Given the technical challenges in what Tanya Yip is trying to sing, it’s perhaps not too surprising that she needs a little extra help.
(Natalie Dessay show us how it’s done here in case your sight reading is a little rusty.)
The rather unusual and improving singing lesson that Tanya gets has its own rather unusual and special inspiration: a famous (or notorious) painting by Balthasar Kłossowski de Rola, or Balthus (1908-2001) as he was more commonly known. The painting is The Guitar Lesson (1934), and I’ll bet it’s scandalous even today (note that the image is from Wikipedia; I am reproducing it in-line for reader convenience):
Controversial, but unquestionably high art created by one of the twentieth century’s greatest painters. It is even used by Richard Posner in his magisterial 1992 book Sex and Reason (pp. 376-7) as an example of how it can be nigh impossible to draw a clean distinction between “art” and “pornography.”
Judge Posner helpfully notes also that the girl in the painting whose guitar lesson has turned into a very different kind of lesson is in the same position as Christ in Enguerrand Quarton‘s fifteenth century La Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.
When I was just about ready to launch EroticMadScience.com I wrote to a friend describing my enterprise in these words:
I guess it’s time I raised the Jolly Roger and set sail.
And that’s very much in the general spirit of things at this site, since a core idea behind the Gnosis stories is that it is a blessing to be able to escape the realm of ordinary human life and its conventions, to find a morality-free zone where we might indulge our imaginations.
Dreams are of course the best and most blessed of all such zones, perhaps. Hence Gnosis Dreamscapes. But pirates do nicely as well.
And naturally, as pirates are outlaws beyond the reach of any state, one naturally imagines that they might get up to some rather interesting activities.
(For a larger version click through to Kinky Delight.)
I’m a little surprised that there isn’t more pirate-themed porn than I can readily find with simple image searching. “Rum, sodomy, and the lash” was how Winston Churchill supposedly characterized naval tradition. Churchill probably wasn’t right about the sodomy bit, given how little privacy there would have been on an a ship in the days of fighting sail. But seriously, wouldn’t a square-rigged ship be something like an ideal BDSM playground? What with all those ropes and spars and the great familiarity that sailormen are supposed to have with different kinds of knots? To say nothing of the fondness that navy men have long had for corporal punishment as a means of maintaining discipline… Perhaps the shortage of usable vessels explains why we don’t see sailing ships used for more bondage shoots. Perhaps the Village People’s use of the U.S.S. Reasoner lingers in institutional memory, making the Navy skittish of any possible proposal by fine folks at Kink.com to borrow the U.S.S. Constitution for an afternoon. But perhaps I speculate too much?
That said, there are certainly some people willing to make good use of the vast homoerotic potential of pirates.
But interestingly enough it was none of this that inspired Bill’s naval dream. Rather, it was Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht‘s song “Seeräuber Jenny” from Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) that really set my inner wheels in motion. A woman in an oppressive situation imagines pirates coming and wrecking destruction on all around her, and then carrying her off. Here is Lotte Lenya performing it in a 1931 film version. (German lyrics, and an alternative audio version, can be accessed here.)
What with all the generalized do-badding, and all theusesandabuses of religious settings going on around Gnosis, I guess it would only be a matter of time before someone decided on performing a Black Mass.
The point at which Maureen walks in on him to settle his hash respecting the aphrodisiac she stole from him is approximately here in the score.
The dynamics marking in the score at the end of the crescendo shown in the third measure is only f, but I have yet to hear a recording of this work in which the performer interpreted that to mean anything other than “wicked loud.” I wouldn’t know how to characterize the technical demands of this piece other than “wicked difficult.” Small wonder Maureen had little trouble dropping in on Arthur.
And if you want to see it performed, you’re in luck, because YouTube has Yevgeny Sudbin doing just that.
Scarier than some old ritual with daggers and alters, or at least so it seems to me.
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
