Summer XXVI. Music

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer XXV. Art appreciation

Of late, I have been wishing for music. An odd chance gratified my desire.

I had to go into Exeter yesterday. I got there about sunset, transacted my business, and turned to walk home again through the warm twilight. In Southernhay as I was passing a house of which the ground-floor windows stood open, there sounded the notes of a piano -- chords touched by a skillful hand. I checked my step, hoping, and in a minute or two the musician began to play that nocturne of Chopin which I love best -- I don’t know how to name it. [This seems to be the most popular one] My heart leapt. There I stood in the thickening dusk, the glorious sounds floating about me; and I trembled with very ecstasy of enjoyment. When silence came, I waited in the hope of another piece, but nothing followed, and so I went my way.

It is well for me that I cannot hear music when I will; assuredly I should not have such intense pleasure as comes to me now and then by haphazard...

Alpha.

So maybe I was wrong about Ryecroft wanting an iPod, or maybe he would find that being able to hear music at will holds advantages he couldn’t have imagined. When did recorded music become a thing? At most, the age of only “performed” music had a decade remaining.

I’m pretty sure, the more I think of it, that Ryecroft would have changed his tune on this point. Listening to music at will holds the same advantages that being able to read books from your own library holds -- the benefit of repetition being paramount. It would have been amazing to have been there at Montreux in 1969 when Eddie Harris and Les McCann performed the music that became the album Swiss Movement. But, as nice as that would have been, it wouldn’t equal the experience of listening to the album over and over and over as we did the autumn of 1970.

Swiss Movement (produced, it's worth noting, by Nesuhi Ertegun and Joel Dorn for Atlantic) was the favorite music of my guitar playing roommate at the time, and he listened to it constantly. I never tired of it, but I also was left with no great desire to add it to my collection when our household eventually broke-up. And then, over 30 years later, I started thinking about it again and bought the CD which held additional songs -- one of which is now a favorite of mine...

-- and the best liner notes I’ve ever come across (including something from Les McCann that isn't included here). Swiss Movement is now on my iPod and, whenever a song shuffles to my ear, I love the music as much as I did in my youth, but to the music is added a frisson of memory of that period of my life between high school and college plus the nerd joy of contrasting the digital quality (no scratches) and astonishing convenience of this musical presentation. I am not one of those people who weep for the age of vinyl.

Not only do I now have hundreds, if not thousands, of songs on my iPod that I can play at my whim, but some of my favorite music might not even be recognizable to Gissing as music. I have in mind Europa by Carlos Santana:

Always With Me, Always With You by Joe Satriani:

And especially Stevie Ray Vaughn version of Little Wing:

Which brings me to Proust. Proust maintained, with regard to painting but it also applies to the other arts, that the artist has to train his audience to recognize new forms of beauty. Impressionism is a new way of seeing, Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp...

...is a new way for buildings to look, Little Wing is a new way for music to sound. We all get it now, but at first it has to have been a shock as there was no context for what audiences were experiencing. I’ve chosen these examples at random, there may be better ones, but the point still holds.

My favorite personal example of this is the Jazz pianist Bill Evans. I’ve always listened to Jazz so I must have heard his music for decades (years when Thelonious Monk was my favorite Jazz great) before I really “heard” his music. Maybe it took me a very long time to mature enough to appreciate Evans. Maybe it was getting older or maybe I was in the right mood or right setting and the penny finally dropped. I don’t know.

And then I thought of Katy Perry. What would Henry Ryecroft have thought watching and listening to some of her music videos? The mind reels. And, as long as this is my fantasy, let’s go all the way with it: Imagine you’ve gathered Henry Ryecroft, Jane Eyre, Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet, and Marianne Dashwood in an English parlor and then suddenly open up a laptop computer and start playing the video below, full screen. And the camera would be on to capture their expressions.

Next: Summer XXVIII. The Tempest.