My brother-in-law, Mel Steele, is a painter whose work I not only admire, but truly enjoy. They give my eyes great pleasure.
We visit Mel and his wife, Deborah, a few times each year and usually I bring along a big bag of DVDs, mostly art or foreign films. Mel and I share a common taste for such things.
Indeed, our tastes match up surprisingly well, not only in movies, but in music and art as well. We love the more difficult music, like Bartok quartets or 20th century operas, and for all that we get along admirably.
But there is a sticking point, a point of contention that we have never been able to resolve. There is a movie he hates and I love; and one I cannot stand that he adores. And I see no way of settling the dispute.
Mel grew up in Madison, N.C., in the 1940s and ’50s and only a block from his house was the local movie theater. He and his sister went to the movies at least once a week growing up. They saw all the usual Hollywood offerings, with Burt Lancaster, Greer Garson, Veronica Lake, Dorothy Lamour, Kirk Douglas — you get the picture.
I am a few years younger than Mel and since there was no movie house where I grew up, my film education came via television — old movies packaged by studios for rebroadcast on fledgling TV channels, such as WOR-TV from New York and its Million Dollar Movie. I was fed a lot of films from the 1930s, and, of course, all those marvelous-awful sci-fi films made for a pittance with Richard Carlson or Sonny Tufts.
I don’t know if our different childhoods made the difference, or what, but that sticking point revolves around the best Western (not the motel chain). I mentioned once that I love The Searchers from 1956, a film in which John Wayne shows that he can actually act. It is a tough film, in which Wayne is an unsympathetic character, a bigot returned from the Civil War, having fought for the Confederacy. For my money, it is the best Western ever made, highlighting the shadings of culture clash and personality.
“Can’t stand the thing,” says Mel. “Can’t stand John Wayne.”
Indeed, it seems as if the presence of Wayne is the primary objection Mel has to the film. And I suspect that Mel’s dislike of Wayne has more to do with Wayne’s later right-wing politics — and the number of undistinguished star vehicles he made as an ever-paunchier alpha male — than with Wayne’s actual performance in The Searchers.
It is clear that Wayne didn’t always have to act, and could rely on nothing more than his screen persona in lesser films, such as North to Alaska, The Comancheros, McLintock!, Hatari, or The War Wagon. He seemed always to be playing a caricature of himself.
And then, there are those absolutely embarrassing moments in The Alamo or The Green Berets. Wayne’s shallow jingoism does not wear well. Nor does his support of the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon.
I used to share Mel’s disdain for John Wayne. The actor was pretty much a punchline. Really? Genghis Khan in The Conqueror? Gimme a break.
I first became acquainted with Wayne when I was a little kid, watching ancient Westerns on TV, where he was Stony Brook in the Three Mesquiteers films, or as “Singing Sandy” in a bunch of old Republic or Monogram Westerns. Compared with some of the old cowboys, Wayne had a graceful presence on screen, if no great acting chops.
Only as an adult, did I come across films in which Wayne played a character not merely himself. After seeing Howard Hawks’ Red River, director John Ford famously said, “Who knew the big lug could actually act?” Well, he could, even if he didn’t always feel the need to.
Then there are such films as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, where he convincingly played a part 20 years older than he was at the time. And most of all, perhaps, his role as John Books in The Shootist, his final film, in when he seems to want to prove once and for all he can be an actor and not just a star.
Mel, of course, was having none of it. “Can’t stand the guy.”
In contrast, Mel proclaimed that the greatest Western ever is Shane, a movie I cannot abide. For me, it is the epitome of Hollywood phoniness. It is pure artifice, with not a believable moment in it.
Even its widescreen projection on release was fake: Paramount wanted something to compete with the then-new Cinemascope and Panavision — both anamorphic widescreen formats — and so they cropped the original Academy Ratio Shane at top and bottom to make a phony widescreen version.
“But it’s so beautiful,” Mel says. “Look at that landscape.” Yeah, I feel, a rip-off of Ansel Adams, with the Teton Mountains prominent in the background. It seems so self-consciously meaningful, so arty, so pretentiously “mythic,” that I cannot take it seriously. There is not a second in it that feels real — apart from the acting of Jean Arthur, who is the only fully human character in the film. These are not people but ideas moving around in the plot, as if they each wore a sign telling us what they signify. Again, only Arthur feels like a real person.
Allegory, for me, is always a tough sell.
I’ve never been able to warm to Alan Ladd. He is one of those movie stars from that era of Hollywood movie in which the dying studios made turkey after turkey.
Van Heflin always feels to me like someone the studios felt they could turn into a major star, but never managed to.
And Brandon deWilde is a blank-faced homunculus, as if that look of animal stupidity should be taken as the face of innocence. Actually the kid gives me the creeps.
The Searchers, in contrast, is filled with all the great character actors that John Ford used over and over. They are people, not cardboard cutouts.
Perhaps I have overstated my case. There are other great Westerns that may be as good as The Searchers. Ford probably made them. Modern Westerns tend to be more period-aware and historically better informed. And perhaps Shane isn’t the worst Western. There are plenty of hack Westerns with much less ambition than George Stevens brought to his work.
But the fact is, the comic disagreement Mel and I had was about these two films in particular. I was not able to persuade him; he was not able to persuade me. Let’s leave it at that.
Sometimes, while driving through a neighborhood, I will see an old person, a retiree, sitting in a chair on the front porch, or in the driveway, just watching the traffic go by. It’s become a meme, much like the “Get off my lawn,” thing that shows up in single-panel cartoons.
I have to admit, I am of that age, although I don’t find traffic that interesting.
But after several years of being partially house-bound by the Covid virus, and at times suffering from cabin fever — to say nothing of the fatigue that comes with hours staring into an iPad screen checking out the news or watching cat videos — I have discovered the pleasures of sitting quietly in my back yard. It gets me out of the house and it reacquaints me with what I jokingly call “reality.” That is, the sense that there is a world without electromagnetic signals commandeering my attention, a world that has been there always, before my greatest-grandparent was born, and will be there when all the power grids in the world are rusting back into the soil.
I can sit there for half-an-hour at a time, maybe 40 minutes, without thinking about anything and just watching this tiny bit of the world as it moves in the breeze, as the cardinals and mockingbirds swoop across it into the low tree branches, as a white butterfly flits over the irises and a rabbit lopes across the bit of lawn.
Occasionally, there is a groundhog who will waddle into the yard, get about halfway across before noticing me sitting there; stare at me for two or three seconds before turning back and returning to where he came from.
This morning a bumble-bee dive-bombed me briefly. I don’t think he was attacking me; more likely he didn’t even recognize I was there.
After a morning of staring at a computer screen, or watching an iPad, it is important to move to somewhere so my eyes can refocus at a distance, perhaps to infinity. I watch the clouds and notice which direction they travel. I listen to the birds nattering, or hear the neighbor on the next block mowing the lawn. An airplane may cut across the blankness leaving a contrail, and dropping a rumbling jet sound that always seems to be coming from some distance behind where you see the plane.
It may seem to some, in the rush of civilization, that nothing is happening, that sitting quietly and watching is the very definition of boring. But for me, it is not. Something is always happening. It may be subtle, but it is happening. The leaves wiggle, the sky shifts from sunlight to shadow as the clouds pass, a mockingbird lights on the top of the shed and repeats his mantra over and over; he seems to notice that I’m there, but perhaps I am no different to him from the patio furniture.
But I have noticed, over the weeks I have been doing this, at least three psychological states I have found myself in.
First, if I am distracted by other thoughts, or if I am not really paying attention, my relationship with the yard is that I am looking at nature, almost as if I was still staring at my computer screen. I may notice things, may enjoy what I see, but it is quite separate from me and is, as I look, clearly something in front of me.
There is nothing wrong with this, but it isn’t why I go out each day and sit there. I consider it a failure when I can’t get to the second state.
That second state is when I feel not that I am looking at nature, but rather I am in nature. That is, it is all around me, and what is more it exists behind as well as in front. It extends into the air and to the clouds; I become aware of the soil under me, the weeds to the right and the undergrowth beneath the tree branches.
To be in Nature is to be taken away from the self and redeposited into the wider world. I can easily lose myself in this state and that is when the watching becomes something more. I can feel the space around me expanding to the rest of the earth and sky and my bit in it, however tiny, is plugged in. I feel alive in a live world.
These two states of mind depend primarily on my mood. If I am tired or distracted, I cannot reach the higher state; it just doesn’t come. But when I can silence my brain for a bit, it is like the coupling of a locomotive to a train. There is a click and it all becomes connected.
It is the same state you enter when you are absorbed in a book and the room you are in disappears because you are so focused.
But I said there is a third state, and that comes only with something like grace. It is when I neither look at nature nor feel in nature, but rather am nature.
The barriers between me and the rest of the world, even the universe, vanish and I realize that I am part of it all. No. I don’t realize it. It just is. The very idea of realizing, or thinking, ceases to have meaning. If I look at the rabbit, I know he looks at me, too. No, again. It isn’t a question of knowing. We look at each other. A recognition. The metabolism that takes place in the cells of my meat is the same as that in the green iris leaf. The motion of the clouds across the blue is the motion of my blood through my arteries and veins. “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
I disappear, except that I don’t. In fact, I am more present. It becomes one thing, and it is not that I am a part of the one thing, but that it is just one thing.
That is, of course, a truism. Even Miss America might say the same thing through a Pepsodent smile. But just saying, or knowing it is not what I’m talking about. It is not knowledge I mean; it is the experience. I sit there in the back yard and it just is.
This cannot happen every time I sit in the back yard. And it isn’t necessary to have a back yard. It is just, as I say, a kind of state of grace, psychologically.
What is required is receptivity, an openness without expectation. Paying attention.
As I get closer and closer to the point when every atom belonging to me will belong again to the soil, I remember the lines in Thomas, that “it will not come by expectation, but it is all around us and we do not see it.”
But once in a while, the veil is lifted and we can see. It is not what we see but that we see.
Until relatively recently, 20th century concert music was a tough sell. It had the reputation of being dissonant, noisy, difficult, and unpleasant. It was a century that began with Arnold Schoenberg dispensing with harmony and Igor Stravinsky upending rhythm, followed by a World War that knocked the complaisance out of any rational being and told us that the coming century was going to be anything but calm and easy.
A number of composers felt that music needed to reflect the mood of the angst-ridden age.
But even Schoenberg admitted “There is still plenty of music left to be written in C-major.” He didn’t believe his 12-tone revolution would destroy all tunes to come, but was simply a logical conclusion to music history from Bach through Wagner, from tonality through chromaticism to atonality. And we shouldn’t blame poor Arnold for all the dreary ruckus that followed: His own music is quite emotional and beautiful, even if it often requires some serious commitment from his listeners.
He was right about one thing certainly: There was plenty of music written in C-major, throughout the century. And F-major and D-minor. In fact, most of the music written in that century was based on familiar scales, albeit with plenty of playing around and trying new ways to use them.
It’s just that the music-industrial complex, so to speak, was hijacked around mid-century by a clutch of academically-minded composers — the “Darmstadt Mafia” — insisting that serialism was the only music to take seriously, and that the more unlistenable it was, the greater it must therefore be. (Some of these composers did write interesting music in that style — it wasn’t a complete loss — but they looked down their noses at anything that might stink of a tune.)
And so, contemporary music turned its back on the concert audiences and those composers wrote only for other composers of their ilk, and audiences shrunk from any concert program that insisted they listen to the stuff. Modern music acquired a very bad reputation.
But I find that after 60 years of concert-going and music absorption, I listen to 20th century music more than that of any other era. It is music that speaks directly to me. Oh, I listen to bunches of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but the plurality of my music listening edges to the century in which I grew up.
So, I wanted to create a list of representative compositions from the century in question and present them as a course in great music that anyone can listen to and enjoy.
I went through my collection of thousands of CDs and chose 30 pieces to offer. I listened to each one, in order, to refresh my memory — and to flat out enjoy them all over again.
The roughly chronological list begins with a surprising entry. Most people think of Ives’ music (if they think of it at all) as noisy, crashing, impish tomfoolery. But Ives was a well-trained musician, with a degree from Yale University. His Symphony No. 2 is pretty tame, except for his borrowing of familiar popular tunes, and a raspberry at the end.
Here is my list:
1900-1920
Charles Ives (1874-1954) — Symphony No. 2 (1902; premiered in 1951) (42 minutes long). Performance listened to: Eugene Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded 1973.
Ives studied under the respectable, if stuffy Yale professor Horatio Parker, and after graduating in 1898, began working on his second symphony (the first was his senior thesis composition for Parker) and included bits from Camptown Races, Turkey in the Straw and Columbia the Gem of the Ocean run through a kitchen blender. He finished Symphony No. 2 in 1902, although, with Ives, he was never completely finished and continued tinkering until his death in 1952. The symphony wasn’t premiered until Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic played it in a radio performance in 1951. The house-bound but still cantankerous Ives heard it on his radio in Connecticut and his response was that he spit.
I listened to Ormandy’s version from 1973. The recordings listed here are not my choices as “best” — although they are all good — but merely the ones I had to hand when I started this project.
Frederick Delius (1862-1934) — On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring (1912) (7 minutes long). Performance: Thomas Beecham and Royal Philharmonic, recorded 1958.
Delius’ score instructs, “With easy flowing movement,” and the quiet, peaceful evocation of the countryside (presumably English) and its birdcalls, it is a calming balm for a tussled soul. Originally, it was one of Two Pieces for Small Orchestra, the other half being Summer Night on the River. Beecham championed the composer’s music and his performances of the music are definitive.
Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) — Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1916) (21 minutes long). Performance: Arthur Rubinstein, piano, Ormandy, Philadelphia Orch., recorded 1969.
Falla was an Andalusian composer and the quasi-Impressionist Nights in the Gardens of Spain functions as a kind of piano concerto, with three movements, each describing a different Andalusian garden. Rubinstein heard it first soon after its premiere in 1916 and performed it regularly after that.
Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953) — Classical Symphony (1918) (13 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded 1961.
Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 is the Sara Lee of symphonies: No one doesn’t love it. It is a jaunty, energetic gloss on the Classical-era symphonies of Haydn, seen through the “wrong-note Romanticism” of the composer’s style.
Gustav Holst (1874-1934) — The Planets (1918) (50 minutes long)
Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1975.
Marketed as “space-age music,” the intent of Holst’s seven-movement suite is astrological, not astronomical, and each movement is a musical description of a psychological type. It has become enormously popular, and it has been recorded more than 80 times, first in 1926 with the composer conducting.
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) — Pulcinella (1920) (39 minutes long) Performance: Claudio Abbado, London Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1979.
Stravinsky took some old compositions by 18th century composers and reworked them into bright, colorful Stravinskian cogs in what Leonard Bernstein once called “Uncle Igor’s Asymmetry Machine,” giving them new life as a ballet score, complete with voices.
1920s
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) — The Lark Ascending (1921) (16 minutes long) Performance: Zina Schiff, violin, Dalia Atlas, Israel Philharmonic, recorded 1989.
Poet George Meredith wrote of the lark in his poem from 1881, “He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound…” and Vaughan Williams gives us the violin and orchestra version, with the British pastoral, And whose primary intent seems to be the creation of simple beauty.
Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) — La Création du Monde (1923) (17 minutes long) Performance: Simon Rattle, London Sinfonietta, recorded 1986.
European composers began hearing jazz and they loved it. Milhaud even moved to Harlem for a while, to soak it all up. One of the best translations of jazz to the classical idiom is his Création du Monde, with its resonant saxophone solo at the beginning.
Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) — Pacific 231 (1923) (6 minutes long) Performance: Charles Dutoit, Bavarian Radio Symphony, recorded 1985.
A steam locomotive begins to move, gathers speed, churns along and comes slowly to a stop, in this propulsive tone poem to modernity. Trains have been a theme in 20th century music, from Duke Ellington’s Happy-Go-Lucky Local to Villa-Lobos’ Little Train of the Caipira. Chug-chug.
Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) — The Pines of Rome (1924) (20 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1958.
There were no flying humpback whales in Respighi’s original score; blame Disney for that. But what you do get are rousing tunes and some spooky catacomb music, with a grand finish, the kind that gets you out of your chair cheering.
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) — Symphony No. 7 (1924) (22 minutes long) Performance: John Barbirolli, Halle Orchestra, recorded 1966.
Sibelius’ final symphony is also his shortest, being in one movement, but by some accounts his best. My old teacher said when he was young, he wanted to play the French horn, because it had all the great solos. But he wound up with the trombone, which “only plays supporting material,” he said. But in this symphony, the trombones get the big tune, the one you will most likely remember and hum after it’s over.
George Gershwin (1898-1937) — Piano Concerto in F (1925) (32 minutes long) Performance: Andre Previn, piano and conductor, Pittsburgh Symphony, recorded 1998.
Who was Arnold Schoenberg’s favorite composer in America? His frequent tennis partner, George Gershwin, who was much more than a Tin-Pan Alley songster. At the time, there was a big rush to figure out how to incorporate jazz into concert music. Well, here’s how.
Leos Janacek (1854-1928) — Sinfonietta (1926) (23 minutes long) Performance: Claudio Abbado, Berlin Philharmonic, recorded 1989
What grabs you at first are the 14 trumpets, four horns, trombones, tuba and euphoniums. But the rest of the music pops with chunks of memorable tunes, piled like crabs in a bucket, and the way Janacek uses musical “jump cuts” to go from one to the next.
1930s
Howard Hanson (1896-1981) — Symphony No. 2 “Romantic” (1930) (29 minutes long) Performance: Gerard Schwarz, Seattle Symphony, recorded 1989.
All those American symphonies written in the 1930s and ’40s have been largely forgotten, despite their quality, but when Ridley Scott used Hanson’s music during the closing credits of his 1979 film Alien, it resurrected this “Romantic” symphony, which developed a second life. Scott did it without Hanson’s permission, which pissed off the composer, but Hanson never sued, probably because of the boost it gave his music with audiences.
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) — Piano Concerto in G (1932) (21 minutes long)
Performance: Samson François, piano, André Cluyten, Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, recorded 1959.
The French were just as taken with jazz as Americans were, in the 1930s. Lots of composers attempted to weave the syncopations and blues notes into their work. Ravel did it twice, with each of his piano concertos. But this one has a slow movement of such hypnotic ethereal peaceful beauty that you feel in a trance, broken by the explosion of the finale.
Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936) — Saxophone Concerto (1934) (14 minutes long) Performance: Marc Chisson, saxophone, José Serebrier, Russian National Orchestra, recorded 2010.
Glazunov was exiled to Paris when he wrote his own jazz-influenced concerto for alto saxophone, which is perhaps less jazzy than Russian, but is nevertheless probably the best concerto ever written for the instrument.
Samuel Barber (1910-1981) — Adagio for Strings (1936) (8 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1957.
Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin made a movie in 2003 titled The Saddest Music in the World, about a contest to find such music. Well, he needn’t have worried: Hands down, the winner (ignored by the film) is Sam Barber’s orchestral transcription of the slow movement of his string quartet. Unbearably beautiful, it is near impossible to hear it without weeping.
Colin McPhee (1900-1964) — Tabuh-Tabuhan: A Toccata for Orchestra (1936) (17 minutes long) Performance: Howard Hanson, Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, recorded 1956.
McPhee heard Javanese gamelan music on a visit to Bali and then moved there. He became an ethnomusicologist as well as composer and wrote his own gamelan-influenced music full of the percussive tintinnabulation that is so catchy. Tabuh-Tabuhan is his most popular work, meaning it’s pretty much the only piece most people know, McPhee having otherwise fallen into undeserved oblivion.
Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) — Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 (1938) (7 minutes long) Performance: Bidú Sayão, soprano, orchestra of cellos, conducted by Leonard Rose, recorded 1949.
The composer was fascinated by the long-line melodies that Bach sometimes wrote and came up with his own. Originally a single movement for soprano and eight cellos, it was recorded that way in 1949 by Bidú Sayão in a recording of singular beauty and power. It is very difficult, as the final third of the movement is required to be hummed through the nose, with the mouth closed, and ending on a nearly impossible octave leap. He later wrote a second movement, but this recording of just the first is so exceptional, it has to be heard.
1940s
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) — Symphonic Dances (1940) (35 minutes long) Performance: Leonard Slatkin, Detroit Symphony, recorded 2002.
It is sometimes hard to realize that Rachmaninoff is essentially a 20th century composer. And all his later music (the Paganini Rhapsody, Third Symphony and this, the Symphonic Dances) is rife with irony and astringency. Heart no-longer on sleeve, but with unforgettable tunes and absolutely brilliant orchestration. These Dances were his final composition, and for my money, his best.
Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) — Violin Concerto (39 minutes long) Performance: Ruggiero Ricci, violin, Anatole Fistoulari, London Philharmonic Orch., recorded 1956.
Khachaturian doesn’t get much love. His music is catchy, tuneful, and never very deep. And so, the Music-Industrial Complex (i.e. German musicographers) turn their noses up. But what is music if not melody? And bright arresting orchestrations. At some point, the world will catch up with Khachaturian and realize there’s room for music that is simply enjoyable, with no philosophical baggage attached.
Bela Bartok (1881-1945) — Concerto for Orchestra (1943) (47 minutes long) Performance: Fritz Reiner, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1958.
Bartok was ill and in hospital when Serge Koussevitzky visited him in 1943 and presented him with the commission for this orchestral masterpiece. Bartok had fled Hungary because of the war and was dying of leukemia, but he got out of bed, left the hospital and wrote what became his most popular work, essentially his symphony, a five movement piece featuring brilliant solo work for pretty much everyone member of the orchestra. He died two years later.
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) — Symphonic Metamorphosis on a Theme by Weber (1943) (22 minutes long) Performance: Wolfgang Sawallisch, Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded 1994.
So much of the century’s music seems to have been written as gloss on music of the past: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody; Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony — even Ives’ symphonies constantly quote old tunes. Hindemith’s most popular piece (popularity not having followed the composer into the 21st century) is his recasting of melodies written by Carl Maria von Weber. It is brilliant. Hindemith should be played more.
Aaron Copland (1900-1990) — Appalachian Spring (1944) (24 minutes long) Performance: Leonard Bernstein, New York Phil, recorded 1961.
When the century’s music seemed to becoming more intellectualized and abstruse, Aaron Copland developed a simpler, more audience-friendly style, best captured in this hugely popular ballet score. Copland became the American composer. Originally for a chamber group, the orchestral version is now a standard concert piece.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) — Violin Concerto in D (1945) (24 minutes long) Performance: Jascha Heifetz, Alfred Wallenstein, LA Philharmonic, recorded 1953.
Korngold was a prodigy once compared to Mozart, came to America and became the Ur-film composer (three Oscar nominations). But after WWII, he tried to reestablish his bona fides as a serious composer, with this most beautiful of 20th century violin concertos, now in the standard repertoire. It begins with a startling two-octave run in just five notes. Championed by Jascha Heifetz, it is now in every serious violinists repertoire.
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) — Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell (“Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra”) (1946) (17 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1974-1978.
Another gloss on old music, Britten wrote his “Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra” as a means to teach about the instruments, along with narration. But much better without the sometimes condescending talking, it is a brilliant showpiece for the orchestra.
1950s
Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999) — Fantasia para un Gentilhombre (1954) ( 22 minutes long) Performance: Manuel Barrueco, guitar, Philharmonia Orchestra, Placido Domingo, conductor, recorded 1996.
Rodrigo reworked the music of 17th-century Spanish composer Gaspar Sanz, in another retro work, mixing the old dance music with eminently listenable modern orchestra colors.
Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000) — Mysterious Mountain (Symphony No. 2) (1955) (19 minutes long) Performance: Fritz Reiner, Chicago, recorded 1958.
Hovhaness wrote 67 symphonies and sometimes it is hard to tell them apart: His style was his style and he stuck to it. But his second symphony, called Mysterious Mountain, is his most popular and a perfect introduction into what you get with this Armenian-American stalwart.
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) — Candide Overture (1956) (4 minutes long) Performance: Leonard Bernstein, London Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1989.
The best overtures are bouncy, tuneful, catchy and bright. It is almost as if Bernstein had absorbed all of the best overtures of the past and wrapped them up in his ultra-brilliant Candide overture, certainly the composer’s most-often programmed work.
Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) — Piano Concerto No. 2 (1957) (20 minutes long) Performance: Christina Ortiz, piano, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, cond., recorded 1989.
The composer write this late concerto for his son, Maxim, to perform. He didn’t have a very high opinion of the work, thinking it a throw-away piece, but it is his most accessible concerto, with a second movement nearly as hypnotic as the Ravel. It may be lightweight Shostie, but it is nothing to sneeze at.
In going through these recordings, some of which had to be dug up out of the lower shelves of my collection, I have redoubled my admiration for the music of the previous century.
In the past, I have had some rather unforgiving opinions about the poetry I was force-fed as a youngster — you know, the Victorian stuff about the light brigade, or Barbara Frietchie. And now, I was reading it again. On purpose.
At college, I foolishly took a Victorian Lit course and hated every second-hand tick of the classroom clock. Turgid, sentimental, maudlin, and unbearably prolix. (I had been primed to hate the stuff since the time I was forced to read Oliver Twist in eighth grade and hated every word of that — I still can’t read Dickens. I know: My loss. But you shouldn’t be forced to read stuff before you are ready for it.)
In that Vic Lit course, I found Browning asphyxiating, Tennyson hollow, Christina Rossetti cloying. I could see no difference in the verse of these hallowed poets from the mewlings of Ella Wheeler Wilcox or Edgar Guest. It was all a smear of treacle and oh-so-earnest goo.
“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” Who came up with this stuff?
Now, Anne is reminding me, I am waxing enthusiastic about the selfsame verse to her, quoting lines and rhymes with affection. I have gone mellow. But what has changed?
I grew up in a time of ascending Modernism, an era of “less is more,” of irony sidelining sentiment and of skepticism in place of belief. When I was just on the cusp of turning adolescent, Modern art was still widely dismissed as something “my kid could do.” And in the eternal wheel of generations, I was signing on to the new version and leaving the old to such fuddy-duddies as my parents and teachers.
(At least, I saw it that way. In reality, my parents were as much a product of Modernism as I was — my father was born the same year that the Bauhaus was founded and that Marcel Duchamp painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa. But the Modernism that affected his life was one of wars, electrification, washing machines and radio. Artistic matters mattered not at all to the solid, middle-class parental units.)
And, like all such newly-awakened youths, I saw through the lies and hypocrisies of the elder generations while surpassingly blind to my own. My generation was going to fix all the botches those fools had made of the past.
I read all the most current novels, ate up contemporary poetry (and all that written after Prufrock), regularly made my pilgrimage to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and preached to all near and far the supremacy of the new.
In short, the modern was true; the old was a lie. A pretty lie, perhaps, but a lie nonetheless. As H.L. Mencken put it, “it’s essential character lies in its bold flouting of what every reflective adult knows to be the truth.”
And all that verse: Mencken really had it in for poetry. He said, roundly including everything written from Chaucer to e.e. cummings, “Poetry represents imagination’s bold effort to escape from the cold and clammy facts that hedge us in — too soothe the wrinkled and fevered brow with beautiful balderdash.”
That certainly summed up my take on Tennyson: “balderdash.”
H.L. was not one to hedge his opinions. He went on to call poetry, “a series of ideas, false in themselves, that offer a means of emotional and imaginative escape from the harsh realities of everyday. In brief, poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.”
But it is that “lascivious music” that caught me short. No doubt Mencken rather misses the point, but it is the music of the old poetry, the poetry I so despised, that has brought me back to it. Let me explain — and apologize.
It started when I recently came across a set of McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, compiled beginning in the 1830s by William Holmes McGuffey. The books were the most common grade-school texts for nearly a century, and are still the preferred books for many current home-schoolers.
They are popular now because of the unrelenting Victorian religiosity of them for Christian home-schoolers. Every lesson seems to have some biblical homily to teach, training youngsters to be pious, faithful, honest, loyal, earnest, frugal and industrious. McGuffey, himself, was a preacher, in addition to being an educator and college president.
But what is often lost in the haze of piety, is just how progressive McGuffey was for his time. Most education was then mere rote memorization enforced with the rod; McGuffey thought that instead of just giving kids lists of words to master, it would work better if the words were embedded in stories, and that new words in one story would crop up again for reinforcement in later stories. He taught an early version of phonics, to parse out the sounds of written words, and followed each story-lesson with a short set of questions to test comprehension.
Really, aside from the heavy Jesus-ness of it all, it was really very forward-looking.
I valued the reprints I own for their classic typography, for the quaint illustrations that go with the stories, and for the insight the whole gives me into that formidable century.
And in amongst the stories of boot-blacks making good, mothers dying, little orphans learning the virtues of truthfulness and the importance of being generous to the poor, McGuffey included many old poems. Some are just versifications of Bible passages, but others are the old standards that I once made fun of.
For instance, in McGuffey’s Eclectic Third Reader, I came across an old chestnut I had not encountered since I was a boy: The Moss Covered Bucket, by Samuel Woodworth. It’s one of those that most people have some vague recollection of, but perhaps not where the lines come from or what they mean.
“The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, the moss-covered bucket, which hung in the well.”
But as I began reading it, I found two very surprising virtues. The first was how much sense-memory there was in the poem — the noticing of small physical things that connect us with the world and that readers can almost feel, taste, or smell as they read the lines.
It is a poem about remembering the things of youth, and there is a scent of sentimentality to it, but the memories evoked feel genuine. Sometimes, reading a pile of “O thou art…” poetry you wonder if a poet has ever actually seen a nightingale, let alone a “knight with burning brand,” but have merely read about such things in other poems. But here, I believe Woodworth really knew “the orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wild wood… the wide spreading pond, and the mill which stood by it; the bridge and the rock where the cataract fell; the cot of my father, the dairy house nigh it, and even the rude bucket which hung in the well.”
Noticing — as I have often repeated — is essential to art. To life.
But the second thing I found in the poem was the “lascivious melody.” Woodworth’s prosody was finished and refined, the meter and rhyme made the lines sing. Maybe not quite the level of Milton, but a danged good ditty.
He describes coming in from working in the field and dropping the bucket down into the well “to the white pebbled bottom it fell,” and then how “dripping with coolness,” it rose from the well. “How sweet from the green mossy brim to receive it, and posed on the curb it inclined to my lips! Not a full blushing goblet could tempt me to leave it, though filled with the nectar that Jupiter sips.”
It moves with a forward-thrusting momentum hied on by the meter.
I’m not trying to make too great a case for the old oaken bucket. It is not earth-shaking poetry. But it does afford a moment of pleasure as you read it, the way you get pleasure from a memorable tune.
There were other poems in the Reader that now sang to me in ways I had formerly ignored. Byron’s “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, and his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold…”
In the Eclectic Fifth Reader, compiled some years later by McGuffey’s brother, Alexander Hamilton McGuffey, you find the familiar, “Under the spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands; the smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands; and the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.”
There is through all of the Readers a level of maudlin sentimentality that cannot be overlooked, but if you can wade through that, there are some true gems to enjoy, if primarily for their lascivious music.
This discovery led me to another old book, one I have owned since I was a boy, but had hardly looked at in 60 years: Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse. First published in 1861, the book was an anthology of “the best English songs and lyrics,” and included Palgrave’s selection of verse written by poets of the past — his past; Palgrave made the decision not to include any poetry written by living poets, so, no Tennyson, no Browning.
The book was originally divided into four “books,” one each per century from the Elizabethan era to the 19th century. There is a good deal of Shakespeare and an equal measure of Wordsworth, but all the usual names are included, and some that have largely been forgotten. Thomas Grey, William Cowper, Thomas Wyatt, Josuah Sylvester (no, that’s not misspelled).
Having put aside my McGuffeys, I took up my Palgrave and read it from cover to cover. I found myself enjoying page after page, for the music of it more than for the sense. A good deal of the early verse is highly conventional in sentiment. Everyone had a version of “carpe diem,” many birds are extolled — I haven’t counted the skylarks, but there be many — many women described with coral lips and alabaster skin. It all gets a bit thick.
But listen to the music instead. “Whenas in silks my Julia goes Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows That liquifaction of her clothes.
“Next, when I cast mine eyes and see That brave vibration each way free; O how that glittering taketh me!”
There is a perfection in the meter, rhythm and rhyme to Herrick’s little stanzas. Felix Mendelssohn wrote “Songs Without Words,” but Herrick has turned that around and written a song without the sheet music.
Throughout my Palgrave, I came across piece after piece like that, with a flow of words as natural in metrical expression as a stream rushing over its rocky bed.
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”
“A chieftain to the Highlands bound Cries, ‘Boatman, do not tarry! And I’ll give thee a silver pound To row us o’er the ferry!’ ‘Now who be ye, would cross Lochgyle, This dark and stormy water?’ O I’m the chief of Ulva’s isle, And this, Lord Ullin’s daughter.”
The marriage of word and rhythm, with the fulfilled expectation of rhyme make these verses trot along like a tune sung well in time.
It is the pleasure of tennis being played with a net.
One listens to music for the pleasure it brings. Yes, there are mighty symphonies and Wagnerian music dramas meant to express deep emotional and philosophical things, but most, like a Mozart serenade or a Cole Porter tune, are meant to delight, devoid of any extra-musical sense. And that is what I am finding in this old verse I once so roundly denounced.
If you don’t need to have profound thoughts as you read the words, then you can find the melody for its own sake and revel in the ear and craftsmanship of the poet.
Yes, I’ve gone mellow in my senescence, and there is a touch of sentimental remembrance for the poetry I was fed when a boy. I guess I share that with those horrible Victorians. That is my apology.
Recently I posted a piece about the history of naturalist illustration. It was a subject so huge — and with so many gorgeous images, that I could not begin to include some of my favorite things from the thousands of images I collected.
For instance, I had to rule out all of the non-Western art, and some of my favorite non-scientific animal art. And so, I felt I should write a follow-up piece for a few of the leftovers.
Most of the art I covered was meant to illustrate botanical collections in an era when new plants were constantly being added to the list of recognized species, and were meant to accompany scientific books written by specialists.
From “Plantae Asiaticae Rariores” of Nathaniel Wallich
For instance, there was Nathaniel Wallich, the Danish-born botanist who collected plants in India and published his Plantae Asiaticae Rariores in three volumes from 1830 to 1833, with illustrations by a half-dozen artists, both Indian and European.
From “Treasury of Nature,” Albertus Seba
The collection I missed most in the earlier essay was Albertus Seba (1665-1736). His interest was less scientific and more one of abject curiosity. He collected tons of oddities from around the world in his “curiosity cabinet,” and in 1734 published his Locupletissimi Rerum Naturalium Thesauri Accurata Descriptio et Iconibus Artificiosissimus Expressio per Universam Physices Historiam (“A Careful Description and Exceedingly Artistic Expression in Pictures of the Exceedingly Rich Treasury of Nature Throughout the Entire History of Natural Science,” illustrated from beginning to end with engraved plates.
Crab from Albertus Seba
The original 4-volume publication included 445 illustrations and Seba’s collecting helped Carl von Linne in his binomial classification system.
But, there are tons of bird, plant, and animal pictures meant for the general public, mostly throughout the 19th century.
Wood engravings of plants
Unfortunately, most of those artists worked anonymously, pumping out pictures for books, magazines and posters. Animals, especially those of exotic locales, were always popular pictures with the public. And most of those were made in the process called wood engraving — a bit like woodcuts, but made with a burin on the end-grain of dense hardwoods and printed very like a copper plate engraving.
Wood engravings of animals
The best-known wood engravings were probably the book illustrations of Gustave Doré. But the technique was nearly ubiquitous in the Victorian era.
From “A History of British Birds” by William Yarrell
Wood engravings occasionally accompanied serious scientific work, also, such as those in A History of British Birds, published in 1843 by William Yarrell (1784-1856). Its wood-engraving illustrations were carried out by two artists, Alexander Fussell and John Thompson.
Such art is meant primarily to identify plants and animals, but sometimes an artist’s intent is merely to look closely at and study his subject. And, as with the botanical illustration, to separate the subject from its context to better see it on its own.
Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci
Artists have always done this, often in sketches, sometimes as studies for larger, more serious and integrated paintings, sometimes purely for its own sake. Leonardo drew lots of them.
Drawings by John Ruskin
And it was the very point that critic John Ruskin made in Victorian times for the art of drawing: He felt that sketching forced close observation and that essence was found in detail. He aimed his eye at plants, birds, even rock formations, to come to know them better.
Drawings by Ruskin
The most significant class of nature art left out of my original essay are the many kachō-e prints and paintings by Japanese artists, ranging from the 17th century to the 20th. I was sorry to leave them out.
Masayoshi, “Gray Thrush”
Kachō-e are so-called “bird and flower” pictures, although the subjects include fish and insects, too. Their ancestry runs back to huaniaochua (“bird and flower” paintings) popular in Chinese beginning in the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907).
The work influenced much of art throughout Asia, and came to Japan, popularized by translations of the Chinese classic instruction book, Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, published in parts from 1679 to 1701. The final chapters instruct how to best paint huaniaochua-style art.
Pages from “Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden”
The Chinese influence was felt all through the continent, not only in Japan and Korea, but as far west as Persia, where it inspired the golomorgh (“Bird and Tree”) paintings popular in the Safavid period (1501-1736).
Golomorgh art
In Islamic art, the paintings take on an allegorical bent, with the birds (sometimes butterflies) standing in for the lover and the flower for the beloved.
But by far the biggest influence was in Japanese art, and the popular ukiyo-e style, mostly woodblock prints made from the 18th through the early 20th century. Ukiyo-e (“Pictures of the floating world”) were popular images of famous actors, courtesans, historical figures, landscapes, genre scenes — and nature. The nature genre was called kachō-e, or “bird and flower pictures.”
One of the early masters of the form was Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806). He published a Book of Birds ca. 1790 (the dating is often uncertain, as records were not always kept, and popular books were published and republished, often with new plates, or new cuttings of old designs — precise dating can be guesswork).
Each image was matched to poetry, written in elegant calligraphy on the empty parts of the image. For this one, named for the mejiro, or Japanese White-Eye (on the left) and the enaga or Long-Tailed Tit (on the right) has two poems. The first: “Pushed out of his honey-filled nest following a fight, the white-eyes bird seems not to mind at all,” while the other says “Come and let yourself be mine; For us the nights will be as long as the tit’s tail.”
Utamaro followed with a Picture Book of Selected Insects, about the same time, which showed dragonflies, beetles, bees, grasshoppers and other buggy life on beautifully drawn leaves and flowers. When Viking Press published a beautiful facsimile edition of the book in 1984, they must have worried about the title, so they renamed it Songs of the Garden. Much more attractive.
In the west, the two most famous ukiyo-e artists are Hokusai and Hiroshige, near contemporaries. They both made kachō-e prints.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) called himself “Old Man Mad with Painting,” and worked in every conceivable genre. He was a one-man image factory. His curiosity spanned everything he could come in contact with. He even experimented with linear perspective after coming in contact with European art.
Hokusai manga
In his sketchbook, or manga, he made pictures of everything he saw. The black-and-white drawings were made into woodblock prints. He tried just about everything. (Most famous, of course, for his “Great Wave off Kanagawa,” which has been reproduced endlessly.)
There is a proverbial saying in Japan: “Hokusai is the greater artist, but I love Hiroshige more.” It is hard not to be entranced by the atmospheric and almost Impressionistic work of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858). Known for his landscape images, he also made a pile of bird-and-flower prints. Most often in the elongated vertical format known as hosoban.
There are so many of them, it is hard to choose just a few examples.
But he also published several books of fish and sea creatures, a “small” book of fish and a “large” book, each titled as such. I cannot help but post as many of Hiroshige’s images as I can. They are so seductive and beautiful.
It is usually said — by snooty connoisseurs — that ukiyo-e standards began to decline in the 19th century and the genre ended by the 20th. But instead, I believe it simply changed with the exposure of Japanese artists to the rest of the world with the Meiji Restoration (1868). Where once Japan’s culture was insulated from the outside, it now opened its arms to new influences.
Hiroshige and Van Gogh
(The artistic fertilization went in both directions, as ukiyo-e art began arriving in Europe and artists such as Van Gogh were blown away by the freshness and style of the Japanese prints.)
And kachō-e changed from a popular and demotic art form to one created by new designers who saw themselves less as craftsmen and more as western-style “artists.” The esthetic, called shinsaku-hanga, became more refined, if less adventurous. It was a retrospective art, honoring the masters and styles of the past.
Birds by Kono Bairei
And artists such as Kono Bairei (1844-1895) continued the birds-and-flowers tradition, but with a turn to more naturalistic drawing, albeit in a stylized setting.
Bairei fish
He also took on fish.
The work of Imao Kainen (1845-1924) maintains that almost-western realism in highly decorative compositions.
By Imao Kainen
The most famous of the shinsaku-hanga artists was probably Ohara Koson (1877-1945). He was a teacher at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and met American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, who encouraged him to export his bird prints to America. His work now sits in most American art museum collections.
By Ohara Koson
It wasn’t only Van Gogh who responded to the Japanese style. One of my favorite and largely unknown illustrators of natural history was Charles Philip Hexom (1884-1959). He was a teacher at Luther College in Dacorah, Iowa, and made many cover illustrations for Nature Magazine from the 1920s into the early ’50s.
The use of flat outlining and spot-color were common to both ukiyo-e and Hexom’s covers.
I don’t know why the work of Charles Hexom hasn’t been collected and published in a book. He seems to have been forgotten. He deserves to be remembered.
Beatrix Potter watercolors
Nature art may be a sub-genre in the world of fine art, but it is a fertile one. One finds captivating and beautiful illustration everywhere. Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) before she became a children’s author, used her drawing talent to study nature. She became an expert on mushrooms and fungi. One of her admirers was the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir John Everett Millais, who told her: “Plenty of people can draw, but you have observation.”
Again, I have left out so much. So, just as a little P.S. to this tiny essay, I want to mention the early paintings of my brother-in-law Mel Steele, who could paint rings around anyone even as a boy and moved on to bigger things and a long career.
And my own minor essay into the field as a photographer. I found that I could put live flowers on my flatbed scanner and get beautiful prints that could be reproduced in fine detail at almost any size.
Friesia, iris and daffodils
I have made many photographs of flowers, birds and insects, not so much to create art as to focus my attention on the world around me. Paying attention is, I believe, the prime directive for life.
Nature is messy. I mean that in a good way. But it is all over the place, hugger-mugger, one thing on top of another and with the edges of one thing blending into that of the next.
And humans have tried their best to regularize and organize all that mess since the beginning of time, naming plants and animals, setting up categories, deciding which bits might be edible, which poisonous, which to take when you have aches or fevers.
One of the primary means of accomplishing this is visual. Certainly the main method is verbal: the naming and sorting. But a mere word description of a plant can be so convoluted as to be confusing on its own. Take this description of the black oak, from E. Lawrence Palmer’s Fieldbook of Natural History:
“Quercus velutina: Tree to height of 125 ft; trunk diameter, 4.5 feet. Upper branches ascending, lower, horizontal. Bark dark, deep-fissured between thick ridges that are cross-fissured. Inner bark yellow, bitter. Twigs stout, angular with sharp-tipped angled buds with dirty-white to yellow fuzz. Leaves to 6 in. long and 4 in. wide, highly variable, thick. Flowers staminate, in hairy catkins, to 6 in. long. Pistillate, on short, hairy stalks. Fruit and acorn maturing in second season.” Etc. And even that is written in simplified language for the lay person. The scientific literature is close to unreadable. And would this help you find a black oak in the woods?
Wouldn’t it be easier, quicker, better, just to have a picture? Roger Tory Peterson thought so when he came up with the idea for his now-ubiquitous field guides. “There are at least 60 ways to say that a plant is not smooth, that it has fuzz, hair, prickles or roughness of some sorts,” he wrote in the introduction to his Field Guide to Wildflowers. And he lists them, including such arcane words as bullate, canescent, coriacious, echinate, flocculent, glanduliferous, hispidulous, lepidote, verrucose, and villosulous. It takes a lexicographer rather than a botanist to navigate such things.
“That is why the best of keys often fail. … But, I am afraid, most of us belong to the picture-matching school.” Peterson began in 1934 with his A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America, which he updated with new editions — and new illustrations — until his death in 1996. The book has been immensely popular and remains so. Peterson branched out with a series of such field guides, covering wildflowers, trees, seashells, insects, fish, mammals — now more than 50 such guides, most written by specialists, while Peterson remained general editor until his death in 1996.
Each book relies on drawings of the animals or plants in question.
Of course, humans have been making pictures of the natural world since the beginning. The animals drawn the the caves of Lascaux date back something like 30,000 years. Egyptians painted notably realistic animals, such as the famous geese from the Chapel of Itet at Meidum from about 2590 B.C. Romans were fond of animal mosaic floors in the villas, and some are so accurate you can identify species.
But the use of drawings for identifying plants or animals reached a new level of importance in the Middle Ages, when plants were used medicinally and books of drawings helped physicians identify the proper plant for the proper malady.
Originally, these were manuscript books. But after Gutenberg, many were printed in quantity, offering advice on the best plants for the worst illnesses.
Often these herbals or “medicinals” were at best diagrammatic. There purpose was simply to sort out which plants would be useful. But as the Renaissance flowered, and a more realistic style of image-making took over, many artists were attracted to the natural world, looking with ever sharper detail at the plants and animals around them. There are drawings and paintings by Leonardo, Raphael and others. But it would be hard to best the small naturalistic pictures by German artist Albrecht Dürer.
But Dürer’s paintings are one-offs. As the 17th century progressed, a more systematic approach took hold, wherein artists as botanists attempted to catalog the plant life around them.
One of the first such attempts was the Hortus Eystettensis, edited by Basilius Besler (1561-1629) beginning in 1613 and spread over several years. It was a collection of copper-plate engravings of the plants collected by the prince-bishop of Eichstätt in Bavaria for his palace garden, which contained examples of all the shrubs and flowering plants known at the time, from around the world.
The book contained images of 1,084 species, divided into 357 plates. A cheaper black and white version was supplemented by a luxury edition in which the images where hand-colored. The book changed botanical illustration overnight. What had been crude and diagrammatic became works of art.
Soon in its heals came Hortus Floridus, a collection of 160 engravings of flowering plants published in 1616, which became so popular its Latin text was soon translated into Dutch, French, and English editions. The book, in modern editions is still available today. It was created by Dutch engraver Crispijn van de Passe the Younger (1595-1670), a popular and prolific engraver of the Dutch Golden Age.
Such books of engravings, colored or not, appeared throughout the century, with Louis XIV’s official painter, Nicolas Robert (1614-1685), producing illustrations in 1640, 1660, and entries in the giant compendium Recueil des Plantes published in 1676.
His drawings and paintings, as well as the engravings made, were of a new freshness and delicacy and presaged a surge in flower pictures made not simply for identification purposes, but as esthetic objects — as art.
As the 18th century began, these two strains of botanical illustration developed. On one hand, there was a rise in scientific exploration, with botanists traveling the world collecting new species of plant and animal previously unknown to European science. On the other, there was a growing market for books and images of pretty flowers. The two traditions flourished side by side, but also cross-pollenated.
That market for flower pictures was given a jump start by the Dutch tulip craze of the 1630s, when speculation in the market for rare tulips created a financial bubble that burst in 1637. But the Dutch economy was expansive and a growing middle class had money to spend on luxury items such as art. The actual tulip mania was confined to a small but important few speculators, the public at large wanted their part and so prompted the production of pictures of the fanciest tulips. If you couldn’t afford a tulip bulb that cost as much as a house, you could afford a colored engraving of the same flower. And so, pictures of flowers became a thing.
There had always been still-life paintings: pictures of flowers in vases; even kitchen scenes with food on the table and game hanging above. But what I am interested in here are those images of singular plants, birds, or animals, usually devoid of background context, meant to show off the specimen to best advantage. Where still life is meant to elicit warm feelings of comfort and beauty, the botanical illustration is meant to focus attention on a particular item, to see it for itself alone.
The 17th and 18th centuries were the great era of cataloguing the world, and it led to a plethora of illustration of new and exotic species as scientists accompanied military explorers around the globe, gathering natural history data and both collecting specimens and illustrating them, usually in books.
Dutch-born Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin (1727-1817), for instance, travelled to the West Indies, Central and South America, publishing prolifically throughout the 18th century.
Sometimes, they went on their own, like the Polish Jacob Breyne (1637-1697), who travelled to South Africa and catalogued plants.
Austrian Franz Bauer (1760-1826) went to Australia, collecting and painting what he found.
Englishman Mark Catesby (1683-1749) sailed to the New World, publishing his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands in volumes between 1729 and 1747.
Henri-Lois Duhamel de Monceau (1700-1782) was a French Encyclopedist, writing on many subjects, but catalogued the flora of his native France over his long lifetime, including his 1768 Treatise on Trees and Shrubs.
Likewise, Englishman Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) stayed at home and made wood engravings of his native animals and birds.
Grub Street writer Oliver Goldsmith neither drew nor painted, but his enormously popular Natural History of the Earth and Animated Nature, first published in 8 volumes in 1774, went through many subsequent editions, each time copiously illustrated by an army of anonymous engravers.
As the 18th crossed over into the 19th century, two men characterized the two thrusts of botanical illustration.
William Bartram (1739-1823) traveled through the New World exploring for flora and fauna. His book, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country (1791), is still in print, usually known just as “Bartram’s Travels,” and covers his travels through Georgia, Florida and western North Carolina and is a readable a travel book as it is important as a naturalist survey.
The other impulse for botanical illustration is the creation of art for the beauty of it. And no one did more for that than Pierre-Joseph Redouté, whose images of roses and lilies are still popular in framed prints to hang in tasteful middle class homes. As Wikipedia puts it: “Reproductions of his prints are available from virtually all print and poster shops.”
Redoute’s life was fascinating. He was official illustrator to Queen Marie Antoinette, and somehow survived with his head after the French Revolution and the Terror, despite his aristocratic credentials, and lived to become official artist for Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais and then survived her divorce from Napoleon Bonaparte, only later to be made Chevalier de Legion d’Honeur, France’s highest honor, and his work bought by Charles X.
His early work was watercolor, but later in life, much of his art was engraved and hand-colored or turned into chromolithographs. And now, there are boatloads of books featuring Redouté’s art.
Two developments affected the publication of prints of the natural world as the 19th century overtook the 18th. One was the mainstreaming of colonialism, and the number of biologists and artists who traveled to the new lands to catalog the flora and fauna.
In the 18th century, much of the exploration was just to find out what was out there, to discover new Pacific islands or what was going on in the polar regions. But in the next century, the drive was to exploit what the colonies offered, and to do that meant to catalog all the new things these colonial toyboxes had to offer.
And so, scientists such as Philipp Frans van Siebold (1796-1855) went to Japan; Nathaniel Wallich (1786-1854) went to India; Johann Joseph Peyritsch (1835-1889) went to Sudan. They collected specimens and wrote books illustrated by a host of artists who made illustrations from the specimens they brought back.
One of the artists employed by the botanists was Walter Hood Fitch (1813-1892). Fitch supplied many of the illustrations for John Dalton Hooker’s 1855 Flora Indica, a survey of plants of India and the Himalaya mountains.
While botanical illustration comprised maybe 80 percent of all natural history artwork, much was done with animals, too, and even such things as seashells, rock types, and landforms.
Colonialism brought in an infection called “scientific racism,” and natural history illustration looked not only at flora and fauna, but at human beings, typing them just as they did genus and species of orchid.
There was almost a mania to classify and name everything.
The second development was the invention of lithography, in 1796, which gave both scientists and artists a better means of mass producing images.
The first botanical illustrations were either drawings or paintings, and the first reproductions were by woodcut. But copper-plate engraving supplanted the coarse woodcut and those engravings were often hand-colored, an expensive and time-consuming process for publication.
For instance, when John James Audubon (1785-1851) published his original edition of Birds of America in England, in sets from 1827 to 1838, at least 50 colorists were employed and no more than about 200 full sets were printed.
But lithography, and later chromolithography, allowed much larger editions of prints and mass production of images. The later work of Redouté was made with the new process. And when Audubon came to work on his later Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (published in 1851, after his death) the images were lithographs.
Of course, the most famous natural history art has to be Audubon’s Birds of America. He initially produced 435 large-scale plates, each with life-size images of the birds he drew and painted in his travels through America. The plates were engraved and etched and hand colored. The pages were called “double elephant” size — roughly 28 inches by 40 inches — and you can see he had to contort some of the larger birds, such as the flamingo, to fit those pages and still have them life size.
Later editions came in smaller pages.
The market for natural history imagery was immense during Victorian times and the number of artists working in the field from the late 18th- through the 19th-century was to great for me to cover them all. But I wanted to show off a few of them.
Such as Matthias Schmutzer (1752-1824), who produced 1433 plates for Das Florilegium Kaiser Franz I, a compendium of plants from the garden of Emperor Francis I, the final emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and first of the Austrian Empire.
And I should mention the father-son pair of William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865), a botanist and illustrator and first director of Kew Garden in London. Hooker published more than 20 major botanical works over a period of 50 years.
His son, Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), who succeeded his father as director of Kew, and was Charles Darwin’s friend. He joined expeditions to the Antarctic, Palestine, Morocco, the Himalayas, and the western United States, collecting specimens along the way, and publishing books on what he found, illustrated by many familiar botanical illustrators of the time, including Fitch.
By the late 19th century, photography began to take over. The earliest I can find is an 1879 set of botanical photographs by Pietro Guidi. The black and white images still had to be hand-colored, just as the old engravings had to be.
And by the fin-de-siecle, as art nouveau gathered steam, the link between nature and art became important. Nature motifs played out in furniture, architecture, book design and painting. Several artists and scientists became immersed in the subject.
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a biologist obsessed with Darwin and symmetry. His Kunstformen der Natur (“Art Forms in Nature”), published in 1904. It consists of 100 prints of various organisms, many of which were first described by Haeckel himself. Haeckel’s intricate drawings were transferred to print by lithographer Adolf Giltsch.
In 1929, professor Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) used photography to express the relationship between nature and modern art in his Urformen der Kunst (“Original forms in Art” or “Art Forms in Nature”). His purpose was pedagogical, teaching his art students to seek for inspiration in natural forms.
This cataloguing and regularizing tendency in German art extended beyond botany and zoology. In the 1920s and ’30s, photographer August Sander attempted to photograph all the jobs and professions in Weimar Germany, and later, Bernd and Hilla Becher made multiple images of German water towers, mining tipples, cooling towers, grain elevators, coke ovens, and blast furnaces, among other things. Those images, made mostly from the 1960s through the 1990s were part of a movement dubbed the “New Objectivity.”
But back to nature: It is hard to overemphasize the attractiveness and popularity of natural images, especially birds and flowers.
Charles Philip Hexom (1884-1959) executed a series of covers for Nature Magazine in the 1930s and ’40s. I have collected several of these. They are simple but elegant.
Irving Penn (1917-2009) published Flowers in 1980 and the perfection and simplicity of the photographs remind one of Redouté.
And finally, for our purposes, Robert Mapplethorpe photographed flowers over his whole career, with his book, Flowers, coming out posthumously in 1990.
This has been a short, embarrassingly incomplete survey of botanical and natural history illustrations from the late Roman Empire until the Post-Modern age. Whole books have been written on the subject and more will likely be published in the future.
I consulted about 20 books for this essay, among them are: The Art of Natural History by S. Peter Dance; The Painter as Naturalist: from Dürer to Redouté, by Madeleine Pinault; Un Jardin d’Eden by H. Walter Lack; and Flora: An Illustrated History of the Garden Flower, by Brent Elliott.
The most distinctive feature of Shamrock, Texas, in 1980 was the old Conoco gas station downtown. I don’t know if it is still there. But that is not what I remember best about the tiny town in the Texas Panhandle.
My wife and I were driving across country for the first time. Neither of us had ever been west of the Appalachian Mountains and we had romantic ideas about the West. We dreamed of mesas and buttes, of cactus and coyotes, Navajos and the Pacific Ocean. And so we had set off in our old Chevy Citation during Carole’s summer school vacation planning to make the grand circuit. We were camping most of the way as our budget was economy size.
It was perhaps the third night we were out, and we found a KOA campground in Shamrock. The sites each had a concrete picnic table under a tin awning. In the center of the camp was a low brick building with the office and camp store.
As we were pitching our tent, a neighbor camper came over and told us that two days before a tornado had struck a few miles away. “No real damage,” he said. “There’s not much out there to hurt.” But he wanted to let us know, he said, because the weather forecast was iffy.
We had driven that day through some rough weather already, with dark, louring clouds, a heavy rain — the kind the windshield wipers only made mad. At one point, we had to pull off the road and wait for the heavens to calm.
But by the time we got to Shamrock, the skies were clear again. And we tucked in for the night in our sleeping bags, with the tent zipped tight and cozy.
Then, about 1 a.m., we woke to find ourselves, tent and all, floating on several inches of water. It felt very like a waterbed, except that the rain made such a racket on the tent-sides. The wind luffed the fabric and lightning grew almost constant. We both began to worry.
The only sane course of action was to leave the tent and head for the brick office. Carole went ahead of me, while I attempted to strike the tent against a howling wind. But the wind yanked it from my grip and I had to chase it until it caught on the picnic table. The tent had a tubular frame, which kept it in full shape. I grabbed the top crease and the wind took umbrage at my effrontery and tried to lift me airborne, with the tent as a kite and me as the kite tail. I fought it over my head, holding on for dear life. Finally the tent caught in the tin awning and held steady enough for me to de-tentpole the thing and collapse the kite into a smart bundle, soggy and dripping, which I put into the car before heading to the office and Carole.
The office was not very big for the 30 or 40 people herded into it. There were crying babies, frightened grown-ups. One man explained that the weather service had confirmed a tornado in the vicinity. A husband and wife were yelling at each other, each blaming the storm on the other. The wind blew outside, hurling detritus past the door. It all finally calmed down after 20 minutes or so and the wind subsided and the rain gave up its anger and turned into a normal rainshower.
But there was no way we could set the tent back up. Our campsite was a pond and the tent itself was a crumpled mess. We got into the car and thought perhaps we could make through the night sitting up.
I remembered, though, we had passed a motel in town. Maybe we should drive back into Shamrock and see if we could get a room. And so we did.
When I entered the motel office — now it was well past 2 a.m. — the office was dark, but a woman came out and got us a room.
I got back in the car and told Carole, “I’m not sure about this.” The office was choked with the aroma of curry — something I normally love, but this felt more like chemical warfare. We found our room at the back of the motel complex. It had that musty smell of old cigarettes, this time mixed with the vestige of curry. The window looked out into the tool shed.
But the prize was the carpet. It was a sickly blue-green shag rug and it ran up the walls like wainscotting, and around the bottom of the bed as a kind of dust ruffle.
This would have been the worst motel experience we had, except that we had already spent a night in Forrest City, Ark., in a motel where we were bitten all night by fleas, and the toilet had a “sanitized for your protection paper band under which was a floating cigarette butt.
Still, our Shamrock motel gave us a chance to sleep and calm our nerves from the storm.
The next day, we set off west again, and finally reached Glen Rio, on the border between Texas and New Mexico, where the bottom dropped out of the flat Panhandle and we drove down into a new landscape filled with the mesas and buttes we had imagined.
We had to laugh at ourselves years later, after living in Arizona for 25 years, at the naive glee we felt at seeing the tiny, unprepossessing hills we first passed in New Mexico, which would hardly merit the notice of anyone used to such things. But they were the first hintings of the sense that the American West was entirely alien to anything we had known in tidewater Virginia, where we were living back then.
It was as if the Western movies I grew up with in New Jersey had come to life. We gawked at everything for the remainder of that first trip West, through Arizona, up California, through Oregon, Wyoming, Montana and all the states in between. We put 10,000 miles on the odometer that summer.
Discoveries are what keeps life interesting. Some are life-changing, like when you first discover the opposite sex, or late in life encounter the music of Bruckner. Others are just a pleasure you hadn’t known the universe afforded, such as chipotle chiles or books by David Sedaris.
Glazunov is one of the latter. I don’t want to make too big a case for him, but his music is effortless enjoyment.
Alexander Glazunov was a Russian composer, born in 1865, the same year as Sibelius and five years after Mahler. He grew up in a Russian musical world split between nationalists and internationalists. On one side, you had “the Mighty Handful,” of largely self-taught composers, such as Glinka, Borodin, Balakirev, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov (the last distinctly well-trained), all of whom wanted to create a genuinely Russian brand of music. On the other side were Tchaikovsky, Anton Rubinstein and others, who looked to Germany and western Europe for their influence. It was isolationism vs. assimilation.
Glazunov, born into this world, was a prodigy and he was taken on as a student by Rimsky-Korsakov when little Alexander was still a high school student. “His musical development progressed not by the day, but literally by the hour,” Rimsky-Korsakov wrote. Young Glazunov excelled in counterpoint, harmony, orchestration and large-scale form. It seemed he could do anything.
His first symphony was performed when he was just 16, and was a huge success — the audience was astonished when the composer came onstage to accept their applause and turned out to be a kid in his school uniform. It was unofficially titled, “The Slavic Symphony,” for its use of Russian and Russian-style melodies, and it would have seemed as if the young composer was going to launch a new generation of nationalist composers. (To put the symphony in context, when it was written, Tchaikovsky had only written four of his six symphonies.) It joins Bizet’s Symphony in C and Shostakovich’s First Symphony as prodigies of teenage composers.
Glazunov as student, young man, middle aged and old
But Glazunov’s second symphony, written only five years later, was “dedicated to Franz Liszt,” and clearly showed Glazunov gazing westward to more modern musical influences.
In all, Glazunov wrote eight symphonies and part of a ninth. Every one of them is a joy to hear, full of great tunes, rich harmonies, fresh orchestration. His style is seen now as conservative and old fashioned, but while it is always familiar, it is never clichéd. He finds new ways of using the old composing tools.
His music also never attempts to move heaven and earth, like Bruckner or later, Mahler, but rather attempts to please, to keep his listeners entertained. For this, he has sometimes been belittled and, as the 20th century progressed, largely forgotten.
But you need to remember that most of Mozart’s output was simply meant to entertain, also, and it is a worthy goal. Glazunov’s music is a delight. Beethoven may churn our souls, but Glazzy just wanted to show us something of beauty and craftsmanship.
That doesn’t mean all his music is major-key bouncy and empty. There is plenty of introspective substance, and the occasional disruption to remind us that the world isn’t always placid. But it is all to the end of keeping our ears interested.
St. Petersburg Conservatory, ca. 1900
As his career developed, he became a respected member of the Russian art establishment, and eventually became head of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he trained many younger musicians, most importantly, Dimitri Shostakovich. His tenure was marked by a great improvement in the conservatory’s reputation and the quality of its instruction. Glazunov took his directorship seriously.
He ran the school from 1905 to 1930, and while the instruction remained rather conservative, built on the principles of 19th century romanticism, its students entered the new century with other ideas.
“Glazunov was ‘born in the middle,’ so to speak,” wrote critic Leo Eylar. “He was born a generation later than the initial great Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, and was born a generation before the modernist revolutionaries such as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. As such, he was destined to occupy a rather difficult position in Russian music history.”
Glazunov continued writing music into the 1930s, and by then seemed like some musical dinosaur. But it is important to remember that he was 32 before Brahms died. His taste was formed before Modernism was even thought of.
St. Petersburg
He was born in czarist Russia and lived through the Communist revolution and into the Stalinist era. He held the conservatory together during some tumultuous years, and with considerable integrity. When he was offered honors (and extra pay) by the regime, he replied asking for some firewood instead, so the students could heat their classrooms. During the privations of the Revolution and civil war, many students were near starvation and would have died but that Glazunov ensured they were given scholarships and the food allowance that came with them.
“This was a period of terrible famine,” said Shostakovich. “The gist of the scholarship was that its possessor was able to receive some groceries. In a word, it was a question of life and death. If you’re on the list, you live. If you’re crossed off, it’s quite possible that you may die.”
Shostakovich was on the list.
And when an increasingly anti-Semitic government required he list the names of all the Jewish students, he sent back a message: “We don’t keep track of such things.”
He listened carefully to his students’ music, even if he was sometimes shocked by it. He attended all of the school’s recitals. If he didn’t like something, he would listen over and over until he understood what was being attempted. This quality made the young Shostakovich love his schoolmaster.
“After the Revolution, everything around Glazunov changed and he lived in a terrible world that he didn’t understand,” Shostakovich said. “But he thought that if he died, important work would perish. He felt responsible for the lives of hundreds of musicians, so he didn’t die himself.”
Shostakovich describes his perfect pitch, his ability to spot any mistakes in a student’s composition, like hidden “parallel fifths,” and his astounding memory. When Borodin died, leaving his opera, Prince Igor, unfinished, Glazunov reconstructed parts from memory, having heard Borodin play them on the piano years earlier.
He understood the instruments of the orchestra. He learned to play the violin well so he could write his violin concerto. Once, visiting London, a french horn player complained that a note in the score was “unplayable.” Glazunov picked up the horn and played the note for him.
“And Glazunov played the piano well,” said Shostakovich. “He didn’t have a real piano technique and he often played without removing his famous cigar from his right hand. Glazunov held the cigar between his third and fourth fingers. I’ve seen it myself. And yet he managed to play every note, absolutely everything, including the most difficult passages. It looked as though Glazunov’s fat fingers were melting in the keys, drowning in them.”
On the minus side, though, Glazunov was a lifelong alcoholic, who kept a hidden bottle of hooch in his office desk, with a tube running from the desk drawer to his mouth, so he could sip while discussing music with his students. His alcoholism is sometimes blamed for the disastrous premiere of Rachmaninov’s First Symphony, which Glazunov conducted in 1887. The performance was so disastrous that Rachmaninov stopped composing for three years.
During his life, Glazunov’s music was held in high esteem, especially in Russia. But as the 20th century began, his music was seen as more and more out-of-date. His efforts at the conservatory slowed his musical production, and by the time of his death in 1936, only his violin concerto remained in the active repertoire, helped mainly by the fact that virtuoso Jascha Heifetz played it frequently.
Glazunov gave up active directorship of the conservatory in 1928 and left Russia. He never expressed any political concern, but it was clear that Stalinism was not going to put up with Glazunov’s independence of spirit, and so the composer moved to France, where he remained until his death.
In all, Glazunov composed eight symphonies, with a fragment of a ninth. He also wrote several multi-movement orchestral suites, which might as well be counted among his symphonies including From the Middle Ages and The Kremlin. He composed several successful ballets that continue to be staged even in the 21st century, most famously, Raymonda and The Seasons.
He was a master of orchestral color and orchestration, and handled the large forms admirably. Especially his inner movements — the slow movements and the scherzi — are memorable and moving. He was fond of unequal phrase lengths, which kept the melodies from being predictable or monotonous (a problem that often beset Robert Schumann, who too often fell into 8- or 16-bar patterns).
Glazunov wrote a handful of concertos, among them the popular violin concerto and, as his last major composition, a concerto for alto saxophone, which is quite forward-looking for the old master. There are a pair of piano concertos and some concertante works for cello.
Quartet writing after Beethoven became a problem for many subsequent composers. The importance and depth of Beethoven’s quartets, especially the dense late quartets, tended to lead later composers to approach the form with such utter seriousness that they become clogged with polyphony (ahem: Reger) and the need to keep each string player occupied all the time. There are exceptions, like the quartets of Dvorak, but even Brahms gummed up his string quartets with thickness.
Glazunov, however, could write counterpoint with clarity and grace. Many of his quartets start with a fugal introduction, but you never get the feeling that he is writing an obligatory chunk of polyphony to prove his seriousness. Rather, his fugues flow like real music, charming and direct.
The quartets have almost orchestral color, as Glazunov alternates timbre with changes in register, double stops, muting, harmonics, and pizzicati. You never tire of the string tone, it is always varied.
He splits the melodic material among his players so that everyone gets a turn with the big tunes. Glazunov wrote his quartets primarily for his friends to play among themselves, and I think they must have been a joy to perform, even more than to listen to. It’s a mystery to me why they don’t show up more often on recital programs. Audiences would love them.
For his symphonies and concertos, there is an inexpensive box set on Warner Classics, conducted by Jose Serebrier that is, I think, the best currently available set. There are other versions with Vladimir Fedoseyev and the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, in somewhat lesser sound engineering; and Naxos has its series of Glazunov’s music, with the symphonies conducted by Alexander Anissimov and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. Serebrier beats them all with sound, performance and price.
As for the quartets, there is a complete set box with the Utrecht String Quartet that is beautifully played and recorded, on MDG. You can get them individually played by the St. Petersburg String Quartet and several by the Shostakovich Quartet.
And, since everything — and I mean everything — is available on YouTube, you can find multiple versions of almost everything Glazunov wrote, often with the musical scores to read as the music plays.
I am not making the case that Glazunov should be seen as some forgotten Brahms or Dvorak. His music lacks the emotional and philosophical ambition to take on the deepest meanings you find in Beethoven, Wagner or Mahler, but none of the big names can claim supremacy in terms of technical proficiency or tunefulness. Glazunov wrote music, and seen in purely musical terms, he was a great master.
Much art and music from before the First World War fell out of favor with the rise of Modernism. Glazunov fell with them. But now that Modernism is old-fashioned, we can reappraise a good deal of work that was denigrated in the 20th century. Rachmaninov no longer has noses turned up at his music. Even academic painting from the second half of the 19th century is finding new audiences. Glazunov deserves to be among the rediscovered.
Now that it is well into spring, I like to sit in the back yard and just soak up the experience. On a chair on the patio, I can sit for a half-hour or so and just listen to what is going on around me. Often, I just close my eyes and enjoy the bird calls, the distant lawnmower, the occasional and distant roar of a passing jet high in the air. It is my form of meditation.
It affords me great pleasure to hear all the sounds, and more, to hear them all at once, piled up in counterpoint, like so many voices in a Bach fugue. Indeed, I try with the same effort to be able to hear all the parts simultaneously. It is great training to hear the more traditional music of the concert hall.
For, in any decent music, there are many things going on at the same time. Not only in dense Baroque counterpoint, but in all music. There is melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, texture — to say nothing about a bass line. If you listen only for the tune, you miss so much else.
And so, in the concert hall, I often close my eyes and concentrate on taking in all the bits. It takes some practice, but it is possible to hear multiple lines of melody at the same time. At the very basic, to hear the tune on top and the bass line at the bottom playing off one another.
In my back yard, I enjoy the stereo effects of a cardinal squawking to my right, while a chickadee yawps to the left, while the mower sounds two blocks away and a dog barks somewhere behind me, down the hill. There is always traffic on the main road, about a quarter-mile up the hill, and the breeze shuffles the leaves on the trees that ring my yard in an aleatory rhythm that serves as bass line to the rest. The mockingbird has his repetitive medley of greatest hits. You can’t fool me. I know it is you.
Listening to it all tells me the world is alive. It is animated and bustling, and it sings an earthy chant.
I am reminded of John Cage’s infamous 4’33’’ — the piece where the pianist sits in front of his keyboard for that amount of time and plays nothing at all. Often seen as a hoax by those unwilling to take Cage at his word, and feeling they are being cheated, such a listener misses the point. The composer intends for his audience to actually hear the sounds of the hall — the rustling of programs, the passing truck outside, the AC unit clicking on, the throat clearing and feet shuffling — and appreciate them as a kind of music of their own.
It is one of the primary functions of art, and music included, to wake you up to the world, to see what is usually ignored, to hear what surrounds you, to feel what is churning inside. It all boils down to paying attention.
The world is full of miraculous sound. I remember Kathy Elks, from eastern North Carolina, telling us of when she was an infant, just after World War II, and would hear the propeller sounds of an airplane too high in the sky to see, and how she always thought that buzz was “just the sound the sky makes.”
Or Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” Or the “good grey poet,” Walt Whitman: “Now I will do nothing but listen,/ To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it./ I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals…”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the Ancient Mariner: “A noise like of a hidden brook/ In the leafy month of June,/ That to the sleeping woods all night/ Singeth a quiet tune.”
“Listen to them. Children of the night. What myoosik they make,” says Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931).
Beethoven included a quail, nightingale and cuckoo in the slow movement of his Pastoral symphony. Messiaen wrote whole symphonies built from transcribed birdcalls. Charles Ives built the sounds of his Connecticut village into his music. Rautavaara’s Concerto for birdsong and orchestra. Vivaldi imitates birds in his Spring concerto. Alan Hovhaness And God Created Great Whales, with its whalesong sounds buried in orchestral texture.
Gustav Mahler said the symphony must embrace the world, and he included cowbells, hammer blows, distant military bands, bird calls, the memory of the postillion’s watery horn call, and even begins his first symphony with seven-octaves of unison A-naturals, almost a tinnitus of the universe — the music of the spheres — interrupted by a cuckoo in the woods. His own defective heartbeat was the opening of his final completed symphony.
Bedrich Smetana wrote his tinnitus into his first string quartet, “From My Life,” in the form of a long-held high “E.”
The same world of sound that fills all this music waits outside my back door, waiting to be organized into coherence. The first step is paying attention. Engagement is the secret to unlocking the world. The ear is a gate to paradise.
Some years ago, when I was still regularly penning verse, I wrote about this:
For 25 years, working at the newspaper, I had a holy scripture. It was my bible. And it was just as strict and just as puzzling as Leviticus or Deuteronomy. It told me how to spell certain words, how to punctuate, how to think. It told me, for instance, that “baby sitter” is two words, but that “baby-sitting” requires a hyphen. It told me that third-graders were not students, but instead, they were “pupils.” And that in street addresses, it was required to abbreviate “Street” as “St.” but ordered me never to shorten “Road” to “Rd.” Never.
It was the Associated Press Stylebook, and the version that first guided my work was the 1988 edition. In it were many notable proscriptions and admonitions. I was not to spell “gray” as “grey.” Unless it was in “greyhound.” That the past tense of “dive” should be “dived” and not “dove.” That donuts didn’t exist; they were “doughnuts.”
There could be no 12 a.m. or 12 p.m. They were “midnight” and “noon,” although which was which was entirely the problem with the “a.m.-p.m.” formulations. (Is 12 a.m. noon or midnight?) Noon is technically neither morning nor afternoon, but the non-existent mini-instant between the two.
“Last Tuesday” should be the “past Tuesday,” unless, of course, time ended and it really was the last one.
These and many other formulations became second-nature to anyone working in journalism. Some of these may have changed since 1988 — usage changes and the AP takes that into account, even if ever so slowly: They are always playing catch-up. (“Ketchup,” by the way should never be “catchup” or “catsup.”)
Even a decade after retiring, I still have lodged in the noggin all these rules and prescriptions and when writing this blog, I tend naturally to notice whether I’ve put my period inside or outside the close-parenthesis, depending on whether the parenthetical remarks are inside a longer sentence, or in a separate sentence of its own. Anyone who has written for a newspaper will likely have the same grammatical Jiminy Cricket whispering in his ear to get it right.
Yet, I grew up spelling “grey” with an “e.” And some of the rules in the stylebook seemed so arbitrary. With my Norwegian background and its Germanic language, I always favored butting words into each other rather than separating them as two words, or with a hyphen. What could be wrong with “babysitter?” It seemed natural.
But I was disabused by my copy desk chief, who explained to me — the way a patient adult has to explain to a toddler having a tantrum — that the point of AP style was never to enforce a “correct” English style, but merely to make sure that we didn’t see on the same page one column with a “grey” and another with a “gray.” “It’s so we don’t look like idiots,” he said. It was not to choose the “right” style, but to choose a consistent one. And AP style was what newspapers everywhere agreed would be the version to provide that.
Still, there were times that the Stylebook asked us to do patently dumb things that would, indeed, make us look like idiots. In Arizona, where I was working, Mexican food was really good — and really Mexican (not just Taco Bell) — remember this was 1988 before Mexican supplanted Italian or Chinese as the foreign cuisine of choice — and we knew the differences among the many types of chile peppers — jalapeño, chipotle, anchos, etc. — but the Associated Press was telling us we should spell the word as “chili.” We would have looked like fools to our readers, who knew better. So, our management slyly gave us permission to overrule the stylebook and spell the word as it should be. “Chile.” The AP Stylebook eventually caught up with us, and now allows “chile” to describe the capsicum peppers.
Most recently, AP relented on “pupil” and “student,” so first-graders are permitted to be students. It is a slow process.
Much of the stylebook does concern itself with correct grammar and proper spelling, just to make sure we writers didn’t accidentally write “discrete” when we meant “discreet,” or forget how many double letters you have in “accommodate.” But most of the important issues concern just how our newspaper would deal with the fuzziness of certain locutions. Is a minister “Rev. So-and-So” or “the Rev. So-and-So?” Can we use “CIA” in a story without having to first explain it as the Central Intelligence Agency?
I thought that non-journalist readers might enjoy a little peek into the old stylebook for a few of my favorite choice entries, starting with the letter “A.” These are all directly from the 1988 edition of the AP Stylebook.
A
A.D. Acceptable in all references for anno Domini: in the year of the Lord. Because the full phrase would read in the year of the Lord 96, the abbreviation A.D. goes before the figure for the year: A.D. 96. Do not write: The fourth century A.D.The fourth century is sufficient. If A.D. is not specified with a year, the year is presumed to be A.D.
Fromaddresses Spell out and capitalize First through Ninth when used as street names; use figures with two letters for 10th and above 7 Fifth Ave., 100 21st St., 600 K St. N.W. Do not abbreviate if the number is omitted: East 42nd Street, K Street Northwest.
all right (adv.) Never alright. Hyphenate only if used colloquially as a compound modifier: He is an all-right guy.
ampersand (&) Use the ampersand when it is part of a company’s formal name: Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. The ampersand should not otherwise be used in place of and.
ax Not axe. The verb forms: ax, axed, axing.
B
baloney Foolish or exaggerated talk. The sausage or luncheon meat is bologna.
barbecue Not barbeque or Bar-B-Q.
brussels sprouts
C
collide, collision Two objects must be in motion before they can collide. An automobile cannot collide with a utility pole, for example.
CompriseComprise means to contain, to include all or embrace. It is best used only in the active voice, followed by a direct object: The United States comprises 50 states. The jury comprises five men and seven women. Never use comprised of.
controversial An overused word; avoid it.
crawfish Not crayfish. An exception to the Webster’s New World based on the dominant spelling in Louisiana, where it is a popular delicacy.
cupful, cupfuls Not cupsful.
D
decades Use Arabic figures to indicate decades of history. Use an apostrophe to indicate numerals that are left out; show plural by adding the letter s: the 1890s, the ’90s, the Gay ’90s, the 1920s, the mid-1930s.
demolish, destroy Both mean to do away with something completely. Something cannot be partially demolished or destroyed. It is redundant to say totally demolished or totally destroyed.
different Takes the preposition from, not than.
doughnut Not donut.
E
engine, motor An engine develops its own power, usually through internal combustion or the pressure of air, steam or water passing over vanes attached to a wheel: an airplane engine, an automobile engine, a jet engine, a missile engine, a steam engine, a turbine engine. A motor receives power from an outside source: an electric motor, a hydraulic motor.
en route Always two words.
ensure, insure Use ensure to mean guarantee: Steps were taken to ensure accuracy. Use insure for references to insurance: The policy insures his life.
even-steven Not even-stephen.
F
Fannie Mae See Federal National Mortgage Association.
Fannie May A trademark for a brand of candy.
farther, furtherFarther refers to physical distance: He walked farther into the woods. Further refers to an extension of time or degree: She will look further into the mystery.
fulsome It means disgustingly excessive. Do not use to mean lavish, profuse.
[“F” is also home to a host of confused pairs and the stylebook makes sure we understand the usage difference between “fewer” and “less;” “figuratively” and “literally;” and “flaunt” and “flout;” and “flounder” and “founder;” and “forgo” and “forego.” It is a minefield of potential oopses.]
G
gamut, gantlet, gauntlet A gamut is a scale or notes of any complete range or extent. A gantlet is a flogging ordeal, literally or figuratively. A gauntlet is a glove. To throw down the gauntlet means to issue a challenge. To take up the gauntlet means to accept a challenge.
ghetto, ghettos Do not use indiscriminately as a synonym for the sections of cities inhabited by minorities or the poor. Ghetto has a connotation that government decree has forced people to live in a certain area. In most cases, section, district, slum, area or quarter is the more accurate word. Sometimes a place name alone has connotations that make it best: Harlem, Watts.
girl Applicable until 18th birthday is reached. Use woman or young woman afterward.
glamour One of the few our endings still used in American writing. But the adjective is glamorous.
go-go [This was the 1988 edition, after all.]
grisly, grizzlyGrisly is horrifying, repugnant. Grizzly means grayish or is a short for for grizzly bear.
gypsy, gypsies Capitalize references to the wandering Caucasoid people found throughout the world. Lowercase when used generically to mean one who is constantly on the move: I plan to become a gypsy. She hailed a gypsy cab.
H
half-mast, half-staff On ships and at naval stations ashore, flags are flown at half-mast. Elsewhere ashore, flags are flown at half-staff.
hang, hanged, hung One hangs a picture, a criminal or oneself. For the past tense or the passive, use hanged when referring to executions or suicides, hung for other actions.
hangar, hanger A hangar is a building. A hanger is used for clothes.
hurricane Capitalize hurricane when it is part of the name that weather forecasters assign to a storm: Hurricane Hazel. But use it and its — not she, her or hers — in pronoun references. And do not use the presence of a woman’s name as an excuse to attribute sexist images of women’s behavior to a storm, for example such sentences as: The fickle Hazel teased the Louisiana coast.
I
imply, infer Writers or speakers imply in the words they use. A listener or reader infers something from the words.
injuries They are suffered or sustained, not received.
innocent Use innocent, rather than not guilty, in describing a defendant’s plea or a jury’s verdict, to guard against the word not being dropped inadvertently.
J
jargon The special vocabulary and idioms of a particular class or occupational group. In general, avoid jargon. When it is appropriate in a special context, include an explanation of any words likely to be unfamiliar to most readers. See dialect.
junior, senior Abbreviate as Jr. and Sr. only with full names of persons or animals. Do not precede by a comma: Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. The notation II or 2nd may be used if it is the individual’s preference. Note, however, that II and 2nd are not necessarily the equivalent of junior — they often are used by a grandson or nephew. If necessary to distinguish between father and son in second reference, use the elder Smith or the younger Smith.
K
ketchup Not catchup or catsup.
K mart No hyphen, lowercase m. Headquarters is in Troy, Mich.
L
lady Do not use as a synonym for woman. Lady may be used when it is a courtesy title or when a specific reference to fine manners is appropriate without patronizing overtones.
late Do not use it to describe someone’s actions while alive. Wrong: Only the late senator opposed this bill. (He was not dead at that time.)
lectern, podium, pulpit, rostrum A speaker stands behind a lectern, on a podium or rostrum, or in the pulpit.
M
malarkey Not malarky.
May Day, maydayMay Day is May 1, often observed as a festive or political holiday. Mayday is the international distress signal, from the French m’aidez, meaning “help me.”
milquetoast Not milk toast when referring to a shrinking, apologetic person. Derived from Caspar Milquetoast, a character in a comic strip by H.T. Webster.
minus sign Use a hyphen not a dash, but use the word minus if there is any danger of confusion. Use a word, not a minus sign to indicate temperatures below zero: minus 10 or 5 below zero.
mishap A minor misfortune. People are not killed in mishaps.
N
Negro Use black or Negro, as appropriate in the context, for both men and women. Do not use Negress.
No. Use as the abbreviation for number in conjunction with a figure to indicate position or rank. No. 1 man, No. 3 choice. Do not use in street addresses, with this exception: No. 10 Downing St., the residence of Britain’s prime minister. Do not use in the names of schools: Public School 19.
non-controversial All issues are controversial. A non-controversial issue is impossible. A controversial issue is redundant.
O
Fromobscenities, profanities, vulgarities Do not use them in stories unless they are part of direct quotations and there is a compelling reason for them. … In reporting profanity that normally would use the words damn or god, lowercase god and use the following forms: damn, damn it, goddamn it. No not, however, change the offending words to euphemisms. Do not, for example change damn it to darn it. … If a full quote that contains profanity, obscenity or vulgarity cannot be dropped but there is no compelling reason for the offensive language, replace letters of an offensive word with a hyphen. The word damn, for example, would become d – – – or – – – –.
OK, OK’s, OK’ing, OKs Do not use okay.
opossum The only North American marsupial. No apostrophe is needed to indicate missing letters in a phrase such as playing possum.
P
palate, palette, palletPalate is the roof of the mouth. A palette is an artist’s paint board. A pallet is a bed.
pantsuit Not pants suit.
poetic license It is valid for poetry, not news or feature stories.
pom-pom, pomponPom-pom is sometimes used to describe a rapid-firing automatic weapon. Define the word if it must be used. A pompon is a large ball of crepe paper or fluffed cloth, often waved by cheerleaders or used atop a hat. It is also a flower that appears on some varieties of chrysanthemums.
FromPrison, jail Do not use the two words interchangeably. … Prison is a generic term that may be applied to the maximum security institutions often known as penitentiaries and to the medium security facilities often called correctional institutions or reformatories. All such facilities confine people serving sentences for felonies. A jail is a facility normally used to confine people serving sentences for misdemeanors, people awaiting trial or sentencing on either felony or misdemeanor charges, and people confined for civil matters such as failure to pay alimony and other types of contempt of court.
punctuation Think of it as a courtesy to your readers, designed to help them understand a story. Inevitably, a mandate of this scope involves gray areas. For this reason, the punctuation entries in this book refer to guidelines rather than rules. Guidelines should not be treated casually, however.
R
raised, reared Only humans may be reared. Any living thing, including humans may be raised.
ranges The form: $12 million to $14 million. Not: $12 to $14 million.
ravage, ravishTo ravage is to wreak great destruction or devastation: Union troops ravaged Atlanta. To ravish is to abduct, rape or carry away with emotion: Soldiers ravished the women. Although both words connote an element of violence, they are not interchangeable. Buildings and towns cannot be ravished.
reluctant, reticentReluctant means unwilling to act: He is reluctant to enter the primary. Reticent means unwilling to speak: The candidate’s husband is reticent.
restaurateur No n. Not restauranteur.
S
Saint John The spelling for the city in New Brunswick. To distinguish it from St. John’s, Newfoundland.
San‘a It’s NOT an apostrophe in the Yemen capital’s name. It’s a reverse apostrophe, or a single opening quotation mark.
Satan But lowercase devil and satanic.
sex changes Follow these guidelines in using proper names or personal pronouns when referring to an individual who has had a sex-change operation: If the reference is to an action before the operation, use the proper name and gender of the individual at that time. If the reference is to an action after the operation, use the new proper name and gender. For example: Dr. Richard Raskind was a first-rate amateur tennis player. He won several tournaments. Ten years later, when Dr. Renee Richards applied to play in tournaments, many women players objected on the ground that she was the former Richard Raskind, who had undergone a sex-change operation. Miss Richards said she was entitled to compete as a woman.
Solid South Those Southern states traditionally regarded as supporters of the Democratic Party.
SOS The distress signal. S.O.S (no final period) is a trademark for a brand of soap pad.
St. John’s The city in the Canadian province of Newfoundland. Not to be confused with Saint John, New Brunswick.
straight-laced, strait-laced Use straight-laced for someone strict or severe in behavior or moral views. Reserve strait-laced for the notion of confinement, as in a corset.
straitjacket Not straight-jacket.
T
teen, teen-ager (n.) teen-age (adj.) Do not use teen-aged.
that, which, who, whom (pronouns) Use who and whom in referring to people and to animals with a name. John Jones is the man who helped me. See the who, whom entry. Use that and which in referring to inanimate objects and to animals without a name.
Truman, Harry S. With a period after the initial. Truman once said there was no need for the period because the S did not stand for a name. Asked in the early 1960s about his preference, he replied, “It makes no difference to me.” AP style has called for the period since that time.
tsar Use czar.
U
UFO, UFOs Acceptable in all references for unidentified flying object(s).
Uncle Tom A term of contempt applied to a black person, taken from the main character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It describes the practice of kowtowing to whites to curry favor. Do not apply it to an individual. It carries potentially libelous connotations of having sold one’s convictions for money, prestige or political influence.
unique It means one of a kind. Do not describe something as rather unique or most unique.
United Rubber, Cork, Linoleum and Plastic Workers of America The shortened forms of United Rubber Workers and United Rubber Workers union are acceptable in all references. Capitalize Rubber Workers in references to the union or its members. Use rubber workers, lowercase, in generic references to workers in the rubber industry. Headquarters is in Akron, Ohio.
United States Spell out when used as a noun. Use U.S. (no space) only as an adjective.
V
versus Abbreviate as vs. in all uses.
Vietnam Not Viet Nam.
volatile Something which evaporates rapidly. It may or may not be explosive.
W
war horse, warhorse Two words for a horse used in battle. One word for a veteran of many battles: He is a political warhorse.
whereabouts Takes a singular verb: His whereabouts is a mystery.
whiskey, whiskeys Use the spelling whisky only in conjunction with Scotch.
X Y Z
X-ray (n., v. and adj.) Use for both the photographic process and the radiation particles themselves.
yam Botanically, yams and sweet potatoes are not related, although several varieties of moist-fleshed sweet potatoes are popularly called yams in some parts of the United States.
youth Applicable to boys and girls from age 13 until 18th birthday. Use man or woman for individuals 18 and older.
ZIP codes Use all-caps ZIP for Zone Improvement Program, but always lowercase the word code. Run the five digits together without a comma, and do not pt a comma between the state name and the ZIP code: New York, N.Y. 10020.
Richard Nilsen 