Tag Archives: Shostakovich

Qwertyman No. 72: Bullets to Ballads

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 18, 2023

MAYBE IT’S that time of year, when we get all wishful and start asking for things that will likely never come or never happen—like peace on earth and goodwill to men—but it’s the wishing that keeps us human.

Two weekends ago, I had the extraordinary privilege of spending Saturday night and then Sunday morning listening to two different concerts. The first, at Manila Pianos in Magallanes, featured tenor Arthur Espiritu and soprano Stefanie Quintin Avila in a program that brought the audience to its feet and singing along at the end of many encores.

After that wonderful performance, I messaged my deepest thanks to concert producers Pablo Tariman and Joseph Uy, noting that they made “magical interludes like this possible in these stress-filled times. If only all those bombs and bullets in Ukraine and Gaza were music. Fire symphonies, concertos, fugues, and cantatas across the border!”

The next morning, we drove out to Batangas City for another friend’s birthday celebration, which was heralded by a sparkling mini-concert with soprano Rachelle Gerodias and tenor Jonathan Abdon. At lunch that followed, I sat down at a table with a renowned journalist, a composer-performer, and a senator, and we were all breathless with joy at the music we had just experienced. It was the composer who put it best: “How can anyone argue with that?”

Indeed, in a world and at a time prone to argument and conflict, where even the most innocuous remark can ignite scorching disputation, the enjoyment of music seems to serve as a universal balm, a hushing power that creates a pause just long enough for us to remember our better selves—taming fangs, retracting claws, infusing tenderness into the coarsest of sensibilities. As William Congreve put it more than three hundred years ago, “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” (not “beast” as it’s often misquoted, although it could apply just as well).

As I’ve noted elsewhere, whenever I think of music as a discipline, what comes to mind is Leonard Bernstein’s description of it as “the only art incapable of malice.” That may or may not be true—music in specific historical contexts such as Nazi Germany and our own martial law has certainly been made to serve the purposes of despotism. 

I recall that in 1980, in particularly disturbing example of music perverted for fascist pleasure, a film titled “Playing for Time” (written by Arthur Miller as an adaptation of the French Jewish singer-pianist Fiana Fenelon’s autobiography The Musicians of Auschwitz) showed how concentration-camp musicians were forced to play to entertain their jailers as well as to stay alive. It still chills me to the bone, as a prisoner under martial law, to hear the New Society anthem “May Bagong Silang” being played anew over the radio as though the past half century never happened.

Still, most people will surely agree that music has wielded a beneficent influence on human life and society, in ways that appeal directly to the heart and mind. 

In my own lectures, whenever I need to reach for metaphorical illustrations of the power of art to compel the human spirit, I turn to music. I advert to composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Symphony No. 6 in C Major, which came to be known as the “Leningrad Symphony,” was premiered during the siege of Leningrad by the Germans in July 1942, and became a kind of anthem of Soviet resistance, and to the story of the Berlin Philharmonic persisting in recording Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung despite the Allied forces knocking on Berlin’s gates in April 1945 (supposedly you can hear artillery in the background of that recording). 

It may be too romantic to hope that music will waft over the bunkers in Ukraine and Gaza this Christmas season and still the gunfire, however briefly. We’ve all seen that movie and know how it ends, with a renewed barrage of rockets—ordered by stiff-backed men far away from the trenches—drowning out the carols.

But there are other battles being waged much closer to us this season where a little night music might help quell the temptation to savage one another—even across the dinner table. 

I can imagine how many Christmas parties will settle down to drinks and coffee and devolve into a discussion of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and explode quickly into partisan debate over proportionality, Biblical prophecy, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Vietnam, Zionism, British colonialism, Arab nationalism, Munich, Entebbe, Eichmann, George Soros, anti-Semitism, Netanyahu, 9/11, and the Yom Kippur War (have I missed anything?). Half the world away from the frontlines, I haven’t seen an issue divide Filipinos—at least those who keep abreast of the news—so sharply as this one, which has become a kind of litmus test of one’s faith or humanity.

Much of that acrimony has, of course, been enabled by the Internet and the ease it provides for instant (often unthought) response—a habit we’ve ported over, perhaps unconsciously, into our daily lives.

Against this backdrop, music is a call to order, a shaping of emotions across a roomful of rampant urges, longings, and resentments. We can choose but not control it; the best response to music is one of sublime submission, from which experience we emerge refreshed and ready to be human again. 

A meaningful and peaceful Christmas to us all!

(Image from economist.com)

Penman No. 403: Bad Times, Good Art?

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Penman for Monday, December 21, 2020

IN MY last column, I wrote about how art and literature respond to times of great distress, like plagues and wars. My spoilsport proposition was that—against most expectations—crisis and chaos are not the best environments for great art, not just because the artists are too busy just trying to survive, but because it takes time, distance, and reflection to integrate, to re-order, the experience of falling apart.

Citing previous examples like Albert Camus’ The Plague and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, I said that this current pandemic will surely be the stuff of both bestsellers and ponderous novels, but the best writing about it will very likely not emerge for many more years, if not decades, to come.

If you need more proof, consider this: the best war stories were written long after the wars they dealt with. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, about the War of 1812, came out as a book in 1869. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, about the Civil War, was published in 1895; World War I’s All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque in 1929; Kurt Vonnegut’s World War II-era Slaughterhouse Five in 1969; and Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam-era The Things They Carried in 1990.

That’s not to say that artists don’t or shouldn’t immediately respond to the tumult swirling around them. Something traumatic like plague and war can be both material for, and instigator of, great art.

The one outstanding example that comes to mind is Picasso’s Guernica, made in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The story goes that Picasso was in Paris working on another commission when he heard about Franco’s bombing of the town of Guernica in April that year, whereupon he shifted his attention to producing the now-iconic antiwar painting, which he finished in five weeks. 

Another oft-quoted story is that of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Symphony No. 6 in C Major, which came to be known as the “Leningrad Symphony,” was premiered in Russia during the siege of Leningrad by the Germans in July 1942, and became a kind of anthem of Soviet resistance. In the more cinematic retellings of this episode, it is said that the Germans realized they would lose the battle when they heard the symphony being played by a ragtag band of Russian musicians on the radio.

On the German side, there’s the story of the Berlin Philharmonic persisting in recording Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung despite the Allied forces knocking on Berlin’s gates in April 1945.

These examples, with their heroic if not tragic overtones, seem to suggest that in periods of great disorder and distress approaching chaos, artists of all kinds rise to the occasion and summon up their finest talents in the service of—and here one is tempted to say “humanity,” but I am more inclined to say “order,” which is inherent in every artist. The desire for justice, for example, is a form of outrage over the disturbance of some natural equilibrium, a sense of fairness, and bringing music into the battlefield is a willful imposition of structure and narrative into the cacophony of war. These creative outbursts in the middle of the fray are also affirmations of one’s higher consciousness, a civilized rejection of the easier option to submit to brutishness.

This reminds me of Umberto Eco’s insightful description of how art works as “a minimum of order compatible with a maximum of chaos.” The artist’s impulse is to bring method into the madness, to see pattern and narrative in the mess of things. 

Sometimes art has responded to war in the most striking ways. There was a very close relationship between Cubism and the development of military camouflage in the aftermath of World War I, with Cubism providing the inspiration for the abstraction of natural forms, culminating in the so-called “Dazzle” ships whose wild geometric designs, by the marine artist Norman Wilkinson, were meant less to hide ships than to confuse U-boat rangefinders.

But for all these illustrations of disorder as the handmaiden of great art, I suspect that they are exceptions, and that the more commonplace product is that enemy of good art, cliché. 

Dystopic times invite posterization, where subjects can either be romanticized or demonized. There’s that overwhelming urge to settle for the literal or cartoonish depiction of the obvious, which would be hardship and pain, violence and sorrow, over and over again. I’ve often pointed out to my writing students—long before the pandemic—that the easiest thing to write is a lament about how terrible and unfair life is, and how awful one feels. Walk into any serious art gallery (real or virtual) and you’ll see that most works by young artists are predominantly dark and gloomy.

I’m not suggesting that we get all Pollyanish and paint an artificially happy world; but I do expect great art to be transcendent and complex, to move beyond the immediate and the literal and to remind us of the need for beauty and hope amid the suffering. Michelangelo did that with the Pieta, which is not only about a son’s passing but a mother’s deathless love. 

Bad times and bad things may even prefigure or provoke some inner good, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”