Writing About Sound, Assignment 9: "Visual Music - Bridie and Kathleen"

My final (non-professional) piece for Writing About Sound: visual music. We were to write a piece capturing the sound and sentiment of the music suggested by an image. I chose a beautiful photograph by the Irish photographer and traditional musician Christy McNamara, whose work I was introduced to by Dr. Mick Moloney of the Glucksman Ireland House at NYU. Dr. Moloney has described Irish traditional music as being like a stone that the waves of sea wash smooth - a single, sparse tune is handled again and again, ever in infinite variety, ground into a gem of surpassing simplicity by a master player. This is the sense that McNamara conveys in his photograhy, and this is the sense in which I sought to articulate the two figures in the photograph.



BRIDIE AND KATHLEEN


‘For I’ve served me time with the Island men
And I’ve known good times and work aplenty…’



I was born in Enniscrone.

And I was born in County Down. But your mawrs kin were long of Easkey.

In Iascaigh and Rathlee on the road between. The road to Inis Crabhann. It was good crawk in the day and now they’ve gone. But you I found in Belfast town.

In rambles back from Rathlin Island. Cast off Scottish shores till Ulster alley. ‘fore shipyard slips went layin’ empty. You were scoffing tears like a feen on the steps afore St. Anne andallandall. I come up till you, just up from the Lagan in a bubble, with me dad wondering after me.

Ah boi, he was rich ahright, an tight as a fishes hole. A right feckin’ sasanach. You come up and by me, a wee purdy thing off and awful in your feen-wear. Your eyes big as baps for the fags. Says ‘brother sailor to where are you bound?’ / Smiles this sailor and answers, ‘To fair London town.’ Aye, right there I’d a pain in my belly for the grá of ye.

He was a respectable man, right so. A man who’d skin a taig. And cook the flesh for Sabbath supper. Tobesuretobesure I was off mad for your wandering ways, your large shoes and taste for the fags. Andallandall I fancied a few whips la, so I did.

Ara I was wee latchaco, ah bo ‘deed I was. Gave me mother blight of mind, got up her beak and put her off the fas. Id a grá for the sea, ah bo so I did. Me dad was a lusher and lower than snakes balls to the ground. He woun’t manage mice at a crossroads. But me mawr was no oinseach. She knew well to leave me by the pain in me belly.

Me dad fashioned that Lagan bubble by custom order, a pretty Orangie prison paid by limey bob. Me mum lived well and good in it, and me sister too. I would have it none atallatall. ‘To London’s fair city I would willingly go / Though how to get over I do not well know / I am not bred sailor, though if ye take on a hand / I would brave the passage over and do all I can.’ An’ me dad were langered. There was no suffering in his upstanding house atallatall, but neither would there be wantings in the belly. When I took up with you and the fags andallandall, he went well and truly pissed, so it is.

Me dad were after the boat and the bottle. He were pissed by face. So me mum worked the praties clear hard in the ditch to the earth so to set me on the road from the sea, the road from me dad. 'All things were ready our ship in full sail / Oh the wind it blew north to our whole pleasant gale. / We hoist up our sails to our whole heart’s content, / Till our ship, she sprang a leak, to the bottom down went. / Our allowance grown scarce, and no harbor nigh, / Then we cast lots, for to know who’d first die.' She was a good woman, so she was, with a seaman’s eye what saw clear through me, me boat adrift on the sea. Ara I was a quare wan and awkward as a pig in reverse. She saw me down at the other end of the ballroom e’en in those days. I was her feen, though I was her girl. And she was right with that and god. Ah bo she were a rock in the sea.

Tobesuretobesure she were a rock in the sea, hard ground by waves ye longed to sail upon. She knew these waves and taught them till you. Her sniper’s eye taught you till see from silence, her battered heart and toil filled you up with courage in your belly. Courage for till be equal asal and hero smooth ground in the cold, journeyed play of the sea. 'But aye, this fair creature, the short lot she drew. / She was to die first for to feed the whole crew.' 'Up steps this sailor, a dagger fresh drew / Saying, ‘I’m sorry to leave you, good captain and crew. / But my jewel, my darling, my own heart will burst. / And in hopes of your long-life, myself will die first.’

Ah bo I’ve been more asal than hero. But the sea has done me well. 'Then ‘ship ahoy’ cried the captain and it pulled into view / And drew up alongside for to save the whole crew. / We hoist up our sails for a full flowing tide / And we landed in Inis Crabhann down by the seaside.' Now we’ve more years than the roads through County Mayo, years a-plenty on the sea. And I’m might bate out. But good, fine years they were. Good, fine years what washed smooth us two fine old stones.

Writing About Sound, Assignment 8: "Crossing Boundaries - New Sounds"

The prompt for this writing assignment was "crossing boundaries: a concert performance of musical sounds and genres you have never heard before." Part of the point of the exercise was to force us as musicians to write about sounds we had never encountered. I, however, chose not to busy myself with finding a musical tradition for which I had no frame of reference - a difficult thing for an ethnomusicologist at any time and even more for ethnomusicologist at an ethnomusicology conference, as I was at the time. Instead, I chose to write about a moment in which two disparate musical traditions intersected in dionysian revelry - as they can only at an ethnomusicology conference.



THE ETHNOIDS: A GROTESQUE IN THREE ACTS


DRAMATIS PERSONÆ:
A TURK, first ethnoid
A DEVI, second ethnoid
THE BACCHANALIANS, ethnoid chorus

Act One: The Floor
Enter THE BACCHANALIANS
The carpet is warm. Wet with wine. Red wine seeping into rose rug. Old, cheap rug. Embossed, Victorian blooms. Pink-tipped and sage-stemmed. With black mid-century blotches. Burning. Banal. They throw salt on it. They miss. Salt on floral ridges and foot-worn valleys. Little rock people in a second-hand landscape. Drowning in rivulets of wine. Are they crying? There is screaming. Salt to soak the wine and draw it from soft, fibrous boards. Boards that sigh in sleep. Snorting pleasures beneath soiled coverlets. Musty hall, rocky salt and prickly pile. The little people die, the big people burn. But the merlot is chortling. Grazing the edges of their Is.

Act Two: The Chair
Enter A TURK, THE BACCHANALIANS
The saz begins to purr. A pretty, preening filigree of gestures curling round an inarticulate raga. Breathing chenin blanc in bourbon hues. A three whiskered kitten. Double strung. Wide haunches and spindle neck. Serpentine soundings in double-forked tonguings. Blanc and bourbon. Weaving slender resonance and dark moist fumes. The anterior hole opens to release hollow tocks from the belly. Taps on the face. Tocks in the belly. Heat over cheeks. Marking the contours of mode as it arises, curl by coil, from its wood gourd bed. Sinuous, reptilian raga. Winking, Turkish puss. A furry, cold-blooded creature. Loosed.

Act Three: The Air
Enter A DEVI, A TURK, THE BACCHANALIANS
The fundamental has been ringing. Upside down, as fundamentals do. She is tickled by the whiskers of the Turkish raga. Her hands lay at rest on her knees, one palm up, one palm down. The corners of her mouth meander into settled curls. Eyebrows up. Eyelids down. Her head bobbles on a wine-flushed neck. She counts tal with fingertips, stroking the snake, wooing the kitten. The purrs articulate name and pain. Grwrrings in the belly. She does not acknowledge the saz. Repose seeps from her, trickling into the fibrous rivulets of the floorboard. The blood has run to the head. Rivulets reversed. Winefalls lift up your head and you are bundlings of myrrh. Sanguine fumes. Sounds not heard.
Exit A DEVI, A TURK, THE BACCHANALIANS

End Act.

Writing About Sound, Assignment 7: "Portrait of a Piece You Love or Loathe"

This assignment was to write a portrait of a piece of music that we love or loathe. I chose Patsy Cline's 'Sweet Dreams (Of You).' I leave it to you to decide which attitude I take.


‘I so happy, oh I’m so happy, no one so happy, so no one so happy, happy as I, no one, so, do’—
says the tumble down, where sweet dreams are made in falling strings. Sprinkling celestial. Buttressing shadows of rhythm to come. The sigh is a dewy, introductive declaration – preluding a melancholic refusal to mourn. Sweet Dreams of you / triangular winks, a rhythmic nudge and the little lilt begins. In the liner notes ‘of you’ is parenthetical. But in verse one, two, three, across a bridge that does not exist, ‘I’ could be incidental. This may be characteristically Cherubino.

[It is difficult to write happiness. Easier to articulate anger. Dejection or dysphoria. Good things always sound like bullshit.]

The song is in three verses. The three line-built jewels are set in a bed of strings, gilded with hand-painted celesta, cushioned on either end by the hysterical prostration of sentimental strings. As the opening, their slippery, downward curl pantomimes John Gilbert in his first talkie, as the closing, a swooning Rosenkavalier. I love you, I love you, oh bliss, I die. Verse one is sweet dreams of you, then comes more you—and something about that incidental I dimmed by the obfustication of slap-happy heartbreak—, verse three is sweet dreams – stop [cue the bass on ‘so’] – and another bout of yoo hoo. Re-cue the falling strings, shading the fading ooo in you, and tumble to the full stop do. The verses are buoyed up by a bed of muted tremelo from the same strings that seep up on either side of them; the cadences that mark their formal contours are airbrushed by chorus of close-knit harmonic jingles. The whole contraption is propelled by the same rhythm section that grounds every other grab-your-sweetheart-and-slow-dance country ballad. This structure, blueprint for the pleasure of compositional abstraction, is really too simple to be of interest. It could be slapped in a card, filed under the thinking-of-you label and sent off with a floral stamp and maybe some lavender scent. One of those good things.

Writing About Sound, Assignment 6: 'The Interview - Voice and Narration'

I'm seriously revising my assignment from last week (prompted by 'Sounds in a Single Instrument') and will post it when ready. Meanwhile, out of order, here is assignment 6: voice, narration and the interview. Unlike some of my colleagues (all of whom had fascinating pieces), I have some experience and even a fair bit of training in the fine art of interviewing as ethnographic practice. And so, for me, part of the challenge of the exercise was in shifting away from ethnographic propriety stylistically while still orienting myself around its principled core. The interview I used was conducted on 24 May 2008 and played a central role in my MA dissertation on the Eurovision Song Contest. I have conducted a goodly number of interviews in my time - none of them have been bad, all of them have been rewarding, and a very few encapsulated the richest moments of my life. This is a portion of one of those few.




Eoin and I are in a haze that has nothing to do with the smog settled over the intersection of the Danube and Sava rivers, post-socialist soot coating the battlements of Kalamegdan fortress and the domes of St. Sava this and St. Sava that—industrial blackheads in the profile of virile, bedraggled Belgrade. It has more to do with the second semi-final last night at Beogradska Arena—where we spotted Iceland’s Draupnir Rúnar Draupnisson, his plucky rainbow feather duster in tow. With the by-invitation-only after-party at the official Euroclub—where we joined arms and kicked up drunken heels in a chorus line honoring the Ukrainian panto-dame cum patron-saint of Euroqueens. With the epiphany of Marija “Full of Grace” Šerifović to torch the dance floor with the sweet-nothings of her Serbian baritone. And it has everything to do with the rumor that Marija will appear tonight, again, in her tux, for a most unusual Serbian wedding at the opening of the Final of the 53rd Eurovision Song Contest.

Eoin is hyperventilating. I can’t afford to, because someone needs to be on hand to catch him when he falls. In many ways, he is Draupnir Rúnar fantastically displaced to the slick, gumdrop and mirror-ball world of Eurobandið, channeling the black soul of Páll Óskar, ardently lip-synching “This is my life - I don’t want to change a thing / This is my life - all the pain, all the joy it brings.” Jean-Paul Gautier would be proud, he would give it away in his commentary. Except Eoin is Irish, dumpy and rural—three facts which do not enhance his Euroqueen caché, two of which nonetheless characterize the vast majority of early twenty-somethings who enthusiastically inhabit that category. Eoin and I are sitting in the hostel common room, nursing hangovers with afternoon moonshine Rakija, exchanging superfluous ‘dahlings’ and dancing around unspoken histories of depression and melancholia. He knows about my research but, until this foolishly official moment, has had the decency to ignore it. I ask him the beginnings of questions that he answers before I finish them. He laughs, gaily, Irishly, with Gaelic traces in a Mary lilt.

Tell me about your Eurovision—

—My Eurovision OBSESSION! Well!! I suppose it started somewhere between ’97 and ’98. Yes, yes. I was taping it by then, yes. But—well, the ’97 contest was in Dublin, you know. And I decided, oooo, let’s tape it for fun—I think I wanted to work out how you tape things. I was like—“ooo, amusing!” And then I kept just watching the tape, after school when I had nothing better to do. And, I was like, ooooo, and you suddenly end up liking most of the songs. And then ’98 came along and I discovered they had these things called NATIONAL song contests! I don’t know where I thought the songs in the Eurovision came from, but it never occurred to me that there were national song contests….I really had nothing better to do during my childhood.

Well, you did live in Cork…

Well there’s that, yeah! That and I was the quiet one in school….

Then after ’98 your Eurovision thing just sort of snowballed?

It grew, it completely snowballed because I discovered that people had written books about the contest and that there were compilation CDs of songs from the contest; and then I realized that, of course, you could actually buy videotape of previous contests from people too!

How did you find this out?

Right, well. There was one compilation that I bought—called imaginatively “This Is Eurovision”—and on the back, it was made in the UK I think, and on the back there were details about the British branch of the Eurovision fanclub. So…and—oh, in the buildup to the ’98 Contest they had shown, like the day before, some of the old winner on Radio Telefís Éireann. And, of course, the Irish ones were all there—and this shows ’94. And at the time I was also quite fascinated by things like how did the stage look and how the umm—how do I… you know how the name of the country and the song comes up on the screen?

Yes, the titles—

—Yeah, I had a particular thing for how the titles come up for some reason. And I particularly liked how they did it in ’94, and so wanted to get the ’94 tape just based on this! Oh god… So I had written to RTE because at the time I knew they obviously had it. But at the time they wanted to charge me 120 pounds— I know! I was like, nooo! I’m not sure I even had 120 pounds and if I did it was all the money I had! Aww. Egh. So I wrote to the British fanclub—I was like “oh-ah, I’m poor…” So they wrote back with the address of this guy in England who had all these tapes and had obviously been recording them for others.

Slightly illegal!

Oh, oh, there’s a lot of illegal goings on in the world of Eurovision! So, he was doing them and he was charging, I think it was only something like ten pounds. So I thought, yeah, the ten pounds I can live with—so I wrote to him, and I sent him the ten pounds and it was like, oo yay! And then, about two weeks later, it arrived in the post, this tape—I was like “it’s 94, oh my god, look at it!” So, it was almost as though it was that year’s contest again. I was completely excited by what was about to happen. Because, up until then, even though I had started collecting the books, I didn’t really know all the other songs from all the other years so much yet. So now there were twenty-four others to see and hear and judge and go “how did that come through!!”

I started collecting tapes. So, we’ll say, ’94 and then a few weeks later it was ’93 and ’96! And then I would start getting two contests at a time, and then three at a time! Because I had asked for two and then in the ’99 preview show they had shown a clip from the ’91 contest and, again, just based on the bit of the title that I saw, I though “ooo, that looks like a good contest” that I had to have!

So now what do you have?

I have all of them back to…1974, now. More to come. Of course.

So why Eurovision?

Why Eurovision!

I guess that’s a big existential question, hmm.

Why Eurovision?!

And what is the meaning of life?

What is the meaning of life and why Eurovision. Eurovision is the meaning of life. That’s why Eurovision.

Since 98.

Yes, yes, yes! It’s just….it is such a unique thing. There are so many moments when you’re watching it that you think, you know, this could only happen at Eurovision. I mean…the acts can be soooo O-T-T! It’s about the glitter and the fireworks…and the voting as well – they love to look for a trainwreck, to be able to bitch about something, to be able to complain about the results and the vote. It’s…the kookiness. This year’s Bosnian entry with the knitting grannies and the washing line and the sister and him coming out of a washing basket, I mean! And last year you had Verka Serduchka, the Ukrainian Cinderella, and the Danish drag queen and we’ve had this fabulous transsexual Dana International, we had the Slovenians dressed-up as air hostesses, singing turkeys in shopping trolleys, buxom Latvian pirates all in sequined lace… I mean, where else are you going to get all of that – together!? As the British commentator Terry Wogan said one year, “every year you think it can’t get any worse, and every year you’re wrong!” Oh, it’s corrupting!!! Really.

Writing About Sound, Special Assignment: 'Musical Memory'

In our 'Writing about Sound' seminar on Wednesday, our professor put to all of us the challenge to write a single paragraph piece about a musical memory that assumes the narrative position of the subject within that particular moment. No reflection, no judgment, really, no nostalgia. Just memory. Here is my original piece.



It is orange in the dark. Orange and warm, with pink bobbles and melted lace. Papa is blue. Blue and warm, with tickly whiskers, sound seeping through the shoulder. My tummy simmers with overtones and I am purple with repose. But the rug is green peas. i gave my love a cherry that had no stone stone stone grey hurtful stone. Pebbles and pies. Peas. i gave my love a chicken that had no bone chicken bone, crispy and nuggety, no bone. The sound is snugly. It is blue in the light. It is strange with the orange. It cooks in the oven. i gave my love a story that had no end i gave my love a baby with no crying. No. O. o. Crying. Who baby who? The orange baby, with cherry pebble pie, warm in my tummy. No peas. How can there be a stone that has no cherry? And can there be a bone that has no chicken? No baby no my love no little houses on the floor. how can there be a story that has no end how can there be a baby with no crying Crying lilts sweet stomach dreams anew. Yes. I want to eat the purpleness of no. A cherry when it’s blooming blooms violets amid the stones. And the leaves are green bees. A chicken when it’s Pippin it has no bone. Yes, pocketses, we wants it. Yes please, my melted lace, we like it curling in my toes. the story of i love you it has no end my anna when she’s sleeping she has no crying Orange wails and blue light whiskers, seeping still. Deep sound shoulder, let me sink. It is purple in my tummy.

Writing About Sound, Assignment 4: 'Memoirs of a Phrygian Cadence'

The prompt for this assignment was: "Your earliest memory of listening to sound of musical sound. Musical memory as an organizing principle that determines structure in writing." I considered explicitly discussing my engagement with the Phrygian cadence (a rose which goes by many other names) but chose rather to take its descending tetrachord as the organizing principle of my narrative. I also tried to push myself out of the 550-650 word length and address the structural and rhythmic challenges of a longer piece.



Memoirs of a Phrygian Cadence (1)

A
In the keening light of deep winter and Christmas trees, the white sheets glow amber, deepening into red velvet. Everything is Christmassy orange, as in the photographs. The crowd hums with the wind outside the windows, their glasses clinking like the ice Papa chipped from the crevices of Old Blue, and I scan shadowy faces for Carol until I spot her sitting there, on the left next to Sue. Sue and Carol, Carol and Sue, who lived upstairs and who mother let me visit when I finished my peas. Damn peas. I always know how to find Carol because she is the girl who is sort of a boy but actually a girl, Sue is just the girl, and Carol and I have an understanding. Soon it will register that there is no more ‘upstairs,’ no matter how many peas I eat, but right now it doesn’t matter: I just got my wink from Carol, I am three years old, and this is my first public performance. “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.” I’m a plump toddler, plentiful in precocity, pink in the cheeks, and proudly wearing my specially-dyed purple terry-cloth underpants beneath my red and green gingham dress, though I’m a big girl with enough sense to know not to wear the purple tights too. That’s wise of me. After all, Mommy said I can have the dress because Grace is too big for it and I’m growing up. I swell with pride in my purple panties as I breathe in and belt out in my baby baritone “where the tree-tops glisten and children listen in the sno-o-o-o-o-oooo!” I have been practicing that line for weeks—mostly in a tutu, in the living room, to the accompaniment of Vivaldi’s Quattro Stagioni. These practice session were an externally choreographed internal debate over the most effective way to enunciate my o-o-o-o-o-os—(project, project, Papa would say, enunciate with your mouth)—a debate peppered by interjections from the all important problem posed by my tutu: yes, Grace’s is crisper and stands up properly, but mine has purple bits stuck in it—a fact which more than makes up for the flaccidity of the tutu. Every so often, though, the sound stops me dead in my leotardian tracks—a raw rumbling inside that baby baritone I’ve been practicing, a screeching holler and dry harpsichordian cackling that scrapes at me, I don’t know where. Prestissimo! Drama! Then it comes and I am suddenly left wanting. (2)

G
I don’t remember precisely when it started but, by the time I was eight, I was awkward, interior, and deeply in love. I’d been grabbing shy, giddy glimpses of her wherever I could, straining my inner ear for the playful, pluridimensional tones of her voice—while we stood for prayer, while we filed out for coffee, whenever she happened to be there. Sometimes, I would invent some excuse to pass by her, accidentally brushing her with my fingertips as some other lucky soul sat engaged with her—oh, that I had his confidence and skill! I ritualized my adoration and obsession for possession in bedtime prayers—“dear God, please, please someday let me just have her, please, please”—prayers which my sensible older sister, snoozing in the bunk below, would dutifully, drowsily scoff at—“Anna, don’t be silly, God doesn’t give things like that”—prayers which then nestled themselves into my soppy pillow—“dear God, please, please.” In the morning, the morning, my mother stood over a neglected, smoking pancake griddle, grinning shrilly, my brothers prancing with exaggerated knowledge, my sister sitting unspoiled in the chair that was supposed to be mine. I was seated at the table, the foot of the table, the special spot directly across from the King Chair at the head of the table. The father assumed his position and with kindly, patriarchal eyes told me the news: it’s brown and black and white where you touch it. The realization winds me, my innards drain and on the last breath of evaporating ‘I’ the three year-old comes to my rescue to speak with perfectly enunciated o-o’s the name of she who warmed me: “a piano…” (3)


F
Think holy thoughts. “Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras.” Vatch zee umlaut, dahlinks. To the left, the altos are going flat—the vowel is spread, they’re thinking about their laundry. Beneath me, a backstage breeze gives me relief from the sweltering women around me. The no-perfume-rule is clearly printed in the manual. Literacy has dropped. Karen is reading Cosmo in the middle of a fugue. Philistine. Focus, focus, ewige Freude. Think about heaven, remember everything it promises—truly, I say unto you: isn’t it worth it? We’ve had five hours of overtime already and this is the third performance of the week; every last one is exhilarating because it has to be. And Brahms was not a Nazi—he was a good, devout man of God. That can be your inspiration…or it could be if you had been born a man. I loathe sopranos, but the fat lady is singing now—why is everything about mothers so shrill?—and she is quite obviously adoring herself in the mirror of her voice. Mirror, mirror in the air. Singing is a fabulous funhouse mirror, and it does wonders for her. But I have to gain weight if I’m going to be a singer, at least fifty pounds, or so I’ve been told—even though I don’t want to sing lead soprano. The romance of the roles is gag-worthy and the poised, precious pinching in my throat suffocates me. You’re an odd duck, you are. You prefer the complete erasure of vibrato, the sensation of being empty of everything but tone. Denn wir haben hie keine…the sound supports being and houses nothing. The invasion of vacant tone in your core, in everyone’s core; we are not I-s or you-s, we are the core-us. The core us that is too exhausted to be full of anything, vacancy moving semi-tonally against vacancy. I’m too tired. Too tired for the next leg of this thing—Brahms should have chopped off the seventh and left it at six. Who needs perfect numbers? I don’t have the energy for the passage through Hell. I have struck my preferred bottom and won’t go any further. But the furious descent of this string dervish plunges me into Hölle—wo ist dein Sieg, Tod, wo ist dein Stachel—flinging me against the iron floor of my insides, resoundingly. Get up, shut up. There is a voice for you. Dig it up and stop your incessant whining. Pull yourself together and be a man. And I relish the challenge. (4)

E
This is a half cadence—it is lacking. It is an open cadence, an endless ostinato of circulum osculans. This is an open cadence—it is gaping and hollow, vulnerable to invasion. A cadence which is a hole. It is an imperfect cadence—a cadence which is not one. This is not a cadence which is a cadence which is not a cadence which is not one. A cadence which is not a whole one. This is a bare, sinking structure hung with the elaborate filigree of silly detail and ornamental inanity that give it body. And it has perhaps not come to the bottom of this sonic carpetbag. For you are not finished decomposing. (5)



(1) “I had lost this song for years, and nothing—not even Mozart, not even Chopin, to whom music lessons had introduced me—matched its ability to extract a kind of passion from me, the passion to take it in, to know it, to make it part of my sound bank forever…I wanted to have it in my mind so I could replicate it in my body: love and desire, as the twelve-year-old “I” remembered and relived then from the two-year-old “I,” became the desire to know the music as a means physically to be that music.” (1)

(2) “And then, for one glorious, supreme moment, came ‘the flash.’ It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside--but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond--only a glimpse--and heard a note of unearthly music.” (2)

(3) “She is superb, like a tiny bit of You; she stirs the soul, tears at the heart, and drives the human mind to madness until she is accepted. And, soberingly, there are some who simply can never do so; though, of course, music is not saving. Though in brief fleeting, moments of utter rapture of the soul, one can almost imagine that she might be. But, my God, what is she?! I can not understand and must try to comprehend the incomprehensible. She surely is your most beautiful creation—a salvation in herself. Is that sinful? You have given us all the freedom to express our passions, so long as they don’t conflict with Your Laws. But you know my sin more than I.” (3)

(4) “Melancholia is the recurrent symptom of modernity, they find, for the decline of patriarchal law and the paternal metaphor as bearer of law; the deterioration of social bonds and crumbling of symbolic structures; the wounded, diseased subject of modern knowledge which seems unable to cure and take care of itself; the profound discontent that lies at the heart of the phallogocentric culture.” (4)

(5) “Gib deine Hand, du schön und zart Gebild', / Bin Freund und komme nicht zu strafen. / Sei gutes Muts! Ich bin nicht wild, / Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen.” (5)