Marginalia, no.268

Each time I look at you I’m limp as a glove…

~ Johnny Burke (lyrics), ‘Like Someone in Love‘

Some love songs can only fail to inspire confidence.

“There is no god but God, and Bach is his prophet.”

Glenn Gould, 1981.

Marginalia, no.202

Keys yearn to mix with change.

~ Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

When you buy a ticket for the commuter train that runs up and down the San Francisco Peninsula, you get your change in dollar coins. Once a week on my lunch break I grab a handful and shove them into my pocket. They tinkle against my keys as I walk into the used bookshop downtown. Today I picked up a John McPhee book and read, on the first page, about the wandering poles of geologic history, and the drumskins of continental plates in perpetual basso profondo concussion. Big and small, all things conspire to make music.

Marginalia, no.161

I always feel like saying to music: ‘It isn’t true! You lie!’

~ Jules Renard, Journal

My seven-year-old son tells me: ‘Esther brought her violin to school and played some Bach, but she pronounced it “batch,” and it was so beautiful I wanted to cry.’ Who was this Esther, I asked, his girlfriend? ‘I don’t want to dance with her by light of the moon or anything,’ he said, ‘but if we got married I could listen to her play “batch” all the time.’  …I wonder if there isn’t an exception, after all, to Neil Young’s golden saying that ‘only love can break your heart.’

Marginalia, no.34

Life without music would be a mistake.

~ Nietzche, Twilight of the Idols

When I neglect for too long life’s so-called big questions –or, conversely, when I neglect to neglect them to the degree necessary for the healthy functioning of my mind- existence inevitably presents itself to me as sheer farce, a mortal joke.  Or else, at the very least, I collapse into a dull sort of epistemological pessimism. Then I remember that there is such a thing as music.  Music is the natural corrective for all extremes of idiocy and presumption.  It whispers into every ear: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”

Marginalia, no.6

You see, you are allowed to read the newspapers now.  I hope you will not attach too much importance to them.  They give you a picture of an ordinary world that does not exist.  You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

~ Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows

Thankfully, my own children are too young to read the papers with any understanding.  Of course, the indecipherability of something never discouraged anyone from believing in its authority.  With something similar in mind, Kurt Vonnegut wrote his own epitaph: “The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”

Raindrop

At about three minutes and fifteen seconds into Chopin’s “Raindrop” prelude, there is a musical phrase so evocative, so strangely transfixing.

The prelude opens with a pleasant melodic theme laid over repetitive mid-range notes that suggest (to me) the slow dripping of water through wide deciduous leaves, maple leaves perhaps.  It’s a sound you’ll never hear while the rain is actually falling (it’s too quiet not to be drowned out), but it slowly steps forward and lingers afterwards.  Then, about a minute and three-quarters into the piece, the clouds begin to heap themselves up slowly, ominous and black, until they are immediately overhead.  There is a brief, violent downpour.  The skies soften for just a moment and then begin to mass themselves for a second assault.  There is another ferocious burst. 

Then in the immediate sequel, a moment resembling nothing so much as the vanishingly brief convex that chases an ocean swell, there comes the marvelous phrase.  In the rest of the prelude there is nothing like it for texture or character.  There’s something arch and almost sinister in it, but majestic; vaguely threatening but stark and blameless as a bare mountain of creviced granite, sleek and steaming after a summer shower.  It’s the commentary of stone spires that drink in rainwater clawed from the ragged edges of clouds.

The phrase repeats itself once, but softer, and then resolves into a reprise of the opening melody measured out in the perseverating drips that fall between the leaves.