de_eekhoorn | Books read ~April 2024 (Reply)

The Female Man - Joanna Russ
Reread, started immediately after I finished reading the book for the first time. Three women, who might or might not in some sense be the same woman, find their realities mixing in ways that keep pulling them together. One of them is from the world of Whileaway: a post-scarcity world without men described in loving and alluring detail.
This book of feminist critique is structured with such skill that, stuck on the walls of this vortex of realities, you don’t realize the whole is a whirlpool until the drop is directly beneath you; that you don’t realize the intricately ticking mechanism is a bomb until the second before it explodes.
All I can say about it right now is that it hooked into something in me and then pulled: I loved all of it, hated parts of it, and look forward to reading it a third time. For now, have a musical interlude:

The early-20th-century composer Béla Bartók wrote a series of progressive piano pieces he called Mikrokosmos. The first volumes started life as a way to teach the piano to his son; in the later volumes this didactic constraint was loosened, and the last two volumes are concert pieces for professional pianists. I have the first two volumes as sheet music (expropriated from the parental collection), and recently pulled them out of my stack for the benefit of one of my housemates who wanted to start learning the piano. However, the result has been that he has mostly continued happily practicing his chosen piece of experimental Japanese classical music, and I have started to learn the pieces in order and also re-listened to the complete recording (in the Claude Helffer version, here). The first volume starts with a number of unison melodies played by both hands; gradually the two lines diverge, and their independence and correspondence is explored, the music repeating, hesitating, elaborating, but still remaining within the constraint of just these two voices, one per hand. And the first time a third simultaneous note is added, completing the major triad, is, to me at least, a very powerful and emotional moment, and so as I was listening to the recording - “…slowly something tears itself away from the not-melody…” - “…we’ll have learned something about the major triad. We’ll have celebrated a little something.” - I started imagining the music of Whileaway as similar in kind to that of Bartók. But Bartók is, of course, a man, and so his music will not be that of Whileaway.

Somewhere in there is my reaction to the book.

Incidentally, if anyone knows of composers, female or otherwise, exploring a similar scheme, I am very open to recommendations. “(The intellectuality of this impossible business!)”

Geschiedenis der Muziek - Curt Sachs [History of Music]
My version of this book is the one translated and adapted for the Dutch market by Otto Hamburg. All quotes cited have been retranslated into the English by me.

Oh man, is this not how you write a history book.

This was the textbook for the general music history course at the Conservatory of Zwolle around 45 years ago, which is why my family’s house had two copies, which is why I could abstract one without protest, which is why this was the music history book that I had on hand.

Now music is a hard thing to write about, and I did appreciate that a significant portion of the book is dedicated to the development of music in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and it did give me a somewhat better sense of the internal chronology of the music of the baroque period, which was my original aim. However, despite the title, this is of course a book solely about formal, ‘art’ music in Europe, and its historiography is so abysmal that I ended up reading this book as much for the groan factor as for the information I got out of it. Have a representative sentence, about the fact that Bach, Händel, Domenico Scarlatti and Rameau were all born within two years of each other: “In an extremely short time Providence had readied the leading figures to close the past and open the present.” And another one, about Schubert: “…in opposition to Beethoven’s strong, masculine energy and self-discipline, an almost feminine subjectivity to the continuous stream of inspiration…”

It took me a while to figure it out, but Sachs’s view of history is this: good is whatever is contributing to or expressing the essential spirit of the times, as defined by Curt Sachs, and bad is whatever is resisting it; hence why he will vilify in one chapter the same thing he praised in the one before. (History is not supposed to be about the question ‘but who were the good guys?’, but in most history books you can tell where the author’s sympathies lie anyway; I do not think this is in itself a bad thing, and it can sometimes be cleaner to admit it than to hide your sympathies in your assumptions. Mais passons.) All the chapters are in fact named ‘the era of’ whoever the defining composers may be. Sachs also adds to this many throwaway mentions of race theory (the essential French, German, Italian character) that I am somewhat prepared to read over in a book from the nineteenth century, but not in a book whose original English publication was in 1955. My bemusement curdled as I read.

But then I got to the last chapter, and I just had to laugh. “All these [electronical] instruments seem to belong more in a history of electromechanics than in one of music, since they owe their existence to the bare and unimportant fact that electricity has proven to be a potential source of tone creation, although no-one asked if the special tendencies of our time actually have need of the particular tones and timbres they produce.” Oh Curt! I am sorry the actual world failed to consult your musical preferences! I still cannot quite get my head around the fact that this was actually used as a textbook.

I have found out that I do not own a copy of Woolf’s Orlando, which would be a good antidote to this, since the view of history neatly sectioned into eras is one of the things satirized in there. I might reread some Gombrich instead, to remind myself that there are also histories of this vintage that are excellent, kind, and wide in their perspective.

My physical copy of this book was a paperback of a cheap quality unsurprising for its time and place. It is now a collection of derelict and crumbling pieces. In this particular case, I cannot bring myself to mind.

Buddhist Psychology - Geshe Tashi Tsering
I started reading this book in… 2019? It is not long. I recall finding some of its earlier parts helpful, in my usual way of only being willing to recognize emotional intelligence when it hides itself [under a cerebral bedsheet]; the latter part, which I read more recently, I found very interesting because it is about an extremely elaborate philosophical framework of epistemology, that is not any more religious in itself than the seventeenth-century European philosophers are, and about which I previously knew nothing. I will be on the lookout for more material on this subject, although possibly not for a while because the list of unread books is long.

Living Alone - Stella Benson
This was, as I saw it described, a very charming and unique in its kind tale of WWI, magic, and daily life. I found the ending however to be quite depressing: as a fellow dweller in the House of Living Alone, I should hope slightly better for my capacity to make friends.