We celebrate the birthday of (arguably) the most important composer in classical music canon – Johnan Sebastian Bach.
My fondest memory of him is lying down in my dorm room, thinking of some girl, and listening to his Passion of Saint Matthew (though for some reason, the CD of it I owned used the French title, Pasion de Saint-Mathieu). It is still the most epic of his works and the one which shows best his ability to match sweeping works like Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies.
I’m feeling lazy, so I’m basically just going to transcribe my notes from that night. It was a series of performances by the Cavatina Duo, a guitar and flute duo. Enjoy.
J.S. Bach
Sonata for Flute and Basso Continuo in E Major
Listening to the opening sonate by Bach made me wish I’d spent more time browsing eighteenth century paintings of nymphs, satyrs, and idyllic forest gods and heroes. My personal highlight was the third of the four movements, the ‘Siciliano.’ A slow dance, it made me wish I had a partner with me and space in which to dance (though I have little knowledge of the forms of eighteenth century dances except that gleaned from BBC miniseries). The frenetic fourth and final movement suffered from the comparison to the ‘Siciliano,’ though intellectually, I understand that a defining feature of baroque music is those changes in mood and tone within a single composition (though not to the extent of the desperate, unnerving, and glorious mood swings of a Mahler symphony).
Astor Piazzolla
Adios Nonino
Flute Etude No. 1
I discovered Piazzolla via an album of his tango music performed by the inimitable Kronos Quartet (who I had the good luck to see live in Atlanta, performing Philip Glass’ score to the original Dracula with Bela Lugosi – and you probably didn’t know the 1931 movie was actually produced without any musical score, did you?). These pieces were not tangos, but the sensibility was still there. They had the bad luck to follow Bach, which is a hard act to follow. The first composition had some interesting experiments with dissonance and tempo and, in place, I swear sounded like music you’d expect to find in a James Bond movie.
The second composition, the etude, even more than the first, sounded like it could have been from a movie score, especially the more romantic bits (romantic in sentiment, I mean).
Miroslav Tadic
Four Macadeonian Pieces for alto flute and guitar
For some reason, the Macedonian pieces made me think of the mythic west or perhaps of the multicultural, nouveau western sensibility of Firefly. With Piazzolla acting as a palate cleanser after Bach, I was in a much better place to enjoy this music. Also, I watched some Firefly on Netflix when I got home.
Unfortunately, the flutist developed a painful sounding cough during the third of the four pieces, which was mostly a work for solo flute. Luckily, she got better.
Vojislav Ivanovic
Cafe Pieces for solo guitar
Fortunately for the poor flutist, the first works after intermission were for solo guitar. Romantic and lovely, they were also slight compared to what preceded them, so that I found it hard to lose myself in the music.
Toru Takemitsu
Toward the Sea
The Night
Moby Dick
Cape Cod
They shifted the order of things, one suspects in order to give her throat a little time to before diving into the song for solo flute by Debussy. But since they jumped ahead to a short song cycle by Takemitsu and since it was the thought of listening to his compositions that really drove me to come out, I can hardly complain.
There had been some clapping after each song or movement earlier, but there was silence after each of Takemitsu’s (except for the final one, of course). His melancholy silences silenced the audience.
Claude Debussy
Syrinx for solo flute
The flutist described the Debussy song as the first significant work for solo flute of the twentieth century. No doubt, even more than in the Bach sonata, you could hear the god Pan for whom it was written (or rather, the character of Pan in a now forgotten dramatic poem, if you want to be picky). A dying Pan, too, making one think of the dying god chronicled in Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
Alan Thomas
Variations on The Carnival in Venice
The final piece was specifically written for the duo. It also suffered from following a far superior composition. It was pretty and romantic but… well, you know. Debussy was writing for the death of a love sick god. Plus, I enjoy French impressionist music. I will say though that this final piece could have been written for Pan in heaven, reunited in death with his music and nymphs, and I’m okay with that.
I’m reading this while listening to a Leonard Bernstein conducted performance of Mahler’s First. Specifically, the movement drawing on a slow building of the children’s song Frère Jacques. Apropos of nothing, but I fell in love with Mahler back in 1995 when I heard this symphony.
Today’s Canto opens promisingly:
Whereof memory of man runneth not to the contrary
Dome Book, Ina, Offa and Aethelbert, folcright
for a thousand years
A bit of old school, King James sounding language, references to old English kings and the first census (I am assuming ‘Dome Book’ to be a reference to the ‘Domesday Book’ which was not about the end times, but a recording of people, lands, and property).
Sadly, it’s mostly downhill from here.
While I appreciate the Canto‘s role in the slow process of building to a grand poetic-historical document, barely the only bone he tosses us after the opening are some outbreaks of ancient history, which could be read as learned digressions by the eighteen century ‘narrators’ of this Canto and can also be read as a reminder of the great work of historicity taking place and as a tool to shake the reader from their expectations.
As another personal digression, Mahler called his First Symphony Der Titan. Each man seemed confident in their own genius and potential to direct the future of their respective forms. Hasn’t each been proved to be right, despite their faults, even their grave ones?
Salon.com, that online epitome of what Dwight McDonald referred to as ‘midcult,’ had a nice little fluff piece on the death of the clerk. Specifically, those record, comic, and book store clerks who were the gatekeepers and guides to the worlds of literature, ‘zines, small presses, alternative music, and jazz.
I wasn’t much into comics when I was in high school and I never went to the clerks at RTO for musical advice. I was too much of a quiet browser and have always hated sales pitches.
Later though, I became friends with a couple of clerks at a Barnes and Noble in Montgomery, Alabama (that store is apparently gone now, by the way). One was a bit of an expert in southern literature and hosted occasional poetry groups in the store and also collected ‘found poetry’ with a southern gothic tinge. The other was closeted anarchist with a taste for political lit.
These two probably were the clerks who influenced me the most.
A third was the owner of the used bookstore in Clearwater, Florida, A Blue Moon. He and my mother sometimes went out, so the clerk-customer relationship was a little weird. But he had a wonderfully curated store with a lot of great stuff and he wasn’t afraid to point out interesting books. He also used an old fashioned camera that took ten or twenty seconds to take a picture and required a photometer to use properly.
Do liberals get it?
the coffee philosopher 