Reading Asterios Polyp's Chart

In my "Future of English Studies" course this week we read David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp.  It's a wonderful graphic novel that you should go read.  Then you can come back and read this post.  I'll do my best, as always, to explain my astrological analysis in non-astrological terms.

Doing a natal chart for a fictional character is always tricky business, but in the case of Asterios Polyp I feel justified.  The book itself draws attention to Asterios's birthday and sign, as one of his key companions in the story is a self-proclaimed "Goddess" who studies astrology and, hilariously, lets Asterios know not to worry "if you fall in love with me, everyone does."  She's a Pisces, we're told, but she must be an Aquarius cusp or a Leo rising the way she comes across in the book.  She's, uh, forward.  And one of only two other characters as opinionated as Asterios.

While Asterios, as a rational thinker, dismisses astrology and its nebulous determinations and interpretations, I thought it might be interesting to see whether his chart tells us anything more about him than "he's a Cancer-Gemini cusp."  Now, the book tells us a few things - birth date, and a number of significant life events - but it gives no time or place, so we have to do a little rectification.  Guessing at place is easy enough.  Asterios lives and works in New York, and his parents are immigrants from Eastern Europe (hence the "Polyp," a shortening of a longer, presumably Greek, name).  Assuming that Asterios was born in New York City seems safe enough.

Time is a little trickier.  I ended up deciding on 5AM, for a number of reasons.  First off, we learn that Asterios is born a twin - his brother dies - after a 30+ hour labor.  For whatever reason, I imagine the doctor's decision to perform a c-section as happening at the end of a second long night of labor.  As for astrological reasons, the first argument for this birth time is that it puts most of Asterios's planets on the Eastern side of his chart.  Asterios is a fairly self-absorbed character who, moreover, is an architect used to shaping his own world.  That jives better with Eastern hemisphere of self-determination than Western.  Moreover, we learn that Asterios has not yet designed something that was actually built, so he's more of a theoretical architect.  That his Northern hemisphere is stronger than his Southern with a 5AM birth time supports this facet of his personality: despite his vociferousness and manifest brilliance, much of his work (Saturn) remains below the horizon (in the fourth house).

The other virtues of a 5AM birth time include a Piscean midheaven, supported by the positive and, I think, transformative relationship he has with our aforementioned Goddess and her family.  Also, Sagittarius - the sign of philosophy and higher education - fills most of the 6th house of work, another sensible configuration given that Asterios works in Academia.  Finally, and most importantly, this birth time puts his Sun in Cancer in the first house, but keeps his ascendant as Gemini.  The book as a whole is largely concerned with how Asterios deals with duality, and so a Gemini ascendant makes sense, as does a first house Sun, as Asterios is extremely self-absorbed for much of the book (it is worth noting that he is a progressed Leo, too, making him something of a showman).

Ultimately, we can't rely too heavily on the houses here, despite how sensible the rectified chart looks.  Nevertheless, they can serve as guideposts for interpreting the signs and planets.

Without further ado, here's the chart.

Asterios Polyp Rectified Chart - Generated by OpenAstro

I won't go into too much detail here.  There's a lot here and, to even my surprise, it fits Asterios extremely well.  Indeed, the chart's correlation to what we know about Asterios as a character is strong enough that I wonder whether Mazzucchelli consulted an astrologer while he was writing.  Anyway, let's look at the highlights.  What really jumps out here?

Short (technical) answer: T-Squares.  Big, messy t-squares.  Mercury in Gemini squares a Saturn-Moon Conjunction, Squares Chairon.  Indeed, throw in Jupiter and you're on the verge of a Grand Cross.

Non-technical answer: Asterios has serious conflict and difficult in his chart.  His workmanlike attitude belies the difficulty he has in translating his work into reality.  Nevertheless, he's so deeply invested in what he does that he makes it a part of his home.  He has a strong aesthetic that he must see realized in his home, and even slight deviation from his expected and desired order of things is profoundly upsetting to him.

This quality he has a hard time expressing and understanding, tending to overwhelm his interlocutors precisely because he's not as self-assured as he seems.  He struggles to communicate how deeply he is what he does and says.  That is, ideas are not merely ideas to Asterios, but are rather a core part of his personality.  This multi-faceted sense of self is so upsetting to Asterios that he subsumes it in his subconscious, refusing to realize that the way he lives is peculiar and personal, instead externalizing it as a philosophical position.

Because of this internal conflict, duality takes the place of complexity in Asterios's thought.  In a beautiful piece of astrological serendipity, Chairon sets off both the internal and external senses of self with a deep, personal wound.  For Asterios, this wound is his dead brother.  Indeed, his splitting the world into dualities is his attempt to heal the loss of his twin.  Not only that, in healing himself - so he thinks - he finds a means by which he might heal others.  That is, he can bring them a simplifying dualism.

That Asterios does not understand that dualism is, of course, the irony at the heart of his character, and the quality that sets the plot in motion.  The story is very much an effort by Asterios to better connect with complexity.  Fittingly, this is represented by the place to which his t-cross opens up: Pisces in the 10th house.  Asterios has Jupiter - a planet of growth - in Pisces, and it is no surprise that his growth throughout the book is both Piscean - in the sense of embracing emotional complexity - and social, as signified by the 10th house.

There are other interesting aspects in Asterios's chart, but this t-cross (which is nearly a grand cross) is really the heart of the thing.  How well it fits perhaps raises a question: how much am I mapping the book onto the chart, and how much am I mapping the chart onto the book?  That is, which is prior?

The answer, of course, is neither.  Yes, my familiarity with Asterios as a character colors my reading of his chart, but should I know nothing about him, I would come to similar, if more abstract, conclusions.  The forces at work here - the important planets, signs, and houses - have very broad meanings that, nevertheless, are narrow enough to allow only particular interpretations.  That the events of Asterios Polyp fit so well with that interpretive baseline, yielding a rich, specific chart seems to me no accident.

Now, the question is, does this tell us anything about Asterios we didn't already know?  Perhaps not.  But it does give me a different language through which I might explain the things I sensed in reading.  Just like writing a reflection on a text, doing a chart might open up linguistic and artistic interpretive pathways that would otherwise stay closed.

To the skeptic, then, that opening up of new pathways is the value of astrology.  It is not about fate.  It is about understanding.

Listening to Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, Part Four: Rebuilding a Melody

As usual, check out parts one through three by clicking their respective links on ye olde sidebar.

What do you do after a catastrophe?

Last time we looked at the wholly remarkable "train wreck" which punctuates (with several exclamation points) the development of the Third Symphony.  It is, in short, a total musical catastrophe.  The development section, up to the train wreck, is a seething mass of competing themes already.  Indeed, even without our catastrophe and the third theme to follow, this development section would have been unusual in Beethoven's time for its length and intensity.  But the train wreck raises the bar.  It plunges the piece into a warlike chaos, destabilizing any sense of harmonic, melody, or even rhythmic balance.

So what do you do after a catastrophe?  Beethoven, in a sense, had written himself into a corner with the train wreck.*  So he responds by doing something completely new and different.  He plays us a melody.



* In a hilarious understatement and/or misunderstanding and/or ironic quip the editor of the Liszt piano transcription notes, in the space between the train wreck and the theme to which we are, by degrees, coming: "Here the genius of Beethoven saw the necessity of a change."  Um, yeah.  Considering the entire piece just fell apart, I don't know that it takes a genius to see that something pretty amazing has to happen.  No, the genius is the one who can put it back together.**

** Scratch that, the genius is the one who is so confident in his ability that he knows he can put it back together, and therefore chooses to break it in the first place.  The "genius of Beethoven" saw this whole thing coming a mile away.  Then again, maybe that's the ironic quip: the necessity of a change is not in this piece, but in composition itself.

Not to say that the previous two themes are not melodies.  They are, in a rudimentary, arpeggiated kind of way.  But this one actually is a melody.  It includes tones that are not the one, three, or five of the tonic chord.  Said another way, it moves stepwise instead of by chord tones.  Said another way, it's something you can actually sing without sounding totally ridiculous.*

*Seriously, try singing the opening theme with this lyric I was cursed enough to hear: "Oh my word, it's Beethoven's Third, again."  It may be a fantastic theme, but I defy you to take it seriously as a melody.

What do we make of this melody?  Well, on its own it's quite pleasant.  It's not harmonically all that complex (just a series of tonic to dominant and back; about as simple as it gets).  It's rhythmically straightforward.  It's, well, a song.  Which is perhaps nothing special in itself, but remember how we got here.



You see, what strikes us as a simple, pleasant, but largely uncomplicated melody on its own is transformed into a kind of symphonic messiah in context.  This third theme literally saves the movement from total chaos, swooping in just after some of the most dissonant, ugly, weird chords that any composer has dared write into a symphony.  It's simplicity is chief virtue: we are rebuilding a melody.  Indeed, we are rebuilding melody itself.

Following the metaphor from the last post, this theme is an attempt to recreate that beautiful life of the Viennese waltz after bombardment has destroyed the city.  It is not melancholy, particularly, even if it has a touch of minor tonality.  Rather it is resignedly determined, complete with a simple-minded view that everything can and will be alright, that the city can and will be rebuilt.

But war - and music - is never that simple.  For where do we go after this theme but once more unto the proverbial breach.



The third theme - as you may have noticed in the first two snippets - doesn't resolve itself.  Instead it launches right back into the opening theme.  That opening theme, far from being a return to "normal," becomes a catalyst for rapid and unpredictable harmonic motion.  We sway from major to minor and back, we change keys, and we end up back at the third theme, only a half step (!) higher.  This time the third theme isn't around for long, either, taking a new melodic turn before leading us into a new statement of the opening theme in which it's not clear where our attention should go.  Are we meant to follow the broiling flutes, or the arpeggios in the bass?

This potential second train wreck is stopped by a harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic reset that is not quite as intense as the one that introduced the third theme, but is jarring nonetheless.  Instead of chaos, we see a kind of sickeningly quiet order, a plucking of pizzicato strings set against the tension of a sustained dominant chord.  And then, of course, the horn comes in (early), and we're back to the opening of the symphony in the form of the recapitulation, where things are very much the way they were when we started.  Except, they're completely different.  All of which will be the subject of part five.

Anyway, the purpose of all that is to give us context for thinking more about this third theme.  As a piece of music, this third theme is hardly amazing.  As a piece of narrative, it is brilliant.  Standing between total destruction and the remainder of the development section, it speaks to a kind of naive optimism that, once beaten down, cannot help but return again (and once against get sent away).  Now, I don't think that Beethoven means to discount this theme, but I also don't think that we can take it at face value.

What would taking it at face value look like?  Well, I think it would be easy to look at the third theme and to say it's a nice maneuverer, a clever ploy to allow Beethoven to go boom boom and get away with it.  It's easy to say it's pretty, and nice, and beautiful.  It's easy to say that it's genius.  It's a lot harder to say why it's all of those things, however, and harder still to say that, maybe, we're not supposed to actually like this theme.

That is, we are supposed to like it, but only because it's so much nicer to listen to than the noise that came before it (or, for that matter, the strangeness that comes after it).  We like it by contrast.  But, as mentioned above, it's not a particularly great piece of music, nor does it really get its chance to play itself out.  No, I believe this theme is a stand in, a joke, a classic example of Beethoven thumbing his nose at his listeners (especially the uptight ones that would have really hated the train wreck).  It's a statement that, no, everything is not alright anymore.  In the face of the kinds of harmonic and melodic atrocities - so-called, anyway - Beethoven commits in the development section, the tradition of music cannot be the same.

While examining the opening theme, I talked about the infamous C#.  It raises questions about heroism, about music and narrative, about harmonic and melodic function.  This third theme, I think, starts to answer those questions, but in a subtle and subversive way.  If music is powerful, I asked, is it also dangerous?  The answer, in this development section, is yes.  Music is dangerous.  Music can change mediocrity into greatness, or vice versa.  Music can tell a story about power and conflict, music can persuade, music can frustrate and anger, music can inspire.  All of that makes music dangerous.

I don't think, to be clear, that it's the train wreck that is dangerous, for all of the chaos that it embodies.  No, it's this third theme that's the dangerous one, precisely because it's so perfect.  The chance for easy redemption, the opportunity to pretend that a revolution isn't really a big deal, these things are a danger.  And music, too, is a danger, if it chooses not to unfurl itself.  Before Beethoven composers rarely, if ever, wrote about themselves, about music, about power.  They wrote, largely, to be pleasing, to make money, and to praise God.  Beethoven does all of those things, but he also drives deeper, and in so doing unearths the flaw of the music of his predecessors (however great much of it was): it can't stand up to true musical force.

We have further to go in this movement, but I want to leave with a glimpse of the entire development section.  In the last two posts I've subdivided the development into two parts: pre-train wreck, and post.  It's worth listening to the whole thing as one unit.  I won't offer any more commentary, since the last two posts have more than enough.  Rather, I'll let the music do the talking.  Here's the entire development section of the Third Symphony. 

Listening to Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, Part Three: Catastrophe

To get to parts one and two, as well as the introduction, use the handy-dandy side bar.  These posts are listed just under the "search" and "subscribe" widgets.

"Catastrophe" is a Greek word, a combination of "strophe" - meaning turn - and "kata" - meaning down.  "Strophe" was used primarily to describe the actions of the chorus in Greek plays, with each choral poem either a Strophe or an anti-strophe, a figurative motion in one direction, or in another.  Catastrophe, then, is a total interruption of that process, a proverbial wrench in the works, a form-defying event in the course of the narrative.

In the development section of the first movement of Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, the listener confronts what can only be described as a catastrophe.  The common name of this section is "the train wreck," and it shows Beethoven at his most intense, most devious, and most, well, catastrophic.  Here's the development section of the opening movement, up to and including the "train wreck," but leaving out the resolution that follows (because that's the next post):



As you can hear, the beginning of the development is a tumultuous back and forth between the second theme (see part two) and the opening theme (see part one).  I think it's fair to say the development starts out relatively cohesive, but each repeat of either theme adds further and further chaos.  The opening theme starts to sway against itself, raising in pitch and intensity, the secondary theme finds itself beset by all kinds of strange counterpoint.  New melodies are introduced, adding tension due to their dominant feel and the urgency of the violins playing them.  Before long, the back-and-forth of strophe (the militant first theme) and anti-strophe (the pastoral second theme) collapses on itself in what can only be described as catastrophe.  As the piece bucks and writhes, it reaches its climax in the "train wreck," separated from the development below:



All semblance of meaningful melody or rhythmic progress disappears from the piece here.  While harmonically the progression still makes sense, that's hardly the point.  This section is barely, by the classical definition, even music.  So many of the chords are dissonant, the entire orchestra is blaring, and there is nothing to do but to push on from one horrible, full-voiced, dissonant chord to the next.

It's too easy to focus just on the train wreck itself, however, and that's why I've included the build-up to it, also.  If the first and second themes truly are incompatible - as I suggested earlier in this series of posts - it's no wonder that, once they were really forced to reckon with each other in the development section, they created a kind of musical conflagration.  A potentially helpful image, if an imperfect one, would be the Viennese elite at their dancing and partying (the second theme) suddenly beset by an invading revolutionary army.  The result is chaos, the destruction of the court itself, and along with it the decomposition (so to speak) of the courtly music to which the nobles were dancing.

A particularly interesting part of this collapse, to my mind, comes not in the loud and flashy places that jump out even during a cursory listening to the development.  No, there's a subtle trick Beethoven plays in the buildup to the train wreck, an inversion of the melodic and rhythmic quality of the second theme that says more about what's going on here than just about anything else.  Listen again to the last statement of the second theme before the train wreck, and then the passage that follows it and leads into our catastrophe:



Can you hear the rhythmic inversion?  Here again is a piece of the theme:



And here's the inversion:



The waltz is still there in the inverted version, but it's hidden behind a strange and different rhythmic emphasis.  All that's really different, actually, is that strong beat of the melody used to fall on the first beat of the measure, in the original theme, but instead falls on the second beat of the measure in the "inverted" version.  The result of this minor change, however, is a fundamental shift in the feel of the melody, a transformation from Viennese waltz to urgent escape from impending disaster.

That this variation of the second theme leads into the train wreck is telling.  Rather than returning to the opening theme, which has found some measure of stability in its back-and-forth washing earlier in the development (perhaps it's not a satisfying kind of stability, but like a pendulum, at least it's not going anywhere), it's the second theme that leads us into catastrophe.  And it does so by allowing itself to be broken, by succumbing to the chaos that surrounds it in the development section.

As for the train wreck itself, there's little to say except that it is completely different from anything in any symphony that comes before it.  As I said earlier, it would hardly be considered music by Beethoven's contemporaries, chiefly because of its dissonance and lack of melody, but also because it plays more of a narrative role than a musical one.  By pointing out the strange motions of the second theme, I hope I've helped you to see how the train wreck is not just a sudden and loud interruption, but rather an inevitable collapse after increasingly strained efforts to put the square peg of the second theme into the round hole of the symphony.

As a wrap-up to this post, I want to ask a couple of questions about meaning.  Well, a question anyway.  What, really, does all of this mean?  In the first couple of posts of this series, I've talked some about potential narrative interpretations we might impose on the symphony, but at the same time I've been hesitant to pick one and stick with it.  Even in this post, I've used the "Viennese nobles confront revolutionary army" idea, but I tell you know that it's only a crutch, a way to help getting at the music.

I suppose, as I listen more and more to the Eroica, as I dive deeper (and I'm diving deeper now than I did even when writing my thesis), I truly am starting to feel like the music has its own narrative, its own meaning, and its own mode of communication.  I don't think that's purely emotional, because I can trace it with some semblance of literary objectivity.  Nor do I think it's purely spiritual, because, while it's mysterious, I'm not sure how meta-physical it is (would, for example, I be able to follow the narrative in the same way were I deaf?).

No, I think the narrative of Beethoven's music is musical, and its meaning equally so.  It's unfortunate that we're stuck using words like "meaning" to describe a meaning that is non-linguistic, but then again isn't that exactly the point of this effort, to find a way to bridge that gap?  Ah, but the point is also to help bring myself (and my readers) closer to an understanding of that musical meaning, even if that understanding is fundamentally non-linguistic.  What I mean is, I will not be able to write a sentence that says: this is what the Eroica means, but I hope that, by sharing the process of trying to understand and - inasmuch as it possible - translate it, we might all get a little better at our music comprehension.

It is no accident, either, that the train wreck raises this conundrum.  I know of no moment in any other piece that is so direct an attack on the notion that music has no meaning, no narrative value on its own.  Then again, it remains one of the most difficult-to-penetrate moments in Beethoven's oeuvre, precisely because its lack of melodic structure makes it less "musical."  Perhaps, then, our next assay into the symphony will help, when we look at the third theme, the resolution of the catastrophe.

Interrogating the Internet, Part Three: Information

In spite of all the mean things I said about e-commerce in my last post, there is a notable exception to the Internet-as-giant-money-machine routine.  Wikipedia is a free website, a vast and successful experiment in crowd-sourcing, and a remarkable human accomplishment.  While the site still requires money to run, it is the rare enormous non-profit enterprise run truly for the good of mankind, and not for the good of some one man.

Wikipedia is the height of information on the Internet, but it is not the hub, nor is it perfect.  Like any source of information, it is constantly in flux, a battleground for ideology and interpretation.  That scholars often scoff Wikipedia does not make it less valuable, but it does indicate that, especially when highly specialized knowledge is involved, the site might be just as guilty of perpetuating myths or, at least, subtly flawed characterizations of information as it is deserving of praise for striving to make anything and everything available to the curious.  Of course, while the debate continues over Wikipedia's overall fidelity compared to traditional encyclopedias, there is no question that it is more comprehensive and more-userfriendly.  The "wiki" has spread far beyond wikipedia.org, and for good reason: behind the specific information presented on the site, there's a process for how to present information that has proven extremely effective.

As I said above, however, Wikipedia is not the hub of information on the Internet, because Google is.  Whereas Wikipedia is a non-profit organization dedicated primarily to providing articles on any and every piece of information available, Google is a for-profit, publicly traded search engine that, some time ago, began to reach far beyond search.  Google's success in part owes to the fact that, when the search engine battleground was still densely populated, Google chose to separate out "sponsored results" from organic ones, giving users the opportunity to make their own decision, rather than being forced towards some marketing campaign by a page worth of disguised but paid-for search results.  Google, internally, put this kind of decision under a broader heading: "don't be evil."

I won't venture into the question of whether Google has become evil, whether it has maintained it's plucky start-up idealism as it has become a publicly traded corporation, slowly but surely taking its place as one of the most successful companies - and certainly the most successful brand - in the world.  Rather, I want wrap up this post by talking about where information fits in the picture of the Internet, in light of the two organizations discussed here.

Can information ever be unbiased?  Probably not.  Any historical event, for example, will have dozens of different interpretations, even at the time that it occurred.  How much more so twenty years later, or a hundred, or a thousand?  What, then, can a provider of information do?  Wikipedia strives for an unbiased account, where possible, but its crowd-sourced mechanism for doing so is susceptible to the tyranny of the masses.  On the other hand, the expert - who pens the Brittanica entry, for example - is liable to skew information in favor of his own perspective, ignoring competing theories or interpretations, even if he does so subconsciously.  Especially troubling is not just interpretation, but hierarchy: not just what happened, but how important any given event - or other piece of information - is might also be debatable, and the cause or result of bias.

The Internet does nothing to change the conundrums of information, it merely makes them more pronounced.  Wikipedia, to my mind, has as good an approach as can be expected: tap into the knowledge of the masses, edit carefully and vigilantly, strive for a lack of bias even when impossible.  As a source for answers to factual questions, there is no better resource in the history of mankind.

Google's approach, meanwhile, is more complex.  As a search engine, it is not actually designed to provide the user information.  Rather, Google connects users with websites, websites which may contain information, but may (and usually do) also contain advertisements, interpretations, arguments, and other kinds of networks.  Google takes minimal responsibility for what you find on the other end of your search, and rightfully so, but it bears remembering that the output part of the search enginge experience is not merely fallible, but often malicious as well.

We might say the same about Wikipedia, of course, if in a different way, because we might say the same about information as a whole.  What the Internet does, I would argue, is that it elevates information by making it so sublimely accessible.  That we can answer almost any question about history, etymology, science, mathematics, sports, weather, or just about anything else almost instantly has made us almost too comfortable with information.  So much of our web-based learning, thanks to Wikipedia and Google, is the transmission and acquisition of information that we might not be doing so well on the critical thinking, interpretation, and creativity side of the equation.

Not that those things don't exist.  Indeed, I have no evidence to suggest that we, as a society or as a world, are any less creative or critical now than we ever have been.  Rather, my point is that, from my own experience, easy availability of information can inspire a kind of intellectual laziness that is far from fatal, but is troubling nonetheless.  Where we should see an opportunity to do more and better critical thinking thanks to the Internet, all-too-often we're satisfied merely to link from one piece of information to the next, as if connections alone comprised analysis.  Society wide, it seems to me that we're more interested in saying what a text (for example) reminds us of or what it resembles than we are in what it means, as if meaning were just another piece of networked information.

What does the Internet do, then?  It makes information readily available to anyone and everyone.  What doesn't it do?  It doesn't assess the validity and uncover the biases of that information, it doesn't interpret it, and it doesn't create meaning.  None of that is troubling, in itself, because those tasks are - to some extend - the exclusive right of the mind.  Rather, what is troubling is that it is so easy to believe that the Internet does assess validity and bias, does interpret, and does create meaning, and, indeed, that it does so better than we can.  Combined, especially, with the obvious but secret fact that the Internet is moved by money, first and foremost, and there is a strong incentive for information to be a commodity, for interpretation and meaning to be bought and sold.

Listening to Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, Part Two: Themes and Structure

Here's a link to Part One.  You can also navigate through the series using the "Beethoven Project Posts" on the right bar of the blog.

In the opening movement of the Eroica Symphony, Beethoven introduces no less than three primary themes.  The third theme - which is really the most remarkable one - we're not going to talk about yet, except to mention that it will happen later on at a surprising place in the piece.  The first two, however, are fair game even at this early juncture in our listening, because that's where they occur.

A word, before we take a look at those two themes, about sonata form.  You've undoubtedly heard the word "sonata" before, but may have assumed it refers to those solo piano (or maybe piano with violin) pieces like the Moonlight, Tempest, or Hammerklavier sonatas by Beethoven.  The root of the word, however, refers not to instrumentation, but to formal structure within a piece.  That formal structure was, up to and beyond Beethoven's time - usually present in the first movement of a symphony.  Sometimes you may even hear an opening movement referred to as "the sonata," but this is rare except among musicologists because of the confusion it causes.

What is "sonata form?"  In short, it's an A-A-B-A structure.  That is, there's an introductory "A" section - called in classical music the "exposition" - in which themes are introduced and developed, and at least one initial modulation* occurs.  That A section is then repeated note-for-note, though some recordings of longer works like the Eroica skip this repeat (including, incidentally, the Dudamel recording in our first post).  After playing the A section twice, the B section, or "development," ensues.  This is not unlike a "bridge" in modern popular music, in that it usually differs substantially from the original A section, but is still related thematically.  Development sections (before Beethoven and the Eroica in particular) were often very short departures from the main ideas of the piece, designed to wedge apart the initial exposition from the recapitulation to follow.

* A modulation is a departure from the original key, accomplished by invoking a dominant feel relative to a key that is not the actual tonic.  As a result, modulations usually move around either the circle of fifths or the circle of fourths, because keys a fourth or fifth away are closely related (they share all but one note) with the original tonic, making it easy to suggest a movement to a new key.

The recapitulation, then, is what follows the development.  It is a restatement of the introductory A section, for a third time, but usually with modifications.  As we'll see in the Eroica, this means there will be a very different treatment of the opening theme.  Likewise, where an early modulation usually results in the exposition being played mostly in a key other than the tonic, the recapitulation usually is designed to allow the entire first section to appear in the original key.  The result - for a trained listener who can hear such large-scale harmonic motions - is that the recapitulation is the first time the piece really feels like it's in the "right" key.

Sonata form is often bracketed with an introduction and/or a coda.  The Eroica does not really have an introduction, per se, except for maybe the first two big Eb Major chords.  It does, however, have a lengthy coda that comes after the recapitulation.  Indeed, the coda might be the richest, most complex, and most engaging part of the entire piece, so we'll be spending some time there later.  The reason for this is that, traditionally, the coda was used as a place to wrap things up and bring a piece to a nice flourishing finish.  In the opening of the Eroica, the coda is actually used almost as a second development section.  Material is reworked and reintroduced, developed in new ways, and synthesized unexpectedly.

Before we get there, however, we have to understand Beethoven's use of thematic material.  As mentioned, the Eroica has three primary themes, two of which appear early in the piece.  The first you've already hear, because it appears at the very beginning.  I've left in the opening chords, but they aren't properly part of the theme:



The second theme occurs not that much further in, and it sounds like this:



In contrast to the opening theme, it is, well, melodic.  Rather than overwhelming the whole orchestra - as the opening theme does after its initial statement* - this theme actually employs a variety of instruments, including winds and strings.  It is not quite sweet, and it is followed by, of course, further intensity (including the "horse galloping motif shortly afterwards), but it is still a departure from the rough, militant opening.

* I encourage you to go back to the first post and re-listen to the movement as a whole.  You'll see that, shortly before the second theme is introduced, this first theme is played by basically the entire orchestra all at once.

Which calls to mind one of the inherent contradictions of this first movement.  These first two themes - introduced a mere minute apart from each other - are so vastly, wildly, different for a reason.  That reason is related, furthermore, to the time signature of the piece.  We're in 3/4, the tempo of waltzes and minuets.  Listen to that second theme again.  Doesn't it sound a little like a waltz?  What is a dance doing in our little military march?

But, really, what is our military march doing in 3/4 time?  Marches - like the second movement - are usually written in 2/4.  The Eroica, however, is somewhere in between war-march and courtly-dance, between chaotic battle and refined elegance.  There is no question that it comes down, in the end, further on the side of tumult than tranquility, but it nevertheless has these moments, these spontaneous outbursts of simple joy amidst such momentous, revolutionary conflict.

Perhaps some light is shed on this strange duality by the form of the piece.  Despite the stretching and bending that Beethoven makes the sonata form do in this movement - pushing each part to its limit - we're still in sonata form.  If we take up, once again, questions about meaning and narrative, we might ask what it means to have a revolution that, nevertheless, maintains at least a semblance of the old order.  We might also ask who our waltzes are, whether they're Viennese noblemen and noblewomen who simply don't see and won't acknowledge the battles raging outside their courtly walls, or whether they're, instead, maybe the revolutionaries themselves, joyful at the prospect of victory.

As in the first post, I won't commit myself to a single interpretation, but I do want to start to forward a psychological angle here.  Beethoven's hero - regardless of his political and social intent - is above all Beethoven himself.  The Eroica, famously, is one of the first major pieces Beethoven composed after he learned definitively of his oncoming deafness.  It is a piece he intended to write as an affront to musical sensibilities of his time.  The revolution, then, is a musical one.  It's hero is Beethoven.  The themes, the quirks, the tumult and battle, and the sweetness are Beethoven's own.

It is so easy to picture Beethoven as he is in movies like Immortal Beloved, a surly, overwrought archetype of human suffering.  Beethoven was not that.*  Beethoven was extremely intelligent and witty, fundamentally kind-hearted, if a bit short-tempered, and above all intensely hard-working and devoted to his art.  That he found joy in music is unquestionable, as the Ninth Symphony undoubtedly proves, but even here in the third the beginnings of that project are visible.  We'll see much more of Beethoven's joy as we move through the other movements (especially the finale), but even here it begins to be present.

* That was Chopin.

The second theme, in this listening, is the dance of Beethoven's spirit, a waltz that - under the oppressive weight of his oncoming deafness and the isolation that will inevitably bring - is brushed aside too easily.  While it appears again and again in this first movement, it always feels secondary, so much so that I recall many arguments in my music classes at St. John's as to whether it should really count as the "second theme" at all, it feels so weak and out of place.  But that, I suppose, is exactly the point.  Unassertive and transitory as it is, this second theme is a linchpin for the piece as a whole, an answer to the roaring questions the first theme asks about the purpose and meaning of human life.

Is it a satisfactory answer to those questions?  Maybe, maybe not.  Regardless, it certainly isn't acknowledged as such in this movement.  And yet it's still there, dancing along throughout the battle, in spite of the battle, or maybe even because of the battle.

And to think, this isn't even the interesting theme.

Art and Abstraction in Waterston's "Clearing"

As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking, reading, and writing about (and listening to) music, I've always struggled to understand the visual arts.  Actually, my problem does not stem from music, but from language.  I'm a linguistic thinker, a slave to narrative and context, a conversationalist and - to the occasional chagrin of companions - a deliverer of monologues that resemble my blog posts.  In short, I am in love with language, with words, with how sentences are constructed and how stories are told and how arguments are made.  Little wonder, then, that I struggle to uncover the meaning of pictures.  "What," I ask, "Does meaning even have to do with it?  Meaning is a linguistic concept, and much art - especially abstract art - is not linguistic.  Whither meaning?"

A part of me wants to believe that modern art isn't supposed to have meaning, but that's clearly not true.  While I certainly cannot penetrate into the hidden meanings of giant blue spots next to giant orange spots, or little red rectangles, or massive canvases painted in a single glossy shade of pink, obviously some people can to the extent that there is a massive modern art community, complete with critics, connoisseurs, and museums sufficient to fuel the careers of a good many artists.  What do those people see, then, in the abstractions of abstract art?  What dialogues do they have?  What narrative is present?  And if not narrative, what emotional content?

You see, much as I am a linguistic thinker, my problem ultimately is musical.  In music - and especially in, for example, Beethoven - there is an undeniable narrative arc, simply because music takes place in time.  Every listener, no matter how tone deaf and/or untrained hears the same fundamental thing in the same order.  The same is true in a novel or a play.*  The story, whether literary or musical, unfolds in a certain way, as determined by the artist.

* Granted, in both music and literature it is possible to get things out of order, but that is not the intent of the composer/writer, usually.  Exceptions like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake - which is just as confusing no matter where one begins or ends - only further support the rule: there is a strong temporal, narrative sense in literature.

In a painting, on the other hand, the experience of the viewer is much more haphazard.  While we have certain tendencies (left to right, top to bottom), any given painting might strike us differently.  Where you might be attracted to the white splotches, I'm drawn to the blue "stars," for example.  While the black spindly branches might strike you as the key to the painting, I might not even regard them as important on first glance.

Being out of time, paintings allow the viewer to revise their initial impressions, of course, but that doesn't change that we remain subtly and heavily influenced by that first brush with the work.  Add in the propensity for art museums to contextualize art with neighboring pieces, with biographical information, or with descriptions of the work in question, and the process of constructing a personal narrative gets very muddled.

Which is not to say that doesn't happen in other media.  Indeed, it happens very much, and such shaping of the narrative is exactly the point of, for example, the Beethoven project that I've undertaken in this space.  What differs, then, is where that narrative comes from, and thus what "understanding" a piece of visual art even means.  Whereas the Eroica Symphony, in my opinion anyway, speaks for itself once you know enough about music theory and a little about history, I'm not necessarily convinced that the same is true in visual arts.

That's not totally fair.  I think that, if I knew more about composition and technique and so on, that works like the one that we are, slowly, coming to would speak to me much more directly.  I suspect, however, that a lot of what they would say would be "this is the style used here, this is the technique, this is the skill," and not "this is the meaning."  Again, this is my bias as a musician, but I feel as though music theory is a way to unlock, yes, compositional techniques, but more importantly, emotional, spiritual, and even political meaning in music.  Is the same true in visual arts, especially the more abstract works of modernity?*  I don't know, but I struggle with the possibility that either answer to that question might be true.

* To be fair, again, we might ask the same question of music, where modern composition has been divided into music for the movies (and TV and commercials and so on) and music that is extremely strange and abstracted.  Maybe the question I'm asking here isn't about art at all, but about modernity (or, I suppose, "post-modernity").  Hmm...

Without further ado - since we've adone enough already - here's the particular painting I want to share and discuss, briefly.  Briefly because I'll struggle to know what to say, for all of the reasons highlighted above.  Nevertheless, I want to share the work because, of all of the many hundreds of pieces of art I say during my recent visit to the bay area, this was the one particular piece that most caught my eye.  Why?  Well, that's the question I want to try to answer.  Here it is:

"Clearing" by Darren Waterston.  Displayed at Cantor Art Museum, Stanford, CA.

The title of the work goes a long way towards shaping the narrative that the viewer - in this case me - constructs.  "Clearing" may be a word with multiple meanings, but it has one particular meaning that strikes me as being the primary - though probably not the only - one intended here.  The black tendrils in this piece are reminiscent enough of branches, and the background enough of a kind of abstracted night sky that, at first blush, "clearing" seems to indicate where you are metaphorically standing as you look at this piece.  The space in the middle of the canvas - with the nebular/amoeba-ish mass and the little blue star-like dots are the night sky from a spot in the forest where the branches part.

I particularly like the sky analogy here because of the figure that looks like a nebula.  While we, perhaps, don't see those massive gas clouds when we look at the night sky, they are there, and this painting in that sense reminds me that, while behind the trees there are stars, behind the stars there are still more things that I do not perceive.  The clearing is, in that sense, only a partial one.

Of course, we still see the branches on either side of the clearing, which further remind us that our view of the space between is constrained.  Consider the second nebula behind the largest of the branches, and you'll see that, though it is just as large, just as complex, and perhaps even more aesthetically pleasing than the more fully visible one, it is also muddled and unimportant thanks to its backgrounding.  Only looking closer do you see that, actually, it is prominent in the narrative of the painting principally because it is partially obscured.

What strikes me most, however, about the painting is the ambiguity of meaning in the symbols.  This work is somewhere in between abstract and representational.  The branches are only just barely reminiscent, the stars not quite the right color, the nebulae a bit too much like water stains.  The random white, blue, and black spots that occupy other spaces in the work may suggest - in the case of the largest one in particular - a not-quite-right moon or other satellites, but they could also be the splotches that occur in a camera when looking near, but not at the sun.

Then again, the painting is too dark to be daytime, but too light to be nighttime.  Dawn or twilight perhaps makes sense, especially with the reddish "cloud" that hands across the top of the painting, but placing the piece temporally almost seems unfair.

It also is unfair to leave the ambiguous symbols with only one interpretation.  The branches could also be briars, I suppose, but are also not unlike the tendrils of a neuron.  Nebula, amoeba, water stain... Why not a ginger root?  And so on.  At a certain point, the representational value starts to break down, and while there are hints and suggestions here, there is clearly no single interpretation that does the painting justice.

Perhaps this is too obvious a point to make, but I'm going to make it anyway: if Waterston wanted to paint a clearing in a forest, with the night sky shining above, I'm sure he could have.  Perhaps, in our sophisticated artistic age, we take for granted that we're not supposed to paint that way (we're not supposed to write music in the romantic style or Petrarchan Sonnets), but that doesn't answer the question at the heart of this post.  What is it that work like this is trying to capture?  Is ambiguity, as such, really the point?  How many works can be about mystery and absence or nebulous meaning before it gets old?  Doesn't art about art have a limit?

In short, the question is "so what?"

And yet maybe that question misses the point, and therefore answers itself.  For some reason this painting spoke to me, not in words, music, emotions, or any other structure that I can access linguistically.  Maybe I'm missing the words, but maybe there simply aren't any, and the "meaning" of art is a nonsensical thing to look for, an artifice we construct because we so much predicate the linguistic.  Understanding isn't what one does with a painting because "understanding" is a word, and words need not apply.  Of course, paintings are (usually) still titled and described, but is that maybe because we're afraid to acknowledge that they might have something profoundly powerful about them that we can't access?

As I've said, I don't know the answers to these questions.  In many ways, writing about art is almost as pointless as writing about language.  If you try hard enough, you're either reduced to talking about structure and technique or you start traveling in logical circles.  In some ways, I think, art drives you there even quicker, because it is so much more urgent than language, so much more removed from our mundane day-to-day experiences.  Looking at a piece like "Clearing," then may not tell me anything, but it certainly disrupts something, and I don't know what.  Maybe that's all that "meaning" means?

The Peter Quince Sonata

Warning, this is a long entry about a poem. Read at your peril.

What I'm not going to do, here, is interpret a poem.* That's perilous territory, not because it's impossible to say something insightful whilst being uncontroversial (indeed, offensiveness may be a barometer of insight), but rather because the poem I'm going to share with you is not, I think, meant to be interpreted in the old English-class-dissection way. One might argue that no poem is meant to be read as a kind or word problem, but some poems are particularly unyielding to that kind of analysis.

* Funny how writing works. As I finish up writing the post, what I've done is, actually, interpret the poem. I'm keeping this paragraph anyway, but know ahead of time that it's all lies. Of course, my disclaimer should be, instead, that I'm ignoring a whole lot of stuff I should be including in my interpretation, but the post is long enough without more detail.

Wallace Stevens is certainly a difficult poet to comprehend no matter what approach you use. Some of his poems - many of his poems - are not even all that pleasant to read, and don't necessarily seem to have a point outside of some bizarre and esoteric conviction that only the truly initiated understand. That, however, is not true of all of Stevens's poems. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird may be one of the more enigmatic poems that have made it into the Canon of English classes everywhere, but it is hardly unreadable.

Fun as it would be to play with that poem, I'm more interested, for the moment, in Peter Quince at the Clavier. A great many poems are described as "musical," which almost always annoys the Hell out of musicians. The problem is, most people don't really know what they mean when they call something "musical." A fairly technical definition might be something like: 'contains tones arranged in logical sequences to produce harmony, melody, and rhythm.' Poems do no such thing. Even if you grant that a poem read aloud has an auditory quality, it would be hard to argue that it is music unless it is sung. So describing a poem as "musical" implies a more touchy-feely definition. Unfortunately, that touchy-feely usage of "musical" often means, simply, "I liked it because it made me feel ______."*

* This is similar to calling music "beautiful." While a great many pieces are beautiful in some sense, it's kind of a throw-away, at a certain point. Calling music "beautiful" is often an excuse to not think about the how and the why of our love for a particular piece. "I can't explain it, it's just beautiful." While wonder and awe are certainly an important part of music - or poetry - that doesn't mean we should just let it be without trying to understand what's so wonderful about it. "Beautiful" music is sometimes the most terrifying and insidious, when you really think about it, and "musical" poetry can be the most disturbing. But we'll have to explore all of that at another time.

For my part, I would call Peter Quince at the Clavier a musical poem, not simply because I like it, but because it is actually an attempt to capture the spirit and form of music. Specifically, Stevens replicates the sonata form in the structure of the poem. This is a remarkable trick, because it asks not only that the reader see an analogy between the written word and the auditory piece of music (and not a fake analogy, but a meaningful, structural one), but also it presents its content - which is inherently more concrete than a sonata's - with a kind of musical sense of connotation.* What makes this connotation more powerful, to my mind, than the connotation in a typical "musical" poem is the self-consciousness of Stevens. He is writing a musical poem, and he knows it.

* Which is, of course, what people do mean when they call poems "musical." The kind of images the poem inspires are the kinds of images a song might.

Let's get the poem on the digital table. I want to present it couched in my own framework (you can read it at the link without my meddling).

Movement One - Sonata Allegro

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;

Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

"Music is feeling then, not sound." Ah, the other tenet of the "musical poem." But here the music comes not from trying to create a feeling in the reader - though certainly that does occur - but more from the description of the feeling itself. This is a poem not to generate a feeling, but about a feeling, and about why that feeling is musical. This is a more genuine way for a poem to be "musical."

More to the point, however, is the form here. The pacing of this section of the poem - this "movement" - is very much according to the sonata form, and, what's more, at the not-too-fast but not-too-slow allegro pace. The pacing you'll be able to tell from the coming sections, but the sonata form bears a little explanation. Sonata form, traditionally, goes A-B-A. That is, exposition to introduce the theme, development to depart from it, and recapitulation to return to it. Here the poem starts with music, a theme. What is music, it says, and what is a poem's relationship to music? That theme never goes away, but it transforms into desire, and metaphor. The development of that initial theme takes the form of "a green evening, clear and warm," a description of a setting for a feeling, which prepares us to return in our recapitulation. "The basses of their beings throb / In witching chords," We return to music, perhaps more specific, certainly more orchestral than our lonely piano at the opening, but music all the same. Our theme has been developed, and is now recapitulated.

Second Movement - Adagio

In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned --
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.

This reads slowly, because Stevens breaks lines in order to force delay. Those milliseconds we take to jump from "She searched" to "The touch of springs" are enough to slow us down, so that we feel the tempo has dropped, and the mood has deepened. The content - the theme - of the first "movement" of the poem was almost philosophical (music is feeling), and so the actual feeling - desire - was subsumed under a kind of joyful and playful intellectual romp. Not so in this movement. Here Stevens is not sad, per se, but he is reflective. His Susanna does not jump, she lies "in the green water, clear and warm."

This movement rhymes, at points, as well, engaging our ears and further slowing our progress as we reflect back to the line with which the rhyme occurs. In all this strikes me as a minor theme, not because it is sad, but because it is unsure. If we had opened in C Major, we are in A minor with strong intonations of C ("so much melody"). The picture here is one of longing, desire, loss even. In some way we are completely divorced from the first movement - as we would be in most music - but there is a vague connection, a promise that this image of Susanna by the water, shares a certain musical feeling with the desires of the opening Allegro. It is an explication of what was melancholy amidst the romp.

Of course, it ends with a nice crescendo into the Scherzo.

Third Movement - Scherzo

Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;

And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

While there is something uncomfortable about the story here, it is very much in the playful, jovial style of a Scherzo. For one, it is undoubtedly the fastest movement yet. The couplets jump off the page quickly, especially because of the regular meter (iambic quatrimeter, for those technical readers out there*). "Scherzo" means "joke," and while the joke here may be a cruel one for Susanna, it is a joke nonetheless. Even the diction (rhyming Byzantines with tambourines twice, for example) here suggests that things are, if not rofl-funny (I'm coining that one), at least a bit absurd.

* It is worth noting that quatrimeter could be considered far more musical than pentameter, the more common poetic meter. Quatrimeter is, basically, 4/4 time. "Revealed (1) Susan- (2) -na and (3) her shame (4)." Each foot is an eighth-note. 5/4 time does happen, of course, but it is exceedinly rare. Especially in sonatas.

Scherzo's also tend to be shorter movements, and this is certainly brief. Nevertheless, they play an important musical role, separating the reflective Adagio from the culminating Finale, punctuating the depth of reflection with a joviality that does not fully forget the melancholy - indeed, it comes from the same source - but recharacterizes it in a different way. Our original theme, "music is feeling," is a bit distant, but the image of Susanna, the desire and longing that she represents, is made sharper here.

Susanna is a delicate, almost mournful creature in the second movement, but here, in the Scherzo, this musical desire that our Peter Quince (a telling name) has takes on it's true form. He may love her beauty, but he also loves her shame. His desire is conent to fester, but it is nonetheless a desire to be bawdy and lusty. His music may be beautiful, sensual, and melancholy at one turn, but at the next it is devious. And should this surprise us? The longings of Beethoven's music were thought dangerous and innapropriate in his time.

Fourth Movement - Finale, Theme and Repetitions

Beauty is momentary in the mind --
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Most every sonata culminates in a Finale that, while encompassing the thematic material (if not in actual notation, in spirit) of the previous movements while moving beyond to a more profound and usually more theatrical climax. Here Stevens winds his Finale around Death, perhaps to our great surprise. As if the movement - which I say is a "Theme and Variations" because "So ____ dies" is a refrain here - were not surprising enough thematically, it opens with a chord we did not expect: "Beauty is momentary in the mind... But in the flesh it is immortal." Music? Longing? Our themes are gone.

Except they are not. Stevens has jumped from music and desire to death, perhaps, but what is that death? The obvious play here is the French "petit mort," seeing the Scherzo here as a culmination of desire in orgasm. I think Stevens may be suggesting that - he is certainly a fan of innuendo* - but I think he is also drawn to death as a musical question. Our sonata is to reach it's final cadence, our poem is to end, our romance is to play out for better or worse. The death here is a death of many things, not the least of which is the true death that awaits all lovers and all musicians, not particularly because they are lovers or musicians, but because they are men (who may also be lovers and musicians for the same reason). Is that too broad? Probably, and Stevens has more going on here, but it is certainly the theme against which his variations are played.

* I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Against death Stevens pits immortality, but of a strange kind. The immortality of physical beauty and the immortality of music are separate from the body itself, from even the mind or the poet or the musician. This immortality that "makes a constant sacrament of praise" depends upon music, or feeling, or desire. What is immortal, what is beyond death - we can hope - is just that; the desire to be musical, to love and to lust after, to play song after song and sonata after sonata.

And yet there is Peter Quince, the Shakesperian ass, playing the Clavier. For all the depth of meaning - most of which I am sure I do not understand - in the poem, there is always that self-depricating, self-sabotaging irony that says we ought not to take any of this too seriously. That may be a profound piece of wisdom, or it may be a reminder that poetry and music are too different to really be translated, even in the clever way that Stevens has tried to do so.

Regardless, this sonata by Stevens - or Peter Quince, I'm not sure - is musical to me, as I said at the outset. It is musical because I feel I need to read it aloud, to feel the meaningless connotations as much as the loaded ones, to explore my own reaction to it as much as the attempt at self-expression that it must clearly represent. It is musical because it exists somewhere in that paradoxical land of great art, being the supremely selfish creation of a particular mind, whilst being so universal as to be comprehensible - on some level anyway - to just about anyone. Perhaps, above all, it is musical because it says it is, and who are we to argue?