SOUNDTRACK: TIGRAN HAMASYAN-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #110 (November 11, 2020).
I have never heard of Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan. I really enjoyed his solo pieces here and am somewhat surprised to read that he often plays with others.
The first piece,
“Road Song,” features a melody Hamasyan wrote in 2008, but recorded with a quintet on his imaginative 2013 album, Shadow Theater. He frequently plays a solo version of it live, but had never played it alone in a studio until now.
It starts quietly. Then he begins whistling (!) which makes it even more haunting. At around 4 minutes his left hand rhythm remains slow and steady while his right hand flies all around the keyboard. It’s wonderful.
That’s followed by “Our Film,” from Hamasyan’s latest and most enterprising release, The Call Within. This performance mirrors the intensity and sentimentality of the album version, but here it’s more intimate and fanciful.
It also has pretty, haunting melody (with more whistling). It picks up the pace in the middle and gets almost frenetic (around 11 and a half minutes into the video) before settling down again. It’s amazing how it all holds together with the more staid left hand.
The last tune, “A Fable,” is the title track of his 2011 solo album, which was inspired by 13th century Armenian writer Vardan Aygektsi.
This piece is flowing and a bit more upbeat. He really gets into it and starts grunting at one point.
Hamasyan is a jazz pianist, but his foundation comes from Armenian folk music. Perhaps that’s why i like this so much–it is very jazzy, but is grounded in traditional melodies.
[READ: November 30, 2020] “Ema, The Captive”
This is one of Aira’s earlier (and longer) stories.
I’m fascinated that his earlier stories seem to be grounded much more in reality–blood and gore–rather than fantastical ideas. Although calling this story grounded in reality is a bit far fetched as well.
This is the story of Ema (at one point in the book it is mistyped as Emma) a woman who goes from being a concubine to running a successful business. The story (translated by Chris Andrews) is broken into several smaller anecdotes as Ema’s life progresses.
But it starts out with no mention of Ema at all.
Indeed, the opening chapter is revolting. A wagon train carrying prisoners is heading across the Argentinian desert (set in the nineteenth century).
In nineteenth-century Argentina, Ema, a delicate woman of indeterminate origins, is captured by soldiers and taken, along with with her newborn babe, to live as a concubine in a crude fort on the very edges of civilization. The trip is appalling (deprivations and rapes prevail along the way), yet the real story commences once Ema arrives at the fort, where she takes on a succession of lovers among the soldiers and Indians, leading to a brave and grand entrepreneurial experiment.
As is usual with Aira’s work, the wonder of the book is in the details of customs, beauty, and language, and the curious, perplexing reality of human nature.
The trek is terrible (and terribly graphic). The prisoners are malnourished and almost starved, while the soldiers are brutal and interested in killing (maybe eating, maybe not) all of the creatures they encounter. It’s ten pages of hard-to-read passages. Then we meet the Frenchman.
He was an engineer, hired by the central government to undertake special projects on the frontier. He didn’t speak or understand the local language and very few others there spoke any French at all.
I found the Frenchman to be interesting and sympathetic (since he was horrified by everyone else’s behavior). I assumed the novel would be about him. But it’s not. Forty-one pages in to the story, Ema appears. She is unnamed; she is simply a young girl–practically a child herself. She is feeding the only baby who has survived this torturous journey.
The end of the chapter ends our time with the Frenchman. The rest of the book follows Ema more directly.
Now Ema is pregnant again, she would give birth in four months time.
As the chapters proceed she becomes the concubine of one of the region’s elders. This man is obsessed with printing money. This angle of the story was wholly unexpected to me and winds up being a large component of the story.
Apparently all of the tribal leaders in the region print their own currency (they all have printing presses (!)). Printing currency is a sign of prestige. They leaders give it to the locals who then gamble with it and that’s how the money circulate. They play a lot of dice.
Some time later when both of Ema’s children were older, she took an Indian lover. In one scene, during a snow fall, he jumps into the river. Wow. I gather they cover themselves in a layer of animal fat, but still.
She is desired by many men and those who take her as a lover also have no problem with her leaving them for new pastures. This seems to be because most of the the men, especially the princes are incredibly lazy–sleeping for sixteen or seventeen hours a day and drinking to absurd excess.
It is one of these princes who introduces her to the pheasants. She is so taken with their beauty that she decides to raise them. She realizes that after the initial start up fee, they will only pay for themselves. She asks for money form one of her former lovers who happily prints up an obscene amount. She goes to an auction where she buys all kinds of birds, including an impressive stud. Then she starts breeding the most colorful and beautiful birds.
After a year the man comes to inspect his investment and is impressed by her but disgusted at how the breeding process works. I have no idea if any of what is described is accurate or was once accurate but it’s an astonishing laborious, process and involves drugging the cocks, while they remove the semen. But the hens cannot be drugged or they will not get fertilized, so the workers are pecked like crazy
The book ends just as abruptly as it started with Ema pregnant again and, although established, not exactly settled.
Aira books tend to be fantastical–flights of fancy that turn on a dime. In interviews he states that he writes as much as he can in a day and the next day he doesn’t look back at what he wrote, he just picks up the story in whatever way he feels.
This story is remarkably detailed in so many things and yet so much of it sounds like it is completely made up and nonsensical. Horses eating hares? Wild packs of starving dogs running at full speed through the desert? Not to mention the way Ema is treated throughout. Women are routinely raped and disregarded. And yet here is a woman who seems to have so impressed the men that they let her go freely wherever she wants.
Or is this just the way it was back in 19th century Argentina?
And yet, its also weirdly enjoyable. As long as you check your disbelief at the door, it’s fun to see where Aira’s mind will take you.
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