The most plain observations
the smallest and simplest
I walked past one of the many Prets next to Kings Cross station today and saw a man in a suit with the most pronounced frown I have ever seen. I instinctively tried to mimic the frown because I knew that I didn’t possess the control to pull my face to such an angle.
Truman Capote said that as a child his best writing was his plain observations. He said he enjoyed writing fiction but it wasn’t as good. I don’t know if this concept could be applied to music. I have a few contenders in my head for what could be ‘observational’ music. One angle is music that incorporates field recordings such as Gavin Bryars’ Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet or Steve Reich’s Different Trains. Both of which build music around a pre-recorded observation. Alternatively, minimalist music such as Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel draws attention to the smallest things. The rule for observational comedy is always be specific and Pärt is just that, it is purely observational of music rather than music that is observational of the world.
Charles Ive’s Central Park in the Dark (which creates a cacophony of sound intended to directly mimic the sound of ‘Central Park in the dark’) is quite heavy handedly representational but maybe falls short of being observational because it doesn’t comment on the thing it’s representing.
The trombonist and composer, John Kenny, told me that some music is about music and some music is about the world. Bach was music about music and Debussy was music about the world in the eyes of Kenny. Bach observes a set of intervals; Debussy looks at the sea.
Hunter S. Thompson would sit at his typewriter for hours copying up ‘The Great Gatsby’ in hopes of absorbing a bit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s genius. I was once advised to copy out all of Debussy’s La Mer but up a semitone. That alteration requires an understanding of the function of the harmony, you’d have to get all the double flats and sharps and such correct for it to be a worthwhile exercise. I don’t know if there is a literary equivalent of putting something up a semitone: a transformation that keeps the material relatively the same but requires the copier to fully understand it. Maybe that would be translating a text into another language although that seems a much larger transformation than just putting a score up a semitone.
I’ve been looking through large anthologies of victorian English concertina music in the British Library. These anthologies are special material which means you have to sit at the special desk and you are not allowed to take pictures of the scores. I have therefore embarked on some very slow plagiarism. It feels as if I’m absorbing something as I’m writing. I like the idea of spending hours and hours copying music, I’d enjoy life pre-printing press in a monastery maybe just copying scores.
I’m currently waiting to collect the score for Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. I’m going to write out the whole thing down a semi-tone. That’s my equivalent of The Great Gatsby. I first found the score for the fifth moment of the quartet when I was 17. At that age I was only interested in the fifth movement, the simplicity of the cello and piano seemed almost within reach. Looking at the score annoyed me because it looked so simple on the page, I could play the chords on the piano, I could sing the melody but the more I looked at it the further away the secret became. Now 10 years later the secret just gets further and further away the more I learn. But I don’t think it’s an entirely impossible secret to grasp.
Debussy’s Pellease Et Melisande is to Messiaen what the Quartet for the End of Time is to me. He carried around the score from the age of 11 and saw everything that he needed from music in it.
I was talking to my friend about never retiring. I reckon I’ve got at least another 60 years in me. It’s fun to wonder what I will come to understand with time and what I will never understand. Here’s a big list of things I predict that I will never understand:
Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht
Species Counterpoint
Where we came from
What we’re doing
The fifth movement of the Quartet for the End of Time (so as to imply I might understand the other movements)
How to structure and pace something across 4 or 5 hours (like a massive opera)
What it’s like to really think that this is the end of time.