Intoxicated Woodpeckers

“Confucius supposedly said that the rectification of society starts with the rectification of its language. This suggests that a careful use of words comes before new laws, new programs, and new leaders. Laws and programs begin in words, and if the words of our leaders are entangled in garbled speech, intoned as nasal whining, bereft of inspiration and wit, and flatter than the commercials that surround them, then we can’t expect the society to prosper.”

-       James Hillman; The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

 

 Amidst all the horrors of our current time, the debasement of language gets scant attention. Lunatic ravings on Twitter that would draw the disapproval of any elementary school English teacher now are par for the course for the leaders in the land. While people are struggling for their very livelihoods and in some cases, lives, worrying about poor speech seems rightfully low on the list of proper fuel for our anxiety. But it is a significant part of the whole catastrophe. In contemporary vernacular,” it, like, really sucks!”

 

I had the supreme pleasure yesterday of watching my nephew Damion’s superb performance in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. 

Besides the fine performances from all the casts and the engaging comedy-of-errors story, it was so refreshing to hear the “inspiration and wit” so typical of times gone by and so sorely lacking in our “awesome” contemporary culture. 

 

This on my mind having looked through an intriguing book on my shelves titled The Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time by Nicolas Slonimsky. It is a collection of reviews by both critics and fellow composers of new works by composers who became famous. On one hand, it reveals the critics’ inability to accept and understand new developments in musical language as they lambast works that went on to become classics in the repertoire. It likewise exposes their abusive mean streaks as they thoroughly deride in no uncertain terms the composers’ sincere attempts at sublime musical expression. 

 

But, oh, the eloquence and wit with which they do it! Sheer poetry! Far beyond the reach of their contemporary counterparts. At the same time that one might laugh at how wrong they were and criticize them for being so mean-spirited, one can’t help but admire their genius in describing the musical sounds they found intolerable. Here is a short list of how they described pieces by giants like Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Mahler, Gershwin and more:

 

 “Absolute bewilderment, acoustical shock, agonized bravura on a pocket handkerchief, agony, alcoholic stimulus of a big baboon, babblings of a deranged man, ballyhoo vulgarity, bassstubathetic, bestial outcries, bloodcurdling nightmare, caterwauling catastrophe in a boiler factory, communist traveling salesman, creaking of rusty hinges, crime against music, curiosity shop of tangled harmonies, demented eunuch, demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, etiolated and emasculated shreds of sound, fierce whiskers stained with vodka, filthy pencils writing on lavatory walls, frog-legs thrown into violent convulsions, gallery of harmonized abortions, hideously writhing dragons, hurricane of wrong notes, inebriated persimmons, intoxicated woodpeckers, masochistic aural flagellation, mass snoring of a naval dormitory, mournful banqueting on jam and honey, outrageous agglomeration of unresolved discords, pandemonium of cross-eyed devils, puffs and snippets of melody, putrefactive counterpoint, raging satanic fury, regurgitation of a water closet, scotch terrier worrying poultry scratching of a glass plate with a sharp knife, self-torture of a flagellant, sticky frog-like sexuality, stuttering tonal delirium, tortured mistuned cackling, ungreased wheelbarrow, wheezy hurdy gurdy…”

And that’s not even the half of it!”

 

So if you feel the need to put other people and their work down, the least you can do is be inventive and expressive. And if you need a cheat sheet, there is one about Shakespearean insults where you choose one adjective from column one, another two-word-hyphenated adjective from column two and a noun from column three, with some 50 words in each column and all their possible combinations. Next time somebody irritates you, feel free to call them a beslubbering beef-witted boar-pig or a craven clapper-clawed clack-dish or a saucy swag-bellied strumpet.

 

Hopefully while listening to the intoxicated woodpeckers in Edgar Varese’s composition Integrales.