robert delaunay, turnul eiffel (vazut de la trocadero;-)
Plouă--Guillaume Apollinaire
| p l o u ă c u v o c i d e f e m e i c a ş i c î n d a r f i m o a r t e c h i a r n u m a i î n a m i n t i r e | ş i v o i p l o u a ţ i î n t î l n i r i m i n u n a t e a l e v i e ţ i i m e l e o h p i c ă t u r i | i a r a r c u i ţ i n o r i i s e p u n p e n e c h e z a t u n u n i v e r s î n t r e g d e c e t ă ţ i a u r i c u l a r e | a s c u l t ă d a c ă p l o u ă î n v r e m e c e m î h n i r e a ş i d i s p r e ţ u l p r e l i n g o m u z i c ă d e d e m u l t | a s c u l t ă c u m c a d c o r z i l e c a r e l e g a t t e ţ i n s u s ş i j o s |
| Traducere din franceză de L. Palanciuc |
replica la interviul martei petreu, incitata de un comentariu anonim la interviul in cauza
Politica e una dintre cele mai sofisticate activitati umane in colectiv, pe cand dragostea este cea mai sofisticata activitate umana in doi...
"Ma simt apartinand unei culturi care se autoignora prosteste" - Marta Petreu in dialog cu Iolanda Malamen
Ce atitudine ai fata de politica?
De uimire! Tot ceea ce eu nu pot face - de la cizmarie la politica - ma uimeste... In toate sensurile. Astept insa momentul cand oamenii politici vor fi si profesionisti, si patrioti.
Ce inseamna pentru tine iubirea?
Placenta. Placenta din care-am fost adusa pe lume si in care am ratat deocamdata intoarcerea. Durere care-mi aduce aminte cat de vie sunt. Utopia zilelor de iarna cu ceata. Adapost. Balta de sange. Cruzime. Insomnie. Vointa de a trai (aceea a lui Schopenhauer) si dorinta de a muri (strict a Martei). Acasa al vietii. Cutia toracica a celui dintai om, poate singurul dupa chipul si asemanarea lui Dumnezeu, in care as fi putut fi coasta lipsa... Scarile unei clinici intr-o dimineata pufoasa de ianuarie. Pulberea de aur a verii. Sensul interzis pus pe strada pe care as vrea sa intru.
ZIUA/CULTURA - Sambata, 26 martie 2005
Marta Petreu in dialog cu Iolanda Malamen
De uimire! Tot ceea ce eu nu pot face - de la cizmarie la politica - ma uimeste... In toate sensurile. Astept insa momentul cand oamenii politici vor fi si profesionisti, si patrioti.
Ce inseamna pentru tine iubirea?
Placenta. Placenta din care-am fost adusa pe lume si in care am ratat deocamdata intoarcerea. Durere care-mi aduce aminte cat de vie sunt. Utopia zilelor de iarna cu ceata. Adapost. Balta de sange. Cruzime. Insomnie. Vointa de a trai (aceea a lui Schopenhauer) si dorinta de a muri (strict a Martei). Acasa al vietii. Cutia toracica a celui dintai om, poate singurul dupa chipul si asemanarea lui Dumnezeu, in care as fi putut fi coasta lipsa... Scarile unei clinici intr-o dimineata pufoasa de ianuarie. Pulberea de aur a verii. Sensul interzis pus pe strada pe care as vrea sa intru.
ZIUA/CULTURA - Sambata, 26 martie 2005
Marta Petreu in dialog cu Iolanda Malamen
nichita lu' stanescu
foaie verde beci,
curge apa-n stalp,
nu-i leguma ca gaina si nici pasare ca porcul
curge apa-n stalp,
nu-i leguma ca gaina si nici pasare ca porcul
Nichita: Nota autobiografica
Nota autobiografica :
S-a nascut la Ploiesti, la 31 martie 1933, dintr-un taran roman venit la oras si dintr-o rusoaica stabilita la Ploiesti cu prilejul mutarii sediului rafinariilor de petrol de la Constanta.
A ramas repetent in clasa intai primara fiindu-i deosebit de greu sa-si imagineze ca vorba vorbita si cuvantul cuvantat exista si ca ar putea fi scrise. Mai tarziu, dupa diferite eforturi fizice provenite din placerea sportului, s-a mirat brusc remarcand ca are un trup si din aceasta pricina, parasind calea dreapta a stiintei, s-a apucat cu ravna, in fine, alfabetizat fiind, sa scrie versuri sau mai degraba un fel de versuri, sau mai degraba un fel de texte cu un caracter subiectiv.
A citit Bacovia si s-a uluit de viziunea lui totala si a descoperit parodiile lui Toparceanu de la care a luat o lectie vie de diferite forme prozodice amare invelite in ciocolata umorului. A invatat atat de bine lectia incat in cele din urma a reusit sa o uite. Asa se face ca matur fiind, inca neconvins de faptul ca vorbirea poate fi scrisa, a ramas din nou repetent in fata cuvintelor, prin practica leit-motivului unor viziuni, si mai ales cu prilejul compunerii unei carti mai speciale intitulate Necuvintele.
Temperament contradictoriu si paradoxal, el este, asa cum au remarcat si prietenii sai, profund influentabil in zonele exterioare si conventionale, ca orice om civilizat, si inlauntrul spiritului sau, daca-l putem numi spirit, indaratnic pe ce a cunoscut de unul singur, si original ca un barbar.
Aparenta lenei in actiunea fizica este numai o aparenta. Se gandeste obsesiv zile si nopti la o singura viziune, iar cand scrie sau mai degraba o dicteaza da iluzia improvizatiei.
E probabil ca nu va reusi niciodata sa-si constituie o familie, din exces de idealizare a ideii de femeie iubita.
Mirat si uluit de ideea ca exista timp, vede in orice cea, in orice orologiu, in orice clepsidra, forma unui posibil sicriu.
Nu-i place sa calatoreasca, desi a calatorit, nu iubeste lucrurile de care, atunci cand le poseda, se desparte repede, cu o bucurie ironica.
Citeste de nenumarate ori, mereu si mereu, aceleasi carti: cum ar fi bunaoara poemul Ghilgames, Cartea lui Iov, Odiseea, si unele piese ale tanarului scriitor Shakespeare.
O ora pe an este extrem de multumit de propia sa munca. Tot o ora pe an este nemultumit de propia sa munca, iar in rest munceste pur si simplu.
Acum, la aceasta data, are 44 ani si a traversat din creier pe hartie inca un metru cub de cuvinte scrise, din care poate se vor alege cateva poezii bune.
Acum, in acest moment, sta si se uita prelung la o veche drahma din Istria si se gandeste ca prea mare lucru nu este de spus despre sine insusi si ca sinea altora, daca nu cumva sinea generala a speciei umane, este cu mult mai apta de contemplatie, desi insasi contemplatia, si ea, are natura unei misterioase oglinzi.
1 noiembrie 1977
(submisa de AMaNi)
S-a nascut la Ploiesti, la 31 martie 1933, dintr-un taran roman venit la oras si dintr-o rusoaica stabilita la Ploiesti cu prilejul mutarii sediului rafinariilor de petrol de la Constanta.
A ramas repetent in clasa intai primara fiindu-i deosebit de greu sa-si imagineze ca vorba vorbita si cuvantul cuvantat exista si ca ar putea fi scrise. Mai tarziu, dupa diferite eforturi fizice provenite din placerea sportului, s-a mirat brusc remarcand ca are un trup si din aceasta pricina, parasind calea dreapta a stiintei, s-a apucat cu ravna, in fine, alfabetizat fiind, sa scrie versuri sau mai degraba un fel de versuri, sau mai degraba un fel de texte cu un caracter subiectiv.
A citit Bacovia si s-a uluit de viziunea lui totala si a descoperit parodiile lui Toparceanu de la care a luat o lectie vie de diferite forme prozodice amare invelite in ciocolata umorului. A invatat atat de bine lectia incat in cele din urma a reusit sa o uite. Asa se face ca matur fiind, inca neconvins de faptul ca vorbirea poate fi scrisa, a ramas din nou repetent in fata cuvintelor, prin practica leit-motivului unor viziuni, si mai ales cu prilejul compunerii unei carti mai speciale intitulate Necuvintele.
Temperament contradictoriu si paradoxal, el este, asa cum au remarcat si prietenii sai, profund influentabil in zonele exterioare si conventionale, ca orice om civilizat, si inlauntrul spiritului sau, daca-l putem numi spirit, indaratnic pe ce a cunoscut de unul singur, si original ca un barbar.
Aparenta lenei in actiunea fizica este numai o aparenta. Se gandeste obsesiv zile si nopti la o singura viziune, iar cand scrie sau mai degraba o dicteaza da iluzia improvizatiei.
E probabil ca nu va reusi niciodata sa-si constituie o familie, din exces de idealizare a ideii de femeie iubita.
Mirat si uluit de ideea ca exista timp, vede in orice cea, in orice orologiu, in orice clepsidra, forma unui posibil sicriu.
Nu-i place sa calatoreasca, desi a calatorit, nu iubeste lucrurile de care, atunci cand le poseda, se desparte repede, cu o bucurie ironica.
Citeste de nenumarate ori, mereu si mereu, aceleasi carti: cum ar fi bunaoara poemul Ghilgames, Cartea lui Iov, Odiseea, si unele piese ale tanarului scriitor Shakespeare.
O ora pe an este extrem de multumit de propia sa munca. Tot o ora pe an este nemultumit de propia sa munca, iar in rest munceste pur si simplu.
Acum, la aceasta data, are 44 ani si a traversat din creier pe hartie inca un metru cub de cuvinte scrise, din care poate se vor alege cateva poezii bune.
Acum, in acest moment, sta si se uita prelung la o veche drahma din Istria si se gandeste ca prea mare lucru nu este de spus despre sine insusi si ca sinea altora, daca nu cumva sinea generala a speciei umane, este cu mult mai apta de contemplatie, desi insasi contemplatia, si ea, are natura unei misterioase oglinzi.
1 noiembrie 1977
(submisa de AMaNi)
despre Celi...
Tribute to a Teacher
by Markand Thakar
Music is nothing.
Sound could become music.
The end must be in the beginning,
and the beginning in the end.
I am here because I am not here.
Music lives in the eternal now.
Music is the now becoming now.
These mystical, enigmatic aphorisms appear over and over in my notes -- these, among many others. I wrote them down, but I certainly wasn't sure what they meant, or what they had to do with making music, or with conducting.
I showed up in Munich for the Celibidache Dirigierskurs with the Munich Philharmonic. It was the summer of 1981; I was a serious young student of conducting with degrees from prestigious schools, and had spent a year conducting in Europe as a Fulbright Fellow. I knew what America had to offer, and I knew what Europe had to offer, and I knew what I had to offer (quite a bit, if you asked me). I was there because I had heard of the legendary Celibidache -- a friend told me I would learn more from observing one rehearsal than I had learned in my life to date. Of course I didn't believe him, but I had to go because -- wellI had to find out. And too, a respected mentor in America told me, "Celibidache is the greatest conductor alive today. Whatever he is doing, GO!" Of course I didn't quite believe him either. But I went.
We started the four-week course with physical exercises, and right away I sensed something different -- something organic -- something fundamentally right. Everything Celibidache told us about the physical act of conducting was grounded in this simple and elegant insight: the job of the conductor can be accomplished only when his or her physical motions resonate synchronously with the sounds. So, we must first learn to free our bodies of the habitual, unconscious tensions which force us to gesture against the music. We practiced finding the basic position, a position free from undue tension. Sure it sounded easy, and it looked easy: just raise your hands to the basic position with a minimum of tension, without raising the shoulders, without raising the elbows, without tensing the neck. I got the hang of it after a week or so (all except for the neck business -- that took a little longer). But by the second day we were beating already. Ah, beating. Creating, from stillness, an impulse in the arm -- an explosion of energy -- after which the arm flies free, free for the next explosion.
And then proportion. Traditionally, conducting students are taught to make gestures to control the orchestra from a position of authority, with clear, sharp ictuses that can be followed easily. From Celibidache I discovered that we are only truly effective if instead we allow our gestures to participate with the ensemble. It became evident that our gestures cannot possibly be clear if they conflict with the sounds (I was surprised to realize that the shortest, most violent sounds in the repertoire were neither short enough nor violent enough to correspond to the seemingly clear ictus). So we learned beating with proportion: controlling the explosive impulses so that each gesture corresponds precisely to the character of the sound. And then we learned patterns -- organizing the beats into their musical groupings; and planes of inflection -- allowing the placement of the gesture to correspond to subtle inflections of intensity; and disparait -- more complicated patterns involving unequal beats and groupings. Every gesture was practiced over and over until it was free from tensions -- free to join the sounds.
Oh, but then what sounds. My first experience with Celibidache the musician was at a rehearsal with the Munich Philharmonic Choir. Never had I known such sounds. Never had I imagined such sounds -- I, who grew up in the capital of the world; I, who regularly heard the finest orchestras and choirs and chamber musicians. I came to Munich hoping to gain at least some small thing of value, and, like Howard Carter opening the tomb of Tutankhamen, found a wealth of treasures beyond my wildest imagination. What I found was a music that grabbed me, seized me, tore me from my surroundings and transported me to another world. It was like no music I ever heard; a spiritual, awakening experience that I never had dreamed possible.
Hyperbole? No. Because it really was a different music. The sounds were different -- they came together in a different way, even from the standard high quality professionally produced concerts. I saw how they were different, and how this extraordinary difference was achieved; no -- I heard how. I heard, that is, after he noticed me following along diligently with the score, as good conducting students learn to do. He took time out from the rehearsal to scream, "Close the book! LISTEN, DONT READ!" And then I listened; and then I heard. I heard sounds that began as individuals, separate and distinct from each other, conflicting in some way -- perhaps in terms of a simple attribute such as intonation, or temporal placement (ensemble), or perhaps in a more subtle way. And I heard the conflicts gradually disappear.
"No! Too flat. No! Too sharp. Ahh, yessss!! Just so." A conflict of intonation systems disintegrates; the sounds join as if indivisible. "No! Too soon. Why so? Yes! Wonderful." A conflict of temporal placement (ensemble) dissolves; again the sounds join as if indivisible. "Basses, No! You cover the tenors. Why so? You didn't listen? Wake up! Bongiorno! Again. Aaaaahhh -- Yes!! It is so. Do you hear?" They do. I do too. Another conflict -- this time of levels of intensity (balance) -- evaporates as the basses structure their volume in a musical relation to that of the rest of the choir. The sounds cease to be sounds. They join, they melt, into a celestial balance. And we who experience them lose ourselvesour selves -- in them. There is for us no more consciousness of subject, and no more consciousness of object (certainly the experience could not take place without subject and object, but they are not present for us in our experience). There is only consciousness -- pure consciousness. In the English language the only word for this transporting experience is beauty; beauty on the highest level.
Celibidache insists on no less than creating the conditions for this narcotic, celestial experience of beauty without interruption in every piece. To create these conditions, we must present the sounds in such a way that they are transcendingly beautiful; we must unfold the sounds so that the open listener can, through focusing his attentive consciousness exclusively on them, have an experience characterized by loss-of-self, an experience that is subject-less and object-less. The sounds must be present so that the subject is not a necessary component of the experience: they are present in that way when every attribute of every sound participates in a single entity -- a unity. Not that imaginary emperors-new-clothes unity that is ascribed to a work if the main theme recurs from time to time, but an experiential unity, an indivisible unity of experienced sounds.
The rehearsal process is one of reducing multiplicities. The multiplicity of conflicting intonation systems is reduced into a unity of intonation systems; and the multiplicity of temporal placement systems is dissolved into a unity. With each multiplicity dissolved, I the listener am no longer needed as an active component in the process. I am not needed to connect the out-of-tune tones; they come to me pre-connected, already within their non-conflicting logical relationships, and I am left free -- free to experience more sounds. But I am also not needed to connect the tones that are not together; they, too, come to me pre-connected, already in their non-conflicting relationships. Again I am free to experience more sounds. This freedom comes to me as beauty. When I experience a momentary fragment of exquisite beauty in musical performance, it is because the sounds have come to me in just this pre-connected way, freeing me from actively participating in their connection. My sublime experience is rudely snuffed out by the first sound that comes to me as unconnected -- for example, the first out-of-tune tone, the first tone experienced as not together, or the first pedestrian structure of balance. Celibidache strives to eliminate these conditions that put an end to this magical experience.
If we carefully examine our customary experience at even the highest quality professional concerts, we find a shish kebob of thoughts or experiences that follow each other in succession: a moment of sublime beauty, a thought about the timpanist, a nice melodic line, a thought about the conductor's gestures, a guess at the soloist's fee, another moment of sublime beauty, and so on, all attached to the skewer of a continuing musical experience. Of course the specific content of these successions of thoughts will vary depending on the listener; for instance, those of the more educated listener may include thoughts about the extra-musical program, or about historical considerations, or about mechanical aspects of the performing process, or about structural considerations of the work. Within any such succession, the component segments are delineated by new objects of consciousness: with each new object of consciousness the previous segment is ended, and a new one begins. Objects of consciousness are themselves defined or delineated by the _disconnection_ of sounds. For example, a passage is sounded so that every sound comes together, already connected for us. We hear it, and experience an extraordinary and sublime moment of beauty. BANG! A sound comes that is unconnected, even in some most subtle way. We are torn from our experience of beauty -- it is ended. That moment of beauty takes its place as a segment in the succession. BANG! Another sound unconnected. BANG! Yet another. Each disconnected event defines the borders of segments within the succession. We tire of being torn back to the real world of the concert hall. We slip into a thought of our tax bill, of the babysitter. Or, concentrating on the concert, we slip into a thought about the tuba player, about the conductors social life, or perhaps about the fourth finger vibrato of the principal cello. If we are particularly musically sophisticated, perhaps we think about the Toscanini recording or a performance with Thomas Beecham that we once heard. All these segments of thoughts are added on to the succession. Another beautiful passage comes, inviting us, drawing us away from non-musical thoughts, from thoughts of any kind. All the sounds are just one, without interruption, without individual components. They invite us in, they seduce us away from our real-world consciousness, they -- BANG! One more disconnected sound; one more segment for our succession.
The actual difference in the sounds between a performance that allows this magical experience and one that does not may be extremely subtle. The difference in our experience, though is enormous. Imagine an oboe tone that is just a bit too soft to join with the other woodwinds in a sublime, spine-tingling balance. Played just a fraction louder, it is loud enough to join with the other tones. That first tone of the oboe, too soft, is disconnected from the unity. It becomes defined as an object itself, and thus creates a multiplicity. Experiencing this multiplicity brings us back into the physical world. We experience the oboe tone as an oboe tone; the woodwind chord as a chord in the woodwinds. While that is not bad, it is not the magical, spiritual experience of musical beauty. Playing the tone just a fraction louder -- the fraction needed to bring it into a sublime balance with the other tones -- allows us to remain in that magical otherworldly experience. The oboe tone does not divide our consciousness into an awareness of separate objects; it does not return us abruptly to the real world. We continue to be drawn into the transcendent experience of pure consciousness. We are not encouraged to think of the laundry, or make comparisons with the Toscanini recording, or even with a previous Celibidache performance (all equally non-musical activities of the intellect); instead we continue to be seduced into the narcotic experience of musical beauty.
So what I learned from Celibidache is extraordinary. Because first, he knows this experience; he knows the crystalized beauty of, say, a celestial balance, and he knows that it comes about when the volume of each component is structured so that the totality comes as an indivisible unity. He knows his job to be not one of seeing that the volume of the orchestra matches a written marking (Oh its written forte? How loud is forte?); but instead one of encouraging and promoting this celestial experience. This he does by pointing out obstacles to the experience for the orchestra to eliminate: "No, too flat. Too sharp. No. Horn too loud. No. Why so? Listen to your function. No. No. No. No. No. AAAAAAHH -- Yes. You hear it now. It is so." And by pointing out obstacles to the orchestra for them to dissolve, he aids them in bringing into existence the conditions in sound for this ultimate beauty. The first thing I learned from him, then, is that there is a narcotic, seductive, extraordinary experience that is available from music; and we performers can consciously make the conditions for it. We make those conditions when we structure each component so that they all join into an indivisible unity.
But I also learned something else extraordinary. Celibidache knows about the temporal aspect of our experience. He knows that time is relative, and that physical time has nothing to do with the temporal aspect of our experience ("How long is a four-hour date with a boring person? How long is a four-hour date with an exciting person? So," he asked, "how long is four hours?"). Along the same lines, he knows that tones stand in the same fundamental relation sounding concurrently or sounding successively. For instance, concurrently sounding tones must be unfolded within a certain structure (balance) to be experienced as an indivisible unity, and thus to yield the incomparable experience of this highest beauty. Likewise, successively sounding tones must be unfolded within a certain structure to be experienced as an indivisible unity. Again, the experience requires that all attributes of all component events are joined together, without conflict. He is aware of the attribute of dynamic function: the gathering of energy or dissipation of energy that comes with the experience of any musical event. Any grouping must be unified in all its attributes; the attribute of dynamic function is unified when the energy created is susequently resolved in an equal degree. Thus a phrase must be presented in sound so that the energy created by the intensification to its climax is subsequently resolved in an equal degree; otherwise these two components (gathering of energy and dissipation of energy) stand in conflict. When its tones are experienced within an indivisible unity encompassing all attributes, the phrase will coalesce into just the same kind of celestial experience of beauty. And, assuming the composition allows it, this is also true of the entire movement. There is no higher experience on earth, I do not believe, than this: when our open consciousness is focused exclusively on the sounds of the entire temporally extended movement, which comes to us as one simultaneous moment, bonded together in an indivisible whole, bonded together with ussubject, object, and consciousness all indistinguishable. From Celibidache I learned that this experience can exist; I also learned to become sensitive to the subtle conditions of balance, of phrasing inflections, and of tempo direction that contribute to bringing it about.
I spent that summer with my mind constantly abuzz, from the flow of new information and possibilities and experiences, and nonstop exercises and lectures and daily assignments conducting the orchestra. I left a changed man. Over the next few years I had more contacts with him: another summer in Munich, and three weeks in Philadelphia for the preparations for the now-famous concert with the Curtis Institute orchestra in Carnegie Hall.
I believe Celibidache was unhappy with me for not staying in Munich and studying with him as he suggested. I very much wish he understood why: I had to learn things for myself. Perhaps it is my spirit of independence or self-sufficiency. In any case, I could not join his remarkable cadre of followers, who go to his rehearsals and concerts, following him from city to city around the European continent. Many are there because they want to be reflected in the glow of the legendary Celibidache; still asking the same inane, irritating questions after years. Even the bright ones, though, are there to get the knowledge from him. But I needed to learn things for myself. For instance he spoke of phenomenology; I wanted to read phenomenologists to discover for myself what they had to offer. He spoke of discovering musical experiences, of problems conducting, of different types of musical conditions and their effect on this highest experience; I wanted to go through it all myself. As an intensely dedicated teacher, he wanted to lead me each step of the way; and as an intensely dedicated student, I wanted to learn by giving it my own best shot.
Maybe he was also disappointed that a somewhat promising young man would leave to embrace the prevailing level of mediocrity at just the point when a really valuable development had begun. He thought, perhaps, that I would stop developing when I no longer had him to scream at me. ("Sure, I studied with Celibidache," someone once told me. "Would you like to see the scars?") Well he vastly underestimated himself as a teacher, then. Because, of everything that I gained from him, most important was this: he gave me myself; he gave me my own mind. He gave me an essential respect for my own being, in part by making it clear to me that the experiences I had were _my_ experiences, not those of the famous Celibidache, nor of anyone else. He answered my questions by posing riddles, and I hated him for it at first, because I felt stupid. But his riddles led me to other questions, which he answered with more riddles, leading to more questions. He allowed me -- no, he forced me -- to answer my own questions. He made me know that the truth lay not in Celibidaches dogma, but inside Markand Thakar. I could answer my own questions if I examined my experiences in great detail, openly, without fear of what I found. I had the key, and he gave it to me.
I have used that key every day of my life since. Years after I last saw him I was teaching at an enormous farming university in Pennsylvania, where I put some things together. The question arose in a class: where is the music? Ultimately, we found we had to say that the music exists only in the consciousness of the listener. When I experience music it seems as if I am hearing an object, and that object is music. But the music exists only in my consciousness. Out there are sounds, not music. The music results from the connection of those sounds; more precisely, the music is the connection of those sounds, a connection that exists only in my consciousness of them. (In a similar way, when I see a line of trees the line does not exist in physical reality; the line exists only in my consciousnessit is the way that I connect the trees.) Music then occurs only in my consciousness of the sounds. One way I know that is because the sounds start and stop, but the music -- the connection of the sounds in my consciousnesscomes to me as continuous. "MUSIC IS NOTHING; SOUND COULD BECOME MUSIC." So an enigma falls; a veil of confusion is lifted.
So what? "Sound could become music." So what? So if the music is something, then the object of my experience is music. The highest experience of music, however, comes to me as object-less -- as pure consciousness. To consider music as the object of my experience is to forfeit the possibility of the highest musical experience. Furthermore, if sound could become music, then it could do so under certain conditions. One condition is my openness as a listener to the experience. Another condition is the nature of the performance -- the way I give life to the sounds. I must find the way for the sounds to combine so that this highest experience results.
More enigmas fall. There is an almost durationless now-point that we experience as an immediate now; it is past as soon as it arrives. There is also another vantage point from which we experience: that is the extended present with which we experience temporally extended objects. For instance, the sounding of the name CARNEGIE HALL has temporal extension; it has a measurable duration. But we experience it all as a single, simultaneous, momentary event, all in the present. Although we do not hear the sound C concurrently with the final sound L, the experience of the sound C is retained as part of our experience in the now-point in which we hear the sound L. Likewise, although we dont hear the sound L concurrently with the sound C, the sound L is part of the essence of the sound C. The sound C would be essentially different without the context of the sound Lthe sound L is protended in the immediate now-point in which we hear the sound C. The sounds C and L, and the entire continuity of sounds in between, are experienced simultaneously in the experience of an indivisible temporally extended object such as the sounding of the name CARNEGIE HALL. When we experience a musical passage as beautiful, it comes to us in a similar way: simultaneously, and as indivisible. (The difference is that I ordinarily would not have a loss-of-self experience through listening to the sounding of the name, but, for a complex network of reasons, I do have it when the experience of the musical passage leads to the highest beauty.) Thus, THE END MUST BE IN THE BEGINNING, AND THE BEGINNING IN THE END. Only when the last note fully participates in the first, and the first fully participates in the last, will I experience this highest form of beauty. MUSIC LIVES IN THE ETERNAL NOW. MUSIC IS THE NOW BECOMING NOW. Music can happen when the now-point experience -- in which the entire grouping occurs simultaneously as a continuity of retentions, actual now-point experiences, and protentions -- is exchanged for a new now-point experience -- in which again the continuity of the entire grouping occurs simultaneously -- in an unboken continuum of such exchanges.
During this most exalted, sublime aesthetic experience, the distinction between subject and object is not there. I absorb the sounds, they overcome me, I become the sounds. Within my focused consciousness there is no them, and because there is no them different from me, there is also no me. And without a distinction between me and the external world that is not me, I come to experience my own being in the fullest way. Thus: I AM HERE BECAUSE I AM NOT HERE.
This detailed analysis of the musical experience may be confusing, and, Celibidache would strongly assert, is irrelevant to the experience itself. To understand the structure of the musical experience is valuable for the performer if it helps him clarify his contribution within it. But neither this, nor any other intellectual process can be part of our consciousness during a musical experience. On the contrary, one requirement for a musical experience is the open, unencumbered consciousness of the listener, absorbed exclusively with the totality of the sounds. If you listen to a Celibidache concert to discover the difference between it and standard fare, you will never find that difference. Because if you listen for something -- if you associate your experience of the sound with something, you can never lose yourself. The subject is ineradicably involved in the process. There is only one approach that will afford a listener this highest experience that a Celibidache concert may -- if all goes well -- offer: find a comfortable position, empty your mind of all external baggage, and focus exclusively on the totality of the sounds. Only if you go to the concert open, like a small child, unencumbered by thoughts of taxes and parking, unencumbered by thoughts of phenomenology and now-points, or of comparisons with the Berlin Philharmonic or Toscanini recordings, or by any thoughts other than the exclusive absorption with the totality of sounds, will you be able to taste this wondrous and unique experience. Afterward is the time to examine the performance. What was that experience? How did it happen? What were the conditions for it to come about? How can I have it again?
This is difficult for many, who have been taught -- both by regular concert-going and by educators -- that the only way to enjoy a concert is to listen _for_ something. Years of ingrained habit combined with self-doubt make Celibidache's contribution hard to accept. As a result, people tend to classify him, and inaccurately at that. On the one hand there are those that vilify him as eccentric, abnormal, crazy, fascistic, and dangerous. Yes dangerous, if one can imagine. But he is dangerous. He is dangerous to those with a vested interest in maintaining a happy status quo. He is dangerous, as is the Communist Party member who says, "Yes, Comrade, but in reality there IS no food." Celibidache, through his insistence on nothing less than the highest possible experience, says, "Yes, Comrade, but in reality that performance does not allow the highest experience that could come from those musicians playing that piece." He, like the honest Party member, is dangerous, because he is right. Celibidache does offer a more valuable experience. While the discovery of a higher experience is eye- and ear-opening manna for that person interested primarily in music, it is shattering and invalidating to anyone whose self-esteem derives not from the musical experience itself, but from a participation in the machinery of the music business. More than a few professional musicians, teachers, conductors, and critics fall into that latter category. No -- for these people Celibidache must be crazy, an eccentric, irrelevant to what they know as music; and dangerous.
Some say he is eccentric -- that he demands too many rehearsals. That is true, if you listen to the relationship between the sounds and the score, or the difference between the sounds of the Celibidache concert and those of the Toscanini recording. If you are willing to limit yourself to ordinary musical experiences (as pleasant as they assuredly are), then it is quite reasonable to stop rehearsing when the ensemble plays together, and in tune, and with a beautiful sound, and with a certain excitement. If, however, you insist on the highest, spine-tingling, magical experience of musical beauty that is available, then there is no choice but to rehearse until the oboe joins with the other woodwinds -- until every tone joins with every other. Nor is that as impossible a task as it seems. It is eminently achievable if the musicians play with that experience as their goal.
Some say he is impractical. (Celibidache may rehearse without a score, but I dont have time to learn my scores that well. Im just soooo busy, offered a former teacher.) They say, in essence, that it is too hard to demand that every attribute of every tone exist in function of each other; that this experience of ultimate beauty is not worth the trouble. To paraphrase the old TV commercial, I say: "Try working hard! Try extending yourself! Try listening openly to the sounds! Try this extraordinary experience that comes when every sound falls into place -- just so. Try it! Youll like it!"
Others ascribe theories to him. I recall statements from three different people (none with any first-hand experience): "He's a fascist -- he makes everyone do it his way" and "He likes the bass soft and the high notes loud" and "Oh Celibidachehe's the one who ends every phrase softly." From my first-hand experience, I offer this opposite impression: Celibidache has no interest in theories, or in principles of performance. His interest is in the highest, transcendent experience of musical beauty. Every musical grouping has a different set of relationships within which the sounds must be unfolded to allow this experience, and for each relationship there is a latitude (we do not know exactly how large a major third is, for instance, but we do know when it sounds too large or too small). We know this set of relationships not from a theory, and not because of any higher authority. On the contrary, we know it because of the most direct and doubt-free reason: we hear it. We know it because we have the magical experience when the sounds come together in this way, and we dont have it when they do not. Once they have come together, we can then examine those relationships that did allow the extraordinary experience. There is no theory, though; if we consider one thousand passages, we will find one thousand different sets of relationships that allow the tones to come together. To speak of a general principle of performance, such as "Play high notes loud" or "End phrases soft" is absurd and anti-musical. Moreover, there is by no means one performance -- one specific way to play. The specific, measurable, physical attributes are of no interest whatever (student: "Maestro, I know that we must get softer in this spot, but how much softer?" Celibidache: "Six centimeters. Pre-cise-ly!"). These measurable physical attributes change from performance to performance, from orchestra to orchestra, from conductor to conductor, from hall to hall, etc., and are essentially irrelevant to our experience of transcendent beauty. Celibidache is, however, fascistic: he insists that everyone -- students, and orchestra members, and performers -- do as he does, giving no less than the utmost of their capabilities.
On the other hand, there are those that deify him as a legendary genius. They, too, are off the track. In no way do I imply any disrespect in this. To say Celibidache is a god; I am a mere mortal, and could never do what he does, is equally missing the point, and in fact goes completely counter to his fundamental message. This message might be summarized as follows: "I, Celibidache, am just a guy. Like any human, I have human experiences; like the audience, like the orchestra musicians, and like -- say -- Mozart." Mozart's works allow us to make the conditions in sound for that extraordinary musical experience, which is a human experience, one that we all as humans can share. We -- conductors and musicians and audiences -- can all have essentially the same experience as he did (it is, after all, the fact that we share the experience that allows us to agree on Mozarts greatness). I, as a conductor, hold no secret keys -- have no magical interpretive powers. I do not create the sounds -- the orchestra creates the sounds. I can at best influence the orchestra in a positive way; at worst, in a negative way. When the orchestra plays an exquisite phrase, however, it is not Celibidache's phrase -- my stick made no sounds. They play an exquisite phrase because they, the musicians, are responding to the requirements of the sounds in an effort to attain the highest experience of musical beauty. My job as conductor is to bring it to their attention when their sounds stand in the way of this experience, and to suggest where they can look to find the correction. I invite an audience to the concerts so they share with us this most high and ennobling experience; any listener with an open consciousness focused on the sounds will -- if we do our jobs -- find it also.
I have come to see a powerful force behind both extremes of opinion: fear of the self. Fear of self motivates Celibidache's deifiers, who look outside themselves to him to structure their lives; and it motivates his critics, who have already found their external structures elsewhere. Celibidache is above all a giver of selves. He teaches his students that they have the means, they have the answers, they themselves are the source; and can find truth if they look internally -- if they look with unflagging criticism at their own experiences. This is terrifying for those students, who, mistrustful of themselves, look to education for a comforting set of external rules or commandments by which to act. Complaints from such students generally take the shape of either "I can't pin him down," or, "I could do without the rhetoric. If only he would just tell me what to do."
Fear of self also motivates criticism of his performances, although in a somewhat more subtle way. Audiences, especially educated ones, often listen to classical music performances to add to their knowledge. The details of the performance become part of their accumulated knowledge, as trinkets in the continuing acquisition of intellectual wealth. Standard performances promote this attitude by presenting sounds that stand as individuals, as objects. Celibidaches performances discourage it, by seductively inviting the listener in. The sounds come together, as one, indivisible, eliminating the need for a subject, and for an object. His performances invite the listeners focused consciousness on the totality of sounds alone; they seduce it, they demand it. There is no external structure to hang on to; there is only pure consciousness -- the self. For those listeners -- fearful of experiencing their own being -- who attend concerts to acquire information with which to structure their lives, Celibidache's concerts -- which force the listener into an exclusive experience of himself -- are understandably frightening.
It would be less than honest, though, to ignore some negatives. Celibidache is not without imperfections, which often serve him poorly. For instance, with his students and his orchestra he uses the old-fashioned tool of humiliation. This is partly generational. European conductors of his generation learned sarcasm and humiliation as part of the trade. I personally hated him for it at times (many of his orchestra members do likewise), and, in the process of finding my own way, have attempted to discard humiliation in favor of more effective tools. He humiliated his students, though, only if he knew they could do better, and so my hatred was never very deep or long-lived. Still, giving it up would surely result in the universal adoration from his orchestra and students that he deserves, and (I believe) is seeking deep down. This is a minor consideration though. More destructive are both the trace of paranoia and the urge to conquer that run through him and surface from time to time. He tends to see questions as attacks -- personal attacks -- and answer them accordingly. On the positive side, he will travel great distances to learn something new himself and to share his own mastery with humanity; he is extremely generous with anyone who is genuinely interested. He refuses to actively solicit new believers, secure in the knowledge that the music speaks for itself, and knowing that only those attracted of their own accord will gain something lasting. On the negative side, he often carries that refusal to an unhealthy extreme, putting off and even ridiculing some who might otherwise learn from him. He demands a kind of supplication from those newly interested in what he offers, saying essentially, "What we do here is special, and we invite you to join us, but to join us is to repudiate everything you hold near and dear." His tendency to speak in enigmas and riddles, which can have positive results with some people (myself, for example), is often carried to extremes -- at times it can seem to do more harm than good. This inclination to discourage limits his audience; it drastically reduces the number of his potential beneficiaries. And, although his Napoleonic strain is quite common (what conductor, famous or otherwise, is free of the urge for recognized supremacy), I think he would be better served to overcome it -- to invite interested minds, telling them (as I know he believes), "Our goal here is to find and share that very experience of musical beauty that drew us all to music in the first place."
But enough vinegar; suffice it to say that Sergiu Celibidache, genius of historical proportion, unyielding seeker and giver of truth, and unquenchable lover of humanity, is himself human. I write this not to excoriate him, but to honor him, and to thank him. His own activities serve me as an inspiration, as a guide, as a constant example of what is possible in human endeavor. Moreover, he gave me myself, my own way. He showed me that by honestly examining my experiences and demanding no less than the utmost of my capacity, I too, may eventually approach those possibilities. He changed my life -- made every single day of it better and more rewarding. I am thankful that such a man has walked on this earth; I cherish my contact with him; and hope that my existence does justice to his efforts.
* * *
MARKAND THAKAR is the author of Counterpoint: Fundamentals of Music Making, (Yale University Press;1990).
by Markand Thakar
Music is nothing.
Sound could become music.
The end must be in the beginning,
and the beginning in the end.
I am here because I am not here.
Music lives in the eternal now.
Music is the now becoming now.
These mystical, enigmatic aphorisms appear over and over in my notes -- these, among many others. I wrote them down, but I certainly wasn't sure what they meant, or what they had to do with making music, or with conducting.
I showed up in Munich for the Celibidache Dirigierskurs with the Munich Philharmonic. It was the summer of 1981; I was a serious young student of conducting with degrees from prestigious schools, and had spent a year conducting in Europe as a Fulbright Fellow. I knew what America had to offer, and I knew what Europe had to offer, and I knew what I had to offer (quite a bit, if you asked me). I was there because I had heard of the legendary Celibidache -- a friend told me I would learn more from observing one rehearsal than I had learned in my life to date. Of course I didn't believe him, but I had to go because -- wellI had to find out. And too, a respected mentor in America told me, "Celibidache is the greatest conductor alive today. Whatever he is doing, GO!" Of course I didn't quite believe him either. But I went.
We started the four-week course with physical exercises, and right away I sensed something different -- something organic -- something fundamentally right. Everything Celibidache told us about the physical act of conducting was grounded in this simple and elegant insight: the job of the conductor can be accomplished only when his or her physical motions resonate synchronously with the sounds. So, we must first learn to free our bodies of the habitual, unconscious tensions which force us to gesture against the music. We practiced finding the basic position, a position free from undue tension. Sure it sounded easy, and it looked easy: just raise your hands to the basic position with a minimum of tension, without raising the shoulders, without raising the elbows, without tensing the neck. I got the hang of it after a week or so (all except for the neck business -- that took a little longer). But by the second day we were beating already. Ah, beating. Creating, from stillness, an impulse in the arm -- an explosion of energy -- after which the arm flies free, free for the next explosion.
And then proportion. Traditionally, conducting students are taught to make gestures to control the orchestra from a position of authority, with clear, sharp ictuses that can be followed easily. From Celibidache I discovered that we are only truly effective if instead we allow our gestures to participate with the ensemble. It became evident that our gestures cannot possibly be clear if they conflict with the sounds (I was surprised to realize that the shortest, most violent sounds in the repertoire were neither short enough nor violent enough to correspond to the seemingly clear ictus). So we learned beating with proportion: controlling the explosive impulses so that each gesture corresponds precisely to the character of the sound. And then we learned patterns -- organizing the beats into their musical groupings; and planes of inflection -- allowing the placement of the gesture to correspond to subtle inflections of intensity; and disparait -- more complicated patterns involving unequal beats and groupings. Every gesture was practiced over and over until it was free from tensions -- free to join the sounds.
Oh, but then what sounds. My first experience with Celibidache the musician was at a rehearsal with the Munich Philharmonic Choir. Never had I known such sounds. Never had I imagined such sounds -- I, who grew up in the capital of the world; I, who regularly heard the finest orchestras and choirs and chamber musicians. I came to Munich hoping to gain at least some small thing of value, and, like Howard Carter opening the tomb of Tutankhamen, found a wealth of treasures beyond my wildest imagination. What I found was a music that grabbed me, seized me, tore me from my surroundings and transported me to another world. It was like no music I ever heard; a spiritual, awakening experience that I never had dreamed possible.
Hyperbole? No. Because it really was a different music. The sounds were different -- they came together in a different way, even from the standard high quality professionally produced concerts. I saw how they were different, and how this extraordinary difference was achieved; no -- I heard how. I heard, that is, after he noticed me following along diligently with the score, as good conducting students learn to do. He took time out from the rehearsal to scream, "Close the book! LISTEN, DONT READ!" And then I listened; and then I heard. I heard sounds that began as individuals, separate and distinct from each other, conflicting in some way -- perhaps in terms of a simple attribute such as intonation, or temporal placement (ensemble), or perhaps in a more subtle way. And I heard the conflicts gradually disappear.
"No! Too flat. No! Too sharp. Ahh, yessss!! Just so." A conflict of intonation systems disintegrates; the sounds join as if indivisible. "No! Too soon. Why so? Yes! Wonderful." A conflict of temporal placement (ensemble) dissolves; again the sounds join as if indivisible. "Basses, No! You cover the tenors. Why so? You didn't listen? Wake up! Bongiorno! Again. Aaaaahhh -- Yes!! It is so. Do you hear?" They do. I do too. Another conflict -- this time of levels of intensity (balance) -- evaporates as the basses structure their volume in a musical relation to that of the rest of the choir. The sounds cease to be sounds. They join, they melt, into a celestial balance. And we who experience them lose ourselvesour selves -- in them. There is for us no more consciousness of subject, and no more consciousness of object (certainly the experience could not take place without subject and object, but they are not present for us in our experience). There is only consciousness -- pure consciousness. In the English language the only word for this transporting experience is beauty; beauty on the highest level.
Celibidache insists on no less than creating the conditions for this narcotic, celestial experience of beauty without interruption in every piece. To create these conditions, we must present the sounds in such a way that they are transcendingly beautiful; we must unfold the sounds so that the open listener can, through focusing his attentive consciousness exclusively on them, have an experience characterized by loss-of-self, an experience that is subject-less and object-less. The sounds must be present so that the subject is not a necessary component of the experience: they are present in that way when every attribute of every sound participates in a single entity -- a unity. Not that imaginary emperors-new-clothes unity that is ascribed to a work if the main theme recurs from time to time, but an experiential unity, an indivisible unity of experienced sounds.
The rehearsal process is one of reducing multiplicities. The multiplicity of conflicting intonation systems is reduced into a unity of intonation systems; and the multiplicity of temporal placement systems is dissolved into a unity. With each multiplicity dissolved, I the listener am no longer needed as an active component in the process. I am not needed to connect the out-of-tune tones; they come to me pre-connected, already within their non-conflicting logical relationships, and I am left free -- free to experience more sounds. But I am also not needed to connect the tones that are not together; they, too, come to me pre-connected, already in their non-conflicting relationships. Again I am free to experience more sounds. This freedom comes to me as beauty. When I experience a momentary fragment of exquisite beauty in musical performance, it is because the sounds have come to me in just this pre-connected way, freeing me from actively participating in their connection. My sublime experience is rudely snuffed out by the first sound that comes to me as unconnected -- for example, the first out-of-tune tone, the first tone experienced as not together, or the first pedestrian structure of balance. Celibidache strives to eliminate these conditions that put an end to this magical experience.
If we carefully examine our customary experience at even the highest quality professional concerts, we find a shish kebob of thoughts or experiences that follow each other in succession: a moment of sublime beauty, a thought about the timpanist, a nice melodic line, a thought about the conductor's gestures, a guess at the soloist's fee, another moment of sublime beauty, and so on, all attached to the skewer of a continuing musical experience. Of course the specific content of these successions of thoughts will vary depending on the listener; for instance, those of the more educated listener may include thoughts about the extra-musical program, or about historical considerations, or about mechanical aspects of the performing process, or about structural considerations of the work. Within any such succession, the component segments are delineated by new objects of consciousness: with each new object of consciousness the previous segment is ended, and a new one begins. Objects of consciousness are themselves defined or delineated by the _disconnection_ of sounds. For example, a passage is sounded so that every sound comes together, already connected for us. We hear it, and experience an extraordinary and sublime moment of beauty. BANG! A sound comes that is unconnected, even in some most subtle way. We are torn from our experience of beauty -- it is ended. That moment of beauty takes its place as a segment in the succession. BANG! Another sound unconnected. BANG! Yet another. Each disconnected event defines the borders of segments within the succession. We tire of being torn back to the real world of the concert hall. We slip into a thought of our tax bill, of the babysitter. Or, concentrating on the concert, we slip into a thought about the tuba player, about the conductors social life, or perhaps about the fourth finger vibrato of the principal cello. If we are particularly musically sophisticated, perhaps we think about the Toscanini recording or a performance with Thomas Beecham that we once heard. All these segments of thoughts are added on to the succession. Another beautiful passage comes, inviting us, drawing us away from non-musical thoughts, from thoughts of any kind. All the sounds are just one, without interruption, without individual components. They invite us in, they seduce us away from our real-world consciousness, they -- BANG! One more disconnected sound; one more segment for our succession.
The actual difference in the sounds between a performance that allows this magical experience and one that does not may be extremely subtle. The difference in our experience, though is enormous. Imagine an oboe tone that is just a bit too soft to join with the other woodwinds in a sublime, spine-tingling balance. Played just a fraction louder, it is loud enough to join with the other tones. That first tone of the oboe, too soft, is disconnected from the unity. It becomes defined as an object itself, and thus creates a multiplicity. Experiencing this multiplicity brings us back into the physical world. We experience the oboe tone as an oboe tone; the woodwind chord as a chord in the woodwinds. While that is not bad, it is not the magical, spiritual experience of musical beauty. Playing the tone just a fraction louder -- the fraction needed to bring it into a sublime balance with the other tones -- allows us to remain in that magical otherworldly experience. The oboe tone does not divide our consciousness into an awareness of separate objects; it does not return us abruptly to the real world. We continue to be drawn into the transcendent experience of pure consciousness. We are not encouraged to think of the laundry, or make comparisons with the Toscanini recording, or even with a previous Celibidache performance (all equally non-musical activities of the intellect); instead we continue to be seduced into the narcotic experience of musical beauty.
So what I learned from Celibidache is extraordinary. Because first, he knows this experience; he knows the crystalized beauty of, say, a celestial balance, and he knows that it comes about when the volume of each component is structured so that the totality comes as an indivisible unity. He knows his job to be not one of seeing that the volume of the orchestra matches a written marking (Oh its written forte? How loud is forte?); but instead one of encouraging and promoting this celestial experience. This he does by pointing out obstacles to the experience for the orchestra to eliminate: "No, too flat. Too sharp. No. Horn too loud. No. Why so? Listen to your function. No. No. No. No. No. AAAAAAHH -- Yes. You hear it now. It is so." And by pointing out obstacles to the orchestra for them to dissolve, he aids them in bringing into existence the conditions in sound for this ultimate beauty. The first thing I learned from him, then, is that there is a narcotic, seductive, extraordinary experience that is available from music; and we performers can consciously make the conditions for it. We make those conditions when we structure each component so that they all join into an indivisible unity.
But I also learned something else extraordinary. Celibidache knows about the temporal aspect of our experience. He knows that time is relative, and that physical time has nothing to do with the temporal aspect of our experience ("How long is a four-hour date with a boring person? How long is a four-hour date with an exciting person? So," he asked, "how long is four hours?"). Along the same lines, he knows that tones stand in the same fundamental relation sounding concurrently or sounding successively. For instance, concurrently sounding tones must be unfolded within a certain structure (balance) to be experienced as an indivisible unity, and thus to yield the incomparable experience of this highest beauty. Likewise, successively sounding tones must be unfolded within a certain structure to be experienced as an indivisible unity. Again, the experience requires that all attributes of all component events are joined together, without conflict. He is aware of the attribute of dynamic function: the gathering of energy or dissipation of energy that comes with the experience of any musical event. Any grouping must be unified in all its attributes; the attribute of dynamic function is unified when the energy created is susequently resolved in an equal degree. Thus a phrase must be presented in sound so that the energy created by the intensification to its climax is subsequently resolved in an equal degree; otherwise these two components (gathering of energy and dissipation of energy) stand in conflict. When its tones are experienced within an indivisible unity encompassing all attributes, the phrase will coalesce into just the same kind of celestial experience of beauty. And, assuming the composition allows it, this is also true of the entire movement. There is no higher experience on earth, I do not believe, than this: when our open consciousness is focused exclusively on the sounds of the entire temporally extended movement, which comes to us as one simultaneous moment, bonded together in an indivisible whole, bonded together with ussubject, object, and consciousness all indistinguishable. From Celibidache I learned that this experience can exist; I also learned to become sensitive to the subtle conditions of balance, of phrasing inflections, and of tempo direction that contribute to bringing it about.
I spent that summer with my mind constantly abuzz, from the flow of new information and possibilities and experiences, and nonstop exercises and lectures and daily assignments conducting the orchestra. I left a changed man. Over the next few years I had more contacts with him: another summer in Munich, and three weeks in Philadelphia for the preparations for the now-famous concert with the Curtis Institute orchestra in Carnegie Hall.
I believe Celibidache was unhappy with me for not staying in Munich and studying with him as he suggested. I very much wish he understood why: I had to learn things for myself. Perhaps it is my spirit of independence or self-sufficiency. In any case, I could not join his remarkable cadre of followers, who go to his rehearsals and concerts, following him from city to city around the European continent. Many are there because they want to be reflected in the glow of the legendary Celibidache; still asking the same inane, irritating questions after years. Even the bright ones, though, are there to get the knowledge from him. But I needed to learn things for myself. For instance he spoke of phenomenology; I wanted to read phenomenologists to discover for myself what they had to offer. He spoke of discovering musical experiences, of problems conducting, of different types of musical conditions and their effect on this highest experience; I wanted to go through it all myself. As an intensely dedicated teacher, he wanted to lead me each step of the way; and as an intensely dedicated student, I wanted to learn by giving it my own best shot.
Maybe he was also disappointed that a somewhat promising young man would leave to embrace the prevailing level of mediocrity at just the point when a really valuable development had begun. He thought, perhaps, that I would stop developing when I no longer had him to scream at me. ("Sure, I studied with Celibidache," someone once told me. "Would you like to see the scars?") Well he vastly underestimated himself as a teacher, then. Because, of everything that I gained from him, most important was this: he gave me myself; he gave me my own mind. He gave me an essential respect for my own being, in part by making it clear to me that the experiences I had were _my_ experiences, not those of the famous Celibidache, nor of anyone else. He answered my questions by posing riddles, and I hated him for it at first, because I felt stupid. But his riddles led me to other questions, which he answered with more riddles, leading to more questions. He allowed me -- no, he forced me -- to answer my own questions. He made me know that the truth lay not in Celibidaches dogma, but inside Markand Thakar. I could answer my own questions if I examined my experiences in great detail, openly, without fear of what I found. I had the key, and he gave it to me.
I have used that key every day of my life since. Years after I last saw him I was teaching at an enormous farming university in Pennsylvania, where I put some things together. The question arose in a class: where is the music? Ultimately, we found we had to say that the music exists only in the consciousness of the listener. When I experience music it seems as if I am hearing an object, and that object is music. But the music exists only in my consciousness. Out there are sounds, not music. The music results from the connection of those sounds; more precisely, the music is the connection of those sounds, a connection that exists only in my consciousness of them. (In a similar way, when I see a line of trees the line does not exist in physical reality; the line exists only in my consciousnessit is the way that I connect the trees.) Music then occurs only in my consciousness of the sounds. One way I know that is because the sounds start and stop, but the music -- the connection of the sounds in my consciousnesscomes to me as continuous. "MUSIC IS NOTHING; SOUND COULD BECOME MUSIC." So an enigma falls; a veil of confusion is lifted.
So what? "Sound could become music." So what? So if the music is something, then the object of my experience is music. The highest experience of music, however, comes to me as object-less -- as pure consciousness. To consider music as the object of my experience is to forfeit the possibility of the highest musical experience. Furthermore, if sound could become music, then it could do so under certain conditions. One condition is my openness as a listener to the experience. Another condition is the nature of the performance -- the way I give life to the sounds. I must find the way for the sounds to combine so that this highest experience results.
More enigmas fall. There is an almost durationless now-point that we experience as an immediate now; it is past as soon as it arrives. There is also another vantage point from which we experience: that is the extended present with which we experience temporally extended objects. For instance, the sounding of the name CARNEGIE HALL has temporal extension; it has a measurable duration. But we experience it all as a single, simultaneous, momentary event, all in the present. Although we do not hear the sound C concurrently with the final sound L, the experience of the sound C is retained as part of our experience in the now-point in which we hear the sound L. Likewise, although we dont hear the sound L concurrently with the sound C, the sound L is part of the essence of the sound C. The sound C would be essentially different without the context of the sound Lthe sound L is protended in the immediate now-point in which we hear the sound C. The sounds C and L, and the entire continuity of sounds in between, are experienced simultaneously in the experience of an indivisible temporally extended object such as the sounding of the name CARNEGIE HALL. When we experience a musical passage as beautiful, it comes to us in a similar way: simultaneously, and as indivisible. (The difference is that I ordinarily would not have a loss-of-self experience through listening to the sounding of the name, but, for a complex network of reasons, I do have it when the experience of the musical passage leads to the highest beauty.) Thus, THE END MUST BE IN THE BEGINNING, AND THE BEGINNING IN THE END. Only when the last note fully participates in the first, and the first fully participates in the last, will I experience this highest form of beauty. MUSIC LIVES IN THE ETERNAL NOW. MUSIC IS THE NOW BECOMING NOW. Music can happen when the now-point experience -- in which the entire grouping occurs simultaneously as a continuity of retentions, actual now-point experiences, and protentions -- is exchanged for a new now-point experience -- in which again the continuity of the entire grouping occurs simultaneously -- in an unboken continuum of such exchanges.
During this most exalted, sublime aesthetic experience, the distinction between subject and object is not there. I absorb the sounds, they overcome me, I become the sounds. Within my focused consciousness there is no them, and because there is no them different from me, there is also no me. And without a distinction between me and the external world that is not me, I come to experience my own being in the fullest way. Thus: I AM HERE BECAUSE I AM NOT HERE.
This detailed analysis of the musical experience may be confusing, and, Celibidache would strongly assert, is irrelevant to the experience itself. To understand the structure of the musical experience is valuable for the performer if it helps him clarify his contribution within it. But neither this, nor any other intellectual process can be part of our consciousness during a musical experience. On the contrary, one requirement for a musical experience is the open, unencumbered consciousness of the listener, absorbed exclusively with the totality of the sounds. If you listen to a Celibidache concert to discover the difference between it and standard fare, you will never find that difference. Because if you listen for something -- if you associate your experience of the sound with something, you can never lose yourself. The subject is ineradicably involved in the process. There is only one approach that will afford a listener this highest experience that a Celibidache concert may -- if all goes well -- offer: find a comfortable position, empty your mind of all external baggage, and focus exclusively on the totality of the sounds. Only if you go to the concert open, like a small child, unencumbered by thoughts of taxes and parking, unencumbered by thoughts of phenomenology and now-points, or of comparisons with the Berlin Philharmonic or Toscanini recordings, or by any thoughts other than the exclusive absorption with the totality of sounds, will you be able to taste this wondrous and unique experience. Afterward is the time to examine the performance. What was that experience? How did it happen? What were the conditions for it to come about? How can I have it again?
This is difficult for many, who have been taught -- both by regular concert-going and by educators -- that the only way to enjoy a concert is to listen _for_ something. Years of ingrained habit combined with self-doubt make Celibidache's contribution hard to accept. As a result, people tend to classify him, and inaccurately at that. On the one hand there are those that vilify him as eccentric, abnormal, crazy, fascistic, and dangerous. Yes dangerous, if one can imagine. But he is dangerous. He is dangerous to those with a vested interest in maintaining a happy status quo. He is dangerous, as is the Communist Party member who says, "Yes, Comrade, but in reality there IS no food." Celibidache, through his insistence on nothing less than the highest possible experience, says, "Yes, Comrade, but in reality that performance does not allow the highest experience that could come from those musicians playing that piece." He, like the honest Party member, is dangerous, because he is right. Celibidache does offer a more valuable experience. While the discovery of a higher experience is eye- and ear-opening manna for that person interested primarily in music, it is shattering and invalidating to anyone whose self-esteem derives not from the musical experience itself, but from a participation in the machinery of the music business. More than a few professional musicians, teachers, conductors, and critics fall into that latter category. No -- for these people Celibidache must be crazy, an eccentric, irrelevant to what they know as music; and dangerous.
Some say he is eccentric -- that he demands too many rehearsals. That is true, if you listen to the relationship between the sounds and the score, or the difference between the sounds of the Celibidache concert and those of the Toscanini recording. If you are willing to limit yourself to ordinary musical experiences (as pleasant as they assuredly are), then it is quite reasonable to stop rehearsing when the ensemble plays together, and in tune, and with a beautiful sound, and with a certain excitement. If, however, you insist on the highest, spine-tingling, magical experience of musical beauty that is available, then there is no choice but to rehearse until the oboe joins with the other woodwinds -- until every tone joins with every other. Nor is that as impossible a task as it seems. It is eminently achievable if the musicians play with that experience as their goal.
Some say he is impractical. (Celibidache may rehearse without a score, but I dont have time to learn my scores that well. Im just soooo busy, offered a former teacher.) They say, in essence, that it is too hard to demand that every attribute of every tone exist in function of each other; that this experience of ultimate beauty is not worth the trouble. To paraphrase the old TV commercial, I say: "Try working hard! Try extending yourself! Try listening openly to the sounds! Try this extraordinary experience that comes when every sound falls into place -- just so. Try it! Youll like it!"
Others ascribe theories to him. I recall statements from three different people (none with any first-hand experience): "He's a fascist -- he makes everyone do it his way" and "He likes the bass soft and the high notes loud" and "Oh Celibidachehe's the one who ends every phrase softly." From my first-hand experience, I offer this opposite impression: Celibidache has no interest in theories, or in principles of performance. His interest is in the highest, transcendent experience of musical beauty. Every musical grouping has a different set of relationships within which the sounds must be unfolded to allow this experience, and for each relationship there is a latitude (we do not know exactly how large a major third is, for instance, but we do know when it sounds too large or too small). We know this set of relationships not from a theory, and not because of any higher authority. On the contrary, we know it because of the most direct and doubt-free reason: we hear it. We know it because we have the magical experience when the sounds come together in this way, and we dont have it when they do not. Once they have come together, we can then examine those relationships that did allow the extraordinary experience. There is no theory, though; if we consider one thousand passages, we will find one thousand different sets of relationships that allow the tones to come together. To speak of a general principle of performance, such as "Play high notes loud" or "End phrases soft" is absurd and anti-musical. Moreover, there is by no means one performance -- one specific way to play. The specific, measurable, physical attributes are of no interest whatever (student: "Maestro, I know that we must get softer in this spot, but how much softer?" Celibidache: "Six centimeters. Pre-cise-ly!"). These measurable physical attributes change from performance to performance, from orchestra to orchestra, from conductor to conductor, from hall to hall, etc., and are essentially irrelevant to our experience of transcendent beauty. Celibidache is, however, fascistic: he insists that everyone -- students, and orchestra members, and performers -- do as he does, giving no less than the utmost of their capabilities.
On the other hand, there are those that deify him as a legendary genius. They, too, are off the track. In no way do I imply any disrespect in this. To say Celibidache is a god; I am a mere mortal, and could never do what he does, is equally missing the point, and in fact goes completely counter to his fundamental message. This message might be summarized as follows: "I, Celibidache, am just a guy. Like any human, I have human experiences; like the audience, like the orchestra musicians, and like -- say -- Mozart." Mozart's works allow us to make the conditions in sound for that extraordinary musical experience, which is a human experience, one that we all as humans can share. We -- conductors and musicians and audiences -- can all have essentially the same experience as he did (it is, after all, the fact that we share the experience that allows us to agree on Mozarts greatness). I, as a conductor, hold no secret keys -- have no magical interpretive powers. I do not create the sounds -- the orchestra creates the sounds. I can at best influence the orchestra in a positive way; at worst, in a negative way. When the orchestra plays an exquisite phrase, however, it is not Celibidache's phrase -- my stick made no sounds. They play an exquisite phrase because they, the musicians, are responding to the requirements of the sounds in an effort to attain the highest experience of musical beauty. My job as conductor is to bring it to their attention when their sounds stand in the way of this experience, and to suggest where they can look to find the correction. I invite an audience to the concerts so they share with us this most high and ennobling experience; any listener with an open consciousness focused on the sounds will -- if we do our jobs -- find it also.
I have come to see a powerful force behind both extremes of opinion: fear of the self. Fear of self motivates Celibidache's deifiers, who look outside themselves to him to structure their lives; and it motivates his critics, who have already found their external structures elsewhere. Celibidache is above all a giver of selves. He teaches his students that they have the means, they have the answers, they themselves are the source; and can find truth if they look internally -- if they look with unflagging criticism at their own experiences. This is terrifying for those students, who, mistrustful of themselves, look to education for a comforting set of external rules or commandments by which to act. Complaints from such students generally take the shape of either "I can't pin him down," or, "I could do without the rhetoric. If only he would just tell me what to do."
Fear of self also motivates criticism of his performances, although in a somewhat more subtle way. Audiences, especially educated ones, often listen to classical music performances to add to their knowledge. The details of the performance become part of their accumulated knowledge, as trinkets in the continuing acquisition of intellectual wealth. Standard performances promote this attitude by presenting sounds that stand as individuals, as objects. Celibidaches performances discourage it, by seductively inviting the listener in. The sounds come together, as one, indivisible, eliminating the need for a subject, and for an object. His performances invite the listeners focused consciousness on the totality of sounds alone; they seduce it, they demand it. There is no external structure to hang on to; there is only pure consciousness -- the self. For those listeners -- fearful of experiencing their own being -- who attend concerts to acquire information with which to structure their lives, Celibidache's concerts -- which force the listener into an exclusive experience of himself -- are understandably frightening.
It would be less than honest, though, to ignore some negatives. Celibidache is not without imperfections, which often serve him poorly. For instance, with his students and his orchestra he uses the old-fashioned tool of humiliation. This is partly generational. European conductors of his generation learned sarcasm and humiliation as part of the trade. I personally hated him for it at times (many of his orchestra members do likewise), and, in the process of finding my own way, have attempted to discard humiliation in favor of more effective tools. He humiliated his students, though, only if he knew they could do better, and so my hatred was never very deep or long-lived. Still, giving it up would surely result in the universal adoration from his orchestra and students that he deserves, and (I believe) is seeking deep down. This is a minor consideration though. More destructive are both the trace of paranoia and the urge to conquer that run through him and surface from time to time. He tends to see questions as attacks -- personal attacks -- and answer them accordingly. On the positive side, he will travel great distances to learn something new himself and to share his own mastery with humanity; he is extremely generous with anyone who is genuinely interested. He refuses to actively solicit new believers, secure in the knowledge that the music speaks for itself, and knowing that only those attracted of their own accord will gain something lasting. On the negative side, he often carries that refusal to an unhealthy extreme, putting off and even ridiculing some who might otherwise learn from him. He demands a kind of supplication from those newly interested in what he offers, saying essentially, "What we do here is special, and we invite you to join us, but to join us is to repudiate everything you hold near and dear." His tendency to speak in enigmas and riddles, which can have positive results with some people (myself, for example), is often carried to extremes -- at times it can seem to do more harm than good. This inclination to discourage limits his audience; it drastically reduces the number of his potential beneficiaries. And, although his Napoleonic strain is quite common (what conductor, famous or otherwise, is free of the urge for recognized supremacy), I think he would be better served to overcome it -- to invite interested minds, telling them (as I know he believes), "Our goal here is to find and share that very experience of musical beauty that drew us all to music in the first place."
But enough vinegar; suffice it to say that Sergiu Celibidache, genius of historical proportion, unyielding seeker and giver of truth, and unquenchable lover of humanity, is himself human. I write this not to excoriate him, but to honor him, and to thank him. His own activities serve me as an inspiration, as a guide, as a constant example of what is possible in human endeavor. Moreover, he gave me myself, my own way. He showed me that by honestly examining my experiences and demanding no less than the utmost of my capacity, I too, may eventually approach those possibilities. He changed my life -- made every single day of it better and more rewarding. I am thankful that such a man has walked on this earth; I cherish my contact with him; and hope that my existence does justice to his efforts.
* * *
MARKAND THAKAR is the author of Counterpoint: Fundamentals of Music Making, (Yale University Press;1990).
A Michael Nyman bio-essay by Anette Morreau
Michael Nyman is a composer in demand, and yet his position in new music today remains controversial. There can be no other composer alive who inspires simultaneously such devotion and antagonism, in apparently equal measure. Nyman is a man of impeccable musical credentials scholar, writer, critic, performer as well as composer. He is also a man of wit, wit which offers a haven of ambiguity to today's demand for easy labelling.
Nyman was born in London on 23 March 1944. His musical background was conventional - studies at the Royal Academy of Music and King's College, London, but with less than conventional teachers, namely, the communist composer Alan Bush and the distinguished musicologist of the English Baroque, Thurston Dart. It was Dart who introduced Nyman to sixteenth and seventeenth century English rounds and canons. These were to be influential, not only for their construction with repetitive, contrapuntal lines over harmonic modules, but for their ambiguity in being at the same time popular and serious. Dart also supported Nyman's interest in folk music encouraging him to visit Romania to carry out research.
Nyman graduated in the '60s at a time when popular music, particularly that of The Beatles, was storming the land. By contrast, 'serious' contemporary composition was dominated by Stockhausen and Boulez - Darmstadt serialists. Nyman's free-wheeling, eclectic, '60s education prevented him temperamentally, intellectually and ideologically from joining this club, either as composer or performer. So for 12 years, from 1964 to 1976, Nyman, though silent as a composer, was prolific as a writer about music, working for The Listener, New Statesman and in particular The Spectator, where he was given virtually 'carte blanche' to write about anything he liked - from John Cage to The Fugs It was Nyman, in a review of The Great Learning by the English composer Cornelius Cardew, who introduced the word 'minimalism' as a description in music.
During this period, he was a frequent performer with a wide variety of groups and bands ranging from the Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonia to Steve Reich and Musicians and The Flying Lizards. But perhaps the most significant event during these years was the writing of his book, Experimental Music - Cage and Beyond (1974), in which he set out to document and discuss the wide spectrum of musical creativity emanating from the aesthetics of John Cage, and its implications for a generation of composers and performers stifled by the rigorous academicism of the serialists.
The book, which to this day remains the most authoritative on the subject, might appear to have acted as some sort of catharsis for Nyman: having so convincingly explained the alternative to the Darmstadt School, and witnessed or taken part in so much of the music discussed, Nyman may unconsciously have seen a route for himself, should he ever become a composer. As it was, in 1976, Harrison Birtwistle, Director of Music at the National Theatre, invited him to arrange some eighteenth century Venetian popular music for a production of Goldoni's Il Campiello.
The music for II Campiello consisted of arrangements of gondoliers' songs for an eccentric street band of medieval instruments - rebecs, sackbuts and shawms with banjo, bass drum and soprano saxophone. It was the loudest acoustic band Nyman could think of, and produced a very distinct instrumental colour, something which was always to be a feature of primary consideration in his music.
It was only when the stage production of Il Campiello came to an end that Nyman, in wanting to preserve the band, became a composer almost by accident, in order to create music for it to play.
In common with many composers today - Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, and writers of jazz and popular music - Nyman has written extensively for his own group, not merely to give it music to play, but also to unite a group of musicians who were as interested as he in breaking down the barriers between serious and popular culture.
The Campiello Band had used no amplification hut, when in the early '80s it transformed into Michael Nyman Band, amplification became as integral to the Nyman sound as instrumental colour.
At first hearing, the Nyman style - simple tunes and chord progressions, an insistent beat, repeated notes, and loud dynamics - relates to pop music. But Nyman owes much to the English experimentalists, in particular John White, and to John Cage, who, as Nyman remarked, gave permission for the music of the past to be treated as a resource, as a raw material to be used in any way allowing, for instance, a single phrase to be put under a microscope, and enlarged into a composition.
The score for Peter Greenaway's film The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), which brought Nyman his first major success, is sourced solely from the music of Henry Purcell, in particular from lesser known ground basses and chaconnes. Purcell's material, in its use of closed harmonic systems, provided Nyman with infinitely repeatable, recyclable, and layerable harmonic structures similar to those with which he customarily worked. Melodic fragments would be varied over the bass line by extension, syncopation, suspension and superimposition. The resulting music is by Nyman, but with a memory, though not a specific memory, of Purcell.
His important collaboration with the English film maker, Peter Greenaway, which began 1977, established Nyman's reputation as a composer of film music, but has perhaps led to a distorted overall view of his output. No doubt this is because the numerous film scores and recordings of them have reached a vast and enthusiastic international public and catapulted him to 'cult' status. But Nyman is extraordinarily prolific in other areas, notably opera, chamber music, vocal music, and dance scores.
This productivity is enabled, to some degree, by certain reworkings of his own music. However, it would be wrong to imply a mere shifting of a page of score from one to another, or simply re-orchestration. Nyman, in fact, completely recomposes a work, subjecting the original material to a rigorous re-assessment so that the new musical conclusions are allowed to emerge. One such work is Zoo Caprices, which transforms ensemble music from his film score A Zed and Two Noughts (1983) into a virtuoso work for solo violin. The ghosts of J S Bach and Paganini may well be invoked, but such references may relate more to the musical memory of the listener than to any specific intention of Nyman.
Nyman's interest in building pieces out of modules and matrices relates paradoxically to serial technique, but his recognisable chords, chord progressions, and melodic fragments, his use of driving repetition and distinctive instrumental colours - the thumping keyboard, 'rude' bass clarinet and baritone saxophone (particularly associated with music for his own band), and the extreme high and low octave doublings - make the result very different from serialism, with an energy and exuberance more associated with pop and rock music.
Within this possibly mechanistic style, there is still room, however, for a remarkable range of emotional expression. The chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (1986) is based on a true case study by the American neurologist, Dr Oliver Sacks, of a patient, Dr P. Through a gradual diagnostic journey, Dr P's visual agnosia, or the inability to recognise what he can see, is painfully revealed. Nyman sets up a music parallel to reveal Dr P's deteriorating condition, by constructing a series of variations based on a 'recognisable' chord sequence which, during the course of the opera, becomes increasingly distorted as detail, contour, melody, colour and texture are removed. In real life, Dr P, a professional singer, relied on specific songs - eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs - to provide 'guide rails' to cope with his mental disorder: to underline this tragic condition in the opera, Nyman poignantly 'borrows' from Schumann's song literature.
But it is Mozart that provides the richest source for a number of compositions by Nyman, including the unforgettable In Re Don Giovanni (1976) and I'll Stake My Cremona to a Jew's Trump (1983). No other score of Nyman's is as ingenious in its metamorphosis of another composer's material than the music for the film Drowning by Numbers (1987). Drawing exclusively on the slow movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola KV 364, Nyman treats his material (principally, the opening to bar 34, and bars 58-61) in a way that is practically a formal analysis. He exposes the melodic and harmonic relationships of Mozart's intense score by drawing out new melodies, be they poignant (Trysting Fields based on the repeated, throbbing, accented appogiatura), chirpy (Sheep and Tides, drawn from a simple bass line), or swaggering (Wedding Tango, a complex combination of the opening C minor theme with the same theme in E flat, as it later appears). In an oblique way, this process is reminiscent of the late Hans Keller's 'functional analysis'. (Incidentally, Nyman, like Keller, is a fanatical football fan.)
String Quartet No. 2, in six movements, commissioned in 1988 as a work for the Indian dancer and choreographer, Shobana Jeyasingh, marks a considerable freeing up of Nyman's harmonic language. While paradoxically, in its cross rhythms and syncopations, it effortlessly assimilates the strict rhythmic codes of Karnatic music, there is no mis- attributing its distinctly European sound with its memories of Scottish folk dance, Viennese coffee house, and the string quartets of Bartok.
Nyman's music is allusive, but not necessarily consciously so. There are certain works - The Draughtsman's Contract, In Re Don Giovanni, String Quartet No. 1 - where the original source, whether Purcell, Mozart, or a '60s pop tune, is not in doubt because Nyman quotes and rewrites passages; but in most of his work he demonstrates an intensely musical mind calling on a vast reservoir of musical memories.
Out of the Ruins, a choral work, composed in 1989 for a BBC TV documentary about the devastation caused by the earthquake in Armenia, uses a simple asymmetric dirge-like melody to set a text drawn from a 10th century Book of Lamentations. The allusion to Armenian chant is no more conscious than is the possible allusion to Faure's Requiem in Nyman's use of unexpected enharmonic shifts.
The Fall of Icarus (1989), a large scale dance work undertaken with the Belgian choreographer Frederic Flamand and Italian video sculptor Fabrizio Plessi, illustrates particularly clearly how, through modules and matrices, Nyman's thematic harmonic and rhythmic material can be expanded or contracted by the repetition, addition or subtraction of a beat, bar, or section, and at the same time speeded up or slowed down through rhythmic acceleration or augmentation. Although Nyman indicates that this technique was fully formed when he (re)started to compose in 1976, it is significant that this approach produces material which perfectly fits the needs of the film editor, even if on occasion, pieces stop abruptly, rather than end 'properly'.
Nyman's music, influenced as it seemed by Cageian aesthetics, English experimental music, American minimalism, and the Baroque, had by 1990 developed a confidence which, while still clearly related to its beginnings, had moved far from the Nyman of simple rhythms and insistent pumping. Prospero's Books (1990), Greenaway's fantasy on Shakespeare's The Tempest, might have tempted Nyman to fall back on an historical model, but instead, misremembering Caliban's line referring to the island as lull of 'voices' (rather than 'noises'), he produced a beautiful original score that, with its luxuriant use of female voices (three singers drawn from three different traditions - opera, rock, and cabaret) and richly substantial Masque, almost became the opera The Tempest that's never been written. There is no denying the score's illustrative and emotional power in underpinning the reconceptualised play and its characters.
The German cabaret singer, Ute Lemper, well known as an interpreter of Kurt Weill, took the part of Ceres in Prospero's Books, and it was for her that Nyman wrote his searing Six Celan Songs (1990). The poems of Paul Celan are amongst the blackest of this century. A Jew from Bukovina, Celan saw his parents shipped off to death camps from which they did not return; eventually he took his own life. Setting the poems in German and to the instrumental accompaniment of his own ensemble, Nyman here embraces his widest spectrum of emotional expression. The first song, Chanson einer Dame im Schatten brings tenderness, passion and bitter irony in bewildering succession, while Psalm and Corona speak of melancholy and tragic resignation. But it is for the final song Blume that Nyman reserves his darkest, most emotionally raw utterance. In its freely associating chords and recitative-like vocal line, the setting recalls the lushness of early Berg and late Strauss with a small dose of Kurt Weill tartness mixed in. The occasional throbbing bass, syncopation, repeated notes and keen instrumental colours, so redolent of Nyman's music, are here absorbed into a music that seems to revel in its structuring of time by traditional harmonic progression.
The Six Celan Songs unlocked in Nyman a response determined little by mechanical musical systems but more by the moment to moment emotional demands of a searing text. These songs may have served, in their exploration of intense emotional expression, as a study for Nyman's apparently a typical score The Piano (1992) written for Jane Campion's Oscar-winning film. But the emotionalism in this remarkable score also stems from the need for the musical expression of text, text (or language) that the dumb character Ada could only utter through her own piano playing. Nyman's 19th century romanticism is refracted through 20th century ears with teasing references to Scottish popular song. But it is the haunting, plangent melodies, lushly scored for strings, that have catapulted Nyman into becoming the best-selling 'serious' composer of our time. The score for The Piano has provided Nyman with a continuing obsession. He has reworked it many times: as a standard piano concerto; as a concerto for two pianos; as an arrangement for chamber ensemble; as a work for soprano saxophone and strings (Lost and Found); as a work for soprano and string quartet (The Piano Sings); he arrives always at new musical conclusions.
The Upside-down Violin (1992) written straight after The Piano represents a complete contradiction in musical and cultural terms. This is Nyman the collector of ethnic material, in this case the Arab-Andalusian tradition, a music developed in southern Spain in the 9th century. Written for the musicians of the Orquestra Andaluzi de Tetouan and the Michael Nyman Band, this three-movement work presented special problems both musical and cultural. Nyman's essentially harmonic/melodic compositional approach had to adjust to a monodic tradition where implied harmonies could not be drawn from melody. In the first two movements, Nyman's solution involves the sustaining of notes heard in the melody as drones or overlays, while the musicians richly embellish the monodic line encouraged by Nyman's Cageian instruction to 'make music related to, or suggested by, the music you have just played'. The rich sound of the Moroccan instruments doubled by the Nyman Band paradoxically recalls the boisterous energy of the rebecs and shawms of the Campiello Band.
The Piano Concerto (1993) represents a deep 'reconsideration' of the film score. Not only does Nyman establish a more coherent structure drawn from necessarily short musical cues, but by providing a more demanding piano part and a more fully orchestrated texture, he has produced a 'free-standing' work which has taken its place in the repertoire of classical pianists. MGV or Musique a Grande Vitesse (1993) for symphony orchestra and the Michael Nyman Band returns to high energy propulsion, delightfully conjuring up rail images not just rhythmically - the Band lays down a guide-rail along which the orchestra travels - but metaphorically, as passing musical environments are visited. Songs for Tony (1993) for saxophone quartet, Tango for Tim (1994) for harpsichord solo and To Morrow for soprano and organ are all works that mourn, joining Memorial (1985) and Time Will Pronounce (1992), pieces that started with one purpose but ended with another. Yamamoto Perpetuo (1993) in 13 sections, lasting 45 minutes, presents a second 'partita' for unaccompanied violin written for Alexander Balanescu. Like the earlier Zoo Caprices, the technical demands are formidable with the teasing mixture of Nyman's 'baroque' sound world. In the tradition of setting himself obstacles - viz. turning a choral work Out of the Ruins into a string quartet - Nyman has taken Yamamoto Perpetuo as the 1st violin part of his substantial String Quartet No. 4 (1995) managing to leave the double stops and implied counterpoint with the first fiddle rather than dividing it across the other three instruments.
In 1992, Nyman completed four commissions for musicians not immediately associated with the Nyman band. Fretwork (with James Bowman), the harpsichordist Virginia Black, the Trio of London and London Brass approached Nyman, all keen to have his works in their repertoire. For reasons of style and control, and in keeping with such composers as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Nyman has largely confined his music to performances by members of his Band, but times have changed. Nyman is content to relinquish control, indeed positively enjoys the invasion of other artists' worlds, and with concerto commissions from such virtuoso performers as the trombonist Christian Lindberg and harpsichordist Elisabeth Chojnacka, the enjoyment is most clearly mutual. Nyman's music has matured and developed from an early cheeky cheerfulness (not withstanding Drowning by Numbers or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) to a point where the emotional content of a piece is the target rather than a by-product of a musical process. An awareness and willingness to engage in an emotional sound world bringing to it an expanded harmonic palette is symptomatic of the destruction of 'schools'. No longer is toeing the 'minimalist' party line a sine qua non. 'Music should now encompass as wide an emotional range as possible'.
Annette Morreau, March 1995
Nyman was born in London on 23 March 1944. His musical background was conventional - studies at the Royal Academy of Music and King's College, London, but with less than conventional teachers, namely, the communist composer Alan Bush and the distinguished musicologist of the English Baroque, Thurston Dart. It was Dart who introduced Nyman to sixteenth and seventeenth century English rounds and canons. These were to be influential, not only for their construction with repetitive, contrapuntal lines over harmonic modules, but for their ambiguity in being at the same time popular and serious. Dart also supported Nyman's interest in folk music encouraging him to visit Romania to carry out research.
Nyman graduated in the '60s at a time when popular music, particularly that of The Beatles, was storming the land. By contrast, 'serious' contemporary composition was dominated by Stockhausen and Boulez - Darmstadt serialists. Nyman's free-wheeling, eclectic, '60s education prevented him temperamentally, intellectually and ideologically from joining this club, either as composer or performer. So for 12 years, from 1964 to 1976, Nyman, though silent as a composer, was prolific as a writer about music, working for The Listener, New Statesman and in particular The Spectator, where he was given virtually 'carte blanche' to write about anything he liked - from John Cage to The Fugs It was Nyman, in a review of The Great Learning by the English composer Cornelius Cardew, who introduced the word 'minimalism' as a description in music.
During this period, he was a frequent performer with a wide variety of groups and bands ranging from the Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonia to Steve Reich and Musicians and The Flying Lizards. But perhaps the most significant event during these years was the writing of his book, Experimental Music - Cage and Beyond (1974), in which he set out to document and discuss the wide spectrum of musical creativity emanating from the aesthetics of John Cage, and its implications for a generation of composers and performers stifled by the rigorous academicism of the serialists.
The book, which to this day remains the most authoritative on the subject, might appear to have acted as some sort of catharsis for Nyman: having so convincingly explained the alternative to the Darmstadt School, and witnessed or taken part in so much of the music discussed, Nyman may unconsciously have seen a route for himself, should he ever become a composer. As it was, in 1976, Harrison Birtwistle, Director of Music at the National Theatre, invited him to arrange some eighteenth century Venetian popular music for a production of Goldoni's Il Campiello.
The music for II Campiello consisted of arrangements of gondoliers' songs for an eccentric street band of medieval instruments - rebecs, sackbuts and shawms with banjo, bass drum and soprano saxophone. It was the loudest acoustic band Nyman could think of, and produced a very distinct instrumental colour, something which was always to be a feature of primary consideration in his music.
It was only when the stage production of Il Campiello came to an end that Nyman, in wanting to preserve the band, became a composer almost by accident, in order to create music for it to play.
In common with many composers today - Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, and writers of jazz and popular music - Nyman has written extensively for his own group, not merely to give it music to play, but also to unite a group of musicians who were as interested as he in breaking down the barriers between serious and popular culture.
The Campiello Band had used no amplification hut, when in the early '80s it transformed into Michael Nyman Band, amplification became as integral to the Nyman sound as instrumental colour.
At first hearing, the Nyman style - simple tunes and chord progressions, an insistent beat, repeated notes, and loud dynamics - relates to pop music. But Nyman owes much to the English experimentalists, in particular John White, and to John Cage, who, as Nyman remarked, gave permission for the music of the past to be treated as a resource, as a raw material to be used in any way allowing, for instance, a single phrase to be put under a microscope, and enlarged into a composition.
The score for Peter Greenaway's film The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), which brought Nyman his first major success, is sourced solely from the music of Henry Purcell, in particular from lesser known ground basses and chaconnes. Purcell's material, in its use of closed harmonic systems, provided Nyman with infinitely repeatable, recyclable, and layerable harmonic structures similar to those with which he customarily worked. Melodic fragments would be varied over the bass line by extension, syncopation, suspension and superimposition. The resulting music is by Nyman, but with a memory, though not a specific memory, of Purcell.
His important collaboration with the English film maker, Peter Greenaway, which began 1977, established Nyman's reputation as a composer of film music, but has perhaps led to a distorted overall view of his output. No doubt this is because the numerous film scores and recordings of them have reached a vast and enthusiastic international public and catapulted him to 'cult' status. But Nyman is extraordinarily prolific in other areas, notably opera, chamber music, vocal music, and dance scores.
This productivity is enabled, to some degree, by certain reworkings of his own music. However, it would be wrong to imply a mere shifting of a page of score from one to another, or simply re-orchestration. Nyman, in fact, completely recomposes a work, subjecting the original material to a rigorous re-assessment so that the new musical conclusions are allowed to emerge. One such work is Zoo Caprices, which transforms ensemble music from his film score A Zed and Two Noughts (1983) into a virtuoso work for solo violin. The ghosts of J S Bach and Paganini may well be invoked, but such references may relate more to the musical memory of the listener than to any specific intention of Nyman.
Nyman's interest in building pieces out of modules and matrices relates paradoxically to serial technique, but his recognisable chords, chord progressions, and melodic fragments, his use of driving repetition and distinctive instrumental colours - the thumping keyboard, 'rude' bass clarinet and baritone saxophone (particularly associated with music for his own band), and the extreme high and low octave doublings - make the result very different from serialism, with an energy and exuberance more associated with pop and rock music.
Within this possibly mechanistic style, there is still room, however, for a remarkable range of emotional expression. The chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (1986) is based on a true case study by the American neurologist, Dr Oliver Sacks, of a patient, Dr P. Through a gradual diagnostic journey, Dr P's visual agnosia, or the inability to recognise what he can see, is painfully revealed. Nyman sets up a music parallel to reveal Dr P's deteriorating condition, by constructing a series of variations based on a 'recognisable' chord sequence which, during the course of the opera, becomes increasingly distorted as detail, contour, melody, colour and texture are removed. In real life, Dr P, a professional singer, relied on specific songs - eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs - to provide 'guide rails' to cope with his mental disorder: to underline this tragic condition in the opera, Nyman poignantly 'borrows' from Schumann's song literature.
But it is Mozart that provides the richest source for a number of compositions by Nyman, including the unforgettable In Re Don Giovanni (1976) and I'll Stake My Cremona to a Jew's Trump (1983). No other score of Nyman's is as ingenious in its metamorphosis of another composer's material than the music for the film Drowning by Numbers (1987). Drawing exclusively on the slow movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola KV 364, Nyman treats his material (principally, the opening to bar 34, and bars 58-61) in a way that is practically a formal analysis. He exposes the melodic and harmonic relationships of Mozart's intense score by drawing out new melodies, be they poignant (Trysting Fields based on the repeated, throbbing, accented appogiatura), chirpy (Sheep and Tides, drawn from a simple bass line), or swaggering (Wedding Tango, a complex combination of the opening C minor theme with the same theme in E flat, as it later appears). In an oblique way, this process is reminiscent of the late Hans Keller's 'functional analysis'. (Incidentally, Nyman, like Keller, is a fanatical football fan.)
String Quartet No. 2, in six movements, commissioned in 1988 as a work for the Indian dancer and choreographer, Shobana Jeyasingh, marks a considerable freeing up of Nyman's harmonic language. While paradoxically, in its cross rhythms and syncopations, it effortlessly assimilates the strict rhythmic codes of Karnatic music, there is no mis- attributing its distinctly European sound with its memories of Scottish folk dance, Viennese coffee house, and the string quartets of Bartok.
Nyman's music is allusive, but not necessarily consciously so. There are certain works - The Draughtsman's Contract, In Re Don Giovanni, String Quartet No. 1 - where the original source, whether Purcell, Mozart, or a '60s pop tune, is not in doubt because Nyman quotes and rewrites passages; but in most of his work he demonstrates an intensely musical mind calling on a vast reservoir of musical memories.
Out of the Ruins, a choral work, composed in 1989 for a BBC TV documentary about the devastation caused by the earthquake in Armenia, uses a simple asymmetric dirge-like melody to set a text drawn from a 10th century Book of Lamentations. The allusion to Armenian chant is no more conscious than is the possible allusion to Faure's Requiem in Nyman's use of unexpected enharmonic shifts.
The Fall of Icarus (1989), a large scale dance work undertaken with the Belgian choreographer Frederic Flamand and Italian video sculptor Fabrizio Plessi, illustrates particularly clearly how, through modules and matrices, Nyman's thematic harmonic and rhythmic material can be expanded or contracted by the repetition, addition or subtraction of a beat, bar, or section, and at the same time speeded up or slowed down through rhythmic acceleration or augmentation. Although Nyman indicates that this technique was fully formed when he (re)started to compose in 1976, it is significant that this approach produces material which perfectly fits the needs of the film editor, even if on occasion, pieces stop abruptly, rather than end 'properly'.
Nyman's music, influenced as it seemed by Cageian aesthetics, English experimental music, American minimalism, and the Baroque, had by 1990 developed a confidence which, while still clearly related to its beginnings, had moved far from the Nyman of simple rhythms and insistent pumping. Prospero's Books (1990), Greenaway's fantasy on Shakespeare's The Tempest, might have tempted Nyman to fall back on an historical model, but instead, misremembering Caliban's line referring to the island as lull of 'voices' (rather than 'noises'), he produced a beautiful original score that, with its luxuriant use of female voices (three singers drawn from three different traditions - opera, rock, and cabaret) and richly substantial Masque, almost became the opera The Tempest that's never been written. There is no denying the score's illustrative and emotional power in underpinning the reconceptualised play and its characters.
The German cabaret singer, Ute Lemper, well known as an interpreter of Kurt Weill, took the part of Ceres in Prospero's Books, and it was for her that Nyman wrote his searing Six Celan Songs (1990). The poems of Paul Celan are amongst the blackest of this century. A Jew from Bukovina, Celan saw his parents shipped off to death camps from which they did not return; eventually he took his own life. Setting the poems in German and to the instrumental accompaniment of his own ensemble, Nyman here embraces his widest spectrum of emotional expression. The first song, Chanson einer Dame im Schatten brings tenderness, passion and bitter irony in bewildering succession, while Psalm and Corona speak of melancholy and tragic resignation. But it is for the final song Blume that Nyman reserves his darkest, most emotionally raw utterance. In its freely associating chords and recitative-like vocal line, the setting recalls the lushness of early Berg and late Strauss with a small dose of Kurt Weill tartness mixed in. The occasional throbbing bass, syncopation, repeated notes and keen instrumental colours, so redolent of Nyman's music, are here absorbed into a music that seems to revel in its structuring of time by traditional harmonic progression.
The Six Celan Songs unlocked in Nyman a response determined little by mechanical musical systems but more by the moment to moment emotional demands of a searing text. These songs may have served, in their exploration of intense emotional expression, as a study for Nyman's apparently a typical score The Piano (1992) written for Jane Campion's Oscar-winning film. But the emotionalism in this remarkable score also stems from the need for the musical expression of text, text (or language) that the dumb character Ada could only utter through her own piano playing. Nyman's 19th century romanticism is refracted through 20th century ears with teasing references to Scottish popular song. But it is the haunting, plangent melodies, lushly scored for strings, that have catapulted Nyman into becoming the best-selling 'serious' composer of our time. The score for The Piano has provided Nyman with a continuing obsession. He has reworked it many times: as a standard piano concerto; as a concerto for two pianos; as an arrangement for chamber ensemble; as a work for soprano saxophone and strings (Lost and Found); as a work for soprano and string quartet (The Piano Sings); he arrives always at new musical conclusions.
The Upside-down Violin (1992) written straight after The Piano represents a complete contradiction in musical and cultural terms. This is Nyman the collector of ethnic material, in this case the Arab-Andalusian tradition, a music developed in southern Spain in the 9th century. Written for the musicians of the Orquestra Andaluzi de Tetouan and the Michael Nyman Band, this three-movement work presented special problems both musical and cultural. Nyman's essentially harmonic/melodic compositional approach had to adjust to a monodic tradition where implied harmonies could not be drawn from melody. In the first two movements, Nyman's solution involves the sustaining of notes heard in the melody as drones or overlays, while the musicians richly embellish the monodic line encouraged by Nyman's Cageian instruction to 'make music related to, or suggested by, the music you have just played'. The rich sound of the Moroccan instruments doubled by the Nyman Band paradoxically recalls the boisterous energy of the rebecs and shawms of the Campiello Band.
The Piano Concerto (1993) represents a deep 'reconsideration' of the film score. Not only does Nyman establish a more coherent structure drawn from necessarily short musical cues, but by providing a more demanding piano part and a more fully orchestrated texture, he has produced a 'free-standing' work which has taken its place in the repertoire of classical pianists. MGV or Musique a Grande Vitesse (1993) for symphony orchestra and the Michael Nyman Band returns to high energy propulsion, delightfully conjuring up rail images not just rhythmically - the Band lays down a guide-rail along which the orchestra travels - but metaphorically, as passing musical environments are visited. Songs for Tony (1993) for saxophone quartet, Tango for Tim (1994) for harpsichord solo and To Morrow for soprano and organ are all works that mourn, joining Memorial (1985) and Time Will Pronounce (1992), pieces that started with one purpose but ended with another. Yamamoto Perpetuo (1993) in 13 sections, lasting 45 minutes, presents a second 'partita' for unaccompanied violin written for Alexander Balanescu. Like the earlier Zoo Caprices, the technical demands are formidable with the teasing mixture of Nyman's 'baroque' sound world. In the tradition of setting himself obstacles - viz. turning a choral work Out of the Ruins into a string quartet - Nyman has taken Yamamoto Perpetuo as the 1st violin part of his substantial String Quartet No. 4 (1995) managing to leave the double stops and implied counterpoint with the first fiddle rather than dividing it across the other three instruments.
In 1992, Nyman completed four commissions for musicians not immediately associated with the Nyman band. Fretwork (with James Bowman), the harpsichordist Virginia Black, the Trio of London and London Brass approached Nyman, all keen to have his works in their repertoire. For reasons of style and control, and in keeping with such composers as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Nyman has largely confined his music to performances by members of his Band, but times have changed. Nyman is content to relinquish control, indeed positively enjoys the invasion of other artists' worlds, and with concerto commissions from such virtuoso performers as the trombonist Christian Lindberg and harpsichordist Elisabeth Chojnacka, the enjoyment is most clearly mutual. Nyman's music has matured and developed from an early cheeky cheerfulness (not withstanding Drowning by Numbers or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) to a point where the emotional content of a piece is the target rather than a by-product of a musical process. An awareness and willingness to engage in an emotional sound world bringing to it an expanded harmonic palette is symptomatic of the destruction of 'schools'. No longer is toeing the 'minimalist' party line a sine qua non. 'Music should now encompass as wide an emotional range as possible'.
Annette Morreau, March 1995
Esec cultural la Berlin
Din articolul 'Wagner in varianta moderna, huiduit la Berlin', publicat in Ziua din 22 mrtie 2005, aflam de esecul unei montari in varianta contemporana a operei lui Wagner de duo-ul Eichinger/Barenboim. Pentru a accesa articolul, click aici!
E foarte dificil sa judeci o opera de arta, dincolo de a spune daca-ti place sau nu, mai ales cand trebuie s-o faci indirect, pe baza relatarilor.
Cu toate astea, e interesant de vazut ca berlinezii inca mai rezista 'modernizarea' impusa in arte ca reactie la scaderea interesului publicului de opera (indeobste, cel tanar).
Bernd Eichinger a pus pe ecrane un film despre Hitler si probabil a vrut cu tot dinadinsul sa repete isprava dela Oscaruri cu publicul de acasa. Fiind tanar, are timp sa invete/emigreze.
Cu Daniel Barenboim, un prieten si protejat pentru o perioada al lui Celibidache, lucrurile stau altfel. El a renuntat la banii si relativa libertate a expresiei artistice pe care le-ar fi avut in SUA (ca director si dirijor principal al Simfoniei din Chicago) pentru a se bucura de generozitatea germana fata de arte in Berlin. Sa amintim discutiile de acum cativa ani pe care le avea cu oficialii Berlinului despre oportunitatea sustinerii Operei din Berlin de un oras cu miliarde de euro in datorii.
Regretam intradevar fiasco-ul berlinez de sub Barenboim--un cetatean exemplar al lumii si extraordinar muzician!
E foarte dificil sa judeci o opera de arta, dincolo de a spune daca-ti place sau nu, mai ales cand trebuie s-o faci indirect, pe baza relatarilor.
Cu toate astea, e interesant de vazut ca berlinezii inca mai rezista 'modernizarea' impusa in arte ca reactie la scaderea interesului publicului de opera (indeobste, cel tanar).
Bernd Eichinger a pus pe ecrane un film despre Hitler si probabil a vrut cu tot dinadinsul sa repete isprava dela Oscaruri cu publicul de acasa. Fiind tanar, are timp sa invete/emigreze.
Cu Daniel Barenboim, un prieten si protejat pentru o perioada al lui Celibidache, lucrurile stau altfel. El a renuntat la banii si relativa libertate a expresiei artistice pe care le-ar fi avut in SUA (ca director si dirijor principal al Simfoniei din Chicago) pentru a se bucura de generozitatea germana fata de arte in Berlin. Sa amintim discutiile de acum cativa ani pe care le avea cu oficialii Berlinului despre oportunitatea sustinerii Operei din Berlin de un oras cu miliarde de euro in datorii.
Regretam intradevar fiasco-ul berlinez de sub Barenboim--un cetatean exemplar al lumii si extraordinar muzician!
Randurile de mai jos sunt o traducere a gandurilor lui Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
1. Te iubesc nu pentru ceea ce esti, ci pentru ceea ce sunt eu cand sunt cu tine.
2. Nici un barbat sau femeie in lumea asta nu merita lacrimile tale, iar acela care le merita, nu te va face sa plangi.
3. Doar pentru ca cineva nu te iubeste in felul in care tu te astepti sa fii iubit, asta nu inseamna ca acela nu te iubeste din toata inima.
4. Prieten adevarat e acel care nu numai ca te tine de mana, dar si ajunge la sufletul tau .
5. Cel mai dureros mod de a-ti fi dor de cineva e sa stai chiar langa el stiind ca nu-l poti avea.
6. Nu te incrunta niciodata pentru ca nu stii cine s-ar putea sa se indragosteasca de zambetul tau.
7. Pentru lumea intreaga tu esti doar o persoana, dar pentru o anume persoana poti fi intreaga lume.
8. Nu-ti irosi vremea cu cineva care nu e dispus sa-si irosesca vremea cu tine.
9. Poate ca Dumnezeu vrea ca noi sa intalnim cateva persoane nepotrivite inainte de a o intalni pe cea buna, pentru ca atunci cand in sfarsit am intalnit-o, sa fim recunoscatori.
10. Nu plange ca s-a terminat, ci zambeste pentru ceea ce a fost.
11. Intotdeauna vor exista oameni care te vor rani, asa ca ceea ce trebuie sa faci e sa-ti pastrezi increderea si doar sa fii mai atent data viitoare in cine te increzi.
12. Incearca sa devii mai bun si sa te cunosti pe tine insuti inainte de a incerca sa descoperi cine sunt altii sau sa astepti ca ei sa te cunoasca asa cum esti cu adevarat.
13. Nu te incrancena, lucrurile bune vin cand le astepti mai putin.
(submisa de Jones Barosanul)
2. Nici un barbat sau femeie in lumea asta nu merita lacrimile tale, iar acela care le merita, nu te va face sa plangi.
3. Doar pentru ca cineva nu te iubeste in felul in care tu te astepti sa fii iubit, asta nu inseamna ca acela nu te iubeste din toata inima.
4. Prieten adevarat e acel care nu numai ca te tine de mana, dar si ajunge la sufletul tau .
5. Cel mai dureros mod de a-ti fi dor de cineva e sa stai chiar langa el stiind ca nu-l poti avea.
6. Nu te incrunta niciodata pentru ca nu stii cine s-ar putea sa se indragosteasca de zambetul tau.
7. Pentru lumea intreaga tu esti doar o persoana, dar pentru o anume persoana poti fi intreaga lume.
8. Nu-ti irosi vremea cu cineva care nu e dispus sa-si irosesca vremea cu tine.
9. Poate ca Dumnezeu vrea ca noi sa intalnim cateva persoane nepotrivite inainte de a o intalni pe cea buna, pentru ca atunci cand in sfarsit am intalnit-o, sa fim recunoscatori.
10. Nu plange ca s-a terminat, ci zambeste pentru ceea ce a fost.
11. Intotdeauna vor exista oameni care te vor rani, asa ca ceea ce trebuie sa faci e sa-ti pastrezi increderea si doar sa fii mai atent data viitoare in cine te increzi.
12. Incearca sa devii mai bun si sa te cunosti pe tine insuti inainte de a incerca sa descoperi cine sunt altii sau sa astepti ca ei sa te cunoasca asa cum esti cu adevarat.
13. Nu te incrancena, lucrurile bune vin cand le astepti mai putin.
(submisa de Jones Barosanul)
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