On September 28, 45th Parallel Universe presented the last of this season’s outdoor garden performances at the home of their Development & Production Coordinator Ron Blessinger. In Blessinger and his wife Ann Medellin’s garden yard, a string quartet performed Philip Glass’s Third and Fifth String Quartets. Blessinger played violin in this quartet along with Shin-young Kwon, violist Maya Hoffman and cellist Nancy Ives.

The concert took place on a modest green, large enough for a few arcs of chairs around the quartet. Surrounding this yard were large rhododendron bushes, overgrown rosemary plants, a low fence, moss-covered statuettes and hidden string lights. One could hear echoes of the strings from around the street corner, and pedestrians craned their necks to see what was happening. 

Blessinger and Medellin’s black-and-white Aussie, Star, appreciated this casual atmosphere, roaming around the yard with a tennis ball in her mouth. At one point Blessiner jokingly asked if the dog’s owners would deal with her. He also remarked, “John Cage would be very pleased,” with some street noise filtering into the performance. (Though at a different point, he seemed nonplussed at some neighbor dogs barking, glaring up from his score to no one in particular.)

A unified endeavor

Glass’ Third String Quartet contains music from his score to Paul Schrader’s 1985 film, Mishima: a life in four chapters, about the life and work of Japanese author Yukio Mishima. In his memoir, Words Without Music, Glass recounts working on the music to Mishima:

“The music had an important role to play in the film. The score I composed was not meant as a musical decoration of the film. It was, in fact, used to help articulate the film’s structure…particularly with Mishima, I think that integrating the composition of image and music into a unified endeavor can provide the most powerful tool for a filmmaker.”

Glass goes on to describe this in more detail. The tragic final moments of Mishima’s life (the author committing seppuku after a failed coup attempt) are scored as a march; the black-and-white flashbacks are introspective and scored for string quartet alone; and scenes based on Mishima’s novels contain, “the most lyrical and sumptuous music,” in Glass’ words. The Third String Quartet is the music of those introspective flashback moments.

He refined this approach while working with Godfrey Reggio on Koyaanisqatsi. Koyaanisqatsi does not have dialogue or characters, but it nonetheless has an emotional and narrative arc. It is structured more like a musical composition than a three-act narrative film. It is a collection of sequences that, when taken in as a whole, forms the emotional arc of the film. Visual and musical motifs return with dramatic weight, especially with the film’s incredible ending. The opening scores ominous drones beneath vast landscapes and builds towards pulsing synth arpeggios and forceful choral passages as the film explodes into time-lapse footage of city life. 

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Koyaanisqatsi, released in 1982, is about as direct a statement of the impending world order as one could find in cinema. It predates Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis by half a decade. (Ned Beatty’s monologue in Network is another such premonition of neoliberalism: “we no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies…the world is a business, Mr. Beale.”) 

Paul Schrader, the writer and director of Mishima, has a fascination with alienated men who are driven to violence. His most famous character, Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, like Mishima dies in a way that to themselves seems the ultimate glorious act of heroic sacrifice. But to others, it seems a pathetic and meaningless death. Mishima was an outspoken fascist who attempted to take over Japan’s army with his own paramilitary force, the Tatenokai. His seppuku was his final attempt to return to the imagined past, where valiant samurai would rather die by their own hands than admit defeat. 

To return to Words Without Music, Glass pens some brilliant criticism on Mishima and the place of the author in postmodern society:

“There may be no writer more autobiographical than Yukio Mishima. Everything he wrote was about himself…for all the writers I personally know, writing is a way of accommodating themselves to the world, of making the world a bearable place in which to live. Mishima became a writer in order to make the world understandable to himself.

“That’s very different from having an agenda, let’s say an existentialist agenda that has an ideological or theoretical basis. Mishima’s solution derives from his experience, and in that way, he resembles Céline or Genet, writers who were not political writers but who were working out of the crisis of being alive, the crisis of experience itself. This applies to the whole postmodern generation, of which we have to say we are a part. That which authenticates our work is the genuineness and spontaneity of our intuitions. In this way, the activity of writing makes the world meaningful. It has no political status, and I would say it has no real social status. That’s precisely the way it is transcendent–it goes beyond the visible world into a world in which being alive makes sense. For the postmodernists, writing becomes the remedy.” 

Such passages in Words Without Music show that artists are often great critics. The work of an artist is itself an act of criticism of what came before. Critics then tease out and reveal what may have been implicit within the artist’s work, things that the artist themselves may not have understood.

The last days of summer

Blessinger and company’s performance of the Third String Quartet was solid. One notable moment came near the beginning, with a steady pulse broken up by violent stab chords. The ensemble twisted those chords into a near-evocation of the sword slashing through Mishima’s belly. 

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In the Fifth String Quartet, the hallmarks of Glass’ music are still here: arpeggios sine-waving up and down, driving eighth-note ostinatos undulating in the accompaniment, shifting meters as beats are added and dropped, diatonic melodies and chromatic chord changes. Glass’ music is strikingly unadorned, stripped back to the essentials of harmony, rhythm and form.

In his usual pre-concert blog post, Blessinger dared to say this quartet was “romantic.” It’s almost Glass’s own take on Romantic music, while retaining the essentials of his musical language. What may have been a moment on the way to something else in a string quartet by Brahms is here repeated, stretched out to the length of the whole movement. It forces the listener to dwell upon something that may seem forgettable or even trite in passing. In the Fifth String Quartet, Glass is more willing to juxtapose these ideas and let dissonant chords hang in the air for a second. 

The concert fell on what may be the last day of summer weather in Portland until next spring. The end of summer hits Portland hard and sudden. It was a comfortable, cool late September afternoon. Crows passing overhead cawed, neighbors relaxed on their porches, and cyclists cruised through the narrow street. These last days of summer were peaceful – a sardonic counterpoint to what the President and his administration think the city is like. 

Earlier that week, the Trump administration announced that it would send federal troops to clean up the “war-ravaged” city, in the President’s words. The state of Oregon has sued to stop this deployment, but the administration’s bluster continues. Every day brings a new development, and no one knows what to expect. Is this the beginning of a civil war, or another failed attempt to maintain the facade of imperial strength? When history repeats a tragedy, is the farce a black comedy, or the same tragedy but dumber? We have to convince ourselves that, surely, we aren’t so far gone. During the performance, I couldn’t help but imagine what was happening at the ICE facility on Macadam just a few miles away. Looking up to the cloudy sky, I imagined Black Hawk helicopters floating overhead, their roaring blades overtaking the quartet. I’m not sure if Cage would’ve been quite as pleased. 

The synchronicity of performing music from Mishima at this moment is hard to ignore. To return to Glass’ quote above, artists enact understanding of the present through their work. Mishima’s writing, his life story and the film by Schrader blur the lines between fiction and reality as only he could have. We can see the beauty in how Mishima identifies and addresses the crises of the postmodern age, even if we may find his solutions despicable. Glass’ music addresses the postmodern condition in a different way: he developed a highly personal synthesis of his musical world. One can hear through his music traces of his studies with Nadia Boulanger, Ravi Shankar, and his time in the “Downtown” musical scene in New York. In a pithy phrase, Mishima could only be Mishima, and Glass could only be Glass.

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If you wish to revisit the music of the garden concert, both of these quartets can be heard on the 1995 album by the Kronos Quartet. The next 45th Parallel Concert is the Golden Ghurls of Broadway on October 27 at the Brunish Theater, in which Zachary Galatis and Maria Garcia revel in the classics of Broadway, from Cabaret to Wicked.

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