Three o'clock in the morning music

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I used to subscribe to Stereo Review in the early 1970s, and I read their articles – especially their record and music reviews – very religiously; they were a huge part of my musical education. (Oh my god, was it really forty years ago?) Anyway, one of the reviewers, when discussing one of the Schubert piano sonatas, described it as “three o'clock in the morning music.” And I knew what he meant: dry intimate personal quiet music. I think each of us must have his own type.

 

 

I don't want to sound like a snob, but my three-in-the-morning music is the Beethoven quartets (especially the late ones) and the Scriabin piano music.

 

 

Why? It's like listening to the musical equivalent of Morse code. There's rhythm and harmony there, and sometimes even (especially in Beethoven, but in Scriabin too) something like melody, but the reasoning – the logic that leads from note to note, passage to passage – goes beyond words.

 

 

I've been listening to the Razumovsky quartets every evening now for about two weeks. I turn on the CD around 10:00 pm. I don't really listen – not intently – but then again, yes I do. I know it by heart, and it throbs in my head. It's quiet, and intense, and gentle. It's playing right this moment as I write this.

 

 

There's a famous moment in Aldous Huxley's “Point Counter Point” in which a character listens to the third movement of the Beethoven A minor quartet, having arranged his own death and while waiting for his killers to arrive. For him, the music is perfect – so much so that everyday life, in comparison, become worthless.

 

 

I get quite the opposite message from this music. Beethoven called it his “Heiliger Dankgesang,” his Holy Song of Praise. It is quiet and lovely and passionate. I hear nature, and humanity, and simple earthy gestures, and simple tunes that weave together to make a grand perfect structure.

 

 

What's that line from Auden? “Nothing is better than life.”

 

 

I agree.

 

 

And I think Beethoven (and even poor crazy Scriabin) agree also.

 

 

Even at three o'clock in the morning.

 

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Alexander Scriabin

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I have been rereading David Lindsay's odd and fascinating novel “A Voyage to Arcturus” lately. There's a wonderful line in the first chapter, describing a society lady sitting slumped at the piano: “She had been playing Scriabin, and was overcome.”

 

 

I have Scriabin playing in the background right now as I write this. I wouldn't describe myself as “overcome,” but I'm enjoying it.

 

 

Alexander Scriabin was a Russian composer at the turn of the last century. He started as a Chopinesque romantic, but gradually became more and more experimental. His music is visionary and free-form; it's not atonal, but it has a harmonic vocabulary of its own. Scriabin gave his symphonies titles like “The Poem of Ecstasy” and “Prometheus: A Poem of Fire.” Two of his piano sonatas are “The White Mass” and “The Black Mass.” (How can you not love a fin-de-siecle composer who thinks the height of wickedness and fashion is a Black Mass?)

 

The piano music sighs up and down the keyboard in long almost-tonal arpeggios. Almost-melodies come and go. Bizarre insect-like trills interrupt the proceedings. The symphonic music is very heady: dark and rich like chocolate cake. Scriabin wanted fragrances pumped into the air supply of the concert hall, and colored lights, so that all of the senses would be involved. He wanted everything at once.

 

Wow! Overload!

 

Scriabin died in 1915 of an infection, supposedly from having cut himself while shaving.

 

The following is the second and final movement of Scriabin's fourth piano sonata. He wrote a poem to go with it: about a faint blue star which, when approached, becomes a gigantic sun, a “sun of triumph!”, which is engulfed by the one who loves it.

 

 

If you listen to it: don't let it overcome you.

 

Or – what the hell! Why not?

 

 

06_Sonata_no._4_Prestissimo_volando.wma Listen on Posterous

 

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