FIELDS OF BACH (3)

Paul Klee loved Bach, which he played on the violin. He wrote a poem

in which his cat complains about it. Music in Klee is about the arbitriness

of notation--music notation is always turning into pictograms , is always

just about to take an anarchic life on of its own--or the absurdity of social structures--

those twittering machines--or novice angels practising on some side street of heaven,

one which resembles Basle.

George Braque loved Bach, but his Bach had nothing to do with notation or novice angels,

but a great deal to do with multi-angled space, which a fugue might be said to be in sound.

Bach's music was one of the things which aided his recovery from a head-injury

suffered in WW1, and it is a synonym for him of quiet meditation. It is after

this injury that the violin replaces the mandolin as Braque's cubist refracted musical

instrument, so it is entirely possible that Braque recovered through much the

same music as Paul Klee's cat complained of.

This would be one of the three solo sonatas or partitas for the violin alone,

which are held to be the apex of the violin literature. There is a recording from

1903 of Joseph Joachim playing a part of the G minor sonata,

which is the first; it has a prescence which belies its years. Nathan Milstein,

Jascha Heifetz, Joseph Szigeti, Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Grumiaux, Henryk

Szeryng,Ida Haendel, Schlomo Mintz, Gidon Kremer, Christian Tetzlaff, Hillary Hahn, Jaap van Shroeder,

among others have recorded them. This does not keep me from regretting

not hearing a gypsy violinist which Huberman(?) took Joseph Szigeti to hear

whose incredible freedom of expression in playing Bach put both these

great violinist to shame.(This story is Arnold Steinhardt's).

My niece and nephew made a bee-line for the solo violin sonatas and

partitas above almost all other music to which I introduced them.

My niece uses the chaconne to warm up before her rugby games;

it seems to work, as she is a national champion. We vote for Grumiaux

and Szeryng after numerous comparisons.

A great deal of Dan Brown-ish nonsense was trafficed in the musical press

a few years ago with the purported discovery that certain Lutheran

chorales were quoted in the great chaconne--or variations on a bass-line--

which ends the second partita. The violinist Christoph Poppen went so far

as to record the chaconne with a choir intoning chorales directly. But

when is Bach not quoting a chorale? He is so imbued with them that it will happen sooner

or later. So Poppen and crew pointed out what is after all

a salient feature.

Numerological decodings of the music are also less illuminating than is supposed,

a way of carving "To the Glory of God" into the joinery rather than an explanation

of the over-arching scheme. Like the omniprescent chorales it is part of the plan,

not the plan. The Czech musicologist, Miroslav Venhoda, compared the Obrecht

masses to medieval computers, the polyphony based on symbolism derived from

the medieval trivium and quadrivium. The question is :if of these medieval

masses be decoded,what would we have? An annotated text of the SUMMA THEOLOGICAE?

A visual model of the cathedral? Would these parts be more or less than the actual music?

My suspicion in both the case of the numerological Obrecht at the

beginning of the polyphonic tradition, and with Bach as its end, is that

it would be less.

It is the fact of Shakespeare which generates theories about the plays being

written by the Star Chamber. It is the fact of Bach which puzzles. Our silliest

theories are due to the suspicion that here magic and science mix.

(to be continued)

THE WINTER MANTRA FROM"THE SLEEPERS"

I descend my western course, my sinews are flaccid,

Perfume and youth course through me and I am their wake.

It is my face yellow and wrinkled instead of the old woman's,

I sit low in a straw bottom chair and carefully darn my grandson's

stockings.

It is I too, the sleepless widow looking out on the winter moonlight,

I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.

A shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie

in the coffin,
it is dark here underground, it is not evil or pain here,

it is blank here, for reasons.

(It seems to me everything in the light and air ought to be happy.

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough)

Walt Whitman section 2 of THE SLEEPERS

("I know not how I came of you and I know not where I go with you,

but I know I came well and shall go well."

The Winter Mantra)

FIELDS OF BACH ((2)

Among the more curious manifestations of Bach's influence is

the desire he inspires to make a counterpoint out of words.

How this is to be done is a matter of debate. Is it to be

done by cutting story against story, as D.W. Griffith did

in film? This is what Gide supposed in THE COUNTERFEITERS(1927)

with which Aldous Huxley soon concurred in his POINT COUNTERPOINT(1929).

No, say the poets lead by Pound:it is done via the inter-collision

of luminous fragments, and the cutting takes place not only with

stories but among historical epochs. It is done by layering historical

epochs over each other, in contrapuntal lines like

geological striations with dolmens sticking out says David

Jones in THE ANATHEMATA. It is done in Voices says James Joyce.

It is more than the symbolist desire to make poetry achieve the

condition of music. It is the kind of music to

which literature aspires which makes this modern,

literature which aspires to music's simultaneity of parts. The simultaneity

is what makes the great ensembles of Mozart's the Marriage of

Figaro or Verdi's Falstaff works that lift off the top of your head,

as you temporarily enter the privileged domain

of understanding six hearts and minds at once. Bach does this more

legibly, more lyrically, more often than any other composer.

This is a supposition--how could it be otherwise?--but

I feel that this need for perspectival simultaneity in narrative literature

began with 19th century urbanization. There are so many stories with

so many histories in so many faces. BLEAK HOUSE by Dickens,

which cross-cuts narratives, is one response to it. Whitman's LEAVES OF
GRASS is another. The difficulty that BLEAK HOUSE poses is

knowing what kind of story you are in; the difficulty Whitman

poses is knowing where you are in the human sea.

The attractiveness of simultaneity is knowing that you are

an individual in the context of a community. The difficulty lies

in believing this without a plenum or compass.

Contrapuntal writing organizes this in music. Narrative

writing begins to try to organize experience with something like these means.

Is Faulkner's THE WILD PALMS a narrative two part invention?

Does Virginia Woolf's THE WAVES become a kind of fugue?

Perhaps.

We look at those moments in civilization where it all came together,

which only happens in art, and we wonder how it might be done, if it might be done,

with what we know now. We know it has been done in this medium:

can it be done in that ? This is what Bach made the story- tellers wonder.

(To be continued)

PATIENCE BENEATH THE BLUE

Patience and still patience,

patience beneath the blue!

Each atom of the silence

knows what it ripens to.

The happy shock will come:

A dove alighting, some

Gentlest nudge, the breeze,

A woman's touch--before

You know it the downpour
has brought you to your knees!

Let populations be

Crumbled underfoot--

Palm irresistably

Among celestial fruit!

Those hours were not in vain

So long as you retain

A lightness once they're lost

Like one who, thinking, spends

His inmost dividends

To grow at any cost.

((the two final stanzas of James Merrill's

translation of Paul Valery's Palme;

it is this poem which he refers

to in LOST IN TRANSLATION;

it was my mantra many times when

waiting for the subway,

and now I impart it to you)

FIELDS OF BACH

Theodor Adorno deplored what he perceived as a Nazi

transformation of J.S. Bach into a latter-day cultural icon.

a Hans Sachs -like justification for the

supremacy of the Third Reich. How unhappily Bach was

treated in his own day would refute any broad claim to

this, as far as I can see; to read Christoph Wolff's

biography is to be immersed in the details of a

sequence of contractual disputes from start to finish.

And at the end he suffered cataract surgery at the hands of the same

quack as did Handel, and was made blind. No, Germany

did not treat him well. They were as nasty, as trite,as stinting

and as underhanded to Bach as

Amsterdam was to Rembrandt.

How might they have known him, and treated him better,

who was a prophet disguised as a scholar? The accounts

from his lifetime treat him as a virtuoso in terms

of technique,not in terms of the beauty of his music or its affekt,

whereas the contemporary complaint--which in one case lead to litigation--is that

the music is stiff, overwrought, and lacks expressivity.

This seems incredible to me in regard to the

choruses of the Matthew passion or the violin chaconne,

to seize on two examples from the far ends of his reach.

But it certainly wasn't galant,that era's sugared style, and it is important to

remember that Bach's career took place during

the heyday of Rococo, of Watteau rather than Rembrandt,

which may explain much of him which is against the grain

of his own time.

Felix Mendelsohn's conducting of the St Matthew passion with the Singakademie in 1829

is said to have sparked the Bach revival after a virtual eclipse to his reputation following

his death,but prior to that Mozart heard parts

of the Well-tempered Clavier played in the salon of Baron von Swieten,

and Bach influenced him ever after. Bach is to be found in Mozart's music in the most curious places, in the Chorale preceding the tests by fire and water in the Magic Flute,

and the monumental adagio and fugue for glass harmonica.

not to mention the c minor fantasia and fugue for piano.

Later,Schumann developed a thing about Bach

(How German is it?) and canons generally,

which leads to some rather blurry contrapuntal exercises, but it is Chopin,paradoxically,who

makes him his own; more than any other composer he understands the

lyric impulse of the Well-Tempered Clavier, which he distills in op.28 Preludes in particular.

Both seek the platonically ideal melody inherent to each different key and

the underlying configuration which will catalyze it.

(Chopin played Bach and Mozart to Delacroix and

Georges Sand- during the painting of their double portrait.

Sand and Delacroix found them old-fashioned in a way that we do not.)

Bach is not always a good influence--Tovey famously compared Brahms'

use of the Art of the Fugue theme in the first 'cello sonata to the periodic

emergence of a porpoise in a muddy aquarium--and it may be argued

that he was the ruination of Max Reger, who learned from him the technique

of carting the theme uphill via the means of the fugue. There

are admittedly a few labored fugues in Bach--not many, but enough to dread

when they occur, which happens just enough for wariness.

In his early work, this is because they are prolix, as in the

Toccata and fugue in C minor for keyboard, the later as

demonstrations of ingenuity.

He is also a great attractant for eccentric performers,

more so than any other composer,as the Goldberg variations

in the hands of Maria Yudina, Rosalyn Tureck, Wanda

Landowska, Glenn Gould, and Charles Rosen attests. The Goldbergs

manages to absorb them, and the three others by Gustav Leonhardt,

my favorite of the harpsichordists,

and two by Andras Schiff, my favorite among pianists. No

one performance encompasses it, and I approach having

heard thirty-three interpretations.Gould's first recording

made in 1955 will always be the one to which all others refer,

never-the-less, and for me personally the first

I heard and the last I will remember.

Each is interesting in the sense that someone crossing

a waterfall on a tightrope is interesting as they pass through the penumbra

of its rainbow.The wonder is that they come out the other side.

(to be continued)

THE CARRIER SHELL

Deep in the coral reefs, in a dark

unlike the land's most unstarred night,

beyond quicksilver flickering shoals

of fishes where neither shark

prowls, or porpoises cavort

at the dim yet lustrous feet

of pagodas of albino white

or alizarin crimson corals

wafting in the slow

yet ever expanding diastole

of the unsurfaced sea

among anemones, barnacled debris

fluorescent polyps, bones' filigree

inconspicuous, and in disguise

the carrier shell is found

whether from Darwinian severities

or because, as ethnologist

Adolph Portmann suggests,

nature practises

concious mimesis

it performs a peculiar task

sifting through detritus from

subaquatic latitudes above

for periwinkles, wentletraps

as obscure upon

the ocean floor they drift

incessant search

chiefly unearths

fragments, shards,

these it discards

yet on a signal

occasion,it

may find, complete

a perfect shell

spinning out of its own entrails, then,

an epoxy which can resist

the sea's dilutions, it attaches

to its own carapace, at an exact

interval from the last

such find, the new found prize

the largest of these inevitably is placed

at center; in neatly graduated degrees

are arranged those of diminishing size

upon the outward rim;

nor are there mirrors to admire

this display--or even eyes

in our sense--all this is done

by touch

above these shells patiently gathered

occurs another of anomalous nature's

relationships:

upon the topmost whorl

of the migratory carrier shell

grows a form, half mineral, half-plant

rising lightly, branching out

into a white sea-flower

as if all this eerie creature thought

as through detritus it had sought

perfection, or protective camouflage

had become a kind

of crown.

(1988)

A LITTLE RIFF ON ARTIST"S STATEMENTS

(for Diane, this morning's muse)

1:ON SELLING WHAT SHOULD BE UNSPOKEN

When the choreographer Trisha Brown explains her work in terms of being a bricklayer

with a sense of humor, she is pointing to the process of construction of her work

as being what it is in fact" about", the steady layering of process upon process.

This is the sort of statement I can handle from an artist. The how you go about

the what you do rather than the reasons why you do it. I am always suspicious of

larger claims, in art as well as life; ideally, an artistic statement should be subsumed in the practise.

The world and social structure, of course ,argue otherwise;

therefore, we compromise in order to communicate. How much and to what degree

can be a matter of period emphasis.Presently artists'

statements are more in the nature of sales pitches than they were during the period of,say,

Mark Rothko. From Rothko's, it is obvious that he had read THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, and

that he believed that the painter could achieve the Apollonian/

Dionysiac synthesis--- which worries:no wonder he felt the weight of the world. . Now everyone is

succinct as an elevator ride--that critical twenty-five seconds you have to sell yourselves--which worries for more pressing reasons. I don't miss the earlier incarnation of the artists' statement as student reading of Heidegger dressed-up as a manifesto, but I resent the present demand for constant self-reification.

Words for a visual artist are always a second language. It means the stresses of

the accents will always have a foreign intonation,and this will apply to meaning as well.

In a period of artistic innovation, moreover, everyone is compelled to become

an autodidact--to teach themselves how to do(ex.:) the first cubist painting, the first light

sculpture. This is both a blessing and a curse. The curse as far as language goes will often

be in the artist's inability to make a distinction between a personal meaning and

the general usage. A word then, if I may put it so, is treated as a vessel to fill up with

meaning of their own. Alas, the poor artist, compelled to turn his or her numinous

experience into a snappy sales-pitch. No wonder such a statement will confuse.

I am no different from anyone else in this regard. If called upon to explain myself, I instantly wish myself translated elsewhere. My basic relationship to art is this: any wresting with nothingness which I may do is voluntary, and consequently I must not mistake myself for a martyr or a saint. This resolve is different

from branding. And a statement must act as a synthesis of these opposite needs.Somehow.

The earliest statement of mine is probably the verbal equivalent to the black leather

and nose bones that I wore at twenty, whereas the press release written c. 1987 might compel

the interest of a student of Mallarme,

but only them. I was caught between wishing to provide an

explanation, the desire to make a manifesto, and the need

to sell. Thus I failed the first requisite:to be clear.

2:THE STATEMENT IN RELATION TO HISTORY

Historically,the artist's statement rose from a period of manifestos, in a time which hoped for Utopia,

which now we view with more qualified hopes, to put it mildly.The first great period of modernism--the period before ww1--is

also a period of manifesto making. It's important

to note that the cubist manifestoes were made by people like

Gleizes and Marcoussis rather than Braque and Picasso, and that

Marinetti, author of the Futurists manifestoes,produced little in the way of art unless a manifesto be considered so. To me there is a great deal of

unconcious aspirant fascism in many of these. Consider what it would be like to

be compelled to live in an apartment by Mondrian in which green,orange and

purple, the secondary colors, are forbidden. Or one of

Corbusier's" machines for living " if clean lines were not your thing .

A great many of the manifestoes had the tone of messianism or prophecy to them,

as if their author believed the future might be foreordained, engineered, even.

This viewpoint was scarcely halted by so unforeseen event as the first world war.

May as well make a megaphone circumspect as far as manifesto makers are

concerned. It effected writers as well as artists, and it is interesting and

instructive to see Ezra Pound try to outdo Wyndham Lewis in vituperation

on the pages of BLAST.

Reading them today, one feels a sympathy with the poet Mandelstam,

who said to his grandstanding confrere, Mayakovski, "Quiet down, Comrade;

you are not a Rumanian orchestra."

With the making of manifestoes

began the tradition of a self-interested pleading with chronology:that this idea begins here,

that this take on an idea is....original, a beginning. The merit

lies in being first. This art-historical beaux ideal underwent a lumbering sort of death, as when an

elephant falls to its knees, during the post-modernist revision begun in mid '70's,but

as a mental habit it very much persists, though we are in an epoch of

developments rather than beginnings.It requires fabricating an ideology which argues for the

merits of your practise. This in turn leads to the pretense of certainty, the fault of concluding too much.This is hardly a recipe for clarity and self-knowledge.

There is also the pre-emptive claim of the future as your own. What art

must be taught by you. And what history must learn from your work.

This was especially prevalent during the second era of

modernist manifestos--1945-1960.

Example:the merits of Caravaggio really lie in their anticipation of Frank Stella,

-- at least according to Stella in his WORKING SPACE-- just as the merits of abstraction

lie in their refusal to record and thereby treat atrocity as quotidian. Poor Caravaggio,

to hang forlornly in the Louvre for several hundred years awaiting the advent of

Stella. As for his claims of the higher ethical status of abstraction: this is no better than saying

abstract painting is on a kind of cheap date with history, with all the

tough parts left out.

(I myself started painting" realistically" again because I see the inability to record atrocity

one of abstraction's limits)(if these terms are valid to begin with, which I also doubt)

History is polyphonic, as far as I can tell , and there are histories within histories

as far as I can see. It must be possible to state one's concerns without purporting to mesmerize

the direction of history.

3

Beyond that, it would be irrate not to mention artists who wrote really well:

Michelangelo,Delacroix, Klee for starters, and with Blake in a zone where poetry

nearly becomes image. The poems of Arp, Van Gogh's letters, Giacometti's essay

--replete with diagrams-- on his dreams. There are titles of a few

words which are as fine as any poem: the sur-titles of Goya's LOS CAPRICHIOS. The schism they try to cross

is the one between word and image. To arrive there would be a great thing.