Amelia Gray: Museum of the Weird

The strings no longer gut

On stage, she arranges her cropped hair, touching the frame of her glasses with a practiced hand, and raises the instrument to her neck. The strings resonate like animal gut, in a round, mellow way that any strings will sound when a master draws the bow. Her hair falls over her face as she plays the opening memorized notes of Prokofiev’s last masterpiece.

Connections

1. artistic difficulty

2. distracted audience

Music theory

Playing the violin is reading and writing at once. You’re given a piece in all its brilliance and insanity, ink from the same press that printed Lolita . The task is interpretation; it comes from the mind as easily as words.

The story is forced

Madeline left the quartet the previous summer. These days, she keeps busy by traveling too much and eating dinner at other people’s houses. During private lessons, she asks her students to make up a story about the music they play. They look at the page and see the rise and fall of dynamics, the difficult fingerings and bowings, marcato, pizzicato . They say it’s about clouds changing into different clouds, or quiet water in a well, or a boy clutching the back of a trolley car as it rumbles over the hill and off its track and plunges, out of control, into a valley. She nods, bored.

Connections (cont.)

3. representing specific emotion doesn’t work in English

4. representing any emotion doesn’t work in any language

General disgust

Composers show their distaste for the oppressive regime by bitching through art. In Prokofiev’s case, it was twisted march songs and dissonant chords. He wrote at the physical limit of the instrument, to the upper end of the fingerboard, double trills, sul ponticello , muted to suffocate the solo, an accompanist jerking his head to keep time, a repeating three-bar time signature that cannot be counted and must be felt. Because of the high difficulty and low payoff, few bother to learn all four movements of his first sonata for violin.

Particular truth regarding music, life

It’s an ugly, ugly piece

Little life (organization)

First movement: faux triumph

Second movement: thinly veiled mockery of Joseph Stalin

Third movement: dissonance (intentional)

Fourth movement: well,

Focused disgust

The kids in the audience don’t like it. You can’t blame them, really; they’ve been raised on the Romantics, the Baroque, the Bachs and Beethovens. Sousa never wrote an ironic note in his life. They don’t understand it. They’re not old enough to know the first instinct of irritation should be avoided in order to keep an open mind. The violin strikes warring chords against the piano. The close listener spends most of the second movement trying to contextualize.

How to play an ugly piece

1. Change rhythms

2. Work backwards

3. Leave offerings

Context

forced marches bread lines hard winters panicked emigration mistrust genocide finger-pointing corruption occasional springtimes fire unspeakable cruelties historical insignificance wood floors broken bones icepicks dirty snow laughing women serbia the soul arthritis one tiny cold little life

How selfish of us (funerals)

The body (seen) and the person (imagined), the two reconciled into something we call an angel, a glowing light, a cool or warm breeze (depending on climate). The soul, for some reason still concerned with us, happy or appreciative at the attendance, the proper amount of tears and flowers, the quality of the entertainment and food afterwards.

Words rarely used in conversation by nineteen-year-olds

contextualize, tyrant, shudder, motif, wastrel, guttural, partition, baroque, muddy, intent, octave, cruelty

Programme

1. Attempted Explanation

2. Company of Friends

3. Sonata for Violin

At one time, Prokofiev had to have been alive

He walked through a public park. He felt snow and saw the three shades of the color grey. He took his glove off and looped his fingers around the links of a chain link fence. His hand warmed the metal and the metal chilled his hand and he thought, if the metal could feel, it would feel warm.

He thought, if the metal could feel

What if the metal could feel

It could feel warm

He thought, I wonder what Stalin is doing today. Perhaps he is having eggs, and mint tea. He thought his thoughts in Russian, which made things pleasantly guttural. He thought often of music.

Action

Madeline shudders with the final notes of the third movement. Her heavy dress is very Russian, very winter-coat. The fourth movement features runs from the opening, the theme repeated, not uncommon, but Prokofiev keeps pushing the envelope, the runs higher, confounding the lower register. The scale pattern is foreign. The upper notes approach resolution at the octave but but never arrive.

This was the piece played at Prokofiev’s funeral.

Connections (cont)

5. no satisfying ending

The tyrant speaks

Perhaps I was having eggs, and mint tea. I tried to read the papers every morning, to be a lover of language and knowledge, but it was very tiring. I couldn’t control anything outside of Russia which, if you think about it, is quite a large space outside my control. From the point of view of a man of my ambition, it is quite a large space, indeed. It is quite a large space from the point of view of any man. Anyway, I prefer coffee, and not to be recalled as a tyrant.