Closing Night: Wireworks
Saturday, June 21; 7:00PM
Ty Bouque
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Tonight—our last night—I want to linger with the presence that has so patiently haunted these last two weeks. Ruth Adler Schnee was a marvel, an inventor of patterns who wielded her pen with a freedom and intuition few textile artists dream of achieving. A work of hers pulsates with that inscrutable logic of inner life by which organisms make fibonacci patterns out of instinct: nature herself organizes in dizzying shapes at Adler Schnee’s command.
The story goes that Adler Schnee, who began her academic life as an architect under Walter Gropius at Harvard in the ‘40s, won the Chicago Tribune’s Design for Better Living competition, whose prompt was to imagine a modern home. Adler Schnee’s contribution—a box of glass and steel—necessarily demanded curtains to provide any source of privacy for the poor residents. She dashed out a pattern, something improvised and hurried and absolutely instinctive—only for an architectural firm to reach out and ask about
purchasing those lovely and strange curtains. Only they didn’t exist. So she got to work learning how, and spent the rest of her career printing, weaving, stitching, and sketching all manner of her geometric proliferations.
Wireworks was an extensive series of furnishing fabrics produced in Detroit during the early ‘50s, one of Adler Schnee’s many ongoing collections (among them Construction, orange and green grids gone wild, and Seedy Weeds, decked out with bulbous little shoots). Wireworks took their impetus from a visit to Alexander Calder’s house, where Adler Schnee spotted his collection of fireplace tools—all manner of strange prongs and shovels and pincers—asleep on the mantle. The textile is the place where they come alive, writhing and zigzagging, spreading out in all directions peppered by little dots that almost look like eyes. But their repetitions—and this is Adler Schnee’s gift everywhere—are imperfect, what the composer Morton Feldman calls “crippled” symmetry: iterative without feeling redundant. (Good wallpaper works this way too.)
So tonight, in Brahms and Fauré, we’ll listen at the cellular level to what spreads out its prongs and small eyes in imperfect repetitions across time. The Fauré quartet—his second and mature attempt at the instrumentation, though today less often played than the first—is erected on a series of sinuous building blocks. The most obvious of them appear in the third movement, where figures follow in endless sequence, but it’s true everywhere else: Fauré is a microscopic composer, and the logic of the Piano Quartet follows suit. In the way that two off-kilter square spirals in Wireworks are the same but different every time, small differences in sameness begin to vibrate with their own invisible coherence.
The Brahms Two Songs for Voice,, Viola and Piano, meanwhile, trade not in the minutiae of Adler Schnee’s figures—Brahms is, after all, a composer of long line and lurid harmonic sequence—but rather in the very fabric of her textiles. These are knitted songs, woven with impossibly fine strings of melody and light and hand-stitched to retain a kind of natural elasticity. Adler Schnee preferred linen for the Wireworks, cream and a hunter green whose softness refuses to announce itself but instead invites the viewer closer, closer, until your face is pressed to its soft side. The endless weaving of threads in the Brahms—famously of two separate melodies between viola and voice (cream and hunter green?) in the first song—retains a cloth’s integrity, soft and light and whole.
Coda
For all that the Bernstein tonight is recognizable, and pleasurable, and joyous—is there a better way to set a night adrift?—I don’t want us to let slack the bargain of geometry, even at this eleventh hour. The ubiquity of West Side Story has caused the intricacy of its interior logic to go too often overlooked: it is fun, yes, but no less rigorous despite. It proposes—on a cellular, musical level—a singular interpretation of Romeo and Juliet (whose story gives that musical its scaffold) that one can only read by attending to its purely musical thought.
Much critical ink has been spilled debating the power imbalances, gender roles, and social forces that give one or another of the Capulets and Montagues the upper bargaining hand: essentially, criticism has preferred to look for external factors that lead to double death. Julia Reinhardt Lupton, however, in her work on virtue in Shakespeare, has centered the role of dignity (of which two houses are both alike) in that play, tracing the story’s ethical stakes through the generous means by which the titular couple freely recognize each other as fundamentally and devastatingly human, outside the structures of family and society. They offer, in other words, a dignified equality—one that will flow out in all directions with their blood at the end of the play.
Bernstein’s reading—on a microscopic musical level—echoes the same. The entirety of the score—and I do mean the entirety, everything from the overture to “Maria,” from “Cool” to “Something’s Coming”—is wagered on a single interval. The tritone, notorious for splitting (disharmoniously!) the octave into perfect halves, is this music’s basic building block. (Music schools today teach it as the “Maria” interval, so ubiquitous is the association.) The struggle to configure a new musical world from the dissonance of the tritone’s dignified halfness gives West Side Story its curious form—though one must wait for the end to see just how.
The final chords—despite musicology’s many attempts to construe them as tragedy’s unresolved failure to reach wholeness—bring two hours of composition to their conclusion. And still, the tritone remains, finally as grounding bass, reconfigured at last from what has felt like the anticipation of resolve (“Ma-RI-a”) to the serenity of resolve itself. The equalizing tritone is no longer a thorn in this socio-musical world: it is its benevolent law. The love of Tony and Maria is predicated on dignified equality, and the entirety of Bernstein’s score is spent bringing that socially disharmonious equality (the tritone, famously the most dissonant of intervals) into musical coherence. That Tony must die for its fulfillment is, then, the product of form’s inevitable reconciliation. Blueprints, as we said on that very first night, always contain the ruin of their design inside.
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What a miracle it has all been to behold: how singular, geometric decisions rush their boundaries to scaffold a world, abstract diagrams alighting into meaning and dignity and hope. Ab uno disce omnes.