The History of the Universe (really!)

Modern science tells us that most of the universe is inhospitable to organic life. And so the advent of life itself as we know it is a political act, a rebellion against the eons-long dominion of non-life. Thoreau in his journals compared the coming of spring to a revolution – the absurdity that flowers should take over the world – flowers! Why do we only notice revolutions in the human world? Every springtime is a revolution, harking back to the first spring of life on earth. The first of random molecules organizing themselves into some semblance of order in the midst of gigantic chaos. Life forms from the dregs of the universe, and yet at some point it organizes itself into a marching band. 

Richard Strauss was disturbed by the march sequences in the first movement of Mahler's 3rd Symphony. He said they reminded him of the workers’ parties parading on May Day. The marches are an eruption of the vulgar into the erudite world of Classical Music. A ragtag army, beating cracked drums and blowing on leaky fifes, storming the citadels of power. Life, far from being natural, is portrayed here as something unnatural, persisting against the odds, against Nature. From a thousand different directions, whimsical toots and whistles coalesce together into an army of the lowly and insignificant. Life turns the tables on the rest of Nature, but only temporarily. The momentum of the march doesn't know when to stop - Mahler has always been criticized on account of his excess. Life pushes itself beyond the planet’s ability to sustain it, leading to mass extinctions and the return of the oppression of non-life. "Balance" does exist in nature but there is nothing tranquil or comforting in the actual way it works. 

Yet, the omnivorous massive first movement of the Third Symphony does not exclude the possibility of reconciliation, even if it only occurs in brief intervals of the struggle of Life against Nature. Near the end of the development section there is an episode of almost unbearable sweetness, a kind of sub-tropical afternoon languor that gives the illusion of eternity. The struggle to survive abates and there is time to dream. But the cellos rumble from down below, and with two subversive flourishes on the woodwinds, we are thrown into chaos again. 

The Third Symphony may be Mahler's most ambitious music, but is also his silliest. He seems well aware of the ridiculousness of trying to write a symphony about the history of the universe. There is something cartoonish about the marches of insect soldiers, like the cosmic aspirations of Disney's Fantasia, or Woody Allen speculating about the Big Bang and male erectile dysfunction to the camera... and because of this self-conscious silliness, Mahler succeeds where so many grand late Romantic symphonies failed. This really is the History of the Universe. (LOL)

Brass Liberation Orchestra

Brass Liberation Orchestra

My friend and I heard them coming down Valencia St. yesterday. Quite a motley crew, blaring on trumpets and beating on drums. The sound pierced the lazy Sunday afternoon, broke a hole in the invisible ceiling above the street of shops, as people went about their business shopping, begging or stealing. And we suddenly realized: we were outdoors, with nothing between us and the sky. This annoyed some people and delighted others. Of two strollers that passed by, I saw one baby wiggling to the music and the other covering its ears: politics begins earlier than we imagine! As for me, my first urge was to march behind the band, no matter what their political affiliations. So my friend and I did that, along with two touristy guys in cowboy hats made from Coors beer cartons. As we marched I felt like I was in some Eastern European village, on my way to the Shrovetide festivities. It also made me think of the marches in Mahler's 3^rd Symphony... more on that later.

Art of Fugue

The complete work on organ

My friend quipped, “Whenever I put this on, it makes whatever I'm doing instantly more meaningful.” You could play this music while you're washing dishes, and you would be washing dishes with the whole universe. The music trains you to hear everything as a fugue – as strands of sound weaving around each other. It is the way everything works – the way roots grow under the soil, the way veins thread through a leaf or through a human body, the way planets and constellations revolve in the night sky.

This is the profundity of Bach's music – the same principle is at work on the smallest and largest scale. The voices speaking simultaneously depend on each other. They illuminate and support each other and derive their meaning from each other. Though written mostly in a religious context, the fugue has nothing inherently religious about it. This is especially clear in Bach's last, unfinished work, The Art of Fugue: written without words, even without instruments! The score gives only four "voices" and no indication of what is to give voice to them. It has been played on everything from harpsichord to organ to saxophone quartet to electronic instruments.

The timbre of the instruments makes a big difference. My favorite is the versions for string quartet. Though anachronistic, the sound of four strings, sensuous yet bare, take the music to a purely human level. It is the voice of the body - physical, social or cosmic, whereas the organ version is a voice speaking from above, dominating the body. The organ seems to embody religious authority.



Bach: Two pieces from The Art of Fugue, played by Keller Quartet

Two Kinds of Love

Aksel Schiotz / Gerald Moore perform Die Schoene Muellerin

You can read the lyrics here: http://members.macconnect.com/users/j/jimbob/classical/Schubert_D795.html#texts

You may have to be between the ages of 16 and 18 to appreciate these songs properly. Back in high school they had the same place in my life as did R&B love songs in the lives of my classmates: balm for broken hearts. Nowadays most "classical" singers are too sophisticated for this music; you can hear the bow tie. Aksel Schiotz's recording from the 1930s is the only one that brings to mind the fresh, flushed cheeks and haplessness of the teenage miller.

Perhaps only rosy-faced teenage boys can move us with lines like these:

"I’d like to raise me a young starling
until he could speak the words loud and clear
until he could speak with the sound of my mouth
with the full, hot press of my heart…”

Perhaps only pimply-faced teenage boys are excused for this kind of love, love that is simply drunken absorption in the babbling brook, in the green alders, in the clattering mill-wheels around the house, the glint of sunlight from the windows, and the fountains of youth pouring from one’s body.

As for the “lovely mill-girl” of the title, she may or may as well not exist. This kind of love ends logically in suicide, in the miller boy drowning himself, merging with the landscape he loves so much. But really he is too young to believe in death, and so he only falls asleep and wakes up in November, older and more embittered, to wander the dead landscape of Schubert's other song cycle, Winterreise.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau / Joerg Demus perform An Die Ferne Geliebte

You can Read the Lyrics here: http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?LanguageId=7&SongCycleId=128

Beethoven’s lover in To the Distant Beloved is homelier, square-jawed like Beethoven himself, with none of the rosy pubescent charm of the miller boy. The melodies are plainer, and in the way Beethoven has with melodies, are nuts and bolts rather than Schuber's wild bouquets. But as nuts and bolts, they constantly remind us of the impulse behind the whole, which here might be summed up in Adorno’s epigram, “He only loves, who has the strength to hold onto love.” The six songs each flow into the next without a break, woven together by the piano, which is in many ways more expressive here than the voice (Beethoven was a pianist, not a singer) and embodies this unwavering, underlying impulse. The most moving moment comes when the refrain of the first song reappears at the very end, and we see, as in many of Beethoven’s works, that it could not be otherwise, that everything we have experienced so far only leads back to the beginning, to what we always knew in a process of trial and affirmation. And so space and time is overcome, and enduring absence and uncertainty, love is transformed from the sunlight of an afternoon into the binding force of life itself. It is a more adult love than that of Die Schoene Muellerin. The experience of love is ennobling in itself, regardless of how things turned out.

Music From Outside

Mozart: Serenade in B flat, K. 361 ("Gran Partita")

My mom had an uncle whom she was close to, a chemistry professor who loved collecting books and records in his spare time, and who sparked her own lifelong interest in visual arts. He had a huge number of Classical music CDs. At one point, my mother recalls, the collection overflowed the shelves into a stack on the floor of his study that almost reached to the ceiling. One day, the Red Guards ransacked his house and smashed his entire collection. No, he had done most of it himself an hour or so before, in anticipation of what was coming. They finished off the absolutely precious recordings he couldn't bear to destroy himself. There they lay on the wooden floor: shards of grooved plastic that were once vintage recordings of Beethoven, Bach and Brahms.

Forty years later, this scene repeated in the living room of my parents' house in Fremont, California. With a hammer, my father, a former Red Guard, smashed the collection of Classical CD's one by one that I had carefully amassed from the local Tower Records. “I'm going to wean you of this drug once and for all!” My father said as he swung his still muscular arms, honed from manual labor. They were propaganda arms, the arms of the perfect workers and soldiers in those posters he painted in the 60's. I stood by with a cold fire in my heart, the unrepentant counterrevolutionary. As I watched bits of shiny plastic scatter over the carpet, I knew the music would be wedded to my heart forever, and to my hatred of everything productive and modern.

This music was as incompatible with Capitalism as it had been with Communism. I remember the first time I heard it. I was about 12, my father and I were driving to his workplace. I switched on the car radio and some Mozart came on. “Turn that off, will you?” My father said, “That music doesn't belong in the modern world.” How true that was, I thought as soon as I looked out the window. We were in Silicon Valley, a landscape of death, a horror of people working in windowless offices and giant warehouses, surrounded by glowing screens and snaking wires. Mozart was an insult to this world, because he reminded us that some part of us was still human, that some part of us still longed to play, to laugh and cry at the beauty of the world, that we were not completely enslaved.

All modern art and music seemed like propaganda to me: Either Communist propaganda to produce more tractors, or Capitalist propaganda to buy more Viagra. The true message of every song on the radio is “Work, work, work! Buy, buy, buy!” The lyrics don't matter, the message is in the monotonous, unchanging beat, which is the same beat as freeways, factories, fighter jets. It makes us into robots who desperately produce and then desperately consume – and that is the whole story of life. It is in this context that I proudly listen to music written, played and enjoyed by dead white men.

Two Kinds of Desolation

Schubert: Moment Musical No. 2 in A flat

The hollow chords echo from the walls of my family's house in Fremont, CA. It is one of a row of identical buildings in a vast suburb, glistening like rows of shiny teeth, built in a hurry for the waves of immigrants, like us, who settled in Silicon Valley. It was our American dream achieved – an empty victory. We never really dwelt in it. We lived with one eye on the property value, cleaning and renovating it not for ourselves but for some mysterious future buyer, who will one day enjoy the spaces we never did. The walls and tabletops had a clammy, hostile feeling, a layer of cold slime clung to them no matter how many times we wiped them.

This house instilled in me a hatred for all that is settled, domestic and cozy. As a teenager I would climb out the window of my room every night. The windy Bay Area night exhilarated me. I spent hours wandering the empty suburban streets, listening to the underground rivers rushing in the sewers, lying on my back on strangers' lawns, buying cigarettes at all-night gas stations. It was my world where I could do whatever I wanted: sing, dance, laugh, cry, all the things that were forbidden during the day. But at the same time, I felt was moving further and further from the rest of humanity.

I don't know if Schubert had the same experience. In Charles Rosen's book he associates the second Moment Musical to a record of a dream, which Schubert wrote down:

“I was a brother to many brothers and sisters. Our father and mother were good. I felt deep love for everyone. Once my father took us to a feast of pleasures. My brothers were glad but I was sad. My father came up to me and ordered me to eat the expensive entrees, but I could not, whereupon my father flew into a rage and banned me from his sight. I turned my steps and, with a heart full of love for those who despised it, wandered in faraway places(...) There I felt the greatest love and the greatest sorrow tearing me apart. Songs I sang these long, long years – and when I wanted to sing of love, it turned to pain before my eyes, and when I wanted to sing of pain, it turned to love. So love and pain tore me to pieces(...)”

The first section of the Moment Musical No. 2 is made up of static chords, the second section made up of restless rolling triplets and a song-like melody that floats over them. The first section represents the bourgeois home, where one is safe and surrounded by loved ones, but also stifled by them and unable to sing. The alternating section represents a nomadic life full of loneliness, where one can sing – yet only sing of pain.

A Dent in Silence

Gulls and Herons Forget Scheming, played by Wu Zhaoji

The credits read: “Soaring aloft between sea and sky, the seabirds mix their hearts with the elements and forget all calculation. This piece has a deep resonance and, if played at night, opens the heart and lightens the spirit.”

As much as I love the great work of European classical music, I always feel like someone is lecturing me, especially when the said works are Really Great, like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Bach's Mass in B Minor. Someone is yelling at me "Stop what you are doing, and listen to me! This is much more important!" And I have no choice but to obey and be overwhelmed by the vastness of the universe, in contrast to which whatever I am doing at the moment seems insignificant.

But there is more than one way to show the vastness of our lives. You can fill the space with a thousand elaborate creations, or you can simply point to space – the pluck of a string attached to a piece of pine wood, reverberates in the furthest reaches of the universe. So now we can afford to relax and stretch our bodies out on a bamboo mat, like those loosely clothed sages in the paintings, who are often seen with the instrument under their arms. Each note of the guqin is a tiny dent or ripple in silence, which immediately smooths itself, before the next ripple arises. In terms of musical logic it is hard to say how each note relates to the next. Maybe we are all alone, and this is ultimate freedom. You can't trace the music, and it is difficult to hum. It never gets stuck in your head no matter how many times you listen to it. It is like clear water running through the ears, "wiping out the traces / of the people and the places that I've been." (Kris Kristofferson) It nourishes the wilderness within.

Going Astray as a Path

Schubert: Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959

Who was Schubert? Can he be said to have been a person at all? All he left behind was his music, and he is not to be found even there – at least not in the way that Beethoven is found in every one of his works, shaking his fist and shouting, “I am Beethoven!” Schubert is shadowy and shapeless – like those figures in Chinese landscape paintings with their backs turned to the viewer, whose only purpose is to show the scale of their surroundings. The self is shown as not the creator of its environment, but inextricably embedded in it. By exploring the contours of the emotional landscape, Schubert reveals a different vision of humanity – not the humanity that demands its rights and dignity, as in Beethoven, but the humanity of which most of us are ashamed in the West – the fleeting experience of living in a body made up of unquenchable fears and desires.

Schubert's provocation is that going astray is itself a path. Life needs no purpose and we are not here to accomplish anything in particular. He veers away from the straight and narrow logic of Western music and carves his own wayward, winding path through the wild. This path digresses deceptively, curving around to find the shortest way down into the depths. The A major Sonata moves by this pattern of deception and digression, constantly undermining our expectations. It does not develop from within, driven by a continuity of purpose, but constantly opens itself to strange new vistas. There is no ground to stand on. This constant alternation is what is so disturbing and at the same time liberating about Schubert's music.

The A Major sonata begins with a wall of sound, an impenetrable, seemingly solid rocky cliff. A trickle of water seeps from its base. A few pebbles come loose. The trickle turns into a stream, into a network of streams. Cracks open in the hard wall and the whole facade breaks apart in pieces, carried away on a roaring flood. But the flood soon runs dry and we are left again on parched earth. At the end of the first movement's exposition Schubert adds a tiny little flourish onto the end of the secondary theme, seemingly a frivolous ornament. But this ornament becomes the pattern for the whole development section, as if, walking in the mountains, we are distracted by the sound of water, and following it, we see a whole undiscovered valley in bloom through the cleft in the rock. The first movement paints the splendor and chaos of the emotions as a riveting landscape, strange yet familiar.

Yet by the second movement, all this richness seems like a delusion. A homeless man is trying to find shelter under the freeway. His steps echo in the vacuous night. The middle section depicts the convulsion of a body abandoned to unspeakable loneliness. This is the dark side of individuality – unspeakable loneliness in a world where everything cold, metallic, dead to the touch. The only logical response to such a world is madness.

The third movement is dancing on broken glass. It carries an echo of the madness from the second movement but maintains a jumpy, precarious balance.

In the last movement, the turmoil is not so much overcome as bypassed – in Schubert, there is no need for resolution, since everything happens and exhausts itself in the moment. Walking and singing are seen to be the thread that ties a life together. The ambling, song-like melody persists through endless harmonic and rhythmic shifts, at times light and ethereal, at times diving into jagged, dark regions, reappearing in different variations, yet staying true to its original pulse. There is finally a sense of “normal life” that gives continuity amid the unpredictable turns of life. Yet even this is undermined at the end – the melody finally thins out like a worn fabric – silences appear in between its phrases – it hesitates, then throws itself into overwhelming chaos. There are no conclusions to be made about life.  

Form is Emptiness

Beethoven: Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 111 (Played by Artur Schnabel)

The two movements that make up Beethoven's final torso, represent two different views of life. The first, from Beethoven's signature, stormy C minor mode, sees life from the midst of the struggle, where one never has enough time; one is so eager to finish that nothing ever gets done, and fate snatches the coveted prize again and again before us, no matter how fast we run toward it. The crude, ungracious three-note motif blunders through a series of disasters, comic and tragic at the same time, before time literally runs through our fingers in the coda. All that speed and aggression has been for nothing. "This is it? Not more?"

Yet the second subject of the first movement already offers a brief glimpse of calm, and in the midst of rage and bewilderment, hints at another way of looking at things beyond happiness and tragedy, success and failure. In the silence between the two movements, all bewildering desires are extinguished. The second movement begins in the coldness of outer space. Yet out of this cold distance a warmth emerges, a delight in the world of appearances divorced from personal fate. Life from now appears from this distance in its entirety, as an effortless, circular dance of light, which grows more dazzling and complex as we approach it, before vanishing on contact.

The long second movement begins as a set of variations, each twice as fast as the previous one. The first variation is still, the second a sentimental stroll, the third a gentle canter and the fourth a frenetic dance. The increasing richness and energy culminates in the fifth variation - where the sheer speed of molecular vibrations is shown as the same as stillness. Matter itself is revealed as a pure shimmering. The method is brutally simple, like the investigations of Buddhist sutras - a rigorous logic that leads us beyond logic, to the inseparability of form and emptiness. As in certain trance practices, where the increasing tension of focus finally releases one into a state of deep relaxation, Beethoven now discards the variation form altogether, and the rest of the movement is a free-form fantasia, which takes us to the outermost reaches of space before depositing us back on earth, with a new appreciation for our place.