(Program)
Deutsche Grammophon recording , Printed in Germany.
W. A. Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Symphony No. 39 (1788)
Wiener Philharmoniker, conducted by Leonard Bernstein
Symphony No.39
- Adagio — Allegro
- Andante con moto
- Menuetto. Allegretto
- Finale. Allegro
Like stubborn boys with big green eyes
We'll see everything
In the timid shade of the autumn leaves
And the buzzard's wing
‘Resurrection Fern’ — Iron & Wine
at some point in the process of putting together this roster of classical recordings last august, i had to fight off the urge to align week40 with Mozart’s Symphony No.40. a bit too obvious for my taste. at any rate, the comparatively understated No.39 feels the more appropriate entry into a whole month of Mozart on here; a journey that continues with No.40, then on to a pair of his piano concertos and ending with the Violin Concerto No.1. so strong is the shadow cast by No. 40, however, that No. 39 nevertheless sounds like a transparent scrim atop the vivid colours of that more popular symphony.
One should add that, unlike his father, he liked jokes of all kinds, and made them constantly. He loved humor, and laughter was never far away in Mozart’s life, together with beauty, and the unrelenting industry needed to produce it. “” Paul Johnson, Mozart: A Life
one of the more impressive instances of the unrelenting industry with which Mozart undertook what he and his father’s helicopter-parenting felt to be his pre-ordained vocation, is the composition of symphonies No.39-41 in the summer of 1788. Mahler’s vision of the symphony as an entity as big as the world, perhaps finds its baroque precedent in these three Mozart symphonies—if not in scale then in the plurality of expression of polyphony—and particularly in the busyness of the final movement of the Symphony No.39. the vision that comes to mind listening to that movement is of a rackety wagon rolling along the length of a coarse declivity—its wheels rattling with that indefatigable jiggle of the harpsichord in baroque music; the same rattle of the cajón in flamenco. and in a moment like this, having arrived in a month of May devoid of live music, then music of this sort can engender the most optimistic expectations in what this year still has in store.
continuing along the same lines of thought as last week, i’ve been thinking of how homophony too can express the plurality of the world around it, granted it is sufficiently boisterous—at least that is the dominant impression i took away from this symphony: the same unruly burgeoning realized in Mahler’s fixation on polyphony in his symphonies. the ‘concomitance of uniformity and diversity,’ as Walter Kaufmann succinctly put it in his Nietzsche, is the conceptual foundation of the virtue of polyphony that Mahler attributed as the inspiration of his Symphony No. 5. the concomitance to two seemingly contradictory modes of being that can exist, in music and in literature too, as an expression of the composer/author’s capacity of synthesis via their dancing jest at the edge of incoherence. that is moreso the case with Mahler than Mozart, nevertheless it got me thinking: consider, as a contemporary example, how different Bon Iver’s For Emma, For Ever Ago is from the band’s latest project (i,i); and yet, concomitantly, there is that same indelible stamp of the Bon Iver musical aesthetic.
in the formatting of this blog, i’ve also aimed for that same (and at times awkward) concomitance: pairing Mozart with Iron & Wine, for example. i’m curious, essentially, of the possibility of a contemporary iteration of what Nietzsche called his ‘gay science’ (the title of a book i owe far too much to). that is, an aphoristic style of writing. flailing off in different—and perhaps counterintuitive—directions in order to justify, or perhaps fortify, the innumerable basements of an underlying and, dare i say, universal truth…so long as one can in fact unify such disparate projectiles.
(song of the week: Resurrection Fern — Iron & Wine)
‘Hattie, the Yellow Room’ by Peter Brown (2019)
And we'll undress beside the ashes of the fire
Both our tender bellies bound in baling wire
All the more a pair of underwater pearls
Than the oak tree and its Resurrection Fern
i could almost forgive all of my fifteen-year-old self’s obsession with the Twilight franchise on account of it being a mere portal into Iron & Wine. first i heard ‘Flightless Bird, American Mouth’, the last song on The Shepherd’s Dog, was almost a decade before i tried, last august, to rediscover the full album. it’s baffling how well some albums can last; such that you can listen to them after a long hiatus not as wistful glances in the rearview mirror, but as new fresh fabric to weave for new memories. the funny thing is how little i now identify the album with the song which introduced me to it; instead songs like ‘Resurrection Fern’ and ‘Lovesong of the Buzzard’ are closer to the nucleus of the record’s ochreous palette: the late summer air, indelible mixes of browns and yellows, that feeling of excitement in the early evening, regret, july, Neutral Milk Hotel, the rattle of horny cicadas, nostalgia for a very recent memory, the velleity of august…