Miriam might find shelter at the farm. Nor did he think he’d be turned away, but would he be welcome? What could he do there, hoe beans? buy a banjo to play while setting fire to the hay? Her high school sweater would not rise up to cheer him, and in the stony glare of her husband’s eyes he would merely be seen as an impediment to the plow: a rock to be turned over and tossed from the field. He had come to love his position at the school. He enjoyed his nice April walks across the quad, exchanging nods with the friendlier students, Professor Skizzen as dignified yet as interestingly odd as his station demanded, yellow daffs arranged in applauding rows along the path, tulips turning to watch him pass, a brisk wind asking the treetops to prance. What was left now but a life of crime? by setting the flypaper danglers afire! casually watching the cuttings curl up in the flame. HUMAN CRUELTIES, IN A PANTOMIME OF HELL, CONSUMED BY OVERLY DRY ATTIC AIR, reports the Woodbine Times. He and his mother had flown solo through life. It had never mattered to him that he had no friends. Nevertheless, he must try to die with decency. He’d be marched to jail in manacles. What did they call it? the perp walk — not the name of a dance step. It had actually come — that fearful moment. Friendless. Motherless. Fatherless too. He began to cry.
March 16, 1968. My Lai Massacre. Nearly five hundred people in the Vietnam villages of My Lai and My Khe were murdered by members of Charlie Company. The Americans demonstrated their skill in such matters (although for some it was their first time) by dropping many victims, like a line of cardboard targets at a carnival, into a handy drainage ditch. Babies were dispatched by gun and grenade, animals and women as well. There were no plants in pots or they’d have been shot. This riot of killing was observed by helicopters. The helicopters snitched.
42
I shall assume that you have each listened with full attention to Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Anyone like it? Hands. That’s nice. Several. We are blessed. This concerto is one of the major musical achievements of the twentieth century. Bartók was ill with leukemia and low on funds. His friends passed the hat behind his back in order to offer him their charity in the guise of a grant from the Koussevitzky Foundation. Koussevitzky was the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. You may have heard the results of his direction on some of your recordings. [… um …] This support enabled the composer to spend the summer of August 1943 at the spa at Saranac Lake — that’s in New York State — a spa is a health resort — where his illness momentarily improved. [……] Apologies. His illness did not improve, he did. His illness weakened. [……] The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke also died of luke. Lots of people do. Lots. It is cancer of the blood, cancer of the marrow of the bones. It should be the disease of duchesses and counts, but it isn’t. Of blue bloods, you see. But it isn’t.
The concerto had its first performance, naturally under Koussevitzky’s leadership, in Boston during the winter of the following year. The audience’s reception was “tumultuous.” Critics were less excited, but performers liked the many opportunities the music gave them to blow their own horn and excel. Listeners were warm. Why shouldn’t they be? It was a wonderfully romantic nineteenth-century piece, with swelling strings, pounded drums, and plenty of trumpets. With a climax worthy of the movies. You can hear the music running into the arms of happiness.
Koussevitzky was a faithful and genuine supporter of the music of his own time, an almost reckless thing to be, especially if you were the conductor of a significant American orchestra, because patrons were customarily twenty-five years off the clock and, like the busy noses of the bees, went for nectar and its sweetness, not newness however savory. For further information on the numbskullish nature of audiences and the even greater tin eardrum of critics, try to remember my earlier lectures. [……] Das Lied von der Erde may have opened the door for Bartók and Schoenberg — it took some pushing and shoving to hear who would get through first — but it was melancholy — a downer, do you say? [… ya? …] We did “Das Lied” two weeks ago. Remember? “The Song of the Earth.” Maa … ler. He died of a sore throat. I find it interesting that Mahler, Bartók, and Schoenberg changed their religion, not quite the way we change clothes, but as the occasion dictated nevertheless. Something for you to file away. Surprise the mind on a cloudy day.
All right, class, we return to our sheep: who is — Koussevitzky — did I call him: commissioner? [……] I call him the Commissioner because he suggested and funded compositions from contemporary composers: for instance he asked Maurice Ravel to orchestrate Mussorgsky’s piano suite “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Listeners have forgotten that it was originally scored for the piano. For most folks only the full orchestra version answers to the name. Ravel’s version is a wonderful piece to test your loudspeakers with. Sorry. It is a good piece with which to test your speakers. [… um …] As colorful as Joseph’s coat. [… um …] A few good musical jokes about Jews. Listeners have forgotten about them, too.
You have to drive these gentlemen — Mussorgsky — Ravel — Koussevitzky — into the same corral, get them used to the smell of one another. Koussevitzky, Ravel, Mussorgsky. Up hands! Come on, don’t you remember the Great Gate? Cymbal crash! [……] Palms aplenty? Well, several. We are blessed. Mein Gott.
The Commissioner badgered work from Ravel — a piano concerto, not just the aforementioned orchestration. He encouraged a couple of operas: Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes; then squeezed from Copeland, let’s see, Symphony no. 3. Next, what? [… um …] He gave Olivier Messiaen’s T-S symphony a push into the light of day, as well as Bartók’s Concerto. [……] No, it doesn’t mean what you gigglers think. [……] TS to you, too. It stands for Turangalîla-Symphonie. I shall write the title on the board. It is not easily spelled. [……] The news about Koussevitzky is not all positive. He led the Boston boys in one of the earlier recordings of Ravel’s Boléro. [……] I’m disappointed none of you groaned. Orchestras in those days were largely made up of scowling old men. Normally they didn’t like to learn, rehearse, or play new pieces, but the Concerto for Orchestra was bait too appealing to refuse.
Words as always fail to convey the power and beauty of this composition. Even Bartók’s own description doesn’t approach that kind of success. I am quoting from the composer’s program notes for the debut performance: “The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.”
Jesting! Jousting, rather. You heard the bray — the hee-haw — the yawp — and then the fairgrounds music? pretending to be a rodent running down an alley. Now, just because the second movement is designated, by the composer, “a game of pairs,” we mustn’t confuse it with boarding Noah’s ark — you know — bassoons two by two, oboes as twins, clarinets a pair, next two flutes, and, lest they be too overbearing and brutish, trumpets with mutes. Nor should we allow ourselves to be misled about the seriousness of these blurts. I was told that, while Bartók was composing the concerto, he heard a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony on the radio and laughed when one of its subjects announced itself. He said it sounded like a Viennese cabaret song. This theme was so vacant of any real energy or significance that Bartók promptly borrowed it to use for an interruption he might ridicule. Why would he do that? Hands. [……] Hopeless. In the middle of a serious sermon, why would the preacher stick out his tongue? [… um …] Rather, my young friends, why would he stick out someone else’s tongue?