Song for Friday Afternoon

Earlier this summer I saw The Bling Ring, and here it is September and I still can’t shake Sophia Coppola’s film from my mind. I spent much of the summer immersed in Benjamin Britten’s world, from his songs and operettas for children to professional works for the operatic stage (notably, The Turn of the Screw and Gloriana). Much of Britten’s work comments on youth and childhood, innocence and the loss of it. Britten tends to gaze on youth (childhood) with a honeyed, late-19th century eye; this yearning for childhood is free from cynicism and anxiety. In fact, his nostalgia often feels like an attempt to free himself from the political and social conflicts of the mid-20th century. In Songs for Friday Afternoons, The Golden Vanity, The Little Sweep, and Noye’s Fludde, the music is simple, playful, and endearing, but Britten’s backwards glance—so idealistic—is also unsettling. It can seem, sometimes, that he skirts the issue.

Sophia Coppola is more honest about traversing the break between childhood and adulthood. In The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, and this summer’s The Bling Ring, Coppola portrays the voyage from innocence to experience as something of a shipwreck. Her films gaze back on the wreck, the wreckage, and its survivors. In The Bling Ring, for example, she follows a group of teenagers who willfully trade the innocence of childhood (or, what’s left of it) for the pursuit of Los Angeles celebrity culture. Through her camerawork and visual framing, Coppola’s look at youth is tender and, well, picturesque, but the summary of the film pushes at a sharper edge. Coppola’s observations are marked by a 21st-century asceticism.

Britten seems to bask in the idealistic glow of the past. Coppola flirts with nostalgia—she even seems to express sympathy—but in the end, she positions herself as a realist. She herself does not want to go live (or hide out) in the worlds on which she turns her camera.

What really struck me, however, amidst the various themes of innocence wrestling against the bid for worldliness, was the emergence of a new idea, of kids wanting, simply, to mythologize themselves. Treble voices sing in canon; adolescents play a series of sophisticated, glimmer-and-sparkle dress-up games (and get caught). These actions are ways of “making a story” and achieving immortality. The boy sailors in The Golden Vanity sing with heroic charm; they preside with pride and independence over their ships, free from the watch of adults. Coppola’s teenagers sing abrasively to hip hop as they joyride around Los Angeles on their way to a new heist. Perhaps what I found most beguiling was how, between Britten and Coppola, the mythologizing begins: in song.

 

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Das Rheingold

If the dappled blue marble we call Earth wore headphones, there is only one piece of music I’d want them plugged into: the opening five minutes of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold. The orchestral unfolding of a simple E-flat major triad is music of all time and place. Wagner’s music depicts the Rhine River, but knowing this bit of literal information in no way hinders the imagination. The French horns outline the triadic skeleton in overlapping entries and I remember the wheat fields of my childhood, the smell of straw, the golden fleece rippling and settling over the rolling hills like a baby’s blanket. As the strings join in the unchanging harmony hundreds of measures later, I remember when I had no choice but to dive into the urban mob of baseball fans lining Market Street in downtown San Francisco, a few days after the Giants won the 2012 World Series. Deranged joy and proud muscle pressed in on me from all sides, lifting my feet off the ground and propelling me eastwards toward the Ferry Building, the destination of my dentist appointment. Wagner’s music turns even the mundane act heroic.

I love this music for the power it exerts on memory and personal experience, even as it supports a story all its own. Its basic soundworld (the harmony, rhythm, and tempo) never changes, and it captures the listener in the liquid amber—in the gold at the bottom of this E-flat River Rhine—a place where the most treasured memories rub shoulders with the most awful. I remember a baby who died, a lover who cheated, a bone that broke. When the chill of some unspeakable thought crosses the music’s otherwise intrepid path, I realize that I can hear the dominant harmony as it ducks in and out of the musical fabric (B-flat here, F and A-flat there). As quickly as the notes of this other harmonic region arise, however, they are consumed by the E-flat river. All is one. Wagner speaks equally to that which exalts and terrifies; he paints the waters to match the sky.

The prelude to Das Rheingold is the introduction to four epic operas, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, arguably the most complex audiovisual imagining of all time. Yet, the music thumbs its nose at complexity; it reveals its bones, measure upon measure of E-flat major, and as such, it reveals the bones of its listener. Thus stripped, breathing in tandem with the seemingly endless phrases, I turn my face skyward and tell the Earth to press the headphones closer.

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