The Impossibility of Words

I’ve often wondered how it’s possible for non musicians to write about music. Indeed, writing about music can be pretty tough because words don’t convey sound, only an approximation and then only in the very best poetry.

When I was young and cool (HA…not sure the ‘cool’ bit ever happened but, hey, I can dream!) I used to read the British music weekly New Musical Express (NME for short) a publication covering the then popular genre of rock and roll. I always found the ability of journalists to describe what they heard to be remarkably limited. The, then really popular, BBC Radio 1 show Steve Wright in the Afternoon used to feature a comedy character called The Music Journalist who would describe everything as a remarkable ‘sonic cathedral of sound’. Which wasn’t too far from the NME.

The great Roddy Doyle novel, ‘The Commitments’, about a soul band forming and breaking up in the Irish capital, Dublin, of all places, is equally unable to describe the music it’s trying to depict. You’re left to your own knowledge and memories of Wilson Pickett, James Brown and others.

This is why Alan Parker’s movie of ‘The Commitments’ is so much better than the novel; you see and hear the real sound of the music; even if Doyle’s writing is witty, full of life and gives you a good grounding in a moment of the lives of some ‘typical’ Dubliners.

The Commitments, Try a Little Tenderness…So cool, there are icicles on the ceiling

1991, the year ‘The Commitments’ movie appeared, I saw Bertrand Blier’s ‘Trop Belle Pour Toi’ (Too Beautiful for You) for the first time. It’s a slightly strange telling of the manager of a car dealership (Gerard Depardieu) falling out of love with his beautiful wife (Carole Bouquet) and into love with his plain, frumpy secretary (Josiane Balasko).

Trop Belle Pour Toi…A waking dream that isn’t a nightmare

We see dream sequences in which Balasko tells the car salesman how she thinks he will leave her; dinner parties thrown by Depardieu and Bouquet in which the tension and pressure to stay with such an accomplished, beautiful woman is palpable.

The whole film feels like a dream. At the centre of it is a piece of music, Franz Schubert’s ‘Piano Impromptu No. 3’. At one point, Depardieu is listening to this whilst his family are asleep, he simply says “this music, it shatters me”. When I heard it and saw this, I was helpless. If ever there was music to fall in love to, this is it.

Now that I’ve thrown up my hands at the difficulty of describing music with words, I’m going to attempt to tell you why this music reduces me to a misty eyed jelly. There is a problem, I can’t read or write music, my descriptive abilities in musical theory are non-existent. So this is going to be difficult.

But here goes.

This is a work meant for piano, you don’t hear any other instrument. The first couple of bars are wonderfully delicate, tender and tentative as if beginning is something to be shy of. As the main motif moves on, a fluttering as if in a gentle breeze picks up underneath it.

What’s that about, you might wonder? The main sound gives you an aching, yearning of the kind you feel when what you need is in sight but only a fingers length out of reach. The piano breeze tells you what’s going on in the heart, the gentle emotion rising to near fever, calming and building again; whilst the main tune (how inadequate that word is here) keeps up a front of ‘should I, shouldn’t I?’ At the half way point, the keys are struck so gently it’s hard to believe they’ve been touched, more they’ve been breathed on to produce the lightest of chimes.

I’ve always had a sense of two people coming close, moving away, raising their hands in a half gesture before pulling back. All the while, what they’re thinking, the pounding of the heart remains private and unspoken, without needing to be spoken.

Sometimes the couple is faced with the storm of circumstance trying to pull them apart; be it personality, family, work, whatever. If they’re meant for each other, the couple might be inviolable regardless of what happens, like a lighthouse on the edge of an ocean hurricane.

It finishes with the same heartbreaking ache that began it, if maybe more knowing and understanding than before. All achieved without words, without touch; only through the most delicate, intricate of sounds barely registering but doing so powerfully.

This is what’s going on in this piano impromptu. No other music moves and touches me in quite the way this does.

Art in black & white…of all things

I love art. Which is strange, because as a child, right up to the age of 20, I had no interest in it at all. Paintings and sculpture seemed irrelevant and anyway, they all looked the same. Unless it was 20th century art, in which case it looked like my dog could’ve done better.

Since the age of 20, art has become one of the most important things in my life. Paintings particularly; sculpture grabs my attention less so, though I’m unable to explain why this.

I used to enjoy kids art shows on the telly, anything with Tony Hart and Rolf Harris (I’m struggling to get over the fact that Harris was, in real life, an evil creature), but it never inspired a wider love of the subject.

At the age of 18½ I visited Denmark as an exchange student. Everyone who’s done this kind of thing will know that the hosts always bust a gut to show their foreign guests what their city and country have to offer. My Danish hosts were no different.

It says a lot about me that I cringed when I was told we were going to see Roskilde Cathedral the Danish Royal Ballet and the Lousiana Museum of Modern Art (both in Copenhagen); these worthy attempts were so Obviously Boring.

I had no interest in the cathedral; none whatever. Me and my group were given a guided tour around the building. The guide was excellent but, I thought, did he have to point out every single minor point of interest. Just one interesting thing would do it.

He took us into a chapel with paintings of sea battles on the walls. The walls were sculpted in marble, there was a statue of someone and a portrait of Christ. All of which left me unmoved.

Until the guide told us the walls were an optical illusion. The picture frames weren’t sculpted in marble, they were all tromp l’oiel paintings. Then he added that the portrait of Christ only became properly visible when viewed through the legs of the statue.

Chapel of Danish King Christian IV The sculpture around the painting is not real

When I took a closer look at the marble frames of each of the paintings, I could see that they were flat as a pancake, there was no sculpture, no marble. Everything had been painted. The grain of the stone, the shadows…make that the multiple lines of shadow…all of it was made to fool the eye.

And that portrait of Christ really was nearly impossible to see properly. It was mounted between two large windows. The light from the windows flooded the eye to the point where Christ was only a little face and not much more. But, we were told, if you stand behind the statue and look at Christ from between its legs, you see the founder of Christianity in all His glory. And it was true. The legs blocked out the light from the windows, making the portrait visible, making Christ himself visible.

From there on, I took in everything the guide said. Checked over everything he pointed out. Listened to everything he said with newly keen attention. But nothing resonated quite as much as that chapel.

Roskilde Cathedral in Denmark is a beautiful, fascinating building and well worth a visit.

Days later I was at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. It has nothing to do with the United States, but is instead named after the wife of the founder.

The very first picture the guide took us to had a Christian looking cross in black against a white background. The block in the top left corner was completely filled with orange paint. What was it? asked the guide. None of us could work it out. Not one.

It was, she said, a painting of a tree, with the sun in the background, totally stripped down to its barest essentials. All you needed to see, the artist was implying, is the shape of the tree and the colour of the sun.

WOW!!!! Now she had my attention. The problem was that I didn’t like the paintings that followed, couldn’t see their reasoning and so my interest waned and died. But I never forgot that one painting. I was knocked over by it.

Two years later, I had started my Communications Studies degree and was beginning to feel that I had found one of my passions, Cultural Studies (I know, but someone has to like it). Among the books on my reading list was Ernst Gombrich’s The Art of Illusion. Now I know what I’m about to describe sounds cheesy and silly, but here it goes.

I had got the book from the faculty library and started flicking through it, scanning the pages and looking at the pictures (HA! there it is!) when I spotted a black and white reproduction of one of Claude Monet’s views of Rouen Cathedral.

Claude Monet – Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight), 1894. The painting that started it…imagine this, but in black & white

I was transfixed. I was stunned. I couldn’t take my eyes from it. I felt a hatch into a completely different world suddenly opening up and I knew I had to follow; that my life would never, ever, be the same again. Black and white for crying out loud.

Suddenly I went mad about paintings. Not ‘merely’ the Impressionists, but everyone-ists. Old Masters, Modernists, you name it, I wanted to see it. Within weeks I was debating the finer points of Cubism, comparing it to the work of the French Realists, contrasting a Picasso ‘Table Lamp and Cup’ to a Fantin-Latour ‘Still Life with Fruit’.

What one of my classmates had dismissed as ‘blob paintings’ suddenly made sense to me. Or if it didn’t, I could have fun wracking my brain, reading up on it to work out what the artist had been trying to say and do.

I have never lost that awe, wonder, excitement of those early days when I discovered Art and Painting.

In the following years I saw each of the Fine Art Department Final Year Shows, gushing profusely over the ideas and work of the students involved.

Going down Memory Lane is not something I like to do: never go back to your past, it’s never as good the second time round. That was my mum’s advice the year after I’d been to Denmark because I wanted to return. Like most mums, she was dead right.

However, there are three things I would love to do again. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art would be worth a rematch because I barely understood what I was seeing. I was incapable of making a judgement, except for that spectacular first painting, what I now know was a Mondrian.

Roskilde Cathedral too, deserves a second look. Not simply to see that chapel, remember its name and take in the effect of something I can now better understand. But to take in the whole building that I couldn’t appreciate when I first saw it.

Finally, I would revisit the Danish Royal Ballet. Like many of my compatriots in that week, I was horrified to be told we would be seeing a performance of Romeo and Juliet. A…a…ballet!!! Booooorrrrrinnnng!!!!!

I was the only one of them to stay after the interval. Watching the dancers, how they moved in flawless keeping to that music; their athleticism, the beauty of the music and choreography, how the two blended into one sinuous vision…I was moved like never before and barely since.

What Gabriel Garcia Marquez meant to me

OK…my second post. Hmmm…what to write about? Well I can’t go on like this, wondering what to write day after day or you, poor reader, will have died of boredom; me too probably.

I noticed that Gabriel Garcia Marquez died some two days ago aged 87. There are acres of articles being written about his greatness, his achievement in Latin American letters and what he meant to people living across that region.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez…Changed the way I think about the novel

Instead, here’s what he meant to me.

I’ve read The General in his Labyrinth, Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and the short story collection Leaf Storm.

What comes across in each of these novels is Marquez’s humanity. He never seems to judge his characters, rather he sets out their behaviour and describes it if not impartially then he leaves the reader to make the judgement. He never sneers at his creations nor does he hide from their squalidity. Marquez seems to understand the inconsistent weakness of people as well as their strengths.

I had never lived abroad, but had always had a fascination for the outside world, especially Latin America and Spain. Marquez took me from my home in the UK with its dull familiarity and remarkable lack of excitement and put me into the steaming jungles of Colombia with Simon Bolivar on his last journey; or the rubbish strewn slums of the unnamed city (probably Cartagena) on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

Leaf Storm grabbed my attention because it’s the only thing I’ve read where the opening scene is told and retold from multiple perspectives, the funeral of the town doctor who never really liked the town – who’s people never really liked him. It was so sad.

Marquez also wrote what I think is the greatest first line ever written. I was working in Borders bookstore in Swansea when a customer asked about the Marquez novels we had in stock. So the customer and I went through the dozen or so novels on our shelves…I opened Chronicle of a Death Foretold and read this first paragraph:

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream.”

Wow! “On the day they were going to kill him,” The finality of that statement knocked me over. There’s no doubt about what is to happen, how the book ends and so on because the first line tells you what’s to happen. In a strange kind of way it makes me think of the story of Christ’s Crucifixion – you know there is no escape, in fact escape is not the intention. It’s like a machine that does what it does from the moment it leaps into life.

But that line never lets you forget that the victim is a living breathing human being who had a life to lead. He’s not just the bull at the corrida, he has options and dreams and they will be snuffed out on this particular day.

All put into the first line of that first paragraph. I was hooked in that moment. I bought the book that day and finished it a week later, savouring each word and each line.

Marquez was the first novelist I took seriously, who’s books I looked out for and absorbed in the way one breathes in the scent of jasmine in the evening. Since that time I have found several other authors who grabbed my attention in different but equally addictive ways.

Writing this has made me realize how much I miss Gabriel Garcia Marquez and how much I need to pick up another novel and read it. Even so, I’m still grateful I found him long before he died.