Patterns

It’s taken a while, but it’s worth the wait: the Complete Music for Cello & Piano by Morton Feldman, performed by my lovely wife Marilyn Nonken (piano) and the estimable Stephen Marotto (cello), is now out and available for purchase from Mode Records. The centerpiece of the 2-CD set is Feldman’s hypnotic 1981 “Patterns in a Chromatic Field,” but the works range in time from 1946 through 1981, permitting the listener to chart Feldman’s development over nearly thirty-five years of his musical activity.  Recorded at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY, in 2018, it’s beautifully recorded and mastered by producers Jeffrey Means and Brian Brandt and engineers Jeff Svatek and Todd Vos. Nobody who’s interested in 20th-century American music will want to be without it.

The CD is available from Mode Records and a top-quality FLAC download of the album can be found at Bandcamp; it will be released through various streaming services next month.

The end of “Civilisation”?

I might say that I continue to “work through” Kenneth Clark’s 1969 series about the history of Western art, Civilisation — I’ve pointed to Clark here and there in the recent past — but “work” is the wrong word. The series is more an extended pleasure, and alas I have just a few more episodes to go. Fortunately, the version available on Britbox has restored the original 35mm film, so the pleasure is unencumbered by faded color or annoying scratches.

Civilisation maintains its fan base — I’ve heard from someone who expresses similar enthusiasm for it, which I must admit cheered me up quite a bit — but to some the presentation is dated. I have to disagree; maybe the best thing about the program is that, to my mind, it hasn’t dated at all. Apparently the BBC came to the conclusion that it was time for an update, and in 2018 released Civilisations (note the plural), a nine-episode do-over hosted not by a single person (therefore the subtitle to the Clark series, “A Personal View”), but by three — Simon Schama, Mary Beard, and David Olusoga — and when it was released in the United States by PBS, narration by Liev Schreiber was added as well. Although I haven’t seen the 2018 series yet, I fear that it may be even more dated than Clark’s, driven as it were by a need to dismiss Clark’s emphasis on the “great man” and “genius” approach to art and a similar need to dress up the history of art in classist social criticism. At the time, Andrew Ferguson contributed a wry comparison of the two series for The Weekly Standard; you can find it here, and it makes interesting reading. (It may take a while to load;  you’ve been warned.)

No surprise

It comes as no surprise to me that Yulia Navalnaya took no time at all to become a prominent and courageous dissenting voice following her husband’s death. Back in June of last year, I noted the central role of women in fighting for liberal democracy against the Putin regime, both on the front lines and on the home front.

I also want to note the arrest earlier today of a female U.S. citizen in Yekaterinburg for donating $50.00 to Razom, the Russian government charging her with “treason for sending just over $50 to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based nonprofit organization that sends assistance to the country,” according to this New York Times report. You know what to do — but I wouldn’t travel to Russia anytime soon.

Making the recent rounds of social media is the below TED presentation about Ukraine and democracy from Ukrainian historian Olesya Khromeychuk, who last November succinctly (in classic TED Talk form) “[shared] three lessons anybody can use to join the global fight for democracy.” Dr. Khromeychuk is currently the Director of the Ukrainian Institute London and the author of the fine wartime memoir The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister, about which Simon Sebag Montefiore said: “Heartbreaking, agonizing, poetical and unforgettable. An immediate history of a cruel war and a personal chronicle of unbearable loss, beautifully and vividly told by a superb historian and elegant writer in a work that brings every death in Ukraine alive with transcendent grief and love.” No argument from me; you should read it yourself.

 

 

In the wake of a murder

I’m not given to audible gasps of shock, but I gasped when I read the news last Friday morning about Alexei Navalny’s death. The news should not have come as a surprise given the terrors of the Putin regime and its reaction to Navalny’s role as a dissident, but I was not emotionally or intellectually prepared for it. Until then, Navalny had seemed almost indestructible, a symbol of the human capacity to fight for justice and liberty. Of course he was never indestructible. None of us are. But such deaths can undermine the hope for meaningful political change, a hope that he and his supporters personified. And so I was stunned. (So was my daughter, who had written a report on Navalny as a middle-school assignment; she was devastated by the news when she saw it on social media.)

Navalny was murdered at a time in which the West’s attitude towards Putin’s Russia and the War in Ukraine had become profoundly ambivalent. The Kremlin’s increasing hostility to the needs and integrity of its own people had come to seem an internal matter; Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin of only a few weeks ago generated little news or attention, and Donald Trump’s facile refusal to commit American support to NATO in the aftermath of hypothetical Russian invasions of other independent European countries appeared to reflect the sympathies of his isolationist base. Similarly, the second anniversary of Russia’s redoubled incursion into Ukrainian territory approached with American aid stalled in Congress and setbacks on the military front. Words like “fatigue” began to appear more frequently in the media — combat fatigue, compassion fatigue. The War in Gaza, because it’s more recent and has led to more controversial and violent protests domestically, received more attention. Military strategists often consider the difficulty of fighting a war on two or more fronts, or fighting two wars at the same time. It seems that American public discourse when it comes to foreign wars finds it difficult to focus on even one.

Both the internal crisis of Russia and the War in Ukraine have generated similar ambivalence; for some time it has seemed difficult to consider them together as part of the same threat to the West. There are good reasons for this. Historically, Central Europe was the home to the Holocaust, the Holodomor, and often virulent antisemitism, a history that still remains within the living experience of its victims, and those who participated in those horrors, and their children, still live and work in the region. Navalny’s early career as a Russian opposition leader flirted with racist nationalism and Islamophobia, trying to find common ground with far-right parties in an attempt to create a larger opposition coalition. Many have not forgotten nor forgiven him for this despite the evolution of his views towards a more liberal, inclusionist philosophy in recent years, especially after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine (incidentally the homeland of Navalny’s father; Navalny spent many summers there as a child). And despite Zelensky’s Jewish background and the contemporary status of Ukraine as a multiethnic and polyglot culture, the collaboration of a significant number of Ukrainians with the Nazi regime in the Second World War has similarly left many Americans cautious of support. This is not to mention continuing significant corruption in both countries, rendering international financial support an endeavor of dubious wisdom to some.

These are ugly facts, and they are facts — there’s no denying any of them. But to respond to them with bad-faith cynicism about the ability of individuals and cultures to meaningfully come to terms with their pasts and develop into more humanist, inclusive societies is a grotesque abandonment of our responsibilities as world citizens. Responsible individuals and governments acknowledge and condemn the missteps and evils of their pasts; authoritarian nationalists do not. (Indeed, Vienna’s Burgtheater has just revived Thomas Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz — a far more searing look at the history of the Holocaust and its contemporary significance than Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt — which does exactly that.)

In the past few weeks I’ve written here quite a bit about civilization, specifically European civilization, and this civilization eventually developed into the background against which Western liberalism emerged. It is this Western liberalism that is at risk from the encroachment of nationalist authoritarians like Putin, Orban, Netanyahu, and Donald Trump (nationalist authoritarianism being the ugly flip side of genuine patriotism). Despite the beliefs of “Hey hey ho ho, Western culture’s got to go” progressives in the West, Western culture and liberalism — a liberalism based in 19th-century conceptions of the integrity of the individual conscience and the obligation to ameliorate the worst of a society’s ills as a primary responsibility of the government — did not invent racism or slavery; indeed that liberalism has led us to recognize them as the evils they are, and to do something about them. That it did not completely do so, and that it may never be finished doing so — that Western liberalism has not been able to entirely eradicate racism, slavery, antisemitism, or poverty — is only to confirm the observation of Immanuel Kant, one of the fathers of Western liberalism, that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” Paradise is for the dead; we among the living are not granted citizenship in it.

So what does all of this have to do with Navalny and Ukraine? Well, everything, really. Western culture is situated in Europe, and it is this Europe that Putin seeks to destroy, that Trump and MAGA Republicans seek to abandon — and whether we like it or not, like the woman getting a manicure in the old Palmolive ads, American culture has been soaking in European culture from the beginning.

This morning, Alexei Navalny’s wife, Yulia, released the below video (with English subtitles), urging that with Navalny’s death we must redouble our efforts to defend those things that are most important to us; that the cause that Ukraine and Navalny represent is the noblest of causes, and that we must do the best we can to silence the bad-faith cynicism within ourselves that might be an understandable response to such crushing events as Navalny’s murder and Ukraine’s dire military predicament. As a first step you might consider a donation to Razom, the US-based Ukraine support group, or to Navalny’s own Anti-Corruption Foundation. As I say, only a first step. But as the road seems to be getting longer with every day, the journey doesn’t begin until that step is taken.

 

A toast to …

Cafe Katja.

This afternoon at Cafe Katja I’ll be raising a glass to … well, myself, for a busy week here at the blog. Apart from encouraging you to donate to radio klassik Stephansdom in Vienna, I offered a few notes from Kenneth Clark on civilization and opera, spent a few minutes looking at the triumph of wisdom, and pointed your attention towards a new Klimt exhibition opening next week at the Neue Galerie here in New York.

But I’ll also be raising a glass to Seiji Ozawa, who today stepped down from this earthly podium at the age of 88. Gramophone has a gossip-free overview of Ozawa’s career here, and the Vienna Philharmonic, of which Ozawa was an honorary member, remembers him here.