"Barack Obama's actions can only be understood if he is a zombie channeling the ghost of his America-hating Kenyan anti-colonialist father."
"Barack Obama's actions can only be understood if he is a corporatist tool, put in office by Goldman Sachs and Big Pharma."
It's Pick Your Favorite Narrative Day! We're going to talk about narratives and music, though, not narratives and politics.
I've mentioned Leonard Bernstein's famous Harvard lecture video series, the Unanswered Question. Here's a very good excerpt from his lecture Musical Phonology (discovered by oysterface), where Bernstein uses an example from Beethoven.
(More fun after the bump...)
Do you hear the word "Please?" when Bernstein plays that? Well, honestly, I didn't, not until he told me that's what he hears. And then I heard it and found it difficult not to hear it. The thing is, there are other narratives that a creative person could make up to add some inner life to that same music. For instance, maybe it's the Three Bears looking at their porridge and wondering who ate it.
"Who ate my porridge!"
"I don't know!"
"Well we damn well better find out..."
Leonard Bernstein was a brilliant man. He's hardly my favorite conductor, although he's my favorite conductor to WATCH conducting. Quite the ham! Conductor, composer, Jew, Communist, homosexual...
Wait, Dumbo! Communist??? Not our boy Lennie, surely!
Well, yes, he was a communist or some equivalent according to such famous Commie-outing publications as the fifties publication Red Channels, some pages of which you can read here:
http://www.authentichistory.com/...
Here's one of Leonard Bernstein's hits, Maria from West Side Story. Won him an oscar. Probably a RED Oscar.
(By the way, in a few weeks, Pico is going to guest-host a diary about his favorite composer, Scriabin. Scriabin had a thang for tritones. You can hear a tritone in Maria. The first two notes of the word Ma-ri-a are a tritone. You're welcome, Pico.)
There are other interesting names on there as well, like Will Geer. Will Geer? That name sounded familiar but I couldn't place it so I had to Google Image it. Oh, it's Grampa Walton! "Goodnight Jim Boy!" Commie.
It got me to wondering about my own father, whose only brief foray into political activism was in the early fifties, when he protested the Ethel Rosenberg execution. FBI agents came knocking on the doors in our neighborhood, asking questions about him and leaders of the anti-capital-punishment group my Dad was involved in. It only slightly complicated matters that my mom's name from her first marriage was Ethel Rosenberg. I wasn't born yet, and don't know how all that shook out, but I can't help but think it wasn't good for the family reputation.
Since this is all going to be rather long and meandering before it seems to get to a point, here's some nice programmatic music, The Enchanted Lake, courtesy the Russian Romantic composer Lyadov.
Just before they were married, my father told my mother that he beat the crap out of my uncle and told him he was going to kick his ass worse if he put any more moves on my mom. It's an interesting narrative, or, well, just lie. My mother told my uncle about this, and he fell down laughing. He patiently explained to her that he wasn't into women that way. This shocked my mother, and then it fascinated her, and she dug the whole story out of this side of his life, one he wasn't reluctant to share even at a time like the early fifties. And, oh by the way, my uncle WAS a card-carrying member of the Socialist Worker's Party, and quite proud of it, and received various socialist newsletters regularly. My uncle proudly told her of all the times he had been arrested partying in Hollywood, and the famous celebrities he had spent the night drunk in jail with... I called and asked her for details just now about who he named, and she said she remembers him saying Mr. Blackwell and the owner of Spreckels Sugar.
To my mother this was all fascinating, and she tried to put it in context through her own personal religion, which revolved around her three gods: Freud, Adler, and Jung. Because, certainly, there was something wrong that a young good-looking man like him couldn't find himself a nice girl to settle down with. Was it a traumatic incident? Something during his childhood?
When I was a kid, my mother told me the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. I think I was about nine when she told me this, because we were living in Lakewood and we moved when I was ten. The wolf, which represented, she explained, uncontrolled carnality, seduced young Little Red Riding Hood, whose hood was red because it represented her new menstrual cycle and coming to maturity as a woman. After the Big Bad Wolf tried to eat her all up, the woodsman came along and killed the wolf with an axe, which represented the castration of the wolf. That's where someone cuts your balls off, she explained. For years, whenever I heard the word castration, I didn't just worry about getting my balls cut off, I thought about somebody doing it with an axe. My Freudian/Adlerian/Jungian mother had traumatized me.
I swear to you now, yes, she told me all this. I bet she didn't even realize the inappropriateness of it, so carried away with her version of the story that she just assumed I didn't understand jack and was using me as a sounding board. Little did she realize that Li'l Dumbo was a little walking recording machine.
Did your parents tell you the story of Little Red Riding Hood? I bet it didn't scare the crap out of you and leave you covering your balls with both hands the way my mother's more erudite version of the same story did.
3:55pm. I'm going to be so late if I don't hurry this along, and I haven't even got started. Type, Dumbo, type!
Narrative is a word with multiple uses. At its simplest level, it means a story, the kind of story that people tell each other. There is a whole branch of academic wankery called Narratology which studies and breaks down the forms and purposes of narratives and meta-narratives (the American Dream, for instance, is a social meta-narrative). Narratology falls under the umbrella of an even bigger wank-factory called linguistics. Never having taken a class in linguistics, other than studying Formal Languages in math, I'm a little bit out of my league with the material I've browsed through in pursuit of my deeply buried lead for this diary.
I have a question. How can music have a narrative? I'm not the expert. You tell me. The comments are there for a reason. But this is a very interesting subject, central to understanding classical music and its evolution.
I think, after last week, we can see that some music definitely does have a narrative of some kind attached to it. Tchaikovsky originally planned to name his Symphony #6 "A Program Symphony," without offering any program at all. Around the time of its first performance, Romantic composers were becoming disenchanted with the whole "program" aspect of program music, feeling that it took something away from the music when people explained it in too much detail. Yet you can't listen to the Pathetique without reading some kind of story into it of your own making. And that is a fascinating mystery.
How can that possibly happen? Music is the most abstract of all art forms! When I hear a story, it's a story with clearly formed nouns and verbs in a language that we as humans share. If we disagree on the meaning of those words, we can look them up on dictionary.com and post them at each other and say, "See?" We might disagree about the subtext of a story, but we don't generally disagree about the meaning of the words in the story.
But instrumental music has no words. There is no common dictionary we can appeal to if we argue about what Beethoven was saying. We can all agree that he played these notes, and these chords and used these rhythms, but putting it all together in a meaningful way is still a personal matter.
If we argue about the meaning of a word, however, like the word narrative, I can appeal to authority. Like this:
http://www.englishbiz.co.uk/...
GLOSSARY OF LINGUISTIC TERMS
� 2010 Steve Campsall
Narrative & Myth
Whilst it's true to say that a narrative is no more than a story, the important realisation from an analytical viewpoint is that when we tell or write a story, we all tend to use a very similar form and structure, no matter what the story and whether it is imaginary or not. Narrative is easily one of the most common varieties of social discourse and a day will not pass without you reading or hearing a story - or constructing one of your own...
Constructing one of our own? Here's the key paragraph.
...From early childhood, we become accustomed to making sense of the complex events of the world through the simplifying and satisfying means of narrative, not noticing the way the form and structure of narrative orders and simplifies reality, most particularly the way it positions people as either wholly 'good' (= heroes and helpers) or wholly 'bad' (= villains and accomplices). The fact that this is merely a point of view and a massive over-simplification of the realities of life passes us by as we become absorbed by and relate to the characters and events of the narrative. It has been suggested that we might even be born with such basic structures and forms embedded within our subconscious; they certainly have an enduring and unshakeable impact upon our psychology. Certainly, it is clear that as human beings we do have a need for security, control and order within our lives and narrative, along with genre, are two very important means by which order and security can be created in what is, in reality, a disordered and even potentially dangerous universe...
Bernstein asks in his Phonology lecture (Phonology being a linguistics term meaning basic sounds that people make when they talk) "Do we the listeners really hear what Beethoven meant?"
The answer to that is that we can't know. Bernstein hears "Please!" I hear "Who ate my porridge!" Likewise, one critic of Beethoven's Fifth says he hears "Fate knocking on the door." I hear Beethoven knocking on my door to tell me my dog pissed on his rosebush and he's going to sue. But we're all hearing the very same music.
The music itself is an amazing abstraction. It isn't even sound, in its most rudimentary form, but dots on paper. The same music can be expressed by different instruments playing at different sound frequencies at different speeds on different instruments by different performers, but we recognize it as the same piece of music because of its fidelity in some way to the basic dots on written sheets of paper.
And here we are, arguing about whether dots on paper mean "Please!" or "Who ate my porridge?" The dots don't say anything like that. We hear it. We create our own narratives to make sense out of what we hear.
Isn't that a very lonely thought? You can't hear music the way I hear it. Nobody can. We're all alone this way. We can all go to a concert together and sit in a room with hundreds of people listening to a 45 minute symphony like the Pathetique and applaud at the same time and cry at the same time, but what we are crying and applauding about is not the same thing. The actual musical sound is so immense in size, complex in organization, open to so many personal interpretations at so many points, that it's impossible for us to even process all that sound in one listening. We pick out bits and parts of it that grab our attention and we assemble those parts together into a narrative of our own making. What chance is there that our narratives intersect at all unless we do like Bernstein did in his lecture, and taint the well by telling people what to hear? Even then, how much of the musical sound can you process in your head to project that narrative upon the music? Once you have made this narrative projection, what chance do you have to hear anything else in the music that doesn't fit nicely into the narrative?
And yet I think we can see a trend in the history of classical music, one in which music becomes more and more narrative-driven, even in pure instrumental music when no program or narrative is supplied to the listener. There is more than just our projection going on. Over the course of many years, as western music and musical form grew in complexity and length, composers made their music more story-like in form, with beginnings, middles, endings, climaxes, etc. In fact, there is almost a sliding scale in the degree of this narrative-ness as time progresses from, say Bach, to, say, Tchaikovsky.
I have heard many people describe the essence of musical Romanticism as being in the emotional expressiveness of music. Sounds good, but it's bullshit. In our Romanticism diary of a few weeks ago, I compared Mozart's Piano Concerto #23 slow movement to a Chopin Nocturne -- there was no greater expressed emotion in Chopin than in Mozart, but there was a huge difference in form.
The Romantics were very heavily narrative-driven in their music. Their reliance on programs like fairy tales and Shakespearean plays came from the narrativity of their music, not the other way around.
But music isn't always this narrative-driven, certainly not to such a degree, and it's stifling to our ability to appreciate music if we come to cherish that so much that we lose the ability to just listen to and enjoy the abstraction. In a Mozart symphony or Bach fugue, rather than hearing a stirring drama that represents striving towards victory or yearning for the unattainable, we can sometimes just focus on the elegant, the juxtaposition of opposites, contrasting pieces of a puzzle placed together in an aesthetically pleasing way with a surprise here and there. Perhaps it sounds too less ambitious when I put it that way. But this, too, is music, and in some ways, it's even more musical music.
Here's the final movement from the Mozart Symphony #41, "The Jupiter." I'd love to analyze it, but don't have time, and it would be a bitch to analyze as well, because as short as this is, with as small an orchestra is it is, it is a complicated cyclone of musical sound, way too much to understand on the first dozen listenings even. It has no narrative tale to tell, and yet it's difficult for us, as human beings, not to create one. The irony is that it's only when we get past the narrative that we start to hear all the really cool stuff that's going on in this, all of it in the details, and oh boy, does the Jupiter have details.
5:16pm. I better stop here. I had more to say but can't remember. And, oh yeah, I'm drinking a mixture of Archer Farms Burundi Kayanza and some Mexico Chiapas from Starbucks. (The one that comes in the solid green wrapper and says "Shade Grown.") I ran out of Burundi, so I had to mix 'em, poor me.
Next week we'll do something with chamber music.