Listen to This (4 page)
Authors: Alex Ross
I’m imagining myself on the other side—as a forty-something pop fan who wants to try something different. On a lark, I buy a record of Otto Klemperer conducting the
Eroica,
picking this one because Klemperer is the father of Colonel Klink, on
Hogan’s Heroes.
I hear two impressive loud chords, then what the liner notes allege is a “truly heroic” theme. It sounds kind of feeble, lopsided, waltzlike. My mind drifts. A few days later, I try again. This time, I hear some attractive adolescent grandiosity, barbaric yawps here and there. The rest is mechanical, remote. But each time I go back I map out a little more of the imaginary world. I invent stories for each thing as it happens. Big chords, hero standing backstage, a troubling thought, hero orating over loudspeakers, some ideas for songs that don’t catch on, a man or woman pleading, hero shouts back, tension, anger, conspiracies—assassination attempt? The nervous splendor of it all gets under my skin. I go to a bookstore and look at the classical shelf, which seems to have more books for Idiots and Dummies than any other section. I read Bernstein’s essay in
The Infinite Variety of Music,
coordinate some of the examples with the music, enjoy stories of the composer screaming about Napoleon, and go back and listen again. Sometime after the tenth listen, the music becomes my own; I know what’s around almost every corner and I exult in knowing. It’s as if I could predict the news.
Eroica,
picking this one because Klemperer is the father of Colonel Klink, on
Hogan’s Heroes.
I hear two impressive loud chords, then what the liner notes allege is a “truly heroic” theme. It sounds kind of feeble, lopsided, waltzlike. My mind drifts. A few days later, I try again. This time, I hear some attractive adolescent grandiosity, barbaric yawps here and there. The rest is mechanical, remote. But each time I go back I map out a little more of the imaginary world. I invent stories for each thing as it happens. Big chords, hero standing backstage, a troubling thought, hero orating over loudspeakers, some ideas for songs that don’t catch on, a man or woman pleading, hero shouts back, tension, anger, conspiracies—assassination attempt? The nervous splendor of it all gets under my skin. I go to a bookstore and look at the classical shelf, which seems to have more books for Idiots and Dummies than any other section. I read Bernstein’s essay in
The Infinite Variety of Music,
coordinate some of the examples with the music, enjoy stories of the composer screaming about Napoleon, and go back and listen again. Sometime after the tenth listen, the music becomes my own; I know what’s around almost every corner and I exult in knowing. It’s as if I could predict the news.
I am now enough of a fan that I buy a twenty-five-dollar ticket to hear a famous orchestra play the
Eroica
live. It is not a very heroic experience. I feel dispirited from the moment I walk in the hall. My black jeans draw disapproving glances from men who seem to be modeling the Johnny Carson collection. I look around warily at the twenty shades of beige in which the hall is decorated. The music starts, with the imperious chords that say, “Listen to this.” Yet I somehow find it hard to think of Beethoven’s detestation of all tyranny over the human mind when the man next to me is a dead ringer for my dentist. The assassination sequence in the first movement is less exciting when the musicians have no emotion on their faces. I cough; a thin man, reading a dog-eared score, glares at me. When the movement is about a minute from ending, an ancient woman creeps slowly up the aisle, a look of enormous dissatisfaction on her face, followed at a few paces by a blank-faced husband. Finally, three smashing chords to finish, obviously intended to set off a roar of applause. I start to
clap, but the man with the score glares again. One does not applaud in the midst of greatly great great music, even if the composer wants one to! Coughing, squirming, whispering, the crowd suppresses its urge to express pleasure. It’s like mass anal retention. The slow tread of the Funeral March, or Marcia funebre, as everyone insists on calling it, begins. I start to feel that my newfound respect for the music is dragging along behind the hearse.
Eroica
live. It is not a very heroic experience. I feel dispirited from the moment I walk in the hall. My black jeans draw disapproving glances from men who seem to be modeling the Johnny Carson collection. I look around warily at the twenty shades of beige in which the hall is decorated. The music starts, with the imperious chords that say, “Listen to this.” Yet I somehow find it hard to think of Beethoven’s detestation of all tyranny over the human mind when the man next to me is a dead ringer for my dentist. The assassination sequence in the first movement is less exciting when the musicians have no emotion on their faces. I cough; a thin man, reading a dog-eared score, glares at me. When the movement is about a minute from ending, an ancient woman creeps slowly up the aisle, a look of enormous dissatisfaction on her face, followed at a few paces by a blank-faced husband. Finally, three smashing chords to finish, obviously intended to set off a roar of applause. I start to
clap, but the man with the score glares again. One does not applaud in the midst of greatly great great music, even if the composer wants one to! Coughing, squirming, whispering, the crowd suppresses its urge to express pleasure. It’s like mass anal retention. The slow tread of the Funeral March, or Marcia funebre, as everyone insists on calling it, begins. I start to feel that my newfound respect for the music is dragging along behind the hearse.
But I stay with it. For the duration of the Marcia, I try to disregard the audience and concentrate on the music. It strikes me that what I’m hearing is an entirely natural phenomenon, the sum of the vibrations of various creaky old instruments reverberating around a boxlike hall. Each scrape of a bow translates into a strand of sound; what I see is what I hear. So when the cellos and basses make the floor tremble with their big low note in the middle of the march (what Bernstein calls the “wham!”) the impact of the moment is purely physical. Amplifiers are for sissies, I’m starting to think. The orchestra isn’t playing with the same cowed force as Klemperer’s heroes, but the tone is warmer and deeper and rounder than on the CD. I make my peace with the stiffness of the scene by thinking of it as a cool frame for a hot event. Perhaps this is how it has to be: Beethoven needs a passive audience as a foil. To my left, a sleeping dentist; to my right, a put-upon aesthete; and, in front of me, the funeral march that rises to a fugal fury, and breaks down into softly sobbing memories of themes, and then gives way to an entirely new mood—hard-driving, laughing, lurching, a bit drunk.
Two centuries ago, Beethoven bent over the manuscript of the
Eroica
and struck out Napoleon’s name. It is often said that he made himself the protagonist of the work instead. Indeed, he fashioned an archetype—the rebel artist hero—that modern artists are still recycling. I wonder, though, if Beethoven’s gesture meant what people think it did. Perhaps he was freeing his music from a too specific interpretation, from his own preoccupations. He was setting his symphony adrift, as a message in a bottle. He could hardly have imagined it traveling two hundred years, through the dark heart of the twentieth century and into the pulverizing electronic age. But he knew it would go far, and he did not weigh it down. There was now a torn, blank space on the title page. The symphony became a fragmentary, unfinished thing, and unfinished it remains. It becomes whole again only in the mind and soul of someone listening for the first time, and listening again. The hero is you.
Eroica
and struck out Napoleon’s name. It is often said that he made himself the protagonist of the work instead. Indeed, he fashioned an archetype—the rebel artist hero—that modern artists are still recycling. I wonder, though, if Beethoven’s gesture meant what people think it did. Perhaps he was freeing his music from a too specific interpretation, from his own preoccupations. He was setting his symphony adrift, as a message in a bottle. He could hardly have imagined it traveling two hundred years, through the dark heart of the twentieth century and into the pulverizing electronic age. But he knew it would go far, and he did not weigh it down. There was now a torn, blank space on the title page. The symphony became a fragmentary, unfinished thing, and unfinished it remains. It becomes whole again only in the mind and soul of someone listening for the first time, and listening again. The hero is you.
CHACONA, LAMENTO, WALKING BLUES
BASS LINES OF MUSIC HISTORY
At the outset of the seventeenth century, as the Spanish Empire reached its zenith, there was a fad for the chacona, a sexily swirling dance that hypnotized all who heard it. No one knows for certain where it came from, but scattered evidence suggests that it originated somewhere in Spain’s New World colonies. In 1598, Mateo Rosas de Oquendo, a soldier and court official who had spent a decade in Peru, included the chacona in a list of locally popular dances and airs whose names had been “given by the devil.” Because no flesh-and-blood person could resist such sounds, Oquendo wrote, the law should ignore whatever mischief they might cause.
The devil did fine work: the chacona is perfectly engineered to bewitch the senses. It is in triple time, with a stress on the second beat encouraging a sway of the hips. Players in the chacona band lay down an ostinato—a motif, bass line, or chord progression that repeats in an insistent fashion. (“Ostinato” is Italian for “obstinate.”) Other instruments add variations, the wilder the better. And singers step forward to tell bawdy tales of
la vida bona,
the good life. The result is a little sonic tornado that spins in circles while hurtling forward. When an early-music group reconstructs the form—the Catalan viol player Jordi Savall often improvises on the chacona with his ensemble Hesperion XXI—centuries melt away and modern feet tap to an ancient tune.
la vida bona,
the good life. The result is a little sonic tornado that spins in circles while hurtling forward. When an early-music group reconstructs the form—the Catalan viol player Jordi Savall often improvises on the chacona with his ensemble Hesperion XXI—centuries melt away and modern feet tap to an ancient tune.
The late Renaissance brought forth many ostinato dances of this type—the passamezzo, the bergamasca, the zarabanda,
la folia
—but the chacona took on a certain notoriety. Writers of the Spanish Golden Age savored its exotic, dubious reputation: Lope de Vega personified the dance as an old lady “riding in to Seville from the Indies.” Cervantes’s novella
La ilustre fregona (The Illustrious Scullery-Maid),
published in 1613, has a scene in which a young nobleman poses as a water carrier and plays a chacona in a common tavern, to the stamping delight of the maids and mule boys. He sings:
la folia
—but the chacona took on a certain notoriety. Writers of the Spanish Golden Age savored its exotic, dubious reputation: Lope de Vega personified the dance as an old lady “riding in to Seville from the Indies.” Cervantes’s novella
La ilustre fregona (The Illustrious Scullery-Maid),
published in 1613, has a scene in which a young nobleman poses as a water carrier and plays a chacona in a common tavern, to the stamping delight of the maids and mule boys. He sings:
So come in, all you nymph girls,
All you nymph boys, if you please,
The dance of the chacona
Is wider than the seas.
All you nymph boys, if you please,
The dance of the chacona
Is wider than the seas.
Chacona lyrics often emphasize the dance’s topsy-turvy nature—its knack for disrupting solemn occasions and breaking down inhibitions. Thieves use it to fool their prey. Kings get down with their subjects. When a sexton at a funeral accidentally says
“Vida bona”
instead of
“Requiem,”
all begin to bounce to the familiar beat—including, it is said, the corpse. “Un sarao de la chacona,” or “A Chaconne Soiree,” a song published by the Spanish musician Juan Arañés, presents this busy tableau:
“Vida bona”
instead of
“Requiem,”
all begin to bounce to the familiar beat—including, it is said, the corpse. “Un sarao de la chacona,” or “A Chaconne Soiree,” a song published by the Spanish musician Juan Arañés, presents this busy tableau:
When Almadán was married,
A wild party was arranged,
The daughters of Anao dancing
With the grandsons of Milan.
A father-in-law of Don Beltrán
And a sister-in-law of Orfeo
Started dancing the Guineo,
With the fat one at the end.
And Fame spreads it all around:
To the good life, la vida bona,
Let’s all go now to Chacona.
A wild party was arranged,
The daughters of Anao dancing
With the grandsons of Milan.
A father-in-law of Don Beltrán
And a sister-in-law of Orfeo
Started dancing the Guineo,
With the fat one at the end.
And Fame spreads it all around:
To the good life, la vida bona,
Let’s all go now to Chacona.
A surreal parade of wedding guests ensues: a blind man poking girls with a stick, an African heathen singing with a Gypsy, a doctor wearing pans around his neck. Drunks, thieves, cuckolds, brawlers, and men and women of ill repute complete the scene.
King Philip II, the austere master of the Spanish imperium, died in 1598, around the time that the chacona first surfaced in Peru. In the final months of his reign, Philip took note of certain immoral dances that were circulating in Madrid; religious authorities had warned him that the frivolity rampant in the city resembled the decadence of the Roman Empire. The debate continued after Philip’s death. In 1615, the King’s Council banned from public theaters the chacona, the zarabanda, and other dances that were deemed “lascivious, dishonest, or offensive to pious ears.” In truth, officialdom had little to fear from these naughty little numbers. They give off a frisson of rebellion, yet the established order remains intact. The errant nobles in Cervantes’s story resume their proper roles; the characters in “Un sarao de la chacona” surely return to their usual places the following day. Tellingly, Arañés dedicated his collection of songs to his employer, the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See. Courtly life had no trouble assimilating the chacona, which soon became a respectable form in what we now call classical music.
The subsequent history of the chacona cuts a cross-section through four centuries of Western culture. As the original fad subsided, composers avidly explored the hidden possibilities of the dance, ringing intricate variations on a simple idea. It passed into Italian, French, German, and English hands, assuming masks of arcane virtuosity, aristocratic elegance, minor-key cogitation, and high-toned yearning. Louis XIV, whose empire eclipsed Philip’s, danced
la chaconne
at the court of Versailles; in the modern era, the French term for the dance has generally prevailed. Johann Sebastian Bach, in the final movement of his Second Partita for solo violin, wrote a chaconne of almost shocking severity, rendering the form all but unrecognizable. In the Romantic age, the chaconne fell from fashion, but amid the terrors of the twentieth century composers once again picked it up, associating it with the high seriousness of Bach rather than the ebullience of the original. The chaconne has continued to evolve in music of recent decades. In 1978, György Ligeti, an avant-gardist with a long historical memory, wrote a harpsichord piece titled
Hungarian Rock
(
Chaconne
), which revived the Spanish bounce and infused it with boogie-woogie.
la chaconne
at the court of Versailles; in the modern era, the French term for the dance has generally prevailed. Johann Sebastian Bach, in the final movement of his Second Partita for solo violin, wrote a chaconne of almost shocking severity, rendering the form all but unrecognizable. In the Romantic age, the chaconne fell from fashion, but amid the terrors of the twentieth century composers once again picked it up, associating it with the high seriousness of Bach rather than the ebullience of the original. The chaconne has continued to evolve in music of recent decades. In 1978, György Ligeti, an avant-gardist with a long historical memory, wrote a harpsichord piece titled
Hungarian Rock
(
Chaconne
), which revived the Spanish bounce and infused it with boogie-woogie.
The circuitous career of the chaconne intersects many times with that of another ostinato figure, the
basso lamento.
This is a repeating bass line that descends the interval of a fourth, sometimes following the steps of the minor mode (think of the piano riff in Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road
Jack”) and sometimes inching down the chromatic scale (think of the “Crucifixus” of Bach’s B-Minor Mass, or, if you prefer, Bob Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate”):
basso lamento.
This is a repeating bass line that descends the interval of a fourth, sometimes following the steps of the minor mode (think of the piano riff in Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road
Jack”) and sometimes inching down the chromatic scale (think of the “Crucifixus” of Bach’s B-Minor Mass, or, if you prefer, Bob Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate”):
If the chaconne is a mercurial thing, radically changing its meaning as it moves through space and time, these motifs of weeping and longing bring out profound continuities in musical history. They almost seem to possess intrinsic significance, as if they were fragments of a strand of musical DNA.
Theorists warn us that music is a non-referential art, that its affective properties depend on extra-musical associations. Indeed, with a change of variables, a rowdy chaconne can turn into a deathly lament. Nothing in the medium is fixed. “I consider music by its very nature powerless to
express
anything,” Stravinsky once said, warding off sentimental interpretations. Then again, when Stravinsky composed the opening lament of his ballet
Orpheus,
he reached for the same four-note descending figure that has represented sorrow for at least a thousand years.
express
anything,” Stravinsky once said, warding off sentimental interpretations. Then again, when Stravinsky composed the opening lament of his ballet
Orpheus,
he reached for the same four-note descending figure that has represented sorrow for at least a thousand years.
Across the millennia, scholars have attempted to construct a grammar of musical meaning. The ancient Greeks believed that their system of scales could be linked to gradations of emotion. Indian ragas include categories of
hasya
(joy),
karuna
(sadness),
raudra
(anger), and
shanta
(peace). In Western European music, songs in a major key are thought to be happy, songs in a minor key sad. Although these distinctions turn hazy under close inspection—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in muscular C minor, defies categorization—we are, for the most part, surprisingly adept at picking up the intended message of an unfamiliar musical piece. Psychologists have found that Western listeners can properly sort Indian ragas by type, even if they know nothing of the music. Likewise, the Mafa people of Cameroon, who inhabit remote parts of the Mandara Mountains, easily performed a similar exercise with Western samples.
hasya
(joy),
karuna
(sadness),
raudra
(anger), and
shanta
(peace). In Western European music, songs in a major key are thought to be happy, songs in a minor key sad. Although these distinctions turn hazy under close inspection—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in muscular C minor, defies categorization—we are, for the most part, surprisingly adept at picking up the intended message of an unfamiliar musical piece. Psychologists have found that Western listeners can properly sort Indian ragas by type, even if they know nothing of the music. Likewise, the Mafa people of Cameroon, who inhabit remote parts of the Mandara Mountains, easily performed a similar exercise with Western samples.
The music of dejection is especially hard to miss. When a person cries, he or she generally makes a noise that slides downward and then leaps to an even higher pitch to begin the slide again. Not surprisingly, something similar happens in musical laments around the world. Those stepwise falling figures suggest not only the sounds that we emit when we are in distress but also the sympathetic drooping of our faces and shoulders. In a broader sense, they imply a spiritual descent, even a voyage to the underworld. In a pioneering essay on the chromatic lament, the composer Robert Muller-Hartmann wrote, “A vision of the grave or of Hades is brought about by its decisive downward trend.” At the same time, laments help to guide us out of the labyrinth of despair. Like Aristotelean tragedy, they allow for a purgation of pity and fear: through the repetitive ritual of mourning, we tame the edges of emotion, give shape to inner chaos.
In 1917, the Hungarian composer Bela Bartók, a passionate collector of folk music, took his Edison cylinder to the Transylvanian village of Mâner
u and recorded the
bocet,
or lament, of a woman pining for her absent husband: “Change me to a rainbow, Lord, / To see where my husband is.” The melody goes down four sobbing steps:
u and recorded thebocet,
or lament, of a woman pining for her absent husband: “Change me to a rainbow, Lord, / To see where my husband is.” The melody goes down four sobbing steps:
This pattern shows up all over Eastern European folk music. In a village in the Somogy region of Hungary, a woman was recorded singing a strikingly similar tune as she exclaimed, “Woe is me, what have I done against the great Lord that he has taken my beloved spouse away?” At Russian weddings, where a symbolic “killing the bride” is part of the nuptial rite, the wailing of the bride often presses down a fourth. Comparable laments have been documented in the Mangystau region of Kazakhstan and in the Karelian territories of Finland and Russia, with more distant parallels appearing among the Shipibo-Conibo people, in the upper Amazon, and the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea.
If you twang those four descending notes forcefully on a guitar, you have the makings of flamenco. The motif is especially prominent in the
flamenco genre known as siguiriya, which stems from older genres of Gypsy lament. On a 1922 recording, Manuel Torre sings a classic siguiriya, with the guitarist El Hijo de Salvador repeatedly plucking out the fateful figure:
flamenco genre known as siguiriya, which stems from older genres of Gypsy lament. On a 1922 recording, Manuel Torre sings a classic siguiriya, with the guitarist El Hijo de Salvador repeatedly plucking out the fateful figure:
| Siempre por los rincones | I always find you |
| te encuentro llorando … | weeping in the corners … |
Flamenco is more than lament, of course; it is also music of high passion. As Federico García Lorca wrote of the siguiriya, “It comes from the first sob and the first kiss.”
Of course, not every descending melody has lamentation on its mind. Lajos Vargyas’s treatise
Folk Music of the Hungarians
contains a song called “Hej, Dunaról fuj a szel,” whose slow-moving, downward-tending phrases display the markers of musical sadness. But it is actually a song of flirtation, with the singer turning a bleak situation to her advantage: “Hey, the wind’s blowing from the Danube / Lie beside me, it won’t reach you.” Likewise, certain laments lack telltale “weeping” features: the aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” from Gluck’s opera
Orfeo ed Euridice,
begins with a decorous, upward-arching phrase in a sunny major mode.
Folk Music of the Hungarians
contains a song called “Hej, Dunaról fuj a szel,” whose slow-moving, downward-tending phrases display the markers of musical sadness. But it is actually a song of flirtation, with the singer turning a bleak situation to her advantage: “Hey, the wind’s blowing from the Danube / Lie beside me, it won’t reach you.” Likewise, certain laments lack telltale “weeping” features: the aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” from Gluck’s opera
Orfeo ed Euridice,
begins with a decorous, upward-arching phrase in a sunny major mode.
In other words, there are no globally consistent signifiers of emotion. Music is something other than a universal language. Nonetheless, the lament topos occurs often enough in various traditions that it has become a durable point of reference. Peter Kivy, in his book
Sound Sentiment,
argues that musical expression falls into two categories: “contours,” melodic shapes that imitate some basic aspect of human speech or behavior; and “conventions,” gestures that listeners within a particular culture learn to associate with particular psychological states. The falling figure of lament is more contour than convention, and it is a promising thread to follow through the musical maze.
Sound Sentiment,
argues that musical expression falls into two categories: “contours,” melodic shapes that imitate some basic aspect of human speech or behavior; and “conventions,” gestures that listeners within a particular culture learn to associate with particular psychological states. The falling figure of lament is more contour than convention, and it is a promising thread to follow through the musical maze.
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