Author: doug-nordfors

Being a classical music fan in the 21st century isn’t so much culturally rewarding as it is a ton of fun. The reasons are like four interconnected movements of a fine symphony: 1) The boundless richness and relevance of great works by great 17th- through 19th-century composers, and the whole world of their lesser-known works to explore; 2) The persistent, fascinating presence of atonal (or, to use Igor Stravinsky’s preferred version, “anti-tonal”) music—if you find it aesthetically unconvincing, are you clinging to the human predisposition to respond to melody and denying the brain a chance to evolve?; 3) The wealth of 20th-century composers who cherish tonality while finding ways to embellish it with cutting-edge dynamics; and 4) A fresh crop of contemporary composers to take stock of—how do they distinguish themselves under the weight of layers of tradition?

Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival co-founder Timothy Summers raced through Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 in a tonally adventurous show on Sunday.

Three of these reasons were on display last Sunday at UVA’s Old Cabell Hall in the third installment of this year’s Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival (and it would have been four except for the cancellation of a work by contemporary American composer Eric Moe).

Sitting side by side at one piano, Benjamin Hochman and Mimi Solomon offered up Franz Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor for Piano Duet. Solomon provided the emotional heft in the lower registers, while Hochman nimbly danced around in the upper registers, and in remarkable tandem they belted out the song-like passages that make the trips home to mournful F minor so meaningful.

Julia Gallego on flute, Matthew Hunt on clarinet, Solomon on piano, and Festival co-directors and co-founders Timothy Summers on violin and Raphael Bell on cello took on the atonalities in Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1. If this work is played with an almost romantic conviction, as these five certainly played it, you can hear Schoenberg’s early 20th-century urge to devise an alternate universe as a counterpoint to political and cultural nonsense dressed up as sense, which in the quietest moments brings to the eyes if not tears, then the ghost of tears.

Finally, violinist Jennifer Koh and Hochman brought to life the Grand Duo for Violin and Piano of American composer Lou Harrison, who died in 2003. The two performers brilliantly handled Harrison’s enchanting brand of tonality: economic yet lyrical, with a rhythmic and melodic concentration that doesn’t need harmony to be complete. Koh particularly shined in the third movement, a kind of Irish/Asian lullaby, and in the second and fourth movements Hochman wowed the audience with his use of a tool Harrison invented—resembling a thin scrub brush—that allows a pianist to evenly strike a cluster of octaves, like a child banging on a piano with his arm in a miraculously rational way.

Two more concerts remain in the Festival, on Thursday, September 18, and Sunday, September 21, each with equally wide-ranging programs.

Am I allowed to say “ass”? Too late. At least I have no trepidation about saying “freezing,” “my” and “off.”
 

Those four words came together in my mind a lot while I was in Chicago in the winter last year. No masochism was involved in the making of this situation. I went to the bitterly windy city voluntarily, after three things—one harmonic—converged. My dad’s birthday is in early February, and it was his 70th in 2007; as an architect, his favorite American city is architectural-history-laden Chicago; he’s also a music lover, and pianist extraordinaire and living legend Keith Jarrett had scheduled a rare (these days) solo concert at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall in mid-February 2007. So my brother got two tickets to the concert and arranged for him and my dad to fly from Seattle, while I got one ticket and arranged to fly from Charlottesville, and there we were for a two-days-and-three-nights birthday bash. 

Enough exposition. Back to the cold. What I’m here to do is not only talk about, but also recommend going to Chicago in the winter, especially if you’re not feeling alive, or even if you are—it’s possible, you see, in Chicago in the winter to feel even more alive than alive. I, for instance, was feeling happy that my brother and I had pulled off doing something big for my dad’s 70th—but there was more to it than that. While I was walking in the single-digit temperature with the two of them down Michigan Avenue toward The Art Institute of Chicago or ogling the storefronts along Miracle Mile, dressed like a moderately but adequately prepared Arctic explorer, confident that a pretty important body part wouldn’t slide off even under extreme duress, my happiness as if froze into place. Prone-to-wavering emotion became almost a crystallized thing I could point to, like an icicle so sharp it could break the skin over a heart. 

All this is getting chillingly abstract, I know, not to mention a tad sentimental. But there are also plenty of concrete reasons for flying midwest in the winter, instead of, say, packing your Bermuda shorts and heading to Bermuda. Take the patches of ice on the Chicago River between bridges, the patterns as if forming immense murals that belong in the Art Institute collection along with the masterpieces by Seurat and Gauguin. I’ve never beheld such natural beauty right smack in the middle of a man-made place. As if on cue, it was snowing lightly as we crossed the river at La Salle Street on our way to a blues club the night before the concert, the flakes as if catching fire in the city lights before falling further through the softer glow cast by the ice. And then the next day there was the view from Navy Pier of Lake Michigan, spreading out like an ocean under a suddenly clear sky, the near surface not far from icing over and looking, to my eyes, beautifully brittle.

All right, I admit, there was something unforgivable about the rattle of an “El” train in my ears as a cruel night wind broke across my eyes while we walked up Randolph Street on our way to dinner before the concert. But there was something bracing about it, too—the rattle as if justifying the wind the way a blues chord validates pain. It was remarkable, though, how I didn’t at any time see any pain on the faces all around me. Chicagoans are true stoics. I saw plenty of hats, of course, but only occasionally did I, as if looking in the mirror, see a section of a scarf over a mouth. I saw many a pair of jeans, and not, as far as I recall, a single pair of wool pants. Maybe the stoicism is a respect for the sheer potency of the cold there, and the joy the respect brings. Stoic joy? As in overviews of the architectural creations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, all things seem possible in Second City in the winter.

This is getting abstract again, and probably overly romanticized. What can I say? That’s how I remember it, and if I did it all over again, I guarantee I wouldn’t run whimpering into the smoke and body heat of a blues club, rather than linger on a bridge and admire the snowflakes. It’s true, I’m not generally a hot-weather person, perhaps on account of my fair skin. As Woody Allen said, “I don’t tan, I stroke.” And I’m aware that if I resided in Buffalo or Minneapolis, I might crack as the brutal winters piled up, and start over-romanticizing the odor of sunscreen. But we’re talking a brief trip here, a chance to soak up a special situation (whether it’s a special occasion or not) before releasing yourself back into the mild, as it were. Oh come on, try it.

By the way, the concert in the toasty warm Orchestra Hall was absolutely fantastic.

The key word is “special.” Perhaps the American Society of Magazine Editors’ recent decision to honor The Virginia Quarterly Review’s fall 2007 special issue on South America will in the future inspire editor Ted Genoways to put together more than the journal’s usual share of special issues. Already, the summer 2008 edition can almost be considered two special issues in one, mainly consisting as it does of two chunks of material, one labeled “No Way Home: Outsiders and Outcasts,” and the other “A Special Portfolio of Israeli and Palestinian Poetry.”

“No Way Home” focuses on places ranging from Jena, Louisiana (where in September 2006 nooses were hung from a tree on the grounds of a high school), to Bulgaria to India, and deals with “not only the role of race in defining communities,” Genoways writes in his introduction, “but also ethnicity, nationality, and political philosophy.”

All nine articles, whether intensely personal, such as poet Natasha Trethewey’s account of her return to her hometown on the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, or somewhat personal, such as fiction writer Daniel Alarcón’s memories of being an envoy in Syria, or springing solely from objective concerns, such as journalist David Enders’ examination of Palestinian refugees in Iraq, are essentially bent on letting the details tell the story. The absorption of facts and observations is a crucial step toward comprehending such a beguiling world. But in this era when visual images reign supreme (this is a good time to remark how dynamic the photographs are that accompany each piece), the dearth of analysis is unsettling.

On the other hand, the pieces skillfully—to say the least—provide a forum for readers to do some thinking on their own. For instance, Charlottesville poet and writer Gregory Orr’s look back at his involvement in the civil rights movement in Alabama in 1965, which included being kidnapped by vigilantes, reverberates with the convoluted question of what really happens as time heals wounds.

The poems in the portfolio are all by well-established contemporary Israeli and Palestinian poets, which doesn’t, of course, mean that they are well known in America. The one exception is celebrated American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who was born to a Palestinian father and spent part of her youth in the Middle East.
 
It’s both disconcerting and fascinating that the poems connected in some way with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which make up most of the portfolio, have a certain sameness: an easy lyricism working hand in hand with an indignation over human folly that sounds more quizzical than plaintive. But that’s not to say the poems aren’t accomplished and powerful. They’re clear proof that political poetry is a viable genre—an issue that’s debated in America only because of our “special” status as a country sheltered from political turmoil.

Needled by the thorns of flowery 19th century poetry and its grip on the first years of the 20th century, Ezra Pound made a now-famous pronouncement: “Poetry should be at least as well written as prose.” The monster that this concept inadvertently spawned is in some ways a friendly monster. There are plenty of contemporary poems that mirror in skillfully executed lines the authentic beauty of, say, Marcel Proust’s sentences, or employ a straightforward rhythm/plain voice combination that, in its own way, is stirring. But watch out: There are also countless contemporary poems that seriously threaten or even annihilate the fact that poetry and prose are separate art forms.

All this brings us to Charlottesville poet Lisa Russ Spaar. Her work is a rarity because it operates several steps away from the basic tension the birth of modern poetry created. Here, for example, is “Womb,” from her new book, Satin Cash (which is a phrase from Emily Dickinson):

What antecedent
for this intramural void,

my native, deep-seated
well—null, untenanted,

sulking place, finger-
slip of truancy, of minus—

if not this cave above:
bludgeon of boudoir stars,

chivalric piñata,
quixotic hourglass

infinitely contracting:
negative, vernacular, & lone? 
 
There’s so much going on here, all as a result of Spaar embracing, and not distrusting, effects that are largely unique to poetry. In addition to how the whole poem extends beyond the idea of extended metaphor, there’s the startling syntax of the opening two lines, alliteration (“bludgeon of boudoir”), assonance (“this intramural void”) consonance and internal rhyme (“cave above,” plus “native,” and “negative”), daring word choices, and a gleeful shunning of Pound’s advice to not mix the abstract with the concrete (“quixotic hourglass”).

With Spaar’s commitment to the pyrotechnics of poetic devices, it’s sometimes apparent in her work, as in performances of expert jazz or classical musicians, what’s pure inspiration and what’s dogged perspiration. But all that really matters is that the house of art she occupies is never less than splendid.

To say that Satin Cash is an affair of language alone would be a complete mistake. While the book begins with poems whose essential subject is the individual power of the artist, it soon becomes a moving chronicle of attempts at using language to comprehend both the presence and absence of others (“the shivering keel of his tongue/makes of our mouths a winged lung”; “night a translucent, colostrum blue/of goodbye”), as well as to explore a delicate compromise between those two realities, as in the intricate metaphysics in a poem near the end of the book, “Adult.”

For poets and non-poets alike, Spaar’s over-riding theme—how the “one” figures in the “many”—is the stuff of life. And for anyone in Charlottesville interested in the politics of contemporary poetry, Satin Cash offers a chance to muse on one of our local treasures.