Category: art

Der Weg der Menschen (review: 3/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Frans Masereel’s book first appeared in 1964 under the title “Route des Hommes.” The 60 woodcuts in this book came forty years after the others I reviewed. From what I can piece together from the French and German sources that I can’t read, I think maybe it was connected with of some kind of exhibition or retrospective. Who knows.
The style is much more loose and slashing, not quite as tidy as the earlier works. Taking on a larger, broader story, the panels also become more thematic. There’s a lot more abstract icons embedded in the pictures. Panels are less explicitly connected to the ones on the previous pages. Characters don’t really carry over from scene to scene, but the ideas accrete and overlap over a series of page turns.

[update: images removed for copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. so it goes.]

Here’s the opening, with its huddled masses:
Later we get to the expressionist bits.
Sturm und drang. I love this one.
Masereel’s omnipresent, beckoning sun.
A rare pastoral scene.
The space age.

I’m out of Masereel books now, so this is the end of the Masereel Appreciation Festival. Previous installments included a tidbit from L’Idee, Masereel in Film, and selections from Die Stadt and Die Sonne.

Frans Masereel in Film

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

As I continue the Frans Masereel Appreciation Week Festival, here’s an animated film adaptation of L’Idee. Berthold Bartosch had Frans Masereel’s help on the film for some of the two years he spent working on it. The end result is almost a half-hour long, and though it starts a bit slowly, there are some legitimately cool effects considering the crude tools available in 1930.
A couple other bonus points: the movie was scored by Arthur Honegger (who’s best known for Pacific 231), and the soundtrack features an ondes martenot—possibly the first-ever use of an electronic instrument in film.

According to that first link, Bright Lights After Dark, Masereel’s work in Die Stadt (my brief review of Die Stadt) was also a big influence on Walter Ruttmann‘s hour-long silent film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Gro?üstadt. More about Die Sinfonie at Wikipedia and shorter clips available on YouTube.

Die Stadt (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Another set of woodcuts from Frans Masereel (last Friday I took a look at Die Sonne). Die Stadt was first published in 1925. The impressions of war-torn Europe cover the range of everyday life: the birth of a child, a man with a prostitute, parents with their children, medical students at the morgue, street scenes both peaceful and violent. They are almost all dense with the detail and distractions that cities offer. You can see the full set of images from Die Stadt at Graphic Witness. These are some of the woodcuts that I particularly enjoyed…
[update: images removed due to copyright complaint from from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity—good luck finding it]

If you look at this image in the original size, you can see the faces of the men walking about. With just a few cuts here and there, he managed to make them unique with mustaches, beards, long noses, weak chins. Most of them are in profile, which probably helps.

I like the perspective in this one, monstrous city receding but growing taller.

Different architecture for each walk-up. Sunlight filtering through the trees.

This one is probably my favorite overall. A slight curve in the edges gives this incredible softness to her skin and clothing. Really amazing.

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Shop Class as Soulcraft, an article about the value of working with your hands and the increasing assembly-line nature of knowledge work:

Much of the ‚Äújobs of the future‚Äù rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a ‚Äúpost-industrial‚Äù economy in which everyone will deal only in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. White collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same process as befell manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of worker—clerks—who replace the professionals. If genuine knowledge work is not growing but actually shrinking, because it is coming to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite, this has implications for the vocational advice that students ought to receive…

The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction, but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life. This is the stoic ideal.

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Atlanta Ballet announced the 2008-2009 season [pdf], which is looking pretty damn good. If only they still had the orchestra.
Dracula was pretty cool when I saw it a couple years ago. They do this great opening in pitch black, then the ghoulish red letters of the title project on the rippling stage curtains before they open on a dark, foggy, spiderwebby set. The dancing wasn’t as exciting, but it’s a cool spectacle. It’s a Valentine’s production this year.

I love the music for Swan Lake, which opens the season, and for The Firebird, which will be coupled with some kind of world premiere. Don Quixote is new to me as a ballet. Never heard the score.

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Chigurh vs. Plainview. I like Javier Bardem’s comments about letting go of the backstory for his role:

Maybe the character’s mother didn’t feed him when he was 5 years old, or something like that…. I started to do that [imagining a “backstory” for Chigurh], but then I realized… in this case, it would be much more helpful if I didn’t know where he was coming from. The challenge was to embrace a symbolic idea and give it human behavior. It wasn’t about how his mother didn’t feed him.

That reminds me of Rebecca Mead writing on Nico Muhly’s recent comments about new music in last week’s New Yorker:

He devises an emotional scheme for the piece‚Äîthe journey on which he intends to lead his listener. Muhly believes that some composers of new music rely too heavily on program notes to give their work a coherence that it might lack in the actual listening. “This stupid conceptual stuff where it’s like, ‘I was really inspired by like, Morse Code and the AIDS crisis.'”

You can lose a lot of creative punch when trying to over-think and over-explain the roots. Embrace an idea and give it behavior. See if it sticks. I like that a lot.

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A couple years ago, Alex Ross rounded up some literature on applause during concerts:

Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, applause between movements and even during movements was the sign of a knowledgeable, appreciative audience, not of an ignorant one. The biographies of major composers are full of happy reports of what would now be seen as wildly inappropriate applause.

Blame for the move to silence eventually falls on the conductors, beginning especially with Leopold Stokowski:

To refrain from applause heightens focus on the personality of the conductor. Silence is the measure of the unbreakable spell that Maestro is supposedly casting on us. A big ovation at the end salutes his mastery of the architecture of the work, or whatever… By the way, I‚Äôve noticed a new trend ‚ÄîThoughtful Celebrity Conductors holding their arms motionless for ten or fifteen seconds after the end of some vast construction by Bruckner or Mahler. ‚ÄúDo not yet applaud!‚Äù those frozen arms say. ‚ÄúDo not profane the moment!‚Äù

He goes on further to touch on the influence of recording technology on the individual & concert listening experience, the rise of classical performance as a high-brow cultural event, and the communal aspect of concert attendance.

(What I learned about craftsmanship in) The Violin Maker (review: 4/5)

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Stradivarius: legendary quality, mystery. It’s upper-crust and exotic. How did Stradivari make such wonderful instruments? What sort of alchemy was involved, and why haven’t we solved it yet? John Marchese’s book The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop talks about the mysteries and realities of violin-making. His book follows the work of violin maker Sam Zygmuntowicz as he works on a violin for Gene Drucker of the Emerson String Quartet.
There’s a good bit about the history of violin making, and the experience of playing and hearing a fine instrument, but the bulk of the book is about Edward Heron-Allen‘s challenge: “Given: A log of wood. Make a violin.”

It’s those bits about craftsmanship really got my attention. For all the magic and mythology about great violins, it boils down pretty easily. Zygmuntowicz:

It’s a very foreign idea that violin making is not all that mysterious, but it is one of those things where the basic way it works best was stumbled onto a long time ago. The requirements haven’t changed, and therefore the results haven’t changed and therefore it’s a very complex custom that is only learned through long application and a great deal of knowledge. It’s not arcane knowledge; it’s something any guy can learn—if you spend thirty years doing it.

You could probably say the same for writing, drawing, sculpting, cooking, building relationships, any number of things. The not-so-secret is good old-fashioned hard work, deliberate attention. If only there were shortcuts! In one passage Marchese talks about a day with Zygmuntowicz near the end of the violin making process:

I spent a whole afternoon watching him work on the final thickness graduation of the violin top with a scraper that removed wood not in pieces, not even in shavings, but in grains. He’d weighed the piece before he started, scraped and scraped for several hours and weighed it again when he was finished. The sum difference in his day’s work was three grams.

Three grams! For reference, 3 grams, give or take a few tenths, is about the weight of a U.S. penny. Metaphorically speaking, I don’t know that I’ve ever paid 3 grams/day worth of attention to any one thing. But the heart of craftsmanship is right there in the attention to detail. Quoting Zygmuntowicz again:

If there’s anything I can measure, I measure it, on the theory that it will become interesting in later years. I’ll make some varnish notes, and some evaluations of the sound, and if I can I’ll follow up and see how the sound might have changed over time… Some guys take two measurements and that’s it. I think I’m kind of a maniac.

It’s a work technique. Not a particularly efficient one, but we’re not judged on high efficiency—which is a very good thing. I wouldn’t survive, or I’d certainly have to alter my work style, if I had to be more efficient.

But it’s all part of a process of becoming—I don’t know what you call it—I guess a more subtle worker. The thing is that you start to care more and more about less and less.

Another spot I loved was Marchese quoting Sir James Beament discussing rare, expensive violins versus work-a-day models: “They do not make any different sound, and no audience can tell what instrument is being played. But if a player thinks he plays better on such an instrument, he will… Audiences are even more susceptible to suggestion than players.”

I went to a photography lecture a couple weeks ago, and in the Q&A session were the inevitable questions about gear. What camera? What lense? What film? What paper? There’s no shame in wanting to use better equipment so you can work better, but it’s dangerous to give in to the lazy thought that equipment trumps the process of attentive labor and the work ethic that drives it (rolls of film shot, hours in the studio, drafts revised, face-time with customers).

Lastly, I liked Zygmuntowicz’ comments on how originality and style develop over time: “When people talk about personal style a lot of what they’re talking about is slipping away from the original—people were trying to do it just like the original but they didn’t.”

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Tumblr and tumblogs are great, but the attribution can be shoddy. I had to click my way back through 4 or 5 websites to to get to the primary source for these really cool illustrations, No Hugging Is So Hard. [sorry, I lost track of the vias, but the next-to-last was startdrawing]

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Art has no shortcuts, folks:

In the course of many centuries a few labor-saving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen—alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Bezedrine, etc.—but these mechanisms are very crude, liable to affect the health of the cook, and constantly breaking down. Artistic composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.

W.H. Auden, The Mental Kitchen [$]

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (review: 5/5)

~ Mark ~ 4 Comments

Early on in his new book, Alex Ross identifies one thing that separates music from other arts: “At a performance, listeners experience a new work collectively, at the same rate and approximately from the same distance. They cannot stop to consider the implications of a half-lovely chord or concealed waltz rhythm. They are a crowd, and crowds tend to align themselves as one mind.” Though Ross doesn’t say it outright, that also applies to crowds of composers.
Much of his new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, is spent wrestling with the idea of the push and pull of the crowd and the “split between modernist and populist conceptions of the composer’s role.” There’s that clever insinuation in the title. Though the book brings up a lot of music, yes, but it’s also about listening to the era, the shifting alliances and rivalries among composers, the feedback loop of popular culture, ethnicity, politics, war.

And the buildup to and endurance of wartime dominates the much of the book. His description of the Teens and Twenties has some eerie parallels with today:

For anyone who cherishes the notion that there is some inherent spiritual goodness in artists of great talent, the era of Stalin and Hitler is disillusioning. Not only did composers fail to rise up en masse against totalitarianism, but many actively welcomed it. In the capitalist free-for-all of the twenties, they had contended with technologically enhanced mass culture, which introduced a new aristocracy of movie stars, pop musicians, and celebrities without portfolio. Having long depended on the largesse of the Church, the upper classes, and high bourgeoisie, composers suddenly found themselves, in the Jazz Age, without obvious means of support. Some fell to dreaming of a political knight in shining armor who would come to their aid.

Two recurring characters appear in the first half of the book. The first is Thomas Mann‘s book Doctor Faustus, about a composer who makes a bargain with the devil and whose fictional music owes a lot to the real music of Arnold Schoenberg. The second is the opera Salome by Richard Strauss, a scandalous early 20th-century opera. Opera comes up quite often. It’s easier to talk about the music with an explicit emotional narrative. Ross can let the libretto tell the story rather than relying exclusively on musical description or intuition. There are also long treatments of the operas Wozzeck, The Threepenny Opera, Peter Grimes, and Nixon in China.

It makes sense to talk about the big works, the standbys, the headlines. I don’t think he meant to create a comprehensive book, so of course there are some unfortunate absences. Ross mentioned that he regrets he could have spent more time writing about “conservative” composers. Rachmaninov, for example, only gets a few mentions. Though he’s a modern-day orchestral standby (and one of my personal favorites), he didn’t shake things up enough to make it to the book. Carl Nielsen and a bunch of the British also get passed over. Nonetheless, the depth and breadth of research that went into the book is consistently amazing, in part because it flows so well. I don’t think I’ve read non-fiction this enjoyable in a couple years.

Be sure to stop by his website. Ross has audiofiles for The Rest Is Noise on his website, as well as a video introduction. If you’re looking for a great sample, there’s an excerpt from the chapter on Sibelius.