We went to Concord, Mass., a couple of weeks ago. It’s my default short-vacation spot. I love the bookstores: The Barrow, the Concord Bookshop, Books with a Past, as well as the gift shops at local museums and authors’ houses. I always find a dozen books there I didn’t know about, many about Transcendentalism. And we walk around Walden Pond, and I wonder how much quieter it might be if Thoreau hadn’t turned it into such a shrine. 

In The Barrow, I was going through
poetry, and my eye ran across a title: Sonata Mulattica. I did a double take,
chuckled in surprise. I tried to keep going. I looked at it again. I took it
out, read a poem, put it back and moved on. But the book virtually leapt back
into my hands. It’s by Rita Dove, African-American poet who was poet laureate from
1993 to 1995. How can it be that the national poet laureate receives so little
fanfare that I can fail to have heard of her 15 years later?

Anyway, Sonata Mulattica is an entire book of poems about a single subject: Beethoven’s writing the Kreutzer Sonata
for the “African prince” violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower,
falling out with him over a woman, and then dedicating the piece to Rodolphe
Kreutzer instead. Dove uses lots of musical terminology, all correctly – in youth she
played the cello, apparently – and her characterizations ring true and tired
and humble, with none of the pompous mythologizing that attends portraits of
great composers. Poem after poem after poem on this one moment in history, some
from Bridgetower’s perspective, some from Beethoven’s, some from that of minor
characters, and some of my favorites are about Haydn, who encouraged Bridgetower. This one is titled Haydn, Overheard (I’ll refrain from entire poems for copyright reasons):

It is a sad thing always 
to be a slave 
but if slave I must, better 
the oboe’s clarion tyranny

than a man’s cruel whims. 
I stayed on at Esterhaza, 
writing music for the world 
between spats and budgets,

with no more leave 
to step outside the gates 
than a prize egg-laying hen. 
Even after Miklós died

and his tone-deaf son 
filled the courtyard 
with military parades, 
I hesitated: Call it

robbing Peter to pay Paul, 
but I had been homeless once 
and did not care for hunger….

But the finest gift I ever received 
was the vision of Johann Peter Salomon 
with his flamboyant nose and cape 
swirling across my doorstep:

“I’ve come to fetch you,” he said. 
It was December. We set out 
from Vienna on the fifteenth 
for London, that great free city.

And here’s Bridgetower, in a poem called Andante con
Variazioni:

Thank you. It was a privilege. You are so kind. 
It is all his doing; I am merely the instrument. 
To have the honor of this premiere… 
a beauty of a piece, indeed.

What an honor! Countess, I am enchanted. 
I only wish I could better express my gratitude 
in your lovely language: Vielen Dank. 
It is all his – why, thank you, sir, I am speechless….

Herr van Beethoven is indeed a Master, and Wien

an empress of a city. My apologies –

I only meant that she is… magnificent.

(Ludwig, get me out of here!)

[UPDATE: In an attempt to better do the book justice, here’s Beethoven:

Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly – I tell you,
every tenderness I have ever known
has been nothing
but thwarted violence, an ache
so permanent and deep, the lightest touch
awakens it… It is impossible

to care enough. I have returned
with a second Symphony
and 15 Piano Variations
which I’ve named Prometheus,
after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god
who knew the worst sin is to take
what cannot be given back.

I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And though I dare not lean in to shout
Can’t you see that I am deaf? –
I also cannot stop listening.]

It’s a lovely book, a theme with variations indeed, and from
every possible perspective. I could imagine reading about this episode and
writing a poem, but an entire book of poems and so musically intelligent – it’s
quite astonishing. I considered ordering it as a textbook for my Beethoven
course this fall, but I think I’ll just put it on reserve, and make a much
bigger deal than usual about the Kreutzer Sonata, which is one of my favorite
middle Beethoven pieces anyway. Rita Dove: Sonata Mulattica (2009): highly
recommended. And it’s why internet shopping is not enough. I would never have
run across this book on the internet, never known to Google “poems about
Beethoven,” never known who Dove was. Occasionally you have to walk into a
really good, independent bookstore and finger every book on the shelves. 

I also ran across The Thoreau You Don’t Know (also 2009) by Robert
Sullivan. It looks and sounds like a facile compendium of Thoreavian esoterica,
but it’s actually a brilliant revisionist biography, with the
contradictory virtues of being breezily written yet withal extremely erudite.
Its ostensive purpose is to rescue Thoreau’s reputation from those who think he
was an antisocial “Mr. Nature,” by emphasizing the year he spent in New York
City trying to get a start as a writer, the time he spent in court as expert
witness for property disputes (being a surveyor), and his wise handling of the
family pencil business. Having not had a superficial view of Thoreau myself
(the book convinced me), I didn’t need the revisionism, but I was impressed
with how much mass culture Sullivan delved into in order to anchor Thoreau in
his immediate society, researching 1840s sheet music and ladies’ magazines, and
the changes in agriculture brought about by the depression of 1837. The
bibliography is kaleidoscopically diverse. Oxymoronically a thought-provoking page-turner, the book is a worthy opposite bookend to
Robert D. Richardson’s more introverted Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. 

If you imagine that I’m relentlessly driving myself to complete my Robert Ashley book before school starts, you would be correct. I’m not quite going to make it, but I’m very close. This is in addition to having written a piano piece, a viola piece, and two string quartets this summer (and reading three volumes of Taruskin’s Oxford music history). I’m never again going to work this hard during the summer without a compelling financial incentive. This week I transferred all of my interviews with Bob to compact discs, and found that they fill up 18 CDs. Someday when someone writes a proper biography of Bob (as opposed to the intro-to-the-life-and-works I’m doing), all this biographical material could come in handy. I can’t use half of what I’ve got.

There are some good stories in the book. My favorite is that when Bob stumbled across the text that would become Perfect Lives, he was trying to write a screenplay for an updated version of The Wizard of Oz. Also, the kid across the street that Bob grew up playing with became Marilyn Monroe’s gynecologist.

Oops – I was supposed to help publicize that microtonal wunderkind Jacob Barton is giving a concert tonight on the microtonal instrument he’s invented, the udderbot. It’s at 8 PM at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center. In Illinois, in other words. He’s playing his own version of my piece Fractured Paradise, along with works by Susan Parenti, Aaron K. Johnson, Joseph Pehrson, Edwin Harkins, Bohuslav Martinu, and, well, there are a lot of names as you can see for yourself. The udderbot is made of a glass bottle, a rubber glove, and water, yet possesses a range larger than that of the flute. I’ve been very impressed with Jacob’s initiative in performing so much microtonal work out there in the Midwest, and impressed with his own music as well. 

I found this curious, that in these days in which the erstwhile existence of an Uptown-Downtown split in new music has been forcibly shoved down the memory hole, an organization called The Field is sponsoring a workshop to bring Uptown and Downtown artists together. Their definitions:

For the purposes of this program:
• An Uptown Artist is an artist who lives and/or focuses their creative activities or aesthetic above 110th Street.
• A Downtown Artist is an artist who lives and/or focuses their creative activities or aesthetic south of 14th Street.

You can’t hear my son Bernard say anything in this Revolver magazine interview with his black metal band Liturgy, but you can watch him look cool. He claims the things he said got edited out, but he’s kind of a quiet guy. Didn’t get it from me. I’m shy around people I don’t know, but I tend to blossom when you stick a microphone in my face.

I finished another string quartet today – or at least, a piece for string quartet. See, I was asked to write a string quartet, and my original idea was to write one in three movements. I’m not much of a three-movement kind of guy, though, and the idea I had for the first movement got too long and too formally all-encompassing to be a movement. So it grew into an imposing, probably too-long, 25-minute movement, called The Light Summer Land. To title it just String Quartet seemed misleading. But I still had these ideas for the other movements, so I went ahead and wrote the third one anyway. It’s a four-part canon at the major sixth, 13 minutes long, called Hudson Spiral – a companion piece to my nine-part triple canon Chicago Spiral, which I wrote in Chicago, and now I live in the Hudson Valley. I’ll probably finish the second movement as well, and that’ll be another independent piece. I don’t think they can all fit in the same, wrist-slittingly long piece, being based on unrelated ideas. 

Yesterday James Sinclair – emperor of all things Ivesian, who heroically catalogued all 8000 pages of Charles Ives’s manuscripts – took me on the Ives walking tour of Yale. While a student there Ives lived in Connecticut Hall, then as now the oldest building left on campus, which, because of its age, tended to house the less affluent students. His dorm room was on the second floor, the last two windows on the right:

In Ann Arbor I took photos of the houses Robert Ashley grew up in. (Old phone books in libraries, I’ve discovered, are a cheap way to chart history.) I showed him this house on Brookwood where he lived as a teenager - 

NEW HAVEN – I played the last two movements of the Concord Sonata in high school, and the final four articulated notes of “Thoreau” – G# Bb G C# – have always bothered me. I remember arguing with my piano teacher about them. They don’t seem to have much motivic resonance with the rest of the movement, and the final ambiguous tritone always struck me as un-Ivesian. So now I’m at Yale library looking through the Ives archive, and I’m finding that Ives’s original manuscript presented a different picture. The original ending, which was followed in the 1920 edition but was dropped for the Arrow Press Edition, followed that C# with a dotted-rhythmed A:

They noted that there were certain things which were impermanent and other things to which the word impermanence did not apply. – Perfect Lives

I spent June composing and July writing a book. Both are enjoyable and self-fulfilling activities; I am fortunate. The first feels like I’m taking care of myself and developing psychically, putting myself first; the second feels like I’m adding to my authority and piling up ammunition for future writing and debate. It saddens me that the book feels like so much more solid an achievement. The music might never get played, it might get played badly, there might not be a recording, people might not like it or not get it, it may disappear into the ether. The book, being from an academic press, will go into 500 libraries automatically and sit there on the shelves waiting to be tripped over. It will be used by other researchers and quoted in other books. Every time I open the book, it will read just as eloquently as the first time; the music, I’ll have to worry again about every new performance, whether it will go well and sound good. Physically, the result of my composing will mainly be a PDF out on the internet. If I’m lucky and find some money, a compact disc may result, which feels a little bit like a book, but doesn’t get distributed as well. CDs seem to disappear, whereas when I go to friends’ houses, I notice my books sitting on their shelves. Books impress my employers, which my un-prize-winning music doesn’t, and the books bring me lecture gigs, which my music rarely does. (Economically, oddly enough, they’re about the same: I’ve made more money from music commissions than book advances, but the quarterly drip of book royalties offsets that.) After Music Downtown I thought I might not write any more books and just focus on my music from now on, which sounded great. I could do that. But I got seduced back into books as a much easier path toward the appearance of achievement. I could have written all my music and still not be taken seriously by a wide variety of people, but the books (peer-reviewed, published at someone’s expense, permanent, not misunderstandable) give me a kind of irrefutable clout that I can’t deny enjoying. And now I have three more books I’m thinking of working on down the road.

This unparaphraseable self-dialogue from Atalanta illustrates something of what I love so much about Robert Ashley’s music:

I said, “Is the struggle with the law manifested in every
aspect of the making of music, or are there law-abiding aspects and others that
are confrontational only because of indiscretion on the musician’s part –
because of a transgression?”

He said to me, “Music is the enactment of the manifestation
of the struggle with the law on a scale of continuous attempts; that is, where
the attempts are related to each other symbolically through a pattern imposed
on our memory. Music is a history of our struggle with the law.”

I said, “Can music, then, substitute itself for the
enactment of the struggle in other parts of our lives?”

He said to me, “That is its most common use.”

I said, “The musician, then, becomes socially symbolic,
enacting restlessness.”

He said to me, “Yes. In order to be law-abiding, there has
to be a place where one can rest. One can be law-abiding only in safety from
the law.”

I said, “Is the listener different from the musician?”

He said to me, “Yes, that is the paradox of music. In
listening to music we are observing other persons like ourselves, but the
consequences of their actions do not accrue to us actually. Their actions are
understood only in retrospect. The consequences may accrue to us as wisdom. May
even endanger our relationship to the law, may change our minds, but for the
listener the act has already come into existence before the law is recognized.
The listener is in safety from the law.”

UPDATE: Notice how subtly and beautifully it nuances the tone that he uses “He said to me” rather than simply, “He said.” The man’s a frickin’ poet.

In an interview on Slate, Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger (who left the organization) confirms the very reasons I quit having anything to do with the web site:

Q. Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?

A. Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject–that because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts essentially being driven away by people who didn’t have any respect for those who make it their
lives’ work to know things.

Q. Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It’s seems odd to be committed to a project that’s all about sharing knowledge, yet dismiss those who’ve worked
so hard to acquire it.

A. There’s a whole worldview that’s shared by many programmers–although not all of them, of course–and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as “epistemic egalitarianism.” They’re greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else….

And later, just as accurately:

This is a general problem with Wikipedia: What is praised as consensus decision-making or crowd-sourcing often just means that the person with the loudest voice or the most time on his or her hands is the one who’s going to win.

We live eight miles from where Chelsea Clinton is getting married this weekend. I walked into my local copy shop, and Jerry asked, “Have you gotten your invitation to the big wedding yet?” I said, “Mine must have gotten stuck in the mail, it hasn’t arrived.” Jerry said, “Yeah, it’s probably sitting next to mine.” No boats are allowed to sail in this stretch of the Hudson for the weekend. The biplanes at the Aerodrome, a popular local attraction, are grounded for the duration. The fairgrounds have been emptied out, because that’s where the helicopters are landing. Two extra sheriffs have been hired, apparently at taxpayer expense. The Clintons are staying with a rich family whose name adorns one of Bard’s most expensive buildings. Residents are pretty much warned to stay away from the town this weekend. The rehearsal dinner is rumored to be taking place at my favorite local restaurant, a joint too pricey for me to dine at except on celebratory occasions. If by any chance Chelsea is a reader of this blog, I highly recommend the macadamia-nut tempura calamari and the garlic soup. They’re fantastic. And mazel tov.