Lou Harrison & The Village Trip
One of Lou Harrison’s Strokes of Genius
The Village Trip trip offered much Lou Harrison this year, kicked off with John Schnieder's show at Greenwich House. John Schneider recounted Harrison's time in Greenwich Village and the story of how New York almost gave Harrison a nervous breakdown.
More about The Village Trip somehwere else. When I say something is hilarious, that's a good thing, not a jab; picture me on the floor on all fours, slapping the floor with one hand. Take the word, and combine it with that image to provide some idea of my utter surprise and delight with what Lou Harrison did.
The slow section of Lou Harrison‘s Canticle #3 channels the rarefied feeling of some exotic Asian court, but also the Peacock Room. California, westernmost outpost of the west, looking west, faces the East.
Likewise, much of Harrison's "Varied Trio" evokes a vague, unspecified Asian court music.
Varied Trio
(Why won't this video embed here?)
In the fourth movement, Rondeau in Honor of Fragonard the East is conflated in a fantastic chimerical fashion with pre-Revolution France (which indulged in Chinoiserie, even then). Harrison circles back to Europe from his East-facing Californian perspective. He suggests surprising parallels in the moods of those courts. The moods are not so different after all? What might be called "exotic" may tell us more about ourselves than we first imagine?
Isn't this poignant as we all know the problems with the absolute monarchy? It was a culture poised at the edge of a cliff. Harrison's work (intentionally or not) picks up those contentions and puts them on a platter for us, and we marvel at them, at all those contentions crystalized. We know little about the political doings in Asia. Part of Harrison's charm is in invoking courtly scenes whose politics are remote, obscure to us, but doesn't this cricling back on our own fraught territory create a delicious frisson? Isn't it more interestig to consider Harrison's Fragonard reference a political statement? I don't know if he left any comments on this question, but at the very least, it's not hard to imagine that Harrison would see that his work comments on his situation -- what it means to be situated in California; the implications of his situation are then limited only by our knowledge of history and our interest and curiousity.
Surprising Parallels
Ezra Pound, Arthur Whaley and Djuna Barnes, and so many others felt a kinship with the Chinese poets. It took a long time for Western poetry to become imagistic. Ezra Pound and Arthur Whaley bring to our attention the fact that in China imagism was the mode for centuries.
Imagism begins with Pound's discovery of TE Hulme. Hulme's essay, “A Tory Philosophy”, provides clues about the imagistic mindset and its relation to the leisure class.
Hulme's Tory perspective cultivates a disdain for any engagement in the world's problems. It goes further, imagism eliminates personal expression, even that is too political.
"Don't help on the big chariot. You will only get yourself dusty."
-- is a line from one of Arthur Whaley's translations of ancient Chinese poems set for guitar and voice by Benjamin Britten.
Humans are a mess. Don't even try to improve them, they can only be governed and even that is messy. Hulme's Tory philosophy reminds us of Hobbs' view of life without government -- “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Throughout Albert Salomon's essays there is a recurring theme -- the identity of man -- implying something like Hobbs' and Hulme's intractable problematics. Identity -- we are one thing, unchangeable. Hulme's Tory is not a meliorist. To that Tory, the perfectabilty of man is Romantic in a pathological sense.
It so happens that Hulme was of the liesure class. The consequences, the outcome of political battles *will not touch people of his class*. They have cushion.
Hulme died in the first world war. While he would take me for a bleeding heart liberal Romantic like HG Wells, I still feel for him and I admire his befriending Bergson.
Positioning oneself beyond the fray, one's perspective may become pure eye, the naked eyeball, as Emerson put it, taking in images in their purest forms. This helps me understand the illiberal quality of Thomas Mann's pre-WWI perspective, described so vehmently in his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man. Romain Rolland's agenda was a distraction from the naked eyball that Mann had come to take for granted. Clearly Rolland's and brother Heinrich's insistence on certain refinements was an intrusion on that sovereign perspective, felt like an affront. Can we imagine that Hulme would understand Mann as he comes across in Reflections of an Unpolitical Man? These issues all explored in such a beautiful way in Der Zauberberg.
A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
Robert Pollock’s Chamber Setting No. 2, written for the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, are settings of some of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. I recall this line --
“…. He is a man of leisure.“
Robert Pollock met Harrison twice, and champions his music. Pollock advocacated for composers for fifty years, first through Jacques Monod's New York Guild of Composers, then for almost 20 years through the Composers Guild of New Jersey, and finally through 25 years running Ebb & Flow Arts in Hawaii. His advocacy was the least ideological of almost anyone I've encountered. It's far more common to find a modernist who considered Harrison a lightweight, dismissable. My test is this: does indifference survive intense engagement with a composer's work? My engagement was very recent. Over the summer I transcribed Canticle No. 3 for orchestra of prepared guitars and last month I conducting it for The Village Trip.
Returning to crystalized contentions --
Her swift cunning impaled on her brain’s darkness.
Crystals
Djuna Barnes
Wax heavy, snared in age-splintered linen, the king’s daughter;
The shimmer of her eyeballs blue beneath the lids like thin rain water.
Small and sour lemon blossoms banked at the breast-bone;
Her two small breasts dark of death and stained a dark tone.
Her lips flower-tarnished, her cheek-braids bulked in rust.
Her shoulders as hard as a wall-tree, frosted with dust.
Precise bone, clipped and grooved, and as sure as metal.
Leaf of flesh built high, like china roses, petal on petal.
Odor of apples rising from the death robes chinks and breaks.
Seeds of pepper falling down from brittle, spiced tomb-cakes.
Her swift cunning impaled on her brain’s darkness. She died
Of her heart’s sharp crystal spiral pricked in her side.
Six tomb Gods in basalt make her one of these—
Who lie a million years, listening to thieves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzwBaSZ9xxg (403)
Harrison’s work becomes so much more interesting than Fragonard’s.
Hulme was an aristocrat. Djuna Barnes and Beethoven willfully assert their aristocracy. I know nothing of Lou Harrison outside of these works which are so clearly in a realm far above the fray. Doing art is inately artistocratic. Beethoven asserted his aristocratic position with a combative attitude. But is it not the case that artists, even when they are classed with the servants, like Haydn, are operating above the courtly manners? Haydn gave his musicians a night off in defiance of his employer.
The arts are naturally apolitical, particularly music. Our moment is anomalous with political works like Doctor Atomic and Klinghofer. A composer I know went to the Met to hear Doctor Atomic and he reported back to me, "I did not need John Adams to tell me the bomb is bad."
Djuna Barnes— I’ve commented before that Barnes' “To the Dead Favorite of Liu Ch’e” defies Ezra Pound’s imagist diktats.
Pound's “Liu Ch'e” is faithful, completely faithful to imagistic principles. Djuna Barnes’ poem goes to the trouble of proving that she gets those principles and then carefully defies them.
Ezra Pound's "LIU CH'E"
The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the court-yard,
There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:
A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
"TO THE DEAD FAVOURITE OF LIU CH’E"
Djuna Barnes
THE SOUND of rustling silk is stilled,
With solemn dust the court is filled,
No footfalls echo on the floor;
A thousand leaves stop up her door,
Her little golden drink is spilled.
Her painted fan no more shall rise
Before her black barbaric eyes—
The scattered tea goes with the leaves.
And simply crossed her yellow sleeves;
And every day a sunset dies.
Her birds no longer coo and call,
The cherry blossoms fade and fall,
Nor ever does her shadow stir,
But stares forever back at her,
And through her runs no sound at all.
And bending low, my falling tears
Drop fast against her little ears,
And yet no sound comes back, and I
Who used to play her tenderly
Have touched her not a thousand years.
–The Dial
Barnes willfully asserts her sovereignty from Pound and from poetical movements.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey