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A Musical Offering
In the 18th century, Count Keyserling commissions Johann Sebastian Bach to compose a piece of music that will finally allow him to fall asleep. Bach, surpassing all expectations, creates an aria containing thirty variations that became known as the Goldberg Variations, in honour of its first performer, put in charge of playing the piece night after night until the count fell asleep. With this story, Luis Sagasti opens a hypnotic tale full of counterpoints that, just like the Variations, sets out to follow the turns of a melody so as to arrive at the final aria—where everything begins again.
Like Goldberg repeating melodies over and over for the Count to rest, Sagasti narrates for us a thousand and one stories that take the reader from Bach to Gould, from Gould to the Beatles, from Sergeant Pepper to the music that was played in Nazi concentration camps, and from there to 4’33’’ by John Cage, to The Who and so on, ad infinitum. But when do we end a story? When do we decide to sing the final lullaby? For Sagasti, undoubtedly, the cosmic order is a musical one.
Like Goldberg repeating melodies over and over for the Count to rest, Sagasti narrates for us a thousand and one stories that take the reader from Bach to Gould, from Gould to the Beatles, from Sergeant Pepper to the music that was played in Nazi concentration camps, and from there to 4’33’’ by John Cage, to The Who and so on, ad infinitum. But when do we end a story? When do we decide to sing the final lullaby? For Sagasti, undoubtedly, the cosmic order is a musical one.
114 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2017
12 people are currently reading
1831 people want to read
About the author
Luis Sagasti
14 books34 followersLuis Sagasti, a writer, lecturer and art critic, was born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina in 1963. He graduated in History at the Universidad Nacional del Sur where he now teaches. From 1995 to 2003 he was Curator in charge of Education and Cultural Outreach at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bahía Blanca, authoring numerous art catalogues for exhibitions. Including Fireflies (known in Spanish as Bellas Artes, 2011), he has published four novels: El Canon de Leipzig (Leipzig's Canon, 1999), Los mares de la Luna (Seas of the Moon, 2006), and Maelstrom (2015). He also has a book of essays Perdidos en el espacio (Lost in Space, 2011). His new novel, Una ofrenda musical (A Musical Offering) came out in early 2017.
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February 20, 2025
A confused and joyous harmony
It doesn’t have a physical aspect at all, it’s happening in your mind. It’s a palace of sound that is being built by your own imagination.
(Pianist Pavel Kolesnikov on playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations)
When Vesna and Chris, who are equally passionate about music, recommended A Musical Offering to me last year, it solved my family’s problem what to put under the Christmas tree (even if they consider bringing more books into their home rather insane). When Fionnuala prompted me to finally read it, my family’s return on investment were a great deal of smiles per page (in case they would had paid attention). I thought A Musical Offering a true gift, doing its title justice - a musical feast, entertaining, playful, erudite and witty. This little book has been an enrapturing reading experience for many reasons, of which my fondness of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and in particularly their interpretation by Glenn Gould are only a few (more about the nascence of that twofold and connected affection in my gushing on Sandrine Revel’s brilliant graphic novel Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo here).
My favourite chapters were Lullaby (The Goldberg Variations! Brahms!) and Silences, of which Silences worked as an eye- (and ear-) opener, as thematising the essential role of silence in musical composition and performance, just like white space can be crucial in poems, shaping the lyrical landscape, rhythming and structuring space, surpassing the promise of mere possibility however, as well as the purely functional by creating a world that continues in the silence, the radiant silence (forgive me if this sounds hardly original, such is entirely due to my ignorance and inability to word it, not to the book). This revelation, keeping me company now like a bird which nestled on my shoulder, continues to reverberate in me when listening to music or reading (for instance when Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus writes ‘Perhaps…it was music’s deepest wish not to be heard at all, not even seen, nor yet felt’ or when coming across an observation of Schumann on Chopin’s Preludes,‘He is here recognizable even in the pauses and the silences.’).
Sagasti blends factual snippets of musical history and the life of composers (of which many felt like old acquaintances since meeting them reading The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century earlier this year (Messiaen, Ligeti, Shostakovich) with reflections on science, the natural world (the loneliest whale in the world), literature (1001 Nights, Borges, Virgil, Dante, Tolstoy), art (Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Mondrian) and imaginary tales (on the building of a giant organ reminiscent of the Tower of Babel). One could as well experience his book as an incoherent potpourri of faintly connected minutiae as revel in the way Sagasti guides the reader from one miniature observation or micro-story to another observation, frothily associating and connecting them by recurrent allusions and echoes.
Intricately structured, circulatory, playing with themes, variations, repetitions, and leitmotifs like a musical piece transmitted into words, the six pieces (and a coda) flow into a gossamer and fluid composition touching on death, sleep, dreams, loneliness, war and resilience in a feather-light, almost ethereal way – a touch so light it might come across as superficial, but also - like Swann is beguiled by that little musical phrase of Vinteuil - luring the reader to pause, not to move to the next fragment yet, to dwell for a while in the luminosity and the brilliance of the fragments, even if Sagasti is partly quoting the words of someone else:
Messiaen: Birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs. Each bird, each instrument has his own tempo, and by overlaying them we achieve a confused and joyous harmony.
The latter could be said about Sagasti’s own creation as well.
As Orhan Pamuk wrote Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight, Sagasti’s book tempts to explore the place of silence not only in music but also in painting, which led me to this wonderful find.
(paintings by Yozanun Suntur Wutigonsombutkul (Suntur)))
It doesn’t have a physical aspect at all, it’s happening in your mind. It’s a palace of sound that is being built by your own imagination.
(Pianist Pavel Kolesnikov on playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations)
When Vesna and Chris, who are equally passionate about music, recommended A Musical Offering to me last year, it solved my family’s problem what to put under the Christmas tree (even if they consider bringing more books into their home rather insane). When Fionnuala prompted me to finally read it, my family’s return on investment were a great deal of smiles per page (in case they would had paid attention). I thought A Musical Offering a true gift, doing its title justice - a musical feast, entertaining, playful, erudite and witty. This little book has been an enrapturing reading experience for many reasons, of which my fondness of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and in particularly their interpretation by Glenn Gould are only a few (more about the nascence of that twofold and connected affection in my gushing on Sandrine Revel’s brilliant graphic novel Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo here).
My favourite chapters were Lullaby (The Goldberg Variations! Brahms!) and Silences, of which Silences worked as an eye- (and ear-) opener, as thematising the essential role of silence in musical composition and performance, just like white space can be crucial in poems, shaping the lyrical landscape, rhythming and structuring space, surpassing the promise of mere possibility however, as well as the purely functional by creating a world that continues in the silence, the radiant silence (forgive me if this sounds hardly original, such is entirely due to my ignorance and inability to word it, not to the book). This revelation, keeping me company now like a bird which nestled on my shoulder, continues to reverberate in me when listening to music or reading (for instance when Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus writes ‘Perhaps…it was music’s deepest wish not to be heard at all, not even seen, nor yet felt’ or when coming across an observation of Schumann on Chopin’s Preludes,‘He is here recognizable even in the pauses and the silences.’).
Sagasti blends factual snippets of musical history and the life of composers (of which many felt like old acquaintances since meeting them reading The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century earlier this year (Messiaen, Ligeti, Shostakovich) with reflections on science, the natural world (the loneliest whale in the world), literature (1001 Nights, Borges, Virgil, Dante, Tolstoy), art (Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Mondrian) and imaginary tales (on the building of a giant organ reminiscent of the Tower of Babel). One could as well experience his book as an incoherent potpourri of faintly connected minutiae as revel in the way Sagasti guides the reader from one miniature observation or micro-story to another observation, frothily associating and connecting them by recurrent allusions and echoes.
Intricately structured, circulatory, playing with themes, variations, repetitions, and leitmotifs like a musical piece transmitted into words, the six pieces (and a coda) flow into a gossamer and fluid composition touching on death, sleep, dreams, loneliness, war and resilience in a feather-light, almost ethereal way – a touch so light it might come across as superficial, but also - like Swann is beguiled by that little musical phrase of Vinteuil - luring the reader to pause, not to move to the next fragment yet, to dwell for a while in the luminosity and the brilliance of the fragments, even if Sagasti is partly quoting the words of someone else:
Messiaen: Birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs. Each bird, each instrument has his own tempo, and by overlaying them we achieve a confused and joyous harmony.
The latter could be said about Sagasti’s own creation as well.
As Orhan Pamuk wrote Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight, Sagasti’s book tempts to explore the place of silence not only in music but also in painting, which led me to this wonderful find.
(paintings by Yozanun Suntur Wutigonsombutkul (Suntur)))
March 25, 2021
Now Shortlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2021
Book 2/10
The prize rewards the best fiction published by publishers with fewer than 5 full-time employees, yearly. Only last year I discovered that small presses published some wonderful and courageous titles and I decided to support them more this year, firstly by reading the longlist of ROFC prize.
Charco Press, the publisher of A Musical Offering, is a small independent press from Edinburgh specialized in South American literature. They only publish 6 novels per year but the quality is very high. I highly recommend checking them out.
It is very hard to write a review for this book because I am not sure what it is, I never read anything like it. It seems to be a collection of fictionalised essays about music and a bit of literature. There is no plot and the structure of each chapter seems random while it isn’t. Despite its weird structure I was entranced and was looking forward to read more. I am not a fan of classical music but the author made me research and listen to most of the works mentioned in the book. I was familiar with most of The Beatles but I still found some interesting details about their work.
A musical Offering debuts with the story of creation of the Goldberg Variations by Bach as a lullaby for an insomniac count. We then move to Glenn Gould and its most famous performance of the Variations. When you think the novel is all about music, 1001 nights and Borges are mentioned to introduce one of the main themes, circularity. After that, there is a short story about Beatles and so on. Each chapter has a theme, (i.e. Lullabies, silence, conflict, space) and all the stories somehow revolve around it. However, there are some themes and works to which the author returns in every chapter, circularity again.
The music we encounter range from classical works such as Brahms, Bach, Wagner to pop-rock legends such as The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones. There are also bits about literature and painters (Rothko, Mondrian), the Navajo people, some Japanese that failed to surrender after WWII and other interesting stuff. I sometimes did not know which was fact and what was invented. There are lot of names in very few pages but I never felt overwhelmed or bored. A delightful pleasant surprize.
Work by the author published by Charco Press: Fireflies
Reviews of other novels published by Charco Press: The Wind That Lays Waste
The Adventures of China Iron
Book 2/10
The prize rewards the best fiction published by publishers with fewer than 5 full-time employees, yearly. Only last year I discovered that small presses published some wonderful and courageous titles and I decided to support them more this year, firstly by reading the longlist of ROFC prize.
Charco Press, the publisher of A Musical Offering, is a small independent press from Edinburgh specialized in South American literature. They only publish 6 novels per year but the quality is very high. I highly recommend checking them out.
It is very hard to write a review for this book because I am not sure what it is, I never read anything like it. It seems to be a collection of fictionalised essays about music and a bit of literature. There is no plot and the structure of each chapter seems random while it isn’t. Despite its weird structure I was entranced and was looking forward to read more. I am not a fan of classical music but the author made me research and listen to most of the works mentioned in the book. I was familiar with most of The Beatles but I still found some interesting details about their work.
A musical Offering debuts with the story of creation of the Goldberg Variations by Bach as a lullaby for an insomniac count. We then move to Glenn Gould and its most famous performance of the Variations. When you think the novel is all about music, 1001 nights and Borges are mentioned to introduce one of the main themes, circularity. After that, there is a short story about Beatles and so on. Each chapter has a theme, (i.e. Lullabies, silence, conflict, space) and all the stories somehow revolve around it. However, there are some themes and works to which the author returns in every chapter, circularity again.
The music we encounter range from classical works such as Brahms, Bach, Wagner to pop-rock legends such as The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones. There are also bits about literature and painters (Rothko, Mondrian), the Navajo people, some Japanese that failed to surrender after WWII and other interesting stuff. I sometimes did not know which was fact and what was invented. There are lot of names in very few pages but I never felt overwhelmed or bored. A delightful pleasant surprize.
Work by the author published by Charco Press: Fireflies
Reviews of other novels published by Charco Press: The Wind That Lays Waste
The Adventures of China Iron
Read
April 13, 2021What Luis Sagasti has done in this short book needs to be experienced to be believed. He has put together hundreds of 'notes' relating to sound, and has created a musical score which we all, even the less musical among us, can read and interpret quietly inside the chamber of our own minds.
From the sounds a baby hears in its mother's womb to the sounds made by whales in the ocean, from the Beetles to Bach, it's all here in a composition where minor motifs weave amongst each other within each movement, and major motifs repeat in different forms from one movement to the next. Glenn Gould's recordings of Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' are one such major movement, and they rhythm the entire book from the opening Aria to the Da Capo at the end.
The reading gods are kind to me indeed. This Musical Offering proved to be the perfect follow-up to Gabriel Josipovici's Goldberg: Variations—in which I'd particularly enjoyed a few sections relating to silence. Sagasti composes with silence too, the 'rests' in a piece of music, the stillness of Navajo sand paintings, and this little piece about a Trappist monastery. Can you hear it?
The monk’s steps
Water falling on dirty dishes
Bells
A crow
The pages of a book turning
The wind
A creaking chair
Distant hammering
A glass set down on the table
A rake drawing a spiral in the sand garden
Birdsong, faintly
A crow
A match
Coughing
A saw
Someone sighing
Sudden rain
Steps in the passageway
A crow
A glass set down
The smell of damp
A lemon tree
Sawing
A drawn curtain
From the sounds a baby hears in its mother's womb to the sounds made by whales in the ocean, from the Beetles to Bach, it's all here in a composition where minor motifs weave amongst each other within each movement, and major motifs repeat in different forms from one movement to the next. Glenn Gould's recordings of Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' are one such major movement, and they rhythm the entire book from the opening Aria to the Da Capo at the end.
The reading gods are kind to me indeed. This Musical Offering proved to be the perfect follow-up to Gabriel Josipovici's Goldberg: Variations—in which I'd particularly enjoyed a few sections relating to silence. Sagasti composes with silence too, the 'rests' in a piece of music, the stillness of Navajo sand paintings, and this little piece about a Trappist monastery. Can you hear it?
The monk’s steps
Water falling on dirty dishes
Bells
A crow
The pages of a book turning
The wind
A creaking chair
Distant hammering
A glass set down on the table
A rake drawing a spiral in the sand garden
Birdsong, faintly
A crow
A match
Coughing
A saw
Someone sighing
Sudden rain
Steps in the passageway
A crow
A glass set down
The smell of damp
A lemon tree
Sawing
A drawn curtain
July 1, 2024
4 ⭐
Thanks is in order to my GR friend Ilse for inadvertently recommending this book to me via her 2021 GR wrapup.
In the spirit of Luis Sagasti’s wonderful efforts, a small Stream-of-Consciousness style Musical Offering from me to you, gentle readers.
Christoph Wolff, in his preeminent Bach bio, The Learned Musician, suggests that the anecdote regarding Keyserlingk’s commissioning of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, however romantic, is likely apocryphal due to the lack of any formal dedication as required by eighteenth-century protocol, along with Goldberg’s tender age of 14. It’s much more likely that the work constituted a Grand Finale to the overall larger concept of Bach’s Clavier-Übung series. Not at all to suggest we should let it affect our enjoyment of Sagasti’s work but something worth thinking about when choosing whether to accept one and all of the anecdotes included.
Sagasti’s ‘A Musical Offering’ can come across as stream-of-consciousness. One could be forgiven for thinking he just sat down, begun with Bach, then the Beatles and just let his musical/artistic mind take him in whatever direction it pleased.
Or maybe it feels more like two friends just having a relaxed discussion about music and the arts over a couple of beers, one playing off the other, trying to outdo one another with musical trivia, the discussion becoming more and more profound, beer after beer, chapter after chapter.
The title itself is either a clever wink to another collection of Bach’s canons and fugues (The Musical Offering BWV 1079) or an unlikely coincidence.
Is it not rather funny to imagine the King drifting off to sleep during the Goldberg Aria only to be rudely awakened by the abrupt G struck at the beginning of the first variation?
“The variations are based on a thirty-two-measure theme, exposed in the ostinato bass line of an aria and in its first eight measures identical with the theme of Handel’s Chaconne avec 62 variations (HWV 442)”. Have a listen, it’s an absolute rip, no doubt about it.
In 1957, Glenn Gould went to Russia to perform 6 concerts as part of a policy of cultural exchange. He played, amongst other titles, four counterpoints from ‘The Art of Fugue’. Eleven years later, The Beatles would sing about this in the first track of their White Album, ‘Bach in the U.S.S.R’.
Auditory Tranquility:
Nails across a chalkboard
A choir of babies screaming
Retching as you change a diaper
Yoko Ono singing 'Imagine'
Microphone feedback
A squeaky loose wheel on a retirement home food trolley
An orchestra of untrained musicians
Despite Sagasti’s clear love for The Beatles, he mistakenly says John Lennon’s lullaby ‘Beautiful boy’ was included on the ‘White Album’. In actual fact it was a part of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's album, 'Double Fantasy' produced some 20 odd years later.
When I listen to Alexander Scriabin's ‘Piano concerto in F-sharp minor’ I feel both sad and optimistic; resigned and hopeful. Is it a coincidence that I feel much the same listening to the Larghetto of Chopin's ‘Piano Concerto no.2 in F minor’ only with less optimism? Are these the inherent idiosyncrasies of the individual keys which Bach considered of the utmost importance to retain when composing the ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’?
Glenn Gould's only commercial recording on the organ was of Bach's Art of Fugue he claims he had no practice on the instrument beforehand and the recordings are a disaster! Critic John Beckwith slammed it proclaiming "Gould’s approach seems downright unmusical, and the image it evokes for me is of the trained seal who beeps out God Save the Queen on a set of car horns.” Words you don’t often hear associated with Gould.
Daniel's donuts has a 2 for 1 sale this coming Thursday. You should get in early; they sell like donuts!
Donuts... Zeros… 000... The wailing of police sirens, music in and of themselves. Subjectively and circumstantially interpreted... Fear? Salvation?... Safety? Danger?
Stephen Marley (son of Robert Nesta), in his jailhouse anthem 'Iron Bars' opens with the sound of sirens, an ominous foreboding for any friendly neighbourhood Rasta partaking in the victimless crime of travelling with a boot full of ‘erb!
Pharaoh Khufu commissioned the band Radiohead to compose a song fitting for the grand opening of his Great Pyramid in 2550 BC. The result was ‘The Pyramid Song’. The swung 4/4 (or 12/8) time signature is rumoured to have been an interpretation of the exhausted gait displayed by farm/slave workers, a brazen undermining of the Pharoah’s rule by the ancient group.
In 1997 a rendition of John Cage's 4'33" (4 minutes and 33 seconds of utter silence highlighting crowd/venue ambience) was performed in a small exclusive venue, with fantastic acoustics, in Santiago, Chile. It begins with the muffled sounds of baffled patrons, unsure discussion, the clinking of glasses, the shuffling of feet. As boredom and irritation sets in there is an unusual blanketing silence at approximately the 3'45" mark followed by an abrupt sound, sharing the characteristics of a bass trombone but unmistakably that of someone passing wind; carnage ensues, uproarious laughter. The culprit, Señora Mehice Unpedo, would later, face of a bright red hue, tell reporters: " It came upon me at the 2-minute mark, caballeros, the pressure in mi estomago. I held it as long as I could when mi novio told me a highly inappropriate joke! Alas, one second of lapsed concentration and Fluffy was well and truly off his chain! Ay Dios!”
My frivolity aside, and I do mean this sincerely; the Chapter 'Wars', the section regarding Pete Townshend’s abusive childhood and a number of other areas gave this otherwise predominantly witty, informative and light-hearted work a sombreness and profundity that until at least the 50th page, I wasn't sure was possible. While I make light of the structure of the work, unlike my own offering, Sagasti’s seemingly jumbled collection of musical and artistic facts are held together, somewhat logically, within the boundaries of a number of chosen themes.
If you've read this far, I commend and condemn you.
Good morning, and in case I don't see ya: Good afternoon, good evening, and good night!
Thanks is in order to my GR friend Ilse for inadvertently recommending this book to me via her 2021 GR wrapup.
In the spirit of Luis Sagasti’s wonderful efforts, a small Stream-of-Consciousness style Musical Offering from me to you, gentle readers.
Christoph Wolff, in his preeminent Bach bio, The Learned Musician, suggests that the anecdote regarding Keyserlingk’s commissioning of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, however romantic, is likely apocryphal due to the lack of any formal dedication as required by eighteenth-century protocol, along with Goldberg’s tender age of 14. It’s much more likely that the work constituted a Grand Finale to the overall larger concept of Bach’s Clavier-Übung series. Not at all to suggest we should let it affect our enjoyment of Sagasti’s work but something worth thinking about when choosing whether to accept one and all of the anecdotes included.
Sagasti’s ‘A Musical Offering’ can come across as stream-of-consciousness. One could be forgiven for thinking he just sat down, begun with Bach, then the Beatles and just let his musical/artistic mind take him in whatever direction it pleased.
Or maybe it feels more like two friends just having a relaxed discussion about music and the arts over a couple of beers, one playing off the other, trying to outdo one another with musical trivia, the discussion becoming more and more profound, beer after beer, chapter after chapter.
The title itself is either a clever wink to another collection of Bach’s canons and fugues (The Musical Offering BWV 1079) or an unlikely coincidence.
Is it not rather funny to imagine the King drifting off to sleep during the Goldberg Aria only to be rudely awakened by the abrupt G struck at the beginning of the first variation?
“The variations are based on a thirty-two-measure theme, exposed in the ostinato bass line of an aria and in its first eight measures identical with the theme of Handel’s Chaconne avec 62 variations (HWV 442)”. Have a listen, it’s an absolute rip, no doubt about it.
In 1957, Glenn Gould went to Russia to perform 6 concerts as part of a policy of cultural exchange. He played, amongst other titles, four counterpoints from ‘The Art of Fugue’. Eleven years later, The Beatles would sing about this in the first track of their White Album, ‘Bach in the U.S.S.R’.
Auditory Tranquility:
Nails across a chalkboard
A choir of babies screaming
Retching as you change a diaper
Yoko Ono singing 'Imagine'
Microphone feedback
A squeaky loose wheel on a retirement home food trolley
An orchestra of untrained musicians
Despite Sagasti’s clear love for The Beatles, he mistakenly says John Lennon’s lullaby ‘Beautiful boy’ was included on the ‘White Album’. In actual fact it was a part of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's album, 'Double Fantasy' produced some 20 odd years later.
When I listen to Alexander Scriabin's ‘Piano concerto in F-sharp minor’ I feel both sad and optimistic; resigned and hopeful. Is it a coincidence that I feel much the same listening to the Larghetto of Chopin's ‘Piano Concerto no.2 in F minor’ only with less optimism? Are these the inherent idiosyncrasies of the individual keys which Bach considered of the utmost importance to retain when composing the ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’?
Glenn Gould's only commercial recording on the organ was of Bach's Art of Fugue he claims he had no practice on the instrument beforehand and the recordings are a disaster! Critic John Beckwith slammed it proclaiming "Gould’s approach seems downright unmusical, and the image it evokes for me is of the trained seal who beeps out God Save the Queen on a set of car horns.” Words you don’t often hear associated with Gould.
Daniel's donuts has a 2 for 1 sale this coming Thursday. You should get in early; they sell like donuts!
Donuts... Zeros… 000... The wailing of police sirens, music in and of themselves. Subjectively and circumstantially interpreted... Fear? Salvation?... Safety? Danger?
Stephen Marley (son of Robert Nesta), in his jailhouse anthem 'Iron Bars' opens with the sound of sirens, an ominous foreboding for any friendly neighbourhood Rasta partaking in the victimless crime of travelling with a boot full of ‘erb!
Pharaoh Khufu commissioned the band Radiohead to compose a song fitting for the grand opening of his Great Pyramid in 2550 BC. The result was ‘The Pyramid Song’. The swung 4/4 (or 12/8) time signature is rumoured to have been an interpretation of the exhausted gait displayed by farm/slave workers, a brazen undermining of the Pharoah’s rule by the ancient group.
In 1997 a rendition of John Cage's 4'33" (4 minutes and 33 seconds of utter silence highlighting crowd/venue ambience) was performed in a small exclusive venue, with fantastic acoustics, in Santiago, Chile. It begins with the muffled sounds of baffled patrons, unsure discussion, the clinking of glasses, the shuffling of feet. As boredom and irritation sets in there is an unusual blanketing silence at approximately the 3'45" mark followed by an abrupt sound, sharing the characteristics of a bass trombone but unmistakably that of someone passing wind; carnage ensues, uproarious laughter. The culprit, Señora Mehice Unpedo, would later, face of a bright red hue, tell reporters: " It came upon me at the 2-minute mark, caballeros, the pressure in mi estomago. I held it as long as I could when mi novio told me a highly inappropriate joke! Alas, one second of lapsed concentration and Fluffy was well and truly off his chain! Ay Dios!”
My frivolity aside, and I do mean this sincerely; the Chapter 'Wars', the section regarding Pete Townshend’s abusive childhood and a number of other areas gave this otherwise predominantly witty, informative and light-hearted work a sombreness and profundity that until at least the 50th page, I wasn't sure was possible. While I make light of the structure of the work, unlike my own offering, Sagasti’s seemingly jumbled collection of musical and artistic facts are held together, somewhat logically, within the boundaries of a number of chosen themes.
If you've read this far, I commend and condemn you.
Good morning, and in case I don't see ya: Good afternoon, good evening, and good night!
March 25, 2021
Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021
I don't know how to describe this book except by what it isn't - there is no real plot and the structure appears haphazard and almost random, and most of the people, events, ideas and musical works that form the subject matter are real - it has been compared to Flights but this comparison seems superficial - in particular there are no long stories here and this book flows rather more naturally.
Sagasti's starting point is Bach's Goldberg variations, and the stories surrounding it, notably its conception as a sophisticated lullaby and Glenn Gould's famous recordings of it. It soon becomes clear that it is about more than music, as another recurring theme is Scheherezade and the 1001 Nights.
I enjoyed the musical content a lot, though serious musicologists will find it superficial, and was struck by how many of the musical works were also discussed in Orfeo - Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time, Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, John Cage and other 20th century experimental composers. Sagasti's musical world also encompasses The Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Who, whalesong and the "music" of celestial bodies.
I did spot one rather glaring typo which sent me down a Google rabbithole - the description of harpsichordist Wanda Landowska's visits to Tolstoy (another digression covers his Kreutzer Sonata which I read very recently) says these happened in 1919, but I think this should be 1909, as Tolstoy died in 1910 - this may seem pedantic but a lot happened in Russia in those ten years!
A very enjoyable book, but I couldn't quite bring myself to give it 5 stars because it is so short and seems a little too random at times.
I don't know how to describe this book except by what it isn't - there is no real plot and the structure appears haphazard and almost random, and most of the people, events, ideas and musical works that form the subject matter are real - it has been compared to Flights but this comparison seems superficial - in particular there are no long stories here and this book flows rather more naturally.
Sagasti's starting point is Bach's Goldberg variations, and the stories surrounding it, notably its conception as a sophisticated lullaby and Glenn Gould's famous recordings of it. It soon becomes clear that it is about more than music, as another recurring theme is Scheherezade and the 1001 Nights.
I enjoyed the musical content a lot, though serious musicologists will find it superficial, and was struck by how many of the musical works were also discussed in Orfeo - Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time, Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, John Cage and other 20th century experimental composers. Sagasti's musical world also encompasses The Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Who, whalesong and the "music" of celestial bodies.
I did spot one rather glaring typo which sent me down a Google rabbithole - the description of harpsichordist Wanda Landowska's visits to Tolstoy (another digression covers his Kreutzer Sonata which I read very recently) says these happened in 1919, but I think this should be 1909, as Tolstoy died in 1910 - this may seem pedantic but a lot happened in Russia in those ten years!
A very enjoyable book, but I couldn't quite bring myself to give it 5 stars because it is so short and seems a little too random at times.
February 10, 2022
Winner of the Premio Valle Inclán award for translation from Spanish and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize
A Musical Offering (2020) is the translation by Fionn Petch from Luis Sagasti's Una ofrenda musical (2017) and the latest, and 19th, book by Charco Press, fast becoming one of the UK's finest publishers.
I've read all of Charco's novels to date, and perhaps my favourite of all was Fireflies by the same author/translator. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... described it as a "highly erudite mixture of fact and fiction, with shades of WG Sebald, Enrique Vila-Matas, Bolaño".
A Musical Offering has a similar flavour, although the more obvious, indeed explicit, literary comparison here is Borges, and the focus, as the title suggests, is more focused on music, one that Sagasti in interviews has described as "al ser pura forma, al constituir una suerte de narración sin argumento, una suerte de matemática con ruiditos" (google translate: being pure form, constituting a kind of narration without argument, a kind of mathematics with noise).
(see https://www.telam.com.ar/notas/201705...)
Like works by Josipovici and Bernhard this novel inhabits the centre of a Veen diagram between music, literature, and mathematics (or perhaps more music theory).
I'm a mathematician by profession and a massive fan of literature. But if music were literature, then rather than reading translated avant-garde literary fiction, I'd be a consumer of airport thrillers and comics, so I am perhaps not best placed to appreciate this one of Sagasti's works.
That said it is wonderful written and translated and bursting with ideas - in little over 100 pages, Sagasti covers topics including whale song, the Voyager Golden Disc, The Beatles, Japanese holdouts from WW2, lullabies, The Shawshank Redemption, paintings by Sint Jans, Navajo language and art, Rothko, John Cage, Coppola's The Conversation, the Siege of Leningrad, the fall of Berlin, Glenn Gould, the Falklands War and Tolystoy, to name just some.
One of Sagasti's themes is circularity, with two key touchpoints the 1001 Nights (including Borges's rather apocryphal tale 602 from his essay Magias Parciales en el Quijote) and Goldberg Variations (which are reputed to have started as a form of adult lullaby), and Glenn Gould's two famous renditions:
In his final version of the Variations, Glenn Gould introduces a subtle, almost imperceptible change, breaking with the nocturnal circularity. As if he didn’t want the Count to sleep after all, condemning Goldberg to inhabit that wakeful night forever. The change occurs in the last beat of the final aria: an ornament that concludes the recording. Gould’s great contribution lies not in what he modifies, but in the very gesture of modification.
And there is a wonderful joke in the last line of the novel where Sagasti performs a similar trick.
Recommended. And I can't wait for Charco Press to publish a translation of Sagasti's 2019 novel Leyden Ltd (http://www.indentagency.com/leyden-ltd) a novel in footnotes.
A Musical Offering (2020) is the translation by Fionn Petch from Luis Sagasti's Una ofrenda musical (2017) and the latest, and 19th, book by Charco Press, fast becoming one of the UK's finest publishers.
I've read all of Charco's novels to date, and perhaps my favourite of all was Fireflies by the same author/translator. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... described it as a "highly erudite mixture of fact and fiction, with shades of WG Sebald, Enrique Vila-Matas, Bolaño".
A Musical Offering has a similar flavour, although the more obvious, indeed explicit, literary comparison here is Borges, and the focus, as the title suggests, is more focused on music, one that Sagasti in interviews has described as "al ser pura forma, al constituir una suerte de narración sin argumento, una suerte de matemática con ruiditos" (google translate: being pure form, constituting a kind of narration without argument, a kind of mathematics with noise).
(see https://www.telam.com.ar/notas/201705...)
Like works by Josipovici and Bernhard this novel inhabits the centre of a Veen diagram between music, literature, and mathematics (or perhaps more music theory).
I'm a mathematician by profession and a massive fan of literature. But if music were literature, then rather than reading translated avant-garde literary fiction, I'd be a consumer of airport thrillers and comics, so I am perhaps not best placed to appreciate this one of Sagasti's works.
That said it is wonderful written and translated and bursting with ideas - in little over 100 pages, Sagasti covers topics including whale song, the Voyager Golden Disc, The Beatles, Japanese holdouts from WW2, lullabies, The Shawshank Redemption, paintings by Sint Jans, Navajo language and art, Rothko, John Cage, Coppola's The Conversation, the Siege of Leningrad, the fall of Berlin, Glenn Gould, the Falklands War and Tolystoy, to name just some.
One of Sagasti's themes is circularity, with two key touchpoints the 1001 Nights (including Borges's rather apocryphal tale 602 from his essay Magias Parciales en el Quijote) and Goldberg Variations (which are reputed to have started as a form of adult lullaby), and Glenn Gould's two famous renditions:
In his final version of the Variations, Glenn Gould introduces a subtle, almost imperceptible change, breaking with the nocturnal circularity. As if he didn’t want the Count to sleep after all, condemning Goldberg to inhabit that wakeful night forever. The change occurs in the last beat of the final aria: an ornament that concludes the recording. Gould’s great contribution lies not in what he modifies, but in the very gesture of modification.
And there is a wonderful joke in the last line of the novel where Sagasti performs a similar trick.
Recommended. And I can't wait for Charco Press to publish a translation of Sagasti's 2019 novel Leyden Ltd (http://www.indentagency.com/leyden-ltd) a novel in footnotes.
February 11, 2022
Shortlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize and for Fionn Petch winner of the US Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán award for translation from Spanish.
Charco Press is an Edinburgh-based small UK press – they focus on “finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world”.
This is the third book of their fourth year of publication – and like the others so far this year, the second they have published by the same author: in this case the Argentinian author Luis Sagasti, author of their 2018 publication “Fireflies” - which remains one of my favourite of their books (all of which I have read).
The book is translated by Fionn Petch who also translated “Fireflies" and two other books for Charco.
“Fireflies” was a delightful, playful and learned exploration of 20th Century history (particularly the history of flight) and 20th Century art (in all its forms) – covering huge amounts of detail in its 85 or so pages and seamlessly mixing factual detail, urban myth and some of Sagasti’s own invention.
This book, at just under 120 pages, is very similar in its delightful, playful and learned exploration; and perhaps even more explicit in mixing fact and invention: both Sagasti’s own invention (a fable like chapter on the construction of a huge organ) and the invention of others.
The subject matter revolves largely around music, and ranges across such areas as: Bach/Glenn Gould/Goldberg Variations; the Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Who (in their more experimental phases); Joshua Bell’s undercover busker experiment; the artist Mark Rothko (and private acquirers of his work); unsurrendered Japanese soldiers: John Cage and other experimental composers; Shostakovich; Wagner; concerns held in cities under siege or performed in prison camps; the music carried on the Voyager probe; Oliver Messiaen; Mondrian and his love for Boogie Woogie; Navajo sand paintings - and much, much more.
I love the writing and style but on a personal level perhaps did not appreciate the subject matter as much as “Fireflies” as I am something of a musical philistine when it comes to classical music and I think just the wrong age to have really been a fan of the pop groups mentioned.
The other theme though is circularity – introduced up front via Goldberg Variations and Scheherazade’s tales (and Borges’s fabled 602nd night); later explored delightfully via the didgeridoo.
And the idea of variations on a theme (and an ultimate circular course) give the book its structure with thematic chapters (on areas such as lullabies, silence, conflict, space, flight) which both loop around ideas within themselves but which have recurring motifs across the chapters.
And the idea of repetition (in this case as a burden – to grandparents of small children and to pop/rock bands) also gave me my favourite quote of this delightful novella
Charco Press is an Edinburgh-based small UK press – they focus on “finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world”.
This is the third book of their fourth year of publication – and like the others so far this year, the second they have published by the same author: in this case the Argentinian author Luis Sagasti, author of their 2018 publication “Fireflies” - which remains one of my favourite of their books (all of which I have read).
The book is translated by Fionn Petch who also translated “Fireflies" and two other books for Charco.
“Fireflies” was a delightful, playful and learned exploration of 20th Century history (particularly the history of flight) and 20th Century art (in all its forms) – covering huge amounts of detail in its 85 or so pages and seamlessly mixing factual detail, urban myth and some of Sagasti’s own invention.
This book, at just under 120 pages, is very similar in its delightful, playful and learned exploration; and perhaps even more explicit in mixing fact and invention: both Sagasti’s own invention (a fable like chapter on the construction of a huge organ) and the invention of others.
The subject matter revolves largely around music, and ranges across such areas as: Bach/Glenn Gould/Goldberg Variations; the Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Who (in their more experimental phases); Joshua Bell’s undercover busker experiment; the artist Mark Rothko (and private acquirers of his work); unsurrendered Japanese soldiers: John Cage and other experimental composers; Shostakovich; Wagner; concerns held in cities under siege or performed in prison camps; the music carried on the Voyager probe; Oliver Messiaen; Mondrian and his love for Boogie Woogie; Navajo sand paintings - and much, much more.
I love the writing and style but on a personal level perhaps did not appreciate the subject matter as much as “Fireflies” as I am something of a musical philistine when it comes to classical music and I think just the wrong age to have really been a fan of the pop groups mentioned.
The other theme though is circularity – introduced up front via Goldberg Variations and Scheherazade’s tales (and Borges’s fabled 602nd night); later explored delightfully via the didgeridoo.
And the idea of variations on a theme (and an ultimate circular course) give the book its structure with thematic chapters (on areas such as lullabies, silence, conflict, space, flight) which both loop around ideas within themselves but which have recurring motifs across the chapters.
And the idea of repetition (in this case as a burden – to grandparents of small children and to pop/rock bands) also gave me my favourite quote of this delightful novella
“There’s not much difference between Sisyphus, a story before bed and a hit song. Musicians and grandparents alike know that the story doesn’t belong to them that they have to sing, and that’s that”
February 16, 2021
I re-read this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize. But also because it was, I think, my favourite book of 2020 and I have been planning to re-read it for a while. At the moment, I have it as my favourite of the 10 books on the prize list (although I do still have one book to read so that could change). I took a bit of time over this re-read and listened to several of the pieces of music that Sagasti references, especially the ones that I don't know (as mentioned below, I am a fairly frequent listener to The Goldberg Variations and the Quartet for the End of Time, but I did Google several of the other pieces and listened to them as I read).
For the most part, I'll stick with what I wrote first time (below), but I did take a lot more notice of the importance of silence and space in the book this time through. It's often said that the most important part of music is the spaces between the notes (Debussy said "Music is the space between the notes") and I think that's a key motif here, not just in music but in the art and science references, too.
This is, for my tastes, simply a wonderful book that I could read over and over again (and probably will).
---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------
The Earl of Keyserling asks Johann Sebastian Bach to write music that will cure his insomnia. The result is an aria and a set of thirty variations which becomes known by the name of their first performer: The Goldberg Variations. This is Sagasti’s starting point for a book that includes The Beatles, Kepler’s planetary music, Messiaen, a fictional and huge organ, John Cage’s 4:33 and ORGAN2/ASLSP (note that, at the time of writing, the next change in this piece is set for 5 Sep 2020, so not long to wait in the 639 year scheme of things), a symphony for 100 metronomes and much, much more. And that’s just the music side of it. Interwoven with all the musical motifs there’s Scheherazade and The Thousand and One Nights, Navajo sand paintings, Rothko, Mondrian and, again, much, much more.
Probably only the author himself (and maybe not even him) knows how he came up with the connections between all of these things, but what we read is, effectively, a narrative poem that juxtaposes one idea after another, jumping between fiction and documentary. As all these ideas swirl around, something comes to life in the reader’s imagination.
I have to say, it is books like this that make me glad I am a reader. I will always be won over by a well-written book that works in an indirect way. Books like this are like works of art: for me, the important thing about them is what they trigger in the minds of their readers/viewers/listeners. The words here are a trigger, not a story. I’m explaining this very badly, but I know what I mean.
Here’s a few things I was reminded of as I read:
And while I was being reminded of these literary things, my mind was simultaneously being taken on a journey exploring the power of music to change things. And that power of music is set down next to the power of storytelling.
There’s a lot of information in this book. Some of it is fictional, some of it is not. If you want, you can jump on the Internet and search for things. I did this a lot as I read: if Google looks at my search history for the last couple of days it will seem simultaneously random and erudite.
I imagine it helps with reading this book if you are a music fan. I was very happy because two of the most played albums in my collection are Gould’s “The Goldberg Variations” and Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time”. If that kind of music doesn’t do it for you, I guess some of the book may not be quite so exciting. If you like that kind of thing, and if you are fascinated by connections and by music, this becomes a completely absorbing book. I genuinely had trouble putting it down.
For the most part, I'll stick with what I wrote first time (below), but I did take a lot more notice of the importance of silence and space in the book this time through. It's often said that the most important part of music is the spaces between the notes (Debussy said "Music is the space between the notes") and I think that's a key motif here, not just in music but in the art and science references, too.
This is, for my tastes, simply a wonderful book that I could read over and over again (and probably will).
---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------
The Earl of Keyserling asks Johann Sebastian Bach to write music that will cure his insomnia. The result is an aria and a set of thirty variations which becomes known by the name of their first performer: The Goldberg Variations. This is Sagasti’s starting point for a book that includes The Beatles, Kepler’s planetary music, Messiaen, a fictional and huge organ, John Cage’s 4:33 and ORGAN2/ASLSP (note that, at the time of writing, the next change in this piece is set for 5 Sep 2020, so not long to wait in the 639 year scheme of things), a symphony for 100 metronomes and much, much more. And that’s just the music side of it. Interwoven with all the musical motifs there’s Scheherazade and The Thousand and One Nights, Navajo sand paintings, Rothko, Mondrian and, again, much, much more.
Probably only the author himself (and maybe not even him) knows how he came up with the connections between all of these things, but what we read is, effectively, a narrative poem that juxtaposes one idea after another, jumping between fiction and documentary. As all these ideas swirl around, something comes to life in the reader’s imagination.
I have to say, it is books like this that make me glad I am a reader. I will always be won over by a well-written book that works in an indirect way. Books like this are like works of art: for me, the important thing about them is what they trigger in the minds of their readers/viewers/listeners. The words here are a trigger, not a story. I’m explaining this very badly, but I know what I mean.
Here’s a few things I was reminded of as I read:
This connection of apparently random ideas reminded me of Colum McCann’s book Apeirogon which I read earlier this year. This also draws lines between dots that you might not imagine are connected and continues to draw lines until some kind of pattern starts to emerge. The same happens here.
The writing style in several sections of the book reminded me of David Markson. For me, this is a very good thing as I am a great admirer of Markson’s work, as, I believe, is the author.
The exploration of connections reminded me of several of Richard Powers’ novels. Of course, Powers has written his own novel inspired by The Goldberg Variations and he also wrote about Messianen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” in Orfeo in a way that reduce me to tears: Sagasti here also writes about that piece of music and several other compositions by Messiaen. But it’s not just the common topics that reminded me of Powers: it is equally the building of connections between apparently unconnected things.
And while I was being reminded of these literary things, my mind was simultaneously being taken on a journey exploring the power of music to change things. And that power of music is set down next to the power of storytelling.
There’s a lot of information in this book. Some of it is fictional, some of it is not. If you want, you can jump on the Internet and search for things. I did this a lot as I read: if Google looks at my search history for the last couple of days it will seem simultaneously random and erudite.
I imagine it helps with reading this book if you are a music fan. I was very happy because two of the most played albums in my collection are Gould’s “The Goldberg Variations” and Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time”. If that kind of music doesn’t do it for you, I guess some of the book may not be quite so exciting. If you like that kind of thing, and if you are fascinated by connections and by music, this becomes a completely absorbing book. I genuinely had trouble putting it down.
November 19, 2021
Update: Shortlisted for the Society of Authors annual translation prize from the Spanish language.
https://societyofauthors.org/News/News/2021/November/Translation-Prizes-shortlist-announcement
As the title suggests, Sagasti uses music, ranging from Bach’s Goldberg Variations to the Beatles, for his beautifully poetic story-telling that links seemingly disconnected episodes from the history of arts, music, politics, wars, and even astronomy.
Not only thematically but also stylistically the novel reads like a musical composition in 6 movements (chapters) plus a "da capo" coda. While musical knowledge is not necessary to enjoy the novel, it is double rewarding if music is a reader's passion, which is my case. It's incredible how the musical pace, melodies, repetitions, variations, and rhythm are seamlessly weaved into the words, recurring stories or isolated vignettes, some imaginary, others factual.
Even when factual, there are playful fictitious insertions or twists in words as at the very ending that takes a keen eye to notice and connect to a clue previously suggested in the novel (if curious, preferably only after reading the book, see it hidden under the spoiler in Paul Fulcher’s excellent review - I spotted the subtle twist but missed the clue connection!). But, even without knowing this detail, a reader can still feel content with the way the novel almost quietly dissolves into its dreamy coda.
It’s meditative, dramatic, funny, sad, … yes, all of it, while also magically blending the genres of fiction, essay and poetry into a cohesive whole. It may look too much for such a short novel, but it’s not. It’s decidedly not a “showy” encyclopedic coverage of artists, musicians, compositions or historical events, though the breadth of Sagasti’s interests is fascinating, but rather a kaleidoscopic treatment of varied motifs from the nature of circularities in life to the fluidity between silences and sounds, dreams and reality.
As with Fireflies, for which he was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize, Fionn Petch again did a fantastic translation. Sagasti is clearly a superb wordsmith and it takes another wordsmith to effectively render it in another language. Both the writer and his translator are on the rise for English-speaking readers and I can't wait for the next novel, once translated (hopefully by Petch), from this incredibly talented writer.
Enthusiastically recommended!
https://societyofauthors.org/News/News/2021/November/Translation-Prizes-shortlist-announcement
As the title suggests, Sagasti uses music, ranging from Bach’s Goldberg Variations to the Beatles, for his beautifully poetic story-telling that links seemingly disconnected episodes from the history of arts, music, politics, wars, and even astronomy.
Not only thematically but also stylistically the novel reads like a musical composition in 6 movements (chapters) plus a "da capo" coda. While musical knowledge is not necessary to enjoy the novel, it is double rewarding if music is a reader's passion, which is my case. It's incredible how the musical pace, melodies, repetitions, variations, and rhythm are seamlessly weaved into the words, recurring stories or isolated vignettes, some imaginary, others factual.
Even when factual, there are playful fictitious insertions or twists in words as at the very ending that takes a keen eye to notice and connect to a clue previously suggested in the novel (if curious, preferably only after reading the book, see it hidden under the spoiler in Paul Fulcher’s excellent review - I spotted the subtle twist but missed the clue connection!). But, even without knowing this detail, a reader can still feel content with the way the novel almost quietly dissolves into its dreamy coda.
It’s meditative, dramatic, funny, sad, … yes, all of it, while also magically blending the genres of fiction, essay and poetry into a cohesive whole. It may look too much for such a short novel, but it’s not. It’s decidedly not a “showy” encyclopedic coverage of artists, musicians, compositions or historical events, though the breadth of Sagasti’s interests is fascinating, but rather a kaleidoscopic treatment of varied motifs from the nature of circularities in life to the fluidity between silences and sounds, dreams and reality.
As with Fireflies, for which he was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize, Fionn Petch again did a fantastic translation. Sagasti is clearly a superb wordsmith and it takes another wordsmith to effectively render it in another language. Both the writer and his translator are on the rise for English-speaking readers and I can't wait for the next novel, once translated (hopefully by Petch), from this incredibly talented writer.
Enthusiastically recommended!
April 27, 2021
In his wonderful short story The Figure in the Carpet, Henry James depicts a writer who uses the carpet as a metaphor for a novel. He claims that in her work, any writer would hide a message which is difficult to see at the first glance, like a figure hidden in the pattern of a carpet. But unlike the carpet's situation, very often no-one would be able to distinguish that message, that figure, without the writer's help; even if they would try really-really hard.
Sagasti reminded me this story. He weaves his carpet out of many elegantly written and almost self-sufficient fragments. Each of them both creates its own mini story and adds to the "carpet". But is there "a figure"? And here, I think I would diverge from Henry James's character. I think anyone who reads this tapestry could literally make her own figure as they see it in the carpet. It would not necessary be the one Sagasti intended. Indeed it must not be the only figure, it might be a myriad of those creating a new pattern. And the beauty of this short book is in this gift to the reader.
Sagasti reminded me this story. He weaves his carpet out of many elegantly written and almost self-sufficient fragments. Each of them both creates its own mini story and adds to the "carpet". But is there "a figure"? And here, I think I would diverge from Henry James's character. I think anyone who reads this tapestry could literally make her own figure as they see it in the carpet. It would not necessary be the one Sagasti intended. Indeed it must not be the only figure, it might be a myriad of those creating a new pattern. And the beauty of this short book is in this gift to the reader.
January 3, 2024
Bayıldım. Tam nasıl tanımlamalı aslında hiç bilmiyorum. Deneme demek en doğrusu ama bir yandan da tam öyle de değil gibi ve bence tüm güzelliği de bu kalıplara sığmaz biricikliğinde. Luis Sagasti, Bach’ın en bilinen eserlerinden olan Goldberg varyasyonlarının hikayesinden yola çıkarak müziğe ve sese dair birbirinden farklı hikayeleri, kişileri; kağıt üstünde alakasız ya da uzak gibi görünen konuları öyle güzel bağlıyor ki hayran olmamak elde değil. Hem bir sürü şey öğrendim hem de büyük bir zevkle okudum. Yazarın parçalı, dağınık anlatımı (bir tür bilinç akışı ya da düşünce haritası gibi ele alınmalı) başta bir ne oluyoruz dedirtse de alıştıktan sonra çok keyif veriyor. Banu Karakaş’ın çevirisi de yine su gibi akıp gidiyor.
Not: Goldberg varyasyonlarının çok yorumu var malum. Vikingur Olafsson’un 2023 çıkışlı yorumu çok hoşuma gitti. Meraklısı için albümün linkini bırakıyorum.
https://open.spotify.com/intl-tr/albu...
Not: Goldberg varyasyonlarının çok yorumu var malum. Vikingur Olafsson’un 2023 çıkışlı yorumu çok hoşuma gitti. Meraklısı için albümün linkini bırakıyorum.
https://open.spotify.com/intl-tr/albu...
January 2, 2023
Updated 8/21/2022
That little dent above our lips, right below the nose, is called the philtrum, I learned here. There's an anatomical explanation that has something to do with how we were once fish. But I prefer the Jewish legend, that right before we're born we know everything, but then an angel places its index finger on our lips so that we fall silent and forget. That's how the philtrum is formed.
Make believe, surely, but also a kind of lullaby. Which is kind of what this book is: an extended lullaby, variations on that theme.
It opens with Count Keyserling, damned to insomnia, who commissioned one Johann Sebastian Bach to compose a work to help him sleep. Bach got Goldberg to first perform it, and the variations carry the young pianist's name to this day. It's said that this book is structurally fashioned after the Variations and maybe so. There are pieces, stories like Scheherazade, which like a Russian doll is one of them. With Glenn Gould, whales, Messaien, Japanese soldiers who would not go home, nameless castratos, the Beatles, Rothko......
Who doesn't love a lullaby:
When I was little my mother would sing me the nursery rhyme 'Rock-A-Bye Baby', and when she got to the line 'down will come cradle, baby and all', the phrase 'baby and all' had a kind of lulling effect, a pleasant hum. Babyandall, babyandall, she went, to the rocking of the hammock. The fear only surfaced when the sounds took on meaning.
Or, Brahms, and the famous one. He wrote it for a Swedish soprano with whom he had had a young man's fling. She would whisper the melody to him. Brahms wrote a peculiar letter to the soprano's husband: "You will have the impression that while she sings it to young Hans, someone is singing her a love song in turn." Well, the father put his foot down. And so the 'Wiegenlied' became the most famous lullaby in the world. And Hans, to whom it was dedicated, was the only child never to fall asleep to it.
In 1977, the Voyager was hurled into space, meant to do space things I presume, but also to carry with it a disc containing all kinds of music, from aboriginal instrumentals to Bach, of course. The promoters of this idea wanted to include The Beatles' Here Comes the Sun but EMI, which controlled the rights, refused. Ain't humans something. The Voyager is supposed to travel for 40,000 years and then turn around and travel 40,000 years back. I can just imagine some Planet of the Apes characters getting the disc and lamenting that they don't have a CD player. But at least there'll be no copyright infringement.
There, I won't spoil with anymore of the wonderful variations in this book. You'll have to read for yourself why the lack of sun spots for a few years helps explain why Stradivari was lucky too with his craft. And I won't give you any context for this gift of a sentence: As is true of venison, some ideas work better in literature than in cuisine.
This is easily the most lyrical book I will read this year. Here's another musical offering: After all, the good thing about not being able to read music is being able to observe handwritten scores as if they were abstract paintings. Looking at the musicality and visual rhythm and imagining it coincides in some way with real meaning. Like ships on the sea, the forms on the even-keeled waves of the staff. The noise in our head only fades away once the music begins to play.
Lullaby.
That little dent above our lips, right below the nose, is called the philtrum, I learned here. There's an anatomical explanation that has something to do with how we were once fish. But I prefer the Jewish legend, that right before we're born we know everything, but then an angel places its index finger on our lips so that we fall silent and forget. That's how the philtrum is formed.
Make believe, surely, but also a kind of lullaby. Which is kind of what this book is: an extended lullaby, variations on that theme.
It opens with Count Keyserling, damned to insomnia, who commissioned one Johann Sebastian Bach to compose a work to help him sleep. Bach got Goldberg to first perform it, and the variations carry the young pianist's name to this day. It's said that this book is structurally fashioned after the Variations and maybe so. There are pieces, stories like Scheherazade, which like a Russian doll is one of them. With Glenn Gould, whales, Messaien, Japanese soldiers who would not go home, nameless castratos, the Beatles, Rothko......
Who doesn't love a lullaby:
When I was little my mother would sing me the nursery rhyme 'Rock-A-Bye Baby', and when she got to the line 'down will come cradle, baby and all', the phrase 'baby and all' had a kind of lulling effect, a pleasant hum. Babyandall, babyandall, she went, to the rocking of the hammock. The fear only surfaced when the sounds took on meaning.
Or, Brahms, and the famous one. He wrote it for a Swedish soprano with whom he had had a young man's fling. She would whisper the melody to him. Brahms wrote a peculiar letter to the soprano's husband: "You will have the impression that while she sings it to young Hans, someone is singing her a love song in turn." Well, the father put his foot down. And so the 'Wiegenlied' became the most famous lullaby in the world. And Hans, to whom it was dedicated, was the only child never to fall asleep to it.
In 1977, the Voyager was hurled into space, meant to do space things I presume, but also to carry with it a disc containing all kinds of music, from aboriginal instrumentals to Bach, of course. The promoters of this idea wanted to include The Beatles' Here Comes the Sun but EMI, which controlled the rights, refused. Ain't humans something. The Voyager is supposed to travel for 40,000 years and then turn around and travel 40,000 years back. I can just imagine some Planet of the Apes characters getting the disc and lamenting that they don't have a CD player. But at least there'll be no copyright infringement.
There, I won't spoil with anymore of the wonderful variations in this book. You'll have to read for yourself why the lack of sun spots for a few years helps explain why Stradivari was lucky too with his craft. And I won't give you any context for this gift of a sentence: As is true of venison, some ideas work better in literature than in cuisine.
This is easily the most lyrical book I will read this year. Here's another musical offering: After all, the good thing about not being able to read music is being able to observe handwritten scores as if they were abstract paintings. Looking at the musicality and visual rhythm and imagining it coincides in some way with real meaning. Like ships on the sea, the forms on the even-keeled waves of the staff. The noise in our head only fades away once the music begins to play.
Lullaby.
October 30, 2020
This book brought many a smile to my face, whether it was a turn of phrase or an anecdote. I will probably make a playlist with all the composers mentioned in it to listen to when I pick it up again. It was a joy to read (even though this was not always about joyful things)!
March 26, 2021
Truish Tales of Music, Painting and Storytelling
Review of the Charco Press paperback edition (2020) translated from the Spanish language original Una ofrenda musical (2017)
I really enjoyed Argentinean author Luis Sagasti's A Musical Offering, despite, or perhaps even because of, some odd errors in either the translation, the research or the copyediting / proofreading. It consists of mostly small paragraphical vignettes and some extended stories. These are often stories of classical and/or recent avant-garde music composers and performers, painters and painting and storytelling in general. It is actually possible that the errors are intentional and signify the writer and translator winking at the reader, in a recreation of the childhood 'broken telephone' game where a story is gradually changed each time it is retold.
This isn't a novel or short stories and it isn't entirely fiction or non-fiction but a blending of all of those elements. It reminded me somewhat of John Cage's Indeterminacy (1961) a performance of 90 stories in 90 minutes. Each story had to be told within its 1 minute limit, requiring either very slow or very fast reading at times. Sagasti's stories do range in length, but I think the variations are about how much each is true or not. Several items were obviously incorrect to me because of my general knowledge about recent composers and musicians (and some Toronto trivia). I didn't research the historical items, although I have read that many of them such as the Goldbergs and Keyserling's insomnia are apocryphal and based on a Bach biography written 60 years after the event.
Still and all, if you are a music nut, which I am, then this will be enormously entertaining to you and will possibly provide an extra game entertainment for you to guess at the truth or fiction of the tales based on your own trivia knowledge. General readers will find plenty to entertain them as well if they enjoy short snippets of trivia about music and art and storytelling.
Trivia and Notes
Translation? error (Notes for future review)
i was about 1/4th through this wonderful meditation on music and storytelling when a sour note struck on page 28 that suggested that John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy" (1980) appeared on The Beatles "White Album" (1968).
This obvious error was so wrong that i had to check the original Spanish which was: "...la otra es “Beautiful Boy” y aparece en su último disco." (Translation: ...the other is "Beautiful Boy" which appeared on his final album.) i.e. The original Spanish correctly states that the song was on the "Double Fantasy" (1980) album.
Maybe only music nerds will care, or this is some intentional added misdirection, as some of the originals below seem to be.
Factual errors (Notes for future review)
pg. 17. Toronto music nerd item here. Glenn Gould rather famously lived in central Toronto in an apartment on St. Clair Ave. West nearby to Yonge St. and ate regularly at the Fran's Restaurant (a local diner chain) across the street. I don't know where this bit about him 'staring out the window at the forest, not far from Toronto' while making his insomniac late night phone calls is coming from.
pgs. 38-39. Again, only music nerds will notice or care about these. Are these errors intentional?
Sagasti mis-states the title of Stockhausen's intuitive music work Aus den sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days) (1968) and calls it Richtige Dauern (Right Durations). He then conflates the texts of Richtige Dauern and Goldstaub (Golddust) as if they were both part of the former.
pg. 41 John Cale was one of the performers at the 1963 premiere of Satie's Vexations, and not just an attendee. Sagasti gives the incorrect year of the premiere as 1949, although that was the year John Cage first published the score. p.s. I wouldn't know all of this otherwise. except that I saw the September 16, 1963 episode of I've Got a Secret .
Review of the Charco Press paperback edition (2020) translated from the Spanish language original Una ofrenda musical (2017)
I really enjoyed Argentinean author Luis Sagasti's A Musical Offering, despite, or perhaps even because of, some odd errors in either the translation, the research or the copyediting / proofreading. It consists of mostly small paragraphical vignettes and some extended stories. These are often stories of classical and/or recent avant-garde music composers and performers, painters and painting and storytelling in general. It is actually possible that the errors are intentional and signify the writer and translator winking at the reader, in a recreation of the childhood 'broken telephone' game where a story is gradually changed each time it is retold.
This isn't a novel or short stories and it isn't entirely fiction or non-fiction but a blending of all of those elements. It reminded me somewhat of John Cage's Indeterminacy (1961) a performance of 90 stories in 90 minutes. Each story had to be told within its 1 minute limit, requiring either very slow or very fast reading at times. Sagasti's stories do range in length, but I think the variations are about how much each is true or not. Several items were obviously incorrect to me because of my general knowledge about recent composers and musicians (and some Toronto trivia). I didn't research the historical items, although I have read that many of them such as the Goldbergs and Keyserling's insomnia are apocryphal and based on a Bach biography written 60 years after the event.
Still and all, if you are a music nut, which I am, then this will be enormously entertaining to you and will possibly provide an extra game entertainment for you to guess at the truth or fiction of the tales based on your own trivia knowledge. General readers will find plenty to entertain them as well if they enjoy short snippets of trivia about music and art and storytelling.
Trivia and Notes
Translation? error (Notes for future review)
i was about 1/4th through this wonderful meditation on music and storytelling when a sour note struck on page 28 that suggested that John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy" (1980) appeared on The Beatles "White Album" (1968).
This obvious error was so wrong that i had to check the original Spanish which was: "...la otra es “Beautiful Boy” y aparece en su último disco." (Translation: ...the other is "Beautiful Boy" which appeared on his final album.) i.e. The original Spanish correctly states that the song was on the "Double Fantasy" (1980) album.
Maybe only music nerds will care, or this is some intentional added misdirection, as some of the originals below seem to be.
Factual errors (Notes for future review)
pg. 17. Toronto music nerd item here. Glenn Gould rather famously lived in central Toronto in an apartment on St. Clair Ave. West nearby to Yonge St. and ate regularly at the Fran's Restaurant (a local diner chain) across the street. I don't know where this bit about him 'staring out the window at the forest, not far from Toronto' while making his insomniac late night phone calls is coming from.
pgs. 38-39. Again, only music nerds will notice or care about these. Are these errors intentional?
Sagasti mis-states the title of Stockhausen's intuitive music work Aus den sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days) (1968) and calls it Richtige Dauern (Right Durations). He then conflates the texts of Richtige Dauern and Goldstaub (Golddust) as if they were both part of the former.
pg. 41 John Cale was one of the performers at the 1963 premiere of Satie's Vexations, and not just an attendee. Sagasti gives the incorrect year of the premiere as 1949, although that was the year John Cage first published the score. p.s. I wouldn't know all of this otherwise. except that I saw the September 16, 1963 episode of I've Got a Secret .
April 14, 2021
Reminds me of Adler and Offill and the somewhat dreaded, for me, "plotless novel", however this is really more of an extended creative essay that makes use of fictional elements while mostly working in a similar style to those authors. What I mean is that it is generally composed of short chunks of text, as if Sagasti has taken his research, put it on notecards, and then mixed the cards up in a fashion and read them through, perhaps in an effort to find new connections between seemingly separate but related things. And thus you get a whale song and a Rothko painting sharing both a page and a point.
As the title suggests the focus of the work is on music, more specifically its creative expression. It begins by imagining how the apocryphal story of the purpose behind Bach's composition of the Goldberg Variations may have played out, a Russian count who suffers from insomnia being lulled to sleep each night by a pianist playing the pieces the count specifically commissioned from Bach for this purpose. This nightly musical offering then has as its formal goal its opposite - silence, for the Count, as he falls asleep and the pianist quietly leaves.
Silence is paradoxically the constant companion to music in Sagasti's telling. As is its relative, disappearance. This is explored in more obvious ways, such as John Cage's (in)famous 4'33" or Glenn Gould's preference that his audiences not clap and for the lights to simply fade to darkness after his performance. But also through interesting less obvious ways, such as the "loneliest whale in the world" swimming the ocean by itself and making a song too high pitched for other whales to hear, detected by our scientific instruments singing and getting back only silence every year since 2004. And Rothko's "yellow painting", auctioned off every few years to be bought by a new investor at ever higher prices and moved from the seller's secure vault to the buyer's secure vault, never to actually be seen and witnessed. Rothko's offering stripped of all meaning and purpose in the world except as a minor mark in some billionaire's ledger, silenced, is about the saddest thing here, even among the stories of Japanese soldiers who hid in caves for decades or the starving residents of Leningrad listening to a new Shostakovich symphony.
There's a rather funny fable in the middle that departs from the general style of the book to tell about a gigantic organ commissioned by some Baron in an Alpine region that would play all orchestral sounds louder and better than any actual orchestra, but when finally completed and played to great fanfare caused an avalanche that buried it and the town that built it. Snow silenced this ultimate hubris of musical offering. Too much, too much.
If silence can be a lonely response or a righteous response, it can also be a meaningful response. Mahler's Ninth symphony, written not long after the death of the composer's daughter, ends with a solo violin fading into the distance followed by the conductor moving his baton to silence for several minutes. The audience thus sits with Mahler's grief in silence. "It seems," Sagasti writes, "that Mahler composed almost ninety minutes of music just to achieve that silence."
Shh.
As the title suggests the focus of the work is on music, more specifically its creative expression. It begins by imagining how the apocryphal story of the purpose behind Bach's composition of the Goldberg Variations may have played out, a Russian count who suffers from insomnia being lulled to sleep each night by a pianist playing the pieces the count specifically commissioned from Bach for this purpose. This nightly musical offering then has as its formal goal its opposite - silence, for the Count, as he falls asleep and the pianist quietly leaves.
Silence is paradoxically the constant companion to music in Sagasti's telling. As is its relative, disappearance. This is explored in more obvious ways, such as John Cage's (in)famous 4'33" or Glenn Gould's preference that his audiences not clap and for the lights to simply fade to darkness after his performance. But also through interesting less obvious ways, such as the "loneliest whale in the world" swimming the ocean by itself and making a song too high pitched for other whales to hear, detected by our scientific instruments singing and getting back only silence every year since 2004. And Rothko's "yellow painting", auctioned off every few years to be bought by a new investor at ever higher prices and moved from the seller's secure vault to the buyer's secure vault, never to actually be seen and witnessed. Rothko's offering stripped of all meaning and purpose in the world except as a minor mark in some billionaire's ledger, silenced, is about the saddest thing here, even among the stories of Japanese soldiers who hid in caves for decades or the starving residents of Leningrad listening to a new Shostakovich symphony.
There's a rather funny fable in the middle that departs from the general style of the book to tell about a gigantic organ commissioned by some Baron in an Alpine region that would play all orchestral sounds louder and better than any actual orchestra, but when finally completed and played to great fanfare caused an avalanche that buried it and the town that built it. Snow silenced this ultimate hubris of musical offering. Too much, too much.
If silence can be a lonely response or a righteous response, it can also be a meaningful response. Mahler's Ninth symphony, written not long after the death of the composer's daughter, ends with a solo violin fading into the distance followed by the conductor moving his baton to silence for several minutes. The audience thus sits with Mahler's grief in silence. "It seems," Sagasti writes, "that Mahler composed almost ninety minutes of music just to achieve that silence."
Shh.
October 20, 2021
Reading with multiple senses at once
I read Sagasti’s Fireflies before A Musical Offering, so after that great pleasure, the second didn’t quite work on me the same. I put it down to the fact that I had not listened to The Goldberg Variations, so my plan was to go back to it after I did so. A problem arose, I started listening to the Goldberg Variations and didn’t get much into that either. I read how they were composed, but still, got no further. I reached a dead end.
Was it the method of reading I got wrong? I didn’t want to believe Sagasti hadn’t got it right. When I read Fireflies, I would stop and look up some detail the author wrote about. I realised that this became an acceptable part of the reading process of the work, it was flexible and open, it’s referential style allowed the reader to go beyond the text into their own dimension of research and interpretation. The work is not fixed. For A Musical Offering to work like this, I had to go to the Goldberg Variations and thinking it would take only the length of time of listening to the Variations to know what I needed to know.
Here is the problem, or the question, that this method poses – music doesn’t work the same way as a vignette of a priest or a wiki entry of an artist as it does in Fireflies. Another possibility of sense and thought has to open up the mind, because listening alone is not enough. Confronted with a simple variation of a solo piano didn’t do much for me. I listened, it was interesting, but I put it aside, unable to finish listening at one sitting. Then I thought, as I worked away in my study on a contract that bored me, that I would listen to the Variations as I worked and when I took a break, I would leave them on in repeat mode. Sometimes my breaks went for hours as I waited for work to come in and colleague responses to come back. Having little to do in those hours yet tethered to the home office was very like the experience of lying in bed unable to get to sleep, wanting to get up as much as wishing sleep or the morning to come. This circularity of listening had an effect.
At the same time, I had a parallel piano experience without realising it. I recalled that as a child, my bedroom faced the 3m high brick wall of the neighbour’s house and behind the wall, was a kind of courtyard of a mid-century house – think Frank Lloyd Wright. I didn’t know it was a courtyard because I had never seen it. I found this out years later. Our two families could not be more socially distinct – the new immigrant family next to the old cultured professional class that owned a mid-century designed house. Ours was falling down, there’s exuded elegance and flow in its design.
Behind that wall daily would come hours of solo piano playing. I would lie on my bed and listen – I never considered whether the music was practice or performance. Later I came across the name of a well-known composer by accident and realised that this person was my younger neighbour. I found the composer easily and emailed her the question of who played the music- I always assumed it was her mother, but she said it was her playing. Though I knew nothing of the music she was playing and our house was actually devoid of music all the time – no one ever put on a radio or a record, her playing left a life-long impact and I told her so. I had an extraordinary thought that I was this composer’s first fan – after her parents naturally. You don’t often get to close off a chapter of your life like that with such clarity, at least I don’t.
So the Variations had an effect on me, and started to make more sense, they weaved their way into my consciousness like a mother’s lullaby springs back and forth between the past and present of memory. The only mental record I have of my mother singing by the way was her broken mumbled rendition of the chorus of the Beatles Love Me Do.
The Goldberg Variations circled around my mind until they performed either this closure, or the beginning of a new circle of thought and experience. Sagasti’s work sits in the cycle somewhere – so I won’t hear a bad word about the value of literary pursuits ever.
The obvious thing to do was to start reading them again.
I read Sagasti’s Fireflies before A Musical Offering, so after that great pleasure, the second didn’t quite work on me the same. I put it down to the fact that I had not listened to The Goldberg Variations, so my plan was to go back to it after I did so. A problem arose, I started listening to the Goldberg Variations and didn’t get much into that either. I read how they were composed, but still, got no further. I reached a dead end.
Was it the method of reading I got wrong? I didn’t want to believe Sagasti hadn’t got it right. When I read Fireflies, I would stop and look up some detail the author wrote about. I realised that this became an acceptable part of the reading process of the work, it was flexible and open, it’s referential style allowed the reader to go beyond the text into their own dimension of research and interpretation. The work is not fixed. For A Musical Offering to work like this, I had to go to the Goldberg Variations and thinking it would take only the length of time of listening to the Variations to know what I needed to know.
Here is the problem, or the question, that this method poses – music doesn’t work the same way as a vignette of a priest or a wiki entry of an artist as it does in Fireflies. Another possibility of sense and thought has to open up the mind, because listening alone is not enough. Confronted with a simple variation of a solo piano didn’t do much for me. I listened, it was interesting, but I put it aside, unable to finish listening at one sitting. Then I thought, as I worked away in my study on a contract that bored me, that I would listen to the Variations as I worked and when I took a break, I would leave them on in repeat mode. Sometimes my breaks went for hours as I waited for work to come in and colleague responses to come back. Having little to do in those hours yet tethered to the home office was very like the experience of lying in bed unable to get to sleep, wanting to get up as much as wishing sleep or the morning to come. This circularity of listening had an effect.
At the same time, I had a parallel piano experience without realising it. I recalled that as a child, my bedroom faced the 3m high brick wall of the neighbour’s house and behind the wall, was a kind of courtyard of a mid-century house – think Frank Lloyd Wright. I didn’t know it was a courtyard because I had never seen it. I found this out years later. Our two families could not be more socially distinct – the new immigrant family next to the old cultured professional class that owned a mid-century designed house. Ours was falling down, there’s exuded elegance and flow in its design.
Behind that wall daily would come hours of solo piano playing. I would lie on my bed and listen – I never considered whether the music was practice or performance. Later I came across the name of a well-known composer by accident and realised that this person was my younger neighbour. I found the composer easily and emailed her the question of who played the music- I always assumed it was her mother, but she said it was her playing. Though I knew nothing of the music she was playing and our house was actually devoid of music all the time – no one ever put on a radio or a record, her playing left a life-long impact and I told her so. I had an extraordinary thought that I was this composer’s first fan – after her parents naturally. You don’t often get to close off a chapter of your life like that with such clarity, at least I don’t.
So the Variations had an effect on me, and started to make more sense, they weaved their way into my consciousness like a mother’s lullaby springs back and forth between the past and present of memory. The only mental record I have of my mother singing by the way was her broken mumbled rendition of the chorus of the Beatles Love Me Do.
The Goldberg Variations circled around my mind until they performed either this closure, or the beginning of a new circle of thought and experience. Sagasti’s work sits in the cycle somewhere – so I won’t hear a bad word about the value of literary pursuits ever.
The obvious thing to do was to start reading them again.
May 16, 2021
Such a delightful book that I can't get my head around! A Musical Offering is a witty, interesting and intelligent series of small episodes (some 2-3 pages long, others just a single sentence) that sometimes seem to be connecting into a coherent whole, other times seem to be separate and unconnected facts and trivia (the latter being the case most often). In its structure it's experimental and maybe a bit conceptual. In its effect, it's intellectual and stimulating.
These short episodes all deal with art (music, painting, literature, storytelling), with silence (the lack or sudden stop of the art forms above), with language (be it literally the language we speak, or art as a form of expression and communication, i.e. language). While I'm not sure I've grasped the whole idea and meaning of this book, I was completely swept away by the meaning I found for myself in the way these short episodes connect, as well as by the intelligence and wisdom of Sagasti. While the book does have a perfect start it doesn't really have a perfect ending. It's like the ending of a seng before the next one on the album starts. It's a short silence that leads to more music.
These short episodes all deal with art (music, painting, literature, storytelling), with silence (the lack or sudden stop of the art forms above), with language (be it literally the language we speak, or art as a form of expression and communication, i.e. language). While I'm not sure I've grasped the whole idea and meaning of this book, I was completely swept away by the meaning I found for myself in the way these short episodes connect, as well as by the intelligence and wisdom of Sagasti. While the book does have a perfect start it doesn't really have a perfect ending. It's like the ending of a seng before the next one on the album starts. It's a short silence that leads to more music.
March 27, 2022
"There is a more or less widely held view that music and sleep share certain convolutions. In truth, they inhabit the present moment in different ways. Music promises the pleasure of the future: anticipating a melody that flutters a few steps ahead is the dessert we savour even as we raise another streaming forkful to our lips. The present of sleep is pure mother’s milk; there is nothing beyond it."
This is my first time reading anything by Charco Press. Also my first time reading the shortlist of any literary prize (Sagasti's book was shortlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize). Charco specializes in English translations---this one translated by Fionn Petch---of contemporary Latin American literature.
It's a slim book offering up various "movements" around music with recurring motifs linking together a wondrously diverse series of anecdotes (real and apocryphal), historical counterpoints, genres, and time periods. Circularity, silence, and how music may stir or soothe the soul feature throughout. The prose itself is rather striking as it wavers between confidently authoritative and lyrical as it reacts to the subject matter. Case in point---this wonderful passage describing the The Symphonic Poem of 100 Metronomes:
"What begins almost in unison gradually falls out of synch; there follow waves of overlaid rhythms, flocks of birds wheeling across the sky without colliding. As the instruments begin to slow, galloping horses emerge, typewriters on overtime, raindrops on tin roofs, the unending applause to a speech by Stalin. In this long-distance race of one hundred monocord voices, Bach fugue-style, the horses gradually fall away, the sun breaks through the clouds and the rain eases off, the typists abandon their offices, the Soviet sycophancy of a secretarial trio fades out until only the tick-tock of an alarm clock remains."There's a melancholic element to the whole book as if we're waiting for the final note to put us all to rest. Definitely an author and a press from whom and which I'd like to read more.
-------------------------------------------------------
1 PHRASE, 13 MUSICAL PIECES, & 2 PAINTINGS THAT CAUGHT MY ATTENTION
myoclonic seizures | Tomorrow Never Knows (The Beatles) | Wiegenlied (Brahms) | Songs on the Death of Children (Mahler) | The Glorification of Mary and Nativity (Geertg tot Sint Jans) | The Symphonic Poem for 100 Metronomes (György Ligeti) | The Art of Fugue (Bach) | Resonant Island and Trilogie de la mort (Éliane Radigue) | Nostalgias | The White Dove | Symphony No. 5 (Bruckner) | Quartet for the End of Time (Messiaen) | Mysterium (Scriabin)
June 2, 2021
This quite an astounding work of imagination and creativity. He blends stories in an out while keeping much of the focus on Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
I don’t think that I have listened to the Goldberg Variation since I started up trying to learn the piano again after playing for a few years and quitting in abject disgust with my lack of progress. It turns out that I just needed to work harder. Believe or not, I had a book by Malcolm Gladwell to thank for making me believe that I could really learn the piano if I tried hard. I don’t remember with book it was, the one about dedicating 10,000 hours to master something.
When I first moved to Spain, I knew Spanish enough to get rather well. I thought that in a year, maybe two, I’d be like a native speaker. After three years here, I thought that I would never learn it well enough to be satisfied. A few years after that, I thought I was doing well. My point is that it takes a long time to learn something like a foreign language or a musical instrument. I just needed to dedicate more time to my playing and be patient.
This book brought me back to the Goldberg Variations. I have been working for a while on the Bach Two-Part Inventions, along with other stuff of this skill level. They are actually kind of hard, but a total blast to play. I usually only listen to music of the stuff I’m learning. When I started listening to the Goldberg Variations, I started with the last one, #30 right before the Aria da Capo e Fine. In the inexplicable logic of YouTube, I was then directed to this video of Variation #13 which this pianist gushes over, calling it her favorite Bach keyboard word. High praise, indeed. It must have been my favorite, too, because I remembered it exceptionally well. I had tried to learn it a couple years ago when my skill level wasn’t up to the task. I looked through my loose sheets of music, and there it was.
It is a stunning work for its majesty and also because it is so incredibly simple, playing it now is almost intuitive. That is a true work of genius, not that I need to say that about the maestro. Genius is stamped all over his works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Vhl...
I don’t think that I have listened to the Goldberg Variation since I started up trying to learn the piano again after playing for a few years and quitting in abject disgust with my lack of progress. It turns out that I just needed to work harder. Believe or not, I had a book by Malcolm Gladwell to thank for making me believe that I could really learn the piano if I tried hard. I don’t remember with book it was, the one about dedicating 10,000 hours to master something.
When I first moved to Spain, I knew Spanish enough to get rather well. I thought that in a year, maybe two, I’d be like a native speaker. After three years here, I thought that I would never learn it well enough to be satisfied. A few years after that, I thought I was doing well. My point is that it takes a long time to learn something like a foreign language or a musical instrument. I just needed to dedicate more time to my playing and be patient.
This book brought me back to the Goldberg Variations. I have been working for a while on the Bach Two-Part Inventions, along with other stuff of this skill level. They are actually kind of hard, but a total blast to play. I usually only listen to music of the stuff I’m learning. When I started listening to the Goldberg Variations, I started with the last one, #30 right before the Aria da Capo e Fine. In the inexplicable logic of YouTube, I was then directed to this video of Variation #13 which this pianist gushes over, calling it her favorite Bach keyboard word. High praise, indeed. It must have been my favorite, too, because I remembered it exceptionally well. I had tried to learn it a couple years ago when my skill level wasn’t up to the task. I looked through my loose sheets of music, and there it was.
It is a stunning work for its majesty and also because it is so incredibly simple, playing it now is almost intuitive. That is a true work of genius, not that I need to say that about the maestro. Genius is stamped all over his works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Vhl...
Read
November 14, 2022What a beautiful, profound book.
Normalize reading and loving something, then totally forgetting it moments later. Haha. A Musical Offering is a pulsing, ephemeral performance on the transcendent power of music and art. The blurb on the Charco Press edition isn't vague about the influence of Olga Tokarczuk's "constellation" style. So if Flights or Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World or even WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn made lasting impressions on you (as they did me), you'll inevitably enjoy this.
As an immediate assessment, my favorite chapters are the ones on silence and cosmic ants. Bits of this book have also tied in to other things I've been reading or have read this year. It only confirms how our reading (or any consumption of art, really) naturally hews to our rhythms and subconscious needs.
Normalize reading and loving something, then totally forgetting it moments later. Haha. A Musical Offering is a pulsing, ephemeral performance on the transcendent power of music and art. The blurb on the Charco Press edition isn't vague about the influence of Olga Tokarczuk's "constellation" style. So if Flights or Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World or even WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn made lasting impressions on you (as they did me), you'll inevitably enjoy this.
As an immediate assessment, my favorite chapters are the ones on silence and cosmic ants. Bits of this book have also tied in to other things I've been reading or have read this year. It only confirms how our reading (or any consumption of art, really) naturally hews to our rhythms and subconscious needs.
March 28, 2021
3 1/2 stars. A fun and entertaining (if dense at times) book that I read as a collection of essays/reflections/fragments, focusing on music. Topics include:
- Glenn Gould
- The Beatles (particularly "A Day in the Life")
- Erik Satie's Variations (a piece of music - meant to be played 840 times -pretty mental)
- Navajo sand art, which is destroyed shortly after it is created
- A Rothko painting that has never been publicly displayed
- John Cage's work As Slow As Possible
- The little dent above the lips that apparently takes shape when we're fish, i.e. still embryos
- The Great Organ of Himmelheim, which seems to be an invented tale according to the internet (thus revealing one of the book's pleasures, never being sure what is real and what isn't)
- A starving orchestra that played during a siege (this chapter, about music and war, was def by far my favorite - very powerful passages)
- This Scriabin guy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...) and his synaesthesia (wish he'd been discussed more!)
- Alessandro Moreschi, and the only remaining recording of a castrated adult man. Fucking nuts!!!
Anyway, you get the idea. Like the other book of his I read (Fireflies), it's kinda like reading Wikipedia, but obviously in a more interesting, beautiful, and more thoughtfully structured way. They must be crazy fun books to research. I found Fireflies more emotionally resonant but this was good too. A lot of the reflections about music felt applicable to writing, which I liked.
- Glenn Gould
- The Beatles (particularly "A Day in the Life")
- Erik Satie's Variations (a piece of music - meant to be played 840 times -pretty mental)
- Navajo sand art, which is destroyed shortly after it is created
- A Rothko painting that has never been publicly displayed
- John Cage's work As Slow As Possible
- The little dent above the lips that apparently takes shape when we're fish, i.e. still embryos
- The Great Organ of Himmelheim, which seems to be an invented tale according to the internet (thus revealing one of the book's pleasures, never being sure what is real and what isn't)
- A starving orchestra that played during a siege (this chapter, about music and war, was def by far my favorite - very powerful passages)
- This Scriabin guy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...) and his synaesthesia (wish he'd been discussed more!)
- Alessandro Moreschi, and the only remaining recording of a castrated adult man. Fucking nuts!!!
Anyway, you get the idea. Like the other book of his I read (Fireflies), it's kinda like reading Wikipedia, but obviously in a more interesting, beautiful, and more thoughtfully structured way. They must be crazy fun books to research. I found Fireflies more emotionally resonant but this was good too. A lot of the reflections about music felt applicable to writing, which I liked.
March 22, 2021
Almost every review I've read online begins by mentioning how this book defies categorisation, and mine is going to be no different. It is almost impossible to define, and with some notable exceptions I'm not even entirely sure it can be called fiction. But I think this is part of the beauty and magic of this book, because in the end it doesn't matter. For me, it just works.
I adored this book. It is so playful, interesting and clever. Most importantly it is beautifully written. It's been a while since I found myself simultaneously actively learning about loads of interesting facts/curiosities and being incredibly moved.
I also read Sagasti's novel Fireflies. Whilst they are structured very similarly, and I really enjoyed Fireflies and found it compelling, for me A Musical Offering just spoke to me in a different way, and I connected with it. My partner is a musician, who also teaches music theory and since being with him I've started to learn piano and have been more exposed to classical music. This doesn't in any way mean that is necessary to enjoy the book, but I think it did allow me a closer understanding of some of the references and pick up on some of the nuances. And I do just mean some. I know there are tons that went over my head, and I can't wait to read it again.
As well as music, and the sounds in between (silence) forming the subject and theme of this book, Sagasti also uses music as a framing/structural device. The book (I believe) is structured like a piece of music, a complex orchestral piece with little riffs and sequences, and motifs that he keeps returning to. The chapers could be described as movements, and the final 'da capo' supports this (I think).
I found the reading experience absolutely magical and there are so many beautiful sentences which culminations of ideas and themes explored earlier that he revisits such as:
"In the thirty-fourth minute of Sgt. Pepper's, Night number 602 turns up: the BEatles begin to play the first song on the album, the title song, all over again. The song that follows, however, is not the second track on the album, but 'A Day in the Life: pure sound astronomy. We listen like Caliphs on the moon."
"When a baby is born, it has the power to speak every language in the world. Its mother's voice is pure music of the sweetest, mildest pitch. Yet day by today this almost monotonous lulling sound puts to sleep all the languages it will now never be able to speak perfectly. That's when the mother's voice stops being music: when words can be distinguished, meaning arrives, and the silence retreats, little by little, to let in the first thoughts. And so, the dead languages become a kind of toneless music, hear as if tracing a line across a canvass by Jackson Pollack."
These are just a few examples of the writing, and even as standalone vignettes work demonstrate wonderful use of language and are thought-provoking. But place them in a context where they become part of a larger work on sound, silence, repetition and they are elevated to another level.
I think the book mightn't be for everyone, certainly not if you are looking for a traditional plot/narrative, but I defy you not to at least enjoy the ride.
I adored this book. It is so playful, interesting and clever. Most importantly it is beautifully written. It's been a while since I found myself simultaneously actively learning about loads of interesting facts/curiosities and being incredibly moved.
I also read Sagasti's novel Fireflies. Whilst they are structured very similarly, and I really enjoyed Fireflies and found it compelling, for me A Musical Offering just spoke to me in a different way, and I connected with it. My partner is a musician, who also teaches music theory and since being with him I've started to learn piano and have been more exposed to classical music. This doesn't in any way mean that is necessary to enjoy the book, but I think it did allow me a closer understanding of some of the references and pick up on some of the nuances. And I do just mean some. I know there are tons that went over my head, and I can't wait to read it again.
As well as music, and the sounds in between (silence) forming the subject and theme of this book, Sagasti also uses music as a framing/structural device. The book (I believe) is structured like a piece of music, a complex orchestral piece with little riffs and sequences, and motifs that he keeps returning to. The chapers could be described as movements, and the final 'da capo' supports this (I think).
I found the reading experience absolutely magical and there are so many beautiful sentences which culminations of ideas and themes explored earlier that he revisits such as:
"In the thirty-fourth minute of Sgt. Pepper's, Night number 602 turns up: the BEatles begin to play the first song on the album, the title song, all over again. The song that follows, however, is not the second track on the album, but 'A Day in the Life: pure sound astronomy. We listen like Caliphs on the moon."
"When a baby is born, it has the power to speak every language in the world. Its mother's voice is pure music of the sweetest, mildest pitch. Yet day by today this almost monotonous lulling sound puts to sleep all the languages it will now never be able to speak perfectly. That's when the mother's voice stops being music: when words can be distinguished, meaning arrives, and the silence retreats, little by little, to let in the first thoughts. And so, the dead languages become a kind of toneless music, hear as if tracing a line across a canvass by Jackson Pollack."
These are just a few examples of the writing, and even as standalone vignettes work demonstrate wonderful use of language and are thought-provoking. But place them in a context where they become part of a larger work on sound, silence, repetition and they are elevated to another level.
I think the book mightn't be for everyone, certainly not if you are looking for a traditional plot/narrative, but I defy you not to at least enjoy the ride.
November 11, 2020
This is a curious book, a set of fragmentary but interlinked ideas and anecdotes about music. It deals with powerful themes of music and loss, music and silence, music and sleep, music in times of war and desolation. A prominent notion is of a note fading away into silence. Una ofrenda musical opens and closes with Bach's Goldberg variations, and Glenn Gould's versions of them, echoing the circularity of the variations themselves. From Count Keyserling, the story moves on to Scheherezade's attempts to survive through narration: putting off death, rather than hastening what Sagasti calls 'la pequeña muerte' - the little death - of sleepfulness, as with the count's Variations.
Before it returns to Goldberg and Gould, the narrative touches on a multitude of subjects and a wide range of musicians: the construction of an ill-fated giant organ in Himmelheim (is this based in any way on historical fact, or is it Sagasti's invention?), Ligeti's metronomes, the Beatles' Revolver, John Cage's 4' 33", the electronic music of Éliane Radigue, Beethoven's deafness, whale song, celestial music, Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Brahms' lullaby, the centuries-long composition being played out on the organ in Halberstadt, the childhood suffering of Pete Townshend, Scriabin's visit to Leo Tolstoy; and much else besides.
The book is extremely readable, and the individual accounts are engaging, gripping (the Himmelheim organ), and sometimes moving, especially when talking about music and death (the ending of Mahler's Ninth, Messiaen's composition of Quartet for the End of Time in a prisoner of war camp, music under the siege of Leningrad, songs exchanged for crusts of bread in the concentration camps); as Sagasti writes, 'Musicians are indispensable when death is looming.' When it is at its strongest, the narrative's diverse elements curl around each other and find echoes in each other as they recur through the book. The relationship between music and silence, and the idea of music as a response to death are powerful themes that pull many of the pieces together and give the book a degree of coherence.
But in a number of places I felt there was a randomness to the selection of anecdotes and ideas. It may be my own lack of musical sense, but I failed to see how many of the fragments developed the 'themes'. The incorporation of painting (Pollock, Rothko,Mondrian and others figures) as well as music dilutes the focus of the work, even though Sagasti deals with some of the same echoing themes (disappearance, transience). The same was true of references to the Japanese soldiers who stayed in hiding for years, not knowing the war had ended (which leads on to a riff about Harry Caul in the film The Conversation). The links between topics are sometimes tenuous, and in some chapters, especialy 'Silencios', I found the rhythm of the writing choppy rather than resonant as it moved from one topic to another and back. And at times Sagasti, striving to say what is hard to put into words, throws in aphorisms that range from the clever to the laboured to the (for me) pretentious. For example: "All the power of all the animals in the world is exactly the same as that of the first living cell."
Despite these reservations, I found Una ofrenda musical an engrossing and diverting musical offering, certainly one worth the read. An English translation, A Musical Offering, has been published by Charco Press (trans. Fionn Petch). 3.5*
Before it returns to Goldberg and Gould, the narrative touches on a multitude of subjects and a wide range of musicians: the construction of an ill-fated giant organ in Himmelheim (is this based in any way on historical fact, or is it Sagasti's invention?), Ligeti's metronomes, the Beatles' Revolver, John Cage's 4' 33", the electronic music of Éliane Radigue, Beethoven's deafness, whale song, celestial music, Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Brahms' lullaby, the centuries-long composition being played out on the organ in Halberstadt, the childhood suffering of Pete Townshend, Scriabin's visit to Leo Tolstoy; and much else besides.
The book is extremely readable, and the individual accounts are engaging, gripping (the Himmelheim organ), and sometimes moving, especially when talking about music and death (the ending of Mahler's Ninth, Messiaen's composition of Quartet for the End of Time in a prisoner of war camp, music under the siege of Leningrad, songs exchanged for crusts of bread in the concentration camps); as Sagasti writes, 'Musicians are indispensable when death is looming.' When it is at its strongest, the narrative's diverse elements curl around each other and find echoes in each other as they recur through the book. The relationship between music and silence, and the idea of music as a response to death are powerful themes that pull many of the pieces together and give the book a degree of coherence.
But in a number of places I felt there was a randomness to the selection of anecdotes and ideas. It may be my own lack of musical sense, but I failed to see how many of the fragments developed the 'themes'. The incorporation of painting (Pollock, Rothko,Mondrian and others figures) as well as music dilutes the focus of the work, even though Sagasti deals with some of the same echoing themes (disappearance, transience). The same was true of references to the Japanese soldiers who stayed in hiding for years, not knowing the war had ended (which leads on to a riff about Harry Caul in the film The Conversation). The links between topics are sometimes tenuous, and in some chapters, especialy 'Silencios', I found the rhythm of the writing choppy rather than resonant as it moved from one topic to another and back. And at times Sagasti, striving to say what is hard to put into words, throws in aphorisms that range from the clever to the laboured to the (for me) pretentious. For example: "All the power of all the animals in the world is exactly the same as that of the first living cell."
Despite these reservations, I found Una ofrenda musical an engrossing and diverting musical offering, certainly one worth the read. An English translation, A Musical Offering, has been published by Charco Press (trans. Fionn Petch). 3.5*
December 12, 2021
A Musical Apeirogon
Sagasti's narrative overlays little morsels of music history into one joyous harmony, as well.
He threads anecdotes, biographical snippets and fictional accounts about music and art using the same technique as Colum McCann did in his masterpiece Apeirogon. These two books couldn't be more different, as the latter paints a conflicted relationship between two ever-warring peoples, using two real-life friends as pillars of the narrative. But Sagasti explores conflict, too: that between, on the one hand, the inescapable reality of death and time, this elusive dimension which marks everything on this side of heaven, but without which there would be no music, no art, no human creation; and, on the other hand, the wonder of art and music, the hope that human creation defeats death –not its power over physical life, but its ability to make life devoid of meaning.
Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is one of my favorite musical pieces, and I was happy to see it explored here, but Richard Powers' Orfeo did it more poignantly.
Storytelling is another human feat that would not make sense without the passing of time. Naturally, Scheherazade is a leitmotif, a paragon of creative resilience in the face of death.
I think the mosaic structure conferred a playful lightness to the narrative, and detracted from its depth, making it an enjoyable dessert rather than solid food.
Messiaen: Birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs. Each bird, each instrument has its own tempo, and by overlaying them we achieve a confused and joyous harmony.
Sagasti's narrative overlays little morsels of music history into one joyous harmony, as well.
He threads anecdotes, biographical snippets and fictional accounts about music and art using the same technique as Colum McCann did in his masterpiece Apeirogon. These two books couldn't be more different, as the latter paints a conflicted relationship between two ever-warring peoples, using two real-life friends as pillars of the narrative. But Sagasti explores conflict, too: that between, on the one hand, the inescapable reality of death and time, this elusive dimension which marks everything on this side of heaven, but without which there would be no music, no art, no human creation; and, on the other hand, the wonder of art and music, the hope that human creation defeats death –not its power over physical life, but its ability to make life devoid of meaning.
Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is one of my favorite musical pieces, and I was happy to see it explored here, but Richard Powers' Orfeo did it more poignantly.
Storytelling is another human feat that would not make sense without the passing of time. Naturally, Scheherazade is a leitmotif, a paragon of creative resilience in the face of death.
I think the mosaic structure conferred a playful lightness to the narrative, and detracted from its depth, making it an enjoyable dessert rather than solid food.
August 2, 2023
Luis Sagasti’s Fireflies is a fun playful book which links many topics around the main theme of war. A Musical Offering is more or less the same, except it feels fuller, more ambitious. In way I could compare this to a debut record and a second offering but since neither of these books are debuts or second efforts this analogy is useless – to a certain extent mind you because Fireflies and A Musical Offering are the only Sagasti books in English. (you could say that this also a round about way of saying that I would like his other works to be translated in English as well)
A Musical offering centres around the creation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: From there we go to Glenn Gould’s interpretations, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Beatles, John Cage, Messiaen , One Hundred and One Nights, Rothko and the special song The Rolling Stones use for their soundchecks.
As I said in my Fireflies review – I love this style as I find it fun and, being a relativist, I adore seeing how topics connect, especially fluidly. For me, A Musical Offering is another winner, from both Luis Sagasti, translator Fionn Petch and Charco Press.
A Musical offering centres around the creation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: From there we go to Glenn Gould’s interpretations, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Beatles, John Cage, Messiaen , One Hundred and One Nights, Rothko and the special song The Rolling Stones use for their soundchecks.
As I said in my Fireflies review – I love this style as I find it fun and, being a relativist, I adore seeing how topics connect, especially fluidly. For me, A Musical Offering is another winner, from both Luis Sagasti, translator Fionn Petch and Charco Press.
May 20, 2021
Dit is een van die boeken waarvan je maar wenst dat ze niet eindigen. En in zekere zin is dat ook zo, net zoals de ´Goldberg Variaties´ van Bach en de verhalen van Scheherzade, eindigt het waar het begint. Dit is een constellatie-roman waar muziek centraal staat. Om duimen en vingers van af te likken.
September 2, 2020
A pastiche of anecdotes and trivia loosely tied together to a narrative orbiting the themes of music and salvation, silence and war. While the stories brought up are interesting in itself, the impact of their accumulation falls flat, especially because the original lines and verses of the author reach not as deep as the reality they are inspired by.
Luis Sagasti's newest book apparently consists only of footnotes. The small details of history are intriguing as well as the experimental style. However this book feels like someone sat down for one month with only access to Wikipedia and Youtube - Countless times, we are reminded of photos one can find online and videos (links please!) - collected all the interesting bits and pieces he could find and somehow tried to make a book out of it. Maybe this could have been better realized as an interactive online multimedia text.
Luis Sagasti's newest book apparently consists only of footnotes. The small details of history are intriguing as well as the experimental style. However this book feels like someone sat down for one month with only access to Wikipedia and Youtube - Countless times, we are reminded of photos one can find online and videos (links please!) - collected all the interesting bits and pieces he could find and somehow tried to make a book out of it. Maybe this could have been better realized as an interactive online multimedia text.
April 6, 2021
This was a fun read. Reminded me a little of James Burke's classic science show Connections. The difference is essential to Sagasti's project. Connections sets out with an overarching inquiry to understand some aspect of human nature, but what if there were no such defined inquiry and we had to take the connections and bind them up as we consume them. This directionless style of thematic connection making is at the heart of A Musical Offering and the result is a deluge of stories both familiar and made up constellated around titled chapters of inspiration. Handled indelicately this could come off poorly but Sagasti (and Fionn Petch) are sensitive enough to handle modal changes in mood so that the enterprise of the book is successfully entertaining.
It's a quick read and a nice way to pass an afternoon but I wonder how much I'll retain in a year's time... or in 25,000 years.
It's a quick read and a nice way to pass an afternoon but I wonder how much I'll retain in a year's time... or in 25,000 years.
August 24, 2022
I liked this a lot better than Fireflies. Sagasti managed to connect a lot of interesting anecdotes related to music & our relationship with it, whether it's classical or modern rock music. Loved the insights provided in this read!
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