Sounds & Fury

Staging Wagner: From Wagner To The Birth Of Eurotrash

We used the occasion of our Sandy-enforced from-the-world-isolated downtime (we were without electric power from Monday a week ago to Monday last; it's sobering to be confronted so directly by just how utterly dependent on electricity is modern everyday life) to read a book we purchased some four years ago but never got around to reading titled Wagner and the Art of the Theatre by Patrick Carnegy (Yale University Press, 2006) and a most informative read it proved to be. The book surveys the high points of the history of Wagner stagings, mostly in Germany with a side trip to Russia, from the Romantic naturalism of Wagner's own staging to the Brechtian "critical" realism of the so-called Bayreuth "Centennial Ring" of Patrice Chéreau of 1976 and as such traces the history of the emergence of what we today refer to as Regietheater; a development which was the product of pressures social, political, and aesthetic.

What we found especially interesting was the huge influence upon this slow but sea-change shift in the staging of Wagner's works of the theoretical writings of the then mostly obscure Swiss "theatrical visionary" Adolphe Appia at the turn of the century; an influence that can be observed in all manner of opera stagings of even the present day. Appia was a devout Wagnerian and it was Wagner's works that provoked and impelled the formation of his theories of mise en scène. He was convinced that Wagner's devotion to 19th-century realism (or rather illusion of the real) in his stagings of his own works was not only misplaced but effectively worked to sabotage and betray those works.

Appia was right and Wagner should have realized his misstep himself for after Tristan he no longer referred to his music-dramas as examples of Gesamtkunstwerk but as "deeds of music made visible," a belated recognition by him of the primacy of the art of music in music-drama which, contrary to his original theoretical formulation of Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner finally realized can never be on an equal footing with the other arts but will always reign supreme among them. It was precisely this that Appia seized upon. His solution to the problem of mise en scène in the staging of Wagner's works is complex but is grounded in the conviction that the music, not the text, should always be the controlling factor in determining the mise en scène and that that mise en scène should always be suggestive rather than literal and formed to great extent by light modeling and shaping solid structures and the space defined by them as well as the living bodies (i.e., the singer-actors) that interact with those structures and move about within that space. On Appia's stage, scene painting on drops and flats and the like was, for the most part, consigned permanently to the dust bin of theatrical history. (As we read about Appia's theories we could not help but experience a delicious stab of self-satisfied pleasure when we saw how similar was our own modest thinking in the matter of staging Wagner's music-dramas as set forth in our 2005 S&F entry titled "Staging Wagner's Music-Dramas" which can be read in full here.)

What we also found especially interesting was how honest and essentially Werktreue were the early Regietheater stagings of Wagner's works in the sense that none, it seems, attempted to supplant the spirit and sense of Wagner's original theatrical concept by the imposition of the director's own but instead worked to achieve a heightened and more revelatory realization of the drama embodied by the music through the spirit and sense of that original theatrical concept using the music itself as the controlling guide.

The first of these Wagner stagings in a major theater to break, at least in part, with the traditional way of staging Wagner's works as established at Bayreuth by Wagner himself and after him by his wife Cosima who ruled Bayreuth for some 23 years after Wagner's death is generally acknowledged to be the Gustav Mahler/Alfred Roller Tristan of 1903 at the Vienna Court Opera where Mahler had reigned as the theater's conductor and general director since 1897. It proved a great success but didn't manage to extend its influence beyond productions mounted at the Court Opera. The next steps were taken by the Russian director Vsevolod Myerhold with his 1909 Tristan for the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Fyodor Komissarzhevsky with his 1918 Lohengrin for the Theater of the Council of Working Deputies (the former Zimin Theater), I. Prostorov's Rienzi of 1923 for the same theater, and, much later, the legendary Sergei Eisenstein with his 1940 Walküre for the Bolshoi.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, the great conductor Otto Klemperer had become director of the Kroll Opera in Berlin in 1927 and there, with stage designer Ewald Dülberg, staged in 1929 a Fliegende Holländer that pretty much jettisoned Wagner's original theatrical concept for its own and jettisoned as well the principles of Appian mise en scène in favor of the principles of so-called "critical" staging as devised and promoted by Bertolt Brecht; principles that are the very antithesis of everything Wagnerian; principles producing stagings calculated to force an audience to think rather than feel during a performance; to adopt an actively critical attitude toward what's being performed onstage before their very eyes. This production set the keynote, as it were, for the post-war, Brecht-influenced German productions meant to counter the hugely successful and essentially Werktreue New Bayreuth productions of the Appia-influenced Wieland Wagner in the 1950s and '60s; Brecht-influenced productions such as the 1970 Ring of Ulrich Melchinger, the 1972 Tannhäuser of Götz Friedrich, and the 1973 Ring of Joachim Herz from which the 1976 Bayreuth "Centennial Ring" of the Frenchman Patrice Chéreau took its cue (something of which we were previously unaware).

Thus was born Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater; Regietheater that's today the norm rather than the avant-garde exception.

(We hasten to make clear that the immediately foregoing declaration is ours and NOT that of the book's author Patrick Carnegy who not only holds that Konzept Regietheater is a perfectly legitimate enterprise but actually applauds its practice.)

For those with a more than passing interest in the staging of Wagner's operas and music-dramas we warmly recommend Wagner and the Art of the Theatre for its informed historical survey of the high points of that staging's development from its beginnings up through 1976 and a small bit beyond. We think you'll find the time spent reading its 400 easy-reading pages time well spent.

Whatever Became Of The Breastplates?

The excellent Wagner-dedicated website The Wagnerian has up a chapter excerpt from author David Littlejohn's 1992 book The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera titled "Whatever Became of the Breastplates?" that comments in brief on stagings of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen from Wagner's own staging at Bayreuth in 1876 down to the present day (or rather, the present day as of 1992). For Ring newcomers especially (but by no means exclusively) the chapter makes for most interesting reading and closes with the following thought, even more salient today than when it was written:

Chaos, as Wagner himself sometimes suggested, is likely to be the rule, rather than the exception, in our world (and in productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen that try to reflect or comment on that world) until another cruel divine order emerges to force things back into unity. Rings devoted to the evils and collapse of Eastern European communism are surely on the drafting boards already, now that Rings devoted to the evils and collapse of capitalism and fascism are becoming routine. Be grateful if you have the opportunity to see a contemporary Ring that is as compelling to look at as it is to listen to; thoughtfully (not narrowly or spitefully) of our time; on the whole generous to Wagner, rather than mean-minded and reductive; one that makes provocative sense, and still seems to grow out of the music, which is (fortunately) larger than all of these postmodern Konzepts put together.

Read the full text here.

Ave Atque Vale, Gore

For the second time in the space of a month our hiatus from blogging is interrupted by the death of yet another irreplaceable artist whose passing we cannot let go without comment.

Gore Vidal — writer; public intellectual; notorious wit, provocateur, and celebrity figure — died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles from complications of pneumonia reports The New York Times. He was 86.

Mr. Vidal possessed an almost embarrassing abundance of gifts: handsome to the point of beautiful, his cutting acerbic wit and sharpness of intellect were wonders to behold on numerous occasions on television talk shows and on the lecture circuit. As if those weren't gifts sufficient, Mr. Vidal, one of this country's most prolific writers, was perhaps the most elegant writer this country has ever produced, a gift on display in his 25 novels and scads of essays too numerous to count, not to mention several plays and a number of TV dramas and Hollywood movies.

With Mr. Vidal's passing, the world has been deprived of one of its most accomplished artists.

Atque in perpetuum, Gore, ave atque vale.

Ave Atque Vale, Nora

The gifted humorist, essayist, journalist, screenwriter, and filmmaker Nora Ephron died today at age 71 from pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia according to The New York Times.

We first encountered Ms. Ephron's work in a short humor piece she did for Esquire magazine in the '70s, if our memory can be trusted, titled simply, "Crabs" (we can't seem to locate it online and so can't link to it), which, it struck us at the time, was one of the most perfect pieces of humor we'd ever read. She once said of writing (this a close paraphrase as we can't locate the source of the verbatim quote): "Beginnings and endings are easy. It's the stuff in the middle that's hard." That's no doubt true (as it is of life as well) but one would be hard-pressed to discern that in Ms. Ephron's writing so effortlessly does it all seem to flow whether it be for the page or the screen. The film When Harry Met Sally for which she wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay is a case in point and a sterling example of Ms. Ephron's pitch-perfect, bitingly humorous but deeply sympathetic and insightful commentary on contemporary male-female behavior and interaction, and her short, best-selling, thinly-veiled autobiographical novel Heartburn another case in point and a sterling example of her ability to find humor (if at times of the dark sort) in even the most painful personal experience. Hers is a voice absent which the world will be a poorer and less bright place. She will be sorely missed.

Atque in perpetuum, Nora, ave atque vale.

Ave Atque Vale, Traditional Book Publishers

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 2:11 PM Eastern on 16 Apr. See below.]

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 5:21 AM Eastern on 14 Apr to clarify and make more explicit several points.]

Commenting on the Department of Justice's lawsuit against Apple and book publishers Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster charging collusion in the fixing of prices for eBooks, writer for The Guardian Alison Flood, joining a chorus of other doomsday whiners, whines:

The DoJ lawsuit plays, it seems to me, right into the hands of Amazon. Yes, we'll have cheaper books, but at what cost? Is it worth paying a little bit less for a title if it threatens the future existence of the publishers who are bringing us the books?

[...]

[I]t scares me, it really does.

Say what? "Threatens the future existence of the publishers who are bringing us the books"(!)? What cave have these recent doomsday whiners been living in for the past decade or so? Haven't they long ago heard that traditional book publishers are today fast becoming almost wholly irrelevant as the source of new books; economic and cultural dinosaurs all whose demise was sealed the day Amazon introduced the Kindle, and good riddance to them?

For the most part, traditional publishers are today coasting on the inertia generated by their centuries of existence. Within a generation they'll largely be history for ordinary new book publishing, fiction and nonfiction. In the past, traditional book publishers served a noble and necessary purpose. Today they're entirely unnecessary and rather than be supported should be left to expire in peace and with dignity, saved harmless from the always demeaning and ultimately futile attempts to sustain a faltering life by artificial means. Let us instead say, Atque in perpetuum, Traditional Book Publishers, ave atque vale.

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Update (2:11 PM Eastern on 16 Apr): In answer to the question, "How is publishing changing?," Clay Shirky, NYU professor, author, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, responded:

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.

In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a WordPress install.

The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. But the publishing apparatus is gone. Even if people want a physical artifact — pipe the PDF to a printing machine. We’ve already seen it happen with newspapers and the printer. It is now, or soon, when more people will print the New York Times holding down the “print” button than buy a physical copy.

[...]

Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is coming from outside the traditional publishing industry.

To all of which we say, Thewayitis!

A Problem Curious And Unanticipated

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 1:56 PM Eastern on 13 Mar. See below.]

Well, this is a curious problem, and something we never anticipated when we set to writing Volume I of the new Kindle book series The Four Days of Wagner's Ring whose coming publication we've been flogging on S&F's main page for the past couple weeks or so (which flogging has now been transferred to our sidebar).

Here's the book's description as it will be displayed on the book's page on Amazon which description makes clear just who the book's intended reader is:

As the subtitle [A Guide For The Willing But Perplexed] of this four-volume series implies, The Four Days of Wagner's Ring has been written for those intrigued by Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen but feel its complexities too daunting or complicated to undertake on their own, and who have found existing guides to be either too simplistic or so scholarly and/or lengthy as to be almost as daunting as the work it purports to explicate and make clear. The volumes in this series adopt a middle ground that it's hoped readers will find engaging reading and a helpful and illuminating guide through the intricacies of Wagner's great tetralogy.

The curious and unanticipated problem is that we're experiencing some measure of unsureness getting "into the head" of that intended reader and so are having some difficulty in judging whether our approach is really striking the middle ground promised above, or whether we're missing the mark by being not simple enough, or too simple, or condescending, or....

Well, you get the idea.

So, this is a call for so-called focus-group participants. If you meet the description of the above intended reader (or know someone who does) and own a Kindle or, alternatively (but not ideally), have installed on your computer Kindle For PC or Kindle For Mac, do drop us an eMail (or have the aforementioned someone do so) at The Wagner Group and we'll eMail you back a Kindle preview (.mobi) file containing the first few chapters of the book along with instructions on how to transfer it to your Kindle or to the proper Kindle document folder on your computer. (NOTE: Please let us know whether you'll be reading on a Kindle or on Kindle For PC or Kindle For Mac.) What we're looking for in return, of course, are your comments, positive and/or negative, on what you've read. We regret that the only compensation we can offer you for your participation in this focus group is a free copy of Volume I of The Four Days of Wagner's Ring on its publication.

We do look forward to hearing from you, and thank you for your attention to this call.

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Update (1:56 PM Eastern on 13 Mar): The focus group is now closed. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Coming Soon. A New Kindle Book.

Coming Soon
A New Kindle Book

The Kindle Touch: A Near-Paragon Of A Digital Book Reader

In November of 2009 we made a plea on S&F to Amazon's Jeff Bezos to price the Kindle digital book reader at $99 rather than the $259 which was the selling price of the Kindle at the time even if he had to sell each unit at a loss as it would hugely profit Amazon overall (and the digital book movement worldwide) for him to do so, and asked whether he was listening. Apparently he was, for we now have the Kindle Touch ("touch" for its touchscreen controls) priced at — mirabile dictu! — $99, and it's a real beauty both in appearance and function.

We've been using the new Kindle Touch with Wi-Fi connectivity (thank you!, Verizon FiOS) for but a few days now but that's more than sufficient time for us to declare that this version of the Kindle is a near-paragon of what a digital book reader should be, never mind that it lacks the ability to reproduce color (for a catalog of its many features and functions check out the page at the above link). The Kindle Touch is beautiful to look at and hold, just the right size, its E Ink display a joy to read, its minimalist button controls philosophy just the right design philosophy for a digital book reader, and its $99 price tag painless (the ads that display themselves when the Kindle Touch is not in use reading the text of a digital book are in no way disruptive). We would only suggest to Mr. Bezos that the Kindle Touch be built with a more powerful processor so that page turns and pop-up screens are instant (as opposed to merely very fast) and screen refreshes invisible. We would also suggest that the Kindle Touch be sold with a slipcase storage case and AC charger as standard equipment — without raising the price, of course — which today must be purchased separately as the Kindle Touch really needs both in regular use.

God bless technology, Amazon, and Jeff Bezos. It's a great time to be alive.

Gee, What A Surprise — Or The Beginning Of The End

In a December 2010 entry titled, "Chutzpah", we wrote the following:

In the event you've been living in a cave isolated from the outside world for the past decade or so, we'd like to call to your attention that it's the year two-thousand-and-ten A.D., Print On Demand (POD) publishing is available to anyone with a book to publish at little to no cost, and the eBook, also available to anyone with a book to publish at little to no cost, has finally come into its own. So, the question is: Why, then, the necessity or need today for book publishing houses? What function do they perform or what service do they provide that an author could not perform or provide himself, or hire experts to perform or provide for him? In short, why are book publishing houses still in business today at all?

Answer: Beats us. Book publishing houses are an anachronism; a relic of the pre-digital past who have — or rather, should have — no place whatsoever in today's book publishing market for new books.

Today, we read this not unexpected revelation.

Sounds to us like the beginning of the end for old-world-style book publishing as far as the general market for new books is concerned, and sounds to us as well the right way to go. We suspect the transition will take almost a generation before it's fully accomplished, but accomplished it will almost certainly be.

Caution! Shameless, Self-Serving Commercial Ahead!

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 9:33 AM Eastern on 24 Jun. See below.]

The spanking new Amazon Kindle edition of my paperback potboiler murder mystery, A Deed of Dreadful Note, is now available in Amazon's online Kindle eBook Store. How much will a copy of this Kindle edition set you back? A whopping $2.99 (I wanted to set the retail price at a neat $1 but Amazon's new pricing schedule won't let me set the price lower than the aforementioned $2.99 [ACD 6/24 - see update below]). The really nifty thing about this Kindle edition of A Deed of Dreadful Note is that you don't have to actually own a Kindle to read it. All you need is your PC or Mac and Amazon's superb Kindle software for computers which can be downloaded for free from Amazon here (Kindle for PC) or here (Kindle for Mac).

Dirt-cheap eBook, perfect for beach reading (Happy summer solstice, everyone!), AND free software. Why, it's the bargain of the bloody century it is. Get yours now!

OK. Commercial break over. As you were. We now return you to our regular scheduled programming.

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Update (9:33 AM Eastern on 24 Jun): Glorioski! I just found out what I have to do in order to sell the Kindle edition of A Deed of Dreadful Note for a list price of $1 and have done the, um, deed. The price change will be reflected on the eBook's Amazon Kindle page within the next 24 hours. My apologies to all those who forked over $2.99 for a copy. Had I the mechanism to give you all a refund for the difference I would do so willingly and with pleasure.

Delicious

This closing graf of a fairly lengthy negative review in The New Criterion by writer Joseph Epstein of a new book by academic Stanley Fish ranks among the most delicious (and devastating) literary coups de grâce we've ever had the pleasure of savoring. Wrote Mr. Epstein:

I seem to have written more than three thousand words without a single kind one for How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. To remedy this, at least partially, let it be noted that, at 165 pages, index and acknowledgments and biographical note on the author included, it is a short book.

RTWT here.

Shape and Ring

In a review of Stanley Fish's newest book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, written for the The Book, the online book review section of The New Republic, Simon Blackburn, the Bertrand Russell Professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Research Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, had this to say:

For Fish a great sentence is like a great athletic performance. It is an example of something done supremely well, so well that it cannot be bettered. Other similar feats will come along, but only to stand alongside it. What exactly is done in such a performance? There is no single answer, indeed no finite answer since there is no limit to the things that can be done with words. But it is what Conrad called the “shape and ring” of sentences, the perfect adaptation of form to achievement, that Fish wants to share.

It is wrong to think that the sentence is a mere slave, whose function is to bear content, which, while being the really important thing, is also something that could equally have been borne by another. Change the shape and ring, and you change everything. The balance, the alliterations, the variation, the melody, the lights glimmering in the words, can work together to transform even an ugly thought into something iridescent....

[...]

Do shape and ring matter? Perfection always matters. Without the sensitivity Fish admires, we would not only have no great literature. We would also have had no Gettysburg address, no Churchill, and no Martin Luther King, Jr. If we cannot move peoples’ souls, we cannot move their ways of living either: “Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who writes its laws.”

Quite right — all of it.

RTWT here.

The Book

It may seem strange for an atheist Jew such as we to confess a love for the King James version of the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible, but that would be a myopic view of the matter as the King James Bible is as much a work of literature as it is a religious text. Writer and author Ann Wroe, obituaries and briefings editor of The Economist and author of Being Shelley, has a lovely piece in the current issue of Intelligent Life titled "In The Beginning Was The Sound" that has much to say about the King James Bible as literature.

Like many Catholics, I came late to the King James Bible. I was schooled in the flat Knox version, and knew the beautiful, musical Latin Vulgate well before I was introduced to biblical beauty in my own tongue. I was around 20, sitting in St John’s College Chapel in Oxford in the glow of late winter candlelight, though that fond memory may be embellished a little. A reading from the King James was given at Evensong. The effect was extraordinary: as if I had suddenly found, in the house of language I had loved and explored all my life, a hidden central chamber whose pillars and vaulting, rhythm and strength had given shape to everything around them.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

Chutzpah

In the event you've been living in a cave isolated from the outside world for the past decade or so, we'd like to call to your attention that it's the year two-thousand-and-ten A.D., Print On Demand (POD) publishing is available to anyone with a book to publish at little to no cost, and the eBook, also available to anyone with a book to publish at little to no cost, has finally come into its own. So, the question is: Why, then, the necessity or need today for book publishing houses? What function do they perform or what service do they provide that an author could not perform or provide himself, or hire experts to perform or provide for him? In short, why are book publishing houses still in business today at all?

Answer: Beats us. Book publishing houses are an anachronism; a relic of the pre-digital past who have — or rather, should have — no place whatsoever in today's book publishing market for new books. And yet one reads articles such as this one bemoaning the lessening power and influence of book publishing houses and the rise in power of brick-and-mortar book mega-stores and online book retailers with bewildering regularity.

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture [the commercial book publishing industry] is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors [Amazon.com]? Amazon is indisputably the king of books, but the issue remains, as Charlie Winton, CEO of the independent publisher Counterpoint Press puts it, "what kind of king they’re going to be." A vital publishing industry must be able take chances with new authors and with books that don’t have obvious mass-market appeal. When mega-retailers have all the power in the industry, consumers benefit from low prices, but the effect on the future of literature — on what books can be published successfully — is far more in doubt.

Excuse us? What kind of lunatic reasoning is that? "[T]he effect on the future of literature — on what books can be published successfully — is far more in doubt"(!)?

No, you purblind flack. What's in doubt is the future of book publishing houses, not literature or books. Books, literature, and authors will do just fine — flourish, even — without irrelevant middlemen like book publishing houses who while eyeing foremost their own bottom line (not "the production of culture") make decisions on which books should or should not be published, and then take a hefty cut of authors' earnings for the privilege of being published by them.

Talk about irrelevancy. Talk about chutzpah!

A Sneaking, Sinking Suspicion

In a previous S&F entry, we expressed our surprise that eBook readers' seeming preferred method of reading eBooks was not via Amazon's Kindle or its imitators, but via a regular old laptop computer. On learning that, we were provoked to investigate further whereupon we learned that Amazon offers a for-free application for Windows computers called Kindle For PC which permits one to employ one's PC to download and read any Kindle eBook on one's laptop (or desktop) computer. We immediately downloaded the application to try it out, and it operates just as advertised and beautifully.

Uh-oh, we thought. We're in big trouble now. Heretofore, when we saw a book we wanted to buy, we placed it immediately in our Amazon to-buy "basket", and when finances permitted, ordered it to be shipped along with whatever else was in the to-buy basket needed to make up a total order of at least $25 so that shipping would be free.

You see the problem. Now, when we see a book we'd like to buy, the first thing we do is look to see whether it's available as a Kindle eBook. If it is, we simply click on the book's Amazon page, and within a matter of seconds it's on our laptop ready to read. We're embarrassed to tell you just how many Kindle eBooks we've already purchased and how just much we've already spent that we really couldn't afford to spend so we won't. Instead, we'll simply tell you about a Kindle eBook we just downloaded titled, A Tear At The Edge Of Creation: A Radical New Vision For Life In An Imperfect Universe by theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser (it's also available in traditional hardcover and paperback editions). We've had time to read only the Introduction and already we hate the guy. His writing is both lucid and lovely, but his premise, Oh!, his premise!

A true believer in unification [as was Kepler, Newton, Faraday, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger], I spent my Ph.D. years, and many more, searching for a theory of Nature that reflected the belief that all is [ultimately] one. [...] Echoing the teachings of Pythagoras and Plato, this idea carries with it an implicit aesthetic judgment that such theories are more beautiful, and, as the poet John Keats wrote in 1819, that "beauty is truth." And yet, as we investigate the experimental evidence for unification ... we find very little hard data supporting [it]. [...] Slowly, my thoughts converged into an aesthetic based on imperfection rather than perfection. [...] [I]t's time for science to let go of the old aesthetic that espouses perfection as beauty and beauty as truth.

See now why we hate the guy? And why exactly do we hate him? Because we've the sneaking, sinking suspicion he may actually be right.

Unexpected

As constant readers of S&F are aware, we've been a champion of the eBook almost from Day One, and predicted (accurately as it turned out) that eBooks would take off like a rocket in the marketplace when a mass-market-paperback-sized eBook reader with a true ink-on-paper-like screen display could be produced to sell at a reasonable price. We need not recount here that with Amazon's Kindle with its E Ink technology, that prediction has been fulfilled spectacularly. Imagine our surprise, then, on reading this:

Amazon’s Kindle has become the breakthrough e-reader since it was introduced only three years ago, fueling a nearly $1 billion business that Forrester Research says will triple in the next five years.

But it is edged out by the humble laptop as the e-reader of choice, according to a Forrester survey released Monday. Laptop users could very well be reading Kindle editions on a computer using software provided by Amazon, and may be motivated to merely avoid a third device.... Laptops only slightly trump the Kindle, 35 percent to 32 percent. Coming in third was the iPhone, with 15 percent, followed by a Sony e-reader (12 percent), netbooks (10 percent) and the Barnes & Noble Nook (9 percent). Also at 9 percent was the iPad.

RTWT here.

"Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues" — A Brief Heads-Up

When we placed our order for Alex Ross's new book, Listen to This, we did so with some trepidation as we knew the book was an anthology of Ross's work as classical music critic for The New Yorker, and we noted instantly that the title of the book was also the title of a lengthy and very personal piece Ross wrote for The New Yorker in 2004 which piece made us crazy and was the impetus for the very first entry written explicitly for and posted to S&F (there were two entries posted before it, but those two entries were carried over from a predecessor blog to "seed" S&F). When the book arrived several days ago and we saw that Chapter 1 was none other than that 2004 piece, which in the preface to the book Ross calls "a kind of memoir turned manifesto", we expected the worst — viz., that it had its place as the book's lede chapter to serve to make explicit the underlying criteria used to determine which of Ross's New Yorker pieces were to be included in this anthology by virtue of their at least sympathy with certain ideas promoted in that 2004 piece.

Rather than be made crazy again right off the bat by rereading that 2004 piece (expanded for the book) or by reading (or rereading, as the case may be) any of the other included Ross New Yorker pieces — which pieces, remember, we suspected were chosen for inclusion because they were all, tacitly at least, sympathetic to certain ideas promoted in that 2004 piece — we instead turned immediately to Chapter 2, "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues", a lengthy original essay Ross wrote specifically for the book and which therefore perhaps dealt with matters entirely of its own which fell outside any belonging to that lede chapter.

And indeed it did. It's an essay both brilliant and brilliantly written although it requires a certain measure of reader attention neither required nor demanded by any of the book's other chapters, which chapters, we not so incidentally later discovered, do NOT take their cue from the book's lede chapter as we initially feared, and are all a joy to read (or reread, as the case may be), the book's lede chapter occupying that slot, we now understand, so that the reader of the book will be given a clear idea of the critical and personal position the book's author takes in relation to the subjects of the book's other chapters the totality of which subjects amazes by the breadth and depth of Ross's research and knowledge, the trenchant quality of his insights, and the catholicity of his tastes, not to even speak of the evocative lucidity of his prose.

But it's "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues" we want to talk a bit about here. In that essay, Ross presents "a whirlwind history of music" that traces the path followed by "two ... elemental patterns: the old dance [form] known as the chaconne [using the later and now more prevalent French spelling] and a pair of bass lines associated with lament," which path "leads from Renaissance madrigals to Led Zeppelin by way of Monteverdi, Purcell, and Bach."

Sounds suspiciously like the ground plan for an academic musicological treatise, does it not, and we all know just how deadly tortuous and prolix is the standard academic treatise where the imperative has always been: never use 1000 words to express what you have to say if you can manage 10,000.

Ross, however, is writing neither for academics nor musicologists, at least not primarily, but for intelligent civilians with an interest in and/or love of music, and so says what he has to say using largely nontechnical language that’s as informative as it's evocative, all in conformance to that golden rule of all well-made things: the Goldilocks Principle (not too much, not too little, but just right).

The chapter quite naturally begins by explaining just what a chacona is — or more correctly, what it began as:

[A] sexily swirling dance that hypnotized all who heard it. [...] It is in triple time, with a stress on the second beat.... Players in the chacona band lay down an ostinato — a motif, bass line, or chord progression that repeats in an insistent fashion. Other instruments add variations, the wilder the better. [...] The result is a little sonic tornado that spins in circles while hurtling forward.

Ross then explains the basso lamento — "motifs of weeping and longing [that] bring out profound continuities in musical history" — which consists of,

a [four- or six-note] repeating bass line that descends the interval of a fourth, sometimes following the steps of the minor mode [four notes] ... and sometimes inching down the chromatic scale [six notes].

Ross makes all of this clear to us sonically by the use of audio clips accessed on the Listen to This Audio Guide; a nineteen-page collection of audio and video samples keyed to the book by chapter title and page number, and put together by Ross himself. For readers not familiar with the repertoire pertinent to this chapter, it's an invaluable aid, and we found ourself consulting it often once the discussion entered the realms of walking blues and of Led Zeppelin.

Ross then spends the remaining thirty pages of this musically rich chapter tracing the careers of the chaconne and basso lamento throughout the history of Western music "from Renaissance madrigals to Led Zeppelin by way of Monteverdi, Purcell, and Bach," and a fascinating journey it is, too; one you owe it to yourselves not to miss taking part in if only as an outside observer going along for the ride. We assure you that you could have no better tour guide than the author of this superlative chapter and of this excellent book.

Perspective

We're at present reading, The Second World War: A Complete History, by celebrated historian Martin Gilbert, and finding that history to be almost physically painful merely to read about. The appalling magnitude of the loss of life, both of active combatants and of civilians, many thousands of the latter, most of them Jews, losing their lives as the result of systematic, coldblooded, non-combat-related slaughter, and the unspeakable, by-directive brutality and atrocities perpetrated most particularly by the Nazis, and as well by other Axis powers and their partners, are, even today, almost unimaginable and make the consequences of the present wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem but products of a mere street brawl as seem the wars themselves, and we've read only so far as the six-years-war's first year-and-a-half — i.e., up through April 1941, two months before the escalated by-directive atrocities and brutalities, including the systematic, coldblooded, non-combat-related slaughter of hundreds of thousands more of Jews, beginning with the Nazi invasion of Russia (in which the invading Nazis were joined by Finland, Romania, Hungary, and Albania), and before the beginning of the systematic operation of the Nazi death camps, and many months before the U.S. entered the war. Unimaginable today as well are the courage, perseverance, and resourcefulness of the British people in the face of the relentless, heavy German bombings of their cities in the war's first year that over a period of just a few months took the lives of tens of thousands of innocent, noncombatant British civilians.

Reading this minutely detailed history of the war (we were tempted to write, The War) is giving us a renewed perspective on what war and its costs in terms of human suffering, physical destruction, and the destruction of human life really mean. It almost makes us grateful for the existence of nuclear weapons which all but guarantee that no such war could ever again take place on such a scale, for, as all nations are aware, even the fanatic Islamist theocracies, such a war on such a scale today would, once begun, end quickly absent both conquerors and the conquered as all that would remain after but a few weeks or months would be the burned and broken bones of the dead inhabiting a now denuded and lifeless planet.

The Tyranny Of The Singer

As some of you may have surmised on the evidence of this S&F entry, we are at present engaged in reading The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, edited and translated by Berlioz biographer David Cairns. It's our first time reading this autobiography, begun by Berlioz when in his mid-forties, and a most informative, revealing, engaging, and thoroughly delightful read it is. (Berlioz, it turns out, was a regular and expert humorist. Who knew?)

We’ve just finished reading Berlioz's chronicling of his one-and-a-half years spent living in Italy as a 28-year-old Prix de Rome first prize winner, a section of the Memoirs that concludes with a savage assessment of the musical proclivities and sensibilities of the Italians; an assessment with which we found ourself nodding in agreement at almost every sentence. That savage assessment concludes with the following summation:

What are undoubtedly more common in Italy than anywhere else are good voices, voices that are not only full and incisive but agile and flexible as well. But the prevalence of voices lending themselves naturally to vocalization and the public's instinctive love of glitter and display react on each other. Hence the mania for fioriture which debases the finest melodies; hence those convenient vocal formulas which make all Italian phrases sound alike; hence that eternal device of the final cadence, which leaves the singer free to embroider at will but maddens many listeners by its perfunctoriness and dreadful inevitability; hence the constant tendency to break into buffo style which lurks even in the tenderest scenes of pathos; hence, in short, all those abuses which have made of melody, harmony, tempo, rhythm, orchestration, modulation, plot, staging, poetry, the poet, and the composer the abject slaves and playthings of the singer.

My oh my. How familiar does all that sound. Who would have imagined that all this time we've been echoing — albeit unwittingly and totally ignorant of the precedent — the assessment of a Frenchman on something other than matters culinary.

The Reluctant Medical Student

On arriving in Paris...with my fellow-student Alphonse Robert, I gave myself up wholly to studying for the [medical] career which had been thrust upon me, and loyally kept the promise I had given my father on leaving. It was soon put to a severe test when Robert, having announced one morning that he had bought a "subject" (a corpse), took me for the first time to the dissecting-room at the Hospice de la Pitié. At the sight of that terrible charnel-house — the dissected limbs, the grinning faces and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off, the swarms of sparrows wrangling over scraps of lung, the rats in their corner gnawing the bleeding vertebrae — such a feeling of revulsion possessed me that I leapt through the window of the dissecting-room and fled for home as though Death and all his hideous train were at my heels. The shock of that first impression lasted for twenty-four hours. I did not want to hear another word about anatomy, dissection or medicine, and I meditated a hundred mad schemes of escape from the future that hung over me.

Robert lavished his eloquence in a vain attempt to argue away my disgust and demonstrate the absurdity of my plans. In the end he got me to agree to make another effort. For the second time I accompanied him to the hospital and we entered the house of the dead. How strange! The objects which before had filled me with extreme horror had absolutely no effect upon me now. I felt nothing but a cold distaste; I was already as hardened to the scene as any seasoned medical student. The crisis was passed. I found I actually enjoyed groping about in a poor fellow's chest and feeding the winged inhabitants of that delightful place their ration of lung. "Hallo!", Robert cried, laughing. "You're getting civilized. 'Thou giv'st the little birds their daily bread.'" "'And o'er all nature's realm my bounty spread,'" I retorted, tossing a shoulder-blade to a large rat staring at me with famished eyes.

So I went on with my anatomy course, feeling no enthusiasm, but stoically resigned.

[...]

I was on my way to becoming just another student, destined to add one more obscure name to the lamentable catalogue of bad doctors, when one evening I went to the Opéra. They were giving The Danaïds, by Salieri. The pomp and brilliance of the spectacle, the massive sonority of orchestra and chorus, the inspired pathos of Mme Branchu, her extraordinary voice, the rugged grandeur of Dérivis, Hypermnestra's aria, in which I discerned, imitated by Salieri, all the characteristics of Gluck's style as I had conceived it from the pieces from his Orphée in my father's library, and finally the tremendous bacchanal and the sad, voluptuous ballet music that Spontini added to his old compatriot's score, disturbed and exalted me to an extent that I will not attempt to describe. It was though a young man possessing all the instincts of a sailor, but knowing only the boats on the lakes of his native mountains, were suddenly to find himself on board a three-decker ship on the open sea. I hardly slept that night, and the anatomy lesson next morning suffered accordingly.

[...]

The following week I went to the Opéra again. This time I saw Méhul's Stratonice, and Nina, the ballet devised and composed by Persuis.

[...]

Notwithstanding all these distractions and the hours I spent every evening brooding over the melancholy discrepancy between my studies and my inclinations, I persisted in this double life for some time longer, without much benefit to my medical career and without being able to extend my meager knowledge of music. I had given my word and I was holding to it. But when I learnt that the library of the Conservatoire with its wealth of scores was open to the public, the desire to go there and study the works of Gluck, for which I already had an instinctive passion but which were not then being performed at the Opéra, was too strong for me. Once admitted to that sanctuary, I never left it. It was the death-blow to my medical career. The dissecting-room was abandoned for good.

—Hector Berlioz, from, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, edited and translated by David Cairns