Home » The theme and variations versus the symphony: on love

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The theme and variations versus the symphony: on love — 11 Comments

  1. . . . the expansive imagination can find variety in small differences, and the stunted one can find boredom in vast changes. And I submit that love is like that, too. . . [cites Kundera] . . . [and] that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.

    Well, to move from the musical form of theme and variation to the literary form of the sonnet, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 seems to fit the kind of love you had with Gerard:

    Let me not to the marriage of true minds
    Admit impediments. Love is not love
    Which alters when it alteration finds,
    Or bends with the remover to remove.
    O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
    That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
    It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
    Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
    Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
    Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
    Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
    But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
    If this be error and upon me prov’d,
    I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

    Sixteen measures of music; fourteen lines of iambic pentameter– both the German composer and the English poet contain multitudes– like the relationship you had (and still have, as you’ll find) with Gerard.

  2. Neo,

    The sublime music reference reminded me that, a few years ago, Gerard didn’t like us commenters to use the term “awesome” —because few things really are.

    I wrote that I immediately thought of something awesome. That the chemicals and physics in the vast Hubble photos he had posted were the same chemicals and physics in the small handful of my brain that let me remember every stanza of the poetry I had composed in 1963, over 50 years before my comment. “It’s awesome,” I wrote.

    He replied that it was, indeed.

    And now I’d like to add, Gerard = Awesome.

    For the same reason.

  3. Neo quoting Kundera again: Variation form is the form in which the concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter.

    Given Neo’s many lessons in dance appreciation for her readers outside the field of ballet, I’m posting here a link to American Ballet Theatre’s 1978 performance of George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, with Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov as the soloists. The music is the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 rather than Beethoven, but the theme-and-variations form shines through because Balanchine did not want elaborate staging or a story line to distract from the dancers’ movements.

    The present video is derived from a VHS tape, so is not as clear as a remastered version might be, but still showcases a performance by two dancers at the height of their powers. It wouldn’t surprise me that Neo saw a live performance of Theme and Variations in NYC in the late 1970s.

    (Note: The ballet itself ends around 21:30 in the video, the remaining 13 minutes being a live interview with Gelsey Kirkland.)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgCareuuxK4&t=368s&ab_channel=baja0270

  4. Speaking of “theme and variations”, looks like it’s time once again for the CDC to redefine another “technical concept”, in this case the admittedly complex, difficult and entirely counter-intuitive “original date”….
    “FDA Quietly Changes End Date For Study Of Heart Inflammation After Pfizer COVID Vaccination”—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/fda-quietly-changes-end-date-study-heart-inflammation-after-pfizer-covid-vaccination
    Opening graf:
    “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has changed the end date for a key study on post-vaccination heart inflammation without notifying the public….”
    (Gosh, is there anything they can’t redefine??!)

  5. The worst thing to do, and many do it, is to walk, run, or jog along a significantly used roadway for a long distance.

    It’s often easier to do that, but it’s a Really Bad Idea. There is a greater prevalence of auto emissions in the area right around a heavily used roadway, namely Carbon Monoxide, Nitrous Oxide and Sulfur Dioxide (IIRC, those are the three main chemicals). Add to this your elevated breathing rate from the exercise, and it is comparable to smoking cigarettes.

    You’re far better off picking a park, as Neo does, or a self-contained neighborhood, or a wilderness area with jogging paths.

    BTW, another suggestion I myself would make is to take up Disc Golf. As with normal golf, you walk a heck of a lot around the course, but it’s pretty close to free, costing, at a minimum, one-time single 10 buck disc (once you get into it you’ll likely have as many as 2-5 — some peeps get pretty fanatical and have entire bags of them. And yes, you’ll have to replace it if you lose it in a water hole or obnoxious neighbor yard). Many areas have a number of different locations for the activity.

    Do you have any near you? Easy to check:

    https://www.pdga.com/course-directory

  6. Simon & Garfunkel wrote many emotional, not-love but melancholy filled songs of beauty and harmony; and poignancy.

    We have a bit of snow in Bratislava, so Hazy Shade of Winter is on my mind – but it is no longer “the springtime of my life”. Last night drinking, not vodka and lime, just gin & tonic & lime (kinda close).

    Bookends, both the song and album, carry that theme of aging, with variations, and Old Friends.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTFtz5hwO3w

    “how terribly strange to be seventy”.

    pretty good bootleg live 2009 in Japan:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WutoU2WJa7w

    My sincere condolences to you, Neo – and to all who’ve lost loved ones.

  7. S&G reached for various kinds of melancholy and their harmonies seemed to fit. I wonder if they could have run up a cheerful, happy song and made a major change in their sound to fit it.
    One of their albums–in the days when the LP gave you maybe fourteen inches by the same to tell a story on the cover–had the two of them in their, iirc, regulation pea jackets and pointy-toed urban rock/folk boots on what seems to be an empty subway platform. The title was “Wednesday Morning; Three A. M.”
    Hemingway said three in the morning is the dark night of there soul. There’s been, possibly forever, an unofficial military truism–not sure it’s in any manual–that three in the morning’s the best time to put in a surprise attack.

    Anyway, you didn’t get up grinning from that album. I liked it but I wonder what the attraction was.

    I’m confident Neo will not be swallowed by whatever attraction grief has for itself, besides the loss of the object of the grief. But not easy.

  8. Simon and Garfunkle wrote “Feelin Groovy.”

    Little known fact: Simon also wrote “Red Rubber Ball”, one of the most upbeat breakup songs ever.

  9. neo. I remember “Feelin’ Groovy”. I had a number of their albums I played often during a difficult time. Problem, for me, with “Groovy” is that not a single thing suggested or named as “fun” struck me as fun.
    “kickin’ down the cobblestone….” Looking for fun….. Might have meant more at other times but seemed both not particularly interesting and….given my situation at the time, indicated no situational awareness.

    He has no goal. No objective. He’s doing nothing to achieve…what? Passively waiting for something agreeable to happen while….the disagreeable is out of town for the day?

    From the outside, I see the song, as I might if I tried to be in somebody else’s shoes. But at the time, did not grok.

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