The Twenty-One Best Albums of the Decade So Far: 2010-2014

Feeling only moderately provoked but more to the point inspired by Pitchfork’s list of the 100 best albums of the decade so far, I have compiled and extensively written out this list of my own. My list forgoes EPs, otherwise works by Blood Diamonds and Holy Other would have made the cut, Zola Jesus would have been placed higher, and Burial and FKA twigs may have been contenders – and perhaps I should have looked out for all of these a little bit, without encouraging them to take figurative dives for the metaphorical short-end money. I am also ignoring some excellent reissues and compilations: The Beach Boys’ The Smile Sessions; Robbie Basho’s Visions of the Country, one of several of his works reissued by Grass-Tops and Gnome Life; and the recently uncovered tandem of albums by the synth-pop artist known as Lewis. The list could have borne more rap and ambient electronic artists; and young and older luminaries of independent music, June Tabor, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Grouper, and St. Vincent, have marginally missed out. There is little sense and only a throwaway impulse behind the inclusion of two How To Dress Well albums, for instance, but not a third; or spurring the presence of Before Today but the absence of Mature Themes. Great albums always grow with age, which at least explains a proclivity towards the earlier years of the decade. I chose twenty-one albums because that is how my endeavour came out; and because there is something to be said for odd numbers, and for numbers which – like my own years – divide neatly by seven, an important figure for all manner of reasons.

21. Frankie Rose – Interstellar

Uniting rather than replacing the sounds of 60s surf pop and proto-punk with 80s synthesizers and new wave – like The Cure gazing skyward at night-time on the Florida Keys, or more simply Blondie turned celestial – Frankie Rose’s second solo album is a distilled triumph of pop music. The titular opening track introduces Rose as a disembodied voice on an astral plane, before a drum hits and she rebounds in the space between it and earth. This is the modus of Interstellar, bounded by glossy synths, glimmering chimes, and pulsing percussion, and rounded by Rose’s vocals, which at points coalesce with the music, and sound especially clear and open-throated on the album’s ballads. At the core of the record is the outstanding middle sequence of ‘Pair of Wings’, ‘Had We Had It’, and ‘Night Swim’.

20. Waka Flocka Flame – Flockaveli

Replete with a motif of mouthed gunshots, Waka Flocka Flame’s debut album is in the same gesture brash and grandiose. In name and conception, full of featuring artists, Flockaveli is an explicit call-back to the gangster rap of the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Yet it steps away from those forebears thanks to Lex Luger’s relentless production, which features dense and heavy-hitting drums, synthetic throbs, and flourishes of orchestral bombast; and Waka Flocka Flame’s aggressively playful vocal delivery. Buoyed by his percussive onomatopoeia, tracks thrust and double back upon themselves, winding up before unleashing with renewed intensity.

19. Zola Jesus – Conatus

Not as tightly wound as the Stridulum EP, Zola Jesus’s third full-length retains its industrial rhythms, dark synths, and Nika Roza Danilova’s voice: at once commanding and empathetic, calling out from a frozen horizon and intimately within the listener’s head, provoking a visceral response felt in the throat and the chest. Zola Jesus’s songs build and change shape. As her singing urges on and reaches a crescendo, the supporting synths may surge in accord, or they may dissipate into murky ambience; or else the music may sustain, while her words fall and inhabit the space with a hard-won hesitancy. On Conatus, Danilova’s singular voice is sometimes subsumed into layered choruses, and instants of voice bounce against and between one another. Her sound has widened, retaining its distinctiveness through more familiar song structures, as on ‘In Your Nature’; and excelling amid the dance environment of ‘Seekir’.

18. Olga Bell – Krai

Russia today – after the contested addition of Crimea and Sevastopol – is comprised of eighty-five federal subjects. Most of these subjects are oblasts, which are provinces with federally appointed governors and locally elected legislatures. Twenty-two republics are afforded more autonomy than the oblasts; five autonomous subjects see even greater autonomy granted to areas where ethnic minorities predominate; and there are also the federal cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, to which Sevastopol was added in March. ‘Krai’ is a historical designation, retained for nine of Russia’s subjects which were once considered frontier territories. Today, Russia’s nine krais function much like oblasts. The nine krais extend from Krasnodar, which looks out onto the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea; to Perm, by the Ural Mountains; Krasnoyarsk, a vast expanse in the heart of Siberia; Primorsky, which borders China, North Korea, and the Sea of Japan; and to Kamchatka, which gazes towards Alaska over the Bering Sea. In short, the krais cover the extent of Russia; and capturing that scope and that diversity on a single record is a stern task, but one at which Olga Bell proves adroitly capable. Trained as a classical pianist, she scored a throng of instruments for Krai, and cello, electric guitar and bass, harp, drums and glockenspiel are prominent among those which fill up the album. Rhythms coil and undulate, or drone as the sound slips effortlessly across the nine pieces from folk to the abstractions of modern electronic music. Voices of all accents accumulate, breaking apart in the best moments as the blazing clarity of Bell’s voice comes through.

17. Majical Cloudz – Impersonator

From within a small space, Devon Welsh commands an audience. In spare songs, comprised of short loops of synthesized keys and strings – guitar, organ, and piano are prominent – Welsh pushes his voice into the gaps of the music, stretching words out and conjuring unexpected sounds and searing emotions. His voice is at once straining, and decadent in its luxurious depth. Welsh’s partner in Majical Cloudz, Matthew Otto has noted that the majority of Impersonator was recorded or processed through analogue equipment – providing the album with a warm background hum, which is allied with brief bursts of white noise which create a lively surface texture. Welsh’s lyrics are acutely personal, yet often cloaked in an elusive language which makes their sentiment feel diverse and general. Some of the album’s strongest songs, including the title piece and ‘I Do Sing For You, show him curiously exploring his craft and his identity as a writer and singer.

16. Oneohtrix Point Never – R Plus Seven

Daniel Lopatin’s Warp Records debut takes its impetus from constrained aesthetic production and the confines of modern life, and frames a view of America in wide perspective. The record’s title indicates Lopatin’s interest in Oulipo, a school of writing founded by Raymond Queneau, and whose practitioners have included Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, which seeks creativity through the imposition of constraints and adherence to identifiable patterns. One of Oulipo’s constraints, referred to as N+7, involves replacing each noun in a text with the noun seven places after it in a dictionary. Lopatin followed Oulipo’s strictures on R Plus Seven to spread disfigured vocals throughout his record. Chopped choirs chatter and chant, accompanied by synthesized brass and saxophone, new-age harmonies, and the sounds of nature, which break through and provide moments of respite. There is a sheen to these pieces which recalls something like Opiate’s Objects for an Ideal Home; but where that record is playful and often warm, R Plus Seven is more fractured. Concerned hums and throbs lie at the heart of tracks, and after the adjusted celebrations of ‘Americans’, tension increasingly builds. The word ‘wait’ is uttered on ‘Problem Areas’ – the only fully enunciated word on the record. The tension reaches a laden and hectic climax in ‘Still Life’, before ‘Chrome Country’ unburdens in a choir of children.

15. Mount Eerie – Clear Moon

‘If I look, / Or if I don’t look, / Clouds are always / Passing over’ – so sings Phil Elverum, the opening lines to ‘The Place I Live’, the third song from Clear Moon. Elverum consistently relays for us, compassionate and clear eyed, those minutiae which substantially comprise all of our lives. Clear Moon was the first of two records he released in 2012: both it and the denser, more experimental Ocean Roar focused immediately upon his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, and were recorded there in the large room of a converted church. Yet through both his lyrics and his music, the detail of his observations, the scope of his speculations and misgivings, and his tracings of the landscape come together to extend beyond the provincial and evoke that which is essentially human. On Clear Moon, accompanied by a rumbling acoustic guitar, steady percussion, and occasional backing vocals which wisp and wind, Elverum’s voice thinly sustains and encompasses.

14. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

I saw Kanye West last year at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam, and his was an exceptionally conceived and fantastically rounded stage show: allowing space for elaborate costume changes and for a tirade against capitalism, slickly and energetically offering some of his biggest hits, but with an extended and improvised version of ‘Runaway’ at the culmination of the evening portraying the supremely talented and instinctively daring musician at the heart of his records. ‘Runaway’ is both the most introspective song and the star feature on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but the album is a tour de force: by the time the first piano chord on ‘Runaway’ plays, the record already seems to distend backwards, to the bluster and drama of ‘Monster’, with its featured performances by Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj, and Bon Iver; to the horns and psychic gesturing of ‘All of the Lights’; and to the tribal sounds and Kanye’s snarling vocal delivery which urge on ‘Power’.

13. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today

While Before Today proved a breakthrough album for Ariel Pink, noted for its clean sound after a decade of lo-fi recordings, and for its hooks which seemed to reconfigure generations of popular music, still the album also served to crystallise some of those aspects which have remained hallmarks of his peculiar aesthetic. Ariel reworked a number of songs for the album, including the centrepieces ‘Round and Round’ and ‘Beverly Kills’. I have discussed his music before in the context of heteroglossia, particularly in relation to the successor to Before Today, 2012’s equally engaging Mature Themes – but no two songs better disclose the tension-filled multiplicity of voices of which his music is uniquely capable. Ariel Pink combines sudden shifts in pitch, rhapsodic choruses and static refrains , and lyrics which contrast openhearted honesty with vague ejaculations and disconnected quotations from old Hollywood.

12. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Chords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do

Fiona Apple’s fourth album is defined musically by her piano playing, its plush jazz sound sparsely constructed whether softly repeating or restlessly pushing forth, and by variegated percussion: along with utilising field recordings, Apple and her drummer, Charley Drayton, are listed in the album credits as playing ‘thighs’ and ‘truck stomper’. The loose and flexible patterns of the percussion and the restrained piano allow Apple’s voice to hold the centre. Her singing is fearless, rolling out into torrents of words with palpable expressive vigour – the straining movements of the muscles in her face as she sings almost show through. The Idler Wheel… also possesses some ofsharpest lyrics written, from the vertiginous psychological insight of ‘Every Single Night’, through pages of personal history, to cultural allusions both recondite and pop-cultural, as in ‘Anything We Want’, which references folded fans and fighting championships.

11. How To Dress Well – What Is This Heart?

Where How To Dress Well’s predecessor Total Loss could feel like a coming together of inspired fragments, What Is This Heart? is more cohesive, despite being the most stylistically varied and sonically diverse work of Tom Krell’s musical career. From the acoustic guitar of album opener ‘2 Years On (Shame Dream)’, the bell chimes which spartanly introduce ‘What You Wanted’, and the industrial beats of ‘Face Again’, each song seems to inhabit a discrete realm of sound and to push towards a distinct genre; further on into the album, there is the steady orchestral surge of ‘Pour Cyril’, and the smooth R&B of ‘Precious Love’. What unites all of this is Krell’s voice, which sounds more relaxed and more tender than ever while reaching lofty tonal and emotive heights. The lyrics depict entangled family history, and see Krell engage acutely – most notably on ‘Repeat Pleasure’ and ‘Words I Don’t Remember’ – with the complexities of love, through its movements of desire and surfeit, as it both compels and cloisters the individual self. The flow of his language too is richly developed, on ‘House Inside (Future is Older than the Past)’ for instance, as the syllables pile up through the first three verses before the punchingly elegant chorus.

10. Jolie Holland – Pint of Blood

Jolie Holland’s songs have always had the quality of sounding, upon first listen, like nuanced and well-sung reworkings of American standards. Welcoming rather than requesting your time, as the songs open up over repeated hearings, their subtle gradations come into focus along with the poetry of her voice and her lyrics. Holland’s voice has become more ornate as her career has progressed, and this has sometimes seemed to alienate fans and serve as a barrier to her music, disguising her careful choice of words. Yet her voice has a majestic tone, and utilised in this way turns her pieces into encompassing soundscapes, amplifying rather than detracting from the underlying emotion. On Pint of Blood, tight song structures and amplified guitar and piano accompany her vocal reverberations: through the sneering ‘All Those Girls’; the moving ‘Tender Mirror’ and ‘Gold and Yellow’; coming to a close with Holland’s interpretation of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Rex’s Blues’, as she elongates the lines and embellishes the song’s steadfast fatalism.

9. Sean McCann – Music for Private Ensemble

Beginning his career with a series of experimental noise pieces released via cassette, on Music for Private Ensemble Sean McCann moved decisively towards modern classical composition. Playing an array of strings, keys, woodwinds, and percussion instruments himself, and sampling others, McCann’s four arrangements – with distinct parts – feature over a hundred layers of conscientiously edited instrumentation. The pieces fluctuate abruptly between different sounds and moods, with finely shaped tumult and orchestral swells giving way to spacious interludes.  They are characterised by McCann’s violin, fluttering and billowing glockenspiel, dimly lighted French horn, reiterating cello, and a gentle choral conclusion – in ‘Arden’, the third section of the album’s final piece – built up by McCann from the vocals of Kayla Cohen.

8. Julia Holter – Ekstasis

Julia Holter has cited illuminated manuscripts as an influence on her music, while Ekstasis was inspired particularly by the Alain Resnais/Alain Robbe-Grillet film Last Year in Marienbad. These sources show through in Ekstasis, in its rich colours and bold contours, and in the impression it creates of cyclical navigation between long corridors and rooms which, though their features change markedly, remain inexpressibly the same. Though the sound is lighter and the compositions more complex, there is an austerity to Ekstasis which is reminiscent of Nico. Fragments of words emerge to be sung – as in ‘Goddess Eyes II’ and ‘Goddess Eyes I’, variations from the original on Tragedy, where the lyrics come from Euripides Hippolytus – and whirring pop structures advance from multilayered and jagged ambience. The album that results is densely musical, meticulously constructed, and yet in its fluid patternations and vocal flourishes instantly memorable.

7. The-Dream – Terius Nash: 1977

After three acclaimed albums established The-Dream as the grandest album-focused R&B artist since Prince, but failed to result in glorious commercial success, in late August 2011, The-Dream released for free this work under his birth name, and with his birth year as the title. Seen as a stop-gap while work on what would become IV Play progressed, the record went unheralded, even after Def Jam released it commercially at the end of 2012. But despite The-Dream sounding sombre as he dwells on failed love, Terius Nash: 1977 is a roundly accomplished work. The first five songs are especially strong, from the irony and wordplay of ‘Wake Me When It’s Over’ to the free-form crooning at the end ‘Ghetto’. And amid bright synths as he defiantly elaborates his feelings upon the wedding of a former lover, ‘Wedding Crasher’ stands – next to ‘Yamaha’ and ‘Cry’ – as one of The-Dream’s defining moments of the 2010s.

6. A$AP Rocky – Live.Love.A$AP

Critics digress, finding difficulties with A$AP Rocky’s commercialism – which seems to a suggest a culture which only embraces the rampant materialism of the mainstream and economically upper-class – and with the subject matter of his lyrics. All this can be laid aside, for Live.Love.A$AP is a perfect harmony of sound. Combining the influence of Southern hip-hop with the emergence of cloud rap, Rocky’s voice lingers and lulls effortlessly over loops and beats provided by producers including Clams Casino, A$AP Ty Beats, and Beautiful Lou. Any hack can write socially conscious lyrics, but few possess Rocky’s ear for cadence, his rapping languid yet emboldened and packed with internal rhymes. ‘Bass’ is especially remarkable, defined by Clams’ low-frequency looped sample which has an impalpable, gaseous quality. Live.Love.A$AP is enhanced too by entertaining cameos from SpaceGhostPurrp and A$AP Ferg. This is the best rap album released so far this decade.

5. Robyn – Body Talk

Body Talk – a compilation of three mini-albums bearing the same name released throughout 2010  – is an album of singles which speak across and echo within one another. Its numerous highlights – among them ‘Dancing on My Own’, ‘Hang with Me, and ‘Call Your Girlfriend’ – portray not the full bloom of love, but relationships which are tentative or disintegrating. Robyn’s romantic hold is therefore never firm; but her voice is both plaintive and commanding, as she endures tribulation and heartbreak without ever doubting or denying her sense of self. The depth of her voice is allied to crisp but continually surprising electronic music, to produce a potently moving, eminently dancable masterpiece of pop.

4. How To Dress Well – Love Remains

Love Remains was love on first listen. How To Dress Well’s debut album smothers softly a beautiful falsetto voice and R&B melodies underneath layers of thick reverb and unsettling percussion. Opening with ‘You Hold the Water’ – introduced by a line from Julianne Moore, from the Todd Haynes film Safe, with this borrowing from film a consistent facet of How To Dress Well albums  – the first five songs sound like keening turned towards popular music. Tom Krell laments in turn strained relationships, a body and mind broken down, and the irrevocable past. ‘Suicide Dream 2’, the longest track on the album and one of its standouts, is equally stately and anguished, emerging steadily and dissolving in profound pain.

In the middle section of the album, the tempo picks up and the songs become more dance-oriented, but the album is unified by a resolute aesthetic, by the production and Krell’s voice. The atmosphere and the conceptualisation of the music call to mind projects like William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks; the rhythms have seen How To Dress Well placed at the forefront of a posited movement which has been alternately dubbed PBR&B, alternative R&B, or bedroom R&B. Yet four years after its release, Love Remains still sounds like nothing else, and could equally have been produced in an empty church: it is an intensely personal and deeply spiritual record, which dwells close to the ground and still ascends as crooked smoke.

After the exuberant breaking clear of ‘Decisions’, ‘Suicide Dream 1’ provides a coda to the album. Krell’s continual refinements of these compositions – on the orchestral Just Once EP and for live performance – have shown the strength of the structures which underlay the sound of Love Remains. His two subsequent albums – Total Loss as well as What Is This Heart? – have proved equally affecting, maintaining something of the same pace and depth of feeling, while significantly broadening his sound palette and bringing his voice to the fore.

3. Joanna Newsom – Have One on Me

Released in 2004, The Milk-Eyed Mender was a breathtaking debut album, which drew from the modes of folktale and the methods of modernist literature as much as from the sound palette of folk music; showcasing across concise, compact songs Joanna Newsom’s agile harp playing and her exceptional voice, at once delicate and twisting and flowing forth with words. Ys, which appeared two years later, featured ornate orchestral arrangements, with movements which seemed to capture mythologies in the act of their initial telling.

In touring for Ys, Newsom began working as part of a five-piece band, and together she and band-member Ryan Francesconi rearranged the album’s songs for live performance. These processes palpably influenced Have One on Me. Combining apparent performative ease with prolonged length and elaborate ornamentation, the album sprawls over two hours and three discs. For the first time, Newsom accompanies herself on piano as well as harp. Songs including the title piece and ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ stretch out, and drive and build to a climax; and they sit happily next to shorter pieces like ’81’ and ‘On a Good Day’, which play as redolent parables.

Indeed, the album’s musical openness extends to its lyrics, which offer American histories and biographies and accounts of the road along with some of the most personal evocations on record. Prominent among these are ‘In California’, and ‘Does Not Suffice’, which closes Have One on Me and reprises the progression from the earlier song, as Newsom recounts in close material detail the strained ending of a relationship. ‘Baby Birch’ is especially devastating, culminating in violent discord as Newsom subjugates the realm of nursery rhyme and allows herself to sound sinister, as she suggestively depicts life’s losses and closed doors.

2. Björk – Biophilia

Conceived as a project as much as an album, the music of Biophilia was intended first to dwell within the rooms of a house-museum in Iceland, then to lead a 3D film which Björk hoped would be directed by her frequent collaborator Michel Gondry. When Biophilia eventually came to fruition, it was as a multimedia endeavour: comprising an album, accompanied by a complex of apps for the iPad and iPhone – replete with games, musical scores, and short essays – and a series of residencies at which the music was to be performed.

Björk’s first Biophilia performances took place in Manchester across June and July 2011, as part of that year’s Manchester International Festival. I attended one of these performances and – aside from the pleasure at seeing Bjork in such an intimate venue, joined by the excellent Graduale Nobili choir, and with the bespoke instruments crafted for the event, including a pendulum harp, MIDI-controlled organ, gameleste, and singing Tesla coil – was enraptured for the first time with ‘Moon’ and ‘Thunderbolt’, and invigorated by ‘Crystalline’, a piece of electronic dance music which draws from drum and bass and had just been released as the album’s first single.

At the same time, the concert closed with ‘Declare Independence’, a song from Björk’s previous album Volta. An exceptional work, with ‘The Dull Flame of Desire’ – based on a translation of Fyodor Tyutchev, and featuring Antony Hegarty – a highlight, Volta always felt to me more like Björk’s earlier albums: a strong collection of disparate songs rather than a closely integrated world, such as those evinced by Homogenic, Vespertine, and Medúlla. The performance of ‘Declare Independence’ in Manchester provoked a fuller conception of Volta. It was a rare and uniquely powerful instance of the communal potential of music. Still, Biophila marked for Björk a move again towards sparser electronics, alongside crunchy beats, unusual time signatures, and lyrical contemplation, with songs which entwine the private with the physiological, and all manner of natural and celestial phenomena. Björk’s voice freely traces the outlines of the music, and – as on Medúlla – she sounds close to the listener. The album stands with the best of her works, which together comprise one of the greatest catalogues in popular art.

1. Grimes – Visions

Grimes is often discussed within the framework of the postinternet – a product of the internet’s profusion of materials, its endless repetition and recontextualisation of images, its viral videos, its fractured texts and snatches of songs – and one of the characteristics of the internet’s materiality is that it speeds up time. With so much to view and to download, and popular content shared with millions and then shared again across a multitude of social networks, trends rise and fall with rapidity and what once gains favour quickly grows old. Yet despite the the wide acclaim and the wide appeal Grimes and her album have won since its release at the beginning of 2012, from the opening shuffle of ‘Infinite ♡ Without Fulfillment’, Visions still sounds like the shock of the new.

Age cannot wither, nor custom stale its infinite variety; and Grimes too makes hungry where she most satisfies: but it is not only the rhythmically propulsive loops and the exquisitely layered vocals, or the diverse influences which range from experimental noise music to K-pop, which make Visions a great album. Nor can it be reduced solely to an inherently modern or feminist manifesto – it took time for people to fully grasp the lyrics to ‘Oblivion’, for instance, while other songs offer profound enjoyment though their lyrical content remains undisclosed, abounding in utterance and expression while eschewing determinative statement. Equally important is the album’s structure and consistent sense of space.

It moves coherently from the opening’s multiple voices into the soaring synths and vocals of ‘Genesis’, while ‘Oblivion’ begins a movement into industrial sounds, squelching percussion, and dance. ‘Vowels = Space and Time’ explicitly gestures towards the inexplicability of language. ‘Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)’ is monastic, and develops musically and lyrically the sense of waiting which is sustained throughout as one of the album’s predominant themes. Indeed, for an album with so many musical ideas and which abounds and rebounds with so much energy and replenished confidence, Visions feels markedly tranquil. An album which merges the generous impulse of a song like ‘Be a Body (侘寂)’ with the tender intimacy of ‘Skin’, Visions is the record of a person quietly embracing life at the same time as she boldly impels it onward.

The Scythians and The Rite of Spring: Stravinsky and Roerich et al.

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (in French, Le Sacre du printemps) – the third ballet which Stravinsky composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, after The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911) – was written for the 1913 Paris season, and premiered just over a hundred years ago, on 29 May, in the newly-opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The centenary of this most notorious premiere is the occasion for numerous celebrations: new performances, revivals, and festivals which will extend across the next year. The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées is hosting a range of balletic and orchestral performances, in a programme led by Saint Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet. In Moscow, four choreographies of the work have been shown by the Bolshoi Ballet over the last two months; with their performance of Pina Bausch’s interpretation set to travel worldwide. The Barbican and the Southbank Centre in London will feature orchestral performances of Stravinsky’s music. Carolina Performing Arts at Chapel Hill have devoted the next year to various showings of the work.

In Amsterdam, as part of the Holland Festival, the Chinese-born choreographer Shen Wei has produced a new version for Het Nationale Ballet. The Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel – which houses the Stravinsky archive – and Boosey & Hawkes are publishing a three-volume centenary edition comprising essays and an annotated facsimile of the score. In Zurich, David Zinman – who studied under and served as assistant to Pierre Monteux, the conductor of The Rite of Spring premiere – will investigate the musical and literary facets of the Rite with the Tonhalle Orchestra on 8 and 9 June. It is something of this endeavour which this piece will also attempt: an exploration of the cultural currents in Russia, centring on conceptions of the East, which led to the development of The Rite of Spring.

The influence of Asiatic art on Russian art, and in the realm of music in particular, was especially evident from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Mikhail Glinka, the father of Russian classical music, drew extensively in his compositions from Russian folk music, which he had heard growing up as a child near Smolensk, and which was being annotated and collected from the last decade of the 1700s. Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842), an opera in five acts based on Pushkin’s poem, is considered an example of orientalism in music owing to its use of dissonance, chromaticism, and folk melodies. Following Glinka’s lead, Mily Balakirev began combining folk patterns with the received body of European classical music.

Balakirev utilised syncopated rhythms, while Orlando Figes – in Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia – argues that his key innovation was the introduction into Russian music of the pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale has five notes per octave, in contrast to the heptatonic scale, which has seven and which characterised much of the European music of the common practice era between 1600 and 1900. While the pentatonic scale has been diversely used, it is a prominent aspect of South-East Asian music, and is a facet of many Chinese and Vietnamese folk songs. Figes asserts that Balakirev derived his use of the pentatonic scale from his transcriptions of Caucasian folk songs; and writes that this innovation gave ‘Russian music its ‘Eastern feel’ so distinct from the music of the West. The pentatonic scale would be used in striking fashion by every Russian composer who followed…from Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky’.

Balakirev was the senior member of the group of composers also comprising Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and César Cui – known variously as The Five, The Mighty Handful, and the kuchkists (‘handful’ in Russian being ‘kuchka’, (кучка)). Balakirev’s compositional manner aside, the central philosophical force upon this group was Vladimir Stasov, who as a critic relentlessly forwarded a national school in the Russian arts. Balakirev’s King Lear (1861), Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko (the name for a tone poem of 1867, and for the opera of 1896) and Scheherazade (1888) were all dedicated to Stasov.

From the early 1860s, Stasov researched and wrote a series of analyses demonstrating the influence of the East ‘manifest in all the fields of Russian culture: in language, clothing, customs, buildings, furniture and items of daily use, in ornaments, in melodies and harmonies, and in all our fairy tales’. His extensive study of the byliny, traditional Russian epic narrative poems, led him to conclude ‘these tales are not set in the Russian land at all but in some hot climate of Asia or the East…There is nothing to suggest the Russian way of life – and what we see instead is the arid Asian steppe’.

While positing the influence of the East was one thing, stating that these traditional Russian songs were in fact not Russian, but had originated entirely elsewhere, drew for Stasov considerable criticism. Any picture of the relationship between Russian and Asiatic art is complex: the developing understanding of this relationship in Russia throughout the 1800s is entwined with so many political and artistic movements and events: the emergence of orientalism after Russia’s annexing of the Crimea in 1783, and while they fought the Caucasian War between 1817 and 1864, which gave Russians a new awareness of and access to the south, and which impelled Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time; the persisting influence of Western Europe, encouraged in literature by the critic Vissarion Belinsky; and the Slavophilism which opposed the predominance of the West, seeking instead the emergence of a truly distinct Russia rooted in its own past. This Slavophilism gained momentum after the Crimean War from 1853-1856, which saw the British and French empires join the Ottomans against Russia. It was inextricably linked with the Orthodox religion; bore the related pochvennichestvo ‘native soil’ movement; and implicated in different ways Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Such complexities are encapsulated in a piece Dostoevsky wrote for his A Writer’s Dairy – a periodical he wrote and edited, containing polemical essays and occasional short fiction – in 1881. Dostoevsky, an ardent Slavophile for much of the second-half of his life, advocates for the progress of Russia through an engagement with Asia which will, at the same time, renew Russia’s relationship with Europe:

‘It is hard for us to turn away from our window on Europe; but it is a matter of our destiny…When we turn to Asia, with our new view of her, something of the same sort may happen to us as happened to Europe when America was discovered. With our push towards Asia we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength…In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in Asia we shall be the masters. In Europe we were Tatars, while in Asia we can be Europeans.’

All this is the long background to The Rite of Spring. The Symbolists who would achieve a Silver Age of Russian Literature were influenced by a combination of orientalism, folk tales, European literature, their Russian forebears, and some of those philosophers and mystics who were a product of the heightened religious thinking that was so much a part of Slavophilism. The philosopher Vladimir Soloviev – a close friend of Dostoevsky – has been characterised by D. S. Mirsky as ‘the first Russian thinker to divorce mystical and Orthodox Christianity from the doctrines of Slavophilism’, thereby establishing a metaphysics apart from nationalist sentiment. Mirsky depicts Soloviev as leaning towards Rome in matters of theology, and as a Westernising liberal politically. Yet he too was fascinated with the East. An important figure for Andrei Bely – whom Mirsky places alongside Gogol and Soloviev as the three ‘most complex and disconcerting figures in Russian literature’ – and for Alexander Blok, Blok’s The Scythians takes for its epigraph two lines from Soloviev’s 1894 poem ‘Pan-Mongolism’: ‘Pan-Mongolism! What a savage name!/Yet it is music to my ears’.

The Scythians was Blok’s last major poem, completed in 1918, just after The Twelve. Mirsky calls it an eloquent piece of writing, but ‘on an entirely inferior level’ as compared with ‘musical genius’ of The Twelve. Its title references the group of poets of the same name: an offshoot of Russian Symbolism in so far as it consisted of its two leading figures, Bely and Blok, plus the writer Ruzumnik Ivanov-Razumnik.

The Scythians as an ethnographic group were nomadic Iranian-speaking tribes, who inhabited the Eurasian steppes around the Black and Caspian seas from about the eighth century b.c.. Herodotus believed that, after warring with the Massagetae, they left Asia and entered the Crimean Peninsula. In literature, ‘Scythian’ increasingly became a derogatory term to describe savage and uncivilised people. Shakespeare refers to ‘The barbarous Scythian’ in King Lear; while Edmund Spenser sought to declaim the Irish by positing that they and the Scythians shared a common descent.

Alexander Pushkin used the term more warmly in his poetry, writing ‘Now temperance is not appropriate/I want to drink like a savage Scythian’; and in the Russia of the late nineteenth century, it came to be used to infer those qualities of the Russian people which marked them apart from Western Europeans. Abetted by archaeological excavations of Scythian kurgans (burial mounds) on Russian soil, a shared heritage with the Scythians was hypothesised as ‘Scythian’ became a byword for Russia’s historical past, Russian character, Russian otherness, and thereby also for Russia’s future.

Emphasising the conflux of Eastern influences in The Rite of Spring, Orlando Figes argues that Stravinsky’s ballet ought to be viewed particularly as a manifestation of this interest in all things Scythian. The painter Nicholas Roerich had initially trained as an archaeologist. He had worked with the archaeologist and orientalist Nikolay Veselovsky in excavating the Maikop kurgan in Maikop, Southern Russia, in 1897. The Maikop kurgan was dated as far back as the third millenium b.c., and revealed two burials, containing rich artifacts including a bull figurine made of gold. Roerich was an adherent of Stasov, and when he began work on a series of paintings depicting the early Slavs, he sought Stasov’s advice regarding ethnographic details. Stasov advised him that wherever there was a lack of local evidence, it was appropriate to use artistic and cultural details from the East since ‘the ancient East means ancient Russia: the two are indivisible’.

Though the specifics of his background and his orientalism were not entirely fluent with the group’s more worldly outlook, Roerich became an entrenched figure in Diaghilev’s World of Art movement. After designing the sets for The Polovtsian Dances – a ballet excerpted from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, which featured during the Ballets Russes first season in 1909 – Roerich went on to work with Stravinsky on the concept, setting and costumes for The Rite of Spring.

The idea for The Rite of Spring had emerged by 1910; Petrushka, which premiered a year later, two years before The Rite of Spring‘s own premiere, was the product of a very different core of people. While Diaghilev quickly became the prominent figure in the movement – owing to his bold entrepreneurial personality; his appetite for and ability to synthesise knowledge; and driving the publication of the magazine of the same name from 1899 – the World of Art (‘Mir iskusstva’ (Мир иску́сств)) originally comprised a group of Petersburg students around Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst. Mirsky describes Benois as ‘the greatest European of modern Russia, the best expression of the Western and Latin spirit. He was also the principal influence in reviving the cult of the northern metropolis and in rediscovering its architectural beauty, so long concealed by generations of artistic barbarity…But he was never blind to Russian art, and in his work…Westernism and Slavophilism were more than ever the two heads of a single-hearted Janus’.

The World of Art embodied these two poles, and was part of the energetic and diverse avant-garde in Russia in the first decade of the 1900s. This avant-garde also included the Symbolists in literature, and Alexander Scriabin in music – an influential composer who experimented with forms of atonal music, and who was much loved by Stravinsky. After Diaghilev’s successes staging Russian opera and music in Paris towards the end of the decade, the Ballets Russes was formed. Bakst produced scenery for the company’s adaptation of Scheherazade in 1910; while Benois designed the sets for many of its earliest productions. He worked especially on Petrushka. Mirsky suggests that not only the set design but the very idea of the ballet ‘belongs to Benois, and once more he revealed in it his great love for his native town of Petersburg in all its aspects, classical and popular’. Both Scheherazade and Petrushka were choreographed by the established dancer and choreographer Michel Fokine.

When it comes to locating the genesis of The Rite of Spring, Lawrence Morton has asserted the probable influence on Stravinsky of Sergey Gorodetsky’s mythological poetry collection Yar. Stravinsky set two of Yar‘s poems to music between 1907 and 1908. He claimed that the idea for the ballet came to him as a vision, of a ‘solemn pagan rite’ in which a girl danced herself to death for the god of spring. Yet Roerich had written in 1909 an essay, entitled ‘Joy in Art’, which depicted ancient Slav spring rituals of human sacrifice. Figes argues the concept for the ballet was originally Roerich’s, and that ‘Stravinsky, who was quite notorious for such distortions, later claimed it as his own’; Thomas F. Kelly, in writing a history of the ballet’s premiere, has argued much the same thing.

Whatever, by May 1910 Stravinsky and Roerich were discussing together their ideas for the ballet. A provisional title, ‘The Great Sacrifice’, was quickly decided upon. Stravinsky spent much of the next year working on Petrushka. Then in July 1911, he visited Roerich at Talishkino, an artist’s colony presided over by the patron Princess Maria Tenisheva, where the scenario for the Rite – ‘a succession of ritual acts’ – was fully plotted out.

Figes considers that the ritual which the ballet explicitly evokes may have been based on Roerich’s archaeological research, during which he had found some evidence of midsummer human sacrifice among the Scythians. The switch from summer to spring was motivated partly by an attempt to link the rite to traditional Slavic gods; and ‘was also based on the findings of folklorists such as Alexander Afanasiev, who had linked these venal cults with sacrificial rituals involving maiden girls’. While Stravinsky composed the ballet, Roerich worked on the sets and costumes, which were rich in ethnographic details: drawing from his archaeological studies, from medieval Russian ornament, and from collections of traditional peasant dress.

The controversy of the ballet’s premiere in Paris is often conceived as Stravinsky’s. He wrote in his autobiography of the mockery of some members of the audience upon hearing the opening bars of his score, which built upon Lithuanian folk songs; and the orchestra were littered with projectiles as they performed. Other critics, however, have forwarded Roerich’s costumes as the ballet’s most shocking aspect. Others still, including the composer Alfredo Casella, felt that it was Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography which most drew the audience’s ire. Figes writes:

‘the music was barely heard at all in the commotion…Nijinsky had choreographed movements which were ugly and angular. Everything about the dancers’ movements emphasised their weight instead of their lightness, as demanded by the principles of classical ballet. Rejecting all the basic positions, the ritual dancers had their feet turned inwards, elbows clutched to the sides of their body and their palms held flat, like the wooden idols that were so prominent in Roerich’s mythic paintings of Scythian Russia.’

Nijinsky had been a leading dancer for the Ballets Russes since 1909. His first choreographic enterprise came with L’après-midi d’un faune, based on music by Debussy, which premiered in 1912. This debut choreography proved controversial: among mixed responses to the ballet’s premiere, Le Figaro‘s Gaston Calmette wrote, in a dismissive front-page review, ‘We are shown a lecherous faun, whose movements are filthy and bestial in their eroticism, and whose gestures are as crude as they are indecent’. Nijinsky’s second choreographic work, again after Debussy, was Jeux, which premiered just a couple of weeks before The Rite of Spring.

Nijinsky and Diaghilev had become lovers after first meeting in 1908. In the aftermath of Nijinsky marrying Romola de Pulszky in September 1913, while the Ballets Russes – without Diaghilev – toured South America, Diaghilev fired Nijinsky from his company. He reappointed Michel Fokine as his lead choreographer, despite feeling that Fokine had lost his originality. Fokine refused to perform any of Nijinsky’s choreography. A despairing Stravinsky wrote to Benois, ‘The possibility has gone for some time of seeing anything valuable in the field of dance and, still more important, of again seeing this offspring of mine’.

When Fokine returned to Russia upon the onset of World War I, Diaghilev began to negotiate for Nijinsky to return to the Ballets Russes. However, Nijinsky was in Vienna, an enemy Russian citizen under house arrest, and his release was not secured until 1916. In that year, Nijinsky choreographed a new ballet, Till Eulenspiegel, and his dancing was acclaimed; but he was showing increasing signs of the schizophrenia that would rule the rest of his life, and he retired to Switzerland with his wife in 1917. Without Nijinsky to offer guidance, the Ballets Russes were incapable of reviving his choreography for The Rite of Spring. His choreography was considered lost until 1987, when the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles performed a reconstruction based on years of painstaking research. Meanwhile, after the 1913 premiere, Stravinsky would continue to revise his score over the next thirty years.

Nicholas Roerich is perhaps best known today for his own paintings, for his spirituality, and for his cultural activism. His interest in Eastern religion and in the Bhagavad Gita flourished through the 1910s, inspired in part by his reading of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. Emigrating to London in 1919, then to the United States in 1920, in 1925 Roerich and his family embarked on a five-year expedition across Manchuria and Tibet. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times; while the Roerich Pact – an inter-American treaty signed in Washington in 1935 – established legally the precedence of cultural heritage over military defence. His art and his life is celebrated by the Nicholas Roerich Museum, which holds more than 200 of his paintings, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

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Figes, O. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London; Penguin, 2003)

Gibian, G. (ed.) The Portable Nineteenth Century Russian Reader (Penguin, 1993)

Mirsky, D. S. A History of Russian Literature (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)

Pierrot Through the Arts: Deburau, Laforgue, Schoenberg and On

Pierrot, the sad clown, with white face and loose white blouse, expressing slowly and subtly and in the absence of and beyond words, emerged in the nineteenth century from his roots in stock comedies and pantomimes to become the embodiment of a certain artistic type, a specific strain of artistic emotion: sensitive, melancholy and solitary, and at once playful and daring in subverting language and suggesting the fraught but still facile and fluctuating nature of gender.

The character of Pierrot can be traced back to Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, first performed in February 1660 at the Palais-Royal theatre in Paris, and with Molière playing the role of Sganarelle. Pierrot is the name of a peasant character who appears in the second act of the play, the fiancé of Charlotte. The Palais-Royal theatre had been established by Cardinal Richelieu, in the east wing of the Palais-Royal, in 1637; and by 1662, Molière’s acting troupe was sharing the venue with a troupe of Italian Commedia dell’Arte performers, including Domenicio Biancolelli, famous for his performances in the role of Harlequin. The Italian Commedia dell’Arte flourished throughout the seventeenth century in France, and in fact the character of Molière’s Sganarelle already drew from the Italian comedians. With Molière and Biancolelli’s troupes in such proximity, this interplay and cross-pollination continued, the Commedia dell’Arte incorporating Pierrot into its repertoire and well establishing the figure by the time of the Italians’ expulsion from France, by Royal decree, in 1697.

So Pierrot persisted on in Italy, and then again in France after Italian troupes were permitted to return during the second decade of the following century. Through the 1700s, though the character began to appear in performances in European centres outside of Italy and France, the Pierrot on display often featured in lesser and disparate roles: the basis of the character, his unrequited love for Columbine, who prefers Harlequin, was sometimes lost, and he was frequently portrayed in a purely comic, or even bumbling and foolish manner. It was in the 1800s that Pierrot gained stature, and began his reach into the other arts, developing in literature and painting as an emblem and as a muse.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a mime from Kolín, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then Bohemia, was most responsible for this recreation of Pierrot. Born in 1796, he began appearing in Paris at the Théâtre des Funambules some time around 1819, under the stage-name ‘Baptiste’. The Funambules had opened in 1816, on the Boulevard du Temple, otherwise known as the Boulevard du Crime owing to the volume of crime dramas shown nightly in the Boulevard’s numerous theatres – all but one of which, including the Funambles, were demolished during Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 1860s. The Funambules originally hosted only acrobats and mimes; and Deburau, taking the role of Pierrot as a young man, would continue at the part until his death in 1846. He extended and deepened Pierrot, his restrained and nuanced acting style replacing the tendency towards bold and gesticulating comedy; gaining recognition and increasing fame towards the end of the 1820s, Deburau’s Pierrot would even be compared to the works of Shakespeare when, in 1842, the versatile and distinctly modern man-of-letters Théophile Gautier wrote a fictionalised review entitled, ‘Shakespeare at the Funambules’.

Other mimes would continue to have success playing Pierrot after Deburau’s death. These included his son, Jean Charles, and most notably Paul Legrand. Still, it was Deburau who enshrined Pierrot within French culture, and established the sense of Pierrot as a sensitive and anguished artist. This conception of Pierrot was celebrated, explored and entrenched in 1945 with Marcel Carné’s film, Les Enfants du Paradis, often considered one of the greatest films of all time; which suffered its own anguishes as it was made in occupied France, with damaged sets, short of supplies, with a cast and crew short of food and comprising several Jews who had to work secretely or risk production shutting down; and consisting of a fictionalised story drawing upon real figures from early nineteenth century France. Deburau is portrayed in the film as ‘Baptiste’, a lovelorn mime who achieves success in the Funambules, in a magnificent performance by Jean-Louis Barrault.

Gautier’s piece on Deburau’s Pierrot was but one of the first entwinements of Pierrot with literature. Writers including Flaubert (who, early in his career, wrote an unperformed pantomime entitled Pierrot au sérail), Verlaine and Huysmens incorporated Pierrot into their works. Most extensively, he was the central figure in the poetry of Jules Laforgue. Laforgue – a French Symbolist poet who died in 1887 aged just twenty-seven years old – wrote three of the ‘complaints’ in his first selection of poems, Les Complaintes (1885), in Pierrot’s voice; then devoted his second collection, L’Imitation de Notre Dame de la Lune (1886), entirely to Pierrot and his moonlit world, influenced by Albert Giraud’s poetry cycle published a couple of years previously.

In his book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first published in 1899, which served to introduce French Symbolism to an English readership, Arthur Symons devoted a chapter to Laforgue. Symons describes Laforgue’s verse and prose as,

‘alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious…It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys.’

and defines Laforgue’s laughter in the following terms:

‘His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as ‘the laughter of the soul’, is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, Pierrot Lunaire, and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman’s patter.’

Laforgue was a great influence upon a young T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Eliot would write that, ‘Of Jules Laforgue I can say that he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’, and, ‘I have written…nothing about Jules Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language’. In this way the figure of Pierrot maintained a relevance beyond French Romanticism and Symbolism, on into the literature of the Anglophone Modernists. He also appeared in canvases by painters who led their art-form into modernity: in Seurat’s Pierrot with a White Pipe (1883); in Cézanne’s Pierrot and Harlequin (1888); whilst Picasso’s Pierrot and Columbine (1900) was the first of several pieces in which he depicts Pierrot.

Pierrot became a canonised figure within twentieth century classical music with Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, a setting of twenty-one poems from a German translation of Albert Giraud’s cycle. Schoenberg’s work was premiered in Berlin, on 16 October, 1912, with Albertine Zehme the solo vocalist. Theodor Adorno, theorist, philosopher and musicologist, wrote some of his earliest pieces on Schoenberg; including a 1922 review of a performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Frankfurt, in which Adorno puts it that Schoenberg’s piece characterises ‘the homelessness of our souls’. Musically and aesthetically, Pierrot has exerted his influence too on popular music: Björk, a fervent admirer of Schoenberg, sang Pierrot Lunaire in a one-off performance at the Verbier Festival in 1996; whilst David Bowie, after studying theatre and mime, played a role in the 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise, and appeared as Pierrot in the video to his 1980 song, ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

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Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis

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Jules Laforgue – ‘Autre Complaint de Lord Pierrot’ (‘Another Complaint of Lord Pierrot’). In French; then translated into English courtesy of Paul Staniforth and brindin.com

——–

Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!

Nous lui dirons d’abord, de mon air le moins froid:

“La somme des angles d’un triangle, chère âme,

Est égale à deux droits.”

–
Et si ce cri lui part: “Dieu de Dieu! que je t’aime!”

– “Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.” Ou piquée au vif:

– “Mes claviers ont du coeur, tu seras mon seul thème.”

Moi: “Tout est relatif.”

–

De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:

“Ah! tu ne m’aimes pas; tant d’autres sont jaloux!”

Et moi, d’un oeil qui vers l’inconscient s’emballe:

“Merci, pas mal; et vous?”

–

– “Jouons au plus fidèle!” – “à quoi bon, ô Nature!

Autant à qui perd gagne!” Alors, autre couplet:

– “Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j’en suis sûre…”

– “Après vous, s’il vous plaît.”

–

Enfin, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,

Douce; feignant de n’en pas croire encor mes yeux,

J’aurai un: “Ah! ça, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!

C’était donc sérieux?”

——–

The one who’ll give an update on her sex!

We’ll tell her first in our least frigid air

“The sum of a triangle’s angles makes

exactly two right angles, dear.”

–

And should she peal “O God! how I love you!”,

‘God’ll know his own’ – or, cut to the quick: 

“My heart knows love’s keys; I’ll play but of you!”, 

then I: ‘All’s relativistic.’

–

Then, with all eyes, feeling too commonplace 

“You don’t love me whom men crave with each muscle?” 

And I, with an eye on Unconsciousness, 

‘Oh, not so bad, ta, and yousel’?’

–

“Let’s vie in fidelity!” – ‘Might as well play

(Nature!) loser wins.’ And after those, these: 

“Oh, you’ll tire of me first, you’ll go away…” 

‘Oh no: ladies first, if you please.’

–

Last, if one night she die in my ‘Divan’, 

soft … with fake disbelief in my closet 

I’ll go ‘Well, now, we’d something to live on –

it was serious then, was it?’

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Pierrot with a White Pipe, by Seurat

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Pierrot and Harlequin, by Cézanne

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Pierrot and Columbine, by Picasso

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Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21

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David Bowie as Pierrot

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Raine, C. T. S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement In Literature (Dutton & Company, 1919)

Wiggerhaus, R. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (MIT Press, 1995)