Herbert Read

Toward the Exit (Dem Ausgang zu)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Hans Arp was born split in two. His mother was French. His father was German. I just called him Hans, the name he was given at birth, but he used a French version of his first name as well, Jean.* He was born in Alsace–Lorraine, a set of disputed provinces that were alternatively French and German as wars whipsawed borders. During Arp’s lifetime, those two countries, those two languages, would be fighting as principals in two World Wars. Just by existing Hans Arp could be an enemy alien simultaneously in two ways.

Until this month I knew Arp vaguely as a 20th century modern artist, but while scrolling on Bluesky I saw four lines of an Arp poem that had been translated by Herbert Read as “The Exit To” posted. That immediately intrigued me.

These were eerie, surprising, wild lines – a kind of poetry that has long attracted me.** Was this all of the poem? Could I find it in its original language and work out my own translation for performance? What else could I find out about Arp and his art, visual and literary?

Luckily, I was able to quickly find Read’s 1968 book Arp, which covers Arp’s life and work. The book provides a good number of examples of that work, including not only the entire poem I was seeking in Read’s English translation, but the full text of two versions in the original German (as “Dem Ausgang zu”)  and in Arp’s own French translation. Read spends most of the pages on the visual art, but tells us that Arp was a life-long poet that considered his literary work an integral part of his expression.

Arp’s lifetime reflects his dual nature. Born in a then German territory, and soon connected with the early 20th century avant garde in France and Germany, he fled to neutral Zurich Switzerland at the outbreak of WWI. Significantly for the fleeing Arp, Zurich was the birthplace of the nonsense-word-named art movement called Dada.

Dada was formed by young people from all the sides in the First World War, who didn’t want to be on any of the sides offered. As France and the various monarchies ground themselves into doit and wurst on the battlefield, the Dada folks were pretty sure that exuberant non-sense was the best rebuttal. Arp himself dispatched his German draft status by going to the German consulate in Zurich, genuflecting and making the Sign of the Cross at every picture of the German minister Hindenburg there, and making non-sense patterns on the forms. He did not seem to the German recruiters there to have a keen tactical mind, nor the possessor of the cool sanity required to make sacrificial charges and retreats through no-mans-land.

You, valued reader and possible listener, may counter that patriotism and bravery, like poetry and art of wisdom and clarity, are not valueless. I myself am a confused soul. I like to fancy that I, gratefully, can engage with either outlook – a variety. I do weigh and consider that this is a luxury. Earnest warriors and confounding satirists have each expended their lives in dialectic for that luxury in art.

A man such as the great French Surrealist poet Éluard I recently featured here can fight on what I think of as the good side of the two World Wars, and still write Dada and then Surrealist poetry. I know much more about Arp now due to the English poet and critic Herbert Read’s book about him – Read who was a decorated and profoundly discouraged vet of the WWI trenches who became committed to art, pacifism, and anarchism as a result, yet then felt compelled to serve his native country when the armies of fascism were arrayed against his nation in the second World War.

To the best of my initial knowledge, Arp seems like a fine person. Modest, unpretentious though a persistent artist, with a sense of humor and somewhat rare ability among his peers to see value and collaboration with women artists in his circle and romantic life. Spontaneously he took to abstraction in his visual artwork quite early in the 20th century, independently of, and often ahead of other Modernists. He explained this by saying that he felt humans are pretentious when they try to depict nature, and that instead they should create things like nature does – not reflected depictions, but abstract though attractive, palpable things like a stone or leaf.***

So where does that leave him with poetry? Dada enjoyed nonsense of course. Surrealism brought forth odd and even random combinations. We may be more accepting of these tactics in visual object than a poem, but in today’s poem the young Arp is using those Dada and Surrealist tactics in this 1912 poem before either movement had been declared. What are we to make of poetry such as this that seeks to surprise us without the comfort of giving a clear path to a denotative meaning?

We might be attracted to its novelty. We might take comfort in our surprise rather than displeasure in our confusion. We might choose to delight in our sense of disorientation. In the same way that we might enjoy the texture and shape of an abstract sculpture, we can enjoy the words as sounds and texture. But I suspect all these are fleeting things to most of us much of the time. So, let’s look at such Dada verse as Arp’s poem another way, the way I had to in order to make my translation. The world of generative AI could easily produce endless combinations of nonsense, but it’s trained to go the other way, to give us the very thing we’ll think is expected of it.   Arp chose his words in German, and then went at it again and chose his words in French. A particular human made a particular set of choices. In Read’s account Arp did intend beauty in his art along with the humor, and he seems absent of any haughty sense of the hermetic artist who means to be misunderstood. He also had a sense of humor. My working understanding of the poem I perform today is that its mood is darkly humorous.

Dem Ausgang zu in three languages

I’ve changed, and think I’ve improved, my last line since I recorded my musical performance earlier this week.

.

Long time readers here will recall my primary goal in translation: find the images and convey them vividly in contemporary English. I’ll continue to do this, even as Arp’s images wish to burlesque and fracture reality. When an AI LLM hallucinates (and we use that very term) we are disappointed in it. When another human wishes to speak of an altered reality we wonder at the purpose, the intent, even unexpressed or accepted-accidental intent. This isn’t stone or wood that’s being shaped abstractly, this isn’t a dollop of paint, these are words we must array to make our human sounds, and we will find it hard to avoid making shards of meaning out of them. Arp may be laughing as he wrote down these words in one language, and then another – two languages that would be fighting and killing each other multiple times in his era – but he’s also delighting in the sound and stretch of his words, and I tried to convey that in English too. In the first two lines I see reflective eyes and mysterious night. In the next three lines, a litany of time and movement constrained by something as old and massive as the mountain.**** I see a tree’s lifetime subject to a timber harvest, long ago logs, then cut down and floating away. The poem concludes with night birds in barn lantern light gobbling a season’s harvest that must then have needed the labor of a manual threshing floor to gather, while the divine (angels) are effervescently seen condensing in clouds (baskets of air). And the final line: (as “when pigs fly” in another idiom) fish are holding their hiking sticks walking through the stars, a rising litany of impossibility leading to a certainty, that the poem and all our human effort will end.

If Arp was to perform this poem at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, would some patrons be availing themselves of the exit? For that matter, how many are still reading this far down in this post of mine, how many will want to hear this poem?

Did Arp intend for that to be in a cryptic poem about the absurdity of life’s effort? I can’t tell, but that’s what I found there, and he surely didn’t intend hard enough to prevent me from finding this.

You won’t have to work hard to hear my musical performance of Arp’s poem. I composed the guitar part in my head, silently, while doing other things this week, visualizing exactly the fingering I would use to play it. That’s something I used to do in my youth, but I can’t recall the last time I did it as an old man. I derived a chord structure from the guitar line for a piano part, laid down a bass line, and worked out a drum pattern, and there you go: angels in a basket of air. The audio player should be luxuriously there for you, brave listener. No player? No, Elon hasn’t muted Starlink, but you can also use this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

 

*I’m using Hans Arp as I relied here much on Herbert Read’s book, and Read uses Hans. Wikipedia lists him as Jean, says than name is preferred in English, but there’s a German language page under Hans. Arp seems to have continued to use Hans when speaking German, and Jean when speaking French throughout his life.

** Yes, I enjoy Dada, oftentimes more than I think I would, and I take pride that I work to make fresh English translations of Dada poems publicly available for poetic work that is hard to find online in English, but I have noticed that even my hardy audience, whose attention I’m grateful for, has little interest in this. I cut my recent early Paul Éluard Dada-style poem series short due to lack of interest.

***To give some flavor to Arp sense of unpretentious, humorous absurdity, here’s his 1921 account of Dada first being uttered as a name:

I hereby declare that on February 8th, 1916, Tristan Tzara discovered the word DADA. I was present with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for the first time this word which has aroused in us such legitimate enthusiasm. This took place at the Café Terrasse in Zurich, and I wore a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word has no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can be interested in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before the existence of Dada….The morality of idiots and their belief in geniuses makes me shit.’”

Arp’s last sentence there sums up a lot of my current newsfeed and the pronouncements of our honored and self-sacrificing leader and his cadre of acolytes.

****In the black horse hitched to the mountain litany I thought of an element of Arp’s biography summarized in Herbert Read’s book. Arp joined in and exhibited with The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group of artists around the time he wrote this poem, and that brought to mind Franz Marc’s 1911 painting that I visit at one of my local art museums.

Conlon Nancarrow

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

A great deal of what you hear me play here is made possible by a 1983 invention, MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a standard for communicating musical commands. MIDI lets me create piano parts I can’t play with my non-pianist fingers. I tell MIDI what to play, and MIDI then instantly responds by playing those notes on an instrument so I can see if they fit.

Given MIDI, I as the composer can have the equivalent of a pair or more of pianists willing to play as simply or complexly as I want them to, and not only are my MIDI pianists totally compliant, they can be preternaturally skilled as well, willing to play odd rhythmic displacements or impossible fingerings.

In the years between WWI and WWII, a young musician of no great wealth or social background was studying composition in Boston. He was said to have crossed paths with some of the giants of 20th Century music there, including Walter Piston, whose Harmony  book I once started many decades ago, and Nicolas Slonimsky whose book on scales later became a huge influence on John Coltrane and Frank Zappa.

However, the titanic forces of world events would soon sweep him away from all this. In the 1930s he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Americans who volunteered to fight the Fascist forces seeking to overthrow a republic in Spain during a war that served as a beta-test for World War II. This was a complex event, but all we need to know for our young man is that the anti-Fascist coalition was defeated, and the survivors who had fought for the Spanish Republic ended up as men without a country.

Earlier this year I was reading some 1939 writing by Herbert Read where he was appealing for support for a plan to transport these Spanish war survivors from French refugee camps to Latin America. Our young man, who’d hobnobbed with key musical theorists before becoming a “premature anti-Fascist,” soon found himself in Mexico City, perhaps as a result of this plan.

It was there our exiled young man took a technological step as a composer. He chose to write his music using “player pianos.” Player pianos, also called “reproducing pianos,” were a home entertainment fad from the era before better quality electronic recordings. An elaborate clockwork rolled a scroll of punched paper across mechanical sensors inside the piano which then drove the hammers to strike the piano strings. Scrolls of piano music, some recorded and played by the famous performers of the early 20th Century could be purchased, and when inserted into the home player piano, and played back with musical fidelity.

Our young man’s name was Conlon Nancarrow. Over the next few decades he exploited the player piano, not for parlor entertainment, but to create striking Modernist music of otherwise unplayable complexity. He was hip to new varieties of rhythm and harmony not only from other 20th Century “serious composers,” but from Jazz too—and the mathematical structures of Bach-like cannons were well suited to the looping scrolls he would punch himself. He wasn’t reproducing music someone played, he was producing music he conceived and punched into the controlling scrolls.

In the first few decades of his work Nancarrow had no funds, no grants, no copyist/assistants, no local orchestral resources to realize his musical ideas; but this one artist, a player piano, and his own score-roll punching could produce work needing only himself and his ideas to sound inside his small Mexican apartment.

Except for it’s painstaking, mechanical, cuckoo-clock handwork, what Nancarrow did is schematically like how one can use MIDI today. In a tip to this heritage, MIDI scores are still shown on the lit-up computer screen like player piano scrolls.

Nancarrow Piano Part MIDI score

“Stuck in holes which once were dots”
One of the piano parts for today’s piece shown in MIDI “piano roll” notation

 

In 1969, using the high-fidelity home entertainment media of its age, an LP record of Nancarrow’s works was issued on a major, well-distributed record label (Columbia, the record company of Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap). That’s when I first heard him. Acclaim in avant-garde music circles, and some grants and touring followed until his death in 1997.

In some ways the typical Nancarrow piece sounds like an artist who when finding out the vast capabilities of his new technology decides to use all of them. At once. A lot. Typical tempos sound like someone playing a recording at the wrong speed—and backwards. The number of simultaneous notes can be overwhelming, the intervals jarring, the rhythms insane. It’s challenging you to understand it, and it’s not a matter if you want to, you likely cannot. As with some avant-garde music, repeated listening (if one allows it) can increase comprehension of the ideas, but Nancarrow is never going to be shoving Billy Joel off the piano bench in popularity.



“Punched polyphony in a row” A Nancarrow scroll plays.

 

No, the reason I wrote this to celebrate Nancarrow isn’t because I think you’ll like his music, or even because he’d figure in any Desert Island Discs episode in my future (though through castaway days one might find the time to try to untie all the knotted ideas in a Nancarrow piece). No, it’s because I admire that kind of audacity and perseverance.

I originally wrote music of an acoustic guitar “folk song” sort, even though the poem sought to make use of eccentric meters and a tricky rhyme scheme to reference some of Nancarrow’s ideas. Today’s version has new music I wrote which fits the words better. Using MIDI-controlled pianos, it’s sort of “Nancarrow-lite” musically. To hear my audio piece for “Conlon Nancarrow,”  use the player below.

 

Love Song for a Woman I Do Not Love

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

One joy of this project’s exploration has been coming upon poets I know nothing about and acquiring their words in my bloodless version of that conqueror on the “peak in Darien.” Writing about Frost, Pound, HD and Eliot in England early in the 20th Century lead me to T. E. Hulme, an Englishman of pugnacious artistic pronouncements and surprisingly modest and moving poetry. And T. E. Hulme led me to F. S. Flint, another British writer and literary theorist in this circle in the years just before WWI.

Last month I introduced readers here to Flint’s amazing rise from Victorian poverty. In the interim I’ve been reading more of his work, including his 1920 collection of poems (he called them “cadences”) titled “Otherworld.”  Since Flint is not commonly studied or anthologized, each poem as I encountered in the collection was a fresh experience, no different than reading a new poet’s chapbook published this year. I could start a poem of his in “Otherworld”  about a confused midnight awakening, and come to find it’s a first-hand account of a deadly London air-raid by a German Zeppelin.

Today’s piece, in the same collection, held another surprise. It tells you it’s a Love Song, but contradicts that before the end of the title. What it is instead is an unstinting examination of the corrosion class and gender inflict on the grail of love. The singer of this song lays bare a combination of disgust at how he’s judged as a poor man, with an undisguised desire to own the things he does not have, including this other human being, the woman of the title.

Bright Coloured Cretonnes!

“Bright-coloured cretonnes…” What is the erotic despair of draperies and upholstery?

I can think of dozens of popular songs that deal in some variation of this, but it’s harder to come up with 100-year-old poems, much less ones as good as this one, that talk of this. Ignore a handful of references to the interior decorating trends of Flint’s time, and this poem could have been written yesterday, except few writers of any time would be as acute as Flint is in observing this.

What new poets of the Modernist movement do I get to discover and share with you in the upcoming year? I can’t be sure, but I noted that Flint’s “Otherworld”  is dedicated to Herbert Read, and from what few poems of his I can find online, Read seems just as fresh and fascinating.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Musically I’ve been telling myself I want to utilize some of the methods of hip-hop records, and yet each time I set out to do this, I get side-tracked by my own idiosyncratic musical muse. The melodic top line is my appreciation of early 1960s hard-bop organ playing. The bass part is a combination of a left-hand organ part with electric bass. Two bass lines shouldn’t work, but I think it does here. That’s not the only duality in this: the drum machine beat is augmented by some percussion which keeps the drum machine from ruling the groove “correctly.” The hip-hop rhythm flow eludes me again, though maybe I recall some predecessors like Dr. John the Night Tripper?

To hear my performance of F. S. Flint’s “Love Song to a Woman I Do Not Love,”  use the player below.