It's easy enough to imagine how a composer might aim for the sublime within a cultural and music framework that allows for a full, lush exploitation of familiar melodic devices. But what do you do when you're a composer writing in the latter half of the twentieth century and those same devices--indeed, familiar notions of tonality--have become problematized (to use an ungainly word from literary theory)? How does one evoke from the human voice something approximating a (postmodern) sublime?
Heaven knows I'm no connoisseur of contemporary works for vocal ensembles. But a couple of tracks have been figuring prominently in my music rotation these last few days and they certainly seem germane to such questions. Oddly enough, they are both from movie soundtracks. The first is from Jürgen Kneiper's soundtrack to Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire, directed by Wim Wenders in 1989] and the second is a piece by György Ligeti's featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey [Stanley Kubrick, 1968].
Here's a 30-second clip from the piece by Knieper:
This scan is from a 1958 Donald Duck comic book. Simon found this ad highly amusing: "Dad, the message is all about safety and these kids aren't even wearing helmets." Of course, this ad was from a time when "seat belt" to a kid meant their mother's right arm.
At a time when so much of our music is digital and an album cover is nothing more than a postage stamp-sized .jpeg, it's easy to forget how much the album cover and inner sleeve used to be crucial to experiencing the music itself. I've always loved the clean look of the album cover of Moving Pictures (see previous post): slick, glossy black, red lettering, and a lush cover photograph that manages to be both playful and artistic (note the three arches and the three columns, which echoes the composition of the band itself, a trio. And in case that interpretation sounds far-fetched to you, the photographer has pointed out as much about the shot). The photos of the band members on the inner sleeve are memorable as well: I used to spend hours listening to the album and reading every word of the liner notes and studying the pictures. The photographs by Hugh Syme seemed to capture in beautiful black and white images something of the precision, grace, and fluidity of the music.
Ah, the music. Just about every album I've ever purchased has had at least one or two good tracks; the best albums have maybe three or four with some other fine tracks besides. Each of the seven tracks of Moving Pictures has been, at one time or another, my favorite on the album. The opening synthesizer splash and tight bass and snare drum of the opening of "Tom Sawyer" gives way to some power chords on guitar that sum up the album as a whole: tight, powerful, and somehow both dark and optimistic at the same time. The track features the synthesizer as much as any cut on the album and, although it was released in 1981, it's amazing how non-dated it seems (compare that with any other use of synthesizer from the early 80s). The drumming throughout is astonishing and, surprisingly enough for those that only know Neil Peart by reputation, always tasteful and restrained (for more evidence, see "The Camera Eye"). But the drum fills coming out of the guitar solo ..., well, I still am floored by their authority.
"Red Barchetta," based on a futuristic story by Richard Foster, is a wonderful track. There's no better song to drive to. I especially love guitarist Alex Lifeson's use of natural harmonics. The ones that follow the line "has been his dearest dream" are absolutely perfect: they evoke the very dream mood that the lyrics describe.
Anyone who has played, or wanted to play, drums or bass guitar has to find "YYZ" enthralling (maybe now is the time to raise your hand if you are strong enough to avoid the temptation of playing air drums during this track!). From the tune's opening 10/8 time signature to the call and response of Geddy Lee's bass and Neil Peart's drums, this is a simply remarkable tune (for a somewhat technical description of the structure of the piece, click here). Alex's solo is absolutely perfect: vaguely Middle-Eastern sounding and incredibly fluid, there's no doubt he was listening to jazz guitar great Allan Holdsworth when the album was made: lots of left-hand hammer-ons and pull-offs and it is put together in such a graceful way that I think it really expanded the vocabulary of rock guitar.
I'll briefly mention one other tune, saving side two for another time. "Limelight" is one of the songs which, along with "Tom Sawyer" and "The Spirit of Radio" (from Permanent Waves) garnered the most radio airplay for Rush. The opening riff is simple, powerful and elegant. The guitar solo may be my favorite Alex Lifeson solo ever. It is a total change of gears from the rest of the song. It is open, introspective, and expressive and, with its final note fading into feedback (which is sustained through an entire chorus), perfectly gives voice to the lyric about Neil Peart's misgivings and ambivalence about the trappings of fame.
Speaking of lyrics, while I am the first to admit Neil Peart has had his ups and downs as a lyricist, there's never been any doubt that, at his best, he is more literate, articulate, and ambitious than virtually any other rock lyricist out there. For example, "Tom Sawyer"'s lyrics catch the vibe of the kind of libertarian individualism that was a frequent theme throughout much of the early work of the band. Many songs have been written about the "rigors" of the musician's lifestyle but absolutely none is so eloquent as "Limelight" in capturing the ambivalence it engenders. "The Camera Eye" is likewise pitch-perfect in evoking the energy and vitality of the cityscapes of Manhattan and London. I'm nothing if not discriminating when it comes to lyrics--I'm a literature professor after all!--and this album is a gem all the way through. My students know that I'm merciless with a red pen in hand and there's virtually nothing in this entire album that I could improve upon.
I'll have to say more about the other tracks--"Witch Hunt" and "Vital Signs"--in another post. For now, suffice it to say that I've listened to this album hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. After twenty seven years, there's still no other rock album I'd rather listen to.
[It seems that the poetry well has dried up for now (I can almost hear a sigh of relief!) so I'm introducing another semi-regular feature: my desert island discs column. Each entry will discuss one of my favorite albums. Of course, I'm aware that in doing so I'm certainly not helping to temper the blogging world's collective narcissism (as if that weren't the general raison d'etre for blogs, after all). But if it's fruitless to try to counter aesthetic narcissism per se at least I can hope to improve in some minor way the general level of taste and discernment out there (so, I'll save my discussion of Iron Maiden for another day)].
Album #1: Moving Pictures (Rush, 1981)
We all have a soft spot in our heart for those albums that came along at a crucial time in our musical development. Most of the time this happens in the teenage years, when we are learning what we like and what we don't and suddenly music comes to appear terribly important, often for reasons totally unrelated to the music itself: our own little (often semi-rebellious) identities are being formed; our friends come to exercise greater influence over our taste and preferences; we become dimly aware of social issues, and so on. Most of the music we discover at such a time will later come to seem shallow or uninteresting or irrelevant once the collateral issues have changed. And we tend to listen to that music later with a bit of nostalgia and vague embarrassment.
Nothing could be farther from the truth with Rush's eighth studio album, Moving Pictures, which I still find absolutely exhilarating to listen to. I still vividly recall hearing it for the first time. I was not quite fourteen and a group of us scouts were headed up to the mountains for a week-long camping trip. One of my friends had brought a cassette player (the old, bulky rectangular kind used for dictation) and a homemade copy of the album, which he played over and over again in the car. I'd never heard anything like it: the music was grating and loud and the singer didn't so much sing as shriek in a shrill falsetto. Coming as I did from a world in which ELO and Styx were pushing the musical envelope, this was like some kind of musical meteor falling from the sky and landing by chance on my (mostly empty) head. I hated it.
Fast forward a month or two and another of my good friends who had also been on the trip subscribes to one of those mail-order record clubs, where you get ten albums for a penny and commit to buying six more in the next two years. Unsure of what to get, he orders Moving Pictures. The records come and we play them incessantly as we play--you guessed it--Dungeons and Dragons. And when I join the same record club a few weeks later, I order it as well. And thus am I initiated into a world which I haven't really left. To be continued...
Perhaps there are great morals to be drawn from this clip: astute observations into the nature of our postmodern moment. But I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to make them.
It's Pioneer Day today, which is a holiday unique to Utah. It's the day when everybody gets patriotic and puts up their American flags to commemorate the 1847 arrival of Mormons in Utah, which was then a part of Mexico because the Mormons had to flee the US to escape religious persecution. Makes perfect sense to me.
Anyway, here are a couple of old photos from my childhood that I came across. You probably think that this was just a cowboy costume I was wearing, with a couple of toy pistols. But you'd be wrong. For I killed a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
Yes, the 1,232 page beast. You know, the one with the 60+ page asides on the Battle of Waterloo, the two or three chapters of opining about how the excrement of Parisians is not sufficiently valued for its array of wondrous properties, the long disquisitions on criminal argot and the admirable absurdities of monastic life. Oh, yeah, and the one with that Jean Valjean / Cosette story.
So, what did I think of what may well be the most famous novel in all of the history of French literature?
It was all right.
Well, I guess I can say a bit more than that. It is almost difficult not to read the book as a truly (if inadvertently) postmodern novel. Of course it's not postmodern in the way Don Quijote is postmodern (or modern, or premodern, or all of the above or none of the above. Take your pick). But it does seem almost postmodern in the way it gleefully pushes the form of the novel to the breaking point, snaps it, and keeps on going like nothing happened. Philosophy, history, military tactics, aesthetics, religion, it's all grist for Hugo's mill. "That's just the modern novel," you say. "Just look at those long-winded Russians or Proust." Well, yes, they were loquacious too. But if nothing else, Les Misérables confirms once again that the birth of the novelist is the death of the editor. I guess the thing about Hugo's novel is that there's so much of it. Put it this way: it wallows in excess in a way that has at least a whiff of the postmodern about it. And speaking of smells, I think that his extended discussion of Parisian merde may entitle us to identify Hugo as the father of contemporary cultural studies (you may think that a laudable or an execrable achievement).
But the story, man, what about the story? Talk about a flawed masterpiece: eloquent and insightful descriptions side-by-side with the most banal armchair pontificating I've ever seen. But, yeah, the rube in me liked it. The academic in me would need to do a lot more work to figure out why.
... will study our culture and wonder why we harbored so much hatred for cheerfully decorated cardboard boxes hung from a piece of string.
Eva had a great birthday. Is there such a thing as a bad day that includes watermelon-shaped cake, ice cream, candy, presents, lots of friends, grandparents and cousins, and a water fight? Do I even need to answer that question?
Yes, yes, I know what they say about picking up baby birds. But we found this little guy in the middle of the street. The kids really went into parenting mode to take care of it. We finally realized there wasn't much we could do so we placed it under a nearby tree where we had seen mature swallows, hoping that they would somehow take over (I'm enough of a Darwinist to know how things probably turned out). But it was a nice picture. Coming up soon: photographs of puppies, butterflies, and rainbows. I wear the wimp badge with pride.
(The photo is from the blog of friend and former student Lindsey Wilkins. Thanks, Lindsey!)
"... nire aitaren etxeak / iraunen du / zutik" ("My father's house / will remain standing"). Those are the final lines of the most famous poem by Gabriel Aresti, the Basque Country's most important poet. I came across this photo of the Jayo house from Bolibar in the Basque Country. It has probably been centuries since any of my ancestors lived here, but it is nonetheless the house from which my great-grandmother's family took their last name. I'm not sure when the black and white photo above was taken, but the house is barely standing now--physically speaking, at least--and is almost completely covered with vegetation. The snapshot below was taken in 2005.
Heaven knows I'm no connoisseur of contemporary works for vocal ensembles. But a couple of tracks have been figuring prominently in my music rotation these last few days and they certainly seem germane to such questions. Oddly enough, they
are both from movie soundtracks. The first is from Jürgen Kneiper's soundtrack to Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire, directed by Wim Wenders in 1989] and the second is a piece by György Ligeti's featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey [Stanley Kubrick, 1968].
