For several days last week it seemed all I did for 5 or 6 hours each day was play the Liszt arrangement of Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (”Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”). It is an addictive little piece which I find to be more theatrically dramatic in the piano arrangement than in its voice-with-piano original.
I usually hear this piece with heavy pedal, but as I rambled through the song yesterday I began thinking that the opposite — a chunky staccato sound — more evocatively summons the sound of a spinning wheel. As an alternative to the traditional pedaled sound I had fun imagining I could literally evoke the sound of the spinning wheel.
But wait. What do I know about spinning wheels? I don’t think I have ever heard one. My childhood was not filled with countless hours of slave labor spent churning fabric out of the spinning wheel.
Regardless, today I let myself imagine that such a contraption would sound something different from smooth and burbling.
Playing the piece pedal-free makes it more difficult, but today I found that it made the melody sing in a different way. I think the word for the sound was “troubled,” a word which also characterizes the text of the song. The traditional way of performing this song is not exactly un-troubled, but absent the river-like flow of sound I think the troubles become more exposed, and tremulous.
Any time I get to measure 97 I think “holy s*** this is strong stuff.” Liszt adds a crushing minor 9th to the left hand in M.97 and again in M.99. This stays true to the Schubert original on one level: the first notes of those measures in the original are literally A and B-flat. But Schubert softens that dissonance by safely spacing it 2 octaves apart, summoning nowhere near as much war-like thunder as Liszt brings to the passage.
There is so much good stuff in this song.
∞
“The day was an utter waste” used to be a running joke between a friend and me.
It was a comment uttered with sincerity, and in the instant that followed we both laughed at the dark humor we found in it. Those words pieced together with sullen resignation, an almost biblical grandeur that could make a passer-by think an apocalypse had just occurred.
As often happens with these running jokes, I remember it many years later, but my friend does not. I seem to remember everything, though at times I remember nothing.
I often find myself walking somewhere and laughing at decades old jokes and punch lines — laughing not at the joke itself but at how funny it was at a certain place and time. I remember orgasmic thunderclaps of laughter in classrooms, corporate boardrooms, on subways and city buses. That all-at-once sound, an impossible product of just one person, is an astounding phenomenon.
I like how Webster’s describes laughter:
A movement (usually involuntary) of the muscles of the face, particularly of the lips, with a peculiar expression of the eyes, indicating merriment, satisfaction, or derision, and usually attended by a sonorous and interrupted expulsion of air from the lungs.”
What intrigues me about this definition is its use of “usually.” This definition attempts to lay down the meaning of this word prescriptively, but the weight of this definition seems to lose its balance as it tips toward a Yue Minjun-ian evocation of twisted laughter and painful smiling.
I know the sound and substance of forced (voluntary) laughter. I have performed this guttural act myself as a show of sarcasm.
Another running gag that I laugh at years later comes from college. A friend came up with a routine where he would say “Do you know me? Where I come from, I’m famous. They know this face!” He would squeeze his cheeks, demonstratively.
It might be impossible to communicate how or why this amused me so, except to add that he did this act in a voice that sounded like the guy from the “Mitsubishi wake-up call” radio commercials that aired years later.
“Laughter,” Webster’s continues, is
…usually attended by a sonorous and interrupted expulsion of air from the lungs”
Since this is only the way laughter “usually” works, the underside of this definition evokes a sterile, horror-show image of a soul-drained human laughing voluntarily without the requisite expulsion of air from the lungs.
Again, Yue Minjun comes to mind, but in fact I question this part of the definition. How is laughter possible without expulsion of air from the lungs? And why must it be sonorous? Hideous, throaty cackles have rattled through all periods of my life.
I do not feel that laughter signals happiness. Laughter is a release of stress, or a signal of existential anxiety, but it does not prove happiness.
I have had days where I can not laugh. Those are the days I am dead inside.
