Works Cited, Middle C

In the alleged state of nature, Joseph would begin, it is said to be a war of all against all. I know you are teasing, Joey. No one can go against gardens. So let me be with my beauties, at peace with nature and all this world’s tossing and yearning. Despite a pledge to cease and desist, Joseph heard himself repeat to his mother how unnatural gardens were, how human-handed every rose was, how thoroughly the irises were trained, how the prizes plants won in their competitions were like those awarded after a proud parade of poodles, each clipped like a hedge. She should not ignore the size of the industry whose profits depended upon fashions in flowers and fads that were encouraged by the press or those ubiquitous catalogs which provoked fears of diseases, worms, and insects that could only be controlled by the poisons, hormones, and fertilizers they recommended. Nor should she make light of the myths extolling the harmless healthiness of gardening, even alleging its psychological superiority to every other avocation. She should notice how the seed companies’ bankrolls grew more rapidly than their marigolds, despite extensive artificial breeding; she should also admit the plants’ reputations were puffed and as pretentious as their adopted stage names—moonglow, for instance. The garden, he felt compelled to suggest, was like a fascist state: ruled like an orchestra, ordered as an army, eugenically ruthless and hateful to the handicapped, relentless in the pursuit of its enemies, jealous of its borders, favoring obedient masses in which every stem is inclined to appease its leader.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (p. 271). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited, Middle C

He had once thought that the many terrible deeds of men might be understood by positing some underlying evil working away in the dirt of each life like the sod webworm. Perhaps there was an unrequited urge at the center of the species, a seed or genetic quirk, an impulse, bent for destruction, a type of trichinosis or a malignant imbecility that was forever ravenous. It might be just possible that we were killing off the weak to make the species strong. The young men can shoot one another. Those left standing can rape and murder the enemy’s mistresses, whores, and wives. Dead men cannot fertilize, or dead women bear. Then maybe our wars worked to keep our increasing numbers in check. But that hope turned out to be Heinrich Schenker’s doing, who had put these ideas in Skizzen’s head by insisting that for every harmonic composition there ought to be such a hidden center—a musical idea from which the notes that would be heard emerged, and were thereby governed, the way words issue from a mouth when the mouth moves on account of a consciousness that is formed, at least in part, by a nature as obdurate as an underground god at his forge hammering the white-hot blades of his weapons.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (pp. 268-269). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Works Cited, Middle C

Begetting was so inevitable, Joey thought, it was as routine as dying, consequently it could be safely left to nature, and otherwise ignored, the way Portho’s presence was ignored even when he slunk indoors, even when he scattered magazines donated by doctors’ offices on one of the polished tables, even when he dropped off, even when he snored. In due course people were born, in due course they managed to walk, they learned to talk, they attended school, they got a job, partied, married, had kids, sold stuff, bought more, overate, drank to be drunk, were relieved to be regular, labored in order to loaf, lived that way a spell—its passage sometimes stealing years—coasting down due’s course—while they lost their hair, sight, hearing, teeth, the use of limbs, the will to live, until, in due course and as their diseases desired, they took to bed; they laughed their last; they said good-bye to the ones they said were loved ones—they curled up in a fist of aches—said good-bye to the ones they said were closest to them—complained about their care—said good-bye to the ones who came to kiss them off, said good-bye to comfort themselves with the sight of another’s going, said good-bye while the designated goer complained, complained of neglect, complained of fear, complained of pain, and disinclined going, but would go, go over, cross Jordan, nevertheless. They uttered last words that no one could understand; they curled up like a drying worm; they cried to no avail because weeping begot only weeping, wailing was answered with wails; they repented to no one in particular; they died as someone whose loss was likely to be felt no farther than the idler’s door, and dying, quite often, in debt for a cemetery plot, the service of a funeral parlor, in the pursuit of a false ideal. Joey didn’t see much to interest him in any of this. It was what was done between times that fascinated him, when due course was interrupted by dream or discovery, murder or music, though wars were, he had to admit, due course to a faretheewell. And he thought, more and more, that death, assuredly dire, was also something due.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (p. 257). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Works Cited, Middle C

Yes, it is true, this music will be keyless, but there will be no lock that might miss it. Atonal music (as it got named despite Arnold Schoenberg’s objection) is not made of chaos like John Cage pretended his was; no art is more opposed to the laws of chance; that is why some seek to introduce accidents or happenstance into its rituals like schoolboys playing pranks. Such as hiccups. Miss Rudolph’s cough. No, this music is more orderly than anybody’s. It is more military than a militia. It is music that must pass through the mind before it reaches the ear. But you cannot be a true-blue American and value the mind that much. Americans have no traditions to steep themselves in like tea. They are born in the Los Angeles of Southern California, or in Cody, Wyoming, not Berlin or Vienna. They learn piano from burned-out old men or women who compose bird songs. Americans love drums. The drum is an intentionally stupid instrument. Americans play everything percussively on intentionally stupid instruments and strum their guitars like they are shooting guns. But I have allowed myself to be carried away into digression. Digressions are as pleasant as vacations, but one must return from them before tan turns to burn.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (pp. 244-245). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited, Middle C

They … who are they, you ask? they are the chosen few, chosen by God, by Geist, by the muse of music: they are Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern. They chose, in their turn, the twelve tones of the chromatic scale and thought of them as Christ’s disciples. Then they sat them in a row the way da Vinci painted the loyals.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (p. 244). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited, Middle C

Liszt, a fellow Hungarian, was an enormous early influence on Bartók. The man traveled the piano, coast to coast, like a coach. Late Liszt, my young friends, anticipates almost everything including the whole-tone scale. [……] Did you know one of his kids, Cosima, married Wagner? [……] She was a notable bitch. Isn’t that how you say it? Liszt made an enormous contribution to the very notation that composes a score, but I cannot take time for that here, or offer you juicy stories about his girlfriends though there is a shelfful, along with a lot of books.

Now listen to what he says—von Bartók, I mean—the words he uses: “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work, because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys.” “Tyrannical rule” indeed. Blame it all on the diatonic scale. Worse than an electric fence. What was at stake? Freedom, first off. From an imaginary limit. From the tyrannical State of Music. [……] Got that? 

Equality, second. For the composer, the instruments, the notes. “This new way of using the diatonic scale brought freedom from the rigid use of the major and minor keys, and eventually led to a new conception of the chromatic scale, every tone of which came to be considered of equal value and could be used freely and independently.” I won’t let anyone tell me that music isn’t political: this is the dictatorship of democracy. Down with the subordinate clause.

You all know how the freedom sought by the French Revolution—revolutionaries take note—or was it carnage? revenge? was it bloodlust?—was usurped—was reversed by Napoléon’s emperorship, and [……] ah, you don’t know, do you? [……] Well, good for you, you have nothing to forget.

So now we have to cope with the smarty-pants atonalists—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—who opposed the very romanticism that energized them—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—it’s only a scratch—to deal with their more specific dislike of Stravinsky’s eclectic modernism, et cetera. Lastly, nearing our station, we observe how the music of the folk as espoused by Bartók and Kodály got handballed from wall after wall of indifference: by the romantic music of Mahler, the intellectual regimens of the Viennese crowd—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—the turncoat classicism of Stravinsky, and the clangorous pauses of Cage and his crew. [……] You may make notes but not pass them. This isn’t kindergarten.

I could say simply that the Concerto for Orchestra is an appeal for peace, but that would make it sound simpleminded, and this piece is anything but. It is a mingling and clashing of competing kinds of music, the instruments that play them, and the totalitarian contexts within which large ensembles necessarily require their musicians to perform. A violin or cello concerto brags that, for a change, the rest of the world revolves around this one violin or cello and its simplest string. [….…]

This is only true of the genre, of course, instances vary. [….…] So, in the Concerto for Orchestra, various instruments enjoy their moment in the sun; turn and turn about, they are allowed to lead; and an ideal community is, in this way, imagined; one in which the individual is free, has its own unique voice, yet chooses to act in the best interests of all others. [……] The problem is: how to save Difference without making its members only frivolously different, like taking your tea in a glass instead of a cup.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (pp. 371-373). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited, Middle C

Jesting! Jousting, rather. You heard the bray—the hee-haw—the yawp—and then the fairgrounds music? pretending to be a rodent running down an alley. Now, just because the second movement is designated, by the composer, “a game of pairs,” we mustn’t confuse it with boarding Noah’s ark—you know—bassoons two by two, oboes as twins, clarinets a pair, next two flutes, and, lest they be too overbearing and brutish, trumpets with mutes. Nor should we allow ourselves to be misled about the seriousness of these blurts. I was told that, while Bartók was composing the concerto, he heard a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony on the radio and laughed when one of its subjects announced itself. He said it sounded like a Viennese cabaret song. This theme was so vacant of any real energy or significance that Bartók promptly borrowed it to use for an interruption he might ridicule. Why would he do that? Hands. [……] Hopeless. In the middle of a serious sermon, why would the preacher stick out his tongue? [… um …] Rather, my young friends, why would he stick out someone else’s tongue?

What was happening around him when he wrote this work? Sorry—when he composed this work. [……] Well, yes, he was ill. He was dying. [……] Okay, he was also a pauper. But he had more important things on his mind. [……] What? His family I suppose. [……] Nothing more? [……] The world was at war, sillies. Everywhere. It was a very large war, deserving the name of “World.” It contained countless smaller ones, and the smaller ones were made of campaigns and battles, deadly encounters and single shootings, calamities on all fronts. But history can hold up for our inspection many different sorts of wars, and World War Two was made of nearly all of them: trade wars—tribal wars—civil wars—wars by peaceful means—wars of ideas—wars over oil—over opium—over living space—over access to the sea—whoopee, the war in the air—among feudal houses—raw raw siss-boom-bah—so many to choose from—holy wars—battles on ice floes between opposing ski patrols—by convoys under sub pack attacks—in the desert there might be a dry granular war fought between contesting tents, dump trucks, and tanks—or—one can always count on the perpetual war between social classes—such as—whom do you suppose? the Rich, the Well Off, the Sort Of, the So-So, and the Starving—or—the Smart, the Ordinary, and the Industriously Ignorant—or—the Reactionary and the Radical—not just the warmongers for war but those conflicts by pacifists who use war to reach peace—the many sorts of wars that old folks arrange, the middle- aged manage, and the young fight—oh, all of these, and sometimes simultaneously—not to neglect the wars of pigmentation: color against color, skin against skin, slant versus straight, the indigenous against immigrants, city slickers set at odds with village bumpkins, or in another formulation: factory workers taught to shake their fists at field hands (that’s hammer at sickle)—ah, yes—the relevant formula, familiar to you, I’m sure, is that scissors cut paper, sprawl eats space—Raum!—then in simpler eras, wars of succession—that is, wars to restore some king to his john or kill some kid in his cradle—wars between tribes kept going out of habit—wars to keep captured countries and people you have previously caged, caged—wars in search of the right death, often requiring suicide corps and much costly practice—wars, it seems, just for the fun of it, wars about symbols, wars of words—uns so weiter—wars to sustain the manufacture of munitions—bombs, ships, planes, rifles, cannons, pistols, gases, rockets, mines—wars against scapegoats to disguise the inadequacies of some ruling party—a few more wars—always a few more, wars fought to shorten the suffering, unfairness, and boredom of life.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (pp. 368-369). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Works Cited, Middle C

 So, Bruno Schulz—you wonder what is the connection?—he was a writer and a draftsman after all, not a musician—so you should wonder at my claim to relevance. He wrote great Polish prose. He drew nudes—you naughties would like that. One of his drawings depicts a dwarfish man and a hurdy-gurdy—that exhausts his relationship to music. As far as we know. And how far do we know? Anyhow, Schulz is another example of what happens to greatness in this world of ours. Like Webern—shot as a dark marketer by some stupid corn-fed pop-singing assassin who at least had the decency to drink himself to death during the years that followed, from guilt, we may like to imagine. Only the Pole’s case was worse and more so. It happened—Schulz’s life—the lesson of his life, our lesson for today—it happened in Drohobycz which was a small provincial town like Webern’s Mittersill, but located in Galicia, not Austria—you know where is Galicia? nah, no hands—well, it is now the western Ukraine, a region also rich in composers, artists, scholars, and oh yes influential Jews including the founder of Hasidism, a movement of which you know? how many? show hands? nein? with a name like Bruno sewn on him you’d never think … of Jews. They slid slowly away from their faith, the Schulz family, in evidence of which I cite Bruno’s mother, who changed her name from Hendel to Henrietta, though what would be the use? what? well, I spare you Schulz’s low-level life, except he wrote wonders, pictured domineering women, drew men down around the women’s ankles like sagging socks.

Misfortune would not leave Bruno Schulz alone. Early in World War One—eh? … many hands for World War One …? six, twelve … congratulations … his house and the family store were burned, as they say, to the basement. In the middle of the thirties, his brother-in-law suddenly died, and Schulz became responsible for the welfare of a bereft sister, son, and cousin. But let us skip the merely syrupy third movement to enjoy the finale. In 1939 Poland is eaten by the two hogs wallowing in their sties nearby. The Nazis devoured the eastern half, and the Reds swallowed what was left in the west, including a little morsel called Drohobycz. This annexation ended Schulz’s publishing career, as meager as it was, for the Soviet Union specialized in propaganda and hero worship, neither of which our writer had any talent for. Two years passed—one wonders how—and the hammer and sickle was raised to affront the dawn and claim ownership of each dismal day.

Then the Nazis invaded Russia and the Huns came. They were far worse for the Jews than the Reds had been because the Gestapo sat behind the city’s desks and made dangerous its streets and corners. Among these minions was a man with a murderous past, a man alas from Vienna, a man named Felix Landau … one of many but one to remember … Happy Landau … called by some Franz, more acceptably German, Franz is … well … how fluid names were, then as now—people, places, identities, owners—no matter … whether Franz or Felix he was a man who eliminated Jews the way he moved his bowels. For a slice of bread and a bowl of soup, Bruno Schulz painted the walls of this art lover’s villa, including the nursery … Landau had commandeered the house from another Jew … it was later known as the Villa Landau, isn’t that—as you say—a hoot … and there he had multiplied himself, imagine … now his son had a room with a crib and a wall full of happy Felix-like scenes from the brothers Grimm … actually a princess, a horse-drawn carriage (Schulz had done a lot of those), two dwarfs (a lot of misshapen souls as well) … anyway, do not let the nursery be a surprise, they always do this—barbarians do—they go forth, they occupy, they consume, they multiply. Moreover, Felix bragged among his thuggish friends about the talented little slave who colored walls for him, a miserable painter who must have wondered what it meant to be actually a submissive man rather than a dreamed and drawn one.

Political criminals require accomplices—their power is based upon obedience, obedience upon dependency, upon bribes, threats, promises, rewards—consequently: so that his sister might live, Schulz acquiesced; so that her son would survive, Schulz said sir; so that a cousin could continue, Schulz kowtowed; and so that Schulz should gain a brief reprieve for himself as well, he took care to please his captor with his painting. On walls stolen from a Jew, another Jew depicted reassuring fairy scenes for the child of a man who murdered Jews and thereby earned a smidge of notoriety; moreover a man who, not as merely an afterthought, had a nice family he considerately looked after. Meanwhile, the Polish underground had not been idle. They provided the highly valued Bruno Schulz with forged documents designed to facilitate his escape from Galicia. He was to become an Aryan. His papers so described him. He was to leave Drohobycz, where he was known, and hide away someplace—someplace elsewhere—in the guise of a person of good blood and docile character who would therefore not write or draw or dream of washing a woman’s feet. Meanwhile, a German officer—a genuine Nazi, too, another Gestapo goon, with his Luger handy at his hip, a man whose name we know as Karl Günther—unlike the GI whom the Americans hid in anonymity—had grown envious of Landau’s gifted lackey, and, during a roundup of leftover Jews on November 19, 1942, shot Schulz in the head while he was bearing home a loaf of bread.

I have heard it said: All dead are identical. Do not choose but one to mourn. Broken toys are broken toys, and useless legs aren’t legs. 

Thus Bruno Schulz—born an Austrian, raised a Pole, and about to become a Gentile—though a freethinker—died a Jew.

Gass, William H.. Middle C (Vintage International) (pp. 216-218). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.