schumann, beethoven, mingus, a spontaneous essay.

i was listening to the radio with kyote on a wednesday afternoon.

schumann was a fucking mess but when you hear the throaty clangor of his piano clashing against vivace strings like german tongues barking into a venetian night, when you hear his pianoforte syncopation lull then jar against melodic blackforest birdsongs, when the angst of his late compositions tear into something deeper than ears or mind to furiously dazzle, you realize his music was sincere and perfect. Languor and anarchy collide in schumann.

he died in an asylum in 1856 at 46 years of age and was still a fucking mess after a suicide attempt two years before. his ambition of becoming a concert pianist was promising as a student- schumann possessed equal proportions of talent, determination and technique- but the dream collapsed when his hand was worked by a machine of his own devising. The function of his invention was to increase the reach & strength of hands but it instead caused irreparable damage.

(there are other theories explaining the demise of his hand. One theory includes a botched surgery to separate ligaments. Another theory proposes faulty coordination of the hand to be an effect of mercury poisoning, mercury being a popular treatment of syphilis at the time. no one really knows but these theories all convey the slan of romantic conjecture unless, of course, you were schumann living through the raw experience, prior to the fauxfinish of a retelling, the ornamentation of myth, the gaudiness of an orator's language. . . the irony of perception and recitation and the mongering that occurs.)

schumann's a composer whose work I know more from his influences (schubert, beethoven) , his influencings (schoenberg, lizst, brahms), than his own actual compositions. but the abrasive ironwork, the bone-hammer of his piano concerto commanded attention and research and then the parallels to other artists start emerging.  

ie: the late voracious pianoworks of schumann compare in emotional texture to beethoven's final works, the hammerklavier and even the antimelodies of the grand fugue quartet. the syphilis connection to schubert offers a simple correlation in both's relatively young death after a prolific period of work. How all three suffered the torture of audio hallucinations becoming “angel songs” and then degenerate noise- cacophonies of unsound mine. I think of mingus, mingus the composer who preceded mingus the photographer. Mingus who preceded the bedraggled figure evicted from his apartment, bass-less and baseless, the tragic clown of his own musical selfportrait. Schumann was a man of hardedged suffering in a long line of them.

all in all schumann is a powerful orchestrator, a titan of the language of pure sound, a man whose mind swelled like a hornet's nest in a storm while spinning out an opus still marveled over today. . . a vessel dissolved by the power of the very acid it contained, like a narrative, like a nautilus, cantor's aleph, like a love or a lust, a shard of music in the afternoon sipping coffee with an orange scone.

don't let the work take the joy out of the thing--

may 5 2010.

don’t let the work take the joy of a thing. that was the mantra running through pa in ribbons wrapping farms and silos, grazing cows, the quietude but for my footfalls (& footclimbs) on the hills of the area. . . . . the bucolic, external beauty became an internal beauty, became a mind-journey as the body churned Aware but unconsciously. huckleberry mountain loomed across the horizon, my feet pushing and pulling against the hills towards that massive gray jut darkening against the northern sky. and through that landscape passed my alternately searching and still mind-body, finding miles and future paintings on some subconscious continuum rarely revealed.

the runs were through a picturesque loop from Benton to Unityville with a one-room school house still standing on one corner by a cow pasture, a few hound dogs lazily watching me pass with heavy eyes, and few cars. the cars that did pass had smiles and waves, unlike anything that greets me at home. the end point was the Swisher Farm, a member of my extended (by marriage) family, and there was the massive dog Kobe, a black lab that looked like a dinosaur mixed with Rottweiler, but whose owner kept him near to the red oxide barn.

the limestone and granite of northern Virginia, the plush life of the blue ridge. we stopped by Fredericksburg and found a charming historic city, bustling with tobacco and pint-clinking bars, galleries and even a river-front park. we then passed the preparations of the Apple Blossom Festival and turned left towards Berryville, where we visited friends on their wild green mountain, farm patches rolling behind rusted iron gates and thickets thrusting luscious and berried and fecund. a wonderful stop.

the premier run was across steep loose-rubble roads where horses nodded and hoof-stomped at my curious arrival. I listened, a bit paranoid, to the woods swallowing me as their rich life ruffled and shook and vibrated cacophonic. an easy breath came at the 1500’ elevation, even climbing the 500’ that rolls nearly unnoticed across the pastorale.

may 6 2010. schubert’s cypresses for string quartet, rachmoninoff’s elegiac trios for piano and strings. marvelous. today brought a six mile run, summer rest looping through the coast and back around wb park and up summer rest, the closest thing to a rolling run one can find at this coast. knee felt okay until I got home and sat outside with my dog and watched the tomato plants grow in the sun; tensed up something awful during that fifteen minute rest. but the run was fast and Hot, good cleansing with a full pint of Gatorade and plenty of h20 afterwards to wash out muscles and toxins. lovely bodies running, already bronzed and beautiful. much of the run was internal, quiet, just breathing and body-awareness (mostly knee and breath) and an effort to rid the negatives of the system. six miles was a good distance, though I look forward to the meditation of the long runs again.

Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings reclaim my interest and provoke the will to work. feels so long ago that I was playing with transfers and really painting. . . . . working fluidly and with excitement in my work. work begets work. also enjoying the previous two issues of Modern Painters, especially the hockney interview. I contemplate the next step of restoring myself to creativity.