23 November 2010: This Time of Year:
Beasts, Basses, Lambasting, and Basting
On the East Coast, it is schizy, bouncing from late-winter weather to spring. It is a time of plunging toward the dearth of winter, when we celebrate light and begin to regain it each day, minute by minute. Half the year is down, half up--depending on your preference, spring or autumn.
This time of year I tolerate the down side, looking forward to the solstice and the climb. It is schizy in the sense that some Native Americans celebrate Thanksgiving and some don't--we eat the food of people who introduced us to it while we introduced many negatives to them. Enough said.
I solve the dilemma by not sitting it out as I used to, since it's also a harvest festival and a time to count blessings-- life's harvest. I simply eat food the Indians did not introduce us to--European fish and so on.
I will suggest a moment of silence this year for that Peaceable Kingdom we never allowed to happen. Fleeing religious persecution, settlers here introduced a new variety and became the people they so railed against.
What does this country really stand for? I prefer the customary narrative, hard to maintain once having read Howard Zinn and company's take on it.
*****
And speaking of entities that give without appreciation, what of the string bass? That and the tuba have been called the ground upon which orchestras stand--"foundational."
You must listen without these string patriarchs, however, and realize how ungrounded the sound becomes, since tuba appears rarely.
String bass players do have custom-made seats, I discovered last Sunday when one of them soloed with a piano. I was relieved. A bit less martyrdom to associate with them now, but the schlepping persists, the ultimate test of the true devotee--no offense meant to piccolo players.
And I'd eliminate that hybrid percussion/string instrument, the piano, from all but concertos and solos, because they tend to drown out other instruments in other settings.
Few are the settings where the string bass soloes or is the featured instrument I heard Sunday night, playing Hindemith's Sonata for Bass and Piano, the latter overshadowing the former, as if the friendly giant were a velvet blanket beneath the concert grand, top opened completely, unnecessarily.
But the ultimate string bass experience happened for me early this month, when it replaced the lyre as accompaniment to Peterson and O'Hare's version of the Iliad, "An Iliad" (see blog entry November 8, 2010, below). I have rarely heard such beauty as it accented extremes and plateaus of the narrative recited by "a Homer"--the closest to a solo I've ever heard by this "umpah" provider. Such sounds, such pathos. What art to elicit its various capabilities so eloquently. A true virtuoso, giving the instrument its due at last.
Nothing so lovely or reassuring than those rare times when the cello and bass violin sections are given brief recitations within a symphony or concerto. They are consolation to the violin's complaints and the viola's supportive obscurity or echos.
Years ago I wrote a lengthy tribute to the string bass, canonizing it more or less. Have you ever heard a muted tuba or seen a tuba mute? In one case it was scarcely audible amid the symphonic din; in the other case it was the most gigantic of mutes, startling and scary, for some reason colored with bright red and blue, as if to draw visual if not audial attention to this ground bass provider that sounds awful otherwise and is easier to carry around than thedouble bass.
At the recent concert, I felt sorry for the bass player called back for a second round of applause, having to lug his instrument for us, as if to remind us why he was bowing. My encomium (mentioned above) specifies the "bass weight." I can't recall it offhand.
I will share the encomium to the "bass fiddle" when I get back to DC. I'm out of town now and so furious at the immediate contemporary that I have to lean on my readings from Zinn's complete American history from 1492 to the present, compressed into 600 or so pages of small print. I had to purchase a reading light to make it a more legible education. The complexity of reality so transcends Senate debates and other acts by the upper class, with an occasional nod to some working-class riot or rally or other disturbance that is usually quelled through violence.
I reach back to the 18th or 19th century here and find layer over layer of vexing issues clashing with each other when not dancing around, tripping over reality, tripping it.
That's when Americans were employed (many of us as slaves both black and white) and outsourcing was scarce and we had lots more muscle than we do now, even with 14 percent of us still unionized. Our work was indispensable.
Wouldn't it be nice if that Thanksgiving icon, the Peaceable Kingdom, could escape from its canvas prison to become reality on earth? All of Edward Hicks's paintings of harmonious bread breaking with the hospitable Native Americans, who waded out into the water to greet the first American ship they witnessed en route to anchoring at our shores, a harbinger of the nearly complete genocide of a people gasping for breath right before our eyes, a most un-"American" relic we honor rarely and forget most of the time.
What savages we were, not noble ones, by far outdone by Hicks's Isaic jungle beasts with such tranquil faces. Hicks himself opposed the abolition of slavery, an unaccountable predilection for a Quaker. He's not around to interview or justify himself in terms of Faith and Practice and all the discrimination his co-religionists suffered to make possible the Peaceable Kingdom he himself evidently inhabited, unthreatened. I must verify that. He could not attempt to translate his art into his life, but that does happen often. Those who create symmetrically destroy.
Why create a dream while espousing nightmaric scenarios? Pacify lions to live as equals among us while bestializing human beings?
Favoring harmony with "redskins" whom we were busy decimating even as he painted those peaceable portraits? I don't understand. I must read his biography, if it's worth the time. Maybe I'm wrong. This is one of the times I hope so.
Happy Thanksgiving. Remember that we are what we eat. May I suggest tofurky? I wish I were a vegetarian. Wish I could get beyond all those evolutionary human traits that oriented us so efficiently and functionally to be carnivores.
Shall we create three stomachs within ourselves to enable us to eat [not smoke!] grass like cows and perhaps with that food become as placid as they are? The stomach feature can be cloned--the peaceability I'm less sure about.
Happy Thanksgiving. Let's all dream on. Maybe someday the Messiah will usher in a Peaceable Kingdom on earth and Palestinians will dance with Israelis, Indian Indians with Pakistanis, former slaveowners with former slaves, the former now seeing the light, the latter basking in it?
I personally can't live without dreaming, whatever realities describe me once I'm done living this life. Will I have justified the space I took up?
Maybe.
We all have our dreams. Maybe one day we'll grow up to a point where we're capable of realizing them.
Peace, for instance.
(c)
