Current Music: Handel concerti grossi. They are smooth like old wine, witty and erudite like professors getting tipsy at seminar dinner. I am thankful that in this day of sampling and artistic collaboration, Handel no longer has to fight the reputation of a musical thief. You young whippersnappers might not remember that back in the day, Handel scholars spilt approximately thirty percent of their ink defending George Frideric from the charge of borrowing too often from other composers and himself -- a supposed violation of the Romantic Code, chapter 6.11.d (Creation Under the Influence). While we're on the subject of defending composers against unfair judgment, how about the entry in the Guinness Book of World records about Georg Philipp Telemann's alleged prolificity, the aesthetic equivalent of, "She has huge ... tracts of land." (Astute readers will be happy for me: if this is what I choose to rant about, ergo I must be doing fairly well for myself. Ha! You wish.
Handel, at some point in the last few years, has become the answer I give most frequently to the question of whom in history I would most like to go out to dinner with. One reason: contemporary descriptions of the heartiness of his appetite (down to some rather unflattering series of cartoons depicting Mr. Handel as a pig in a frock-coat seated at the organ) lead me to believe that dinner out would be particularly pleasurable to him. Imagine, on the other hand, how frustrating dinner with Socrates would be: he would be an hour late, pick at his food, and never get drunk, no matter how much wine he might put away. No: when I go out to dinner with somebody, I expect him to tuck in and stint not till he be sated. I also expect him to put out: and, if I get to pick a dead man to dine with, I might as well stipulate the young, sexy Handel of his Italienreise (Although this only if I could also speak English with him and ask about his last years, too; otherwise I would be satisfied with old fat Handel for the advantages age would provide to our conversation.) Of course, I also despair, when this sort of question arises, that I would get any more out of meeting a famous producer-of-artistic-objects than I do out of experiencing the objects themselves. Although his biographers don't characterise him as a particularly unpleasant or taciturn man (he could have a sharp tongue, it seems, but that's a boon to repart�e) it would be a waste of the miraculous only to stare in awkward silence at a resurrected Handel while he glaringly demolishes a side of beef and three bottles of port, surtout when what I want from him is found more readily in Pianger� la sorte mia from Giulio Cesare. However, if hunches were cement mixers, it would be hard to park on my street. I suspect dinner conversation with Mr. Handel would be fascinating, wide-ranging, clever, bitchy, and all-around great fun.
Here will be found an essay by Robert Hicks about seventeenth-century French music. Especial mention therein is made of Charpentier's M�d�e, better put and less goggled with hormonal admiration than my own paean to that opera. Mr. Hicks, by the way, is a charming man, whom I met when he came to KK and SS's to drop off the Flemish single he lent them last year. Like practically every harpsichord maker I've ever met, his personal characteristics blur with the characteristics of his instruments: somehow, I remember him soft-spoken, bearded, and dressed in rust-red paint with matte gold trim. Harpsichord makers fit into the sacred class of people who labor both with their minds and their hands: their privilege is to occupy the space where the Word (the Number, the Document and the Score) is made Flesh. In many ways, it would be my ideal career if I had the proper talents for it. At least thirty percent of their brains must be dedicated to historical scholarship of the most crabbed variety: catalogues of instruments by the family Ruckers, with their scale-lengths and plucking points, must flow as easily as general aesthetic connoisseurship of early modern Europe. And then there is the question of maths and physics, to calculate string lengths and optimize the creatiion of the bentside. And over all this arches the manual dexterity and the organic understanding of materials which enables one to create an object by feel and by intuition in real space.
Sorry to those of you who might be sick of the music-themed entries: I appreciate that I'm here dancing rather pointlessly about architecture, and that all the writing about music in the world can't take the place of hearing it. I was on the phone with my mother today, and was trying to help her understand why it was that I threw so much of myself into baroque music when there's no money in it, and what prestige there is resounds in a shoebox. For her, all the world can be reduced to a dollar-amount, much as for some the world is the reticulation of written and spoken texts, and for others, the whole universe can be written in open-score (you just need to know a thousand clefs).