Category: Hmmm….

April is National Poetry Month, but unless you are an avid poetry consumer, the celebration of this art form is likely to be eclipsed by other seasonal holidays. A poet and chapbook publisher in an article for the Boston Phoenix opined, “No wonder America’s National Poetry Month begins on April Fools’ Day!…Poetry is not now and never has been in America an art for the faint-hearted.” I wouldn’t characterize most Americans as faint-hearted, quite the contrary, but poetry does remain elusive to many. How many poems can you recite? (“Roses are red…” doesn’t count.) On the other hand, everyone sings songs.

When poet Dana Gioia became the Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts in 2003, he noted that the mission of the NEA is not only to “foster excellence in the arts, but to bring art to all Americans.” He knows that this is not an easy task. As he explained it to a Philadelphia newspaper, “…there’s a difference between entertainment and art. Entertainment provides a series of predictable pleasures. It allows an audience to enter and leave more or less the same. Art affords at least the possibility of transformation. So we need to make some room for art in this overwhelmingly successful entertainment world.”

That possibility for transformation is afforded by an artist’s ability to embody his or her own transformative experience in a work of art – be it a poem, song, painting, or other art form.

Jazz pianist Fred Hersch is no stranger to poetry, having at the age of 18 been moved by Walt Whitman’s works — that was in the mid 1970s. Nearly thirty years later, Fred re-read “When I Heard at the Close of the Day” and was inspired to embody it as an instrumental piece. That one composition led Fred to an entire album based on Whitman’s poems — the orchestrations are for an 8 piece ensemble plus singers. The words are important: “…so many touchstone lines…words that represent to me what is the best about America,” Fred explained in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition two years ago.

Fred talks also about the universality and timelessness of the poems’ meanings. “If you don’t have love, it’s just a bunch of stuff on your resume.” Long-form jazz-based works often receive critical attention, sometimes acclaim, but seldom do they resonate as positively with the audience. Happily, reports are that Hersch’s Leaves Of Grass is a crowd pleaser. In March of last year a New York Times concert review by Ben Ratliff concluded as follows:

“I have often experienced audiences palpably losing interest in long-form jazz pieces well before the finish. This one brought a full house to its feet.”

And in February of this year, Nate Chinen, also writing for The New York Times, reported:

“Buoyed by the success of “Leaves of Grass,” which has become one of the best-selling titles in his catalog, Mr. Hersch has plunged into another large-scale cross-disciplinary work. “It’s a song cycle for the stage with the poet Mary Jo Salter,” he said recently by phone from the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where he was finishing a five-week residency. “The working title is ‘Hold Still!’ It’s a whole evening of about 18 songs loosely connected around the theme of photography.”

What is the secret alchemy that occurs when words are married to music? It might be said that music makes poetry more accessible to the average person, or that it touches the soul in ways that words alone cannot. This is not the first time I have pondered this question and a year or so ago I emailed my friend and noted arts critic Terry Teachout, asking him to comment on this question. [For those of you who may not yet know of Teachout, he is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the music critic of Commentary, as well as contributor to publications such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, National Review, many other magazines and newspapers, and he blogs about the arts almost daily. He wrote back:

“When Igor Stravinsky saw the ballet that George Balanchine made out of his Movements for Piano and Orchestra, he said, ‘The performance was like a tour of a building for which I had drawn the plans but never explored the result.’ That must be what it feels like to have your words set to music by a good composer – it tells you something about your own writing that even you didn’t know.”

I wonder what Walt Whitman would have said upon hearing Hersch’s opus.

I recently heard a pianist who has great facility, a voluminous repertoire, and knows all the correct chord changes. I heard someone describe this musician as “a cocktail pianist,” but I disagree. I heard a depth of harmonic understanding far greater than that which I’d expect from “a cocktail pianist.” So why then did the performance leave me cold?

Several reasons, including a lack of swing and an overabundance of cleverness. The music was so busy going here, there and everywhere that it never found a groove, and I could never get a good foot-tap going. But most off-putting was that I could hear all the hard work that was going into the performance. With each lean into the piano and up-tic of a shoulder I could see the brain gears engaged and grinding away to create intricate segues between tunes and find just the right bar into which a clever musical quotation could be inserted.

I closed my eyes, but even then the performance was painstaking, and therein, I believe, lays a problem. Great works — be they musical, literary, fine art, or theatrical — should feel effortless. We the audience, want to experience the end result, at least at performance time. I add that “at least at performance time” caveat to acknowledge our interest in behind-the-scenes processes – an attraction well plumbed by ArtistShare. But when we see or hear the heavy lifting and mental machinations during a performance, when we see the man behind the curtain, the magic disappears.

So, if the appearance of effortlessness is one criteria for a great performance, what else? What makes an artist great rather than average?

• Superior technical skill?

• Emotional presence?

• Unique sound or style?

I would posit that many artists have one or two of these attributes, but that only those few who have the whole package become the great masters or legends in their field. Having said that, I must also acknowledge the point made by Owen Cordle, jazz writer for the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and also JazzTimes. In an account shared online courtesy of Rifftides, Owen writes “Sometimes the spirit of a thing can give you hope and heal you even when the source isn’t perfect. ” I agree. Here’s another excerpt (read the full account here):

This may sound odd, but part of the joy came from watching Lou grab bits and pieces of the heads and sometimes feel his way through the first improvised chorus or part thereof and then nail the chord changes solidly the next time around. He was fallible and human but a quick study. And that was the beauty of it — recovery, ingenuity, memory and the musical ear in action on the wing.

I’d likely have felt the same way had I been there. What leaves me cold is not so much the awareness of the “work” being done as the purpose of that work. When the goal is communicating the essence of the music, all is well, but when the stylistic trappings, technique and cleverness become the point unto themselves, then all is lost. This is true of great writing as well as great music; if the style screams “look at me,” it is usually to cover up some deficit. I’m hoping that some of my esteemed colleagues and DevraDoWrite readers will weigh in with their thoughts via email.

And here’s one more thought to consider. Should an artist’s personal reputation matter? Whether factual or speculated, based on press or personal knowledge, should anything other than the person’s artistic ability influence our choices of consumption? Clearly publicity and advertising do influence us, but should that be so? Perhaps I am missing out when I refuse to pick up a book by Frey just because I think he’s a liar. Being a liar doesn’t preclude being a good writer, at least not technically. And I won’t even consider reading a book by someone named Cupcake, partly because of the Frey fallout, partly because of her name, and partly because I’m sick of the look-at-my-sorry-life-now-better memoirs. None of these are good reasons to dismiss a work unseen, but hey, I’m only human and that’s my reaction. I’m glad I became a Sinatra fan before I heard that he wasn’t always such a nice guy. It’s also a good thing I read “In Cold Blood” before I found out that Capote made stuff up and exploited his subjects and Harper Lee too. Hmmm.