Elysium

Posted on August 17, 2013 by barczablog

Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) is the most original film I’ve seen in a long time, a mash-up of science fiction tropes and some very political elements.  I wrote about it in passing in a long rambling essay (long even by my standards, please note) concerning travesty & drag.  The main character is infected with alien genetic material that begins to turn him into a hybrid of human and alien, a travesty of both the alien and human species of which he is comprised.  Blomkamp not only shows us something brilliant and troubling, but he then takes us inside the emotions of that character, problematizing our loyalties.  One doesn’t come away from this film loving humanity.

I don’t think Blomkamp’s new film Elysium is as original as District 9, but even so there are good reasons why the film is filling theatres.  Once again we’re into the borderline between human and non-human, this time via varieties of human-machine hybrids, a cyborg travesty.  The concepts –and there are several—don’t feel quite so prominent nor as breath-takingly original in this film, although we’re drawn inexorably into the life of the main character.  Where I found myself thinking about the situations & implications in District 9  (and did notice several awkward changes in tone), in Elysium the struggles of the protagonists overwhelm everything else.  In other words Blomkamp’s latest film is more accomplished, less of a diatribe and more like an actual film. It’s a fast smooth ride that’s irresistible.

If you’ve been reading this blog lately you’ll have noticed my current obsession with politics:

  • Ai Weiwei (both his show opening, and before that his DVD)
  • A piece quickly touching on the political (Ethics & Aesthetics in the news) including –among other things—Ai Weiwei, Putin’s homophobic policies in Russia, The Lepage Ring (on TV last week)
  • Political Beethoven, which aptly describes the subject matter

Given a choice of what movie to see tonight I was drawn to Elysium by what I’d heard about the film: that it follows the trajectories of current politics.  The rich are richer, the poor are poorer.  The environment of the Earth has further been degraded, so much so that the rich have jumped ship: moving to an orbiting sanctuary called “Elysium”.  The trope is one we’ve seen before, certainly as far back as Metropolis, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there are earlier influences on Elysium.

And in passing one can’t help noticing the authoritarian behaviour of the police.  Nevermind the G20, in Egypt hundreds of people are being killed.  I saw a piece online from Adbusters implying that this was the beginning of the new struggle between rich & poor. While I wasn’t ready to buy into their theory, when you come to Elysium, set roughly forty years in the future, you have to wonder.  What civil rights would anyone have?

The film is melodrama, a roller-coaster ride to which the viewer surrenders simply by showing up.  The visuals, the story, the performances, are all very powerful.   I can’t deny that I found the ending a bit disappointing.  Like many melodramas, the unfolding of the story invokes recognizable tropes, classic conflicts that push our buttons.  I have no doubt that most people will find the story engaging, and may find my quibbling with the ending a sign of a defective character.

Maybe so.

There’s much to admire in the film, not least the acting of the principals.  I’d be grateful if Hollywood would for once consider science fiction for its big awards, particularly Jodie Foster & Matt Damon.

But considering the political itch I’ve been scratching the past few days, I’m happiest to see a film take such an unequivocal position.  It’s too dark for Frank Capra, but I have to wonder if films can change the way people vote.  If so the Republicans will not like this film.

Posted in Cinema, video & DVDs, Personal ruminations & essays, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Six years since Richard Bradshaw

Posted on August 16, 2013 by barczablog

It was August 15, 2007.  I recall hearing the news that Richard Bradshaw had died.

The Canadian Opera Company now have a resident conductor & a general director. Johannes Debus conducts the COC Orchestra & Alexander Neef is the canny executive managing the company’s operations.  Those two men now do what Bradshaw expected to do alone (admittedly with all sorts of discreet help in the background).  Bradshaw conducted at least a few operas each season.  And he somehow organized the activities of the company.

Richard Bradshaw, general director of the Canadian Opera Company, built an international reputation for the COC. (Michael Cooper/COC)

I was not surprised when I heard that he’d had a heart attack.  I’d wondered about his health.  Bradshaw was a hard worker, apparently tireless, but hearing that he’d died of a heart attack was sad news indeed.

I’d met him precisely once.  I’d walked up to him in the lobby of the O’Keefe Centre (or whatever it was called: as it’s had several names), noticing that he was not as usual surrounded by admirers.  I congratulated him for his Pelléas et Mélisande, meaning his conducting.  I told him that I found it wonderfully bold and  (I suspected) authentic in its crisp tempi.  He was very polite, giving me enough time to express myself.

But I noticed that even in the lobby for an opera conducted by someone else, he was working.  I felt badly, that even in a friendly  I  chat I was making him work.

I recall his unpretentious comments at one of the “Opera Exchange” conferences, when he declared his conducting philosophy, his unwillingness to let the music drag, especially in Wagner.  While the majority (if not all) of the available recordings of Wagner operas are slower than Bradshaw’s tempi, from what I’ve read I’ve come to believe his brisk tempi were authentic.

I recall reading that Bradshaw sought to stage the best theatre in Toronto with the COC.  I’ve always been impressed by this brave and ambitious goal.  And many times they pulled it off in a very competitive theatre city.

R. Fraser Elliott Hall in the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Photo Credit: Tim Griffith © 2006

The great achievement of his era is surely the Four Seasons Centre, a wonderful home for the COC, christened by the first COC Ring Cycle.  I’ve heard the home field of the Seattle Seahawks called the 12th man, as though the supportive crowd were players; the Four Seasons Centre is something like that in opera, changing the nature of the game.  Singers are cast in parts for which they’d be over-parted in a bigger house: and they manage to pull it off.  The orchestra sounds wonderful, yet singers come through clearly. The space feels intimate, without a bad seat anywhere. What more could an opera fan want?

As I said, it’s the achievement of his era, a team-effort, not his creation, yet it feels so unfair that he only enjoyed one brief season in that amazing space. The COC is a very different company in the six years since. I’m sorry Bradshaw didn’t get to see the COC’s growing profile in the city & indeed on the continent.

He would have been proud.

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Ai Weiwei According to What?

Posted on August 15, 2013 by barczablog

Shortly after entering “According to What,” Ai Weiwei’s exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, I experienced a magic moment, in my encounter with  “Tea House”, a deceptively simple installation by the artist.

Here’s what this piece usually looks like.  It smells just like tea: because it is tea.  It’s a model of a house, made of tea.

Tea house.  Get it?  As with so many of Weiwei’s pieces, there’s an element of wit.

Ai Weiwei: According to What? From left to right: Grapes, 2010; New York Photographs, 1983-1993; Tea House, 2009. Installation view of Ai Weiwei: According to What? at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., 2012. Photo: Cathy Carver.

Ai Weiwei: According to What? From left to right: Grapes, 2010; New York Photographs, 1983-1993; Tea House, 2009. Installation view of Ai Weiwei: According to What? at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., 2012. Photo: Cathy Carver.

In addition to the model house, there’s a kind of base, a loose surface of leafy material (tea?!).  Notice how perfect the edge of that loose material is in the photo.

I am only sorry Weiwei couldn’t be there for a moment he surely would have enjoyed.

As we stood in the small crowd bunched around a few pieces, we noticed something rather extraordinary.  An older man had shuffled through the tea at the base of the piece, messing it up.  I don’t think he realized it.  It was an accident of course.

“Oh my God” we all thought.  Someone joked and pointed at me: “you did it!”  I giggled and denied it. But of course it was this elderly man who had walked without picking up his feet.  You’re not supposed to touch the art, let alone destroy it. But accidentally, this man had shuffled across the floor, messing up a little bit of the edge of the piece.

I looked down and went to photograph it.

A gallery staff member told me I couldn’t photograph this.

Excuse me?  I couldn’t take a picture, why exactly?  This piece, by an artist who seems to love impromptu acts of destruction & the defiance of authority, would be defended by an authoritarian act? How ironic indeed.

And I said all this, laughing my head off to the gallery staffer, and a couple of other bystanders who agreed.

This is the same artist whose documentary film begins with a lovely little set-piece.

  • One of the artist’s many cats is messing up his art.
  • A colleague tries to stop the cat.
  • But Weiwei says the first line of the film in English, telling him to let the cat be: “he’s not going to destroy it”.

And so of course I was allowed to take my really bad photo.  Here it is…

floorAt that moment, irony or not, it was clear we don’t live in a totalitarian place.  We have the luxury of jokes in this country.  By the time the show opens of course the work will surely be tidied up and perhaps its edge properly protected.

I had a moment, looking at the photo, when I ran through my head, “what would Ai Weiwei have said”?  It was a startling echo of the classic question that gets asked: “what would Jesus say” or “what would The Buddha say”… OR plug in your favourite God or authority figure.

I think that answers a key question that Matthew Teitelbaum, the AGO’s Director & CEO posed in his introductory remarks.  Is Ai Weiwei a great artist, or just famous for the moment?  It’s a brave question.  But I think Teitelbaum is on a winning streak at AGO, bringing in a succession of wonderful shows over the past few years, and his question shows a man and a museum who truly understand what they’re doing.

And the art? I think the short answer is that one doesn’t dare answer such questions prematurely.  I only know that there’s much in this show to move you, to make you think, to make you laugh, and possibly make you cry.  And that’s more than I would say for most installation art I’ve seen in my life.

Photo: Ai Weiwei

Some of Weiwei’s work is provocative in a sophomoric vein.  The photos of famous world landmarks with a middle finger raised?  This isn’t profound art, but it makes me giggle.

Sometimes the humour is subtler.  For example, “He xie” means “river crab”, and also sounds like the word for “harmonious” in Mandarin.  We’re told that the word figures prominently in propaganda, particularly when dissent is being silenced.  The work at the gallery –which shows a vast crowd of many little crabs—commemorates a celebratory feast of crab at his house where he was under house arrest.

There’s Straight, a much more difficult piece.  The title tells you a great deal about the piece.  It’s made of literally tons of rebar, salvaged from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.  Each of the many recovered pieces has been straightened: an enormous effort.  The resulting piece has a stillness and dignity of a tombstone monument.  I am reminded in spite of myself of the twisted ruins of the World Trade Centre, and the intimations of human mortality & death seen in the destroyed remnants of buildings.  I spent a great deal of time looking at this piece from different angles.

Weiwei’s work is often very big, very monumental.  I suppose this is something architects figured out in Ancient times: that size matters.

My favourite is among his biggest, namely the Snake Ceiling.  I wasn’t sure how I’d react to the piece, having been prepared by the powerful images of mothers crying, children calling for help from inside damaged schools, and the pictures of piles of knapsacks.  I couldn’t help thinking that as a parent, a knapsack is a poignant image, impersonal in one sense, but very directly personal if one thinks of it as part of the ongoing conversation between parents and children, sent off daily with a lunch, perhaps a sweater or books inside.  The snake made from the knapsacks is a powerful answer to the sad behaviour of the Chinese government, a kind of bold totem.

There’s much in the show to move you, some pieces more political than others.  Weiwei the activist-artist appeals to our emotions more directly than any installation artist I’ve ever seen.

Ai Weiwei’s “According to What” runs from August 17th until October 27th. 

Posted in Art, Architecture & Design, Reviews | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Ethics and aesthetics in the news

Posted on August 13, 2013 by barczablog

It’s an odd week to be sure, as the Political keeps pushing its chin into the picture, rearing its handsome & long-haired head.

The biggest controversy I’m currently hearing about is the fortunate convergence of Putin with Tchaikowsky…more on that in a moment.

Yesterday I reviewed Nicholas Mathew’s Political Beethoven. The book has left its mark in my head as surely as if I’d listened to a few sonatas or symphonies.

I have other books I am reading, particularly Kirsty Johnston’s fascinating book Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre.   I have only peeked at it (and will eventually review it), but can’t help thinking of parallel struggles.

  • At one time there were no women onstage except played by men. Then women came to the stage.
  • At one time there were no persons of colour onstage, although for a time people would play them in black-face; and then eventually that changed.  We’re talking about a kind of travesty, whether in the women played by men, or the black-faced actors.
  • So too with disability….
  • And the content of the stories gradually changes from something using travesty for mere exoticism, into something getting closer and closer to real life.

And so I’m thinking of something negotiated, a dialectic of change & normalization. Sounds political to me.

Last week I watched the Lepage Ring cycle.  The political element is surprising underplayed in the production, but backstage? That’s another story, in the alleged refusal of some singers to appear in future incarnations of the production. There’s also the dismissive responses of some in the audience.

Tomorrow I’ll be at the media preview for Ai Weiwei’s show at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He’s been in the back of my head since I saw Never Sorry, his documentary.  Two installations are already in Toronto, namely the zodiac animals (Nathan Philips Square) and Snake Ceiling, a provocative snake made of back-packs already at AGO.  Provocative? If you have children, you understand that a backpack is like a symbol of the trust with which parents send their kids off to school.  I was shaken by the images of crying mothers and piles of unclaimed backpacks after the great earthquake that destroyed many shoddily built schools.  Weiwei has brought attention to something the government sought to conceal.  Most people are happy to appease the Chinese government, conveniently forgetting that their fake smiles are a mask for fascist thuggery.  Ai Weiwei won’t let us forget.  I’ll write a great deal more about this tomorrow.

Three men, not two

The Metropolitan Opera’s opening gala performance of Eugene Onegin will star two Putin supporters, namely conductor Valery Gergiev & soprano Anna Netrebko, at the very time that the Russians have come out of the closet with an overt nasty policy of official state-sanctioned homophobia to make a Hitler smile in approval.  As Russia gears up for the Olympics the International Olympic Committee seem intent again on a kind of appeasement, just like what we see with China.  The IOC seem as cowardly now as they were in Mexico City 1968, when three protesting athletes were sanctioned.  Considering that opera is known at least anecdotally to have a disproportionately high proportion of gay men in the audience, it’s no wonder that there’s an online petition, a call for the Metropolitan Opera to take a strong stand.  It seems particularly fitting that the opera is by Tchaikowsky, the gay skeleton in the closet of the Russian soul.

The Met’s response was respectful but unhelpful:

“The Met is proud of its history as a creative base for LGBT singers, conductors, directors, designers, and choreographers. We also stand behind all of our artists, regardless of whether or not they wish to publicly express their personal political opinions. As an institution, the Met deplores the suppression of equal rights here or abroad. But since our mission is artistic, it is not appropriate for our performances to be used by us for political purposes, no matter how noble or right the cause.”

And so I’m pondering this question, what is the relationship between ideology and art, between the ethical and the aesthetical.

Are we fooling ourselves? One of the biggest successes this past year was Identity Theft, a film whose chief laugh throughout is at the fat woman who steals the identity of an average guy.  Fat people have not yet figured on the sensitivity radar, and so this kind of comedy doesn’t generate boycotts or petitions.  Maybe this is progress: that other groups are no longer acceptable targets for humour.  Is humanity progressing?  I am not sure, but we can’t really use Hollywood as our only bellwether, not when gays and women are still treated so horribly in most of the world.

For the record?  While I am happy that Melissa McCarthy made money on this film, one of the first fat women in a long time to have a starring role, I don’t think she advanced the cause of large people (and I suspect were she to read this I hope she’d get a laugh out of the thought…I am not seeking to call her a traitor or a sell-out.  Or am I?  In comparison, Jay Silverheels –the original Tonto—brought a great deal more dignity to his work, stopping short of being a complete buffoon.  I hope she invests her 30 pieces of silver, and maybe someday she’ll get to play a plus-sized heroine in Ibsen or Chekhov).  McCarthy didn’t really have much choice.  I admire the work of John Goodman and Jonah Hill, two great actors who look reassuringly genuine: which is to say, without the kind of ripped muscular definition or breast & lip implants that Hollywood often requires of its talent to get you past the door.

There are other excluded groups who are considered acceptable targets.  I quite enjoyed Sweet Home Alabama, a romantic comedy that played with the predictable optics, mocking southerners, and following a character arc that seemed destined to hang the southerners out to dry (sorry if that’s a spoiler).

Pardon me if i sound cynical.  The Met did exactly as i expected in their appropriate but minimal response. Yet I thought the Olympics were supposed to be a kind of enactment of our ideals, not a fake party where the host country could ride rough-shod over human rights.   Silly idealistic me.

Can you imagine an inclusive world where no one is the butt of a joke?  I can’t. At one time I dared to dream that swords would really be beaten into ploughshares.  Maybe Hillary Clinton will be the next American President.  And we’ll read about more atrocities of girls prevented from being allowed to read or uncover their faces. With every passing year, with every new transgression of the Geneva conventions, with every report of regional disparities of wealth & human rights, I see less reason to believe arms dealers will be put out of business anytime soon.  The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and so we’ll continue to need our utopian fantasies.  So long as people continue to hate we’ll have our romantic dreams of universal love.

And the creativity of political artists will never run dry.

Posted in Personal ruminations & essays, Politics | Leave a comment

Political Beethoven: time for truth

Posted on August 13, 2013 by barczablog

Do modern times sometimes upset you? seeking to escape?

It’s a nerdy question naturally.  If you’re alive, you’re in modern times, no matter how preoccupied you allow yourself to become, lost in a video-game, biography, opera DVD, soap opera… (you name it).

A friend posted a Facebook quote that seems apt here.  My friend Romy Shiller said “Facing mortality makes you realize there’s no time for bullshit”.  BS takes many forms, but I’d summarize them all as the ways we distract and delude our minds, to lose sight of the here and now.  Sometimes even the moments from centuries ago can be the “here and now” that’s been lost.

Nicholas Mathew (click for bio)

The headline of this piece, read superficially might mislead you, precisely because we are so habitually inclined to miss the truth.  Indeed, I rarely use the word “truth” without some sense of irony, because I am so unsure what truth is, so hesitant to endorse any viewpoint without hesitation.  Let’s therefore understand that the word is used in an ironic way, as if to hold up a mirror to BS.

Nicholas Mathew’s new book Political Beethoven is like a bracing glass of lemonade, cleansing the palette, making one’s sense of taste sharper and more discerning.  I love Mathew’s reminder of the pieces Beethoven wrote that are like parodies of the composer we celebrate (or a heroic style), pieces such as Wellington’s Sieg for instance, that musicologists quietly ignore as anomalous, while celebrating compositions that display more of what Mathew calls “the rhetoric of resistance”.

Mathew brings up the additional –and troubling—dynamic of collaboration to further cloud the mix, even though he stops short of the kind of speculative fantasy I wouldn’t be able to resist.  I suppose I can never ignore the elephant in the room, which for me in any thinking about the mature Beethoven is the man becoming deaf.  When he’s writing a piece for theatre it’s not enough to be articulate on the page, given the usual give-and-take that’s necessary in live theatre.  Does the comparative banality of some of Beethoven’s music ever have to do with his communicative faculties?  I wonder.  Or maybe I’m being simplistic & reductive (unlike Mathew).

I consider Mathew’s book properly fourth dimensional, in its ability to show us glimpses of the conversation in the Napoleonic era, the Viennese society that the composer inhabited, and the historical conversation since.  We’re presented with the mythology and a patient but irresistible deconstruction of that –pardon my French—bullshit.  It’s polite, it’s respectful, yet the layers of falsehood are lifted from the surface of this story like the residue of last night’s dinner washed out of your mouth by the morning’s orange juice.  I’ve been seduced by these familiar tales, for instance, the image of the Eroica as an icon of individuality, a “radically autonomous” work of resistance.  Mathew brilliantly conflates the famous story –the composer’s erasure of the original title—with the realities of composition & publishing:

The history of  the Eroica thus mingles uncomfortably with its mythic aesthetic: the sources of the symphony and the copious criticism that the Eroica has generated present a scrawl of erasures and re-writings, assertions and retractions, open secrets and encrypted public pronouncements.  The figure of Napoleon has hovered on the fringes of the debate about the symphony ever since the early nineteenth century—a connection that critics, like Beethoven himself, seem to assert and then retract, write about and then cross out.  One can only read the history of the Eroica under erasure.  (Mathew)

I have much here to re-read and re-think.  I’m especially fascinated right now with Mathew’s understanding of the late works, especially in response to Adorno’s commentaries.  I have to also factor in my own responses to those pieces, responses that aren’t necessarily harmonious to those I’m reading.  The discourse across decades with admirers & critics is ultimately one I find stimulating and even intoxicating.  I find myself wondering if I even know what I mean by such adjectives as “political” or “personal”.

Oh well. It won’t be the first time a book knocked me on my can, and got my to let go of some assumptions.  It’s not so bad if I’m moved to re-evaluate what I thought I knew.

Mathew’s book is very helpful, very stimulating, and unquestionably worth reading, especially if you love Beethoven.

Posted in Books & Literature, Music and musicology, Reviews | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Worship through Music, or “This is your soul on music”

Posted on August 10, 2013 by barczablog

This is a blog version of a message I delivered August 4th 2013.

The readings (read by someone else) were

  • Joshua 6: 1-21: one of scariest displays of the Old Testament God’s power, music is central to this moment.
  • Psalm 98 — #750 in the Chalice Hymnal: as in the Joshua reading, notice how the world and music are bound up together
  • Matthew 26: 26-30: a tranquil reading contrasting the first one.  They make an interesting pair (the placidity of this one, vs the violence of the other one)

Then I read from 1st Samuel chapter 16, verses 16-23

Let our lord command his servants here to search for someone who can play the lyre. He will play when the evil spirit from God comes on you, and you will feel better.”

17 So Saul said to his attendants, “Find someone who plays well and bring him to me.”

18 One of the servants answered, “I have seen a son of Jesse of Bethlehem who knows how to play the lyre. He is a brave man and a warrior. He speaks well and is a fine-looking man. And the Lord is with him.”

19 Then Saul sent messengers to Jesse and said, “Send me your son David, who is with the sheep.” 20 So Jesse took a donkey loaded with bread, a skin of wine and a young goat and sent them with his son David to Saul.

21 David came to Saul and entered his service. Saul liked him very much, and David became one of his armor-bearers. 22 Then Saul sent word to Jesse, saying, “Allow David to remain in my service, for I am pleased with him.”

23 Whenever the spirit from God came on Saul, David would take up his lyre and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him.

I paused after the reading for a moment (including a brief invocation), then began my talk, introducing myself.  This is an entirely different sort of vehicle but I hope it’s suitable to my blog, at least as I reflect back on my experience standing in the pulpit last week.  I reflected that my usual location during a service is in the choir.  Sometimes I get to be substitute-organist when David Warrack is absent.  Normally the only words I have are words in the songs I sing.  Otherwise I am sitting listening to someone else preaching.

I began by holding up Daniel Levitin’s book THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC, a recent best-seller.   Levitin is a psychologist.  The book looks at how we respond to music.  One reason the book was a best-seller is that, while music is something many people enjoy, knowing how it works inside us? Not only is this something most of us haven’t thought about, but it’s a fascinating question that science hasn’t fully answered.

There are some fun things to investigate.

  • Why do some melodies stay in our heads?  A good song does that.  A good advertising jingle does that too.  Some of the hymns we sing stay in my head for DAYS afterwards.  Sometimes people call these “ear-worms” because the song doesn’t leave.  Still, I think it’s a miracle if someone can create a song that stays in your head.
  • How does it work? Levitin reminds us of the mechanics of music:
    • rhythm
    • pitch
    • timbre
    • intensity

I suppose the appeal of Levitin’s book is to take music –something magical and transformative to most people—and try to explain it.  While I understand the sentiment, I am not sure I approve.  I like magic & mystery.  Science has given us many good things, such as modern medicine & space travel, but I do not want science telling me why I like a song, particularly when there’s no mention of the dimension of spirit.  Science can’t explain everything, can it?

I’m no psychologist, for instance like Dr Levitin, but I too am interested in how music makes us feel.  Not so much the science but the emotional, and even the spiritual.   If I were to write my own book, I might call it THIS IS YOUR SOUL ON MUSIC… not explaining, really, but exploring & celebrating.

I am certainly not trying to explain like a scientist (partly because – last time I checked, I am not a scientist).  I am coming at this in appreciation, gratitude. I am thinking of how church services use music as part of the act of worship, and indeed, how this connects to our experience of music in the world at large

  • To help us celebrate
  • To help us to pray
  • To help us to say thank you
  • To help us to commit ourselves & spread the Christian Message.

What are we talking about, really? It’s a huge topic, but I will just touch on a few obvious thoughts, in hopes of helping you in your experience of music, and as you go about your lives.

This includes both

  • what it’s like to LISTEN to music.
    ALSO
  • what it’s like to MAKE music.

That wonderful passage from 1 Samuel 16 is very moving, but also a bit of psychology, a story that illustrates the workings of mind & spirit.  It feels very modern to me.  Sometimes I work a bit too hard, and have difficulty relaxing or sleeping, my mind too full, over-burdened with cares.  To me Saul’s troubled spirit wouldn’t be out of place in many of the films or TV shows I see. I feel so sorry for him, and I understand his response to David’s music.

David Warrack

It’s also funny because of course, here at Hillcrest we have our own David, David Warrack who plays the organ & leads the choir.  While listening to music may be good for us, composing, singing, performing is even BETTER for you.  I am not just saying this because we’re trying to recruit new members for the Hillcrest Chancel choir.  Singing is really good for you.  If you don’t believe me, try googling HEALTH BENEFITS OF MUSIC.  Trust me, you’ll see many articles. I saw…

  • evidence that singing in a choir is as good for you as yoga.
  • I read online that heartbeats of choir members become synchronized.
  • Singing releases endorphins (the pleasure hormones that we feel in the brain).
  • The lymphatic system –an important part of the body’s defense against disease—is stimulated by singing.
  • Other research is investigating whether Alzheimers is held back by musical performance.
  • Music HEALS! ….so much so that
    A DOCTOR, FACED with an ILL PATIENT, COULD ALMOST SAY…
    TAKE TWO HYMNS and CALL ME IN THE MORNING…

I believe I’m exploring this because I want to share my experience: something that defies my understanding.  I suppose the choice to speak about this in a pulpit is a lot like blogging: the desire to bear witness as a part of my own spiritual journey.

It’s a big irony that a lecture or a sermon argues, tries to appeal to your brain, while MUSIC works thru the mind and the emotions.  To be standing up there, in the space for words, talking about music?   It is so ironic to be speaking of music, to turn it into an essay for discussion: when music can be so much simpler.  Music is always more eloquent.  During the sermon, we normally send the children downstairs:  Because the sermon is challenging… Harder work. The music appeals to all ages.  I have SO MUCH RESPECT, and gratitude for the people who stand in the pulpit.  Music seems so much easier, by comparison.

You have probably heard someone say that “music is abstract”.  Indeed, how much meaning is there in the music itself?

You may recognize this hymn-tune:

Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee, God of glory, Lord of love;
Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee, opening to (or Hail Thee as) the sun above.…

HENRY VAN DYKE wrote those words in 1907.  But the tune was ALREADY almost a century old, from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, written back in the 1800s with a different set of words before… in GERMAN.  The message of each set of words was joyful, but not really the same.

OR here’s another example.

I could sing…

Alas, my love, you do me wrong,
To cast me off discourteously.
For I have loved you well and long,
Delighting in your company.

 BUT… I can sing the same tune with different words

What child is this, who, laid to rest,
On Mary’s lap lay sleeping?
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?
This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing:
Haste, haste to bring Him laud,
The Babe, the son of Mary.

I bring this up as an illustration.   Music is in many ways a MYSTERY to us.  The same melody can work in many ways.  The effect comes from the combination of words & music.  The words may lecture us, and seek to teach us something. But when we sing the words, our response is much more than just argument.  When we sing some words, we are living the words, making them real.  In the moment we sing, it’s as though we are making a promise, as though we are talking to God, and for awhile the congregation is connected as one into a single body.

Music is a pathway to the spiritual, to the divine, to God.  I daresay, it’s not just that we worship through music. Music itself is a kind of worship, God manifest around us as we bask in the moments of music.

If you think of what we experienced, it’s words + music.  Why exactly do we feel these things about music? How could something non-verbal, something abstract, inspire such strong emotions?  Let’s think about it.

Before we understand complex words… We understand simpler words
As a child imagine–or recall- how this hymn sounds:

We do not need to understand big words…. Its a hymn of small words  And this hymn is as meaningful to me at 60 as it is when I was just 6.

Jesus Loves me this I know
For the Bible Tells me so
Little ones to him belong
They are weak but he is strong
YES Jesus loves me, Yes Jesus loves me
Yes Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.

This is a hymn about trust.  I’ve been singing this hymn for a very long time.  Singing those words has given me several ideas.

  • Jesus loves me… Singing it, I believe it.
  • It feels good to say so… I feel happy to place my trust in Jesus
  • When I sing “the Bible tells me so” I am not just reminded about the Bible, I am getting in touch with my own faith, my connection to this wonderful book.

I recognize, in bringing this to my blog, that some readers won’t have the same experience.  They might not feel the same connection, and indeed might not want to sing such a song.  But whether or not you’re Christian, whether or not you want to sing “Yes Jesus loves me”, there’s no denying the influence and power of having a child singing such a message, and continuing to sing it yourself.   Who needs membership cards, when the music can show your allegiance and faith so clearly?

So I have spoken about some of the words we learn, while we are in Sunday school, while we experience Christmas, and gradually develop a greater relationship with the church, with Jesus and come to understand the Bible and its teachings.
BUT  even before this, we encounter music. Before we have ANY words, we hear music.

I don’t pretend to remember.  I simply have my sense of how my mind works and how I think it always worked.
We have concrete expressions.

…words saying

stop
Go
Eat
Sleep

And other things not so clear, because they are ABSTRACT

Happy
Sad        

                     Scared

 And MUSIC…
Yes “music” itself is an abstraction….

Music continues to speak to us from the abstract place of symbols, of our dreams, the images and shapes that we recall from our sleeping time, from our unconscious.

I don’t think we need to talk about psychology… or invoke Siegmund Freud… we don’t need to get that serious.   But… Music speaks to each of us, a language of immediate feelings.  Music helps us to feel that which we can’t precisely name.  At any age, music is part of this dichotomy between specific and abstract, between word & symbol.  The irrational and unconscious hold of symbols upon us is primal, from a time before we could think rationally.  I’d like to think that music points in both directions: back to our childhoods, and forward to where we’re going after we pass away.  The symbols speak to us so powerfully because they are in the language of our spiritual home: not of this world but the next, our once and future home. 

Feelings and emotions can be expressed in music. 

When someone gets married, music is there.  Music helps us solemnize the occasion, to help us hear the promises and feel the seriousness of the occasion.

And Music helps us celebrate. Can you imagine a party without music?  Yet some people have no choice.  Ludwig van Beethoven, who gave us that melody we use in the hymn “Joyful joyful we adore you”, gradually became deaf in his adulthood. He wrote that amazing tune without the benefit of hearing. He was deaf.  Be grateful for your hearing, and try to be respectful of those around us who are losing their hearing.  They are still able to come to the party, even if their celebration may not be the same as yours.

So music is one of the things we use to celebrate.

And we use Music to mourn.  We know we are at a serious occasion by the music.  But music may help set our emotions free.  I know that some melodies make it easier to cry, to be in touch with my sense of loss.

As a composer, as a singer, as a piano player, we all seek to harness the beauty of music to serve the purposes of worship: because music is a pathway to Jesus.

One of the great pleasures and PRIVILEGES I enjoy, is helping pick the hymns for many of our services (not all of them…it depends on the pastor).  There’s a handbook that is purchased for me each year, that makes hymn suggestions that are designed to match the biblical readings for the week, whether it’s…

  • Advent
  • Christmas
  • Lent
  • Easter
  • Pentecost

The hymns we sing at Christmas are different than what we sing during Lent or during Easter.  That handbook makes it much easier.

I went on to talk a bit about the mechanics of the church service, how the music is meant to lead us to the different emotional spaces of the service.

I closed with this suggestion, that in the days, weeks and years to come…: I invite you to notice the power of music, whether or not you’re ever in a place of worship.  Notice it and let that inform your life, recalling how music has been your pathway during childhood, during your moments of jubilation, and during moments of crisis & mourning.  Music is a gift coming to us from God, and our pathway back to the divine, from the beginning of our lives, and at every moment going forward.

Posted in Music and musicology, Personal ruminations & essays, Psychology and perception, Spirituality & Religion | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Omens and portents

Posted on August 10, 2013 by barczablog

I am no soothsayer.

A little over a week ago Ontario had five by-elections. Here’s what I expected to hear on August 2nd (the day after the election):

  • If the Liberals got massacred, that they were clinging to power, and in desperate trouble in the coming election, the opposition & press licking their chops in anticipation
  • If the NDP did well, that they were the party to beat in the next election
  • If the Conservatives did well, that they’d be the party to beat
  • And if the results were a mish-mash, as so often happens, you’d get partisan comments, each claiming victory

It’s more than a week later.  Here’s what I think I saw in the press:

  • I suppose I was busy, not paying attention but i heard very little beyond the results. I expected much more…why is that, i wonder?
  • The press seemed a bit confused by the results
  • And the one story that caught my eye is perhaps the big story in waiting: whether the results mean trouble for one of the leaders.

Had Wynne and the Liberals been totally repudiated –as I confess I had expected—she might have been in trouble.  I like the woman very much, and don’t hold the transgressions of her predecessor against her.  That her party won two of five by-elections is a creditable result. She certainly held her own.

Reason to smile..(?)

Had the NDP won fewer seats than two I think their leader Andrea Horvath might have had some explaining to do, even if –hello– her party is in third place, and doesn’t have the same pressures as the usual front-runners.  But winning two of five for the party coming out of third place looks good, I think, and portends well going forward.  Right now Horvath begins to look like the next Premier of Ontario.

And maybe that’s the problem Tim Hudak faces.  Already in these first days after the by-elections, there are rumblings about a leadership review.  While there are also some who are claiming that the single seat the PCs won represent a break-through, considering the recent press –where the Liberals have been on the ropes for more than a year—only a partisan Conservative would claim that one seat out of five, at a time of huge Liberal scandals is in some way an endorsement of the official opposition.  While you’re at it, If the Blue Jays lost four games of a five game series (if there were such a thing) would we be told that they’re about to win a World Series? I think not.

I remember several versions of the Conservative Party in this province.  Under Bill Davis they were unbeatable, because Davis occupied not just the right but also the middle ground.  His policies were reasonable, a government who built much of our infrastructure, who were the face of Ontario.

Under Mike Harris it became a more right-wing party, which worked well for a time and coincided with a federal Liberal Government who were just as conservative (for instance in their cost-cutting, budget balancing & cuts to provincial transfer payments).  I don’t think there was much difference between the two, other than the colours on their signs.

Hudak is even further to the right.  That might not be a problem in Ford country, but Ford won as mayor as the single candidate on the right, against multiple candidates who were moderate or left, in a contest set up by a garbage strike and perceptions of over-spending at city hall.  Ford was a clear choice, whereas Hudak & Horvath give those who would remove the Liberals a bit of a dilemma.

The Liberals seemed to commit political suicide in their dealings with the teachers this past year, then faced the enquiry into the cancellation of a power plant, that seemed cynical even before we started to hear of erased correspondence.  So many scandals, so many moments in the glare of controversy, yet the Liberals won two of five.

Oh my, the Liberals have had such a rough couple of years –and it looked to me as if former Premier McGuinty left, running scared, not wanting to be defeated at the polls or worse—that any half-decent opposition should have been able to win more than a single seat out of five by-elections.  I wonder if it’s because the PCs have become too right wing for this province.  Or is it because voters are torn, not knowing who to vote for in three-way races.

The Conservatives can’t change leaders now, it’s too close to election time.  Perhaps in a general election Hudak will finally show the voters (and his party) that he has what it takes to be the winner.  But right now the Liberals are showing surprising signs of life, possibly due to voters who can’t decide which of the other two parties they prefer.

And Horvath’s smile looks more and more self-assured all the time.

Posted in Personal ruminations & essays, Politics | 2 Comments

Whose dream?

Posted on August 5, 2013 by barczablog

We’re in the summer of Wagner’s Bicentennial.  Frank Castorf’s new Ring cycle has opened at Bayreuth, which led to the inevitable boos from the audience.

Inevitable?  Two of the greatest Bayreuth productions of the past few decades were booed at first.  If Chereau & Kupfer were booed –and later embraced—what is one to make of Castorf’s new Ring production being booed? I wish I had a sense of whether it’s any good.  We seem to be in a kind of critical no-mans-land, at least those of us unable to see the production.  I don’t trust most critics.  I have to wonder whether Castorf deliberately sought controversy, given that Anthony Tommasini wrote the following in his NYTimes review, “the entitlement and hostility that Mr. Castorf conveyed while staring down the booing Bayreuth audience seemed revealing: this was a director who wanted to get a reaction. He got it.”

click image for more info about Susan Froemke’s documentary

Coincidentally, PBS broadcast Susan Froemke’s documentary Wagner’s Dream, concerning the Robert Lepage / Ex Machina Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera, tonight in the Toronto-Buffalo area.  The gossip I have read suggests the production won’t be revived anytime soon:

  • Because the tickets didn’t sell well for the last Cycle
  • Because some singers are allegedly resistant to participating

And that’s too bad.  When I posted the broadcast time on Facebook, a friend showed no compassion whatsoever in observing the disconnect between the claims of the documentary (doing it Wagner’s way) and the critical reception for the production.  Canadian Wagnerians I know seem very supportive of the production, whereas Americans seem much less willing to meet the production on its own terms.

On one side of the Atlantic Regietheater is the norm.  On this side, there seems to be less readiness to use imagination to meet a director half-way.  I was charmed by Lepage’s choices, often made from between a rock and a hard place.  I think the director under-estimated the willingness of singers to take physical risks onstage, a mistake that drives the surreptitious refusal of singers to appear in future cycles.

There’s so much that’s new in this interpretation I don’t think the production has had a fair hearing.  Lepage’s understanding of the Cycle is fascinating to me still, and much clearer from this documentary.

I understood that the “machine”, an ever-changing contraption of huge planks that is both a set and a kind of sculptural installation, represents the world.  Its malleability and changing shape is daunting because it’s more than just a backdrop.  Lepage spoke of two aspects of the Ring, that his set is emulating:

1) the source tales for Wagner’s Ring are the Icelandic Eddas.  Lepage saw Iceland as a kind of landscape of tectonic upheaval, perpetually changing & malleable.  His set echoes this, the planks being something like tectonic plates

2) the leit-motivs in the score, too, appear, combine, and then change.  Lepage spoke of the set as a kind of visual echo of the motives of the score.

And as I said more than once (I wrote a ton about this production), Lepage captures the essential cosmology of the Ring in his set.  The world changes, new powers overthrow the old ones, and this too is reflected in the set.

While it’s not literally what Wagner wrote, Lepage managed to stage a great number of moments in the cycle that usually are omitted, from Rhine-Maidens who seem to swim at the beginning, to Grane & Brunnhilde riding onto the pyre at the end.  It’s very ironic to me that one of the biggest problems with the Lepage Ring is Wagner: that instead of heavily glossed productions we see just how little is really there.

As for Lepage’s direction, I saw little or nothing by way of acknowledgement that whatever else you might say, Lepage is a terrific director.  There were complaints from people upset that the set compelled people to play in a narrow space downstage, or perhaps some other locale on the stage.  I don’t understand this kind of objection.  When you come to opera, you don’t expect movie or TV acting, you don’t object to characters singing rather than speaking, so why make other stipulations?  I did not see comments about the many marvellous moments in Lepage’s conception, the character relationships elucidated as never before.

The thing i love most about Froemke’s documentary is how well it seems to capture the adventure of this Ring, including a willingness to show us the many challenges backstage.  We see Debbie Voigt fall in rehearsal, and even saying “i’m not going up there again, you heard it here”.  But she does, and she recants.  This is not whitewash, but a very brave and truthful documentary, or as truthful as you can expect under the circumstances.

Here in Toronto, as we wait for the Girard Parsifal to come to town, we may be wondering if we’ll see the COC Ring anytime soon.  The imported Sellars/Viola Tristan production did very well at the box office last season, but I believe that’s due more to Ben Heppner than anything on the stage (just as the Met’s difficulties likely have more to do with musical issues than what they put onstage).  Even so I suspect a Ring could be very good at the box office, especially if the Met has decided to mothball their Ring for awhile.

Forgive me if i didn’t answer the question that’s in the headline.  I think that if one really engages with the works, one embraces alternative interpretations, even if these are uneven.  That is my dream, as i believe it’s the dream of anyone who loves Wagner’s operas.

I believe the Met will eventually revive the Lepage Ring, perhaps in a few years time, as they have too much money invested in it to simply mothball it.  Perhaps the use of doubles needs to be stepped up, possibly to the exclusion of singers onstage for anything potentially risky.  I’d like to see what the production can do when it isn’t being held back by technical limitations, when singers feel safe; that may only be possible by turning it into a lip-synch extravaganza, at least in the scenes where singers were fearful.  I wonder what it would look like.

In closing, i recall one of pianist Stewart Goodyear’s Facebook statuses from May 2012:

“First, it is ridiculed….; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” -Arthur Schopenhauer

The Lepage Ring took the same sort of abuse as Chereau & Kupfer.  I wonder if the interpretation will ever get a chance to become “self-evident”?

Posted in Cinema, video & DVDs, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

What a concert is supposed to do

Posted on August 2, 2013 by barczablog

Too much fun in church means that at least one person will guiltily look over their shoulder.

The church was Koerner Hall, and the fun was The Minimalist Dream House Project from Toronto Summer Music, Katia and Marielle Labèque plus several additional players.  At intermissions (yes there were two: at this massive concert) I kept hearing incredulity, joy, wonderment.

Of course in classical music circles “new music” has often mean “dissonant” or “atonal” within living memory.  A concert of recent compositions that’s tonal?

No wonder the audience was buzzing with pleasure.

Photo Credit (from left) Katia and Marielle Labèque. Photo by Umberto Nicoletti.

Photo Credit (from left) Katia and Marielle Labèque. Photo by Umberto Nicoletti.

Too bad the younger audience I’d hoped to see never materialized.  Maybe they didn’t hear about it or perhaps they were out of town (Toronto does feel relatively empty this week).  I had the surreal –and thoroughly exhilarating—experience  of watching a classical concert hijacked, as if a rock band hiding backstage took over partway through.  We started with the Labèque sisters, Satie & Pärt, Duckworth & a powerful piece by Philip Glass.

But after the first interval? Terry Riley’s In C, employing two guitars, pianos, electronic keys & percussion provided a pretext.  The guitars, synth & percussion stayed, and more or less took over, as we heard Brian Eno, Radiohead, and Sonic Youth interspersed with minimalist compositions executed with the same orchestration, and often the same edgy delivery of rock music. Where the first part was often very quiet, the second part was often quite loud!  The passionate explosion of this section was phenomenally cathartic after the relative stasis of the first hour, blowing the lid off the place.

While I’d bravo’d in the first section, in the second part it felt more appropriate to scream and shout.  I wondered if dancing would have been possible, perhaps with a moshpit in front.  Even so,  inhaling the delicate fragrances of Koerner Hall’s wood finishes, I didn’t lose all sense of decorum, especially with a grinning Douglas McNabney (the Artistic Director of TSM) sitting ten feet away. If the balance in the audience had been a bit younger, had those of us hooting and hollering been more than a handful, this would have been perfect.

But even so McNabney had reason to be pleased, in programming that is at least experimental if not downright edgy.  He’d introduced our evening with his usual studious talk, this time giving us some ideas about minimalism.

He reminded me of something I’d almost forgotten, namely that some people dislike minimalist music & composers, something that’s hard to believe after a night like this one.  There’s a knock knock joke starring Philip Glass for instance, where the people who tell it usually think they’re making a clever remark, in pointing out that his music repeats frequently.,.. I suppose it was funny: in 1980. Or 1990 then?  But by now i hope Philip Glass isn’t unknown.

But I was put in mind of the whole context when Minimalism arrived on the scene, that some people were tired of dissonance, of the complexity of modernist composition.  I only wish that concerts like this one became the norm rather than the exception.  Throughout the audience was silent with wonder, in awe of the beauty they were hearing, including the quirky beauty of some of the compositions in the final section of the evening, experimental sounds that straddled the boundary between a classical concert and really exquisite rock music.  David Chalmin, Nicola Tesscari, Alexandre Maillard & Raphaël Séguiner brought virtuoso chops to their instruments, but also a willingness to let their instruments wail when necessary.  The concert at times had a decidedly experimental -exploratory feel to it, as though we were watching something being created afresh, and as though the players weren’t sure what was going to come out of their instruments.

This is what concerts are meant to do.  The audience was challenged, provoked, moved, and yes, shown all sorts of beautiful sounds [and let me add –the morning after–that there was a moment that had me thinking of the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps, when some in the audience were overwhelmed and resembling tired old folks, while others stood and cheered… i wondered if we might have a riot, except that the assembled conflict was between the youthfully inspired and the old and tired. No chance of a battle. But “Dream House” is indeed an epithet to be explored… oh how i wish i could ask Katia and Marielle about their dream]. At times it resembled a happening as much as a concert.  It’s the best concert I’ve been to this year.  Bravi!

Posted in Music and musicology, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Perpetual motion and minimalism

Posted on August 1, 2013 by barczablog

It’s time.

Katia et Marielle Labèque (photo by Brigitte Lacombe): click on photo and then click “The Labèques’ Minimalist Dream House” for more information

Recently I wrote about minimalist music in anticipation of Katia et Marielle Labèque playing Toronto Summer Music’s August 1st concert: The Minimalist Dream House project.  While I titled that piece The Geneology (sic) of Minimalism I was not suggesting an evolutionary pathway so much as family resemblances.  The metaphor of evolution for artistic forms is one I am very hesitant to invoke.  Sometimes composers are amenable to influence, but there’s never a smoking gun.

I am sure someone must have connected the romantic virtuoso perpetual motion showpiece to minimalism, although I can’t recall reading about the link.  The long compositions of regular patterned eighth notes surely anticipate the pattern music of more recent composers.

So let’s listen to some examples, first from the classical realm, and then from the world of popular music, with minimalism in mind.

Beethoven? While several movements from piano sonatas have perpetual motion qualities, the purest example –that is, the one without the gripping drama of the last movement of the  Appassionata sonata or the beautiful melody found in the last movement of the Tempest sonata—is the finale to Op 54, a pure display of movement as an end in itself.

Schumann’s Toccata is very much a virtuoso display piece, with only a few moments of actual melody & accompaniment, suggesting the sort of figure-ground relationship I alluded to before: where the quick pulsing notes that might be an accompaniment take over, to become the raison d’être of the piece. 

Rimsky-korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee is another example of the genre.

Are any of those influential? I don’t know, only that they showed other composers that music didn’t really have to devolve into melody + accompaniment, that they could be exhibited in one complex pattern.

Here are some more recent examples that take these patterned compositions in a new direction, especially celebrating rhythm in their textures & shapes.

“12th Street Rag”, written by Euday L. Bowman in 1914 is highly influential, in taking a syncopated pattern of notes that is almost anti-melodic, and making that the central feature of the piece.  Listen for it 37 seconds into the piece, a tune that’s very familiar even if the composer is comparatively unknown. No it’s not minimalist; but other compositions that are minimalist emulate the style of composition.

“Fascinating Rhythm” by George Gershwin dates from 1924, and isn’t minimalist either; but it does the same sort of thing with its melody as what we see in 12th Street Rag.

Fast forward to 1959, when Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” appeared.  This begins to sound minimalist.

Let’s digress slightly, to include Bernard Herrmann’s film music for Fahrenheit 451 that appeared in 1966.  The prelude to the film is also minimalist by the way, but roughly a minute and a half into the clip he creates odd-numbered rhythms, a perverse march for the firemen sounding a bit like goose-stepping.  Did Herrmann have Brubeck’s happier piece in the back of his mind?

And finally let’s listen to King Crimson’s 1974 Fracture by Robert Fripp.  

I’m looking forwared to the TSM concert.

The Minimalist Dream House
Thursday August 1, 7:30pm
Koerner Hall

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