February/March 2014

Books Bought

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Gary Shteyngart, Super-Sad True Love Story

Andre Aciman, Harvard Square

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

JND Kelly, Golden Mouth: John Chrysostom—Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop

El Libro de Oración Commún

The Enlightened Kitchen: Recipes from Japanese Buddhist Temples

George Balanchine, 101 Stories of the Great Ballets

Books Read

Eusebius, The History of the Church

Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach

Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed Part III

Augustine, Enerrationes Super Psalmos Liber I

Numbers, Deuteronomy, Gospel of Mark

Music Bought

Beck, Morning Phase

Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks and Blond on Blond

Karen Jonas, Oklahoma Lottery

Performances Attended

Roseanne Cash (14 February, GWU Lisner Auditorium)

New York City Ballet (1 April: Balanchine, Jewels; 3 April: Mixed Reparatory)

Rebel (6 April, Dumbarton Oaks: Music by Telemann, Bach et al.)

In my beginning is my end.

Eliot's line from Four Quartets, that ode to a civilization and a piety that is no more (and maybe never was), kept recurring to me these past weeks, as the relentless winter brought us three major March snowstorms.  Not until April did it gradually, reluctantly yield to spring.  I spent many of the cold, dark nights immersed in music and books and pondering the overlap and interstices between the two.  Paul Elie's Reinventing Bach certainly straddles both worlds.  Modeled on a Bach fugue, it interweaves a music-first biography of Bach with similar treatments of the three greatest Bach performers of the 20^th century (Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, and Glenn Gould), thumbnail sketches of a dozen other Bach-centric musicians, musicological essays, and reflections on the impact of recording technology on the experience of music for performers and listeners alike.  The effect is mesmerizing, with flashes of brilliance on every page and several full-stop revelations per chapter.  A major insight, convincingly documented and argued, is that Bach was no conservative, but rather the most innovative artist of his age, transforming old structures and inventing new ones in his compositions, then relentlessly seeking the newest instruments and the best musicians to bring them to life.  Equally arresting is Elie's argument that the golden age of Bach is now, with myriad versions of his major works available on a variety of media and his music constantly performed throughout the world.  Turns out Bach's contemporaries, who heard his music seriatim in one-off performances at church and in concerts, scarcely knew him at all.

Roseanne Cash and her band made it to D.C. for their Valentine's Day concert, but it was a close thing.  They had played several dates in the U.K. the week before, and their return to the U.S. was delayed by a Nor'easter that dumped a foot of snow and scrambled flight schedules up and down the eastern seaboard.  Their fatigue and perhaps their stress were evident in a certain rote, pro forma quality to Roseanne's between-songs jokes and banter, and in the band's refusal to return for an encore despite thunderous applause.  But when they played, they were gold.  The first half of the show consisted of a song-by-song, in-sequence performance of her new album, The River and the Thread.  The band was spirited yet studio-tight, and Johnny's daughter was in rare form, looking fitter than she has in years and with her voice half an octave lower than three decades ago but, if anything, stronger and more confident, more supple to her will.  After intermission, she and the band ran through a few early hits, plus several songs from The List (including her father's Tennessee Flat Box Top), and a terrific version of Bobby Gentry's Ode to Bobby Joe.  The show closed with her great Seven Year Ache, sans the annoying early-80s synthesizer that marred the original recording.

Absent from the set list, however, were some of her strongest songs: the elegiac duet September When It Comes, recorded with her father just a few months before his death, and the great songs of love, lust, and loss (What We Really Want, Seventh Avenue, Sleeping in Paris et al.) from her mid-career albums Interiors and The Wheel.  September When It Comes is among the most heartbreaking songs ever recorded, and it is perhaps understandable that Roseanne chose to omit it from a Valentine's show.  But What We Really Want and Sleeping in Paris are as romantic as they come.  Why then the swerve?  I'm just speculating, of course, but I suspect biography played a role.  Interiors was written and recorded as Roseanne Cash's marriage to the singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell was beginning to fracture and fail; The Wheel documents its death throes, as well as the incept of her relationship with John Leventhal, now her husband and lead guitarist.  That period (late 80s/early 90s) was transitional for Cash in other ways, as she turned her back on Nashville, country music, and the South, moved to New York City, bought an apartment in Chelsea, and began recording new music for a new record company.  Over the past decade and a half, of course, she has walked much of this back, starting with The List, a recording of country standards suggested by her father.  And now comes The River and the Thread, an open-armed embrace of her family's southern heritage.  Yet, for all that the new album is clearly a labor of love, marked by impeccable craftsmanship and featuring some fine songs (Sunken Lands, Modern Blue), it seems to me to fall a little flat.  At times Cash tries to channel a southernness that she simply no longer possesses, if she ever did. (To invoke Eliot again, many of the songs lack an objective correlative, a state of affairs sufficient to account for the emotions she describes.) When the Master Calls the Role, a song that moved me to shivers on first listen, now seems to me the album's most serious misstep.  Here Cash was plainly trying to write an Appalachian story song, a tear-jerking ballad for the ages.  But her reach exceeds her grasp: she leans on shopworn clichés (a newlywed soldier heading off to war and certain death, leaving behind his heartbroken bride) as well as some forced, awkward rhymes (It's the love of one true-hearted lass/that made the boy a hero/But a rifle ball and a canon blast/cut him down to zero).  Its piety feels insincere, and the end is rushed, with the lyrics bounding ahead to lay claim to a pathos they haven't earned.  Like the album as a whole, the song strikes me as more aspirational than realized.  As we filed out of packed Lisner Auditorium into the frigid, flurry-filled night, it occurred to me that what was missing was Cash's trademark urgency, as well as the above-mentioned triad—love, lust, and loss—that made her mid-career work so great.  In their stead she has substituted nostalgia, which just won't do.  I was reminded of a scene from the film Trainspotting, in which two characters try in vain to identify a genuinely good rock n' roll record produced by a musician over 40.

”What about Bowie?  His new album isn't bad."

"Yeah, but it's not too bloody good either, is it?"  

This, in turn, led me back to Eliot.

                Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age

                To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.

First, the cold friction of expiring sense

Without enchantment, offering no promise

But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit

As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

Well.  That's certainly one way of looking at it.  On the other hand, in 1781 a hitherto obscure German professor quietly published his first book, at the age of 57.  The professor was Immanuel Kant; the book was The Critique of Pure Reason.

Thank God for hope, and spring.