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Cal Performances at Home is much more than a series of great streamed performances. Fascinating behind-the-scenes artist interviews. Informative and entertaining public forums. The Cal Performances Reading Room, featuring books with interesting connections to our Fall 2020 programs. For all this and much more, keep checking this page for frequent updates and to journey far, far Beyond the Stage!
Major support for Beyond the Stage is provided by Bank of America.
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Beyond the Stage
Issue 1 (March 26)
Beethoven 250: In Search of Something Unreachable
![](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/in-search-of-something-beethoven-1920x900-2.jpg)
In this excerpt from Beethoven’s Shadow, Jonathan Biss considers what has developed into a lifelong effort to come to terms—both personally and professionally—with the composer’s titanic accomplishment.
by Jonathan Biss
As part of Cal Performances 2019-20 season, pianist Jonathan Biss performed the complete cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in seven concerts in Hertz Hall.
The word “wonderment” goes a long way towards conveying my own feelings about Beethoven’s music. It was the dominant sensation when I first heard Serkin’s Appassionata on a cassette tape in the car, at age 9. It was again at the forefront when I discovered the Grosse Fuge, a year or two later, in a recording by the Budapest Quartet. 6 (I can remember, vividly, that my immediate reaction was that the piece was totally incomprehensible, and that I had to hear it again, right away; years later, after countless hearings, and even a number of performances of Beethoven’s own arrangement of the piece for piano four-hands, it seems only slightly more comprehensible, and remains as irresistible as ever.) And it was an actual sensation, felt in my whole body, when I had that first encounter with the complete cycle of piano sonatas at age 13.
Those were all listening experiences. When I am the one playing—that is to say, when my relationship to the music becomes tactile and is complicated by questions of self-expression—the sensation becomes exponentially more powerful. This sort of awe, while a very intense thing to live with, is not in any way negative; in fact, it is probably essential, given my conviction that the search for something unreachable is part of this music’s expressive DNA. But at the same time, it creates a very practical difficulty: once you come to the conclusion that something is unreachable, how—and when—do you decide to reach for it? If one is, by definition, never really ready to play all the Beethoven Sonatas, when is the moment to say, “ready or not, here I come?”
In trying to answer this troublesome question, I again resort to a negative definition: It may be impossible to know that you are ready to take on such a project, but it is emphatically possible to know that you aren’t ready. For most of my life—probably since the Peabody cycle—I’ve known that I’ve wanted to play the 32 Beethoven Sonatas. What I’ve known, to be more precise, is that this body of music is more important to me than just about any other, and that I want—feel compelled—to spend my life interrogating it. And while the open-ended study of music can be a wonderful, wonderful thing, one’s relationship with a piece invariably takes on new dimensions after public performance. There are probably many reasons for this—again, there is the tactile aspect of music-making, so vital to an instrumentalist, which will always receive more emphasis when a performance looms—but above all it is because these works exist to be communicated, and thus there are things to be known about them that one simply cannot know without experiencing that communication. And so, when a concert presenter in a major American city asked me, aged 23, to play the 32 sonatas, I should have been thrilled. And in fairness, I was sort of thrilled. At the same time, though, I was absolutely plagued with doubt. So plagued that nothing—not putting off the start of the project for three years, or spreading the concerts over a longer period—could make me feel that the enormous fear I felt was unjustified.
![Photo of three Beethoven portraits Photo of three Beethoven portraits](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/travels-with-beethoven-1920x900-1.jpg)
Beethoven at different ages
Some of the sources of the fear were probably intangible, but others were plenty tangible. First of all, at that point I’d played no more than 10 of the sonatas, including just one of the last five. (While it would be wrong to say that the earlier works are easier—on a purely physical level, for one, some of them are enormously uncomfortable to play—the late sonatas are composed in a language, or languages, so unprecedented, unique and seemingly inscrutable, that coming to terms with them seems to me a greater bridge to be crossed.) While I’d always assumed—to whatever extent I’d thought it through—that when I got around to performing the whole cycle there would be certain sonatas I’d still need to learn, making the leap when I still had 22 sonatas to go seemed to involve a degree of hubris.
A second reason, closely related to but ultimately independent from the first, is that experience has taught me that the physical and mental preparation of a piece of music can take you only so far: Putting the piece away for a time, letting it rest while the mind and fingers are occupied with other things, often leads to more development than the actual, quantifiable work does. Time and time again, I’ve struggled with something—the shape of a phrase, the handling of a transition—in a work that is new to me, searched and searched for a solution that seemed organic, and found that nothing I tried sounded natural—nothing passed the “rightness” test. But then, after leaving the piece for a period of several months, sometimes really not even thinking about it at all, the same passage has somehow, through some kind of osmosis, resolved itself, and no longer poses a question at all. (Or rather, to go back to Schnabel once again, having answered one question, it now poses a new one.) It can be frustrating knowing that this process has no shortcuts, but ultimately it has led me to the conclusion that I simply should not perform a work immediately after learning it; much better to let it percolate first, away from the pressurized atmosphere of the concert hall, which tends to force the performer to fall back on what works—even if it doesn’t work too well. And if I had accepted that offer when I was 23, there would have been no way around the reality that I would need to play many of the sonatas immediately after learning them.
Then there was a third reason, which goes beyond the Beethoven Sonatas themselves: Performing the cycle when I still had so many sonatas to learn would have meant a degree of immersion in that music so extreme, it would have all but excluded the possibility of my learning anything else at a time in my life when I should have been musically omnivorous. This is partially, of course, a question of my musical development at large: It would have been a very bad decision to have taken on the complete Beethoven Sonatas and in the process moved away from other music—the Mozart concerti, or Schumann’s solo works, for example—which was arguably as important to me, and which would become vastly more difficult to learn if I postponed it too long. But it also played directly into the question of my readiness to take on the project itself. Beethoven’s music is so exceedingly easy to program in part because it represents such a watershed in the history of music: To a remarkable extent, all the music that precedes it (certainly in the classical era) seems to be leading up to it, and all the music that has come since exists in response. Haydn’s will to surprise, to invent, and Mozart’s way of finding expressive possibilities everywhere (how different they are from one another!) are among the roots of Beethoven’s music, which grows from them in ways neither prior master could have envisioned. And one would have to go outside the central European tradition to find music written after 1827 that does not grapple with the essential aspects of Beethoven’s music—the fierce independence; the architectural asymmetry, with enormous works resisting any resolution until their final movements; the harmonic boldness, which precipitated the slow collapse of the tonal system; the grit. And even farther afield, he looms large: With music as various as Kirchner and Kurtág, Janácek and Takemitsu, he might not be central, but one quality or another of the music points backward toward him; he is always in the room. And so, deciding to spend the bulk of several years of my life with Beethoven, without having addressed such a huge volume of great music with so much to say about him, seemed not only inadvisable, but irresponsible.
Seven years later, what has changed? I will make this series of recordings over a nine-year period, which naturally makes the prospect somewhat less daunting. And a significant side effect of this pacing is that my relationship with Beethoven while I am preparing the recordings will be immersive but not exclusive; his music will exist not in a vacuum, but in conversation with his predecessors and followers (or rather, precedents and consequents). Still, my decision to dive into this undertaking when I could not bring myself to commit to it when it was offered to me, relatively recently, on a plate represents a significant shift. Particularly as what I am committing to now is not just performances of the sonatas, but recordings—recording, as described, being the most fraught, disorienting process in a musician’s life.
First, the straightforward answers: The 10 sonatas I’d played as of 2004 have now become 18, drawn from all periods of Beethoven’s compositional career. While it is true that each sonata poses decidedly unique questions and problems—to refer to the Beethoven Sonatas as a “body of music” is misleading, given the extent to which each sonata is a self-contained emotional universe—the percentage of this music I’ve now played makes me feel that I am at least reasonably well acquainted with both his musical personality and his ever-evolving musical language. This feeling is bolstered by the amount of Beethoven I’ve played beyond just the sonatas (many other isolated solo works; all of the concerti; most of the chamber music), and the time I’ve spent listening to and studying the symphonies and, especially, the string quartets. The latter, even more than the sonatas, often seem to me to be Beethoven’s most personal statements, and perhaps because they are written for instruments Beethoven did not have a physical relationship with, it is in these pieces that earthly concerns—practicality for the player, comprehensibility for the listener—seem furthest from his mind, freeing him to write both some of his most consoling and his most harrowing music. The late quartets in particular often seem to be beyond human understanding, and yet to engage with them is to feel that you know Beethoven, somehow.
And in these past seven years, I also learned plenty of other music, from Bach and Händel to new works—in several cases, ones composed specifically for me, which gave me invaluable insight into the creative process from which I, as an interpreter, am one enormous degree removed—and of course, a vast quantity in between the two. I learned a huge amount of Mozart, which taught me about Beethoven not through their similarities but through their staggering differences. In short: Mozart, a theatrical composer if there ever was one, writes about the real world; Beethoven writes about an idealized world. Beethoven’s admiration for Mozart was enormous, which makes it all the more interesting that the drama of his music is drawn from such utterly different sources than Mozart’s. While Mozart’s music so often suggests conversation, Beethoven’s is most often written in one immensely strong voice. Where Mozart’s temperament is quicksilver, Beethoven’s is steadfast. And where Mozart is so often willing to interrupt the narrative of a work if inspiration takes him in a different direction, Beethoven’s music is nearly always relentlessly argued, never straying significantly from the business of resolving the central questions it poses.
I learned a great deal of Schubert, and was repeatedly struck by the way this musical genius with a personality so fundamentally different from Beethoven’s was still profoundly influenced by him. There are some very specific instances of this debt—the last movement of Schubert’s A Major Sonata, D. 959 hews far too closely to the finale of Beethoven’s Op. 31, No. 1, in form and even in specific gestures, for it to be an accident7—but it is the monumentality and the individualism Schubert pursued in his late works that really show what the example of Beethoven provided him with. The material is utterly different in character, and the use of the material is no more similar—where Beethoven develops and insists, Schubert wanders and dreams—but the breadth of Schubert’s vision and the nerve he needed to realize it show beyond doubt how closely he had studied Beethoven.
I learned much of Schumann’s piano music, and found that even German music’s most original and unanticipated voice is in conversation with Beethoven. The poetry, the ear for detail both bizarre and exquisite and the talent for glorious non sequitur are all Schumann’s own, but the sense of striving and the use of music as diary—as a means of working through life’s terrors and dissatisfactions—are straight out of Beethoven. I played many of Brahms’ great works, and was moved by the obviously crushing weight that this master, born six years after Beethoven’s death, felt in the form of the need to be Beethoven, and the subsequent difficulty he had merely being his own, great, self. (Brahms may have carried this burden more heavily than others, but Beethoven cast the same shadow over the entire nineteenth century.) Furthermore, it was through Brahms that I discovered something equally true of Beethoven: that the presence of rigor is in no way an impediment to the expression of passion, and that the craft of composition, while no substitute for inspiration, is absolutely essential if the inspiration is to have any impact at all.
I learned the works of Schoenberg and his contemporaries, and felt more strongly all the time that while Beethoven never could have imagined this music, it was a natural consequence of the trail he blazed. Schoenberg spoke about his need to “emancipate” dissonance with the 12-tone system he built, and Beethoven’s music, in its daring, so destabilized the diatonic system that the road toward atonality was in a sense already paved by the time he wrote his last works. And of course, Schoenberg’s attempt to create an entirely new language, which he did with tremendous fanfare and, one can now say, six decades after his death, limited success, makes Beethoven’s late period seem more awe-inspiring than ever. For where Schoenberg’s serial works juxtapose passages of great nostalgic beauty with music that is both leaden and obviously “constructed,” Beethoven’s late style, while no less linguistically removed from all that came before it, is seamless enough to accommodate some of the most profound statements of western civilization. To play one of Schoenberg’s piano works directly before Beethoven’s Op. 109—as I’ve done on a number of occasions—is to make the rather astonishing discovery that the Beethoven is not only more satisfying, but more daring and modern than the Schoenberg. The latter’s music is often complex, but it is a complexity that one can work through; the mystery of Beethoven remains inexplicable.
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Beethoven 250: Travels with Beethoven
![Beethoven 250](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/travels-with-beethoven-1920x900-1.jpg)
“In a world as unstable as the ground in earthquake country, we need Beethoven.”–Larry Rothe
Portraits of Beethoven at different ages
Eight years ago, in an article called “Beethoven’s Guide to Being Human,” I made the case for Beethoven’s power to fill his audience with optimism, his capacity to convince a listener that good will prevail. This, I admit, reduces my argument to its most simplistic components. Even back then, few would have believed the victories celebrated at the end of Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies, or his opera Fidelio, could last beyond the final curtain. But how much has happened in these eight years. Today, when national and world events demand we re-examine and get more serious about what “being human” means, Beethoven can help.
These days we can be forgiven for imagining we live in a uniquely unstable world, where unwelcome news is dismissed as fabrication, facts possess alternatives, and even nature’s laws are questioned. But stability is always an illusion, as Beethoven knew, personally and politically. Imagine: a 31-year-old composer loses his hearing—”the one sense,” he confessed, “which ought to be more perfect in me than others.” Imagine Beethoven’s Vienna, where the freedoms left intact by Napoleon’s army were undercut by the Austrians themselves. Emperor Franz II, his ear fine-tuned by the French Revolution, heard seditious whispers everywhere, sent his spies to root out enemies of the people, and abolished the free press he abhorred. Beethoven tamed such personal and social catastrophes. Facing deafness, he rejected suicide as an option: “It was only my art that held me back. It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.” He reassembled his inner resources, intent on changing things. Beethoven (writes his biographer Maynard Solomon) “was prepared to furnish [Vienna] with a model of heroism as well as beauty during an age of revolution and destruction and to hold out the image of an era of reconciliations and freedom to come.” He has done the same for the generations since. He translated his inner powers into music of virtually uncontained aspiration, music that urges us to do as he did: continue, and reject despair. Beethoven’s message is optimism, optimism hard-won but ever-present and waiting to be captured: a constant, a kind of stability.
A World in 32 Pieces
Fortunately for the Cal Performances audience, Beethoven is a focal point of this 2019/20 season as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth. You will hear orchestral works and chamber music. But for the full Beethoven immersion, pianist Jonathan Biss appears in seven recitals. Between September 2019 and March 2020, Biss performs the complete cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas.
Beethoven began composing piano sonatas early in his career and continued writing them to the end. As you might expect, given the span of years between the first and last of these creations, they encompass an artistic and emotional terrain of varied contours, ranging from lighthearted melody to cosmic statements at music’s outer limits. If you think of the sonatas as a 32-piece jigsaw puzzle that, completed, forms an image of the world, you get some idea of what’s in store.
Jonathan Biss, who has spoken of Beethoven’s sonatas as “a private diary of a genius,” is nearing the end of a nine-year project of recording the Beethoven sonatas, with the final volume scheduled for release in November. Biss is an eloquent writer, and with disarming candor he talks about his relationship with this music in Beethoven’s Shadow, an extended essay available as a Kindle e-book (but not in a print edition) through Amazon.com. (An excerpt from Biss’ writing appears in the program notes for each of his concerts.) In this personal account Biss covers a broad territory—his earliest experiences with Beethoven, his changing reactions over the years to the Appassionata Sonata, the opportunities and problems of recording, the challenges and assurances Beethoven offers a listener.
A Better World?
Count me among the multitude for whom Beethoven opened a world. His work is a point of entry and defines why we listen to “classical” music. Compared to him, every other composer comes up short if what we’re looking for is urgency and a persistent sense of necessity. In the words of British music critic Neville Cardus: “Beethoven most times was a rebel, beating his fist against the mortal limitations of music. He often wanted to say things which music couldn’t contain, let alone express…. That is why there are so many repeated notes and chords in Beethoven, violent sforzandi which are symbols of protest. Repeated notes in music, when they are strenuous and weightily harmonized, usually mean that a composer has something on his mind. He, at any rate, is not just trying to write a melody.”
Beethoven molds our sense of what we expect music to offer. No one before him had given instrumental music such narrative power, and everyone after him attempted to emulate his storytelling command. His genius was to infuse his music with psychological scenarios, to join an almost operatic concept of drama with music not limited by the words that any characters sing. The Fifth Symphony is the most obvious example of this. Tchaikovsky, who claimed his own Fourth Symphony was “a reflection” of Beethoven’s Fifth, wrote that the Fifth was based on a program “so clear that there cannot be the smallest difference of opinion as to its meaning.”
That plot, depicting a movement from struggle to victory, darkness to light, suggests that abstract music possesses an ethical component. Which is not to say that music makes us better people. That claim disintegrates in light of history’s many bad-guy music lovers. But abstract music, because it is abstract, is open to interpretation. Lacking the limits and specifics that words would impose on them, Beethoven’s unconstrained dramas engage the imagination, enlisting our gut responses to his scenarios, enabling us to grasp his messages by understanding our own reactions to him. In this, Beethoven tells us to value our own emotions. That may not make us better, but it certainly can make us happy.
The Effort and the Payoff
If Beethoven can open a wider world for listeners, the door to that world is perhaps accessed most easily through his symphonies. Besides the large and insistent gestures delivered by an orchestra—try ignoring those—we encounter theater in every Beethoven symphony: rising and falling action and climaxes, all delivered in unforgettable lines.
The symphonies tell only a fraction of the story. Big public statements can convey their messages with blunt power, but Beethoven explored most deeply in more intimate forms, especially his piano sonatas and string quartets. In those genres, particularly in the late works, he experimented with structure and devised new ways to communicate—Biss has written of “the perpetual innovation which is one of the most significant aspects of Beethoven’s output.” Beethoven ignores limits. Into his music he loads a multitude of beauties and complexities, and he trusts our anticipations and memories of both—he trusts our close listening—to ensure that his compositions will transcend their formal borders. He expands music’s capabilities.
Beethoven, says Jonathan Biss, “writes about an idealized world.” The pianist speaks of the “wonderment” he finds in Beethoven’s sonatas, as though “the search for something unreachable is part of the music’s expressive DNA.” Beethoven invested huge effort in that search, and to be true to the music, the artist must convey that effort. As Biss writes, “Without the sense that blood, sweat and tears were involved, a performance simply will not sound like Beethoven.”
Discovering the Sonatas
Even in the early sonatas you hear a new voice. Listen to No. 2. Neither Haydn nor Mozart wrote anything so highly spiced, or so delightfully narcissistic. Its self-love dictates its structure: because Beethoven can’t let go the principal theme of his third movement, it becomes part of the finale. Beethoven aims at more than what music before him could embrace, and he carried that aim to extremes in the late sonatas. For example: In the second movement of the two-movement Opus 111 Sonata, the last of the 32, we never know where he is leading. He asks that this movement be played in a “simple and song-like” way, yet no line of melody goes in a direction we expect. At the same time, he convinces us of the momentum’s inevitability. He convinces us he has captured and transcribed some essential generative rhythms. Think back to what Neville Cardus said. Rather than melody, this music is about rhythm and energy and invention.
Energy also marks the many great, tender adagios Beethoven created. In them, too, the music is not so much based on recognizable and memorable melodies as on reflection, on gesture, on beautifully uttered phrases—quietly urgent, at once rapt and taut with compressed force, sublime.
Beethoven understood the sublime, and also the absurd. As a deaf composer—what could be more unlikely?—he would have had to cultivate a sense of irony and the ridiculous. His humor could be crude. If his instrumental music included words, you can bet many of them would be spelled in four letters.
Sometimes crude and more often direct, Beethoven is also subtle. Listening to different artists approach him reveals different shadings and nuances. I recently compared recordings of the Appassionata Sonata’s first movement by three pianists. A minute into Rudolf Serkin’s recording, he attacks the keyboard, seemingly bent on destroying it. Trills that emerge as ornaments in recordings by Artur Schnabel and Alfred Brendel pinch like pinpricks in Serkin’s recording, which is only slightly slower than Schnabel’s but almost half a minute faster than Brendel’s. (Schnabel, still identified with the sonatas today, was the first to record them all, in the 1930s.) Toward the end of the movement, a racing passage is suddenly interrupted, punctuated by a downward jab. Serkin hesitates for a micro-second before the jab, and in that suspension you feel him gathering strength for the blow. Neither Schnabel nor Brendel bring a similar sense of drama to this moment. While Serkin focuses on each step in the narrative and its various characters, Schnabel is less episodic, integrating its elements more completely, emphasizing the music’s beauty. Brendel stresses architecture and balance, drawing special attention to a four-note figure that is cousin to the fate motif of the Fifth Symphony. Do these differences reflect the artists, or Beethoven?
“Who knows what ingredients go into the greatest of performances?” the film director Errol Morris asks in his New York Times essay “The Pianist and the Lobster,” proceeding to point out that “no matter how good we can ever be, we may still be chained to the wall in Plato’s cave, fantasizing about an unreached ideal.” Given such shifting ground, you might think Beethoven offers no more stability than the public figures who alter their positions with the polls. But all three pianists whose Appassionata I compared suggest what the Appassionata is, different and yet the same, there for us.
In a world as unstable as the ground in earthquake country, we need Beethoven. As we perform and listen to what Beethoven gave us, we do well to remember the deafness and illnesses he coped with, how his very act of writing represented courage in the face of considerable misery, and how that misery vanishes and that courage is mirrored in the dramas he wrote—dramas that culminate insistently or gently or even enigmatically in some ideal destination. In our lives, that ideal will remain unreached simply because it is an ideal, but traveling toward it can be good in so many ways. Beethoven invites us to join him.
Larry Rothe, who writes about music for Cal Performances and the San Francisco Opera, has written for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony. His books include For the Love of Music and Music for a City, Music for the World.
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In the Presence of the Present: Thoughts on A Thousand Thoughts
![Kronos Quartet Elvis](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/kronos-quartet-elvis-1920x900-1.jpg)
On Thursday, February 13, 2020 a special program in Zellerbach Hall celebrated both the Kronos Quartet’s more than 45 years at the vanguard of contemporary music and composer Terry Riley’s 85th birthday.
Photo Credit: Waleed Shah
A bow made of wood and horsehair coated with resin from trees scrapes across a string, which makes vibrations in the hollow of the wooden instrument which travel as a series of sound waves in the subtle matter of the air and, perhaps, penetrate the labyrinth of a human ear, or a hundred or a thousand, and this vibration is interpreted by the brain or the brains as information that might have, to use a word that means such vibrations, resonance as a source of pleasure or pain or sorrow. This is one way to describe a note of music on a violin. It is as ephemeral as the waves of the sea or ripples in water; it arises, it fades, it exists in time, and that ephemerality always speaks of mortality and the desire to transcend it, of motion that exists in time, of life that is itself a kind of motion, since we call the living animate and the un-living inanimate.
Human beings have acknowledged and transcended mortality with culture, with rites and songs and other elaborations that can be passed on and bridge more than one human life, that can spread like ripples on a pond, like a sound, that can be reiterated. A Thousand Thoughts begins with the story of The Lost Chord, a song that was one of the first pieces of music recorded when technology made possible the conversion of live sound into tiny impressions on a wax cylinder (and later on phonograph records [phono for “sound,” graph for “writing”; these were literally devices for writing down sound]), and then on magnetic tape, and then as digital data that shaved off some of the fuzz of the vibrations to make something perhaps a little pared down and cleaner than what sounded in the studio where the recording was made).
A Thousand Thoughts begins with the irony of The Lost Chord, because it was about music heard once and never recovered that offered some joy, some solace, some peace that then vanished, about the sense of loss that was tied to death and perhaps to the impossibility of hanging onto transcendent moments. Perhaps it begins with that story because in it is the desire of all art to transcend time, to shore something up against its depredations, and the particular contradictions of art that unfold in time, like music—that pleasure in the ephemeral, in sounds that can only exist in time itself. A note is heard, it fades, it is gone. There is no music outside of time, and time itself is full of the impossibility of keeping and the inevitability of change, that force that sometimes feels like liberation and sometimes like tragedy.
Kronos founder David Harrington described a quest analogous to The Lost Chord, saying “We have not created the bulletproof piece of music that will prevent harm from happening— you know, [that] a young child can wrap around herself or a grandparent can wrap around his family. We haven’t been able to do that yet, but I think it’s possible, and I spend every minute of my waking life trying to find that.”
A Thousand Thoughts, a thousand questions, mine, yours, ours, theirs, questions that perhaps open up things that definitive answers would only nail shut. Kronos Quartet’s long trajectory offers a series of questions that are solid and answers that are elusive: How do you find a path between predictability and instability? How do you have both a clear identity and an open door that lets in new ideas and collaborators? How do you keep the faith that what you’re doing matters? How do make an art that grows like a tree, ring by ring, year by year, and stands as a testament? How do you keep it alive through all the changes, and how do you incorporate the change that is, as my photographic collaborator Mark Klett likes to say, the measure of time? Or how do you proceed as Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi said in some instructions for Zen Buddhist practice, “not too tight, not too loose,” not so tied by custom and convention and the past, not so formless that you lurch and spill into whatever the present offers?
There was an old idea of immortality as transcendence, as beauty, as power that was less about living forever than about lifting someone out of themselves and the gloom and despond of mortality. There is also a particular beauty of mortality, of this light that will never shine the same way twice, of the spring that will be devoured by the summer, the youth that will be consumed by maturity, the freshness of beginnings and the ripeness of arrival.
The live music of the “live film” A Thousand Thoughts raises other questions, about irreproducible and evanescent experience, about the water that runs through your fingers, about the events that cannot be reconstituted. How do you swim upstream against what film and all our digital era has become, an immersion in other times and places than the present: in recordings, images, and reproductions? Once, everything happened and was then irretrievable, though you could sketch it or describe it in words on paper or spoken aloud, and then in the late 1830s came photography, promising exact replication of the visible, and half a century later came recorded sound, promising exact replication of the audible. They had photographs, then phonographs; they thought that they had conquered time; we had even more recording technology, even more data stored, even more ease in capturing every moment.
Did we conquer time or were we conquered by substitutes for presence? Did we give up the moment itself, the things themselves, for their reproductions? Did we fall into substitutes and fakes and lose our grasp on the moment, give up presence for absences and in the process lose ourselves that are also mortal, time-bound, eternally changing, eternally invited to witness in the moment? Is there a way that thinking you will never die becomes a way to never live, like the person who tries to document the moment so that in the future the past will be retrievable and only misses the present? The present, that pun in English for gifts and for now.
The foundation for modern cinema was laid when Eadweard Muybridge animated sequential photographs and when Edison captured recorded sound on his wax cylinders. The latter man saw it as an uncanny act, a reaching into the grave, a dance with the dead.
“In the year 1887,” Edison later remembered, “it occurred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument which would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear and that, by a combination of the two, all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultaneously. I believe that in coming years by my own work and that of Dickson, Muybridge, Marey and others who will doubtless enter the field, that grand opera can be given at the Metropolitan Opera House at New York… with artists and musicians long since dead.”
Photo credit: Mary Cybulski
He declares that cinema is a ghost dance, as I said somewhere else, that it is a raising of the dead or at least a fraternizing with the dead and the gone. It is not about presence but absence and the ability to be with who and what is absent. Harrington wanted to make a music that would protect a child from harm, but Edison aspired to revive the dead at least enough to make them sing for us. Perhaps in that is the difference between the present and the past recaptured.
Edison’s astonishing declaration raises as well questions Sam Green has tried to answer: What is live cinema? What is it to be fully present? What is it to have the thing itself and not its representation? What is it to be here and now in an age of being anywhere but here, and every time but this irreproducible moment? What is it to have a film mixed live before you, prone to accidents and serendipities, to be each time something distinct, of its time, and not outside it, to hear music as a vibration of horsehair and wood and the movement of muscles traveling through the air and then into the labyrinth of your ear, with all the nuances that get sanded down and painted over by a digital recording? What is the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, and what is it to be in the presence and the present?
A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, Rebecca Solnit is a frequent contributor to the Guardian and Lithub.com, and the author of 25 books about hope, history, feminism, landscape, and cultural transformation.
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Choreographer Mark Morris in Comparative Literature class?
![](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/mark-morris-comparative-literative-1920x900-1.jpg)
Each semester for the last eight years, Cal Performances has worked with professors on campus to create unique academic courses with curriculum built around the music, theater, and dance offerings presented on its stages, in disciplines as varied as environmental studies, psychology, and legal studies, among many others.
“Don’t even hold a pen” is an unusual directive to receive in any college course, let alone one as inherently dependent on writing as a poetry class. Yet this was the advice given to a group of Cal undergraduates during a fall meeting of Comparative Literature 50—by none other than world-famous choreographer Mark Morris.
The internationally renowned dancemaker attended the class titled “Between Direct Speech and Sensory Excess: A Poetry Workshop” as a guest lecturer, where he and the students focused their discussion on the concept of rhythm in music, poetry, and dance. Morris’ suggestion, though, was intended specifically for the students’ next class meeting, which was to take place at a performance of the choreographer’s Mozart Dances in Zellerbach Hall.
Morris’ classroom visit, as well as attendance at the performance, were featured in the syllabus because the class is a “Cal Performances Course”—funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through an initiative to actively integrate the arts into the rigorous academic context of UC Berkeley.
Cal Performances Courses are intended to “demonstrate that the live performing arts can—and should—play an active role in a world-class academic environment,” explains Jeremy Geffen, the organization’s executive and artistic director. “Students come to UC Berkeley with the goal of becoming more well rounded and encountering the world in all its diversity. Key to this is considering human experience as seen through the eye of the creative artist, by engaging with works of art that are the most representative and revealing documents of their times.”
A centerpiece of Cal Performances’ relationship to academics at Berkeley, this initiative began in 2012 and has supported courses across multiple disciplines—classes that don’t just incorporate the arts, but actually structure their curriculum around the music, theater, and dance on offer each season at Cal Performances. Along with coursework, the classes offer interviews and post-performance reflection in partnership with scholars and instructors from a range of disciplines—environmental studies, philosophy and psychology, art and music history and theory, religious studies, legal studies, education, ethnic and queer studies, and many others.
Japanese butoh troupe Sankai Juku perform Meguri: Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land at Cal Performances, October 2019
In addition to the Comparative Literature class last fall, students in Gender and Women’s Studies have explored how performance grapples with ecological change by observing, among other events, the hyper-controlled movement of Japanese butoh troupe Sankai Juku. This spring, a history class will examine diaspora and community by attending other Cal Performances events, including a gospel music celebration of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led by Damien Sneed (Feb. 20). Psychology course, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Identity: Individual, Cultural, and Beyond,” will be centered around performances of Myra Melford’s Jazz Platform (Feb. 9) and Cirque Éloize’s Hotel (Feb. 22-23).
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