Tuesday, November 11, 2003
nice excerpt from a friends blog... thought it was nice... same piece that i happened to play today... just fer fun... was looking thru my old collection of scores n came across this... still can remember hw after almost 1 yr of not touching it at all... was the result of daily practice for countless hours... felt a sense of nostalgia there=ple tombeau de couperin is a collection of six pieces (this is the menuet from it, it's number 5) and they were ravel's last work for solo piano. they were written towards the end of the first world war and were written as a tribute to a friend who was killed.
it starts gently, introducing the motif which runs throughout the entire piece. it brings to mind wind blowing over the poppies in flanders fields. the many blood-red poppies swaying in the breeze on thin, fragile stems that yet do not break. you hear slight dischords: is something marring the calm and stillness of the moment; it is the why for why the poppies were planted.
then it becomes heavier, and distinctly sounds discordant (there are no second, augmented etc. chords here. it's just their progression). the piece shifts to below middle c and then up again: from high to low it goes, the melody unbroken but always being played on a different register. the entire mood and tone of it become desperately and whimsically dark as the chords fill up. i think it represents the battlefield, and the chaos: you see men charging forward, screaming at the top of their lungs. some of their mouths take the shape of the war cry forever as they are shot down in mid-stride. men pulling each other back as one after the other they fall as they receive the flying bullets. the climax of the piece comes with its highest note, two c's above middle c in a simple c major chord.
(this is striking because the chords in the entire system leading up to and after it are these - a flat major, g minor, f minor, e flat major, d major, e flat major, f minor, g major, e flat major, d flat major, c major, b major, c major (climax point, first position 351), c major (root position 135), b flat minor, a flat major, g major, a flat major.)
so you see the ugliness and the sheer beauty of war in these chords - you see more than just the tired general looking out at a forlorn battlefield strewn with the bodies of his men after battle. you see more than young men cut down in their prime. more than just mothers and lovers and sisters weeping; black and white photographs in silver frames of too-neat boys in uniform, a faint echo of the people they were and in some way an insult to their memories because it isn't really them - boys who were meant to be rough and muddy, wouldn't you have wanted a photograph where the true essence of them shone through instead of an obscene picture where they stood ramrod straight with their hair neatly combed? the packing up of clothes never to be worn again, man-scent still clinging to them. daughters crying to be allowed to train as nurses. lockets with tiny pictures worn close to warm breasts, the glass kissed nightly. letters, read and re-read, falling to pieces from being folded and re-folded so many times, stuffed under pillows. dried flowers crumbling to dust. scenes flashing through your mind like so many stills, as if you've somehow taken photographs of each and every moment of your life; you wish they were, in fact, because we do forget because that is how the brain works.
you see yourself and your dreams, your hopes and your ideals and who you are striving to be. war, i believe, brings out the best and the worst in people. relationships, homo and heterosexual, platonic and romantic are formed. people fall in love because it seems like the simplest and best thing to do, a form of escape from the horror surrounding them. and for thousands of miles around, the people far far away from the battlefield finally see, somewhat, some semblance of true courage - which i guess has to be really felt and is a feeling i think we'll never be able to put into words. and so many other feelings come along with this as well. a whole mish-mash, colours from one end of the rainbow spectrum to the other. from darkest black to palest pastel, scarlet and vermillion and verdant all at once - life flashes before you and you try to catch it.
you are a loser at 12:13 AM
