On the Joys of Reading Long Books

There was a time in my life when I found books of a certain size intimidating. Maybe it goes back to my attempt, at the age of twelve, to absorb my father's copy of War and Peace when the only adult literature I had read until then was science fiction. I remember getting to the end of chapter one and feeling like I'd just eaten way too much chocolate cake. I knew it was good stuff, on a level above anything I'd seen, but I also knew I wasn't ready for it.

By the time I reached high school I was able to plow my way through not only Tolstoy but Dostoyevsky, and not only Russians but Americans like Steinbeck and Faulkner -- even Absolom, Absolom with its pages-long sentences. In my college years Hermann Hesse came into vogue, so I consumed most of his works including the monumental Magister Ludi (or The Glass Bead Game) which is supplemented at the end by a sort of appendix of poetry and three short stories  purported to have been written by its main character, a wonderful example of a book that contains other books. I also developed my fondness for philosophical works by digesting William James' Varieties of Religious Experience and Aldous Huxley's The Perrenial Philosophy. Both of those are heavy wading, but they made an interesting pair since they shared the idea that all the world's religions have much in common, an idea that appealed to me as a Unitarian who was destined to become a Quaker.

Then, as happens to many of us, I became so caught up in the world and the need to make a living that I found less time for reading. I returned to my first love of science fiction for recreation, and gravitated toward short stories that were quicker to consume. I lost my taste for big thick books that revealed from their sheer bulk the amount of time and attention that would have to be give to them. It was so much easier to take two hours to absorb a movie or a magazine.

I suppose it has just been reaching a later stage of my life that has drawn me back to those substantial works I had avoided for so long. But the pleasure of discovery -- or rediscovery -- has been well worth the wait. Armed only with the willingness, I launched into such projects as reading the twenty volumes of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring novels, and Neal Stephenson's trilogy of 700-pagers set in the Baroque period. I also got an ebook reader and have been using it to catch up on many of the classics that I had somehow managed to overlook, things like Moby Dick, The Magic Mountain, and the other wonderful novels of Joseph Conrad which are not called Heart of Darkness.

Having acquired the taste, it is now one of the most satisfying feelings I can imagine to sit down and crack the covers on something that measures a couple of inches in thickness. I'm finally reading Shadow Country, Peter Matthieson's final version (900 pp.) of his legend about Mr. Watson, the backwoods killer who was shot down by his neighbors in the Florida Everglades.

And, just to keep things interesting, I've also started in on the three volumes of Shelby Foote's definitive account of the Civil War. Something wonderful happens when you realize the author will take as much time and space as it takes to give you the full picture. Thus we begin with two capsule biographies of Lincoln and Davis, the rival Presidents, and proceed at leisure up to the first conflict at Harper's Ferry.

The reader can sit back with a sigh, confident in the hundreds of pages remaining to unfold the whole tale, and comforted by the other two volumes still waiting on the shelf. When you're having this good a time, the best news you can hear are the words, "To be continued ..."

Last Thoughts on Mahler

This is it, I promise ...

Just because Michael Tilson Thomas is blabbing to the whole world about Gustav Mahler on Public TV (see Keeping Score) there's no reason I can't add the rest of my thoughts as a kind of footnote. So here in no particular order are some further impressions that came out of my recent immersion in those nine symphonies.

Beginnings: Out of the silence, grandeur. Some of them emerge like pale shapes swimming up out of the depths of a dark ocean. Others begin in medias res, sort of like, "So as I was saying ..." or "Then the next thing that happened was ..." It feels like the composer was so familiar with his material that he could begin that way, fully confident of where he was going.

I'm reminded of something a friend said after listening to part of Wagner's Ring cycle in Germany: "It goes on forever, but then every once in a while there's this incredible music." (It's also been said that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds.")

While building familiarity with Mahler I sometimes felt that way, impatient to get to my favorite parts. But eventually I understood that these choice moments had been set up by the texture of everything that went before. The music is a continuum, an environment in which one wanders, stopping here and there to enjoy the expansive views. Clouds and fields of sound, oceans to swim, forests in which to wander. He's created an entire world, the way a novelist does.

Vocals? In a symphony? Yes, and not just material from his lieder, but soloists and whole choruses stray into the orchestra pit and demand to be heard. Melody is not enough, he seems to say. I must put a voice to the deep feelings here. It's another example of the great range of expression to be found, from the collosal augmented orchestra down to the intimate scale of chamber music. When is the last time you ran into an extended duet for violin and french horn in the middle of a symphonic work?

A lilting tune that becomes too much for itself, strains, develops discords, turns anguished. ... Wait, is that "Frere Jacques?" Yes, but in a minor key and reduced to only two parts while being scored for a hundred instruments.

All the time in the world, no rush to get anywhere. Endless brooding, currents and counter currents. And now it sounds so nostalgic, like "I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places ..."

And again, there's comic relief in the form of Jewish folk dances, or circus-style marches that sound like they belong in a Fellini film.

Long endings. Really long. Endings that make you consult the minute hand of your watch. One time in particular I sensed the vast gathering of forces that signals a Coda, the grand finale ... except instead of the usual thirty or forty seconds it was fully eight minutes until we got there.

And now here we are.

Learning How to Listen

One thing leads to another ...

Coming as I do from a home in which classical music was always prominent, with both of my parents playing the likes of Beethoven, Chopin, and Grieg on the solid upright piano in the living room, it's not surprising that I have grown into an avid collector and appreciator of such music. What's got me stumped is how it could possibly have taken me so long to get around to one of the most monumental composers of the last century and a half.

Granted, it takes time for musical tastes to mature. It was not until my teens that I started making my own selections of what to listen to and forming my own collection of recordings. As I recall I began with Gershwin, having got there through jazz, then moved on to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, the Romantics being among the most accessible.

Then my interest in learning to play the recorder sent me on a musical odyssey through the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque. There I crashed head first into Johann Sebastian Bach and fell down on my knees, awestruck -- a condition that continues to this day.

Once so afflicted, a person is probably doomed to move on to all the other gods in this pantheon of human achievement. Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, Telemann, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Stravinsky, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Bernstein ... all these and more came crowding around me, demanding to be heard. They all got their chance, and I was seldom disappointed. I even tried some things that are darn hard to like, such as the clinically atonal works of Schoenberg and Berg, which sort of feels like wandering in a surreal desert. And as a technology buff I collected examples of the new art of electronic music way back before modern synthesizers had been invented.

It wasn't until recently, while trying to round out my collection through eMusic, that I ran into a speed bump by the name of Dmitri Shostakovitch. I already owned the set of 24 preludes and fugues -- one in every possible key -- that the 20th century Russian had been the first to attempt since the time of good old Bach (who did it not once but twice). But, suddenly appalled that I knew nothing about his 15 symphonies, I set out to listen to them all.

I was puzzled to find how impenetrable they seemed. Words like ponderous, harsh, chaotic, directionless, and unmelodic came to mind. I remember thinking, "This sounds like something enormous is being hauled by a cast of thousands tugging on ropes into a giant public space -- like maybe Red Square in Moscow."

It took a few more months, but I finally found out what my problem was. I had skipped someone. Someone important. Someone whose work both anticipated and laid the groundwork for those who came after. Someone in whose work lay the key to understanding.

That someone was Gustav Mahler. My curiosity about him had been piqued by an upcoming performance of the New World Symphony with the redoubtable Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. I was pleased to find that all of his recent recordings of Mahler with the San Francisco Symphony were available at eMusic, so I grabbed them all and started to absorb them.

It's hard to describe what an unexpected pleasure this was. Imagine going through your whole life in ignorance of Beethoven, and then suddenly discovering what you'd been missing. I had no idea that at this stage of my life there were any more such pleasant surprises to be found, but here it was.

I loaded them all onto my phone and started listening to them one after the other as I made my way to and from work each day. They became like a single huge opus divided up into chapters and books, one continuous stream of invention. This is a good analogy, because Mahler's music is literary, a composition consisting of long sentences and paragraphs that take their time to fully explore each idea. And absorbing them all is like working your way through a multi-volume set of novels, such as Patric O'Brian's seafaring yarns or Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Moody doesn't say half say it. These things wallow in mood. And there are wonderful recurring devices such as the dying crescendo -- kind of like saying "TA-DAAaaaa-ohhhh wait a minute I didn't mean to sound so positive about it ..." There is no excitement that can't be moderated, no sadness that may not turn triumphant, no exaltation that does not turn frenetic and threaten to self-destruct.

You can't help thinking of film music, because several generations of movie composers from Bernard Herman to John Williams have sat at Mahler's knee, learning from the master how to push the emotional buttons of their audiences on demand. But if you follow the rest of 20th century music you will also hear shades of Prokofiev, Aaron Copeland, even Bernstein ... and Dimitri Shostakovitch.

Fortified by my months-long immersion in pools of Mahler I ventured into Shostakovitch again, and this time found him readily accessible. Mahler had shown me how to listen and left me wanting more. The saga continued, as it has for centuries, as the thread was picked up by a new voice. Lead on.