THROUGH THE YEARS, 14

35 years ago: May 26, 1972

This is The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, one of the greatest rock'n'roll albums of all time, for all time. How to express my love for this record? How do I love thee, let me count the ways.

First let's do the historical: The Stones with Mick Taylor started great (Ya Ya's, Let It Bleed), hit their stride with the first new Rolling Stones release I ever bought, back in 1971: Sticky Fingers (I was 12 and didn't really understand why it was a guy's zipper -- what's with that Andy Warhol, anyway?), and then peaked with this double album. The next two albums with Taylor were drop offs but certainly respectable, it's just that in '73 and '74 prog-rock was in its heyday, and of course rampant Ziggyness (à la that zipper). Bowie wore a dress on an album cover in 1970; The Stones kinda went 'drag' on Goat's Head Soup in 1973. Anyway, those were the days.

But what were the days for Exile? The familiar story: The Stones living in the South of France to escape onerous Brit taxation, recording in the basement of Keith Richard's château (O saisons, O châteux!). Letting it all hang out. The album as The Stones' answer to Dylan and The Band's "basement tapes" (not even officially released yet). I like that explanation, actually. If you don't find Dylan and The Band's recordings from 1967 a defining moment in rock, then you might be untouched by Exile too. It's the looseness of it, the drunken camaraderie, but more than anything it's Mick Jagger's vocals. Who sings like that? Nobody that white would dare to sound that black. It's like Mick finally managed to get it on record, that overwhelming desire to be Little Richard or Chuck Berry or even Muddy Waters.

In these days of countless internet lyric sheets, it's hard to believe that once upon a time there was no recourse to the words, unless you frequented sheet music shops. The lyrics on this album have long eluded me. Not surprisingly, some of the words are really good. Even less surprisingly, many of the words aren't what I thought I heard. But the point is that, more maybe than on any rock album I can think of, the words don't matter! And it's not because, as is the case on many albums, and many later albums by The Stones, the words aren't interesting. The words here are involving, if you catch them. But it's the way they're sung that counts. Everything is in how Jagger uses his voice. It dominates every track as the lead instrument and it never flags, it never stops testifying, it never stops embodying rock'n'roll funk. And the backups -- whether reedy Keith (who sings lead on one track -- almost wish he'd done more, he complements Mick so well) or those kicking "colored girls," Clydie King and Vanetta -- seem to push Mick past his own powers.

Then there's the horns . . . and Charlie Watts, my favorite rock drummer of all time, at his relaxed best . . . and Taylor and Richard, the best guitar duo The Stones ever had, and piano handled by Nicky Hopkins, or Ian Stewart, or Billy Preston, all Stones regulars at the time. In the early days, I viewed some of the tracks as "less essential." I guess I could still prune it if I had to, but in thirty-five years the LP has become fixed. I wouldn't change a hair of its head. And I don't care about alternate takes and demos and all that nonsense. Sure, if there are more finished tracks that didn't make the cut, I'd love to have them. Albums this good don't come around very often.

I had a copy of this album in the summer of '72, but on the record player I had at the time it sounded like a muddy mess. Which is what some of its critics claimed it was (I wonder what they listened to it on). My definitive listening was in the summer of '78, by way of comparing it to the current Stones album (by then Exile commanded respect; Some Girls was touted as "the best Stones album since Exile" -- which in fact it was). But Exile... A friend and I listened to it at concert-level volume one afternoon on Belle Klipsch speakers drinking cold Chablis and imbibing other things. Wasn't there a time when hedonism was a political gesture? Let's go back . . . this album takes you there. That summer was the first time I fully appreciated the funkiness of the album, which frankly used to embarrass me in my uptight early teen years. You know how it is. Anyway, this album's in my blood, all the way, and it holds up for me in a vital way whereas some great stuff from the '60s and '70s strike me as artifacts. Whatever historians say the '70s were, to convince me they got it right, they have to include Exile on Main Street.

May the Good Lord
Shine a light on you
Make every song you sing
Your favorite tune
--Jagger/Richard, "Shine a Light" (1972)

DON'T GET ME STARTED...

The following post consists of my comments on the poems on Poetry Daily last week (posted as commentary on Andrew Shields' blog where readers are asked to vote for best poem of the week -- you can still vote up till Thursday):

If I were to title my comments it would be something like: Why I Do Not Read Poetry Mags. This is the worst week yet. Dismal, disheartening, even. For some reason I have the idea that a poem, whatever it may be about, is also "about" command of language. Doing something interesting with it. Also, that, whatever the subject matter, one avoids clichés, the predictable, the banal, and -- one tries to at least -- the bathetic and sentimental. Somewhere between my standards and those of Hallmark Cards resides the world of poetry magazines . . . and Poetry Daily.

This harangue is mainly against #50, Hickok, and #52, Grøndahl (the latter is a translation and that may be the problem, language-wise, but in terms of content it's clichéd treatment of a cliché -- gee, does that make it postmodern?; the former takes issue with all those awful "Dad" poems and then proceeds to write one as bad as one would expect, or worse). Those are the worst offenders, but they manage to contaminate the rest. For instance, Dybek (#51, "Pan") -- clearly he knows how to write and work a line, but I'm underwhelmed by the paucity of imagination here, by something "school-teacherish" about it (yes, I know, most people who publish poems probably teach in some capacity, therein may lie the problem, but I won't go there).

The last four lines of Gallaher's dubya-bash say all that needs to be said, the rest, I guess, sets us up for it, but, "Now watch me make this shot" -- fish in a barrel, y'know? "Obit," Lehman's (#54) coulda been ok without that "hard-hitting" ending. Spare me a pundit's obit on the 20th century. Talk about belated! Are we done yet? No, #55, a Creation myth for the "new Eve"? Talk about 20th century! Zzzzz.

So, finally, my vote: #56, "Corpus Hermeticum" -- Eric Pankey. "A year, but only a day or two recalled, / And then only piecemeal: / a fallow field / Winter-dulled, a lean horse / Subsumed in fog". If it looks like a poem and sounds like a poem, it must be a poem! One for the week. Not great, but, hell, the thrice-great Hermes might not be utterly offended. And "a contingent cosmology" -- nice. I mean, what other kind of cosmology could there be, these days....

NO, IT'S NOT DÉJÀ VU

This semester I had to deal for the first time with a case of what seemed to me pretty deliberate plagiarism. It caused me to think a bit about plagiarism, which I really haven't given much thought to before.

In fiction, there are three levels, it seems to me. 1) To use an already existing fictional situation. This isn't that serious because most situations can be reconfigured so as not to rely much on the original, so it's more like taking someone's idea and running with it. However, certain fictional depictions kind of trump further use of a situation without incurring debt. We have many updates or re-imaginings of already existing material -- like the film Clueless's treatment of Emma -- but it does necessitate acknowledgment. 2) To use deliberate incidents from prior depictions; this is when the plot points or the incidental characters or a particular line of thought are employed in the same sequence or with the same inferences as in an original. Now we're getting into real trouble because the sequence of events, how details are used, and how actions play out are largely what fiction consists of, and these things have to be protected as original to the writer who uses such material initially. 3) To use actual language from the published text. This is the worst of all. The choice of words is what is most deliberate and individual to each writer. To import the words of others without treating them as quotations or allusions violates all the expectations we have about reading something "in the original."

I feel that unacknowledged use of published material in a creative writing course is the worst kind of unacknowledged use of published material that can occur in a college course. Ideas and the statement of facts should always be traced to where they originate, if possible, but both are able to be restated in various ways so as to avoid outright plagiarism. The ideas in creative writing are dependent on situations depicted and the very words in which they are described. A published work can be referenced so as to lead the reader to the original, in which case the allusions act as commentary. The original is indicated. But to treat work one has read as material one has created or invented is a travesty of the process of creative thought and a serious infraction of the code that defends original material from theft.

PAPA'S HEROES

Do you remember your President Nixon
Do you remember the bills you have to pay
Or even yesterday?--David Bowie, "Young Americans" (1975)

I'd have to say, yup ... yup ... yup. But the other question asked by Bowie's song is: "where have all papa's heroes gone?" Well, a few of them have birthdays this week. David Byrne turned 55 on Monday, May 14th, Brian Eno turned 59 on Tuesday, May 15th, and Robert Fripp turned 61 today, Wednesday, May 16th.

The Bowie lines occurred to me because I also remember 1979 when all three of papa's heroes could be found on one of my favorite records of the year: Talking Heads' Fear of Music. Eno produced three Heads albums, 1978-80, but he also was a feature on two Bowie albums in 1977, and Fripp played memorably on Bowie's "Heroes" album (that riff on the title song, in case you don't know) and on Lodger and Scary Monsters. Fripp and Eno collaborated on several albums, and Eno and Byrne collaborated on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1980. These three guys helped to define what came to be called the "art-rock" of the late '70s/early '80s, a New Wave-y treatment of what might otherwise be called "prog-rock." Fripp was an early exemplar of the latter with his band King Crimson, particularly the years 1969-73, but with the addition of Adrian Belew (who played on the Heads' 1980 album), Crimson became noticeably more Heads-y on Discipline (1981). Eno got his start with the glam-prog band Roxy Music in 1972, but his solo recordings of '73-'78 are still the must-haves of his career, in particular Taking Tiger Mountain (1974) and Another Green World (1975), but it's "King's Lead Hat"(1978, a scrambling of the letters of Talking Heads) that notes his fruitful association with the band.

Where are they now? Byrne's got a blog, but I haven't heard new music from him since 2004's Grown Backwards, not bad but not as good as the excellent Look into the Eyeball (2001). Eno's album of 2005, Another Day on Earth, is reminiscent of his Another Green World era. Fripp's most recent King Crimson album was in 2003, which wasn't as good as the album of 2000. I've seen the latest incarnation of Crimson perform three times, 2000-03, and will generally avail myself of any opportunity to hear the Frippster play live. Rock guitar gods are dwindling...

Still, what I associate most with these guys: becoming enamoured of Fripp's acoustic guitar work on Lizard and Islands in the mid-70s, and of course those patented distorted riffs of the "Larks' Tongues" songs; finding in Byrne's Heads of '78-'83 THE definitive cool music of the times, quirky, arty, fun, sufficiently estranged but not in too dark a manner; finally getting around to Eno's solo albums in '82 and finding in them the perfect music to compliment some of the artier sounds of the time, like King Crimson's return to form with Beat, Kate Bush's astounding The Dreaming, Peter Gabriel's advanced Security, and of course the career pinnacles not yet come down from of the Heads' Remain in Light ('80) and Bowie's Scary Monsters ('80).

Maybe this is all just to remind me that the early part of the '80s was actually interesting -- thanks largely to these three birthday boys of May.

The other musical question Bowie asks, famously, is: "ain't there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?" Actually, the last one that came close was Greg Brown's "Where is Maria?" sometime in the late '90s -- but that's another story...

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN

is read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996). I've just finished reading it, once. And that's enough. I can imagine re-reading parts of it, for there are parts of it that are, as they say, tour de force. But even so. I feel that returning even just a little bit might make me like any of the many addicts in the novel: just looking for an excuse for full re-immersion, and life is much too short. I still like to imagine I have things to live for, and this Entertainment isn't one of them.

As IF says: "concentrating intently on anything is very hard work." It's not that reading IF is hard work, it's simply incredibly extended work. "Following it," as in determining events' sequence and what is happening in "the story," requires preternatural powers of attention, sure. Though, as with any entertainment -- particularly if narcotics are applied -- following the story might not be the point. Granted, the time-frame of anything that happens is more knocked-out-of-kilter than in any novel I can think of. It follows gleefully in the "unreadable" tradition of Gravity's Rainbow (in that the logic of lucid drugged states is definitive for some of it and the enjoyment of quizzical scenes and odd flights of fancy for their own sake is accepted) and of Gaddis (in its penchant for ad infinitum monologue and dialogue and infinitesimal descriptions of scenes in which details dropped elliptically are somehow made to add up).

IF offers us many capsule comments on what reading it is like (most ostensibly aimed at the work of "après-garde" filmmaker James Incandenza). My favorite is: "'Watching Grass Grow While Being Hit Repeatedly Over the Head With a Blunt Object: Fragmentation and Stasis in James O. Incandenza's Widower, Fun with Teeth, Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell,' Art Cartridge Quarterly, vol. III, nos. 1-3, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken." But then I'll take this one too: "is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film's audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself [the filmmaker; here, the author] simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?"

Actually that rhetorical question runs in the wrong direction: it's not that Incandenza (or DFW) is a "shitty editor" because that would presuppose some failed attempt to edit so as to produce less puzzlement, boredom, impatience, excruciation and near-rage, but I suspect in JOI and in DFW no such intent. Rather the question is: does it have theoretical-aesthetic import (sure, it does, of course, what else) or is Himself simply a monstrosity of mind-boggling self-involved proportions with no sense of limitations -- in other words, is DFW, like JOI, borderline demented most of the time? Probably not.

DFW (as narrator) seems intent upon nothing so much as producing in the erstwhile audience (those who can't look away, poor fools) puzzlement, boredom, impatience, excruciation, and near-rage. That the latter effect is in fact the theoretical-aesthetic end. With also the intent to provoke some related reactions such as: laughter (I laughed aloud, a few times), disbelief (driving with a dog tied to your car?), mild horror (most of the AA speeches), uneasiness (child abuse), excitement (though DFW's narrator tends to describe scenes of action in such a way that one thinks of trying to watch an important moment of decisive action on screen in a movie theater while the projectionist makes shadow-puppets on the screen), curiosity (provokingly unsatisfied, often), suspense (the latter tends to lead to near-rage since it is provoked by playing a scene out interminably until it finally seems ready to reveal something and then immediately stopping the scene so as to jumpcut to something bearing no relation to the scene in which suspense was evoked, thus stimulating a constant state of suspended action, which many of the characters live in anyway, one way or another), pathos, sympathy, and wisdom-recognition, even.

It's a staggering achievement in its way. I mean, I refer to Dave Eggar's memoir as "A Staggering Work of Mind-Numbing Tedium," but Eggar's a piker compared to DFW. DFW may be the closest thing to a Beckettian sensibility produced on these shores, but... Maybe it's just because good old Sam B. broke down all those narrative assumptions way back in the '50s when things were still existential, but my take on the Trilogy is that it's much more metaphysical, aimed at something generally called "the human condition." DFW's target seems to be "the American condition," which, granted, may include all humanity, especially in the sense of pharmacology and video über alles, but even so, the diagnosis remains in the purview of endless navel-gazing. Gately's stint in the hospital bed is Beckett-like but remains the consciousness of Gately who is suffering from being Gately, not just from Being. And the novel rips off its most effective "image" -- Mme. Psychosis as the Angel of Death -- from Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (though the latter film does get a credit line -- elsewhere, Fun With Teeth steals from an early '80s film called Reuben, Reuben, without a credit).

Or let's take James Albrecht Lockley Struck, Jr's response to a tedious-beyond-belief account (which we get to read too) of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents: "Struck at certain points imagines himself gathering his [the writer's] lapels together with one hand and savagely and repeatedly slapping him with the other -- forehand, backhand, forehand." Amen, the very image I occasionally contemplated with regard to Himself, DFW. Or like totally demapping the guy to put him out of his angoisse du discours incessant.

SEMESTER ENDERS, 3

Those Were The Days, My Friend
It seems no spring semester is really over without a trip into NYC for some kind of entertainment. Last year it was a performance by Tom Verlaine in the Bowery. This time it was a couple of documentaries from the '60s by Emil de Antonio. The first, America is Hard to See, covered the McCarthy campaign in '68. It was instructive since it's sometimes hard to remember when presidential candidates were witty and urbane and didn't feel they had to dumb down unduly, or weren't already pre-dumbed-down. But of course that's why McCarthy didn't have a prayer. Maybe if they'd passed a law that only college-educated citizens could vote . . . then at least it would've been a question of college-educated liberals vs. college-educated conservatives. But McCarthy was never talking to "the people," only to the people like him. But footage of him set against the Hube and Tricky Dicky sure added to his appeal. And I really liked seeing the speech where he had to take pot-shots at the Kennedy camp, once Bobby finally decided he should run (i.e., once LBJ was out of the race). Up to that point, McCarthy could just criticize the sitting president, but once RFK made his move, then it was time to point out that the great think-tank of JFK advisers in LBJ's administration got us into the Vietnam debacle that McCarthy was primarily running against. Then we get clips of Daley and the '68 Convention floor and if it wasn't already clear that bucking the system from within the system was hopeless, it is then. No footage of the Yippies outside, storming the gates, but their presence is implied and, looking at the conventioneers, their angry frustration justified.

The second film, Millhouse, showed highpoints of Nixon's career -- particularly painful, funny, awful, was seeing almost the entirety of the famous "Checkers" broadcast where Nixon doggedly reads out his entire assets and income and debts on the air. But even more humiliating than that was the footage of Nixon paling it up with a benign Ike (now that "his boy" has pulled himself out of the frying pan) on a fly-fishing trip. Nixon looks so gauche and uncomfortable in his outdoorsmany get-up you almost feel sorry for him. The interesting thing about pairing the two films is that the McCarthy film shows the Democrats splitting apart over "their" war and what to do about it; Nixon barely mentions the war in the footage shown -- he's all about returning order to the streets and upping the spending power of the Silent Majority. The thing which struck me most watching this quick precis of Nixon up to his successful 2nd bid for the presidency is that he was a political animal first and last, in some ways the epitome of the system as it existed at the time. Defeated in '60, he was just waiting for his chance to come back. '64 was a trial run to stay in the limelight while supporting the far Right Goldwater (Nixon was a centrist by comparison) who had no real chance against LBJ and the Kennedy legacy. But in '68 with LBJ refusing to run and the Democratic leadership shaky -- you know how VP's never really make it on their own, witness Nixon vs. JFK, witness HHH vs. Nixon, witness Mondale vs. Reagan, witness Gore vs. W. -- it was time for King Richard. And the rest is infamy.

SEMESTER ENDERS, 2

Celebrating the Day
On May 8th, Thomas Pynchon turned 70 years old. The week before was the last meeting to discuss the end of his recent novel, Against the Day. The question that arises, I suppose, is if there will be another novel. One can only speculate, of course. But Against the Day feels very valedictory to me, seeming to reference elements of the entire corpus, so IF there is no further novel, this one "ends" the career.

But it might only end a phase of the career. It may be that TP will find another tack to take. Maybe he'll become the chronicler of a Chums of Chance series, sort of a more parodic kids' adventure than the ubiquitous Mr. Potter. Or maybe he'll go for something short and easily accessible in a single sitting: a play, a film-script, a collection of short stories.

The odd thing about AtD is that it seems to be several novels collapsed into one, as if it was easier to publish one big novel than a number of shorter ones: the adventures of Lew Basnight and the Major Arcana figures could have been a novel the size of Lot 49 at least, probably could've been expanded to Vineland size, and I, for one, would've loved it. The adventures of Frank Traverse wear thin in AtD, in part because, to be really involving, we need more involvement. The quick re-caps of Mexican in-fighting doesn't make it. So, maybe there was a Mexico Revolution-era novel in the works that just didn't get its day. The characters that take off in the second half of AtD -- Yashmeen Halfcourt and Cyprian Latewood -- are only tangentially part of the Traverse story. Sure, they hook up with Reef, but it's not as if it has to be Reef, if you know what I mean. Cyprian's story at least "ends," Yashmeen's fate seems to follow some dictum like "once a woman becomes a mother, she's no longer interesting for the purposes of novelistic evocation." I miss Yashmeen in the end because there's precious little evidence of the gal we've got to know. Part of the problem too is bringing her to America. No, Yash, noooo. Then there's Kit Traverse, whose adventures, like Yashmeen's, always hold interest and are thoroughly unpredictable and, unlike the adventures of Reef (the most unpredictable of all), Kit's peregrinations have more internal consistency and involve, at certain points, the two best female characters, Yashmeen and Dally Rideout.

OK, this could easily devolve into armchair quarterbacking of this long, involved, frequently mystifying and even more frequently amusing novel. TP's 70. What's next?

SEMESTER-ENDERS, 1

Heroic Film-making
Friday night the WHC Film Series kicked off its final weekend of the semester with a showing of Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972). I've seen the film on-screen a few times, but probably not since the '70s. One thing that struck me, seeing the film now: that era -- the '70s -- was really the era of heroic film-making. Rob Slifkin, a friend who also watched the film last night, said it would be great paired with Apocalypse Now!; one point of comparison is that the certifiable maniacs who made those movies actually went to these wildernesses to make the films, and carted along the equipment to do it, and subjected their cast and crews to the conditions necessary to make the film. In the '70s, cinema verité principles were applied even in cases of historical, costume drama like this one. No green screens or CGI, just green jungle and real river.

The other thing that struck me is that Herzog is the champion of the megalomaniac. Yes, we knew this in 1980 when Fitzcarraldo appeared (both starring Klaus Kinski -- and though Fitzcarraldo was more of "a role," Kinski will forever be emblazoned in my unconscious (wherever that is) as Aguirre, with his helmet and flowing locks and staring blue eyes and the shit-gnashing smirk of Olivier as Richard III). But since Herzog has recently given us Grizzly Man (2005), it's even clearer the extent to which he is drawn to these characters who move "beyond the pale" in their quest of some inflated sense of possibility. Aguirre wanted to be another Cortez and discover El Dorado (the real life Aguirre actually did make it to the Atlantic Ocean and declared himself prince of Peru); Timothy Treadwell, the "Grizzly Man," wanted to be a human bear. And the way Aguirre is filmed, it's almost as if the conquistador has a camera with him the way Treadwell did. So then "heroic film-making" has become the province of the DIY amateur in out-of-the-way places? Or as Coppola said in the documentary Hearts of Darkness (about the making of Apocalypse Now!): the great film-maker of the future will be a kid with a hand-held camera. In any case, my '70s purity was pleased to be watching, on the night of the much-ballyhoed opening of effects-extravaganza Spider Man 3, the adventures of spider-monkey-man.

And on that, a third point about this viewing. The Yalelies gathered to watch the film were extremely solemn. The movie does have humor -- but maybe you had to date from the '70s to appreciate it? There was barely a sound (and the place was pretty full), but a noticeable gasp and chuckle of disbelief after the scene (possibly my favorite) when Aguierre holds up a writhing spider monkey (the creature is truly emoting all its discomfort) and declares "I am the Wrath of God," and then flings the creature contemptuously away. One could sense the tension in the audience (Hey! were any animals harmed in the making of this film?). I'm sure the monkey landed on his or her feet. But who knows but that it lived tremblingly the rest of its life, fearing that moment when a giant gloved hand will again hoist it heavenward and declare -- with blazing blue eyes and in German -- "I am the Wrath of God," before flinging it to who knows what possibly insufferable fate?

Our revels now are ended
Final assignments for Daily Themes have been read and discussed. The task was continuity: five segments that tell a single story. There is a certain difficulty to the assignment that is perhaps inimical to the writing of a story. That it should be five parts and no more. Some of the stories I read clearly needed to go on, the writer had too much to work with and the ending didn't satisfy as an ending but simply as the end of part of something larger. In other cases, two parts could've been condensed to give more weight to the ending: so, writing a story in set units doesn't really work. All the students did a capable job with the assignments, and though it was best to focus on incident over character, the main thing I noticed was that this week was a vast improvement over "Character Week" because four or five themes to explore a character in some kind of conflict could accomplish so much more than a 300 word sketch of a person.

It was an interesting and diverse bunch -- two seniors graduating in molecular biophysics, two grad students receiving Masters -- one in music (an accomplished classical guitarist), one in forestry -- two English majors, an art major (painting), a film studies major, a political science major, and an undeclared with quirky sartorial flair. My final meetings were a stream from 2:30 to 6:30 Wed. and 10:15 to 4:30 Thurs. I think all but 15-20 minutes of those spans was spent in enjoyable (to me anyway) discussion. Such is Daily Themes. Maybe the only thing better than writing is talking about writing.

MUSIC OF THE FEARS

Saturday I attended a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, presented by the Yale School of Music, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, the Yale Glee Club, and featuring the Philharmonic Orchestra of Yale. The piece, commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the consecration of a cathedral in Coventry, was first performed in 1963. Composed in the post-WWII period, it looks back at a half century of war by incorporating WWI poems by Wilfred Owen into the Missa Defunctis. Performed in 2007, the piece can be said to indicate effectively the "timelessness" of war: parts of the Missa, such as the "Dies Irae" and the "Libera Me," speak of fears and hopes in the face of death and easily embrace the condition of war as a factory of death. And Owen's poems, while written in occasions of trench warfare which must rank among the worst horrors war has devised, can extend to any situation of hostilities. There seems no hope of an age devoid of such things. 

Mind you, I'm not someone who likes choral works, by and large. When I listen to classical music I go for symphonies and concertos, finding that music for voice tends to be distracting, the manner of singing too distanced from the popular song for my middlebrow tastes. This piece convinced me otherwise. At first put off by the tenor voice -- the singing simply seemed too pretty and nice for the subject matter of Owen's poems -- I gradually began to appreciate the singing. I still preferred the baritone because his manner of declamation was more appropriate to my ears. As to the soprano: when she sang I made no effort to follow the text provided in the handbill. Her voice was best received as an expressive instrument and she sang in Latin most of the time anyway. 

The various choruses gathered for the performance, including a children's group from New Haven, sang the Latin parts of the Missa and added immeasurably to the proceedings. The effects achieved by use of these choral voices positioned up on the second tier of the hall were the most powerful of the entire performance. The "Libera Me"'s opening reached vocal crescendoes that put me in mind of the passage in Against the Day when Kit passes through the Prophet's Gate en route to Siberia and hears a vast wave of sound including many voices. And since the choruses were singing things like "Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna, in die illa tremenda . . . Dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem . . . Quando coeli movendi sunt et terra" the feeling of apocalypse communicated -- by a work written after the A-bomb and performed in what feels more and more like some late stage of the world as we know it -- was for me the peak of the evening.

But something should also be said for the masterful blending of the Agnus Dei -- "Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world" -- with Owen's lines: "The scribes on all the people shove / and bawl allegiance to the state, / But they who love the greater love / Lay down their life; they do not hate." Trusted home, this interplay makes of each fallen soldier a Christ figure, while at the same time Owen's poem derides the need for warfare and those smug 'disciples' who let someone else do their dying for them. 

Finally there was the use of my favorite Owen poem in the midst of the Offertorium. Sheer genius. The prayer that the faithful departed be saved from hell is speeded by "sacrifices and prayers of praise," so that Domine may grant them passage into life as "promised to Abraham and to his seed." The Owen poem describes Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac, commanded by God. In the Bible, an Angel appears to say that the command was simply a test of Abraham's faith and resolve, that he may sacrifice a ram instead. Owen concludes: "But the old man would not so, but slew his son, / And half the seed of Europe, one by one." 

Owen was probably thinking of the Offertorium with its reference to Abraham's seed -- in the Bible, the chosen race -- but Britten's placement of the poem in the midst of this prayer on behalf of those "departed" provides levels of irony that unfold in concussive waves. The promise to be delivered from death is given when Abraham spares his son at God's dictate. The society which slays its sons, bawling allegiance to the state, can expect no such deliverance. And yet the prayer says that sacrifices are offered on behalf of the dead, thus letting us imagine how generations to come will live to be sacrificed for the sake of "the dead" -- which can include whatever man-determined truths we can't let pass away. 

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!