The Clockwork Nightingale
I made a clockwork nightingale.
I cut the gears and shafts from brass.
The springs I bought at my hardware store.
I made the body and wings from copper,
and etched the feathers in the metal.
The beak and tail were stainless steel.
I enameled eyes so the bird could see.
I wound it up with a silver key.
I taught it madrigals and sent it
from door to door to sing for my supper.
A Nashville crow lured it away
with promises of country music stardom.
I have not heard it sing on the radio,
nor seen its discs in music stores.
I sometimes wonder, late in the night,
if it sings on Nashville’s meaner streets,
or lies scrapped in a dump in Tennessee.
Die Zwitscher-Maschine (Twittering Machine) -- Paul Klee
I made a clockwork nightingale.
I cut the gears and shafts from brass.
The springs I bought at my hardware store.
I made the body and wings from copper,
and etched the feathers in the metal.
The beak and tail were stainless steel.
I enameled eyes so the bird could see.
I wound it up with a silver key.
I taught it madrigals and sent it
from door to door to sing for my supper.
A Nashville crow lured it away
with promises of country music stardom.
I have not heard it sing on the radio,
nor seen its discs in music stores.
I sometimes wonder, late in the night,
if it sings on Nashville’s meaner streets,
or lies scrapped in a dump in Tennessee.
Die Zwitscher-Maschine (Twittering Machine) -- Paul Klee
ReplyDeleteI cannot be grasped in the here and now, For my dwelling place is as much among the dead, As the yet unborn, Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, But still not close enough.
--Paul Klee's epitaph, Schosshaldenfriedhof, Bern, Switzerland.
In 1921 Paul Klee began teaching at the Staatliches Bauhaus, founded 2 years earlier by architect Walter Gropius, and poet
Rainer Maria Rilke remarked that "Even if you hadn’t told me he plays the violin, I would have guessed that on many occasions his drawings were transcriptions of music." Novelist Wilhelm Hausenstein called him "one of the most delightsome violinist playing Bach and Händel, who ever walked on earth" and noted that his composition was "written in notes." Klee's father taught music at the Bern State Seminary in Switzwerland, and his mother a singer; they had met as students at the Stuttgart Conservatory, and Paul began taking violin lessons at 7. In 1906 he married a Bavarian pianist. "Die Zwitscher-Maschine" (1922), the most popular of his 9,000 paintings, inspired at least 100 musical compositions, more than any other single piece of art, beginning in 1951 with an orchestral piece by Giselher Klebe. In 1948 James Thrall Soby claimed, "The bird with an exclamation point in its mouth represents the twitter's full volume; the one with an arrow in its beak symbolizes an accompanying shrillness –- a horizontal thrust of piercing song. Since a characteristic of chirping birds is that their racket resumes as soon as it seems to be ending, the bird in the center droops with lolling tongue, while another begins to falter in song; both birds will come up again full blast as soon as the machine's crank is turned." But Kay Larson said that the birds "whir helplessly, their heads flopping in exhaustion and pathos. One bird's tongue flies up out of its beak, an exclamation point punctuating its grim fate—to chirp under compulsion." Even the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which owns it, is ambivalent about its message, claiming in its catalog that it as evocative of an "abbreviated pastoral" but inspires "an uneasy sensation of looming menace" but the are "deformations of nature" and the twittering machine produces a "fiendish cacophony" that lures "victims to the pit over which" it "hovers." In 1933 the new Nazi regime in Germany denounced it as "degenerate art" (Entartete Kunst), a term the party adopted in the 1920s to describe modern art as an "insult to German feeling." The designation caused the art to be removed from state-owned museums and banned in Germany, and the artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, or being banned from producing art at all. The Gestapo searched Klee's home and he was fired from his job. Late in 1933 he emigrated to Switzerland, his birthplace, but due to the controversy over his art, he was denied Swiss citizenship until 6 days after his death in 1940. In 1937, 17 of his pictures were included in an exhibition of 650 examples of "Degenerate art" and 102 were confiscated from public collections.In 1939 the Nazis sold "Die Zwitscher-Maschine" for $120.
In 1950 WSM-AM announcer David Cobb called Nashville, Tennessee, "Music City U.S.A." WSM ("We Shield Millions" was the motto of the National Life & Casualty Company) had begun broadcasting the "WSM Barn "Music Appreciation Hour," prompting the show's creator George Hay to tell his audience in 1927, "For the past hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera. From now on, we will present the 'Grand Ole Opry,'" the name by which the program has been known ever since. The radio station had a 50,00 watt signal that was received in 38 states and parts of Canada, and its programming promoted the popularity of country music. The offices of numerous record labels, publishing houses, music licensing firms, recording studios, video production houses, radio stations and networks, and other businesses that serve the music industry were established in an area called "Music Row" (centered on 16th and 17th Avenues South, known as Music Square East and Music Square West), and the Country Music Association was formed in Nashville in 1958, and the Country Music Hall of fame and Museum in 1964. But despite being long identified with country music, the city is the site of many other musical genres; for instance, in 2007 the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc. moved there from Kenosha, Wisconsin. The city's association with music began at least as far back as 1871, when the Fisk Free Colored School (established in 1866 by the American Missionary Association as the 1st American university to offer a liberal arts education to “young men and women irrespective of color)” was in dire financial straits. The university's treasurer, music professor George L. White, formed a 9-member touring choral ensemble of students. The group left campus on 6 October (still celebrated as Jubilee day). During their 1st tour White named them The Jubilee Singers (Leviticus, Chapter 25: 10 --"proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you"). In 1873 the 11-member group toured Europe and raised enough money to construct Jubilee Hall, the school's 1st permanent building.
ReplyDelete