Apropos of nothing, two classic stride pianists taking on classic romanticism. Lambert playing Wagner, & Tatum playing Chopin.

E&V; fodder.

So let me just get this straight: Lars Von Trier's new film is called 'Melancholia', it's about the end of the world, and it's soundtracked by Wagner's Prelude to Tristan & Isolde? Ummm...

Pre-Freudian Psychology.

One thing I can't quite understand about the ruling class is their attitude to culture. Seeing that they are generally very well educated, and seeing the reputation that high art and culture has, you would imagine that they would supportive of the arts. But no, like everything else that elevates us above germs, they find it superfluous to the demands of extracting profit.

So we have a long slow war of attrition waged against the BBC, among the most symbolic organisations in the world, which produces programmes such as 'Discovering Music', quite simply one of the most lovely things this island produces. This is a programme which is accessible but not patronising, which explores great art-music in detail, tying together the old problem of emotional and social impact with technical construction and execution, and is endlessly fascinating to boot. That our ruling class would want to destroy this in favour of private broadcasters who would never, ever commission something quite so informative and enriching, highlights the inherent contradictions of conservatism better than almost anything. Fuck them.







Here's some quotes from the programme, which are, let's face it, total E&V; fodder...

The most famous chord progression in the history of music

Keeps fulfilment at bay

World of unfulfilled longing and endless desire

As we suddenly become aware of sexual attraction and painful desire

The most poignant interrupted cadence of all

We feel the music has come alive after the disjointed and lonely opening but it has only come alive to experience further heartache and unfulfilment.

But the harmony, like our unconscious lives, is never truly at rest. The structural goals in Tristan are moments of unfulfilment, disorientation and frustration of varying intensities.

We might think that at last the music is about to achieve emotional fulfulment. Longing and denial, both musically and psychologically, will be a thing of the past.

One of the mightiest climaxes in all music, a revelation of pre-Freudian psychology in which climactic achievement is merely an illusion.

In spite of the spiritual and erotic adventures, the striving and longing, we're back where we started.

From agony and unfulfilled desire in life, to mystical union in death.

This is orchestral genius at work.

This music still speaks to us today with a power that is hard to resist.

Wagner now begins to build his final overwhelming climax, striving for mystic union in death.

Only a compositional giant could have sustained such a span, and kept alive without monotony this world of agony and unfulfilled desire.
This was a work that revolutionised the composition of music.

I mean, there is an interesting argument to be had regarding the final chords of Tristan. It's quite easy (and actually quite correct) to identify the B major at the very climax as a kind of false unity, as posited by fascism. I mean, every time I listen to it, it sends shivers up and down my spine, I become liquid of limb and prone to swooning, but I know at the same time that it is a bare-faced metaphysical lie. This is why Mahler will always be an improvement on Wagner - listen to the disintegration at the end of the Adagio from Mahler 9, and you hear the unfulfilling disintegration of self-hood that is almost a perfect companion to the voice in Beckett's 'Malone Dies' - ever obsessed with an end that cannot be experienced from within the self that is utterly focussed upon it. Although Wagner is correct about desire, he is wrong about the Will.

Some listening.

Here's a few things that I have been listening to lately. You might enjoy them too.
Marcus Fjellstrom
the disjointed by miasmah
This guy is an excellent composer of original haunted compositions.

Holy Other

Holy Other 'Yr Love' from FAMILY on Vimeo.

Some haunted disco. This, to me, feels like a cross between Decasia and a Burial record.


A little recording I made recently, with some shockingly anachronistic rubato.

The Fall - Hit the North

This has been a recent favourite after hours in our flat.

Fennesz - Before I Leave

An old favourite of mine.

Thomas Hampson / Leonard Bernstein / Wiener Philharmoniker, Mahler : "Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen."

Oh! This is so unbelievably lush.

Moseivitch plays Wagner/Liszt

Crackle!

Rudge plays Wagner/Liszt

Crackle!

Salem - King Night

This is what the 'hip cats' are listening to. Personally I reckon this is the only really good track off the album. Disregarding all else, I like the histrionic quality it has.

Kristen Flagstadt - Wagner : Im Treibhaus

Another pinnacle performance, this is most notable for its very slow tempo.

And...

This is an ultimately futile attempt to cheer up.

Im Treibhaus

There will be nothing on here for the next two weeks as I'm taking what feels like a well-earned break. In the meantime, here's a recording I made of my own arrangement of Wagner's 'Im Treibhaus' from the Wesendonck Lieder, as mentioned previously here.

I'm slightly pleased with having done an arrangement of this piece, if only for the fact that a German Romantic lied about being melancholy in a greenhouse more or less covers all of what I've been talking about for the last year or two. Add to that the sheer morose joy of the repeated iv-i-iv-i (in minor, of course) and you have hopefully enough to temporarily fill the 'desolate, empty, horrible void' of my absence(!)

Das ist kein Mann! (Das ist ein Kaninchen!)

This is one of those 'Sorry I haven't written anything for ages' posts. Truth is, I've been sooooooooo busy. But in the meantime, here's something for all you Wagnerian furries out there...

Iron, Glass & Wagner

Iron & glass architecture had a very strange relationship with music. This played out in a number of different ways, some of which I discuss in the manuscript for my book, or have written about here in the past. Take the 'discordant display of loyalty' as the two organs at either end of the Hyde Park palace failed to play 'God Save the Queen' in time with each other, or the very first recorded music, created by the Edison Gramophone Company at the gigantic Handel festivals which were held triennially at the Sydenham Crystal Palace. Listen to it again here, because it's absolutely stunning, if you're interested in that sort of thing.


On the other hand, another aspect of the musical life of the late 19th century was revealed to me during my studies, as my searches for material threw up more and more cheap and cheerful fodder, otherwise thankfully lost. The British Library has reams and reams of throwaway Victorian sheet music, all compiled into big fat volumes, all of it dirge, and in a few cases composed in honour of some new edifice that had just been thrown up. Hence 'the Albert Palace Grand March' above, one of two pieces composed in honour of the ill-fated iron & glass building off Battersea Park, which I previously depicted in what you might call a quasi-ruined state, driving friends, colleagues and lovers to near-total distraction.

So imagine my surprise when, inamongst the vulgar kitsch of Crystal Palace Waltzes and such like, I found the following passage, regarding the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876:

“The Women’s Centennial Executive Committee […] commissioned the Centennial Inauguration March from Richard Wagner which was played at the opening ceremony on 10 May 1876. Joseph Wilson, Henry Petit’s Partner, felt that ‘to one who is an enthusiastic admirer of Wagner, it must be confessed that it is somewhat disappointing. Still, it is Wagner. None can dispute that. The grand clashes, swelling up and up until they almost overtop the heaven’s themselves’”.

Allwood, John. The Great Exhibitions. London : Studio Vista, 1977, p.54

Was this some example of a decent piece of music being composed to go along with an iron & glass building? Well, I had a look at it when in the library, and I must say that, lo and behold, it wasn't particularly impressive. In fact, it was as dirge-like as any other piece of shit throwaway music from the period. (If you have access to spotify you can hear all thirteen achingly dull minutes of it here). Indeed - Allmusic have an interesting anecdote about the piece:

Meanwhile, the United States was preparing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and, at Christmas 1875, commissioned Wagner to compose a commemorative march for the occasion. By February 1876 it was completed, as music for the Flower Maidens in Parsifal sprang to mind -- perhaps they wanted to be Americans, he quipped. Wagner was obviously correct when he said of this vacuously pompous effusion that the best thing about it was the $5,000 he was paid for it, which funded -- despite a festival deficit of 150,000 marks -- an Italian vacation.

From here.

So we have here two opposed logics regarding the music of the exhibition palaces. On the one hand the music that accompanied them was altogether vulgar and unrefined, totally in keeping with the pomp and naivety of their popular reception, but on the other hand we can look back and collect reverberations, echoes and distorted memory artefacts, coming to understand the haunted qualities of their musical cultures, much as we understand the strange dreaminess of their spatial qualities, both dream qua hope and dream qua phantasm, in accordance with Walter Benjamin's analysis.

But in fact, we have not yet exhausted Wagner's contribution to iron & glass and its cultures. First I'd like to note here his minor appearance in Kenneth Frampton's excellent 1970s essay Industrialisation and the Crises in Architecture, where Wagner comes to represent a similar bourgeois reaction to industrialisation (which Frampton describes as 'The Crisis of 1851'):

In short, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk became the aesthetic model for a wholesale bourgeois retreat from the barbarisms of an industrialised world. From Morris’ Red House, built at Bexley Heath in 1859, to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde of the same date was but a step.

Oppositions reader : selected readings from a journal for ideas and criticism in architecture, 1973-1984 New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c1998. p.51

In this case Wagner strongly represents the whole-hearted rejection of technology, and of course it's very easy to draw lines between the Pre-Raphaelites, with their medievalist aesthetic, and Wagner's own pagan nonsense. I'm certainly no expert on Wagner's work but generally I don't think that there's really any machines in there - the utilisation of myth as some kind of universal doesn't make much sense when you consider that industrialisation was already near-fully established: by 1844 Charles Valentin Alkan had already composed 'Le chemin de fer', a rather mental etude depicting a railway journey. The universality of myth in this instance can only really point backwards.

But it's actually more complicated than that. Wagner, while working on 'Tristan und Isolde', was living in a house in the garden of his patrons the Wesendoncks. He, being Wagner, got rather too close to Mathilde Wesendonck, although nobody is quite sure whether they 'got it on', so to speak. While he was there he composed the Wesendonck Lieder, some of his only music that isn't set to one of his own texts. The poems that he set were ones written by Mathilde, including one called 'Im Treibhaus' (In the Greenhouse), which is a substantially more modern subject than what we might be used to from Wagner.


Musically the piece is a sketch for the Prelude to Act III of Tristan und Isolde, with Tristan's leitmotif, the ascending four notes that govern the entire opera, stretched out across a minor scale, and a lushly abject voicing of the tonic chord. This alternates with short passages of more bittersweet character, although still quintessentially Wagner; those slippery, wandering minor chords sliding in and out through tight chromatic voice leading. Overall it's a small-scale and less bombastic side to Wagner and thus is far more palatable than one might normally find him, although it's no less brilliant as a result.

But the lieder as a whole is what is most interesting here. The protagonist is in a winter garden considering the lot of the plants, which have been uprooted and brought to this horticultural museum:

Hochgewölbte Blätterkronen,
Baldachine von Smaragd,
Kinder ihr aus fernen Zonen,
Saget mir, warum ihr klagt?

High-vaulted crowns of leaves,
Canopies of emerald,
You children of distant zones,
Tell me; why do you lament?

The protagonist compares the alienation and suffering of life to the strange-nature of the greenhouse:

Wohl, ich weiß es, arme Pflanze;
Ein Geschicke teilen wir,
Ob umstrahlt von Licht und Glanze,
Unsre Heimat ist nicht hier!

I know well, poor plants,
A fate that we share,
Though we bathe in light and radiance,
Our homeland is not here!

Indeed, the lugubriousness of the scene is encapsulated in what must be one of the darkest lines I've ever come across in a Lied:

Und umschlinget wahnbefangen
Öder Leere nicht'gen Graus.

And embrace through insane predilection
The desolate, empty, horrible void.

Gosh.

Anyway, it's worth looking just a tiny bit closer at this. The setting for the poem is not a public greenhouse like the Jardin d'Hiver or Kew Gardens, although they did exist at this point. Instead, we can assume that we are inside a private greenhouse. The earliest winter gardens, originating around the beginning of the 19th century, were not public buildings, but rather spaces attached to aristocratic houses. Public winter gardens would only start to be built from around 1848, of course, but once they were on the scene the era of the private winter garden was in decline, accompanied by a deepening, you might say thickening of the Romantic aesthetic. Kohlmeier and Von Sartory's amazing Houses of Glass outlines this condition in the following passages:

With the change from family- based enterprises to the anonymity of twentieth-century monopoly capital, the era of the private winter garden came to an end […] the winter garden [w]as a place beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, an unreal world where amid rarities and rituals the nobility prepared to make its departure from the historical scene. As the nobility was relinquishing the acquisition of nature to the bourgeoisie (which, moreover, began to buy up the castles and mansions), it developed a sense of Romanticism for which the winter garden was the last refuge.
Kohlmaier, G & von Sartory, B, Houses of Glass, Cambridge, Mass. London : MIT press, 1986.p.31

So, on the one hand this piece of music can function as a lament for cultural decline as seen from the endangered aristocracy. In this sense, the fragility of the alienated plants is a metaphor for the beauty and delicacy of a vulnerable way of life being threatened from below by the ascendant and uncouth bourgeoisie. Proust, of course, bases so much of the Recherche on this botanical image of the aristocracy - too beautiful and rare to survive in this new world.

But I would prefer to read this differently. The alienation of the poem might be understood with the benefit of conceptual hindsight. Here we can think that the fragility of the plants in their artificial environment forces a reframing of concept of nature, an obvious artifice that reveals an underlying artifice. In this sense we are closer to what is more interesting and radical about Romantic attitudes to nature - indifference rather than harmony, fragment over totality. This already-alienated nature universalises in a way no anti-industrial grasp at timelessness could ever possibly achieve.

With this piece in consideration, we now have what is almost a perfect musical correspondence to the three main different cultural readings of Iron & Glass architecture that I'm trying to understand. There is the naïve and the glorious, as represented by the Victorian pap that accompanied the pomp. There is also our archived perception of the memory of the iron & glass world, as testified by the haunted recordings and images of the buildings that are long gone, and indeed were barely there in the first place. To this we can add the strange romantic attitude whose melancholic gaze does not look back wistfully, but confronts its technologised setting and reframes itself accordingly.


King Ludwig of Bavaria, Wagner's eventual patron, had this large winter garden built on the roof of his palace in Munich.

Hauntological Record Breaking

I didn't get a chance to go the Wire's Hauntology Salon a few weeks ago, but I recently listened to the recording of the event from the Wire's website. I was struck by something that Adam Harper said, which was along the lines of "'Indignant Senility's Wagner project is the furthest back that Hauntology has gone". Now, personally I don't think the Indignant Senility record is particularly good, as it brings absolutely nothing to the table that isn't already done better in the Caretaker, and acts as a continuation of the reduction of the interesting aspects of hauntology into a kit of aesthetic parts. This is despite Harper's protestations regarding the 'utopian' aspects of Wagner, which I'm not buying, especially after having just read Adorno's book on Mahler. Adorno's ideas about the inclusive nature of Mahler's sound world are a lot more suitable to Harper's notions of sonic collage, which he points out in Charles Ives, than the doubtless universes of Wagner. Hauntology, when it is interesting, is defined by weakness, a quality almost completely absent in Wagner but continually present in Mahler. While in hauntological music this weakness is often manifested in crackle, dust etc, in the pre-recording music of Mahler it is manifested not only by the use of common tunes inamongst his high art, but also in a continual refusal to make a definitive statement; his pieces are often arguments with themselves, making doubt into a creative force.


Anyway, I was digging around my hard drive today and I found the above piece, which surely must be the earliest hauntological source, unless somebody wants to do Palestrina or John Dowland... It's based on a fragment of Bach's Komm Süßer Tod, (Come, Sweet Death) which is also the source for Knut Nysted's utterly amazing 'Immortal Bach', which I've written about before, and is a lot more interesting than my simple and derivative sketch.

The Old IV-I-IV-I...

I don't have absolute pitch, but I do have the beginnings of it; when listening, I'm often overwhelmed in a sort-of Proustian way by the memory of another piece of music, which always turns out to be in the same key. I suppose with practise I could hone this down to naming the notes themselves, but it's a bit late for me to become a child prodigy so I'll just stick with what I have thank you very much. Anyway; after writing yesterday's post I've been pissing around at home a bit with the 'Liebestod', and as I was playing with it I involuntarily made one of these musical connections, and seeing as yesterday's post was about the ubiquity of a certain progression, and seeing as it's the end of a decade that was at least partially defined by the technique, I decided to do something about it: I made a mashup.

It's horrible. Paul Morley would not be proud.

The Old I-IV-I-IV...

One very strange thing about music is the emotional quality of a plagal cadence. For some reason, repeating the transition from the subdominant to the tonic (or the other way around of course) in a major key, for some inextricable reason the effect is more melancholy than any other progression I can think of (although you could make a case for the old I-iii-IV-iv, as used by Radiohead on 'Creep'). And if you add major sevenths to the chords, well... you might as well just start crying right away.

So this post is just a wee tribute to that strange phenomenon. Here are four seminal examples:



Lou Reed - Coney Island Baby (I-IV-I-IV)
I think that Lou Reed owes a lot of his success to his repeated and skillful use of the old I-IV-I-IV. For example, all three of the slow songs on The Velvet Underground & Nico are based upon it, and a few of the fast ones are too. He often uses it to signify that particular feeling of serene defeat that his characters tend to express, and this song might be the best example.



Erik Satie - Gymnopedie No.1 (IV-I-IV-I)
Only one of the most recognisable melodies in the entire world, you can here really appreciate the power of the major sevenths when added to the voicings, giving this seminal use of the progression that particular dreamy sadness that everyone and their granny loves.


John Coltrane - Naima (I-IV-I-IV)
The coda from this unbelievably brilliant composition is a simple rising melody over the old I-IV-I-IV in, again, major seventh chords (from around 6:30). I used to have a really really big thing for 'Trane, almost a decade ago, although he hardly ever gets listened to now, for whatever reasons. In these late performances it's incredible how he takes such a pretty ballad and slowly destroys it, before reigning it all back in; this process of extension and contraction I always preferred to those pieces which started 'out' and then just stayed at one level of intensity. I used to have a particular Coltrane recording, Live at the Village Vanguard Again! and on this composition it featured one of the most ridiculously mental solos from a young Pharoah Sanders, sounding at times like a baby being fed through a blender feet first. I loved that record. I loaned it to someone, it never came back, and it seems now that the record label have discontinued it.


Richard Wagner - 'Liebestod' from Tristan & Isolde (IV-I-IV-I)
And; if you want to know what it feels like to be roughly slapped about the face by a plagal cadence, then Wagner's your man (the big one comes at 5:00)
A couple of things to note; the scene here is of Isolde literally dying of grief, a fatal romantic swoon, the melancholy-major tonality perfectly suited to evoking the required mixture of passion and abjection. In this case the sixths of the chords are prominent rather than the jazzier sevenths, resolving downwards as an outrushing torrent of vitality (or Will, of course). This particular plagal cadence comes at the end of an entire opera's worth of teasing, deferred non-cadences; you need only look at Simon Rattle's face to get the idea of just how much of a release it is for that tonic chord to finally 'arrive', as it were... dirty boy.