SOUNDTRACK: DAVID GREILSAMMER-
Tiny Desk Concert #676 (November 24, 2017).
It has been quite a while since there has been a classical pianist on Tiny Desk. I’m unfamiliar with the Israeli pianist David Greilsammer, but his playing is wonderful and his selections are quite fun and diverse.
For this Tiny Desk appearance, Greilsammer begins with his muse Domenico Scarlatti, the 18th-century Italian whose 500-some keyboard sonatas are compelling, colorful snapshots of his decades-long service to Spanish royalty. In the “Sonata in E, K. 380” you can hear a little street band processing along with trumpet fanfares.
Greilsammer describes the piece as sounding very contemporary. Scarlatti lived 300 years ago and his music sounds ahead of its time. He says it’s almost jazzy or pop-like harmonies. He says it feels like he is playing a Beatles song.
Greilsammer follows by jumping ahead 175 years to the eccentric Frenchman Erik Satie, who not only owned seven identical gray velvet suits but, with a freewheeling spaciousness and humor in his music, is often thought of as the precursor to everything from minimalism to new age. His series of mysterious pieces called Gnossiennes strike a particularly sedate mood, capable of neutralizing any source of anxiety.
Greilsammer plays “Gnossienne No. 3” which he describes as full of pop and jazz and colors and harmonies. He was writing these strange short pieces that at the time people in Paris didn’t understand. Everybody loves Satie now but just over 100 years ago he was completely misunderstood.
I absolutely love the way the final notes ring out in this room–they are quite haunting
Lastly, Greilsammer takes a left turn to Leoš Janáček, the idiosyncratic Czech composer from the early 20th century, acclaimed for his operas. He set one of them on the moon; another, the dramatically taut and emotionally wrenching Jenůfa, is perhaps the most undervalued opera of a generation. But Janáček also wrote in smaller forms. His piano cycle On An Overgrown Path plays out like a diary of musings, nervous tics, simple pleasures and mysteries. Within the claustrophobic tension that pervades “The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away,” you can hear the rustling of wings and the repeated four-note bird call.
Greilsammer says that Janáček lived in the Romantic period and all of his music is enigmatic, with many secretive things. He wrote things related to dreams and wild scenes with things obsessively haunting him. In “The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away” (from On An Overgrown Path) the theme of the owl comes back many times. Every time you try to get away from it, it comes back.
For Greilsammer, who recently performed in a working crypt in Harlem, threading these disparate musical fabrics together comes as naturally as, well, playing behind a desk in an office building.
These are some really beautiful and nicely unexpected pieces.
[READ: May 31, 2017] Audubon
I have really enjoyed most of the French graphic novels that come across my desk. This book, translated by Etienne Gilfillan, is no exception.
It is a biographical sketch of John James Audubon (born Jean-Jacques Audubon in Haiti in 1785). His story, aside from the whole birding aspect, is quite fascinating in itself. He was an illegitimate child (his father has seduced a servant) who was eventuality adopted by his father (!) and called Forgèére (which means fern). His father wanted him to escape military conscription, so the boy was sent to Mill Grove in he United States in 1803. He became a US citizen and there met his wife Lucy Bakewell.
The book actually begins in 1820 with Audubon and two other men sailing on the Mississippi river. They hit bad weather but all he cares about are his drawings.
Then we jump back to 1812 in Kentucky. Audubon climbs into a tree to study the swallows who are living in it–some 9,000. He took home more than 100 birds to study them. And then he tagged some others to study their migratory patterns.
As the end of the book points out, Audubon was one of the world’s greatest naturalists who did a lot for birding. Except he was also responsible for the death of thousands of birds. There’s a section where he kills two ivory billed woodpeckers. He is so excited at his luck because they are becoming a rarity.
As the first section draws to a close, we learn what sent Audubon on his life’s mission. He was a failed businessman. He had invested in a sawmill which went bankrupt and he was briefly in debtor’s prison. Lucy, saint that she was, saw his desire to draw birds and she encouraged him to travel as far as he needed to sketch every bird he could find.
Back on the Mississippi River he has drawn and painted hundreds of specimens.
When he turned them in for appraisal, he hears the same refrain–his paintings are artistic not scientific. In 1810 Alexander Wilson dismissed his paintings as too romantic–the painting of peregrine falcons has fluttering feathers and blood on their beaks–what was he to make of that? Audubon argued that birds were not lifeless matter but living entities. And then we flash to him killing a blue jay and then posing it as he wants for his portrait.
Audubon spent some time with Native Americans, and he admired their freedom, their nakedness (much to the consternation of many white men). The Natives Americans also saved him when he came down with swamp fever. (The hallucinations in this section are pretty out there).
While just outside of the Mississippi river, Audubon catches a ferry boat where he is rescued and brought to New Orleans where he saw even more species than he could ever have imagined.
Once again the scientific community dismissed his paintings (there’s a wonderful panel of 12 angry men all saying he is to artistic and not scientific enough).
While in New Orleans he also encountered a runaway slave encampment. They helped him and he was able to help them as well. But when he returned to the city he grew bitter and focused exclusively on his birds–he grew a beard, lost weight, lost teeth and rarely bathed. In that time he hardly ever wrote home. But when he was finally taken care of and snapped our of his state, he returned and was lovingly greeted by his family
The final sections of the book talk about his trip to Great Britain (in 1826), where he had to sail if her wanted his book printed in aquatint. His stories won over the British and they were delighted by his paintings. He also met and befriended Charles Darwin.
His book was published in 1838 and the publication of it made him rich and famous.
He returned home with is beautiful book of birds–435 engravings worth! He met the President who encouraged him to begin a new project painting and cataloging all of the mammals of the country
He went out with hunters who enjoyed killing everything they could. And this was when Audubon began to realize that the senseless slaughter of creatures was horrible. The scenes in which the hunters wipe out herds of buffalo is really sad and although impressionistic, it is really quite impactful.
He made it as far as the Missouri River’s last military bastion, beyond which lay wilderness and the Rocky Mountains. But Audubon decided he was ready to turn back. He felt that his life’s work was complete with his birds and he was no longer compelled to go further. And with that her returned home in November 1843 where he grew old and somewhat senile (as the end of the book displays). He died in New York in 1851, aged 61.
The final pages of the book include several gorgeous Audubon reproductions and a very brief biography as well as a portrait by John Syme. The biography says that Audubon was forgotten for a time but revived in 1896 by the Massachusetts Audubon Society
I found this paragraph particularly interesting:
John James Audubon, the great lover of nature is considered one of the founders of American ecology (even if his activities as a hunter would horrify the majority of nature lovers today)… In the United States, John James is the only Frenchman as well-known as Lafayette. In France, he remains practically unknown.
There were 200 initial prints of Bird of America. In 2010 a complete edition was sold for 7.3 million pounds.
For ease of searching, I include: Leos Janacek.
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