Goodness and Wellness at the Community Action Summit
February 26, 2013 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Dr. Paul Zingg opened and closed Chico’s Community Action Summit with an assertion. At the start of the day, he said that the summit was about “virtues.” At the end, he said that he was pleased to hear the issue of wellness receive so much attention. “But,” he added, “we must add goodness to wellness.”
The distinction goes to the core of the summit’s focus: our city’s problem with alcohol.
Wellness is good health, both physically and emotionally. As a culture, we are comfortable talking about this category. We spend vast sums of money on fitness, dieting, and medicine. We analyze many problems like alcohol abuse as public health issues. If people were educated about wellness, we think, they would make better decisions.
It’s a useful model.
But wellness is not the same as goodness. Goodness is the result of the moral disciplines that Dr. Zingg called virtues. The very term goodness calls us to discriminate between actions — that is, to discover which ones might be evil. We are less comfortable with this category.
During the summit, the need for clarity about goodness came up repeatedly.
A session on sexual assault was attended by many survivors of violent crimes, both men and women. Several young women identified themselves as survivors of rape, describing an atmosphere on campus in which men laugh about sexual assault, stalking is a constant reality, and the most dangerous spaces are not public but private. One male student described being beaten in front of cheering bystanders. A father told of an attack on his son. Alumni in the group said that the atmosphere has not changed since they were students years ago.
Survivors of actions like these do not need evil explained. They want change for the good.
Assault survivors talked about creating a culture of personal responsibility by focusing on daily actions and relationships. Associated Students president Jay Virdee also raised the issue of personal responsibility and ran a session exploring educational approaches. He is articulate and passionate about this priority, and has ideas to encourage good decision-making through student mentoring.
I attended a session in which bar owners described being swamped with fake driver’s licenses, either forged or stolen. They conferred with a police officer, cordially but inconclusively. Does the city have resources to arrest and prosecute the people who make and use fake cards? Clearly not. I was struck by the diligence bar owners and managers have shown in enforcing the laws. They are the people who confiscate fake i.d. from a parent trying to pass his kid off as 21. Personal responsibility came up in this discussion as well.
Clearly we need to change individuals’ decision-making. Is wellness a strong enough category to bring about that change?
The parent sneaking liquor into his daughter’s dorm room has a sense of wellness. If he thought it would hurt his daughter to drink, he wouldn’t get her the stuff. If anything, his sense of wellness is offended by what he sees as intrusive rules.
The 19-year-old who uses his older brother’s i.d. to get into bars has a sense of wellness, too. His partying is under control. He gets good grades and holds down a job. He’s not on crack. Who gets hurt?
The 26-year-old who gets a 19-year-old woman to “sext” him when she’s drunk, and later posts her pictures on the web – even he has a sense of wellness. How could his actions possibly have hurt her? She’s famous now. Guys love her.
On what basis will we argue that these three people are not well? They don’t see the harm in their choices. They don’t see any connection between their actions and nights of mayhem like last Saturday, when the police received 391 calls in a twelve hour period. These three will say it’s other people who are “out of control.”
To make the case, we will have to use the word wrong. We will have to talk about what is good. We’ll have to examine beliefs — critically evaluate the reasons we give for our actions. We’ll have to speak in terms of goodness because wellness is not a self-evident concept. It is derived from ethics.
There are several things we can do to make this case. We can recover some old words that express the differences between actions: honesty and lying, wisdom and folly, lust and love. We can also restore to educators the mandate to teach these words. Even further, we can link consequences to good and bad actions. These are the things that confident communities do.
As a pastor, my job goes one step further. The gospel I teach has to go beyond wellness. Jesus is indeed a healer. But he did not die and rise again because of our poor decisions. He died and rose again because we are not good. He came to deliver us from evil. Only that message is worth calling “good news.”
A Performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto
November 14, 2012 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
Kyle Wiley Pickett, music director of the North State Symphony (NSS), has built large audiences while programming new music. The NSS has played pieces by regional composers such as CSU Chico’s Russell Burnham and Simpson University’s Dan Pinkston, as well as Lowell Lieberman, who is nationally known. On November 10-11, the symphony performed Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (1935), a classic twelve-tone work, with NSS concertmaster Terrie Baune.
As a member of the first violin section, I was eager to experience the piece from the inside. I was also interested to gauge audience responses, and to consider what kind of spirituality Berg’s work expresses.
In February, 1935, the American violinist Louis Krasner appealed to Berg to produce a work that would show the beauty of twelve-tone music using a concerto form that audiences would readily appreciate.[1] Berg took the commission two months later after the death of 18-year-old Manon Gropius, the daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, widow of the famous composer. Berg adored the girl, and composed the Concerto in less than four months around the theme of death and loss, inscribing the score, “To the Memory of an Angel.”
The piece rises to Krasner’s challenge in several ways.
It makes dramatic quotations of two tonal melodies, a Carinthian folk song and a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach. The quotations give reference points for the listener to understand, and to some extent organize, the music he or she hears. They also have strong symbolism, the Carinthian tune conjuring the image of Manon dancing, and the chorale (“It is Enough” from Cantata No. 60) expressing the desire to leave this painful life for the bliss of the next.
The melodies, however, are not mere bones thrown to the audience. Berg assimilates their tonal harmonizations with his twelve-tone row, so that they emerge from his atonal world in a manner that is both musically organic and emotionally devastating. Bach’s tune in particular, with its unusual opening of three whole tones, is an ingenious development of the last pitch classes of Berg’s row.
In this way, Berg brings an audience into his concerto with feats of structural integrity, and his success was affirmed by the warm responses of audiences in Chico and Redding. Terrie earned the ovations not just with technical agility, but with the romantic sensibility she brought to the work. Her sure and beautiful sound production and her astounding intonation gave the performances a confidence that was essential to winning the audiences. She deployed her skills in advocacy of this piece when she might have played a more beloved concerto and garnered even louder applause. Terrie and Kyle are showing our region what it means to have high artistic skill and character.
A serial work has to win over orchestra players before it can reach listeners. Berg’s orchestration is important in this regard.
Even in great tonal works, players often struggle against a composer’s assignment of parts and dynamics, laboring to overcome thick textures or compete with stronger sections of the orchestra. So when a composer orchestrates fluently, the musicians’ work is rewarded. Players simply have to place their notes accurately to realize the composer’s design. They can then spend their time polishing instead of struggling.
Berg is one of these fluent orchestrators, especially considering the technical challenges of twelve-tone music. A basic problem is the equality of each pitch class. Lacking the tonal center of the diatonic scale, which orders seven pitch classes into a strong hierarchy, the row does not allow the listener a sonic home. A serial work’s organization is not even open to players without careful analysis. The main and secondary ideas are actually marked in the scores of serial pieces, so that players will have some understanding of their parts.
From the first bars, Berg’s elegant orchestration clarifies the Concerto’s motifs, structure, and harmony for players and listeners alike. He aligns timbres and overtones in a quintessentially Viennese manner, and also contrasts sections of the orchestra dramatically without drowning the weaker instruments.
This concerto should be recognized as an artistically important marker for modernist spirituality.
Behind the memorial to Manon Gropius lie Berg’s more complicated personal stories. He was a believer in numerology, avidly following the schemes astrological determinism that fascinated many Viennese artists, and encoding secret messages into his compositions.[2] The 10-bar phrase structure of the opening, for example, symbolizes Berg’s mistress Hannah Fuchs. In the concerto’s passages expressing death throes, the violin cries out Berg’s initials along with Hannah’s, filling the Bach chorale that follows with longing for eternal union, not with Christ, but with a lover. The Carinthian song has a double-meaning, recalling a daughter Berg fathered by a family servant as a young man but never knew. Berg lost two young girls.
Berg’s concerto is a mature work of post-Christian culture, a work already nearly 80 years old. In this modernism, the artifacts of Christian hope become malleable symbols, as all cultural artifacts must, expressing the most subjective longings, and consecrating erotic experience as holy ground. Part of what makes this work a classic is its perfect capture of modernist spirituality: the sexual self under the stars.
[1]Kyle Pickett, “Evening at Egan Talk” (unpublished, n.d.).
[2] Douglas Jarman, “Alban Berg, Wilhelm Fliess and the Secret Programme of the Violin Concerto,” The Musical Times 124, no. 1682 (April 1, 1983): 218–223.
Audio: Adore God
October 31, 2012 § Leave a Comment
The iGod and the Real God
Psalm 135
Matthew Raley (10-28-12)
One of the key lessons we have been learning in this series is that, unlike listening to an iPod, worship is not an escape from life. We can't retreat deeper into our own heads, conjure the emotions we want, and expect to find God there. Worship is serving God by reengaging life, getting out of our own heads and dealing with God as he actually is.
Vertigo: Herrmann’s Use of Forms
October 25, 2012 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
One of the visual abstractions we noticed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was his evocation of famous paintings. We saw that his shot of Madeleine floating in the Bay alludes to the painting of Ophelia by Millais, and that references like this give an unconscious emotional atmosphere to the film.
Bernard Herrmann uses a similar abstraction in Vertigo‘s score. He refers to musical forms in a way that intensifies the cultural and psychological atmosphere. Two such references are important to the score’s role as co-narrator with the camera.
First, Herrmann employs a habanera rhythm in relation to Carlotta. The habanera was a Cuban dance that made its way to Spain in the 19th century, and thence to Europe, becoming famous through Georges Bizet’s Carmen. As a cultural artifact, the dance is associated not just with Hispanic atmosphere but also with seduction.
Second, Herrmann uses ecclesiastical forms in his cues at Mission Dolores. He draws the church modes into his harmonies, employing sighing motifs, and using a pipe organ.
Both references, which David Cooper calls “extraopus intertextuality,”[1] remain at some distance from their antecedents. They are not literal. No one dances a real habanera during a café floor show. Scottie doesn’t pass an organist on his way to the graveyard. By remaining abstract, these references allow one’s imagination to play at a less conscious level, and with profoundly ironic implications.
[1] David Cooper, Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook, Film Score Guides (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 65.
Audio: Be Honest With God
October 25, 2012 § Leave a Comment
The iGod and the Real God
Daniel 9:1-19
Matthew Raley (10-21-12)
In the course of this series we have learned that to build the alternative fulfillment of the Christian life, you have to leave the iGod who lives in your head and engage with the real God in real life. Doing this involves thinking of worship differently: true worship is not an escape from life into ecstasy, but an assertion of spiritual power into life.
Audio: Interact With God
October 25, 2012 § Leave a Comment
The iGod and the Real God
Nehemiah 1
Matthew Raley (10-14-12)
Many Christians think of their relationship this way: In the Bible, God talks to us. There we get his side of things. In prayer, we talk to God and tell him our side of things. Although this is not altogether wrong, it's not close enough to the alternative fulfillment of Christianity which we have been exploring in this series.
Vertigo: Herrmann’s Abstract Score
October 11, 2012 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
I’ve given several examples of Alfred Hitchcock’s abstract visuals in Vertigo (here and here). But Hitchcock also created a sound-world to match, and he found a collaborator in Bernard Herrmann. Together, they raised the score to the level of co-narrator with the camera.
The term “Wagnerian” is often used to characterize Herrmann’s score for Vertigo, and for good reason. But the variety of composers who influenced Herrmann hints at a more complex musical imagination.
He was famous for loving English composers such as Edward Elgar[1] and Ralph Vaughan Williams.[2] Vertigo’s frequent similarity to music by Claude Debussy is mentioned by critics.[3] Less well-known is Herrmann’s study as a thirteen-year-old of Hector Berlioz’s Treatise on Orchestration. The influence this Romantic maverick had on Herrmann was life-long.[4] Nor was Berlioz the only musical outsider with whom Herrmann identified. Though Herrmann spent his student years in New York close to such American icons as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, Herrmann also developed relationships with young radical composers in a group modeled on Les Six.
Most significantly, Steven Smith documents Herrmann’s long association with Charles Ives, the ultimate outsider, noting Herrmann’s early study of Ives’s 114 Songs and his habitual visits with Ives until Ives died in 1954.[5]
With such a background, there should be no surprise that Herrmann’s score is one of the more abstract elements of Vertigo.
It is not explicitly tonal—that is, the harmonies are not organized around a triad that specifies a key, but around the pitch-class structures and intervallic relationships that occur in the first bars of the prelude. Such harmonies, while not expressionistic, are at the outer reaches of the common practice era.
Herrmann, further, employs a modular phrase structure that permits the extension of a line, but is not intrinsically melodic, alluding to but not identical with the traditional eight- or sixteen-bar phrase.
Moreover, Herrmann blurs the classic distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music at various points in the score. Diegetic music comes from a source within the film, like the record-player in Midge’s apartment that annoys Scottie. Nondiegetic music comes from outside the story’s action: the audience hears it, but the characters don’t.
As we will explore over the next posts, the abstraction of Vertigo’s music allows it to operate with subtlety, concision, and force. The score is a large part of the greatness of this film.
[1]Bernard Herrmann, “Elgar: A Constant Source of Joy,” in Edward Johnson, Bernard Herrmann: Hollywood’s Music-Dramatist, Bibliographical Series 6 (Rickmansworth: Triad Press, 1977), 29–31.
[2]Bernard Herrmann, “Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony,” The Musical Times 100, no. 1391 (1959): 24.
[3]William H. Rosar, “Bernard Herrmann: The Beethoven of Film Music?,” The Journal of Film Music 1, no. 2 (2003): 137; Royal S. Brown, “Herrmann, Hitchcock, and the Music of the Irrational,” Cinema Journal 21, no. 2 (April 1, 1982): 20.
[4]Steven C. Smith, A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 14–15.
[5]Ibid., 21–23, 38–39.
