Harmonielehre, Autobuslehre
Nighttime intercity bus window-watching is soundtracked last Friday with the third movement of John Adams's Harmonielehre. Under that starrily pulsing orchestral sky passes a calm stream of golden lamplights, their individual stalks always gradually changing position in relation to each other. Below them, small round headlight-pairs traffic by in quicker smooth curves. The scene glides along with the music in a thoughtful aura of consonant resonance. A gibbous moon has affixed itself low on the horizon, bright but otherwise evoking the texture and temperament of a folded moth.
Under the first few minutes of Adams's Violin Concerto, the same scene unwinds differently: finding kinship with the eerie unravel of mindwandery melody, the headlights now are curious, mouselike, of their own agency and passing each other by in loose counterpoint. The lamplights on this stretch of highway have disappeared; the moon's tilt now implies a leaning in, a peering over the rim of however many miles of void come between it and the road. During some of the spikier violin digressions a note of paranoia creeps in — — that moon may not be entirely disinterested — — —
These fifteen minutes of Adamsian road movies are the one transcendental note of an otherwise very unpleasant process, that of depending on Greyhound to get you from New Haven to Boston on a Friday night. For various reasons that I have no interest in laying out, this took seven hours.
My favorite Greyhound bus memory is watching dusk fall over the NY Thruway between Utica and the City, the third movement of Naive and Sentimental Music peppering its pulse into the shifting landscape. This was the summer three or four years back; I didn't know the piece well then, and the communion between its moving parts and the glowing stream of cars and horizon going past kind of made it click for me.
Much better than Friday's trip was the return Sunday night, much more comfortable, as the trip went straightforwardly, without traffic or significant holdups, and still the industrious bus pulled into New Haven an inexplicable hour and twenty minutes behind schedule.
The message from this particular volume of bus lessons is this: Do Not Take Greyhound Buses Any More. I mean it this time. I am very tired of Greyhound buses.
Under the first few minutes of Adams's Violin Concerto, the same scene unwinds differently: finding kinship with the eerie unravel of mindwandery melody, the headlights now are curious, mouselike, of their own agency and passing each other by in loose counterpoint. The lamplights on this stretch of highway have disappeared; the moon's tilt now implies a leaning in, a peering over the rim of however many miles of void come between it and the road. During some of the spikier violin digressions a note of paranoia creeps in — — that moon may not be entirely disinterested — — —
These fifteen minutes of Adamsian road movies are the one transcendental note of an otherwise very unpleasant process, that of depending on Greyhound to get you from New Haven to Boston on a Friday night. For various reasons that I have no interest in laying out, this took seven hours.
My favorite Greyhound bus memory is watching dusk fall over the NY Thruway between Utica and the City, the third movement of Naive and Sentimental Music peppering its pulse into the shifting landscape. This was the summer three or four years back; I didn't know the piece well then, and the communion between its moving parts and the glowing stream of cars and horizon going past kind of made it click for me.
Much better than Friday's trip was the return Sunday night, much more comfortable, as the trip went straightforwardly, without traffic or significant holdups, and still the industrious bus pulled into New Haven an inexplicable hour and twenty minutes behind schedule.
The message from this particular volume of bus lessons is this: Do Not Take Greyhound Buses Any More. I mean it this time. I am very tired of Greyhound buses.
1 Comments:
"The moon's tilt now implies a leaning in," pulled me a bit out of your second paragraph, there, Jack. Not so much the grammar as the diction, seems to disrupt the tone - I'm not sure if you're using the notion of implication to soften the transition towards a personified moon, but perhaps it would be more effective if you just allowed the moon to have its own agency. The fact that you give opposing headlights mammalian import allows for the moon to tilt and peer on its own as well (without the not-quite-stilted-enough dangling prepositions). The more straight-forward personification of the moon should also highten and solidify the paranoia that your narrator has gained in the absence of street lights.
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