Italo Calvino, guest blogger

A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture. A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without having read it," and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his whole life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance, whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.

This passage comes from Mr. Palomar (written in 1983 and published in an English translation by William Weaver in 1985).

Scarbo

When I encountered Scarbo the dwarf in Steven Millhauser's "The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon," the second story in his 1993 Little Kingdoms the other day, I thought immediately of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit. I guess Steven Millhauser was thinking of it as well.

And today in the last novella in the collection, which is presented as an analysis of a series of paintings (some of them portraits) Robert Schumann's opus 9 "Carnaval" and his opus 12 "Fantasiestüke," musical portraits and collections of images themselves, made an appearance. Also today Rat Krespel (otherwise known as Councillor Krespel) in "The Cremona Violin," one of my favorite E.T.A. Hoffmann stories, got his portrait painted in prose by Millhauser.

I am one happy reader these days.

Millhauser’s creation speaks of genius

From From the Realm of Morpheus

For genius—outrageous and daring genius—inventing its own laws—and sustaining all others—expresses itself completely within those laws.

Robert Musil, Guest Blogger

From Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, The Man Without Qualities, written by Robert Musil in 1913:

Something imponderable. An omen. An illusion. As when a magnet releases iron filings and they fall in confusion again. As when a ball of string comes undone. As when a tension slackens. As when an orchestra begins to play out of tune. No details could be adduced that would not also have been possible before, but all the relationships had shifted a little. Ideas whose currency had once been lean grew fat. Persons who would before never have been taken seriously became famous. Harshness mellowed, separations fused, intransigents made concessions to popularity, tastes already formed relapsed into uncertainties. Sharp boundaries everywhere became blurred and some new, indefinable ability to form alliances brought new people and new ideas to the top. Not that these people and ideas were bad, not at all; it was only that a little too much of the bad was mixed with the good, of error with truth, of accommodation with meaning. There even seemed to be a privileged proportion of this mixture that got furthest on in the world; just the right pinch of makeshift to bring out the genius in genius and make talent look like a white hope, as a pinch of chicory, according to some people, brings out the right coffee flavor in coffee. Suddenly all the prominent and important positions in the intellectual world were filled by such people, and all decisions went their way. There is nothing one can hold responsible for this, nor can one say how it all came about. There are no persons or ideas or specific phenomena that one can fight against. There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can't put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysterious disease has eaten away the previous period's seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older. At this point a new era has definitively arrived.

[Translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike]

In the original German:

Etwas Unwägbares. Ein Vorzeichen. Eine Illusion. Wie wenn ein Magnet die Eisenspäne losläßt und sie wieder durcheinandergeraten. Wie wenn Fäden aus einem Knäuel herausfallen. Wie wenn ein Zug sich gelockert hat. Wie wenn ein Orchester falsch zu spielen anfängt. Es würden sich schlechterdings keine Einzelheiten haben nachweisen lassen, die nicht auch früher möglich gewesen wären, aber alle Verhältnisse hatten sich ein wenig verschoben. Vorstellungen, deren Geltung früher mager gewesen war, wurden dick. Personen ernteten Ruhm, die man früher nicht für voll genommen hätte. Schroffes milderte sich, Getrenntes lief wieder zusammen, Unabhängige zollten dem Beifall Zugeständnisse, der schon gebildete Geschmack erlitt von neuem Unsicherheiten. Die scharfen Grenzen hatten sich allenthalben verwischt, und irgendeine neue, nicht zu beschreibende Fähigkeit, sich zu versippen, hob neue Menschen und Vorstellungen empor. Die waren nicht schlecht, gewiß nicht; nein, es war nur ein wenig zu viel Schlechtes ins Gute gemengt, Irrtum in die Wahrheit, Anpassung in die Bedeutung. Es schien geradezu einen bevorzugten Prozentsatz dieser Mischung zu geben, der in der Welt am weitesten kam; eine kleine, eben ausreichende Beimengung von Surrogat, die das Genie erst genial und das Talent als Hoffnung erscheinen ließ, so wie ein gewisser Zusatz von Feigen- oder Zichorienkaffee nach Ansicht mancher Leute dem Kaffee erst die rechte gehaltvolle Kaffeehaftigkeit verleiht, und mit einemmal waren alle bevorzugten und wichtigen Stellungen des Geistes von solchen Menschen besetzt, und alle Entscheidungen fielen in ihrem Sinne. Man kann nichts dafür verantwortlich machen. Man kann auch nicht sagen, wie alles so geworden ist. Man kann weder gegen Personen noch gegen Ideen oder bestimmte Erscheinungen kämpfen. Es fehlt nicht an Begabung noch an gutem Willen, ja nicht einmal an Charakteren. Es fehlt bloß ebensogut an allem wie an nichts; es ist, als ob sich das Blut oder die Luft verändert hätte, eine geheimnisvolle Krankheit hat den kleinen Ansatz zu Genialem der früheren Zeit verzehrt, aber alles funkelt von Neuheit, und zum Schluß weiß man nicht mehr, ob wirklich die Welt schlechter geworden sei oder man selbst bloß älter. Dann ist endgültig eine neue Zeit gekommen.

Four Seasons Reading Club

Michael keeps lists of the books we read together, and makes an “annual report” every May. Here is the list from 2018-2019.

Report for the Four Seasons Reading Club

I feel so very fortunate to be married to a "literary professional" (now retired from teaching college). I'm also fortunate that he has kept a list of the books we read during the 2015-2016 season. We began calling ourselves the "Vacation Reading Club," then the "Summer Reading Club," and then when summer turned to fall, we settled into the "Four Seasons Reading Club." By the organization of the musical year you could say that we are now entering our second season.

We sit together just about every day after lunch (sometimes we read at other times, and between books we take a day off), me with a pot of tea, and Michael with a cup of coffee, and we read an average of 20 pages. We take good advantage of our local university library (and sometimes our not-so-local bookseller) so that we have two copies of each book. We often remark on the exact same sentences or paragraphs, and we both crave more Willa Cather once we finish one of her novels.

(We both read other books in addition to our FSRC books.)

Here's the list of what we have read together during the last twelve months, as well as a list of what we have abandoned. We always vote on whether to abandon a book, and we almost always agree. I enjoyed Our Mutual Friend more than Michael did, but to me it seemed like a random collection of character studies, perhaps of people who he "fleshed out" but didn't use in any of his previous books. Michael has also read a lot more Dickens than I have, so I kind of have a Dickens deficit that should be remedied.

Completed Books:

Herman Meville, Moby-Dick

Willa Cather, A Lost Lady , Death Comes for the Archbishop ,The Old Beauty and Others

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory ; Ada

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

Robert Walser, The Tanners , trans. Susan Bernofsky

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis , trans. Susan Bernofsky

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Robert Walser, Fairy Tales , trans. Daniele Pantano and James Reidel

Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, ed. Ronald de Leeuw, trans. Arnold Pomerans

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark , Lucy Gayheart , Alexander’s Bridge , Shadows on the Rock

Abandoned books:

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I

The Real Toscanini: Musicians Reveal the Maestro

Cesare Civetta is a conductor by profession and not a writer, so the biographical parts of this book are (thankfully) not overly "writerly." Civetta became interested in learning about Toscanini when his high school band director, who had played trumpet in Toscanini's orchestra, introduced him to Toscanini's Beethoven recordings. He supplemented his reading and listening by interviewing people who knew Toscanini and worked with him. During the 1970s Civetta produced a 35-part interview series on WFUV (Fordham University's radio station), and his guests included members of the NBC Symphony, singers who performed with Toscanini at La Scala as well as at the Metropolitan Opera, and other conductors. He also gathered information privately from people who knew Toscanini and worked with him in various capacities.

This extremely useful book is a thematically organized collection of quotations from 40-50 people (including many people I knew from my days in New York in the late 1970s, so I enjoy "hearing" their voices). Each chapter is divided into subheadings that offer commentary on a given subject from several musicians. The chapter on tempo, for example, includes subheadings that discuss rubato, Toscanini's sense of timing, his clarity of beat, his rhythmic accuracy, tempo in relation to acoustics, and working with soloists. There's a chapter on opera, one on musical architecture, and chapters on balance, baton technique, philosophy, rehearsal style, and recording.

The book is rich with quotations from Alan Shulman, A cellist in the NBC Symphony, who was also an excellent composer, the oboist Robert Bloom, the violist Emanuel Vardi, the violinist, Misha Mischakoff (by way of his daughter's book), bassist David Walter, the choral conductor Robert Shaw, and many other musicians. Together they not only describe Toscanini as a conductor and as a human being, but they demonstrate a kind of like-mindedness that permeated Toscanini's musical New York, and informed its first true golden age of music.

I'll give you just one quote from Josef Gingold, and then you'll need to get a copy of the book to read the rest.

"My wife likes to tell the story about the day I had some bug and wasn't feeling well enough to go to a rehearsal, but there was something on the program that I wanted to play, so I said: 'I'll bundle up and go, and I'll play that one piece and then come right home.' I went there feverish and in no condition really to play; but once the Maestro began the rehearsal, I became so absorbed in what we were doing that I forgot I was sick, I forgot about myself entirely; and at the end of the rehearsal I was feeling completely well. This was the effect Toscanini had: when you were playing with him your mind never wandered for one moment; you were completely absorbed in music-making and one with him and with the composer."

The Viola in My Life--in My Life

I spent the last couple of years helping Bernard Zaslav write The Viola in My Life: An Alto Rhapsody, and a copy of the book finally arrived in today's mail.

I have been a musical memoir junkie for most of my life, and a deep-seated goal of mine has always been to help someone write a memoir. Now I have done it, the book is in print, and everyone can enjoy Bernie's stories as much as I have enjoyed them. I feel very proud for having served as sometime editor and sometime muse for this project.

Bernie began his musical life as a violinist. Immediately after graduating from Juilliard, he made the permanent switch to viola when he got called to play in Raymond Scott's band for the summer. He studied viola for a year, and landed a job in the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell. Eventually he returned to New York, and after a nine-year hiatus (selling plumbing supplies!), he began playing in Broadway shows. In the late 1950s he began his career as the violist of a series of important American string quartets, including the Composers Quartet in New York (sort of a prototype for the Kronos Quartet), the Fine Arts Quartet, the Vermeer Quartet, and finally the Stanford String Quartet.

Bernie describes the personalities of many iconic musicians (mostly conductors, composers, pianists, and string players), and he also describes the personalities of the luthiers he knew in New York (he hung out at their 57th street shops between gigs). He gives the surprisingly entertaining details of his quest for the perfect instrument (which he finally found), and elaborates on his obsession with bow collecting. His "fermata" (he calls some of his digressions "fermatae") called "Fiddlesticks" (my personal subtitle is "confessions of a bow nut") makes for wonderful reading. In addition to collecting bows during his adventures and travels, Bernie collected lifelong friends (including me). His life as the middle voice of many string quartets has been full of all sorts of wonderful musical and personal joy, and I think this "view from the middle" will resonate with other people (like me) who love to play the viola in chamber ensembles and orchestras.

The book comes with two terrific CDs that are tucked into each of its covers. One has viola and piano music, and one has string chamber music. There is an excellent index, a thorough discography, and lots of pictures. You can get it from Amazon.

Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers

Bálint András Varga's Three Question for Sixty-Five Composers is a goldmine. It was published in Budapest in 1986, and just came into print in an English language edition, which has been revised to include post 1986 updates, and a handful of younger composers who are still living.

Here are Varga's questions:

1. Have you had an experience similar to Witold Lutoslawski's: he heard John Cage's Second Piano Concerto on the radio--an encounter which changed his musical thinking and ushered in a new creative period, the first result of which was his Jeux vénitiens (1960-1961). [N.B. Varga was referring, of course, to John Cage's Concert for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra.]

2. A composer is surrounded by sounds. Do they influence you and are they in any way of significance for your compositional work?

3. How far can one speak of a personal style and where does self-repetition begin?

I'm surprised to find composers I haven't heard of before, like Sandor Balassa, who responded to the third question in a most compelling way.

The artist, while changing his subject, tells of this and that--what he has experienced and dreamed of in the course of his life.

The permanent and repeated moments are manifested through the author's personality and his limitations. The fact that his subjects are communicated by him, means that we see through his eyes, we experience his works filtered through his personality.

He goes on to say:

I also want to tell people to remain faithful to their youthful ideals. Why should I only do so just once? The fact that modernist music has lost the sympathy of listeners is due in part to its renunciation of the principle of repetition. Look, I am no linguist. I have no intention of inventing new languages. I would like to communicate something in the language we have, so that my message should reach its addressees. My main concern is for them to understand me.

My next excerpt of particular note comes from Sir Harrison Birtwistle's response to the second question:

Color is like orchestration, if you like. You can't divorce color from a picture, it is part of it. You cannot divorce orchestration from a composition.

I just find smell very evocative, in a purely Proustian sense. Like taste. I do not know if it has anything do do with music but it seems to me to be a very potent recaller of material. Smell is something . . . I smelt something the other day that I hadn't smelt for forty years: the smell of a dairy. The sour smell of slightly stale milk--no matter how you clean the place you can never get rid of it. I went to a farm, and I smelt this and it was amazing--it was my childhood.

But do you get any musical ideas from smells?

No.

Then there's Elliot Carter:

To work out a series of stylistic devices and then use them as formulae bores me as a prospect and it bores me in others who do it. Self-repetition is to me a sign of fatigue.

and George Crumb:

All of the great composers of the past had immediately recognizable fingerprints. With a more recent composer like Stravinsky, for example, even though he is referred to as having changed style many times, what strikes me about his music over his whole lifetime is its consistency.

I find the response to the third question by the "humble" Morton Feldman quite interesting:

Many people feel that if they hear one piece of mine, they heard it all. Yet all Rembrandts are more or less the same. All Giottos are more or less the same.

You are not hurt when people make this remark? Perhaps you agree?

About my music? I don't agree. It means they are not listening. All Proust is the same. Kafka is the same. All gardens in Vienna are the same.

Why is it people expect music to be so different? I'll tell you why. Because people get very bored, they can't listen to music. They can't listen to music . . . My problem is that I want all my pieces to be the same but I haven't got the discipline to make it the same . . .

Pierre Schaeffer's response to the third question comes as a surprise:

I cannot answer this question because I am not a composer. Why did I stop writing which I had always regarded as an experiment? I had a positive and a negative reason.

The positive reason has nothing to do with music. I used to work a great deal in radio and television--but after all, we only have one life and for me, writing was my actual vocation. I only have a few years left to write my books: philosophical works, novels, and other things. For me, music was an accident. An unfortunate accident.

The negative reason: music today is in a crisis. My contemporaries try to flee from their all-encompassing metaphysical fear in that they seek an impossible sort of music: stochastic or repetitive music, Stockhausenian blah-blah, Cageian clownery. I do not wish to become the victim of new simplicity--I prefer to reject it all.

There are many more interviews I could quote, but I'll save further discovery and delight for you. Gunther Schuller's interview is so compelling that I cannot bear to take only an excerpt. It certainly whets my appetite for his forthcoming memoir Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty, which happens to also be published by the University of Rochester Press.

Byron Janis talks about playing with arthritis

I'm in the middle of reading Byron Janis' memoir Chopin and Beyond. His career itself as a young pianist was "paranormal." The pinkie on one of hands (I'm not sure which one) had its nerves severed when he was 10, and he continued to use it--playing without any feeling in it. He managed to, without ever paying for lessons, study with the greatest piano teachers and pianists of the 20th century. He seemed to waltz through life, surviving three near fatal car accidents through acts of serendipity, piano keys jumped off his piano three times while playing three different concerts, and various other seriously "not normal" things happened to him. My rational and post-Freudian analytical (and unschooled) mind would say that he has a penchant for "magical thinking" because of the events that happened in his childhood. There was no "Tiger Mother" here--just a love for music, inborn talent, good looks, and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He was also taught the right things by the right people. I could be proven wrong about not attributing events in his life to the paranormal (and I don't know what to make of the weeping Chopin death mask), but Janis makes a pretty good case for the ability to transcend the physical world we all believe to know by way of music.

Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians

These flights of partially-informed musical/biographical fancy by the Illinois-born Elbert Hubbard are a great joy for people (like me) who enjoy reading the works of 19th-century and early-20th-century American eccentrics. As you will see (and read), Hubbard was one of a kind. Volume 14 of Hubbard's Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great from 1907, has character portraits of Wagner, Paganini, Chopin, Schumann, Bach, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Beethoven, Handel, Verdi, Mozart, and Brahms (an example of a hundred-year-old "top ten list" (I know, there are 12). At 359 pages it is a lot to read, but I'm putting a link to it here so that when times get tough you can dip into it. The other volumes in the set are also available on line. I particularly like reading his Love, Life & Work: Being a Book of Opinions Reasonably Good-Natured Concerning how to Attain the Highest Happiness for One's Self with the Least Possible Harm to Others.

Van Loon's Lives

When I feel out of sorts I often go to my bookshelf and pick out a book that I might have bought when I felt out of sorts at some earlier time. The book I picked up yesterday was Van Loon's Lives by Hendrik Willem van Loon. I bought it at a used book store thinking that it was the book I tried to read in second grade (I wanted to read every book in the school library, and this was the biggest one of all) called The Story of Mankind by the same writer. When I realized I had the wrong book it went on my book shelf and sat there for a few years, until yesterday.

The book, written in 1942, is a series of scenarios involving dinner parties with various people from various times history. Some dinner party "groups" are made of people who lived at around the same time, and some groups are made of people who lived in entirely different times from one another. Van Loon introduces each guest to the reader, he and his wife have to decide what to serve, and we get to read about their dinner discussion. Here are some of the chapters that involve musicians:

Chapter IV: This Time Erasmus Had a Surprise for Us, and we Make the Acquaintance of the BACHS and the BREUGHELS

In the course of this chapter the host plays Bach a recording of his Toccata and Fugue as orchestrated by Stokowski, and Bach is not impressed. He thinks it sounds like something Vivaldi might have written before he learned to write. J.S. Bach is joined by his ancestors and his sons, and W.F. does a considerable amount of drinking. Of course the Bachs spent much of the evening playing music while the Breughels painted their portraits.

There is reference also to dinner guest from another evening, Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire (I learned his full name from this book), who was impressed with Frits' (another member of the party-giving crew) typewriter. "If I had one of those contraptions," he said, playing with the keys, "I might have done a little writing."

Chapter XI: SAINT FRANCIS, H.C. ANDERSEN, and MOZART Come, But They Do Not Come Alone

Chapter XVII: And Now a Rather Strange Combination, EMILY DICKINSON and FREDERICK CHOPIN, But Emily Has the Time of Her Life, and Chopin Shows us What Can Be Done With a Minni-Piano

This book is sure to keep me "in sorts" for a long time.