Stingy Kids

Bell, Stradivari and Bach in 2007

Music critic Rythmik generously offered to share his reading of the Joshua Bell experiment as a guest post, a first for Stingy Kids. The italicized quotes are from the Washington Post article "Pearls for Breakfast." If you haven't read this article yet, I suggest you take a look at it before reading Rythmik's critique.

Ok, well first of all. Joshua Bell is indeed an excellent violinist. As absurd as his little experiment was, we can’t deny him the recognition he’s earned. Serious music reaches a musical level in which an average listener’s mere opinions of like and dislike are no longer relevant. For instance, it’s not hard for anyone to love the sound of a Stradivarius, but if someone were to say that they don’t like it, well then simply put….they just don’t understand. True in this day and age it is now important for those involved in serious music to accept the theory that a casual listener doesn’t have to be musically knowledgeable in order to appreciate. However, as soon as the listener begins stating what is “good” or “bad”, we see that a musical understanding was needed from the start. And that is really the heart of the whole issue at hand.

So the Washington Post attempted to essentially make fools of the general public, mind you the music listening public, modern day American culture, and in the end Joshua Bell concert ticket holders. I think that all they succeeded in doing was waking up the classical/serious music world to their own ignorance rather than waking us up to ours. In “an unblinking assessment of public taste…would beauty transcend?” I ask, should it?

When Gabo Met Shakira

A recent Washington Post article on the Colombian pop star (and SK favorite) Shakira ("Sense and Sensuality"), predictably quoted from Gabriel García Márquez's 1999 profile of the artist.  I'm ashamed to say, however, that until a couple of days ago I myself had not read it.  A quick online search brought up the original Spanish version, published in the Colombian paper Cambio in June 1999.  I read it ravenously, mentally translating into English, as I tend to do when I really like what I'm reading and already anticipate sharing it with non-Hispanophones.  But then it hit me: Certainly, an article this well known already exists in English translation?  Indeed it does--sort of.

On June 8, 2002 the Guardian, a UK newspaper, published an article in English titled "The poet and the princess."  The subhead reads: "They are the greatest Colombians: Shakira, pop phenomenon, and Gabriel García Márquez, novelist.  Naturally, they had to meet--and he, the magical realist, was astonished by her fantastical work-rate."  Ignoring the ridiculous pun on "fantastical" and the over-used modifier "magical realist," what struck me about this subhead is that it suggests a contemporaneous "encounter" between "the poet and the princess," meaning one that occurred at around the date of publication.  Naturally, I assumed that what the Guardian editors meant was that "they had to meet" again, in addition to their 1999 meeting.  I started reading the English article and instantly recognized it as a translation of the 1999 interview, though no mention of a translator is made. 

This didn't make any sense to me.  This famous interview took place in 1999, so how can the article pretend to situate it in 2002?  The Spanish original makes several references to topical events--a benefit in Colombia for the victims of the 1999 Armenia earthquake, preparation for Shakira's first English-language album (the one that became Laundry Service), her current single-status, and others--so there's no way, I'm thinking, that any of this could pass as 2002.  But the editors of the Guardian had anticipated this chronological shift and their solution was, in my view, highly problematic, if not unethical. 

Basics Made New

My brother sent me the following quote ("I put the part I thought could apply to literature/translation in bold"):

Mozart belongs, like Bach, to the rare species of the conservative revolutionaries, or the revolutionary conservatives. We have seen that in the days when oblique parallels between music history and the history of the pictoral arts were favored, Mozart was compared with Raphael. But this is one of the most oblique of all parallels. For what Michelangelo said of Raphael is true: one sees in this young man what study can accomplish. Raphael's is an ideal, calligraphic, soaring perfection in which the soul is not involved. Mozart, too, was a great learner but his soul was never uninvolved. He took over a complete language, and used it in new combinations, giving it's words new meanings, to say things that were at once old and new, unknown and thrice known. Thus a great poet uses but the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, and without devising a single new word gives voice to thoughts undreamed-of.--Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, His Work, 1945, Oxford University Press

This is a great passage! In writing, common words become uncommon in their relation to other words. But also, when it comes to writing, so much is in the arrangement of words on a page (or screen), the space between the letters, the font and kerning, the width of the margins. These relations shift meaning, redistribute weight.

The Context of Art

In January, Joshua Bell, a renowned violinist, spent forty-five minutes of his morning busking at L'Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC. A recent Washington Post article describes his reception by DC commuters, many of whom walked by without a glance. The article has sparked many interesting observations and discussions on the relation between context, meaning and value in art. Even my favorite NYC busker, Natalia Paruz (aka The Saw Lady), weighed in. The Post article speculates that the general disinterest of the passers-by is not due to a failure to appreciate good art but rather that our perception, reception and appreciation of art has much to do with context. On the whole, this does seem to be the case. It's interesting to watch those videos of Bell playing at a metro station and to observe the number of children who hang back for a moment to take in another glance. It made me think of a something a professor recently said to me: "students learn what they are not supposed to know." In other words, we learn through the years to discriminate and judge not only the things that surround us, but also our ability and capacity to understand what is unfamiliar. A few years ago, a friend asked me to read a poem and tell him if it was any good. He refused to reveal the name of the author. I read the poem in a state of panic. "I don't know," I said. "I don't know if it's any good." Without a context, without a way of positioning the author in a critical tradition, I felt completely lost. Context is our comfort zone, our security blanket. To be "taken out of context" is largely a negative condition. It is "out of context" that things get mangled, distorted, mistranslated. But the terrain of "in context" hazards its own risks--a distrust of one's own perceptions, that quicksand of "what we are not supposed to know"