Ashbery's Something Close to Music
[Music playlists included.] Poetry, art, and music all a seesaw together...
Truth be told, 24 hours ago there wasn’t a letter on this posthumous Ashbery release on the docket.
But the death of Wayne Shorter—who along with being a jazz legend had also composed classical pieces and an opera—moved me suddenly to take a second look over Something Close to Music, after a first readthrough last year.
Ashbery had fruitful gigs as an art critic, and otherwise as a set of journalistic eyes in the New York and Paris art scenes of the 50s and 60s. And he continued to write about, and collaborate with, painters, photographers, and sculptors throughout his career. In this book, poetry, art (with ekphrasis of course being literature that talks about art), and music intermesh: the reader gets a sampling of poems and art writing from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, along with the music he was listening to at the same period.
Last year I had collected as many of the listed recordings as I could (they don’t all exist on Spotify) and arranged them in playlists, which you can publicly access below the section break!
The late poems—all ekphrastic in some way, naturally—in the book are fine to read here. “Uptick” for example is a short lyric that involves a “slightly apprehensive” painting that has to pay attention to “a vision,” which is perhaps the shared essence of poems and pictures:
Therefore poetry dissolves in
brilliant moisture and reads us
to us.
A faint notion. Too many words,
but precious.
The restriction to his post-90s poems does mean that obvious (probably too obvious) choices like “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” aren’t included.
But the opening lines of the latter early poem feel relevant to how Ashbery took concern with art and aesthetics. “So much for self-analysis,” it begins. Indeed, so much for confessionalism in letters, and egotistical identity in the practice of painting—hence the drive of Kelly and Cage to abandon the self and giving things over to so-called random chance.
The speaker addresses someone else as if they share a long history, and these lines could be read as a relationship between writing and painting together in this “poem-painting". The phrase “we were a seesaw” especially speaks to the historical dynamic presented here: paintings illustrating epic poetry, poetry speaking from within the world of the painting.
Ashbery wrote these light but exciting vignettes of a wide array of artists, including Tanguy and Mapplethorpe. The most resonant one for me was on Ellsworth Kelly. Ashbery relates Kelly’s encounter with Cage, personally and aesthetically in their usage of indeterminacy, which occasions some pretty deep thoughts comparing impressionism as practiced in Europe and later in America:
The European works in question are the product of ideas—of a fully seasoned, altruistic infrastructure whose presence can be felt even when it goes momentarily out of focus. With Kelly and Cage the “ordering” principle paradoxically is chance, improvisation—that is, whatever looks right or sounds right at a given moment does so because it has been chosen at random.
I confess a weakness for Kelly’s random spectrum color paintings, which seem to foreshadow raster graphics.
Ashbery can give these artistic personas more of a compelling, novelistic energy than the actual novels he wrote with James Schuyler. Very few lines are given to describing Joe Brainard’s work in the article on that artist, but the man and his world stand out for his enigmas. “Joe seems to have taken extraordinary pains for us not to know about his art.”
Another color figure is the painter and jazz musician Larry Rivers. Through Ashbery’s anecdotes, you get the art critic’s admiration for mavericks who manage to stay above the trendiness of the art scene.
“Occasionally he would gripe that he had painted flags before Jasper had, or soup cans before Andy,” Ashbery writes, “but mostly he ignored the art world and concentrated on making work.” Such work included History of the Russian Revolution: From Marx to Mayakovsky, a panoramic DIY collage-frieze. In color, it’s mostly white, gray, and earthtones—with accents of splotchy red, like blood on snow.
“He’s great on History 101 titles that promise to give you all of Western civilization in return for a few moments of your attention,” wrote Ashbery in 1993.
Of course, a major artist for Ashbery, personally and professionally, was Joan Mitchell, whose abstract expressionist pictures took on mammoth, neoclassical-like sizes. According to him the first of her pieces he’d viewed was Cross Section of a Bridge in the early 50s.
The picture sums up the general mood of the period: “a fierce will to communicate and an equally frantic refusal to make this task any easier for the sender and the receiver of whatever message was being transmitted,” Ashbery writes in his ekphrasis from 1993. “A cross section of a bridge is not going to help anyone get from here to there.”
But the unique highlight of this book is the music component. The classical music and film score records Ashbery was hearing are organized chronologically, by year, and divided into five periods, so the reader can perhaps get a sense of the influence of these recordings—the Austrian high modernists, Cage, Adams, Part, Boulez; but also Schubert and Scarlatti, and plenty more—on the selected poems and articles.
It made for some fascinating listening last fall, and it’s worth playing these tracks while reading the poet’s work from his last two decades.
A consonance with Ashbery’s poetry definitely emerges from the unrepentant dissonance of Webern’s chamber music, and the more cacophonous soundscapes of Elliott Carter’s Concerto.
But the big center of gravity in these playlists is solo piano literature. And Ashbery’s ourve more and more seems reminiscent of that instrument’s color (and not just because of his posthumously published cycle of poems after pianist Carl Czerny’s tutorial The Art of Finger Dexterity). Whether they’re about paintings or dreams or meeting Screwy Squirrel in a bar, Ashbery’s poems all have that unmistakable Ashbery register. His striking imagery has a brilliant-toned effect at first, while diffuse meanings come around the edges later on.
When reading Ashbery we like to slow down and space out, like hearing Satie’s Socrate , and Nikolai Roslavets’ Five Preludes for piano.
But a true gem, and our segue into Ashbery’s playlists, must be Ligeti’s piano etudes:
Ashbery’s Playlists (Spotify):
Playlist I 1988-1990.
Playlist II 1991-1993.
Playlist III 1994-1999.
Playlist IV 2000-2002.
Playlist V 2003-2009.