As usual, I’m late in highlighting this, but, last weekend, I was in T, the New York Times style magazine, attempting a vastly over-generalized, three-hour-tour précis of a thousand years of classical music. (Many thanks to reporter Mitchell Kuga and fact-checker Justin Simon for hammering my ramblings into concise coherence. Mitchell had to make sense of an interview done while I was doped up on DayQuil! That’s hazard pay.)

Part of the interview was the fool’s errand of picking pieces to stand in for entire musical epochs. (Luckily, I am a fool.) I think I came up with a decent enough list, but there is nothing like that exercise to rub one’s nose in the overwhelming dead-white-guy nature of classical-music history. So that nature, and efforts to change it, have been on my mind as of late, along with some recent news about one of those efforts that went rather sideways. And it reminded me of an idea that originated in the world of economics.

(Anyone who’s followed this blog since its early days might wonder why I’m so interested in economics. I think it’s because, more than almost any other field of inquiry, economics has a tension between theoretical elegance and stubborn real-world messiness that’s both profound and intractable, to the point that you will often see even genius-level practitioners tripping over it. It’s good practice for thinking about other subjects where the hazards of that tension might not be so obvious. Music, for instance.)

Anyway, this particular idea has its origins in monetary policy: the ways that government and quasi-governmental institutions—the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, and so on—try to exert some control over market cycles and economic conditions. (You can skip this history and jump ahead three paragraphs to the payoff, but I think the history is fun.) In the early 1970s, the Bank of England suddenly found itself at sea. Since 1944, the value of the British pound had been dependent on that of the US dollar, but, in 1971, the Nixon administration announced that dollars would no longer be convertible to gold, making the dollar a floating currency, its value allowed to vary according to the free market. The UK followed suit a year later. With the pound now subject to the vagaries of the money markets, the Bank of England needed a new framework for managing the British economy.

What the Bank turned to was the supply of money. Analysis of data from the previous decade had shown that, when interest rates were higher, the amount of money in the system grew more slowly; and when the amount of money grew slowly, inflation (a pressing problem in 1970s Britain) was kept in check. So the Bank decided to focus on the money supply, adjusting interest rates to keep the money supply from growing too rapidly.

Except it didn’t work. While Edward Heath’s Conservative government pursued aggressive economic growth policies throughout 1971-72, the Bank of England kept its eye on the money supply and, sure enough, when it started expanding in 1973, hiked up interest rates to forestall a spike in inflation. But the broad money supply kept getting bigger and bigger. In a 1975 paper (reprinted here), Charles Goodhart, then an economist at the Bank, tried to make sense of it all. Money-supply calculations that had been stable and predictable under the previous, dollar-backed monetary scheme turned out to be not so stable when currencies were allowed to float. And, Goodhart admitted, focusing solely on the Bank-set interest rate rather than the differences between that rate and the yields financial institutions could obtain with other investments or in other markets missed an ongoing speculative fever that had kept the economy hot.

But the most enduring takeaway from Goodhart’s analysis was one he only hinted at: that, in turning the state of the money supply from something that the Bank measured into something the Bank pursued as a quantified goal, the economic wires somehow got crossed. He somewhat jestingly dubbed it “Goodhart’s Law”:

any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes

Goodhart’s Law has now spread far and wide, into a variety of disciplines. The form in which I’ve most often seen it was, as far as I can tell, first formulated by accountant and academic Keith Hoskin:

every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure

I don’t know that I agree with the blanket value judgement in that version—measures-turned-targets are still telling you something. But in slightly modified form—

when a measure becomes a target, it is no longer measuring quite the same thing that it measured before

—I think that Goodhart’s Law is absolutely and universally true.

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Which brings us to Florence Price. If you’ve been in and around the classical-music world over the past fifteen years or so, you know Price and her story: a black American, late-Romantic composer in the first half of the 20th century who enjoyed some modest early success, then, in large part due to her race and gender, fell into comparative obscurity in mainstream classical-music circles, but whose legacy was posthumously jump-started by the discovery of a cache of unpublished manuscripts in 2009. 

If I ran the world, the main applied lesson from the Florence Price “re-discovery” would be this: there are a thousand more Florence Prices out there right now—potential composers with exceptional talent and imagination—who, like Price, have not had opportunities to utilize and develop that talent because of who they are, or what they look like, or where they were born, or their socio-economic status; and legacy classical-music institutions—ensembles, publishers, schools—ought to be establishing programs and protocols and methods to better find that talent and provide those opportunities. Instead, by and large, my sense is that the main reaction among organizations has been a retroactive canonization of Price and her music, adding her to the pool of composers likely to appear on classical-music programs.

This is not an unwelcome development, but it is a remedy that, in comparison, minimally disrupts the classical-music status quo. (I wrote about this vis-à-vis superhero narratives a while ago.) It also, it turns out, brings Goodhart’s Law into play. Because how do you measure whether an ensemble or a presenting organization is meeting the goal of diversifying their programming? The most obvious way is to keep a tally of whose music you’re programming, and how often. But if you start to conflate the tally and the goal, now the tally isn’t measuring exactly what it was measuring before you started trying to change the tally. This might seem like such a subtle shift that it wouldn’t ever matter in the real world. And I think that, for the most part, it doesn’t. Except when it does.

This year’s installment of that wonderfully frothy tradition, the waltz-soused Neujahrskonzert by the Vienna Philharmonic, was guest-conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Montreal Orchestre Métropolitain, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Metropolitan Opera. Nézet-Séguin has been a prominent champion of Price’s music, including conducting recordings of her three surviving symphonies, so it’s not surprising he was eager to have Price on his Viennese program as well. She had written a “Rainbow Waltz,” in 1939, a gentle, charmingly wayward wisp for piano solo.

Here’s the “Rainbow Waltz” that was played in Vienna, as arranged by Wolfgang Dörner:

I will not buy this record; it is scratched. I mean, Price’s music is in there somewhere, but, then again: wie bitte​? And that’s before it came out that, originally, the Vienna Philharmonic, at Nézet-Séguin’s behest, had commissioned Valerie Coleman, another black female composer, to arrange Price’s waltz, only to reject Coleman’s version and turn to Dörner.

Now, I don’t know what the powers-that-be at the Vienna Philharmonic were thinking in vetoing Coleman’s arrangement, or what Dörner was thinking in making his arrangement (though Hannah Edgar has some valuable clues). I don’t know what Nézet-Séguin was thinking in going along with it. There are a number of things going on in this story, many of them not great. But among them, I think, is an example of Goodhart’s Law biting, and biting hard. To introduce new audiences to Price’s music is fine, but to do so in the novel and not-immediately-relevant context of a Vienna New Year’s Concert is, on some level, ticking off a box, and if you’re not careful, the box itself starts to crowd out its own reason for being ticked, in ways small and big—in this case, to the point of overriding common sense.

The story is an extreme example. Extreme examples are instructive, though. A story like this doesn’t mean that you stop measuring. But it should be a hint that, as the Bank of England discovered, changing the measurement not only does not necessarily change the system, it often leads to gaming the system. If a first-order measurement of classical programming diversity is seemingly improving, but the classical-music industry is still ill-serving under-represented composers, as in the Price example, it’s not a sign that the effort is futile, but that other measurements—and changes—need to be made. Systems are holistic in ways that measurements aren’t, and a lot of mischief can happen in the gap.

A few years ago, flutist and data scientist (not an unprecedented combination, incidentally) Mansi Shah surveyed that gap, and some tactics for not falling into it, concluding:

Maybe instead of asking, “Are we there yet?” and solely focusing on the outcomes (as overdue as they might be), we need to be asking, “What are we working toward, and how are we getting there?”

That’s completely sensible, right? It’s also harder. It means engaging with root causes, not just seemingly easy fixes; it means putting in time, work, and money, without the short-term satisfaction or even the guarantee of a nice, clean, positive data point to show off to critics or donors or board members or the like. That’s the challenge inherent to Goodhart’s Law: you have to measure to maintain accountability, but you can’t conflate accountability with just a measurement.

It is, it turns out, easy to miss the forest of change for the trees of data. That connoisseur of forests, Henry David Thoreau, had some sense of the hazard. “Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither,” he wrote. “I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.”

My insomnia has returned as of late, so, the other night, I decided to fill up a few sleepless hours by rewatching my very favorite movie of all time. And I realized that, apart from a passing cameo in this old review, I’d never really written about my very favorite movie of all time.

I first saw David Lean’s 1962 magnum opus Lawrence of Arabia in the spring of 1989, when Robert Harris’s restoration screened at the late, only-mildly lamented McClurg Court Cinemas in downtown Chicago. (The theater’s 70mm projection and sound system were, at the time, the best in the city, but the place was pretty charmless otherwise.) It immediately became my favorite movie.

It is not for everybody, I know. It’s long. There’s a whiff of a white-savior narrative about it (though I would argue that one of the great things about the movie is how thoroughly and loving it sets up that trope only to thoroughly and ruthlessly dismantle it). As history goes, it’s iffy (though, in its defense, it got me interested in the actual history of the region and the era, which is complex and revealing and fascinating and—thanks to our staggeringly corrupt and incompetent administration—once again, depressingly relevant). But it has stayed at the top of my personal list. I watch it at least a couple of times a year. If it’s showing in a theatre anywhere within an hour’s drive, I am there. It’s one of a handful of movies of which I never grow tired. It’s one of an even smaller number of artworks in which I never seem to reach an endpoint; every time I see it, I notice something new.

Beyond that, it’s just about the only movie that, even though I know exactly what’s coming and exactly what’s going to happen, still lands, for me, with something close to its original impact. It took me a long time to figure out why. It’s because Lawrence of Arabia is a deeply musical movie. I don’t mean literally, sonically (though the sound design and music are great). I mean structurally. It is a subtly but relentlessly symmetrical movie, in a way familiar to any freshman music-history student. Lawrence of Arabia is a movie in sonata form.

Think about sonata form: you start off with a theme in a given key (however you’d like to define that) which is then followed by a bunch of new themes in new keys. This creates formal tension, which is resolved in the second half of the form, when all those themes return, but, this time, all in the original key. Now look at Lawrence: it’s a rise-and-fall story, the two halves neatly demarcated by an intermission. During the rise, every scene is, in effect, a new theme: new subjects, new characters, new locales, new complications, constantly modulating from mood to mood and place to place as the story progresses. In the second half, the same themes and characters return, but now everything is cast in the key of Lawrence’s downfall, his hubris and its effects on him, those around him, and history.

I suppose you could could say that a lot of movies or narratives follow this pattern, in a very loose sense. The difference is the extent to which Lawrence of Arabia commits to the pattern. It’s not loose at all. For every significant scene in the first half, there is a corresponding scene in the second half that mirrors it—thematically, textually, visually, even down to the composition of the frame and the camera angles.

Here’s an example. In the first half, Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, convinces Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish, played by Omar Sharif, to gather a group of Arab warriors and mount an attack on the Turkish-held port of Aqaba. In order to do this, they must cross the Nefud desert, a hazardous undertaking. They make it, but when Lawrence notices that one of their party has been lost in the desert, he insists on going back to find him, a foolhardy risk that dismays Ali. But, of course, Lawrence does rescue the man. That night, as they rest, Ali asks about Lawrence’s family, and Lawrence informs Ali that he is, in fact, illegitimate, to which Ali responds that Lawrence is, then, free to choose his own fate.

Note the composition here: Lawrence and Ali, in front of a fire, Lawrence under a blanket, Ali listening. At the end of the scene, Lawrence lies down and Ali pulls the blanket up over his shoulders. Ali then proceeds to throw Lawrence’s army uniform on the fire. And then there is a hard cut to Lawrence, resplendent in his new, dazzling white Bedouin robes.

In the second half of the movie, Lawrence embarks on another foolhardy adventure, a reconnaissance mission into the Turkish stronghold of Deraa. No success: Lawrence is captured, tortured, and assaulted. Later, as he recovers, we once again find Lawrence, lying in front of a fire, as Ali pulls the blanket over his shoulders.

Lawrence tells Ali that he was wrong, that he can’t choose his own fate, that he’s just an ordinary British soldier and that he’s going to leave the Arab army. There’s another hard cut: to Lawrence, at headquarters, back in his army uniform. The two sequences are virtual mirrors of each other. (Even literally—toward the end of the first scene, Lawrence turns and falls asleep facing away from the camera; in the second he remains facing toward it.)

Once you start looking for this pattern in Lawrence of Arabia, you see it everywhere. But I don’t think you’re supposed to notice it. Apart from a few more obvious examples—the fact that the movie begins and ends with motorcycles, a pointed callback to Lawrence seeing his face reflected in a dagger—you’re meant to feel it, to feel a sense of these larger forces playing out, and the arrogance and futility of one man thinking that he can somehow defy them. And it works so, so well. It’s a tribute to the robustness of sonata form. Lawrence of Arabia is, after all, a story of failure, a narrative that could have easily turned into a numbing slog. Instead, its encroaching bleakness is tempered and balanced by the satisfaction and even exhilaration of feeling the form resolve in such a thoroughgoing and disciplined way. 

(Speaking of problematic white-guy-in-foreign-lands narratives, a fun fact: McClurg Court was named after Alexander McClurg, the turn-of-the-last-century Chicago publisher and bookseller who first published the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.)

(By the way: that Walt Dickerson album up at the top? Legitimately good stuff. Features a pre-Cecil-Taylor-Group Andrew Cyrille on drums, having all kinds of sneaky far-out fun.)

What Have I Been Practicing?

Frédéric Chopin, Prelude in f-sharp minor, op. 28. no. 8. This is one of the Preludes that I never fully learned—in this case, because I am an impatient man, and persisted in trying to put the two hands together before they had been sufficiently drilled in isolation. But with my left hand still on the mend, I am finally in a position to force myself to give the right-hand part, at least, the attention it needs.

I love the Preludes immoderately, and have for most of my life. I’m pretty sure they were the first piece of sheet music I bought for myself, the Joseffy-edited version, in one of those crappy stapled-newsprint Schirmer “student editions” that proliferated in pre-IMSLP days. (It’s still the copy I use, although the cover fell off about twenty years ago, and I’ve had to tape in photocopies of the last few pages.) They’re quintessential Chopin but also gloriously weird Chopin, highly polished and deeply awkward at the same time. (No wonder 12-year-old me was into them—aspiration and reality, side by side.) The Preludes are Chopin’s version of McCartney II: what you get when a restlessly creative musician sequesters themself away and indulges their most curious instincts. (And, yes, I have an immoderate fondness for McCartney II as well.)

Once I started composing in earnest, I found another way to love the Preludes: a handful of them, to my ear, represent some of the greatest instances of a composer turning yesterday’s leftovers into today’s special entrée. Because, come on, that eighth Prelude is totally a bootleg étude. And the fifteenth is a bootleg nocturne! (So is op. 45.) Waste not, want not, &c.

(Speaking of McCartney II: if you don’t already, you should know that NME, the British music magazine, has been uploading a whole bunch of back issues to the Internet Archive, and they are glorious. I jumped in and promptly found this ad for the single release of “Temporary Secretary”:

Seems like something that might come in handy down the line.)

What Am I Listening To?

Just in time for Holy Week, François Couperin’s Leçons de ténèbres, in this new recording by Le Concert Spirituel, conducted by Hervé Niquet (which also features music by Chien, Charpentier, and Lalande). Nobody wrings expression out of half-step inflections like Couperin le Grand. The Leçons are packed with secondary dominants and major-minor sidesteps that exist solely for their decorative shimmer, the melodies bobbing and weaving with chromatic footwork that never derails the momentum. It’s like watching a particularly daring bicycle messenger nonchalantly dart through rush-hour traffic.

As you can hear from that live performance, the one unusual thing about this recording is, unlike every other one I’ve ever heard, even the first two solo-voice Leçons are sung by a full soprano section, in unison, rather than just a single singer. As long as we’re making pop-music comparisons: between that and the unapologetic use of vibrato, it kind of gives off ABBA vibes. Works for me. After all, I suppose this, in its own way, is a Tenebrae service, too.

I, too, have spent the past week wondering just what is going on at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. To recap: on March 6, the BSO Board of Trustees and president and CEO Chad Smith released a fairly terse statement announcing that the contract of music director Andris Nelsons would not be renewed, as conductor and organization “were not aligned on future vision.” The move apparently caught Nelsons by surprise (“not the decision I anticipated or wanted”) and was made without consulting the orchestra’s musicians. Theories as to why have coalesced around two possibilities:

• a) Nelsons, who is also the Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and, of late, has been spending a lot of we’re-just-good-friends quality-time with the Vienna Philharmonic, had stretched himself too thin to keep adequate eye on the store in Boston, with a corresponding drop-off in focus and quality (we’ll call this the “David Allen conjecture”)
• b) Smith, who was hired away from the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2023, has been itching to revamp the BSO’s programming into something more like LA’s, with more pops-leaning crossovers and post-modern, audience-friendly new music, but has been stymied by Nelsons’ insistent devotion to the European canon (we’ll call this the “you’re-not-from-here postulate”)

You can debate these on the merits (Allen’s diagnosis of decline, for example, might be a bit of correlation-causation confusion; from the start, Nelsons struck me as a kind of Reggie Jackson of conductors—lots of home runs, lots of strikeouts). To be sure, there have been hints that a Smith-Nelsons partnership was not built for the long-term. But that still doesn’t explain the abruptness of the announcement. (Pure speculation, but my own wager would be that this has a great deal to do with the imminent departure of vice president of artistic planning Anthony Fogg, who is retiring in September, leaving an enormous hole in the BSO’s administrative apparatus. If CEO and music director were in a high-noon standoff over Fogg’s replacement, I could see the board panicking and turning an “ease him out” situation into a “rip the band-aid off” situation. But again: pure speculation.)

Among the Nelsons-friendly and more Boston-centric comment boards I’ve been perusing, Smith already has been cast as the heavy in this drama, a top-down corporate outsider imposing an unwelcome agenda. (This take assumes that the unaligned future vision mentioned in the board’s announcement is option b) up there.) Out of curiosity, I went back and took a look at the trustee-board committee that picked Smith to be the CEO. It looked like this: medical research institute administrator, foundation director, arts administrator, corporate governance lawyer, private equity partner, philanthropist, and arts administrator (and former BSO member). It’s a group, I think, symptomatic of the tension at the heart of American orchestra governance, where governing boards are expected to be fundraising machines, fiduciary watchdogs, and artistic stewards all at the same time. On the one hand: if you’re hiring an administrator, that’s the kind of expertise you want in the room. On the other hand: that’s a largely corporate crowd, making a corporate decision-by-committee—not exactly a recipe for out-of-the-box innovation. It’s probably going to land on a corporate candidate.

(Incidentally, lest you think that a gathering like that is some sort of 21st-century late-capitalist perversion of the BSO’s mission, here’s the lineup of BSO trustees ca. 1950: lawyer, judge, investment banker, paper executive, real estate broker and philanthropist, church administrator, car dealer and politician, investment banker, advertising executive, lawyer and academic, media executive, education administrator, lawyer, judge, lawyer. That there were at least three people on Smith’s hiring committee with professional-level musical training is significant progress, for what it’s worth.)

Still, if Smith really is aiming to plug-and-play some facsimile of the LA Phil ethos in Boston, he might want to sit down over a two-hot-dog combo with one of the people who hired him.

Joshua Lutzker—the private equity guy in that list—has been a BSO trustee since 2014. He is a managing director at Boston-based Berkshire Partners. In 2014, Berkshire Partners, in a deal worth right around a billion dollars, acquired Portillo’s, a Chicagoland chain of hot-dog-and-Italian-beef stands. Lutzker was part of the team than landed the deal, and he has served on the Portillo’s board of directors ever since, shepherding the company through both an IPO and a nationwide expansion. (Though it was announced just this week that, with the appointment of a new CEO, Lutzker will be leaving the board. History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, &c.)

How’s that expansion going? It’s going… just okay. On paper, the Portillo’s acquisition must have seemed like a slam-dunk. Founded in the 1960s, the chain only had a handful of outposts until the 1980s, when it aggressively expanded throughout Illinois. With all locations under central management, rather than being franchised, processes and quality-control were locked-down and consistent. And Portillo’s made a heap of money. At the time of the sale, the Chicago Tribune reported that the average Portillo’s location was pulling in 7 to 8 million dollars in annual revenue, three times your average McDonald’s. Berkshire Partners looked at those margins, thought of all the ex-pats that had fled Chicago winters for warmer climes out of state, and signed the check.

It turns out, however, that the concept is not quite as portable as all that. Newer Portillo’s locations outside of the Chicago area make money, but nowhere near as much money as those in Chicago. Here’s some per-location numbers from around the time of the company’s 2021 IPO (source):

That’s a nearly 50% drop in revenue once you leave Chicago. And here’s a revealing graph from a Portillo’s investor presentation in 2022:

That graph seems to me to be as good an illustration of how an LA-style revamp of programming might fare in Boston. And it’s for similar reasons. The off-the-charts revenue of Portillo’s in Chicagoland is not just an indication of quality, or value, or even long-term brand awareness, but of just how much demand there already was in the area for what Portillo’s is selling. (Both Chicago-style hot dogs and Italian beef sandwiches have been around since at least the Great Depression.) Likewise, the audience the LA Phil has been cultivating for the past 50 years is not quite the audience that the BSO has been cultivating for the past 50 years. Would there be an audience for what the LA Phil is doing in Boston? Absolutely. Would it be as large and enthusiastic as the audience there already is for what the BSO is doing? That, I’m not sure. You could build that audience, but that is a long-term project.

Anyway, spending all this time with Portillo’s financial data has made me realize the true scandal here: Lutzker has been on the board since 2014, but there’s still not a Portillo’s at Tanglewood? Come on, people.

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What Have I Been Practicing?

My writing procrastination has been formidable this winter, so I came up with this conceit as a way to prod myself into writing more, since I’m always working on some piece of music, which means I’m always thinking about some piece of music, and, given the way my skull-bound hamster wheel tends to turn, those thoughts often lead to something divertingly weird. And then, as soon as I decide to put this plan in motion, what do I end up having to practice? One-handed hymns.

I tripped and fell last week—overconfident American face-planting right in front of H-Mart, I am a metaphor for something—and busted my hand. (Avulsion fracture with dislocation of the fifth metacarpal, if you’d like to wince along at home.) Fortunately, a merciful stretch of the church calendar means I can get by for the time being on five fingers, two feet, and some creative registration. I will hope for a more practical splint in time for Holy Week.

Is there anything to learn from such ad hoc accommodations? Yes, as it turns out: a real physical sense of the origins of gospel music. Because if you take the bulk of 19th-century Protestant hymnody and shift the top three voices into the right hand—as you would do if you were, say, at the piano and wanted to bang out the bass line in octaves—a lot of typical gospel voice-leading starts to happen without even trying. I had sort of made this connection, theoretically, but there’s nothing like accidentally recreating a genre from first principles to drive it home.

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What Am I Listening To?

Naomi Akimoto’s album One Night Stand, released in 1982. I always find dealing with medical things to be a little surreal, so some surreal music felt appropriate. As with Akimoto’s debut album, Rolling 80’s (also from 1982), the track list of One Night Stand—all old-time jazz standards—might suggest that it is an exercise in retro torch-song nostalgia. (The original label on One Night Stand called it “teen-age romantic jazz.”) And, as with Rolling 80’s, it is not. Akimoto’s languorous voice, the glass-and-neon production (by pop mavens Tetsu Hoshika and Daiko Nagato) and the arrangements (uncredited, but I suspect by composer and saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu, who did the similar arrangements on Akimoto’s first album) reposition all this repertoire at the crossroads of neo-big-band swing, gleaming 80s Tokyo city pop, and experimental electronica. When it works, it’s kind of amazing.

Here’s the thing, though: even when it absolutely, objectively shouldn’t work, it’s somehow equally amazing. Turn up the volume, click this link, but DO NOT LOOK AT THE TITLE. I promise you will never, ever, ever guess what song you are about to hear. (Even well into the verse, I was still not quite able to bend my mind around it.)

Akimoto made six more studio albums in the 1980s before embarking on a long and ongoing acting career; beyond a handful of jazz flourishes on The 20th Anniversary (also from 1982, full marks for work ethic), those later efforts abandoned the Your-Hit Parade-Julie-London-with-synths recipe. Her first two albums remain strange, singular outliers. I am glad they exist. Anytime I want to hear a “Tennessee Waltz” that sounds like a newly-sentient Speak-and-Spell glitching out on designer drugs, I know where to go.

New from me: James P. Johnson in the Jungles. An essay for Lincoln Center’s Legacies of San Juan Hill initiative. Many thanks to Anna Troester for the chance to write about the multitudes of James P. Johnson. Go see Aaron Diehl this Saturday!

Best sign I saw at the protests over the weekend:

Pessimismo dell’intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà….

Less than four years separate Surfin’ Safari, the Beach Boys’ first studio album, from Pet Sounds, their eleventh. Brian Wilson was 20 years old when the former was released; he was still 23 when the latter, his masterpiece, came out. Even that only hints at the relentlessness, the whirlwind out of which Wilson pulled his songs, single after single, album after album. In that time, the group went from teenaged California nobodies to international superstars to, in much contemporary critical opinion, pigeonholed has-beens. They toured constantly, playing well over a hundred concerts a year, across the United States and as far afield as Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. In the midst of it all, in 1965, Brian Wilson had a nervous breakdown.

It’s hardly surprising. Wilson had been forced to grow up at supersonic speed. At the Beach Boys’ outset, he was an ungainly combination of ambitious and diffident, a deft but derivative songwriter, a solid but unremarkable guitarist and bassist, a studio client, letting others produce and engineer, letting his abusive father Murry call the shots for the band. By the time of Pet Sounds, Brian had taken the reins. He had fired his father. He had mastered the techniques and potential of the recording studio to an extent unprecedentedly audacious in the pop realm. And the songs: the songs had become like nothing else on the radio, expansive, intricate, ravishingly old-fashioned and bewilderingly avant-garde at the same time. And then, during the making of the follow-up to Pet Sounds, the legendary sunken cathedral that was/is Smile, he had another breakdown.

I have a theory about Smile. The lyrics, by Van Dyke Parks, were really the first time that Wilson was composing to words that fully matched the musical style he had achieved: naive yet elusive, playful yet pensive, familiar yet enigmatic, savvy yet shot through with subconscious impulses that even its creators probably couldn’t quite articulate. Up until that point, Wilson had been working with lyrics almost banal in their straightforwardness. Isn’t my car faster than yours? Remember all those fun things we did last summer? My girl just dumped me, can you make me feel better? Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older? The power of the songs was the way Wilson’s music could supply the very real tangle of emotion that such situations, however modest, could elicit, and how profound and revelatory such emotions might feel to someone in the thick of it, feeling love and lust and heartbreak and jealousy and power for the first time as they fumbled their way toward adulthood. And the more I learned about Wilson himself, the more I thought that he was, in a way, the same: a person who craved emotional simplicity and clarity but, at the same time, was unexcelled at creating pop music of emotional complexity and ambiguity. Maybe, in trying to finish Smile, he realized that he would never square that circle.

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Way, way back in another era of online life, I argued that one of the essential elements of Brian Wilson’s harmony was a gravitational pull toward the plagal—toward subdominant and pre-dominant chords, the harmonies that more conventional progressions pass on the way to a conventional dominant-tonic resolution. I still think that, but it’s really only one aspect of how his music behaves. 

The quintessential Brian Wilson move is a sudden, unexpected tonicization, a brief slide into another key. He first experimented with this in the middle of a phrase or section: both “The Warmth of the Sun” and “All Summer Long,” for instance, feature verses that momentarily twirl a flatted third away from the home key. In other songs, Wilson would shift up a half- or whole step when going from verse to chorus, a trick he picked up from Four Freshman arrangements but made his own. “Don’t Worry Baby” does this, as does “Don’t Back Down.” “Girls on the Beach” is a particularly gorgeous example, the E-flat verse swooning into an E-major chorus, then doing the same move in the middle of the verse so the next chorus can land on F. 

That all these zigs and zags still sit sonically and solidly within rock-and-roll and doo-wop contexts anchors their fluency. Those styles, designed to establish and reiterate the home key with maximum efficiency, become the master keys with which, Wilson realized, he could unlock any door he wanted. On the 1977 album The Beach Boys Love You—practically a Brian Wilson solo project, and one of the weirdest, wackiest, and most truly wonderful things the man ever did—such shifts have become almost second nature to him, as natural as breathing. The it’s-my-fetish-and-I’ll-sing-if-I-want-to “I Wanna Pick You Up” starts in F, turns that F into the F-minor submediant of A-flat, then takes a detour into a couple of completely unrelated iv-ii progressions before dropping back into F for the chorus, yet the whole thing feels as cozy and lived-in as a favorite sweater. “Solar System” is practically an encyclopedia of how Wilson can pull far-flung keys into a song’s orbit. Stepwise sequences, major-minor substitutions, bass lines that suggest one progression while the chords suggest another: everywhere you listen, there are multitudes, and suddenly Wilson’s almost absurdly childish celestial ruminations are crossing interplanetary distances.

The effect is of there being more there than is actually there, of feelings and implications and realms just out of reach of language, of intellect, of the possibilities of a two- or three-minute pop song. It is intensely romantic, in every sense of the word: emotional, novelistic, philosophical, historic.

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The light bulbs of Wilson’s inspiration were fairly consistent in his telling: the Four Freshman, Johnny Otis playing early R&B on KFOX, The Ronettes singing “Be My Baby.” But the one that I find the most intriguing and revealing is Rhapsody in Blue. Wilson first heard it as a toddler, on a record his mother would play over and over again, and he spoke often of the indelible impression it made. Except it wasn’t actually Rhapsody in Blue. What imprinted itself on Wilson’s psyche wasn’t Gershwin’s original, but Bill Finegan’s arrangement of the Rhapsody, as performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

Listening to it, it all becomes so obvious. How Finegan thickens up Gershwin’s harmony with sweet sixths and ninths; how he massages the opening chord progression closer to a standard blues; the vocal quality of the solos by Bobby Hackett and Tex Beneke. The bulk of the arrangement is given over to the famous Andante theme, and it’s easy to hear just how many principles Wilson absorbed from it. Just like the Andante, Wilson’s melodies alternate between compact, mesmeric grooves and expansive flights into vaulted-ceiling spaces. Just like the Andante, Wilson’s phrases orient themselves not around the final cadence, but around the most charged harmonic fulcrum, the point around which the music can ebb and flow in multiple directions.

But where I hear the arrangement’s most provocative influence is in its abridgment. Finegan and Miller aren’t trying to hide that they’re shrinking fifteen minutes of music down to three. In fact, they’re leveraging it. They’re assuming you’ve heard the whole thing. As the chart flits opportunistically from theme to theme, it’s counting on you remembering the piece and supplying some sense of the original’s breadth and depth.

Wilson’s songs do that, too, except the memories they call forth aren’t musical, but psychological. As the music feints toward simultaneity, as it gives us an aural glimpse of the space between its bright, chiming surface and its intangible emotional underpinning, it prompts us to fill the space with some corresponding moment in our own memory, and, suddenly, it’s all there, in the middle of the experience, a flood of feeling, cushioned by close harmony, buoyed by a soaring falsetto, propelled by an earnest backbeat.

That conjuration was Brian Wilson’s superpower. And, like any superpower, it seems to have been both a gift and a burden. Maybe that’s why in person, in interviews, in his memoirs, Wilson could come across as so disconcertingly naive, so arrestedly childlike, some kind of holy fool. Certainly, the task he set himself, again and again—distilling entire worlds of hurt and joy into three-minute tracks—was a fool’s errand. That he pulled it off so often was the miracle.

An announcement: this Saturday, January 18, I will be in Boston, handling the lecture part of a lecture recital on Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, with baritone Randall Scarlata and pianist Tanya Blaich. The performance—part of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven & Romanticism series—is at 6:00 pm, at the Goethe-Institut. Admission is free, but you need to reserve a ticket. More information here.

There’s a cameo appearance in my talk by Philip Marlowe, the fictional, Los-Angeles-based private investigator invented by Raymond Chandler in the 1930s. Re-reading the Marlowe novels—in particular, The Long Goodbye, published in 1953—I started thinking about the place of music and art in Marlowe’s world.

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It’s interesting that Chandler name-checks two then-living composers in The Long Goodbye, and within a few pages of each other. The first comes just after Philip Marlowe recieves a purported final word from Terry Lennox, the rich, charming wastrel whom Marlowe befriends at the novel’s outset. Later, Lennox will ask Marlowe for a favor—a car ride to Mexico—only for Marlowe to discover, upon his return to Los Angeles, that Lennox’s wife has been murdered. Marlowe spends a few days in jail for his trouble, but is released when the news comes that Lennox has killed himself. Soon a letter arrives for Marlowe, from Lennox, saying goodbye and apologizing by way of an enclosed five-thousand-dollar bill. That night, Marlowe can’t sleep.

At three a.m. I was walking the floor and listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.

The next day, Marlowe is waiting in a hotel bar to meet with a new client. A blonde woman walks in, and Marlowe is transfixed: “It seemed to me for an instant that there was no sound in the bar, that the sharpies stopped sharping and the drunk on the stool stopped burbling away, and it was like just after the conductor taps on his music stand and raises his arms and holds them poised.” (The woman will prove to be Eileen Wade, wife of novelist Roger Wade, and and Marlowe’s involvement with the Wades will form the second strand of the novel’s tangled plot.)

This leads into one of the novel’s more famous passages, a taxonomy of blondes, including

the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençale. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

The litany of shallow pretension is made more sour by the fact that Toscanini never conducted any music of Hindemith’s; whether the dismissive ignorance is Marlowe’s or Chandler’s is unknown. But Marlowe’s distaste for modern music links the two successive chapters, which prove to be the linchpin of the plot. Even as one element of the story seems to have reached its end, however uneasily, the atmosphere is suddenly flooded with dissonance and the sense of an impending downbeat.

Music is a fairly constant presence in Chandler’s Los Angeles, a consistent element in the novels’ sonic landscape. (A favorite Chandler effect is an only barely perceptible background music, coming into a scene from other spaces, other rooms, through walls, across distances.) But it is only in The Long Goodbye, the sixth of Chandler’s seven novels, that Marlowe/Chandler references the repertoire in such provocative detail. Maybe it’s to hint at how out-of-place Marlowe’s unsentimental chivalry has become in post-World War II America. Later in the novel Marlowe meets Sylvia Lennox’s sister, Linda Loring, who tries to convince Marlowe that their wealthy father was univolved with Terry’s reported suicide, a notion that Marlowe cynically questions. Loring is indignant. Marlowe is unrepentant: “I don’t make the kind of music you like to hear.”

But what kind of music does Marlowe like to hear? We never actually find out. But we can guess. There’s a hint in an early Chandler story called “I’ll Be Waiting.” The Marlowe figure here is named Tony Reseck, a hotel detective. His office doubles as the hotel’s radio room, so when a woman begins to spend night after night there listening to music, it means Reseck can’t sleep. He pays her a visit as a Benny Goodman jam session is being aired.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the girl said. “Goodman makes money, and a lad that makes legitimate money these days is a lad you have to respect. But this jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.”

“Maybe you like Mozart,” Tony said.

“Go on, kid me,” the girl said.

“I wasn’t kidding you, Miss Cressy. I think Mozart was the greatest man that ever lived—and Toscanini is his prophet.”

“I thought you were the house dick.” She put her head back on a pillow and stared at him through her lashes.

“Make me some of that Mozart,” she added.

“It’s too late,” Tony sighed. “You can’t get it now.”

A similar contrast comes via the visual arts in the second Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely. Early on, in his office, Marlowe regards an Old Master. As usual, his eye is precise.

They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o’-shanter which wasn’t any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew.

Later, when Marlowe visits the house of a new client, he less likes what he sees.

Mr. Lindsay Marriott arranged himself in the curve of the grand piano, leaned over to sniff at the yellow rose, then opened a French enamel cigarette case and lit a long brown cigarette with a gold tip. I sat down on a pink chair and hoped I wouldn’t leave a mark on it. I lit a Camel, blew smoke through my nose and looked at a piece of black shiny metal on a stand. It showed a full, smooth curve with a shallow fold in it and two protuberances on the curve. I stared at it. Marriott saw me staring at it.

“An interesting bit,” he said negligently, “I picked it up just the other day. Asta Dial’s Spirit of Dawn.”

“I thought it was Klopstein’s Two Warts on a Fanny,” I said.

Mr. Lindsay Marriott’s face looked as if he had swallowed a bee. He smoothed it out with an effort.

One might charitably read this as Marlowe criticizing Marriott more than the statue, prodding a superficial aesthete for whom art is more a matter of acquisition than appreciation. But I rather think that Marlowe simply doesn’t like modern art, doesn’t like Asta Dial, or Hindemith, or Khatchaturian. It doesn’t speak to him, on a level deeper than the usual use of that dismissal. From the few examples we have, it seems that Marlowe doesn’t engage with art in order to have a novel sensory experience, or to shift his perspective. Note how he turns Rembrandt’s painting into his own self-portrait as well. What Marlowe wants out of art is to find a kindred spirit.

It’s escapism, of a sort. Marlowe is a man alienated from his own time, longing (as Chandler did) to find beauty in a place and a milieu he finds ugly and greedy and shallow. Modern art—modern artists—are too much of their own time for Marlowe. He doesn’t want to live in a previous era; he wants to transcend his own, to somehow redeem the messy, granular experience of it. He wants to be like Rembrandt and Mozart, unmoored from the baggage of the past, untroubled by the onrushing future. In other words: Marlowe aspires to the canon.

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For much of his life, Raymond Chandler seemed more destined to be a Lindsay Marriott than a Philip Marlowe. He was born in Chicago and raised in Nebraska, but, at a young age, and following the breakup of his parents’ marriage, he moved to England with his mother to live with her relatives. There, he received a quintessential British public-school education, had brief, unavailing careers in government and journalism, experimented with romantic poetry, and then decided to make his way back to the United States. On the boat, he met Warren Lloyd, a California oilman with artistic tastes and, upon settling in Los Angeles, joined the Bohemian circle of artists writers and musicians that Lloyd and his wife cultivated. Chandler was particularly close to Julian Pascal, a Barbadian-born British composer, conductor and pianist. The two even collaborated on an operetta called The Princess and the Pedlar—libretto by Chandler, music by Pascal—but the piece was never performed, interrupted first by Chandler’s service in World War I, and then Chandler’s affair with Pascal’s wife Cissy, a noted beauty in her time and an accomplished pianist herself. The Pascals divorced and Chandler married Cissy, some eighteen years his senior.

The Chandlers kept a cultured household (most nights, they sat together, listening to classical music on the radio) but Chandler abandoned his literary ambitions for the better part of twenty years, only returning to writing after burning his bridges in the oil industry, where he had advanced from an accountant to an executive. His turn to detective fiction was pragmatic—the style easy enough for him to adopt, the market lucrative enough to make a living—but the tension between the poet Chandler had wanted to be and the hard-boiled writer he became crackles throughout his work.

Chandler was always more interested in atmosphere than the puzzling out of clues (The Big Sleep famously and inadvertently ends with one murder unsolved); in The Long Goodbye, that gap reaches an eloquent peak. Both Marlowe and Chandler’s prose are too engulfed by the dingy, corrupt kaleidoscope of 1950s Los Angeles to give the actual case much more than a professional interest. Strictly as a mystery, The Long Goodbye is casual, diffuse. It’s also Chandler’s best book.

Especially toward the end of the 40s and the beginning of the 50s, the distance between Marlowe and his creator seemed to shrink. Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye with an eye on the exit. He had already been plotting to leave California, to return to England, but Cissy Chandler’s health repeatedly postponed any move. After she died, Chandler was free to go. He spent much of the rest of his life in England, on longer and longer visits. (At least one went on so long that—to his accountant’s dismay—Chandler ended up paying tax to two governments.)

Chandler’s specific dissatisfaction with postwar America comes into focus, I think, through the lens of another Californian, one who was very much a presence in Marlowe’s Los Angeles: Richard Nixon. (The Marlowe of The Long Goodbye would have had Nixon as one of his senators.) I’m sure I’ve written before about Garry Wills’ 1970 book Nixon Agonistes; it remains, still, my favorite book on American politics, the one that best explains How We Got Here, even now. My copy is the 1979 paperback re-issue, to which Wills added a post-Watergate preface:

Naturally, I have been asked if anything in Nixon’s downfall surprised me, and one thing did— the venality he showed in office, the growing importance of the cash nexus in all his dealings. I think that was not pronounced in Nixon’s earlier career; but I should have expected it. The man of the classical liberal marketplace measures other things, and is measured himself, in terms of financial authentication. Worth is established by its symbol, money. Even that would complete the picture of Nixon as the last liberal of the social Darwinian school.

If anything, such venality is even more all-consuming in 21st-century America. After the erosion of safety nets and the hollowing out of every public sphere of community connection, the cash nexus is all that’s left. We’re all stuck in it.

Chandler felt the encroach of this attitude intensely. All of Chandler’s novels are about money, about how money makes its own morality and justice, about people consumed by their pursuit of it to the exclusion of their own humanity. Marlowe resists being defined by his earnings, usually to his financial detriment. He doesn’t keep the five-thousand-dollar bill. No wonder he appreciates the canon. Of course Rembrandt and Mozart worried about money, but in their art, in the the part of them that endures, in the place that the culture carved out for them, money doesn’t matter. Beauty does.

Chandler didn’t quite make it out, dying in California in 1959. But he gave Marlowe an escape. At the end of the last Marlowe novel, Playback, Marlowe receives an unexpected phone call. It is Linda Loring, with whom Marlowe had a brief affair in The Long Goodbye, calling from Paris, proposing marriage. Marlowe can see a new life stretching out in front of him. When the phone rings again—a disgruntled client, this time—it’s already far away. “I hardly heard it,” Marlowe muses. “The air was full of music.”

Illustration by (for real) Andy Warhol.

Hi! It’s me, Matthew. I used to post stuff on the internet. And then I stopped, because—well, look, I’ve learned that it’s futile to wonder why my brain does anything it does. Anyway, I’ve been thinking (always a dodgy pursuit, admittedly) that, after a couple years away, it’s time to start straightening up the old space and putting some new goods on the racks now and again. So let’s flip the lights back on with a holiday card.

I spent a good part of the past year messing around with Romantic piano transcriptions, primarily of Bach. I’ve always loved this repertoire: it is both unnecessary and impractical in ways that I find wonderfully appealing. And from the Chicago fire until the Second World War, it seems like everyone took a stab at it. Poke around the margins and you make all kinds of new, fascinating, dead friends. (Ignaz Friedman, you lovable maniac.) However, there is a slight problem with a) falling down this rabbit-hole b) with a church gig c) in December, which is that all of these people took Christmas off, thematically. Advent? You’re spoiled for choice—you could fill an entire recital with arrangements of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland alone. The 25th, though? Pretty slim inventory. So to pad out my Christmas Eve prelude slate, I did one of my own.

Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich (J. S. Bach, arr. Guerrieri) (PDF, 81Kb)

Now all I have to do is learn it.

More to come in the new year. Stay warm, stay cool, stay safe.

Update (12/23): Fixed a couple of typos in the score; thanks to Dan Schmidt for having better eyes than mine.

Today, August 15, is the 100th birthday of the German-American composer, conductor, pianist, educator Lukas Foss. I studied with Foss in grad school, and I’ve written about him on more than one occasion. For his 100th, though, let’s go into the archives.

When I was living in Washington, DC, pre-pandemic, I carved out a couple of days a week to spend at the Library of Congress, ostensibly in service of a long-gestating research project, but also just to enjoy what was there. That included a perambulation through Foss’s papers, some tidbits of which I previously highlighted. But there was also this curious treasure:

It’s an “A-minor Sonata” for piano, a full-fledged, four-movement classical-style effort: an opening Allegro con brio, an Andante theme and variations, a Vivace scherzo and trio, and a final Allegretto rondo. Foss dated it “Marz-April 1930,” when he was seven. I don’t think this copy is from 1930, at least not all of it; some Durand & Cie.-brand manuscript paper and occasional marking—

—would hint that it dates from at least 1933, when Foss and his family left Berlin for Paris. But did he first write it in 1930? I’d believe it; parts of it are both correct and incorrect in exactly the way you might expect from a precocious, self-confident seven-year-old. Then again, interestingly, some of the handwriting bears a strong resemblance to the adult Foss’s manuscript. I wonder if Foss, who, in later years, became fascinated with the idea of bringing the music of his early life into the present in some memory-refracted way (for example, his Fourth Symphony, subtitled “Window to the Past”), toyed with resurrecting this particular snapshot.

I’m still working on deciphering the piece—Foss’s handwriting is breathtakingly messy in spots—but here’s a phone recording of the first movement.

Perceiving the future in a creative artist’s juvenilia is a dangerous temptation, but there is one detail worth highlighting. In a few places in the first movement, particularly in his opening theme, Foss seems to have been undecided on whether to bar the music with two beats to the bar or four; after erasures and negotiation, he settled on a momentary detour into two:

In the recapitulation and coda, though, he left this passage all in four:

Same notes, same rhythms, different downbeats. Maybe this is just the young Lukas Foss still getting the hang of mixed-meter, but the nominally-grown-up Lukas Foss loved this sort of maneuver. A lot of Foss’s more avant-garde works have similar moments in which the performer’s eye and ear go out of phase with each other, semantically, conceptually, or just literally, like here. How does that change the performance? How much does it change the sound? Can the performer communicate such a change to the listener? It’s an obvious manifestation of Foss’s idea of musical performance as a kind of elaborate game between the composer, the performer, and the audience, each with their own fluid roles, each with their own tweakable rules.

Games are both serious and not, as was Foss’s music. Maybe that’s why Foss’s centenary seems to be flying a bit under classical music’s institutional radar. What few commemorations I’ve been able to find—the Buffalo Philharmonic’s two-part mini-series being the most substantial—largely celebrate Foss the neo-classicist, not Foss the try-anything-once modernist. And even that observance is an exception. The Ojai Festival, of which Foss was the music director numerous times, declined to mark the occasion. The Milwaukee Symphony, which Foss conducted from 1981 to 1986, isn’t doing any of his music. Neither is the Boston Symphony, where Foss served as the orchestra’s pianist in the 1940s, and which gave the premieres of several of his early works. In many of Foss’s more far-out pieces, there’s a risk that the performance—and the performers—come off as more ridiculous than profound, a risk that the classical-music world, at the moment, seems disinclined to take. But Foss knew that the classical tradition, as it had persisted into the contemporary world, was both absurd and profound, and that there was a unique power in that duality. He loved plugging into that power, wherever he could find it.

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Other writing on Foss and his music:

A master of music’s complexities (Boston Globe, February 7, 2009)

Foss plies his maverick spirit in idealized Americana(on Foss’s The Prairie) (Boston Globe, August 2, 2014)

Style Points (includes a long digression into Foss’s Solo) (NewMusicBox, August 27, 2014)

Rediscovering a piece of Boston’s choral and architectural history (on Foss’s Behold! I Build an House) (Boston Globe, February 27, 2020)

Lukas Foss: Complete Symphonies (notes for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s recording)

Emerging from hibernation with a guest post for Ethan Iverson’s Do the Math: “James P. Johnson Gets Dressed.”

Break the news, Dennis!

Yes, Soho the Dog HQ is moving again, this time back to my original, once-familiar, probably-not-all-that-familiar-anymore hometown. Come mid-October, at least I won’t have to mail-order poppy-seed hot dog buns. (The move is occasioned by my wife—still and always the brains of this operation—landing a new job at Chicago Public Media. I myself will be doing… something or other.)

This, of course, will also mark a fond, albeit oddly liminal, farewell to Washington, D.C. It’s strange to move somewhere new, just start to find your footing, and then watch as a pandemic shuts everything down and your sense of place shrinks to something not much larger than your house. But even if my experience of public, monumental D.C. was curtailed, I will still miss the merits of quotidian, lived-in D.C.: the subtleties of neighborhood, the piecemeal assembly of a roster of favorite takeout, the surprising amount of primordial nature still tucked in the odd corners of the district, the serendipitous counterpoint of friends and acquaintances, both tied-down and transient in a peculiarly-D.C way.

(On the other hand: the weather here in August? I, um, appreciate it, but I won’t miss it.)

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The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy died last month. I came to Nancy’s work late, only after meeting filmmaker and fellow Radcliffe Fellow Phillip Warnell, who collaborated with Nancy on three wonderful-in-every-sense films: The Flying Proletarian, Ming of Harlem, and Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (the latter leaving a small but crucial mark on my Horror of Fang Rock analysis). In short order, I read everything of Nancy’s in English I could find. The effect was rather like meeting someone who had thought about a lot of the same things I had always thought about, but had gotten closer than I ever would to their essence while seeming to expend far less effort. But what I found most compelling about Nancy’s writing and thinking was how he, tacitly or otherwise, acknowledged that language could only get you so far in expressing an idea, that there was always going to be a gap—and how he actually leveraged that gap in both analytical and expressive ways.

A compact but consistently effervescent collection of Nancy’s writing on music has been translated into English by Charlotte Mandell under the title Listening. I think about this passage a lot.

It is not a hearer, then, who listens, and it matters little whether or not he is musical. Listening is musical when it is music that listens to itself. It returns to itself, it reminds itself of itself, and it feels itself as resonance itself: a relationship to self deprived, stripped of all egoism and all ipseity. Not “itself,” or the other, or identity, or difference, but alteration and variation, the modulation of the present that changes it in expectation of its own eternity, always imminent and always deferred, since it is not in any time. Music is the art of making the outside of time return to every time, making return to every moment the beginning that listens to itself beginning and beginning again. In resonance the inexhaustible return of eternity is played—and listened to.