Carousel Waltz (Richard Rodgers, 1945)

I have always loved the Carousel Waltz, and sifted through YouTube to try to find a good version. I found several - and then this one, and I wondered what piece of music I was listening to. It COULDN'T be the same one! It was like wandering around in a very familiar setting - a circus, maybe, or a carnival - but seeing everything startlingly new, the veils ripped away, as if I were hearing it all for the very first time. 

It's just the way the musicians attack the piece, the way they don't pussyfoot around but just dive right in. And make no mistake, this IS circus music, dark, sometimes dissonant, with thumping bass drums and blasting tubas, dreamily romantic (OH THOSE VIOLAS!), with sparkly carnival effects charmingly reproduced by crisp percussion and those big bald men blowing tiny little piccolos. 

This is a glorious piece of music which has beckoned and pulled me in again, after too long away from music, too much distraction, too many things pulling me in different directions. This is so perfect and encompasses so much, with a glittering cinematic quality and a kind of primal sophistication. And the tempo couldn't be more perfect - bad tempi being my all-time-worst pet peeve in music. For that, you must thank the conductor - and this is without a doubt some of the most glorious conducting I've ever heard. The musicians play this with focus, joy and gusto, but also with the requisite fierceness that is all a part of a beloved musical which, for a popular Broadway show, is exceptionally dark.

And because I just thought of it, here's another favorite piece I keep coming back to - another dance in 3/4 time, Khatchaturian's magnificent Masquerade Waltz, (sometimes called Dark Waltz), with the same primal, inscrutable melancholy lurking under a great bumptious cymbal-crashing piece of circus music. Call it My Armenian Cousin.

Khachaturian - Masquerade Suite (Waltz)

No! No! This ISN'T the same piece I posted a few days ago! This is just the waltz from Masquerade, not the whole suite. But it's much better, with a dark and slightly sleazy circus atmosphere that is like the worn velvet on Viennese trousers, worn because its wearer has been furiously engaged in an activity both illicit and sublime.

Khachaturian, Masquerade Suite

A favorite. When I latch onto one of these, I listen to it over and over again. This is like dark, quirky circus music. The percussion, including nasty little snares and great smashing cymbals, is outstanding. Try to imagine the piece without it.

Lost and found, found and lost: the miracle of the Tube

This is one of those pieces I inadvertently tracked down through wonderful YouTube. I've been immersed in music lately, discovering those playlists of 148 complete symphonies end-to-end, many of them live performances with superb sound. I guess I didn't indulge before because I had a hard-and-fast rule: NO MUSIC while I was writing. Too distracting! My mind can't do two things at once.

But this writing doesn't matter so much (except to me): I write about whatever is at the top of my head (or over it!), and don't need to worry about some pecksniff of an editor picking it to pieces. It's wild and free. So maybe I CAN have music on while I write, because it isn't really writing, not like those miserable little 500-word blocks of text I had to turn out every week for newspapers.

This piece by Khatchaturian (an Armenian whose music straddles conventional romanticism and sexual/edgy/spicy/fierce/exotic Armenianism, with a dose of early-20th-century dissonance on the side) is one that I heard in my childhood, which whether I liked it or not was drenched with classical music. I was expected to be a musician, a violinist specifically, though I had little talent and no inclination. The fact that I went back in my 40s and took nine years of violin instruction is another story. 

My siblings were all vastly older than me, and always seemed to be coming home from university and Europe and stuff, and often they came bearing records. (And sometimes pot, but that's another story.) These were New Discoveries, things we hadn't heard before, outside the box of Bach and Brahms. Thinking back, there was nothing too spectacular about these things. Khatchaturian isn't exactly a secret, not with the Sabre Dance appearing on Ed Sullivan every week while Armenians juggled flaming torches. But this waltz, well. 

My brother called it Dark Waltz, and it would be right at home in today's climate of sexy vampires, Dark Shadows Redux, Beauty and the Beast gasping back to cheesy life, and Twilight. I searched and searched for the right version, played at the right tempo, as many of them are just too fast and miss the point: this is Armenia via Vienna, almost a wink or a trick or a parody of Strauss, with its lurking corners, sneaky dissonance and falling cadences. As a matter of fact, I have that queer feeling (did you know I'm queer? Neither did I, until this moment) that it is the SAME recording I listened to in my childhood. It's quite possible. Strange are the ways of YouTube, which to my mind gets better and better, so long as you ignore the Cretan-ish crap in the comments section. 

Things are within reach now. As far as I am concerned, I will never buy a CD again. I keep making discoveries, every day, and things from the past pop up and say, "HI!", with an idiotic look on their face. So I WASN'T hallucinating Clutch Cargo and his Pals Spinner and Paddlefoot, or Spunky and Tadpole, or I Married Joan (do-wah, do-wah!). It's all there, though I have no idea where people get these things, along with ancient Anacin commercials and even (selah, my Saviour) a rare clip of Milky the Clown bothering Little Nancy, the crippled poster child for the Whatever-it-is Pity Society in Detroit.

I mean, people must have vaults of this stuff in their basement. Hundreds, thousands of things, old TV themes like T. H. E. Cat (gifinated by me a few posts ago - what an amazing, elegant piece of animation!). Just stored? Do they come from musty old TV vaults? Or what? The mysterious provenance of them just makes it all better, I think. They seem to waft up from the past. Here I am again, only this time everything is different, and how. I'm not this bewildered little kid any more, but a bewildered adult with many of the same compulsions and dilemmas, with the same confusion as to why I am alive. 

I was assigned this, my life; I did not choose it. I guess no one does. But it does seem a heavy burden, and a long one, a long trudge through unknown territory. I savour all the discoveries I make, no matter how tiny. 

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

It's not just the music - it's the masks!

Oscar Levant plays Khatchaturian

So here is the only clip I could find that would play: the Concerto in F one wouldn't work. This is more of a flashy showpiece, but my my, what he does with it! Women must have thrown their hotel room keys on the stage. This video displays certain unique aspects of his playing: the prizefighter bobbing and weaving; being a hair's-breadth ahead of the beat, which conveys a certain urgency; tiny comic elements like turning around to face the orchestra; producing a "something extra" with some chords (I can't express this, but I can hear it), almost a hidden overtone or bright extra sound that wasn't written down anywhere, a new color in the spectrum, so that the chord opened out and became excruciatingly pleasurable (and this is, after all, Khatchaturian, the composer I rhapsodized about a few posts ago). But it happens so fast and then vanishes, not so much mercury as lightning. I wish I knew who wrote this arrangement of the Sabre Dance, but at the same time I know it could be no one else but Oscar, incorporating his trademark sour/sweet dissonances and complexity. He blows this tired old piece of circus music out of the water.

Musical orgasm (I promise you!)

I want to just shut up here so you can listen to this, but I am also bursting to tell you: this was a process like everything else. Eons ago I used to watch a British TV show called The Onedin Line, not really watch it but be transfixed by the theme song which seemed to be describing a magnificent ship in full sail. It was only later, much later, that I found out the piece was from a ballet by Khatchaturian called Spartacus. It's a long way from Kirk Douglas and the Sabre Dance, but it had to come from somewhere.


I don't know, a very long time went by, maybe 30 or 40 years (could it be so?), and something happened, the floor got deeper or the ceiling higher, and I feel now in each chord, each cadence of this piece, a rapture that can only be described as erotic.

This is sexual music, the excruciating, almost unbelievable pleasure, the peaks and valleys, the mounting feverish intensity and the lashing, splashing, furious climax. It's hard to describe such fever in words - one can't without sounding ridiculous - but music comes closer. There are other contenders, perhaps: Daphnis et Chloe by Ravel, which I once heard Bramwell Tovey conduct live with the Vancouver Symphony (a highlight not just of my musical life, but of my life period). It's much more sustained and seems to have acts in it like a great erotic play, with moods on moods. This is just a rhapsody, a passionate lover grabbing a lush young woman and pulling her dress down and smothering her body with kisses. It's the point of no return, when you wonder if it is even possible to feel more than this, not just pleasure but extremity, reaching the very edge of what is possible in a human body.

Sort of like. I told you it was hard to describe.