacLeish’s words, Dylan made no comment other than to allow that he liked Eliot, who was "worth reading,'' but disapproved of Pound's anti-American propaganda from Italy in World War II and never did read him

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 09, 2008 at 10:00 AM in Dylan Watch | Permalink

Comments

like many very talented people bob seems able to channel many voices and express them in a really pure way. he's not a deep thinker. he can just get into a vein. his song "joey," about the mafioso joey gallo, has no soprano-style irony. there's humor in that song, but it's not "knowing" humor. as is clear from his book entitled chronicles, bob can see what's good in so many different kinds of acts, from the royal teens to frank sinatra. there's nothing snobbish about him. yardbird parker had something of that too. if there was somebody really bad playing, he would say, "i see what you're trying to do," and he would sit in with them. btw: i will buy a mcdonald's happy meal (boy's or girl's, your choice) for anyone who can explain why charlie p. was called "yardbird." not bird, yardbird!
Posted by: | August 09, 2008 at 01:53 PM

I think it is perfectly appropriate to include Bob Dylan in an anthology of American Poetry, however, what should be included is one of Mr. Dylan's poems, not a song lyric. I think Dylan's poem "Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie" is a great American poem. You can find the text here: http://orad.dent.kyushu-u.ac.jp/dylan/lasthowg.html

A recording from 1963-64 of Dylan reading the poem is in on the "Original Bootleg Series Vol 1-3" release on Columbia Records.
Posted by: Stan Denski | August 10, 2008 at 07:32 AM

Saying he took his name after Dylan Thomas is incredibly slack journalism, i.e. utterly unsubstantiated drivel that's been repeated so often it's taken by fools to be something you don't even have to bother researching. (More plausible is the story that he was walking around NY with a little notebook full of song titles, and one day after the rain he opened it and part of the name of the song 'Candyland' had been obliterated by the rain, leaving only 'xxxdylanx').
I do think there's a rabble-rousing minority in the poetry world that's keen to include dylan, but the obvious problem is that words to a song aren't meant to stand alone as poetry. At least they've chosen a lyric that isn't augmented too radically by the music that goes with it, but i still think it's out of place. Poetry is meant to be enjoyed on the page, music is multi-media in nature. That said, what distinguishes dylan among vocal performers is that he approaches his work with a poetic eye.
Posted by: AndoDoug | August 10, 2008 at 01:22 PM

I think the inclusion of any number of Bob Dylan's works is more than appropriate. There are so many works to choose from, both in terms of poetic and musical merit. In particular, his lyrics coupled with the piano have created some extraordinary works of art. "Oh Mercy" has a few songs on it worth taking a look at.
Posted by: Amy | August 10, 2008 at 05:29 PM

Stan Denski's suggestion re. "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie" is a good one, but the distinction between song lyrics and poems is weak at best, in the history of English literature (Elizabethan sonnets, for example). Just take his best verse, song-lyric or otherwise, and he'll beat many's the long-included poet in the canon. Pick one, any one, from ""The Times They Are A'Changing" to ""Mr Tambourine Man" to " Go 'Way From My Window" (A perfect aubade!), you can't go wrong.
Posted by: John McLaughlin | August 10, 2008 at 09:20 PM

Have to disagree. The better the song, the worse the poem. Studying song lyrics as poetry is akin to studying the paintings of Van Gough from 4 X 6 black & white photographs. See: bad idea.
Posted by: Stan Denski | September 13, 2008 at 09:46 AM
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"Young Blue Eyes: Frankie in the Forties" [by David Lehman]

Back in January 2008, when Dwight Garner was editing the "Living with Music" blog for the New York Times, I got to write a column on my top twenty Sinatra  tracks from the 1940s, an enviable assignment and one that I had a swellegant, elegant time with. Here it is. -- DL
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David Lehman’s January 2008 “Young Blue Eyes” Playlist:

Sometimes overshadowed by the Capitol Years (1953-1961) or the years after when “our hoodlum singer” (as Johnny Carson put it) became the iconic leader of the Rat Pack, the 1940s are the closest thing to a forgotten decade in Frank Sinatra’s career. This is a lovely way to spend an evening:

1) All or Nothing at All (music by Arthur Altman, words by Jack Lawrence). Though initially recorded on the day before the Nazis invaded Poland, this most famous of the songs Sinatra sang with the Harry James Orchestra is eligible here on a technicality. The 1939 recording didn’t become a hit until it was re-released as a single four years later, during a prolonged (and ruinous) musicians’ strike, when Columbia Records was desperate for material. Sinatra in 1944: “It’s a funny thing about that song. The recording we made of it five years ago is now in one of the top spots among the best sellers. But it’s the same old recording. It’s also the song I used to audition for Tommy Dorsey who signed me on the strength of it. And now it’s my first big record.” The final bar of the vocal is miraculous.

2) I’ll Never Smile Again (Ruth Lowe). As recorded on May 23, 1940, by the Dorsey orchestra with Sinatra and the Pied Pipers vocal group. Jo Stafford, then the golden female voice of the Pied Pipers, likes to say that within a few bars of first hearing Sinatra sing, she knew. You’ll hear why the first of his nicknames was “The Voice.”

3) Oh! Look At Me Now (Joe Bushkin music and John De Vries lyrics). January 6, 1941. Another gem from the three years Sinatra spent as Tommy Dorsey’s boy singer. In the allegory of Sinatra’s career, this song –– which he recorded as a solo on “A Swingin’ Affair” in 1957 –– figures heavily: “I’m so proud I’m bustin’ my vest.” Sung here as a duet with Connie Haines backed by the Pied Pipers.

) Be Careful, It’s My Heart (Irving Berlin). June 9, 1942. Like Artie Shaw, Sinatra recognized the value of recording not only current hits but a repertory of songs written by the masters, and thus he did as much as anyone to (1) extend the life of the music and (2) launch the concept of the “standard.” In this excellent Dorsey arrangement of an underrated Berlin ballad, Tommy’s trombone beautifully states the melody all the way through and then comes Sinatra’s vocal. Among other songs he recorded with the Dorsey orchestra I would name “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon”), “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” “Fools Rush In,” “How About You?” Too bad he never recorded “Our Love Affair.”

5) (There’ll be a) Hot Time in the Town of Berlin (Joe Bushkin music and John De Vries lyrics). I’ve heard two versions of this tune that Bushkin (Lee Wylie’s pianist) wrote to boost morale among the troops abroad. The CBS radio broadcast of Oct. 17, 1943, which became a V-disc, is interesting for its variant lyrics (“Michigan” rhymes with “gimme some skin”), but I prefer the more relaxed delivery of March 4, 1944 (arranged by Axel Stordahl; available on the “Frank Sinatra in Hollywood” boxed set; disc 1, number 19). This is one of “the songs that fought the war,” in John Bush Jones’s phrase. Our lads were going “to take a hike / through Hitler’s Reich / and change his Heil to whatcha-know-Joe.”

6) Dick Haymes, Dick Todd, and Como. October 23, 1944. Sammy Cahn, Sinatra’s personal lyricist, who could craft a song at a moment’s notice, took “Sunday, Monday, and Always,” the Johnny Burke and James Van Heusen hit, and wrote this about some of the competition in the continuing battle of the baritones that marked the Big Band Era. You’ll find it on Columbia’s “The V-Discs” (disc 2, number 6). “Every time I sing / I’m compared with Bing.” Jokes about how skinny he is (“They say that I need weight, / I’m just a mass of joints”) and the bobbysoxers’ adoring screams, which may yet cause him grief, “but if they ever stop / I’ll find that I’m back on relief.”

7) All the Things You Are (music Jerome Kern, lyrics Oscar Hammerstein). Recorded January 29, 1945. Axel Stordahl and orchestra. The apotheosis of the great American love song from one of America’s two greatest melodists. Concluding crescendo illustrates young crooner’s amazing range. From “The Best of the Columbia Years, 1943-1952.”

8) Where or When (music Richard Rodgers, lyrics Lorenz Hart). See comment (above) on “All the Things You Are” recorded on the same day.

9) Saturday Night (is the Loneliest night in the Week) (music Jule Styne, lyrics Sammy Cahn). Recorded February 3, 1945. Cahn and Styne turned out hit after hit for Sinatra in the mid-1940s (“Five Minutes More,” “Time After Time,” “Let it Snow, Let It Snow, Let it Snow”). Maybe more than any other song of 1945, “Saturday Night” is an instant metonymy for the home front during World War II. Superb uptempo George Siravo arrangement.

10) Put Your Dreams Away (Ruth Lowe, Paul Mann, Stephen Weiss). Recorded May 1, 1945. Sinatra’s radio and later his TV theme music. A full-throated display of his ability to sustain a note seemingly past the breaking point, a function of the breathing technique he learned from Dorsey’s trombone. This is what they played at Frank’s funeral recession.

11) Oh Bess, Where's My Bess? (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Du Bose Heyward). Recorded February 24, 1946. An early example of Sinatra’s “method acting” approach to singing. The emotional identification of the singer with his material reaches operatic heights.

12) That Old Black Magic (music Harold Arlen, lyrics Johnny Mercer). Recorded March 10, 1946. Arlen, the jazziest of the songwriters, and according to Ethel Waters, the “Negro-est” white man she knew, wrote songs of extraordinary complexity. In Mercer he found his ideal lyricist: “For you’re the lover I have waited for, / The mate that fate had me created for.”

13) The Coffee Song (They’ve Got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil). (Music Dick Miles, lyrics Bob Hilliard). Recorded July 24, 1946. Charming night-club number reflecting the late 1940s fascination with South America. “And when their ham and eggs need savor / Coffee ketchup gives them flavor, / Coffee pickles way outsell the dill. / Why, they put coffee in the coffee in Brazil.” Close your eyes and you’re at The Copa.

14) Begin the Beguine (Cole Porter). Oct 19, 1946. Arranged by George Siravo, responsible for Sinatra’s best charts until Nelson Riddle at Capitol. Porter liked to say that the key to writing Broadway hits was to “write Jewish music.” Listen to this amazing tropical-sounding dance number - which veers even further from the 32-bar structure than Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic” - and you’ll appreciate Richard Rodgers’s remark that the popular composer who “has written the most enduring `Jewish’ music” is Porter, “an Episcopalian millionaire who was born on a farm in Peru, Indiana.”

15) All of Me (Gerald Marks music, Seymour Simons lyrics). Arrangement by George Siravo, November 7, 1946. Sinatra recorded this number many times, most notably on the “Swing Easy” album he did with Nelson Riddle’s arrangements in 1953 or ‘54. That will remain the touchstone, but the Siravo version comes close, a sexy example of “kidding the lyrics.” The singer’s cocky confidence belies the words (“Your goodbye left me with eyes that cry”) and ends up sounding as defiant as, say, “Why Should I Cry Over You?” Of numerous alternate takes, I like best the one that ends not with the Sinatra whistle but a mutter: “You better get it while you can, baby. I’m gettin’ outta here.”

16) My Romance (Rodgers and Hart). April 25, 1947. In contrast to the fabrications of old age, Sinatra excelled at live duets during his radio years - with such as Peggy Lee, Doris Day ("Let's Take an Old-Fashioned Walk"), Eileen Barton ("Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are"), Sy Oliver and here Dinah Shore. (His duets in the 1950s with Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong and Jo Stafford are equally grand.). Criterion for judging duets: When the performers sound like they’re genuinely having fun.

17) The Song is You (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein). Oct 26, 1947. Definitive version of great standard.

18) Body and Soul (Johnny Green music, Edward Heyman lyrics). Recorded November 9, 1947, with Bobby Hackett on trumpet. See note on track 17 above. Gary Giddins calls this the best “straight” (i.e. non-jazz) rendition of the song.

19) It All Depends on You (Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson). Recorded July 10, 1949 with Hugo Winterhalter’s orchestra, and a fine sax solo from Wolf Taninbaum. Sinatra does a nice little be-bop scat following the bridge of this swing classic. Track five on “Swing and Dance with Frank Sinatra” is the best among many satisfactory takes. Compare to how Ruth Etting does this 1920s song –– or how Doris Day playing Ruth Etting does it in “Love Me or Leave Me.”

20) Bye Bye, Baby (music Jule Styne, lyrics Leo Robin). July 10, 1949. Swell brassy number from Jule Styne’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Leo Robin’s lyric cleverly transforms goodbye to its opposite through the agency of a pun: the song begins with the title words and ends with the lovers re-united: “I know that I’ll be smiling / with my baby, by and by.” Sinatra was a natural at the finger-snapping style that he made his own increasingly in the 1950s. Compare this version with the duet of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell and male chorus in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

This list was incorporated in Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World by David Lehman (HarperCollins).

Here's to you, Hoagy Carmichael

Photo by Mark Minton in Bloomington, Indiana, special for the BAP blog.

And here's Ella with "Skylark," one of the great collaborations between Hoagy and Johnny Mercer.

 

Beethoven's Choice [by Lera Auerbach]

The truth is that I do not know how I feel about Beethoven.

There seem to be two separate things – one is Beethoven, the other one is our admiration for Beethoven. The second is so thick that it's impossible to find the real Beethoven.

Just try to move the world's admiration for Beethoven aside: what will you see in its place? The admiration seems to be made of bronze: it can take any patina or color, yet it is so heavy it cannot be lifted or moved; it seems to replace Beethoven forever. Beethoven became insignificant compared to what he symbolizes: the greatness, the spirit, the best of the best of humanity.

Was the real Beethoven a great genius, a spiritual leader of free men, an example of the best of humanity? Nobody knows; the bronze veil of admiration is just too great to move aside. I suspect there is something awkward about Beethoven. We admire him because he can rise above his squareness, grumpiness, and inability to fly easily. He triumphs over his limitations, and that is why he's closer to the masses than Mozart with his Mozartian divine ease. 

Beethoven is a lion who tears music with his teeth, claws, and sforzandi. Through the efforts of his stubborn will, he can roar at the end triumphantly. We celebrate his brows; we celebrate his sweat; we forgive his foul smell, nasty hygiene habits, and bad manners, his lies. None of it matters. 

We forgive him for a choir that has to wait for an hour before singing for a few minutes at the end of the ninth symphony. We happily forget that Beethoven didn't write his most famous tune: it is a drinking song. None of it matters.

When a man becomes a god, he sheds all his humanity alongside his life.

Godliness, like anything else, requires sacrifice.

Was that Beethoven's choice?

 

Beethoven's Death Mask

Stravinsky: "I surround myself with obstacles. ."

Albert Gleizes, Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, 1914, Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 114.3 cm. Muséum of Modern Art Collection

"My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit." -- Igor Stravinsky

—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

from the archive; first posted May 15, 2016 by sdh

Elizabeth Bishop and the Grateful Dead [by Jeffrey Harrison]

  (San Francisco, 1968-69)

Whether she ever saw them perform we don’t know,
but she did go to a Janis Joplin show,
and Thom Gunn’s account of smoking a joint with her
backstage at a group reading makes it easier
to imagine her chatting with Jerry during a break
(about Billie Holliday, or Baudelaire, or Blake)
if not dancing in the aisles during one of the band’s
already notoriously labyrinthine jams
like the one between “Dark Star” and “Saint Stephen”
(a new song in their repertoire that season).
He would have been twenty-six, she fifty-seven.
She might have let it drop that Donovan
wanted to record “The Burglar of Babylon,”
he might have praised her trippy “Riverman,”
but she probably wouldn’t have uttered the phrase
she’d used in one of her unfinished essays
to describe the music of a rock band she’d seen
several times that year: a fucking machine—
though that might have led to a flurry of wit
or perhaps a killer rendition of “Love Light,”
with Pigpen lewdly rapping, in the second set.
Unlikely? Still, I’d like to think it happened—
my favorite poet meeting my favorite band.
Her partner then was in her twenties and
had connections to the music scene. Also,
in the year and a half she lived in San Francisco,
the Dead gave over sixty-five performances
so you’d think she’d have seen them once. Is
that too much of a stretch? Well, this just in:
five or so years later, on one of her trips up
to her beloved Nova Scotia, Bishop
brought as a present for her teenage cousin
a copy of Europe ’72—a triple album
gathered from live concerts—telling him
the Grateful Dead was a band to know about…
and also that it was okay to smoke pot.

—Jeffrey Harrison, Between Lakes, Four Way Books, 2020.

Leonard Bernstein conducting Brahms's "Academic Festival Overture.

Leonard Bernstein conducting Brahms's "Academic Festival Overture." He is one of the instruments -- just watch him. Like a method actor, in a way. He dances with the baton. And the music ends with history's greatest rendition of Gaudeamus Igitur.

 

Happy birthday to you, Georges Bizet

 

On George Gershwin's Birthday [by David Lehman]

On George Gershwin’s birthday
I keep expecting them to play
Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris,
the Cuban Overture,  the Concerto in F,
Porgy and Bess as played by Miles Davis,
but no, all day it’s been Dvorak, Grieg,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and other worthies
not born today, Elgar for heaven’s sake;
at least they could give us some Debussy,
as didn’t they (such a useful pronoun)
criticize him for imitating Debussy,
or Ravel, who declined to give George lessons
saying “Why become a second-rate Ravel
when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”

-- DL