France Musique is one of my Paris radio stations of choice. Listening to it while in the city, as opposed to from a kitchen or living room in Normandy, has made a surprisingly noticeable change. Now the presenters and their music feel like immediate neighbors who can both delight and irritate me, and most often they end up doing both at once. If it is not the weekend evening jazz host forcing his French accent to sound as American as possible when pronouncing musicians’ names, it is the excessive opera played by the insistently cheery morning announcer, to say nothing of the peculiar fascination with experimental music so characteristic of France that some (no doubt also insistently cheery) programmers decided to slot in at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday nights. Ah, well. Vive la différence, as we say here.
Tonight, however, it is this station that has set my creative racehorses running through the gate, to the sound of a piece that has long had sentimental attachments for me: George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” The piece is being played in its entirety as part of the concert du soir (“evening concert”) broadcast at 8:00 pm on weeknights.
I must have discovered this piece when I was about six-years-old or even younger. How such a work could be so lengthy, and yet still captivate the listener by encompassing so many emotions, astounded me. Being inclined to storytelling from a young age, I picked up on the narratives that woven into the piece. I would imagine that the clarinet glissando in the introduction was a man waking up in the morning, stretching and yawning, or associate the orchestral finale with the shimmering lights of the New York skyline that I would so excitedly look out for when flying in at night.
They harangue me like corrupt preachers expounding on theories they insist are rationally-founded while ensuring that the soapbox beneath their feet will not collapse.
Although I am presently in Montmartre and not in Manhattan, looking out at passersby with tourist umbrellas, joggers on their way to the Sacré Coeur steps and windows of life in the apartment across the street, the rhapsody’s richness remains. Placing the piece in its historical context is equally fascinating. Gershwin, a New Yorker of Russian Jewish descent whose birth name was Jacob Gershwine and whose early childhood was spent in tenements of the Yiddish Theater District, was bringing his stone to the rapidly-growing skyscraper of American music, while honoring jazz, blues and drawing on the harmonic experimentations of his idol, French composer Maurice Ravel. Gershwin perceived jazz as a serious art form — a recognition that has been historically wider in France (specifically, Paris) than in its birthplace, the United States.
Perhaps it was my unsuccessful attempt to keep up with the ebb and flow of the rhapsody’s chords on my piano that prompted me to take my notepad off the shelf and write. In any event, it was as if a skyscraper had sprouted up in my mind, and not acting on it would be letting it falter and crumble. Especially since Parisian skyscrapers are hard to come by — unless you count the glass Gargantua that is the Arch of La Défense, the business district in the North, or the ocular aberration that is the Montparnasse Tower. But I digress.
Seeing this skyscraper grow in my mind and on paper is my own personal way of tearing down old, rotting foundations. Decaying blocks of sediment beneath a skeleton of shaky steel welded together by worry. Other, more accomplished writers have had words for this. Charles Baudelaire termed it “the spleen” and Winston Churchill nicknamed it his “black dog.” Both sought respite from whatever they called it through writing, salvaging the good steel on paper even when their surroundings were dire. So at least I know I am not the first when I say that these “poor foundations,” which one could call “the Devil,” underscore my thoughts and lead me to think absurdly, breaking mental windows and letting the rain in, plunging the upbeat rhythms of a piece like Gershwin’s “American in Paris” into the mournful depths of Chopin’s “Funeral March.” They harangue me like corrupt preachers expounding on theories they insist are rationally-founded while ensuring that the soapbox beneath their feet will not collapse.
But I have one thing these preachers, these phony builders, do not know: a real skyscraper, that glistens with the melodies of my words, fearlessly reaching upward. I will let you speak but I will not let you act. I will make this building sail, prettier than the Montparnasse Tower, as majestic as the 174 steps leading up to ground level in my metro station, solid as the Pequot in “Moby Dick.” Saying that nothing will stop it is wrong; yet, saying that it will let itself falter too easily is not right either. Of course, vines will grow up its walls, but they will not choke anything but themselves. Snakes too will slither up, but as far as my building is concerned, they can drink their own poison and fall back to being a few poorly-played notes in an otherwise harmonious symphony.
Snakes too will slither up, but as far as my building is concerned, they can drink their own poison and fall back to being a few poorly-played notes in an otherwise harmonious symphony.
When I went to Mass at Sacré Coeur a few days ago and knelt in front of the altar after presentation of the Blessed Sacrament — its adoration after every Mass has been a tradition at the basilica for over 150 years — I prayed that God give back my older self, the one who did not wake up with the bark of the black dog, the wrenching self-pity of the spleen or the clatter of poorly-made steel. I am not certain whether the answer I got was clear or riddled with static. Still, I cannot help but feel that some people do want to see me elevated, like the clarinet glissando lifts the listener up to a resounding B flat. Slowly constructing this skyscraper has made me realize that writing is the clarinet of the heart, taking our dispersed notes to other heights, helping us craft them into a new shape however we see fit. And if it is not to our liking, no matter. Either stick with it — which one has to do in music — or rub out the word and begin again.
Now the music has changed. The workmen have put down their machines and wiped the sweat from their brow. The clarinet is put away in its case, and the rhapsody will continue to drip out of my apartment window, unhindered by the thinness of the closed curtains or the metal of the small balcony.
