Raw Goods

He, Said.

i didn't believe until Brahms played your hands across a silver screen and you nodded under compliments to require a bi-national solution that incorporates past and present.

we list massacres of innocents only to begin. Wagner couldn't have known how we'd dismiss his hatred and seize upon The Ring to begin to reconcile a Holocaust with a Nakba.

but who are we?

more than you know...we won't let fear of surpassing our fathers keep us from preludes, overtures, or odes to peace. we won't let Romantic sentimentalism keep us from lieder, tone poems, or symphonies. Beethoven may have intimidated Europe for half a century, but Haydn kept joy alive with quartets. You taught me that.

i didn't understand that music emerges from silence and disappears into silence until you recorded your voice and transposed the words onto a printed page, so how do we let the terms of endearment surpass rules of engagement to bring young cellists from the stage to the streets, where we can refute Krystalnacht as well as refugee camps, Stonewall closures as well as Franco's expulsion of those dissidents who insisted on their right to hold hands?

how do we let the music speak for itself, and still refuse to accept a national language as the final solution?

Our repertoires don't have to remain mutually exclusive - Mozart wrote six hundred and twelve major pieces by the time he died at age thirty seven.

So what takes these desires beyond the scale of Great Works by Great Men?

We play it. We take it. We make it ours.
Claim it. Re-frame it. Don't let anyone else steal what you've started. harmonics carry through you, like Chopin's deceptively complex serenades - seems so easy to say what matters, but when blood stains the sheets, is this menstruation or tuberculosis? does our sex bypass the menses, or does my cough spatter the piano score?

and still, the urge to insist, to list referents - that's one way to compose yourself.

and yet, if we do not respond as part of the whole, how extensively we deceive ourselves with continual revisions. evidence of three perils in humanistic criticism - Mahler's despair, Liszt's indulgent frenzies, and Adorno's destructive rage - bulwark us against summary interpretation, and avail us to create a democratic history.

these are your terms - i didn't believe i could ever feel them. we argued over anger and how it ought to be spoken, and yet we can still reunite with four-handed inventions, Purcell's lullabies, and a Well-Tempered Clavier.

So it begins.

Later, we reunite over Irving Berlin and good-bye parties, Mendelssohn and cocker spaniels, Satie and hiking trails. Here's how we ask permission to accept an impersonal invitation - informal and yet polite, reticent and bold. Leave it to Lulu to wallow in death - Berg may have fetishized murder, but that doesn't mean we have to (nor does it mean he actually did - ask Brecht for a review, and he'll give you a manifesto).

so the point is we are not the silent lovers of a frozen past; we have become a living poem, authenticated by each others' lashes (both eye and fist) and influenced by the burning pestle of satire, passed from Chaucer to Cervantes, Debussey to Spooky, in an uncanny evocation of millennial repression and civil discontent. from Freud's Dora or Hirohito's "Tora" we have not learned to evade abuses of senility, but we may continue to see just how Shostakovich captitulated to Stalinist censorship not only to save his hide, but to surpass it.

In these sustenatos, evidence; in these glissandos, perseverance. I have you to thank for that - and Heifitz.

posted by judy j @ 2:24 PM