What is there to say about Michael Jackson that has not already been said? Christmas marks six months already since his death, and it seems, happily, that many who did not count themselves among his fans now listen to his music, to keep some part of him around. A year ago my friends lovingly packed away dozens of boxes of my books and records, almost all of which remain in storage, but since this summer I have stepped up my digital listening and now feel like sharing a few words, and a picture and a short film each day for several days, in case any among these friends remains unconvinced. This man was a true talent, an aesthete, a romantic, who seemed to suffer so much while he was alive that a part of me is more comfortable believing he is now at peace. I have no designs on turning Christmas into a memorial for one of the Jackson brothers, but I do think the celebration of Christmas has to do with compassion and hope, with the most fundamental elements of how we get along as different people. Michael Jackson leaves an example, among many, of how this spirit of celebration can remain in my mind not only at Christmas but at other, more ordinary times. His creativity, his legacy, is extraordinary.

The most touching things I have learned about Michael since reading recollections after his death are his love of drawing and painting, his fondness for horsing around and water fights. Diana Ross took him to art supply stores the summer he lived at her home, after the Jackson family had moved to California from Indiana for their work with Motown. He came to love paintings of Michelangelo and Poussin. Beyond the musical sphere, Michael adored films, relishing his work with Diana in The Wiz (1978) and looking forward to other projects. He respected other musicians, composers, actors, and dancers, citing the tremendous influence Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Fred Astaire, and Charlie Chaplin had on his creative life. He was incredibly knowledgeable about black music traditions and recording artists who had preceded him, from Major Lance and Tyrone Davis to Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye. As he came of age in the Jackson house, Michael listened to Debussy and Tchaikovsky, Copland and Prokofiev, and would later proclaim his great love for American musical theater and the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Modest when it came to his own talent, he was quick to give credit to his mentors and collaborators, Berry Gordy and Quincy Jones, his own brothers, and especially his sister, Janet.

I remember Michael as a towering figure in popular music and dance as I grew up in the 1980s. From the moment I was old enough, I emulated his moves, even as students in my ballet studio mocked me for my enthusiasm. As I grew older, I purchased his records, of which Off the Wall (1979) and Dangerous (1991) remain favorites. I stayed up at night to watch his short films on television and dreamed of having the chance to see him perform live. That dream never materialized, but I sensed so much electricity even in his televised appearances that it was as though I had already met Michael in person. Until that day comes, I will continue to play his records and remain grateful for the incredible gifts of talent and compassion he shared. Discover more about this man as you can, by listening to the records he made and even more to those he himself loved, especially James Brown’s Live at the Apollo (1963), Jackie Wilson, the Temptations’s Cloud Nine (1969), Holland-Dozier-Holland, Bee Gees’s Trafalgar (1971), Burt Bacharach, Sam & Dave, Stevie Wonder’sTalking Book (1972), Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (1971), Sly & the Family Stone, the Drifters, the Delfonics, and the Beatles. It is wonderful if you already own some of these, but if not, send me a message and I can put together a tape for you.

Anni Rossi downright charms me with pizzicati and poignant singing in a live performance of “Machine,” from her recently released album Rockwell. Rossi is all “impulses, impulses, from a machine,” as she sings.

When a performance startles me, I go searching for words to add meaning to the event, and find myself again and again mouthing words from the eighteenth century. Odd? Nevermind. Look at how Rossi thumps away on the shoulders of her viola as she sings. Hear her feet, heels digging into the suitcase on which she stands, in sync, in rhythm. This could be a noisy, unpleasant collection of plucks and squeaks and stomps, but instead it’s a treat. It’s a performance that sounds nothing like it looks: not hard, not wooden and dry, but alive and supple.

In an essay on painting in the mid-1760s, Denis Diderot penned a few lines about the musical performances he loved best: ones in which a player’s stomps and strains never once seemed noticeable. “A violinist struggling and straining over his instrument vexes and annoys me,” Diderot writes. “I require ease and freedom of a singer; I want an orchestral musician to move his fingers over the strings so easily, so lightly, that I have no idea of the difficulties he negotiates. I expect a pure and painless pleasure.” Diderot loved a performance that seemed effortless. I think he would have gotten a kick out of Anni Rossi’s nimble musicality atop her suitcase, onstage.

In fact Anni Rossi’s performance of “Machine” brings me back to the eighteenth-century philosopher’s words with a smile. “We are instruments,” as Diderot writes in D’Alembert’s Dream, “we are possessed of sensitivity and memory. Our senses are so many keys which are struck by things in nature around us, and often strike themselves.”

What has brought on the new ruminating? A rediscovery: a book of poems and prose poems by Mary Oliver. Her Winter Hours (1999) doesn’t have a preface. It has a foreward. And what a quiet, controlled, honest foreward it is. Part of me thinks Rameau would love to have said (just) as much, just enough, well over two centuries ago.

Therefore I find a compelling reason to write something revealing, a little, my private and natural self, to offer something that must in the future be taken into consideration by any who would claim to know me. I am only too aware of the ways in which inclination and supposition will fill whatever spaces in this world, or a life, are left vacant. And so I say again: I myself am the author of this document; it has no other formal persona, as my books of poems certainly do.

And thus does Mary Oliver dog-ear the beginning of her slim, yet rich, wintery volume.

Call me crazy, call me too quick to suppose or to quick to dream up chords of supposition. Here, with Oliver, I hear a voice I’ll bet Jean-Philippe wished he had. A writing voice: an honesty about the limits of a document and the thrills, or chills, of its dedication.

Here, then, is a Lullian pony. I had a professor in years past refer to notes, abridged guides, etc. as “ponies,” I think for the way they were meant to lead a reader through otherwise dense material. But does anyone else actually call such things ponies? No matter. Here is what I sketched, based exactly on what my friendly inquirer requested.

A Lullian Pony

Bibliography

If you have yet to investigate Lully resources in the libraries of the University of North Texas, go there right away and start scouring their files. The bibliography there is among the most comprehensive in print or online.

James Anthony, “Lully’s Airs: French or Italian?” The Musical Times, 128/1729 (March 1987), 126–129.
_____, “The musical structure of Lully’s operatic airs,” in Jean-Baptiste Lully: Congress Report from the 1987 meeting in Heidelbert and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, ed. Jérôme de La Gorce and Herbert Schneider. Neue Heidelberger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 18. Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1990.
_____, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau, rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1978.

Anthony is the locus classicus for English-language scholarship on Lully. For additional crucial works in English, see works by these scholars.

Patricia Howard
Lois Rosow
Rebecca Harris-Warrick
Geoffrey Burgess

Among the scholarship in French and German, the most significant studies are by Jérôme de La Gorce and Herbert Schneider.

* * *

Lullian Opera

My favorite among the staged works is Persée (1682). Try the excellent recording by Christophe Rousset and Les talens lyriques and the videodisc with Tafelmusik (2005). One review of the Tafelmusik production, with additional discussion of genre and the history of tragédie en musique, appears in the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music. See also the inimitable Raphaëlle Legrand, “Persée de Lully et Quinault: Orientation pour l’analyse dramaturgique d’une tragédie en musique,” in Analyse Musicale 27 (April 1992), 9–14.

There was an entire issue of the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music devoted to Persée, and among its articles, you may find the one by Lois Rosow useful.

Aside from Persée, any serious scholar of Lully will expect you to know the most famous and most studied of the staged works, from the earliest of the lyric tragedies Cadmus et Hermione (1673) and Alceste (1674), to the later and rightfully famous Armide (1686). Much of the basis for debates between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Philippe Rameau in the 1750s came from musical material, especially recitative, in Armide.

* * *

On the livrets, and the Quinaultian tradition, sources are extensive. For a consolidating piece, try the review of Buford Norman by John Hajdu Heyer, in the Journal of Seventeeth-Century Music.

If you wish to extend your survey beyond musical or textual matters, the following are of note. (1) Rebecca Harris-Warrick has written on dance in the Lullian tragédie en musique, on the ballet de cour, and dance in the Lullian era more generally. (2) Jean Bérain (1638–1711) is an important figure in painting, engraving, and set design in the Lullian era. The briefest possible sketch of his significance appears here or possibly here. (3) Remember, also, that Lully and Quinault had precedents, much as some scholars may not want to admit. Be sure to look into Robert Cambert and Pierre Perrin. (4) Finally, Bruce Gustafson has written extensively on French harpsichord music and is publishing editions of it with The Broude Trust and A–R Editions. He is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Franklin & Marshall College. He knows a ton about Lullian matters, operatic and otherwise.

That about does it for my knowledge of Lully, at least for the moment. Last but not least, with a grain of salt, is a certain article on the history of French opera. It is monstrously unscholarly, but does succeeed in taking you, succinctly, through a very large amount of material from the dawn of French operatics to Poulenc.

Enter the irascible Rameau, known for his beautiful, if difficult, opéras and significant, if prolix, theoretical treatises. Mine is hardly the earliest or most recent word on flaws in the composer’s prose style. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had taken Rameau to task on many occasions, for many different things, but he remarked in the most bittersweet way on Rameau’s Traité de l’harmonie (1722), which had all but put Rousseau off music theory for its verbosity. One passage in Les Confessions is perfectly explicit: reading Rameau was rough going.

Now that I was beginning to read music fairly well, the next thing was to learn composition. The difficulty was to find someone to teach me, for I did not expect to learn by myself, with only my Rameau Traité for assistance, and there was no one in Savoy who knew anything of harmony. I still did not give up studying my Rameau. By hard work I finally managed to understand it and to make a few small efforts at composition, the success of which encouraged me.

Hard work, hard work, Rousseau laments.

The effort it had taken to plow through the Traité was something Rousseau would hold against Rameau years later, when musical and aesthetic criticism fairly bristled with polemics about simplicity, expressivity, and French and Italian opera. But Rousseau was not the only critic of Rameau’s opacity as a writer. In the 1950s, Cuthbert Girdlestone praised Jean Le Rond d’Alembert at Rameau’s expense, claiming d’Alembert’s Elemens de musique (1755) was pure poetry where Rameau’s theoretical works had been cumbersome complexities. “When one has fought one’s way, gasping and oppressed, through the eiderdown opacity of Rameau’s turgid prose,” Girdlestone writes, “the relief one feels on emerging into the crystal air of d’Alembert’s easy writing is inexpressible!”

Poor Rameau. I plan to reconsider historical carping about his self-expression, mainly by weighing ways he aimed at conceptual and textual clarity in the 1750s, the very same era key debates raged about French and Italian opera. The trick will be to write an essay about these issues that doesn’t spiral into prolixity itself.

And as for the odd title, no, not that monstrous Thing, nor this one, Heaven knows. I am far from the first to suggest oddities of this sort in Rameau’s music, or writings, or reception, although I look forward to reshaping the idea that complexities may have pervaded the composer’s textual works even more than his thoughts or musical compositions.

The public is warned that an epidemic disease is raging among the filles de l’Opéra, that it has begun to reach the ladies of the court, & that it has even been communicated to their lackeys; this disease elongates the face, destroys the complexion, reduces the weight, & causes horrible ravages wherever it takes root. One sees ladies without teeth, others without eyebrows, and some completely paralyzed, etc., etc., etc.

Few could know what this dire diagnosis meant this late in the century, long after the infamous Le Maure and Pélissier had reached the height of their popularity as performers in the 1720s and 1730s.

More to the point, I wonder what Théveneau de Morande specifically means. What disease is this? Syphilis can cause terrible deformation, as the case of Gérard de Lairesse shows, and yet I rarely hear of teeth falling out of heads or eyebrows disappearing along with all dignity and muscle control. Théveneau de Morande may have been one of the finer specimens of Grub Street, but his chops as a diagnostician leave me wondering just what was coursing through the Opéra, and French court life, in the decades preceding the Revolution.

Part of what bothers viewers confronted with a production such as this is a rupture in what might be thought of as an aesthetics of correspondence in opera. In the wake of Wagnerian thought, we expect the visual, musical, and textual dimensions of operatic works to cohere and correspond, unfolding as they do in the same temporal dimension, even if they ultimately act on distinctly different sensory domains. When stage action is radically at odds with the immutable dimensions of music and text in a given operatic work, we lose our sense that the piece as a whole presents a unified aesthetic vision, to say nothing of the fact that undue license in staging bespeaks irreverence toward the livret, a kind of antagonism turned inward on the work itself.

Consider, for instance, Argie’s second-act ariette “Je vole, Amour,” framed both by Rameau’s instrumental interlude for the danse des Paladins and by charming projected images of conductor William Christie‘s manicured French garden.

That these scenes foreground modern costume and contortion at the expense of the drama inherent in the sung livret is evidence that the postmodernity of productions such as this (and perhaps also this) significantly downplays distinctions that would have been far clearer during the eighteenth century. These historical distinctions, including the generic subtleties of recitatif and air, the versification and declamation of the livret, and differences of scoring and orchestral manipulation relative to French and Italian practice, recede into the background in the Montalvo production, which instead appeals to the idea that modern audiences most value works that strike them on a kinesthetic level. Indeed Montalvo’s emphasis on the physiological spectacle of dance, further amplified by the loud, bright costuming decisions of Hervieu, makes this production one in which the sheer physicality of performance upstages the poetry and symbolism of the livret. The visual spectacle of the production even competes with Rameau’s music for what best captures our attention both during and after its performance.At the same time, the connection Montalvo attempts to establish with his audience is less an invitation to understand the staged works of Rameau in historical context than an invitation to reconsider and revalue them altogether.

What the Montalvo production would seem to suggest is that Rameau’s oft-cited musical and dramaturgical radicalisms have a curious way of sticking with him, that the composer’s music and livret can withstand ruptures in their visual representation because these sonic and textual elements were sufficiently resistant to an aesthetics of correspondence even in their original historical context.

Not the kind of stuff you were expecting from a former Boston audio blogger, you might say. And you would be right. While I enjoyed writing on independent rock for a couple years there, the time had finally come for the end of Hello Gina. Archives are gone, pictures are gone, the whole site is gone; but I like to think it still lingers in memory. Readers and fellow writers were far too generous for that not to be the case. There are some tremendous acts out there to follow, and I am grateful to have read, listened, and puzzled alongside them. The question I keep turning over at this point is whether I might find a middle road between these extremes, between academic metabanter of the musical sort and garage rock antics captured in prose and pictures. If I start edging toward an answer, you may see it in an upcoming post.

Mais elle fit dans le monde plus de bruit que les Castelly, les Rochois et les Antier, par sa beauté, par ses aventures et surtout par son humeur belliqueuse.

What I find especially interesting in this report is the intersection of two tropes I never anticipated finding in the same place at the same time. The first of these is the metaphor of noise, which pervades the pedagogical literature on instrumental music and singing, usually accompanying hesitations about the display of difficulty in musical performance. Noise and difficulty fade in and out of ill repute in music criticism of the French Enlightenment, the one turning music into the other. What is interesting in the account of Touchard-Lafosse is that the noise metaphor seems to have switched registers, hopped ship in the discourse, standing not for the disintegration of musical meaning or the incoherence of a given performance but for the problematic symbolism of women in the theater. As Georgia Cowart has pointed out, this was something that had troubled French writers since the ancien régime.

The second, more common trope here involves setting singers over and against each other to highlight their respective talents or troubles. Of course little is surprising about this kind of comparison. As Charlotte-Elisabeth Aïssé famously described, so heated had the debate become about the merits of the singers Marie Pélissier and Catherine Nicole Le Maure in the 1720s and 30s that swords were nearly drawn in the theater parterre, and Pélissier’s name circulated in anagrammatic form as Pilleresse (“female pillager”) and Pille le reste (“pillage the rest of them”). It might be interesting to know whether conflicts of opinion about Pélissier and Le Maure reached a noisy din in and of themselves, or whether French critics reserved their references to racket solely for those moments when they felt the powerful force of female reputation exerting itself in the public or the press.