A Friend of Mine: Beyond Polyphony

As any APLV readers know, the classical music greats feature prominently on the blog. Please don't think, though, that we neglect that modern music which speaks straight to the heart. Right here we have a great 20th century hit which cuts past those nasty fugal complexities behind us for some toe-tapping elation. In a way this is purer song, finer expression through its liberation from complex harmonies and expressive means. Listen.

First, hear how the symmetry of those opening notes, three pairs of two, is broken by the seventh, lone note. One does not simply write such a groovy theme. One is inspired. Likewise, notice the triplet figure in the bass rolling on and on, as if eternally, reminiscent of a great passacaglia from Bach, Purcell, or Buxtehude. See lastly how yet another figure theme lays atop the bass, there.

Naturally we cannot ignore the text, which is deliberately emphasized by the lack of musical development. The text features rhyming couplets, emphasizing contrasting pairs such as different and same by their end-stopped placement and important concepts such as name, and same by the end-rhyme. Lastly, the imagery references everything from the ancient myth of Actaeon. "Once I tried to run," to the modern morality tales of Dudley-Do-Right, "He is like a Mountie, he always gets his man."

Complemented by the timeless look of leather vests and pelvic swaying, this video is simply electrifying. Zap!

Six Bach Dances: Part II: The B Minor Mass

And so flung wide are the doors of heaven.

IV. Gloria: Cum Sancto Spiritu

This festive trumpets-and-drums finale closes the ring of the Gloria which kicked off with another dancing D major fanfare. We begin vivace in 3/4 time with one of Bach's most rhythmically potent figures in the first of three sections of free declamatory material which sandwich the two fugues.

In the free sections dancing figures in the accompaniment leap and bound over sustained notes on patris  or ride virtuosic waves of ecstatic thirty-second notes on gloria, producing contrasts of texture and symbolism.

The two fugues utilize a variant of the opening figure for a theme against which he throws, "an animated countersubject, a weaving, conjunct idea on the word 'Amen,' which acts as a perfect foil for the leap filled main subject." [Stauffer, 93-94] The fervor and flurry of second fugue is charged by doubling instruments and false fugal entries, producing a feeling of spontaneous exuberance and, as Stauffer wisely observes, liberation.

It is one of soul's purest pleasures to be carried off in the glory of the Cum sancto stretti as they overflow into the rivers of amens and one grand affirmation: In gloria Dei Patris.

V. Credo: Et Resurrexit

Where the Cum Sancto Spiritu flowed easily and graciously from the noble bass aria Quoniam tu solus Dominus, the trumpets-and-drums Et Resurrexit is an epoch-making break from "the crown of thorns" that was the dissonant Crucifixus.

If the swelling elan of this movement, with rising figures every which way and a positively irresistible downbeat, don't quicken your pulse, check it. Bach has here combined the dignity of regal galanterie and the verve of spontaneous festal feast into a hymn of purest praise.

VI. Credo: Et Expecto

Like the Cum Sancto the Et Expecto flows without delay from the previous movement and like the Et Resurrexit this follows one of great gravity. Bach links the movements with an adagio bridge where a simple and declaratory anapestic figure on A in the first soprano which no sooner begins to fall through the voices than it falls into tempo Vivace e Allegro against a rising fanfare as the movement proper begins. 

After the orchestral ritornello of the fanfare figure the voices rejoin for a short fugato and every factor conspires to paint a clear sense of gesture, space, and scale. First, the leap of a fifth in the figure itself suggest the raising of one's senses to the celestial and divine. Second the rising entrances from the tenor to the second soprano draws the scale and gives a sense of graded escalation while the leap from the bass to first soprano suggests a spiritual vaulting to the heavens. 

The final fugal section achieves a similar sense of space and scale but here a contrast in both sustained and melismatic lines on saeculi, suggesting both the roll of ages and the constancy of the eternal firmament, all complemented by the heraldry of the paired fanfares in the trumpets above.

–

Bibliography

Stauffer, George B. Bach: The Mass in B Minor: The Great Catholic Mass. Yale University Press. 2003.

Six Bach Dances: Part I: Passion Sarabandes

The rhythms of dance are at once wax earthly and celestial, calling the listener to join his corporeal form to a timeless continuance. No dance wants to end and no composer understood this innate property better than Bach, whose dances not only in suites but also sacred choral works remain sculptures of rhythmic perpetuity as they within hold the most expressive harmonies. 

Here on this Good Friday I would take a look at three movements from Bach's two surviving Passions. All three are built on sarabande rhythms in 3/4 time and make use of the room within the sarabande for both gentility and passion.

I. St. John Passion, BWV.245: Tenor Aria, Ach mein Sinn

Score & Text @ Bach Cantatas Site

The St. John Passion's counterpart to Matthew's more famous Erbarme dich, the tenor aria Ach mein Sinn is Peter's turmoil after his threefold denial of Jesus. Yet where the Erbarme dich is a haunting, twining torment in the memory, Ach mein Sinn is an extroverted display of furious self abasement. Where the twists and turns in the Erbarme dich seem as Peter's sin again and again trickling into his mind, they here seem daggers amidst the din of dissonance, halting dotted rhythms, and rising and falling phrases. 

II. St. John Passion, BWV.245: Chorus: Ruht wohl

Score & Text @ Bach Cantatas Site

The stately sarabandes which close both of Bach's surviving passions have been variously referred to as  lullaby-like. This is somewhat appropriate, given the gentle flute and oboe parts above and the falling figures, suggestive of laying-down, which both pieces also share. Rising-and-falling figures, the lullaby-rocking, if you will, also contribute to the soporific mood, but the grieving leaps in the chorus and descending chromatic bass are bitter contrast to the sweet gentility of the rhythm.

III. St. Matthew Passion, BWV.244: Chorus: Wir setzen uns

Score & Text @ Bach Cantatas Site

Here the more regular sarabande rhythm creates a more persistent, sepulchral tone while the sudden shifts into dissonance draw an expressive interiority within the scene-painting of Christ's burial. The contrasting emotions of grandeur in the sarabande rhythm and tenderness in the falling figures, of personal grieving in leaps and communal grieving in vertical dissonance, and the death of Jesus the Man and Christ the Lord coalesce into one unfolding both immanent and transcendent.

–

Bibliography

Little, Meridith & Jenne, Natalie. Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach. Indiana University Press. 1991, 2001.

Stapert, Calvin R. My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Co. 2000.

Steinberg, Michael. Choral Masterworks: A Listener's Guide. Oxford University Press. 2005.

Changing Your Avatar, Political Edition

So when I got home from work yesterday I noticed on the social media that many folks had changed their Facebook and Twitter avatars to a pretty red equal sign, evidently in support of something. I found this reaction incredible and impossible to take serious for a few reasons.

The first is the unrestricted nature of the claim. Outside of a philosophical context, Christian or humanist or legalistic, this is simply a platitude. Yet instead of "equal because of Christ's suffering" or "equal because of equal nature" or "equal under the law," we're all just "equal."

The second is the lockstep into which these folks have fallen with the news cycle, persuaded that Tuesday was some landmark moment. There's little more pitiful to a conservative than someone who lives so much in the moment, let alone one so fraudulent and patently manufactured.

Thirdly, it's embarrassing after umpteen administrations, supreme courts, and congresses usurping and riding roughshod over liberties, to snuggle up to these monopolists whenever they look willing to throw you a bone. Tuesday's effusions demonstrate not spontaneous solidarity on the battlement but hopeless sycophancy to power and indifference to all but the matter of the moment.

Lastly, it's hard to accept the furious and exclusively political bent of some people. Many people seem to think that because much activity occurs in some political context, i.e. in society, that the nature of such activity is chiefly political. Even when persecuted, you can be principled without having a cause, and vice versa.

On Dressing Down

It is no revelation to observe that a man reveals himself in what excites him, yet one instance of this banal principle reveals. Why oh why do people get so excited when they're allowed to "dress down?" Now I'm not talking about the habitually disheveled or congenitally unkempt, but those who would seem to pride themselves on a tidy and appropriate appearance. Nor do I refer to some mild excitement: these people are ecstatic as if some Sisyphean vestmental duty has been lifted from their shoulders. What gives?

Is dressing well such a burden? Are a collared shirt, tie, and pressed pants really so hard to put on? Perhaps it is the upkeep, although as far as I know the washing machines do all the work these days, and dry cleaning is affordable. Perhaps business and light formal attire is thought expensive. Of course it can be, but so is the fashionable grunge-wear hocked by Ambercrombie et al. And what of the dress shoe's recent demotion? Sneakers are for sporting, boat shoes for boating, sandals for the beach, and boots for messy business. The humble dress shoe is king.

Aside from practical concerns, though, is dressing well such a penance? Can this finery, and finery it is although many today can afford it, truly displease us? It's not as if we're talking about 18th century galanterie formalwear stiff enough set you upright all by itself. Today's materials are soft, flexible, and resilient. And is dressing up not fun? A crisp collar, the delicate dress socks and laces, the supple leather of the shoes and that moment when the trousers fall on them at just the right place. And I should be grateful for the right to slide on a pair of shorts or aptly dubbed dungarees?

It's not as if in ditching proper attire we're removing layers of Baroque frippery to unveil some buried Vitruvian perfection, rather we replace the dignified and complementary with the shabby. Doing such doesn't mean we've embraced austerity or simplicity or comfort, but rather that we've lost the ability to take pleasure in the exquisite.

Aesthetics of Scale

After today's early tea, I came across an illuminating comparison of the two largest ocean liners of their ages, the infamous HMS Titanic and her modern counterpart, the Allure of the Seas. The image, alas for me, says most if not all: standards for size have changed. This at first might seem like progress. Surely Allure achieves commendable economies of scale which allow travelers of modest means to book passage. Too, today's sea queen boasts finer amenities and luxuries for all on board than the most posh of Titanic's rooms and decks. Look at the picture to the right, though. Isn't something amiss?

I think so: beauty. Allure of the Seas is a massive, ungainly vessel. Look how she seems to overflow from her prow and how the decks look slapped and storied atop one another. Look, below, at the carnival of bulbous, glassed-in theaters that festoon the top deck.

In contrast, observe the relative austerity of Titanic, how the top decks, protruding forward slightly, seem to cap off the prow. What dignified simplicity in the contrast of colors. Each ship is massive, but Allure looks overgrown, whereas Titanic looks consistent with itself: harmonized. Titanic impresses where Allure imposes.

What irony in the names, then. Titanic is a frank attempt to denote gravity and immensity, yet her design reflects an aesthetic. The name Allure is supposed to entice us, to charm us by natural appeal, and yet beauty here has been overlooked, or worse, disregarded.

Maybe the difference is of purpose. Titanic had just one, to carry passengers in luxury, whereas Allure is a floating amusement park attempting to be everything to everyone. Where Titanic achieved a noble simplicity of purpose and elegance of execution, Allure is a meretricious cash cow. Perhaps that's why, for all of their engineering feats and affordable accommodations, we take today's luxury liners for granted. They don't allure, they don't capture the imagination. They simply roll on, servicing the bourgeois as hi tech testaments to the tawdry and tasteless.

Gratitude and. . . Capitalism?

Few words these days come with as much baggage as the dreaded moniker capitalist. Synonymous for many with greedy bastard, most defenses of the free market begin with some attempt to reclaim the title. My association with the appellation is perhaps the least expected: gratitude. How can this be? Well, the answer is pretty simple.

I'm not a world-class chef, nor am I a barber. I also can't make furniture, or microprocessors. Nor can I repair arteries, engines, or bridges. Moreover, my mortal self will never live so long as to learn, let alone perfect, those crafts. Setting skills aside, then, I don't even own the materials to make any of the aforementioned. Not copper or lumber or oil or silicon or wool. Moreover, I don't even have the property on which to store or from which to extract the materials. As you might imagine, then, I'm pretty grateful to sit in a house, at a desk, typing at a computer.

"That's all well and good," you might say, "but what does that have to do with money? People could make those things anyway." True, true. Imagine this for me, though.

I ask my neighbor, a master woodworker, to make me a desk. I tell him that I want it quite large and ornately adorned. He agrees, but quotes me no price and goes ahead to make the desk. I come back a few weeks later to pick up my desk and learn he has spent the whole month working solely on my desk. How honored I am, and what a desk!  So honored that I offer him $100, all I can afford for it. What can he do? I have no more money, although he can refuse to sell it to me. Either way, he's lost not only the resources, but the opportunity to have covered costs and made a profit. Now here's my particular point here: he needs the profit to buy food and gas and pay his mortgage and so forth, and he needs to buy those things because he can't make them, and he can't make them because he's a carpenter. He's a carpenter because he's good at it, so he takes the risk of refining his skill in the hope that people prefer his expertise to their own, or to not having crafted wood products at all.

Yes, at all. Well who else is going to make the desks? The dentist, the lawyer, the cook, the classicist? Of course not, the carpenter does, in the hope that he can make enough money to buy the things he can't make for himself. I say hope because he might not be able to do anything else.

Now without setting a price for his material and labor, how will he know how to use his limited time and limited resources to make enough money to afford what he needs. The fancy desk which takes a month to make and earns him $100 doesn't buy him what he needs so that plan won't work, but maybe if he can make a simpler desk in three days and sell it for $150, it profits him. That equilibrium is his to find, his equation to balance.  It is his burden to figure out how to serve as many patrons as he can with his limited skills so that he can support himself. No one can force him to make a certain price, but no one can give him the formula for success either. So how does gratitude fit into all of this?

I'm grateful that so many people can balance that equation not only well enough to support themselves, but with such ferocious ingenuity that I can afford such a fine desk and dual-core marvel of a computer, amidst other wonders. The next time you bemoan the stupidity of mankind, and we all do in our haughty, self-satisfied moments, look around at the thousands of people doing things you can't do. Look at the curves of the keys on your keyboard or the stitching on your shirt. It's actually pretty humbling, especially when you consider the alternative: everyone doing everything ourselves, most of it badly. Out the window goes excellence because no one can specialize and get good at anything because we're busy doing a little of everything. So no more phones, cars, or computers. "Fine," say the aesthetes who reject such pedestrian concerns, and whom I ask: would you prefer that Mozart, DaVinci, and Shakespeare have spent more time farming?

That's not all the gratitude, though, because I'm also grateful whenever people want my own services. First, I'm grateful they've chosen me over other people offering the same work. Second, I'm honored they're bringing something I make or do into their lives. In fact, I'm no less honored that a man lets me teach him Latin than I would be if he hung a portrait I painted in his living room. Customers have taken a part of their lives, the time they spent working for the money they paid me, and trusted me to fill it. Wow. Lastly, I'm grateful they're supporting me. Without them, I'd be out of luck, and money. They are my patrons.

All of this gratitude also engenders two other emotions. The first is the humility which comes when you realize you cannot, in fact, do everyone else's job, and that even if you could, you could never do all of them at the same time. Even if you can do the job of the bag boy or cashier, you have your own job to do, remember? So out the window goes the contempt for so-called "menial" jobs.

The second feeling is respect, both for the people whose money you have taken, your patrons, and for those you patronize. The former support you with money and the later support you with goods. Remember the money is useless unless you exchange it for something you want for its own sake. So it's all support, then, and that realization is what makes some libertarians, in my experience, such jolly and gracious people. They don't feel entitled to certain profits or see exploitation around every corner, but rather they see the serendipitous confluence of interests in the free exchanges of free people. Now that's something to be grateful for, and something beautiful too.

On Re-Forming

Reform. The innocent word pops up at every changing-of-the-guard, the most recent of which being the election of Pope Francis. Will he reform the church? Ought he? Amidst the endless blabber and inane speculation, I ask, what does it mean to reform? We're rather liberal in our use of this little word, most often meaning simply to improve. This is of course not quite right and even progressives and reformers will admit that not all change is for the good. So perhaps we mean just, to change.

Yet many degrees of change present are possible. I may change my shirt, or my hairstyle, or where I live. I may also, though, change my philosophy of life. My mood changes as well. Can my character? Ought it? Curious that we don't use reform with reference to ourselves anymore. We used to. "He's reformed," they would say of a man after he served his jail sentence. There was in that use a sense of the gravity of the change. He's re-formed. He's a different man. They acknowledged the change as significant and, in this case, desirable.

Today, reform is used almost exclusively to refer to institutions and societies, not men. Society, we readily say, is a wreck. It's the politicians, the bankers, the immigrants. It's unions, it's the Tea Party, it's this or that president. Something's wrong with them. Society needs reform, that is, change by law, by fiat. We, however, are ourselves perfected, or perfect in imperfection. Never simply imperfect, though. Do we no longer think of changing ourselves? That we can, or ought to? Or do we simply glory in our noble, raw forms?  We educate minds, we rehabilitate physical health, but we don't reform. Maybe we don't re-form because we don't form, but how can we reform society if not ourselves?

So we'll reform society. We'll to reform "healthcare." We'll reform "education." We want the pope to reform the church. The president wants to "fundamentally transform" the nation. We have great expectations yet we casually speak of reform as if we're remodeling a living room or patching a few roofing shingles, hammering out a few kinks. Individuals who would not tinker with their stoves and who refuse to change themselves champion reform of nearly everything else.

Now reform might technically be the proper word, but what I think we mean is reconstitute, that is, to change the rules, to change the agreement and the system. We want to shuffle the deck for a new deal. We want to constituere, to set up, to decide anew. Re-form indeed. And we say this casually. It'll take just a few more laws, a little managerial tinkering, a little more authority in the right hands, and, naturally, more funding.

So near, so simple. Only it's not, of course, because we're still talking about changing people.

Sometimes reform is needed, but it's a grave thing, best started at home, and wherever, best without the conceit that one can both reform and conserve.

Dear Lazy People

We've found you. Yes, at long last we know exactly who you are. It's taken us a while but we've done it. So how did we finally track you down?

Well, it wasn't easy. Everyone has bad days, right? So it wasn't so much your unkempt attire, your frequent complaints, or your lateness that gave you away. Nor was it your recycled work or the fact that you never have the correct or enough materials.  It wasn't the soggy fries you served or the parallel fifths in your song or the stretched out, pixelated images on your cover. It wasn't that you complain when there's a lot of work. It wasn't even that whenever the topic of laziness comes up, you admit to being lazy. Do you know what gave you away? 

Incidentally, yes. Yes, we see all of those little shortcuts, the reheating, the copying-and-pasting, the surface-cleaning, crib-noting shortcuts you think are so neatly concealed.

Anyway, what gave you up was how, after you admit to being lazy, or after someone criticizes your work or corrects you, you laugh. We all fall short here and there, but you laugh at the thought. We don't know why you laugh, whether you're amused at yourself or you're suppressing something, but you laugh. And so we're onto you. 

We haven't decided what we're going to do with you yet, right now we have Gordon Ramsay out there yelling at some of you, but we're onto you. In place of a verdict on your fate, please accept this meme.

Sincerely,

People Who Care

People Who Value Excellence

People Who Make Things Work
People Who Make Things Look Good
People Who Don't Insult Others By Giving Them Junk
and Perfectionists

Another Kind of Cliff

We've all been there. You're talking to an acquaintance, maybe even a friend of some degree. The conversation hums along from the weather, that inevitable point of departure, to the ills and maybe even delights of the day. Then it happens: he says something not foolish or wrong, per se, but unintelligible. Of course what you'd really like at that point is to stop and think, only he's still babbling and so you're still following, hoping everything will click. Only it doesn't.

Eventually he solicits your opinion and you take a mulligan: "That was interesting. What was it you said about the foot of the bullfrog?" This buys you a few more minutes and now you listen ever more finely, all of your intellectual gears and cogs whirring to process every permutation of the variables. You exhaust yourself with periphrastic gymnastics in the hope of finding some golden angle at which the thoughts make sense, but no, none exists. His thought is an impermeable, inscrutable monad, a frabjous ode to absurdity.

We can only learn to love such thoughts and the minds that make them. We can't examine them too closely lest like Wile E. we plummet from the mesa. I find the key to escape lies in elevation and escalation: elevate their question to an imponderable and make an equally incomprehensible statement with which to leave. For example, "You know there was a good article in The Times about that a few weeks ago. They did a study at Columbia, I think. Big scandal. Anyway, I'm going to have a postprandial nip and then try to pick up a cape before the haberdasher closes." It's a fun opportunity to get creative. 

Remember, the fool jokes to amuse others, the wise man jokes to amuse himself.