Piano Four Hands: Vladimir and Estragon

It is now several weeks since I saw the Vladimir and Estragon piano duo perform at nonclassical, but the performance remains imprinted on my mind for its freshness, its vitality, and its inescapable, bursting sense of fun. The above video captures something of the breakneck urgency with which they tackle Ligeti's Sonatina, a piece so often robbed of its hectic, urban rhythms and reduced to a rather stately pomp. Alas, the camera position does not allow the viewer to get a sense of how charming the pair are to watch. Whether playing Schubert or Samuel Barber, one can't help but think of Chico and Harpo Marx playing vaudeville tunes in Animal Crackers - and this is, of course, entirely to their credit.

There is a certain air of Victorian respectability clinging to the 'piano two hands' repertoire. Musicologist Philip Brett once said, "Piano duets tame the concert-hall repertory of symphonies and chamber music for the drawing room and substitute private intimacy for their busy public rhetoric." However, although there is certainly an intimacy to watching Vladimir and Estragon, a certain sense of being invited into their living room, or their private world, there is little to be considered tame. In their gleefully anarchic romps through a repertoire on the borders of respectability (Wolfgang Rihm, Edvard Grieg ... ) there is a kind of soft subversion, a teasing provocation.

Though in life, Samuel Beckett, a writer steeped in music, chose to collaborate with rather austere modernists like Morton Feldman and Charles Dodge, his characters (as in All That Fall) are perhaps rather more likely to listen to Schubert. A composer probably more associated than any other with the 'four hands' canon, Schubert's most notorious duet is the sexually charged Rondo in D, a sort of dance of seduction which ends with both players crossing hands, the music leading them quite literally into each other's arms. To Vladimir and Estragon then, a piano duo as sensual, as irreverent as Schubert himself.

Mahler (1974)

Ken Russell's somewhat Grand Guignol biopic of the fin-de-siecle Austrian composer offers us, rather like the old Comic Strip Presents..., Robert Powell as Woody Allen as Gustav Mahler, via Laurel and Hardy, Al Jolson,  the Marx Brothers, and, of course, Visconti. What we get, however, from the rather curious musical passages in the film, supposed to illustrate visually various excerpts from Mahler's music such as the Leider eines fahrenden Gesellen, remind us that Mahler's music marks possibly the last point in history where it is acceptable for progressive music to take as its model or muse some vaguely anthropomorphised image of 'Nature' - a mainstay of music aesthetics since Aristotle's Poetics, common, though articulated differently, to both sides of the 'War of the Romantics' in the mid 19th century. By the time we get to Erwartung, composed two years before Mahler's death, nature is no longer something gay and innocent, but a terrifying threat to the psyche. Four years later, Russolo's Art of Noises banishes, conclusively, the natural world from the avant-garde, and so it stayed throughout a twentieth century defined, musically, by noises both inspired by, and crafted out of, machines and the urban sprawl.

A Very Brief History of the Piano

If the history of the development of the piano up to the Nineteenth century is a narrative of its increasing technical perfection, the expansion of its dynamic range and the richness of its sonorities, then the continuation of this story into the Twentieth century mirrors a scene in the Marx Brothers’ film A Day at the Races in which Harpo’s piano playing causes keys to fly off and the body to break down, until he is left with just the strings and their frame - which he proceeds to play upright, as a harp. Throughout the last century, the history of the piano, as ultimate symbol of cosy Victorian domesticity, is a history of its progressive abuse and mutilation. After the ‘preparations’ of Cowell and Cage, the abuses and invasions of the Fluxus school, finally, the Radiophonic Workshop’s disembodied frame, struck by Brian Hodgson’s house keys to make the sound of the Tardis lifting off, and the single plucked string, autonomous partial object, from which Delia Derbyshire constructed the bass line of the Dr Who theme.

"When Bill Cosby chastises you, you forget that you're grown."

One of the best bits in Eddie Murphy's Raw is a skit early on in which Murphy recounts being chastised on the telephone by Bill Cosby for using so much foul language doing stand-up. Afterwards Murphy calls Richard Pryor, "And Richard was like, 'Tell Bill Cosby to suck my dick!'" The way he gets, just perfectly the vocal mannerisms of Cosby, and especially Pryor, betrays hours spent studying their records as a child. The mimicry is all in the voice - he doesn't really get them physically. It's a little like what Simon Reynolds is talking about in The Guardian - a portrait of the artist as a consumer. A similar thing happens towards the end of Woody Allen's much-maligned homage to the Hollywood musical, Everyone says I love you (the title itself is a homage to the Marx Brothers). Interestingly, it's all set up by the music: a scene before features an instrumental snatch of 'You brought a new kind of love to me', the song each of the three Marx Brothers sing in order to impersonate Maurice Chevalier in Monkey Business, next a big musical set-piece opens with a couple of dozen dancers, all dressed as Groucho, singing 'Hooray for Captain Spaulding' (from Animal Crackers) in French. Then we have Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn, talking intimately with Groucho disguises on, in the midst of a party where everyone has a Groucho mask. The dialogue itself is very Woody Allen but just a few times Woody throws in a few smirks and raised eyebrows that are just perfectly Groucho, betraying exactly the same obsessive watching and re-watching of old Marx Brothers films as Eddie Murphy with his Richard Pryor records. Curiously, when a comic pays his respects to another comic, he borrows the style and mannerisms (form) but not the actual gags (content), whereas a band will tend to cover another band's song (content) but will be expected to do so in there own style (form). Of course, there is a certain taboo amongst stand-ups around 'stealing' another comic's material and doing impressions is a common feature in comedy routines, whereas musicians are expected to develop their own style, their own 'voice', but playing covers is accepted as educative. However, what happens in a hypothetical situation in which Eddie Murphy is doing an impression of Bill Cosby chastising him for using swear words in his act, and as Cosby chastises Murphy he starts to impersonate him, so we have Murphy impersonating Cosby impersonating Murphy. Or what if the specific bit of Murphy's act that Cosby has a problem with is the bit where he does an impression of Bill Cosby, so we end up with Murphy doing an impression of Cosby doing an impression of Murphy doing an impression of Cosby ad infinitum. We find ourselves back in the territory of Douglas Hofstadter's 'strange loops'. How might this work in music? Already, with Allo Darlin', we have a kind of meta-music, a music with other music nested within it. If I (or, even better, Johnny Cash) were to then cover 'Heart Beat Chilli' with its reference to 'I Walk the Line', then we reach a kind of meta-meta-level, but still not the kind of tangled hierarchies we find in Gödel, Escher, Bach. 

These kinds of Epimenidean structures turn up a lot in marxism - Vladimir Tatlin's Escher-like Monument to the Third International springs immediately to mind. Or take Zizek's analysis of the relationship between politics and economics (in In Defense of Lost Causes), such that politics is determined in the last instance by the economy, but by an economy which is itself a political-economy, an economics imbedded in, and imbued with, politics. Of course, Zizek delights in seeming paradoxes like this, but it is interesting to see these kind of self-referential loops turn up even in the critics of marxism. Doesn't Simone Weil's image, for her critique of the logic of proletarian auto-liberation, of a horse riding itself, recall somewhat Escher pictures such as 'Drawing Hands'?

Looking In or Leaping Out

Watching Death in Venice again the other day, I was particularly struck by how often the camera is drawing you into the picture. Throughout the film, the gaze of Dirk Bogarde's Gustav von Aschenbach is redoubled by a roaming, searching lens, forever zooming in and moving towards some object or person in the middle distance. Nothing ever seems to come towards the camera of its own volition - the camera will always move out to meet it. The very next day I found myself watching the Marx Brothers' At the Circus, and found, this time, precisely the opposite effect - of things forever leaping out towards the camera, and by implication, beyond the screen and into my living room. Each performance of the circus itself is opened by an acrobat or an elephant looming straight towards the lens. At one point, Groucho turns straight to the camera, in the middle of a scene in which the money he is looking for is hidden in Eve Arden's brassiere, and says, "There must be some way of solving this without circumventing the Hayes code." Unlike some cinematic asides delivered straight to camera, Groucho is here clearly not inviting the audience into the picture, but rather himself leaping out of it so that he can comment on certain institutional factors governing its production. The few films I happen to have seen in the few days since this all tend to fit broadly in to one or other of these tendencies, drawing in or leaping out, that strike me as two different approaches to what might be seen as one of the fundamental problems of cinema - making a two-dimensional space into a three-dimensional space. So, of the latter tendency, what we might call extensive cinema, I have seen both At the Circus and All of Me, both characterised by things seemingly leaping out of the screen, or otherwise moving from the back of the shot towards the camera; and of the former, intensive cinema, since Death in Venice, I've watched Deep Red, and Who Saw Her Die, both of which feature a lot of point-of-view shots that sneak up on, and follow, various characters, lots of zooms and jump cuts into people and objects, bringing them into sometimes extreme close-ups. When George Lazenby is wandering the streets of Venice (in Who Saw Her Die), knocking on doors and windows in search of his daughter, when the door or window in question is opened, it is always the camera that enters the house, not Lazenby.

Obviously this is far from an exhaustive or even vaguely representative survey, nonetheless it may be worth remarking that both of my 'extensive' films concern performers (acrobats and singers in At the Circus, a lawyer and a musician in All of Me), whereas our 'intensive' trio are all about voyeurs and the act of looking, the testimone populare. From this we might expect other films which foreground cinema's voyeuristic mode, such as Rear Window or Peeping Tom, to fit into this tendency, and those films which foreground cinema's spectacular mode, disaster movies and musicals for example, to tend towards extensivity. Likewise, At the Circus and All of Me both have some sort of roots on the stage. Though At the Circus was written exclusively for the screen with no prior stage performance, its format and a great deal of the brothers' material comes from their Broadway years. Likewise, All of Me, though adapted from a novel, is, like The Jerk before it, still something of a showcase for material from Steve Martin's stand-up routines, such as his man who is not entirely in control of his own body, and of course his by then legendary catchphrase, "Well, excuuuuuuse me!" By contrast, those films I have labelled intensive all have some sort of literary origin. Death in Venice is adapted from Thomas Mann's novella, and our two gialli, though neither of them are adapted directly from novels, nonetheless pay a certain homage to the gialli filone's origins in the cheap detective thrillers published in Italy in the thirties and forties, bound in yellow covers (giallo in Italian means 'yellow'). In Deep Red, several buildings, even, at times, the sky itself, are a violent, bright yellow. Two of the film's characters are writers, one a journalist, the other the author of a book about urban myths which becomes itself a significant plot device and the object of a long big close-up during which David Hemmings's character opens the book and thumbs the pages as if to invite us into the very text itself. Who Saw Her Die is also not adapted directly from a book but does bear certain striking resemblances to Nicholas Roeg's (later) Don't Look Now which was adapted from a Daphne Du Maurier short story (having not read the Du Maurier I can't comment on whether the similarities between the two films are equally present in the short story, suggesting that it was a likely inspiration). Similarly to Deep Red, texts, albeit newspaper clippings, play a significant role in the plot of Who Saw Her Die, providing the vital clues that lead to the solution of the central mystery, and as Gary Needham argues it is characteristic of gialli in general to base their narrative structures on those of the literary genre that preceded them. Although, obviously, not all films are adapted from books or stage material, all films must in some way engage with the projection of three-dimensionality from a two-dimensional screen. In the current issue of Sight and Sound, for instance, during an article about the return of the 3D movie, that most, traditionally at least, extensive of cinematic novelties, a brief aside about Joe Dante's new film, The Hole, states, "3D movies traditionally poke the audience in the eye, " before citing Dante's wish for his new film to use the 3D imaging  to do precisely the reverse, "to make us reach instead of recoil." I wonder how many films will fit consistently into one or the other of these two tendencies, and whether there might be a third type, characterised by a certain flatness - I'm thinking for instance of the long, still takes of Stranger than Paradise, or the way in which Crash, despite being a literary adaptation and, in some ways, quite an 'interior' film, nonetheless has this rather forbidding metallic sheen to it that seems to forbid the audience from diving in and getting involved.