By David Amos

SAN DIEGO–We know the great musicians of the past from the legacy of wonderful music they left us. But, we may not be familiar with their writing and comments. Some composers were quiet, shy, and introverted, while others were notorious conversationalists, humorists, writers, and commentators on many social issues of the time.

Here are a few interesting and insightful comments which I hope you will find amusing, enlightening, and informative; they may also give you a fresh perspective into composers familiar to you only through their music.  And if you enjoy these, I would like to recommend that you obtain for your library the book from which they were extracted,  Music Lovers Quotations by Helen Exley.

PETER I. TCHAIKOWSKY: To hear Mozart’s music is to feel one has accomplished some good deed. It is difficult to say precisely wherein this good influence lies, but undoubtedly, is beneficial; the longer I live and the better I know him, the more I love music.

CHARLES GOUNOD: The great geniuses suffer, and must suffer, but they need not complain; they have known intoxication unknown to the rest of us and, if they have wept tears of sadness, they have poured tears of ineffable joy. That in itself is a heaven for which one never pays for what it is worth.

IGOR STRAVINSKY: I know that twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

RICHARD WAGNER: I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: I am inclined to think that a hunt for folk songs is better than a manhunt of the heroes who are so highly extolled.

ANTONIN DVORAK: In the Negro melodies of America I discover a great and noble school of music… These beautiful and varied themes are the products of the soil. They are the folk songs of the United States. All the great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people….I have myself gone to the simple tunes of the Bohemian peasants for hints in my most serious work…The Negro melodies are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay, gracious.

PABLO CASALS: For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I can not think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning to me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.

GEORG SOLTI: Mozart makes you believe in God-much more than going to church- because it can not be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into the world and then passes after thirty six years, leaving behind such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces.

HECTOR BERLIOZ: When I hear a piece of music…I feel a delicious pleasure in which reason has no part. The habit of analysis comes afterwards to give birth to admiration. The emotion increasing in proportion to the energy or the grandeur of the ideas of the composer soon produces a strange agitation in the circulation of the blood; tears, which generally indicate the end of the paroxysm, often indicate a progressive state of it, leading to something still more intense. In this case, I have spasmodic contractions of the muscles, a trembling in all my limbs, a complete torpor of the feet and hands, a partial paralysis of the nerves of sight and hearing. I no longer hear, I scarcely hear—vertigo—a semi-swoon.

ANOTHER TCHAIKOWSKY QUOTE: I grew up in a quiet spot and was saturated from earliest childhood with the wonderful beauty of Russian popular song. I am therefore passionately devoted to every expression of the Russian spirit…As to this national element in my work, its affinity with folk songs in some of my melodies and harmonies comes from my early years in the country.

And to conclude, there is an old Jewish legend about the origin of praise. After God created mankind, says the legend, He asked the angels what they thought of the world He had made. “Only one thing is lacking”, they said. “It is the sound of praise to the Creator”. So, the story continues, “God created music, the voice of birds, the whispering wind, the murmuring ocean, and planted melody in people’s hearts”.

*
Amos is conductor of the Tifereth Israel Community Orchestra (TICO) and has guest conducted orchestras around the world.

El joven director venezolano Gustavo Dudamel fue honrado este sábado 24 de octubre con la condecoración de caballero de las Artes y las Letras otorgada por el gobierno francés. La distinción le fue entregada, al término de su segundo concierto en la Salle Pleyel, por el ministro de Cultura Frédéric Mitterrand. De igual forma, José Antonio Abreu, fundador del Sistema Nacional de Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela, recibió las insignias de oficial de la legión de honor.

Dudamel estuvo al frente de la Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil Simón Bolívar y la Filarmónica de Radio Francia, quienes interpretaron música francesa y venezolana. En primer término, el ensamble de la radio pública francesa obsequió a los asistentes con la Suite No. 2 de Dafnis y Cloe de Maurice Ravel. Inmediatamente después, la agrupación sudamericana ejecutó la obra Santa Cruz de Pacairigua del venezolano Evencio Castellanos. Después del intermedio, ambas orquestas se integraron en un solo ensamble conformado por más de 150 músicos e interpretaron la Sinfonía fantástica de Hector Berlioz.

Recientemente Dudamel, de 28 años de edad, inauguró su primera temporada al frente de la Orquesta Filarmónica de Los Angeles y realizó una breve gira europea con la Orquesta Sinfónica de Gotemburgo de la que también es titular.

Redacción Clásica México

I can’t believe I just pulled an all-nighter.  You know, I dislike that phrase.  “All-nighter.”  There must be a better phrase out there.  Drat, I can’t find one.  That’s our new challenge, alright?  We need to think of a new phrase that means to neglect a sleep cycle.  I feel pretty good, actually.  I took a two hour nap sometime before dinner yesterday.  That helped a good deal, I bet.  And I finished my essay for ENG222, poetry.  I hope it turned out all right.  I think I’m too engrossed in the work now to appreciate it for what it is.

The Song of the Day is Strawberry Swing by Coldplay, because that is the kind of day I intend on having.

People moving all the time
Inside a perfectly straight line
Don’t you wanna curve away?
When it’s such…
It’s such a perfect day
It’s such a perfect day

Now the sky could be blue
I don’t mind
Without you it’s a waste of time

I read something very true, two days ago now.  Here it is:

There is something fascinating about people in the grip of a passion: their unquestioning belief that the whole world is engrossed in it too, and the touching faith with which they act of that assumption. — Hector Berlioz

Anyway, I’m going to go shower, which seems weird to me.  Have a really excellent day, to whomever is reading this.  Do something really brave.

<3
Sarah

p.s.  Happy Birthday, Stacia.  This is going to be an extraordinary day.

Hector Berlioz

Symphony Harold en Italie, Op. 16
I. Harold Aux Montagnes (Adagio – Allegro me non troppo)
II. Marche des pélerins (Allegretto)
III. Sérénade (Allegro assai – Allegretto)
IV. Orgie de brigands (Allegro frenético)

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Hector Berlioz

Requiem Grande Messe des Morts, Op. 5
I. Requiem aeternam – Kyrie
II. Dies Irae – Tuba mirum
III. Quid sum miser
IV. Rex tremendae
V. Quaerens me
VI. Lacrymosa
VII. Domine Jesu Christe
VIII. Hostias et preces
IX. Sanctus – Hosanna in excelsis – Sanctus – Hosanna in excelsis
X. Agnus Dei

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Alan Gilbert / Foto: Michael J. Lutch / Fuente: www.alangilbert.com

El próximo miércoles Alan Gilbert se estrenará como el nuevo director musical de la Orquesta Filarmónica de Nueva York con un concierto que se transmitirá por televisión por cable, en vivo desde el Lincoln Center. Durante la presentación que marcará su debut con la más antigua de las orquestas estadounidenses, Gilbert estrenará EXPO una obra comisionada a Magnus Lindberg, compositor en residencia de la institución musical. Ésta será la primera ocasión que una obra nueva se incluye en el programa inicial de una temporada de la Filarmónica de Nueva York, desde que en 1962 Bernstein estrenó Connotations de Aaron Copland para inaugurar el Avery Fisher Hall. La orquesta también interpretará la Sinfonía fantástica de Berlioz y los Poèmes pour MI de Messiaen con la participación de la soprano Renée Fleming

Durante su primera temporada, Gilbert buscará equilibrar los programas brindando presencia a música del siglo XX con repertorio clásico y romántico . De igual forma, tiene planeada la realización de dos giras por Asia y Europa.

Tanto el padre como la madre de Gilbert (ambos violinistas) formaron parte de la Filarmónica de Nueva York. Por lo que de alguna manera el director ha estado vinculado con la institución desde su propia infancia. Egresado de la Universidad de Harvard, la Escuela Juilliard y el Instituto Curtis, el joven músico estuvo al frente de la Filarmónica Real de Estocolmo durante 8 años. Gilbert es el primer músico nacido en Nueva York en dirigir a la orquesta más importante de la ciudad. Sin embargo, algunos escépticos, han criticado que un conductor de tan sólo 42 años de edad se haga cargo del ensamble.

La agrupación ha sido dirigida por batutas como Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini, John Barbirolli, Dimitri Mitropoulos y Leonard Bernstein. En las últimas tres décadas, personalidades como Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Mazur y Lorin Maazel se han encargado de conducir los destinos del ensamble con más tradición en los Estados Unidos.

Gilbert continuará con su compromiso como director huésped de la  Orquesta de la Radiodifusión del Norte de Alemania.

Maija Kovalevska in Benvenuto Cellini.

Today I took a break from a lot of editing tests, reporting and writing to take in a showing, via Emerging Pictures, of the 2007 Salzburg Festival production of Berlioz’ Benvenuto Cellini (here’s the trailer).

This production, in which all the singing, particularly that of the Latvian soprano Maija Kovalevska and the American mezzo Kate Aldrich, was excellent, got a lot of criticism for its out-there staging. The scene has been changed from the 16th century to the mid-21st, or thereabouts, when wealthy families will be able to rely on robots and/or androids to get themselves primped up for a night on the town (as in the picture above).

And there are all kinds of other bits of manic invention, such as the arrival of Pope Clement VII at the Cellini foundry in a red cruiser with a lighted-cross hood ornament, or the scene in Act I in which the rival sculptor Fieramosca is set upon by a chorus of women bearing brooms. It struck me during the opera that these kinds of things were so memorable they took away from the thrust of the piece.

But then I thought: Well, that’s not such a bad thing. As I listened, I could picture in my mind’s eye a sober, traditionally minded staging of this piece, with period costumes and stiff characters, and frankly, I could also imagine how monumentally dull it would be. The problem is that the libretto, by Barbier and de Wailly, is pretty awful, and a normal staging would be hard to take.

The other problem is the music. It’s brilliant, for the most part, with astonishing orchestration, vivid colors and terrific choral writing that thrums with a kind of excitement and exuberance that fits the image that has come down to us of Berlioz, that of an intellect and an artistic identity on fire. You can hear his influence on Wagner, among other people (Cellini was first performed in 1838), and it is in every sense of the word original.

But, for all its energy and power, it’s also oddly stiff, and this has something to do with Berlioz’ admiration of Spontini, I suspect. I don’t know that much of Spontini’s work, but grandeur and seriousness of intent is critical in the pieces I have heard (and there is a large amount of his music on YouTube, interestingly enough). Berlioz’ music for Cellini has passion and spirit to burn, but the Stolzl production shows that it also is old-fashioned in a grand-opera way.

Much of the music is first-rate, but it falls short of being a first-rate opera, at least for today’s sensibilities, because its melodic inspiration is not that effective, and while the score glimmers with orchestral genius, it also lacks a certain variety that would make the opera easier to take in a more sober staging.

As is, it seems to me that Philipp Stolzl did Berlioz a favor by coming up with this bold, manic staging, indebted as it is to television. movies and pop culture, and so full of the short-attention-span mentality prevalent today. Having so much crazy stuff to look at, so much business (including the theft from Star Wars of the idea of C3PO without a head for Ascanio’s aria), takes the viewer’s mind off some of the stasis of the music.

That’s how it struck me, at least. I greatly enjoyed this production, loved Kovalevska and Aldrich, and especially enjoyed hearing what is probably the best performance overall this opera has ever received. But it also showed that opera, like movies, is beholden to spectacle these days, and that Berlioz’ score, while unfairly neglected, has been pushed aside for other reasons than just its difficulty of presentation.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a very laid-back kind of guy, unlikely to take an irrational dislike to anything or anyone and in possession of an easy-going and tolerant nature not disposed to any form of grumpiness.

However, I’ve decided to celebrate the fact that I’ve finished marking all my resit examinations by letting my hair down a bit and giving you a list of my musical pet hates. The title is an allusion to  George Orwell’s 1984, wherein Room 101 was a personalised torture chamber containing a prisoner’s own worst nightmare. Here I’ve confined myself to music. I was going to include rap but, as I said, I’ve decided to confine myself to music.

Brass Bands. I don’t mind brass bands – particularly colliery bands and the Salvation Army band – at Christmas or for singing hymns to, but I’ve put them on my list for the excruciating brass-band arrangements of classical or jazz that make my skin crawl. You wouldn’t want to play Jimi Hendrix on the banjo, and you shouldn’t let a brass band play Wagner.

Elvis Presley. His music was largely nicked from much more talented black musicians, and his inferior versions became popular simply because he was white and (when he was young) good-looking. He wasn’t even average as a singer. During his later years he became a monument to extreme self-indulgence and dreadful Las Vegas Kitsch, a bloated laughing-stock in a sequinned jumpsuit. I like a lot of Rock’n'Roll, but Elvis was the pits.

Brahms & Liszt . Where the majestic journey of the Germanic romantic tradition veered off into a tedious cul-de-sac. Turgid and impenetrable on the one hand, flowery and overwrought on the other. But what about Brahms’ German Requiem? I’m with George Bernard Shaw, who said that it was a work to be “patiently borne only by a corpse”. When invited to hear the work for a second time, he declined. “There are are some sacrifices which should not be demanded twice from any man; and one of them is listening to Brahms’ Reqiuem.” I could have added Schumann to this too, but then I would have lost the reference to Cockney rhyming slang.

Period Instruments My heart always sinks when I pick up a CD of a much-loved piece only to read the dreaded words “played on period instruments”. Read “played on inferior instruments (and probably out of tune too)”. Why on Earth would anyone prefer the buttock-clenchingly awful scraping sound made by a baroque cello or viola da gamba to a proper instrument? And as for the so-called “natural trumpet”, words fail me.

I’ve added this from Anton, which makes the point better than I could!

Barbershop Quartets Close-harmony singing can be wonderful to listen to – I’m a great admirer of Welsh male voice choirs, for example. However, the whining fake joviality of a Barbershop quartet is quite unendurable. Cut my throat with a razor rather than make me listen to one!

The Four Seasons I’m prepared to accept that Antonio Vivaldi might have written a reasonably competent piece of music in The Four Seasons. After all, he wrote so many little concerti that he’d be expected to come up with one half-decent one just by chance. The problem is that I’ve heard it so many times, in lifts, shops and, worst of all, at the other end of a telephone call centre line – and usually in very badly played versions – that I think I’ll commit murder the next time I hear it. And don’t get me started on Nigel Kennedy either.

Pan Pipes I dream of the day when it is possible to walk along a British high street without my ears being assaulted by faux Andean tootling to the accompaniment of overamplified muzak. Those guys may dress like Incas but they’ve probably never been closer to South America than Weston-super-mare. And do they think people can’t tell they’re miming?

Hector Berlioz Revoltingly overblown bombastic nonsense from a man whose ego exceeded his talent by as large a factor as you can find. My music teacher at School loved Berlioz, with the result that his vacuous splurgy ramblings were inflicted on me and my classmates lesson after lesson. The normally generous Giuseppe Verdi said that Berlioz “was a poor, sick fellow, full of fury against the world at large, bitter and spiteful.” Perhaps he couldn’t come to terms with his own mediocrity.

Folk Singers I like a lot of folk music, but don’t like English folk singers,  especially those that sing in a made-up west country accent and stick their fingers in their ears as they do so. If we have to listen to their irritating nasal droning, then at least they should have the courtesy to unblock their ears and suffer with the rest of us.

Harpsichords I could have included these under “period instruments”, but I think they deserve to be singled out for special mention. There might have been an excuse for playing a harpsichord in the days before the pianoforte was invented, but they should now all be destroyed to save us from the hideous plinky-plonky jingly-jangly noise they make. “Like two skeletons copulating on a tin roof” was how Sir Thomas Beecham described them, and who am I to disagree? Nothing was ever written for the harpsichord that didn’t sound better when played on the piano.

So there you are. That’s my list. If you feel like relieving a bit of stress feel free to add your own via the comments box. But please keep your contributions as measured and reasonable as mine.

Hector Berlioz

An Episode in the Life of an Artist : Symphonie Fantastique (Fantastic Symphony), Op. 14 (H 48)
I. Rêveries, passions (Largo – Allegro agitato ed appassionato assai)
II. Un Bal (Valse: Allegro non troppo)
III. Scène aux champs (Adagio)
IV. Marche au supplice (Allegretto non troppo)
V. Songe d’une Nuit du Sabbat (Larghetto – Allegro – Ronde du Sabbat: Poco meno mosso)

London Symphony Orchestra; Sir Colin Davis (Conductor)

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Louis Hector Berlioz (1803–1869), compositor francés y figura destacada en el desarrollo del romanticismo, es muy conocido por su Sinfonía Fantástica, estrenada en 1830, y basada en la obra de Thomas de Quincey, Confesiones de un inglés comedor de opio.

Berlioz nació en La Côte-Saint-André, entre Lyon y Grenoble. Su padre era médico y envió al joven Hector a París a estudiar medicina. Sin embargo, Berlioz quedó horrorizado por el proceso de disección y, a pesar de la desaprobación de su padre, abandonó la carrera para estudiar música, asistiendo al Conservatorio de París, donde estudió composición y ópera.

Rápidamente se sintió identificado con el movimiento romántico francés, contando entre sus amigos a los escritores Alejandro Dumas, Víctor Hugo y Honoré de Balzac. Tanta fue su identificación que Théophile Gautier escribiría: “Me parece que Héctor Berlioz, con Victor Hugo y Eugène Delacroix,  forman la Santísima Trinidad del arte romántico”.

Más allá de sus composiciones, su gran aportación a la música vino de la mano de su ensayo pedagógico “Gran tratado de instrumentación y orquestación moderna“. Mahler y Strauss estudiaron detenidamente esta obra que también sirvió como modelo para el libro de Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov, quien había asistido como estudiante de música a los conciertos que Berlioz dirigió en Moscú y San Petersburgo.

El crítico Norman Lebrecht escribió: “Antes de las visitas de Berlioz, prácticamente no había música académica rusa. El suyo fue el paradigma que inspiró ese género. Tchaikovsky, para su Tercera sinfonía, “tomó” de la Sinfonía fantástica como si de una tienda de golosinas se tratara”.

El compositor ruso Modest Musorgski moriría con una copia del tratado de Berlioz en su cama.

(Copyright © 2009)

I’ve posted about consciousness being situational in nature (Reflection 80), about the left-brain interpreter module deciding the meaning of events (Reflection 86), about idioms of consciousness providing ways of being in the world (Reflection 124), and about elixirs of consciousness adjusting “reality” to our way of thinking (Reflection 127). What I’ve not mentioned is where such activities might be seated in the brain, for if they are aspects of consciousness as I claim, that’s where their stories would necessarily begin. It strikes me that these four modes of consciousness have something in common, but I’m not sure what that something might be. This post is about my search to find out. As usual, it points to discovery through coincidence or by accident—and beyond that, to the mind revealing itself in strange ways.

My first step was to consolidate my thoughts on situations, interpreters, idioms, and elixirs in one place to make comparison easier. How to do that? I thought of a matrix laid out with the four aspects of consciousness lined up in columns and possible functional substrates listed in rows down the side. The word matrix stems from the Latin meaning a female animal used for breeding—basically, the female principle in reproductive mode. That’s just what I needed, something to stir my creativity. I listed the functions of each aspect as briefly as I could:

• Situations—provide the context or framework of consciousness
• Interpreters—develop meaningful stories or narratives accounting, rightly or wrongly, for awareness
• Idioms—are ways of being in the world according to one acquired discipline or another
• Elixirs (fudge factors)—adjust understanding to accord with fundamental beliefs in order to produce a desired effect.

Reading what I had written, I felt a jab of anxiety. What could they possibly have in common? Nothing sprang to mind. So I went on, off the top of my head listing broad functional regions of the brain where facets of consciousness might arise or at least be involved: perception, conception, memory, expectancy, feeling, planning, judging, speaking, acting, and so on. Then I took an hour to break down each of the four aspects in terms of what I knew about different functional areas of the brain. And went to bed. This on the day before my son’s birthday.

For two hours, I lie awake in the dark, wondering what to do. Basically, worrying. It all started so innocently. Days ago, I’d left a message on my son’s answering machine, asking how he’d like to celebrate his birthday. I said Carole and I would be happy to provide a floating meal to be eaten whenever and wherever he chose. If Friday didn’t work, maybe Sunday. Just give me a call. Days rolled by with no response. His birthday is tomorrow. What to do? After installing a bilge pump in my boat, I stop by my son’s workplace. It turns out both his mom and I (long divorced) are pestering him about his birthday. He’s working toward a show on Saturday and feels cornered with no place to hide. So he disappears by not taking calls. Anyway, after encouragement from his wife, my son agrees that Monday is doable. We agree to meet at the boathouse at noon. He’ll see if his brother can come. I call Carole to ask if Monday is OK with her. It is. I will bring turkey loaf, mashed potatoes, and ice cream; she’ll bring asparagus and bake a cake. So it seems settled.

Yet here I am at 2:00 in the morning, worrying how to pull it all together. Catsup. I don’t use it, so don’t have any. Buy catsup. Bring salt and pepper. How keep the turkey loaf and mashers warm while rowing across to the island, the ice cream cold? How many potatoes do I need? What if rains? With the battery for the bilge pump in place, how can I fit two other people in my boat? Where will I brace my feet without jarring the pump? And that’s only for starters. I progress to more serious anxieties, dwelling on times things hadn’t worked out in the past. I spend two hours reviewing my life—marriages, divorces, relationships. And in the back of my mind—the consciousness matrix and what it has to tell me. I run through the four aspects of consciousness, their possible placement in the brain. Everything is problematic—life is problematic. Eventually I get back to sleep.

When I woke up, I saw immediately that the four aspects of consciousness all deal with attention, arousal, and anxiety. They are all ways of putting energy into coping with stress. Situations are situations precisely because their parts are at odds, and so kindle anxiety. Our interpreter modules provide answers to questions that stir anxiety (I recall a write-up of Michael Gazzaniga’s work in which a split-brain patient begins his answer to a question about his interpretation of an experimental situation by saying, “Oh, that’s easy” or something to that effect, which I now see as compensating for anxiety). Idioms of consciousness focus attention on discrete topics, reducing anxiety by narrowing the field of concern. And elixirs of consciousness serve to deal with anxiety more than truth, as students are anxious to fulfill assignments by coming-up with right answers by hook or by crook. Shelley Smithson’s piece in the June 29, 2009 issue of The Nation, “Radioactive Revival in New Mexico,” provides this example of using God as a magic elixir to help things turn out as desired:

[Marita] Noon, . . . a Christian motivational speaker before becoming a self-proclaimed “advocate for energy,” says God put uranium in New Mexico so that Americans can wean themselves from Middle Eastern oil and Russian uranium.

Consciousness appears to be largely a means of dealing with situations in which doubt, uncertainty, and consequent anxiety predominate. The amygdala is involved in each of the aspects of consciousness I am focusing on, shaping relevant strategies for converting motivating stress into productive behavior. In The Emotional Brain (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Joseph LeDoux writes:

The amygdala is like the hub of a wheel. It receives low-level inputs from sensory-specific regions of the thalamus, higher level information from sensory-specific cortex, and still higher level (sensory independent) information about the general situation from the hippocampal formation. Through such connections, the amygdala is able to process the emotional significance of individual stimuli as well as complex situations. The amygdala is, in essence, involved in the appraisal of emotional meaning (page 168).

And it is certainly the emotionally meaningful aspects of consciousness we pay special attention to and, thanks to the hippocampus, remember. As I have said, consciousness is given us to solve novel problems, including those in a cultural, not natural, context. I have reached that conclusion the long way round, by using my late-night anxiety as a means of studying anxiety itself. Anxiety about loose ends hanging from my wish to celebrate my son’s birthday kept me awake. So anxiety was an integral part of my mind at the time.

Schools are hotbeds of anxiety. Every test, lesson, and assignment is a source of stress. Even sports fire people up, both players and spectators, all traceable to anxiety. What we learn is not content so much as how to deal with tensions that force us to learn how to proceed through difficult tasks that upset us at the time. Through exposure to various subject disciplines, we learn to cope with related life situations. We acquire the idioms educated people use to surmount their problems. We learn how to do research, how to listen, how to express ourselves, how to solve problems—how to accomplish tasks others assign to us. All based on suffering anxiety and applying techniques that diminish it.

Sitting down to write a post, I am nothing if not anxious. Usually I am anxious in a way shaped as curiosity about an issue I am involved with. But every creative endeavor starts with stage fright of one sort or another. Am I up to the task? Do I have the skill, energy, and desire to work this through? I remember Hector Berlioz writing in his autobiography about dreaming a piece of music in specific detail, but knowing how difficult it would be to ever get it performed, not writing it down. The music came to him in his sleep two nights in a row—then never again, scuttled by anxiety over the trouble it would cause later on.

When dirty dishes pile up in the sink, we become active in a constructive way—or else make ourselves scarce. These are two different ways of dealing with stress, by coping or refusing to cope at all, by fighting or fleeing—as I fled from the lady with the torn jaw and cheek on a street in London 50 years ago (see Reflection 119: Man and Dog). Our amygdalas help us decide which strategy to select. Schooling trains us to face into challenges directly. When we tire of that, we go to the movies—the funnier, the sexier and more violent, the better to distract us from our worries. We can learn from the emotional fixes we get into, or maybe get high or drunk. We can deal, or try to escape.

I heard Terry Gross interview Woody Allen on Fresh Air this week. His view is that life consists of one anxiety-producing situation after another. Each of his films deals with a different episode of the human condition as he sees it:

TERRY GROSS: So, may I ask, what are some of the real problems that making movies distracts you from?

WOODY ALLEN: Well, they distract me from the same problems that you face or that anyone faces, you know, the uncertainty of life and inevitability of aging and death, and death of loved ones, and mass killings and starvations and holocausts, and not just the manmade carnage but the existential position that you’re in, you know, being in a world where you have no idea what’s going on, why you’re here or what possible meaning your life can have and the conclusion that you come to after a while, that there is really no meaning to it, and it’s just a random, meaningless event, and these are pretty depressing thoughts. And if you spend much time thinking about them, not only can’t you resolve them, but you sit frozen in your seat. You can’t even get up to have your lunch.

So it’s better to, you know, distract yourself, and people distract themselves creatively, you know, in the arts. They distract themselves in business or by following baseball teams and worrying over batting averages and who wins the pennant, and these are all things that you do and focus on rather than sit home and worry.

Woody Allen is a good example of someone who reduces anxiety by immersing himself in his work—adopting a way of being in the world, an idiom, that he has the drive and skill to maintain while working on exactly the same types of problems that he finds so overwhelming:

WOODY ALLEN: [M]aking a movie is a great distraction from the real agonies of the world. It’s an overwhelmingly, you know, difficult thing to do.

You’ve got to deal with actors and temperaments and scripts and second acts and third acts and camera work and costumes and sets and editing and music, and you know, there’s enough in that to keep you distracted almost all the time. And if I’m locked into what would appear to be a painful situation because half my movie works, let’s say, and the whole second half of it doesn’t work, or a character in my movie is terrible, you don’t believe the love story or something, these are all problems that are, or generally are, solvable with reshooting, with editing, with thinking, diagnosing what’s wrong. And they distract you from the real problems of life, which are unsolvable and very painful problems.

Also in the problems of moviemaking, if you don’t solve your problem, all that happens to you is that your movie bombs. So the movie is terrible. So people don’t come to see it. Critics don’t like it. The public doesn’t like it. This is hardly a terrible punishment in life compared to what you’re given out in the real world of human existence.

Working our way through anxiety-producing situations may be the essence of life if it teaches us how to accurately diagnose situations, train our interpretive facilities to identify what’s really going on, adopt idioms giving us mastery over a small slice of life, or develop cons and scams for beating the system one way or another. Consciousness offers us a range of such powerful survival techniques to apply in particular cases. Members of congress try most of them—inevitably disillusioning their constituents by the deviousness of their means for maintaining their public image while abusing the power of their office. But there are no good guys—or gals—it turns out, only those with a will to live and thrive. In the big leagues, innocents, idealists, and dreamers get eaten alive. No one is larger than life, for life is run by consciousness, and that as everyone knows can get pretty seamy.

Am I more jaded than the next person? Naive, perhaps, but not jaded. I haven’t given up on humanity just yet, thought I have my doubts. I still believe consciousness is worth studying, but it sometimes takes a strong stomach. I figure that if our record is ever to improve, we are going to have to come to terms with ourselves. Evidence points to the fact that we are selfish bastards always seeking to advance our personal cause at others’ expense. More likely, we are doing the best we can under extremely difficult circumstances to figure out what is going on in and around ourselves. In truth, I think we are half  babes in the woods, half hungry wolves—innocence and cunning wrapped in the same fleece.

Besides anxiety signaled by the amygdala, other neural-based features shared by situations, interpreter modules, and both idioms and elixirs of consciousness include: a strong sense of cohesion through time, expectancy, reliance on sensory feedback, executive judgment and decision-making, motor planning, and execution of specific behaviors. Thus the amygdala relays messages to several higher areas of cerebral cortex, which ultimately shape and execute behavior, and look to subsequent feedback from appropriate sensory areas. This is an extremely rough sketch, but to me the keystone of this activity is the potential danger or opportunity available to the conscious organism as signaled by the amygdala. The follow-up details appear to be a function of individual judgment and decision-making based on learning, prior experience, and current expectations.

Consciousness, it seems to me then, is not based on prowess and ego so much as on stress and anxiety. If that is true, it would appear to be one of our best defenders within cultural situations which natural evolution could never anticipate. In rising to consciousness, each of us is on her own, doing the best she can to cope with situations that might well undo her. Going solo, we have a great many options for dealing with such situations. Diagnosing more-or-less accurately what’s going on in a given situation is one of them. Interpreting ever-changing relationships in meaningful terms is another. Adopting the idiom and special expertise of one favored discipline is a third. And applying magic elixirs or fudge factors in order to view situations in terms of a predetermined ideology no matter what is a fourth option among others I have not considered in this post.

In dealing with personal fear and anxiety, evolution hands the choice to consciousness—namely us. Whether we deal on the basis of greed, faith, evidence, prejudice, or aesthetics is up to each of us personally. In selecting the choice we prefer, we reveal who we are. The scary part is realizing that how we choose determines the wiring of our brains by strengthening the synapses involved. We become the creatures of our prior choices. Which is why growing up is so hard—think of the child soldiers of Africa. “Survival of the fittest” is shorthand for those who make the best choices under the circumstances being more apt to make it than those who select poor choices for whatever reason. Life requires endlessly dealing with anxiety as evolution intended. If we flub-dub around, we are apt to be dead.

Al vecchio inverno subentrò l’April,
Natura s’è ringiovanita:
Dalla splendente cupola infinita
Del ciel, piovono raggi,
Fluir per l’aria io sento
La mattutina brezza;
E molce il petto ardente
La soave freschezza;
Ascolto gorgheggiare
Gli augei che si destâr.
Ed il romoreggiare
Di piante lungo e d’acque.
Oh! come dolce è vivere
qui nella solitudine
Lungi alle lotte umane,
Lungi alla moltitudine|
S’io avessi mai a dire
All’attimo fuggente:
«Tempo, t’arresta!»
No! Tutto si disperde!…
Sul campo dell’onore,
o chi dopo una danza delirante
Da morte è colto in braccio d’un’amante?
Un uomo son io.
O sono un dio?…
Qual luce si fa agli occhi miei?
No, il mondo degli spiriti
Chiuso non è!
È il tuo cor che è morto, e per sempre…
Tu, discepol, ti leva! – Bagna il tuo sen mortale
Nel purpureo raggio dell’aurora.
Dall’empireo alla terra lo spazio armonioso
S’apre per te in un cantico eternale!

Faust, da la Damnation de Faust, dall’opera lirica di Hector Berlioz

Con Faust ho preso un abbaglio… è stato un errore colossale, memorabile…
Quel miserabile non ce l’aveva affatto l’anima, e per questo sembrava ne traboccasse: era posseduto soltanto da un’inestinguibile frenesia progettuale, del continuo fare e disfare, senza altro scopo che l’azione di per sé stessa …

Mefisofele, Fernando Savater, 1993, da Creature dell’aria – Monologo XII

 

No doubt translated from the French, in 1867 the flowery but cranky Berlioz enthuses over the Steinway piano. Kate who is deep into Berlioz’s autobiography has been regaling me with anecdotes from his unhappy life in the ‘music biz’ (&in love) and assures me that nothing has changed in that regard. Plus a short video of harpists rehearsing for the Symphonie Fantastique. Filagree.

I suppose under most circumstances this is a completely nonsensical subject. Ask yourself: have I ever thought about Julia Roberts and ninjas before in the same sentence?

I’m going to assume not.

Ah, but now the thought teases you, seductively scratching you underneath the chin. Ninjas and Julia Roberts. Especially Julia Roberts circa 1991. Which is the year her movie Sleeping With The Enemy came out. Boy, didn’t that one slip off the radar?! Remember the plot? A married couple are rich and happy and very much in love, right? Except the husband is a total sack of shit and hits his wife. Like, brutally. So she decides “fuck this,” fakes her own death, and escapes from New England (and husbands with horrible mustaches) to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to start a new life. Great, right? Shouldn’t the movie end right there? Nope. Because the husband is batshit crazy. Psychopathic. Obsessed. So he tracks her down. Do I really need to spoil the end for you? The tagline for the movie is “Self-defense is not murder.”

Pop a couple of caps in his ass–boom–and there’s your happy ending.

So where do the ninjas fit in? Sorry, there’s no clever segue. I was playing video games tonight at my friend’s house. I let him borrow the PlayStation 3 game, Ninja Gaiden Sigma. For those of you who grew up in the 80s, Ninja Gaiden might ring a bell. Original Nintendo, raw carnage, massively challenging. The Ninja Gaiden series is legendary for having incredibly high degrees of difficulty. This version is no different.

I bought the game last summer, like the second game I bought for the system after the obligatory Grand Theft Auto 4. I played the first level…uh, more than once, and kept getting my ass kicked by this huge dude with nunchucks. Repeatedly. Out of frustration, boredom, and of actually having a life, I put it on the shelf until my friend requested it, suggesting he “wanted to fuck it up.”

So then we started up a new game and indeed fucked it up. In like 2 hours of playing time, we more than doubled my previous progress. The gameplay–if not the camera angles–is phenomenally fun. It’s brutal, requiring precise timing and skill, not to mention a strong knowledge of where the block button is (L1). It’s one of those rare games you lean forward in your chair to play. But you must become good…otherwise they will piss all over your pansy ass.

Around 9:00, I left to return home because my friend has to work early in the morning. A part of me wanted to take the game back home with me so I could selfishly indulge in video game excess, but I did the courteous thing. He did request it in advance, after all.

Which leads us back to Julia and her abusive predicament. How many times has this movie been covertly remade? Geniune question. While I was laying there watching it (parallel to the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Anison movie The Break Up, which was on another channel), I wondered about a great many things.

As I’ve aged, I have come to see Julia Roberts as a somewhat insufferable movie star. Did it begin with the Erin Brocovich Academy Award speech? Perhaps. It’s really nothing personal, she seems nice enough and normal enough, just mega rich and famous. I get that, no problem. It’s that her acting kind of sucks. Let me ask you this: when you think of Julia Roberts, what’s the first thing you think of?

Amazing versatility?

BEEP! Sorry, Bob. Wrong Answer. Try again.

The smile? Absolutely. Maybe that’s the smile that sailed a thousand ships. But the smile only takes you so far with me. I need more. I’m a selfish movie watcher. I need multi-dimensionality, I need you to transport me. Or make me laugh. Just because I’m picky doesn’t mean I’m not vulnerable. But golly gee, seeing this movie tonight totally reminded me why the world fell in love with her in Pretty Woman. A red-haired angel. Hard to not love that. But it’s hard to stretch a career 20+ years with the same gimmick.

That said, the score was surprisingly awesome. Done by the departed Jerry Goldsmith of The Omen fame, it has a great balance of tension and release. It really plays on the heartstrings. When the shitty husband is about to smother Julia’s blind mother with a pillow, the music is basically telling you “Oh shit!!!” Then there are the brilliant insertions of soundtrack songs, like “Runaround Sue” by Dion, which almost gave me the goosebumps, and also the 5th movement of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, “Songe d’une nuit de sabbat,” or
“Dreams of a Witches’ Sabbath.” If you haven’t heard this song, I recommend you download it now. You won’t regret it. It has some of most haunting chimes you’ll ever hear.

Irishman Patrick Bergin puts in an inspired turn as the wacko husband. He’s pretty scary. And where did he get that mustache?

Seriously...wtf?

By now the connection between Julia Roberts and ninjas is tenuous at best. Sorry about that. Non-sequitor digressions are the norm around here. I suppose I was hoping some serious ninja-ry would be involved, like stabbing the husband to death and getting personal on that corpse. Ah well, we can’t have everything we want.