Tag: saudade

Auguste Rodin, sculpture, bronze, art, culture, history

Essay: Music Amidst Pandemic – New Doors, New Windows, Same View?

Since mid-March, I’ve been engaging in drawing and painting more frequently. It is a passion I first found immediately following a trip to the Algarve almost two decades ago. After years of engagement in photography, dance, and acting, visual art seemed like a natural next step. A sharp contrast to my then-job in advertising (the social aspects of which were fun but equally draining), a weekly art class, held in the basement of a local artist and teacher, was a solace of quiet, self-directed time, a solitary creative activity at once technical, instinctual, emotional, and sensual. I loved the smell of paints, the feel of charcoal on fingertips, the way red smudged into green. Art became an extension, rather than an escape, and it’s one I’ve found myself driven to over the past few uncertain and lonely months of pandemic lockdown. The quarantine necessitated by coronavirus restrictions has allowed for both contemplations of the present and future, as well as regular wanderings through old memories and experiences, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes winding up in waves and lines across sheets of foolscap and virginal white canvasses.

Looking through a stuffed old steamer trunk of old paintings, I remember the ochre sand, the cerulean blue sky, the jade-like palm fronds, the steely grey of clouds, of the intermingling textures of mottled-smooth-rough sculpture of every crevice and darkened corner. I recalled smells (of salty sea and wet sand on skin), tastes (I brought spice packets and various savoury pastes home with me), the cool-warm granular feel of the rocks, the grains of sand like razor-blades underneath, around, and against fingernails and feet and face; all of this I tried to translate with paints, pencil, points and brushes. I even tried to capture my conviction at the time that one of the red-shorted lifeguards at the local beach was a merman; he had vanished beneath the waves one day for well over fifteen minutes, gracefully materializing out of the waves unexpectedly and glinting a sleek silver against a mid-September overcast sky. My amateur efforts were sometimes successful, sometimes not; it was a feeling I aimed to capture, of oneness with a moment outside of time, reason, reaction, comforting identities and familiar faces and places. My instructor, a professional artist and professor at a major Canadian art school, would actively discourage the use of erasers in sketching. “Be open to any and everything,” she would say, in soothing caramel tones, “Whatever you think is a mistake might not be.” It was surprisingly easy for me not to use an eraser, surprising considering I was a lifelong perfectionist. might instead be approached as an opportunity for a new and unexplored path, and so, off I went on many, many paths, losing, finding, forming, shaping, and re-shaping, again and again, each time anew, awake, alive… or, that’s how I frequently want(ed) things to be. They sometimes weren’t, and aren’t, and that’s probably important to remember, especially now.

The current overtures toward reconfiguring presentation within the context of classical music are being greeted with a mix of sighs, scowls, boos, cheers, but largely (I would suspect) held breath. Navigating change is not, depending on one’s familial, cultural, and social baggage, always easy; in a forced situation it seems even more difficult and onerous. it might be done on tentative tiptoes, or it might be approached with an open-armed embrace. What with the figurative windows and doors being replaced, there’s concern if and how the view might be affected – and if that’s a good thing, a bad thing, an overdue thing, a thing that can lead to what may or may not be some overdue transformation within an industry some (particularly in North America) perceive as being adverse to innovation, one which would embrace experimentation and all the possibility (and diversity) within that framework. The openness to new horizons, even (or especially) ones that don’t seem good or viable (or comfortable or familiar), are notions being actively discussed and tried, especially in light of the recent reduced musical and theatrical presentations at Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, running through early June. Some are appalled at the safety restrictions in place; others say it’s a hopeful sign. Classical fans (at least some) perceive the safety measures as a small (and hopefully temporary) price to pay for the opportunity to experience live performance again. Being taken entirely out of self and place and time, whether at the easel, the concert hall, or the opera house, is not a reliable or predictable thing, and indeed, it does not happen with every single drawing, or every single performance.

Still, there’s the possibility, and it’s the opportunity for this possibility that I suspect is so missed. Our collective cultural saudade (for what else should we call it?) relates directly to the concept of community, quite possibly the most important form of beauty we have right now, and perhaps also our hardest loss. What was ‘normal’ may not, as I wrote recently, be coming back any time soon, and as such, we can’t experience the breaths, the sighs, the miniscule “mm”s and slight (or not) head cocks, the irritation of audible humming and tapping feet and seat-conductors, the resonance of instruments and voices vibrating through thighs and hips and sternum, into temples and through ear lobes. Pressing one’s head against speakers does not produce the same feeling of transcendence, one intimately tied to community. Communal transcendence within a confined space and time is not an every day experience . It is, in the 21st century, one of the few highly experiential and directly visceral things we desire actively and will pay for. Writer Charles Eisenstein wisely writes in a lengthy and very thought-provoking essay:

Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?

[…]

To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?

Advancement versus preservation; this seems like such a strange idea, and yet it has become, like masks in public, part of the new definition of normal. Perhaps the two ideas are synonymous? That advancement as a species means the preservation and protection of others, especially its most disadvantaged? Perhaps, amidst the lessons corona might be able to teach us (as Eisenstein posits), a more active idea of community might not only be understood but literally, loudly lived. Experience of community within a live setting implies agreement of chosen presence within a predetermined space, for a predetermined period of time with other breathing beings with their own notions and ideas (and hopefully sense of openness as well) hearing and seeing what you are, but as themselves, with their own ears and eyes. I go to live events as much to experience this unique interconnected energy as I do for the music and staging; hell is other people, so goes the saying, but it feels equally true that hell is also being without other people, without having the opportunity for that community, not by choice, but by force. To be robbed of that, when one has not partaken of the social ritual of family, is indeed a cruel and unusual punishment – never mind the masks.

despair, sculpture, art, Perraud, history, desepoir, French, face, man, physique

Le Désespoir, Jean-Joseph Perraud, 1869, Paris; Musée d’Orsay. Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

For those of us who are quarantined on our own, community and time acquire new meanings and varied applications. In an excerpt from his book On Nostalgia (Coach House Books, 2020), David Berry writes that “Nostalgia can only be lived in or abandoned: it is yearning distilled to its essence, yearning not really for its own sake but because there is nothing else to be done. Maybe it resisted definition for so long because naming it doesn’t help resolve anything anyway.” Thoughts of the past, of Portugal, of more recent trips and journeys, inspire an assortment of images, bold and pastel, hazy and in sharp focus. Amidst drawing, reading, teaching, there has also occurred the right kind of mental space for a re-exploration of Susan Sontag’s landmark 1977 collection of essays On Photography (Picador, 2001). The writer’s words ring particularly true in light of the many video items on offer throughout the pandemic era:

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity — and ubiquity — of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

Such broadcasts are effective at giving a sense, however ephemeral, of memory of how, and what we remember of which performances, and why. How did X orchestra handled that particular passage, of who’s looking at the conductor and how often (and when, and sometimes perhaps why), of unconscious (and sometimes not visible to the assembled audience) forms of body language which may indicate sound and fury, or indeed, nothing at all. The Metropolitan Opera’s Live In HD series, originally intended for cinema transmission alone, has taken on a second life online, a life many of us feel should’ve been there all along as an actual first iteration in the way Wiener Staatsoper, Moscow Conservatory, and the many offerings via Arte and Mezzo have done, and continue to do. Does the disposition to digital erase the supposed “grandiosity” of the operatic experience? I suppose it depends on how (and if) one perceives the experience of opera-going as such in the first place. There is an understandable element of nostalgia at play for certain audiences who attend live performances, a nostalgia that leaks into filming and demands pure (so-called) documentation, rather than creative interpretation.

Playing on such nostalgia is useful for marketing (especially right now), but tries (in vain) to supercede the reality of theatre as living, breathing art form, giving obvious weight to those who say a creative experience can’t be replicated online. Hopefully governments in North America will sit up and take notice, and stop handing out grants based on digital appeal alone; never has the understanding of art as a necessary part of every day been more divided than in the pandemic era, with its patchwork of funding models and ensemble support. Perhaps now is the time, more than ever, for North American artists to stand, sing, act, move, dance in the streets, more boldly than ever, not to play on a collective saudade but to blaze, fiercely, in the windows of all, providing a new and better view.

Something Old

Orpheus & Eurydice, Auguste Rodin, 1893.

The first Friday of every month sees many New York City museums waiving admission fees.

Keen on seeing the newly opened Kandinsky exhibit at the Neue Galerie (a spot I have some history with), I rushed to catch the uptown train, amidst a sticky, stinky, mid-autumn heat wave. Several stops later, with sore feet and aching shoulders, I exited, and found myself nearly running along 86th Street; it was getting onto 6:30pm and I knew the lines might be fierce. Worst fears were confirmed with three-plus blocks of eager, sweaty faces and shuffling sneakers.

 

Not being keen to deal with the suffocating effects of the oppressive humidity (bugs! sticky armpits! ruined hairdo! oh yes… asthma!), I decided I’d keep on the Fifth Avenue path, and take another look at the Balthus exhibit on at the Met (review forthcoming). The cool air of the Met was a beautiful respite from the heat, and Balthus’ beautifully geometric paintings were a sight for my over-computer-monitored eyes.
Notes duly taken, I sauntered, enjoying the dusky quiet, and just …looked, a pleasure I rarely allow myself in the cultural realm anymore; it feels like a luxury, dawdling amongst artful things. And yet, as Guardian editor (and part-time classical pianist) Alan Rusbridger writes in his recent memoir, there is “a mundane need to have moments off the hamster wheel of editing [… an] instinct to wall off a small part of my life for creative expression, for ‘culture.’ ”

 

Serious, capital-J journalism -and its study for me, right now, at NYU -has been eating up every available ounce of creative/mental/emotional/intellectual energy the last five weeks or so. I’m beginning to resent something so central to my being – my arts passion -being ripped away from me, and the chorus of quiet, snarling voices of doubt uttering some uncomfortable phrases: no one’s interested in culture; the arts isn’t real news; you’re wasting your time; no one cares.
Reliquary Arm of St. Valentine, 14th century,
Swiss.

And yet, Friday night’s visit to the Met reminded me of the fallacy of those statements, but underscored my determination to find new ways of sharing my passion, and blending that with my writing. Some of you seem to like it. (Thank you to those readers who’ve followed me through the years.) My artsy walkabout allowed me to stare, in the face, two truths: I need to keep writing, in my own way, about culture. There’s a certain sort of longing I’m experiencing, between past and present and future, between what I want and what’s in front of me, to try to take this passion somewhere else, somewhere higher and more powerful and… to be remembered, appreciated, loved in grand and intimate ways, probe, create, fail, and always, always stay authentic to who and what I am.

“Saudade” is a Portuguese word which, roughly translated, means “longing” or “nostalgic longing.” I first heard it used at a lecture in Dublin given by singer/writer Nick Cave. He defined it thusly:

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call “saudade”, an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul, and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration, and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the love song. Saudade is the desire to be transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is not of this world. The love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting up though our wounds.

Whether or not you believe in God doesn’t matter in order to understand saudade, or to appreciate its power in a writer’s (or creator’s) life. The idea (and experience) of longing is a very, very old thing, one expeirenced in the biblical cry, “why hast thou forsaken me?“; it also colors the entirety of Psalms, in fact, and is glimpsed in the hieroglyphic scenes of ancient Pharoahs raising their hands in praise of the sun. In the act of worship (surely a consummate act of love joined with faith), or musing on the nature of the divine, or amidst faulting that which we love and want to be joined with, we express our nostalgic longing for something beyond ourselves, and yet, deeply of ourselves.

Like the German “sehnsucht,” saudade has deep, earthy roots, and divine, heavenly aspirations. The calm and cool of the museum, its lack of usual noisy visitors, the enveloping darkness and the shadows cast by the strategic, subtle lights, all created the contemplative environment I so craved, one where I wondered at the role of this oldest of emotional experiences, and its role in creation: of life, ideas, even… hey, new, artistic ways of telling and sharing stories.

Cleopatra, William Wetmore Story, 1869.

Saudade sits at the heart of the art I love most: it is a longing for something beyond itself. That “thing” -historically expressed as an old man with a beard, a round disk, elements of the earth – doesn’t have to be specifically religious. Lately I’ve wondered at the line between the earthly and the divine, and how it finds expression: marble, ivory, ink, oil, bronze, walnut, granite, graphite, silver, glass. Then there’s sound (singing, music, the plucking of strings, the beating of drums) and of course, bytes and pixels. We engage these things out of a certain love. Don’t we?

What is longing? Why do humans engage in it? There are no concrete answers, but again, I think such a feeling has to do with trying to scratch at the transcendent – something beyond us, past us, past our comprehension, and yet of us, with a certain familiarity and perhaps, a certain chemistry. Maybe it’s canvas, a slab of marble, maybe it’s the act of creating itself, maybe it’s God’s face, a lover’s face, our newborn’s face, the sunrise… the sunset. The cycles of life, death, sex, regeneration. We long for this kind of connection – to divine things, human things, beauty and pain wrapped together. Some of the best love songs capture this with a swoon-worthy precision (listen to anything by the aforementioned Mr. Cave or Leonard Cohen); other works of art -whether they be religious or secular -also distill this “saudade” into a grand, and yet deeply intimate, experience that whispers secrets of that most bewildering of trinities: love, lust, longing.

Bellini’s Norma, which I had the pleasure of seeing recently at the Metropolitan Opera, offers a heartbreaking portrait of just that trinity, with generous dollops of transcendent belcanto splendor. There’s something about the title character that seeks something beyond herself, her distant lover, the friendship of her handmaiden, the power of her tribe; it’s only when she is burned (with her beloved, no less) that she will come to be joined in a kind of union with divinity. Even as she faces disgrace and punishment, there is a discernible quality of saudade -in the libretto as well as the music -that lifts the opera out of the tawdry and into the realm of awe-inspiring beauty. There’s something divine about not only the story but the music, in and of itself. It scratches at a divinity it channels, pouring out its longing for a sort of union that is expressed physically in the love between the two main  characters at the opera’s end.

The opera whispered the questions; Friday night’s museum walkabout said them right out loud, confronting me with some uncomfortable feelings. Not only did I need to be reminded of my passion for arts and culture, but to underline the role of saudade in my life and work. There’s something magical about visiting dark places you’re familiar with; you know what’s around every corner, but you’re not quite sure how it’ll present itself without the safe filter of daylight. Darkened corners provide opportunities for dalliances, an empty tomb brings thoughts of permanency, changeability, communion with divinity and the folly of desiring such a thing. Beautiful sculpted faces remind one of a lover both human and divine. Night whispers its sad, beautiful song of saudade through such moments, and such intimacy with art, old and new, solid and not. It colors everything, personal and professional. Living with saudade feels like the right position for the artist -and the journalist -living, sometimes battling, inside of me. Experiencing the feeling of intense longing – for God, for blessings, for perfection, for failure, for permanence, for change, for flesh, for spirit, for love… for creation itself.

 

 

 

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