"Music like a Goy"

A musical friend wrote briefly about the greatness of Donald Runnicles today, and it made me obsess for a little while. There's no question, Runnicles is very, very good, but he arrives me at a pet peeve in music, and attitudes towards life, that generally makes me terribly anxious and depressed. It made me think for three hours about what exactly was it I found lacking in Runnicles, which I couldn't put my finger on all afternoon until it occurred to me

Runnicles is one of those inestimably good musicians who 'makes music like a goy.' Everything is primary states, happy is happy, sad is sad, the shades of ambiguity, the melancholy colors in joy, the lighter moments of sadness, don't occur to him. The musicians for whom this is true, in any genre of music, do not speak to me either. This is why Chopin and Verdi both give me trouble. I don't know what to do with works in which everything means what it seems to mean. What's there to return to?

Art is about meaning, and meaning is infinite in its layerings. If I want to only enjoy myself, I can always go back to playing in rock bands and feel a lot less lonely in my enjoyments. If I need to suffer, I'll just lock myself in my room and punch pillows while crying and eating ice cream. Joy and sadness are most certainly crucial parts of the artistic experience, but they belong together. You can only arrive at catharsis through a mixture of fun and depth. If it doesn't have both, I think it's time better spent elsewhere. Experience, like family, like love, like sex, like friendship, like meaning itself, gives a deeper, longer sense of satisfaction by the negative experiences involved in attaining its goal. But with many artists, it's only one or the other, and like any experience that's entirely fun or entirely serious, that lack of one or the other makes me terribly anxious. As a bipolar or obsessive or whatever it is I am, you need experiences to ground and center you, and if the experience is too extremely one thing or another, the mind inevitably compensates in the other direction in ways that are not entirely within one's control.

I experience my various favorite works of art (a brief and incomplete list): Mozart's da Ponte operas, Haydn's last two oratorios, Mahler DKW1347DLVDE9, Cunning Little Vixen, Into the Woods, La Regle du Jeu and Tokyo Story, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, The Canterbury Tales, The Simpsons, Shel Silverstein, Louis Armstrong, Monteverdi Madrigals Book VIII, Shakespeare's Falstaff scenes and whenever a Fool makes his appearance, Montaigne's Essays, Shostakovich song cycles (those are his greatest masterpieces), Mussorgsky miniatures of all types, Bartok violin duets and the Mikrokosmos, the Book of Ecclesiastes, certain parts of Don Quixote, Joyce's POTA, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, Leonardo's drawing of a fetus and Courbet's Origin of the World, Schubert's final works, Rembrandt's biblical series, the Book of Genesis, various Brahmses, the late paintings of Goya and Van Gogh, Madame Bovary, late Beethoven, the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer....

In all of these, even The Simpsons, I feel a sense of the infinite meanings, and they not only mean themselves in the moment, but constantly present themselves related to the situations of daily life, the larger world, and the metaphysical world behind the world where truly infinite things lay; and provide this multiplicitous experience on levels physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Whether it's productive, that's the Jewish attitude toward life, where every state in life is balanced by its opposite, and the only approach I know how to take that keeps me sane. Whether it's productive, that's the Jewish attitude toward life, and the only approach I know how to take that keeps me sane.

This, to me, is what great art does.