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Music

Hanacpachap Cussicuinin

Amazed I managed to spell that. More amazed at what it actually entails. Today’s title words are the name of a four-part polyphonic piece titled Hanacpachap cussicuinin, to a text in the Quechua language, to be sung ‘in processions when entering the church’; it is the earliest example of polyphony printed in the New World. The work was either composed by Friar Pérez Bocanegra, or by an anonymous native composer in Lima, Peru, in 1631.

I learned all this when reading up on Latin American Baroque music after a splendid concert by Portland Baroque Orchestra last week. An Empire of Silver and Gold featured “Daniel Zuluaga as guest director with a  trailblazing program of works he gathered in archives of Latin American cathedrals. Five singers, two guitars, dulcian, violins, cello, cornetto, harp, and percussion blend familiar baroque sounds with distinct Latin American flavors.”

 

 

The concert was an energetic romp, and initiated me to a combination of elements that I only knew individually: classical Baroque music and South American or Mexican melodies and rhythms. What I learned in my subsequent reading was that colonizers, and in particular missionaries bent on converting indigenous souls, were no psychological slouches.

“Spanish missionaries in the New World often used music as a means for converting and indoctrinating native populations, often combining it with their knowledge of indigenous language and culture. The Hanacpachap specifically incorporates both Incan and Christian imagery, describing the harvesting of the land and praising the Virgin Mary, who is symbolized by a pale blue flower that grows in the Andes. This same flower was also the symbol of a local goddess in the Incan pantheon.”

http://brynmawrcollections.org/home/exhibits/show/bulkeley-dillingham-project/missionary-histories/ritual-formulario–1631-

 

 

In Mexico City, “the conquistadors decided to build their church on the site of the Templo Mayor of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan to consolidate Spanish power over the newly conquered domain. Hernán Cortés and the other conquistadors used the stones from the destroyed temple of the Aztec god of war Huitzilopochtli, principal deity of the Aztecs, to build the church.” (says Wikipedia)

Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de la Santísima Virgen María a los cielos was built across two centuries, starting in 1573. Here you have the combination of land and material that meshes the usurped with the new, in addition to a melding of music, language and other cultural entities.

 

 

Wherever you come down on the politics of this or the (in) justice, the results are often amazingly beautiful in their own right, both buildings and music. You can judge for yourself by listening to the link below.

Photographs are all from cathedrals and churches in Mexico City.

 

And here is last year’s blog on the cathedral:https://www.heuermontage.com/?p=5726

 

 

 

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Things to be grateful for: Music

Let’s finish this week with a few select pieces of music that celebrate the weather – the rains have returned. It’s the perfect thing to sit during the post-Thanksgiving – meal -stupor and listen to them, enchanted by the creativity that went into these sound inventions capturing the weather and by the technical skill and musicality of those playing these pieces. Not included is the warhorse of them all, Chopin’s Raindrop Prélude; as always, I was more inclined to explore off the beaten path.

In no particular oder, (other than the first one, my favorite right now for obvious reasons, birds, fall, empty landscapes)

and accompanied by photographs from a rain soaked walk yesterday where I had 635 acres of wetland preserve all to myself, with astounding glimpses of color in a gray landscape, a few oblivious birds, and reminders of the fragility of life,

here goes: the list should last you for the weekend!

Grey Clouds Franz Liszt

In the Mist by Leos Janacek

14 ways to describe the rain: Hanns Eisler

The Storm, Ludwig van Beethoven

Ode to the West Wind: Hans Werner Henze

The Storm P.I.Tchaikovsky

Atmospheres Györgi Ligeti

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Detour to Vienna

Since I was asked to explain how I come about the various topics for the blog, here is another example of chain of thought, linked to yesterday’s Freud essay. Freud on my mind, I thought back to my visit to the Freud museum in Vienna this summer.

 

First I thought about the fact that I never understood people’s pilgrimage to these kind of places. I don’t say that condescendingly. I truly don’t understand what people get from visiting places where their idols have lived, walked, worked, that they can’t get from the output of their work. Is it a form of paying respect? Is it a form of experienced closeness by sharing a spatial environment which only contains surviving traces of the famous person? What new insights can be provided? Perhaps these person-oriented museums organize information in a way that have you truly learn more?

All this pertains to the Vienna Freud Museum which is in the process of reorganizing, renovating and extending its physical space – the actual house and office where he lived and practiced. The throngs of visitors could barely be accommodated in the small rooms, there was no access for people living with disability, and the waiting lines disturbed the neighborhood.

 

How will it feel to the pilgrims if they see the photographs, the mementos, in spaces not hallowed by his presence, or distinctly changed? (Much of his stuff is in the museum in London to begin with, the Vienna collection rather rudimentary, since he was able to take his personal belongings and household goods when he had to leave the country to escape the Nazis.)

In any case, I went to look up the museum website to dig further. I learned that there are crowd funding campaigns to finance the renovation, and also a big bash fundraising event at the Neue Gallerie in New York two weeks back.

https://www.freud-museum.at/en/

At this first annual NY Celebration dinner a married couple, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, were among the three honorees. Have you read their books? She is a fearless, fierce intellectual, bordering on subversive, and her novel The Blazing World is among my favorites.  (I wrote about the novel in an earlier blog: Her protagonist deals with issues of aging and trying to make it as a woman in a male-dominated art world. She resolves to take her revenge, in a way that exerts an incredible emotional toll. My admiration for the novel can be traced to the fact that it brilliantly describes suffering, but then balances it out with hope, all the while challenging you intellectually to rethink all the issues of gender wars, specifically located in the arts.)

He is a whiner. There, I said it, about a Nobel candidate, no less. Here is a more elaborate version of that assessment.

https://www.vulture.com/2017/01/what-happened-to-paul-auster.html

One of his favorite topics is coincidence/fate, which finally brought me to think of what I am currently reading: a thrilling debut by 28! year-old Daisy Johnson, Everything Under, shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Loosely following Sophocles’ telling of the Oedipus myth, this novel propels the belief that all is fated into a visceral nightmare. The woman can write with a vengeance, and the raw anger is directed at the traps of womanhood.

(I love how my arm is reflected on the right next to the other in a painting in Freud’s study…)

Which brings me back to Freud and his affinity for Greek mythology and philosophical musings: here are photographs of the place where he lived.

 

Here is on of those pilgrimage for another famous son of the city:

And one of my favorite, romantic recordings of Mozart’s 40th – Bruno Walter rules!

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Patterns

Here is the chain of events that led to today’s blog. Another one of those days of just me and the dog at home. I: trying to play the piano, as I only do when no-one is around given how much my skills have deteriorated these days. The dog: doing his best to make me stop, sharing that quality assessment, I guess. I: trying to explain to him the complicated structure of Bach’s fugues and how I needed to concentrate. He telling me in no uncertain terms that he hates counter point and really wants someone to throw a  ball.

Guess who won?

And guess who, reduced to reading, came across an interesting essay by Freud, flagged by someone who wrote about Bach’s ability to invoke both joy and fear, horror and beauty, exact opposites in his compositions?  Freud’s (1910) essay is called The Antithetical Meaning of primal Words (Über den Gegensinn der Urworte) and starts with a reference to his work on dreams and their ability to combine contraries into a unity – said simply: something can stand for both one meaning and its opposite. He then introduces an 1884 text by a historical linguist, Karl Abel, that describes at length a peculiarity of ancient languages. They contained, according to Abel, numerous words that have two meanings, one the exact opposite of the other. Some old Egyptian word might mean wet as well as dry, for example. Further, he claims, there were compound words that bind together things of opposite meaning (old- young, far-near) but they express only one of them.  All this was postulated for Egyptian, Semitic and Indo-European languages (and, coincidentally published at the same time in the late 1800s when Marx had written extensively about dialectics…)

Freud enthusiastically took off with finding words in the more familiar Latin that seemed proof for this: altus means high and low, sacer means sacred and accursed, and so on. Then he explored German, and wouldn’t you know it there were words with opposite meaning: e.g. Boden meaning the lowest part of the house as well as the attic… voila, archaic languages provided the pattern that re-appeared in dreams.

You can read his deductions now linking this perceived pattern to the analysis of dreams yourself (if you are not distracted by a bored puppy…) https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Antithetical.pdf

Only one problem: The bulk of Abel’s work was thoroughly discredited, it’s a croc; and that was already established by serious philologists in the late 19th century, for sure at the time of Freud’s writing. Freud was clearly seduced by a claimed pattern that fit with his hypothesizing around his discoveries and methods in his psychoanalytic studies. Whether he willfully ignored or was just hopelessly blind to the state of the art in linguistics, who knows. It is certainly the case that we are all subject to this kind of confirmation bias.

Independent of dreams, it is a fact that contradictory emotions can be experienced when listening to a single piece of music, and that patterns can be woven into compositions that are of a dialectical nature. Nobody did that better than J.S. Bach. Which was what started this whole train of thought….

Photographs today of some lovely point/counterpoint reflections, collected during fall.

 

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Distractions

I iron when I need therapeutic diversion. I love to iron and to see all that crinkly stuff somehow get back in semi-pristine shape, o.k., hints of pristine, given my ironing skills. It calms me down to watch the overflowing ironing basket empty slowly, and the shelves back in order, neat for about a minute-and-a-half. I like ironing even more than I despise cooking, and that’s saying something.

It did not work to calm my nerves, however, on this eve of midterm election. If anything, thoughts cropped up like: “Which one of my beloved tablecloths (I have a bit of a fetish there) would I take if we had to leave the country?” Now, we are NOT leaving the country, not yet anyhow, but the fact that these thoughts involuntarily pop up is disconcerting.

Back to positive thinking then, heeding the sage advice of those less prone to drama than yours’ truly; the only thought that came up, alas, was along the lines of “How did other people manage to get through far worse catastrophes than a potentially messed-up midterm election?”

Well, for one, they made it through a horrible war and decided to focus on beauty, and playfulness, and doing good. They, in this case, refers to the French, who shortly after WW II created a small miracle of a traveling show displaying the height of French fashion on small, strangely life-like wire mannequins in sets created by numerous fashion houses and artists. The idea was to raise funds for war relief and also bolster a sense of pride in a people identifying with fashion as an important part of their culture.

The 237 little mannequins in their elaborate, functioning outfits, buttons buttoned, zippers zipped, hats ever so slightly angled,

 

 

 

 

were put into sets representing either Parisian landscapes or fantasy worlds, all depending on the fashion to be augmented by such backgrounds.

The exhibit opened at the Louvre in 1945 and then traveled the world.

From Wikipedia: After Paris was liberated, the idea for a miniature theatre of fashion came from Robert Ricci, son of couturier Nina Ricci. All materials were in short supply at the end of World War II, and Ricci proposed using miniature mannequins, or fashion dolls, to address the need to conserve textiles, leather, fur, and so on. The mannequins were 27.5 inches (700 mm) tall, fabricated of wire. Some 60 Paris couturiers amongst them Nina Ricci, Balenciaga, Germaine Lecomte, Mad Carpentier, Martial & Armand, Hermès, Philippe & Gaston, Madeleine Vramant, Jeanne Lanvin, Marie-Louise Bruyère, Pierre Balmain.joined and volunteered their scrap materials and labour to create miniature clothes in new styles for the exhibit. Milliners created miniature hats, hairstylists gave the mannequins individual coiffures, and jewellers such as Van Cleef and Arpels and Cartier contributed small necklaces and accessories. Some seamstresses even crafted miniature undergarments to go under the couture designs. Seamstresses carried their sewing machines around with them to complete work on the Théâtre de la Mode during Paris’s post-War electricity shortages.

You can see it all close to home at Maryhill Museum in Goldendale WA, where each year a third of the sets get rotated into view. (The museum closes on 11/15 until the spring, so you either have to dash or you have something to look forward to in 2019.) The link below gives a thoughtful, more detailed description.

Creativity Triumphs – Theatre de la Mode

I can see how a project of this size can help people focus, be motivated, create a sense of community. The money it generated for victims of war must have been meaningful to the organizers. But above all, I think the creativity that went into generating this beauty served as a release valve from the direness of everyday post-war existence.

As Phil Ochs put it: In an ugly world the only true protest is beauty.  Looks like we have options, even after November 6th…..

 

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The Power of Inspiration

Hatred alone won’t do

I want us to go into the weekend contemplating these words:

“Powerful factions, as part of their intimidation tactics, deliberately try to breed a sense of collective and personal impotence: you’re too small and powerless, and they’re too fortified and entrenched, for you to meaningfully challenge them. But human beings, all of us, have the power to move the world even a little tiny bit at a time. And the more that happens, the more the world moves in the direction it’s pushed.

We’re trained to think only grandiose, revolutionary overhauls have meaning. But tiny, isolated actions also matter – convincing a single person to change how they think or behave, helping or saving a single life, being an anonymous, unrecognized part of any campaign or movement. It matters on its own because of its inherent worth, and because of its cumulative effect. But so often your actions can reverberate in ways you would never expect. Impotence and hopelessness are a tactic, a lie told by those who wield power, to foster resignation, passivity, and acceptance.”

This from a report by Glenn Greenwald, a journalist I do not often see eye to eye with, but find him here spot on.

https://theintercept.com/2018/10/25/roger-waters-marielle-franco-and-the-power-of-inspiration-in-the-face-of-darkness-and-danger/

This week’s blog was about change; I tried to find models of inspiration for all kinds of change. This seemed particularly urgent in light of the changes the world is experiencing right now. In this country we see the start of violent actions against political adversaries, the green light from above to act on racism and nationalism, whether by shooting and/or imprisoning black children or rounding up brown ones in internment camps, or by dialing back any protective legal measures afforded to the vulnerable and the environment.

We are, of course, not the only ones. I have frequently written about what’s going on in Europe; now this week all eyes are turned towards Brazil, where undoubtedly a genuine monster is going to win the election.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/25/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-democracy-rights

 

Block the Nazis

Two days ago Roger Waters (remember: Pink Floyd?), warned against the rise of true fascists like Bolsonaro and invited the family of progressive politician Marielle Franco, an openly lesbian human rights activist and champion of the poor, who was murdered, along with her driver, in March of this year, onto the stage. The musician, in his late 70s now, is touring Brazil with his Us+Them show and played in Rio to a full house, despite many cancellations of tickets due to his political outcry. He strongly believes there is no us and them, but we are all us. I fear that is wishful thinking, but understand what message he is trying to give to the hundreds of thousands listening to him.

When I get discouraged, starting to think that our own election will be bought, manipulated, or simply decided by the passivity of a public worried about daily survival and hampered by lack of education, I will read the words posted today at the top.

Onwards.

Today’s photographs are “writing on the wall” – here are the lyrics from Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall

I don’t need no arms around me
And I don’t need no drugs to calm me
I have seen the writing on the wall
Don’t think I’ll need anything at all…

Be the change you want to see in the world

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Reality Check

This week’s report on one of the loveliest weddings I ever attended will conclude with a few observations.

Observation #1: Everyone is a photographer now, although they all leave their cameras behind while on the dance floor…..

 

 

 

Or they check on the images immediately….

Observation # 2: I cry at weddings. Never mind that I know the political roots of the institution, the oppression it was associated with for many centuries and in many cultures. I am moved to pieces when I look at a happy couple, so full of hope for the future, and families merging, differences be damned.

Observation# 3: People always throw around these statistics that marriage improves your physical and mental health, assuming there is a causal relationship. It is indeed the case that compared to singles, married people live longer, have fewer strokes and heart attacks, recover faster from them if they get them, are likely to survive cancer longer, and have fewer incidence of mental health issues, particularly depression. But these findings have to be looked at with caution because they are largely correlational. That means any number of other factors could account for them.

For one, there is a gender differential. Men profit from marriage much more than women do when it comes to health effects.

Secondly, people in unhappy, stressful marriages are way worse off than singles who have a good friendship support network.

Third, people who have already compromised health might not get married in the first place, and so when they have worse outcomes for coronary diseases it is because of their original health status, not their married life. Isolation leads to depression, and it is the absence of any partner/family network rather than the marriage status that might account for higher rates of depression in singles.

 

The health advantages of marriage

The effects also seem to solidify when a marriage lasts for a long time, (counted as 10 years and up), while the positive effects are not pronounced in shorter marriages. With this said, my current favorite bride and groom will have a long marriage, excellent health, no regrets that they tied the knot and will live happily ever after.

 

My current favorite singles, on the other hand, can also rejoice: there are nifty benefits out there:

https://health.usnews.com/wellness/mind/articles/2018-02-12/5-health-benefits-of-being-single

And just think: girls night out whenever you want!

i’m giving the last word to  Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro:

 

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Flower Power

One of the many heartwarming experiences this weekend were the adventures of the flower girl. Barely three years old, this young lady explored her surrounds, was patient during unfamiliar proceedings,

performed her job marvelously in front of the best man and maid of honor,

knew exactly what she wanted (including trying to get all the petals back into her basket,)

and, after overcoming an initial bout of shyness, was a hit on the dance floor.  Chloe, I adore you!

The history of flower girls, and that’s what they mostly are, goes back to the Romans. Little girls paraded in front of the bride, dribbling grains and herbs on the ground as a kind of offering to the Goddess of fertility. Or, as Liz Susong put it in a really funny essay on the topic “it of course represented the collective hope that this woman could also make little humans just like the ones tossing oatmeal, lest she be doomed to a life of barren dread. And this my friends, is the definition of patriarchy.”

Now, how you get from the first quoted sentence to the second escapes my feeble brain, but I nonetheless enjoyed reading her descriptions of the origins of the process, as well as its later versions during the Victorian period, where the innocence and purity of childhood was celebrated, soon to be lost by the virgin bride.

https://www.brides.com/story/where-the-flower-girl-tradition-comes-from

I also learned something else from Susong’s writing, which makes me declare a new goal in life: I want to be a flower grandma.  Elective grandma will do, given that I see no Heuer grand-babies on the near horizon (and in despairing late night thoughts about climate change consider that a sad but perhaps preferable thing….)

I am henceforth publicly available to be an Ersatz grandma, throwing flowers at a wedding, sort of like the one in the clip below, which just made me feel good for a long while.

I will, of course, also enjoy the freedom of rolling around on the dance floor when everyone else is line dancing which I am simply unable to master. Just don’t wait until I need a walker…..

Lift off!


 

And if nobody calls on me I will just sit wilting at home listening to Delibes – I know I have posted this duet before, but I just love it. Here is the Sutherland version, rather than the Nebtrebko who we heard some time back.

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Swift Apparitions

This mini-Trump. This histrionic, petulant, entitled, raging, shameless small man. This liar. Even in the details – The WSJ reports that he listened to Dr. Ford’s testimony on a monitor in a side room. He denied this when asked by Senator Harris. Never mind the lies about all the rest of it, even for facts that can be verified, like drinking age in 1980s Maryland.

These sycophants. A huge round of applause, apparently, when Senator Graham walked into a closed-door meeting after the hearings. These hypocrites. After their female assistant so spectacularly blew her job by not catching the accuser in any conflicts and starting to dig into endangering facts with the accused, she was fired on the spot, and never publicly thanked for her role even pro forma after that. These angry old, white men, (a)rousing themselves after their cowardly silence in front of Dr. Ford.

And now they vote. Judicial temperament be damned. Truth be ignored. Power exercised. Perhaps it is just as well that the farce of having a Supreme Court pretend to be a neutral arbiter and guardian of checks and balances can no longer be upheld. And perhaps important to acknowledge that this is not only a Trumpian phenomenon but the result of a long arc – Bush himself made multiple phone calls to senators urging a vote for the dissembler. As one of Germany’s major newspaper wrote over night: The Senate hearings fully revealed the advanced state of decay of American political culture.

This courage. This exemplary willingness to overcome sheer terror for the good of the nation. This calmness, vulnerability, honor. This dignity. Whatever the outcome, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford will be a model for generations of women to come. As the target of unadulterated misogyny she stood in for all of us, prepared to sacrifice life as she knew it to do what is right. Reminds me of a another heroine, Käthe Kollwitz, “I am in the world to change the world.”

One of my thoughts while listening to the Senate Hearings was about today’s blog: How could I possibly write something while in a state of disbelief, upset, sadness, and above all anger at what is unfolding before us?

I came up with an imperfect solution, but the only one I could think of: depict a moment of unadulterated happiness during this last week of misery and churning, even if the happiness came swiftly, and went swiftly.

Boys and birds. All it took. Or, come to think of it, lovely girls as well. (Since I feel 100 years-old this morning I am allowed to use that youthful term for once.)

 

Boy and girl took me to see the annual fleeting spectacle of swifts filling the evening sky, before they descend, at some mysterious signal, into the chimney of a local grade school for their night’s rest.

 

The Vaughx swifts visit PDX every September during their annual migration South. With much old growth forest being cut down they use artificial structures like chimneys these days to take a break. They adapt to changing environments to ensure their survival. As we will have to do. Alas, hiding in chimneys is not one of our options.

Up to 12.ooo or more birds twirling in the sky, advancing and retreating until they disappear, it is a sight to behold.

The mood on the ground is communal and festive.

Young entrepreneurs make the rounds.

Up to 2000 people gather nightly on the school grounds, bring the kids, have a picnic, marvel at the movement and lightness above them. For a short while your awe of nature takes over and lets you forget the ugliness of our world.

As Flake declares he is voting for the liar and TV declares that too much of a year of woman is happily gone and this is the year of men, cherish whatever fleeting moments of happiness you can get – there won’t be many of them for many of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhNqso6VElE

And Popper’s Elfentanz might as well have been written for swifts and not elves….

 

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Visions of Transience

“Humanism is the only – I would go as far as saying the final – resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigured human history.

Separation between peoples is not a solution for any of  the problems that divide peoples. And certainly ignorance of the other provides no help whatever. Cooperation and co-existence of the kind that music lived as we have lived, performed, shared and loved it together, might be.”

 

Words by Edward Said, University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who died this week 15 years ago. A scholar, an activist, a true intellectual, he had lived with leukemia for over a decade, longer than anyone thought possible, until he succumbed at age 68. People either adored him or despised him for his political views, his literary analyses and creation of the field of post-colonial studies. All agree, though, that he was a fighter. Against the disease, but more importantly, for the right of Palestinian self-determination and against human rights abuses in the Middle East and everywhere else.

 

His best known book is Orientalism, published 40 years ago in 1978, a groundbreaking study of figurative and narrative representations of the East. It looked at the relation between knowledge and power, or more precisely the motivated relationship between interested knowledge and the power it serves. Who benefitted from false descriptions of the peoples under colonial rule?  I have attached below an obituary from 2003 that offers a better introduction of Said and his work than I ever could. I am also linking to an interview with Said (within an Amherst lecture) that allows us to appreciate the depth of his thinking and his political passion. Longish, but so worth it.

https://newleftreview.org/II/24/tariq-ali-remembering-edward-said

 

I also want to focus, though, on a lesser known aspect of Said: his love for and scholarship of music. He was the music critic for The Nation for decades. He was also a close friend of Daniel Barenboim who established a music academy in both their names, devoted to cultural cross-fertilization, in Berlin in 2015.

 

You can read all about it and its fabulous programs here:

https://barenboimsaid.de/about

Said’s last book On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain was an exploration, among others, of Beethoven’s late works. In his honor and memory I am posting Barenboim’s rendition of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 29, Op. 106 (Hammerklavier)

 

 

 

Photos are from the Portland International Rose Garden. The younger set had, coincidentally, spotted roses reclaimed from the Gaza Strip and Fallujah this year, which prompted me to visit the fall garden myself, finding perfect representations of transience.

 

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