From Too Many Notes to Silence

Figure 1: Joseph II / Figure 2: Mozart / Figure 3: John Cage 

                           

 

I.

 

Following the premier of Entführung aus dem Serail [1] in the summer of 1782, at the Burgtheater (Vienna), Mozart famously had an exchange with the man who had commissioned the work, Emperor Joseph II. 

 

Whilst the latter lavishy praised the three-act comic opera, he suggested that there were times when the music became too convoluted and contained, as it were, too many notes ... [2]

To be fair to Joseph - who was by no means musically illiterate or some kind of Bildungsphilister - the complexity of Mozart's work had been noted by others - including Goethe - and what he actually said was: Zu schön für unsere Ohren, und gewaltig viel Noten, lieber Mozart!

This might more accurately be translated into English as: 'Too beautiful for our ears, and a great many notes, dear Mozart!' 

 

Such a translation doesn't unfairly portray the Emperor in a foolish light - although it does, of course, rob the story of its humorous aspect.     

II.

I thought of this the other day when trying to read what was, in my view, a long and overly wordy poem, written by someone (about a pet parrot of all things) who has argued in the past in favour of pleonasm (i.e., an excess of language). 

 

Rightly or wrongly, however, like the Holy Roman Emperor of anecdote and cinematic fiction, I do think that a poem can have too many words and that often it's what is not said that matters most; i.e., the space between words is the true space of poetry. 

 

Thus, for me, the task of the poet is not to assemble words, but to take language apart and show its limitations; to erase meaning and return us to lovely silence, the great bride of all creation [3]. 

 

Perhaps the perfect poem is ultimately the one that remains unspoken, unwritten; just as the perfect piece of music is the one with no notes, performed by no instruments, à la John Cage's 4'33" [4].      

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Known in Engish as The Abduction from the Seraglio, the work is a German-language music drama, known as a Singspiel. 

 

[2] This exchange between composer and monarch was nicely dramatised in the 1984 film Amadeus (dir. Miloš Forman), with Tom Hulce as Mozart and Jeffrey Jones as Emperor Joseph II: click here.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Silence', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 612.

 

[4] 4′33″ is a three-movement work by American experimental composer John Cage. It was written in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs performers to remain silent during the entire duration of the piece. One wonders what Emperor Joseph II would make of this ...? (Not enough notes, Mr. Cage!) My concern is that the composition only gives us a negative representation of silence; silence as a lack or absence of sound.

      To watch the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Lawrence Foster, give their interpretation of the work at the Barbican, London, in 2013, click here.

Mozart's Starling

I.

Although many people object to their mad chatter (and the mess they make), I like the gregarious character of starlings and the way they can walk and run across the ground - limber and saurian, as Ted Hughes writes.

What's more, experts inform us that far from simply making a racket, starlings have a diverse and complex range of vocalisations, which includes snippets of song from other bird species and even sounds picked up from an increasingly urban envirionment, including car alarms and human speech. 

Perhaps it was this amazing talent for mimicry that first attracted Mozart to the starling ...


II.

We might never know for certain why Mozart decided to buy a starling. But we do know from his personal records that he purchased one from his local pet shop on 27 May 1784 and that it cost him 34 kreutzer.

We also know that the bird was able to whistle the opening bars of the third movement of the Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, which Mozart had started composing earlier that year. Indeed, some scholars suggest that this particular section of K. 453 originated with the starling. For when Mozart bought the bird he recorded not only its price in his expenses book, but the 17 note tune it was whistling - a tune almost identical to the one found in the above work.

Of course, it's also possible that Mozart had taught the bird the tune in the pet shop prior to eventually purchasing him - either way, it's nice to imagine an interspecies collaboration of some kind.    


III.

Mozart had his starling for three years, before it died in its feathered prime on 4 June 1787.

He buried the much-loved bird in his garden with considerable ceremony and provided an inscribed headstone. Mozart also read out a funeral poem of his own composition which, although humorous, was doubtless a sincere expression of mourning.

Interestingly, there's no such record of his being moved to eulogy by the death of his father only seven days previously. But then, what is the loss of a parent compared to the loss of a pet ...  

Note

Although not an advocate of birds being kept in cages, starlings do make excellent pets as they adapt well to captivity and thrive on a straightforward diet of seed, fruit, and mealworms. Their intelligence makes them easy to train and, being extremely social in nature, means you can keep several birds in the same cage should you wish to do so. On the downside, starlings - like other birds - indiscriminately defecate, attract numerous parasites and transmit certain diseases to humans, so probably best just to watch them in the garden. 


See: 

Ted Hughes, 'Starlings Have Come', in The Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan, (Faber and Faber, 2003). 
 
Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling, (Corsair, 2017).  


This post is for Maria Thanassa (who suggested it).

A New Entry in the Big Book of Little Girls: Alma Deutscher (The Prodigy)

Photo of Alma Deutscher 
By Anna Huix (2016)

I.

One of the books I would still like to write, is my Big Book of Little Girls - a work dedicated to all of those fantastic creatures who are so much more than merely young females destined to grow up to be women in a conventional bio-cultural manner.

At their best - which is to say at their most phenomenal and inhuman - little girls are extraordinary events whose individuation doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. They are defined, thus, not by their age, sex, or material composition (sugar and spice), but by the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

I already have an index of possible candidates for the book, both living and dead, actual and fictional. And now I have another name to add: Alma Deutscher ...   


II.

Born in February 2005, Alma is a highly celebrated and much-loved composer and performer. Starting her musical career early - she began playing the piano aged two, followed by the violin at three - this wunderkind has already written sonatas, concertos, and operas.

For some, she's an angel sent to redeem the world through melody and she herself contrasts the simple beauty of her music with the ugliness and complexity of the times. Anyone wanting to see people in jeans or hear works that deal with social issues, should probably stay away from her recitals: Let them look at passersby in the street or watch TV, she says, with the regal disdain perfected more by Marie Antoinette than by Mozart.

And suddenly one recalls that the term prodigy refers not only to a young person with exceptional gifts, but - as her own mother reminds us - to a monstrous being who violates the natural order and brings with them something more troubling than a nice tune; something unbidden and unexpected ...

At the very least, I think it reasonable to regard this young girl as genuinely inspired, if not, indeed, one possessed; a witch who whirls a magical skipping rope about her head and allows strange forces to work through her. Whether these forces be divine or daemonic in nature is debatable; but it's surely worth remembering that the Devil has all the best tunes and that the positing of Beauty as the highest of all high ideals has, in the past, put dreamy Romantics on a path to Hell ...

But then I'm just one of those whom Robert Schediwy characterises as an advanced culture-theorist, suspicious of any attempt to steer contemporary classical music back to the 18th and 19th centuries with their "uninhibited love of melody", before those decidedly ungalant, 20th century composers dared to experiment with dissonance and require listeners to develop new ears.

As for Alma, obviously I wish her well. But I also hope that, as she matures, she rethinks her relationship to the present, to reality, and to popular culture and sees how even beauty can become an ugly impediment to genius ...


See Robert Schediwy, 'Alma und die gefährliche Liebe zur Melodie', Der Standard (13 Jan 2017): click here.

To listen to Alma play, or to read numerous other press reports and interviews with her and her parents, go to her website by clicking on the link already given. Alternatively, there are plenty of videos available to watch on YouTube, including this one, in which Alma not only performs her own piano and violin compositions, but speaks about her work before an invited audience at the WORLD.MINDS Annual Symposium (2016).

Birthday Musings of an Aquarian

It is very easy to sneer at astrology, but perhaps the ancient heavens of the zodiac continue to offer us what D. H. Lawrence describes as a truly imaginative experience and the entry into another world of being; one that is vital and meaningful, even if it is a world of which our astronomers and physicists know nothing. Perhaps.

At any rate, without quite feeling the ecstatic sense of joy that Lawrence experiences when released into this other world of mytho-cosmic splendour, I have always been pleased that I was born under the sign of Aquarius like many of the figures I have at one time or other loved and admired (from Mozart to Malcolm McLaren).

However, although feeling blessed to be a child of the 11th House, I have never been very happy that Aquarius is symbolized by a water-bearer; certainly not when other signs of the zodiac have marvellous starry beasts to call upon and find totemic satisfaction in. Who wants someone with a jug, when there are lions, bulls, goats and even crabs on offer?

It doesn't even help to discover - as I have only recently discovered - that this someone with a jug happens to be the iconic gay figure of Ganymede; i.e. a beautiful boy who, when all's said and done, is but an eternal servant and sexual plaything of the gods, offering not only libation but soft lips, nimble fingers, and strong thighs.

Now, whilst I've no moral objection to the Greek social practice of paiderastía, I don't like the idea of any mortal down on their knees before the divine - particularly when they have been kidnapped, raped and forced into slavery.