Cygnus Ensemble

(in development)

The premise of Love, Death, Guitar begins with the easy assertion that the guitar, among all musical instruments, is most associated with love and death (by which I intend the more loaded terms, Eros & Thanatos), and continues with the further observation that plucked strings can be found playing this role all over the world. We will try to show that these senses of love & death are still ubiquitous, and even coming to the fore here in the U.S. in works such as the HBO series, Six Feet Under, and in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.

The success of the project hinges on the claritiy of the connections made between European, Asian, Middle-eastern, and American (and other) examples, and between older strains and more recent strains as well as contemporary strains of Eros & Thanatos–the kinship of Dowland & Britten, for example.

Americans are generally not decadent, so most Americans will treat this subject with a sense of humor, despite the complete lack of irony that characterizes the aesthetic of Eros & Thanatos. Quentin Tarrantino manages this. .

Sketches of possible concert programs

Milestones in Eros & Thanatos

—-plenty of Greek sources, notably, regarding plucked-strings, Orpheus

—-Shakespeare’s Ophelia is a highly suggestive model for others later.

—-Goethe’s characters–Faust & Margaret, Werther , Wilhelm & Mariana, Eduard & Ottilie (Eduard is a more subtle Werther)—these map out the major themes of what might be called “modern eros & thanatos”

—-Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen—as in Goethe, the girl dies, the boy develops spiritually

—-It all becomes explicit with Wagner’s Tristan & Isolde, and Nietzsche’s exegesis on Wagner’s pathology. Oboe is the death instrument for Wagner in Tristan. Babbitt brings back the oboe in this role for his Swan Song No. 1.

—-In Gustav Meyrink’s novel, The White Dominican, the girl dies and the boy develops spiritually. The girl is named Ophelia.

—- Schnitzler forms an empirical approach to eros & thanatos, translating the romantic elements into elements that will hold throughout the positivistic (empirical) American century. Freud is a proselyte of Schnitzler. (20th Century realism owes a great deal to Schnitzler. Oddly, Schnitzler probably had less direct influence than the positivists of the Vienna Circle, who, it seems to me now, had an enormous influence on American attitudes. Schnitzler made the literary connections long before the Americans did.)

The Guitar’s role in love and death

In the literature of Eros & Thanatos, it is often the case that plucked strings sound the primal scene:

Lorca:

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.

(See appendix 1 for complete poems)

The guitar is likewise often connected with death and decay:

Benjamin Britten chose to set this his Songs of the Chinese for guitar and voice because of the guitar’s role as the instrument most closely associated with love & death, decay, decadence. Britten shows the influence of both the decadents and the PreRaphaelites.

Songs of the Chinese (excerpts)

Depression
by Po Chu-i

Turned to jade
are the boy’s rosy cheeks;
To his sick temples the frost of winter clings
Do not wonder that my body sinks to decay;
Though my limbs are old, are old,
my heart is older, older, older, older yet.

Britten makes the connection between the guitar and death explicit by setting the poem about the old lute, employing decay once more, even while mentioning that a new lute is in the offing:

The Old Lute
by Po Chu-i

Of cord and cassiawood is the lute compounded;
Within it lie ancienct melodies.
Ancient melodies weak and savourless,
Not appealing to present men’s taste.

The guitar summons the lover:

Obviously, the guitar is an instrument for wooing, but in works imbued with an explicit sense of eros & thanatos love is inextricably tied up with death. The ultimate expression of this is Schoenberg’s Serenade, where the plucked instruments are absolutely vital to the overall scene.

Trakl’s poem also has this sense—

Georg Trakl (trans. Alexander Stillmark, Libris, 2001)

Amid red foliage full of guitars
The girls’ yellow hair streams
Beside the fence where sunflowers stand.
Through clouds a golden cart passes.

In the repose of brown shadows, old folk
Grow silent in foolish embraces.
Orphans sweetly sing at vespers.
Flies buzz in the yellow vapours.

Along the brook women are washing still.
The hung-out linen gently flutters.
The young girl whom I long have fancied
Returns again through dusk at evening.

–still trying to organize this coherently–
Appendix 1–Poems & songs that connect the guitar with Eros & Thanatos
Appendix 2–An annotated list of works that are redolent of Eros & Thanatos