William Gass - Middle C

March 16, 1968. My Lai Massacre. Nearly five hundred people in the Vietnam villages of My Lai and My Khe were murdered by members of Charlie Company. The Americans demonstrated their skill in such matters (although for some it was their first time) by dropping many victims, like a line of cardboard targets at a carnival, into a handy drainage ditch. Babies were dispatched by gun and grenade, animals and women as well. There were no plants in pots or they’d have been shot. This riot of killing was observed by helicopters. The helicopters snitched.

I shall assume that you have each listened with full attention to Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra . Anyone like it? Hands. That’s nice. Several. We are blessed. This concerto is one of the major musical achievements of the twentieth century. Bartók was ill with leukemia and low on funds. His friends passed the hat behind his back in order to offer him their charity in the guise of a grant from the Koussevitzky Foundation. Koussevitzky was the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. You may have heard the results of his direction on some of your recordings. [… um …] This support enabled the composer to spend the summer of August 1943 at the spa at Saranac Lake — that’s in New York State — a spa is a health resort — where his illness momentarily improved. [……] Apologies. His illness did not improve, he did. His illness weakened. [……] The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke also died of luke. Lots of people do. Lots. It is cancer of the blood, cancer of the marrow of the bones. It should be the disease of duchesses and counts, but it isn’t. Of blue bloods, you see. But it isn’t.

The concerto had its first performance, naturally under Koussevitzky’s leadership, in Boston during the winter of the following year. The audience’s reception was “tumultuous.” Critics were less excited, but performers liked the many opportunities the music gave them to blow their own horn and excel. Listeners were warm. Why shouldn’t they be? It was a wonderfully romantic nineteenth-century piece, with swelling strings, pounded drums, and plenty of trumpets. With a climax worthy of the movies. You can hear the music running into the arms of happiness.

Koussevitzky was a faithful and genuine supporter of the music of his own time, an almost reckless thing to be, especially if you were the conductor of a significant American orchestra, because patrons were customarily twenty-five years off the clock and, like the busy noses of the bees, went for nectar and its sweetness, not newness however savory. For further information on the numbskullish nature of audiences and the even greater tin eardrum of critics, try to remember my earlier lectures. [……] Das Lied von der Erde may have opened the door for Bartók and Schoenberg — it took some pushing and shoving to hear who would get through first — but it was melancholy — a downer, do you say? [… ya? …] We did “Das Lied” two weeks ago. Remember? “The Song of the Earth.” Maa … ler. He died of a sore throat. I find it interesting that Mahler, Bartók, and Schoenberg changed their religion, not quite the way we change clothes, but as the occasion dictated nevertheless. Something for you to file away. Surprise the mind on a cloudy day.

All right, class, we return to our sheep: who is — Koussevitzky — did I call him: commissioner? [……] I call him the Commissioner because he suggested and funded compositions from contemporary composers: for instance he asked Maurice Ravel to orchestrate Mussorgsky’s piano suite “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Listeners have forgotten that it was originally scored for the piano. For most folks only the full orchestra version answers to the name. Ravel’s version is a wonderful piece to test your loudspeakers with. Sorry. It is a good piece with which to test your speakers. [… um …] As colorful as Joseph’s coat. [… um …] A few good musical jokes about Jews. Listeners have forgotten about them, too.

You have to drive these gentlemen — Mussorgsky — Ravel — Koussevitzky — into the same corral, get them used to the smell of one another. Koussevitzky, Ravel, Mussorgsky. Up hands! Come on, don’t you remember the Great Gate? Cymbal crash! [……] Palms aplenty? Well, several. We are blessed. Mein Gott .

The Commissioner badgered work from Ravel — a piano concerto, not just the aforementioned orchestration. He encouraged a couple of operas: Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe , and Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes ; then squeezed from Copeland, let’s see, Symphony no. 3. Next, what? [… um …] He gave Olivier Messiaen’s T-S symphony a push into the light of day, as well as Bartók’s Concerto . [……] No, it doesn’t mean what you gigglers think. [……] TS to you, too. It stands for Turangalîla-Symphonie . I shall write the title on the board. It is not easily spelled. [……] The news about Koussevitzky is not all positive. He led the Boston boys in one of the earlier recordings of Ravel’s Boléro . [……] I’m disappointed none of you groaned. Orchestras in those days were largely made up of scowling old men. Normally they didn’t like to learn, rehearse, or play new pieces, but the Concerto for Orchestra was bait too appealing to refuse.

Words as always fail to convey the power and beauty of this composition. Even Bartók’s own description doesn’t approach that kind of success. I am quoting from the composer’s program notes for the debut performance: “The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.”

Jesting! Jousting, rather. You heard the bray — the hee-haw — the yawp — and then the fairgrounds music? pretending to be a rodent running down an alley. Now, just because the second movement is designated, by the composer, “a game of pairs,” we mustn’t confuse it with boarding Noah’s ark — you know — bassoons two by two, oboes as twins, clarinets a pair, next two flutes, and, lest they be too overbearing and brutish, trumpets with mutes. Nor should we allow ourselves to be misled about the seriousness of these blurts. I was told that, while Bartók was composing the concerto, he heard a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony on the radio and laughed when one of its subjects announced itself. He said it sounded like a Viennese cabaret song. This theme was so vacant of any real energy or significance that Bartók promptly borrowed it to use for an interruption he might ridicule. Why would he do that? Hands. [……] Hopeless. In the middle of a serious sermon, why would the preacher stick out his tongue? [… um …] Rather, my young friends, why would he stick out someone else’s tongue?

What was happening around him when he wrote this work? Sorry — when he composed this work. [……] Well, yes, he was ill. He was dying. [……] Okay, he was also a pauper. But he had more important things on his mind. [……] What? His family I suppose. [……] Nothing more? [……] The world was at war, sillies. Everywhere. It was a very large war, deserving the name of “World.” It contained countless smaller ones, and the smaller ones were made of campaigns and battles, deadly encounters and single shootings, calamities on all fronts. But history can hold up for our inspection many different sorts of wars, and World War Two was made of nearly all of them: trade wars — tribal wars — civil wars — wars by peaceful means — wars of ideas — wars over oil — over opium — over living space — over access to the sea — whoopee, the war in the air — among feudal houses — raw raw siss-boom-bah — so many to choose from — holy wars — battles on ice floes between opposing ski patrols — by convoys under sub pack attacks — in the desert there might be a dry granular war fought between contesting tents, dump trucks, and tanks — or — one can always count on the perpetual war between social classes — such as — whom do you suppose? the Rich, the Well Off, the Sort Of, the So-So, and the Starving — or — the Smart, the Ordinary, and the Industriously Ignorant — or — the Reactionary and the Radical — not just the warmongers for war but those conflicts by pacifists who use war to reach peace — the many sorts of wars that old folks arrange, the middle-aged manage, and the young fight — oh, all of these, and sometimes simultaneously — not to neglect the wars of pigmentation: color against color, skin against skin, slant versus straight, the indigenous against immigrants, city slickers set at odds with village bumpkins, or in another formulation: factory workers taught to shake their fists at field hands (that’s hammer at sickle) — ah, yes — the relevant formula, familiar to you, I’m sure, is that scissors cut paper, sprawl eats space— Raum! — then in simpler eras, wars of succession — that is, wars to restore some king to his john or kill some kid in his cradle — wars between tribes kept going out of habit — wars to keep captured countries and people you have previously caged, caged — wars in search of the right death, often requiring suicide corps and much costly practice — wars, it seems, just for the fun of it, wars about symbols, wars of words— uns so weiter —wars to sustain the manufacture of munitions — bombs, ships, planes, rifles, cannons, pistols, gases, rockets, mines — wars against scapegoats to disguise the inadequacies of some ruling party — a few more wars — always a few more, wars fought to shorten the suffering, unfairness, and boredom of life.