Groombridge Place

'The origin of the plot of The Draughtsman's Contract is autobiographical ... I discovered a house on the border of England and Wales not far from Hay-on-Wye, where I attempted to draw a fairly modest early Victorian house. The weather was unusually fine. For about three weeks, I did some drawings ...  But also, since I was on holiday and enjoying myself, there were constant interruptions that I made no attempt to avoid: playing with my children, doing a piece of gardening, going to the shops, having meals, simply falling asleep in the sun. And this is the premise for the film. It's a story about a draughtsman who draws a country house and is constantly interrupted. ... It is also a fictional evocation of a long-vanished age in which draughtsmen and painters were employed by country-house owners in England to draw or paint their estates, their property, their houses and gardens. They commissioned such works to show off to their neighbours, or maybe even simply to delight themselves with their prosperity and status ... The whole film is very much a landscape film, which would relate to the traditions of Claude Lorraine and Poussin, two Frenchmen who spent most of their lives and their painting careers in Italy and had an enormous influence, not only on French landscape but on English landscape. The three predominant colours of this film are black, white and green. The black and white essentially of the costumes, and the green of the English countryside.' - Peter Greenaway quoted in the Guardian, 1 August 2003

Yesterday, in 'unusually fine' weather, we travelled to Groombridge Place in Kent, the setting for The Draughtsman's Contract (1982).  The house was built in 1662 by Philip Packer, with assistance from Christopher Wren, and the gardens designed by John Evelyn (all three were fellows of the Royal Society).  Writing about this period at the beginning of his gardening history The Arcadian Friends, Tim Richardson regrets that 'there is a tendency today to view this kind of seventeenth century 'formality' - what a strange term for it! - as sterile and lifeless.'  The same has been said of Peter Greenaway of course: 'for every person who reveres his work, there are many others who regard it as arid, cerebral and insular. "It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content," he says. "It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport."'  The Draughtsman's Contract exemplifies Greenaway's belief that 'the form and the content should ideally be brought closely together.'  It is designed like a Baroque garden and its plot links the ideas of framing for a drawing and framing for a crime.
 

Michael Nyman, Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds

The game of formal constraints that structures the film carried over into Michael Nyman's conception for its music.  Nyman's website explains that he went back to the complete works of Purcell (who died in 1695, a year after the film is set) 'and rooted out ground basses' to provide repetitive harmonic schemes. These 'could be interpreted as making a musical parallel with the organisational and temporal constraints that the draughtsman Neville imposes on the Herbert household as he goes about his task of completing the 12 commissioned drawings of the house and the grounds. The initial plan for the score was to assign a different ground bass to each of the two sets of six drawings (to help with the ‘reading’ of each of Neville’s designated viewpoints) and allow each piece to grow and develop as each drawing progressed over six days. This fine plan was shot to pieces by the practicalities of film length, the editing process and the invariable problems of balancing the demands of dialogue.'

Hyacinthe Rigaud, Hans Willem Bentinck, c. 1698-9
(those wigs in The Draughtsman's Contract were not completely exaggerated)

One aspect of the film I particularly like is that for all its postmodern artifice in design, dialogue and music, there is a very specific historical context.  It is 1694, year of the Married Woman's Property Act (which is crucial for the plot) and, as Greenaway explains, 'the Dutch Protestant aristocracy is now firmly in place in England.'  At Groombridge the canal, where a body is found in The Draughtsman's Contract, certainly gives the garden a Dutch feel.   It is Tim Richardson's contention that this period of Dutch influence, rather than the eighteenth century, gave birth to the English landscape garden.  Formality gradually began to give way to naturalness in the form of looser planting and serpentine walks.  Richardson writes about the friendship between Sir William Temple and Hans Willem Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland, both diplomats and garden designers who worked to secure the throne for William and Mary.  Bentinck 'proudly commissioned a series of forty-four engravings of his garden at Zorgvliet in the 1690s', a fact which makes me wonder whether Greenaway had them in mind when he wrote his film.  Eventually Bentinck married a niece of Temple's, with whom he had six children.  There is a Dutchman too in The Draughtsman's Contract, but he is unable to provide his wife with an heir.  Which is why she strikes up her own private contract with the Draughtsman, for rather more than he could deliver with a pencil...

Sonic Waters and Fantastic Caverns

I have written here before about composers who have sought to impress the environment into their music by burying instruments in the earth (Richard Skelton) or immersing recordings in river water (Rob St. John).  A desire to enter into the landscape may also lie behind music that has been created underwater or in caves beneath the ground.  I have mentioned a few examples of the latter before, but there is now a relatively long history to these genres of landscape music and so I thought I would highlight here some examples from over thirty years ago, beginning with the work of Michel Redolfi, whose Pacific Tubular Waves / Immersion was recently reissued by Editions Mego.  Pacific Tubular Waves (1979) is not an underwater piece - it was 'inspired by the oceanic horizons of San Diego' - but it became the raw material for Immersion (1980).  For this, Redolfi played his earlier piece through a sonar loudspeaker underwater, so that it was 'shuffled by the waves and unexpected filtering effects resulted from its passing through clouds of foam.  Its dispersion at sea by currents would send back incredibly smooth harmonic echoes.'  If he had left a recording of Immersion in the sea it might have been brought up years later, scoured by the underwater currents but still usable as the basis for a third version of this composition.

In 1981 Redolfi's Sonic Waters concert was broadcast underwater in the Pacific for an audience who could experience it floating on the surface or submerged in diving suits.  However, as Stefan Helmreich has pointed out, this concert was 'accompanied by campy sea creaturey devices, such as the giant colorful “jellyfish” that kept a low-frequency speaker afloat in La Jolla Cove. Such playfulness is a reminder that Redolfi does not imagine crustaceans, fish, or marine mammals as audiences ... Redolfi’s approach looks similar to that of the Florida Keys underwater music festival. Celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2009, the festival offers to scuba divers music played over Lubell Laboratory speakers attached to boats floating near the reef.  Attendees dress up as fish.'  There is an ocean of difference between that festival's 'reef rockstars, "Paul McCarpney" and "Ringo Starfish"' performing sea-themed pop songs and the experimental underwater investigations of modern sound artists like Jana Winderen.  I can't help feeling there must be potential between these extremes for new forms of site-specific undersea composition and performance in the future. 

Over the last few decades most of Redolfi's concerts (see clip above) have taken place in swimming pools, where the emphasis is on the unusual auditory experience rather than the character of the sea. However, the ambience and special qualities of these locations will never be irrelevant.  The pools chosen by Redolfi and others like the Wetsounds organisation or Max Neuhaus, the pioneer in this field, will have had their own acoustic properties and historical associations.  Similarly, performances in cave-like spaces in cities or industrial locations can be as atmospheric as concerts in natural caverns.  As with the underwater composers, much of the motivation for seeking out resonant underground spaces has been to make use of their unique sound properties - the Deep Listening Band, for example, have played in the giant Fort Worden Cistern which has a 45 second reverberation time.  But caves have a deeper significance, having been the sites for music making since prehistoric times, a point brought home to me recently by the discovery of an ancient lyre in a cave on Skye.  Here there is no direct parallel with performing underwater, although if there is an atavistic urge to make subterranean music, there may be an even more profound source for subaquatic music, since all of us begin life experiencing sound and music immersed in amniotic fluid.

Back in the late 1950s (when the real Paul McCartney was making his first appearances at the Cavern club with The Quarrymen), the Great Stalacpipe Organ, designed by Leland W. Sprinkle, was under construction at the Luray Caverns in Virginia.  Although described as ‘the largest natural musical instrument in the world’ its design involved altering the shape of some of the stalactites.  Music had actually been performed in this sonorous cave (as the postcard above from 1906 below shows) almost since its discovery in 1878.  A delegation from the Smithsonian Institution were surprised on an 1880 tour when co-discoverer Andrew Campbell picked out a tune on the rock formation that was later used for the Organ.  There are no other Stalacpipe Organs, but many other American caves have been settings for concerts: Bristow Cave, Tennessee, the Great Saltpeter Cave, Kentucky, Longhorn Cavern, Texas.  Worth mentioning here if only for its cover is a live recording from 1968, The Fantastic Thrashers at Fantastic Caverns.  According to its sleeve notes, 'the underground auditorium was packed and jammed. The dripping water, the underground river in the background, the weird effect of the lights off moist stalagmites were all made to come alive by the sparkling sound of the Thrashers.'

Then, in a very different vein, there was Don Cherry, who recorded two improvisations at the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in 1978.   Here is Anna Mayo's description (from the useful Caveinspiredmusic site)

“On a morning in early October I watched the great free jazzman Don Cherry as he scaled a ledge high on the sheer wall of the Longest Cave in the World and played the rocks like a xylophone. Far below, our guide had fired up two kerosene lanterns so that we were able to doff our miners’ hats. Cherry, on the ledge, gave off vibes of the leopard-spirit of the Ngbe tribe as he improvised a roller-coaster of sound. Throughout Cherry’s performance, producer Verna Gillis sat on the cave floor, at one with her Stellavox tape recorder, earphones like a ceremonial headdress... Adjusting the AKG microphone... was sculptor Bradford Graves. Cherry darted from one rock to another, striking them with two hickory branches he’d brought along at the guide’s suggestion.”

Perhaps improvisers are best suited to exploring the musical possibilities of cave systems.  The Summartónar festival has brought jazz musicians like John Tchicai to perform to an audience in small boats in the sea caves of the Faroe Islands.  However, it is more usual to find show caves used as natural halls for the staging of more traditional concerts.  There are several such venues in Germany, including the cavern at Hohler Fels where, some 35,000 years ago, Palaeolithic musicians left behind bone and ivory flutes.  In Lebanon the Jeïta caves were opened for concerts in 1969 and closed a decade later during the Civil War, its passages converted into a munitions store.  Thus the distinction between caves and buildings becomes blurred - 'natural' spaces cease to become natural when they are discovered.  My last example below below combines natural and electronic sounds.  It is part of Jeïta ou Murmure des eaux (1970), a composition by François Bayle, who performed the inaugural concert at the the Jeïta caves.  When he found back in Paris that some of the field recordings he made in the cave were not good enough for his purposes he decided to replace them with 'beautiful water sounds' recorded in the bathroom of the studio.

The sea is never far

'Narrated in fruity tones by future Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, Figures in a Landscape offers a poetic portrait of sculptor Barbara Hepworth and the otherworldly Cornwall landscapes that inspired her work.'  This is how the BFI Mediatheque describes Dudley Shaw Ashton's short film and you can hear that plummy voice in the extract below, along with the 'haunting score' by Hepworth's friend Priaulx Rainer.  It would be easy to assume that the words in the film are Day Lewis's but in fact they were written by Jacquetta Hawkes, whose remarkable book on Britain, A Land, had appeared two years earlier.  The film begins with shots of the sea and coast and the words I have quoted below (punctuation my own), in which landscape, through the forces of wave and wind, is figured as a natural sculptor.  It then traces the ways that stone has taken on 'forms rising in the minds of man', from stone circles to churches and mines, standing out initially from their settings until 'seasons and centuries claimed them for the landscape.'

 

"Cornwall, a horn of rock, its point thrust out into the sea. Smooth or ribbed with waves, pale deep blue or angry dark, the sea lies round about it and from three sides sends up its mirrored light. Here is Penwith, the moors narrowing to Lands End, from the sea coast to the north it is not far across the rusty moors, where the rocks break through the bracken, not far to where the sea lies to the south. The sea is never far. It shapes the rocks, sometimes fingering them gently, sometimes forging them with long thundering blows, hollowing those caves where waves revolve in darkness.

"Or it cuts arches where the bright see light stares through above the waters, the wind blows upon the skin of the sea until it creeps and shivers. It follows behind the relentless roll of the tides. The wind passes its hand across the moors, ordering the grasses, smoothing the rocks beneath. Autumn, winter, spring and summer, the wind and the sea carve the rocks, whittling their images. They are at it now and have been at it a million million years, beyond the reach of clocks."

Whilst the dominant metaphor here may be nature as sculptor, it is hard not to read a sexual element into this imagery.  I mentioned this in an earlier post on Jacquetta Hawkes, whose lover J. B. Priestley is quoted as having said of her "What a woman — ice without and fire within!"  Ashton's visual imagery echoes the script with shots of standing forms and foaming waves, but what is most distinctive is the way he uses Hepworth's sculptures, placing them around the landscape in compositions that have a surreal quality (see below).  The clip embedded here shows Hepworth in her St Ives garden (which Priaulx Rainer helped design), at work with her mallets and files, but around the three minute mark we see a finished piece lying on the sand to be polished by the waves.  "The waves beat on the stone and the yielding wood, claiming them back from the small plans of man, they give them the shape of the earth and its tides, but the carver cuts deeper with her seeing eye."

Barbara Hepworth's Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) (1940) 

in front of mounds of china clay in a scene from Figures in a Landscape.

   "But others came cheerfully to dig for china clay. They piled the dark moors with soft white cones that stood in the staring light of the sea, bright light that breaks into colour."

A new exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World starts next week at Tate Britain and it will focus on the way her work has been presented or imagined in different contexts, including the landscape. 

Uncommon Ground

A few weeks ago, on leaving the job I had done for six years, I was gifted a copy of Dominick Tyler's Uncommon Ground.  It combines attractive photographs with short descriptions of some of the words that have been used for British landscape features, partly inspired, like Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, by the Barry Lopez/Debra Gwartney collection Home Ground. There are some intriguingly obscure words here like 'fraon', a place of shelter in the mountains, which Tyler found in a couple of early eighteenth century Gaelic dictionaries.  But many will be familiar from school geography lessons: tor, meander, blowhole, clint and gryke.  As I remember it the standard geographical terms were taught rather than local British variants: arête rather than druim or aonach.  However in one case I do recall being offered three interchangeable terms - cirque, cwm and corrie - as there seemed to be no collective agreement on what to call these glacial basins.  Tyler groups these under the word 'coire' - the Gaelic original of 'corrie'.  He says coombes are the same thing too which I don't think my geography teacher would quite have agreed with (we had lots of coombes in periglacial Sussex).  The one that Edward Thomas described in his poem 'The Combe', 'dark, ancient and dark', would have been quite difficult to photograph for Uncommon Ground: 'The sun of Winter, / The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds / Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper, /Are quite shut out.'

blowhole!

Uncommon Ground quotes sparingly from writers, but there are three lines from Milton's 'Comus' that mention both 'dingle' and 'dell': 'I know each lane, and every alley green / Dingle or bushy dell of this wilde Wood, / And every bosky bourn from side to side.'  The photograph accompanying this text shows Bunyan's Dell in Hertfordshire, where a large congregation of non-conformists once gathered 'under the canopy of heaven' to hear John Bunyan preach.  Milton's word 'bosky', referring to a thicket of trees, 'was also a word for a state of mild inebriation, perhaps drawing a parallel between a confusion of mind and a tangle of branches.'  I can't find any of these terms in the Landmarks glossaries, which suggests there is less overlap between the two books than you might think.  Robert Macfarlane is happy to admit words coined by poets, most notably Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poems include: 'twindle' - stream foam dividing into two braids;  'heavengravel' - hailstones, and in the same line of poetry 'wolfsnow' for a sea-blizzard; 'slogger' - the sucking sound made by a waves against the side of a boat; 'shadowtackle' - the shifting patterns of shadow on woodland floors; 'leafmeal' which evokes the way leaves fall one by one and then lie like ground grain, 'silk-ash' - the fine ash covering glowing embers; and 'doomfire', an apocalyptic sunset.

Bunyan's Dell

Uncommon Ground starts with a local word, 'zawn', derived from a Cornish word for a chasm, but reading it through you keep coming across connections with other languages and landscapes.  'Shiver', the Cumbrian term for a fragment of slate derives from the Germanic word for splinter, 'scivero', which in turn, 'in a nice little etymological loop', led to the modern German 'schiefer', slate.  It is pleasing to learn that the Russian word 'Zastrugi' which gives us the name for ridges in snow formed by the wind also means 'the splintering of planed wood against the grain' and 'the undercut bank of a stream' (although even more pleasing would be to learn that Russian has two additional words for these precise phenomena).  This kind of thing made me want to see the global glossary of landscape terms being slowly compiled, according to Robert Macfarlane, by the Arabic scholar Abdal Hamid Fitzwilliam-Hall.  It has occurred to me that this Borgesian encyclopedia may prove insufficiently ambitious if it excludes the rimae, catena and dorsa of the Moon, or the words that will be needed to describe detailed features or atmospheric effects elsewhere in the solar system.  But I suppose I am betraying here my urban sensibility, where the daily experience of nature can seem as remote as those planetary features discerned in telescopes and given Latin names before anyone has been able to experience them.

Wreckage upon wreckage

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920

'A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.'  - Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'

A couple of months ago I was in Eastbourne to see the exhibition Ori Gersht: Don’t Look Back. It included his two-screen film, Evaders, a reimagining of the last journey of Walter Benjamin.  The film begins with an actor in a hotel room and we hear Benjamin's famous description of the angel of history.  When the voice-over reaches “his face is turned toward the past”, the other screen is activated.  Now the actor is trudging through the cold mountains, battered by the weather, looking older than Benjamin actually was in 1940 (but Benjamin was physically frail and encumbered by a heavy suitcase). ‘He moves at a steady, laboured pace through patches of mist, along a snowy tree-lined path. Often, on the right screen majestic landscapes contrast with the man’s suffering and vulnerability on the left: sweeping mountain vistas grazed by clouds, trees shrouded in fog, craggy boulders, and the wind whipping over a riverbed’ (Al Miner, Ori Gersht: History Repeating).  The route taken by Benjamin was  'particularly dangerous because of the tramontana, a violently strong, dry wind that can last for days and is, in the cooler months, bitterly cold. The tramontana is known for its piercing moan, and locals attribute murders and suicides to long exposure to the sound.’  Benjamin survived the journey but at Portbou, on the border of France and Spain (as I wrote here a few years ago), exhausted and fearing repatriation, he took his own life with an overdose of morphine tablets.

.

In 2005 Ori Gersht travelled to Kosov in Ukraine, the birthplace of his father-in-law, who hid there for from the Germans two and a half years after the village had been declared “Judenrein” (cleansed of Jews).  The blurred Richter-like photographs Gersht took raise similar questions about the representation of such places as the Sally Mann Civil War landscapes I wrote about here a few years ago.  Gersht explained his decision not to photograph what he saw in a clear, objective way: ‘the camera can only depict the here and now, in this instance a pastoral Brueghelesque landscape, but my experience of these places was conditioned by what I knew…’ Steven Bode puts it well in an essay in the book to accompany Gersht's exhibition The Clearing: ‘the ghostly indeterminacy of the majority of the images, rather than reading as portentous, seems more redolent, at times, of feelings of uncertainty and doubt. Is this landscape as haunted, and as loaded, as he himself sees it? Have these places retained any traces of what happened over sixty years ago? And if not, how can they be made to communicate, so that the memory of what once went on there is not to be forgotten?’

On the same journey Gersht made a film in the Moskolovka Forest (see the clip below).  The setting, a site of Nazi atrocities during the war, reminded me of Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory ('Blood in the Forest') and the histories, myths and ideologies associated with Europe's ancient woodlands.  In Forest trees are felled, crashing slowly to the ground with a sound that reverberated around the gallery.  In between these moments, birdsong can be heard again as the camera remains still or pans slowly across the tall trunks, leaving you wondering which one will be next.  We never see the men whose actions result in the death of these trees.  Whilst it is, in Al Miner's words, ‘an elegy for the nameless dead who were lost in wartime atrocities, the piece also enacts the kind of ceaseless vigil that will be needed if these crimes are not to be repeated.’

The vast and queachy soil

In this post I want to draw your attention to Complex Crosses, a book of close readings by my friend Edmund Hardy which 'spans the history of poetry by alighting on small fragments'.  I reproduce with permission one of these in its entirety below.
 

Michael Drayton / compounds of place / 1622

From fast and firmer earth, whereon the Muse of late,

Trod with a steady foot, now with a slower gait,

Through quicksands, beach, and ooze, the Washes she must wade,

Where Neptune every day doth powerfully invade

The vast and queachy soil, with hosts of wallowing waves

(Polyolbion, The Five and Twentieth Song, lines 11-15)

The muse trods in gradations from the “fast and firmer” chalky uplands of Lincolnshire into the ooze of “vast and queachy soil”: “with a steady foot” begins on the chalk (to the north and south of the fens) and Jurassic rocks to the west, then down into the levels “with a slower gait” as sedimentation has slowed the landscape with “quicksands, beach, and ooze”, an interdigitation of peat, clay, silt and chalky islands. “Neptune every day” fixes the eroding action of the sea within the long time-span needed to imagine the erosion of the one-time chalk escarpment as the sea breaks in, and sedimentation fills the basin – the long span of Neptune within “every day”. The resulting fens are both sea and land, compounded linguistically in “wallowing waves”, presaging the area’s own self description in the poem “I peremptory am, large Neptune’s liquid field” (line 151). The soil is onomatopoeically queachy, heard and felt as the steady foot of the topographic muse puts a foot in, and finds that foot sucked into the landscape.

- Edmund Hardy, Complex Crosses (2014)

Illustration from Polyolbion (1622) engraved by William Hole

While the topographic muse trod through quicksands, beach and ooze, the inhabitants of the Fens in Drayton's day got about on stilts.  Drayton mentions this in his poem and William Camden, writing a little earlier, drew particular attention to the practice.  In Brittania (Latin 1586, trans 1610) we read of the inhabitants of Cambridgeshire’s peat fens: ‘a kind of people according to the nature of the place where they dwell rude, uncivill, and envious to all others whom they call Upland-men: who stalking on high upon stilts apply their mindes, to grasing, fishing and fowling.’  Isaac Casaubon spent some weeks in 1611 in and around Ely where he ‘made acquaintance with the solitary bittern and the imitative dotterel, with turf-fires and with stilts, and with the stilt walkers who were able to run so quickly.  At Downham, he was surprised to see one man on stilts drive 400 cattle to pasture with the help of only one small boy.’^*  It is tempting to draw a comparison with Drayton's poem, which is rarely stilted but does (as I've mentioned before) tend to stride rapidly over the landscape without really touching its surface.

Drayton died in 1631 and in the subsequent decade work began on the draining of the Fens.  It was a process described in a poem that has been attributed to Samuel Fortrey:

I sing Floods muzled, and the Ocean tam'd,
Luxurious Rivers govern'd, and reclam'd,
Waters with Banks confin'd, as in a Gaol,
Till kinder Sluces let them go on Bail;
Streams curb'd with Dammes like Bridles, taught t'obey,
And run as strait, as if they saw their way. 

It is not surprising to read in 'An Account of Several Observables in Lincolnshire, not taken notice of in Camden, or any other Author’, written at the end of the seventeenth century by Christopher Merret, that 'Stilts are now grown out of Fashion.’ 

^*  H. C. Darby, The Draining of the Fens, 1940, which contains the two quotes in the last paragraph here too.

Earth, besmirched, is churned and shattered into chunks

I'm a bit amazed to see I have now written 3000 tweets, which looks a lot when put together as a long list.  The great epic of Old English, Beowulf, is 3000 lines long.  The same length sufficed for Parmenides to write On Nature (fifth century BCE), Bernard of Cluny to explore De Contemptu Mundi (1150) and Mayakovsky to sing the praises of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924).  The manuscript shown above comprised 2997 hexameters and was the first significant poem in Lithuanian: Metai ('The Seasons'), composed by Kristijonas Donelaitis around 1765–1775.  It was first published posthumously in Königsberg in 1818, with a dedication to Wilhelm von Humboldt.  Seasonal poetry had by then been popular for some time in Europe - half a century earlier Prussians were reading Ewald Christian von Kleist's Der Frühling ('The Spring'), which had been inspired by James Thomson's The Seasons.  In an earlier post I mentioned another such poem, Počasy ('The Seasons') by Hendrij Zejler, the 'father' of modern Sorbian literature, and regretted that I didn't know whether it conveyed 'any particular sense of the Lusatian landscape.'  Fortunately there are some translations of Metai available online that provide an impression of how seasonal change was felt in the Lithuanian countryside.  Here are a few lines (translated by Demie Jonaitis) on the effect of autumn rain - the blubbering earth is one of many examples of anthropomorphism in the poem.

Earth, her every corner soggy, blubbers softly
For our wheels slash through her washed-out back.
Before, how smoothly two old horses dragged our load;
Now, with four good horses struggling, we bog down,
Wheel on axle, groaning, gags and, grinding, turns.
Earth, besmirched, is churned and shattered into chunks,

Fields in patches swim and splatter, drowning everywhere,

Rain, splish-splashing, washes down the backs of folks,
Bast shoes, stuffed in shabby boots, soak up the water,
While they stomp and knead foul mud like dough.
Ah, where are you now, you wondrous days of spring,
When we, re-opening the windows of the cottage,
Welcomed back your first warm flood of sunshine?

Record sleeve for a recording of Bronius Kutavičius's Metai oratorio.
  From the 'Kristijonas Donelaitis in art' page of a site (in English) dedicated to the poet.
The site also includes illustrations for Metai, including this autumn rain scene. 

The questions of the sea

The Royal Academy's Richard Diebenkorn exhibition divides neatly into three rooms, the first covering his early abstract period in Albuquerque and Urbana, the second charting his move into figurative drawing and painting while living at Berkeley, the third focusing on his famous Ocean Park series (1967-88).  Diebenkorn had grown up in the San Francisco Bay area and moved in 1950 to Albuquerque to complete his MA at the University (Agnes Martin, the subject of a respective at Tate Modern opening next month, taught there a few years later).  The city is located on a high plateau of the Chihuahua desert and, as co-curator Sarah C. Bancroft writes, 'the dusty whites, tans, reds, ochres, oranges, yellows and pinks of his environment are seemingly baked onto many of his paintings'.  It was on flight from California to Albuquerque in 1951 that Diebenkorn was first struck by the view of landscape from the air. "I guess it was the combination of desert and agriculture that really turned me on,” he said, “because it has so many things I wanted in my paintings. Of course, the earth’s skin itself had ‘presence’ - I mean, it was all like a flat design - and everything was usually in the form of an irregular grid.”  Diebenkorn's paintings in the 1950s often remind me of the contemporary works of Peter Lanyon who also used an aerial perspective - it is sad to think that Lanyon might have had an equivalent of the Ocean Park series ahead of him if he had not died in a glider accident in 1964.

By the early sixties Diebenkorn was painting more recognisable landscapes like Cityscape #1, which you can see and read about in the RA's Exhibition in Focus PDF.  'The colours and atmosphere of these landscapes are clear, crystalline and bright.'  Too bright, some viewers have apparently felt, although as Bancroft says Diebenkorn himself was struck by the vividness of Northern California when he made a return visit in the 1980s: "God, that is the colour I used to use, when I lived up here!"  Whilst in Berkeley he was also painting interiors with views through windows, influenced to by Matisse, Bonnard and Hopper.  These, Steven A. Nash writes in the catalogue, 'provided a means to compare internal and external light, a way to project attention into the far distance, and a device for exploring the emotional contrasts of near and far, culture and nature, and a sense of confinement versus longing for release and freedom'.  Nash also makes a connection with Caspar David Friedrich's paintings of windows (which I've referred to here before), whose 'reigning mood is serenity tinged with melancholy'.   

Back in 2006 I wrote about the Ocean Park paintings and their relationship to landscape.  Since then an essay by poet and former Ocean Park resident Peter Levitt has appeared called 'Richard Diebenkorn and the Poetics of Place'.  It can currently be read online as a PDF and I will end this post with a quotation from it that conveys the rapture these extraordinary paintings can provoke.  However, I think Laura Cumming is as usual very perceptive in her review, when she notes that up close they 'are stranger than expected, and this paradise is not without shadows – sometimes a grey pall, or a funereal black border edging into the frame.  In fact the Ocean Park series that has given so many people such pleasure arrives out of hesitation, correction, uncertainty, further attempts, frequent cancellations.  How can one tell?  Diebenkorn leaves the workings on show.  The veils of colour that settle on the painting like a misty haar lie over many trials and second thoughts.  The paintings look light, bright, uplifting, slim; but this only comes after long and patient thinking.'  Here then is Peter Levitt, who first visited Ocean Park in 1967 and marvelled 'at the unique and beautiful quality of the light, how from morning to night the sky’s variable shades of blue seemed to retain a moist translucence, as if the colour rose from the nearby sea to cool the heated summer air.'  

'The paintings call forth how it actually felt to live bathed in a wash of such colour and light, to feel the steady, calm, and gradual movement of time reflected in the environment as one lived one’s moments, days, months, and years in a small seaside town (now grown overlarge) whose primary quality was the interaction of this extraordinary light with everything and everyone it fell upon. ...  There is something that moves through me when I stand calmly before this work that doesn’t seem to have a beginning and, equally, may never end.  It may be the way Diebenkorn caught the light I’ve been discussing.  It may be how the shapes are so perfectly drawn and coloured that they call to mind the sound of the nearby ocean, where, as Pablo Neruda wrote, waves repeat the questions of the sea.  How can I know?  Should I even try to comprehend?  To stand in the company of these paintings—where the world I know is one a painter helped to create, and what lies beneath the paint is the common bond of what I call home —is enough.

The sound of water escaping from Mill dams

John Constable, Stratford Mill, c. 1820

Source: Wikimedia Commons (National Gallery)

Anglers often appear in the paintings of John Constable, who had gone fishing on the Stour in his youth.  In his 'micro-biography' Constable in Love (2009) Martin Gayford writes that 'angling was a perfect preparation for landscape-painting, which also involved sitting patiently in the countryside, trying to capture something.  By a river with a rod in his hand, an imaginative boy would absorb impressions - the reflections on water, the shadows beneath the willows, the smells, the sounds - while waiting for a bite.'  Constable wrote of a painting of a mill^* by Jacob van Ruisdael, that he could 'all but see the ells [eels]' in its water. 'The most famous of all Constable's statements was sparked by the topic of fishing.  In 1821 the younger John Fisher wrote, mentioning that he had been up to his middle in a fine, deep New Forest river and as happy as a 'careless boy'.  He caught two pike and thought of John Constable.  In reply, Constable produced an amazing sequence of free sensory associations:'

"The sound of water escaping from Mill dams... Willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, & brickwork. I love such things... As long as I do paint I shall never cease to paint such Places......"

In a similar vein, Constable exhibited the 'eye of a miller and relish of a connoisseur' in the way he praised another Ruisdael painting, Thatched-Roofed House with a Water Mill (Constable's father operated Dedham and Flatford mills).  The quotation of Constable's is also referred to by Andrew Motion in an article he wrote at the time of the RA's 2006 Ruisdael exhibition: 

'Constable's brother once said: "When I look at a mill painted by John, I see that it will go round, which is not always the case with those by other artists." It was a smart remark, and takes us to the heart of Constable's genius, where accuracy and authenticity generate a mighty emotional strength. This is what so pleased him about Ruisdael: we can hear it ... in his response to Thatched-Roofed House with a Water Mill. "It haunts my mind and clings to my heart," he told his friend Archdeacon Fisher, the very day he saw the painting, "and has stood between me & you while I am now talking to you. It is a watermill, not unlike Perne's Mill - a man & boy are cutting rushes in the running stream (in the 'tail water') - the whole so true clear & fresh - & as brisk as champagne - a shower has not long passed."'

Constable moves here from technical appreciation with specialised, poetic vocabulary ('tail water') to a simile that describes the painting's overall atmosphere in terms of a taste which, as Gayford says, 'brings with it a feeling: the exhilaration of sparkling wine.'

John Constable, Dedham Lock and Mill, 1820

Source: Wikimedia Commons (V&A)

^{* Gayford writes 'watermill' but Seymour Slive says that this refers to Evening Landscape: a Windmill by a Stream (Jacob Van Ruisdael: Windmills and Water Mills p12)}

Wave Movements

Billboard poster advertising Mountains and Waves, Highbury, April 2015

We were at the Barbican on Sunday for the last concert in a weekend of new music entitled 'Mountains and Waves'.  The first half was a premiere of Wave Movements by Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire and Bryce Dessner of The National (see the clip embedded below).  This was 'composed directly to the actual rhythms of waves' and began with rising and falling sounds reminiscent of breakers arriving and departing.  It was pleasant enough but after a while I started hoping for more of the drama and beauty you hear in the great sea compositions (Debussy, Sibelius, Britten), or to hear something more surprising than swelling violins and the rumble of kettle drums.  The ending was rather surprising - Maddy Pryor, once of Steeleye Span, came on and sang what sounded like a sea-themed folk song (her voice was half drowned by the surging strings).  Having read that the performance would feature Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes I had expected something quieter and more minimal.  Hung in a gallery setting, his images radiate silence and mystery, their skies empty, their grey seas stilled by the camera.  Perhaps we try too hard to project music on natural processes.  It was almost easier to sense 'wave movements' in the second part of the concert, listening to So Percussion perform Steve Reich's Drumming (1971).  I could imagine something sounding like this inspired by the uneven phasing of waves striking a rocky coastline.  Drumming was composed under the influence of West African polyrhythms and Reich later recalled the impact of studying percussion in Accra with the Ghana Dance Ensemble: 'I was overwhelmed by their music, like being in front of a tidal wave.'

The Virgin and Child in a Landscape

 Jan Provoost, The Virgin and Child in a Landscape (detail), early 16th century

I managed a few minutes in the National Gallery at lunchtime yesterday resting my eyes on this landscape by Jan Provoost.  Everything is softly lit, ducks drift slowly down the river and the few figures going about their business are barely visible, blending into the dark green of the grass and pale brown of the buildings.  I suppose the Virgin is sitting in a walled garden, although it looks rather overgrown (it is hard to maintain a small garden when you have a young child).  Jan Provoost (or Provost) is one of ten sixteenth century artists discussed in Max Jakob Friedländer's classic study, From Van Eyck to Bruegel, Early Netherlandish Painting, first published in 1916.  This selection, which includes Massys, Patenier and Bruegel, compares well with the book's fourteenth century line-up, ten as well if you count Hubert van Eyck along with his more celebrated younger brother Jan (the Jackie and Bobby Charlton of early Netherlandish painting).  If only some publisher would commission monographs on lesser players like Provoost... all of them would be interesting to study for their treatment of landscape.  Friedländer concluded that 'Provost loved landscapes planned like gardens (flower-pots, espaliers, flower beds); he avoided distant views and wide vistas.'  

Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of this painting is the copper-gold of the Virgin's dress and hair.  I came across this same golden-haired Virgin a few weeks ago in Genoa in another work by Provoost, an Annunciation.  It is an interior scene with only grey light visible through one high window, but as if to compensate for the lack of a view a small unframed landscape picture has been tacked to the wall.  This shows a Samuel Palmerish village in the countryside with a large tree on the left and a church spire visible against the sky.  In the context of the Bible story its presence feels strange, as if the Virgin had come upon an image of a place far away in space and time, a humble rural scene whose strangeness made it seem as precious as the other more ornate objects in her room.  Not long ago I wrote a post on the theme of landscape paintings within paintings, focusing on illustrations of wealthy collectors' displays and conversation pieces set in bourgeois interiors.  Provoost's painting is much earlier, from a time when the idea of independent landscape painting barely existed.  The tiny view in the Annunciation has writing underneath (too small to read) and looks like it might be a page from a book or calendar rather than a painting. Nevertheless I have added it to my Pinterest board on landscape paintings to be found within other paintings.

Jan Provoost, Annunciation, first decade of the sixteenth century

The Road to San Giovanni

In Liguria recently I took on our walks my much-read copy of Italo Calvino's Our Ancestors, which contains his short novel The Baron in the Trees.  In the book's introduction Calvino says that its tales 'breathe the air of the Mediterranean which I had breathed throughout my life ... So the Ligurian landscape, where trees have almost disappeared today, in the Baron is transformed into a kind of apotheosis of vegetation.'  He imagined a world of abundant fruit trees and olive groves of 'silvery grey, a cloud anchored halfway up the hillsides.'  Above these were the oaks, and then the pines and  the chestnuts.  'The woods climbed the mountain, and you could not see their bounds.'  Choosing to live out his life in these trees, the Baron would come to know a world of 'narrow curved bridges in the emptiness, of knots or peel or scores roughening the trunks, of lights varying their green according to the veils of thicker or scarcer leaves, trembling at the first quiver of the air on the shoots or moving like sails with the bend of the tree in the wind.'  

These steep wooded hills sloping down to the sea were important to Calvino from the outset, as he explained in a 1964 preface to his first novel, The Path to the Spiders' Nest (1946).  They had not really featured in literature before, except in the poems of Eugenio Montale (the subject of an earlier post on this blog).  Like the other neo-realists, Calvino was striving for authenticity, working with his own 'lexis and landscape', although his was a version of Liguria that omitted the tourist coastline centred on San Remo.

'I began with the alleyways of the Old Town, went up along the hillside streams, avoiding the geometric fields of carnations: I preferred the terraced strips planted with vines and olives surrounded by crumbling, dry-stone walls.  I advanced along the mule-tracks rising above the fallow fields up to where the pinewoods began , then the chestnut trees: that was how I moved from the sea - always seen from above, like a thin strip between two green curtains - up to the winding valleys of the Ligurian Pre-Alps'

Seen from the aeroplane: Calvino's Liguria

All the walks we made began by the shore and took us, like Calvino's descriptions, up through the trees towards the mountains.  In his autobiographical sketch, 'The Road to San Giovanni', Calvino recalls another of these climbs, from the family home to the experimental farm his father ran in the hills above San Remo.  The carnation fields Calvino would avoid mentioning in his novel a few years later were bypassed by his father too, 'as if, despite working professionally in the floriculture business himself, he felt secretly remorseful about it. ...  What he wanted to achieve was a relationship with nature, one of struggle and dominion: to get his hands on nature, to change it, to mould it, while still feeling it alive and whole beneath.'  His son, reluctantly accompanying him on these walks, 'could recognize not a single plant or bird'.  Living in the midst of nature, he wanted to be elsewhere.  'My father is talking about the way olive trees blossom.  I'm not listening.  I look at the sea and think I'll be down on the beach in an hour.'  It was later, in writing, that he would come to explore this landscape and it was through literature that he sought a different kind of connection to nature, where 'everything would become true and tangible and possessible and perfect, everything in a world that was already lost.'

Everywhere they tossed grass and flowers

Jan Wildens, May - Walk in the Avenue, c. 1615

On this first day of the month here is a delightful May painting that I saw a few weeks ago at The Palazzo Rosso in Genoa.  The Italian title of the painting uses the word 'la passeggiata', with its connotations of the customary evening stroll, "a socially sanctioned opportunity for flirting and courting" (Giovanna Delnegro, The Passeggiata).  In the midground a couple is walking very close together, in the foreground a young gentleman appears to be asking a young lady to dance, while another pair converse over a book.  A woman on the left may be concentrating on her dogs but the central figure with his back to us and his leg at a jaunty angle looks as if he might skip over to join her.  Everything is suffused in a silvery-pink light.  The water is a mirror reflecting the pale sky and soft green foliage.  The boat's passengers are no doubt returning to a pleasant evening in the country house half-hidden by the trees.

Jan Wildens (1586 - 1653) painted the other eleven months too, possibly while he was living in Italy.  They seem poised half way between north and south - there is a stepped gable visible in the painting above, but an Italian city in the painting for February.  The museum in Genoa has another painting, a collaboration with Cornelis de Wael, that has exactly the same compositional form as the May painting.  A comparison of the two is almost uncanny: there again music is being played to a group of people sitting in what appears to be the same avenue of trees, but around them the landscape has changed.  Nature is tamed into a formal garden and the avenue ends not in distant trees but at a baroque building.  The central standing figure seems a little bored as he looks over at his companions.  Put together they would resemble those 'before and after' landscapes Humphry Repton deployed to show clients how he would improve an estate.  

Simon Bening, Labours of the Months: May, from a Flemish Book of Hours, 

first half of the 16th century

Wildens' twelve compositions are a late example of a tradition that stretches back to medieval book illumination, stained glass and sculptural cycles for churches.  Although these 'Labours of the Months' generally show agricultural labour, May is the month for hawking, music and courtly love.  In the Da Costa Hours, illustrated by Simon Bening a century before Wilden's painting, a similar boat with four passengers glides towards a moated grange to the strains of recorder and lute.  This boat can also be seen in a Flemish Book of hours (above) and again, in a version by the workshop of Bening, heading under a bridge (it looks like it will be a bit of a squeeze).  There is an excellent Flickr site dedicated to the Labours of the Months where it is possible to look for other earlier echoes of the Jan Wildens paintings (the May boat for example can be seen here and here).  

I have referred here before to Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, whose May scene shows noblemen and ladies processing at the edge of a forest.  In Michel Pastoureau's recent cultural history of the colour green he discusses the fact that three of the women  are wearing 'the pretty vert gai (light and bright) mentioned in wardrobe inventories and chronicles.'  All sixteen figures in this miniature are wearing the mai in the form of necklaces, crowns, leaves, branches.  This tradition  'consisted of attaching to oneself an element of greenery. ...  To be pris sans verd, that is, not to display on oneself a single element of this colour, neither plant nor textile, led to becoming the object of mockery and harassment.'  In Simon Bening's May the figures in the boat all carry sprigs of foliage.  On the first of May it was traditional for a young lover to plant a single branch in front of his lover's home, 'a linden branch constituted a declaration of love; a rose branch celebrated the young woman's beauty; an elder branch on the other hand discretely denounced her more or less fickle nature.'

 The Limbourg Brothers, May - Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, c. 1412-16

Jan Wildens' painting really needs to be seen full size, although the small photograph I have included here emphasises the fact that landscape is his true subject.  The figures I have mentioned look insignificant in comparison to the trees' abundant crowns of fresh leaves.  Similar trees are central to Bening's miniature, and in front of them the riders and man on foot all hold leafy sprigs.  The boat party are sitting among sprays that turn their vessel into a floating version of the wooded countryside.  The transformation of the landscape in Spring was celebrated in the ancient practice of decorating houses with leaves and branches on this day in May.  I will conclude here with a passage Pastoureau quotes from the thirteenth century Guillaume de Dole, attributed to the Norman trouvère Jean Renart. 

'At nightfall the inhabitants of the town went to the woods to do their gathering ... In the morning when the day was very bright and when all was decorated with flowers, gladiola and green leafy branches, they brought in their May tree, carried it upstairs and displayed it before the windows, thus embellishing all the balconies.  Onto the floors, onto the cobblestones, everywhere, they tossed grass and flowers to celebrate the solemnity and the joy of this day.'

In the Cairngorms

We spent last weekend at a remarkable wedding in the Cairngorms National Park. I'm not sure if I was technically 'in the Cairngorms', in the Nan Shepherd sense, as we didn't get to explore the mountains. However, as Robert Macfarlane has often pointed out, climbing to a summit was not for Shepherd the way to experience this landscape.  I've been reading her poems, originally published in 1934 and reprinted last year.  In the Cairngorms is a rather uneven collection: some poems shine out as brightly as when they were written, others are dulled with old-fashioned language (was hers the last generation to use 'thy' and 'thou'?)  Four are written in the Scots dialect Doric; for Robert Macfarlane these poems, which 'stud the book like garnets in granite', best exemplify her sense of the hills as both unsettling and enfolding.

In these poems the elements are never entirely stable.  They change places and touch each other, unifying everything that can be perceived and felt in the landscape.  Light is the substance of the mountains; a loch is 'bricht, an' bricht, an' bricht as air'; the shadows of rocks are like the smoke from a bonfire.  In one poem 'air is tinged with earth', in another it is hard to tell a distant, tremulous blue hill from a morning star, vanishing in the morning light.  At dawn, a flooded landscape is 'unsubstantial blue', 'uncertain, half like dew / and half like light withdrawn.'  After the rain, clouds 'plod to the slouch of the wind their drover', stars process across space, 'boats come in from the width of the ocean.'  Water resembles 'clear deeps of air, / light massed upon itself', and tumbles in 'cataracts of wind' that crash in the corries.   

Robert Macfarlane finds echoes of Nan Shepherd's poems in the prose of The Living Mountain.  Her chapter on water, for example, explains the transparency of the Cairngorms' burns, undarkened by peat, which the poems describe as 'fiercely pure' and flowing with a 'glass-white shiver'.  When the water has a colour at all it is 'a green like the green of winter skies, but lucent, clear like aquamarines, without the vivid brilliance of glacier water.  Sometimes the Quoich waterfalls have violet playing through the green, and the pouring water spouts and bubbles in a violet froth. ... In summer I have stood on the high buttress of Ben a' Bhuird above the Dubh Loch, with the sun striking straight downwards into its water, and seen from that height through the water the stones upon its floor.'

A landscape of touch and double-touch

From the film Possession (2002): poets Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash

These two fictional nineteenth century poets in A. S. Byatt's novel Possession (1990) both draw inspiration from nature.  In one brief, intense summer they explore together the coast and moors of Yorkshire.  They write under the influence of Lyell and Ruskin but, like their Romantic predecessors, they are fascinated too with myths of metamorphosis, animism and elemental forces.  The poems of Christabel LaMotte (her name recalls Coleridge's poem 'Christabel' and the author of 'Undine', Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué) become, by the time the contemporary sections of the novel are set, the subject of close readings by feminist scholars.  One such critical study is read by Possession's unassuming hero, a lowly 1980s academic called Roland, just before he sets off to retrace the poets' journey north.  It leaves him with a vision of a land 'covered with sucking human orifices and knotted human body hair.'  I'd like to quote a paragraph here because, even as an amusing parody of academic writing, it is interesting on writing and landscape.  Byatt's novel is full of such extracts from fictitious poems, letters and journals.  Here, places reimagined by nineteenth century novelists are reinterpreted a century later by an American scholar who is herself merely a fictional character in Possession - nature transformed and distorted through three cultural filters.

'And what surfaces of the earth do we women choose to celebrate, who have appeared typically in phallocentric texts as a penetrable hole, inviting or abhorrent, surrounded by, fringed with-something? Women writers and painters are seen to have created their own significantly evasive landscapes, with features which deceive or elude the penetrating gaze, tactile landscapes which do not privilege the dominant stare. The heroine takes pleasure in a world which is both bare and not pushy, which has small hillocks and rises, with tufts of scrub and gently prominent rocky parts which disguise sloping declivities, hidden clefts, not one but a multitude of hidden holes and openings through which life-giving waters bubble and enter reciprocally. Such external percepts, embodying inner visions, are George Eliot's Red Deeps, George Sand's winding occluded paths in Berry, Willa Cather's cañons, female-visioned female-enjoyed contours of Mother Earth. Cixous has remarked that many women experience visions of caves and fountains during the orgasmic pleasures of autoeroticism and shared caresses. It is a landscape of touch and double-touch, for as Irigaray has showed us, all our deepest "vision" begins with our self-stimulation, the touch and kiss of our two lower lips, our double sex. Women have noted that literary heroines commonly find their most intense pleasures alone in these secretive landscapes, hidden from view. I myself believe that the pleasure of the fall of waves on the shores is to be added to this delight, their regular breaking bearing a profound relation to the successive shivering delights of the female orgasm. There is a marine and salty female wave-water to be figured which is not, as Venus Anadyomene was, put together out of the crud of male semen scattered on the deep at the moment of the emasculation of Father Time by his Oedipal son. Such pleasure in the shapeless yet patterned succession of waters, in the formless yet formed sequence of waves on the shore, is essentially present in the art of Virginia Woolf and the form of her sentences, her utterance, themselves. I can only marvel at the instinctive delicacy and sensitivity of those female companions of Charlotte Bronte who turned aside when she first came face to face with the power of the sea at Filey, and waited peacefully until, her body trembling, her face flushed, her eyes wet, she was able to rejoin her companions and walk on with them.'

Lake Mashū

I have just finished reading Nicolas Bouvier's Japanese Chronicles (1989, translated by Anne Dickerson) a compilation of travel sketches based on his experiences in the country between 1955 and 1970.  Bouvier spent some time in the northern island of Hokkaidō, a little more than twice the size of his native Switzerland, just then becoming popular with younger Japanese tourists.  Older Japanese, he observed, 'will never go there and don't think much of it.  This island has no prestige in their eyes because it has almost no history ... this neglect has lasted for a thousand years.'  Thus one cannot find old Japanese poems and paintings devoted to Hokkaidō's most beautiful views, but this has not stopped experts codifying their qualities for tourists.  Lake Mashū is an almost pristine volcanic lake, once (according to a measurement taken in 1931) the clearest in the world, although its transparency was reduced with the introduction of sockeye salmon and rainbow trout in the fifties.  Bouvier went to see it in the late sixties:

'Mashū-ko lake lies in a crater dominated by another crater that resembles a felt hat that has been crushed by a fist.  A little like the lakes in the Swiss mountains, but wilder, with the ambiguity a volcano adds to the landscape. In the middle, a small island.  No sign of inhabitants, but an observation platform for tourists where, on Sundays in August, you can hear Osanai de kudasamaise (Be so good as not to push).  There are two other lakes in the area that rival this one, but the Mashū-ko lake is sought after for its 'mystical' or mysterious ambience (I think that it is better to understand the word shimpiteki in the first sense) - no doubt because some authority in matters of landscape has said so.  I am the only foreigner. 
'Do you find the lake mystical?' someone asked me.
'I find it very beautiful, but why mystical?'
'Because a very esteemed professor said so - when will you learn to believe?'
'When? Very good question!'

Nicolas Bouvier is best known for The Way of the World (1963), an account of the journey he made ten years earlier with the artist Thierry Vernet from Yugoslavia to the Khyber Pass.  It contains some remarkable passages of image-rich descriptive writing that seem both densely packed and lightly done. At different points it reminds me of two very different books, On the Road and A Time of Gifts (Patrick Leigh Fermor described it as 'nothing short of a masterpiece').  Vernet's striking Indian ink illustrations punctuate the text and give a sense of the landscapes they encounter (the photograph below shows my copy open at their journey on the road to Anatolia).  Bourier was inspired to travel by his childhood reading - 'at eight years old, I traced the course of the Yukon with my thumbnail in the butter on my toast'.  As the biography in the back of the Eland Press translation says, 'without waiting for the result of his degree, in 1953 he left to join Thierry Vernet in Yugoslavia with no intention of returning.'  The Way of the World covers only the first eighteen months of his travels and it was not until 1956 that he reached Japan (as described in Japanese Chronicles).  He was an advocate of  slow travel and 'proud to boast that it had taken him longer to get to Japan than Marco Polo.'

The Black Earth

Last Sunday we were at the Sir John Soane church at Bethnal Green for the third and final performance of 'Landscape', three sets of new music by Rob St. John, Laura Cannell and Richard Skelton.  The last time I was at the church, Rob played some songs on his guitar; this time he came with two collaborators, a synth, a screen and an overhead projector.  The music and visuals - shadows of water, leaves, and disintegrating tape - were from his new record, Surface Tension.  For this he has drawn sounds from the dirty water of our local river, the Lea, as the Thames21 website explains:

'Tape loops of the field recordings as well as new music composed for the project were soaked in tubs of polluted Lea river water – duckweed, decaying leaves, oil slicks and all – for a month. When replayed, the loops slowly disintegrated, the river etching new channels and tributaries onto the tape, which slowly peeled off and faded away. The negatives of the film photographs were given the same river water treatment, with their prints developing odd new microscopic marks, layers and flares.'

Whilst Rob's music contains physical traces of the landscape, Laura Cannell reworks fragments of early music - Hildegard of Bingen, The Cantigas de Santa Maria, Henry VIII.  Her album, Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth, is named after one of those extraordinary condensed poems in Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho.  She plays two recorders simultaneously and reconfigures her bow so that it is impossible to lift it from the violin strings, creating a continuous drone.  One of the recorder tunes, she explained, echoes "the sound of deer barking in the woods by my house" - it was a lonely sound, floating out in the cold air under the church's high bare ceiling.  In her sleevenotes for Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth she writes about the experience of recording the music in a different church, standing isolated in the Norfolk landscape:

'The cold winter daylight
pouring through clear leaded windows

The wind shifts against the stone walls
It bangs on the ancient oak door

Like the clang of a distant wherry
over the marshes...' 

Finally Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson took to the stage to perform the forthcoming album Belated Movements for an Unsanctioned Exhumation August 1st 1984.  They were dressed, as Luke Turner says in his review in The Quietus, 'for a mildly blustery day on the tops, with sturdy jackets and solid knitwear'.  We still had our coats on in the audience - there was something chilling about this dark church, with its candle-lit paintings of Christ suffering on the way to the crucifixion.  Lindow Man, the bog body exhumed in 1984 may have died at the same time; the British Museum website dates his horrific ritual killing to between 2 BC and AD 119.  It would be a very different experience to the concert I wrote about here last year, where Richard played with the Elysian Quartet in another church, St Lukes, against a backdrop of leaves.  ‘We will begin with a collective symbolic descent into the soil',  Richard had said in an interview a week earlier, 'to the fox’s “earth beneath earth”, from where we’ll summon “Canis, Lynx, Ursus” and return, with great violence, to the surface.’
 
Listening to the first piece, ‘Petition for Reinterment’, it was apparent that the music would change very slowly.  As Richard describes it, this string elegy 'gently begins to disintegrate, to distend and rot, as if the music itself is being subsumed in soil and subjected to the natural cycles of decay and renewal. It is interesting to note that, whilst the skin of bog-bodies is often very well preserved, the bones undergo a process of decalcification - they literally dissolve from within.'  Eventually the music subsided with a kind of tolling sound and then merged into the second movement which I have embedded below, ‘To Your Fox-Skin Chorus’.  This refers to the arm covering on Lindow Man (the title is from an Edmund Gosse poem 'Old and New', contrasting BC and AD).  Once this too had receded there was a final slow build of intense, unsettling sound, with an insistent skewed keyboard pattern under the churning treated noise of a disinterred violin.  This last movement represents a 'downward delving to the bones of animals long made extinct in England by humans: the wolf, lynx and bear - animals that haunt the popular imagination.'  How long this lasted it would be hard to say.  Then, suddenly, the gale of sound abated and the last remnants of music faded gradually back into the ground.