out of the sanctum and into the friar

they got me doing lowercase again

there’s a man in my french class who makes no effort to do the accent. he’s got a pretty good grasp on the grammar, but just, I mean, you can imagine. to learn french is to come to terms with trying to do a french accent. it’s embarrassing, but guess what, we all have to do it.

not this fellow.

the class has a focus on politics, and this week he made two simultaneous claims:

1. the iraq war was the worst thing america ever did

2. the U.S. should have invaded the soviet union in the aftermath of world war 2 to topple its regime

sometimes being a leftist makes me feel insane. sometimes, one person’s bad french makes me lose all hope.

we’ve got to do better, man. we’ve got to try.

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I’m thinking about Sibelius’s swans again. They come to me in february, even though he died in september.

I’m out of sync - I think we all are. we don’t so much have jobs these days as much as individual tasks. the algorithm becomes an algo-rhythm of life, never focusing on one thing, constantly in multi-task mode. I feel this all the time. the 40 tabs open on my laptop. the 10 books I’m currently reading. I close my email and I open my email. everything everywhere all at once. make it stop.

music history will make you start believing in angels and devils. Bach went blind and Beethoven went deaf and Mendelssohn wrote his violin concerto in a dream. Janaçek’s most gut-wrenching music was for a woman 50 years his junior (she did NOT reciprocate). everyone got syphilis and died too young. only Sibelius lived too long. the last 30 years of his life, he went silent. he didn’t write anything.

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thank god for orchestra. I leave my phone backstage - it doesn’t even hurt. in rehearsals, there’s no asynchronous work - when the conductor wants to tune the brass, the strings have to wait. we move forward together, go back together, stop together. it’s really boring, honestly. but it’s a healthy kind of boredom, the kind that you share with others.

Vijay Iyer talks about how synchronicity is the evolutionary basis of music. you can warn your far-off tribe of an approaching stranger if you clap or stomp in unison. acting in unison is one of those things that only humans can do.

do you know what it’s like to have an awareness of what the timpani is doing, 50 feet behind you? to try to play with him?

I’m convinced that some composers write primarily for the musicians. Mahler is one - the only way I’ve ever been able to ‘get’ his music is by being inside it. but once it’s inside you, you’re never the same. I think I’m just an uneven quilt of these ‘never-the-sames.’ everything else falls away.

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music and dance have a unique marriage among the arts. music implies the dance; the dance longs for music.

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sometimes, there are a few moments of silence before the lights go down. something happens in the crowd and among the musicians, the collective quieting. it’s that first quiver of synchronicity, all eyes turning forward. the audience gets to feel it too. in those moments, you can feel the aura of the symphony orchestra. what follows is the holy ritual: turning down the lights, the concertmaster walks on stage, the oboe gives the tuning A, then the conductor sashays on out, etc. etc. by the time the music starts, we - all of us - are in a different state.

sometimes, I get bored. I zone out. the concert will pass me by. it’s my job after all, which is to say it’s mundane. but sometimes something special happens. the orchestra responds a bit tighter. we get that electricity. we get nice with it. it’s my fucking favorite thing, man.

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I catch my eyes glazing over a paragraph of text on my screen, like I’ve forgotten how to read. I’m checking my phone during Severance. checking substack while I’m talking to my best friend. alternating between a wikipedia page about the South Africa Border war and an AI-generated ‘best space heater’ list. Everything is nowhere and I can’t take it anymore.

walter benjamin talks about how art used to be in the sanctum. you had to go there to look at it, and it had religious significance - magic power, really. it had aura. then we took the art out of the sanctum and put it in the gallery. we put it on the internet. we tattooed it on our bodies. we burned down the sanctum. we made it a mobile app. someone will deliver the sanctum to your home and the first month is free.

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I’m thinking about Sibelius again, thinking about the swans. I don’t feel like telling you what they are. you’ve got to look them up if you care. Patti Smith wrote about it too. beauty and truth come together on the wing. Shostakovich’s 7th symphony flying over the battlefield. they played it during the siege of Leningrad. it explains everything, I think.

millions of Russians died fighting Hitler. they starved to death in the snow. america ended the war with the entirely unnecessary murder of 250k Japanese civilians in two fells strokes. the sequel was another slaughter - historians call it a genocide - of koreans in their villages. there were, famously, no more targets to bomb. then it was the vietnamese, etc. etc. it took us a long time to get to the iraqis.

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it’s hard to make sense in february. this is the month it all comes apart. always been like that. I’m giving a lecture next week on Vaughan Williams. I hate Vaughan Williams. there’s only ever been one good British composer, and they probably wanted to chemically castrate him. philistines.

I’d rather talk about Sibelius or Mahler. or Brahms. you know how the second symphony starts? imagine hearing it in a concert hall. imagine it changing something inside of you. laying siege to your heart. you can’t imagine - it’s unimaginable. it’s still in the sanctum: vas-y vas-y!

you’ve got to seek the place where truth and beauty wing together. you’ve got to be a student of history. when you are paying attention to everything and nothing, that’s when they come from behind and shove you over.

if you have to speak french, do the fucking accent.