Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

 Half Blood Blues is a novel by Esi Edugyan. It deals with territory that is rarely successful for the writer, that of music and musicians. They have surely been many successful books about writers, painters, even sculptures. But novels where the composition and performance of music figure large are often rather less than significant and are often, frankly, unsuccessful. Perhaps it has to do with the non-visual, largely abstract and utterly personal nature of the effects of sound and our individual responses to it. It’s hard to avoid cliché when words have to describe music. Time, surely, also plays its part, since for the listener music exists within its own time that can neither be controlled or compressed into a phrase.

After such a preamble, the congratulations to Esi Edugyan for her convincing portrayal of jazz musicians in Half Blood Blues are significant. We are in the late 1930s, long before free expression or even bebop, in a period when Sydney Bechet was still cool and Louis Armstrong was the hot thing, but these characters assembled in prewar Berlin do form a convincing band. In the novel’s pages, we do feel what it might be like to play bass, horn, trumpet or bass. Drummers, perhaps, like guitarists have always been a race apart.

Half Blood Blues focuses on the life of Hiero, a German who happens to be both a jazz musician and black. With his fellow band members, Chip and Sid, he ekes out a living playing clubs in a city where the expression they choose is now seen as degenerate. Just a few years before, American music, even jazz played by black people, had been popular, but times have changed. The musicians sense that change, but Hiero feels it more deeply, because now he is doubly estranged from the country he must call home. Changing times, the onset of war and the threat of violence forces the band to flee to Paris, in the hope they can escape across the Atlantic.

Like stereotypical performers, the bohemians are somewhat scattered in their habits, seek casual sex, use drugs and eat sporadically. Delilah enters their lives. She presents a different approach to life, and almost surreal vision of what the men assume to constitute a woman and she thus seems to possess influence over these men’s lives as they pursue their expression, albeit personal, via the ensemble and its public sound.

The book opens in Paris in 1940 and revisits later. The band of had to flee their home in Germany. It also inhabits Berlin in 1939 to trace the origins of the band’s flight from Nazism and then it revisits the same city in 1992, as a couple of characters trace what might have this might’ve happened as a consequence of actions over 50 years earlier.

By the time they reach Poland in 1992 in an attempt to trace one of their number, they are thoroughly surprised, exonerated, if not actually forgiven. At the heart of the tale the influence of the music, especially the improvisation, is paramount. It’s what you do now at this instant that matters. You might plan, you can reflect, you might even rehearse. But the now is all that matters. Just play on.

Esi Edugyan uses a certain style of language here and there to characterize the protagonists as jazz musicians and in some cases foreigners and in others black. It is not overused and so achieves its intention, so it rarely intrudes between the character and the reader. The intention, however, successfully communicates the characters’ status as outsiders and it’s never over-used.

At the heart of this novel, whose plot is significant and so will not be described here, is an act of betrayal, selfishness and duplicity that lays on the conscience for decades. The victim, once traced, indicates that life went on and reasserts the importance of engaging with the here and now. Which all goes to show, you can contemplate to your heart’s content and even analyse endlessly, but the only real advice is to get on with it and life will create itself. Improvise.

Scriabin’s Divine Poem and Manuel de Falla played by Judith Jauregui is a revelation

Josep Vicent, artistic director, and conductor at ADDA, Alicante, decided to entitle the whole season of concerts ‘Divine Poem’. One must conclude that he really wanted to build this particular work into the orchestra’s repertoire. In last night’s concert, he and the ADDA Orchestra played the Divine Poem, effectively the Symphony No. 3 of Alexander Scriabin and it proved to be nothing less than a triumph.

This is very much a transitional work, or so we are told. Scriabin’s early work was heavily influenced by Chopin and Liszt. Then he discovered Wagner and other extra-musical influences, including Indian mythology, pantheism and the stimulus provided by an ego the size of a universe, and so his style changed, as we are told. The expressive, apparently unpredictable and vivid symbolism of the late piano sonatas seems not to relate to the early works, but a keen listener will, however, find progression, not change.

The Poem of Ecstasy and the Poem of Fire, orchestral works that followed the Divine Poem, were single movement pieces, more like the tone poems than symphonies. The Poem of Fire reflected the composer’s increasing tendency towards the grandiose in that it involves a large orchestra, a piano soloist, a full chorus, an organ, and, if it is done as the composer wished, an auditorium-wide light show and perfumes wafted in using wind machines. Personally, I have attended one such a performance, in London’s Royal Albert Hall in the 1970s. The program notes made Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye.

The projected work to follow these, a work that the composer promised to write but only had time to sketch was his Mysterium, a giant ego-trip in three movements that would have involved building a new concert hall in the Himalayas and mounting a week-long festival whose finale, so the composer thought, would be the end of the world. Death at forty-three from blood-poisoning prevented Alexander Scriabin from completing the project.

In 1972, the year of the centenary of Scriabin’s birth, his music was for a while in the spotlight. I bought John Ogden’s Sonata cycle, a disc of the two late poems and Svetlanov’s Melodiya, recording of the Divine Poem. I now have at least one recording of every work the composer wrote. But the Svetlanov Divine Poem is the only recording I have of this work. It’s not played very often.

Which is a surprise, because on the face of it, it’s a conventional symphony. It sounds like Rachmaninov in places and is very much in a nineteenth century idiom. It’s not as challenging at first hearing as a Mahler symphony, or a Strauss tone poem, for that matter. It’s quite melodic and reaches some amazing dynamic heights. It is certainly memorable.

But on this hearing, I found much more in the Divine Poem, a work I have been listening to for fifty years. Embedded in the second and third movements of the three movement  symphony are all the musical elements, the themes, the harmonies, and the orchestral juxtapositions, that would reappear in Ecstasy and Fire. They are all there! It became nothing less than revelatory to realize that there is nothing new in those later, often described as revolutionary works. It’s all there in the Divine Poem.

Josep Vicent’s reading of the score was, as ever, superb. The rich textures of Scriabin’s orchestration were all interpreted and played to perfection, and one thinks that the trombones and tuba have never worked so hard for a living! The performance was a total success, and I await the other works’ inclusion in future programs. ADDA’s habit of projecting images onto the back of the stage would work well for the Poem of Fire. The orchestra’s encore of the Prelude to act three of Lohengrin was an informed choice, since various passages in the Divine Poem clearly owed much to Wagner, not least the birdsong section in the first movement, we seemed to have flown in directly from Siegfried.

The Divine Poem came after a first half of music by Manuel de Falla. We began the evening with the Jota from El Sombrero de Tres Picos, and then we heard a stunningly beautiful performance of Noches en los Jardines de España, Nights In The Gardens Of Spain with Judith Juregui a soloist. Some of Manuel de Falla’s orchestral textures in the third movement were distinctly Scriabin-esque. Judith Jauregui’s playing of this work, which is a piano concerto in all but name, was exquisite and her encore of music by Mompou was an inspired choice.

Josep Vicent and ADDA keep on presenting concerts which transcend my abilities to write reviews. They are nothing less than memorable, every time!

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Billy Budd is doubly famous. He is the eponymous principal character of Herman Melville’s novella and, by adoption via E M Forster’s hand, also the eponymous hero a Benjamin Britten’s opera. The contrasting if not contradictory words ‘character’ and ‘hero’ are important in the context of these two masterpieces.

Like all good stories, it cannot be spoiled, because it is in the way the story is told that the real experience lies. Billy Budd is a young man, rather handsome in a simple, lower status, ratings way. He is recruited from a merchant ship called The Rights of Man to HMS indomitable and so joins the King’s Navy as a foretopman. The previous ship’s owner with its explicitly political title is mentioned in the book as owned by someone who sympathises with Thomas Paine and presumably the American and therefore the French Revolutions. This point is merely referenced by Forster and Britten, probably because it might provide an alternative political motive for the antagonism that develops, an antagonism that, in the opera, focuses on sexuality.

The Indomitable embarks on its mission during the Napoleonic Wars under the direction of Captain Vere and is policed by a master-at-arms called Claggart, whom Vere only met on the return part of his last voyage, indicating that exists no personal friendship between them. Melville tells us that Claggart is around thirty-five, an age he generally exceeds by a considerable amount in most productions of Britten’s opera.

Billy Budd is a genial sort of giant. Everyone notices his good looks, his youth, his athletic stature and his obvious strength. But it is also noted that he is naïve, perhaps overly trusting. An old hand tries to warn him that Claggart has taken against him, but Billy insists that he himself has never spoken ill of anyone, so there can be no problem.

Claggart conspires to pin an accusation of recruitment for mutiny on Billy. The name of his previous ship and presumably the political associations of its owner play an important part, as does the impressed status, equals kidnapped, of some crew members. Already I fall into the trap of labelling the ‘bad’ guy with a surname and the foretopman with a forename. But that is the reality. For whatever reason, Claggart is out to get Billy.

Billy has one severe weakness. He stutters. He stutters more when stressed. And when, in the company of Captain Vere, Claggart publicly delivers his accusation against the young man, Billy becomes so incensed that he cannot defend himself verbally. The words will not come and in frustration he strikes Claggart and kills him. Billy is tried, found guilty of striking and killing an officer and is condemned to death. He hangs.

At the trial, Vere presents his version of events in a cold hearted, matter of fact manner that will admit no nuance. In effect, he merely recites the rulebook. In the opera, Vere’s ghost, still troubled by conscience, admits he could have saved Billy Budd, but chose not to. In Melville’s original, things are more complex. Vere must enact the demands of his office and so he behaves as he does. Stability, loyalty to King and country and the rightness of superior social class trump notions of justice, fairness or compassion. The obvious injustice almost creates sufficient reaction amongst the crew to itself provoke a mutiny, but the anger dissipates, defeated by continued enforced subservience.

And, by the way, all of this applies to the opera, as well as the novella. Forster and Britten make more of Vere, paradoxically, than Melville, despite the novella spending much more time on the actual trial than the opera. Vere is torn by conscience, but he is the apparently unwitting possessor of a responsibility that trumps personal judgment. In some ways, Vere is more of an order taker than those whom he orders. And at the end of the opera, Britain illustrates how the aspiring middle classes, those promoted and paid to populate a buffer zone between protest and power, eventually protect the status of their social betters, but cannot salve a collective conscience, a conscience that in any case does not care.

A theme which becomes central but not rarely explicit in the opera is the suggestion that Claggart is homosexually attracted to Billy Budd. The antagonism generated within him towards Billy is thus the result of an inner purging of guilt and self-loathing that the attraction itself generates. There is the mere hint of this in Melville’s words. For obvious reasons, it was a theme that interested Britten deeply.

But the opera’s amplification of the theme is justified. Melville distances himself from anything sexual. The topic clearly exists in the lives of the sailors. But Melville apparently refuses to enter the establishment, let alone the bedroom where implied acts take place. There is a clear reference to Claggart’s attraction, but the author also wrote of the highly ambiguous relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg at the start of Moby Dick. There is evidence enough of the author’s reluctance to enter the bedroom, even when he declares himself explicitly in attendance!

Perhaps the most moving experience in Billy Budd is to read the epilogue, which is a sailor’s poetic retelling of the story. Personally, I find it impossible to read these words without also singing Billy’s almost proud but frank lament from the opera. The story is, undoubtedly, a double masterpiece.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I did not begin the two hundred thousand words plus of Moby Dick expecting to be surprised. Herman Melville’s book has been on my reading list shelf for years, always an intended read but never opened. Its iconic status has always proved too much of a barrier to its starting. The motivation eventually came, however, from a particularly moving production of Benjamin Brittten’s opera Billy Budd, itself based on a Herman Melville story, that prompted a decision to start Moby Dick, the whale sized book about whaling, and I had a whale of a time. A copy of Billy Budd, incidentally, was not to hand at the time. This must be remedied.

The bare whalebones of Moby Dick are very simply arranged. The story is told by Ishmael, who is seeking work as a sailor. Paradoxically, perhaps, we learn very little about Ishmael. It seems he is cast almost like some detached observer, able to discern the motives of others, but usually unable to declare his own feelings. He is, however, undeniably a character, not a mere vehicle for a writer’s declamation.

In Nantucket, Ishmael befriends Queequeg, a fellow sailor, who is ethnically and religiously different from himself. They soon share a room and even a bed. How the cultural difference and the male camaraderie are described is one of the more memorable aspects of this thought-provoking book. Both men are recruited onto the Pequod, a whaler under the command of the initially anonymous and even mysterious captain Ahab. Ostensibly, they are joining a factory ship on a standard mission to harvest whales for the extraction of profit via oil. The source of the profit and the means of realising it may run counter to our current assumptions, but the capitalist nature of the activity remains central to our contemporary interactions.

Once on board, however, they, along with the rest of the crew, discover that their now revealed captain has been all but destroyed in an encounter with a vast animal called a white whale and that their ship, the Pequod, is embarking upon a mission to extract vengeance. Captain Ahab is intent, nay single-mindedly obsessed with hunting down his attacker and repaying its compliment. A simple irony about Ahab is that having lost his leg in his encounter with Moby Dick, he now supports himself on a false leg made of whalebone, tapered at the base so it locks in a deck socket for stability. Thus anchored, supported by the very material he seeks to destroy, he surveys the sea for evidence of his prey. He does find his goal and pursues it for three days. Ishmael lives to tell the tale. But those particular events are more than one hundred and thirty chapters in the reader’s future after first encountering Ishmael seeking work in Nantucket.

In Moby Dick Herman Melville places us firmly in the middle of the nineteenth century. Modern readers must bear in mind that assumptions will be challenged by what has changed in the intervening decades. This was an age before electricity, before mass travel, before immediate communication over distance. But it was also an age when the industrial exploitation of the earth’s resources, animal as well as mineral, was not just under way, but was seen as an essential and desired end that might provide employment, generate wealth and benefit human life. As readers today, we must therefore attempt, for that is all we can do, to relieve ourselves of our novel positions on the activity the book describes. This was an era when killing whales for extraction of profit was quite normal, if, for most people, still a distant, dangerous, even fabulous activity. Reading a whodunnit does not indicate acceptance of murder, so exposure to Moby Dick does not imply support of whaling. And making this required mental shift will unlock the tremendous power, immediacy and indeed wisdom of this masterpiece.

That whaling happened, that a large industry grew up and was sustained by the activity and that people lived the life that it demanded is indisputable. Like all history, we are never condemned to repeat it, but we are also reminded that, though we remain free to reinterpret it, we are powerless to change it. And this book, almost like no other, is replete with the whaling experience which is now so foreign to us. We do, via Herman Melville’s magnificent narrative, enter into that world, that pursuance of life and death, and the experience is not for the faint hearted.

But what is most surprising about Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is its form, or indeed its lack of it. The effect is strikingly modern, in that the novel is not presented as a linear narrative. Instead, Moby Dick presents facts about whales, descriptions of the whaling process, details of its contemporary setting and, above all, portraits of the characters who populate the Pequod and are pressed into partnering Ahab’s mission. In some ways, Moby Dick presents a total experience of a microcosm, often so focused it does its subject literally to death, but in other ways so lacking in focus that a reader can profitably dig in and out of the book almost at random.

And despite the location of the subject matter in a particular time, some of its themes are also relevant to our contemporary society. For example, through Ishmael’s narrative Herman Melville addresses the question of what kind of animal the whale might be. He is aware of Linnaeus and the modern concept of species. He is aware of the evidence that whales, unlike fish, give birth and suckle their young with mother’s milk. The Bible, however, describes Jonah’s encounter as being definitively with a fish, and so that is that, and thus the question is unarguably answered. The whale has to be a fish, since God may not be contradicted. What more perfect example of fact-ignoring fake news or conspiracy theory could one imagine?

Ahab, certainly, is a tyrant, but he is perhaps not the totalitarian dictator that some interpretations demand. He is driven by a personal mission and recruits others, perhaps by deceit, perhaps by stealth, to further his ends. Now a flawed human being, he uses the able bodies of his recruits to pursue his ends and rise above his own limitations. But though he does conduct his pursuit on his own terms in his own autocratic way, eventually he leads his own chase, his personal vendetta and tunnel vision relieving him of his better judgment, whereas a modern dictator would have the exit strategy ready before any risk might be considered. Essentially, Ahab is the ultimate politician who recruits unquestioning and loyal followers who become part owners of individual drive. And then, like any politician who needs to exert pressure, he calls upon his followers to amplify himself, albeit unsuccessfully. All political careers, we are told, end in failure.

Overall, once the paradigm shift in the reader’s assumption is made, Melville’s Moby Dick presents a thoroughly modern and therefore a thoroughly surprising experience. The subject matter may not be fashionable today, but then it reminds us that today’s preoccupations and assumed values might soon themselves appear both pointless and, indeed, repulsive.

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf is the author’s last novel. It is often described as a difficult read. And indeed, difficult it is, not because it is full of shocking scenes, tough language or improbable plot, but because it attempts to present what people think, as they think it, jumbled, processed only by passing experience, often random and disjointed.

The style might be called ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘internal narrative’, but no stock phrase can sum up or adequately describe the abrupt changes in point of view, the disjointed time, the juxtaposition of sometimes unrelated material, the real with the invented, all imagined and suffused within the feared. One thing that does become clear as the book progresses is that this process is much more akin to poetry than narrative. Its images often flash past in opposite directions, apparently unrelated but thought by the same person, often in contradiction to what we have come to assume is the professed intent of the character.

Ostensibly, this is just a group of people coming together to see a play. They assemble in the open air, in the bucolic landscape of the English shires, on a long light summer evening to witness the performance of a drama conceived by one of their number and acted by their acquaintances. We learn that the proceeds from ticket sales and donations will go towards the installation of electric light in the parish church, probably to replace the now extinguished Light of The World which has now proved to be defunct. Thus, at least on its surface, Between The Acts seems to be a rural English, middle class comedy, where society folk gossip about one another while view while they remain baffled by amateur dramatics. After all, what might one expect from artists?

But that surface is mere illusion. Written in 1939 to 1941, Between The Acts senses war close at hand. There is potential for destruction, for disquiet, for foreboding. In addition, the characters who almost anonymously populate the book, relate their own histories, fears, hopes, prejudices and confusion, any of which might change by the moment. They are all complex in an ordinary and perhaps predictable way and, like all of us, they often think and act tangentially, with one person‘s utterance provoking perhaps unrelated responses in others.

Between The Acts is not a long book. Neither, on its surface, is its language difficult. But its myriad of associations, random shifts and passing associations make it impossible to follow for any reader intend on finding a one-dimensional narrative. It was obviously never Virginia Woolf’s intention to facilitate such an experience.

But any conventional route is not an appropriate way to approach this book. It is a work to be absorbed word by word, phrase by phrase, and then again, with the reader’s own imagination stimulated by the images supplied. In these pages we are presented with the play itself, with all of its non sequiturs and all of its deliberate imitation of well-known drama. But overall, we are amongst people who are as confused about their own identity as anyone, and we live through that confusion apparently as they live at themselves.

A rewarding activity for anyone interested is to read the book and then to work through the free course on the book available via a The Open University’s Open Learn website. What the course admirably achieves is a promotion of reflection on the text, and insistence that writing as dense as this needs a reader’s reflection and an imagination’s participation.

It has to be noted also, however, that the author herself was not in the best of mental health when the book was written. This surely is reflected in the text and, as such, Between The Acts probably offers at least some insight into what it must be like to suffer mental illness. The dividing line between coping with experience and being overwhelmed by it is a fine one, it seems, so narrow that any of these characters and indeed any reader may cross that boundary without really knowing it.

The Ambassadors by Henry James

Soft words butter no parsnips is an English saying that is, let’s admit, not overused, especially these days. It probably means get on with it and shut up. In many decades of reading, I have probably only ever ones come across the expression used seriously, rather than in jest, and that was in the Ambassadors by Henry James, who has a certain facility with language and a particular style of sentence construction. Here’s an example. Well, there was an example, but the bookmark went missing and I can’t remember where the evidence was located.

So there it is. And there was The Ambassadors, some thousands of words of story relating to late nineteenth century Americans who found Paris society and culture seriously challenging.

There is a plot. X is the son of Y. He is in Paris and has taken up residence with a woman of all things who might even not speak English as the first language. It seems that at least one of the protagonists in The Ambassadors night at least have twigged that some people in France speak French. X is really wants to go back at home, to be embraced in the family fold, guided to occupy the role others want him to play. He seems oblivious to these desires and seems to like France.

Y talks to Z, who comes across the Atlantic us to England and then to France. He seems to have time on his hands when he sets about persuading eggs to come home. Z is not a little taken with Y and agrees, though his motives may not be of the first order.

Strether visits Paris and finds that it is not precisely what his preconceptions might have predicted. And that, I’m afraid, is about it. Plot is developed largely via dialogue, which is often expressed in the kind of language but probably no one ever spoke.

Do these soft words really butter parsnips? On that issue the jury is still determinedly out, one feels.

Musical perfection - the Bamberger Symphoniker, Jakub Hrusa, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Many years ago, when I was a student, I, along with many others, bought a new stereo system and we regularly listened to chosen LPs to assess the relative merit of the purchases. One of the disks was Istvan Kertesz’s Dvorak Symphony No.8 on Decca. The recording and playing were both crisp, sure, and sonorous. The entries were decisive, the interpretations subtle, and the dynamics generous. Until last night, I thought I had heard the definitive interpretation of this familiar, but never disappointing, work.

The last night in question was a performance by the Bamberger Symphoniker under Jakub Hrusa who, for me, arrived with a certain reputation to prove. What was it about this conductor that now seems to have the world of classical music at his feet? Well, the list proved to be long - and included precision, dedication, vision, cooperation, and, above all, a sheer delight in music. I began with a question and by the end of the evening it, along with many others had been definitively answered.

This performance of Dvorak’s eighth symphony was more than memorable. The pianos were piano, and the fortes were forte. These are platitudes, perhaps, but nonetheless often and crucially such elements can be smoothed out to a generalized shape which hides the music’s detail, especially in a piece so well-known and as often played as this. Jakub Hrusa, from the very first notes of Beethoven’s Leonora overture number three that started the concert, was clearly someone who wanted to shape the sound, to make sense of the musical argument. It is this vision of the work’s shape and construction that makes the listeners’ experience complete. I cannot remember a performance of this Beethoven overture where the transitions were quite so clear and contrasted, where the dynamic changes added to the musical experience rather than merely punctuated it. And equally, it was the same with the Dvorak Symphony. The attention to detail, the continual consideration of the question of what the composer was trying to say produced a performance that was utterly memorable.

And so to the central work in the program. I like to save the best to the last. Igor Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto uses no bombast at its surface and its employees little which is merely an opportunity for the soloist to show off. But at the heart of the piece is a dialogue. often humorous, between the soloist and selected bands from within the orchestra, which itself behaves differently from a conventional concerto accompaniment. Stravinsky always concentrates and contrasts sonorities, grouping instruments into surprising combinations of timbre and harmony. The work progresses as a dialogue between the storytelling solo part, amid interjections and comments from the orchestra.

To work as music that communicates, this piece needs a soloist who can overcome the technical challenges with ease, whilst at the same time, maintaining a conversation with the different orchestral elements. Patricia Kopatchinskaja was not only able to do this, but also to raise the performance to a perfected artwork. One was not conscious of ‘soloist and orchestra’, one felt only that one had entered a music world, understood it’s highly personal language and shared its vision and thus become a partner in the experience, not a mere onlooker.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s performance of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto was one of the most memorable musical events. I can recall in over fifty years of concert-going. The playing was perfect, but that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t the virtuosic performance that made the difference. Such adjectives simply don’t apply when an experience is so completely absorbing that all you hear is the communication and the message, not just the voice that tells the story. Music, after all, can say things in ways that words can’t. That is why we listen to it. And I will be listening to this performance in my memory for the rest of my life, and happily so.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja made the point that much of Stravinsky’s music in the concerto takes the form of chamber music. And, as an encore, she unusually presented more chamber music in the shape of part of the violin and cello duo of Ravel, the Bamberger’s principal cello playing the second part. Like the Stravinsky, this work was full of humour and contrast, but here, Ravel also delved into the surreal. Music is a language, and the Bamberger orchestra, Jakub Hrusa, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja were simply its voice.