Frank Herbert Overview, Part 1

After I finished reading the complete fiction of Ursula Le Guin at the beginning 2020 (which I still need to write about), I decided to reread Frank Herbert’s Dune series in anticipation of Denis Villeneuve’s new adaptation. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the film’s release being delayed a year, I opted to read the rest of his fiction as well, which I finally completed towards the end of December 2021.

While every author has their ups and downs, Frank Herbert’s seem to be more extreme than most. Dune is a towering achievement, of course, and several of his other books show the same level of imagination and attention to detail, but in the 60s Herbert published several half-baked novels that he had completed earlier (most likely in an attempt to cash in on Dune’s success). In addition, few authors have ‘enjoyed’ so many posthumous publications, many of which probably should have stayed unpublished (not to mention Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s additions to the Dune canon, which I will discuss later). This unevenness makes Herbert’s legacy somewhat difficult to evaluate, so I will give brief overviews of each of his works before I attempt to sum it up. Bear in mind that it has been almost two years since I read the Dune series and up to a year for many of the other books so my memory is not particularly fresh. I will attempt to avoid spoilers where possible.

Dune Series

Dune

So much has been written about Dune since the release of Villeneuve’s adaptation that I will not write much here. This was my third reading of Dune, I think about 15 years after the last time I read it, and I noticed a lot more foreshadowing of the events that take place after the novel (particularly those that heavily undermine any ‘white saviour’-type critique). There is some dispute about whether or not Herbert planned to incorporate Dune Messiah as a third part of the original novel, but those claims seem much more plausible after this reread. While Dune’s story is certainly quite generic in structure, its political themes are significantly less clear than when it was written, and some of its other aspects (the obvious homophobia in its depiction of Baron Harkonnen, etc.) have aged poorly, it is still a gripping read. Herbert clearly spent a great deal of time and effort creating the novel’s universe, and reveals the details in a very organic way, often providing no more information than necessary for the reader to understand, unlike a lot of heavy-handed world-building in more recent science fiction. This style does make it more challenging on a first read, but heavily rewards rereading. One thing is for sure: Dune is one of the most quotable (and memeable*) novels I have read.

*Dune Sietchposting is one of the best Facebook meme groups in both content and atmosphere.

Dune Messiah

This novel is much more character-driven than the first, and it begins to add the much stranger elements that dominate the later books of the series, making it somewhat less accessible, but I think reading Dune Messiah is essential for anyone who wants to understand the themes of the first novel. Herbert shows the emptiness that comes with power and success, and how even those who seem to be in power are beholden to larger systemic forces. His prose is very effective at conveying the novel’s atmosphere of decay and, ultimately, resignation.

Children of Dune

This book reminded me a great deal of the first volume in structure as well as in tone. Like Dune it has its Saturday Morning Cartoon-style villain with a complex plot of betrayal, but its protagonists are far less naïve than Paul. The prescience-soaked, increasingly psychedelic language towards the end is even more intense than at the equivalent part of Dune, leading to Herbert’s simultaneously worst and best neologism, “he felt an adult beefswelling in his loins.” Overall, Children of Dune felt a bit redundant, but the latter part of the novel is important to set up the remainder of the series.

God Emperor of Dune

Most readers of the series stop before they reach this point, and for good reason: this book is approximately 80% political dialogue. That being said, God Emperor of Dune is likely the clearest distillation of the overall theme of the series (and of much of Herbert’s work), namely the danger of charismatic authority figures. Despite its heavy subject matter, this book is as quotable as the rest of the series, but is mostly very, very strange: Paul’s son Leto II has transformed himself into a prescient biologically immortal 5 metre-long part man, part-sandworm that has ruled the galaxy for 3500 years. If you can get past that premise, it can be a rewarding experience.

Heretics of Dune

This book is much more of a sci-fi thriller than the rest of the series.  It takes place another 1000 years after God Emperor of Dune, and things are once again very different from the earlier books of the series. Several planets from earlier volumes return as settings, but under different names, and powerful organizations like the Bene Gesserit return with very different roles and motivations. It sometimes feels a bit alienating because of its overall lack of connection to the story thus far, but Herbert creates several new characters that are nearly as compelling as those from the first few volumes are. Interestingly, many of them are elderly women with well-rounded personalities, which is far better than the female representation in the rest of his work (or most sci-fi up to the mid-80s when Heretics of Dune was published). That being said, he also introduces the Honored Matres in this book, which are a sort of bizarro Bene Gesserit who enslave men with weird sex stuff, so he can only get so much credit.

Chapterhouse: Dune

This might be my favourite in the series after the original, but for very different reasons. It is a direct sequel to Heretics of Dune, but is mostly a much slower-paced book. Its first part is a nostalgia-tinged reflection on loss, as the Bene Gesserit give up their beloved home world Chapterhouse in order to create a new Arrakis. Many characters return from the previous volume and are further developed. It does eventually lead to a thrilling climax, but ultimately ends on a cliff-hanger where Herbert teases a threat even larger than the Honored Matres that would feature in the sequel he was unable to write because he died shortly after Chapterhouse: Dune was published. In short, like Dune Messiah, this book is somewhat frustrating, but it is beautifully written and contains some of Herbert’s best character development

A Note on the Dune Sequels

I read Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s various prequels to the Dune series years ago, and I found them very pulpy, with a lot of gratuitous sex and violence (much less artfully depicted than in the main series), but overall a fun exploration of the lore behind the series. The authors claim to be working from Frank Herbert’s notes, but I highly doubt much of what is to be found in these prequels came from them if they exist. The prequels may be alright, but I thought the sequels were horrendous. I finally read Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune for the first time after the rest of the series in mid-2020, and they were some of the laziest-written books I have ever encountered, with highly arbitrary plot twists, essentially no character development, and absolutely no trace of Frank Herbert’s well-structured and often beautiful prose. Some of the ideas are very juvenile and not well thought out. For instance, they feature genetically modified sandworms that live in water called seaworms that produce “ultraspice”. I originally decided to read them because I wanted some kind of resolution to the story, but I can now assure everyone that a cliff-hanger is a much better way to end the series than this garbage.

On Reading

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He talked to her occasionally about books, pictures, music. Dimly she learnt one of the most important of all lessons, how art can console. She read fewer magazines and more books.

Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man

 

Serious reading often starts from a deep frustration with living

Mark Greif, “The Concept of Experience” from Against Everything

Three Views of Madrid

I’ve been reading some somewhat depressing Spanish-language literature lately. It seems they all agree on the subject of Madrid.

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The city is so stunted, so lacking in historical substance, treated in such an offhand way by arbitrary rulers, capriciously built in a desert, inhabited by so few families rooted in its past, far from the sea or any river, ostentatious in the display of its shabby poverty, favored by a splendid sky which almost makes one forget its defects, ingenuously self-satisfied like a fifteen-year-old girl, created merely for the prestige of a dynasty, endowed with hidden immaterial treasures which cause one to forget its material deficiencies, lustfully thrusting toward the future, bereft of an authentic nobility, people by its slum-dwellers who can be so heroic on occasion in an elemental and physical way, like a young peasant who jumps across a river in one leap, enraptured with itself though in fact the liquor which intoxicates it is not in the least intoxicating, surprisingly superior in times past to foreign cities which could boast two cathedrals, several collegiate churches and haunted palaces (one haunted palace for every century), incapable of speaking its own language with the correct intonation as it is spoken in villages a hundred miles to the north, overwhelmed by the influx of gold which could have been converted to stone, but which become instead carriages and teams of horses with gold and black trappings, having no authentic Jewry, but filled with men who are grave when important and friendly when unimportant, oblivious to everything (at least until the electric train and funicular chair-life were invented elsewhere), torn by ecclesiastical tribunals which burn their victims over to the secular arm, seldom visited by persons of authentic Nordic rave, rich in dull theologians and poor in splendid mystics, teeming with cabaret singers and writers of comedies of manners, cape-and-sword plays, café plays, point-of-honor plays, plays about sequestered beauties, plays of the lower depths and French drawing-room comedies, filled with snorting two-decker buses spouting clouds of black smoke over the pavements where people walk with raincoats on days of cold sun in this city with no cathedral.

Luis Martín-Santos, Time of Silence (1962) trans. George Leeson

 

A grandson of Spaniards who hailed from somewhere between Colmenar de Oreja and Villamanrique del Tajo and for that reasons spoke glowingly of the land they left behind, the master had pictured Madrid otherwise. To him, raised amidst the opulence of Mexican silver and red lava stone, the city appeared drab, gloomy, and mean. Except for the main square, all was narrow, dirty and squalid when one considered how broad and richly ornamented the streets at home were, with their tiled façades, balconies aloft on the wings of cherubs between cornucopias pouring forth fruits carved out of stone, and signboards the very models of fine painting whose lettering entwined with vine leaves and ivy proclaimed the attractions of jewelry shops. The inns here were poor, with a smell of rancid oil that seeped into the rooms, and it was impossible in many of those hostelries to sleep as one would like because of the din set up by street players—bawling the verses of loas or bellowing at Roman emperors, changing from togas fashioned of bed sheets and curtains to costumes of buffoons and Basques—whose entremeses had musical accompaniments which, although enormously entertaining to the young black for their novelty, quit irritated the master because they were so out of tune. As for the cuisine, the less said the better. The sight of the meatballs they were served and the monotonous hakes called up remembrance in the Mexican of the subtlety of red snapper and the pomp of turkey swathed in dark-hued sauces rich with the aroma of chocolate and the fires of a thousand spices; the quotidian cabbage, insipid beans, chick-peas, and broccoli moved the black to sing the praises of the full-throated, tender avocado, of malanga tubers which, sprinkled with vinegar, parsley, and garlic, appeared on the tables of his country in the company of crabs, the tawny meat of whose claws was more substantial than the beefsteaks of this land.

Alejo Carpentier, Concierto Barroco (1974) trans. Asa Zatz

 

By now it was two o’clock and we had to be on our way, so we left Madrid. I said good-bye to him much against my will and made my way towards the city gate. So that I shouldn’t think of things I ought not to, God had me meet a soldier. We started up a conversation straight away. He asked me if I had come from Madrid. I said I had passed through the town on my way.

‘That’s the best thing you could have done, pass through it,’ he said; ‘it’s a lousy place. By God, I’d rather be somewhere in snow up to my waist, doing a manly job and chewing wood, than put up with the way they fleece an honest man.’

Francisco de Quevedo, The Swindler (1626) trans. Michael Alpert

 

2017 Reading in Review

Last year was not the most active year in reading for me: I had less time due to getting a full-time job, and I also read quite a bit less non-fiction and scholarly literature, since I was bogged down in volume one of Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History (more on that later).

The most notable part of my 2017 in reading was that more than 80% of the books I read were by female authors. This was a deliberate choice, mostly inspired by my near-overdose of Philip K. Dick in 2016. I read all five volumes of his complete stories that fall, and was struck by his growing misogyny. My brief review of Volume 5 sums up my feelings quite well:

Most of these stories are excellent. Around 1970, however, it seems PKD’s latent but palpable misogyny exploded forth in several stories, most notably “The Pre-Persons”, which is offensive not because it is a barely- disguised polemic against abortion, but because it treats women as stultifying figures who suck all the joy out if life. The same is true of “Chains of Air, Web of Aether”, where one of the only round female characters in his entire output is described as “thanatous” (literally death-inducing) and becomes more and more parasitic, culminating in a de facto married state.

Then, in January 2017, I made the mistake of reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (with the additional mistake of reading the later, uncut version). Despite his attempts at representing a progressive vision of society and sexuality, Heinlein’s novel and its naïve protagonist are hopelessly stuck in the misogynistic era in which they were conceived. The one-two punch of Dick and Heinlein’s misogyny turned me increasingly to female authors.

Continuing my theme from the end of 2016, I read mostly science fiction for the first half of the year. I had heard of Connie Willis’ series of novels and short stories on time-travelling historians, so I started with her collection Fire Watch. The title story (and to some extent the rest of the series) is essentially a celebration of the field of social history, emphasizing the experiences of those who lived through pivotal historical events. The standout from the collection for me, however, was “All My Darling Daughters“, which is one of the most disturbing stories I’ve ever read. The uniquely female perspective as reflected in that story strengthened my desire to read (nearly) exclusively female authors over the course of the year.

Next, I read The Handmaid’s Tale, which, as my first Margaret Atwood novel, I like to joke was an attempt to appease my Atwood-expert father. I also read Kelly Link’s collection Stranger Things Happen, inspired by (fellow Wesleyan graduate) composer Katherine Young’s MA thesis, which explored the intersection of the musically familiar and bizarre in much the same way as Link’s stories, which combine realism, fantasy, and horror in a genre known as slipstream. The realism of early 20th century stories by Katherine Mansfield and a young Gertrude Stein came next, often highlighting moments of quiet despair in women’s lives of the period.

The highlight of 2017 for me was reading the first decade’s worth of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. The early novels, despite their pulpy titles and premises, bring a marvellously elegant style to science fiction. Le Guin reaches a career high in The Left Hand of Darkness, which is even better than I remembered from when I read it as a teenager, and especially in The Dispossessed, which I would nominate as a candidate for one of the greatest English-language novels of the late 20th century. The Dispossessed is the fulfillment of the failed promise of Stranger in a Strange Land; its protagonist, Shevek, is far more alien on the capitalist and misogynist world of Urras than Heinlein’s Martian Valentine Smith is on Earth.

I rounded out the year with several more contemporary novels, my favourite of which was Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which strikes a balance between family drama and historical epic in China from the 1940s to the present, with music and storytelling binding together disparate lives through several generations and across the Pacific.

Simultaneously with all this, I read Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600, which is more a heavily-annotated reading list than a book one could read as a continuous whole. Moore’s tone is effusive and his passion for the material he discusses is highly infectious, but his technique is far from scholarly and he is maybe a bit too fixated on sex and violence at the expense of other aspects of these texts. Because of its structure, it took me over a year to get through its  more than 700 pages, but I learned a great deal about early fiction from a wide variety of cultures, and have dozens of books to add to my reading list for the future.

 

 

Composition Preview: ‘La ſelle d’ærain’ premieres Feb. 13

In my last post I described a large-scale project of which, at the time, I had completed only a few fragments. As I hinted in the last post, I anticipate this that this project will take several years to complete. Lately I have been working on another long-term project: a setting of five Nostradamus quatrains, of which two will be premiered on February 13 as part of the Oak Bay New Music Festival.

When I was 15, I found the ominously-titled Final Prophecies of Nostradamus in a used bookstore called The Flaming Novel. The shop, located in a strip mall parking lot in Apache Junction, Arizona, lived up to its name by falling victim to a fire sometime later.  The book features the text of Nostradamus’ Prophéties (originally published 1555-66), comprised of 941 quatrains organized in ten Centuries, mostly in Middle French. It features uninspired translations and misguided interpretations by Erika Cheetham. Cheetham did write a fairly interesting introduction however, and I learned that Nostradmaus was born Michel de Nostradame to a Jewish family in Provence. Regardless of their reputation as prophecies, most of the quatrains also are of dubious value as poetry; many are lists of 16th century states, cities and towns (e.g. VIII.LII et al). That being said, there are a handful of quatrains that struck me as beautiful when I first read them, especially quatrain VIII.XCVI (the text from this 1566 edition rather than from Cheetham’s book):

VIII.XCVI: La ſynagogue ſterile

La ſynagogue ſterile ſans nul fruit,
Sera receuë entre les infideles,
De Babylon la fille du porſuit,
Miſere & triſte luy trenchera les aiſles.

The sterile synagogue without any fruit
Will be received by the infidels,
The daughter of the persecuted one of Babylon,
Miserable and sad they will clip her wings.

The explicitly Jewish content of the poem and its powerful imagery convinced me to attempt a setting, which I began in late 2006.  The piece began as an attempt to reconcile the traditions of Klezmer and serialism, each of which I was beginning to discover at the time.  I came up with the following piano dyads, which use all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, and derived two tone rows from them:

I ended up setting only the first line of the poem before abandoning it in 2007. The first line of the original version for voice and piano uses a mixture of Klezmer modality and serialism, including this representative passage:

Untilthe end of 2007, I continued setting fragments of several other quatrains, but never completed any of them.

The next step in the development of this project took place in fall 2012 when, as part of Ron Kuivila’s composition seminar at Wesleyan University, we were assigned to write for an ad hoc ensemble of Connecticut musicians: namely voice, tuba, percussion, harp, accordion, viola and double bass. This highly unorthodox instrumentation, particularly the tuba, accordion and bass, reminded me of a Klezmer band, so I decided to complete my earlier setting of La ſynagogue ſterile for the ensemble. In order to emphasize the Jewish content of the work, I decided to intersperse a doina between the lines of the quatrain. The doina stems from sketches I wrote for solo tuba in 2010-11, which I called Der Levoner Doina (The Lunar Doina). I completed this version of La ſynagogue ſterile in November 2012 and it was subsquently performed and recorded at Wesleyan:

I decided to revisit my Nostradamus project recently, because I felt as though La ſynagogue ſterile was not  substantial enough a piece in its 2012 incarnation, and its unusual instrumentation meant that it might not be performed again in the foreseeable future. When the opportunity arose to write a piece for a chamber ensemble of voice, flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano for the 2016 Oak Bay New Music Festival, I jumped at the chance to adapt La ſynagogue ſterile for the new instrumentation, and also to expand the work to include two additional movements. I had come up with the title La ſelle d’ærain (The Brass Saddle/Tripod) when working on the 2012 version. The title comes from quatrain I.I, in which Nostradamus explains his method of divination. The tripod refers to the three quatrains I had decided to set, namely I.XVII (Par quarente ans l’Iris) and I.XXI (Profonde argille blanche), as well as VII.XCVI, which I  had already set.

By last November, I had decided to add movements for voice and piano framing the central three ensemble pieces: quatrains V.XCVI (La roſe) and II.XIII (Le verbe) as incipit and ‘excipit’, respectively (the latter term for some reason seems only to have existed in French literary analysis otherwise). I completed La roſe on Christmas Eve, and the final version of La ſynagogue ſterile exactly a month later, and these two movements will be joined by an instrumental interlude for the performance on February 13.

Mallarmé, Mourning and Microtones

After a series of posts about an often difficult past, I thought it would be a welcome change of pace to write about something I’m working on currently. This post is a preview for what is effectively my professional debut as a composer in a non-self-directed or workshop format: Friday Oct. 16, the inimitable Mark McGregor will perform a new piece of mine for flute and electronics at Open Space.

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For the past several months I have been formulating a large-scale project based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s Pour un tombeau d’Anatole. After the death of his son Anatole at the age of eight in 1879, Mallarmé attempted to write a memorial poem, but he was unable to finish it and left behind 202 page-long fragments. These were eventually published posthumously in 1961, and are starkly modern in their fragmentary form. Pour un tombeau d’Anatole was translated into English by Paul Auster (whose translation I am not especially fond of) and then by Patrick McGuinness. There also exists an incomplete and fascinatingly non-literal translation by William Marsh.

As can be seen from the last link, the fragments are formatted in a very idiosyncratic way, reminiscent of Mallarmé’s later and more well-known poems such as Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. However, it is unclear if the work would have stayed in its more unusual format if it had actually been completed, or if its formatting was simply a sign of its provisional nature. There are also a plethora of strange annotative punctuations in the original text, ranging from several styles of brackets to horizontal lines of various lengths to floating numerals, both Arabic and Roman. They seem to strive to fill in the gaps where Mallarmé’s words failed him. The combination of the work’s extreme emotional content and its open-ended layout made it irresistible to work with.

I knew that a setting of the entire text of Pour un tombeau d’Anatole would be far too long, but nonetheless I wanted to set a substantial part of it. This would still demand a very long duration, most likely an hour or more, so I decided to make it a poly-work in the style of Richard Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth (first movement) or Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf’s Hommage à György Kurtág (a solo piccolo fragment),where a large-scale work is actually made up of several smaller pieces for some subset of the instrumentation that may be performed separately. So far the work is in its infancy, but I already have two segments completed: a draft of a setting of the first fragment, en triste existence, for solo soprano and small chorus (which was read at the SALT Festival this July by the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart) and a piece for flute and electronics, «la double à remplir…», which takes its (incorrectly gendered¹) title from fragment 9, which will be premiered this Friday by Mark McGregor.

I decided that, following the text, the theme of the whole work will be an exploration of aspects of mourning from music of various traditions, including the ‘lament bass’, dirges, drones, crying, etc. In keeping with this sense of mourning, the pitch content of the work is derived from the undertone series on a high C. For at least the first section of the work, I decided to use an octave-inverted alteration of the series, which is spaced somewhat like the harmonic series. Using only quarter tones and arrows to indicate approximate twelfth-tone inflections, the modified series is as follows:

«La double à remplir…» for flute and electronics is in the form of a doina. Originally a Romanian shepherd’s lament, the doina entered the klezmer repertoire around the turn of the 20th century (a classic example). Doinas typically consist of a highly ornamented solo melodic line that is accompanied by droning chords that modulate over the course of the piece.  In «la double à remplir…», the flute is accompanied by sine tones that play a series of major seventh chords, derived from the constructed series discussed above, that gradually deviate more and more from equal temperament:

Chords connected with a bracket alternate freely, since they are roughly equivalent in distance from equal temperament. Over top of this, the flute plays the freely virtuosic trills, arpeggios and scalar patterns of doina repertoire, but microtonally detuned.

I look forward to the first public performance of a project that will be central to my practice for at least the next few years.

Footnotes

1. This mistake is in Mallarmé’s original.

Friedman on Dialectics, Part 2: Difficulties

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts reflecting on some formative aspects of both myself and my music. Part 1 examined my intellectual development, while this post deals with the effects of the experience of my mother’s death from the same period and my subsequent emergence as both a person and as a composer. I meant to finish this within a few days of the first part, but it has proven quite difficult to write. Part 3 will address more recent changes in my music and ideas.

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Here, then, lies the difference: modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter of solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.

Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?″ translated by Régis Durand in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 81.

This past winter marked the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death. This is not something I have discussed very much with anyone, and will come as a surprise to most people that know me. Why am I sharing this is in so public a forum? First of all, it has become increasingly obvious to me that I have not come to terms with her death, and I feel as though talking about it (or at least related moments from that time in my life) might help. Secondarily, in light of the previous point, I think that opening up here will give those who know me (and read this blog) some important perspective on how these events have affected who I am and what I do.

My mother, Dorothy Christine Cole, was first diagnosed with leukemia in 2002, when I was 12 years old. After several months of chemotherapy, she successfully went into remission and would remain healthy for more than 2 years. In late October 2004 she fell ill and tests showed that her cancer had returned. She was quickly taken to Vancouver General Hospital, where she spent the next two months before it became clear that the chemotherapy would not prove effective a second time. I was only able to see her a couple times in the hospital before my family ended up spending Christmas in Vancouver to be with her. In early January 2005 she was taken by air ambulance back to Kamloops where she stayed at first the Royal Inland Hospital and then the Kamloops Hospice, before she passed away on January 16.

However, this post is not explicitly about her death—this is not the place for that, and I may not be ready to fully confront it. It is about the circumstances surrounding it and the music that came out of that period, which I believe I am ready to address at this point. I will begin by examining in detail the clarinet sonata I wrote during this time and then trying to make sense of what I was going through before and while composing it.

It was about a month after my mother’s death that I started my first foray into serious composing. I had composed a few things before this point, the most substantial of which was a pseudo-classical piano sonata in D minor, but sometime in the fall of 2004 I started writing a clarinet sonata based on a transitional section  of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1. I started work on it in earnest in February 2005 and spent nearly the entire year completing it. What resulted is Sonata Flebile, which is a 35-minute piece for clarinet and piano.  It draws thematically from Liszt, both Piano Concerto No. 1 and Nuages gris, but it is also inspired by a lot of other music I was listening to at the time: late-period Liszt, Beethoven, Mahler, Chopin, Brahms, etc.  You can view the score and play back a horrible MIDI realization here (if you have the Scorch plugin), but I recommend listening instead to the final Chaconne, which is probably the only salvageable part, here played by Liam Hockley and Kevin Thomson:

Looking back at this piece, the most striking aspect for me is its structure, which is partially based on Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, but is considerably more elaborate. It is nominally a distended sonata form, but can be broken down as follows:

• Fantasia (subtitled contradictory, juxtaposed circumstances) which forms a free introduction to
• Theme and variations (self-reflection, contemplation of the innumerable facets), which is also the core of the sonata form:
  • Exposition: Theme and Variations 1-3
  • Development: Variations 4-10 of which
    • Variations 4-6 are free development and
    • Variations 7-10 are a double fugue, which is also in sonata form:
      • Exposition: Variations 7 & 8 (each is a full fugue exposition of one of the two themes)
      • Development: Variation 9
      • Recapitulation and Coda: Variation 10 (both themes return simultaneously)
  • Retransition and Recapitulation: Variations 11-14
• Ciaccona (understanding: finality, loss) as a coda to the work, itself a ground with 7 variations and coda.

At this point, I am quite sure that the structure of the piece was in some way therapeutic. In order to avoid the emotions I was experiencing, I drew on my intellectual experience with math and created something which emphasized structural rigour, while still comfortingly familiar in its musical foundations. A connection to the common-practice tradition via classical forms of sonata-allegro and variation, but combined in a particularly potent nested structure, proved extremely intoxicating to my desire for things to make sense.

Another striking element of the piece, for me, is the subtitles of the sections. The contradictory, juxtaposed circumstances were clearly the raw emotions I felt at the time of its composition—grief, but also intense adolescent infatuation, which was first manifesting in me at around the same time. The subtitles form a sort of idealized process of grieving, where I imagined that self-reflection, contemplation of the innumerable facets would eventually be followed by understanding: finality, loss and some sort of closure.

However, as those who have gone through the grieving process know, things are not so simple. Most of what transpired those few months is a blur. I can remember only a handful of fleeting images: short, disconnected conversations, seeing the Vancouver Opera do Madama Butterfly after a hospital visit, finding The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on a shelf at the house where we were staying and reading its roughly 1200 pages in less than three days. Numbness alternated with an intense sensation of poetry and meaningfulness. It is difficult to chart one’s progress in an idealized process when continuity does not seem to exist at all. The dissonance between the idealism of the piece’s construction and the way I actually felt at the time illustrates its fundamental problems.

Not long after I finished writing it, I began to realize that Sonata Flebile had many major flaws. I was not capable of really handling the grandiosity of the piece’s structure at the time, which I came to realize was itself not really appropriate for the biographical nature of the piece’s inspiration anyhow. On top of that, it is really unnecessarily difficult—neither the pianist nor the clarinettist gets much of a break for the entire 35-minute duration and the piano part has too many simultaneous voices most of the time. None of those things were enough to make me regret writing the piece, but the realization that its construction was diametrically opposed with my actual experience of mourning effectively killed any interest I had in it. This realization had set in fairly strongly by the time that I first performed a portion of the piece in the spring of 2007. It is only after many years of reflection that I have realized its value as an artifact of a particular time in my life, one that I can examine when I am incapable of examining my experience of that time.

Some passagework.

From the double fugue.

Fugue ‘development’.

Ornamented recapitulation of the theme.

End of recapitulation/variations.

I still consider myself to have learned how to compose by writing Sonata Flebile, and not just in the mechanical sense; from it, I also somewhat paradoxically learned how not to compose. Not only did my realization about the philosophy of the piece’s structure effectively banish it from my mind, it also radically altered my notion of what composition is. This realization can be seen as the effective end of both naked formalism and any 19^th-century influence in my compositions. I started writing some serial pieces not long afterwards, but they always had some sort of subversion of their system. Though there is some nascent polystylism in Sonata Flebile, I started to explore it more in earnest afterwards, but that will be for another post.

Returning to the work’s subtitles, I have come to realize that the most important thing I learned from the whole process has formed the foundation of my philosophical perspective ever since: life is actually made up of continuous contradictory, juxtaposed circumstances, and no amount of self-reflection can resolve them. This post may sound somewhat cold and analytical to some, but that is an ongoing related issue of mine. The emotional and the intellectual have been conflated for me since this time in my life in nearly every way: I have intellectualized my emotional life, seeking to make sense of it (such as in this post), but also have found great joy and sorrow in often esoteric and abstruse music and writing. This may have been detrimental to my personal life, but, as Schoenberg wrote, what is music but a union of “heart and brain?”

Friedman on Dialectics, Part 1: Of Formalist Denial

This is the first in what I hope is a series of fairly serious and personal posts I will write in the coming days, which will also address several issues that arose in my MA thesis, which I completed last spring. Part 1 deals with the intellectual background of a formative period of my life, roughly 2003-2008. Part 2 will deal with emotional and musical aspects of the same period.

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 My music sometimes seems mysterious. Part of the mystery comes from the fact that I wait, receptively, then I welcome, I accept … Listen, there are two kinds of people: the type that is only interested in what they understand, and the type that wants at all costs the hermetic mystery, enigmas. The first gets bored when they don’t understand, the second is bored when they do understand. Me, I accept poetry, the inexplicable. Things are born in the waiting.

Morton Feldman, interviewed by Martine Cadieu in “Morton Feldman – Waiting, May 1971” in Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964-1987. Edited by Chris Villars. London: Hyphen Press, 2006, p. 40.

In grade 12, my school counsellor asked me why, when I was definitely going to be doing a degree in music, was I also studying calculus, chemistry and physics.  At some point a few years earlier, I had come across the 17th century polymath Athanasius Kircher’s exhortation that “there is nothing more beautiful than to know all” (where this quote came from I have no memory). This may have been possible at the time he was writing, but is clearly not now, something I obviously knew intuitively but did not really believe until after I started university. For my entire childhood and adolescence I intentionally read books that were far too difficult, culminating in Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, an attempt to explain the physical properties of the universe in 1100 pages. I vaguely remember understanding about the first 200, which deal with the math required to understand the rest of the book; I read the next 900 in a daze, trying to at least absorb the terminology. My reading was not limited to science: I also read books at random from my family’s shelves. My family owned somewhere in the area of 2000-3000 books at this point, skewing heavily towards CanLit and literary theory, thanks to my father. I read experimental novels like Death Kit by Susan Sontag and the highly obscure the telephone pole by Russell Marois (which I know I finished on Oct. 28, 2003 and Jan. 18, 2004, respectively, thanks to a Microsoft Access database [!] I kept of my reading at the time).

The book that most affected me during this period, however, was Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I read GEB in the fall of 2004, which was otherwise a very difficult part of my life (something I will address in my next post). In both his preface to the 20th anniversary edition of the book and in his later book I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter essentially complains that no one understood the underlying message of GEB, which is an examination of self-reference and its ramifications on the possibility of artificial intelligence. GEB very easily comes off as seeming to be about fanciful connections between its various subjects: not only the titular figures, but also Zen Buddhism, microbiology, computer science and the like. Its highly novel structure helps this misinterpretation: it alternates fairly normal chapters with dialogues between the characters Achilles and the Tortoise (drawn from a dialogue by Lewis Carroll [pdf], who himself got them from one of Zeno‘s paradoxical thought experiments) which are in the form of contrapuntal pieces by J. S. Bach. I do not pretend to have fully understood GEB, but I definitely gathered quite a bit from it, particularly the enormous paradoxes that loom under the surface of logic and therefore underpin nearly every aspect of thought. It’s possible that I took almost the exact opposite message from the average reader of GEB, namely that, while everything is connected, it is connected in such a way that nothing makes sense.

The most important paradox discussed in GEB is Kurt Gödel‘s so-called incompleteness theorem (of which there are actually two). I will attempt a simple explanation of it, which is probably ultimately fallacious, but will give the reader an idea of what it entails. A formal system is a logical construct where one can use certain axioms (statements which are assumed to be true beforehand) and rules (which transform axioms and other statements which are derived from axioms). Gödel leans heavily on the notion of compactness, which can be used to prove that, in a particular formal system, provability by the system is logically equivalent to truth. A compact formal system can have the property of completeness, whereby it can prove every true statement, as well as the property of consistency, whereby no false statement can be proven. Let us examine a statement in a formal system that can be translated as something like “this statement cannot be proven,” which is clearly a paradox: if it is true, then we have no way of proving it, so the formal system is incomplete (since we have found an unprovable truth); if it is false, then it can be proved, so the formal system is inconsistent (since we have found a provable falsehood). The result is that any system must be either incomplete or inconsistent, and that any attempt for a system to describe itself either fails because of incompleteness or yields dangerous results because of inconsistency. In the first case it means that in order to describe a system completely, we must create a meta-system, which must be described via a meta-meta-system, and so on. These statements hold true for even relatively simple systems, like those describing arithmetic. Interpretation of these theorems in other fields is often overblown (much like quantum physics), but it does essentially destroy the positivist perspective of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, which sought to derive all of mathematics from logic.

GEB was my first exposure to dialectical thinking, or at least unresolved dualities: Hofstadter dwells on several of them, particularly holism vs. reductionism. He attempts to resolve them via the Zen notion of mu, which “unasks” the question or at least points out its absurdity. In some questions the answer is both of “both and neither” of the choices, but also neither of those, and so on. The infinite regress of dialectics seemed to be isomorphic to the infinite meta-levels required to completely describe any formal system given Gödel’s incompleteness, while contradictory bare dualities seemed to map onto inconsistency. These notions led me to actively engage with the fundamental dichotomies I encountered in every subject I studied after this point, particularly in my undergraduate philosophy electives. But, in a sense, it was too late for my earlier interests: I believed that any formalist notion of truth was bound to end in an infinite tree of undecidability or a flat-out contradiction. I still tried to take a second major in math during my first year, but found the time demands of a music degree precluded much external commitment, and I realized it was basically impossible, at least at UVic, after two semesters. I was still helping some of my friends in sciences with their homework in second semester classes I would never take when I realized that I had to radically rein in my ambitions, however I did continue to take electives in philosophical logic until my fourth year, which were some of the most creatively stimulating classes I have taken, even if no longer directly relevant to my work.

What does all of this have to do with music? Though I am now unquestionably primarily a composer, I still have serious parallel interests in philosophy, math, science and literature, and these concepts provide some vital underpinning to the way I think about music. My interests have always straddled the art/science divide and I believe that I chose to pursue an academic career in music because, in my opinion, it is located at the nexus of the arts and sciences, and can be produced and interpreted using a plethora of different fields and techniques. Being a composer is my way of intellectually having my cake and eating it too. My next post will address the joint emotional aspects to the intellectual issues raised here, as well as their impact on the music I wrote until fairly recently.

[Review] Claude Vivier: A Composer’s Life by Bob Gilmore

I once again find myself in Victoria for the foreseeable future. As a way to ensure that I continue writing regularly while I’m between degrees, I have decided to start a series where I write about books (mostly on music) that I feel are worth sharing. There will be three rough categories:

1. New books, which I will write informal reviews of (hopefully prior to being able to have a formal review published somewhere)
2. Classics which I feel could use some further explanation or encouragement for potential readers (e.g.  Formalized Music)
3. Obscure books which I feel more people should know about (e.g. The Modern Composer and His World which I mentioned some time ago)

Obviously there will be some overlap in the latter two categories depending on one’s perspective. However, this first article is very clearly in the first one.

UPDATE: This review has been published in the November 2015 edition of Musiktexte in a German translation by Monika Lichtenfeld as “Mythen und Widersprüche. Bob Gilmores Claude-Vivier-Biographie”.

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Bob Gilmore
Claude Vivier: A Composer’s Life
Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014
295pp. $34.95

In Claude Vivier’s brief life (1948-1983) he composed a substantial output of varied and compelling pieces for both vocal and instrumental forces, and his final works from Lonely Child for soprano and orchestra (1980) until his death constitute one of the strongest series of pieces written by a single composer in such a short time-span. His work is marked by a strong emphasis on the unknown in a very general sense: he fixates on such aspects as distant locales (including imaginary ones), death and love. A large portion of his output is vocal, much of which sets passages in a language or languages of his own creation, and much of it has strong autobiographical resonances. Born to “unknown parents” (an oft-repeated phrase found in almost all descriptions of his life) in Montreal and killed in Paris at the age of 35, his life’s details often threaten to overwhelm both appraisal of his music and his place in the Canadian musical pantheon.

Gilmore’s somewhat workmanlike biography attempts to cut through the various layers of mythology surrounding Vivier. Through a great many primary sources and reams of interviews with Vivier’s family, friends and colleagues (including a huge number of prominent musicians in Canada and Europe), Gilmore sketches out what can be definitively known about Vivier’s life. His work on these sections includes large extracts from sources and sometimes prosaic summaries. These can be quite effective: through them Gilmore manages to effectively unmask Vivier’s mythological status as a “great composer-traveler” in connection with Asia. Contrary to what some believe, Vivier did not spend years travelling through Asia (a myth repeated by his Wikipedia article), but only a total of five months in 1976-77, of which three were spent in Bali and the remainder in Japan, Thailand, Iran and Egypt. Even the much-vaunted Asian influence on his music is in fact mostly restricted to its instrumentation and his vague impressions of the places he visited. Pulau Dewata for open instrumentation (1977) is a perfect example of a piece that was supposedly inspired by Gamelan but actually bears very little resemblance to its inspiration. Other passages of the book prove more problematic but also more intriguing. Gilmore admits that writing a biography of someone who hailed from the era of the telephone proved to be quite difficult since the contents of most of Vivier’s interactions were ephemeral and the memory of those who knew him fallible. In order to fill these gaps, Gilmore relies on anecdotes by Vivier’s friends, which are usually vague but often quite entertaining, as well as speculation, which is usually well-justified. Speculation on some of these matters can be seen as appropriate, in fact, since Vivier himself cultivated many personal mythologies which complicate attempts to narrate his life. Vivier often imagined his birth parents to be Eastern European (or even Jewish), something that proved very influential on his autobiographical pieces, furthering his fixation on loneliness and personal mythology.

Finally, other aspects of Vivier’s life defy definitive interpretation or any sort of clear speculation, and the contradictions and myths must be presented as-is. For instance, his sexuality was somewhat complex: it is well-known that he was gay, but Gilmore brings up the oft-forgotten fact that Vivier engaged in at least sexual relationships with women throughout his entire life. When Vivier’s friend Rober Racine brought up the possibility of writing a book on Vivier, his would-be subject told him “You have to say I love women!” (p. 187). And of course his death is particularly divisive: a myth has arisen that he was stabbed in the Paris subway, but this is in fact an event from the story of his final work (Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele for voices and ensemble); in reality he was killed in his apartment by a lover, though contemporary sources and the recollection of his friends do not always agree on whether he was stabbed or strangled or both. At least one source claims that his death was in fact an erotic accident and not murder (though this is not given much credence by Gilmore). Gilmore also raises doubt as to whether Vivier’s last composition was unfinished at the time of his death (as most sources state): “it is hard to imagine what could have come after the chilling ending.” (p. 279) The most controversial of Gilmore’s assertions is that Vivier’s lifelong preoccupation with mortality and his fascination with eroticized violence in his later years did not ultimately lead to his death. The fact that Vivier was stabbed with a pair of scissors and robbed by an opportunistic man posing as a one night stand only weeks before his death led may of his friends to the conclusion that he must have been seeking out the kind of dangerous situation that ultimately killed him. Gilmore writes that these trends are counterbalanced by Vivier’s equally strong fixation on love and redemption, which should preclude suicide, though he ultimately states that this is merely his opinion and the decision ultimately rests with the reader.

Gilmore makes it quite clear that this book is both a biography and a companion to Vivier’s compositions. He provides concise and effective analyses of many of Vivier’s works, presented in such a way as to be relatively understandable to the layperson. He clearly explains such aspects as the influence of Stockhausen’s works from the 1960s and early 70s (such as Mantra) on many of Vivier’s pieces from the 1970s, especially Learning for four violins and percussion and Siddhartha for orchestra (both 1976), which are constructed from long melodies, and the nascent Spectralist movement’s influence on his late works, particularly in his use of ring modulation in Lonely Child. The one area where any analysis fails is in the text of many of Vivier’s vocal works: though some of it can be written off as mere exoticism (the quasi-Asiatic text in Bouchara for soprano and ensemble), much of Vivier’s use of invented language is still nearly impenetrable despite Gilmore’s elucidations. The opera Kopernikus, Vivier’s largest-scale completed work, in which the historical Copernicus plays only a small part among a cast of various historical and fictional characters (including Mozart, with the lead character being Agni, the Hindu god of fire), proves to be so idiosyncratic as to be almost entirely inscrutable. Gilmore does an admirable job connecting it to such precursors as the works of Lewis Carroll and The Magic Flute, but ultimately its intended meaning may be unknowable to any but Vivier.

Given these analytical gaps and the non-specialist level of the analyses of Vivier’s works, there is still plenty of work to be done in order to understand Vivier’s oeuvre. That being said, it is hard to imagine an English-language biography that could be more definitive than Gilmore’s book. In tandem with Vivier’s collected writings, which are published in the journal Circuit (and will hopefully be translated into English at some point), it makes a fine starting point for the student of Vivier’s life and work, which had seen a paucity of English-language scholarly attention until now.

Postscript to Rzewski

Many years ago, I met a very young pianist, Frederik [sic] Rzewski, and he said with the peace of mind available, he said, “You know that canon for two pianos?” Canon, me, my canon? Oh yes, that free-durational piece. It was a canon, I suppose. To tell you the truth, if I’d thought it was a canon, it would have caused me to commit suicide.

Morton Feldman, “Darmstadt-Lecture” from Essays