AMERICAN DREAMERS

posted by James Reel

    No blogging here recently, because I’ve been scrambling to meet end-of-month deadlines a little before the end of the month; at lunchtime today, I’m off on a short visit to Charleston to attend a conference of testy music critics and sample the Spoleto Festival USA. And that means no blogging until I’m back on duty next week. As a stopgap, here’s something from the archives of a long-gone e-zine I columnized for. With the presidential primaries underway, I thought it might be a good time to dredge up a little literary essay about American dreamers. Please note that I wrote this about 10 years ago, so anything the essay claims to be “recent” or “current” is most assuredly not.

A COMMUNITY OF DREAMERS

    THE AMERICAN DREAM CAUSES US much tossing and turning, for we are by nature a restless people, and our dream suffuses our waking hours even more than our sleep. For about a century, Americans have conjured a cultural vision based on conflicting notions of egalitarianism and material prosperity. Egalitarianism, because democracy implies community rather than hierarchy, and universal opportunity for personal success. Materialism, because our economically stable, ostensibly egalitarian society measures success that way.
    Yet there is more to our dream. Within this grand vision of a common life lurks a peculiarly American preoccupation with the individual mind and heart. It's a question of uniqueness within community—how can we fit together while setting ourselves apart from one another? Therein lies the dream's inherent tension.
    Two fairly current books, when read in tandem, provide a masterly analysis of our cultural ideal and its individual realizations. Each pursues one of the opposing forces in the American Dream to its logical extreme.
    The more recent treatment of this subject is the 1996 novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize. It begins as a Horatio Alger story: boy of humble means makes a name for himself through wit, strength of character and some luck. But by the end it seems to have been hijacked by Jorge Luis Borges; as Martin Dressler's dream expands, it can be conveyed only through fantasy and symbolism.
    The tale begins in the 1880s. Martin is a child working in his father's modest Manhattan cigar store. As time passes, Martin finds lowly work in a fine hotel, moves up through the ranks and learns the business, saves his money and gradually builds a chain of restaurants, and finally is able to buy a hotel of his own, a microcosm of the world.
    But Martin is restive within the limits of a traditional hotel. He builds bigger and more complex edifices, culminating in the high, wide and deep Grand Cosmo, which integrates living quarters with shops, theaters, amusements, freak shows, wonders and elaborate indoor re-creations of natural settings. It is the whole world in a single city block. One can't help thinking of the latest synthetic pleasure palaces erected in Las Vegas, but Millhauser is writing less about today's America than the genesis of today's America.
    The second book under consideration is This Boy's Life, a 1989 memoir by Tobias Wolff. With the unity, detail and grace of a novel, it recounts the second decade of Wolff's life, in the late 1950s and early '60s. He dreams of living in a more stable, affluent household and schemes to create a bigger, more complex Self, integrating a respectable way of life with a dynamic personality. But Jack, as this boy insists on being called, fears that he is unworthy of success, for he is a liar, a vandal and a petty thief contending with a loving but unconventional mother and a self-absorbed, intermittently violent step-father.
    Both Martin and Jack are first-class American dreamers, but Martin dreams himself into a world of parable, while Jack dreams himself out of hard reality. Martin is optimism; Jack is, if not pessimism, at least self-doubt. Martin devises building projects of such magnitude that they border on tools of social engineering. Jack's reveries are entirely personal—being adopted by strangers he sees on the street, or running into his estranged, distant-dwelling father. He indulges any fantasy that would offer him better circumstances in which to be a better person:

I was a liar. Even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was, I couldn't help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions failed to persuade.

    While Martin strives to reproduce the world in perfect miniature, Jack strives to produce a perfect little self, a combination of privileged lineage and good character traits that would lift him out of his squalid, mean, lower-middle-class circumstances. But the ideal Jack is a creature solely of the imagination; Martin feels confident that he can shape at least a small bit of the world, but Jack finds himself constricted by the world around him:

Unlike my mother I was fiercely conventional. I was tempted by the idea of belonging to a conventional family, and living in a house, and having a big brother and a couple of sisters....And in my heart I despised the life I led in Seattle. I was sick of it and had no idea how to change it. I thought that...away from people who had already made up their minds about me, I could be different. I could introduce myself as a scholar-athlete, a boy of dignity and consequence, and without any reason to doubt me people would believe I was that boy, and thus allow me to be that boy.

    Both characters learn that, if the customer is not always right, at least the customer is easily manipulated. Martin Dressler quickly grasps the value of advertising and marketing, with help from a marketing genius named Harwinton. Martin insists that every venture combine convenience, comforting familiarity and exciting innovation in a balance that will intrigue rather than overwhelm the customer. (His downfall is forgetting the part about not overwhelming people.) Jack Wolff learns how to adopt a persona for every occasion, an approach that will get him through encounters with tough kids, kind teachers, do-gooders and ill-wishers. In lieu of finding anything interesting to say about his true self, he learns the value of a well-crafted lie, going so far as to plagiarize his first confession.
    Martin is diligent; Jack is negligent. But something about both boys—their looks? their manner?—attracts people who can help them. Martin realizes this vaguely but never analyzes it; Jack fails to recognize this at all, being certain instead that intelligent or sensitive people will instantly perceive his fraudulent nature.
    Still, Jack aspires to be—or at least to appear to be—the ultimate homo sapiens, the thinking man, the man of wisdom, someone respected for the intangibles of mind and character. Martin, on the other hand, is the classic homo faber, the man who builds, someone whose sense of worth lies in his tangible accomplishments. Neither is firmly grounded in reality. Images of sleep and dreaming permeate both books.
    In Martin Dressler, New York City is described as "a fever patient in a hospital, thrashing in its sleep, erupting in modern dreams." Martin's success hinges on the breadth of his imagination: "It seemed to Martin that if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater, something as great as the whole world, then he might rest awhile." And toward the end, he begins to wonder if he "dreamed the wrong dream."
    In This Boy's Life, the dream images are more subtle: "Most afternoons I wandered around in the trance that habitual solitude induces." This is when Jack imagines better parents—strangers—snatching him away.
    And yet what ultimately saves both Martin and Jack is an awakening to reality. Reflecting on the imminent failure of his magnum opus, the Grand Cosmo, and why he so deeply cares about it, Martin contrasts himself with the advertising whiz Harwinton:

As an advertising man he saw the world as a great blankness, a collection of meaningless signs into which he breathed meaning. Then you might say that Harwinton was God.... But of course God could not believe in the Grand Cosmo, just as He could not believe in the universe, a blankness without meaning, except as it streamed from Him. For only human creatures believed in things: that much was clear.

    Then there is Jack, unmoved by a priest's attempt to talk some sense into him: "He believed in God, and I believed in the world." Accepting the world, just as it is, turns out to be the most courageous act. For although it teaches us that the grander notions bound up with the American Dream are impossible, perhaps undesirable, to realize, it gives us a firm platform on which we may, ever so tentatively, remake ourselves.
    Martin's version of the American Dream—to co-opt, to synthesize the whole world into a compact, controlled "Grand Cosmo"—must fail, because however morbidly fascinating and excessive the dream may be, people will ultimately sense its synthetic nature and reject it. Even Martin Dressler acquiesces to its failure, and reconciles himself to the real world.
    Young Jack Wolff's version of the American Dream will succeed only when he learns to reconcile individuality with social exigency. After trying to create himself from scratch to escape an unpleasant situation, he realizes much later that such situations are only transitory:

Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

    Such knowledge comes to us slowly, individually, through diverse momentary setbacks and petty victories. This is the knowledge that enables 260 million sometime dreamers to coexist as a practical community of Americans.

DIVISI

posted by James Reel

    In his Orange County Register review of a Philadelphia Orchestra tour concert, Timothy Mangan identifies trouble that Philly shares with the Tucson Symphony:

    The way that [conductor Christoph] Eschenbach has the orchestra seated may be a problem. The first and second violins are split right and left, and the cellos and basses are massed behind the first violins. In Brahms' Symphony No. 1, which concluded the concert, this left the first violins high and dry, playing against a dark sonic background of cellos and basses rather than with the close harmonic support of the second violins. The first violins sounded wiry.
    Nor could you hear the seconds properly much of the time. Seated on the right, their sound is sent away from the audience, toward the back of the stage.

    This is precisely what has been going on with the Tucson Symphony’s sound since music director George Hanson moved the second violins over to the right. True, there are excellent historical and musical justifications for this arrangement. Splitting the violins across the stage was common 200 years ago, and composers often took advantage of this set-up by writing quasi-antiphonal material for the first and second violins—they fully intended the musical strands to sound separately. This was probably accomplished with little fuss when orchestras were smaller, playing in smaller halls.
    But now, even though we have a lot more violins to produce sound, when the second violins are moved to the right their sound is projected toward the back of the stage and up into the cavern that is the modern orchestra shell, and it isn’t properly bouncing back into the hall. (At least that’s what happens in the perpetually acoustically troubled Tucson Music Hall.) Thus, instead of bringing greater clarity to the second-violin line, the setup causes 10 to 12 professional violinists to saw away to little audible purpose.
    Here’s an arrangement I think would delineate the lines adequately while allowing all the sections to be heard: from left to right, first violins, violas, second violins, cellos and basses. This way, all the instruments are more or less facing the audience, but the violin parts are separated, and the violas don’t turn to mush, which they usually do when they’re pressed up against the cellos. Does anybody have any experience with this layout?

JUMP THE SHARK

posted by James Reel

    My latest review in the Tucson Weekly:

A play titled Swimming in the Shallows invites easy jokes about its lack of substance. And, indeed, Adam Bock's work of that name, currently running at Invisible Theatre, does emphasize cleverness over content. Nevertheless, while Swimming in the Shallows isn't very deep, the writing is splashy, the production is confident, and it all makes for a pleasant way to spend 75 minutes in the theater.

    Read the rest here.

DISTINCTIVE?

posted by James Reel

    Simon Heffer’s defense of Elgar in the Telegraph is typical English boosterism. The basic argument: Elgar was great because he was English! Heffer tosses out a few superlatives for Elgar’s weakest works (the Violin Concerto, the Second Symphony, The Coma of Gerontius) without ever identifying anything that gives them musical value. This is typical of the Elgarians: Declare the old man to be superior and it must be so, even in the absence of supporting evidence. Of what value is criticism by assertion?
    Of course, not every Englishman is an idiot when it comes to music. I don’t recall the position on Elgar taken by Pliable, the proprietor of On an Overgrown Path, and for some reason Pliable’s opinions do not always coincide with mine, but he is certainly an intelligent observer and listener. I particularly like his definition of excellence in broadcasting, from a recent post about the dismal state of British classical radio: “To do great radio you need to be distinctive, inclusive and personal.”

SCORE!

posted by James Reel

    Thanks to a link provided by Patricia Mitchell, I’ve been downloading lots of public-domain scores from the International Music Score Library Project. It’s not entirely easy to fish out specific things, like pieces for cello and piano, because of inconsistent titling and organizing (which is what happens when you have more than one enthusiastic person involved in an uploading project). Not all the scans are as readable as one might wish, and some of the ensemble works are available only in full score, not parts. And, of course, we’re talking about old editions of a lot of things, which may lack corrections and useful fingerings. But still, this could turn into a tremendous resource.

MY OTHER CAR IS A CELLO

posted by James Reel

    Harry, my cello teacher, sent me a link to an interview with his old teacher, George Neikrug, who spent some time talking about one of his old teachers, Demetrius Dounis. Most of Neikrug’s comments fall in line with what Harry has been telling me for two years, including this:

Dounis believed that technique is essentially based on "evenness," the goal being to give the impression that everything is on the same string. One should be able to get the same vibrato with every finger in any position on any string, the same tone with the bow on every string, and to make unnoticed string changes. Any deviation from this evenness would then be for musical reasons, not due to technical deficiencies.

    That’s all well and good, except that I still have trouble getting the same sound from the same finger at the same position on the same string every time. Sometimes I feel that I shouldn’t be wasting my time working when I really need to be practicing the cello. At least I’ve gotten to the point at which I can have some pretty decent moments during some of my practice sessions (note the liberal use of qualifiers). All I have to do is figure out how to do that consistently. Harry is great at getting me in shape during the course of a lesson; it’s a matter of remembering to apply all the techniques and advice simultaneously when I’m not under professional supervision.
    Why is it that we can get a license to drive after just a few months of supervised practice, yet it takes us so much longer to be turned loose with a musical instrument? Yeah, driving makes fewer simultaneous demands on our attention, and doesn’t require such refined motor skills. Still, a car is much more dangerous than a cello (but watch out for that endpin!). If there were cosmic balance, we’d achieve instrumental facility within half a year, but we wouldn’t be on our own behind the wheel without a decade of hard preparation.