An Ineluctable Modality is a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo's 2013 Challenge where the goal was to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. This year, I wrote a novel-in-blog-posts.
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For a long time, I used to wake up early. Usually, moments before the darkness of the night would fade with the faintest glimmer of the morning sun, I would not even realize I was waking up, it happened so suddenly. Other times, it was the long, slow process of surfacing from the bottom of the sea, gradually, reluctantly, tempting me to roll over toward the wall, away from the window where, eventually, sunlight would force me to face another day. It was good that I rarely needed an alarm clock except on cloudy days when it always seemed easier to oversleep.
On days when I had to be at school for an early class, I would quietly crawl out of bed hoping not to wake my wife sleeping beside me, though nothing ever seemed to disturb her, she slept so soundly. If she had to get up in the middle of the night, I would instantly be aware of some disturbance, whether it actually woke me or not.
But those days were gone, now, not that it took much to remind myself. Even after six years, it was still like waking up in a strange place, getting used to things all over again. The room would come into focus and I would remind myself there was no school today – there was, in fact, no school – not any more, not for me.
Since I had retired, there was no longer the need to wake up so early, no hurry to get the day started and I often found myself thinking "another hour would not be so bad, would it?" Then I would turn to the wall again, pulling at the covers.
But usually I found, once awake, getting back to sleep was never the rest I'd sought and I'd lie there conscious that it was all a pretense, trying to keep my eyes closed. "What was the point?" and so I'd sit up on the edge of the bed and look around. What day was it, I'd wonder – sometimes, it was hard to tell. Another day. Wasn't that enough?
I supposed I ought to feel thankful for that, adding with a sarcastic edge, "at my age." Another day, another week – that's right, and now another month – one thing after another, the irreclaimable March of Time – tempus continues to fugit, the ticking of my life's clock.
Not everybody would wake up this morning, fortifying themselves with coffee, go about their day, and feel the rewards of a life that has, admittedly, lasted longer than I could have imagined as a child. Tick tock, tick tock...
I keep no clock in my bedroom since I moved here, as if not knowing what time it was would keep me younger.
The beach was quiet yesterday, walking along the sea, grim and overcast as it was with a long expanse of visible grayness in all directions. Rocks, water, seafoam, sky, clouds, everything seemed gray, even the trees which, shedding their leaves, were darker gray against the near-blackness of the pines. The sound was even gray, tatters of sound carried across on the tattered wind.
The tourists had largely left which made the beach habitable again. My boots – his boots, inherited ("they came with the house," I'd say, my uncle's boots) – clattered against the rounded stones worn down by centuries of waves, I'd like to think. How water has shaped them. And time.
Visibility was intense under the clouds, vibrant even if the light was limited. It was not a damp expanse of air I stood in, then. But there was a storm coming, they said, perhaps not much of one but a change in the weather.
Imagine that – "a change in the weather!" Another summer had come and gone and winter was not far off, despite autumn's clinging to the calendar. A change, indeed.
A young man walked behind me, a child, perhaps, I couldn't tell, at first. I turned and looked. No, it wasn't – no one there. For a change, there was no one in sight. Me as a child, perhaps, visiting Grandpa?
How odd when last month this place was teaming with people who'd come to gawk at our beach and soak up our atmosphere.
No, I hadn't lived here long enough to think is was even partly mine, though, not yet. According to Henry who's lived here only six more years than I.
We're still making the transition, Henry and I, like some leg-sprouting fish not yet ready for land.
The leaf-peepers had gone, now that the foliage season reached its peak two weeks ago and though the weather had gotten colder, I was surprised to find it was so mild as I strolled along the quiet beach. When I first moved here, I was not prepared for the cold but now I realized I was not prepared for this autumnal warm-up, a last gasp before snow.
Trudging along, I'd thought of rolling up my trousers, sorry I had not brought along a peach when I stubbed my toe against a particularly large stone I should have seen. "The proof is in the rock, Algy, sorry," and thinking of Michelangelo, I went.
The first of November was something of an anniversary for me, one of those remembrances that passed for anything else worth recollecting. My birthday would be coming soon enough, but that was something less and less looked forward to – endured, perhaps.
God, it was good to turn from cliff to sea, horizon limited on my left by gray rock topped by trees and town, limitless on my right out toward the sea, topped by clouds and seabirds.
It was on this day, now seven years down, I'd been told my uncle died and his house, if I wanted it, was mine. It surprised me, like a mild November day surprised me, that he had still been alive.
Or, now that he was gone, that I was his only heir, like some distant cousin come into an unexpected inheritance. Not that he was my rich uncle. Or I his poor nephew.
His lawyer, Madeleine LeMare, reminded me, while I was here, to think about it, not that I needed to make up my mind to live in it or sell, not right away. Propitious, I thought – my wife's name, that (Madeleine, I mean).
But, yes, winter was coming and these things needed considering, didn't they? No pressure but, yes, it felt like it. I was not one to make quick decisions, not since Madeleine died (my wife, that is, that Madeleine). I looked at her and tried not to frown.
He'd been a man in his early-90s, my uncle, who, for the most part, lived in his own home until the end. It was, she said, a good life if lonely but added "the property needed work," though dismissing my fears it was run down. My aunt had died decades ago, her funeral the last time I'd visited what Dad had called The Homestead. It wasn't much, then.
His great-grandparents had built the house in 1870, an old-style farmhouse even if it wasn't really a farm. I don't remember many of the details. We last visited my grandparents when I was in my teens and the place was, to my mind, ancient then.
But of all those sons and daughters, sisters and uncles over the generations, I was now his closest heir? We had never been a close family, moving away and only rarely coming back to visit, the occasional summer holiday, but still, what were the odds?
It turned out my uncle had been a bit of a miser: frugal, as the lawyer put it. He could have put a little more into the house, I thought.
I came into town yesterday to have lunch with Henry, an old friend – a friend of long standing who was also now old, just to be clear. Bald, he was, and had the air of a millionaire and judging from the house he lived in, Henry Jordan was no one's poor nephew. His house was in the village, though, above those cliffs, a grand house with a grand view of the sea which at times frightened him.
Older than me by a decade, he looked younger, lacking the white hair that automatically aged a man. Stately, plump, a young buck in his day, he was still vital and easily dominated his surroundings. We would meet upon the beach and walk a bit.
This would be the last time this month he might be free, he'd warned me, though he did not need to explain – he talked of little else for the past two weeks, at least on those occasions we spoke.
He was like a child looking forward to a holiday but with no idea where his holiday would take him and this didn't frighten him.
Henry challenged me, hand extended with his ash-sword, a swashbuckler without the costume. His cane, a hand-carved walking stick that was once his father's, waved harmlessly in my general direction. "A duel," he coughed, "a duel," and pranced about the strand.
It was November and he, like millions more (or so he figured) would spend his waking hours writing a novel. The goal in thirty days was to write 50,000 words.
He would be up at the crack of dawn, earlier if he could manage, ready to leave. And the strangest bit was, he wanted me to go with him. A duel, indeed...
I laughed when he first suggested it – "Me? Write a novel?" I figured he was joking but laughed all the more when I realized he was serious.
His workroom was set, a studio looking out over the sea. I imagined pirates coming ashore, the way he talked of adventure. The desk was ready, lined with notes and index cards – for he had been outlining for days, now – his laptop disconnected from the internet (to diminish the ultimate distraction), and he would face toward the sea and await his inspiration.
"But you know what you're going to write about?" I asked.
"No," he said, "not really." And this didn't frighten him.
"But you've been outlining for days, you said," I said.
"I know the bones but how I'll flesh them out – who knows?"
He pranced a bit more, trying to rouse my interest but I only laughed more, as much at the idea of me writing 50,000 words in a month as at the sight of him, standing there, round young virgin – so far as novels went – overflowing with anticipation.
For years, he told me when he first brought this up, he had wanted to do this and finally decided – who knew how much time he'd have left – that it was now or never. He brandished his cane at a passing seagull.
"It would mean so much if you would join me: we could spar each other on."
"You mean 'spur,' don't you?"
"That, too."
I laughed, but I declined.
The morning turned even grayer as I stood on my porch with my morning's first cup of coffee. Initially, it looked like the sun would break through – then, teasingly, it did for a moment before disappearing again. The weather, typical of Maine, was constantly changing, something I still haven't gotten used to, but it was November, now, and soon we could add snow to the endless variations.
If I put the porch furniture back out – at least a chair – I knew with the wind kicking up again, it was only a matter of time before I'd have to drag it back in. Would it be long enough to enjoy my coffee?
Despite the mugginess, it could still turn out to be a one day Indian Summer if it lasted even that long. There was no point in checking the weather forecast – a thankless job in New England at best – and I knew better than to consult my neighbors.
With a wink and a smile, they'd trot out all the old sayings for the newcomer: "if you don't like the weather, wait a minute." And that was just to start.
The days grow shorter, the afternoon ending earlier each day, faster now that November is here though it will stall a bit this weekend as we pay homage to the government's attempt to regulate the sun.
At least I'll have an extra hour's sleep to enjoy on Sunday or perhaps more likely wake up an hour earlier, once I've changed my clocks. An extra hour to spend doing nothing-in-particular.
Try as I might, I have never successfully re-set my body clock. It grows old in habit and wakes me when it wants to (tick tock, tick tock).
Henry will be glad of the extra hour to write, no doubt. I wonder how it's going?
Creativity never struck me as a communal thing, something we did as a group. I'd sat in enough faculty meetings to bear that out even when I was young and still idealistic. There was nothing worse than a meeting to kill a good idea and I had no interest in wasting my time – or my ideas – in the service of an academic committee. The only faculty member under 30 in the music department when I started at Cheatham College, I let the dinosaurs run the business: they would, anyway. Once elevated to fossilhood, I saw it had now become fashionable to let the younger generation bring things forward.
The first order of business for any committee had been to give its project a name, sometimes even before it really knew why it existed. I always suggest "Fred," met at first with polite laughter then, over the years, with mounting annoyance until I was being accused of not taking things seriously.
But I'd been quite serious, just not serious about the things they wanted me to be serious about. Wasn't that the point of being creative, letting one's inhibitions go, finding the... – whatever the cliché was before someone came up with the "Inner Child"? Creativity was play, after all, but that was something only artists (I mean, creative artists) seemed to understand.
Judging from most of the academics I worked with, whose purpose in life was take what creative artists created and analyze the hell out of it so other academics could understand how in fact we'd done that, "play" had nothing to do with it.
And here was Henry Jordan, my old friend, living up to his eyeballs in the success generated by his family's business, who decided one day he would write a novel. Of course, the whole point of this challenge, as he explained it, was to commit yourself to writing enough words to qualify for a book thick enough to be called a novel.
Quality had nothing to do with it. That wasn't the point. If you made the goal – and really, 50,000 words was, what... 115 pages, perhaps? not very much of a novel – you got a prize for showing up at the finish line.
But wasn't it just another issue to undermine our already delicate self-awareness that, thirty days down the road, you might have something that was so thoroughly indigestible, it wouldn't last two days as kindling for the fire?
Then he could sit back and call himself an author while I was stewing at my desk still trying to find enough confidence to think of myself as a composer.
"All you have to do to get started is come up with a title," he'd told me over lunch yesterday, "and that should be enough to get things flowing." (What things?) We'd found a quiet diner off the cove where the servers weren't all dressed in Halloween costumes (pirates, most of them – how original). "It's not like you're committed to it, you can always change it."
For me, titles were usually generic descriptions like Symphony No. 1 or Violin Sonata, unimaginative at least to begin but better than "Work in Progress." As the piece evolved, as inspiration met the challenge of getting from one point to another, perhaps something else might suggest itself.
He wouldn't tell me his title or for that matter anything about his would-be novel's plot, something about jinxing the process making him cautious on his first time out. Would his father have stroked a rabbit's foot before starting on a business gamble? I'm sure, good Catholic that he'd been, it involved a good deal of praying: after all, rabbit's feet were only superstitions; taking a lap around the beads was faith.
Somewhere between the end of the sandwich and the second cup of coffee – which there, I was told, was very good – Henry became increasingly sullen and eventually accused me of being a wet blanket.
"I'm not trying to talk you out of it: enjoy yourself, have a blast," I said, "but certainly you don't need me to go along with you, do you?"
If he wouldn't tell me his title, how could we discuss plot details and character development, if that was to be the benefit of writing in tandem?
"And one thing I'm sure of, is the world doesn't need a novel by me."
I'd walked down to the edge of the wood to pick up some branches that had fallen in last night's wind even though the grass would need no more mowing this season, I was sure. But then the wind suddenly blew up and strafed through the trees. I would come back tomorrow to pick up the rest. And then it began to pour.
One foot in front of the other – nacheinander – and I would eventually make my way back to the house, temporarily blinded by the rain. It was the way you got through anything that had a contiguous fashion.
When Monday was an unpleasant reminder that the weekend was far away, we'd count the days, one after the other. That way, it didn't seem so long, waiting till Friday. I was convinced we'd discovered how to speed up time.
But then before long, another month was gone and the summer would soon be over and now a year had passed. Suddenly, we could not stop its galloping along (ticktóck ticktóck).
Autumn was a pensive time of year, a time to lean against the fence and watch the leaves change color and fall. We had those days a few weeks back and I savored them, standing in the corner of my porch, oblivious to the world beyond.
It was almost as magical as that first autumn I lived here, six times 'round the cycle, since, listening to its music of the spheres, its timeless cadence.
There were years the trees were like a brilliant sunset lasting a week, and others when clouds obscured the sun and failed to notice as it merely sank, leaden, beneath the horizon. Soon it will grow cold and white – despite its sunny days – the nighttime of the year.
There was a variety to change and its inevitability, even in this slow-moving kind, if one could recognize the pattern. The sudden changes of mood, fluctuations and transformations, were, like many things these days, a memory of the past. Spread out into seasons and cycles, the ups and downs of decades were marked by historical events (or not) with the effortlessness and inevitability of orbits.
But the real variety came in comparing me as I stood here this morning with me who walked around this yard six years ago, much less with me who ran through my grandmother's garden, chasing butterflies, fifty summers before that. Nebeneinander, one thing next to another.
I'd made it to the porch, soaked, and looked back toward the valley I knew existed beyond the trees, the way I knew that finally it was Friday and the weekend was upon us. Then I went inside to change into some dry clothes.
Behind me, I could hear someone say, perhaps in the tone I recalled from my grandmother, "you'll catch your death of cold."
And someone else, more recent, would respond, "old wives' tale..."
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...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
Friday, November 01, 2013
November is National Novel Writing Month
I wrote my first one in 2008 though I'd wanted to do it for a while, but time was always a concern. After having been laid off, though, I had no excuse: what was time?
True, 50,000 words may not be that long, compared to some novels you've read - I would estimate it to be perhaps 115 pages or so - and, really, over a span of 30 days, that breaks down to an average of 1,667 words a day. My blog posts are longer than that but, true, I'm not blogging every day.
This first post is about 3,255 words long (which might be 7 pages of a printed book). Most of them will be shorter, as I have it planned.
An Ineluctable Modality will be my 6th NaNoWriMo novel.
It is designed to be in 30 chapters, one for each day of the month. So, for some reason, I thought why not raise the stakes a little by posting each chapter at the end of the day? This precludes a certain amount of editing in the final process, once the whole novel is done, but I'm hoping that I've outlined my ideas sufficiently before beginning it to keep any major surprises to a minimum. As one of my characters, a would-be author himself, says, "I know the bones but how I'll flesh them out - who knows?"
The title may sound familiar, from the opening line of the third chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses.
- - - - -
'Ineluctable modality of the visible, at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read... Limits of the diaphane. ...If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see... You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. ...Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes.'
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But there are other references, semi-quotes and puns just as Joyce himself did: my opening line references the famous opening line of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past as it was known in English when I first read it).Both Proust's Swann's Way (the first of the seven novels making up In Search of Lost Time) and Ulysses were published in 1913, so I'll consider this my Centennial Tribute.
Mostly I write "classical music appreciation thrillers" like The Schoenberg Code, The Doomsday Symphony , The Lost Chord and now The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben (you can read an excerpt here). But I've always wanted to do a more lyrical novel, something that is not so plot driven or, for that matter, so tightly organized, something that exhibits an entirely different sense of style.
So join me in this month-long adventure. I make no promises (especially since I doubt anyone will be reading these posts, anyway).
The first chapter begins here. Please be aware this is only a first draft and may change over time.
Thanks for getting this far,
Dick Strawser
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And now, from the "Well, That Didn't Last Long" Division of the Best Laid Plans Department:
I rather quickly, given other commitments and a pesky thing called reality, fell behind schedule. And while I'm only a day behind in writing the chapter-posts to my novel (yet still staying ahead-of-schedule in the total-number-of-words-written-toward-the-goal department), I find I need more time to edit and polish the text before committing it to the world, even as a first draft, and that is time I'd rather spend writing. So, eventually I'll get back to posting - and when I do, they will be posted on the day they should have been posted because that's the way the novel was planned...
- Dick Strawser
Thursday, October 31, 2013
The Story of Nepomuck and How He Found His Killer Viola
For the past seven weeks, I have been working on another novel, a music appreciation thriller, The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben, the third in a series starting with The Doomsday Symphony, then The Lost Chord. The 2nd in the series is a complete rewrite of the parody I'd initially written after reading Dan Brown's novel, The Lost Symbol, but I didn't particularly care for it (the original or my parody) but I liked a lot of the details, especially the character names.
Now it came time to revisit the earlier Dan Brown parody, based on his novel, The Da Vinci Code which became The Schoenberg Code. I still like this even as a free parody, but I didn't want to just throw it away, so again, I took elements of it and turned it into a new, original [sic] thriller that is becoming The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben.
Today, since it's Halloween, I thought I'd give you a preview with two excerpts (expanded from the earlier parody) taken from different chapters that tell a story-within-the-story: how the villain, Nepomuck – or rather, one of the villains, Klavdia Klangfarben being the main villain – found what becomes the murder weapon.
The novel is set on December 16th, 2013, mostly in and around London, but the rest of the plot is immaterial to the following excerpt. Suffice it to say, Nepomuck has just killed his third victim.
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Rossiniana's, near Wigmore Hall, mid-morning on a snowy day
A large balding man in a rumpled overcoat carrying a tattered viola case slid into an isolated booth at the back of a popular Italian restaurant. Nepomuck always liked it here, stopping by regularly, enjoying the menu's endless variety, a place famous for its numerous pasta dishes. He also liked that they played nothing but the finest Italian classical music, mostly Rossini (naturally) but also Vivaldi and Verdi, hardly anything more recent than Puccini's glorious melodies except maybe Respighi's Ancient Airs.
Young Gioacchino, the owner's son, bustled about, smiling, urging on his kitchen staff, and noticed one of his regulars settling in. He always took time to chat with customers, greeting them like old friends. Lots of his customers liked this easy-going familiarity as much as the food, and usually first-timers would quickly turn into regulars.
But Gioacchino knew this one, the large balding man in the rumpled overcoat, kept to himself, preferring to be left alone. He was always friendly to him, of course, but the man rarely responded. There were all kinds of people, he knew, but basically only two types: out-going friendly people, and then those who weren't.
This guy whom he knew only as Nepo was one of the introverts but he always ate a ton of food. Gioacchino knew he'd lose money on this guy if he ever went "all-you-can-eat."
"Eh, Nepo, my large friend, good seeing you! What'll it be this morning?" Young Gioacchino waited while Nepomuck scanned the specials. Meanwhile, Gioacchino scanned the restaurant as other customers arrived and waved to them.
Nodding his approval, Nepomuck ordered the breakfast lasagna, made with sausage and bacon, which came with scrambled eggs and fried potatoes.
Gioacchino, a spry, wiry man over 80 already, bounded off to the kitchen. ("Young" was a relative term to distinguish him from his father, the owner: Old Gioacchino only worked on Sundays, any more.)
Nepomuck placed his tattered old viola case carefully beside him on the bench and wrapped his equally tattered scarf around it. It was awkward slipping out of his coat, so he left it on. Standing well over six feet tall and weighing a solid, bear-shaped 340 pounds, he had enough trouble fitting into the booth.
He preferred coming to Rossiniana's after a gig, unlike that place on Mandeville: much simpler and less inclined to notice him. It was food he was after, not ambiance, not to mention cheaper prices. He could afford three entrees here, most likely, compared to just one there, and, still a growing boy, that was important. Of course, his being a free-lance classical musician also meant budget was important, and they're very good about "doggy bags" here. He could just imagine asking for a box from the waiters at Mandeville.
It was these unfortunately infrequent special gigs that tired him out the most, made him the most ravenous, especially for Italian. He wondered if anybody here had noticed he'd also been in last night? He had the dinner special, a Florentine lasagna along with some pasta fagiole. In fact, he'd ordered three servings of each.
Last night's had been a particularly exhausting gig with another early this morning, the drawback of a limited window of opportunity, considering Nepomuck wasn't a soloist or even a very good freelance section player. Like most people who were not musicians themselves, his employer never understood artists, especially what it took to develop that skill.
Nepomuck had developed a very good specialized reputation, proving music was fully capable of doing more than soothing the savage beast. If artfully handled, he found he could use his instrument to kill people.
He never remembered much about his early childhood beyond wanting to study music which had become a solace to his reality. Nepomuck loved listening to music, especially the good old tunes of classical music. He found he could lose himself in music, become transported to another world through its beautifully expanding melodies or exciting rhythms. Someone had once handed him a toy drum which he'd thought too pedestrian and he'd beaten the crap out of it. But it was a violin he'd stumbled upon that really captured his imagination.
The only memory he had of his mother, beyond the vaguest of recollections, was watching his father bludgeon her to death after what had started as just another fight (that's when he ran away). After coming up with so many different identities, he'd forgotten his real name by the time he arrived at the orphanage.
It was a janitor there – someone named Blindt – who had christened him Nepomuck, though why didn't make any sense to him. It's a big awkward name, he thought, and he's a big awkward bloke. Of all the other aliases he'd tried on for size over the years, he felt this one maybe suited him best.
But it was hearing the old man play the violin late at night when all the other children should be asleep that made him want to learn to play and give his life purpose.
After weeks of listening in the tranquil darkness, Nepomuck approached the old man and asked if he would consider teaching him. So the long process of his training began on that very same night. He struggled learning how to hold the thing, how to draw the bow, how to produce a sound that wasn't painful.
Blindt told him he must practice each day once he started playing melodies, working eventually toward an hour every single day. "It could take thousands of hours, my boy, maybe even ten thousand hours!"
Mr. Grinder, the director, reluctantly adjusted Nepomuck's schedule despite not seeing the purpose of weekly music lessons and needing to practice. "It's a waste of time," the old worn-out teacher complained, "rots the mind!"
"Ten thousand hours at an hour a day," Nepomuck estimated: "that's twenty-seven years! What kind of idiot would work that hard?"
Maybe life at Dothby's Orphanage was not easy but Nepomuck didn't really notice. It seemed little different from his previous life. Every day was practically the same except for days he had his lessons. Bullying from the other children was one thing, he was used to that, and the abusive adults were like his father. But it helped he quickly began developing as a boy, growing taller and, more significantly, broader across the chest and shoulders. Though not the oldest of the boys there, he'd easily become the biggest.
Eventually he found the others left him alone, meaning there was less fighting, and he realized his size gave him security. He only fought to defend himself, he'd say: he wasn't one to attack. In fact, Nepomuck hated violence which didn't mean he wasn't incapable of it. It's just he didn't care to use it.
So, the bigger he got, the less the older children beat him up, an easy target who appeared to be stupid. Instead, they teased him because he was slow but this didn't bother him. The fact is, he knew he was stupid, everybody always told him that – "slow and stupid, that's our Nepo," they'd say.
Everyone except Old Blindt at his violin lessons where he made excellent progress and was now practicing two hours every day. The only consolation was found in his music. Nothing else mattered to him.
The problem was he didn't have much talent and Blindt had his limitations, a player of little technique and less experience. Plus the boy was physically outgrowing his violin, presenting all kinds of problems. Besides, Blindt grew up as a dance-band musician who played mostly old-fashioned tunes which even the staff at Dothby's couldn't recognize.
These were the popular songs from his youth, back when life was good, tunes that wafted him into a nostalgic fog, plus the usual bunch of folk songs everyone could recognize but not remember.
But Dothby's was not equipped to teach music beyond Miss Carbunckle's little chorus where students learned to sing some popular tunes. Music existed primarily to entertain them, like recess, and didn't require private lessons.
Director Grinder agreed to send him to the town church for his lessons where he began studying with Dr. Franklin Stein.
Long ago, when Old Professor Stein was a young man everybody called Frankie, he was a jazz pianist with monster chops, plus he played violin in the local orchestra and conducted his church's choir. He listened to classical music quite often and even loved opera, he confessed, building his musical taste from this and that. He had little patience for rap music, though, and even less for what other people considered the "pop music du jour," so he'd stopped listening to it years ago – "there were limits," he'd stressed.
When Nepomuck arrived at the church to meet Professor Stein that first time, the old man was playing the pipe organ, what he later found out was Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The sounds continued to reverberate around the church even after Stein stopped playing but ricocheted inside his head for minutes longer.
Nepo said he'd never heard such music before, asking him not to stop, so the old man obligingly kept on playing. The sound grew in volume and became faster, flurries of notes cascading everywhere. Once the music roared to its inevitable conclusion, Nepomuck shouted bravo and applauded. Music had always been soothing – this... was exhilarating.
But it would be impractical for him to take lessons on the organ, not having access to one at the orphanage. Besides, solving the violin problem was easy enough: Stein handed him a viola.
As the other orphans were gradually all adopted, soon replaced by new ones, Nepomuck was now the senior orphan at Dothby's on the verge of finishing his allotted time, ready to be cut loose. Then after Blindt the janitor became ill and Nepo substituted for his mentor, he realized, "here's something useful I could do."
Since Old Blindt soon became too weak to return to work full time, Director Grinder agreed to make Nepomuck Blindt's assistant, since he'd essentially finished all his necessary classes and needed an occupation now.
One night Blindt was taken to the hospital after he'd suffered a stroke, Nepomuck going along, playing his viola for him. After the old man died, Grinder asked Nepomuck to become Dothby's chief janitor.
As career paths went, it had been no different for Blindt who'd started there as an orphan himself, never to leave.
Through all this, Nepomuck had kept up with his lessons from Professor Stine, shuffling off each Wednesday for the village church. Sometimes he would go in early, hoping to catch him practicing the organ. Being the janitor kept him quite busy but his evenings were his own when he could practice late into the night.
Being the janitor also meant he had his own room – a cell, really – a little privacy just off the basement steps. There, he could practice three hours every night and not bother the others.
He was making great progress, Stine told him, mastering several popular classical melodies, great tunes from Beethoven symphonies or Verdi operas. This classical music, even older than Blindt's songs, he found new and exciting. On an old radio Stine had given him, one station would play nothing but great hits from two hundred years ago.
Even if he didn't know the themes or what the chords were doing, he pretended he was part of the orchestra, scraping along with the sounds, trying to fit, getting the hang of it.
At first, not knowing what he was doing, he admitted it sounded awful, but with familiarity he could figure it out; rather than playing the melodies, he'd find a note that fit the harmony.
And when it was over, he would laugh and applaud from sheer joy, feeling happier than he had ever remembered before.
Sitting there, waiting for his breakfast at Rossiniana's, Nepomuck felt that same satisfaction, warming to old and pleasant memories nearly forgotten, how the discovery of something new had given him a sense of power. That awareness of satisfaction was something he rarely felt before – felt rarely since – but it was good to feel it again.
Realizing he might become a musician had given his life some meaning, then, rising above the horrible, empty childhood he'd endured. He filled with pride when he was handed his first musician's union card.
Stine trained him well and worked him hard, had him play in church, and included him in the school's student orchestra which no one seemed to mind since there were few other violists around. From there, he was hired for several performances by the local opera company, known for being quiet and a hard worker.
"It's only been a few years," he reminisced, almost breaking into a smile, "but it's like such a long time ago." The waiter sat down a plate heaping with lasagna, scrambled eggs and bacon. How much trouble it had been to find a tux that fit him – "cost more than the gig's pay, that did."
And now he's attained a whole new plateau in his career, he thought, "one where I shall excel and achieve success. I've been inducted into the Penguins of God! I wear its uniform proudly!"
The gig that changed his life was the one where Stine asked him to play as part of a chamber ensemble before a big-time banker from London was going to be speaking about music, some philanthropist whose goal was to preserve the great masterpieces of classical music, a talk he called "Why You Hate Schoenberg." They had practiced several hours, getting it right, playing one of Mozart's divertimentos and of course his favorite piece, Pachelbel's Canon. It promised to be a big crowd and the speaker was very persuasive.
He likened music to the Garden of Eden, this long-sought-for, unfortunately long-lost paradise where there stood two trees with tempting fruit, one full of beautiful simplicity and lovely melodies, the other full of thorns, and how we music lovers should eat plentifully from the Tree of Enjoyment but avoid the bitter, disappointing Tree of Knowledge.
In every age, there were those who ate too much of Knowledge and pushed Enjoyment beyond the boundaries of good taste, and these composers, their music and their advocates needed to be weeded out. After he ended by asking them to join him in this important cause, Nepomuck went up to him, ready to enlist.
It sounded like he had been recruiting believers to form a great army to protect Beethoven from the likes of Schoenberg, and Nepomuck, a committed believer, would never forgot that man's name: Maurice Harty.
But then he remembered, before enjoyment, before fulfillment, Nepomuck knew, even before he could become one with his plate of lasagna, there was a phone call to be made and news to be reported. He had now completed three assignments – so far – with further instructions awaiting him. He reached into his pocket for his phone.
Like his viola, this was a special phone designated for only one purpose, programmed to communicate with only one special person, encrypted to circle the globe to reach someone who might be blocks away.
It was the voice he always heard that now spoke clearly to him, relaying his instructions, requiring confirmation of his success, always speaking in a low, digitally modified voice, the sibilants like drawn-out hisses.
The call was quickly answered by a man known only as The Serpent. The news was quickly imparted: all was good.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
Nepomuck slipped his phone back into his pocket with a smile of satisfaction as Gioacchino brought him a heaping second serving of the breakfast lasagna special. No words were spoken between them this time – nothing needed to be said – as Nepomuck again tucked in with evident delight. An overnight cook told Gioacchino some big bald guy'd come in before midnight and ordered three dinner specials, one after another. Looking at Nepomuck's obvious enjoyment, Gioacchino needn't imagine who that might have been.
Food was only part of this customer's satisfaction, if the restauranteur only knew, and the ambiance hardly even entered into it. Yet it wasn't just a hard night's work that somehow affected his appetite. The funny thing was playing his new viola for any length of time always made him especially ravenous for Italian food.
Once again, Nepomuck admitted he felt overly warm sitting there in his overcoat, heated up by his breakfast and the coffee, but then he remembered why he was not supposed to take it off: The Serpent had told him if he's seen wearing a tuxedo at 9am, it would only call unnecessary attention to himself.
"No self-respecting free-lance musician would be out playing a gig at that hour," his master had warned him, citing security protocols. "Jazzers might get back from late-night clubs then but they don't wear tuxes."
Nepomuck had left Professor Stine's church after a rather long concert months ago – a wonderful program full of Telemann and Vivaldi – and he'd forgotten to change out of his tuxedo before returning to Dothby. Along the way, he was taunted by some school boys calling him names until he rose up to his full height.
Standing behind them, leaning against the village fountain and completely oblivious to everything, was a drunken bum he'd never seen before. Or at least not someone he'd seen recently until it dawned on him.
Standing in the moonlight, wearing his tux, his viola slung over his back, Nepomuck realized the drunk was calling him names. It was the wheedling voice he recognized first, a pestilence from his past.
He immediately went over and began pounding his fist into the man's face, the man he last saw killing his mother.
Should he murder his own father this way, attacking him on the street? He wanted to, but was it worth it? The police would catch him and then they would throw him in prison. He didn't think they'd let him play his viola in prison – would they? – so he decided there must be another way.
A few days later, Professor Stine showed him a new instrument he'd acquired, a large cream-colored viola brought in for repairs. Aside from a few cracks around the sides, it didn't look too bad.
The odd finish, as if it'd been dipped in a white cheese sauce, was without a doubt its most striking feature but not necessarily its worst problem, Stine figured, demonstrating the instrument's 'wolf tone.' This was an acoustical phenomenon that plagued even very fine instruments, he explained, a nasty sound originating from the lower strings.
But Nepomuck's mind wasn't on Stine's scientific demonstration ever since seeing his father and realizing how much he wanted him dead. This man had recently been released from prison but he had changed little. Nepomuck contemplated beating him to a bloody pulp like he'd beaten his mother, perhaps several times before he'd out-right kill him.
There were many ways he could kill him, playing them in his mind, then he'd run away again, escape the police...
"Nepomuck," Stine said with a kindly smile, "have you heard anything I've said?"
This unusual, supposedly 'legendary' instrument, Stine was explaining, came to him quite accidentally, a local businessman hoping it could be repaired, an instrument he'd found in an old cheese shop when traveling through Cremona. It had, he'd whispered mysteriously, a "strange and unusual history going back centuries," rumored to have been made in Stradivarius' workshop.
What Nepomuck most liked about it, more importantly – it was larger than most standard violas and easier for him to play. Too bad about that ghastly finish and those ugly wolf tones, he thought.
The weirdest thing was, after you'd played it and it warmed up enough, the room smelled like a plateful of spaghetti or more specifically like the grated Parmesan cheese he always heaped on spaghetti. Supposedly the result of a lunchtime workroom accident, it completely ruined the finish, an apprentice spilling alfredo sauce onto fresh varnish.
Stradivarius instruments are, naturally, valued for their tone, their exquisite, rarely matched sound as well as the beauty of their finish. This poor instrument, set aside before being completed, was basically sold for scrap.
A woman named Ricotta Fontina bought it to hang in her cheese shop where for several centuries it absorbed fantastic aromas.
The fact Antonio Stradivarius made only a dozen violas in his storied career should have added some value to this one: with its odd, white finish and cheesy smell, this became the "Unlucky Thirteenth."
Stine set about over the next few weeks to fix the various cracks and with any luck eliminate the wolf tone though he could do nothing about the finish or its unusually fragrant varnish. He figured the change in climate after all these years aggravated its problems, given England's cooler, damper weather compared to Italy's.
With the help of his newly hired apprentice, a young boy named Silas, Stine took other old violas, discarded and broken, to find the necessary parts that, added inside, might correct the wolf tone.
Then, on a particularly dark and stormy night, Stine had finished his work and played an impromptu performance for young Silas. But the wolf tone turned out to be worse than before – much worse.
Before Stine knew what happened, he saw poor Silas fall to the floor, a horrific expression of fear upon his face.
Nepomuck had braved the storm that awful night to come help his teacher when he called about disposing of a body. The professor tried to explain what had happened but it hardly seemed possible. If word got out his playing could cause a listener's death, no one would ever hire him again – he'd be ruined.
A month later, Nepomuck, sneaking into the church, watched Stine practicing the viola when one of the local delinquents broke in. He watched as Stine marched toward the boy, repeatedly playing the wolf tone.
Immediately, the would-be burglar halted in his tracks, falling to the floor – dead! Even behind glass, Nepomuck knew it sounded awful. Other than the horror on the boy's face, there'd been no visible violence.
Once again, he helped his teacher drag the body down into the crypt and that's when they both figured it out.
There was something about the wolf tone that'd been amplified by Stine's repairs, how both deaths happened around the full moon. Whatever he'd done to it, Stine had turned it into a killer viola. It left not a single mark upon its victims, no sign of murder, and yet somehow the player had remained immune.
"The wolf tone has become even more evil – it's become a Werewolf Tone!" The poor professor, Nepomuck realized, began babbling incoherently. "God, Nepomuck, I've created a monster," Stine wailed. "Here, take it – destroy it!"
The old man fell to the ground, sobbing, when Nepomuck had an idea and threw the viola into its ancient case. Hurriedly tearing the bow from his teacher's hand, he disappeared into the night. Nepomuck would find his father and kill him by hardly lifting a finger but it would still be a horrible death.
It didn't take long to locate the bastard, partly visible in the moonlight, lying there drunk in a back alley nearby.
"Here, old dad," Nepomuck said, "let me play you a nice little ditty."
What started as Brahms' Lullaby quickly turned into a fiendish shredding of sound once he began violently attacking the wolf tone. The beast who'd beaten his mother to death now shrank back in horror.
Holding his hands to his ears, his father thrashed about, then fell back.
Nepomuck quickly checked the body. "Like a doornail!"
He stood back, delighted with his new discovery. "My god, it really works!" (Then he realized how hungry he felt. Pasta!) At long last, his mother had been avenged and the evil man punished. Here, his father was dead just as if he'd shot or strangled him and with a great deal less effort, too. There was not a single mark on him, no sign of physical attack. The only trauma was visible on his face. Certainly it was quick if not exactly painless and a lot less messy.
Another thing he realized as he put the viola back in its case: "Here's something I can do – and do well." But what kind of career options were there for a free-lance hired assassin? It wasn't like he'd be in big demand plus was there a union? – and then the matter of income and benefits.
At that moment, Nepomuck decided to leave the only home he knew behind, heading off in search of fame and fulfillment. But where would he go, and how would he realize his new dream? Then he remembered hearing that businessman from London who'd talked about defending Beethoven, protecting us from musical villains like Arnold Schoenberg.
He would offer his services to the cause, but how to find him? There can't be many bankers named Maurice Harty.
This, Nepomuck knew, would be his true calling.
He'd become a serial killer.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Yesterday, I finished writing 97% of the first of the four parts of The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben (about 44,893 words out of a projected total of 149,082 words) – there's a segment of an inserted document (a musicological flashback) that I intend to write and insert later – which is not exactly one-fourth of the book, more like 30%.
But now I'm going to take a break and write another novel for NaNoWriMo 2013 - since November is "National Novel Writing Month" - in which the writer's goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel. Unfortunately, since what I've written so far of The Labyrinth has taken seven weeks and still hasn't reached 50,000 words, I've decided to take a different approach and try something that is less... well, complicated to write.
And that one I hope to be "live-blogging" every day during the month (we'll see...).
It is called An Ineluctable Modality.
– Dick Strawser
© October, 2013
Now it came time to revisit the earlier Dan Brown parody, based on his novel, The Da Vinci Code which became The Schoenberg Code. I still like this even as a free parody, but I didn't want to just throw it away, so again, I took elements of it and turned it into a new, original [sic] thriller that is becoming The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben.
Today, since it's Halloween, I thought I'd give you a preview with two excerpts (expanded from the earlier parody) taken from different chapters that tell a story-within-the-story: how the villain, Nepomuck – or rather, one of the villains, Klavdia Klangfarben being the main villain – found what becomes the murder weapon.
The novel is set on December 16th, 2013, mostly in and around London, but the rest of the plot is immaterial to the following excerpt. Suffice it to say, Nepomuck has just killed his third victim.
= = = = = = = = = = = = =
Young Gioacchino, the owner's son, bustled about, smiling, urging on his kitchen staff, and noticed one of his regulars settling in. He always took time to chat with customers, greeting them like old friends. Lots of his customers liked this easy-going familiarity as much as the food, and usually first-timers would quickly turn into regulars.
This guy whom he knew only as Nepo was one of the introverts but he always ate a ton of food. Gioacchino knew he'd lose money on this guy if he ever went "all-you-can-eat."
"Eh, Nepo, my large friend, good seeing you! What'll it be this morning?" Young Gioacchino waited while Nepomuck scanned the specials. Meanwhile, Gioacchino scanned the restaurant as other customers arrived and waved to them.
Nodding his approval, Nepomuck ordered the breakfast lasagna, made with sausage and bacon, which came with scrambled eggs and fried potatoes.
Gioacchino, a spry, wiry man over 80 already, bounded off to the kitchen. ("Young" was a relative term to distinguish him from his father, the owner: Old Gioacchino only worked on Sundays, any more.)
Nepomuck placed his tattered old viola case carefully beside him on the bench and wrapped his equally tattered scarf around it. It was awkward slipping out of his coat, so he left it on. Standing well over six feet tall and weighing a solid, bear-shaped 340 pounds, he had enough trouble fitting into the booth.
He preferred coming to Rossiniana's after a gig, unlike that place on Mandeville: much simpler and less inclined to notice him. It was food he was after, not ambiance, not to mention cheaper prices. He could afford three entrees here, most likely, compared to just one there, and, still a growing boy, that was important. Of course, his being a free-lance classical musician also meant budget was important, and they're very good about "doggy bags" here. He could just imagine asking for a box from the waiters at Mandeville.
It was these unfortunately infrequent special gigs that tired him out the most, made him the most ravenous, especially for Italian. He wondered if anybody here had noticed he'd also been in last night? He had the dinner special, a Florentine lasagna along with some pasta fagiole. In fact, he'd ordered three servings of each.
Last night's had been a particularly exhausting gig with another early this morning, the drawback of a limited window of opportunity, considering Nepomuck wasn't a soloist or even a very good freelance section player. Like most people who were not musicians themselves, his employer never understood artists, especially what it took to develop that skill.
Nepomuck had developed a very good specialized reputation, proving music was fully capable of doing more than soothing the savage beast. If artfully handled, he found he could use his instrument to kill people.
He never remembered much about his early childhood beyond wanting to study music which had become a solace to his reality. Nepomuck loved listening to music, especially the good old tunes of classical music. He found he could lose himself in music, become transported to another world through its beautifully expanding melodies or exciting rhythms. Someone had once handed him a toy drum which he'd thought too pedestrian and he'd beaten the crap out of it. But it was a violin he'd stumbled upon that really captured his imagination.
The only memory he had of his mother, beyond the vaguest of recollections, was watching his father bludgeon her to death after what had started as just another fight (that's when he ran away). After coming up with so many different identities, he'd forgotten his real name by the time he arrived at the orphanage.
It was a janitor there – someone named Blindt – who had christened him Nepomuck, though why didn't make any sense to him. It's a big awkward name, he thought, and he's a big awkward bloke. Of all the other aliases he'd tried on for size over the years, he felt this one maybe suited him best.
But it was hearing the old man play the violin late at night when all the other children should be asleep that made him want to learn to play and give his life purpose.
After weeks of listening in the tranquil darkness, Nepomuck approached the old man and asked if he would consider teaching him. So the long process of his training began on that very same night. He struggled learning how to hold the thing, how to draw the bow, how to produce a sound that wasn't painful.
Blindt told him he must practice each day once he started playing melodies, working eventually toward an hour every single day. "It could take thousands of hours, my boy, maybe even ten thousand hours!"
Mr. Grinder, the director, reluctantly adjusted Nepomuck's schedule despite not seeing the purpose of weekly music lessons and needing to practice. "It's a waste of time," the old worn-out teacher complained, "rots the mind!"
"Ten thousand hours at an hour a day," Nepomuck estimated: "that's twenty-seven years! What kind of idiot would work that hard?"
Maybe life at Dothby's Orphanage was not easy but Nepomuck didn't really notice. It seemed little different from his previous life. Every day was practically the same except for days he had his lessons. Bullying from the other children was one thing, he was used to that, and the abusive adults were like his father. But it helped he quickly began developing as a boy, growing taller and, more significantly, broader across the chest and shoulders. Though not the oldest of the boys there, he'd easily become the biggest.
Eventually he found the others left him alone, meaning there was less fighting, and he realized his size gave him security. He only fought to defend himself, he'd say: he wasn't one to attack. In fact, Nepomuck hated violence which didn't mean he wasn't incapable of it. It's just he didn't care to use it.
So, the bigger he got, the less the older children beat him up, an easy target who appeared to be stupid. Instead, they teased him because he was slow but this didn't bother him. The fact is, he knew he was stupid, everybody always told him that – "slow and stupid, that's our Nepo," they'd say.
Everyone except Old Blindt at his violin lessons where he made excellent progress and was now practicing two hours every day. The only consolation was found in his music. Nothing else mattered to him.
The problem was he didn't have much talent and Blindt had his limitations, a player of little technique and less experience. Plus the boy was physically outgrowing his violin, presenting all kinds of problems. Besides, Blindt grew up as a dance-band musician who played mostly old-fashioned tunes which even the staff at Dothby's couldn't recognize.
These were the popular songs from his youth, back when life was good, tunes that wafted him into a nostalgic fog, plus the usual bunch of folk songs everyone could recognize but not remember.
But Dothby's was not equipped to teach music beyond Miss Carbunckle's little chorus where students learned to sing some popular tunes. Music existed primarily to entertain them, like recess, and didn't require private lessons.
Director Grinder agreed to send him to the town church for his lessons where he began studying with Dr. Franklin Stein.
Long ago, when Old Professor Stein was a young man everybody called Frankie, he was a jazz pianist with monster chops, plus he played violin in the local orchestra and conducted his church's choir. He listened to classical music quite often and even loved opera, he confessed, building his musical taste from this and that. He had little patience for rap music, though, and even less for what other people considered the "pop music du jour," so he'd stopped listening to it years ago – "there were limits," he'd stressed.
When Nepomuck arrived at the church to meet Professor Stein that first time, the old man was playing the pipe organ, what he later found out was Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The sounds continued to reverberate around the church even after Stein stopped playing but ricocheted inside his head for minutes longer.
Nepo said he'd never heard such music before, asking him not to stop, so the old man obligingly kept on playing. The sound grew in volume and became faster, flurries of notes cascading everywhere. Once the music roared to its inevitable conclusion, Nepomuck shouted bravo and applauded. Music had always been soothing – this... was exhilarating.
But it would be impractical for him to take lessons on the organ, not having access to one at the orphanage. Besides, solving the violin problem was easy enough: Stein handed him a viola.
As the other orphans were gradually all adopted, soon replaced by new ones, Nepomuck was now the senior orphan at Dothby's on the verge of finishing his allotted time, ready to be cut loose. Then after Blindt the janitor became ill and Nepo substituted for his mentor, he realized, "here's something useful I could do."
Since Old Blindt soon became too weak to return to work full time, Director Grinder agreed to make Nepomuck Blindt's assistant, since he'd essentially finished all his necessary classes and needed an occupation now.
One night Blindt was taken to the hospital after he'd suffered a stroke, Nepomuck going along, playing his viola for him. After the old man died, Grinder asked Nepomuck to become Dothby's chief janitor.
As career paths went, it had been no different for Blindt who'd started there as an orphan himself, never to leave.
Through all this, Nepomuck had kept up with his lessons from Professor Stine, shuffling off each Wednesday for the village church. Sometimes he would go in early, hoping to catch him practicing the organ. Being the janitor kept him quite busy but his evenings were his own when he could practice late into the night.
Being the janitor also meant he had his own room – a cell, really – a little privacy just off the basement steps. There, he could practice three hours every night and not bother the others.
He was making great progress, Stine told him, mastering several popular classical melodies, great tunes from Beethoven symphonies or Verdi operas. This classical music, even older than Blindt's songs, he found new and exciting. On an old radio Stine had given him, one station would play nothing but great hits from two hundred years ago.
Even if he didn't know the themes or what the chords were doing, he pretended he was part of the orchestra, scraping along with the sounds, trying to fit, getting the hang of it.
At first, not knowing what he was doing, he admitted it sounded awful, but with familiarity he could figure it out; rather than playing the melodies, he'd find a note that fit the harmony.
And when it was over, he would laugh and applaud from sheer joy, feeling happier than he had ever remembered before.
Sitting there, waiting for his breakfast at Rossiniana's, Nepomuck felt that same satisfaction, warming to old and pleasant memories nearly forgotten, how the discovery of something new had given him a sense of power. That awareness of satisfaction was something he rarely felt before – felt rarely since – but it was good to feel it again.
Realizing he might become a musician had given his life some meaning, then, rising above the horrible, empty childhood he'd endured. He filled with pride when he was handed his first musician's union card.
Stine trained him well and worked him hard, had him play in church, and included him in the school's student orchestra which no one seemed to mind since there were few other violists around. From there, he was hired for several performances by the local opera company, known for being quiet and a hard worker.
"It's only been a few years," he reminisced, almost breaking into a smile, "but it's like such a long time ago." The waiter sat down a plate heaping with lasagna, scrambled eggs and bacon. How much trouble it had been to find a tux that fit him – "cost more than the gig's pay, that did."
And now he's attained a whole new plateau in his career, he thought, "one where I shall excel and achieve success. I've been inducted into the Penguins of God! I wear its uniform proudly!"
The gig that changed his life was the one where Stine asked him to play as part of a chamber ensemble before a big-time banker from London was going to be speaking about music, some philanthropist whose goal was to preserve the great masterpieces of classical music, a talk he called "Why You Hate Schoenberg." They had practiced several hours, getting it right, playing one of Mozart's divertimentos and of course his favorite piece, Pachelbel's Canon. It promised to be a big crowd and the speaker was very persuasive.
He likened music to the Garden of Eden, this long-sought-for, unfortunately long-lost paradise where there stood two trees with tempting fruit, one full of beautiful simplicity and lovely melodies, the other full of thorns, and how we music lovers should eat plentifully from the Tree of Enjoyment but avoid the bitter, disappointing Tree of Knowledge.
In every age, there were those who ate too much of Knowledge and pushed Enjoyment beyond the boundaries of good taste, and these composers, their music and their advocates needed to be weeded out. After he ended by asking them to join him in this important cause, Nepomuck went up to him, ready to enlist.
It sounded like he had been recruiting believers to form a great army to protect Beethoven from the likes of Schoenberg, and Nepomuck, a committed believer, would never forgot that man's name: Maurice Harty.
But then he remembered, before enjoyment, before fulfillment, Nepomuck knew, even before he could become one with his plate of lasagna, there was a phone call to be made and news to be reported. He had now completed three assignments – so far – with further instructions awaiting him. He reached into his pocket for his phone.
Like his viola, this was a special phone designated for only one purpose, programmed to communicate with only one special person, encrypted to circle the globe to reach someone who might be blocks away.
It was the voice he always heard that now spoke clearly to him, relaying his instructions, requiring confirmation of his success, always speaking in a low, digitally modified voice, the sibilants like drawn-out hisses.
The call was quickly answered by a man known only as The Serpent. The news was quickly imparted: all was good.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
Nepomuck slipped his phone back into his pocket with a smile of satisfaction as Gioacchino brought him a heaping second serving of the breakfast lasagna special. No words were spoken between them this time – nothing needed to be said – as Nepomuck again tucked in with evident delight. An overnight cook told Gioacchino some big bald guy'd come in before midnight and ordered three dinner specials, one after another. Looking at Nepomuck's obvious enjoyment, Gioacchino needn't imagine who that might have been.
Food was only part of this customer's satisfaction, if the restauranteur only knew, and the ambiance hardly even entered into it. Yet it wasn't just a hard night's work that somehow affected his appetite. The funny thing was playing his new viola for any length of time always made him especially ravenous for Italian food.
Once again, Nepomuck admitted he felt overly warm sitting there in his overcoat, heated up by his breakfast and the coffee, but then he remembered why he was not supposed to take it off: The Serpent had told him if he's seen wearing a tuxedo at 9am, it would only call unnecessary attention to himself.
"No self-respecting free-lance musician would be out playing a gig at that hour," his master had warned him, citing security protocols. "Jazzers might get back from late-night clubs then but they don't wear tuxes."
Nepomuck had left Professor Stine's church after a rather long concert months ago – a wonderful program full of Telemann and Vivaldi – and he'd forgotten to change out of his tuxedo before returning to Dothby. Along the way, he was taunted by some school boys calling him names until he rose up to his full height.
Standing behind them, leaning against the village fountain and completely oblivious to everything, was a drunken bum he'd never seen before. Or at least not someone he'd seen recently until it dawned on him.
Standing in the moonlight, wearing his tux, his viola slung over his back, Nepomuck realized the drunk was calling him names. It was the wheedling voice he recognized first, a pestilence from his past.
He immediately went over and began pounding his fist into the man's face, the man he last saw killing his mother.
Should he murder his own father this way, attacking him on the street? He wanted to, but was it worth it? The police would catch him and then they would throw him in prison. He didn't think they'd let him play his viola in prison – would they? – so he decided there must be another way.
A few days later, Professor Stine showed him a new instrument he'd acquired, a large cream-colored viola brought in for repairs. Aside from a few cracks around the sides, it didn't look too bad.
But Nepomuck's mind wasn't on Stine's scientific demonstration ever since seeing his father and realizing how much he wanted him dead. This man had recently been released from prison but he had changed little. Nepomuck contemplated beating him to a bloody pulp like he'd beaten his mother, perhaps several times before he'd out-right kill him.
There were many ways he could kill him, playing them in his mind, then he'd run away again, escape the police...
"Nepomuck," Stine said with a kindly smile, "have you heard anything I've said?"
This unusual, supposedly 'legendary' instrument, Stine was explaining, came to him quite accidentally, a local businessman hoping it could be repaired, an instrument he'd found in an old cheese shop when traveling through Cremona. It had, he'd whispered mysteriously, a "strange and unusual history going back centuries," rumored to have been made in Stradivarius' workshop.
What Nepomuck most liked about it, more importantly – it was larger than most standard violas and easier for him to play. Too bad about that ghastly finish and those ugly wolf tones, he thought.
The weirdest thing was, after you'd played it and it warmed up enough, the room smelled like a plateful of spaghetti or more specifically like the grated Parmesan cheese he always heaped on spaghetti. Supposedly the result of a lunchtime workroom accident, it completely ruined the finish, an apprentice spilling alfredo sauce onto fresh varnish.
Stradivarius instruments are, naturally, valued for their tone, their exquisite, rarely matched sound as well as the beauty of their finish. This poor instrument, set aside before being completed, was basically sold for scrap.
A woman named Ricotta Fontina bought it to hang in her cheese shop where for several centuries it absorbed fantastic aromas.
The fact Antonio Stradivarius made only a dozen violas in his storied career should have added some value to this one: with its odd, white finish and cheesy smell, this became the "Unlucky Thirteenth."
Stine set about over the next few weeks to fix the various cracks and with any luck eliminate the wolf tone though he could do nothing about the finish or its unusually fragrant varnish. He figured the change in climate after all these years aggravated its problems, given England's cooler, damper weather compared to Italy's.
With the help of his newly hired apprentice, a young boy named Silas, Stine took other old violas, discarded and broken, to find the necessary parts that, added inside, might correct the wolf tone.
Then, on a particularly dark and stormy night, Stine had finished his work and played an impromptu performance for young Silas. But the wolf tone turned out to be worse than before – much worse.
Before Stine knew what happened, he saw poor Silas fall to the floor, a horrific expression of fear upon his face.
Nepomuck had braved the storm that awful night to come help his teacher when he called about disposing of a body. The professor tried to explain what had happened but it hardly seemed possible. If word got out his playing could cause a listener's death, no one would ever hire him again – he'd be ruined.
A month later, Nepomuck, sneaking into the church, watched Stine practicing the viola when one of the local delinquents broke in. He watched as Stine marched toward the boy, repeatedly playing the wolf tone.
Immediately, the would-be burglar halted in his tracks, falling to the floor – dead! Even behind glass, Nepomuck knew it sounded awful. Other than the horror on the boy's face, there'd been no visible violence.
Once again, he helped his teacher drag the body down into the crypt and that's when they both figured it out.
There was something about the wolf tone that'd been amplified by Stine's repairs, how both deaths happened around the full moon. Whatever he'd done to it, Stine had turned it into a killer viola. It left not a single mark upon its victims, no sign of murder, and yet somehow the player had remained immune.
"The wolf tone has become even more evil – it's become a Werewolf Tone!" The poor professor, Nepomuck realized, began babbling incoherently. "God, Nepomuck, I've created a monster," Stine wailed. "Here, take it – destroy it!"
The old man fell to the ground, sobbing, when Nepomuck had an idea and threw the viola into its ancient case. Hurriedly tearing the bow from his teacher's hand, he disappeared into the night. Nepomuck would find his father and kill him by hardly lifting a finger but it would still be a horrible death.
It didn't take long to locate the bastard, partly visible in the moonlight, lying there drunk in a back alley nearby.
"Here, old dad," Nepomuck said, "let me play you a nice little ditty."
What started as Brahms' Lullaby quickly turned into a fiendish shredding of sound once he began violently attacking the wolf tone. The beast who'd beaten his mother to death now shrank back in horror.
Holding his hands to his ears, his father thrashed about, then fell back.
Nepomuck quickly checked the body. "Like a doornail!"
He stood back, delighted with his new discovery. "My god, it really works!" (Then he realized how hungry he felt. Pasta!) At long last, his mother had been avenged and the evil man punished. Here, his father was dead just as if he'd shot or strangled him and with a great deal less effort, too. There was not a single mark on him, no sign of physical attack. The only trauma was visible on his face. Certainly it was quick if not exactly painless and a lot less messy.
Another thing he realized as he put the viola back in its case: "Here's something I can do – and do well." But what kind of career options were there for a free-lance hired assassin? It wasn't like he'd be in big demand plus was there a union? – and then the matter of income and benefits.
At that moment, Nepomuck decided to leave the only home he knew behind, heading off in search of fame and fulfillment. But where would he go, and how would he realize his new dream? Then he remembered hearing that businessman from London who'd talked about defending Beethoven, protecting us from musical villains like Arnold Schoenberg.
He would offer his services to the cause, but how to find him? There can't be many bankers named Maurice Harty.
This, Nepomuck knew, would be his true calling.
He'd become a serial killer.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Yesterday, I finished writing 97% of the first of the four parts of The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben (about 44,893 words out of a projected total of 149,082 words) – there's a segment of an inserted document (a musicological flashback) that I intend to write and insert later – which is not exactly one-fourth of the book, more like 30%.
But now I'm going to take a break and write another novel for NaNoWriMo 2013 - since November is "National Novel Writing Month" - in which the writer's goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel. Unfortunately, since what I've written so far of The Labyrinth has taken seven weeks and still hasn't reached 50,000 words, I've decided to take a different approach and try something that is less... well, complicated to write.
– Dick Strawser
© October, 2013
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Have Quintet, Will Travel: Shostakovich and His Piano Quintet
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| Jasper Quartet |
(You can read more about that concert, and hear different excerpts from the Quintet, in my blog for Market Square Concerts, here.)
In this post, I'm re-posting the famous video recorded in 1982 with the legendary Sviatoslav Richter and the Borodin Quartet which had a long working relationship with Shostakovich since 1944. In the course of the post, the cellist of the Borodin - performing in this recording - remembers working with Shostakovich when they first played the Quintet with him in 1947.
At the end of the post, there are audio clips of the recording the composer himself made with the Beethoven Quartet, the ensemble he'd originally composed it for.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
The G Minor Piano Quintet began life as almost his 2nd String Quartet. But friends of his in the Beethoven String Quartet had asked him to compose something with piano that he could play with them, and so the quintet began to take shape. He began working on it during the summer of 1940 and completed it on September 14th. He and the Beethoven Quartet gave it its first performance on November 23rd at the Moscow Conservatory. It was received with universal acclaim and the scherzo and finale both had to be encored.
Here is the Borodin Quartet (who first performed the quintet with the composer in 1947) recorded in 1983 in a concert at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory (the same space where it had been premiered) with legendary pianist Sviatoslav Richter:
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In fact, it was so well received, it won the Stalin Prize in 1941, something rather unusual for a chamber work without an overtly political programme, given the timing, but also ironic, perhaps, since Shostakovich had been in such political hot water for his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District which resulted in the (in)famous attack in the press – the article “Muddle Instead of Music” – brought on by Stalin's dislike of the opera and its “degenerate Western influences” (Stalin and his wife went to the opera and stormed out, highly offended, despite the fact it had already proven to be a box-office success). He was able to save himself – quite literally – by composing his famous 5th Symphony which someone (not the composer) called “A Soviet Artist's Response to Just Criticism.”
To place things in a chronological perspective, the article appeared on January 28th, 1936; in the spring of 1937, he was nearly arrested (he would have been one of over seven million people who'd be arrested in Stalin's purges between 1936 and 1939) and was saved only because the person who was preparing his arrest was himself arrested first!
This was around the time he'd already been sketching what would become his 5th Symphony. He finished sketching it on September 11th, 1937 and completed the “short score” a week later and the full score in October. The premiere on November 21st was a huge success that no doubt saved his career (and quite possibly his life).
In 1938, he wrote his first string quartet, starting what would become a new interest in chamber music through the rest of his career. If for no other reason, it usually failed to attract the attention of the government bureaucrats who were more concerned about the large-scale “public statements” the composer made in his more public works like symphonies and operas. He would save many of his most personal statements for his chamber music, especially his later string quartets – like the 8th which incorporates his famous musical signature, his initials D SCH in the pitches D – E-flat – C – B-natural in German notation.
His Sixth Symphony, then, composed shortly after the string quartet, was a more “public” work and was being anticipated as “more of the same,” an offering to the concept of Soviet-Socialist Realism. Unfortunately, the work met with almost universal confusion and has always been a difficult symphony to make sense of, in three movements with a long, slowly unfolding first movement (instead of the traditional allegro) and then a seemingly unrelated scherzo and galloping finale, almost vulgar compared to the expected heroic finish.
This was premiered in November, 1939.
The following summer, then, he composed another chamber work – which, as I mentioned, was originally going to be a second string quartet before being turned into the Piano Quintet.
As Shostakovich told the story to his life-long friend, the literary critic Isaak Davidovich Glickman:
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“Do you know why I added a piano part to this quartet? So that I could have the chance to perform [it] myself and thereby travel on concert tours. Now the 'Glazunovs' and the 'Beethovens' [the two quartets whom he'd scheduled performances of the quintet with] won't be able to do without me – and I'll get a chance to see the world.”
We both burst out laughing.
“Are you joking?” I asked.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich [Shostakovich] answered, “Not in the slightest! You are an inveterate stay-at-home, while at heart I'm an inveterate traveller!” But from the expression on his face it was impossible to tell if he was joking or not. We had this conversation in the summer of the year preceding the war [1941].
[Glickman, Letters to a Friend, quoted in Elizabeth Wilson's “Shostakovich: A Life Remembered,” p.165]
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The next-to-last time he performed in public was in February 1964. He was scheduled to play the quintet with the Borodin Quartet in the city of Gorki, but played only the Intermezzo because of the unreliability of his hands. Though he announced it was to be his last public appearance, he agreed to accompany Galina Vishnevskaya, the soprano who was married to his friend and protege, Mstislav Rostropovich, and a baritone in a program in May 1966, but he was so nervous about the concert and whether his hands would cooperate or not, his friend Isaak Glickman who was in the audience saw the composer was in physical agony, presumably brought on by his nerves.
The next night, Shostakovich suffered a serious heart attack and spent the next two months in the hospital. (It was while he was in the hospital this time that he chose the texts for his 14th Symphony which is a combination symphony/song-cycle for soprano and baritone with strings: all of the texts deal with death...)
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
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| Shostakovich in 1941 |
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“We, the string players, wanted to 'sing,' to play with more emotion. Shostakovich accentuated the constructive, motor elements and achieved his effect through clarity and the flow of the music. The emotional restraint of his playing led to a certain contradiction with the nature of strings. He demanded the minimum use of vibrato. The fast tempi excluded in themselves any possibility of emotional exaggeration and an open cantilena.”
[quoted in Elizabeth Wilson's “Shostakovich: A Life Remembered”, p. 165.]
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Valentin Berlinsky, the cellist of another quartet – this one, not yet called the Borodin String Quartet – recalls their first association with the composer in 1944 when they were still conservatory students. He was coming to hear them play his first quartet and “he had arrived a few seconds after nine [o'clock]. To my amazement, he started apologizing for being late.”
They didn't perform the quintet with him until 1947, but Berlinsky recalls some details from their rehearsals:
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“...which took place at his home. In the Prelude, he asked us not to make a ritenuto [a drawing out of the tempo] despite its being written in the score. 'But ritenuto is written here,' we exclaimed. He came up to us very nervously, took out a pen and crossed out the marking in every part.
“Rudolf Barshai was the violist in the quartet at the time. In the Finale there is an imitation between the cello and viola. It's in the score now but it wasn't then. The cello and viola were supposed to play together but Barshai made a mistake and came in after I did. Shostakovich stopped playing and said, 'Please, mark it the way you played it just now.'”
[ quoted in Wilson, “Shostakovich: A Life Remembered,” p.279]
= = = = =
Barshai told Ms. Wilson separately his side of this story:
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“Barshai was also studying composition [she writes in a footnote] and on occasion would show Shostakovich his scores. Once, just before the rehearsal mentioned [by Berlinsky], he visited Shostakovich and during their meeting they talked about the Piano Quintet. Barshai suggested a small correction in the finale. 'Play it like that tomorrow in the rehearsal and we'll see,' the composer suggested. At the rehearsal Barshai played the suggested correction in the relevant bars without warning his colleagues. Shostakovich then stopped the rehearsal and told him, 'Leave it like that, please.' Berlinsky in turn was skeptical... telling me that it was unheard of that Shostakovich should accept advice from anyone.”
[ – Wilson, “Shostakovich: A Life Remembered,” p.279]
= = = = = =
Berlinsky continues, saying how, in all, the Borodin Quartet played the quintet eight times with the composer, the last time being that sad occasion where he could only play the Intermezzo.
= = = = =
“Shostakovich was a very anxious performer. Because of that all our tempi tended to be too fast. The amazing thing is that he appeared to be ashamed of his own music. He used to say, ' Let's play it fast, otherwise the audience will get bored.' He particularly rushed the slow movements. For instance, in the 3rd Quartet, he hurried us on in the great funeral march of the fourth movement. 'No, no,' he would say, 'while you're stretching out that first C-sharp, the audience will fall asleep.' In general, his marking of the tempo often contradicted what he really wanted.
“We would say, 'But, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, your metronome mark is such-and-such.'
“He replied, 'Well, you see, my metronome at home is out of order, so pay no attention to what I wrote.'
“Sometimes he wrote in the metronome markings after the first performance by the Beethoven Quartet [who usually premiered his new quartets]. It's leader, Dmitri Tsyganov, was by nature a fast player, and this influenced Shostakovich's tempo markings. We never played the same tempi that the Beethoven Quartet took.
“Many years later, we recorded the first eleven quartets [there would eventually be fifteen, in all] in Japan and we presented Shostakovich with the records. Shortly afterwards, he wrote us a very detailed letter which didn't contain a single reference to the tempi. Most of the complaints were in regard to the dynamics... and to some wrong notes. These mostly turned out to be misprints in the score.”
[ – Wilson, “Shostakovich: A Life Remembered,” p.280]
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A violinist who later joined the Leningrad Philharmonic, Yakov Milkis recalled seeing Shostakovich for the first time in the late-1940s when he was in his prime as a performer.
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“I often heard him perform his own works and I particularly remember his concerts with the Beethoven Quartet. He was a wonderful pianist and when performing, he was completely absorbed in his own world. His playing conveyed an ideal sense of form and structure but more than that it was an expression of his innermost world, one that cost him sweat, blood and tears. He played with a special touch and colour, and often quite intentionally treated the piano as a percussion instrument. It is rare that a composer uses the upper register of the piano like a xylophone, making a sharp, percussive sound. This is how he played the Scherzo from the Piano Quintet, for instance. I still have the particular sound of his sarcastic dry staccato in my ears today. It completely suited the style of the music.
“He always sat alone [in orchestra rehearsals] preferring some inconspicuous spot in the stalls. He... seemed to retire into himself, melting into his surroundings, so as to be left undisturbed while listening and working. This incredible modesty was apparent also when he was in a gathering of people. Here too he appeared to fade into the background, doing his best not to attract attention to himself.
[ – Wilson, “Shostakovich: a Life Remembered,” p.355]
= = = = =
1948 had been another terrible year for Shostakovich. Unlike the attack in 1936, Zhdanov's decree was intent on rooting out Western influences in Soviet music in which Shostakovich, Prokofiev and several other leading composers were condemned first by the Stalinist bureaucrats and then by their colleagues. This affected Shostakovich differently, this time.
Rather than writing another “Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism,” he ceased composing at all. Or, that is, publishing anything. Life was difficult, his income dried up – no one would perform his music so he had no income and who would risk commissioning new works from him with Stalin's displeasure so close to the surface? – and so he turned inward, writing solely for himself, often leaving things unseen by others in desk drawers, like his Violin Concerto and, perhaps, much of his 10th Symphony which either didn't see the light of day or wasn't begun until after Stalin's death in 1953 (the same day as Prokofiev's, as it turned out).
But he did compose a series of piano pieces inspired by Tatiana Nikolayeva's performance of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: his own set of 24 Preludes and Fugues.
Imagine what it must have meant for a composer, accused of being too influenced by Western Music and Germanic forms like the symphony, to sit down and write Bach-inspired fugues: there can hardly be a more Germanic formalist approach to writing music than a fugue! How completely un-Soviet!
And yet his Piano Quintet, composed in 1940 before the Nazi invasion drew the Soviet Union into the 2nd World War, opens with a Prelude and Fugue, as Bach-like, Germanic and formalist as anything he was accused of writing in 1948!
And yet in 1941, this Quintet won the Stalin Prize, the Soviet Union's highest award in the arts!
If it had been such a patriotic issue to attack a composer for his “formalist Western” style in 1948, why was the same “formalist Western” style worthy of receiving the government's highest award seven years earlier?
Vagaries of politics aside, given that – now listen to Dmitri Shostakovich playing his Piano Quintet which he premiered in 1940 with the Beethoven Quartet for whom it was composed, but recorded here in 1949, the year he turned 43:
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Prelude:
Fugue:
Scherzo:
Intermezzo:
Finale:
= = = = =
– Dick Strawser
Sunday, July 21, 2013
A Path Not Taken: Claude Debussy's Violin Sonata
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| Claude Debussy |
Last August marked the 150th Anniversary of Claude Debussy's birth which was largely overlooked in this country.
(You can read about the concert at the Market Square Concerts blog here, and find out more about the series in general and other works on the first program, here.)
Peter Sirotin – artistic director of Market Square Concerts as well as violinist in the Mendelssohn Piano Trio and acting concertmaster of the Harrisburg Symphony as well as a teacher associated with, among other schools, Messiah College in the Central Pennsylvania area – suggested this video to me, a compelling performance of Debussy's sonata by violinist Janine Jansen and pianist Itamar Golan, recorded in 2011 at Paris' Salle Pleyel. It's one of the best performances of the work I've ever heard, so even if you are familiar with the piece, I strongly suggest listening to these clips.
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1st Movement:
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2nd Movement:
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3rd Movement:
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| Monet's Sunrise (1872) |
It is this lack of “tonal tension” that still makes some people uncomfortable even 120 years after The Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” which Debussy wrote between 1892 and 1894. We seem to be in no particular key and since most of Standard Classical Music was built on the concept of tension-and-release in the role of tonality – stating a key (say, G Minor), digressing from that key and creating a sense of tension that, ultimately, will be resolved by returning to that key – and this gives “Impressionistic Music” the sense it “has no tension” which (if you listen to any of Debussy's major works like La Mer or parts of his only completed opera, Pelleas et Melisande) is not the case: his tension, however, is the result of other aspects of music but not the natural pull of tonality.
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| Debussy & Stravinsky |
And yet both are part of the same musical continuum: as music of the 18th Century with its classical lines and direct structural clarity (and, of course, its strict adherence to traditional tonality) gave way to one of the 19th Century's primary reactions and expansions of those concepts into what we call “Romanticism” with its more free-wheeling use of harmony taking us further (and further, once you get to Wagner's Tristan) from standard tonality, not to mention its overall structural ambiguity and more emotional responses.
By the time we were getting closer to the 20th Century, composers like Franz Liszt were flirting with music so “chromatic” it had no sense of tonal center at all. Even as lush a piece as Schoenberg's Transfigured Night from 1899 threw most listeners for a musical loop, “as if the pages of Tristan had been freshly smeared,” even though it begins clearly in D Minor and ends radiantly in D Major!
Atonality reached something of a peak between 1912-1913 with three seminal works: in addition to Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, there is also Claude Debussy's ballet, Jeux which is probably the epitome of his stylistic ambiguity, especially its magical if not ominous opening.
After each of these works – as Wagner had done with Tristan in 1859 – their composers pulled back from the direction it would take them, whatever that may have been. Stravinsky's was almost immediate: having “done” The Rite, he seemingly repudiated its vast musical canvas and searing dissonances by writing small, comparatively intimate works – of which the “Five Easy Pieces” heard on Summermusic's first concert, written in 1917, is just one example. Schoenberg may have taken a little longer, but then he spent several fallow years before he developed the style – better, the “compositional approach” – that became “serialism,” a term that requires more explanation than I have time for in a post about Debussy.
Let's leave it at the realization that, like harmony working within a tonal framework is a”system” where chords have specific hierarchies and distinct functions (the IV chord leads naturally to the V or dominant chord leads inevitably to the I or tonic chord), and that Schoenberg's “system of composing with twelve notes” in which no single pitch has any more prominence than any other, is a system that replaces the “rules” of tonal harmony with a different set of rules, but rules nonetheless.
Like it or not, it is another way of writing music: Mozart, in writing a Sonata in C Major, was as much bound by rules as Schoenberg was in his String Quartet No. 4 which, despite its surface language, still relies on rhythms not too dissimilar from Mozart's time.
If you listen to Transfigured Night from 1899 and then to the opening of Pierrot Lunaire from 1912, followed by the 3rd String Quartet of 1927, you will notice a strong difference in the style of this composer over a span of 28 years.
The first is still tonal, the second is completely atonal – though both are “representational” in telling a story – and the third is serial (and entirely abstract: in other words, no story-telling images involved which might help a confused listener face the unfamiliar). Serialism, here, is a way of taking the idea of “atonality” which is unorganized and organizing it according to fairly strict methods (or “rules”). Remember, technically, while it's possible to write serial music that is still tonal, for the most part “serial music may be atonal but not all atonal music is serial.” Just to clear that up...
Now, since this is a post about Debussy's Violin Sonata, what does all this have to do with Debussy?
So, listen to these three works:
- the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun completed in 1894
- Jeux from 1912
- and again, just the opening movement from the Violin Sonata of 1917.
They are all “different sounds” of the same composer. And like Schoenberg and Stravinsky, they indicate different approaches to the question “how can I organize sounds into music?”
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| Debussy alone |
But look at the next works he composed: with the advent of World War I, Debussy found himself editing Chopin and, as a result, found inspiration to write a set of Etudes much in the same way Chopin had. Rather than giving them picturesque titles as he had done with the second set of Preludes written in 1913 (“The Terrace of the Audience in the Moonlight” or “Dead Leaves” – admittedly, they lose considerable beauty in translation...), the etudes, composed in 1915, were given abstract names describing their technical challenges (the purpose of an etude, after all) like “For the Fourths” (after the interval of a fourth) or “For the composite arpeggios” and so forth.
That was the same year he began his projected series of six sonatas “for diverse [combinations of] instruments,” of which he composed only three: the Cello Sonata and the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, both from 1915, and the Violin Sonata completed and premiered in 1917.
While the Cello Sonata is suggestive of “character pieces” in its moods, its clarity is a direct influence of the short, independent and often picturesquely titled pieces by an earlier musicien français, Francois Couperin. It has a greater clarity of line and harmony than you'd heard in the earlier pieces I'd mentioned. There is nothing here that could be labeled “impressionism.”
But then, look at these two very different impressionist paintings:
Monet's Impression of a Sunrise from 1872 (see above) and Georges Seurat's most famous painting:
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| Seurat: Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of Le Grande Jatte (1886) |
The next sonata Debussy composed was for the unusual combination of flute, viola and harp, but sounding so natural for Debussy with its flute part reminiscent of the earlier “Afternoon of a Faun” solo, the colorful use of the harp and the deeper tone of the viola as the middle voice than either the violin or cello.
The most memorable aspect (if not “impression”) of this sonata is, compared to its two fellow-sonatas, how impressionistic it sounds: again, the use of coloristic chords and ambiguous tonal relationships.
By comparison, the opening movement of the Violin Sonata is another world – for one thing, its clarity is distinctly classical rather than impressionistically romantic, and it is, after all, a sonata that is actually an old-fashioned sonata, unlike its two companions which are just called that.
It's curious, but many people regard this sonata as “the weakest of the three” or “an illuminating failure.” They miss the point. Why would he repudiate his former style in favor of something – the tonal requirements of a classical sonata form – he had proven to be unnecessary in practically all the music he had been composing since the 1880s?
Again, bearing witness to Debussy's two contemporaries, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, it is very clear Debussy's thoughts were headed in a new direction. If he was looking for “other ways” to organize his music, why not try to hybridize the old structures with a language that was still his own?
If you follow the concept of the dialectic, an idea (or thesis) is countered by a reaction to it, not necessarily its opposite but a contradiction to it (antithesis) out of which one finds enough common ground to create a synthesis which, in turn, becomes a new idea (or thesis) to which there can become a new antithesis and so on.
If Tonality is our initial “thesis,” then Atonality is its “antithesis.” Schoenberg and Stravinsky each found their own way to reach a “synthesis,” just as Ravel would do. For Debussy and Ravel (two very different composers forever crammed into the same pigeon-hole of impressionism), the “antithesis” might be “Impressionism” which might be tonal or atonal, depending on how you created it.
For Ravel, his later music became more classically lined, particularly in light of what we'd call the whole “Neo-Classical” School of the early-20th Century, to which Stravinsky would inevitably belong as, in a broader sense, would Schoenberg's serialism, if you examined the technical aspects of it and his textures, for the most part. But then, we normally consider “Neo-Classical” as a tonal approach, harmonically, and that leaves serialism out of the equation.
But Debussy didn't live long enough to follow through with his synthesis: he died the following year.
Diagnosed with cancer as early as 1909, his health began failing with the advent of the war. In late-1915, after completing the first two of these six sonatas, he endured one of the first colostomies ever performed. Though the respite was brief, it was enough to allow him to compose one more sonata: its premiere on May 7th, 1917, was the last time Debussy would perform in public. He died on March 25th, 1918, his funeral procession weaving through the deserted streets of Paris during the German aerial bombardment.
It's clear from these three sonatas that Debussy had different approaches in mind for each one, not very different from any 18th Century composer who wrote string quartets by the half-dozen (think of Mozart's “Haydn” Quartets or Beethoven's Op. 18), not just in the instruments they were written for. Where they might have gone has intrigued composers throughout the 20th Century – witness the works inspired by them by Richard Rodney Bennett (mentioned in the companion post, here).
So it's unfair to call the Violin Sonata a “failure” because it doesn't match up to the Impressionism of his earlier style – it is its own work and an assured one, at that, plus it has implications for a future Debussy never had the chance to explore – or that we ever got the opportunity to experience.
- Dick Strawser
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Finding Foote: A Surprising Piano Quintet on the Program
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| Arthur Foote |
With Ernest Bloch's "From Jewish Life" and Mozart's Piano Quartet K.493 on the first half, the program concludes, not surprisingly, with a Quintet for Piano and Strings.
But this one is by Arthur Foote.
Arthur Who?
Most American concert-goers would be hard-pressed to say they’re “familiar” with music by any American composer before 1900 – or at least, one way or another, before Charles Ives, that innovator of American music better known than heard.
Yet you’d think, considering our history technically goes back before 1776, there’d at least be something comparable to what was going on in Europe: Mozart and Haydn during the early years of the Republic, Beethoven around the time of our War of 1812, or Brahms and Wagner in the decade or so after the Civil War.
The truth is, there was very little market for classical music in the New World. The popular mood was for dance music and hymns – feeding the secular and spiritual needs of a hard-working population – while the wealthier Americans imported what they needed from their distant ancestral homelands and would have considered anything by American artists too plebian to decorate their cultural lives with.
European Art was considered edifying and appreciating it (and certainly owning it) was a sign of intelligence as well as wealth. American culture, such as it was, couldn't compete on an intellectual or even an aesthetic level with European culture and its long and brilliant history. This attitude can be found in many American literary works but especially in the novels of Henry James with their constant friction between established European culture and the rough-around-the-edges newly minted Americans looking for acceptance in the world, especially in A Portrait of a Lady and his last major novel, The Golden Bowl.
Besides, painters may have painted American scenes but they did so in English or German fashion; poets may have written about American subjects but – with one glaring exception – they wrote in English or German styles (the exception was and always will be Walt Whitman).
The same could be said for literature at least on the surface but here there were more distinct and distinctly American voices despite their cultural roots. The written word, at least, had deeper roots in American society.
America was viewed as an economic possibility for touring musicians and we, in our early centuries, would no doubt have benefited from visiting figures had transatlantic travel been easier. It was the amount of time cooped up on a ship that deterred Robert and Clara Schumann from following through on plans for an American tour. But, like Anton Rubinstein or Camille Saint-Saëns afterward, these visits were primarily to make as much money as quickly as possible and then return to the comforts and familiarity of home.
Much of the basis of what became our musical life here was founded or assisted by those fleeing history: the French Revolution or the decades of Napoleonic wars that followed; the series of mostly failed revolutions of 1848-1849 across much of Europe.
Even though he may have had little impact on the musical life of his adopted country, Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, the collaborator on such masterpieces as Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, fled creditors more than history and opened the first academic course in Italian literature in this country, introducing us to the likes of Dante. In addition, he also would run a country store in Sunbury PA, of all places, driving his supply wagons through Harrisburg on his way to and from Philadelphia. If nothing else, his conversations with a young man who worked for him named Simon Cameron helped instill in the boy an interest in cultural things unknown in this land. It would be amusing to imagine Cameron ever having discussions with Abraham Lincoln about the finer points of Mozart operas, but it may have only been one more reason Lincoln referred to his erstwhile Secretary of War (and former Ambassador to Russia) as “The Tsar of Pennsylvania.”
Anyone who wanted to become a composer in this country went to Europe to study. There were no conservatories here, not even university music departments. In fact, when John Knowles Paine offered lectures in music at Harvard where he was chapel organist and choirmaster, the faculty wondered why. In the early-1860s, he was allowed to give lectures but there were no credits available toward a degree – consequently, there were few students.
It was only later in 1870 that his lectures were given official recognition: a course in harmony was successful enough to warrant setting up a course in counterpoint and with it, eventually, course credit.
I mention all this because Arthur Foote was 21 when he graduated from Harvard in 1873, having taken Paine’s music classes, even though his plan was to go into the practice of law. It wasn’t until he started taking organ lessons to pass that first summer he decided music should be his career. In two years, he began a career as a music teacher in Boston, a profession he enjoyed for over sixty years. In addition to being organist at Boston’s First Unitarian Church until 1910, he also helped found the American Guild of Organists.
Technically, he is the first of that generation of composers who did not go to Europe to study. He is an entirely home-grown American composer. His style, for the most part, bears all the hallmarks of European standards, conservative and Victorian which itself was largely Germanic and often derivative of Brahms.
But like many of his generation, he has been forgotten, largely overshadowed by the innovative composers who came with the New Century, particularly Charles Ives (Yale, Class of 1898) and later Aaron Copland (who, ironically, went to Paris to become the first American pupil of the French teacher, Nadia Boulanger in 1921).
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Here is a recording of Foote’s Piano Quintet with pianist Mary Louise Boehm, violinists Kees Kooper and Alvin Rogers, violist Richard Maximoff, and cellist Fred Sherry, a recording currently available on the Albany label but which I’d owned years ago on the Vox label. It’s in four movements which was posted on YouTube in three clips:
1st Mvmt
2nd Mvmt
3rd & 4th Mvmts
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It’s tempting to compare it to Brahms’ Piano Quintet especially when there are so few well-known works in the genre to begin with (imagine if there were only four string quartets that got any regular performance-time?). It certainly sounds like Brahms, at least on the surface, but Foote is more interested in the harmonic world of Brahms’ romanticism, not its underlying structure and counterpoint.
In Boston in the 1890s, Brahms was certainly not a “conservative” force. Today, we tend to lump Brahms and Wagner together as “two leading German Romanticists,” unaware how vibrantly (and often violently) different they were from each other to their contemporaries: if Wagner had started by creating “Music of the Future,” a term borrowed from his future father-in-law Franz Liszt, Brahms was looking back at the legacy of Beethoven and Bach (the conductor Hans von Bülow coined the idea of the Three B’s more as a marketing gimmick than a reflection of Brahms’ perceived placement in the musical firmament). But Brahms’ love of contrapuntal writing turned most of his American listeners off (the famous comment “Exit in case of Brahms” originated in Boston).
Dvořák, on the other hand, was a kind of “Poor Man’s Brahms” – the best elements of Brahms with his tunefulness and ability to switch between drama and lyricism combined with a populist folk-like style and lively dance rhythms that animated so much of Dvořák’s music whether it was written in Bohemia, Vienna or New York City (or, like his American chamber music, Spillville, IA).
And it was in 1892 that Dvořák arrived in New York to chair Mrs. Thurber’s National Conservatory – the following year, he would compose his newest symphony there, subtitled “From the New World.” She’d already hired the likes of Victor Herbert, but snagging Dvořák was a wealthy patron’s attempt to bring in some famous European superstar to guide and inspire young American talent. At least, that was the plan.
Now, it’s unfortunate that her money ran out in 1895 and Dvořák returned to Prague when it did. No great composer came out of his class – but one could say the same of many great composers who had numerous students: not every student went on to achieve greatness and Dvořák’s three academic years in America would certainly have created a small sampling to expect greatness from.
The only student who went on to have any impact on future students was the New York-born Rubin Goldmark whose uncle was the Austrian composer Carl Goldmark. He could count among his students names like Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, though it would be fair to say that he was also the reason Copland decided to go to Paris to study instead (finding Goldmark too pedantic). While Gershwin wrote his charming “Lullaby” as a harmony assignment for Goldmark, there was too little association to consider his future fame as anything but an indirect result of their brief intersection in time.
Even so, we think his idea about building an American Voice out of the use of American Folk-Songs – especially the spirituals of the American Negro – was a huge influence on the national scene. In fact, though he says he never quoted folk songs himself but only “wrote in the spirit” of these tunes, it wasn’t until later that composers took him literally, still arguing about exactly what an “American folk song” was.
There were the “Indianists” who found inspiration in the songs and rhythms of the Native Americans, including Goldmark who wrote a Hiawatha Overture as well as a “Negro Rhapsody” or Philadelphia-born Preston Ware Orem whose “Indian Rhapsody” for piano sounds more like one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies superimposed on a few meager Native American ideas.
But most of America’s already established composers in the 1890s – especially those in Boston, the conservative antipode to America’s futuristic New York City – rejected Dvořák’s idea. Amy Beach (then known as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) went so far as to write a symphony based on actual themes and folk songs from her British heritage which in 1896 became her Gaelic Symphony.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t “American elements” in Arthur Foote’s quintet aside from the homage to Brahms. He was, after all, a thoroughly American composer, born and trained here, but his Americanisms are no less American than Dvořák’s were – the essence of the idea rather than the substance of it – and I think unless he wrote specifically somewhere that he was in fact incorporating American themes into his music, we might probably be making assumptions of what it sounds like to us today rather than how it might have been perceived by his contemporaries over a century ago as well as by the composer himself.
Does that lessen the quality of the piece? No, not at all.
The Quintet as well as his most frequently performed piece (if the term is applicable at all), the Suite in E for Strings, and other works like his tone poems In the Mountains and Francesca da Rimini deserve to be heard if only in the context of a culture trying to find its voice.
There is, for instance, a Cello Concerto that was performed in 1894 by the recently formed Chicago Symphony: consider that Victor Herbert’s 2nd Cello Concerto was premiered in March 1894 and Dvořák began composing his that November, what could Foote’s Cello Concerto add to the fairly limited cello repertoire?
Will Arthur Foote’s Piano Quintet replace the Brahms Quintet on chamber music programs throughout America? Not very likely. It’s not sufficiently “substantial” (given our preference for the Masterpiece Quotient) to be the main work on any program – even here, the musical substance is on the first half of the concert with Mozart’s E-flat Piano Quartet, K.493 – nor is its composer recognizable enough to attract big crowds (in as much as chamber music ever does).
Could it stand being heard once in a while instead of one of the Big Four Quintets – those masterpieces by Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák and Shostakovich?
Yes, please.
- Dick Strawser
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