vita  brevis  ars  longa

brad   mehldau       elegiac   cycle

-  liner notes  -  by Brad Mehldau

 

vita brevis ars longa

One of the qualities of art that attracted me initially was its seemingly mystical ability to raise up the everyday experience of life and transfigure it, give it beauty. Being exposed to new music, literature, and the like was never a discovery for me. On the contrary, it was always a confirmation of something shared between myself and its creator, an overlap of sentiments, if you will. But a novel, a piece of music, a painting, would go one step further, a crucial step: It would nurture and embrace this sentiment, no matter how unappealing it might be, and give it a facelift or two, using all the trickery and witchcraft of its medium. This process is explained by Thomas Mann's character, Tonio Kröger, who gives us a rather fatalistic dictum: "The artist must be unhuman, extra-human; he must stand in a queer aloof relationship to our humanity; only so is he in a position...to represent it, to present it, to portray it to good effect. The very gift of style, of form and expression is nothing more than this cool and fastidious attitude towards humanity.... For sound natural feeling, say what you like, has no taste."
     Art seems to say to its recipient, "This is what you are, I understand." Thus an acknowledgment, and kinship. Because of this commonality, a breaking of bread takes place between artist and beholder--at once a sacrament and a celebration. Again, from a tender age, there was a mystical feeling to all of this for me: I got to partake in a communion with someone who might have been dead for centuries! To use a vague catch-word, art was the first evidence I had of something spiritual, in the sense that its essence is invisible, ungraspable, non-perishable:  eternal.
Another Thomas, the historian Carlyle, said: "Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die." Posterity won't let these very words die more then a century later! But evidence of the indestructible quality of "truth or goodness" in art is more than a matter of posterity. It's a comforting knowledge, one that I carry in a world where nothing around me seems permanent.

     Human Condition 101. Perhaps the most commonplace everyday experience of life is: death, in all its manifestations. On a deep, inner level, there is a fear of our own end, that paradoxically drives us to live and create. There are the deaths of loved ones, taken away without our consent. Death is a metaphor--end of a relationship, leaving a city you lived in for years, losing a job, giving a garage sale, throwing away your favorite shoes that have had it. Or, willful deaths--when you've got to part with something you love because it's the very thing that's killing you. Worst of all, maybe, is the death of hope:  resignation.

elegies

I've always been attracted to elegiac works of art, that mourn so many kinds of loss, from the most profound to the most prosaic death of them all--what the French aptly call "la petite mort." There are concrete examples that clearly mourn the loss of a person or people. Musical compositions like Charles Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," or John Coltrane's "Alabama." But there are so many works that aren't elegies proper, yet are elegiac in character. Much of Brahms' late music, for example. Often, we find an elegiac strain in the late period of any artist's output: the poignancy of Bill Evans' 1977 rendition of "You Must Believe in Spring" or Chet Baker's achingly ironic late take on "Blame It On My Youth." Laments--lamenting the loss of springtime and youth.
     In literature as well, an elegiac strain is often apparent, objectified, lamenting the death of a cultural epoch: Thomas Mann's Gustav Aschenbach symbolically mourns the death of romanticism in Death In Venice, and in his Doctor Faustus, the protagonist/composer Adrian Leverkühn loses his soul to the devil in order to create modern music--a metaphoric elegy on Germany's loss of innocence as a nation after the second World War. In post-war America, writers like Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs discerned that America had sold her soul as well--to a corporate Mephistopheles, ruler of an icy Cold-War hell. And they mourned--at times ecstatically--America's loss of naiveté. (Burroughs and Ginsberg, recently departed, are two I'll be singing elegies about for a long time.)

romantic freedom?

Often I think back to a conversation with my friend Evan. He told me once about an old professor of his who maintained that Romanticism never died, that something like punk-rock was a natural progression of the romantic freedom of the artist, with his or her ability to express himself independently, not at the whim of King or Bishop. It's a cute, general idea taken out of context, but I always come back to it, in an effort to figure out what it means to have a "romantic" temperament these days, to contextualize it historically. Why? Because I'm probably a hopeless romantic, one who would seek to take back an idea and restore it to its original meaning. Say "romantic" now and you've got people thinking about flavored-coffee commercials. How did that happen, and when?
     First, that word "freedom." The great thinkers of The Enlightenment sought freedom from an Idea of truth based on Scripture, and what they saw as a tyrannical demand that we blindly accept it. "Truth," said John Locke or Diderot, was best sought through a subjective process, within the individual's perceptions of the world around him. Beethoven, the granddaddy of individualism in Western music, took this freedom as his starting point. An avid reader of Rousseau, first enthralled by Napoleon and later deeply disillusioned by him, Beethoven was the true artist-child of The Enlightenment. The famous oboe solo that so wonderfully disrupts the recapitulation of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony suddenly emerges from the objective humanity-struggle of the full orchestra, and says to us. "Helloo! Anyone listening? It's the subject here...!" In an instant, everything's changed: Irony, humor, self-consciousness and doubt are all implied in that plaintive oboe-cry--sentiments that we now understand to be implicitly romantic.
     Beethoven, and an artist from more recent history, John Coltrane, are musical heroes of mine for the same reason. It was not a question simply of personal expression on their parts. Anyone can express themselves, but, alas, Tonio Kröger has told us that this isn't enough for art--"sound natural feeling" in itself "has no taste." Truer words were never spoken. Romanticism opened up a can of worms: the opportunity for any knucklehead to grind out "art" from their own personal outhouse. Beethoven and Coltrane's crowning achievement was that their subjective creations were and still are universal. How? Hegel identified a process he called Aufhebung or "sublation." He referred to a method of logic that simultaneously contains and overcomes all previous knowledge--not either-or, but "both-and." Apply this principle to any creative act, and there's the potential for a kind of liberating paradox--Freedom! When I listen to Beethoven and Coltrane, the wonder and pleasure I experience is due to this: However violently their music broke from the past, it nevertheless subsumes that past within it. As a listener, you partake of the timeless "truth or goodness" that Carlyle identifies. Whether Beethoven or Coltrane were setting out to make "timeless" art is irrelevant. But they were dead serious about making music to enrich people's lives, and not just reflect the shittiness around them.
     This needs clarification. The enrichment is not a moral one. For a while now, often in the field of literary criticism, it has been the fashion to "deconstruct" texts from an ethical standpoint--"Shakespeare lived and wrote in the male-dominated society that was Jacobean England. That's why King Lear's a misogynist!" The Romantic spirit presupposes that we'll leave morality to the moralists. Art will not help you to Love Thy Neighbor, but in your free time from hating him, you can listen to music, read a book, and have that confirmation alluded to earlier, which is a kind of exaltation that has nothing to do with morality. Reading a review of a movie these days that's informed by the artistically impotent agenda of political correctness gives me the same kind of embarrassment as when I read Plato's take on music, where he talks about the benefits or dangers of each Greek mode:  The lonian is good and will inspire work and productivity, but watch out for the Phrygian! It can lead to all sorts of sex orgies.... It's comforting to know that this sort of moralistic barking up the wrong tree is as old as Plato. Since I was a kid, Oscar Wilde's famous dictum that art serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever has variously enraged and intrigued me. These days I understand his words to be a defense of that artistic autonomy from moral obligation that's so vital to the Romantic enterprise, albeit expressed in his characteristically ironic, lighthearted way.
     Back to the real world for a moment. The big lesson of the 20th Century for me is that freedom often leads to more tyranny, that there's plenty of slippage in that duality. Freedom from moral obligation in the political or ideological realm leads to the tyranny of fascism. These days, freedom of speech in the media can result in a kind of tyranny of information that we have no choice but to be exposed to. The politically correct agenda that speaks in the name of the oppressed can be oppressive as hell in it's one-sidedness. Art for me has everything and nothing to do with all that disturbing stuff. Confirming Wilde again, the nature of art, like philosophy, is that it comes on the scene when the shit has already hit the fan, as a kind of exalted commentary on what's passed. Much of the philosophy and art of this century is informed by an aching yen for some prelapsarian innocence that got sabotaged amidst humanity's blunders (elegy). The Romantics proper summoned up a vision of the Renaissance and even Antiquity. What do we look back to?

sick of irony

Elegies...Romanticism...bygone days...obsession on the past, throwbackism? If that's the case, I'm not alone. To be sure, I'm a child of my time--us Gen-Xers glom onto the cheddary residue of our recent past with a glee that's more than a little suspect. "Gone but not forgotten," we say with irony (alas, always with irony), "are the days of disco...." (The pitifully funny aspect of this phenom is that oftentimes we were only six or seven years old when the schlock we're worshipping was being produced.) Andy Warhol is our Oscar Wilde, our trickster-moralist who told us that it's all about 15 minutes of fame. Did we catch his irony? What arises often is a kind of phony immortality, a parody on the very idea--all well and good as long as we don't miss the joke in all that. Parody, pastiche, self-conscious irony layered on top of irony in a movie that knows it's a movie that knows it's a movie...these are the tools we use to represent the world around us. Often, there's a defeatist ring to all that--"What's left? Why bother? Who cares?"  In Mann's Doctor Faustus, with grim humor, the devil gives the composer Leverkühn these words of sarcastic wisdom:  "Convince yourself that the tedious has become interesting because the interesting has become tedious." This potentially defeatist outlook on any current creative enterprise is to me nothing more than the legacy of Romanticism. When folks became enlightened, art followed suit. No longer at the service of church or state, Beethoven created Wilde's  "Art for Art's Sake." Observing this autonomy, Beethoven's contemporaries Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis noted that now art had the ability to comment on itself and called this phenomenon Romantic Irony. Whatever Postmodernism may be, in artistic matters it seems to be just this: a kind of sickness of our endless commentary within the work, on the work. We've grown weary of our ironies..."Enough!"

immortality?

Has music "suffered"?  By my definition, music itself can't "suffer", that's a false personification of something which is truly immortal. But our perception of it has perhaps been blurred by all the commodities at our disposal. We've seen the advent of sampling: Take a funky beat from a '70s LP, blow some licks over it, and you've got Acid Jazz. Why bother to get a real drummer who can lay down a groove? Every groove is at our disposal already....The problem with all these hybrids is that they're so goddamn impermanent:  Like the technology that spawns them, they're gone with the blink of an eye. We always return to the original. It didn't take long to figure out that Acid Jazz was just bad Funk. The ever shorter and shorter life span of each trend perpetuates a sentiment that's characteristic of some of our jazz critics these days:  a fetishistic obsession with "Masters." To be a Master you must do one or more of the following:  A.) Imply, with the help of Yes-Men, that you are nothing short of a Messiah;  B.)  Rise from prolonged, unexplainable obscurity;  C.)  Have a good portion of your work recorded before 1965; D.)  Die.
     To speak of creating anything  "timeless" today has a whiff of ludicrous naiveté. Bad faith like that is easy to understand. The phony immortality that the media presents us with is impermanent in the worst sense. It hard-sells us a bill of goods and cynically pre-writes our emotional response, giving an illusory sense of closure. This dupes us into buying the next flavor of the week. A typically frightening example of this kind of tyranny is soundtrack music on real-world news events being reported. What the hell's going on? Used for the hard sell like this, Romantic Irony becomes a twisted off-spring of itself. It says, "We'll do the commenting for you, just stay nice and dumbed-down." And the comment is interchangeable whether it's Desert Storm or flavored coffee. When our experiences become commodified, when we can "access" sex on the internet, in a profound sense we're no longer  experiencing  anything at all. "Experience" implies that the event will stay in our  memory, and the sum of these events will shape our understanding of the world. But this is all about forgetting, denying. So count me out of "The Information Age." To deify information is to pray to a legless stump--fetishism, nothing more.
The media has manufactured a demented cult of youth, staging festivals of bad faith that culminate in sacrificial killings. It clings to an image of the young while at the same time leaving a trap-door close by. Everything has an expiration date and the spin doctors have us channel-surfing in a bleary haze of memory loss. All this can have a sad, tragic effect:  It distracts us from our mortality.

mortality!

Alas--life is short, art is long. Great music packs a primordial punch. And when the wind is knocked out of you, something great takes place:  You get to feel your own mortality.  The role of time is crucial.  Music doesn't just represent time, it moves  through time, and the listener experiences that passing. What's the feeling? That tingling in your stomach, that sweet ache in your gut, that tickly weakness that creeps over the body when you're pulled into the music? It's a kind of death-feeling, in a place where ecstasy and mortality-fear overlap.  Rilke told us in one of his elegies that our perception of beauty is just the beginning of terror.... The process of improvisation is a kind of affirmation of mortality:  Even in the moment you're creating something, it's already gone forever, and that's precisely its strength. Improvisation would seem to solve the problem of death by constantly dying as it's being born. It scoffs at loss, and revels in its own transience.
     Whether music is improvised or written, it has the ability, in its time-bound fashion, to play on our  memory.  In matters of form, the closest models for my elegiac effort are the memory-music of late Beethoven and Schumann, works that are  cyclical. A theme that appears in the beginning is referred to and developed through time, until it comes back to us, transfigured. What we gain is two-fold:  the experience that time grants us, and the comfort of something ineluctable that always returns despite our own transience. Amidst all its fractured ironies, art can still mirror the part of life that's about hope, faith. It says:  Whatever feeling you may have that something's ending forever is illusory. Everything cycles around again and again--within a single day, within a cultural epoch, within a millennium. And what we gain each time through propels us towards the Manifestation of God.

     Dying, being remembered, music sings an elegy to itself, beautifying the "everyday" loss around us, showing us how intimate we can be with death. So an elegy can have this purpose:  To celebrate those very things that make us mortal.

     Brad Mehldau
     1999

 

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