Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Mandelshtam and Maybeck: music, wood, architecture

Прозрачной слезой на стенах проступила смола,
И чувствует город свои деревянные ребра.

Resin's oozed onto the walls like a transparent tear,

And the city feels its wooden ribs.

(Osip Mandelshtam, "За то, что я руки твои не сумел удержать," / "Because I couldn't hold off your embraces," December 1920)
Although there's not really anything at all in the poem that would suggest it, I can't help but hear the sound of a stringed instrument in the background to these lines from one of my favourite poems by Mandelshtam. (Here's the whole poem--but the translation is downright shoddy). There's a space that's wooden and resonant (the city, the Trojan horse, homes, poems, рукоделие, things made) that cries tears of resin. If there's a sound of wood weeping, its tears have formed the rosin that helps the cello's strings' sound, the sound then consoled and amplified by the crafted wooden shape that it fills and mingles with.

Hearing that sound stems from my fascination with and love for the cello's crafted wooden-ness, inhabiting the poem with my own meaning, perhaps. Another of Mandelshtam's poems, "The Finder of a Horseshoe," (Нашедший подкову) begins with the view of a forest in which the trees are seen simultaneously as the masts of ships; time and its transformations coexist; forms contain others that may be wrought upon themselves. --Which, we might say, is how music shapes time too.

Глядим на лес и говорим:
— Вот лес корабельный, мачтовый,
Розовые сосны,
До самой верхушки свободные от мохнатой ноши,
Им бы поскрипывать в бурю,
Одинокими пиниями,
В разъяренном безлесном воздухе.

We look at woods and we say:
Here is a forest, for ships and for masts;
The pink pines
Stand free to their tops of bushy accretions,
They should creek in a storm
As do lone-standing pines
In the infuriated forestless air.
(Bernard Meares' translation)

When I first came to California, one of the first things that captivated me, after the brick I had grown up inside of, was the wooden houses. For one, the wooden house feels more porous, more connected to the outside (my own apartment, alas, a little too porous; the return of the rain will renew my battle with the leaky bathroom roof). And the wooden house feels built--as if the process and the intention is more palpable--whereas my brick houses felt like they grew from the ground, or, rather, felt as if they are as present with the same kind of certainty as the ground is itself. Sometimes in California, I feel acutely aware of the ground, of things being built on the ground, of the built thing's ongoing negotiation with the ground, while in England, the matter of the building and the ground's relationship was settled long, long ago.

Where I live now is my third home in Berkeley/Oakland. And it is a house with historical foundations: it was the first house built by Bernard Maybeck, the famous Arts and Crafts architect, and the first house that he himself lived in in Berkeley. It dates from the 1890s, and it is very wooden. It has been divided into apartments and is not in perfect condition, but it retains a special character and traces of its creator.

In this picture of the house from 1902, the projecting sleeping porch (extended and refashioned) is now my kitchen. The house has gained some more in size since then too.

Charles Keeler, who had first met Maybeck in 1891, on the commuter ferry from San Francisco to Berkeley (long before any Bay Bridge!), described the house as it was in 1895:
"I sought out Mr. Maybeck at his home in northwest Berkeley and told him I had come to accept his offer to design our house. I really had no idea what I was getting into when I put myself in his hands. I found his own home was not yet complete and that he was working on it at odd times, with the assistance of Julia Morgan’s brothers. His house was something like a Swiss chalet. The timbers showed on the inside and the walls were of knotted yellow pine planks. There was no finish to the interior, for the carpenter work finished it. There was a sheet iron, hand-built stove, open in front and with brass andirons. Most of the furniture was designed and made by Mr. Maybeck himself. It was a distinctly hand-made home."
Keeler formulated Maybeck's architectural philosophy:
"A wooden house should bring out all the character and virtue of wood—straight lines, wooden joinery, exposed rafters, and the wooden surface visible and left in its natural state. A house should fit into the landscape as if it were a part of it, it should also be an expression of the life and spirit which is to be lived within it. [...] whatever was of structural importance should be emphasized as a feature of ornament. [...] [Maybeck] was interested in the simple life which is naturally expressive and consequently beautiful. He believed in handmade things and that all ornament should be designed to fit the place and the need. He did not mind how crude it was, provided it was sincere and expressed something personal."
And here, in particular, is a description which places the wooden house in the company of music and poetry: (The Gothic cathedral is also a prominent architectural image in the poetry of Mandelshtam, from approximately the same period, and for approximately the same reasons; meanwhile elsewhere in his metaphorical thinking, made and used domestic utensils are important too.)
"So Mr. Maybeck proposed to build wooden houses in which the beauty of the natural wood was to be given its full value on both the inside and outside. His next principle was that whatever was of structural importance should be emphasized as a feature of ornament. He called attention to the fact that, in the old Gothic cathedrals the rafters which upheld the pointed arches, the succession of pillars which gave strength to the walls, the flying buttresses that helped hold them firm were all necessary to the solidity and stability of the building. The repetition of exposed columns and rafters were like the beats in music or the metrical emphasis that gives accents to poetry. That is why Ruskin speaks of architecture as frozen music. But a room with smooth plastered walls creates no sense of rhythm and its machine stamps wallpaper is applied to relieve the barrenness of its boxlike effect. Mr. Maybeck proposed to restore the handcrafts to their proper place in life and art."

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Cello & Chard

I might have discovered, tonight, the bikram yoga technique of cello practice. With the temperature still over 80F at sunset, I decide to bake, in my kitchen that's been lapping up the sunshine all day long, a Swiss chard and goat's cheese quiche--an established favourite, and quite summery, you could say, were it not for the cranking up of the oven that its preparation requires.

The recipe also nicely accommodates a multi-tasking cello-practice (and my practice is always accommodated in my kitchen):
  • blind bake the crust for 10 mins :: warm up with a few scales
  • pause to saute chard for 2 mins (Take care before, during and after this stage to wash hands and keep bow safely out of way of olive oil; the amateur-bloggeur lost her first bow to some wayward sardine oil. Sunflower oil, as readers of Master and Margarita well know, is capable of even more diabolical damage.)
  • bake assembled quiche for 35 mins :: a couple of times through the 4th movement (allegro) of the old Vivaldi Sonata No. 3 in A minor, with special attention to syncopated rhythms and transitions between phrases (I'm prone to just stop).
  • Ping! Remove quiche from oven!
Tonight's post, it should be added, comes with a nod
of acknowledged inspiration to Dining with Dostoevsky.

This was a particularly pleasing practice session; I got through some tricky passages more smoothly than ever. It even elicited some kind words of approval from my long-suffering neighbour who arrived home to hear strains of Vivaldi (and smell of baking) wafting out my open front door. I partly attribute its success to the staggering temperature that my kitchen must have reached during this hour -- all the better for limber limbs and faster fingers, it seems.