today’s audio is my version of mozart’s “funeral march in C minor”. i thought it would be fun to download the sheetmusic to a piece i’d never heard or played before, and see what i could reconstruct in my computer. i played everything myself via my keyboard, except for the little clicks and clacks, which i sampled, processed, and chopped up from my friend mark alan miller’s industrial project “out out”.
a few years ago, i was working on a musical that involved whales, and so i was collecting clicks to compose to. the musical never panned out, but i have tons of these little whale tracks sitting around. they’re nice with the mozart, right?
i recently succumbed to the inevitable: i watched tar, the todd field movie about a famous, fictional conductor, played by cate blanchett. i held out as long as i could. i had hear the movie was boring, which it is. i had heard it was problematic, which it is. i had heard the ending was inscrutable, which it is.
but i do love cate blanchett. i avidly follow dyke blanchett, the instagram account that posts pictures of blanchett in suits and doing and saying vaguely non-binary, queer-adjacent things. i love blanchett’s face on film. she is a strange alien with obvious mastery of the mystery that is acting.
i got about halfway through the movie in my first sitting, and i doubted i would finish it. the two news pegs to the movie, what supposedly made it so necessary to watch and culturally relevant, were the fact that it deals with a modern infrequency, the female conductor, and a favorite modern punching bag, cancel culture. blanchett’s lydia tar is cleary shown to be a genius at conducting, which is a hard skill to depict, more on that later. but she is also apparently, a sexual predator or at the very least a bad boss. we’re never quite sure. she loses her job for her behaviour, in an echo of many contemporary stories, and we’re supposed to ask the questions - is this fair? can you separate the art from the artist?
the thing is - i know many female conductors. they are more than capable; they are not tokens; they are both remarkable and unremarkable. the fact that lydia tar is a woman in the rarefied world of classical music conducting neither interests me nor inspires me. and then there’s the supposed thorny questions the movie raises about “cancel culture”. i hate that phrase. it’s actually a tool of conservatives, like the phrase “politically correct”. in my opinion, neither phrase describes what it purports to. instead, they sneakily express a pejorative, divisive opinion about something basic and human.
“politically correct” is just a bad way to refer to the practice of considering your audience when you speak. and being careful to listen when you are not speaking. and “cancel culture” is a poor way to describe people facing consequences for their actions. you are not owed the conductorship of a major philharmonic! you have lost that privilege.
but erin, what if lydia tar didn’t do the things she was accused of? spare me! just like the famous description of porn, we know something fishy when we see it. or smell it. lydia, you are welcome to practice your craft somewhere else where you have less access to power and resources. but calling her “canceled”? that’s a red-herring. we cancel stamps, we cancel checks, we cancel TV shows. if we could cancel movies, we should.
so, given this, why did i finish watching tar, beyond the chance to see blanchett be luminous and upset, luminous and loving, luminous and petty? i have a very poor character trait of needing to finish things i start.
so i finished the movie. i was, like most folks, confused about the ending. then i read an article that made me think the ending was more interesting in retrospect than when i was watching it. this kind of revision in my experience tickled me. and ultimately made me glad i watched the movie. if only to slag it and have something to talk about as the oscars aired last week.
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thanks for listening!
some have said that tar is a psychological thriller, or a mystery, or a dream sequence. but to me, it’s actually another in a long line of horror films. the horror is not gore, suspense, monsters or aliens, it’s the horror i feel watching the experience of writing and playing music be depicted on film or TV.
i suppose it’s obvious why i feel especially sensitive about this. but i think humans long to be understood, to have our experiences validated by others who haven’t had the same lives. the way being a musician is generally depicted in film and TV is so unreal that it makes it seem like we’ll never bridge this gap of understanding.
it begins with the supposed magic of the impulse to write. a character gets a far away look in their eye, they stare at the ceiling, they grasp their head suddenly, or say “i’ve got it”. this is supposed to signal the arrival of an idea or inspiration.
in reality, you probably can’t tell from my face when i get an idea. because i don’t always know that the sudden thought i am having or bit of music i hear in my brain is anything special. and i am almost never sitting at a piano, staring at the ceiling waiting for an idea. i am usually walking, driving, cooking, listening to someone else talk about something unrelated.
when it’s time to do something with the idea, it also doesn’t look like it does in the movies or TV. bringing an idea into musical fruition takes either endless repetition or comes together instantly, neither of which i grant make for something anyone would want to watch. movies and TV try to thread this needle, but the result is deeply unreal. i can’t quite describe it, but it’s like someone approaches you. they look vaguely like your parents and proceed to act as such, but you’ve never seen them before. it’s something you are supposed to recognize because it’s familiar, but it’s not-quite-ness leaves you cold and distanced.
the same experience goes for the other bits of music life that are often shown. recording in a studio, playing a performance. all of it takes way longer than you see. all of it is way more mundane and tedious.
interestingly, i think one thing visual stories about being a musician get right is the awfulness of being on the road. for some reason, movies are really good at depicting that bleakness and exhaustion punctuated by moments of ecstasy.
but i don’t want to be entirely pessimistic about this topic. i have seen a few things that i felt really got it right, or got a lot closer to my own experience. in this year’s oscar contenders, i thought “the banshees of inisherin” did an amazing job of capturing the pathologic, sometimes self-harming, drive to make something outside yourself, to express and leave a legacy via art.
i think the film version of “hedwig and the angry inch” resonates with the familiar weirdness of a fame-adjacent, working musician. the parking lot scene in the new “a star is born”, where lady gaga sings to bradley cooper as though she is just talking softly and they start to make “their” song, that felt almost plausible.
by far my favorite scene of music creation, one i continually reference to this day, comes from “amadeus”, the 1984 biopic of mozart. i remember seeing this when it came out and finding it terrifying but also compelling. on later watchings, there is a particular scene that stands out time and time again.
this is how i remember it:
young, disheveled, genius, deadline-flouting mozart is in his apartment, rushing to finish writing some piece of music or other. like all successful young men, he has outfitted his rooms with a big pool table, or whatever it was called in 18th century vienna. he is sprawled across its felt surface. manuscript paper covered with his scrawlings is strewn everywhere, like pillows full of sheet music have just exploded in a pillow fight.
with his right hand, mozart is writing music, maybe singing to himself, maybe talking out loud. but his left hand is flicking a pool ball. flick. the ball outlines a big diamond, softly hitting all four edges of the table before coming back to rest in his left hand. flick. he does it again. again the ball comes back. his right hand does not stop moving. he never stops composing, and he never stops flicking.
this is what making music is like. you have to trick your mind into thinking you’re doing something else. you have to occupy your internal editor with something repetitive and mundane, like walking or cooking or flicking, so that you stay out of your own goddamn way. and you can’t stop. you have to be composing all the time, whether you want to be or not. whether you are writing it down or not, the engine, the motor is always running just below your consciousness. what mozart was doing in that scene was externalizing the internal experience of being a writer.
TV and movies fall into some basic categories: there are a lot of police shows. a lot of lawyer shows. plenty of cooking movies. firefighting epics. medical dramas. if you have any one of those vocations, do you feel the same way as i do about music movies and TV? do you feel that same weird sense of alienation? they look like your parents, but they aren’t. i think the fancy word is simulacrum. but in a practical sense, where have you seen something you do reflected well in culture? not something you felt, but the actual mechanics of a career?
is “the bear” an accurate depiction of what it’s like to work in a kitchen? does “moneyball” show what it’s like to be a baseball executive? chefs and GMs weigh in!
x erin
ps - your requisite carl content
carl is thinking about joining grindr. but before he does, he needs get this sorted out:
mister marx paid the price for his curiousity 🦔 (i know thats a hedghog, but where’s the porcupine emoji??)
¡ME GUSTA! : SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS!
seriously, are you looking to hire a woman or non-binary person to conduct, music direct, orchestrate or contract your band? click here for a radical, very useful, database of professional people with those skills.
i did not see “the whale” because… this.
i did see “the woman king” and i am very glad i did. the stunts!!!
not for the squeamish, but this is an incredible podcast about a mobile sheep shearer and butcher in rural vermont. mary lake is a badass!!!
i am old enough to remember “crazy eddie” and his TV commercials, and the SNL parodies of them. the real story is even more bonkers.
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