After Virtue, Revisited
One of the experiments in this blog that I enjoyed more, and that I still revisit, is the stream of consciousness reaction to Wim Mertens' After Virtue, brought back by his concert two weeks ago and my own excessive consumption of his music in the following days. I tried to avoid listening too much before the concert, to arrive fresh, but then I was trying to identify what music he played, and just trying to make the feeling of elation from the live performance last.
I suppose his favorite of the album is Humility, as he plays it very often live, though he has revisited the works a couple of times, with arrangements more complex than the piano and occasional voice of the original. It is also one of may favorites, but not the top. It is short, but easy to lengthen if necessary, so good for live audiences. My own favorite is the longest, Faith. Humility is not certainly one of my virtues, and while a self convinced atheist (with the help of a few books), I still think I have Faith, Faith as I defined it back in 2005.
Faith. Usually associated to religious beliefs, how can an atheist have faith? And even more, why should it be a virtue.
The virtue lies in believing in something good that is beyond ourselves, no matter how you call it. Whether it is a moral requirement or an almighty God, it is a way to get us out of ourselves. To stop measuring all things to our own standard, and instead using a higher standard.
A bit pompous, but my position has not changed.
Some (six?) years ago I got rid of all the music in recorded tapes, which included my first version of it, a gift from my brother, who had got a tape from a friend, so a copy of a copy. It must have been 1989, so just released, as he also loaned me, but did not give me copies of The Belly of the Architect and Motives for Writing.
I got it in CD when I got my post graduate grant money, after using most of the first month payment to get a new music center with a CD player, in 1990. Eventually I also got the other two as well, and A man of no Fortune and with a Name to come. Unfortunately, most people around me did not like his music and specially his singing, so it was a private pleasure.
They were very helpful in keeping company the first months of my post-doc stay in France, and even helped me when I met another fan, a Belgian coworker. That helped with my French, that helped a lot making friends, so it all improved and I had less time for music listening, and I also started getting new one.
His music became a kind of curiosity in my collection, and I did not buy anything else from him, till the arrival of the iPod and then the music in the iPhone meant I had to pick and choose what to include in my playlist, which brought a huge revision of all my music, and decisions what to include. Combined with a car with a 6 CD player meant also that rather than the same scratchy tapes, I could revisit my CD collection in both short and long trips. And that meant a new interest in Mertens' music.
It is in those circumstances that I made the piece on After Virtue, and when I also started buying his music again, though without the whole emotional baggage of the earlier pieces they have less impact. I still have four more records from him, till I stopped buying CDs around 2012.Now they are all in storage, but I do not intend to throw them away.
Going back to After Virtue, what I really liked was the idea of classical music snippets, connected but standing on their own feet. Most classical pieces are long, and it feels like cheating to take an excerpt or fragment. Here you could lose yourself in a few minutes and just do something else. It was a discovery that made me buy a lot of instrumental music, as no lyrics means, to me, that I can impose the meaning I want without interference. I also enjoy Lyrics as the Poetry of our time, but the message and the writer's intention is usually clear. Probably why I also enjoy human voice as an instrument without discernible or understandable lyrics. from Lisa Gerrard to Ella Fitzgerald, passing by Sigur Ros.
¶ 9:55 AM
