LISTENING OUT LOUDBecoming a Composer by Elizabeth...

LISTENING OUT LOUD

Becoming a Composer

by Elizabeth Swados (Harper & Row: $17.95) It can been argued that music is the one art medium best not written about, for it touches our emotions most intimately, sending a subliminal message that evades analysis. Highly expressive music such as classical, on the other hand, doesn’t speak to unaccustomed ears; it is doubtful, for instance, that the Los Angeles City School’s yearly opera trips have convinced many students that there’s more to music than Madonna. In “Listening Out Loud,” Elizabeth Swados offers an alternative to introductory musical texts that simply recount musicians’ lives or describe instruments’ sounds. By showing how composers “see” with their ears, Swados captures the spirit of compositions, if not their essence.

Composing has allowed Swados to make her world and her thoughts more comprehensible, both as a child--sounds of a nearby zoo became less frightening when she began “discerning a pattern in the zoo voices, organizing a kind of animal symphony in my mind”--and as an adult. Listening to an old man humming a melody outside her window, for instance, she hears “a longing in his voice. I imagine a village near an ancestor’s town in Latvia. I hear his mother singing him the tune. He sings it thinking of her, of the loss of her, of the loss of that town and that time . . . Has the old man’s humming contained all these elements? Probably not . . . . His music becomes mine now.”

To Swados, music is also a channel for political hope (her oratorio “Jerusalem” combined the voices of Muslims, Jews, Christians and other ethnic groups in Israel) and a narrative connecting us with our past: In George Gershwin’s songs and even in the street music in “West Side Story,” Swados senses the “furious rhythms and sweet melodies” of davening in Jewish prayer.

Swados does fall prey to some of the perils in writing about music. A highly individual group, not all composers fit Swados’ generalizations: They are “by nature believers in magical powers,” she writes, and so “childlike” in their dependence on nonverbal impulses that they seem “immature, possessive and moody.” Swados’ comments about the business and society of music also seem too detailed to be of interest to serious composers, for as Swados herself writes, the composer’s ideal world is insular: “When all the elements are right . . . nothing else exists . . . not concerns about money, bookings, agents, rehearsal space, grants, audience reaction, reviews, or acceptance--but the music itself. If you are a real composer, you know absolutely that that is more than enough.”

“Listening Out Loud” is a valuable resource for many others, though, offering sobering warnings for beginning composers--”To enter this profession with the expectation of being loved and rewarded is folly”--as well as sensitive guidelines for nascent aficionados.

OUTCROPPINGS

by John McPhee, photographs by Tom Till, edited by Christopher Merrill (Peregrine Smith: $29.95) The New Age movement has been the impetus behind the most recent incarnation of environmental awareness, viewing nature not as another reason to protest developers, but as a source of inspiration for pro-development baby boomers. John McPhee is an environmental writer from an earlier era. Rather than accompanying a photograph of the Colorado River glowing lava orange after a storm with dreamy philosophizing about primal origins, as might Barry Lopez, for instance, McPhee writes about the way sand, gravel, stones, rocks and boulders conspire to create rapids.

“Outcroppings,” a blend of writing from three of McPhee’s books, will not appeal to all readers because of this emphasis on hard science. Names of geological eras are often cited, for instance, without clear profiles of the periods. For the most part, however, McPhee’s explorations through quartzite ridges and carbonate valleys of folded-and-faulted mountains are compelling, showing that America as we know it is merely “an unnatural subdivision of the globe, a metaphor of the human ego sketched on paper and framed in straight lines and in riparian boundaries between unalterable coasts.”

PRE-POP WARHOL

by Jesse Kornbluth; introduction

by Tina S. Fredericks (Random House: $29.95) These sketches and paintings from Andy Warhol’s work as a commercial artist in late 1950s New York City wouldn’t be collected here were it not for his “15 minutes” of fame--while whimsical, droll and exuberant, they are not exceptionally inspired--but they do offer clues about an artist who did his best to remain a cipher until his death last year following surgery.

By the time Warhol asked Tina Fredericks for a job at Glamour magazine--”a pale, blotchy boy,” she writes in the introduction, “diffident almost to the point of disappearance”--leading American artists were eschewing all conceivable bounds of convention and authority. Jackson Pollock, for instance, dribbled and splashed kaleidoscopic colors on canvas in an effort to subvert the force of even his own consciousness. Warhol rebelled against this rebellion. “When I think about what sort of person I would like most to have on a retainer,” he told Fredericks, “I think it would be a boss. A boss who could tell me what to do, because that makes every thing easy when you’re working.” Such statements, of course, led many to wonder whether Warhol’s work satirized the banality of his time or whether it simply was as banal as its time.

While the text in “Pre-Pop Warhol” is more profile than criticism, the intimate friends of Warhol quoted by Jesse Kornbluth do suggest that he wasn’t satirizing. Warhol emerges here not as a sophisticated post-Dadaist, but as an innocent who absorbed and then reflected the world around him. As Emile de Antonio, one of Warhol’s chosen bosses, commented on seeing Warhol’s first pop piece: “It’s our society, it’s who we are, it’s absolutely beautiful and naked.” During his pre-pop phase, however, Warhol also learned to see the world as others wanted him to see it. Warhol’s first assignment for Fredericks was to draw a set of shoes, for instance. On the next day, Fredericks writes, Warhol came in with drawings of “shoes with the swells and cracks and wrinkles of true personality, full of character.” Fredericks asked him to create something with more “sell,” which he did the next day--and from that day on. There is a certain misfortune in this loss of artistic sensibility which isn’t captured in this largely sanguine text.

Much of the work collected here, nevertheless, is uniquely whimsical and joyful. Black and white circles representing the heads of musicians are sketched in blotted lines in one drawing, for instance, that suggests harmony with multicolored accents, while Christmas cards designed for Tiffany & Co. feature tiny rainbow-colored stars lining up around the outline of a large white star, like worshipers at an altar.

FIRE DOWN BELOW

A Journey of Exploration

from Mexico to Chile

by Robert Harvey (Simon & Schuster: $19.95) This politically balanced analysis and evocative travelogue takes us far through time as well as terrain. Robert Harvey, a member of the British House of Commons and a former Latin American correspondent for The Economist, begins as Christopher Columbus first meets Central America’s Indians: “I believe there is no better race,” Columbus wrote. “They love their neighbors as themselves . . . have the softest and gentlest voices in the world, and they are always smiling.” With a novelist’s sense of story, Harvey then changes the setting to a symbol of the growing uneasiness in relations between First World and Third: today’s U.S.-Mexican border, where more than 1.5 million Latin Americans try to escape poverty and revolution each year.

Harvey’s focus on economic problems is especially insightful, emphasizing issues often ignored in the news media’s rush to report the latest revolution. While Latin America’s population is nearly twice that of the United States, it produces less than one-seventh of our GNP. Its economic problems, though, are not intractable, Harvey writes: “Recent surges . . . suggest that Latin America can achieve a prosperity that will not equal that of (the First World), but not fall far short either.”

Harvey’s optimism is not always borne out by his evidence, however. Huge debts to Western banks (caused in part by the banks’ lack of foresight, Harvey writes) and leaders opposed to needed reforms threaten to keep many countries trapped in a cycle of poverty. In a chilling interview, for instance, suspected Salvadoran “Death Squad” leader Roberto D’Aubuisson tells Harvey of the need for “a quick, final solution . . . getting rid of all Communists.” When asked if this means eliminating the Christian Democrats as well, whom D’Aubuisson calls Communists, D’Aubuisson simply fixed Harvey with a stare. “The banality of evil? Nothing about him was banal: he knew the whirlwind he reaped, the tiger he had set loose.”