Form, Function, and Frank

I first heard the name Frank Lloyd Wright from a Simon and Garfunkel song. Embarassing, but true. Actually, I don't know that it's really all that embarassing. I'm a musician and an unapologetic lover of pop music as a valid art form, so it really makes sense. In any event, I had no idea who FLW was while listening to Art Garfunkel's male alto singing, "So long, Frank Lloyd Wright. All of the nights we harmonized till dawn." The chorus was particularly baffling: "Architects may come and architects may go and never change your point of view." I'm of the "get it on, bang a gong" school of pop songwriting and while I certainly believe a great song can change the world, it would probably never occur to me to write a song about an architect. I mean, unless she were a really hot architect, and even then, her work in that field would be secondary to verses about her legs or whatever.

I actually am quite embarassed to say that I matriculated for a full seven years within an hour's drive of Fallingwater, Wright's iconic masterwork, without ever having seen it. I started not to mention that, but it really does get to the essence of what I'm thinking as I write. Or maybe it's what I've not thought about very deeply over the years.

The arts philosopher Suzanne Langer wrote a wonderful (though rather difficult) book entitled Feeling and Form. She tackles the issue of the essence of each of the disciplines and I remember being quite impressed by her treatment of music when I was an undergraduate. Langer wrote that the essence of music is time, that it is, in some way, time made audible. Nietzche and Frank Zappa have said much the same thing in their own ways. As a musician, I love that. Langer argues that music is the most abstract of the arts and I think she's right. A C major chord is a set of pitches. It has no specific meaning beyond those sounds and it's actually quite a task for a composer to make those sounds have a direct analog in the "real" world. Now, if I write a song (i.e., I put words to the music), suddenly my piece is about white Christmases or doggies in windows or walking like Egyptians or whatever. It is the words telling you what the song is about though. The other arts may be abstract, but abstraction is music's default mode. It's difficult for music not to be abstract.

In many ways, architecture is the opposite of music, so much so, in fact, that some do not readily recognize it as an art form. After all, the architect is designing rooms for people to peel potatoes or use the toilet. And all of us live and work in these spaces, many of them the antithesis of beauty, elegance or affective expression.

The one thing I have always remembered about Frank Lloyd Wright from my art appreciation class was his emphasis on functionality in architecture. "Form follows function" was the dictum Wright followed, a phrase coined by his mentor Louis Sullivan. It is the one thing that has left an impression on me as I think about the arts generally, and even music specifically. It is so easy for musicians to fall into formalist traps, following a prescribed template, whether rondo form or thirty-two bar Tin Pan Alley song structures. The result is usually something inorganic (a term Wright would have undoubtedly approved), something that does not seem even authentic in itself. When you hear music where the form is an outgrowth of the expressive elements, whether Beethoven first movements with extended codas or Muddy Waters' 11- and 13-bar blues, it resonates as something that occurs almost naturally. There is something organic in these forms, the same way there is in Wright's irregular hexagons.

So today, at the inviation of our friends Rachel and Robert, my wife and I had the opportunity to tour Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was truly remarkable and left me in awe of the man. This "winter camp" was established by Wright when he was 71-years-old. He moved there largely for health reasons, but established a school of architecture that split sessions between this "campus" and the other Taliesin, in Wisconsin. He spent the first two years in a tent, literally, while his students built his home. There was no running water and no electricity for years. The facility makes use almost exclusively of natural light that comes in through canvas roofs. Bedrooms were largely open to the elements and every building is constructed with materials found mostly on the desert floor where the campus sits.

Yet the beauty of the place is truly remarkable. The way the buildings seems to rise out of mountains and incoporate the forms of the saguaro cacti and other natural elements is striking. It's not just the archiecture that adds to the beauty. Collected Asian art works, three theatres that host the performing arts, and three grand pianos (left from the nine that Wright furnished during his lifetime) give the impression that this is a place to create.

Create he did. And not alone. The school was really the brain child of Wright's wife, Olgivanna, something of an Eastern European mystic and dancer. She was Wright's third wife and thirty years his junior. They established a small community (some might say "cult") of about 70 individuals, including 30 or so apprentices, who lived and worked at Taliesin. Such was their devotion to the place, and to the man, that today 98-year-old Cornelia Brierly, one of the original members of the Taliesin Fellowship, still lives and works there. And she's not the only one of Wright's former students who has stayed on. They put on concerts and plays, cooked together and entertained guests, and visited Wright in his bedroom to borrow books and learn from his wisdom.

By the time Wright moved to Taliesin West, he had already completed one career. He was America's most prolific architect and revolutionized the form many times over with ideas great and small: Prarie Houses, car ports, "Usonian" housing, floor lighting and more. He lived in Japan for six years and designed the Imperial Hotel. He designed the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Johnson Wax building. He was controversial, abandoning one family and later living openly with his mistress. She was murdered, along with six others, by an axe-weilding servant who burned the original Taliesin to the ground. He bought ninety cars during his lifetime, opining, "Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves." He wore a suit and tie to his desert office everday, not knowing when clients might stop in. He was opinionated and perhaps arrogant. He played the piano from memory, including entire Beethoven sonatas. He reportedly told friends that had he been a musician, he would have changed music much the same way Beethoven had; he couldn't even read music. Our tour guide told us that he rejected the title "America's Greatest Architect." He preferred "The World's Greatest Architect."

I find myself tonight with two books on Frank Lloyd Wright. I'm hoping to harmonize with him, too.

The Arts & Meaning in Pain

Today I watched a setting of Euripides' Medea with 500 high school students. It was a re-imagining of the tale by the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center, set in an early 20th century tea house, styled in a quasi-Kabuki manner and performed entirely in Japanese, with English subtitles. It was deeply affecting and brilliant, a perfect example of 21st century "remix" culture: the sex-roles of the patrons and geisha of the chashitsu were used to comment on Medea's frustrations as a woman in Greek society, and the uncomfortable intersection between East and West was continually highlighted, as Medea is repeatedly referred to as "Asian." Under different circumstances, this is probably what I would blog about right now.

As it is, life has chosen to interrupt art to a great extent and my experience of the play this week is probably much different than it would have been otherwise.

Although the performances were profoundly different in many ways, my mind naturally wandered to school performances by the West Virginia Dance Company, which I have seen many times. I suppose it's because they, too, often blend cultural elements to achieve a greater artistic impact. Or maybe it's just because they have performed in more West Virginia schools than probably any other arts organization in the state.

I've thought a lot about how young people respond to art. When they are very young, there is an openness that is enviable, even among those of us who spend a good deal of our time in the arts. The youngest of children have not yet learned to mask emotion or to hide with pretension and they respond to the thing itself. It's really beautiful and it's one of the reasons artists like to work with younger students.

Once students reach middle school, they're expected to behave certain ways. They are not allowed to have pure emotional responses, for any number of reasons: they are viewed as inappropriate by adults, as unsophisticated by their peers, and as unnatural in our educational system. To top it off, the arts community (and I'll include myself in this guilty number) bombards them with all these rules about how to experience and respond to art, what to wear, what to do, not to talk, when to laugh or cry, when to applaud . . . and the rules can vary widely according the whether you're watching theatre or dance, whether you're in a concert hall or a jazz club, even who else is in the audience.

Coupled with the truly limited experiences many of them have, most students are pretty uncomfortable watching a performance by the time they reach high school. I suppose it's the years I spent teaching, but I've come to expect this response and to accept it as the general order of things.

Here's something particular I have noticed: when a work of art touches a group of students on a particularly deep level, they get nervous. Just when you know they are feeling the thing the artist is giving them, they act "inappropriately." They fidget. They make disarming comments. They giggle. I've seen it time and time again, and it used to make me angry. "Why the hell can't these kids just go headlong into what is happening? Why do they have to act so damn goofy?"

I don't get angry anymore. I think I understand it somewhat better. Most of them - maybe 80% or more - aren't used to feeling this deeply. They do not have the mechanism to respond.

Most adults don't either, by the way. It's just that when teenagers feel insecure, they joke. When adults feel insecure, they just pretend they know more than they do.

I don't mean this as a judgment in any way. I think the need is clear. We need more art. The arts give us that emotional language to respond to those deep places. Some of those places are transcendent. Listening to Bach helps us feel the divine. Watching Shakespeare helps us fall in love. Some of those places are dark, part of our shadow side.

Medea, especially the production I saw today, was one of those pieces that helps us make meaning of those dark experiences in life. I'll recap the story briefly.

Medea, a princess from a foreign land, is brought to Greece after she kills her brother and helps Jason steal the golden fleece. She marries Jason and has a son by him, but the king of Corinth offers his daughter to Jason, who decides to leave Medea. Creon, king of Corinth, banishes Medea and her son because he suspects that she has powers of witchcraft. Medea hatches a plot to seek her revenge. She makes a gift of a robe and comb to her ex-husband's new bride. The bride puts both on, not knowing that they are poisoned. She dies violently and when her father, the king, comes to rescue her, he is killed, too. Medea completes her revenge by murdering her own son, leaving Jason without an heir.

The setting I saw today was performed in kabuki style. The "readers" of the play were Japanese officials visiting a tea house, while the silent "players" were the geisha who served. The subordinate role of the women is emphasized throughout, with the geisha objectified, silent and serving. The play-with-the-play shows the male officials sexually harassing the women even while they read the angry words of Medea against dominant men. The play concluded with the geisha slaughtering the male officials just as Jason discovers Medea's deeds.

It was brilliant and affecting at the deepest level. Medea's pitiable situation was presented without sentimentalism. There was real pathos and fear as she stabs her own child to death.

The students giggled.

I could feel their discomfort. For most of them, death is presented casually in video games and many films. Now, this is not a "back when I was a kid" diatribe. I actually don't think that these casual portrayals necessarily desensitize children to violence. But they do not portray the powerful emotional impact of violence the way that art does - with color, gesture, pitch, rhythm, movement, drama. You could not watch the action onstage, though it was not graphic in any way, and not feel the horror of the moment.

If we are to make meaning of all of life's experiences, we need art. The universe seems ruled by chaos. The arts - along with religion, philosophy, mathematics, science and the rest - help us make meaning of the chaos. The special role that the arts play are in making meaning of the emotional tumult of our lives.

This is the other reason I was thinking of my friends at the West Virginia Dance Company while watching the play today. One of their dancers, a beautiful young woman named Cyan Maroney, was violently murdered this week. Several of them were witnesses; all of them were a second family to her. I cannot imagine the profound pain they are feeling right now. I find myself hoping that I never know the type of psychic turmoil they have experienced in the last three days.

I only knew Cyan casually from a few introductions. I had seen her dance, though. She was dancing Anne Frank in a piece that the company was currently touring. She knew the power of the arts to bring order to all the darkness there is in the world.

How are the other dancers coping? Today, they are dancing. To those who are not artists, this probably seems strange. For those of us in the arts, we can imagine no other response. Their dance is catharsis, I am sure. But more than that, it is one way they can fight against the occasionally unbearable awfulness of the Universe, a way to scream out, "You haven't beat me yet, dammit!"

There are those who imagine that education is merely to prepare young people for a life of work, so they may go home and anesthetize themselves in the face of life's tragedy. But rather than an anesthetic life, I would suggest an aesthetic life, one that embraces the pain with the joy, knowing that it is all part of our common experience. Such a life is unimaginable without the arts.

My thoughts are with Cyan's family, along with everyone at the West Virginia Dance Company and those in the Beckley arts community who are hurting so much. I hope they find solace.