My mother attended a Dave Brubeck (1920-2012) set with, so she recalls, a quintet, on a Sunday afternoon at a UPenn fraternity with about fifty students present. "That's the way Philadelphia was then."(now)

Later she was dating a cousin of Gerry Mulligan, who informed her that Gerry was a black sheep in the family and no one spoke to him. She induced him to take her to one of his shows and then to approach him. Twenty minutes later, Gerry was overjoyed, saying he hadn't been greeted warmly by a family member for years.

Then my Dad came calling and she got him to take her to see Nina Simone at a club, where he felt out of place and complained about the price of drinks. He didn't listen to music but liked it when I put on a Bing Crosby Christmas album once and enjoyed Lionel Hampton at Disneyworld. Breton (#nodads), de Chirico (#yesdads), and Michaux (#nosoonercouldItalkthanIsaidIwasafoundling) didn't like music either.  Michaux more directly and specifically stuck up for the printed word's presentaton of connotation than the once-Dada Breton, who was rumored to have liked Sun Ra (perhaps for his manifestoes). de Chirico (right, "A Child's Brain") was as usual strident and proud:

"I have always remained perplexed by these moments of public excitement over music and musicians, and also by the infinite patience with which so many individuals, apparently sane in mind and body, sit in concert halls and listen, for hours on end, motionless but visibly tired and bored, to symphonies and very long-drawn-out compositions which are never-ending and, what is even worse, pieces of modern music. I have wondered why the same thing isn't done for painting; why for example in a room, facing a public armed with binoculars and opera-glasses, pictures (naturally not modern ones) are not shown, and why the public is not forced to look at each picture for a time corresponding to the duration of a long symphony : that is, about sixty minutes. I do not believe that looking for an hour, with the eye of a painter and the mind of a philosopher, at a large and beautiful composition by Titian or Reubens, should be less interesting and more tedious than listening to a long symphony or a long concerto for the same period. Why is this not done?"

Titian, Venus and the Lute Player

Georgio's answer next week.

OK I'll write it in now, in case I forget: "I believe that the explanation of the difference can only lie in human stupidity which, as I have already said.. is as immense and infinite as the universe."

I've been known to sit in front of single paintings as long as I'm not making the staff uncomfortable, though I don't usually go for the "have it both ways" approach to Titian's and de Chirico's allegorical problem: the mp3 player, which seems rude to my sensibilities, especially in galleries (and in case Schjeldahl's there and I need to correct him) but one time Zwirner had construction sounds from outside and I cued up tunes for a Daniel Richter show and found it most delightful.  Speaking of long views and Daniel Richter, I once sat on the floor of the Zwirner cubicle at the Armory to hang with his "Ophelia" and the previous year stared at the very large "The Owner's History Lesson" for the longest time when it was hung in front of a cafe area and no one was looking at it... the only person who seemed to notice me was I believe the guy who, I read later, ran the Armory Show and he seemed to approve. Hard to pull yourself away from his large canvases when he's at his top form and content yourself with something else.

Ezra Pound's interest in Asian literature intensified when Mary Fenollosa picked him to be the executor of her husband Ernest's writings in late 1913, after she read "In a Station at the Metro" that Spring, which he called in 1916 a "hokku-like sentence." Though translating Chinese poetry throughout his life, Pound never so far as I know translated a haiku or referred to a Japanese Haiku master in publications or letters.

Much suggests his discomfort with Japan's spiritual and animistic tradition of Shintoism - which he never mentions by name - such as qualifications made for his translations of Japanese Noh plays in 1916 (warning: Uncle Ezra talking) "These plays are full of ghosts, and the ghost psychology is amazing. The parallels with Western spiritist doctrines are very curious. This is, however, an irrelevant or extraneous interest, and one might see it set aside if it were not bound up with a dramatic and poetic interest of the very highest order" and "The suspense is the suspense of waiting for a supernatural manifestation - which comes. Some will be annoyed at a form of psychology which is, in the West, relegated to spiritistic seances. There is, however, no doubt that such psychology exists. All through the winter of 1914-15 I watched Mr. Yeats correlating folk-lore (which Lady Gregory had collected in Irish cottages) and data of the occult writers, with the habits of charlatans of Bond Street. If the Japanese authors had not combined the psychology of such matters with what is to me a very fine sort of poetry, I would not bother about it." Pound wrote to patron John Quinn (who first received word of The Waste Land's existence) in 1917: "China is fundamental, Japan is not. Japan is a special interest, like Provence, or 12th-13th Century Italy (apart from Dante). I don't mean to think there aren't interesting things in Fenollosa's Japanese stuff... But China is solid."

In 1937 Pound tried to disassociate an authentic rendition of Hinduism from "the general impression of Indian thought now clouding Occidental tradition. This cloud exists, and until some light or lightning disrupts it, many of the better minds in the West will be suspicious of all Eastern teaching.. It is in the opinion of the hard-headed, as distinct from the bone-headed, West that Westerners who are drawn to Indian thought are Westerners in search of an escape mechanism, Westerners who dare face neither the rigors of mediaeval dialectic nor the concrete and often exhausting detail of the twentieth-century material sciences." 1939: "Confucian faith I can conceive. I can conceive of a man's believing that if, and in measure as, he brings order into his own consciousness (his own 'innermost') that order will emanate from him. The cycle of Chinese history, the reception of the 'mandate' (called the mandate of heaven) by various dynasties, seem to offer demonstrable evidence of this process." The order of consciousness is to emanate from nature, just as in the Rig Veda from the fourth millennium BC, the first known poetry:

"May there be peace on mortal, immortal and divine planes. I meditate upon the most brilliant splendor of the Sun God. May he stimulate our intellect (so that we are inspired to take the right action at the right time)."

This being a blog I may wonder aloud whether Pound read any Bashō before writing "In a Station at the Metro," as any anthology of haiku would contain them. Pound's emphasis on "spaces between the rhythmic units"

The apparition     of these faces    in the crowd      :

petals     in a wet, black     bough

may have come from the way haiku were translated in keeping with the solitary unit of each ideogram on the vertical plane of Japanese writing as with Bashō's early (1666) poem:

Kyoto | as-for | ninety-nine-thousand | crowd | 's | blossom-viewing | kana

Westernized as:

here in Kyoto

ninety-nine thousand people

out to see the blossoms

in the following year Bashō relates blossoms to faces:

do those blossoming faces

make you feel bashful?

hazy moon

I have always viewed 'petals' to be an appositive to 'faces'  - the faces are the petals - (Kenner: "Pound called it an equation, meaning not a redundancy, a equals a, but a generalization of unexpected exactness") and this interpretation agrees with my speculations of Bashō's influence. Pound said the poem was inspired by a moment in 1916 he "saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another then another.. and then another beautiful woman."  The Gustave Moreau Museum was most certainly open to the public in Paris at the time, which contains Moreau's disembodied face of "The Apparition":

Just like on an airplane in the custody of military police facing treason charges in 1945, "looking down at the tremendous sunlit sea (he) became, on his first ocean crossing by air, ecstatic.." he would assign mythological significance to the underground Metro.  The "crowd" waiting for the train evokes how "Odysseus and Orpheus and Kore saw crowds in Hades" (Kenner).  Kenner also suggests several times in The Pound Era the Persephone myth: "since past poetry has occurred in time, a poetic in transformation will assimilate history to a present moment, and glimpse Persephone in a station at the Metro," as does Cocteau, Chris Marker, etc.

Pound was well aware of Frazier's Golden Bough by this time: in 1913 he so described the poet Allen Upward to Dorothy Pound: "He seems to [know] things that aren't in Frazier," writing to Margaret Anderson in 1918 "Frazier has done the whole thing monumentally, BUT good god how slowly, in how many volumes."  Frazier wrote that Persephone "can surely be nothing else than a mythical embodiment of the vegetation, and particularly of the corn, which is buried under the soil for some months of every winter and comes to life again, as from the grave, in the sprouting cornstalks and the opening flowers and foliage of every spring. No other reasonable and probable explanation of Persephone seems possible."

Aeneus carried the Golden Bough with him in the Underworld, but a "wet, black bough" is another sort of branch, like the "matted boughs" of "the immemorial forest" that, by Frazier's account, he encountered there: "(Virgil) describes how at the very gates of hell there stretched a vast and gloomy wood, and how the hero, following the flight of two doves that lured him on, wandered into the depths of the immemorial forest till he saw afar off through the shadows of the trees the flickering light of the Golden Bough illuminating the matted boughs overhead. If the mistletoe, as a yellow withered bough in the sad autumn woods, was conceived to contain the seed of fire, what better companion could a forlorn wanderer in the nether shades take with him than a bough that would be a lamp to his feed as well as a rod and staff to his hands?"

So it would be the faces of the crowd and not the Golden Bough that illuminate the immemorial forest of the Metro station, consistent with Pound's use of the Golden Bough image at the crucial end of Canto I, affixing it to Aphrodite's "dark eyelids."   Though here Pound doesn't mention Aeneus, Venus's (Aphrodite's) son, he does so repeatedly in the following Cantos and the mention of Aphrodite and the Bough reference positions Aeneus, defender of Troy, as a mirror image to Odysseus, the subject of Canto I heretofore and one of the destroyers of Troy.  Aphrodite is also the mirror image of Artemis, the main figure in Frazier's book, as Cy Twombly documents in his painting from his Ilium series which has the two at the top of the two columns of names:

Michaux: "The Chinese have a talent for reducing being to signified being (something like the talent for algebra and math). If a battle is to take place, they do not want to serve up a battle, they do not simulate it. They signify it. This is the only thing that interests them, the actual battle would strike them as vulgar."

Frazier traces the Golden Bough to "Diana's (Artemis') Mirror," the lake of Nemi near Rome where "the divine mind of Turner" depicts Sybil at the gates of the Underworld holding Aeneus' offering of the Golden Bough as the Fates dance in a circle:

During last year's hurricane in which owing to its noteworthy but not so menacing forecasts I permitted myself to upload Turner storms, I was told that people look at paintings in reproduction, as Frazier and it would seem Pound did, had the curiosity visited him, while Turner's painting had been loaned by the Tate to Dublin before returning there for current visitors.

Jung lamented years later "Modern man does not understand how much his 'rationalism' (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic 'underworld.'" If it was, in fact, corn harvests of underground Persephones that made up Pound's apparition, he would in late 1921 set his hand to edit another Frazier-influenced poem: Eliot's The Waste Land, which, like "In a Station of the Metro," sets the fertility rituals in the city,  relating assorted expressions of sexuality "in different voices." The example cited by Frazier of ritual sexual intercourse as fertility rite was from Java, of animist derivation though Frazier doesn't use the term, and the book makes several references to Shintoism. Edward Tylor and then Frazier developed the style of relating rituals from different parts of the world thematically that would inspire this tendency in Claude Levi-Strauss and then Chris Marker's Shintoist references in Sans Soleil.

Eliot wanted to see paradise just like Dante, and his poetry thereafter consisted mostly of religious symbolism often along the lines of Goethe's definition: "the particular resembles the general, not as a dream or shadow, but as a living, momentary revelation of the inexplicable." The Waste Land's references are more allegorical than symbolic as when Baudelaire's Unreal City gives way to a Dante passage. Benjamin wrote:  "It was owing to the genius of allegory that Baudelaire did not succumb to the abyss of myth that gaped beneath his feet at every step" and "if we can distinguish between spinning and weaving activity in poets, then the allegorical imagination must be classed with the former.. it is not impossible that the correspondences play at least some role here, insofar as the word, in its way, calls forth an image; thus, the image could determine the meaning of the word, or else the word that of the image."

Diego Velázquez, The Spinners (Las Hilanderas)

Pound wrote in his "Pragmatic Aesthetics" "Art is the particular declaration that implies the general; and being particular (Hamlet, Odysseus, Madame Bovary) may not divert, distract, melt and muddle like an abstract declaration which becomes a party cry; or cloak or mask for a hundred different ideas... Philosophy, philosophical expression [is] nothing but a vague fluid approximation; art achieves a MORE PRECISE manifestation" and elsewhere "The statements of analytical geometry, he said, 'are 'lords' over fact. They are the thrones and dominions that rule over form and recurrence. And in like manner are great works of art lords over fact, over race-long recurrent moods, and over tomorrow."

John Tytell wrote "(T.E.) Hulme had heard Henri Bergson discuss the image as a locus between intuition and concept, and he realized that in poetry the image could become a new lever suggesting feeling. Pound attended a series of Hulme's lectures on Bergson and then described to Hulme the difference between what Pound called Petrarchan 'fustian and ornament' and Guido Cavalcanti's more 'precise interpretive metaphor.'"

Eliot's religious portrait of modernity is given the traditional ending of the Upanishad of the post-Vedic age of the second millennium BC. The worldly Pound ends by saying "I have tried to write Paradise/ Do not move/ Let the wind speak/ that is paradise."  The Rig Veda, at the dawn of poetry: "Exulted by our silence, upon the winds we have ascended."

In 1996 the Rotterdam Conservatory released a CD of Cuban Contradanzas and Danzóns which quickly became for me, a longtime Cuban music enthusiast (I, II), part of my daily bread. The album was inspired by a concert by the Orquestra Típica, a folklore/ preservationist initiative, in Santiago de Cuba in 1994 which led the producers to search for sheet music of any 19th Century Contradanzas or Danzóns, of which they only found 28. The music, a precursor to both New Orleans and Afro-Cuban Jazz, introduces a slow, melancholy melody honed for full effect over centuries that becomes uptempo at the close.

The music most certainly comes from the "country dances" of Southwest France, with horns brought to what is now Haiti when Louis IV was persuaded in 1685 by his ardently Catholic mistress Françoise d'Aubigné to lift the Huguenot King Henri IV's 1598 Edict of Nantes, which had ended over 30 years of the Wars of Religion, prompting a Huguenot diaspora to far flung places in the world including what was then the colony of Saint-Domingue. In the 11th Century, the patronage of the troubadours by Provençal nobility came when the region was loosely controlled by House of Barcelona, Catalan being more similar to the Provençal Occitan than French. Ezra Pound notes in Canto VIII how the first troubadour poetry is indebted to Arabic music from Moorish Spain. The Albigensian Crusades of the early 13th Century cut Provence off from Catalonia and caused troubadours to flee from the region in all directions.

Sordello da Goito, who wrote in Occitan despite living in Mantua of Italy's Lombardy region, spent those years in Spain and Portugal along with many other troubadours. Dante had Virgil (also a Mantuan) bow to him (memorialized in stone in Trento, right)*, Browning penned about him the epic of which Pound would begin his Canto II "there is only one..", asking in the first published draft of Canto I "What's left for me to do?" Stuart McDougal wrote: "For H.J. Chaytor (whose works were well known to Pound), Sordello was an important poet largely because he represented a transitional stage between the Provençal and Tuscan views of love. In his poetry love has become 'rather a mystical idea than a direct affectation for a particular lady: the lover is swayed by a spiritual and intellectual ideal, and the motive of physical attraction recedes to the background. The cause of love, however, remains unchanged: love enters through the eyes; sight is delight.'" The theme of unrequited love in this verse of his was common for its time, and may have helped lay the thematic foundations for later genre of the region like Fado. ("If only it pleased her, with her consent,/ to grant me some hope of mercy from her,/ whate'er the pain which I may feel/ she'll hear from me no plaint.// Alas! What good are eyes to me/ if what I want they do not see?"):



Alfonso the Wise of Castile sponsored troubadours in exile, utilizing their techniques for religious music. The surviving manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (1250), from his court, document a range of instruments found later in Huguenot Contradanzas, of which many were of Moorish origin, including early forms of trumpets, clarinets, and string instruments. The Huguenot Protestants arose in the 16th Century out of the influence of Luther and Calvin and disenchantment with French rule, forming strongholds in the Beaune region, East of the Basque region and North of Catalonia, as well as scattered towns like Bergerac, Montauban, Agen, and Figeac. It was around this time that Sardanas were believed to have been first performed in Catalonia, with instruments and melodies similar to the Contradanzas:



Relocated in what is now Haiti, the Huguenots came to lord over the colony's cultural life, and their instruments and compositions became popular amongst the African slaves who, to the delight of the Huguenots, added African-derived aspects to the rhythms, but between the slave insurrections of 1791 and the division of the country in 1807, all French settlers had to leave the island, and many relocated, along with their slaves, to Santiago de Cuba and New Orleans, leading to the popularity of Contradanzas in both places. Around the time of this migration, the first notations and records of Contradanzas are found in Santiago, with the first evidence of this music in New Orleans dating from the mid-19th Century, where in Congo Square Haitian Vodou drumming became a regular feature, its more sacred practice moving underground due to touristic attention until it was banned altogether by Louisiana's Black Codes. Maya Deren wrote how Vodou drumming is not improvised and that Haiti, also, banned the drumming in places due to anxiety about Vodou and possible rioting. Louisiana's ban may have been what severed the United States' historical link to the rhythm-keeping ensemble of Afro-Cuban percussion, paving the way for the solo, individualized styles of percussion that led to Blakey, Roach, Braxton, and Murray. The horn melodies of ragtime, however, that developed in New Orleans in the late 19th Century can be heard in Contradanzas.

Although musical notations in Spain have been found going back to the 8th Century, there was a discernably different approach between those to the North and East who after Monteverde, Vivaldi, and Bach produced notations for posterity and the Iberian belief in music functioning for a performer and audience in the moment, as described by Lorca: "All the Arts are capable of possessing duende, but naturally the field is widest in music, in dance, and in spoken poetry, because they require a living body as interpreter - they are forms that arise and die ceaselessly, and are defined by an exact present. Often the composer's duende passes to the interpreter." Contradanzas and Danzas went through several stages of development, transformation, and stylistic controversy in three countries before any of it began to be written down.

The Rotterdam Conservatory's unsigned liner notes say "The greater part of the (Orquestra Típica de Santiago de Cuba) consisted of septua- and octogenarians, and on hearing them perform, I realized that with the death of these musicians this music would probably disappear." So thought I, but I was wandering around one predictably warm night in the City of Eternal Spring, Cuernavaca in the State of Morelos, Mexico, when walking to the North of the Plaza de Armas I heard a familiar melody. I had for years been listening to the Rotterdam album and also had no idea that the music was performed in Mexico. A brass band was belting out Contradanzas in the Jardín Juárez, which, on quieter evenings, relies on a community of grackles for musical entertainment in the twilight, from a gazebo designed by Gustave Eiffel (above), while about 20 couples, mostly elderly, elegantly dressed and all Mexican, were dancing in the evening air, steps for which they seemed to have a regular familiarity. I read here that Cuban Contradanzas made their way from the port of Veracruz southwards to Mexico CIty, Cuernavaca, and to the Valley of Oaxaca.**

On the "textile route" East of Oaxaca City is the Zapotec town of San Jeronimo Tlacochahuaya, called in the Blue Guide Tlacochahuaya de Morales and known locally as Tlacochahuaya, tho calling it Tlaco would invite confusion with neighboring Tlacochistlahuaca, Tlacolula, and Tlacochero. The town, 8 kilometers east of the tree with the largest trunk in the world (left) and 2 kilometers west of the ruins of Dainzu, boasts the Tlacochahuaya Philharmonic, which plays Contradanzas as part of its regular repertoire:



There are no hotels in Tlacochahuaya, and the performance of Contradanzas in Mexico is a living form, not a folkloric performance for tourists. The 2006 protests in Oaxaca, which gained the most notoriety in the US from the unpunished murder of Indymedia journalist Brad Will by a city councilman and two police officers, were precipitated by the misappropriation of 920 million US$ of the state's public funds and extremely underfunded schools, like May '68 escalating to over a million protestors after a response of police brutality. But as with the drumming in Congo Square, there arose during the protests a tension between culture and folklore: the Guelaguetza, a pre-Columbian Zapotec festival, had been taken over by the state and turned into a tourist spectacle, an irritation enhanced by the fact that the corrupt, repressive Governor Ulises Ruiz was overseeing the festival, leading to an alternate People's Guelaguetza which over 200,000 participated in.

So this is a close approximation of what the precursor to jazz sounded like in the late 19th Century, bringing to mind Lorca's meditation in that same lecture: "The dark and quivering duende that I am talking about is a descendant of the merry daemon of Socrates, all marble and salt, who angrily scratched his master on the day he drank hemlock, a descendent also of Descartes' melancholy daemon, small as a great almond, who, tired of lines and circles, went out along the canals to hear the drunken sailors sing." Witnessing the musical accompaniment for Tlacochahuaya's parade for St. Jeronimo's feast day, the Dance of the Conquest, and other performances I found, it would appear that every able bodied male in this farming town of 2,000 is a member of a brass band. Indeed, on the 17thC facade of the town's church, God himself is holding a trumpet up to St. Jerome's ear. (below)

Another Danzón from Tlacochahuaya:



From a 50's photographic imprint of the Valley of Oaxaca: "..the great Valley of Oaxaca, justly famous for its pure air, its blue sky and its pretty countryside covered with flowers the twelve months of the year, where ash-trees, jacarindas, eucalyptus-trees and laurels of India abound. A great garden, a delightfully placid and harmonious place full of tranquility and well being, of ancient dreams and gay landscapes, and of pure poetry. There, among the meadows, sometimes half hidden in a wood, others around some hill, towns and villages suddenly appear, giving life to the countryside and inviting one to share their rural peace.

"But besides the beauties of nature, the Valley of Oaxaca, so sweet and calm, so appropriate for day-dreaming, contains History. The silence of the beautiful landscape is frequently broken by the echo of a thousand memories of its exciting past. A past situated in an almost mythical world, but amazingly rich in manifestations of the spirit and the actions of man. In this very ancient land the people carry deep inside them the nostalgia for something undefined, but which in their imagination must take the form of fabulous wealth, opulent cities and races in the fullness of their vigor. Nostalgia, indeed, for a mysterious and very remote past, full of beauty, irretrievably lost in spite of the fact that it sometimes seems that the old gods wander around here once more.."

* Sordello even gets the main square of Mantua named after him, containing the cathedral and the ducal palace, while Virgil must content himself with a Napoleonic-era piazza a block North, tho Virgil gets a statue and Sordello doesn't.

** Another link between the cities of Cuernavaca and Oaxaca is extended visits by Malcolm Lowry, who headed South from the setting of his opus to seek in Oaxaca the perfect mezcal, finding hallucinatory friends like fauns being slaughtered in the hotel dining room, vultures in his bathroom and upended turtles bleeding to death, and, in a letter, "no less than five policeman are watching me." The classic Lowry documentary is embeddable:



Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry by Donald Brittain & by John Kramer, National Film Board of Canada

Yehudi Menuhin, violin 

"I am only inclined to send myself best wishes if I can give a satisfactory answer to the question: are other people the only ones obliged to consign me to the rubbish heap, or must I join in?" Arnold Schoenberg, "On My Fiftieth Birthday, September 13, 1924"