May 9, 2023 On Music Dear Mother By Colm Tóibín The Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, ca. 1880. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. In the second half of the seventies, when I was in my twenties, I wrote letters home to Ireland from Barcelona. Early in 1976, for example, from my pension on the corner of Carrer de la Portaferrissa and Carrer del Pi, I described my first visit to the Liceu opera house. Dear Mother, The walls in this small, cheap hotel are thin. The man in the next room listens to opera on the radio. He looks like someone who has seen little daylight, but instead he has seen many operas, as he tried to explain to me in broken versions of several languages. Two days ago, he was waiting for me in the corridor. At first, I thought a fire had broken out or the police had, once more, attacked the people. He was saying something that clearly would require quick action on my part. Having calmed him down and got a dictionary, I realized that he had seen a production at the Liceu that was special, and he believed that I, as a matter of urgency, should see it too. It was Puccini’s La Boheme, and it starred Montserrat Caballé. It was hard to know what to do when I went to the box office. Some of the prices for individual tickets would also buy you a studio apartment in the city. I bought the second cheapest type of ticket. When I showed it to my opera-crazed neighbor, he peered at it for some time, turned it around to check the back, and then shook his head. But this made no sense. It was the precise opera he had recommended, in the very venue he had suggested. What could be wrong with this ticket? Read More
May 8, 2023 On Music Mozart in Motion By Patrick Mackie Young Mozart performing for Louis François de Bourbon in Paris in 1766. Gustave Boulanger, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Opening nights of new operas may be the most fraught of all. So many things have to go right. The paint must have dried on the backdrops, the soprano’s throat must be clear of infections and the tenor of overly distracting fits of pique. The orchestral players must be confident that their strings or reeds will behave themselves. Enough copies of the score must have gone out, and everyone needs to know which big aria has been cut at the last minute. Large amounts of money hinge on the airy stuff that musical performance comprises. An eerie tension awaits anyone without enough to do—but everyone generally has far too much to do. No one can control how the audience will react, though sometimes in the eighteenth-century sections would be paid to get their reactions right. Mozart’s era often left it unclear who was meant to be in charge of this broadly purposeful chaos; the role of the conductor had, for one thing, not yet attained its later clarity. As the first notes got closer, an entire social world was readying itself to be funneled into drama and music. Read More
February 17, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Estoy Aquí” By Ana Karina Zatarain Shakira. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed Under CCO 2.0 This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. Romance and heartbreak are promised before they are experienced. As a child I was filled with a sort of yearning that preceded any actual object of desire. It was a desire for desire itself, one that, like many girls who grew up speaking Spanish in the late nineties and early aughts, I conjured by listening to Shakira’s 1995 album, Pies Descalzos. The first song was my favorite. “Estoy Aquí” begins with a teenage Shakira’s lilting voice over an acoustic guitar: “I know you won’t return,” she sings with quavering melancholy, and then the song explodes into a saccharine tempo unbefitting of a lovelorn person. But how would I have known that? I sang along in my room, imagining that one day I would love someone but also one day I would lose them, and that was even more thrilling. To be alive! And drowning amid “photos and notebooks and things and memories.” I could hardly wait. Read More
February 17, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Slow Show” By Nathan Goldman Matt Berninger. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. In her 1993 memoir Exteriors, drawn from seven years of journal entries, Annie Ernaux describes overhearing a familiar pop song at the supermarket. She is struck by the pleasure she experiences—and by a “feeling of panic that the song will end.” This prompts her to consider the relative emotional effects of books and music. While certain novels have left a “violent impression” on her being, the impact hardly compares to the “intense, almost painful” feeling produced by the song. “A book offers more deliverance, more escape, more fulfillment of desire,” she writes. “In songs one remains locked in desire.” The structure of pop music is inherently erotic; the repetitions of rhythm and melody continually summon and satisfy aching anticipation. Love songs bring this otherwise sublimated longing to the surface: some through grand, theatrical gestures, others by drawing out the dialectic of desire embedded in everyday life—say, the feeling of being alone at a party, sad and self-conscious, desperately missing someone. This is the premise of “Slow Show,” a somber but rousing midtempo track from The National’s 2007 album Boxer. The narrator spends the verses separated from his lover, surrounded by people but unable to reach them, confined to the claustrophobic quarters of his own mind. Guitars flutter frenetically over foreboding squalls of feedback, while Matt Berninger’s mumbling baritone evokes the narrator’s recursive, dead-end thoughts: “Standing at the punch table, swallowing punch”; “I leaned on the wall, the wall leaned away”; “I better get my shit together, better gather my shit in.” In the choruses, an atmospheric sweetness swells as he briefly spans the distance, if only in his imagination: “I want to hurry home to you,” Berninger croons, “put on a slow, dumb show for you and crack you up / so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain.” His halting syntax smooths out into the simple, fluid choreography of a fantasized intimacy, which disrupts his anxious solitude. Read More
February 17, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “You Don’t Know What Love Is” By Blair McClendon Nina Simone, 1967. Wikimedia Commons. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. There was a woman who was always explaining to me the structures of the world, of desire, of experience. Her analysis was brilliant. I have never met somebody so sure of the way things work. Between us, they didn’t. In the end, I learned, form was a problem. Well placed constraints can excite; they can also kill. Either way they tend to leave marks. A studied silence, breezy banter—these are not so convincing if she can take you in at a glance and see where you are still mottled from the pressure of her touch. But it is easy to adopt the position of the wounded lover. If you know what love is, like Nina Simone sings it, then you know that you, too, can leave, must have left, someone with lips that can only taste tears. Nina Simone was not the first to sing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and her version is not the most famous. That honor probably belongs to Dinah Washington, with her bright and clear voice, or maybe Chet Baker, about whom I have little to say. Billie Holiday’s take, with her enchanting, off-kilter warble is also probably better known. But Simone’s is something else entirely. Hers was released much later on a collection of rare recordings. It is live, noisy, and the background hum nearly merges with the brushes sliding along the snare drum. That and the crowd’s murmurs lend the track a warmth that all the other versions lack. It speaks, in spite of itself, to love’s inexplicable optimism. Read More
February 16, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” By David S. Wallace David Byrne, 1978. Photograph by Michael Markos. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. I think the best love songs are simple. They’re simple because love isn’t, simple because we need to dream a little. Complexity, ambiguity, doubt—they can have their place in novels or in the movies. A love song lets you live in the fantasy of the absolute; maybe that’s also why they last only a couple of minutes. And that’s why we carry them with us, play and replay them until they wear out like old clothes. They stand for too much. I have many songs that mark the time of particular relationships, both their highs and the lows of their dissolution. I’ve played songs on repeat enough to drive people crazy, and I’ve locked myself in my room to listen to late-period Billie Holiday with the lights off. But I have only one renewable love song, which I’ve brought with me through all my relationships: the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” That’s probably because, although it pains me slightly to say this, it began for me as a family romance. When my parents were young and childless and living in Seattle, they saw a sign for the movie Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film, at a theater near the Pike Place Market. I don’t think my parents were particularly interested in the hip music of the eighties—they just liked the name of the movie. They bought tickets on a whim and went inside. Read More