By Stuart Mitchner

You can see it isn’t easy to get on with me. But don’t lose heart because of that.

—Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

Harvey Sachs begins and ends Schoenberg: Why He Matters (Liveright 2023) with those words from an August 30, 1923 letter the composer sent to “a new acquaintance.” The statement’s simplicity is reflected in the way Sachs demonstrates why an artist as notoriously difficult as Schoenberg is worth “getting on with.”

The “difficulty” is addressed in Schoenberg’s Wikipedia page under the heading “Twelve-tone and tonal works,” which begins by noting that he once compared his discovery of a new compositional method to Albert Einstein’s discoveries in physics. The language from Ethan Haimo’s 1990 book Schoenberg’s Serial Odyssey: The Evolution of his Twelve-Tone Method, 1914–1928 is nothing if not daunting, difficult, and discouraging (try getting on with “hexachordal inversional combinatoriality” or “isomorphic partitioning”), especially compared to the composer’s own simply, vividly worded “painting without architecture … an ever-changing, unbroken succession of colors, rhythms and moods.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song….

—Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

It’s broad daylight, I’m driving in rush hour traffic, and my eyes are tearing up because of a song called “Sleeping” from the Band’s third album, Stage Fright (1970). In his liner notes, Rob Bowman calls it “a gorgeous ballad” that Richard Manuel co-wrote with Robbie Robertson. But “gorgeous” doesn’t do it justice, nor does PopShifter’s Paul Casey when he calls it a “desperately sad song,” Manuel’s goodbye to the Band “and Robbie’s goodbye to his friend,” who died in Florida 16 years later by his own hand. Casey finds it “hard to separate Richard’s bad end from the songs he worked on,” and this one “was the end of the line, and addresses the oncoming void openly.”

That dark reading misses the emotional and poetical magnitude of the song. My excuse for turning to Walt Whitman at this point is that while reading Leaves of Grass and listening to Stage Fright late the other night, I sensed that Walt must have had “Sleeping” in mind when writing section 26 from Song of Myself, with its reference to the violoncello as “the young man’s heart’s complaint” and to the way the “key’d cornet … shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast” while the orchestra “wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possessed them.”

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By Stuart Mitchner

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book…

—Edgar Allan Poe, from “Berenice”

I love Poe. He’s always there, the shadowy Kilroy of American literature. Last week my attention was “riveted” by the chapter subheaded “Berenice the Barefoot Queen: Revolution” in Jerusalem: The Biography (Knopf 2011). Holding Simon Sebag Montefiore’s 650-page historical epic open in both hands like a gigantic hymnal, I read the first two sentences of the chapter on the Death of Jerusalem AD 66-70, in which barefoot Berenice walked “the same route Jesus would have taken from Herod Antipas back to Pilate thirty years earlier. The beautiful Berenice — daughter and sister of kings and twice a queen — was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to thank God for her recovery from an illness, fasting for thirty days and shaving her head.” In the next chapter, she’s become the “Jewish Cleopatra,” of whom it was said that Titus “had a general murdered for flirting with her.”

According to an online National Library of Israel article titled “The Queen Who Loved the Destroyer of the Second Temple,” Berenice’s pilgrimage had a nobler goal, which was to plead with Florus, the procurator of Judea, for “the lives of the city’s residents.” The article about “a Jewish woman, a queen” whose “dramatic life story might resemble something out of Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon” is accompanied by Queen Berenice, a painting by Charles Landelle (1821-1908). more

By Stuart Mitchner

After we recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” and “Across the Great Divide,” I felt we were making some kind of magic.

—Robbie Robertson (1943-2023), from Testimony

In a 1995 interview, the Band’s lead guitarist and songwriter Jaime “Robbie” Robertson, who died August 9, said that he wanted to write music “that felt like it could’ve been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday — that had this lost-in-time quality.”

Halfway through his memoir Testimony (Crown Archetype 2016), Robertson refers to his interest in writing lyrics about the Civil War “from a southern family’s point of view” — “there was a chord progression and melody rumbling through my head, but I didn’t know what the song was about.” When he played the sequence for the Band’s only American member, drummer and singer Levon Helm, the Arkansas native “liked the way it stopped and started, free of tempo.”     

After a visit to the local library to do “a little research on the Confederacy” (“They didn’t teach that stuff in Canadian schools”), Robertson “conjured up a story about Virgil Caine and his kin against this historical backdrop, and the song came to life,” the only catch being could he get away with it? Could you call this rock ‘n’ roll? more

By Stuart Mitchner

You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s…

—Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

Thoreau scholar William Howarth quotes those words in his June 5, 2017 American Scholar essay “Reading Thoreau at 200.” When I learned of his death two weeks ago, I felt as if I’d lost a friend, although we’d met only once in person, at a party in Princeton some 30 years ago. While I can’t remember what we actually discussed, we most likely talked about family names, politics, Princeton, writers and writing, and of course Thoreau. One thing I surely mentioned was my long ago visit to Thoreau’s grave in Concord, where the only word on his gravestone is HENRY, no secrets, no obscurities, just the name, as if he’d died on familiar terms with the planet. more

By Stuart Mitchner

Walt Whitman is America.

—Ezra Pound

I am as bad as the worst, but thank God I am as good as the best.

  —Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Walt Whitman was as good as the best when nursing and “being there” for wounded and dying soldiers from both sides of the Civil War. On May 31, 1865, his 46th birthday (today is his 204th), he sat beside a 21-year-old rebel soldier, “who lies a good deal of the time in a partial sleep, but with low muttering and groans — a sleep in which there is no rest. Powerful as he is, and so young, he will not be able to stand many more days of the strain and sapping heat of yesterday and to-day. His throat is in a bad way, tongue and lips parch’d. When I ask him how he feels, he is able just to articulate, ‘I feel pretty bad yet, old man,’ and looks at me with his great bright eyes.”

Whitman expands on what he means by “the worst” in Democratic Vistas (1871), where he finds “the problem of the future of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride, competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond example, brood already upon us….Flaunt it as we choose, athwart and over the roads of our progress, loom huge uncertainty, and dreadful, threatening gloom. It is useless to deny it. Democracy grows rankly up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all — brings worse and worse invaders …. We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and under-currents, vortices — all so dark, untried — and whither shall we turn?” more

By Stuart Mitchner

I was born in the spring of 1941. The Second World War was already raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it.

—Bob Dylan, from Chronicles

Bob Dylan will turn 82 today (Wednesday, May 24, 2023). This week I’ve been listening to tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who was born 100 years ago February 27, and singer songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, who died at 84 on May 1. Incidental music is provided by John Donne (1571/2-1631).

A Tortured Torch Song

Released a year after his death in 1990, Dexter Gordon’s Blue Note album Ballads features standards like “Willow Weep for Me” and “Darn That Dream.” The track that I’ve been fixated on, however, is the relatively little known “I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” a tortured torch song with lyrics by Sammy Cahn and music by Jule Styne. Composed for Glad To See You, a musical that folded before reaching Broadway, the tune dates from 1944, when America was three years into the war.

Although I’ve been listening to “Tears” on my copy of Gordon’s 1962 Blue Note album Go, the cover of Ballads is shown here because of Herman Leonard’s justly famous photograph, taken in 1948 when Dexter was 25. Much to my surprise, I found that this seemingly obscure song has been recorded by at least 25 artists, including Frank Sinatra, who sings the line “When I want rain, I get sunny weather” with almost operatic bravura. A big man with a big sound, Gordon produces a work of searing, cry-in-the-night intensity, blowing through the passages that singers have to deal with (“Dry little tear drops, my little tear drops hanging on a stream of dreams”). Still, it’s obvious that Gordon knows and feels the words. The power of his playing makes something strange and wonderful out of this piece of musical comedy make-believe. According to the Dexter Gordon chapter of Gary Giddins and Scott DeVaux’s invaluable book Jazz (W.W. Norton 2009), “Before performing a ballad, he would often quote the tune’s lyrics, as if inviting his listeners to take part in the deeper world of the song.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

The human face is a terrible place,
Choose your own examples….

—Keith Reid, from “Your Own Choice”

I picked up Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore at the Princeton Public Library after dropping off his novel Norwegian Wood. Around 30 pages into Kafka, the 15-year-old runaway who chooses to call himself Kafka Tamura talks about how he’s lived in libraries ever since he was a kid: “Think about it — a little kid who doesn’t want to go home doesn’t have many places he can go. Coffee shops and movie theaters are off-limits. That leaves only libraries, and they’re perfect — no entrance fee, nobody getting all hot and bothered if a kid comes in. You just sit down and read whatever you want.” Eventually  he moves on from children’s books to the general stacks. And when he needs a break from reading, he goes to the library collection of CDs which is how he got to know about “Duke Ellington, the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin.”

Sounds like a typically welcoming library, not unlike Princeton’s “community living room,” just as Tamura sounds like an interesting kid who might well grow up to be Haruki Murakami — except maybe for the name he’s chosen to go by when he’s on the road. The obvious assumption is that he’s named himself after the novelist Franz Kafka, which immediately puts a somewhat surreal spin on his typical-kidness. Only when the novel is moving toward one of its variety of endings does he tell Miss Saeki, the beautiful 50-something head librarian at the Komora Memorial Library in Takamatsu, that he gave himself the name because “kafka” means “crow” in Czech, and his alter ego is a boy named Crow. In fact, the title of the first chapter is “A Boy Named Crow.”

At this point, I should admit that my wife loved — I mean really loved — Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Until, that is, an ending she thinks he couldn’t find his way out of, trapped in the wonderland of his creation. In Patti Smith’s memoir M Train, she’s so enthralled by the book that she doesn’t wish to “exit its atmosphere.” Among features she mentions is the search for a lost cat, and as readers like my wife and I who both love M Train know, Smith ends up searching for her copy of Murakami’s book.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

I sat me down to write a simple story which maybe in the end became a song…

—Keith Reid (1946-2023), from “Pilgrim’s Progress”

The first “simple story” Keith Reid gave to the world took some strange and wonderful turns. According to Beyond the Pale, Procol Harum’s rich, many-leveled website, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and has inspired as many as a thousand known cover versions while becoming, says the BBC, “the most played song in the last 75 years in public places in the UK.”

And it all began when Keith Reid mailed the lyrics to singer/pianist Gary Brooker in an envelope addressed simply “Gary, 15 Fairfield Road, Eastwood, Essex” and postmarked South Lambeth. You can see the very envelope on the website, along with a photo of the Burmese Brown cat for whom the group was named.

Introduced by Scorsese

The song that has fascinated generations since it was released in the UK as a single on May 12, 1967 is not by any means Reid’s most impressive accomplishment. In his foreword to Henry Scott-Irvine’s group biography Procol Harum: The Ghosts Of A Whiter Shade of Pale (Omnibus Press 2012), Martin Scorsese points out that the band “drew from so many deep wells – classical music, 19th Century literature, Rhythm and Blues, seaman’s logs, concertist poetry,” each tune becoming “a cross-cultural whirligig, a road trip through the pop subconscious.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

I’m lost amidst a sea of wheat
where people speak but seldom meet…

—Keith Reid (1946-2023)

Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation (Knopf 2022) comes with a blurb from Patti Smith, who compares readers waiting for the novelist’s latest work to past generations lining up at record stores for new albums by the Beatles or Bob Dylan. As it happens, the Beatles are at the heart of Murakami’s chapter “On Originality” where he recalls a boyhood moment sitting in front of his “little transistor radio” listening to them for the first time (“Please Please Me”), thinking, “This is fantastic! I’ve never heard anything like this!”  It was as if “air of a kind I have never breathed before is pouring in, I feel a sense of profound well-being, a natural high. Liberated from the constraints of reality, it’s as if my feet have left the ground. This to me is how ‘originality’ should feel: pure and simple.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

Rachmaninoff is for teenagers. Brahms is for adults!” I overheard this brook-no-dissent proclamation at Princeton’s Cafe Vienna a year before the pandemic shut it down. The speaker was at a nearby table and judging by snatches of conversation coming from his vicinity, he had clout, he knew his stuff, and what he said seemed to make sense at the time.

So began, or begins, this piece on Johannes Brahms, who died on April 3, 1897, 136 years ago Monday, and who was born on May 7, 1833, which makes 2023 his 190th year. I say “began” for “begins” because the first thing I saw yesterday morning when I sat down to breakfast was this headline on the first page of the New York Times’ arts section: “At 150, Rachmaninoff Still Hasn’t Lost His Step.” The opening paragraphs of Joshua Barone’s article mention the composer’s immense popularity, although his reputation has been that of “a sentimentalist and nostalgic who was guilty, worst of all, of being an outlier in classical music’s embrace of modernism.”

So there it is: Rachmaninoff for teenagers, like Classical Music for Dummies. It’s true, one of the few classical records among my mid-teen Basies and Sinatras was Van Cliburn’s best-selling recording of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. A few years later when I was in college and by then in my late teens, a member in good standing of the Columbia Record Club, the only works by Brahms or any other composer I knew were symphonies and concertos. Solo piano pieces, string quartets and such were waiting for the middle-aged father who discovered Franz Schubert in a children’s book shared with his 2-year-old son. more