HarpingOn

for Thibault and Andrea

Seven years ago, I started this blog with the intent of writing about what I want. My confidence grew, and eventually got to the stage where I was writing pieces that other outlets wouldn’t publish. But for various, reasons, I fell off. It’s the New Year, so there’s no better time than to return to where I started by nerding out for a very select (boutique, niche, etc.) audience.

Like everyone else, I had some newfound spare time in March 2020. It was that year that I learned to read and enjoy the ability to consume dense literature without any sense of urgency or distraction. In late February, I had just finished a tour with Apollo’s Fire. Not long after we played our final concert in Chicago, the lockdowns began and I stayed put for several months, staying in the empty apartment of an old professor of mine who generously allowed me to squat. I called my roommate to pull out of my lease (which was fortunate, as her fiancé had to leave his student accommodation and move in). I had my harps, a suitcase of clothes, and only a few books: Stendhal’s Italian Chronicles, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (please chuckle at the irony), Roth’s Radetzky March and Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. The last of these would initially occupy me for nearly a month and fundamentally change how I thought about mythology and, in turn, music.

Calasso’s central thesis is simple: when taking in the cumulative sweep of Classical literature, – that is, from Hesiod right up to late Roman scholars (and even early Byzantine critics) – one sees that each fable or tale of morality is but a repetition or reference to another story. In the opening chapter, Calasso repeats the question “but how did it all begin?”

Europa is abducted by Zeus, disguised as a bull.

But how did it all begin? Golden basket in hand, she is picking flowers, as Persephone did before her, before being taken by Hades; or perhaps like Thalia, who wandered among the flowers on the mountainside, before being whisked away by Zeus disguised as an eagle; or even Creusa, who picked saffron flowers by the Acropolis before being kidnapped by Apollo.

But how did it all begin? Europa’s golden basket is a family heirloom, made by Hephaestus and granted to Libye, who passed it to Telephassa, who bequeathed it to Europa. It is embossed with a Golden bull resting on the waves. Not Zeus, but Europa’s great-grandmother Io. Not the Aegean, but the Nile.

But how did it all begin? Io was saved by Zeus. Having fled to Egypt after being transformed into a bull, Zeus finds her in Egypt. He skims lightly skims his hand over her. She becomes mortal again.

Calasso concludes: “as Europa walked down the flowery meadows near the sea, what Europa was carrying, embossed in precious metals, was her destiny. As in a piece of music, her own tune was the melodic inversion of her ancestor, Io’s. A bull would carry her off from Asia toward the continent. A bull would carry her off from Asia toward the continent that was to be called Europe, just as years before the desperate sea wandering of a young cow who had first grazed in Greek pastures was to end in Egypt with the light touch of Zeus’s hand. And one day the gift of the golden basket would be handed down to Europa. She carried it along, without thinking.” (Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony)

On and on the book goes likewise, each page containing paraphrases of the collected interpretations of mythology, from the Homeric Hymns right up to the Early Christian critics. The key point however is not that it is about classical literature, but that the revisitation of this material carries on the tradition of reinterpretation. After all, the reader is party to the knowledge of all those things which the mythical characters do not know and cannot know. We are like Argus, having many eyes, able to see each and every folly without being able to predict the fate that will befall us.

“Everything repeats itself, everything comes back again, but always with some slight twist in its meaning… And there is always some tiny territory untouched by the anthropologist’s fine-tooth comb that survives, like an archaic island, in the modern world: thus it is in antiquity we come across the emissaries of a reality that was to unfold more than two thousand years later.” (Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony)

Calasso touches on a lot of things: the philosophies of history, on the warning signs the Classics might even give us about totalitarianism, gender, sex, remorse, etc. Sadly, music is largely absent. But in this little book, I found the most fantastic blueprint for thinking about our myths about music in the theogony. And so, I started reading more and more, accessing Loeb translations online and starting with the story that musicians (especially harpists) know best: Orpheus.

Orpheus marries Eurydice, but soon after she dies, having trodden on a snake. She’s taken to Hades where Orpheus tries to fetch her. He plays the harp for Charon, and is allowed into hell. He’s allowed to take Eurydice back from Hades so long as he doesn’t look behind. (There is no Chekhov’s Gun quite like a contract meant to be broken.) He turns around, and she is lost. In grieving, he forswears women. The women of Thrace get angry, flay him alive, and tear him limb from limb.

But an amazing thing will happen to you, Orpheus: you now charm wild beasts and trees, but to women of Thrace you will seem to be sadly out of tune and they will tear your body in pieces, though even wild beasts had gladly listened to your voice. (Philostratus, Imagines 6)

As with every myth, any number of things can be latched onto in the Orpheus myth. One could speak of the symbolism of the Styx, the trope of the dead woman and the male gaze, or even the snake that killed her. But what if a key to understanding Orpheus had nothing to do with Orpheus, but with the instrument he had in his hand?

Before Orpheus, there was famously Apollo. But where did it all begin?

“Leto’s all-glorious son goes to rocky Pytho, playing upon his hollow lure, clad in divine, perfumed garments; and at the touch of the golden key his lyre sings sweet. Thence, swift as thought, he speeds from earth to Olympos, to the house of Zeus, to join the gathering of the other gods: then straightway the undying gods think only of the lyre and song, and all the Muses together, voice sweetly answering voice, hymn the unending gifts the gods enjoy and the sufferings of men.” (Homeric Hymn 3 to Pythian Apollo)

But the skill of Apollo was once put to the test. Though it is not known why, he was challenged a musical contest by the flute player Marsyas, a satyr. Apollo not only played, but sang and even turned his harp upside down. King Midas, the umpire was impressed and Marsyas forefeited both the contest and his life.

“The Satyr Marsyas, when he played the flute in rivalry against Apollo’s lyre, lost that audacious contest and, alas! His life was forfeit; for, they had agreed the one who lost should be the victor’s prey. And, as Apollo punished him, he cried, “Ah-h-h! why are you now tearing me apart? A flute has not the value of my life!” Even as he shrieked out in his agony, his living skin was ripped off from his limbs, till his whole body was a flaming wound, with nerves and veins and viscera exposed.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 6)

Marsyas’ body would serve as an example.

And so Apollo defeated Marsyas, bound him to a tree, and turned him over to a Scythian who stripped his skin off him limb by limb. He gave the rest of his body for burial to his pupil Olympus. From his blood the river Marsyas took its name. (Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 165)

But where did it all begin? His harp came to him via Hermes, who stole two cattle from Apollo and flayed them alive. In his anger, Apollo tried to punish Hermes.

“Apollo twisted strong withes with his hands meaning to bind Hermes with firm bands; but the bands would not hold him, and the withes of osier fell far from him and began to grow at once from the ground beneath their feet in that very place. And intertwining with one another, they quickly grew and covered all the wild-roving cattle by the will of thievish Hermes, so that Apollo was astonished as he gazed.” (Homeric Hymn 4 to Hermes)

It is Argus who ameliorates. He sees Hermes’ harp on the ground, and begins to fumble on its strings to distract Apollo. The archer is entranced, plucks the strings as if it were his bow, and demands to take the harp for himself. Hermes tells him,

“ ‘…as it seems, your heart is so strongly set on playing the lyre, chant, and play upon it, and give yourself to merriment, taking this as a gift from me, and do you, my friend, bestow glory on me. Sing well with this clear-voiced companion in your hands; for you are skilled in good, well-ordered utterance.’ (Homeric Hymn to Hermes 4)

All of Apollo’s cattle are now Hermes’, in exchange for harp?

When Hermes had said this, he held out the lyre: and Phoebus Apollo took it, and readily put his shining whip in Hermes’ hand, and ordained him keeper of herds. The son of Maia received it joyfully; the glorious son of Leto, the lord far-working Apollo, took the lyre upon his left arm and tried each string with the key. Awesomely it sounded at the touch of the god, while he sang sweetly to its note.” (Homeric Hymn 4 to Hermes)

But where did it all begin? But does Apollo not know? Hermes not only had a harp, but invented it. After finding a tortoise near his dwelling in the mountains, Hermes is shocked but also delighted. It is in mirth he mutilates the animal to see what will happen.

“Living, you shall be a spell against mischievous witchcraft; but if you die, then you shall make sweetest song.’ “

“Thus speaking, he took up the tortoise in both hands and went back into the house carrying his charming toy. Then he cut off its limbs and scooped out the marrow of the mountain-tortoise with a scoop of grey iron. As a swift thought darts through the heart of a man when thronging cares haunt him, or as bright glances flash from the eye, so glorious Hermes planned both thought and deed at once. He cut stalks of reed to measure and fixed them, fastening their ends across the back and through the shell of the tortoise, and then stretched ox hide all over it by his skill. Also he put in the horns and fitted a cross-piece upon the two of them, and stretched seven strings of sheep-gut. But when he had made it he proved each string in turn with the key, as he held the lovely thing. At the touch of his hand it sounded marvelously; and, as he tried it, the God sang sweet random snatches, even as youths bandy taunts at festivals.” (Homeric Hymn to Hermes 4)

But where did it all begin? Argus picks up and saves Hermes, not knowing that Hermes will betray him. Argus (of 100 eyes) appointed by Hera to kidnap and guard Io, who was transformed into a heifer when Zeus found affection in her.

Yielding obedience to such prophetic utterances of Apollo, he drove me away and barred me from his house, against his will and mine; but the constraint of Zeus forced him to act by necessity. Immediately my form and mind were distorted, and with horns, as you see, upon my forehead, stung by a sharp-fanged gadfly I rushed with frantic bounds to Kerkhnea’s sweet stream and Lerna’s spring. But Argos, the earth-born herdsman, untempered in his rage, pursued me peering with his many eyes upon my steps. A sudden death robbed him of life unexpectedly; while I, still tormented by the gadfly, am driven on from land to land before the heaven-sent plague.

“Oh, oh! Aah! Aah! A gadfly, phantom of earth-born Argos is stinging me again! Keep him away, O Earth! I am fearful when I behold that myriad-eyed herdsman. He travels onward with his crafty gaze upon me; not even in death does the earth conceal him, but passing from the shades he hounds me, the forlorn one, and drives me famished along the sands of the seashore. The waxen pipe drones forth in accompaniment a clear-sounding slumberous strain. Alas, alas! Where is my far-roaming wandering course taking me? . . . I cannot discern how to escape my sufferings.” (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound)

Fearing for Io’s life, Zeus sends Hermes to fetch her. Hermes lulls Argos to sleep with his flute and voice and kills him.

So Hermes joined him, and with many a tale he stayed the passing hours and on his reeds played soft refrains to lull the watching eyes. But Argus fought to keep at bay the charms of slumber and, though many of his eyes were closed in sleep, still many kept their guard. Argus asked too by what means this new design the pipe of reeds, was found. Then the god began to tell the story Pan. But the story remained untold; for Hermes saw all Argus’ eyelids closed and every eye vanquished in sleep. He stopped and with his wand, his magic wand, soothed the tired resting eyes and sealed their slumber; quick then with his sword he struck off the nodding head and from the rock threw it all bloody, spattering the cliff with gore. Argus lay dead; so many eyes, so bright quenched, and all hundred shrouded in one night. (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1)

For all of Argos Panoptes’ ability to see, his ears can be deceived. After he dies, Hera takes his eyes and preserves them in the feathers of the peacock, the loud, shrill guardians whose cries cannot be ignored.

But where did it all begin? Hermes has a new flute, yes, but so did Athena once. Pausanias tells of a statue of Athena striking Marsyas for taking the flute that was to be cast away for good. For though she invented it, we know she hated it.

On flute playing: Athena for foundress and Apollon for patron, one of whom cast the flute away in disgust, and the other flayed the presumptuous flute-player, Marsyas. (Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades 2)

(After all, like Hermes’ harp, it is fashioned from slaughter.)

Minerva is said to have been the first to make pipes from deer bones and to have come to the banquet of the gods to play. Juno and Venus made fun of her because she was grey-eyed and puffed out her cheeks, so when mocked in her playing and called ugly she came to the forest of Ida to a spring, as she played she viewed herself in the water, and saw that she was rightly mocked. Because of this she threw away the pipes and vowed that whoever picked them up would be punished severely. Marsyas, a shepherd, son of Oeagrus, one of the satyrs, found them, and by practicing assiduously kept making sweeter sounds day by day, so that he challenged Apollo to play the lure in a contest with him. (Hyginus, Fabulae 165)

But where did it all begin? Athena was not the last to forfeit her instrument. Hermes gave his harp to Apollo, yes, in order to continue to search for Io. But after slaying Marsyas, Apollo would repent of the evil he had done and resign his instrument.

Hermes also introduced wrestling-schools and invented the lyre out of a tortoise-shell after the contest in skill between Apollo and Marsyas, in which ,we are told, Apollo was victorious and thereupon exacted an excessive punishment of his defeated adversary, but he afterwards repented of this and, tearing the strings from the lyre, for a time had nothing to do with its music. (Diodorus Siculus, Library 5)

Hermes lust for contest would return. It is Linus who would find the instrument, and teach it to his brother Orpheus, but also Thamyris and Heracles.

Linus who was admired because of his poetry and singing, had many pupils and three of greatest renown, Heracles, Thamyris, and Orpheus. Of these three Heracles, who was learning to play the lyre, was unable to appreciate what was taught him because of his sluggishness of soul, and once when he had been punished with rods by Linus he became violently angry and killed his teacher with a blow of the lyre.

Thamyris, however, who possessed unusual natural ability, perfected the art of music and claimed that in the excellence of song his voice was more beautiful than the voices of the Muses. Whereupon the goddesses, angered at him, took from him his gift of music and maimed the man, even as Homer also bears witness when he writes.

There met the Muses Thamyris of Thrace and made an end of his song…But him, enraged, they maimed, and from him took the gift of song divine and made him quite forget his harping. (About Orpheus, the third pupil, we shall give a detailed account when we come to treat of his deeds.) (Diodorus Siculus, Library 3)

Now, back to Orpheus. Is he really innocent? Or does his grief turn to pride? Jadedness?

But having gone down into Hades because of his wife and seeing what sort of things were there, he did not continue to worship Dionysus, because of whom he was famous, but he thought Helios to be the greatest of the gods, Helios whom he also addressed as Apollo. Rousing himself each night toward dawn and climbing the mountain called Pangaion, he would await the Sun’s rising, so that he might see it first. Therefore, Dionysus, being angry with him, sent the Bassarides, as Aeschylus the tragedian says; they tore him apart and scattered the limbs. (Homer, Illiad)

Did he not learn from the example of Pentheus, who likewise refused to worship Dionysus, and was ripped apart by Ino and Autonoe, while his mother Agave looked on?

His mother, as priestess, began the slaughter, and fell upon him. He threw the headband from his head so that the wretched Agaue might recognize and not kill him. Touching her cheek, he said : ‘It is I, mother, your son, Pentheus, whom you bore in the house of Ekhion. Pity me, mother, and do not kill me, your child, for my sins.’

But she, foaming at the mouth and twisting her eyes all about, not thinking as she ought, was possessed by Bakkhos, and he did not persuade her. Seizing his left arm at the elbow and propping her foot against the unfortunate man’s side, she tore out his shoulder, not by her own strength, but the god gave facility to her hands. Ino began to work on the other side, tearing his flesh, while Autonoe and the whole crowd of the Bakkhai pressed on. All were making noise together, he groaning as much as he had life left in him, while they shouted in victory. One of them bore his arm, another a foot, boot and all. His ribs were stripped bare from their tearings. The whole band, hands bloodied, were playing a game of catch with Pentheus’ flesh.

His body lies in different places, part under the rugged rocks, part in the deep foliage of the woods, not easy to be sought. His miserable head, which his mother happened to take in her hands, she fixed on the end of a thyrsos and carries through the midst of Kithairon like that of a savage lion, leaving her sisters among the Mainades’ dances. She is coming inside these walls, preening herself on the ill-fated prey, calling Bakkhos her fellow hunter, her accomplice in the chase, the glorious victor–in whose service she wins a triumph of tears. (Euripides, Bacchae 990)

With each answer, a new question arises. The question “where did it all begin” asks how, but also why, over and over and over again. Stories of tragedy are foretold ahead of time, either in their own lives or the lives of ancestors.

Eventually the search stops. Both an innocent party and a guilty perpetrator are identified. Ovid identifies Marsyas’ hubris as the source for his demise, and focuses on the pain felt by those who grieved his death. Hyginus focuses on the fact that Apollo won by deception, turning his harp upside down. (Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Ovid came from wealth, whereas Hyginus was a freedman.)

And when Marsyas was departing as victor, Apollo turned his lyre over, and played the same song, which Marsyas couldn’t do with his pipes. And so Apollo defeated Marsyas, bound him to a tree, and turned him over to a Scythian who stripped his skin off him limb by limb. He gave the rest of his body for burial to his pupil Olympus. From his blood the river Marsyas took its name. (Hyginus, Fabulae 5)

Indeed, the image of his innocence has endured. For Plato, it is Marsyas to whom Socrates is compared.

The way I shall take, gentlemen, in my praise of Socrates, is by similitudes. Probably he will think I do this for derision; but I choose my similitude for the sake of truth, not of ridicule. For I say he is likest to the Silenus-figures that sit in the statuaries’ shops; those, I mean, which our craftsmen make with pipes or flutes in their hands: when their two halves are pulled open, they are found to contain images of gods. And I further suggest that he resembles the satyr Marsyas. Now, as to your likeness, Socrates, to these in figure, I do not suppose even you yourself will dispute it; but I have next to tell you that you are like them in every other respect. You are a fleering fellow, eh? If you will not confess it, I have witnesses at hand. Are you not a piper? Why, yes, and a far more marvellous one than the satyr. His lips indeed had power to entrance mankind by means of instruments; a thing still possible today for anyone who can pipe his tunes: for the music of Olympus’ flute belonged, I may tell you, to Marsyas his teacher. So that if anyone, whether a fine flute-player or paltry flute-girl, can but flute his tunes, they have no equal for exciting a ravishment, and will indicate by the divinity that is in them who are apt recipients of the deities and their sanctifications. You differ from him in one point only—that you produce the same effect with simple prose unaided by instruments. For example, when we hear any other person— quite an excellent orator, perhaps—pronouncing one of the usual discourses, no one, I venture to say, cares a jot; but so soon as we hear you, or your discourses in the mouth of another,—though such person be ever so poor a speaker, and whether the hearer be a woman or a man or a youngster—we are all astounded and entranced. As for myself, gentlemen, were it not that I might appear to be absolutely tipsy, I would have affirmed on oath all the strange effects I personally have felt from his words, and still feel even now. For when I hear him I am worse than any wild fanatic; I find my heart leaping and my tears gushing forth at the sound of his speech, and I see great numbers of other people having the same experience. When I listened to Pericles and other skilled orators I thought them eloquent, but I never felt anything like this; my spirit was not left in a tumult and had not to complain of my being in the condition of a common slave: whereas the influence of our Marsyas here has often thrown me into such a state. (Plato, Symposium 215)

In reading and rereading Calasso over the last few years and obsessively pouring over Classics translations online, I feel as if I’ve started seeing Marsyas and the extended family tree of musical violence everywhere. In Bellini’s The Holy Allegory, the Virgin Mary sits under a canopy, on the top of a small set of stairs. She looks upon elderly Job and Saint Sebastian, shot with an arrow. A frieze on the side of the staircase depicts Marsyas’ death at the hands of Apollo. A cross can be seen in the distance, though it looks as if it’s but a shadow. The crucifixion is indeed implied by those stories which foretell and echo it at the same time.

I wandered the Met Museum the other day after being shown the Tudor exhibit by its curator. I didn’t get very far, as when I got into the rooms of vases, I spent an hour in total awe that all the minuscule connections in literature also appear in living, visual artifacts. Athena looms over the flute players, and Apollo over the Citharodes. Olympus is haunted by his dead lover, and Apollo by clever Hermes. Heracles’ toils are illustrated with lyre players in the foreground, at once telling his deeds with the art of his teacher Linus, who he killed in anger. There is no image without a moral. There is no harp without its violent inheritance. There is no music without memory.

As I keep reading, it’s my hope that I’ll keep sharing thoughts on what I discover. Needless to say, I’ve found some material to reinvigorate the urge to write.

Enough time has passed since my last visit in 2019 that I have forgotten early spring mornings in Cambridge. Take your first steps out into the front court at King’s, and a gentle moisture envelops your face and hands without any biting or harshness. The chapel and the Gibbs Building glow in the early light to the point where it feels like midday. The only sounds are that of birdsong everywhere and a few bicycles creaking towards the few and faithful coffeehouses open before 8am. (Naturally, they are populated at that hour by US expats such as yours truly.)

Since my arrival, I’ve been practicing gently through the jet lag and getting acquainted with the harp I’ll be performing and recording on over the next week. Dinners and drinks are spent with Nico Muhly, a celebrity/familiar face in Cambridge. He emerges from the room next door dressed in solid black, that musician’s uniform which somehow seems innocuous in Manhattan but totally conspicuous in Cambridge. (Full disclosure: I’m not doing much better. Having been on a Club Monaco spending spree in December, my minimalist fag packing choices for this trip included patterned trousers which indicate I’m about to get cocktails in Flatiron at 3pm on a Tuesday or golfing in Boca Raton in 1973.) We imbibe and discuss what all people discuss in Cambridge: college, education, memories of development, the past. What did we read? Who taught us? What characters did we meet?

Old universities, be they Ivies or Oxbridge, have this bizarre self-conscious rigor in maintaining tradition, attracting eccentric and precocious undergraduates, who will either fly the coop into one or another greater cosmopolis or remain and become the eccentric professors who you can tell haven’t ever left. (In Cambridge, they dress in tweed, poorly tailored shirts or dull sweaters – signifiers of a chic frumpy austerity which seems never to change.) And yet, despite being in a scholastic paradise, the undergraduates one meets are hungry to know what awaits them on the other side. They inquire with alumni about how to get out, form a bridge into the real world, ditch the tweed and get into the city. It is then that one remembers that these universities, even big ones, are really very small places with a highly specific purpose: education. They put up paradoxic fronts of changelessness and authority for students, most of whom who will ultimately have an ephemeral existence here of only three or four years. The buildings, the clothes, the birds, the sunlight all remain the same, surviving the ages. It is we who are just passing through.

The other question students love to ask is “what is it like to be back?” For me, the only correct answer is “weird.” No alum is the same person as they were as an undergraduate. In my humble opinion, if misgivings arise, that’s ok. Before coming to the UK, I was driving my parent’s car through Tennessee listening to an excellent interview with writer Ocean Vuong. One thing in particular he offered resonates with me this week. He apparently tells his students that if they hate a story or an essay they wrote even month before, they should be congratulated. It means they’ve grown. Fortunately for me, feelings of regret or foreboding are fleeting, as there are a great many wonderful and beautiful things to do and see, which not many people care about unless you’ve studied here or have some romance with others have passed through. Here one can commune with any number of Saints, or at least with the imprints of their embryonic existence as students.

When I come back to King’s, I slip back into a routine. I sneak into the library, climbing two flights of stairs and grab a ladder to a row of tattered choral octavos. I grab a copy of Handel’s Israel in Egpyt and look on E.M. Forster’s signature in the front page. I peruse Messiaen scores with Sir Andrew Davis’ markings in them. I head downstairs to find volumes in the history section which (according to local lore) are filled with Salman Rushdie’s notes in the margins. I grab my running shoes and run through Coe Fen, the slightly overgrown bog past the Fitzwilliam Museum after which my old school’s favorite hymn was named (which includes the fabulous lines “Ten thousand times ten thousand sound Thy praise; but who am I?”). I work my way towards Sheep’s Green and into Grantchester. I stop at the church and sit before running past Rupert Brooke’s onetime abode before stopping again at Byron’s Pool, eavesdropping on a group of undergraduates talking about an article. Then it’s back over to Grantchester Meadow and zipping past Newnham College, reverse tracing Virginia Woolf’s treks to have tea at the Orchard. Grange Road takes me West Road. I pass the history faculty where I went to lectures and checked out stacks of books I know I’ve read but can’t remember reading. I run into the back of King’s and into front court. It’s no longer quiet, as the organ scholar is practicing Liszt at full throttle.

It’s funny that with the exception of grabbing a harp, I haven’t been back into chapel. But whenever I walk by, it seems as though the organ scholar is always practicing (which is likely the case). I know why I don’t go in to listen. I know full well the absolute sense of horror I would have felt if another ex-organ scholar came in to listen, even if for pure enjoyment. The pressure is always on. For as wonderful and easy as communing with the dead in Cambridge, somehow doing the same with the living is terrifying. Eminent alumni, musicians, Nobel prize winners and famous writers are on every corner, striking awe into the hearts of undergraduates either with their brilliance or perhaps their quickness in overturning your ideas with a simple question in a tutorial or seminar. They attend concerts too, they smile, they applaud, and yet it’s unfathomable that their critical faculties ever shut off. After all, they spend hours telling you to get your brain into high gear and to engage it as much as possible. How could it be any other way?

Ancestor worship in Cambridge is a weird and shitty way of coping with the pressures of self-expectation. When you’re a student, all those feelings get supplanted onto worries about the exams, the intellectual rigor, the teaching style (and evensongs and voluntarues), etc. As a result, it’s easy to look to the Immortals of Cambridge Yore to witness that there is life on the other side. For me, I latched onto the Bloomsbury Group, seeing a gaggle of misfits with wild ideas who somehow lifted themselves out of the self-imposed restraints that the atmosphere in the college somehow enables. In particular I devoured Forster and Woolf, being a pretentious literary queerling who had yet to figure a host of things out about what my sexuality meant (which in the end was very little, but at least the depressive book binges were good).

Back in the States, my friends will tell you that since the pandemic started, I never shut up about Hesse. As Time has passed, I’ve steered towards his novels about getting out of one’s own head, rather than the melancholy wallowing which one finds in Mrs. Dalloway or Orlando, or the strange moralistic smugness of Maurice or Howard End. At the end of one of Hesse’s more famous novels, music obsessed protagonist (The Steppenwolf) is guided through hell by Mozart, who invites him to look on at Wagner and Brahms slaving away and laugh at them as they travail in their aesthetic ideologies. It’s then you realize the entire novel is about one man’s realizations that all our chosen ancestors were not all immortal at one point, but human. Likewise, our isolated existences and identity formation see us come emerge from our shells, transforming our wolf-like, self-protective tendencies into softer, more human impulses.

“I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket . . . I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being. One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.”

If anything, I’ve not laughed as much at Cambridge as I have the last few days. The town’s love affair with the tradition is beautiful but comical. There is no reason that walking on a patch of grass (a privilege reserved for Dons, alumni and ducks) should have the same thrill as unprotected sex (or any other shot of adrenaline). Punting (rowing a boat in a shallow river using a 12 foot pole) is a fundamentally stupid and inefficient means of getting anywhere. That one bell-tower that peels thirteen times at noon is ridiculous. And yes, it is comical that there is in fact a phantom-like creature practicing the organ at such a volume that it can be heard in the street on a busy afternoon.

Returning is complicated but freeing, as one gets to see the other side – the peace of some unforeseen transcendence. The conditions of my return are something I actually could not have imagined a decade ago. If someone had told me undergraduate self that in a decade, I’d be (1) living splitting my time between New York and Cleveland, (2) playing the harp for a living and (3) hearing Mozart emanating from Nico’s Muhly’s room next door, I might tell you that you were out of your mind, or else wonder if its another expectation which needed achieving in order to “live up” to the magnanimous and imposing aura of my chosen university. Time heals, but laughter is the best medicine. (Try as I may, I can’t describe how great it is to be back.)

NOTE: this blog is supposed to be about music. I swear I’ll get back to it… eventually.

I had a great time doing a little write up for Camac Harps on my collab with Marcos Balter for the Miller Theatre at Columbia University. Sometimes getting into the nitty gritty of how to approach a new work gets bogged down in a little too much specificity, so I was lucky have an outlet where I could nerd out!

EN: https://blog.camac-harps.com/en/latest/demystifying-new-music-parker-ramsay-marcos-balter-and-omolu/

FR: https://blog.camac-harps.com/en/latest/demystifying-new-music-parker-ramsay-marcos-balter-and-omolu/

Reopening. New York is returning and so is my giant gay cliché of an existence. Mozart and Debussy scores in my studio pass judgment on me as I either head out to the Eagle, some mediocre (but very well-decorated) restaurant on the Lower East Side, or a movie theater on Houston Street. At night, I head to my apartment building in Murray Hill, where the stench of week-old, fetid Blue Apron boxes (addressed to str8 residents Brock, Zane or Ward) fills the lobby en route to the elevator. On the 12^th floor, my housemate paints and cooks between his conferences with Google, scooting between rooms decorated with Danish(?) furniture and contemporary art painted by his friends. Meanwhile, over in my own little cave, it looks as if I shopped for all my terrible wall tapestries at Buddhas’R’Us. Pairs of running shorts and athletic socks are strewn across my floor and overpriced books I intend to read this summer are piled up on my desk. My espresso machine sits at the ready to help me find courage upon waking up in the morning.

How incredibly boring, right?

Well, not exactly. My “eureka” moment in the pandemic was realizing that the lockdowns affected my lifestyle very little, as I spent the previous year or so keeping my nose to the grindstone, investing time in things I “ought” to be doing: reading long novels, going to bed early, saving money, cooking more, etc. While things were gradually picking up in my career, the lifestyle that went along with it was distinctly pedestrian. These days, I’m making concerted effort to reconstruct my life to look the way it did when I was at Juilliard: over-scheduled, pretentious, and eager to take in as much as possible. The last step? Getting back to the blog.

(Ta-da!)

The ex is jealous of Delon’s affair.

Delon is jealous of the ex’s success.

Delon falls for the ex’s daughter.

The ex tries drunkenly to torture Delon.

Delon drowns the ex.

Delon covers it up but makes a mistake or two.

Romy Schneider lies to the investigator.

 She lies to the dead ex’s daughter.

The secret is safe.

(The swimming pool is drained.)

With each plot twist in La piscine, resentment and anger are met with some effort to render silence over the dramatic noise, or at least deflection away from the turbulence. Indeed, because of mutual co-dependence, terrible and destructive behaviors are put up with and compensated for because all three adults are liable to face complete social isolation. 

The swimming pool is where all the action happens, as the water is some kind of distraction, but also the site of everyone’s ultimate demise. I can’t unsee the overwhelming influence of David Hockney in Deray’s film, evocative of Bigger Splash and later Pool with Two Figures, where the water in various Los Angeles swimming pools proves an unnerving source of ambiguity. After all, one can hide underwater, or have their vision impaired. One can cool off or exercise. One can draw life from the presence of water or die from drowning.

Who jumped into the water?

What was the first splash? Or a second?

Is there anyone else around?

I can’t see a body – how deep is that pool exactly?

If this is a self-portrait, which one is David Hockney?

Is it one or both?

Is he swimming?

Did he drown?

Who drowned him?

In this way, a gay life is one spent underwater, as the difference between swimming and drowning can be hard to perceive unless you’re the one kicking your legs. It’s not that we don’t deal with what straight people deal with, but rather in a different sequence and under less common circumstances. Body obsession isn’t vanity, but a defense mechanism. Alcohol isn’t an excess, but a crutch. Polyamory (for many of us) is not some revolutionary goal, but rather a naturally occurring phenomenon or silent compromise. Private spaces, be they bars, apps or Nicodemite circles are not so much novelties as social necessities.

We talk about the coming out of the closet, but in reality there are always several closets that lay beyond. Like the concept of a closet, the dual lives we lead are total clichés, making good David Bowie’s assertion that “all clichés are true.”And indeed, gay friendships and relationships are likiwise built on twin foundations of emotional codependency and solidarity. Wandering through Chinatown last week with my friend Isaiah, as expressed exasperation at the maintenance of not only veils of secrecy, but carpets of empathy for the men who cross our paths to sit on. Again and again, we encounter the same affairs, open relationships, competitive spirits, abusive closet cases, suicidal tendencies, all wrapped up in that overwhelming fear of a peculiar isolation that somehow cannot be made plain to straight friends. It’s not that our straight friends aren’t empathic, but rather that they can’t conceive of relationships where these issues are built in right from the start, rather than arriving at some climax. Or they can’t conceive of a world existence where the characters in La piscine are in fact rather ordinary, or indeed that the dynamics of romantic and professional jealousy playing out between four characters can just as easily boil up between two. And so perceptions of “toxicity” don’t arise from the patterns and behaviors themselves, but rather from the lack of a language about how to talk about them – that is, unless the other party in the conversation is also gay, living the same clichés.

The single most important thing I’ve done in the pandemic (apart from buying an espress machine) is recalibrate my friendships. Be they 22 and recent college grads, or gay couples around the age of 50, my primary pillars of support have little in common with me (or each other) save that they are all gay men. In them, I’ve frankly become more comfortable doing the things I want to do, being more comfortable in the constant search for metaphor in art, literature and film on days when my therapist pisses me off or I can’t face another fucking hour at the harp bench. They’ve seen me on my worst days and vice versa, and tensions even spill over into levels of anger that can only be understood by someone else conditioned by society to hate themselves on the basis of who they are attracted to. Conversely, varying levels of physical intimacy help with the reality that the prospects of loneliness never truly depart, paralyzing our sensibilities time and time again. Why? Because when you’re gay, a normal human response will invariably be seen as indicative of a loose screw, a lack of control or an invisible illness related to your sexuality. Hence despite pain, these bonds of mutual discretion are maintained, and the supposedly “toxic” behaviors to which we fall prey remain a secret, drowning in the various pools of experience which many of our friends can only dip their toes. For while all clichés are true, very few end up living them out.

“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.” The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson

The album comes out in just a few short weeks, and while I’ve been trying to stay active on social media, I’ve not been so attentive to the blog. But as I sit on Oberlin’s campus this week, memories flood back as to how my perspective on performing changed, not so much because of what I was playing, but because of what I was reading.

Just a year before coming to Oberlin, I was sat at Cambridge University, finishing a history degree and miring myself in a steady diet of music-crazed Teutons. I admit I latched on to Nietzsche, Hesse and Mann (to whom I still cling to an extent), all brilliant progenitors of fantastic deconstructions of the world around them, spinning existential discussions of “succumbing” and “overcoming.”

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Nietzsche’s references to Beethoven Beyond Good and Evil are almost comical:

Beethoven is something that happens between an old crumbling soul which is constantly breaking up and a very young soul of the future which is constantly coming. In his music there lies that half light of eternal loss and of eternally indulgent hoping – that same light in which Europe was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced around the freedom tree of revolution and finally almost worshipped before Napoleon.

Hesse’s horrific opium dream in Stepphenwolf is guided by Mozart, describing Germany’s spiritual deprivation after the First World War with references to Brahms and Wagner:

Mozart aised his hands as though he were conducting, and a moon, or some pale constellation, rose somewhere. I looked over the edge of the box into immeasurable depths of space. Mist and clouds floated there. Mountains and seashores glimmered, and beneath us extended world-wide a desert plain. On this plain we saw an old gentleman of a worthy aspect, with a long beard, who drearily led a large following of some ten thousand men in black. He had a melancholy and hopeless air; and Mozart said:

“Look, there’s Brahms. He is striving for redemption, but it will take him all his time.”

I realized that the thousands of men in black were the players of all those notes and parts in his scores which according to divine judgment were superfluous.

“Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted,” Mozart said with a nod.

And thereupon we saw Richard Wagner marching at the head of a host just as vast, and felt the pressure of those thousands as they clung and closed upon him. Him, too, we watched as he dragged himself along with slow and sad step.

“In my young days,” I remarked sadly, “these two musicians passed as the most extreme contrasts conceivable.”

Mozart laughed.

“Yes, that is always the way. Such contrasts, seen from a little distance, always tend to show their increasing similarity. Thick orchestration was in any case neither Wagner’s nor Brahms’ personal failing. It was a fault of their time.”

And who can forget Hans Castorp’s slow prolonged death to the tune of the Lindenbaum from Schubert’s Winterreise?

Oh, how ashamed we feel in our shadowy security ! We’re leaving we can’t describe this ! But was our friend hit, too? For a moment, he thought he was. A large clod of din struck his shin-it certainly hurt, but how silly, it was nothing. He gets up, he limps and stumbles forward on mud-laden feet, singing thoughtlessly:

                        And all its branches rustled // As if they called to me

And so, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, he disappears from sight.

(You get the idea.)

These authors embody so much of what I had always loved about music: the ability to share in an experience with a great writer or author, plunging a mundane existence into something “larger” or temporally expansive.

Of course, Cambridge is the perfect setting to look at culture through a set of binoculars. The Ivory Tower is old and tall, looming over you as you wander cobble streets alongside Nobel Prize laureates and borrow tattered library books once handled by members of the Bloomsbury group. You can bury yourself in your studies and consume all the material in the world, keeping its fundamental implications at an arm’s length. You can learn to argue and philosophize and never form an identity or opinion. You can be smart without gaining an ounce of wisdom.

There was no more damning an indictment against my Cambridge education than my first seminars with Dr. Steven Plank at Oberlin, for it was there I had my first exposure to Ralph Waldo Emerson. In reading The American Scholar, I realized the terrifying truth that – despite being an American – I had zero concept of American liberal education or the peculiar mission still alive in the American academy to “free the mind.” Of course, “the” famous quote was discussed in class:

The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before nature, this great spectacle. He must settle its value in his mind.

We were assigned the task of responding to the essay from the standpoint of a musician, and I admit it was a struggle. I scrambled something together that was analytical and factual, and it backfired. I was told the essay was fine, but that it didn’t merit a grade ­– “I don’t want to read it. Read more Emerson.”

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And so I did. A few readings of the famous Self-Reliance were followed by a mild obsession with the more obscure Circles. It wasn’t long before I moved on to Thoreau, reading about the author’s experiment in forging knowledge in the wilderness.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Walden, Henry David Thoreau

From my seminars to my instrumental lessons, I realized that I had placed a huge wall between myself and music without realizing it. I could tell someone whatNietzsche got out of Beethoven, but not why I liked Beethoven. I could hum Der Lindenbaum and quote Thomas Mann, but I couldn’t tell you how I was impacted by the music on its own terms. I found myself simply assigning value to art which non-musicians found meaning in, thinking it proof that I was somehow getting “outside” of my headspace as a musician.

I’d be lying if I said that Thoreau and Emerson didn’t hang over me in the transcription process. Dealing with any score by Bach constitutes an experience in the wilderness, as he leaves few clues behind as to what to make of his music. This is nowhere truer than in the Goldbergs, where one lacks even the guidance of movements labeled with dance idioms to figure out tempi or affekt.

Variation 1 keeps performers up at night, as everyone knows it and can hum it but cannot agree on what’s going on. Is the cute little “Yaa-baba-pum pum pum pum” a polonaise figure? Or a mere diversion from the right scales which have picked up from where the Aria left off? Are there two voices?

Or does the left hand have an extra implied voice? If one separates out the bass line from the middle voice, it’s as if there’s a trio of voices singing rather than a duet between the hands.

What about when the hands start passing material off to one another? Is the rhythmic motor really the polonaise figure? Or is it an incredibly minute cell of two sixteenth notes which are continually echoed between the two hands?

The great thing about the harp is that it basks in sonic ambiguity, as any note naturally rings long beyond its written duration. The dichotomy between two and three voices becomes moot, as does any difference of articulation between the two hands. One resigns that level of control and in turn allows the distinct disciplines of harmony and counterpoint to be naturally conjoined.

What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web, but always circular power returning into itself. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

During the pandemic, I’ve returned to Nietzsche, Hesse and Mann with enjoyment, as they remind us all what it means to be changed continually by the inheritance left behind by composers. But that’s only half the story. For me, Emerson and Thoreau complement our external impetus and beckon the scholar – or musician – to withdraw into themselves to find Performers don’t have the luxury of sitting at a distance and treating a dead composer as a kindred spirit, but rather have to tussle with a mediation process and assume the audience has the capacity for reception. In this sense, the scholastic approach and musical approach are no different, so long as they are both undertaken with the premise that there is something which we might not yet know.

September 5, 2019
King’s College, Cambridge

Upon arriving at King’s, the first person to greet me at the front gate was none other than my old director of studies, Dr. Michael Sonenscher, an eminent historian of political thought. His quiet and pleasant demeanor hadn’t changed since the afternoons of my final year at Cambridge, in which I listened with some degree of awe as he would spout prodigious and encyclopedic knowledge of Hegel, Rousseau and Voltaire in his rooms, just a stone’s throw from the Cam. It was all the more fitting that I should run into him, for on the bus from Heathrow, I had been wading through one of his final literary recommendations to me before my final exams in 2013.

I’m sure reading Marc Fumaroli’s When the World Spoke French in English translation qualifies as a cognitive dissonance, if not a minor crime against authenticity. The book is nevertheless insightful, for in its pages sits an account of the sustained primacy of the French language from the mid-seventeenth century well into the eighteenth, right up to the French Revolution. As France and Europe gradually liberalized from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) to the Wars of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), so too did the French language, shedding pretenses of mere authority and gaining status as a tool of self-expression, articulation, even linguistic freedom (don’t worry, having failed a French class myself at Oberlin, I too am skeptical of any notion of flexibility in French). In practical terms, French, having once been a language reserved for official business, soon became the choice language for conversation and socialization. Most famously, the court of Frederick the Great only operated in French, influencing tastes in music, art and philosophy thereby. But even as early as 1687, German writer Christian Thomasius noted  that “French clothes, French food, French furniture, French customs, French sins, French illnesses are generally in vogue.”

In the end, Fumaroli’s project takes readers through a series of historical vignettes to paint a picture of 18th-Cenutry European society, while simultaneously pinpointing the origins of its visage: French’s exigency of style. From the era of Greek and Latin as lingua franca to the primacy of Italian in the Republic of Letters, and even now with the primacy of technocratic English in the 21^st Century, Europe has seen a series of phenomena whereby languages lay claim to universality (and often with great success, on a practical level). Where Enlightenment-era French differs from these languages was the insistence on exactitude and uniformity, despite the difference in ideas that might be espoused therewith. (After all, the French spoken by the aristocrats was spoken by Robespierre, who like his victims powdered his wig and bore an impeccable profile.)

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Elsewhere in my bag was a copy of The Illiad, another volume discussed in history seminars, though it itself does not constitute a formal work of “history.” Unlike our modern storytellers and thinkers, Homer appears absolutely and totally unconcerned with leading you along or telling you where things stand in his labyrinthine plot of interactions between mortals and the Olympian heroes.

As anyone who survived either AP literature or an A-level in Classics will tell you, there’s a great rush when you open up the first page of Homer’s magnum opus:

          Rage – Goddess, sing the Rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
          murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
          hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
          great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
          feasts for dogs and birds,
          and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
          Begin, Muse with the two first broke and clashed,
          Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

But of course it’s not long before you’re lost. Even if you’ve studied the work twice before, made it through a 61-page introduction or memorized the geography of Greece, the Peloponnese and Asia Minor, you’re still likely to be fuzzy about who Peleus is. Or what Achilles is doing there (the ankle guy, right?). Or Agamemnon (DON’T turn on Strauss). Or who the Achaeans are (OK, I may or may not have gotten distracted and watched Christina Goerke for an hour or so. Oops.)

But supposing you want to get organized, it’s necessary figure out who all these people are, and what they are doing same place at the same time, some ten years before the Trojan War’s conclusion. And yet, even with a paperback copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology in hand, a critical commentary and nine Wikipedia pages open in your browser, it’s still hard to piece together why the hell they are doing what they are doing.

As the Argives and the Achaeans are getting their asses handed to them, Achilles calls upon his mother, Thetis, to bargain with Zeus on his behalf. It’s an interesting plot twist, as Thetis is female and thus far we’ve been told that the place of women is merely as interchangeable pawns (for instance when it’s apparent that Chryseis, the object of Agamemnon’s affections, has to be removed from his custody, the stand-in is Briseis, and unrelated woman but whose name intentionally rhymes). What does Thetis possess that mortal women cannot? Or even Hera, Zeus’ sister-wife?

(Dig, dig, dig.)

Thetis is apparently not just any mere nymph but the female who freed Zeus when Hera and Minerva imprisoned him. Zeus is indebted to her, in this respect, having retained his autonomy on her watch. But she’s also apparently the only woman to reject Zeus’ sexual advances, at once angering him but also protecting him from further catastrophe. In raping the goddess Metis, he wrought Minerva, who fulfilled the first prophecy that his first child would rise up and overrule him as would his second. Hence in denying Zeus’ lust, Thetis became a protector of the Olympian status quo, preventing another uprising the likes of which she rescued Zeus from in Minerva’s rebellion.

Homer’s demands on the reader are high, as thousands of years later we have to trudge through Hesiod, Aeschylus and a handful of other sources to divine what the motives might be in the interactions between Gods and men. What we don’t like to think about is that the demands Homer made on readers and listeners were just as high in his own time, as we’ve no evidence of the total standardization of the Olympian origin myths.

Once again, I turn to another of Dr. Sonenscher’s recommended readings. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso points out that the Homeric account of the Olympians is “perfect” as it shows the definitive lines over and over again between where the will of man ends and the interference of the divine begins. But those things which are perfect and circular in logical form necessitate a breakthrough for some emotional impact to be divined. Indeed, the more you read, the more the mitigating zones of inquiry aren’t set up between Achilles and Thetis, or Thetis and Zeus, but rather between you and Homer, as you desperately try to figure out each and every “why” and infer elements of drama on the lives of the Olympians.

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This summer, I told myself I that I was not only going to write, but write a lot about the Goldbergs, as chasm remains open between the technical demands of Bach’s giant variations and the listener’s expectations for something more. Too often, the work can only be seen for its academic and mechanical elements, from canons and fughettas to movements laden with virtuosic chromaticism or excessive rhythmic drive. That’s all well and good, but the most obvious elements aren’t always the key to understanding “why” these pieces get under our skin, become ear-worms or beckon performers to pour over the score again and again.

Homer drops readers into the middle of the Trojan War, and Bach wastes no time in stranding the modern listener in the cosmopolis of musical style in the eighteenth century. In opening up our scores and turning to the Aria, we see a page of music that is at once coherent, and simultaneously baffling. Take the title for instance. We’re told it’s an “Aria,” but in no way does it resemble the da capo form we know and love from a baroque opera. There is no return to the opening theme, but merely has an A and a B section. And what of these A and B sections? They are different in affect, the first being melancholic, while the second impassioned and then emboldened, having passed through e-minor to make it back home to G major. And yet their journeys are the same in length, making up 16 bars in each section, though the second half invariably feels longer or more constitutionally dense than it’s preceding counterpart. In this sense, the length of the sections resemble more an Italian song form or chord progression, in the 17th Century manner of Frescobaldi and his contemporaries.

And yet the ornamentation speaks French, though the message is derived from Italian. Ports de voix, mordents and tremblements appear one after the other, comprising a minuet for the listener to wander through as if in an afternoon at court in Versailles. The accompaniment too, through providing a rhythmic steadiness does little more than build triads in the style brisée, as if accompanying the right hand on a lute.  Bach’s game here is subtle. Because the Goldbergs are called “Aria with Variations” and not “Variations upon an Aria,” Bach sets the scene for a Francophile smorgasbord that never manifests. (Peter Williams points out that even the first four bars can be considered a miniature joke, as they comprise the harmonic scheme necessary for a slow Chaconne, a dance which is almost always reserved for the end of a French dance suite.) As there is no direct reference to the filigree anywhere in the variations, the Aria is not in fact a theme at all, but merely a considered presentation of the work’s repetitive harmonic scheme.

So why all the detail and complexity, just to present a series of harmonies? Why does Bach appeal to us in French?

“French grammar, the French lexicon, whose relative poverty Voltaire was not afraid to mock, French versification, poetry, the memoirs of occasion, the genres in which our language excelled–all this difficult apprenticeship had the meaning of an initiation to an exceptional fashion of being free and natural with others and with oneself. It was altogether different from communicating. It was entering ‘into company.’” (Marc Fumaroli, When the World Spoke French)

But like Homer, Bach isn’t real big on telling us how the ornaments should be played, for just as Homer doesn’t hand us a theogony, Bach doesn’t hand us a French textbook. Herein lies the irony that in order to understand those things which make this Aria perfect and whole, we must deconstruct it first and break the unbreakable circle. From an earlier source, we do have Bach’s account of how his ornaments ought to be played. In his table are a smattering of French, German and Italian terms, reflecting not Bach’s status as a polyglot so much as the state of European music as being composite of a host of geographically identifiable styles.

For all the erudition and galanterie, Bach’s Aria is hummable and immediately memorable in a way that the French Suites or his other French inspired works aren’t. The aspect that makes it so incredibly catchy is the lack of nebulous or ambiguous affect in the melody. For bars and bars on end, every note is seemingly in perfect concord with the harmony or violently dissonant, yearning for a resolution. What’s more is that there are a lot of them. Just in the first four bars there are six such instances of these fleeting extreme dissonance slide into their consonant counterparts.

The big question is of course is what to do with these clashes when we identify them. Do we iron them out immediately, or bask in each an every one of them? Do we set up organized hierarchies, or let the moment move us, accepting that our reasonable faculties are subject to forces of the ephemeral as much as they are to our long memories of performances past. Indeed, for all the ornament table tells us about the order of notes in an ornament, we know not how they are played (pace, volume, affect, etc.).

“Of all natural gifts, goût [“taste”] is the one that makes itself most felt and that is the hardest to explain. It would not be what it is if it could be defined, for it judges objects that the judgment can no longer weigh and, if I dare draw such a simile, is the reading glasses of reason. Among melodies, some songs are more agreeable than others, although all are equally well modulated. In harmony, some things impress, others do not, although all are equally correct. Weaving the pieces together is a fine art that involves using some pieces to make the others stand out, that involves something more refined than the law of contrasts. (Rousseau, Dictionary of Music, 1768)

While treatises innumerable speak of “taste” and “discretion,” or of their utility in times of “necessity,” Bach’s son Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach (employed in the Court of Frederick the Great) paints ornamentation with a broader brush

 It is not likely that anybody could question the necessity of ornaments. They are found everywhere in music, and are not only useful, but indispensable. They connect the notes; they give them life. They emphasise them, and besides giving accent and meaning they render them grateful; they illustrate the sentiments, be they sad or merry, and take an important part in the general effect. They give to the player an opportunity to show off his technical skill and powers of expression. A mediocre composition can be made attractive by their aid, and the best melody without them may seem obscure and meaningless. (C.P.E. Bach, An Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, 1753)

 “Technical skill” and “powers of expression” stand out in this paragraph, for in the end all the details really are up to us to sort out on our own. For all the time we can spend pouring over ornament tables, French grammar books or different accounts of the Olympians’ struggles, the only truth that be derived is that which we come to individually. The Aria is not beautiful because of the ornaments, but rather because those ornaments sound different under every set of fingers and in every set of ears.