Googoo Gaga

I've been willing to write about Lady Gaga for a little while, but it was incompatible with postdoc application time so I postponed. Also, I wasn't too sure, to be honest, what I could possibly write about her that would not be too obviously dumb. My attention was brought to her by this video (not exactly the official vid -- careful). Check out this video rather, viewed more than 300m times (I remember a time where a million views was amazing..) [I'm not saying there's nothing lame about the video btw]. I liked the fact that some of the lyrics are in French, or at least in some sort of French. Quite glam I thought, for an American pop song. Also there's a purer rave sound than you'd expect, stuff that was underground in the 90s but that still does the job OK. Then I realized that Lady Gaga is closer to a performance artist than a pop star, and a rather interesting one moreover. My first suspicion of her significance was confirmed when I learned that the young US officer that smuggled the 240,000 diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks did so by burning them on a Lady Gaga CD! This mixture of art and political revelations might appear coincidental but I like to imagine, a bit in the spirit of Wreck & Salvage, that there is some deeper connections, whose roots dive into the current American Zeitgeist. Whatever.

Gaga's first words in Bad Romance are something like

Rha rha a ah aha

Roma rromama a

Gaga oh lala a

Want your bad romance

[Just to mention, there are already two French elements in there: the rolled "r" and the "oh lala".]

And this is the kind of thing that will play in your head while you're cooking for instance. So at some point I asked myself but what is she saying for fuck's sake? There are words that I can recognize, specially the last bit, that's rather clear, and "Gaga" also makes an apparition, and there are bits that are clearly just sounds, like the "ohooho" of the introduction; but what I find puzzling is that there is also something that is between the two.

First, the "rha rha" are purely bestial (think MGM lion) and they degenerate, just like every line, to some simply musical sounds. Then comes the intriguing part: "Roma". This also appears as just a meaningless sound but it's far too close [sic] to the "romance" in the title of the song not to be related to it. Certainly it has to be some embryonic version of it. Something is taking shape here, from the bestiality of a prelinguistic realm towards some more advanced form of communication, namely language. Notice also that when the "roma" degenerates, one could hear "mama" [compare to "papa paparazzi"]. Just like what happens in the development of a child, the first thing that comes out of the undefined darkness is the figure of the mother. Then comes "Gaga", the ego. This also frequently a child's first sounds. And finally something resembling a sentence expressing a desire towards the other can be formulated.

So my verdict would be that this chorus illustrates the genetics of the artistic process, through which a raw emotion is sublimed into some creation that resort to a higher level language.

Now one could wonder if this emergence process was successfully performed in this case. After all, it all comes to wanting "your bad romance". Sounds more like a destructive drive to me. In addition, the ego/other or subject/object couple is not adequately articulated. Not only is the "I" still missing, but also it would seem more natural to want "our romance" instead of "yours". Similarly, later in the song one hears "And I want your revenge": what is that suppose to mean? Well, maybe this is intended as "I want my revenge on you". That would make more sense. Unless... Could the artist be skillfully using this me/you confusion to underline the fact that such a vicious spiral of projections and counter-projections often characterizes a "bad romance"? Stefani Germanotta: brava!

Masterclass with Mitsuko Uchida

Yesterday I went to a master class given by Mitsuko Uchida to four performance students of the Music Faculty. The students presented pieces by Schubert, Schumann, Bach, and Beethoven. It was fascinating to see how much emotion and contrast she was able to percieve in those pieces and how well she could communicate it. She used a variety of ways to do it: obviously by playing herself on the piano, and by singing and screaming, but also with her body, directing with her hands and dancing, jumping around really, but also through more indirect ways. She used metaphors, she talked about a "dry sunny day, when it hasn't rained yet and you can smell the warm sand" and so on. She also resorted to musical analysis, for instance she explained how Bach was moving between the tonic, the dominant, and the sub-dominant---in fact, she apologized for having to sound so technical but it was just a way for her to express how she felt the piece should be played, what was at stake, what psychological tensions and what resolutions.

The precious moments when Mitsuko was playing for more than two seconds revealed the depth of her concentration and total involvement into the music. It was amazing---also certainly completely unavoidable to any great performer---how she was never playing lightly, but always mobilizing her full life's experience, all her pains, all her joys, all her emotions and sensations, her entire mind and body focused on the musicality.

She had something of a yoga teacher trying to encourage her students to stretch their bodies. She has probed the extremities of the various human emotions. One advice that struck me particularly and that she repeated to almost every performer of the day (at least the girls) was not to play "too beautifully". She encouraged them not to iron the peculiarities, the oddities of the compositions, but on the contrary to make the strangeness emerge, accentuate the dissonance, show how bizarre reality is. (It is something I think about a lot these days, bringing out the surreal...)

So you had for example this nice little American blonde playing as beautifully as she could, and hirsute Mitsuko shouting to her to play it uglier. At some point she told her "Play with your biggest pain!"

She also got mad when one of the students told her that the reason she was playing in a certain way was because of the influence of some famous pianist (although I think she misunderstood what the student meant). She said that every interpret makes mistake and so it is pointless to copy them, one should create her/his own mistakes :)

Mitsuko has recently become a 'Dame' and

today she was receiving and honorary doctorate at Oxford's Encaenia Ceremony (the word apparently meaning "festival of renewal"). Since she lives in London I was looking forward to her next concert, but according to her agenda, she will have sooner toured the planet several times than perform again in the UK. Farewell Mitsuko!

Time thickening

On Sunday I went to a Coffee Concert by John Myewrscough (cello) and Lara Dodds-Eden (piano). They played various compositions among which the mind-blowing Cello Sonata n° 1 by Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998). Here I just want to talk about a thought that came to me during the concert.

The enjoyment of music increases with the ability to "grasp" with the mind a piece of melody as a whole -- at once. I mean as a unique entity rather than as a succession of individual notes (Husserl tried to explain the possibility of such a thing in his Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins). The broader the perception of a fragment of music, the deeper the pleasure (think about Mozart who was able to restitute an entire concerto after hearing it only once...). So listening to music encourages the development of the ability to grasp longer periods of time instantaneously, i.e. to have them "present" interiorly as sensations.

This is how music enriches our existences : by teaching us how to thicken our present time.

(The cellist's name contains the name "Myers", so I'll call that the timelike Myers effect ; )

Schubert : Winterreise

I finally overcame my aversion for classical singing : ) I think the key factor was the realisation of the importance of the lyrics, without which the songs often sound like empty gargles to me.

I went to the Oxford Lieder Festival to hear Florian Boesch (bass baritone) and Andrew West (piano) play Schubert's Die Winterreise ("The Winter Journey"), composed in 1827, one year before his death at age 31. It is based on a cycle of 24 poems written by the (also short-lived) poet Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827).

The organizers had the presence of mind to distribute the full text of the poems, and I followed them closely during the entire concert. I only looked at the stage occasionally to see Boesch's raging face, which would have scared the most pitiless murderers. The story of Winterreise is about a man that has to leave the house of his fiancée -- for an unknown reason (the pre-concert speaker mentioned something about her getting married to a rich man...) -- and shouts out his anger and sadness as he wanders across wintry landscapes. He's going through a succession of phases from deep despair to vain attempts at cheering up, from a sparkle of hope to impatience for death. His journey finally leads him to a graveyard, but he's pissed off not to find an unoccupied grave and keeps on walking against the snow storm in an outburst of nihilist courage :

Lustig in die Welt hinein
Gegen Wind und Wetter !
Will kein Gott auf Erden sein,
Sind wir selber Götter !

The two last songs then appear as mysterious epilogues :

xxiii. Die Nebensonnen

Drei Sonnen sah ich am Himmel stehn,
Hab' lang' und fest sie angesehn ;
Und sie auch standen da so stier,
Als wollten sie nicht weg von mir.
Ach, meine Sonnen seid ihr nicht !
Schaut Andren doch in's Angesicht !
Ja, neulich hatt' ich auch wohl drei ;
Nun sind hinab die besten zwei.
Ging' nur die dritt' erst hinterdrein !
Im Dunkeln wird mir wohler sein.

xxiv. Der Leiermann

Drüben hinter'm Dorfe
Steht ein Leiermann
Und mit starren Fingern
Dreht er, was er kann.

Barfuss auf dem Eise
Wankt er hin und her ;
Und sein kleiner Teller
Bleibt ihm immer leer.

Keiner mag ihn hören,
Keiner sieht ihn an,
Und die Hunde knurren
Um den alten Mann.

Und er lässt es gehen
Alles, wie es will,
Dreht und seine Leier
Steht ihm nimmer still.

Wunderlicher Alter,
Soll ich mit dir gehn ?
Willst zu meinen Liedern
Deine Leier drehn ?


The picture shows a "Leier" ("vielle à roue" in French ; I remember my grandfather use to have one of those instruments that always fascinated me). In this last song, I understand it as a symbol of an implacable periodic cycle that transcends men's miserable finiteness. The organ-player looks weak and insane, an outcast, but it is the disguise of ultimate wisdom, whose concern is stretching beyond death.

The lover's misfortune should not be taken too literally but rather as an illustration of a more universal departure from a state of being where meaning was god-given (some sort of Garden of Eden) towards an absurd world depraved of unquestionable foundations (the speaker had presented Schubert as a predecessor of Nietzsche...). After having gone through all stages of despair, touching the bottom in the graveyard, he finds an unexpected solution : although life has lost the a priori meaning it use to have in more rudimentary periods, it is still possible (and necessary) to make sense of it by its representation in the arts [and sciences], and in particular music. The Leiermann is a symbol of the lover's creative drive.

The 24 songs properly form a cycle in the sense that they themselves are the response to the last question : "Willst zu meinen Liedern / Deine Leier drehn ?" By listening to them the empathic audience has participated in their transfiguration by acknowledging and validating their representational power.

Baroque Bach

Only once in his lifetime did Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) pose for a painter but it is known that, being a busy man, he actually left the workshop before the end of the session! So even though Haussmann's painting (1748, right) is the best we have, it remains very unreliable. This could have been the end of Bach's iconography, but it is not. In 1895 Bach's body was exhumed, and a sculpture made from his skull (below; recently, a Scottish anthropologist made a computer-modeled reproduction of Bach's bust, shown on the right below).

Imagine that: you come out of your mother's womb, you do your thing, you die. So far so good. But 145 years after your burial, someone removes your body from your grave in Leipzig to look at the shape of your skull and try to figure out what you might have looked like during your time! You'd agree that would be surprising.


But in fact, in the case of Bach, there was a catch: when I said he did his thing, that would be an euphemism to say that was an euphemism. After his death, even though he never thought his music would survive him, but rather that other composers will simply replace it by their own compositions, he came to be considered as the greatest composer that ever lived by such people as Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Debussy, etc.

Bach's musical involvement was absolutely permanent. Jack Gibbons (the pianist-lecturer of that evening) used the -- somewhat dubious -- image that if you were to copy every note he's ever written, you wouldn't achieve it in your lifetime ("Think about it for a minute," he added with humour). Bach must have been mostly writing in one throw, without any correction. Add to this his numerous administrative duties (he even had to teach Latin during his last position in Leipzig, where he was taken only as a third choice!), his immense family of twenty or so children, and you have the picture of an extremely productive composer sleeping barely a couple of hours every night.

Bach's family was so musical that they had it in their blood: a usual Sunday afternoon leisure was to improvise fugues on popular themes, an very technical exercise! (The last of the Goldberg Variations is an illustration of these "games.") The word "Bach" was practically a synonym for "Musiker" (By the way, the equivalence in England was the Gibbons family -- and Jack Gibbons to add that it is not known if there are any living descendants nowadays... (I can think of Beth Gibbons at least.))

I've admired the effects of such a pure dedication to music in a documentary about Ravi Shankar. I had been struck by the fact that most (if not all?) of his children decided to become musicians (his daughter Anoushka Shankar who plays the sitar too, and also of course Norah Jones). The intensity of his passion was powerful enough to diffuse to his children. The documentary had a magical scene where he gives a concert with Anoushka and during his solo you can see her face illuminating by delight and surprise.

[There I saw the beauty of the (rather old-fashioned) tradition of a family business: the son of the baker become a baker and so on. It is sad if this continuation is due to some kind of inertia, but it can also be due to a sincere love of work, a proudness and joy of creation, which acts as a positive force (rather than a negative constraint) on successive generations... The example of Ravi Shankar is less ambiguous here, as his own parents were not musicians, so that the choice of becoming musician was less automatic than in Bach's family.]

Bach's first wife died as he was on a trip, and he found her buried when he came back. He was however to find love again in Anna Magdalena, which was 17 years younger than him. They had a very joyful marriage, as JG illustrated by playing one of the French Suites, if I remember correctly. He said Anna was also an accomplished musician (which is a bit in contradiction with the technical ease of the Notebüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach...). Their passion for music was so fusional that Anna ended up having the same handwriting than her husband, for the greatest confusion of modern musicologists.

The second part of the lecture-concert was devoted to the famous Goldberg Variations (1741). Bach composed them by the request of a Russian Ambassador, Count Kaiserling, who wanted to be distracted during his long nights of insomnia. Goldberg was the name of the Count's personal musician (his Hi-Fi set in some sense), who must have damned Bach every time he had to get up in the middle of the night to play those amazingly hard variations. It is fascinating to imagine the sleepless Count meditating on the infinite depths of the Variations in the darkness of his luxurious room...

Bach died of the sequels of disastrous eye surgery operations. As his blindness was keeping him away from his work, he decided to precipitate a second operation very shortly after the failure of the first. Several months later, he suddenly recovered his full vision for a few hours and then died.

Unbelievable Franz Liszt

So I went to one of the conferences-concerts given by the pianist Jack Gibbons the other day, and that one was about Franz Liszt (1811-1886). He started by saying that if someone was ever to make a movie about Liszt's life, and keep to the facts with the highest strictness, then he would indefectibly be accused of exaggeration. Nice image - though not so original of course (unlike the 1841 daguerreotype above).

But first a word on the pianist-lecturer. Born in 1962, Gibbons apparently started to play piano at 10 but already at the age of 15 he was giving his first professional performance. And in fact it was in that very same Holywell Music Room ("the first purpose-built concert hall in the world" (1748)), with that very same Sonata in B minor by Liszt, on which he ended that night! It was very touching to see this (I wouldn't say old, let's say mature) pianist come back to the exact same circumstances in which everything began for him (even more so by taking into account that in 2001 he almost died in a car accident). He recorded many CDs and is a world-authority on Gershwin.

So that night he played about ten pieces by Liszt and told stories about his life between them. Here is what I recall:

Liszt, just like Mozart before him, was a child prodigy, and him tour the entire world with his father, amassing a huge fortune that was to ensure his wealth until the end of his life. He had such a magnetic personality that people treated him as a rock star, collecting his cigar stubs and glasses he'd drunk in. Beethoven himself was so impressed by his playing that he came on stage to kiss him - although by the time he was already profoundly deaf... Liszt was the first pianist to give concerts alone, without any other musicians, and the word piano "recitals" was coined after his kind of performances. His concerts were actually quite free, as he often stopped his playing to start chatting with members of the audience for a while. He also had a number of tricks that he loved to play on the audience: for instance he would engage in an impossibly fast Tarantella, which, at the precise instant where he couldn't possibly finish what he had started, he would suddenly interrupt to rescue a lady in the first row (his accomplice) that had fainted (the day the lady forgot to faint at his signal, he had no other option than to faint himself...).

During his youth (and after) he was perpetually falling in love with ladies and religions, that he feverishly worshiped one after the other. He was both deeply romantic and religious.
He was to find his soul mate at 36 in the person of the immensely rich Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein (any connection to Ludwig?). She persuaded him to dedicate himself to composition, and he entered the second phase of his life, much darker and tempered by doubts. In spite of all their efforts, Rome would not allow Carolyne's divorce, which would eventually lead her into madness: she locked herself into a cell, smoked obsessively, and produced a 24-volumes critics of the catholic church...

Liszt's compositions did not receive a warm welcome; he was eclipsed by the genius of his son-in-law Richard Wagner. He considered it a duty to teach everything he learned about piano, and never charged any of his numerous students. He was so generous that he gave money to his friends until he consumed his entire fortune. He died ruined, alone and insecure.

Among the most admirable pieces played by Gibbons that night were Funérailles, written a few days after Chopin's death in 1849, which begins by an astonishing repetitive sound of funeral bell; Nuages Gris, a premonition of Debussy's impressionism; and of course the most famous Sonata in B minor, basically constructed around four small musical ideas.
Liszt is also well-known for having transposed a lot of other composers pieces, and for his first bis Gibbons chose a transcription of Schumann (the second bis was his own composition, apparently to make sure that it would be the last...).

I was hoping that he would also play the transcription of Bach's Prelude BWV 543, that Yvonne Lefèbure played so gorgeously well, but that didn't happen. Maybe at Gibbons' next conference-concert on Bach this Wednesday!