Since one, today, I've been trying to write an entry on baroque music appreciation, and, while it's all coming out in dribs and drabs, none of it is terribly coherent. This is what I could salvage of previous forms of this entry. And down at the bottom, below the little asterisks, is a cute little cat story to which you might want to skip if you're not so good at patience and technical vocabularies, or if you unrepentantly dislike baroque music.
"I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone."
--Tallulah Bankhead, Tallulah (1957), Chapter 1.
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Which is for milkmonkey. And for myself, of course, since it applies. (My earliest memory of Miz Bankhead, by the bye, is of the anecdote wherein she tells a thuriferous priest, "Darling! I love your dress, but your handbag is on fire!" Thanks to the lovely and praying-mantis-like DU for sharing that.) Too well it applies: so well, in fact, that it makes me difficult to employ and inconvenient to spend time with. Not to mention that sore, over-tired feeling.
Current hallucinatory hypochondriasis: Severe brain damage and asphyxiation brought on by spilling the facial cleanser MCH gave me all over my carpet and dressing gown. Woke up yesterday at three in the afternoon with a headache, plush and rectangular like heavy shelling over Beirut, and enough muscle aches to prove to me once and for all that I do, in fact, have muscles. They are deep under the surface, like most of my good qualities; and like most of my qualities (in general), no amount of burrowing will ferret them out.
What you're listening for, when you approach a piece of classical music, is notes. There will be a lot of them, and the listening to each of them is a harder routine of mental gymnastics than you'd surmise. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century music is designed to wash through the listener transparently--the bourgeois music appreciator sits in a velvet seat that is not his own except by subscription, closes his eyes, tries to keep still and quiet. In an overstimulated world, one where there are more written letters than human eyes to read them, and sounds are inescapable, it is vital that music have an emptying, simplifying gesture. From Wagner to the present, the majority of Western music aims at a temporary brainwashing, in order to trasport the listener to someplace the composer has been. As in a cinema, this transportation is effected by blindering the audience into using only one or two specific senses, looking only one direction, participating in the composer's perspective. Whichever came first, reverence or the concert hall, the routinization of the musical divine from Mahler to Cage (and through, pace Adorno, to the Beatles and Godspeed You Black Emperor) makes a "silent" space wherein to concentrate your musical tastebuds on one particular experience. In the case of loud music, the concert-going experience is a drowning-out of out all other stimulus. In the case of quieter (or self-consciously "Classical") music, an artificial "silence" is created to contain the music. Because, at least since the proliferation of mechanized music reproduction, there has been a steady inflation of the amount of insistence a piece of music has to have to be noticed. First off, sheer volume. The 24 violons du Roy (Louis XIV) couldn't hope to drown out a three-piece punk outfit, let alone a two-hundred person orchestra. And they were a big band, in their day.
To hear seventeenth-century music with anything like immanence, I have to experience it quite differently, listening to the inflection of the words, the subtleties of the rhythm. For most of the period I'm interested in, there was a tension between (a) the natural rhythm of the words, particularly in languages which have long and short vowel sounds and a pattern of stress. Humanist scholars are obsessed with the scansion of poetry and setting one syllable per note, in such a way as to underline the quantity of the vowel in the syllable. We point to one thing: the drum. The drum, long after the rest of music fades, will not be silenced. However, the drum is not the preferred Early-Modern-European expressway to the heart -- we are seeking not immediacy, not unanimity of experience, but the creation, in the work, of a distinct personality which engages in conversation to persuade the listener. The palette chosen by Rossi and Charpentier and J. S. Bach is of harmonies, poetry, rhetoric, and expectations, both logically-resolved and dashed.
The challenge with earlier music is to experience it as a kind of discrete sculpture existing in space you don't necessarily inhabits own space. Late music (to pluck a convenient term from the air) is immediate because it has A Tune and A Beat and A Groove, and represents landscapes of the self with a fairly simple representational vocabulary. I think this has to do with the fact that fewer and fewer people who enjoy music are actively involved in making it -- it's become a spectator sport. In a mere two hundred years, and we have the Romantic generation to blame for this, the Subject, the Composer, and the Perfomer have become hopelessly confused, and they are placed on the other end of the room from the poor audience. In the seventeenth century it was the exception, rather than the rule, for music to refer directly to the composer, or gods forbid, the performers' emotional state. Those of you who have been following me closely might now interject that it's interesting that my favorite music being made today is explicitly about characters who are Not To Be Identified with their singers. So here it is: the aspect of drama is what I like about a lot of early music -- the singers are either disembodied abstracts creating poetry in some kind of holy space, or else they are some kind of character. Anyway, we like the mask and the Masque [but not Mask, because of that whole Ch*r thing].
Appreciating early opera, getting as rabid about it as I am, is probably most of all a question of long association. Anybody who has been intensely bored and picked up a book about sea-sponges knows what I'm talking about. Just listen to a lot of it, and you (first off) get to know how to tell the composers and songs and genres apart (which is pretty damn exciting in itself) and also you get to know the vocabulary. Once you build up a mountain of rules and conventions and standard practices, you get the jokes, you understand why certain things are shocking and revolutionary. It's that beautiful moment when you say, "Oh, wow: I totally expected that chord to resolve this way, and instead he just lets the whole structure dissipate into nothingness..." -- especially when you see how this musical trick interacts with the poetry and the drama at that moment of the opera -- that's cool.
Also, keep in mind music has a long history of dissonance-inflation, which you can see in the macrocosm from Palestrina to Stravinsky or in the microcosm from Mozart to Beethoven. Dissonance, loud noises, and percussion are the cheapest tricks to get people's attention, and even if they get weaker over time, they always work. [We like Punk Rock.] But that means that older music sometimes seems a little pallid by comparison.
Another door into the whole thing is an finely-developed sense of camp: fear not, there's considerable evidence that this is not just a cheap PoMo response to baroque opera. As in most theater, gender is a central concern, and is put in question through two whole centuries where the main characters, male and female, sang in soprano and alto ranges exclusively, where at least one opera in three has a cross-dressing character. Moreover, the emotional One is tempted to argue for this by simply asking "How could operas in which the main characters are neurotic, self-obsessed, and otherwise display all the traits of histrionic personality disorders ever be considered anything other than a huge, complex joke, particularly when the plots are invariably solved by some completely far-fetched divine intervention?" Well, this isn't exactly spot-on, since there are some things which XVII-C audiences found genuinely moving and which seem a little melodramatic and tasteless to us, likewise there are many things they found funny that we don't get at all. On the other hand, I feel it's a lot easier to respect George Frideric Handel in the morning when I consider the more bathetic moments in his operas existing in two worlds: a little sympathetic, a little mocking. It's the gentle balance between marinading yourself in grief, understanding the awful things people put one another through, and having the perspective to appreciate the ambiguity or arbitrariness of suffering in the world that draws me in.
So when Agrippina sighs, for the twentieth time, "ohim�" (which rhymes in sound and meaning with "oy vey"), you don't have to take it like your heart is breaking, too. A central sacrament of opera is witnessing pain, borne beautifully and nobly. Remember, too, that tragedy wasn't really a part of the musical language of the XVII and XVIII -- audiences demanded, and got, happy endings for everything from Orpheus to the death of Tamurlane. Perhaps I'm fooling myself, but I read this as a fundamental optimism about the universe: when push them into action, the gods ultimately want us to be happy, and, even if a few people die or suffer during the course of the show, it turns out well for the people left at the end. Hell, it's contrived in the best sense: it shows the effects of human agency for the good.
So I'm sitting in the darkened auditorium. First off, there's a French overture. It has a slowish, dotted opening, with grand gestures, flourishes, a sense of the monumental. And then it breaks down into a faster, fugal section, dance-like, manic, effervescent, and, just as the pot is about to boil over, there's a dramatic shift, and the rhythms of the opening get you to settle down just as...
There's a dance of shepherds or something. It's kind of irrelevant what sort of costuming the librettist chooses, except that it adds spectacle and allusion to the main idea of the Prologue. On the surface, prologues in French Baroque opera are hard-line royalist propaganda, but under that veneer seethes some sense of dissent and subversion -- the spin that one puts on the good deeds of the king is a coded message to him. This is interesting the way the McLaughlin group used to be; luckily, for this and other places where the text adds to my enjoyment, most productions won't let you get by without supertitles and a librettos in at least three languages. Also, please sit back and enjoy the ballet, the costumes, the wigs, the powder, the re-creation of it all. Baroque dance music, since it doesn't rely on drums, is all about melody and polyrhythms (like hemiola or syncopation). Try to decipher the differences between minuet and sarabande, for example: when you learn the system of correspondences, you get the sly implication a composer makes when he associates a character with the sarabande: a Spanish dance, proud, restrained, and deeply sexual. A note about polyrhythms: mid-twentieth century "traditional" or "bad" performances of baroque music (think Stokowski or Yehudi Menuhin) downplay the sexy rhythms, since they try to force eighteenth century music into nineteenth-century categories of taste. We know better now. You know that thing that happens rhythmically (1-2-3 1-2-3 / 1-a 2-a 3-a) in America from West Side Story? That's hemiola.
And then there's the can of worms that is text-setting: the ideal, through most of the early modern, under the inspiration of classical poetry, was to place long syllables on long notes and short syllables on short notes, and to let the rhythm of the words seem natural as possible. Except that nobody actually speaks in quantities that precise. Hence the genre of recitative was born: it's a way to set poetry with total fluidity, and, when done well, it explains itself, naturalized both to singing in metre and the way speech comes out of humans in its own time.
I guess it all comes down to speak-a-ing its language: when you get the base-states of baroque music set in your mind, you appreciate the delicious diversions from the norm that make great music. That's all.
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As promised, I chased Cat 1 off the dining room table today: she squealed, launched herself towards the kitchen, landing messily on Cat 2, who launched himself out towards the hallway, slamming into Cat 3. The three of them looked very upset for the rest of the afternoon, as if it was too much for feline dignity to bear.
Current news: I have exchanged SLB for KG. SLB is in H**st*n, TX, for a wedding. KG just walked in. We love you.