Les said, the better II

Bartok Paper

I read the Bluebeard article with great interest. When I was at the Joan of Arc Centre in Orleans, one of the things I learned is that the real-life Bluebeard may have been the commissioner of the play, La Misterie du Siege d’Orleans, which I am researching. While the man who became famous for his misdeeds is a character in the play, none of his future misdeeds are mentioned and he is treated as a hero. Some suggest that this is evidence that he paid for the play to be written. Others believe that this is useful information for dating the year that the play was written. In either case, Bartok and the anonymous fifteen century playwright share a commonality for casting Bluebird, a real life serial killer of children and folk-tale murderer of wives, as a hero.
Frigyesi’s interesting research suggests that Balazs’ and Bartok’s heroic casting of Bluebird does not use stereotypical and harmful gender roles, but is almost a proto-feminist piece. Unlike the fairy-tale, where Judith is punished for her disobedience, here she just runs into the essentially solitary nature of the soul. Frigyesi acknowledges that other critics feel that the original fairy-tale interpretation is present in the opera and then unearths a mountain of evidence to support his own, contrary, claim. Some of this evidence, however, is underwhelming. For instance, when analyzing the Gulacsy painting The Magician’s Garden, Frigyesi suggests that female figure’s partial disrobement indicated openness and hence masculinity. While I’m not familiar with the the painting conventions of turn-of-the-century Budapest, I can say with certainty that more recent western images of partially unclothed women with fully clothed men have not intended to convey anything but femininity and submissiveness on the part of the pictured female. While certainly The Magician’s Garden is more complicated than a modern Budweiser ad, I require more context to be convinced of Frigyesi’s interpretation. Similarly, I am not fully convinced that the ending of the opera, like the folk-tale, is not a punishment Pandora-like for Judith being too curious.
That said, the context Frigyesi provides around the opera greatly increased my understanding of the piece. Otherwise, it would have been hard to know what to make of it other than a very strange retelling of the folk-tale. The nihilistic context is immediately familiar to anyone who was a pretentious highschool student during the time that I was in school. I used to frequent a cafe where all the young patrons wore black clothes and propped up their Nietzsche tomes so that others would be able to see the author’s name on the binding of the book. We drank lattes and talked about meaninglessness and how our words could never adequately convey our angst. Had I been aware of this opera during that time, I’m sure that I would have become a great devotee.
The angst, isolation and nihilism that this opera portrays, us teenagers experienced as a facet of modernity. The Kafka story, The Metamorphosis, which was also extremely popular around Coffee Society, takes place in an explicitly modern setting and our highschool english teachers instructed us about the modernist content. Kafka, of course, lived in Prague when he wrote that, but Frigyesi talks about nihilism as a social force throughout eastern and western Europe at the time.
Bluebeard’s Castle was also written around the time that the Esperanto movement was gaining steam. The language was invented in Poland and it’s “national library” is currently in Budapest. It became extremely popular in France and Germany, but it’s strongest staying-power has been in Eastern Europe, especially in Hungary. It’s ironic then, that Bartok and other members of the intelligentsia where fretting about the utter inability of words to convey meaning that the same time that others were trying to bridge gaps between people of different languages.

new last paragraph

It was also interesting to read about how the modes in Svadebka were related to Medieval modes, something that Taruskin assumes his audience to be familiar with. I look forward to re-reading that section as my research project progresses. Actually, I’ll probably never re-read any part of this paper because it is incredibly long and boring. There is nothing to say about it because Taruskin has already said everything anyone might possibly want to say about Svadebka and said it with examples over many, many pages. I cannot possibly imagine being this interested in Stravinsky. And all of this is for one single work. It boggles the mind to think about the amount of research that went into this book. Didn’t Taruskin have anything better to do? I can’t imagine dedicating that much of my life to somebody else’s work. On his deathbed, he’ll be able to think that he knew more about Stravinsky than anyone else, but he’s created nothing new. He has only analyzed. He has not worked to make the world a better place, only pointed out how someone else has. This book is emblematic of all the problems of academia and academic writing.

not in my paper

My paper will not say, “On the othe rhand, this paper, by contrast, is not very long and has not been overly researched at all. It may still be boring and not creative, unfortunately. fortunately, I spend a bit of time when i’m not doign homework by writing music.” My paper will not say, “I am not an ethnomusicologist. I am not here to write papers.” My paper will not say, “I am counting the minutes until I get to the airport.”

bad paper

try as you might, you cannot imagine how long and boring the 300 pages are about this one stravinsky piece. the piece is only a half hour long. that’s ten pages a minute. ok, myabe it’s less than 300 pages, but it feels like 300 pages. the author has figured out where every single note came from and how the plan to include it changed over time and he wants to tell you all about. Stravinsky miscopied a note from a melody that he was stealing. But when he realized it was wrong, he didn’t fix it, he exploited it. That note appears in the following 50 locations where it is surrounded by the followign 50 things. Also, people used to think all peseant songs and powems had the following stresses and here are the stresses and here is how every major russian composer before stravinsky transcribed the stresses, but then some guy figured out that they weren’t stressed that way at all and look, stravinsky didn’t use the odl stressing pattern and he put in rests in the music wherever he felt like it and here’s 789362562345796892345 examples of where he put rests with long discussions of the stress patterns of the 23801641036735 poems he may have been quoting.

fall break starts thursday night . . .

Celeste Hutchins
Proseminar
Stravinsky Paper

As a composer, I found Svadebka to be very interesting. Specifically, I was intrigued by Stravinsky’s use of source material and how his plan evolved as he worked on the piece. This is a compositional model that I would like to employ with my project around Joan of Arc, by using material that an expert in the field (or a person from that time, or in Stravinsky’s case, a peasant) would recognize as appropriate. Stravinsky had an easier time collecting source material, as the tradition that he taped was within the memory of living people and because of the giant book of collected wedding songs that he was able to draw upon.

Taruskin goes into perhaps too much detail regarding to origins of the motifs of Svadebka. It was interesting to read about how Stravinsky became so familiar with the source material that he was able to write prototypical folk songs, but perhaps this could have been expounded upon at less length.

I watched a tape of this piece with new choregraphy and I watched it before I did any reading, so I do not know how much of the “acting” originally written was present in the production. The music, however was superb. This piece has some rythmic motifs that are similar to those in Rite of Spring, but since they both cover similar themes of “virgin sacrifice,” this seems appropriate.

(While I question the notions connecting virgin sacrifice and marriage, I understand that they may have been connected Stravinsky’s mind.)

The diversity of source material is apparent in the piece. The first clear instance of chanting is somewhat surprising, but also wonderful and perhaps my favorite part of the piece.

It was also interesting to read about how the modes in Svadebka were related to Medieval modes, something that Taruskin assumes his audience to be familiar with. I look forward to re-reading that section as my research project progresses.