091031a

Saturday, October 31, 2009, Halloween

Of course the name of the holiday, that word itself derived from "Holy Day", is "All Hallow's Eve", tomorrow being "All Saint's Day" or "All Hallow's Day". Tomorrow is a Holy Day of Obligation in the Catholic Church calendar, and today has traditionally been a day to memorialize the dead as in "Noces do la Morte" in Mexico and other Latin Countries.

We do now broaden the idea of holiday to mean any traditional hiatus from work where institutions and business shut down and people travel for recreation or to see family. Some of our observances have always been secular, but most are based on times that were either religious obligations of days with religious overtones, I am thinking of Thanksgiving in this latter.

Musical Skulls

I had taken the tradition of listening to Mozart's Requiem on either today or tomorrow as I understand it is often done in Austria. I don't know if the book I was engrossed in yesterday at Kepler's Books was part of the traditions of this day or not, but it was on the macabre disposition of the remains of great composers, Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn, principally becase of the discredited Phrenology of their skulls. I don't recall the title, although the cover art resembles a plate inside that shows the skull of Haydn, and recounts the mcabre act of severing the rotting head from the bady and cleaning it of all its putrid flesh.

There is a germ of truth to the idea that the typography of the inside of the skull has some relationship to the treasure that lived within. Beethoven's post mortem is well-enough documented, given the crude methods of 1827. We know that he willed his remains to science and that a description of the condition of his remains was made, noting that he had unusual brain anatomy, more numerous and deeper convolutions (sulcae), large brain mass and a thick skull. Of course the brain was not preserved, and the skull has deteriorated over time in part due to a really poor job in opening the cranium.

Beethoven's Death

A photograph of Beethoven's skull from 1868 exists, but by that time there were a number of mysteries that have hardly been solved. At the same time as this exhumation, remains of Franz Schubert were also recovered. His hair, which was quite thick, was recovered and given to his brother Ferdenand. Both sets of remains were reinterred a few feet from one another.

The information we have is not sufficient to diagnose the cause of Beethoven's death, and especially the cause of Beethoven's deafness. This is compounded by the fact that the aural anatomy has been missing from the start and not found.

The account of Beethoven's death is the same one contained in Theyer's famous biography. It recounts that his last words were a reference to "And the Trumpet Shall Sound" from Hendal's Messiah which is significant since one of the last treasures Beethoven acquired was a recently publicshed Handel Complete Works, for it is known how much Beethoven admired Handel. Also, noted was that many people took locks of Beethoven's hair. There is a research center for Beethoven at San Jose State University, that I have yet to visit, and I remember seeing a locket with one of thses locks of hair supposed to be from Beethoven. I am not expressing disbelief, only that I am assuming that a chain of custody does exist. This lock was chemically analyzed recently and found to contain high ammounts of heavy metals, Hg and Pb, and supports the speculation that Beethoven was treating Syphilis, but that is not known for certian.

I need to reverify the observer who gave us the account of Beethoven's death and autopsy, for he seems to have entered the Master's life at a point where he was still lucid, if ailing. The account is that when he first came to call, Beethoven says he is working on a string quartet, but our visitor realizing that Beethoven was deaf played the piano while waiting. It is interesting to speculate which Quartet Beethoven was working on. It might have been the Rondo for Op 130, that replaces the Grosse Guge (op 133) or Op. 135 or even the Quartet Fugue Op 137. If only Beethoven had lived to my age now. We might have gotten a whole host of fugues for string quartet, letalone piano fugues, let alone a Tenth Symphony. He did surpass Mahler in age, after all.

A couple of years ago I had also read an account of the exhumation of J.S. Bach from the graveyard of the Thomaskirke in Leipzig, and the rebarial of the nearly complete skeleton in the Nave of the church. I don't recall any account of the skull, only that Bach was a giant of his time standing at over six feet.

Musical Brains

There has been much research done of late on the neurological basis for music, and indeed why music seems to be so important to most humans, and much important than that to some people, myself in that latter group. The talk about skulls and brain anatomy of great musicians has a legacy in study of the brains of more people including geniuses of all types and people of known inclinations. The book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacs, a neurologist gives an account of musical abilities affected by trauma. It is a discussion of brain plasticity, and how trauma has both given and taken away enhancements in musical ability.

As I recall the Right Temperal lobe is especially significant, but the language centers, especially the parts that do syntax are also important. Pathology involving under use of the visual cortex may be involved as blind people often have strong native musical abilities. For myself some of these indications are quite interesting as I am left-handed, hence probably right hemisphere dominant. I have had trauma to the left motor cortex causing right-side weakness and spacisity, and suffer from low vision having lost my left eye to blindness and having about a third normal acuity in my right eye. The visual nerves from each eye innervate both sides of the visual cortex, but the traffic om my visual cortex may be less, have less bandwidth than normal. As my use of music is propelled by having a good memory for what I hear, including pitch recall if I don't try too hard, there is a good bet that I have some of the anomalies associated with musical skills developed under brain plasticity after trauma, with a strong genetic componant as I know that both of my parents were sensative to music. Indeed most people are to different degrees, and the universal meaning of music cannot be overlooked.

The (Painful) Art of Fugue

A particular ancedote stands out. In 1999 I was working in a national system support call center. There was one engineer there who was alittle slow on the uptake. He could sove problems with a dogged determination, but he was a plodding kind of guy who gave the prehaps undeserved impresion of not being very bright. He may have had a learning or processing defecit, as I discovered from one striking incident. At the time, to while away the slow time we could surf the web to suit ourselves within reason. There was no Internet Police with the possible expection of being indescreet with porn sites as women did work there as well. I had been looking for MIDI files of serious pieces I loved and found a set of Bach's "Art of Fugue". I played one of these over the little speaker in my desktop and the slow guy was around. He recoiled and winced and said something about it being painful to listen to, I think it was Contrapunctus 1, a simple fugue in four parts, not even one of the more complicated pieces. I think now, that he was overwelmed, and couldn't actually process the counterpoint in anything like real time. Now, many more people can quite comfortably process complicated music without pain, even if thay are not conscious of what is going on. Lots of familiar popular music requires sophistocated harmonic and somethimes counterpuntal preception.

Music and Me

Equally fascinating is how irrestible my inclination is, and what it has done for me. In some basic way it has saved my life. as astonishing as that my seem; people regard music as entertainment. To the pragmatic kind of people America is full of, I am sick of them, too, something that doesn't result in a salable trade is worthless, and I have not been able to develop my skills into performance for probably the same reasons as I have them, poor vision and poor coordination. But the advice given to people who live with a loss is to do something that is a peak experience, which shows one's own divine spark, every day. I do that through music, for being able to understand and remember the sound and the action of thousands of wonderful pieces and to do it effortslessly and in my dreams. I do not doubt my accomplishment even though it is largely locked away, for when I talk about music to musicians and others who know music, they are very impressed. Most other people cannot appreciate this; it is either something they have little awareness of or it is a threat to them.

Looking Bach

This is a retrospective on events in my life that go back to the aftermath of 9-11 and cover 2002 to the present. Now at that time I knew plenty of J. S. Bach, but there were gaps and there were plenty of unexplored details, in fact it can be said that the hallmark of Bach, like God, is in the details.

My latest adventure with Bach begins with misadventure from years before. Around 1997 some interloper in my life stole an 18-LP budget set of all of Bach's Organ Music from the garage and sold it probably for booze. He was living under a bridge in San Francisco when last I heard. In retrospect this set was probably not of good quality, although many of the recordings were on period instruments, the recording quality left much to be desired. Even though I had a complete set of the sheet music for this in 8 pocket scores from the Bach Geselleschaft Edition, I did not really pursue the great body of work until after 9-11, which had the effect on me of withdrawing to find ground. I did find ground alright in Bach's Cantus Firmus in the organ chorales mainly, but later the preludes and fugues of the organ music.

I had begun collecting MIDI files from the Internet of Bach's music some years before, and in the time when everybody was afraid in 2001 and 2002 I looked to them for solace and found to my joy their greatness,  especially in the Orgelbuchlein and Liepzig sets. Beginning there and with a few of the Preludes and fugues, such as the Tocatta and Fugue in F BWV 540 and the "Gigue" Fugue BWV 577, I really began to concentrate on these in early 2002.

Later in 2003-4 I began collecting MP3's and because of a move purged much of my LP collection having replaced it with digital recordings, and began to build up a collection of all of Bach's Organ music, among lots of other works by Bach and others.

I had long known that to really get Bach one has to read his music as part music, usually in three or four voices,  and more. Sometimes Bach tells us how many voices. This is not to be ignored even when the music is clearly idiomatic to a keyboard, as is the Organ music and collections like the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Not being a keyboardist, or at least a very weak keyboardist, I had been able to approach this music, all of it, as part-music, learning each line as if SATB. The four-part model works very well for most of it, and having a decent memory means that you can hear how each part you read individually fits in with all the others.

This shouldn't be surprising if you remember the Swingle Singers, a French Jazz vocal group of the 1960s, who became famous for their sparingly modified vocal renderings of Bach sung as part music. In fact their version of "Num Kome Der Heiden Heiland" BWV 659 is still one of my favorite performances of that work even though I now know all the  of the Leipzig chorals in their original form.

I delight in singing each part as well as I can, and often can hear it better that way as the lines can be lost or obscured on a given organ or choice of registeration.

In 2008, I was surprised to find that this paradigm even applies to that clearly keyboard work the Well Tempered Clavier. Most keyboardists would see that music as sufficiently challenging to master under their fingers, but it was the Glen Gould performances of 1955 which I had acquired on CDs a  couple of years earlier that taught me that they could be approached in the same way as other Bach as part music and them sung each line as a part. This is even true of pieces like the D-Flat Major Prelude of Book II, which is clearly a keyboard arpeggio, in its first section, and clearly true of most of the fugues. At first I was put off by Gould's use of the modern piano instead of the Harpisichord, which is most often chosen as the instrument to perform these with, but it is clear that the modern instrument makes it easier, at least with the uniqueness of Gould's technique and manner, to reveal an analysis of each voice in the performnce. One of the best examples in the C-Sharp Minor Fugue form Book I. Gould was able to play so that he could bring forward whichever voice had control of the interest, now alto, now tenor, maybe the bass, then the saprano, according to an analytic scheme for the piece.

Now, I knew and loved many of the pieces from the WTC long before this, It was "Switched On Bach" of Walter (Wendy) Carlos from the 1970's that turned me on the the E-Flat Major Prelude and Fugue from Book I with its double fugue in the "prelude". You get two wonderful  fugues in one, in that work. But it was Giould's insights that allowed me to get nearly all the rest in 2008.

Of Course, this pursuit is never really finished. My memory isn't flawless or complete. A given performance will reveal new detail even though I have possessed the sheet-music for years. There is so much detail in the interplay of parts that a lifetime isn't enough to exhaust the possibilities.