Spirits

 

Intuition

I've felt it wandering through the darkness between old memories and beneath maps

blown in from nights of endless dreams.

It's as elusive as the fragrances of colors.

I've almost seen it as a kind of palimpsest

on which time inscribes a baffling beauty.

It sometimes appears when I think of a place

that doesn't exist, where evening comes deeply and austere shadows are winged in by swallows. It's like the dim flowing of chemicals in poppies. I've almost known a word floating from trances, similar in valence to “significance.” It quivers

as a hesitant disclosure or like the fractal irises 

of a strange curator's eyes. Something like hope is gathering quietly in the fantastical tangents.

~TB

a meditation on Schubert's WINTERREISE

Franz Schubert died at the age of 31.

When I listen to his works, a condition of reverence permeates my brain -- a spontaneous, natural hallowing of his memory. He conjured music of deathless beauty. His songs are exquisite spells of melancholy.

I think this book is a good thing, a well-written and thorough appreciation of the great song cycle Winterreise:

amazon.com

Schumann's SPRING

Robert Schumann's imagistic, programmatic ideas for his Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 38 ("Spring") came to him only after the work was completed.

He suggests for the opening movement a longing for spring. Later in the symphony, a sense of things coming to life. Projected onto the last movement is a sort of in-the-moment melancholy that spring is passing too darn fast.

This is the first symphony I fell in love with. It happened around 1979. I still have this LP, recorded in 1958:




I bought the George Szell and Cleveland Orchestra CD of all the Schumann symphonies:

amazon.com

I've always had some trouble trying to apply Schumann's after-the-fact spring imagery to this work. Occasionally, I succeed in placing my imagination beside an imaginary winter fireplace -- longing for spring. Occasionally, I succeed in sensing a surge of growth, of vernal energy and bounteous bloom during later symphonic moments. But for the most part, I take in this work as an abstract musical wonder -- I'm stunned by and made captive to high-quality aural structures, oblique emotions, gestural spirits.

amazing and wonderful

I've been a Doctor Strange fan since the Strange Tales comics of the 1960s. The artist Steve Ditko's pocket dimensions back then entranced me, suspended my teenage time, made me strange.

This movie is a quality envisioning, a marvelous homage:

amazon.com

a thrilling thing

A lot of folks would say that the music of Johannes Brahms is conservative, unadventurous, even formally claustrophobic. During his time, the musical radicals Liszt and Wagner were ascendant and excited the public. But I think the denser, plaintive textures of Brahms are more artistically intrepid and exhilarating than the chromaticism of Liszt and the hyperventilation of Wagner.

Brahms's adherence to certain formal constraints or models didn't prevent him from filling those composition spaces with stunning moments of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic invention. When I say "invention" I mean something unique to Brahms: the coming-to-presence of unusually elevated spiritual substances. Brahms wasn't religious, so when I say "spiritual," I mean something more like "intensively artistic."

Even today -- Brahms. Artistic culture has sadly deteriorated, become facile, hectoring, and ironized nearly to death. And what passes nowadays for a musically thrilling creation, in whatever genre, faints into mediocrity and irrelevancy when set beside Brahms's "String Quartet in A minor, Op. 51 No. 2."

Here, Brahms goes deep, goes into abstract tissues of subtlest emotion and austerest beauty. What could be more thrilling than that?

perfection happens

Not often. When it does in musical creation, is there a basic principle at work or in play that can be fetched by intuition, proposed by the listening, floating brain?

How about inevitability?

Chopin's "Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 1" flows and develops with an organic, unifying complexity of formal elements. Color and rhythm, line and structure, contrast and rhetoric. Also spiritual components -- disquiet and beauty, dream and melancholy, regret and candlelight. These aspects taken together build up a dynamical, living momentum, startling the ear and soul with a sense of ordained emergence, of aural fate.

The effect is like listening to music spontaneously write itself. The artistic logic unspools as if according to a graceful algorithmic compulsion. What we hear could not be otherwise. This night piece defies the natural and usual law of contingency. The fact that it exists is as necessary as time and gravity.

Is paradox also part of perfection? As this nocturne enters and interrogates the evening, a sense of improvisation blends into the destiny of the flowing equation.