I love flying. I never get tired of aerial views. Would anyone disagree that the two best ways to see the sun rise or set are by the sea and in the air? In addition to the undiminishing romanticism such vistas hold for me, I love long flights for the uninterrupted stretch of reading time they offer.
We just returned from a 13-day recital tour of the Mediterranean region, beginning in Rome and ending in Barcelona. I will write about the voyage and the experiences of singing Neapolitan songs and opera in Naples, surrounded by Giordano and Solimena frescoes, singing Puccini in the church in Lucca where he was baptized and later played the organ, and other adventures. Soon.
But first I want to write about temperament.
Stuart Isacoff's engaging little book on that subject (Temperament: The Idea that Solved Music's Greatest Riddle. Knopf, 2001), has been sitting on my shelf awaiting such an airborne reading opportunity since I acquired it in 2002.
He deftly navigates the historical worlds of music, philosophy, mathematics, religion and myth in a book devoted to the evolution of the tuning system that ultimately led to the equal-tempered scale in use for most Western music written since Bach's time.
Indeed, Bach's keyboard masterpiece, The Well-Tempered Clavier was directly influenced by the myth-inspired work from 1715 of Johann Fischer, Ariadne Musica. Like Ariadne's mythological thread which Theseus used to find his way out of the labyrinth after slaying the minotaur, Fischer's work snakes its way through the series of keys by exploiting the chromatic possibilities of the newly emergent tonal system.
(Enquiring readers are referred to earlier posts below for more cryptic connections on Ariadne, Labyrinths, myth and art. For more info on tonality and the history of tuning systems, Isacoff's book is an excellent point of departure).
One of my favorite young composers is British-bred, New York City-based Tarik O'Regan. The first series of a cappella works of his I explored were the three motets from Sequence for St Wulfstan (the Chorale performed the middle motet, O vera digna hostia last spring).
One can be forgiven for assuming that same Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, was also Wulfstan, the former Cantor of Winchester. Wulfstans are everywhere in medieval England. The former was one of at least two Wulfstan II's. So, be pleased to know the latter Wulfstan, Cantor of Winchester, was among the first to stop his ears as 70 men pumped air through the 400 pipes of the newly built organ of Winchester Cathedral, which first bellowed and resounded throughout the city of the same name near the end of the 10th century (before either Wulfstan II was allegedly born).
The development of keyboard instruments played a not uncertain (though not uncomplicated) role in the labyrinthine road of temperament that winded from Winchester across the Channel, around the Continent and across several seas in the ensuing centuries.
As late as the early 20th century, the eminent, droll conductor Sir Thomas Beecham would describe the well-tempered timbre of the harpsichord as sounding like two skeletons copulating on top of a roof. Conductors all aspire to the stand-up comedy stage or the pulpit. Or both.
Leonardo da Vinci is another important player in our multi-disciplined drama. Artist & scientist, poet & musician, the visionary discoverer was interested in "the shaping of the invisible." Let not such metaphysical rhetoric disguise his absolute commitment to discipline.
"Artists who practice without science are like sailors without a compass."
Every student of every age and trade does well to remember such advice in the lifelong quest to master (and then maintain) technique. This requires a certain temperament.
The multivalent uses of this word ("It's a verb! It's a noun! It's a gerund!") are another reason every reader of the English language should have at least the abridged ("Shorter") edition of the O.E.D. (Oxford English Dictionary).
"Temper" appears on p.3202 (6th edition of the Shorter OED). After 11 definitions of the noun and 15 of the verb (and examples via quotes from actual historical usage), the next entry is tempera ("ORIGIN Italian, in pingere a tempera paint in distemper").
Isacoff also mentions the French tempérer (to mix ingredients), the Olde English temprion (to regulate) and among many others, the original Latin's temperamentum variant meaning "to instill peace."
Josquin des Prez was among the earliest of composers to go on record against a performer's predilection for improvisation. With choleric temper, he complains to one such interpreter:
"You ass, if you wish to improve on finished compositions, make your own, but leave mine unimproved."
Isacoff's book is worth the read for such anecdotes alone. One of Whitman's quotes he cites could apply to the dance his book performs, "scooting obliquely high and low."
Galileo is one of the great Renaissance artists to challenge--and temper--the status quo allegiance to religious dogma. Such blind temperance was anathema to Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and other dissident visionaries (Ingrid Rowland's excellent Giordano Bruno: Philospher, Heretic didn't make it to the shelf until I'd read it, two days after its arrival. I first encountered Bruno in the modern-day Renaissance Mensch Hans Werner Henze's cantata Novae de Infinito Laudes. Bruno's 16th c. poetry, an ecstatic vision of unity and infinity, is the libretto for Henze's 20th c. oratorio).
The line between temperate and temperamental, as we understand it, is evident in Galileo's incisive credo:
"I do not believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."
Galileo, Bruno, da Vinci and company forged the way forward to what we aptly call the Enlightenment. Are our own schools still teaching this history? This literature? This science? This art?
On the way to the Enlightenment, Rousseau described what everyone who's ever experienced the joy of unbridled singing knows:
"Melody imitates the accents of language but has 100 times more energy than speech itself."
Descartes proclaimed cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am).
Canto ergo sum. I sing therefore I am.
The "Renaissance Man" was so-called because his curiosity took him in apparently divergent directions. The resulting life-well-lived of adventure and discovery (via the intellectual and aesthetic challenges of making connections) is a primary conduit of those experiences we deem meaningful.
"The great merging" of these connections and the unity of knowledge common to both the Cartesian and Taoist worlds still emanate like echoing vibrations across time and space.
The inextricably bound solar systems of music, poetry and art, unlike Ariadne's spool of thread, cannot be unwound.
We may tamper with all means of temperament.
Temper our temperamental tempers with reason, rhetoric or religion.
But our temperatures are always temperable when creativity is temperative.
Vissi d'arte.
Vissi d'amore.
Et saecula saeculorum...
No comments:
Post a Comment