The last thing a child wants to learn is a language that shows some prospect of being useful. Sheer impracticality is one of the strongest points in a language’s favour for the young learner. The main reason my French is so much better than my Spanish or Portuguese is, naturally, that I grew up in countries where there was no use for it.

Holla, students of Faroese worldwide! A few months ago, I wrote the following about Helen DeWitt’s book The Last Samurai (which I swear to god if you don’t buy it right now for the low-low price of $11 on Amazon.com we are so no longer friends, and (!) you can get both ytt and John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure for $22, there really is no excuse):

This is also one of these books where to read it is to have the totality of the author’s vision only hinted at: despite its epic scale, it still feels like a tiny but perfect puppet fable played at the outskirts of a big, bustling city inside her head. I don’t say this by means of a judgement, but rather, it is interesting and important to think about the scale of the work that you’re doing and how it relates, in a sense, to the greater Projects that you have going on. I know that one of my major problems as a composer is that I used to feel, instinctively, that each piece had to fully represent (even in fleeting miniatures) all the aspects of my Whole Thing.

It’s interesting to revisit this little nugget from August; when I wrote that, I only obliquely knew what I was talking about as it related to music, but very much knew what I was talking about when it related to the written word. Some scattered examples. Does anybody else receive an erotic charge by knowing that the American Museum of Natural History in New York has over 32 million specimens, “of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time.” Or, as a counter-example, is it not a total buzzkill when a shopkeeper tells you, “the only sizes we have are the sizes that are on the floor?” Other things about which I get a physical tingle thinking about that same thing:

Awesome, Deep Shuddery Things
The phrase “tip of an iceberg”
The idea that an Island is just a giant mountain
Sinkholes
Library Stacks
Museums with 1% of the shit visible and the rest…somewhere…ELSE
Opera Houses with Giant Backstages
Those crazy tunnels under Columbia

There is a very subtle and important way, in the making of Art, to hint at the enormousness of the underlying island, archive, or stack; one way to do it is to just throw it all in there — this is sort of the Tony Kushner model, who once said (or wrote?), “A good play, like good lasagna, should be overstuffed. It has a pomposity, and an overreach. Its ambitions extend in the direction of not-missing-a-trick, it has a bursting omnipotence up its sleeve.” This is also the model that my old teacher, John Corigliano expertly employs; I saw a band piece of his once, and Nadia and I turned to each other and both agreed that that piece had the most “stuff” going on – both physically and musically – of basically anything we had ever seen before.

There are really great moments in Rushdie where I would get the same physical sensation – one such is in The Ground Beneath Her Feet:

And as he passes that unseen frontier he sees the tear in the sky, and for a terror-stricken instant glimpses miracles through the gash, visions for which he can find no words, the mysteries at the heart of things, Elusinian, unspeakable, bright. He intuits that every bone in his body is being irradiated by something pouring through the sky-rip, a mutation is occurring at the level of the cell, of the gene, of the particle. The person who arrives won’t be the one who left, or not quite. p.252-253

What about Bach? How much are we being shown compared to how much there actually is? How off-limits is the rest of the archive? Bach, for me, always works because you don’t actually know when you are in Forbidden, Ecclesiastical Backstage Space.

J.S. Bach Mache Dich, mein Herze, rein from the St. Matthew Passion
I don’t know whose recording this is but I will figure it out

I am going to be posting more Iceberg Tipp music in the next couple of days.

There is something very satisfying about having had so many people staying in the apartment this last week, with stuff on every surface, and then cleaning it off — which isn’t to say it’s not great to have a full house (in fact, it is my favorite thing in the universe), but more that I am very pleased that our apartment can accommodate such a wide variety of situations. We had a rehearsal here, conducted with scores in laps while sitting around the kitchen/dining/only table — I ordered guacamole and chips.

The day after a concert is always exhausting. We all joined up with the New Amsterdam Records after-party downtown, which was sort of weird and totally great (”How was your concert?” “Great! How was yours?” “Great! Cheers!”). Today, it is pouring rain, insanely cold, the cats are despondent and I am laying low.

A couple of years ago, there was a song by Sigur Rós that seemed inescapable - I heard it on every mixtape, student film soundtrack and college radio station. It is the third track from the band’s untitled album (the one that’s sometimes written down as “()”) from 2002. The song is sometimes titled Samskeyti, which can be variously translated from the Icelandic as juncture, joint or seam. There are no words, just five chords repeated without pause for six minutes. As the chords get louder and louder, a piano arpeggiates above them, ecstatically jumping up an octave at the climax. The song is undoubtedly very effective, but also seems to explicitly resist referencing any traditional episteme through its strange titling, lack of lyrics and solidly ambiguous textures. It is a winning formula; other songs on the album similarly resist meaning: the lyrics are almost entirely in an invented language and sung in an inscrutable falsetto.
What, then, to make of a younger generation of musicians who seem to be eager to link up their music with larger patterns of “meaning”, specifically religious structures? A few weeks ago, I got a CD called At War With Walls and Mazes by a young American composer going by the name of Son Lux. Immediately, my ecclesiastical bells starting ringing faintly; both those words have buried religious code. In addition to a Prologue and an Epilogue, there are nine tracks called Break, Weapons, Betray, Stay, Raise, Tell, Wither, Stand, and War. “All right!” I thought, “here are some patterns for me to sink my teeth into.” We have two violent bookends, and then six pretty explicitly, religiously charged keywords. The 30-second prologue begins with a ghostly pair of voices intoning: “Put down all your weapons/ Let me in through your open wounds.” This melody becomes a sort of ur-melody for the entire album, reappearing many times as a chant, always in the same key. It also quite explicitly points to various places in the Bible - both New and Old Testaments - notably: “And with his stripes we are healed” from Isaiah, or the moment where Jesus has Thomas stick his finger in his gash to prove that it is, indeed, Him. Salvation ensues, via the open wound.

Like the Sigur Rós song, the Son Lux song Betray is an endless cycle of hymn-like chords that we have heard before - they are familiarly cyclical. A compressed bass plays little jagged 1970s licks over a clean funk beat on distressed-sounding drums. Woodwinds trill between chords, making a halo around the sound. It is gorgeous. A voice intones: “You will betray me, baby, and I will be true/ I only ask, ‘May I share dinner with you?’” This is explicitly from Mark 14:18: “And as they sat and did eat, Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, One of you which eateth with me shall betray me.”

However, is this not, in a sense, a universal emotion? You have that last dinner, no matter how high the stakes or fraught the relationship. It’s unclear if the shuffly beat modernises the story or if the lyrics historicise the beat; in either case it is a beautiful moment that spans the profane and the secular to the detriment of neither. What I find exciting about this is the way that people my age are beginning to unironically use biblical sources without the intent to offend or provoke. In a more general sense, it speaks to a greater honesty about using one set of sources to create another: it’s like knowing where all your food comes from.

I think that it’s a pretty brave move to use unmanipulated references either from literature or the Bible; it speaks to a growing awareness of the power of orthodoxy and a greater facility to pay attention both in creators and audiences. The fact that an album such as At War With Walls and Mazes can exist is, to me, representative of our movement away from the ironies of indie emotions and the emotionally blasted landscapes of, for instance, Marilyn Manson. There is something satisfyingly one-to-one about this album in its simple and uncomplicated references and cycles.

How great are English people’s biographies when they include names like “Lucasta Miller” and “Julius Drake?”

When I was a teenager, I saw this portrait of Bostridge and thought to myself, maybe someday, I will dress like that. Look how good that scarf is! And I love the texture of that jacket.

Here he is, singing Ivor Gurney’s delicious song Sleep, from the English Songbook CD. Click here to see Gurney’s really beautifully engraved gravestone.

Ian Bostridge & Julius Drake
Ivor Gurney Sleep from The English Songbook

Sleep, from Five Elizabethan Songs
John Fletcher (1579-1625)
Come, Sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving
Lock me in delight awhile;
Let some pleasing dream beguile
All my fancies; that from thence
I may feel an influence
All my powers of care bereaving!

Though but a shadow, but a sliding,
Let me know some little joy!
We that suffer long annoy
Are contented with a thought
Through an idle fancy wrought:
O let my joys have some abiding
O let my joys have some abiding.

Lesbos called and they would like their intellectual property back. “The Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece could not be reached for comment” is also my favorite thing. What did they do, send them a mass mailing?

A few scattered thoughts about this production:

1. Every time I went into the lobby, somebody was looking giddy. I heard more than one person say, “I can’t believe we’re at the Met!” This is a good thing.
2. If at any point during the production I thought to myself, “these tempos sure are a little slow,” the last eight minutes were all the sweeter as a result of the waiting. I made a mental note not to rush things.
3. This opera is one of Philip’s first pokes outside of his own ensemble. He sticks an electric organ in the pit as a sort of a security blanket, and also as a way to cover up some of the complicated breathing required to sustain the endless arpeggios. I will say, at the risk of getting in trouble, that while the orchestra generally sounded awesome, there was a major Piccolo Situation that verged on the aggressive: even if you don’t like the music and if it is very very very hard and very very fast, you don’t have to chip the top of every arpeggio. It reminded me of somebody being told to set the table and slamming down the fork and the knife and the plate and the dessert spoon. Chill it out. Also: turn up the organ! I want those arpeggios up in my grill.
4. Love that Richard Croft!

I was online this morning trying to see how financially reasonable it would be to design my friend a t-shirt for his birthday (very!), and in so doing, I uncovered some pretty amazing font choices. Check it out:

Under the sub-heading “Foreign:”

Excuse me?

But then, even better, weirdly found under the sub-heading “Scary,”

Where are we, the Temple of Doom? It’s pretty intense to think that even the web coder dude didn’t flag this as “completely insane.” What’s scary about Devanagari? How is that any more or less scary than “Alfred Drake” or, for that matter, “China Town?” Anyway, moving on to another delight from “Scary:”

Ahahahahah! And then finally, my favorite:

HOLLA! Try getting a racist font named after your ass’s opera, Chuckles! I totally beheld him again at George Steel’s awesome Stravinsky show at the Park Avenue Armory last week. I totally seen the Pope’s Car beforehand! Plus Wuorinen and Stravinsky Religious Music! A Glut of Orthodoxy! Difficult Iconz on the Upper East Side! Nadia and I got stuck in a barricade for about ten minutes. She had her viola on her back, so we thought that maybe we could convince the police officers to let us through on account of “she has to play a concert” (which wasn’t true). The best was the guy next to us with his giant Eli’s bag overflowing with the makings for tsimmes taking pictures of the motorcade with his iPhone. I went home and listened to the Mass about sixteen thousand times as well as Wuorinen “The Winds” CD, which has those genius Bassoon Variations on it (a beautiful piece for harp, timpani, and bassoon).

I think I can really confidently say that there is no piece of non-Anglican music that has had such a profound influence on me than the Kyrie from the Stravinsky Mass. There are about sixteen things that for me, contain a hugely erotic charge:

1. The first note
2. In the third iteration of the first gesture (as in, the third big phrase), the lego-brick wind octaves expand out into chords that I steal on a daily basis
3. The ends of the phrases feel like tying shoes: you don’t get how it works, but it is really elegant and quick.

Listen here:

Kyrie from Stravinsky’s Mass
Leonard Bernstein on DG

Prior to 1931, New York Times reporter William Buehler Seabrook, allegedly in the interests of research, obtained from a hospital intern at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of a healthy human killed by accident, and cooked and ate it. He reported that, “It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.”

Well, that’s exciting research for you. The quality of journalism really has gone downhill. Now, all we have is Mark Bittman talking about a “Hangtown Fry” and lengthy exposés on how Robert Downey, Jr. is sober now. PS, Seabrook is totally fascinating. I am going to read all his stuff. You have to love when his bio contains the sentence, “Due to his alcoholism and sadist practices they divorced in 1941.”

PS, everybody in New York needs to go see Satyagraha in a major way.

An Observation about British Food. I think, you guys, that we are over the hump with this. Now, it’s easier to eat well than it is to eat badly. Jaffer and I have eaten basically nothing but excellent, excellent food for the last seven days, which is a real triumph. Of course, the trick is to make as many meals as possible happen at either St John or St John Bread and Wine. I went the other night and ate Cuttlefish in Her Owne Inke, Pig’s Ear and Sorrel, Ox Heart Salad, and an epic, delicious Steamed Lemon Sponge. I salivate now just at the thought. Also, the variety of bacons available for purchase in the market is inspiring and wonderful. Also: the video player at St John Restaurant is amazing and you all need to go right now.

An Observation about my Visual Proclivities. I had to meet a friend at the National Gallery, but arrived very early, as is my wont, and wandered around the 16th century Italian art galleries for twenty minutes. I went to the gift store afterwards and saw the following postcards:

My first thought to myself was, “Ooh, that’s a handsome G!” And so I marched up to the lady and was like, “How much for that G?” and she said, “Sir, those are just the letters to tell you the names of the artists reproduced on the cards. They are not for sale, I am sorry to inform you.”

It is a handsome G, though.

Some Observations about Chronic Mispronunciation in England and among the Elderly. I was walking down the street and noticed a series of ads for the wonderful LastMinute.com, the copy of which reads, “This Weekend, Go Somewhere You Can’t Spell:”

Now, of course, England People and America People and basically Anywhere People have their own pronunciation preferences and I’m not going to get into a whole conversation about that here. What I wanted to talk about is this completely insane English practice of re-accenting foreign words.

I have a friend who came to visit me in New York just after he and his family had come from the Vèneto. See that accent there? That’s where the accent goes. Now, in Italian, you can print the accent or not, but everybody there would certainly pronounce it as I have just rendered it. My friend went to about as fancy a sequence of schools as money can buy, and is generally well-read and -travelled. So, what is it that would compel him to say Venèto? He wasn’t hesitating, either, it was like, Venèto this and Venèto that. What instinct governs this rule?

More jarringly, a few weeks ago, an English artist friend of mine - my age! - was talking about other artists’ use of color and referenced the Spanish artist Joan Miró. Now, I think in basically all contexts, the accent on that Ó is both printed and pronounced. Homegirl, similarly, has had as posh a schooling as is available on this Island, and he was saying it not once, twice or thrice but like four million times with the accent on the first i. Míro. Now seriously, you guys? What is this about?

I was thinking about this in the context of some other weird interviews I’ve had recently, where people – usually around my parents’ ages – have seemingly deliberately mispronounced the names of other artists – sticking H’s up in Antony’s name, rendering the J in Björk’s, even pronouncing my own name Nicko, despite the IPA guide I put at the end of my bio (”His name is pronounced [ˈni ko] [ˈmju: li]).” Nobody is asking for people to render Sigurðsson or Hrafnhildur with native perfection, but, where does the tongue twister leave and general politeness take over?

[A note to my Webmistress. Is there a way to have a style sheet for single letters as themselves? As in “it was a U-shaped road” – aren’t you meant to make that U a special sans-serif deal? I know Jenny has blogged about this most cleverly, but I can’t seem to dig up the entry…]

When I was growing up, my father would chronically mispronounce my friends’ names if they were remotely not New or Old Testament; he too is well-travelled and read, and is not what could be described as culturally insensitive. I think what it does is establishes the Mispronouncer as the linguistically dominant party in a conversation, as if somehow the introduction of a foreign word is an offense to the sovereignty of his knowledge (not to offend him, a loyal reader of this space! Perhaps “offense” is too harsh a word: a grain of sand in the espadrille of his knowledge?). I know that I engage in a lot of this kind of play to reinforce that language is there to be played with - replacing w’s with v’s, older pronunciations, older spellings, and I know that what it does it shines the light of my own life on the sentence that I’m speaking; it’s on purpose. I do tend to try to leave people’s names out of it, preferring an aggressive nickname to an aggressive mispronunciation, because at the end of the day, your name is your whole joint, you know?

The other advantage of a deliberate mispronunciation is that it can be subtly dismissive of a topic that you, the Mispronouncer, are somehow ashamed to admit to knowing too much about. One time I have caught myself doing this is with the artist M.I.A., whom everybody had been talking about in, like, 2003. So as not to appear deliberately branché (BRAHN-shay) about her music, I caught myself talking about her like, “Oh, I was just listening to…how do you say it, is it Miyya? Emm Eye Ay?” and of course, it’s an asshole move, and it slows the pace of conversation. I heard myself do it, and vowed never to do it again.

Anyway, this sort of deliberate mispronunciation of foreign words can, I think, be culturally useful in Island places; in a sense, it nativizes and neutralizes the intense – and debatably problematic – amount of foreign influence in an otherwise closed culture. It says, your word has been transformed by its introduction to this conversation, house, location, culture. It’s a fascinating move; I just wonder what Miró and the good inhabitants of the Vèneto have to say about it. Maybe they don’t mind. I have found that people with, for instance, the Icelandic name “Daníel” (which is a spikey, three-three syllable affair) will readily introduce themselves as “DAN-yell” in non-Ice contexts; similarly, when in France I will spondee-out “Nico” as is the native custom.

This is not to say, however, that I’m proposing that everybody be super NPR about pronunciation or that anybody should ever rock out a fully rolled “Croissant” up in the Dunkin’ Donuts (has anybody ever tried to render the word Croissan’wich in this fashion?). NPR is the worst, when they play that racist-ass generic third world background noise (goats, chickens, children weeping) and then say that they are reporting live from Baghdad, rendered like بغغغ-ضاااااااض or God forbid, somewhere in the Quechuaphone world.

So instead, everybody go buy some David Lang off of iTunes!

Anybody who doesn’t wish to listen to my diatribe should navigate away from this page at this time.

We need to briefly discuss that this abortion of an article also won a Pulitzer. First of all, everybody I know emailed it to me when it first came out. Second of all, the comments attendant to this article on the Washington Post were unreal; I don’t know where they are now. Anyway, the basic premise is that Joshua Bell, who is, like, young and talented and handsome, went into a subway station in our nation’s capital and played a little recital during the morning rush. Nobody paid any attention because they were too busy on their iPods or whatever. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation. However, this article! It drove me to madness! I hope that everybody reads this thing and proves me wrong, that it’s not through-and-through offensive.

I’m re-reading it now and my heart is racing. The writing is as appalling as The Da Winci Code but somehow striving for more. Check it:

Mark Leithauser has held in his hands more great works of art than any king or Pope or Medici ever did.

Hot Grammar, right? Or:

“I had a time crunch,” recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. “I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement.”

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

Whyyyyyyyyyy is that two sentences? What is this weird halting style? This method of writing? This jerking? It continueth:

There’s nothing wrong with Myint’s hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

Oh. Was he? Listening? To his iPod? What? What is the question. What does that mean? Jerky Jerky.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences.

Gross.

“I didn’t think nothing of it,” Tillman says, “just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks.” Tillman would have given him one or two, he said, but he spent all his cash on lotto.

When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he laughs.

“Is he ever going to play around here again?”

“Yeah, but you’re going to have to pay a lot to hear him.”

“Damn.”

Tillman didn’t win the lottery, either.

What are we supposed to make of this little parable? Also whose voice is, “you’re going to have to pay a lot to hear him?” What drives me crazy about this whole experiment is that it is designed to fail and then give some random guy the opportunity to quietly pontificate (quoting KANT!) up in the Post. The tone is “elevated,” the same way people change their discourse when they say grace before a meal. The writer feels free to talk about how “we” as Americans rush around, his prime example being that we rush around during rush hour. There is something additionally nasty, I think, about subjecting the Chaconne, which is so divine, to this treatment. It’s chamber music, not public art. I have many times stopped in Times Square for the nine seconds it takes to quickly appreciate the Lichtenstein murals, or the Jones/Ginzel eye mosaics in the old World Trade Center stop: all examples of good public art making “us” do what “we” should: take a minute. Not fourteen minutes, are you crazy?

I am reading, as is my wont, a whole new pile of mass-market books about autism. I think I have read most available novels that feature autism in any fashion, and am now working through all the available memoirs. There’s a new one out in England, called A Friend Like Henry by a woman called Nuala Gardner. While I don’t recommend it per se, it does have many many chapters of what it’s like to be British and try to navigate the healthcare system to get a diagnosis of autism. Good train reading.

I ate last night in what from the outside looked exactly like the restaurant Dressler in New York. It then later turned out to be sort of my vision of what happens if you give gay people £1,000,000, put them in an office chair, get them drunk, and spin them around until they’re dizzy. Then say, “decorate a restaurant!” Let’s just say that there was a statue with a boa on it, shirtless men on the business cards, and a surprisingly decadent burger. Highly recommended, if you go in for that sort of thing.

Housekeeping! I have noticed that literally nann person has commented on my post about programming new music. Click here and read it and get sassy!