Apr '03 [Home] Poetry Feature: Music Preface by Guest Editor, Mark Nickels B Schubert's Silent Rival ~ Baruch November | The Piano String ~ Terence Purtell | Ancestral Refrain ~ Rebecca Seiferle | Bill Evans ~ Daniel Shapiro | Bartók ~ Rob Wright | Lines Not Written To Handel ~ Nomad Song ~ Eric Yost | Mysterious Mountain: Hovhaness ~ Passacaglia, 3rd Movement, Shostakovich, 1st Violin Concerto ~ Michael T. Young (The Concert, Jan Hermansz Biljert) A That Spirit ~ Dad, You Fucker ~ Thomas Bauer | Overture ~ Lorna Knowles Blake | Seven Sounds From the Book of Wisdom ~ Robert Klein Engler | forget not me ~ Brenda Gannam | dans l'ensemble ~ Jack Greene | Jewel Case of Sorrowful Songs ~ Thomas Kerr | The Last Snowstorm ~ Jim McCurry | The Comforter ~ J. Morris | Side 4: Couperin, l'Apothéose de Lully ~ Side 7: Prokoviev, Violin Sonatas no. 1 and 2 ~ Mark Nickels (Saint Cecilia at her Organ, Max Ernst) Contributor Notes |
. | . | . | ~ . ~ Schubert's Silent Rival Baruch November Not after numerous lifetimes will I see why you sleep with Schubert playing, while I breathe and fumble for you nightly without a virtuoso to cull sobs out of hollowed wood for you. Strung tauter than any violin Without you, I press the highest octave of your missing chords, nowhere firm to rest my chin. ~ . ~ The Piano String Terence Purtell do you know what it's like to be a piano string stretched to its limit feeling the hammer blows every day taut metal waiting to but not able to cannot just dying to break would make it so much easier just snap all done there you have it the performer performing on you but you are metal a tool machine computer built for efficiency and your fuel or whatever the hell keeps the strings strong is exhausted now and one hammer could be anything any random miniscule hammer and the entire world's eyes upon you hear the POP! and murmurs through the audience you've already lost some function because it was so, so much easier to not have to deal with the tightness, irritated a certain threshold rusting coils cried overload midway through a standard-sounding pitch the sound breaks into static the uproar the maestro's rage suppressed but none of them can talk to you because you are not you don't hear it doesn't reach you have disconnected, not like you would have heard a thing when connected for you were metal all along and any criticisms hit that string the hammers hit and they bounced right off and it couldn't get through but it can't get through anyway either you repel and stop caring or BWONG! there goes the freakin' concerto because no one understands how the fuck to care for a piano string assumed to do its job 24-7 and at an odd time recoiling FWAP! unloosing a riot in the black-tied cummerbunded concert hall so that amidst the brawl they forget you're the most obvious cause you the piano string not doing your job and instead look to blame some no-name piano tuner who tweaked your peg a bit too far because you are only a mechanism not any being or conscience with that capability of taking blame that inhumanity may seem bad that quality exempt from moral responsibility but it was really enough to be stretched that far and way too easy to snap too easy to not see it coming and not to ever consider to not entertain the possibility because you are too in love with and know your function too well but (right from the start, you heard fate and its death knell) it would not be too late even if you endure the piercing agony when that string pops you got about 175 disintegrations to go yet teeth clenched all the way Woman at a Virginal, Gabriel Leiden Metsu (1629-67), Amsterdam ~ . ~ Ancestral Refrain Rebecca Seiferle I hate the sound of the bagpipes. Each morning as we go from lecture hall to classroom, dozens of children, bussed in to practice for a week, march up and down, pumping their arms and elbows like flightless birds trying to take flight, changing their individual breaths into a chorus of keening, dirges mourning, the piercing of Scottish war songs. Yet, the woman who turns to me this morning is rapturous at being Scot. "It's so serene, that lilting refrain, it reminds me of my heritage," her face tilts like that white island catching the breaking sun. "It's Gary Owen," I choke out, "the damned song Custer played before each 'battle.'" Such élan swinging into the waking hours, the bayonets flashing along the banks of the Little Washita, though by then the music was silent, slicing into the tents of the sleeping Cheyenne. The fighting itself lasted only a few minutes, though it took hours to finish off the warriors hiding in the brush, then to slaughter all the horses, for the army first tried to cut their throats, but the animals were too afraid of the smell of the white men, so the cavalry called for more ammunition—it took 800 rounds to kill all the horses—and Custer's final tally listed 103 fighting men killed. In truth, only 11 could be so classified the other 92 were women, children, and old men. We're both startled by my vehemence; her Scottish fingers twitch in her plaid scarf, as if trying to unravel that loose thread of undisclosed genealogy. Still she pleads, "I didn't know, it sounds so sweet," and "it's the voice of my ancestors." Of course, she's right, it is the voice of our ancestors— all war cries, in any language, the children rehearsing, trying to get just right, each note in a song of slaughter. (The 2002 winner of the Western States Award, Rebecca Seiferle edits The Drunken Boat.She lives in northern New Mexico.) ~ . ~ Bill Evans Daniel Shapiro Someone called his existence The longest suicide in history. Death grants an extension to those Who coax beauty out of black and white. In his later years, he wore a beard, Hiding disfigured, cracked lines, A far cry from the fluid ones That flowed through his fingertips. The photo showed him with head down, Surging from block chords to arpeggio. He heard bassist and drummer in his soul, Still swollen, but almost all he had left. He leaned on triplets in the end So he wouldn't fall from the bench. Deaths come in threes, after all, And he had to wait for Nos. 1 and 2. ~ . ~ Bartók Rob Wright Bartók not only brought back songs from the Ruthenian hills, the sea of Marmara, and a dozen places, whose names are only now remembered because of him, but the tones of flat-pitched chanters, drilled with hand-made bits, and blunted fingers more accustomed to the rhythms of knobbled wheels than Viennese dances. And the way a player's fingers slow, stiffened with age, autumnal cold, knuckles swollen stiff from digging; drunken, modal fingerings on fiddle boards which, after all, lived in the same daub and wattle, and suffered as men and women suffer: birthed, shriven, dragooned to war, black harvests, senility. And the last flicker of a soul in a bear's eyes, moving timorously to the bitter humor of shrove-tide yokels, armed with birch goads. The smell of fieldaw burned wet, uncurried horses, rotted teeth, plum brandy. And the seignorial respect given, however reluctantly, to an indifferent, bootless deity who can only be teased from seasonal tantrums, and petty grievances with widows keening to counting dances. The Rustic Concert, Adriaen van Ostade (1610 -1685, Haarlem) ~ . ~ Lines Not Written To Handel Eric Yost Shut up, says the door to the room. Listen to what music has done to poems: burbling spheres, effete lyres, dead guitars, that interminable loudmouth nightingale, a wartime jukebox in the midtown dive, elegant rag, diamond stylus of the dead. Better to have engraved shotguns, looms, grapes bursting against the virgin's palette. If a chainsaw fights an obbligato on greenwood, fire it up anyway. I cannot write to music, but always find a song in noise. ~ . Nomad Song Eric Yost We have learned a way of singing In the golden early evening Crossing orange sands and flowers Over mountain shaded forests On bright and rolling oceans Walking city streets at night: To find what is not dying In mountain, sea, or city To treat it like a brother, Like a sister, like a child, To leave what's in us dying As a song to what sustains us As a memory of our living As a pledge of our attention To the travel still before us In the music that surrounds us Kept in balance out of time. Though nothing sung can join us To the past that grows behind us We have loved what cannot leave us We have learned to find our home. We have learned a way of singing In the golden early evening Crossing orange sands and flowers Over mountain shaded forests On the bright and rolling ocean Walking city streets at night. ~ . Mysterious Mountain: Hovhaness Michael T. Young This is not a mountain but the sound of one, its slope arcing the same curve as closed eyes, the climb of someone sleepwalking up its side, or listening to an orchestra and knowing the bass strings are rooted in their wood and the trees they came from vibrate lifting each passage to its proper altitude. But whatever the range, however high the violins go, and though a movement might peak and the score might indicate a rest, there is no plateau, there is no summit, there is no view, for the mountain has more in common with water than earth. It passes like a wave, settles in the ear like surf, rising in the listener, a memory of elsewhere that he wakes to everywhere he goes. ~ . Passacaglia, 3rd Movement, Shostakovich 1st Violin Concerto Michael Young This river slows and trembles, a violin string vibrating between the banks of a wartime town. It dashes its high notes against a few rocks, and further on, tosses an alluvial fan of sand and dirt, artifacts and relics flung ashore, a spindrift lifted into an orchestra of singed elms. How it looses itself in its losses, the evaporation of its passing, its current throwing faint light back into the smoldering. But nothing is forgotten, only attenuated in the drifting dilutions of history, small drops that wet the branches and remaining leaves. There, in the green reticulations, the bark's crevices, it is a thought, it is all that's remembered and is enough for a hawk to feed on, for men leaving their ruins to emerge on shore and see it take to flight above the smoking tree-line. A |