I refer to the Mobile Symphony Orchestra. As I've had more than one occasion to mention here, there is something in the experience of live music that just can't be had by listening to recordings at home, no matter  how good the recording or the system reproducing it. The orchestra doesn't have to be one of the world's greatest--a capable, enthusiastic, and hard-working one in a medium-sized city which is hardly a major cultural center is enough to give you that something. 

The MSO plays at the Saenger Theater in downtown Mobile, which is where what people generally refer to as "nightlife" happens. On weekend nights especially, it's thronged with young and youngish people going to restaurants, clubs and bars. On symphony nights, of which there are only a half-dozen or so in the year, you also see a certain number of incongruous-looking older people, some of them downright elderly, many dressed much more formally than the young crowds. They--or we--look, and some of us feel, rather out of place--but some don't appear to feel that way at all, being well-to-do Old Mobilians who seem to regard themselves as the rightful proprietors of the area. By "Old Mobilians" I don't mean old people who live in Mobile but people who are of the families who have lived there for generations, or who are in the extensive network of friends, business associates, and others who might be called the ruling class of the city.

It's a shame that I can so easily identify symphony-goers by their age and class. But it is unfortunately the case that people who are interested in classical music tend to be older and more affluent. I don't think this is necessarily a sign of doom, though, as some think. It's somewhat natural that classical music would become more appealing to some people as they get older and, perhaps, more open to music with deeper and more lasting appeal than pop. Perhaps. Or perhaps attendance at the symphony is a bit of a status marker, or a mainly social event. I do sometimes overhear conversations which suggest to me that the speaker actually has little interest in the music itself. Well, that's ok: I'm glad they paid for a ticket and hope they keep doing it, and that they're getting some enjoyment out of it.

And the audience is by no means entirely made up of older people. There are quite a few younger ones, not the majority perhaps but a not-insignificant minority. A group of half a dozen or so who seemed to be quite young, probably not, or maybe just barely, out of their teens, was hanging out in the lobby at intermission, taking pictures of each other, and seeming to be having a great time. They didn't seem to be posturing or sneering or sulking or anything else except being young and lively. They asked me to take a picture of the entire group, which I was very pleased to do, for the sight of them had cheered me. Why were they there? It's fairly likely that they were music students.

Which does not necessarily mean that they are music enthusiasts. I think music students are sometimes required to go to concerts. The most hilariously un-enthusiastic remark I've ever heard at one of these concerts came from a group of music students who were sitting behind me in the very cheapest seats, way up in the balcony. Surveying the program before the concert started, one of them noted the symphony that would be the second half of the program and wailed to her friends "Y'all, they're going to play all four movements! We'll be here all night!" If I remember correctly they spared themselves that ordeal and left at intermission.

So much for social observations. What about the music? The first piece was Benjamin Britten's "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra," which as you probably know is meant to exhibit all the instruments in the orchestra, one by one, in a theme-and-variations. I'm pretty sure I'd heard it once or twice over the years and wasn't expecting much. But it's a much more substantial piece than I had thought. The theme is a grand tune from Purcell, and the variations are really pretty remarkable. They quickly went much further afield than I was able to follow, and the piece ends with what struck me as a rather wild fugue, and a restatement of the theme. If you can get over any patronizing sense that it's a merely pedagogical tool, this is a pretty impressive piece of music. 

Next was the Barber Violin Concerto, with Randall Goosby as the soloist. A week or so before the concert I listened to a recording of the concerto, thinking that I had never heard it before and would at least get a little acquainted with it. But I immediately recognized the main melodies of the first movement, so obviously I had. And one of those melodies is now, four days later, sounding in my head, which means it ranks with some pop music in memorable tunefulness. I love that first movement, and may with a few more hearings love the whole concerto. The second movement has so far not made a strong impression, but the third is pretty striking: it's a very short, only four minutes or so, fast and furious thing, going at breakneck speed from start to finish, and, it seems to me as a non-violinist, making some pretty strong demands on the soloist. To my unexpert ears Goosby seemed to have no problems with it.

Then came a delightful surprise. Goosby's encore (much demanded) was a piece I had never heard of by a composer I had perhaps vaguely heard of, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. It's called "Louisiana Blues Strut" and is just 100% enjoyable for someone like me who likes the blues as much as he likes classical music. See what you think:

Here's a little about the composer.

The second half of the concert consisted of Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances (op. 45). This was the last thing Rachmaninoff wrote before his death--which, I was a bit shocked to hear, occurred in 1940. Yes, I knew he had been born fairly late in the late 19th century (1873) and had lived and worked well into the 20th, but I somehow had the notion that he had not lived past its first couple of decades. Maybe that's because I think of him as a late Romantic composer. (If you do the arithmetic you'll note that this was not an exceptionally long life: 67  years. But the vast changes that occurred during that period make it, in effect, longer.)

I had not heard this piece before, and didn't have time to give it a hearing before the concert. So all I have is a first impression, which is that it's big and colorful and spectacular, but not especially profound or moving. That may be a totally unfair judgment--I repeat that it's tentative. It certainly has some materials for profundity, reaching into Rachmaninoff's personal history as well as Christian sources both Eastern and Western on the themes of death and resurrection. In any case it was very enjoyable, and I think is the kind of piece that the Mobile Symphony does well. Its conductor, Scott Speck, is a very energetic and enthusiastic person, and this performance was definitely both of those. I greatly enjoyed it, and it seemed that the entire audience did, too.

The moment I saw the cover of this book I wanted to read it. 

It isn't just that she's a pretty girl, or even that she seems miraculously suspended in space. Presumably she's jumping on a trampoline, and the image we see is only a bare instant in one of those jumps, frozen by the camera. The power of the image is in the look on her face, that her eyes seem to be on or searching for something in the far distance, and that she seems to be not just suspended but ascending. Or levitating. Maybe that's it--it's like those medieval saints who were said to levitate. 

Did the novel live up to the promise of that picture? Well, not really. But that only shows the power described in the old saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. That's generally true but almost necessarily true if the words are an attempt to describe, or provide an equivalent of, the picture.  How could words, no matter how brilliantly chosen and placed, do just what that image does? Words must be read in sequence, over some period of time, while the image has its effect in an instant, and this is a picture of an instant.

More to the point, is it a good novel? Yes, it is. 

I can't help associating the girl in the picture with a crucial character in the novel, who hardly appears at all but is very significant. Her name is Hannah, and she and the narrator, who is in his middle or late thirties, had been childhood friends. (It's mentioned in passing that she did in fact have a trampoline.) As they entered their teens he fell in love with her, but never had a chance to do anything about it because she died suddenly of an unsuspected brain aneurysm on New Year's Eve of 1995, just shy of her fourteenth birthday. On that night he might have made, in fact had more or less intended to make, some kind of approach or declaration to her. But he chose, instead of going to the New Year's Eve party at her house, to play Dungeons and Dragons with friends (and drink beer, his first experience of drunkenness). 

The novel opens in 2017, and the first-person narrator has not thought much about Hannah for many years. Then the sight of honey locust trees on an October evening sparks his sudden recollection of the night of her death:  

...my mind without warning or apparent cause [was] seized by the memory that despite every reason to be by her side I spent the night that my childhood love Hannah died far away from her, playing a game of fantasy and getting drunk.

This sudden surge of memory is the catalyst for a series of recollections amounting to a review of his whole life since adolescence, and to events which lead to major upsets in his marriage and his life in general. 

The narrator is, we are told, a writer of fantasy novels, but I admit I was never quite convinced of that--I mean, convinced that he had actually written popular fantasy. Certainly he is extremely interested in fantasy, but the interest seems more that of a reader and a thinker than of a practitioner. I would in fact describe him first as an intellectual, but a polymath, not a specialist: very widely read, very much preoccupied with ideas, having a useful knowledge of multiple languages, a cellist accomplished enough to play Bach's cello suites, and a composer of music, at least in his student days.

And this is a very cerebral novel. It's almost the exact opposite of the last book I wrote about here, Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War. That novel, though not lacking in thought, and implying much more, is primarily a story of action, often very robust (to say the very least) physical action. This one, though not lacking in physical action, is primarily one of thought, often fairly abstract thought. And whereas the main body of Soldier is one continual sequential narrative, Absolute Music is a sort of mosaic of memories of different times and places, moving among the latter in a connected but not sequential fashion, though always within the framework of the events following that moment in 2017. 

This sometimes leads to memories within memories, a technique which I found somewhat confusing at times. I've just glanced back at a section which begins from the point of view of 2017, looks back into 2001, and from there into 1989. As these recollections are often, or usually, accompanied by some more or less abstract philosophical or theological reflection, it is easy--or at least it was easy for me--to lose track of where and when we are.

And I could have done with less explicit philosophizing, though the complaint is a little unfair, as that is clearly the nature of the narrator. But though it may be at times a little confusing to me, the novel itself is not confused. It's in fact pretty tightly structured. Its structure is based on that of Bach's cello suites, a conscious and explicit decision by the narrator, who refers to the narrative as "suites." There are six of these, one for each of the cello suites. And each suite is divided into seven parts, corresponding to the dances, or pseudo-dances, of Bach's work: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, two Minuets or Bourrees or Gavottes, Gigue. I would be surprised if there is not some significant relationship of the "dances" of the novel's suites to Bach's, but I did not make the effort of figuring it out. (And I don't know the cello suites so well that the relationship is obvious.) And I'm pretty sure that themes and ideas are worked into the novel as musical themes are worked into a symphony or other substantial work, though, again, I did not attempt to dig them out and analyze them. 

So. We have an elaborately woven picture of a man's mind and life, including the intimate presences of friends, family, lovers, and wives--two of the latter. And places: I would be culpably negligent if I failed to mention the important role which place and love of place have in this novel. Much of it is set in Cincinnati, and I have to admit that I had not thought of Cincinnati as a place inspiring deep affection and study. But I believe it here. In saying that the novel is cerebral I don't mean to imply that it is indifferent to the physical, which is portrayed vividly. Those honey locusts in the opening pages, for instance, are described in detail, not only those specific trees at that moment, but the species at large.

What does this picture portray? What is most significant in it? This is a complex novel and that's not a question to which I would attempt to give a full answer in a blog-length review, or in fact without reading the book a second time, which I may do--I think it would be worth re-reading. It is a startlingly full book, though it isn't quite 300 pages long; it's crammed with incident and thought and people and places. It would take me another thousand words just to name the characters and their relationships. One of the blurbs on the back cover emphasizes its focus on the elemental human relationship, man and woman. And that's a fair reading. But I think these few sentences, which occur near the end of the book, are closer to the heart of it:

It seemed to me in that dim midday that only in the pure music I had long since renounced, the absolute music that reaches into the world behind the world, can the artist master time, set a time signature at will and free of words. But even that was an illusion, wasn't it? For only in performance...only then is the composer's time realized, only then--in time.

I wanted to believe that singing in my veins and sinews from one autumn to the next there had been many kinds of music that made up one great music. Who then was the composer, and for whom did he compose?

*

With A Soldier of the Great War still fresh in my mind, it occurs to me that the experience of reading it, a mostly straightforward linear narrative, provides something closer to the experience of music than does the musically organized Absolute Music. Like music, a story as such is experienced in time, and moreover it is, you might say, a simulation of time: it depicts events, which by definition exist in the stream of time and therefore in the only sequence of which we have knowledge and experience, the only one we can truly call sequence, the one we call chronological, They may not be presented in that order, but if the result is to be a story in any useful sense of the term, it must at least be susceptible of that ordering. In a non-linear narrative, at least one in which the non-linearity is the norm and not an occasional effect, we see temporally disconnected pieces of the story. There is no continual flow, and we can only grasp the story as a story after we've received all the pieces, i.e. out of time. Some assembly required. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and may be very effective artistically. But it is a different sort of experience from the elemental one of hearing a story. 

Supposedly, I don't buy music on physical media anymore. There are various reasons for that, lack of storage space being the major one. But I listened to this album once on Pandora and then ordered the LP. (I assumed my local record stores would not have it, which perhaps I should not have done.) And the main reason was not so much to own the object as to support the artist. When I like something as much as I like this, I don't want to just more or less freeload on a streaming service, for which the artist only gets a fraction of a penny for every play. (See this chart for the grim reality.) I want to lay out some cash as a gesture of support, and because the artist deserves to be compensated for her work. 

For those who don't recognize the name, Beth Gibbons is the singer for the band Portishead, providing the distinctive voice which is an absolutely essential element of their sound. (Those who don't recognize the name Portishead should fill that gap in their musical interests as soon as possible. Well, at least check them out, as I recognize they are not to everyone's taste. Here's a link to "Sour Times," from their first album, Dummy.)

Apart from Gibbons's voice, the music on Lives Outgrown has almost nothing in common with Portishead's. It's a subdued and I think entirely acoustic album, but hardly the simple, possibly bland, "folkie" affair that description might suggest. The songs are melancholy and in themselves not very remarkable. By that I don't mean they aren't good, because they are, but that it's not their quality as songs that stands out. That is, they are not the kind of composition that can stand alone performed by, say, one ordinary singer, strumming a guitar in an ordinary way--great songs no matter who sings them or how. That one singer would probably have to be Beth Gibbons to make it work. It's the brilliant arrangements, which are of a piece with the material, that make the entire artifact, so to speak, brilliant. 

Two names that I don't recognize, James Ford and Lee Harris, seem to be, along with Gibbons herself, in some large degree responsible for those arrangements. Harris shares songwriting credit on four tracks. Judging by the credits it would be fair to call the album the work of a group and give them a collective name. 

The instrumentation is generally sparse and low in pitch, which contributes greatly to the subdued quality. Tempos are mainly slow to moderate. There's a lot of percussion, but it's mostly deep and resonant--the standard drum kit is not present at all, as far as I can tell. In fact there are a lot of instruments, period, but they're deployed with a lot of space. The credits often list a dozen or more instruments for a track that doesn't sound in the least busy. There are (bowed) strings, also sparse and carefully, almost minimally, placed. The word "careful" could apply throughout, and yet in general the arrangements strike me as very imaginative. 

The overall coloring is dark, both musically and lyrically. The lyrics and general emotional tone run from wistful to near-despairing, as in "Rewind":

And we all know what's coming
Gone too far
Too far to rewind

It tends toward the darker as it goes along. The next-to-last track, "Beyond the Sun," has something close to a driving beat, and includes a brief passage which I can only describe as a free-jazz freakout, the only bit on the album that could be called noisy. And the lyrics end with

The loss of faith
Filled with doubt
No relief
Can be found

But the sun comes out with the last song, "Whispering Love," where a gentle and pretty flute tune evokes, for me, some of the more innocent and  hopeful music of the late '60s--something by Donovan, maybe. The lyrics take a hopeful turn:

Leaves of our tree of life
Where the summer sun...always
Shines through...the trees of wisdom
Where the light is so pure....
          (the ellipses are in the printed lyrics)

And the album fades away into bird calls and other natural sounds, which some might find gimmicky, but I don't.

Enough talk. This is the first track, and not necessarily the best, but representative.  

Back in February, a couple of months before the album was released in May, a video for "Floating On A Moment" appeared. I wrote about it here. If I had to choose a "best" from the album, that might be it, though I didn't like the video (which is included in that post). It includes a haunting chorus of children sweetly singing "All going to nowhere," a striking and slightly chilling effect.

In 2003 Gibbons released another non-Portishead album, Out of Season, a collaboration with "Rustin Man," who apparently is Paul Webb. I don't think I heard it until maybe ten years after it was released, and although I liked it I was not nearly as enthusiastic about it as I am about this one. I took it out again to see if my opinion had changed. Not really. It's very good, but Lives Outgrown strikes me as great.