Two Villains and a Goddess

All right, I’ll give you Wikipedia’s assessment of Jessye Norman:

Jessye Mae Norman (born September 15, 1945) is an American Grammy award-winning contemporary opera singer and recitalist, and is a successful performer of classical music.

Yeah? Here’s mine:

The lady is a goddess.

A goddess who, in my case, manifested herself through the radio one day, when I was perhaps 21 and she was in her mid-thirties. She had been living in London and, in that period of her life, she was not singing opera. In fact, between 1975 to 1980 she didn’t sing opera. Born in 1945, she would have been 30 at the beginning of this—I’m sure—self-imposed exile. Thus, these were her prime years.

Norman is a singer who had the luck to have a strong education, as well as a strong will. After going to the Marian Anderson Competition in Philadelphia at age 16, she met her future teacher, Carolyn Grant, at Howard University. Grant was so impressed that she took Norman to the dean, who arranged for a full tuition scholarship.

“I know, it sounds like a fairy tale,” Norman says in one part of the interview below. But the point is that it’s not. Because consider this fact, again drawn from Wikipedia:

Norman was born in Augusta, Georgia, to Silas Norman, an insurance salesman, and Janie King-Norman, a schoolteacher.

An insurance salesman and a teacher? What that tells me is that the family wasn’t poor, but that it wasn’t rolling in riches, either. And with five children in the house, there probably wasn’t much money to spare. At one point, Norman tells the story of being given her own private radio—no sharing with her brothers!—so that she could listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons. Oh, and she had to clean her room, so on days when it was Wagner, wow, the room really got clean!

What else did she have? She had teachers in her racially segregated school who knew that she was listening to opera, and who let her talk on Monday mornings for 15 minutes about what she had heard. She remembers the names of those teachers, who must have been extraordinary, and also remembers the principal of the high school. That guy decided that the whole school should donate their lunch money to Norman for one day, so she’d have something to spend on her trip to Philadelphia. So the kids donated the money, and the Board of Education gave lunch free that day.

Why do it? Well, if you’ve chipped in your 75 cents that day, you own a piece of Jessye Norman—or at least a part of her trip. And it was on that trip that her teacher, who was accompanying her (in both senses, since she was at the piano for the competition) decided to see if there was anyone at Howard who might her Norman sing.

To say that Norman had a glittering career is somewhat like saying that Warren Buffet is getting by, financially. True, I don’t think she ever conquered the Opera House in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin (every town, no matter how small, had one…) but everywhere else? She came, she conquered.

And she’s a wonderful example of someone who is intelligent and articulate: two increasingly receding qualities. And why are they receding? Because, more and more, we’re slashing arts education.

I hate to say this…no wait, that’s the problem: we’re always apologizing, feeling bad for suggesting that the chorus and the band are just as important as the football team. Anybody out there seen the TV series Glee? Then you’ll know what neck is first put under the guillotine, when it’s time to start cutting.

I worked in corporate America—improbable, I know, but there it is. And I can tell you: most musicians can think circles around businessmen. Why? Because spending hours at a keyboard gives you discipline, for one thing. But there’s something else: it’s not just me saying that musicians have an edge. Google “cognitive effects music” and you get this, from Boston College and Harvard Medical School:

ABSTRACT: Research has revealed structural and functional differences in the brains of adult instrumental musicians compared to those of matched non- musician controls, with intensity/duration of instrumental training and practice being important predictors of these differences.

I told you—it was not a fairy tale, the glittering life that Norman has lead. It’s a tale of a community who had no idea that there wasn’t money for the band or the chorus, of teachers that gave up their time and money to take a 16-year old to Philadelphia, to a principal who knows that there’s a talent in his or her school, and knows that he has to get the school behind her.

And how many lives did Norman change or affect? What was the return on the investment that all those people poured into her, those people poorer, mostly, than we are, but who could still afford to give what we cannot?

Well, in my life, Norman started what would be a lifelong love of the human voice. I was in my twenties, and I didn’t—like many instrumentalists—like singers. They were artificial, I thought—all high C’s, no musicianship.

What do I listen to, now? Almost all vocal or choral music—I can’t remember the last time I heard a cello concerto. And here it has to be said, I have learned much more from the singers I have heard than the cello teachers I have paid. And when I hear most instrumentalists play, I can almost always tell who has listened to singers, and who has not. Singers, you see, have this problem or gift—they have to breathe. Cellists don’t, but should.

But that’s hardly the most important thing. I discovered a world of music that did more than give me pleasure. I lost my mother, my job, and my mind in a two-year period a couple of years ago. And what music accompanied me, as I lived through those days? Schubert’s great song cycle: Die Winterreise.

I said it accompanied me, but it was more than that. In some ways, the work was informing my journey, and I was spiraling down, down, down—being pulled by that music, but ultimately being saved by it as well. I took the winter’s journey, as some of us must, and got through the village and met the hurdy-gurdy man and started off. Schubert both defined and clarified that process.

I got to Jessye Norman two nights ago, after the opera, since I had seen the encore performance of the Met’s performance of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. The performance was a four-hour, bottomless bottle of champagne, so I came home and wondered: could I buy a DVD of the opera, in order to play it for Ilia, my mother-in-law who’s caring for an ailing husband, and who often cannot get away? So I checked the Met’s gift shop, online, and yes, there it was. And what else was there? Jessye Norman’s autobiography, which came out days ago.

And so I spent the morning looking at the clip below, and doing a bit of compare and contrast—remember that from high school? Because I had been seeing on Thursday—before the opera—a documentary about the Koch brothers, those guys who have found the way to buy the government, and who are also finding ways to buy the educational system. It’s breathtaking, in fact, the scope of their ambition.

Both clips are long—who but a blogger has the time to listen? So I’ll paraphrase—with considerably less eloquence than Norman’s unscripted remarks—what Norman says about the American dream. She said—and I have tears in my eyes as I write this—that it’s the knowledge and acknowledgment that government has the obligation to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to live and, especially, to thrive. And don’t trot out that dusty line about the bootstraps, because you know what? Some people don’t have boots.

Norman was one of those people—a black girl in the Jim Crow South whose parents were struggling. Her parents, could they afford to go to the opera, much less sip champagne afterwards? Or put it this way—could they afford to go hear their child sing? I don’t know: but my strong feeling is no.

I wish that the people who are decimating public education and cutting off aid programs and perpetrating this myth of the undeserving poor would get it: it’s terrible fiscal policy. Nobody gave Norman the career she had—she worked and struggled and took risks and succeeded, gloriously.

But she also had resources that—increasingly—people want to take away. She didn’t want and never needed a “handout.”

She needed a foundation.

What kid doesn’t?

Watch Out!

“Can I ask you a question, Marc?” said Naïa, the 12-year old daughter of the owner of the café, who was being homeschooled in Language Arts, at the time. I thought I knew what it was about, since I had been overhearing the lesson.

Language arts, you see, is what used to be called grammar, which at least was straightforward and no-nonsense. But language arts? Mealy mouthed if I ever heard it….

“Do you know how to diagram a sentence?” asked Naïa.

“Of course I do,” I said. “I personally start every day by diagramming at least three sentences, randomly chosen from The New York Times. Should the sentences prove insufficiently challenging, I create them myself. Today, for example, I decided to diagram the sentence:

Europe—roiled by war, torn by turmoil, worn and weary by woe—lurched uncertainly, in the aftermath of the bloodiest conflict of the 20^th century, towards an unsteady and tenuous peace, which, despite the watery goodwill of all concerned, seemed increasingly unlikely to be achieved.”

“You diagrammed that sentence?”

“Of course I did, nor did it take me more than 33 seconds,” I swore. It’s important to maintain the illusion that these things are important. “My mother was an ardent diagrammer of sentences. She once became so engrossed in diagramming a sentence that she unwittingly missed a trip to Paris. Indeed, the anecdotal evidence is rife with people who have neglected to eat or sleep—so immersed are they in diagramming sentences. I only permit myself three sentences a day, so as not to fall into the trap.”

Naïa was completely unconvinced. Lady, Naïa’s mother, joined us. I urged her to join me in diagramming a few sentences.

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to do it,” said Lady, in what I thought was an unnecessarily truthful—and deflating—remark. Surely Lady understands the necessity of hypocrisy in child / adult relationships?

“It’s totally stupid,” said Naïa, and I prepared to fight the statement to one of our deaths. It did occur to me, however, that it had been years since I had diagrammed a sentence. So what was it all about? And could I still do it?

Well, that was a week ago, during which I went to New York on the flimsy excuse that I needed to hear the world’s greatest singer.

“It’s the voice I want to hear at the moment of my death,” I told Lady, who asked me what the German baritone Matthias Goerne sounded like. And Lady, who may have sniffed something fishy in my ardor for diagramming sentences, called for proof. Fortunately, YouTube came through, and I played her Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume”. She got the point.

And so I flew 1600 miles northwest, and arrived in a city that was, according to The New York Times, colder than Montana. It was not, however, colder than Wisconsin at its worst—by which I mean that it was bearable. Just….

And Goerne? To tell you how good he was, and how completely he transfixed the audience, he stood dead still in his singing poise after he had finished the 20^th and last song of the song cycle Die shöne Müllerin. And the audience? Well, we all went into what my brother John called “negative silence,” meaning that no one even breathed, and for a space of thirty seconds. And I mean that “thirty,”—as in “one, one thousand, two, one thousand…”

At last, Goerne relaxed, and then the applause was thunderous.

“It was the best ‘shöne Müllerin’ ever,” said a lady next to me on the subway—and it was hard not to disagree. I might hear it as good, but never better….

Well, it was something I had to do once in my life—spend an inordinate amount of money on going thousands of miles away to hear a concert. And was it my guilty conscience that brought on attack of Montezuma’s revenge that utterly felled me the two days following the concert? On the third day I resurrected myself, had a nice weekend, and came home.

John and Jeanne live in the quietest building in New York. From their apartment, I could hear vague traffic sounds six floors below me. But anything else? Utter silence.

Alas, what was going on this morning when I woke in San Juan? Jackhammers, since now that the street has been re-bricked, it’s obviously time to re-brick the intersections, which hadn’t been done. And why not? Why not do the whole thing at once?

What, and limit the amount of disruption and noise? Are you crazy? Besides, if it’s two projects, then think of the exponential number of cost overruns and overtime and fraudulent-or-at-least-questionable design changes available to the contractor, the subcontractors, the suppliers, and who knows else? And so I did the trot, and turned to the café. Naïa was busy at work, still diagramming sentences. It was time to find out—what was that all about? And here, Dear Reader, is what a diagrammed sentence looks like:

Ummm? It was nothing like what I remembered, so I went to YouTube, to hear a presentation on diagramming sentences. And guess what? I understand it now—because I learned grammar on my own, and from having learned Greek and Latin. But if I were coming at it from a 12-year old’s perspective? Which is to say, Naïa?

I’d be sunk….

Look—sometimes making things too easy is simply to make things infinitely more difficult. Notice in the sentence diagrammed above that there are absolutely no grammatical terms—no transitive versus intransitive verbs, no direct versus indirect objects, no present participles versus gerunds, no prepositional versus adjectival versus participial phrases. But to diagram the sentence above? You have to grasp the concepts of all the terminology above. So why not come out, explain to kids what all this stuff is, and then figure out a scheme to diagram the sentence?

How about this?

It’s rudimentary, of course. “Forecasting” in the sentence above is actually a present participle doing time as an adjective, and “and” and “but” are conjunctions—but are they coordinating or subordinating? (Answer, they’re both coordinating….) Oh, and what to do with that “today’s forecasters?” Technically, it’s an example of the Saxon genitive, (Marc’s hat, or Naïa’s computer, or even Sam’s Club—all that “apostrophe s” stuff.) Of course, if it were “forecasters of today,” then “of” would be the preposition and “today” would be the object of the preposition. But as it is, doesn’t “today’s forecasters” sound like a compound noun, like “toilet paper” or “bowling alley?”

Of course, Franny would have wanted me to identify the predicate, which I dimly remembered from half a century ago. So I asked Mr. Fernández, who assured me: it’s utterly vital. So what is it?

Anything that’s not the nominative—which would be the subject and whatever modifiers and / or conjunctions and / or preposition phrases and / or clauses…

In short, anything including and after the verb.

Why bother?

“How was the concert,” asked Lady, coming into the café.

“Fucking amazing,” I said, forgetting that there was a 12-year kid sitting by—now populating her imaginary zoo with real-if-virtual animals.

“So glad you didn’t miss it,” says Naïa, “so busy you might have been, diagramming those sentences…”

World?

Watch out!

On the virtues of cold (reposted)

I wrote this post originally on October 25, 2012….


I grew up in a cold place, some of / felt like most of the year. I now live in a hot place. And for the most part, I don’t miss it. In fact, I do my best to avoid cold.

So why was I looking at this?

It’s Norway. And everything about it suggests cold—the brooding sky, the greys and ochres, the diffuse light, the shadows. Step into the water by mistake and your feet will be cold for days, seemingly.

Until you move to a radically different climate, you don’t realize the basic assumptions that you’ve made about your world. A couple of decades ago, I came on Raf standing at the sink, lost in thought, staring at—but not seeing—the water flow over his hands.

“What are you doing?”

“Water,” he said. “This is how the water feels at home.”

I stuck my hand in it—it was tepid.

“Ridiculous,” I said. “Water is cold.”

Then I wondered—can I have a relationship with someone whose experience of the world is so fundamentally different that my own? 

Yes.

Although there are challenges.

It works the other way, too. Years ago, at the Conservatorio de Música I attended a master class—a young Puerto Rican singer was tackling Schubert’s Im Frühling (In Springtime). The voice was excellent, technique right in place, phrasing great.

So what was it that was just so slightly wrong?

The “master” got it right.

“Wonderful,” he said. “And tell me, what’s this song about.”

Well, of course she knew.

But also she didn’t.

“Have you ever experienced a northern winter?”

No.

So he described it, quite poetically. Your world becomes grey and black. You stand at the window and see the fine thin snow blowing like a ghost across the landscape.

Then he described spring. Equally poetically. The first time you see green after months of grey—you eyes are shocked, you stand and gape, wondering how you lived without that color. Taking your shirt off and feeling sunshine, on that first really warm day—how light you feel without that 10 pounds of parkas / sweaters / thick shirts.

“I think I understand,” said the soprano. “It’s sort of like going to the beach would be for us….”

The master smiled gently. There are things you have to experience.

And perhaps at a very young age. I live in a hot place, but my body doesn’t. Which is to say that every time I leave the house, I will be sweating before I’m out the door. I walk as one walks in a cold place, which is to say “get-the-hell-home-and-turn-on-the-furnace.”

Nor does my mind. I live in a large apartment. What did I think when I saw it first?

‘How in hell are we gonna heat this?’

In the mountains, I often wonder ‘how do they get up this road in winter?’

Cold tempers you, as the flame tempers steel. You have to prepare. You have to pit yourself against nature, which may overcome you.

I used to tell my students—those who didn’t know winter—that drunk guys coming home at night often dropped their keys. If they were really drunk, they made the mistake of searching too long for them…

…and died of exposure.

In the last three years of my mother’s life she broke two hips and had one open-heart surgery—all in the deepest depths of winter. Cursing, I would be sweating a storm in San Juan, barely able to believe that somewhere, ANYWHERE, it could be cold.

Then I stepped out of the El station in Chicago, and was hit with a blast of air mixed with sleet sandpapering my face. 

I hated it.

But I’m also glad I grew up with it….

(Im Frühling starts at 6" 10')

A Winter's Journey Re-journeyed

Right, so as usual I’m a little behind the times. It’s officially spring—time to pay the taxes, watch for the scilla (yes, my dear computer—it’s a little blue flower that against the newly green of grass and a fresh snow manages both to soothe and to shock the eye at the same time) and get the frisbee out for the dog to play with. I spent the last weekend, however, immersed in that most wintery of music, appropriately called Winterreise, a Winter’s Journey.

Now for a word of reassurance. Readers of Iguanas will know that this was the music that I chose that was given to me when I descended into madness in December of 2011 and the following January. Relax—I’m not in the same place, but in one much better.

Saying which, I will also confess to not knowing now, as I didn’t know then, whose finger had been on the iPod then, or the mouse pad now. I simply stumbled onto Winterreise, which of course I don’t believe and neither should you.

So I was there and not there, a state eerily similar to the experience of watching a documentary, Over the Top with Franz, about the filming of a DVD about the singing of a glorious English tenor and the playing of a majestic also-English pianist of a song cycle written by an Austrian composer about a guy with serious problems.

The composer is Franz Schubert, the year was 1827, and the physical / psychological conditional of the composer was, as we would now say, quite compromised. Right, Schubert was rotting away with syphilis, untreatable at the time, and staring into the face of eventual madness. This normally does not provoke gales of laughter….

So Winterreise has moved out of autumnal and into the coldest of regions. Fitting, then, that as I read the lyrics—which you can do in five minutes, though the performance will last an hour easily—they’re really images: the weathervane, the village inn, the frozen spring. And the lyrics are spare; these are the lyrics to the song in the clip below:

He used to see three suns, but two of them have turned away to shine upon another, and now he sees only one, and he wishes that would pass away and leave him to the darkness.

Schubert’s treatment, to me, paradoxically matches that sparseness and is extended as well. Thus, you find yourself suspended in a long, bleak, horizontal landscape with no possibility of escape. The singer has left willingly the warmth of home that he knew; he could but will not go back.  The first poem makes this clear:

By moonlight, in winter, the poet leaves the house as he came to it, a stranger. The daughter has allowed their love to grow, and the mother has encouraged the pair to think of marriage: but the daughter's love has wandered to some new sweetheart. So he quietly and secretly steals away while they are sleeping, writing 'Good night' on her door, and leaving the path of his footsteps in the snow.

Pretty romantic stuff—the moonlight, the poet, the broken romance, writing “good night” on her door. But it’s almost artifice, this hoary repetition of the hero with the broken heart—the music suggests much more. Curiously, Schubert’s other song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (D. 795, Op. 25, 1823) has the same theme, but the jilted young man has both an unhappier end and yet a stouter heart. Yes, he drowns himself, the hero of Mullerin; the hero of Winterreise goes on mutely, accompanied by an organ-grinder he encounters at the edge of the village. But could anything be worse than endlessly enduring, stoically going on, a poet chained by his own misery to an organ grinder?

Everything about Mullerin speaks of youth; everything about Winterreise whispers age, decay, and death.  And yesterday, I came upon a wonderful clip of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears performing and discussing three songs of Winterreise. They say, as does everyone, that it’s music for the old; Pears decided to wait until he was fifty to perform it.

Ian Bostridge, thank God, decided otherwise. And while it had been a superb German baritone, Matthias Goerne, who was the singer who accompanied me on my own winter’s journey a year ago, it was Bostridge, an amazing English tenor, who sang for me last weekend. And more than sang—I followed him throughout the process of making the film as he argued and sparred with an opinionated director, David Alden, a guy completed uncowed by the two artists in front of him. Both the pianist, Julius Drake, and Bostridge must have been frustrated; equally, they must have trusted that Alden would produce an interesting piece.

And it appears that he did, though I would have slapped Alden several times along the way. He constantly pushes Bostridge and Drake to be more gothic—at one point Drake plays the open notes of a song in a perfect parody of a music hall organist. Drake means it to repel; Alden is delighted.

But however much Pears may have been right to wait until his fifties to sing this work, I’m glad Bostridge didn’t. He’s perfect for the part—rail thin, gaunt, sunken cheeks and wide eyes.

His singing is amazing, his control perfect, and he’s unafraid, in one of the clips I saw, to make a truly ugly sound a couple of times in the last song. It shouldn’t work, it wouldn’t work with anybody else, but with Bostridge it does.

Wikipedia quotes a contemporary of Schubert’s, Joseph von Spaun, in the following anecdote:

"Come to Schober's today and I will play you a cycle of terrifying songs; they have affected me more than has ever been the case with any other songs." He then, with a voice full of feeling, sang the entire Winterreise for us. We were altogether dumbfounded by the sombre mood of these songs, and Schober said that one song only, "Der Lindenbaum", had pleased him. Thereupon Schubert leaped up and replied: "These songs please me more than all the rest, and in time they will please you as well.'".

That hasn’t happened for me yet. I suffer through Winterreise when it comes upon me, and am glad when at last it goes. I endure, not listen, when the unknown finger hits the play icon. Nothing about Winterreise is beautiful, everything about it is essential.

Is that its strange beauty? 

A Norwegian Song Cycle

First scenario—I tell you that I’m taking you to the symphony tonight, and that we’ll be hearing some Beethoven. What are your chances of guessing what we’ll hear?

Not very good, I’m afraid—besides the nine symphonies and the five piano concerti and the violin and triple concerti, there are roughly half a dozen other orchestral works, mainly overtures.

Second scenario—I tell you that I’m taking you to the symphony tonight, and that we’ll be hearing some Grieg. And here, you’ll very likely be able to pin it down in the first three guesses. It’ll be the piano concerto, Peer Gynt, or possibly the Holberg Suite. Unless you’ve got a conductor willing to scrounge into the forgotten corners of Grieg’s repertoire, that’s all you’re likely to hear.

So Grieg falls into that enigmatic category—you might call it famous but not well known. He certainly has his place in the pantheon, but only for a handful of works. And given that he died at age 64, shouldn’t we know more music of his? He had to have been doing something other than writing merely three pieces in nearly half a century of creative life.

Yes and no. He wasn’t a very healthy man; a lung condition he picked up at age 17 plagued him most of his life. He was also a conductor, and worked for many years with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he served as music director from 1880 – 1882. But he was unusual for his time in not producing a symphony, except for an early work that he suppressed.

He was, said one commentator, a man of little works, almost a miniaturist. He struggled even to produce a string quartet, although he came up a creditable one—Debussy, not an easy man to please, thought highly of it.

He got around, this man from Norway who studied in Leipzig, disliked the rigidity of the system, and went back to his native land. He met Liszt, who was impressed with him (and sight-read the famous piano concerto and invented a reduction of the orchestral score—they were giants on the earth, some of those guys…). He also met Tchaikovsky, and was struck by how sad he was.

You could—perhaps fancifully—say that he met me this morning on the daily trot, when I was cruising my iPod for something new to listen to. It’s a discipline for me, now—how much new music can I listen to? For years, I was buying CDs of interesting music that I never found time to listen to. Well, now’s the time.

And so it had been with a CD of Grieg’s songs, as sung by Anne Sofie von Otter. And instantly I was struck by the rich harmonies, the deftness of the piano part, the freshness of the music.

What I didn’t know was that I was listening to a song cycle, indeed the only song cycle that Grieg ever wrote. And what, you ask, is a song cycle? A musical form that crops up with Beethoven and is still going on—a group of songs that are meant to be performed together, often because they are telling a story, or are thematically linked. And the 19^th century was a sort of golden age for the song cycle: Schubert with his Winterreise and  Die schöne Müllerin; Schumann with Liederkreis, Dichterliebe, Frauenenliebe und Leben.

Grieg wrote the song cycle Haugtussa over a three-year period, and mind you, the work only lasts 25 minutes. But it was worth it; Grieg later wrote that it was his best effort in song. Sadly, though, in the YouTube clip below, we’re missing the one crucial component of a song cycle—the lyrics themselves.

So here is what will have to suffice, a brief description of the work from Wikipedia:

Haugtussa opens and ends with the nature mysticism of "The Enticement" and "At the Brook". The second extended stage includes the two melancholic portraits "Veslemøy" and "Hurtful Day". Between them the climax is reached in the central love songs "The Tryst" and "Love", which have a cheerful, pastoral approach, and approached and transitioned from in, respectively, "Blueberry Slope" and "Kidlings' Dance". The main character, the Veslemøy, is a shepherd girl who has abilities that others do not have and therefore can not find a place for her personality in rural communities. She turns to nature for answers to her desires and questions. During the course of the text she falls in love with the boy Jon, and "Hurtful Day" describes her feelings when she is deceived by him. In the last song, "At the Brook", which is often compared with the last song of Franz Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin or Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe,[4] she seeks refuge by a mountain brook, musically represented by a rhythmic figure on the piano. From verse to verse, Grieg gradually changes this passage using different harmonizations.

What’s good about the clip? It has the wonderful Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter singing at her best, and that “best” is nearly unbeatable. And how fortunate we are that von Otter is Swedish, and can thus sing in a language most other singers wouldn’t tackle.

Which leads me, perhaps, to the last strike against Grieg—he’s Norwegian, he’s identified as a nationalist composer, and ever so slightly looked down on. However much the piano concerto gets played, among musical snobs—and you don’t have to be told that snobbery is rampant in classical music, do you?—Grieg isn’t considered in the absolute top drawer.

But listening to this song cycle, I think he is….

969,133,413

No, it’s not the amount of money that we as a nation go deeper into debt ever minute.

It’s the number of YouTube hits for a song called “Gangnam Style.”

Well, the computer has just red squiggled Gangnam, and for once I’m comforted. Someone, or something, is as unhip as I.

Well, if 969,133,413 people have watched, shouldn’t I? Am I missing something? Doesn’t a blogger have a responsibility to his international audience to keep himself up to date with modern culture?

I go roughly from Gregorian chant to Part / Lauridsen—is that enough? Shouldn’t I check out the latest trends in pop culture?

Well, I happened on the whole thing through CNN—a gentleman in England dropped dead of a coronary while dancing to the song. So I became curious—was there something particularly lethal about it?

The first indication that something was seriously bizarre was Wikipedia’s article. Guess, Gentle Reader, how many citations the article had!

Oh—and keep in mind that the song was released on 15 July 2012. That means it’s been around only five months.

I fear for you if you guessed too high. There are, in fact, 341 citations backing up what is one of the longest articles I’ve read—OK, skimmed—on Wikipedia.

This is the story that you—presumably—know and I didn’t. The song is by a South Korean performer named PSY. Gangnam is an exclusive area of Seoul.

Well, I took 4 minutes out of an otherwise productive life to watch it. And here, stripped of the hypnotic beat, the flashing lights (anybody prone to migraines should think twice about watching this), the blatant and annoying sexuality is the essence of the piece.

Yup—nothing. Zilch. Nada. It’s the musical equivalent of bubblegum, and it lasts about as long.

And what’s wrong with bubblegum?

Absolutely nothing.

I chew it, occasionally, and find it mildly pleasant. I don’t, however, expect it to be in any way nourishing. I wouldn’t replace with food as my steady diet.

Now, dear Reader, guess how many citations there are for the greatest song-cycle in the canon of Western Music (love that pomposity—wanted to use the word “canon” for years….)—Winterreise?

39.

So? Why should it matter? In fifty years time, no one will remember PSY, and no one will much care.

But I worry about kids that assume this is the only music there is. Or indeed, that it’s music. It worries me that people—adults, scholars, writers—encourage this belief. It bugs me that people assume that all music has equal value. Or worse, that there’s something condescending about a person who says, yeah—there’s a difference.

My other worry?

That kids’ view of the world is being shaped by this video. Nothing about it has any semblance of sense. It’s random, ridiculous, hypnotic and erotic.

It’s as far away from a narrative as it can get.

At age fourteen, with adolescence and a world looming ahead of me, would I have wanted a message like this?

With a Nod to Shirley Jackson

It’s curious to think about—I’ve probably spent more time listening to this song than Schubert spent writing it. The manuscript is, if the website I stumbled upon can be trusted, a single sheet of paper. It was published some two decades after it was written. Liszt transcribed it—as he did so much else—and Primrose as well. Not surprising, if you’re a violist, you gotta do a little borrowing to fill in the repertoire.

That was a cool, cool paragraph written on the day after a bloodbath. And by cool I mean not hip but emotionally chilly, neutral, stepped-back and slightly ironic.

Which is not how the rest of the nation is feeling. People are in shock. The New Day has discovered that a little girl with connections to a town on the east side of the island was killed. Boricua Blood in the Tragedy screams the front page today.

And people are saying the usual. Evil, we are told by CNN, visited the town of Newton, Connecticut, yesterday.

Yeah?

Or was it a paranoid schizophrenic who had access to semi-automatic rifles?

I’m skipping this one. I’m assuming that if we had wanted to do something about it, we would have. I’m forced to conclude that there is something in my countrymen that wants slaughter, that relishes in the bloodshed, that thirsts to see anguished families and a weeping president and destroyed lives.

Why don’t we celebrate it?

The Spanish—a more honest people—go happily to their bullfights, and delight in seeing the bull downed in a pool of blood.

Well, we could do the same thing. Every Saturday, at random, a school somewhere in the nation is picked—will it be yours? Your children’s? Your grandchildren’s?

No matter, Friday night you will not sleep. Little children will beg to sleep with their mommies. “I’m scared, Mommie,” they’ll whisper.

Go back to bed, it will all be all right.

But you’re not sleeping either.

Because after all, it could be your child, your daughter, your sister.

Right, school chosen. Now we have to know the grade, the classroom.

Hey, do it in real time.

Add some excitement to the game.

How long does it take for the killer to walk from his home to his car? How long is the drive? How long to search for parking, to unload the guns, to pull the mask over his face?

Half an hour?

Forty-five minutes?

Right, so now we have the kids in the school. Everybody is there—teachers, principal, kids. Everybody is in their places.

Waiting for the slaughter to begin.

The media is filming. Relieved parents in other towns all across the country are cracking the first beer.

Better than Monday Night Football!

It’s old, our bloodlust. The Romans, seeing the Christians fed to the lions.

The gentry, viewing the mad raving at Bedlam.

Maybe it’s time to say it. We love to see the young butchered, the blood splattered on the chalkboard, the entails underneath the little desks / seats.

Love it.

Death and destruction and blood and tears.

Makes us feel good.

Or some of us. Because who’s going into that school?

The killer.

Also chosen by lottery.

A card-carrying member of the NRA.

Litany for the Feast of All Saints

Rest in peace, all souls,

Those that have done with care and suffering,

Those that have fulfilled a happy dream,

Those sated with life, those scarcely born...

All who have passed from this world to the Beyond,

All souls, rest in peace.

Souls of loving-hearted maidens,

Those who shed uncounted tears,

Whom false lovers deserted,

And the blind world cast out...

All who have departed hence,

All souls, rest in peace.

And those that have never smiled on the sunshine,

But beneath the moon waited, on thorns,

To see God one day, face to face

In the pure light of Heaven...

All souls that have departed hence,

All souls, rest in peace.