Tuesday Tones
Continuing my exploration of queerness in music for this Pride Month, I turn to composer Wendy Carlos, a great transgender artist who is a notable late-20th century pioneer in electronic music. Carlos was born in 1939 as Walter Carlos, but after first experiencing gender dysphoria as a five-year-old, Carlos eventually underwent sex-reassignment surgery in the early 1970s.
In addition to her work in electronic music, Carlos also composed the scores for several notable films: Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, and the Disney “world inside the computer” classic TRON.
TRON was one of my first sources of exposure to electronic music. From the vantage point of over 40 years since the movie came out (40 years, OMG!), the score sounds dated in some ways, but entirely fresh in others. Carlos isn’t just interested in making weird noises with her synthesizers; she is a composer, we have to remind ourselves. There are melodies and recurring motifs and development. This score would not work if it was simply electronica for the sake of being electronica.
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The Queries of the Sunday Past
Here are questions from this week’s Sunday Stealing! Which are a day late. Oh well.
1. What’s your life’s motto?
Life’s too short to not wear what you want. (I just made that up, to be honest.)
2. Where were you living 13 years ago?
Same town, but in an apartment just a few miles away from where we are now! At that point we were already looking into the house idea. My mother wanted to move with my father up to Buffalo from the Southern Tier, and live in a duplex with us on the other side so they’d have a support system. That’s how it played out.
3. Is anyone jealous of you?
There’d better be! I don’t manifest this much weirdness to not have someone out there envying me.
4. Where were you when you heard about the 9/11 terror attacks?
In my car on the way to work. I was at the shitty telesales job at that point. (In fairness, I sucked at that job.) At that point, it wasn’t even clear what kind of plane it was. I was picturing some doofus in a Cessna.
5. Do you consider yourself kind?
I try to be. I fall short at times.
6. Can you change your car’s oil?
Yes. I don’t, though. I like having skills, but I don’t worship at the altar of DIY.
7. What’s the last thing you heard about your first love?
Sheesh, who even is my “first love”? I suppose the one I’d have to consider shared something on Facebook. (Yes, we’re friends. She lives in Florida now. Terrific person, there’s a reason I crushed on her hard. A while back her sister was cleaning out the family house and found my confessional note that I wrote way back in, I dunno, eighth grade? Yikes!)
8. Have you ever been burned by love?
Oh, yes. Luckily, it’s been many years. I still remember 18-year-old me, swearing off the whole damnable business, just thinking, “I’m just gonna have fun for a while and stop looking for love because it’s never gonna show up….” (yes, I was a dramatic weirdo, whaddaya want from me), and then my roommate’s birthday celebration was joined by, among other folks, a cute oboe player I didn’t know very well….
9. What was the last thing you paid for with cash?
Popcorn and asparagus at the Farmers Market the other day.
10. Do you hug your friends?
Not usually, though I’m not unwilling.
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A musical offering….
Any accounting of the greatest composers of the Baroque era would include, as a short list, the names of J.S. Bach, Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Vivaldi, and George Frideric Handel. We’re talking about Handel briefly today, partly because of his immense status in the history of music, and also partly because he may have been gay. Possibly. There is very little information about that to go on, but it is known that Handel was an enthusiastic member of several communities in his life where homosexuality was known and condoned. Is that enough to make any conclusion? Obviously not…but there does seem to be a high likelihood that many of our great musical masters–our great artistic masters, come to that–were queer in one way or another.
Handel is best known mainly for a few of his towering masterpieces–the oratorio Messiah, most importantly, and his Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. But Handel was highly prolific, and also among his great works are his Concerto grossi. The concerto grosso is a form that arose during the Baroque era and then fell into disuse as other forms, like the symphony and the more familiar modern concerto, arose. A concerto grosso features a group of soloists engaging in musical interplay with a larger orchestra. Handel was a master of the form, composing eighteen concerto grossi over his lifetime. Here is the first in a group of concerto grossi that was later organized as Handel’s Op. 6, numbered 319-330 in the HWV numbering of all Handel’s works. (The numbering of composers’ works can be a surprisingly messy affair.)
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Exposure
Heavens, what a week it was! Bad? No, not at all. But very, very busy. Work gave me a quite proper arse-kicking this week, oh yes it did. I’ll recover in days to come, but for now, here’s a shot I quite like from our trip to Toronto in April. I love that city and this was our first trip there since my new dedication to photography in general and street photography in particular. This was taken on a Sunday evening at Sankofa Square, which is at the corner of Yonge and Dundas, just across from Eaton Centre. For this shot I slowed down my shutter speed to roughly 1/5 of a second, which is just about as slow a shutter as I can manage while shooting hand-held. The idea here is for some elements to be still and sharp, while elements that are in motion (people, cars) are slightly blurred.
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My city
I haven’t edited this photo yet, seeing as how I jut took it yesterday morning, and I’m a couple weeks behind on my photo edits. But I wanted to share this one now because I really love this vantage point. This was taken on Fuhrman Boulevard on Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, down by Wilkeson Pointe (which is supposed to be open this year and sure doesn’t look close to being open, but that’s another thing for another time). I love how the Skyway dominates, but as it falls away, the city rises beyond. Unfortunately this vantage point is slightly marred by the presence of a chain link fence (I’m just now realizing that I should have taken my lens hood off and got closer…but in all honesty, I actually rather like the effect the chain link gives. It lends a bit of perspective, a suggested framing, to the image.)
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Pride Month: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Today begins Pride Month, so let’s listen to some Tchaikovsky.
It is not actually conclusively known if Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was gay or not, but most biographers and historians have concluded, from the nature and the durations of the various relationships in his life, that he was. Sadly, late 19th-century Imperial Russia was not a good time for being homosexual, and it’s certainly known that Tchaikovsky, for all his artistic success, struggled for all of his 53 years through a life full of melancholy, loneliness, and outright depression. He married once, and it was a calamity that was annulled within just a few months. Most of the important relationships in his life were with men, though the nature of those relationships can only be guessed at from the contents of letters and contemporary accounts, many of which were suppressed by various Russian and later Soviet governments. Even in death, Tchaikovsky has been forced into a closeted existence.
Tchaikovsky’s death itself may, or may not, have arisen from his tortured melancholia. The facts seem to be that, in the midst of a cholera epidemic, Tchaikovsky went out with some friends and at some point drank unboiled water. He was dead of cholera just days later…at least, as far as the official accounting of his passing goes. Some wonder if he drank the unboiled water intentionally, or if he actually purposely poisoned himself in an act of suicide. The truth of this will never be known, either. It does seem to be the case that Tchaikovsky’s sad life is an artifact of a time when queerness was held in contempt and disdain. Have we made progress? Yes. Have we made enough? Oh, most certainly not.
But at least Tchaikovsky’s music remains! Here is his Symphony No. 5, my favorite of his six symphonies, with its stormy first movement, its stunningly meditative and heartbreaking second, its graceful third, and its epic finale that in the end feels like sun breaking through clouds. This performance isn’t the best sonically, but the quality of the playing (by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1974) and the interpretation (by conductor Leonard Bernstein) is simply amazing. Of course, Bernstein himself was a figure whose sexuality has been the subject of much speculation…but that’s another post.