ATDTDA p 555 Chopin's E Minor Nocturne

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

           Cometman:
           surprisingly, the classical is not unrepresented at YouTube.

. . . .wonder if there's an Asia Carerra performance available. . . . 
 
           Ajaxman:
           A whole page of Chopin's E Minor Nocturnes to choose from:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chopin+e+minor+nocturne

And none worth listening to on its own merits!!!

           CTM:
           Orange tab city!  

As I recall, those were the tabs that made me reach for the thorazine.

           ATM:
           Hard to imagine on a ukulele, at least for me...

. . . .uh, yeah---maybe with a sustain pedal, perhaps a T.C. electronics
stomp box. . . .

http://tinyurl.com/37azjg

. . . .better be a big Uke too:

http://www.kulick.net/photoalbum/BK_Message_Jan06/GiantUkulele.jpg

Let's check out the local territory, shall we? First off, it's only the 
latest in a long string of offenses the author in question has 
committed against 'innocent' works of popular classical music. 
Boyd Beaver anyone? 'Doper's Cadenza'? Ben Franklin 
mesmerizing chicks with his patented glass armonica sounds?
The 'suppressed' Haydn Op. 76 ,"Kazoo" quartet in G-flat 
minor [pg 725 in my copy]? 

There's always this deliberate distortion of the mode of address 
in Pynchon's presentation of 'The Classics'. Of course, classical 
music , in all its "Margaret Dumont at the Opera" ostentation is 
such an easy, juvenile target for TRP. But it seems much more 
complicated here. Go back to page 552, where Miles Blundell
is discussing the low esteem of the ukulele with Thorn Ryder:

           . . . .traceable, we concluded to the uke's all-but-exclusive 
           employment as a producer of chords---single, timeless 
           events apprehended all at once instead of serially [1]. Notes 
           of a liner melody, up and down a staff, being a record of 
           pitch versus time, to play a melody is to introduce the 
           element of time, and hence of mortality. . . .

While Chopin's E Minor Nocturne is nothing if not a whiff of mortality. . . .

http://tinyurl.com/3bzwer

. . . .what with most of the events in this nocturne consisting of long-held 
notes in the right hand backed up by arpeggiated figures in the 
left---this work introduces the 'element of time' to the world of the 
Chums. Ryder calling the arrangement 'snappy' is all the more 
perverse considering the overwhelming melancholy of the work.
It's also the perfect soundtrack for a land about to be subsumed 
by the horror of industrialised warfare. . . .

          ". . . .Do you know where we are right now?"
          " On the road between Ypres and Menin, according to 
          the signs," said Miles

Flanders, the 'mass grave of history.'

>From Bernard Duyfhuizen's "The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness": 
Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day: 

           All pretense of innocence is finally lost as they fly over 
           Flanders during the war. Miles Blunden, who among the 
           Chums most often displays the clearest insight into the 
           real world, puts the scene in perspective:

           "Those poor innocents," he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, as 
           if some blindness had abruptly healed itself, allowing him at last 
           to see the horror transpiring on the ground. "Back at the beginning 
           of this...they must have been boys, so much like us.... They knew 
           they were standing before a great chasm none could see the to 
           bottom of. But they launched themselves into it anyway. Cheering 
           and laughing. It was their own grand 'Adventure.' They were 
           juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative--unreflective and free, they 
           went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of thousands 
           until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and instead of
            finding themselves posed nobly against some dramatic moral 
           geography, they were down cringing in a mud trench swarming 
           with rats and smelling of shit and death." (1023-24)

           The passage clearly echoes Brigadier Pudding's battlefield trauma at 
           the Ypres Salient in Belgium from Gravity's Rainbow as well as the 
           war poems of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg. 
           The Chums, like the world itself, have fallen from innocence, and 
           they choose now to make their way as independent contractors. . . .

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/17.2duyfhuizen.html

           . . . . The stink of shit floods his nose, gathering him, 
          surrounding. It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient. 
          Mixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses, it was the 
          sovereign smell of their first meeting, and her emblem. . . .
          GR, V235/B274/P238

A shit Madeline, eh?

A little background from 'A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, 
Steven C. Weisenburger:

           The british historian A. J. P. Taylor (87) sums it up:
           Everything went wrong. The drainage system of Flanders broke down, 
           as had been foretold. To make matters worse, it was the rainiest 
           August for many years. Men struggled forward up to their waists 
           in mud. . . .

           . . . .Three British soldiers were killed for every two German. The 
           British lost a third of a million men to casualties at Passchendaele.
           pgs. 65/66

>From the Wikipedia:

           . . . .Its comparative failure and the horrendous conditions in which 
           it was fought damaged Field-Marshal Haig's reputation and made 
           it emblematic of the horror of industrialised warfare. . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passchendaele

The E-minor is Chopin's earliest Nocturne but has the highest opus number, 
having been published posthumously. I'd recommend Artur Rubinstein's 
stereo set from 1967---the Ariston's spinning a 'dead dog' Dynagroove copy,
[LSC-7050] though of course it's been transfered to CD [good luck finding
it these days]. The new Maurizio Pollini set of Chopin Nocturnes is also very 
worthwhile and probably easier to find in a brick 'n' mortar right about now.

http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/special/?ID=pollini-nocturnes

1: Music is about to spin out in the cultural cul-de-sac of serialism, just 
about the time the shit hits the fan in Passchendaele.