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Object Lesson
The Manuscript Found in a Closet
January/February 2007
Vivian Perlis, founding director of
Yale’s Oral History American Music project, and Libby van Cleve, the project's
associate director, are the authors of Composers' Voices from Ives to
Ellington.
The brilliant and quirky composer
Charles Ives, who graduated from Yale College in 1898, is widely considered the
father of American experimental music. Here you see details from the first
movement of his Three Places in New England, a three-part set for orchestra
that premiered in 1931. This manuscript, long believed lost, was recovered as
the result of an interview for Yale’s oral history project on American music.
Many Ives works exist only as
sketches or in barely finished condition. In this original ink score, one can
see penciled additions and modifications, such as the crossed-out figure at
left. (Editors have described working with Ives manuscripts as “excavations.”)
Ives often wrote colorful and revealing remarks in his manuscripts; a wry
comment (below) underneath a complicated musical passage reads: “Franklin
Carter Esq asked me to whistle this measure—no smile.”
The first movement of Three
Places in New England is called “The 'St. Gaudens' in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored
Regiment)” and was listed in the catalog of Ives scores as “lost.” But in 1969,
Vivian Perlis initiated a series of interviews with people who had known and
worked with Ives, including Goddard Lieberson, then-president of Columbia
Records and an early admirer of Ives. In the course of the conversation,
Lieberson mentioned that Ives had given him a manuscript. Perlis said, “Oh no.
It must be a photostat.” But Lieberson insisted. He got up, and he found it in
a storage closet.
Ives’s innovative compositions often
incorporated well-known tunes from hymns, parlor songs, ragtime pieces, and
patriotic odes into dense multilayered textures. He was also one of the first
to use highly dissonant harmonies. Early on, Ives realized that his unusual
works were not likely to meet with commercial success. Thus he pursued a career
in the insurance business and composed music nights and weekends; he was known
to say that he didn’t want his wife and children to starve on his dissonances.
But he was careful to protect those dissonances from would-be correctors. Ives
left this admonition in the margins of the score for The Fourth of July: “Please don’t try to make things
nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have—I want it that
way.”
One Actor, Forty Characters
Brian Seibert '97 is a freelance
writer for the New Yorker and other publications.
Within the first minute of the
one-man play Emergence-SEE, it becomes clear that the main character, Rodney, has a
big problem on his hands. A 30-year-old spoken-word poet, he’s on his way to
compete for the title of grand slam champion when he learns that his father—who
has been hearing voices ever since Rodney’s mother was murdered a few years
back—has run off.
Finding him is easy enough, yet that's
not nearly the end of Rodney’s troubles. For his father has climbed aboard a
400-year-old slave ship that has inexplicably surfaced near the Statue of
Liberty. Symbol alert: the ship is called Remembrance. Rodney and his father are African
American.
So is the play’s author and star,
Daniel Beaty '98. In a 90-minute show that recently had an extended run at New
York’s Public Theater, he inhabits 39 other characters, also African American
or African, as they respond to the slave ship’s reappearance. These characters
range widely across age, gender, sexual orientation, and class. And yet that
diversity is wound around an autobiographical core.
There is, for example, the poetry
contest that Beaty—himself a 30-year-old former grand slam champion of
the Nuyorican Poets Cafe—has put at the center of his play. And the poem
that one of the contestants, an Ivy League graduate, recites about the battle
within him between the Nerd and the Nigger. The Nerd accuses the Nigger of
feeling nothing but rage; the Nigger accuses the Nerd of acting removed,
denying his roots: “Yo' daddy still smoke heroin/ Yo' brother still on crack/
Ghetto nightmares still haunt your dreams/ And yo' mama is still black.”
All of that is true of Beaty, who
was raised by his mother in a poor section of Dayton, Ohio. For much of his
childhood, his heroin-addicted father was in prison. After graduating from
Yale, Beaty earned a master’s degree from the American Conservatory Theater.
Only later, he says, when he was teaching in Harlem, did he feel his own
duality, the distancing of a college education. His desire to connect with
young people led him to the slam-poetry world. There, he says, “I knew I was
different. Everyone knew I was different. But I was warmly embraced.”
Much of his play poured out of him
in a single day after he attended an empowerment seminar that emphasizes taking
responsibility for your life. “I chose the solo form because I lacked
resources, but also because it drew on my talents as an actor.”
Those talents are readily apparent
in Emergence-SEE as Beaty shifts smoothly between characters. He manages the technical feat of
defining the characters clearly and then keeping them clear, even as they carry
on a three-way dialogue.
The message of Emergence-SEE is partly in its form—that
the African American community has many voices. But the play is also quite
explicitly about turning pain into power. It’s a message that’s resonated with
many: there’s been talk of moving the show to Broadway.
As for Rodney, he makes it to the
poetry contest. His father tells him to “come home to the truth of who you are,”
and the slave ship disappears. His poem, about constructing the pieces of his
manhood before a crumbling model, resolves upliftingly, as do all of Beaty's
stories. “If I didn’t choose an angle of positivity and hope,” he says, “I’d be
very depressed.”
“What I am supposed to do with the
anger?” asks one of his characters. Well, you could write a play.
Avant-Book
Anthony Weiss '02 works and writes in New York City.
Only Revolutions, the second novel by Mark
Danielewski '88, and a National Book Award finalist, is intimidating. The book
is written with its two separate story lines—the stories of Sam and
Hailey, 16-year-old lovers—printed upside down from each other on each
page, running in opposite directions. The end of Hailey’s story is the beginning of Sam’s story, and vice
versa. (The inside flap offers the following advice: “The publisher suggests
alternating between Hailey & Sam, reading eight pages at a time.” In other
words, flip the book upside down every eight pages.) The text itself is written
in a sort of prose poetry, packed with neologisms (“Everything. Everyway.
Exvious./Hoofing flammatory over ice/shackled meadows and
melting/Mountainstacked pebbles. Mine.”) and devoid of a clear narrator.
Meanwhile, running alongside the two story lines is a series of side notes that
catalogue 200 years of history (or technically, 143 years of history and 57
years of future), in terse, cryptic statements (“Abeid Karume & US ties.”).
Plus, the letter “o” is always in color, and some of the pages have a black dot
in the corner, and … well, you get the picture.
The award nomination confers public
status on Danielewski, but he has had a devoted following—some might say
a cult following—since 2000, when he published House of Leaves, his first book. House of Leaves is a literary labyrinth of a horror
story, with stories inside of stories, footnotes, multiple narrators,
multi-colored text, upside-down text, backwards text, appendices, and even an
index. Dense as it was, House of Leaves found a commercial audience that embraced it. And it
in no way hurt Danielewski’s cultural cachet that he and his indie-rocker
sister, Poe (born Anne Decatur Danielewski), promptly embarked on a book and
concert tour.
The best place to understand the
Danielewski fan base is the forums that Danielewski has sponsored on the book's
website. Danielewski’s books are filled with elaborate puzzles, and he has
acquired a devoted following of fans who devote tremendous effort to unpacking
these puzzles, attempting to penetrate to the heart of his mazes. On the
forums, they offer each other theories. Why is the “o” colored? “Directing us,
perhaps, in the direction of one kind of meaning for 'revolution' over other
possibilities.” Why is the book’s layout so baroque? “MZD is deeply committed
to an older notion of text, one which values not merely the deft use of words
but, as well, their presentation: that is, the container they come in.” What's
the easiest way to read Only Revolution? (Too many answers to list.)
Katherine Hayles, an English
professor at UCLA who teaches a course in experimental fiction, says that
esoteric novels periodically become social phenomena. Much the same thing
happened in the 1970s around Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon, which became a
popular topic of conversation at cocktail parties. “Someone would quote a
phrase from the book, and two of the five people in the group would smile
knowingly,” says Hayles.
Danielewski sees the forums as a
natural extension of the cell phones and e-mails that have come to dominate
modern communication. “For people who spend a great deal of time with books,
reading, and writing,” he says, “it’s a type of socializing that can be more
effectively integrated into their routine.”
In a sense, these forums are salons
for the Internet age, international, collaborative, quick, and convenient. The
elaborateness of Danielewski’s books creates a self-selecting society of
kindred spirits. Reading, normally a solitary act, becomes a communal effort.
Along with the esoteric noodling is an element of casual sociability—discussion
of new movies, music tips, and opinions on who is the most attractive National
Book Award nominee. The verdict: Mark Danielewski.
Vive la Différence
The Female Brain
Written by Louann Brizendine '81MD
Morgan Road Books, $24.95
Reviewed by Jennifer G. Ackerman '80
Jennifer G. Ackerman '80 writes about the brain and other parts in her forthcoming book, Sex, Sleep, Eat, Drink, Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body.
You might think that a 47-year-old woman with two daughters, four sisters, and three mothers (including two stepmothers) would know a little something about the female brain. But I still
find it an organ of wonder and mystery, so I’m predisposed to welcome a new
book on the topic: The Female Brain by neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine '81MD. The wonder
of the brain, of course—male or female—is that a three-pound mass
of gray tissue can harbor all that makes us human, our intellect and wit, our
passions, creativity, and emotions. The mystery of the female version was
brought home to me recently by two events. The first was a car ride home with
my teenage daughter and three teammates after a soccer tournament in which
their team had suffered blistering losses, skunked in all three games. The girls
seemed unbothered by the stressful skirmishes on the soccer field. Chattering
away in the back seat as if I were invisible, they analyzed each girl's
personality by tagging her with “essential” traits: what color would she be?
What kind of music? And car? Their blithe babble and peals of laughter in the
wake of crushing defeat puzzled me. How could their young brains so easily let
go of humiliation and disappointment to revel cheerfully in one another's
company? The second event was a reunion with my sisters, where I marveled at
the way my eldest sister, an empty-nester in her 50s, seemed suddenly free of
the fetters of anxiety over every aspect of her children’s lives, concerns that
once consumed her. What had so radically shifted the obsessions of her midlife
brain?
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There is a lopsided
two-to-one ratio of depression in women as compared with men. |
Despite my extensive experience with
women—or because of it—I’m deeply curious about the female brain
and how it changes over a lifespan. From The Female Brain, I hoped to learn whether behaviors
of teen girls and mature women, young mothers and empty-nesters, are rooted in
sex-specific biological factors, as I suspect they are—at least in part.
Brizendine is founding director of the Women’s and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone
Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, the first clinic in the
country devoted to the study of women and their mental, sexual, and physical
health. In her book, she intertwines stories of her patients with discussion of
findings from scientific and popular sources to explore how sex hormones affect
the female brain and modify the way women function in the world. As a resident
in psychiatry at Harvard, Brizendine became fascinated by the lopsided
two-to-one ratio of depression in women as compared with men. At first she
blamed the “patriarchy” of Western culture, which “kept women down and made
them less functional than men.” But when new studies suggested that the same
skewed ratio held in other cultures, she began to think that something more
fundamentally biological was going on. This book is Brizendine’s effort to
argue that hormones hardwire male and female brain circuits, resulting in
sex-specific emotions and behavior—and to offer women a guide to their
own wiring throughout life.
Over the past decade, science has confirmed that men and women differ in nearly every facet of the body, in skin
and bone, muscle and gut, heart and nerve, and—yes—gray matter.
While many aspects of male and female brains are similar (average level of
intelligence, for instance), there are intriguing sex differences in the
anatomy of the brain and how it works. As Brizendine points out, men’s brains
are 9 percent larger than women's, but in some regions women have a higher
density of nerve cells. In the brain centers for language and hearing, for
example, women have 11 percent more neurons than men. Likewise, women have more
abundant brain cells in the hippocampal region of the limbic system, the heart
of both emotion and memory formation, and in the decision-making anterior
cingulate cortex, what Brizendine calls the “worrywart center.” Men, for their
part, have a larger amygdala—important in fear, anger, aggression, and
decoding threatening stimuli—which makes a man’s “anger button” more
easily pushed, says Brizendine. Men also have bigger sex-related centers—about
two times larger than parallel structures in the female brain, says Brizendine.
“Men, quite literally, have sex on their minds more than women do.”
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Gender influences hearing, memory, emotions, problem-solving, hunger, and humor. |
These anatomical differences are
caused by activity of estrogen and other sex hormones that bathe the prenatal
brain. In some cases, these physical differences appear to correlate with
cognitive differences (though establishing a true link is a tricky business). A
surge of findings from functional neuroimaging and other studies suggests that
gender influences hearing, memory, emotions, problem-solving strategies,
processing of faces, reading, hunger and satiation, the way people orient
themselves in space, and—my favorite—appreciation of humor.
Sex-specific disparities in the
brain’s chemistry and architecture may also affect how we respond to stressful
events. Estrogen not only prolongs the secretion of the stress hormone
cortisol, but also stimulates activity in a broader area of neurons in the
brain, including those responsible for forming vivid memories of an event.
Because of differences in emotional circuitry, says Brizendine, a woman’s brain
activates more than a man’s in anticipation of danger or pain, and she tends to
feel more stressed in the moment. “Anxiety is a state that occurs when stress
or fear triggers the amygdala, causing the brain to rally all its conscious
attention to the threat at hand,” writes Brizendine. “Although this may not
seem like an adaptive trait,” she explains, “it actually allows her brain to
focus on the danger at hand and respond quickly to protect her children.” This
hair-trigger stress response may make women become anxious and depressed more
quickly than men do, Brizendine suggests—which could account for the
depression gender gap that seems to exist across cultures. (However, other
scientists suspect the gap is illusory: women are more willing to discuss their
symptoms, and so may be simply more frequently diagnosed.)
In Brizendine’s probing of the
neurobiological roots of behavior, I found plenty of “aha!” moments. She
explains, for instance, why intense, intimate conversation may play such an
important role in the lives of teenage girls. Not only does the female brain
have enlarged verbal areas, but it’s subject to a flood of estrogen during
puberty, which activates sex-specific brain circuits organized to respond to
stress by nurturing protective social networks: “The Stone Age brains within
them are flooded with neurochemicals telling them to connect with other women
so that they can help protect the young,” writes Brizendine. “The primitive
brain is saying, ‘Lose that bond, and both you and your offspring are toast.’ … No wonder girls find it unbearably hard to cope with feelings of being left
out.” This pattern of behavior, termed “tend and befriend,” may be a distinctly
female strategy for dealing with stress, she suggests—and may well
explain my daughter and her friends' chatter during that car ride home from
their drubbing. For boys, the surge of testosterone during puberty has the
opposite effect, suppressing interest in talking and socializing—“except
when it involves sports or sexual pursuit,” says Brizendine. While girls
experience a fivefold rise in testosterone during adolescence, which boosts
their libido and interest in sex, a boy’s levels increase five times that much
between the ages of 9 and 15, resulting in triple the sex drive of girls the
| |
Brizendine categorizes human behavior in stark pink/blue terms that
may make one squirm. |
In a chapter on the mature female
brain, Brizendine also offers an explanation for my sister’s new midlife
attitude: when a woman has launched all her children, she loses the
estrogen-fueled circuits in her brain that function as a “Maserati engine” for
tracking the emotions of others. “Her ancient mommy wiring comes loose and she
is allowed to pull a few of the connections to the child-tracking device out of
her brain.”
Brizendine has taken risks in this
book—among them categorizing human behavior in stark pink/blue terms that
may make one squirm. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that the
basic male/female reproductive asymmetry (women must make massive investments
in one infant; men don’t have to and can father large numbers) would result in
different biological and behavioral strategies for perpetuating genes. But men
and women are individuals. Hormone levels vary from person to person, and there's
a continuum from “male” to “female” behavior. In some of the arenas Brizendine
discusses, such as the ability to read nuances of emotional expression in voice
and face, the brain and behavior of men I know would have to be categorized as “female.”
Perhaps more important, Brizendine
treads dangerous water by so heavily stressing the role of hormones in shaping
every aspect of a woman’s life, from getting angry to caring about her work to
making decisions about the value of her marriage. She rightly observes that
hormones alone do not cause behaviors; they “merely raise the likelihood that
under certain circumstances a behavior will occur.” But on nearly every page,
she emphasizes how women in their reproductive years are run by their hormones
and by the “gyno-crises”—the spikes and troughs in hormonal levels that
occur monthly and throughout life—which may cause emotional stress and
unpredictable behavior. And while she notes, significantly, that only 10
percent of women suffer severely from this hormonal flux (experiencing edginess
and easy upset), she suggests that even the 80 percent of us who are only
mildly affected by it still march to the beat of the estrogen drum, our sense
of reality “shifted and hijacked” by our pulsing hormones.
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It’s important to understand that in
matters of the brain, gender matters. |
These kinds of assertions are going
to rub a lot of people the wrong way. I don’t relish being told that at certain
times of month and stages of life, my brain is “marinated” in hormones that
usurp my judgment, upset my emotional equilibrium, and alter my reality (just
as some men I know may resent the portrayal of their own testosterone-drenched
brains as nonverbal, emotionally handicapped, and driven by aggression, sex,
and watching football). These characterizations seem perilously close to
reinforcing old that-time-of-the-month stereotypes of erratic female behavior.
But Brizendine suggests that the
real risk lies in failing to grasp the nature of our own biology, especially
its ups and downs. By understanding hormonal changes, she argues, we can make
good choices about how to manage our own lives and gain important insights into
what’s influencing the behavior of people around us, including our wives and
daughters. In this case, knowledge really is power.
It’s important to understand that in
matters of the brain, gender matters. Sex hormones direct the hardwiring of our
brains and continue to shape our actions, perceptions, and the way we respond
to the world throughout life. But it’s equally important not to overrate their
influence or the “hardness” of the brain’s wiring. We’ve learned lately that
learning also matters deeply in shaping the physical brain. Thanks to brilliant
research by the Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and
others, it has become clear that the brain has a remarkable ability to rewire
itself throughout life by learning and experience. Virtually every thought we
have, every action we take, can shape, modify, and strengthen neurons and their
connections. The real wonder of the brain is this remarkable plasticity; male
or female, the brain is never a finished work but creates and recreates itself
from cradle to grave.
In Print
Fame
Junkies: The Hidden Truths behind America’s Favorite Addiction
Houghton
Mifflin, $23
Jake Halpern '97
Thoreau chose truth over fame, but today many of us
would opt for celebrity. Halpern melds research in psychology and evolution,
interviews with stars and wannabes, and portraits of celebrity personal
assistants into an insightful and entertaining look at our obsession with fame.
A Needle in
the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning
of the Bayeux Tapestry
Random House, $25.95
R. Howard Bloch,
Sterling Professor of French
“If the Battle of Hastings began with poetry, it ended in the realm
of the visual arts,” writes Bloch. In a masterful exploration of the “world's
most famous textile,” the author traces the history of the 230-foot-long
embroidered account of a pivotal battle.
The
Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose
Marian Wood/G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
$25
Karl Kirchwey '79
In his fifth
collection of poetry, the critically acclaimed writer and teacher marries the
personal and the political in well-wrought encounters with intimacy, national
politics, home repair, and road kill. The book finishes with an
autobiographical tale of a journey eastward in search of his long-dead uncle's
ghost.
New York
2000: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Bicentennial and the Millennium
Monacelli Press, $100
Robert A. M. Stern '65MArch, Dean, School of
Architecture; David Fishman; and Jacob Tilove
At 10 pounds and more than 1,500 pages, this
beautifully illustrated and truly definitive study examines the development of
the city’s architecture from the July 1977 blackout to 9/11.
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History
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Elisha
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S. Gerstenberger 1960STM
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Ruth
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Steven
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the People Who Make It
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Andrew
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Mark
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Mark R.
Nemec 1991
Ivory
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Neil
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Michael
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