selfdivider

One classical music reviewer that I’ve been reading with pleasure is Bernard Holland of NY Times. His reviews usually are shorter than most, but he is remarkably deft at describing the compositions under discussion with concision and understanding. I learn a lot from reading his reviews. Yet he is also one reviewer I disagree with the most. For example, this Glenn Gould assessment. And this morning, in the review of Brentano String Quartet’s concert featuring “late style” compositions by Brahms and Shostakovich, Holland had this to say about Mozart and late style -

Late style is less appropriate to composers who might have thought they had another 20 years to go when unexpected deaths turned middle periods into late ones. Mozart had no late period; he died suddenly in his prime.

This seems like a preposterous claim to me. I am no Mozart scholar, but there are many indications that Mozart was very much aware of his failing health and mortality in the last years. Some of his last letters to Constanze are bone-chilling, and they contain none of the youthful exuberance of his earlier letters -

If people would see into my heart, I should almost feel ashamed… To me, everything is cold - cold as ice. Everything is empty.

The letters are quoted from Andrew Steptoe’s Mozart-Da Ponte Operas, and the icy emptiness which Mozart wrote about is again described by the composer as “a kind of emptiness which hurts [him] dreadfully - a kind of longing, which is never satisfied, which never ceases, which persists and increases daily.” Late style I’d say so. Edward Said, in his magisterial On Late Style which I’d briefly discussed in a previous post, writes about the last of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas, Cosi fan tutte, as the exemplary work of the composer’s late style. In short, Said describes Cosi as a work that bears its composer’s icy sense of control and rigor, cold-heartedness disguised as comedy, and refusal to bend toward customary views of emotions, especially, of love.

I suspect that Bernard Holland’s refusal of Mozart’s late style stems from a rather elementary view of what late style might be, insofar as today’s review is concerned. He describes Mendelssohn’s late quartet as “bitter and death-ridden… an act of mourning,” and Shostakovich of the Quartet #15 as “a man writing his own obituary.” Which are apt descriptions for those particular compositions, but I wonder if those phrases color the Holland’s notion of late style, as well. Not every work of late style veers toward mourning. Beethoven’s last works, for example. Yes, there is the mournful Richard Strauss of Four Last Songs and Metamorphosen, but also of Der Rosenkavalier: rigorously technical, impenetrable.

And there is Mozart.

(Image: by Anthony Goicolea)

My wife is delivering our second child this week (a daughter). So please excuse me as I can’t post as much as I’d like to. It’ll get more hectic with family flying in from California. And school’s starting again in a week! I will cardiac arrest right after all this is over. For some reason, I’m very nervous, although I’ve been through this process before. I’m freaking out, also, because I chose not to go to a refresher Lamaze class at the hospital, because I fell asleep my first time there. But I think I forgot most of the techniques, and we’ll have to resort to impromptu breathing patterns during labor. It is very likely that at my wife’s side, I’ll look like a third-base coach sending complex and frantic signals to a confused base runner. My wife, on the other hand, exudes a Siddhartan calm. Just an amazing woman.

Two nights ago, I took her out on a date. A last-chance respite, you know, before our incarceration. We went to the Radu Lupu recital at the Carnegie Hall. One of my favorite discs is Radu Lupu’s Late Brahms; when I die, I want to lose my final consciousness listening to his Opus 118 A-major intermezzo. Or Weird Al Yankovic, maybe, who knows.

Anyway, the first half of Lupu’s recital was devoted to Schubert’s D. 850 Sonata, and the second half, to the first book of Debussy’s Preludes. The hall was packed. Amazing, considering that there was no war-horse virtuoso piece nor an especially intriguing program. But I suspect all of them were there, just like me, to hear the sheer beauty of sound that Lupu can produce out of the piano. I don’t know of any other pianist who is capable of producing that kind of tone from the instrument. Maybe Krystian Zimerman or Murray Perahia.

Schubert’s D. 850 Sonata is called “Gasteiner” because it was composed in 1825, during Schubert’s visit to the spa town of Gastein. He would die in three years. His last symphony, the “Great” symphony in C-major, is also based on the sketches he made in Gastein in 1825. So the sonata, too, has a Beethovenian grandeur. I don’t know if Lupu was over-pedaling or if the Carnegie Hall’s acoustics were suspect, but the first movement came off a bit hazy. But the Con moto slow movement was perhaps the finest I’ve heard, either live or on record. And it was beyond my understanding how Lupu could make the mysterious hush of the ppp which ends the sonata linger in the hall’s air.

The Preludes were even finer. Became a suite of damn-near miraculous luminous sound in Lupu’s hands. As an encore, he played something from the second book of Debussy’s Preludes (I can’t remember the title, because Lupu didn’t announce his encores). Then for the second encore, he played the C sharp-minor from Schubert’s Moments Musicaux. In virtually all the renditions I’ve heard, the pianists invariably try to accentuate and over-emphasize the piece’s connection to Bach. But Lupu downplayed such a connection, and just… played. It sang as I’ve never heard it sing.

It should be obvious to you by now that this post isn’t much of an objective music review, because it was impossible for me not to love the moment. During the slow movement of the Schubert, I was holding my wife’s hand, my forearm nudged against her side. The entire hall was silent, straining to listen to the quiet music of Schubert, then I felt my baby squirm and move, grazing against my arm. I looked at my wife in wonder. I was so happy. She’s listening to this, I thought, the way the notes hang in the air before their decay.

(Image: by Shaun Tan)

So I wanted to follow up on yesterday’s post on Adorno, Schubert and Sebald, especially about the operetta (Das Dreimäderlhaus) that Adorno alludes to in comparing the wanderer in the Winterreise with the fictional doppelgänger of Schubert Like any self-respecting scholar would have done, I googled “Adorno” and “Dreimäderlhaus.” It turns out that Alex Ross had briefly mentioned Adorno’s hatred for the operetta in his profile of Adorno he’d written for The New Yorker back in 2003. From the article, I learned something even creepier: Hitler had also condemned Das Dreimäderlhaus in a speech he gave in 1929, basically for the same reason as Adorno, that Schubert’s sacred melodies were defiled.

Ross’s article is a good one, especially in its clear-eyed assessment of Adorno’s influence on German music. There’s a bit about Stockhausen. A mention about Eminem and a composition by Helmut Oehring called “Do You Want A Blowjob” But all that aside, what makes the article special for me is a sequence of three sentences (after which all of Alex’s writing must be seen as an inevitable denouement) which has the epigrammatic zing of, let’s say, a mordant Fénéon dispatch -

Tragically, Adorno was himself a victim of the shock tactics of pop culture. In April, 1969, a group of female activists interrupted his lecture, “An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking,” by flashing their breasts in his face and taunting him with flowers. He died a few months later, on August 6, 1969.

(Speaking of Fénéon, I just learned through The Dizzies that Luc Sante has a new blog. Go check it out.)

Adorno writes about Schubert’s song cycles this way -

They link up with poems in which again and again the image of death present themselves to the man who wanders among them as diminutively as Schubert in the Dreimäderlhaus. A stream, a mill and a dark desolate wintry landscape stretching away in the twilight of mock suns, timeless, as in a dream - these are hallmarks of the setting of Schubert’s songs, with dried flowers for their monumental ornament… The eccentric structure of this landscape, where each point is equidistant from the center, is revealed to the wanderer who traverses it without making any headway, every development is its own perfect antithesis, the first step is as close to death as the last.

In 1972, well before he started writing outside of the academia, W. G. Sebald wrote a great essay called “The Death Motif in Kafka’s The Castle.” In the essay, Sebald mentions the particular Adorno quote cited above to link Schubert’s winter wanderer to Kafka’s K, to emphasize the point that the image of journey or an aleatory hike is the symbol of death in both Schubert and Kafka’s works. It should also seem obvious that Sebald’s own prose works operate on this principle as well. Writing about K’s yearning for death as a desire for salvation, Sebald writes that in death, K can avoid the terrifying alternative - to be a “stranger and pilgrim” on earth, unable to die like Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus, or the “Wandering Jew.”

Kafka’s presence is pervasive in Sebald’s Vertigo. Not only is one of the four sections from the book dedicated to Kafka (”Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva”), Kafka appears throughout the novel as an apparition, or in the forms of doppelgängers (think of the twin boys Sebald meets on the bus, who look just like Kafka). Kafka’s story of Hunter Gracchus plays a prominent role in Sebald’s narrative as well; Sebald carefully retells the story of Hunter Gracchus, especially focusing on the two men carrying the bier upon which Gracchus lies. This image of Kafka’s Gracchus finds its double image, when Sebald, in Pizzeria Verona, sees two men carrying a bier and upon it, a dead body. More tellingly, in the section “Il ritorno in patria,” perhaps the most autobiographical piece in all of Sebald’s writing, the Sebald-narrator remembers his childhood years in W (Wertach) and Engelwirt. He remembers a beautiful girl named Romana, a twenty three year-old woman whom Sebald seems to have idolized as a child. The Sebald-narrator remembers spying on Romana having sex with “Schlag the hunter” in a woodshed. Schlag is a huntsman who regularly disappears in the Black Forest for weeks before surfacing in the town again. Later, the Sebald-narrator says that whenever he saw the ice stores open up for summer in his town, he’d imagine that he and Romana would be locked in the ice store by accident, and holding each other tight, they would freeze to death (a variation on Stendhal’s “crystallization” metaphor, which appears in the first section of Vertigo: “Beyle, or Love Is a Madness Most Discreet.”) Anyway, Schlag the hunter is later found on the other side of the border, in Austria, having died from falling off from a cliff into the ravines. The Gracchus image is vivified again and Schlag becomes Gracchus’ doppelgänger, as Sebald writes that above the sledge which bore Schlag’s body was a wine-colored horse blanket (above Gracchus’ bier is a floral-patterned cover.) Shortly after seeing Schlag’s dead body, the Sebald-narrator falls gravely ill, the first of many instances of vertigo which would recur throughout the rest of his life, as we learn from Sebald’s subsequent books.

The question is: why was Sebald so obsessed and unnerved by these doppelgänger moments which serve as structural buttresses of his prose works Too many answers, too little time, I suppose. But at least for now, we can turn back to the Adorno quote on Schubert at the head of this post, the one that Sebald used to compare Kafka to Schubert. If you read closely, Adorno compares Schubert’s diminutive wanderer from Winterreise, who sees the image of death everywhere in his journey, to the “Schubert in the Dreimäderlhaus.” This is a mysterious and beguiling comparison: the Dreimäderlhaus was not Schubert’s own composition, but a cheesy and sentimental operetta which adapted Schubert’s music to fictionally imagine Schubert’s romantic life. Adorno loathed the Dreimäderlhaus, yet still used the operetta to compare the Winterreise wanderer to the fictional doppelgänger of Schubert.

This irony would not have been lost on Sebald when he used the specific quote for his essay on Kafka. As much as he maintained that fiction, in essence, is merely a string of lies, Sebald was also riveted and disturbed by the level and content of truth that fiction brought forth. (It is no coincidence that the word “Schwindel,” the German term for “vertigo” and the word Sebald uses as his novel’s title, also means “fraud” or “deceit.”) Any doppelgänger effect is also, strictly speaking, only an illusion. Yet such illusions, for Sebald and those who read him, open up other insights, different roads meandering into difficult, uncanny truths.

In the section relating to Kafka in Vertigo, Sebald notes that according to his diary, Kafka had gone to a cinema one day in 1913, and muses if Kafka hadn’t watched Student of Prague, a Faustian tale in which a hero named Balduin sells his soul to a stranger named Scapinelli to woo a girl. “[Kafka],” Sebald writes, “would have recognized a kind of doppelgänger [in Balduin]… just as Balduin recognizes his other self” -

In one of the very first scenes, Balduin, the finest swordsman in all Prague, confronts his own image in the mirror, and presently, to his horror, that unreal figure steps out of the frame, and henceforth follows him as the ghostly shadow of his own restlessness.

The ghostly shadow of fiction, in other words, always accompanies us in real life through our winterreise, as our own, unshakable doppelgänger.

(The first image - “Winterreise” by Caspar David Friedrich)

No, I am not drawing parallels between Stalin and Stockhausen. Just saying that I was thinking about both yesterday. I went to the bookstore to see if I might finally buy Montefiore’s Young Stalin, the book that was high on my “to read” list. I’m sure the book has its merits, but I’m sorry to say that I could not stomach its first page. This is how the book’s Prologue begins -

At 10:30 a.m. on the sultry morning of Wednesday, 26 June 1907, in the seething central square of Tiflis, a dashing mustachioed cavalry captain in boots and jodhpurs…

You gotta be kidding me with those adjectives. We get “sultry” and “seething” in a quick succession, and the sentence is not even halfway done. I’m not so hot about “dashing mustachioed” either. And the writing in the first few pages is nauseatingly over-spiced with unfortunate adjectives and adverbs, shouting: INTRIGUE IS HERE! Very disappointed because I’m sure the narrative is as good as many of the reviewers have mentioned. Call me a fascist, but I don’t think I could get involved in the story past all that purple, purple, purple.

Later in the day, my friend M called me to see what I was up to, if I wanted to catch the Mayweather-Hatton fight tonight. Then he told me if I knew that Stockhausen died. I was caught off guard, not because I was stunned by his death, but rather because for some reason, I’d thought he died a long time ago. God, I thought to myself, he lived a full life.

So right now, I’m listening to the new recording of Stimmung, by Paul Hillier and Theater of Voices. Stockhausen composed the work after wandering through the ruins of Mexico, contemplating about the way that the Aztecs recited the magic names of gods through stimmung. The composition consists of 51 models organized around four eroto-spritual poems and the magic names of ancient gods (i.e. Aztec, ancient Greek). Six singers on six microphones (which are tuned to an inaudible harmonic of B-flat) progress through the models by singing in overtones. As you can see from the image, Stimmung is not a traditionally “written” work. The singers have a great amount of freedom, even in choosing the order in which the models and names should be sung; the order can be decided upon beforehand or improvised during the performance. I guess Cortazar’s Hopscotch may be a literary analogue, except that Stimmung allows for an even greater aleatory freedom and spontaneity. (For a fantastic explanation of Stimmung, go here.)

I’ve never been to a performance of Stimmung, but would love to, as it is very much a work which almost requires a live audience to convey its constantly morphing spiritual atmospheres. But Hillier’s luminous new recording is as close as you can get to a live experience, I guess. Stockhausen was once asked how he had arrived at the novel compositional technique of Stimmung, and his response is as beautiful and magical as anything you might ever read about creating a work of art -

After a few days, my work was only possible during the night. The children needed silence also during the day. So I began humming, did not sing loudly anymore, began to listen to my vibrating skull… Nothing oriental, nothing philosophical: just the two babies, a small house, silence, loneliness, night, snow, ice: pure miracle.

(The greatest Stockhausen photo, ever: by Betty Freeman)

It seems really cold this morning in NYC and my back is killing me because I slept on the couch for the week. Whenever I have a lot of work to do, I can’t put it upon myself to go into the bedroom and sleep like a decent human being. Anyways, my wife just brought me a cup of coffee and Glenn Gould is on the stereo, the French Suites. I think of how so many artists - from Mozart to Klimt and dozens in between - end up being skewered by Thomas Bernhard, but Glenn Gould is immortalized. “We exist,” Gould says in The Loser according to its narrator, “we don’t have any other choice.” Bernhard’s life and work in a nutshell, in other words.

Which makes me think of Edward Said on Glenn Gould. Although Edward Said’s interpretation of Glenn Gould’s pianism is too dependent on Adorno’s description of Bach’s polyphony (perhaps the weakest chapter in On Late Style), his ultimate assessment of Gould’s genius seems spot on to me -

The tension in Gould’s virtuosity remains unresolved: that is, by virtue of their eccentricity his performances make no attempt to ingratiate themselves with his listeners or reduce the distance between their lonely ecstatic brilliance and the confusions of the everyday world.

Gould’s disinterest in resolving the tension between aesthetic pleasure and worldly confusions finds its literary counterpoint in Cavafy. Said quotes from “The God Abandons Antony,” in which Cavafy orders Antony, before his attendant death, to hold still in absolute silence so that he can hear the exquisite music of Alexandria in its exact notes, for the final time -

go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final pleasure - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

Said claims that this refusal to resolve the tension between disenchantment and pleasure is the prerogative of late style in art: “[Late style] has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them.” This seems entirely right to me, too. For example: Beethoven’s Opus 110 Sonata. Its Arioso dolente is perhaps the most despairing passage of music among his late sonatas (Beethoven’s accompanying injunction is Ermattet, klagend - Exhausted, lamenting). Yet it leads, eventually and inexplicably, by the way of fugue, into a finale which is transcendentally ecstatic, life-affirming. The twin flames of disenchantment and pleasure. I think one of Jean Genet’s metaphors in Prisoner of Love illustrates this concept of late style, albeit inadvertently, better than anything I can say about it -

If you put two matches together and light them, they twine so close you can’t separate their single ember. Two immortalities in one. And so with the bard and the power that he sings, as long as no one goes and touches what’s left of the confused but splendid conflagration.

One more application of late style: W. G. Sebald. It bothers me to the n-th degree when different scholars and critics peg his work as unremittingly pessimistic, without hope, even going so far as to proclaim that the trajectory of his work seemed to foretell his untimely death. Is it me or does their reading seem reductive and problematic to you, too They miss the tiny moments of gleam which Sebald pits against the portents of destruction - the rendering of the pleasure and the disenchantment. Without this notice, it seems to me, one is reading only 1/2 of Sebald. The narrator’s notice of a flitting butterfly and the myriad of quartz fragments glimmering in the Alps, before his dreaming of the Great Fire of London in Vertigo. The bodies of herrings which glow in phosphorence after their death (The Rings of Saturn). The impenetrable beauty of salt crystals that the narrator of The Emigrants notices in the salt-frames of Kissengen, after he comes out of the neglected Jewish cemetery that’s almost crumbling into the ground. What to make of these numerous, tiny moments of “beatific” pleasure and beauty, pitted against the scenes of destruction

The answer comes from Sebald himself, in an interview with Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s Bookworm (you can listen to the podcast here, or read an excerpt from the interview in the forthcoming The Emergence of Memory). Silverblatt astutely notices that there is something in Sebald’s prose which brings “the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, to the enormity of the post-concentration camp world.” Sebald agrees with Silverblatt’s assessment, and his reply in characterizing his project is not so distant from Said’s characterization of what late style is, how it renders both pleasure and disenchantment, without the artist’s attempt to resolve their contradiction -

I think Walter Benjamin at one point says that there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. And from that, by extrapolation, one could conclude that perhaps in order to get the full measure of the horrific, one needs to remind the reader of beatific moments of life, because if you existed solely with your imagination in le monde concentrationnaire, then you would somehow not be able to sense it. And so it requires that contrast.

One of my favorite chapters in The Rest Is Noise is the Benjamin Britten chapter. Perhaps because Alex Ross, who is also a keen reader of W. G. Sebald, points out the fact that the fishing town of Aldeburgh and the surrounding regions on the east coast of the British Isles, where Britten’s Peter Grimes is set and where Britten lived for most of his life, is also the very locale that haunts Sebald in The Rings of Saturn. The desolate melancholy of Aldeburgh’s landscape is the backdrop against which Peter Grimes, a fisherman, loses his mind; the same gray landscape of Suffolk’s sea coast also causes the narrator of The Rings of Saturn to lose all his bearings, slipping into a catatonic state of total immobility. When put to the task of explaining his opera, Britten said quite succinctly, “The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.” The tenor of Britten’s comment resonates in Sebald’s prose, as well, in all of his major works, as his primary occupation.

At the end of Act III, after Peter Grimes loses his mind and sails into the sea to kill himself, the chorus sings about the eternal revolutions of the sea: “In ceaseless motion comes and goes the tide… it rolls in ebb yet terrible and deep.” Ross, in his typically lucid and understated prose, notes that this ocean of sound, “neither dark nor light, neither major nor minor,” marks the fisherman’s grave.

In the third section of The Rings of Saturn, the Sebald-narrator is walking on a footpath that runs along the dunes and low cliffs, a few miles south of Lowestoft; a town, incidentally, where Britten was born. He spots a few tents along the beach, put up by some nomadic fishermen as if they have been fishing there and gazing out to the sea since time immemorial. Sebald notes that fishing no longer affords a living, as much of the fish population has been decimated by the pollution of the North Sea, whose waters bear tons of mercury, cadmium, and lead, not to mention fertilizer and pesticides. If not for fishing, then, why are they there

They say it is rare for any of the fisherman to establish contact with his neighbour, for, although they all look eastward and see both the dusk and the dawn coming up over the horizon, and although they are all moved, I imagine, by the same unfathomable feelings, each of them is nonetheless quite alone and dependent on no one but on himself and on the few items of equipment he has with him, such as a penknife, a thermos flask, or the little transistor radio that gives forth a scarcely audible, scratchy sound, as if the pebbles being dragged back by the waves were talking to each other. I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

Alex Ross’s description of the ending of Peter Grimes, the ocean sound which marks the fisherman’s grave - “neither dark nor light, neither major nor minor” - also seems like a perfect way to characterize Sebald’s passage quoted above, don’t you think And in an indulgent flight of fancy, nothing more, I can well imagine that each fisherman as described by Sebald - each lost to his neighbor, staring out to the emptiness and the ceaseless revolutions of the sea - might as well be a Peter Grimes or one of the ghosts of the dead who haunt the fisherman into his final dementia and suicide. Peter Grimes, before he sails off to sea to sink in his own boat, asks, “What harbor shelters peace, away from tidal waves, away from storms?” No man can answer that question, of course, and Peter Grimes sails off into the terrible ocean, the same bleak body of water that the fishermen in The Rings of Saturn fix their eyes and thoughts on.

(Last image, by Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Thanks a lot for coming out to The Blue Notebooks interview with Alex Ross last night. Alex is somewhere in the photo on the left, talking and autographing; sorry about the “Where’s Waldo” effect but I couldn’t really find a picture from last night that I could use. I was quite nervous in talking to him, as I’ve been his avid reader for many years now. And it was difficult trying to find a way into the discussion, as The Rest Is Noise attempts to recount nothing less than the cultural and political history of the twentieth century by a musical path. I tried to find a way in by exploring Alex’s book through asking him about recurring themes in his book: 1. the consequence of the historical practice in aestheticizing politics, and politicizing music (Hitler, Stalin, R. Strauss, Shostakovich), 2. “anti-modern modernism” vs. avant-garde (Britten & Sibelius vs the Second Viennese School, for example), 3. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus as an organizing trope of the book 4. The Book of Daniels and the “apocalypse” (Klaus Mann & the Weimar Republic, Stockhausen, Messiaen), and 5. Cross-pollination of influences and the eventual miscegenation of music, what it means today.

Needless to say, Alex’s answers were illuminating (rather than relying on my faulty memory to recollect his responses, I’d say you’re better off reading The Rest Is Noise yourself to find out.) The highlight of the event was when Alex played audio clips of the music in discussion. There was Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians as people were walking in, and Alex played some Messiaen and Cage, and combed through his iTunes library (in vain!) for John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme to compare with the Sibelius Fifth. It didn’t matter that Coltrane wasn’t played, because Alex sang the beginning of Bernstein’s “New York, New York” to demonstrate that the intervals of Bernstein’s song are also the same intervals from the beginning of the Sibelius 5, too, and that Bernstein, most likely, was appropriating Sibelius’s set of intervals with a knowing wink (UPDATE: see Alex’s update of this, here). We closed with a discussion of Britten’s artistry, his version of “modernity,” and I talked to him about the devastating performance of Jon Vickers in Peter Grimes that can be seen on YouTube, which Alex linked before on his blog. There was just no other way to discuss Grimes’s devolution into dementia, the scene in which the off-stage chorus chants “Grimes… Grimes…” seventy-three times, except by listening to it; so Alex played the excerpt when Grimes is reduced to singing his own name, his sanity and sense of self all but completely broken down. And I’m sure it scared the shit out of everybody. The audience favorite, though, was clearly the Sibelius Fourth, as many people asked me after the event what the piece was; Alex commented over the music, sensitively demonstrating Sibelius’s genius in manipulating our sense of time, how the music sounds like it’s slowing down, yet it’s not - just the notational value of each note lengthening.

Afterwards, Alex and some of us walked to Radio Perfecto to have some really greasy quesadillas and burgers and alcohol, for further conversation. About Radiohead. The Lenny Kravitz (no, not the dreadlocks + sunglasses guy but the long-defunct band). He was as open-hearted and sincere in person as he is in prose. I asked him if he might like to participate in a possible panel I’m planning on Edward Said’s On Late Style, and he seemed interested. So stay tuned.

Arthur Lubow profiles Gustavo Dudamel in NY Times Sunday Magazine, who will soon take over the helms from Esa Pekka Salonen to lead the LA Philharmonic. Like everyone else, I’m very excited at the prospect; it seems that the LA Phil is always thinking ahead of the curve these days (Esa Pekka Salonen deserves all the praise), and Dudamel’s appointment bodes well for the cultural life of the city, which is undergoing a remarkable rejuvenation. More than anything else, I hope the initiative of “Youth Orchestra LA” will thrive under Dudamel; it will be hard to replicate the phenomenal success of Venezuela’s sistema, through which Dudamel and many other musicians had been discovered as talents. But who knows I can only hope that our next Bernstein is playing kickball on a dead-end street somewhere in Inglewood, barely staying out of trouble.

My favorite section of Lubow’s profile occurs when Jose Antonio Abreu - the director of the sistema and Dudamel’s mentor - thrusts upon the 17 year-old Gustavo the task of conducting the Mahler First with the national children’s orchestra on a tour of Italy, in less than two months’ notice. What follows is a tasty account of Dudamel’s discipleship and his rapid ascent, as satisfying as a crisp montage sequence of a young disciple training under a reticent master in a great kung-fu flick -

In 1998, when Dudamel was 17, Abreu gave him less than two months’ notice that he would be conducting the national children’s orchestra in Mahler’s First Symphony on a tour of Italy. Abreu coached him personally. At one session, held on the move in typical Abreu fashion, he handed Dudamel the partiture — the full conductor’s score — and told him to mark up the first movement. Then the maestro went off to Mass. “I looked at it and kept writing, ‘This is important, this is important,’ ” Dudamel recalls. “You couldn’t read the score, I wrote so much. He came back and said, ‘O.K., conduct.’ I went to take what I had written and he said, ‘You don’t need the partiture.’ When I started, he said: ‘Where is the entrance Sing the second melody. Sing it in reverse.’ ” It was sink or swim. During the orchestra’s tour, Dudamel met the conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli in Sicily. He became the first of Dudamel’s foreign mentors, to be followed by Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim and Simon Rattle, who have all encouraged and coached him.

(Photo of Dudamel by Gueorgui Pinkhassov for the NY Times)

Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise gets a headlining review in this week’s NY Times Sunday Book Review. It’s written by Geoff Dyer, who generously praises the book for its ambition and scope, but is curiously dispassionate and “aw-shucks” about his praise. To me, it almost read like a reviewer fishing for what is not in the book, which is probably one of the worst kinds of book reviewing in practice. It’s as if Dyer, throughout the review, kept dreaming about a similar kind of book that he might have written, the alternate-reality version. For example, he seems genuinely disappointed to not find Keith Jarrett in the book, whom Dyer designates as the culmination of the Lisztian virtuoso classical tradition in some ways. Insane.

I know Geoff Dyer to be a very elegant prose writer, whether his writing is an essay on art or a work of fiction. But there are patches of writing in this review which I found to be quite embarrassing, the metaphors straining to make sense, the sentences laboring to carry their meaning in vain. Dyer says the true test of Ross’s book will be in vivifying the various musical works for a musical agnostic through its prose. He counts himself as such a novice, and the trope he uses - in a spectacularly torturous manner - is that of an “invalid” -

When he’s treating an invalid (pronounce the word however appropriate) like me, he will have to proceed like a therapist faced with a physical inadequacy that can’t, of itself, be fixed. His prose is going to have to work on the surrounding muscle to compensate for a more deep-seated weakness. If he does this - if he succeeds in articulating what my ears have been ignorantly hearing - then he will have produced a thoroughly invigorating program of rehabilitation.

Wow. Does it have to be this hard Compare the above passage with Geoff Dyer at his absolute best: In “A Long Patience,” his essay on the photographer William Gedney, he perspicaciously links William Gedney’s photographs of Benares, India with a passage from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. In his journal, Gedney had transcribed a passage from Fielding’s novel, about barbershops coming into the pre-eminence as a place of public exchange of actions and curiosities. Gedney, in a note written later, claimed, “All of Benares is a large barbershop.” Dyer is not only perceptive enough to catch this subtle connection, but relates this detail to the images that Gedney captured -

“How do Indian streets differ from American streets” Gedney asked himself in Benares. Partly by the way that, in America, at some point, life inevitably retreats indoors, becomes hidden. But in the barbershop streets of Benares everything was on display constantly… The struggle, photographically, was to find his own space, to find quietness in the midst of perpetual bustle. Tourists photographing, people washing on the ghats of Benares saw only the event, the spectacle. Gedney had to train himself to find a pictorial equivalent of the space that each of those bathing individuals found for themselves. He had to enter that space, find room for himself.

The passage is simple, poetic, and incisive. Dyer unobtrusively realigns our gaze with the photographer’s gaze, and the graceful way with which Dyer achieves such a reorientation moves me every time I read it. (The essay appears in What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney, which Dyer co-edited.)

Anyway, back to Dyer’s review of The Rest Is Noise - perhaps an editor should have exercised a firmer hand, because I know he’s too good of a writer to be writing that way. There’s also a brief interview with Alex Ross in the LA Times Book Review, with a focus on the influence that California had on many of the composers examined in The Rest Is Noise, from Arnold Schoenberg to Steve Reich. And on Monday: my interview with Alex, at 8 pm, 501 Schermerhorn inside Columbia’s main campus.

(Image by Christoph Niemann for The NY Times)

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