COLUMN ONE

Thought concert

Stream-of-consciousness, the literary critics call it, referring to a style of writing that wanders around the way the mind will at times. At random. The way it did during a chamber-music concert at the Clinton Library the other evening. Thoughts and images changed as the chords did. “Brahms the Romantic,” the program said, but it began with Mozart. Specifically, his String Quintet No. 3 in C Major. Big step-giant step-up. Not that Brahms is in any way ordinary, but Mozart is … Mozart! To compare the two would be like comparing greatness to . . . Perfection.

After a day of rush, rush, rush, this is the sound of rush, too, but a whole different order of rush. The four movements go from allegro back to allegro, from lively to lively.

Chatter, chatter, chatter. But it’s divine chatter. The way the gods atop Olympus might gossip of an evening.

With a Herr Mozart taking notes, transforming their chit-chat into . . .

Perfection. It can happen when the transcriber is so much greater than what he’s transcribing.

On second thought, this isn’t a whole different, higher order of rush that’s being conveyed. It’s not rush at all. It is simplicity itself once Mozart has arranged it, each note falling into place in the perfect mosaic, all of a piece. Like the stars in their places. And not just the notes fall into inevitable place, but the silences between the notes, too. Like the spaces between words on an ancient scroll of Scripture, each different, each left there vacant yet pregnant, by a different. anonymous scribe, each . . . holy.

If you think I exaggerate, how could anyone exaggerate Mozart’s genius? You might as well argue about the exact width of an angel’s wingspan. “These wings go from world to world, from this world to the world to come!” “No, they go from one eternity to another, and have nothing to do with mere time.”

I refuse to believe that one W.A.

Mozart was a mortal, not when he wrote music as angelic as this.

And angels will appear at the most unlikely times, and in the most unlikely places, following not our will and certainly not their own, for they have none, but Someone Else’s.

One of them shows up out of nowhere to tell Joseph where his brothers went (“And a certain man found him . . .”) before disappearing like any other unidentified passerby.

Another comes rattling along U.S. 65 in an old pickup truck just as your old junker gives up the ghost-and gets it going again. Or changes a tire for you in the middle of a driving rainstorm.

The way one did for me on Little Rock’s Cantrell Road a while back.

And still another angelic creature must have written this string quintet in C major before dying at an early age and being buried without great ceremony in a graveyard in Prague, a city still full of mystery, legend and music. Or is there much difference between all those? Unpredictable, angels. There’s no telling when or where they’ll show.

Just ask anyone who’s ever chanced on an angel, though it’s hard to believe chance had anything to do with it. That would require a real leap of faith. Tonight this stream of-musicness continues in step with Mozart’s notes and the pauses between them. And then he is gone, like any other angel.

At the end of the last allegro, and the moment of stunned silence that follows the performance of any great piece of music, applause rocks the hall and all awaken. As if from a trance. Or is the now resumed rush of the mundane the trance, and was it the music that was the Reality?

Can only an hour-or even less-have passed since the first lovely, anticipatory note, and not a whole, elaborate age?

Outside the hall, in the night that by now has enveloped the city, visible through the great clear windows of the Clinton Library, the cars and trucks, their headlights bright now, cross the river on the interstate, interspaced as evenly as the notes on a page of music, as the dots in an ellipsis . . . as jetliners coming into O’Hare one after the other-as if they were on a paved road. Then we turn to another image, another thought, another piece of music. And he is gone as suddenly as he came.

———

Some works of perfection issue an imperative, as in Rilke’s concluding line on seeing an archaic bust of Adonis: “You must change your life.” But other works are so perfect we are lost in their contemplation, as when looking into the night sky and seeing, really seeing, it. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge . . . .

———

The next number on the program is by a Japanese composer named Takemitsu. It is called Rain Tree and is very . . . Japanese, or at least the opening is. It may not be music, or at least not Western music, but it intrigues, as an oriental version of John Cage might. Both are composers saved by their sense of humor. East is East, and West is West, but the twain do meet on occasion. The opening section intrigues, like Cage. It would be nice to hear it on chimes outside a kitchen window, or as a screen score for a Hitchcock movie if only you could hear it without having to watch the movie.

After a time the piece becomes more Western, more’s the pity. It loses a certain integrity. A certain wholeness. The ensemble playing it includes a vibraphone and couple of marimbas. East meets Lionel Hampton.

You see, or rather hear, the problem. It’s the whole multiculti problem in one musical composition. It can be solved, probably through patient and judicious assimilation, but not in this uneven way. Not by just squeezing different cultures together and trusting they’ll fit.

Successful combinations abound in man’s curious history.

See the Babylonians and Israelites, the Medes and the Persians, Anglo-Saxon-Norman English, or, perhaps more familiar in these latitudes, jazz and America. All of which are no longer composites but wholes.

Successful integrations are possible. They can be achieved, as in Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of Chinese and Japanese poems, which are more than translations. They’re re-creations of their own. Just as the King James Bible is not the Hebrew Scriptures but a miraculous visitation of its own. Tricky things, assimilation and integration, culture and acculturation. But they can be achieved. Even if the obstacles are formidable. For the world contains, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase and title, both Culture and Anarchy.

———

Then comes the Brahms, as advertised. If only it hadn’t been preceded by Mozart, if only it had been allowed to stand on its own, or at least come first, its effect and affect might have been wholly different. And better. But this piece, his Clarinet Quintet in B minor, does impress, especially by its harmonies-or is the appropriate music-speak harmonics? Whatever the right word. The music doesn’t need words.

Who knew Brahms sang with such barbershop-quartet charm?

It’s as if the bearded old burgher had gone for one of his long walks in the country, or just ducked into the kitchen for a spot of tea with the help. It’s fine, but not served as dessert. Not even the great, not even a genius, should follow the angelic, the perfect. It’s not good showbiz. Or even good menu planning. The peace has been diluted, the whole divided.

We leave the Great Hall headed back to the surly bonds of earth to rush, rush, rush to nowhere. But for an everlasting moment, we were Elsewhere. It can happen in the company of an angel.

———

We are blessed to have performers such as tonight’s display their musicianship, which doesn’t get in the way of the music at all but brings it out. Performers like the Rockefeller Quartet’s Gregory Robson on violin and Daniel Cline on cello.

My old friend-well, old acquaintance-cellist Rafael León joins in on the Mozart. Years ago he was in on the creation of Pine Bluff’s fine symphony orchestra, too, and the extraordinary strings program in that town’s public schools. By now that program has produced more than its share of music scholarship winners at colleges and universities across the state and country.

Happily, Rafael León is still creating and re-creating. Audibly.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com

Perspective, Pages 81 on 10/06/2013

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