Shostakovich: Quartet No.14 in F Sharp Major Op.142 [1973]

Having recovered to some extent, the composer is seated in the armchair with a small embroidered blanket over his knees. He seems comparatively pert and articulate.
He addresses the audience as if presiding over a friendly academic seminar.

LIGHTS ARE MOSTLY YELLOW

Janácek?

He scans every face in the audience carefully.

Did someone say Janácek?

Well and good.

He rubs his hands together with some difficulty, almost as if he is wearing mittens.

It seems I’ve written something sound enough to be compared with the work of Leos Janácek, a marvelous Czech gentleman with Pan-Slavic sensibilities and a genuine respect for the Russian language and culture.

He appears gratified.

Janácek was like our Mussorgsky
In that the speech of the Narod
—The People—
The patterns and tonalities of their speech were essential to his musicality.
The Hungarians, Bartok and Kodaly, followed a similar discipline.

There is a plate of sausage, bread and cheese nearby. Without hesitation he takes a minute to consume some of the food, then wipes his lips with a cloth napkin.

Real communication requires nourishment.

Never take this much for granted.

Many of us recall how scarcity both fosters and curtails real communion.

Even partial abundance is distracting for us.

Today…

Using both hands and moving slowly, he fastens onto a teacup, sips from it and sets it back down.

…today it’s more bountiful by comparison.

Tilting his head and smiling

But the water tastes funny.

And I’ve lost my ability to distinguish between one lie and another.

The truth is somewhere far away and Pravda wears its name perversely.

And one has spent upwards of fifty years trying to distinguish the un-distinguishable.

Gravely playing the part.

He raises his head and peers into the LIGHTS which ARE ROSY AND GOLDEN.
The following words are delivered almost as if he is reading them from afar.

In the voice of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra:
“Do I not hear?
Can I not hear the music?
It is coming from inside of me”

And yet

To be mortal is the initial and most important transgression.
And here I speak into your time from out of mine.
Non-linear, as deceased persons in particular have the power to be.
Your electronic informational matrix, which I am fortunate to have missed out on,
Is thickly larded with language heaved back and forth at impossible velocities
Until every angle of syntax, context and comprehension has been torqued
Twisted and knotted into a hellish macramé extending forever in all directions.

LIGHTING SHIFTS TO WHAT MIGHT BE TERMED “GOLDEN HEROIC”

The composer stands with some discomfort and faces left in rigid profile.

My favorite example is a phrase widely attributed to Lenin
But clearly originating with Maxim Gorki, who conflated ethics and aesthetics.

“Ethics is the aesthetics of the future” or something to that effect.

LIGHTING REVERTS TO PREVIOUS SETTING.

He resumes his reflective demeanor and sits back down.

Most references in your 21^st century data swarm 

persistently assign the words to Lenin!

Lenin: Afterwards deified, like a Roman Caesar explained by Suetonius.

This little miracle traces cleanly back to 1960 and Le Petit Soldat, a motion picture by Jean-Luc Godard. 76 minutes into the film, an actor expresses enthusiasm for a future wherein ethics and aesthetics will have somehow become interwoven, or even indistinguishable, and says that he believes the concept might have been put into words by Lenin. He doesn’t verify Lenin as the source, admits he isn’t sure, but it’s right there in Le Petit Soldat, Godard’s politically charged follow-up for À bout de souffle.
Godard later explained in an interview that he had the actor cite Lenin over Gorki simply because he “liked Lenin better”. Of course he never met Lenin, or Stalin.

Shortly after I took my last breaths, a North American conceptual artist by the name of Laurie Anderson took the quote and recorded it onto magnetic tape, stretched it onto a violin bow and drew the phrase back and forth over a pick up head mounted on her fiddle. Bisecting the word “future” to emphasize the word “few”

ETHICS IS THE AESTHETICS OF THE FEW 

Ingenious!

Yet it seems likely that your Anderson saw the movie. For in the work’s title she credited the words to V.I. Lenin. This solidified the misquote, and I was dead anyway. Since then, the essence of Gorki’s idea appears to have informed virtually all of this woman’s subsequent work.

He smiles.

I have a very good feeling about where some of the more creative music has gotten to.
And I do so love humanity.
Don’t you?

BLACKOUT
















© arwulf arwulf 2015