Introduction To Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
– Billy Collins
Right now, I’m asking you to stay with me for a couple of minutes while I get through my perfectly wonderful introduction to the topic! It’s going to be all abut ART and most especially a discussion of MUSIC as one of the arts.
(While I do that, please go back and look at the last two verses of Collins’ poem.)
First perhaps I should give you some thoughts and definitions from which I will be working, since I sometimes forget that others are often smarter than I and have outgrown me in the ART business.
While you keep thinking of MUSIC AS ART, just accept these ideas as working ones. You can disagree to your heart’s content, but then you may have to clarify your ideas and write you own column. Here to consider: The list (not my own, but ones I have accepted and modified to suit myself and my argument)
“Art is what makes us human.”
(Maybe it was like this: When primitive man finally managed to keep a fire going, accumulated some workable stone-tipped spears and maybe some skins to cover himself, he had time to stand up and make some scratches on the walls of his sooty cave. He may even have found it enjoyable to bang some “Bizarrarex” bones against the same wall.)
“Art is NOT life, but rather life as It COULD BE – LIFE RE-ARRANGED.”
(Life could be the natural sounds in the forest, for example, but if one could put together those or similar sounds into a pleasing pattern……?
THE FOLLOWING IS IMPORTANT when considering all art:
“Art does not MEAN anything – It just IS! Art is to be EXPERIENCED, not explained. Humans REACT to ART because Art is supposed to EVOKE – TO CAUSE interactions.”
I think that’s enough teachering: And as I say, these bits of information are my interpretations of the ideas of thousands of others more wise and introspective than I. (You are free to catcall and pull your hair or cease to read further.)
To the point about MUSIC as ART and our reactions or non-reaction to it: Here are a few of my immediate reactions when I first experienced some pieces of music – music as different as beans and acorns:
Back, way back in the early days of listening to the Opry or maybe it was “Barn Dance, ”I was dumbstruck when I first heard, on a tiny AM radio, a lone guitar picker picking out, in simple clarity, “Under The Double Eagle.” I learned later that the picker was Sam Pruett on his electrified guitar. Not long ago I was able to Google him on Youtube, and I revisit the site quite often. That version may still be available. Sam Pruett’s version of “Under The Double Eagle” is, to me, art.
My point here is this: I REACTED to that music in a particular way, and it stayed with me a long time. In fact, I can still hear Pruett’s rendition when I think back, but I never once listened and asked myself or others around me, “What does it mean?”
Many years later, while watching the movie “True Grit” (the newer one)…near the end began the quickly recognizable voice of Iris Dement and her lament – “Leaning On The Everlasting Life.” I was struck again, and I knew I was experiencing something rare and eternal. I have heard that song by others and my band has a wonderful singer who makes it her own in a beautiful way, but I am struck with the feeling only when Iris Dement is singing. Her voice and the words and the experience I undergo make it Art.
I reacted strongly to the music but never thought to ask: “What does it mean?”
Shortly after we bought a beautiful Stereo console in Germany in 1962, I was transfixed by my first exposure to Aaron Copland’s, “Appalachian Spring.” played on that beautiful piece of what is really just furniture! The first notes announced to me: Something special is here, and within a minute, I was caught. This, by anyone’s reasoning, was art, but we don’t ask, ”What does it mean?”
So, music is an art and we are supposed to REACT to art. One may argue that the greater and more sustained the reactions among more people over the longest period of time would be a good indictor of the greatness of a particular work, but that is for smarter people than I to discuss.
Now, I will share one of my MOST visceral reaction to a more recent introduction to a piece of Music. (in just writing these few words, I am caught up in that music and it will stay with me all day!)
Shortly into my initial viewing of Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” on PBS, I was caught up in the fiddle lament (“Ashokan Farewell) which captured the Civil War more perfectly than did words or photography. Like others to whom I spoke of this music, I assumed it was an ancient piece from the Old World and a long time ago – it evoked that kind of response in many. That fiddle music evoked the essence of the great evil of that war – of loss, death, inevitability. I could not escape the complexity of feelings as I half watched the program and as I listened intently to that lone fiddler, whom I envisioned standing alone, perhaps in a slow rain, in the desolation of a Civil War battlefield.
With deference to others who watched and listened to the same things, I reacted in my own personal way, because I was brought up in an area of the South which was touched by the War, where the War was lived and has been remembered. My Great Grandfather Thomas Asa Brady and his four brothers, all tenant farmers, enlisted in the “Clinch County (Georgia) Volunteers” on the same day in early 1862 and endured four years and many of the battles and other hardships of the war. Asa Brady is in my history and my DNA. He suffered several wounds in different battles, including Gettysburg, and suffered with the injuries for the rest of his life.
When I watched the Ken Burns’ program, I was caught up in OUR COUNTRY’S War, but the music came along and pushed me down into the great sadness of personal experience and memory….of MY GREAT GRANDFATHER’S private war against his own nation.
He and his brothers , poor farm workers, bound themselves into the losing side in the Nation’s greatest sorrow….and that is what that music evoked and continues to evoke in me.
“ASHOKAN FAREWELL” written and performed by Jay Unger (Jewish and , born in New York) is with me today. You can get dozens of versions, including orchestral arrangements, but I URGE you to search (Youtube) to get Jay Unger performing it solo. It is generational artistry and it is pure ART.
And, although I know what it evokes in me, I never ask, “What does it men?”
