3. Lean

“My criteria was to only write songs I couldn’t live without [...] It felt like a relief, like I could sleep for a whole day after I’d made a song.” 

-- Oh Land

I don't know if it counts as a trip, but Oh Land's music takes me outside myself. The transcendent  "Lean" features the Nightingale String Quartet, who provide rich and unusual diminished harmonies to Oh Land's ethereal voice. The cellist is incredible. I haven't heard that kind of control in years. Most songs I like tend to start quiet and then escalate. (The "start from nothing" melodies feel alchemical. And I need time to get used to a song.)

The swelling consists of a series of loud notes accompanied by insistent vibrato. The effect is electric. Just like Oland herself; she appears fragile but moves like current. 

The song begins with a series of resonant questions:

Did you really carry me when I was asleep
Did you try to defend me when I was weak
Did you pick me up that lonely night
when the lights died out
and it turned to the gray side 

Her uncertainty swells with the music. But these dark triads that resolve into tiny, major-key harmonic victories as she tells us to lean on her ("Now you're out on the bottomless sea/so it's time for you to lean on me") It's a moving plea -- statement -- command? given to a former protector.

Now that I'm out on the bottomless sea, whom can I lean on? Her music puts me out into the foam, but I'm okay as long as I can lean on the music.

But like her work, it's important to listen twice: once for the lyrics and the second for the weightless melody. For her, it's about the musicality; the words are just conduits for that effort.

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Jowigee1 via travelpod

I romanticize string quartets.

Last winter, my father and I snuck into a (free) performance by the Orion String Quartet at Mannes. We sat in the back, behind the bored women who liked to fidget with their bracelets and wrists. The sound of rocks and skin didn't stop throughout. It's odd how a performance can transform a stage, since I have performed on that same stage a dozen times as a child and as a teenager. Just being there frayed my nerves a little bit. My father put his foot down -- hard -- on mine, to stop the shaking.

He asked me what was wrong.

"I feel like I'll have to play," I said. My father rolled his eyes and told me that I was too old for others to force me to perform anything.

Oland is one of those rare artists who doesn't make me nervous. Her artistry is deceptively simple. I can ignore her effort because she doesn't display any. The Orion Quartet, too, had that quality. After the musicians ascended the stage, they tuned and contemplated the manic audience in silence.

I was only months away from my last disastrous performance on stage. Music hadn't been a soothing factor for me in a long while. My father hadn't realized this when he asked me to go with him. It was a casual invitation, but for me it was nervewracking. I only remember my hands, suspended in the air over a keyboard, blocked into an impossible Liszt finger-twister and unable to proceed.

"I don't get it," he said, finally, "I thought you liked concerts."

I decided to take notes. My notebook was there, anyway, denting my pelvis. My shaking hand grew confident the more I wrote. I can never throw myself fully into a performance. I am always distant, detached, intellectual. Always seeking meaning but never living it.

And this is what I wrote:

I don't need my program to tell me that the Orion String Quartet is "one of the most sought after ensembles in the United States". They're a bunch of investment bankers turned superheroes. The hero bursts from his suit the moment Orion takes out the Stradivariuses (:ii?) and what-have-yous.

For example: The violist's instrument is from 1560. 15-60. No, I can't believe it, either. Pieces like these belong in museums and not in the hands of mortals.

First, there's the Op 18 no 5 String Quartet by Beethoven. The third movement's an extended string of exquisiteness. Beethoven wrote fast sections and slow sections by turn, and though the movement is classified as Andante Cantibale it's rich and varied. The players themselves are outstanding. The whole quartet was a sheer pleasure both in terms of composition and performance. The Allegros, both beginning and end, bookend a neat sense of continuity.

I have to buy a recording of this and play the third movement at full volume, non-stop, until I sink into my figurative mattress of infinite softness and die a happy death.

Have you ever felt a sense of musical deja-vu? Of all composers I think I felt it just now, with Schoenberg. There is this violently atonal piece of his with piano/string quartet called 'the Kammersymphonie' . Its beginning is a jarring explosion of sound with a bizarre resolution to a sonorous major third. When that happened I knew I heard that very cloud of cacophony before. of course anything that came after it remains completely new to me. Schoenberg reminds me of my brother. The music has all the trappings of coherence; the music is emotional, with stirring legatos and an undeniable sense of virtuosic urgency. But the notes themselves! It's an exquisite madlib, a Eschereque descent into purgatory. Here the cello carries the melodic weight with the piano's capable pounding as accompaniment. The violins/viola serve to make the song sound one shallow step from the greatest freakshow ever. The 1st violin just had a sparring match with the piano. Now they're sailing a patchwork balloon into atonal heaven.

Even when the music was atonal, even abstract melodies and music that provides the illusion of harmony satisfy me. But it gets more difficult on a percussive instrument like the piano.

I put the notebook away and left feeling cleansed. I prefer to enjoy concerts rather than fearing performances.

*

Oh Land, short for Nanna Oland Fabricius, is a Danish singer/dancer and the daughter of an opera singer and an organist. Her performances are emotional, intense and almost as captivating to watch as they are to hear. Oh Land, her self-titled album, is her second studio release.