Composing A Childhood

"For a long time, life deals with the still tender memory of childhood like a mother who lays her newborn on her breast without waking it." (Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood)

I.

Memories intrigue me. Not only for what we remember but how we remember. Tunes and transcriptions fascinate me for that reason alone: they exemplify the memory function of music (tunes are tuneful only if we remember them; transcriptions require us to highlight choice parameters at the expense of others, but the joy that one feels in listening to a transcription must come from recognition). But to remember is to accept the inevitability of forgetting, and all of us experience forgetting, either trivially in names or shopping lists, but more puncturedly in the way our childhood conceals itself to us. But childhood also reveals itself unexpectedly, as if by chance, withheld to us for years and then offered anew through the medium of a faded photograph, a passing scent or a petite madeleine.

Confronting our memories is both joyful as it is terrifying: joyful because the patina of the past always seems golden hued, and the adjectives that accompany our childhood are always variations of "carefree" or "simpler"; but terrifying because we realize that we do not stand outside of time, that we too (our parents, ourselves and our children) are subject to its laws: for Barthes, looking at a photograph of his mother (then looking at himself), this too, we too, shall pass.

There are two possible responses to this remembering: we either attempt an erasure of time when we re-present our past, and in doing so we attempt to escape our future, filled, as it is, with dangers, threats and, ultimately, death; or we trace a prophecy of what is to come in our past, seeking the capacity of our past to echo our future, revealing Ariadne's thread: "Here, in fact, or not far away, must have lain the couch of that Ariadne in whose proximity I first experienced what only later I had a word for: love." There is a beautiful scene in the movie Howl, in which James Franco, playing the role of Allen Ginsburg, re-defines for us the notion of prophecy:

"At the moment of composition you don’t necessarily know what it means; it comes to mean something later. After a year or two, the meaning becomes clear ... which takes time like a photograph developing slowly. What prophecy actually is, is not knowing whether the bomb will fall in 1942, it’s knowing and feeling something which someone knows and feels in a hundred years, and maybe articulating it in a hint that they will pick up on in a hundred years.”


II.

There is a curious genre that some composers tackle, the ostensible children's piece, a work in which a composer makes obvious his or her journey into lost time. To name the most widely-known: Schumann's Scenes from Childhood (as opposed to the more pedagogic Album for the Young), Debussy's Children's Corner Suite and Kurtag's Games. But for composers, we experience not only a private past (our personal memories, the experience of which is entirely hermetic, its relevance entirely subjective) but a public past as well (our early encounters with music's past, the experience of which is shared, the interpretation of which is not entirely subjective). Thus to transcribe, must reflect, on some level, a different sort of journey into lost time, albeit a public as opposed to an entirely private one, and one's approach to borrowed material can be said to reflect a Proustian, Barthesian, or Benjaminian view of re-presentation, in the same way that one could view, interpret and talk about (a vocabulary is always what I'm after) a composer penning a children's piece.

III.

"The empty grave and the heart weighed in the balance - two enigmas to which life still owes me the solution." (Walter Benjamin, Two Enigmas)

Schumann The Poet Speaks: What is it he says when the poet speaks (the extended monologue in the middle of the movement, where Schumann notates the music senza misura: it exists outside of time)? What happens when a memory encounters a figment of childishness in which was reflected (too soon to understand; too late to matter) a prophecy? Our childhood is in many ways an empty grave: it is forever closed to us, buried; and yet its presence still exerts an influence on our lives, casting a long shadow on the rest of our adulthood.



(The Poet Speaks is at 15:30)

IV.

Kurtag's Hommage to Tchaikovsky. To embrace our childhood is not to be embarrassed by our memories. To transcribe is to reveal how we listen; to display our capacity for play. Sometimes to subtract is not only to take away, but to add; to preserve the identification of the original through register alone, but also to paint a picture of a child, not playing, but playing at Tchaikovsky.



V.

There is also a literal side to a composer's metaphorical remembering of childhood: in what he sees in his children, whether we speak of Schumann, Kurtag (I was moved to see a performance at Zankel with Kurtag and his wife, their backs to the audience, on two upright pianos with the practice mute depressed, and their son sitting on stage but behind the pianos, gently amplifying their purposeful muteness) or Debussy.

It is touching to read Debussy's letter (dated 2 December 1910) to his daughter ChouChou:

"1. Once there was a papa who lived in exile ... 2. and every day he missed his little ChouChou. 3. The inhabitants of the city saw him walking past and murmured 'Why does that gentleman look so sad in our gay and beautiful city?' ... 5. So ChouChou's papa went into a shop ... and asked for the most beautiful postcards they had, so that he could write to his darling little daughter ... 6. The said papa went back to his hotel, wrote this story which would make a goldfish weep, and put all his love into the signature below, which is his greatest claim to fame.

LepapadeChouchou"

But I am even more deeply touched by a letter (dated 8 April 1918) that the 12 and a half year old (!) Chouchou writes to Raoul Bardac after the death of Debussy. Chouchou herself would die sixteen months after her father, from receiving the wrong treatment for diphtheria, on 16 July 1919, four months short of her 14th birthday:

"... I saw him one last time in that horrible box - lying on the ground. He looked happy, so happy and then I couldn't control my tears. I almost collapsed but I couldn't embrace him. At the cemetery Mama, naturally, couldn't have behaved better and as for me, all I could think of was, 'I mustn't cry because of Mama'. I summoned up all my courage. Where did it come from? I don't know. I didn't shed a single tear. Tears restrained are worth as much as tears shed ..."