These Variations Brought to You by the Letter K

Our musicologist friend K dropped by on Thursday to give an impromptu hearth-side violin recital. Why? Well partly because she's nice and likes to share her music. But also because she was preparing for a public concert the following day and wanted my wife and me to lend her a set of friendly ears for a dry run. By the way, I'm calling her by the letter K, not because there's any particular secret about her name, but because to do so fits in with a general spirit of minimalism here at Sunnyside. Also because I like the letter K, which is a joyful comical letter, and makes me think of a gymnast/illusionist who for the moment has set aside her head and is doing a cartwheel to the left. Though as regards our own visitor, the more meaningful bit of information is that K originally signified kaph, which is ancient semitic for “hand.” Which in turn means that K is hugely appropriate for a violinist, whose intricate art at every instant involves the most skillful work of the hands. 

Now, it may seem strange that a classical violinist has, for the second time in as many months, been featured on a homesteading blog. But that is simply (and sadly) because our music heritage, like heirloom vegetables, is probably not a consistent enough part of our lives. We limit such music to hi-falutin concerts and maybe to church, whereas....well, music should be to daily life, as rice is to India, or as bread and cheese is to France. Away with all these conceptual compartments in our lives! Let beauty flood our hearts!

There were not many preliminaries. She arrived with a smile. She took out her violin and the all-important bow, then proceeded to tune up as my wife and I found ourselves listening-seats in the living room. The fire in the wood-stove crackled amiably, while the stove itself made little iron sounds expressive of the pleasures of expansion. 

K played in the threshold between our living room and our dining room, facing the picture window that looks east. And what she played was Bach. Specifically his Partita in D minor for unaccompanied violin, which is to say, the partita that, as its final movement, features a chaconne that is one of the principal glories of western music.

I plan to say something about the Chaconne soon. First though I want to list four ways in which K's concert illustrates the minimalist, elemental, but also imaginative and gracious life that this blog aspires to encourage, and which I believe is possible without nearly so much money as many of us spend, and not nearly so many machines as most of us use, and not nearly so much fuel as we presently burn.

1. K walked here, serving as her own means of transportation, as well as her violin's. No need for a car.
2. The music K played required only one violin! No accompaniment. No sheet music even, because she played it all from memory.
3. The character of the music that K played was, like so much of Bach, unabashedly dance-like and physical, earthy and rhythmical. Which suits us here Sunnyside, where we believe that all things thrive best in communion with the universal dance.
4. The music itself, and especially that final chaconne, illustrates that even with the most basic of materials, the most extraordinary results are possible, in art as in daily life; given that is, sufficient inputs of imagination and a consistent willingness to work. Simplicity does not ever have to mean stupidity. Elementality need not entail ugliness. Trust Bach on this one, and his oracular Chaconne.

Speaking of which. I'm not by any means a musicologist, only an enthusiastic listener with a longstanding attraction to the classical stuff: I reach for meaning when I listen. I try to fit what I hear with what else I know and read. I offer these words then, as personal meditation and intelligent guesswork, not as scholarship.

But so here we have a chaconne, which is a strict variation form, the subject of which, in this case, is not a melody, but a harmonic progression stretched out over a musical distance of about eight measures. This sequence then repeats itself something like three dozen times—although in this particular chaconne, the musical borders of each variation, for the sake of subtlety and flow, are often blurred. 

The task of following the progression, which is often very artfully camouflaged, is a huge part of the fun of listening here. So much is going on in the music that masks the progression! Mood changes. Modulations of key. Passages of such spectacular technical difficulty that they seem like rapids and waterfalls, and you think the player is sure to capsize. Still, if you listen attentively, you can begin to follow what's being done. And the chief beauty of the variations in my opinion, is that they flow so artfully into one another and exhibit such infinite variety of invention and transmutation, even as the basic form is so strictly kept to.

Now here's the thing. What the whole process reminds me of honestly is alchemy. And here I mean the ancient magical art of transforming one substance into another, step by step, in a scripted metaphorical journey that yokes the soul of the alchemist to the physical process itself, so that the chemical changes induced by the work serve to mirror and empower the alchemist's inner journey toward purity and transcendence. (The modern world has of course defined alchemy as nothing more than a hopeless attempt to make lead into gold, but this disappointing definition says far more about our fixation on wealth and material ease than anything else. How sad.)

But to flesh out the metaphor: the progression on which the chaconne is based serves (in my opinion) as a sort of alchemical lesson to be learned by the alchemist-listener. It is the wisdom that you hold onto as you journey through the performance, but that you cannot know the full meaning of, until the journey is over and the final note is played. As for the variations themselves, they are of course the outward transformations of the substance that we as listener-alchemists are working with as we actively, attentively listen. These transformations serve both to empower and to mirror the changes that occur within our consciousness as the piece is played. 

And what is the goal of all this? Why, a change in consciousness of course! An adjustment of inner perspective. An attenuation of the soul toward the beautiful and the good. What else could it be? What else is worth all that trouble and work? 

I would forgive you if you said I was naively dreaming all this up, though I take the comparison between the practice of alchemy and the performance of (especially Renaissance and Baroque) music very seriously. I am not, mind you, saying that Bach had alchemy specifically in mind when he wrote the Chaconne. What I am saying is that it is clear to me that he believed that music had the power to accomplish many of the same things that alchemists believed they could accomplish with their art: again, a transformation of consciousness. Of outlook. And perhaps even of one's day to day personal character. 

But all of this is musing in the abstract. Listen to the actual music, and see what that does for you. See if it doesn't flex and vary you into something just a little different in the end! For myself I can say that when I'm discouraged in my work; when life seems just a little too much to take; when yet again I realize that, on this day too, I have to die and be reborn into yet another iteration of what it means to be human—well, music like this equips and encourages me in that task.

Finally (as coda) what I want to say is this: that there are moments in life when there's only one sensible response to what's happening, and that's to brim with gratefulness the way a fountain brims with water, or a bluebird in the morning brims with song. Gratefulness in this case, that certain utterly beautiful gifts come to you free of charge sometimes, unattended by any necessitous grasping. No work on your part. No strings attached. Just the willingness to receive it. K's afternoon performance at Sunnyside was one such gift to be grateful for. So thank you K. 

(And thank you G for JSB.)

HB

(Next Post Wednesday, February 4th)