Trash Talk

Garbage is flooding the streets of Naples, yet again. In 1994, a state of emergency was declared to combat the masses of rubbish accumulating in the southern Italian city. This summer is providing a repeat performance.

The last legally available Neapolitan landfill was topped off in May. Soon after, the construction of two large incinerators fell through when politicians balked at local protests. Surrounding towns refused to accomodate the city's refuse. There was no other option than to heap waste in the gutter, like a medieval village.

Small-scale incineration became widespread. Over a hundred fires are found burning on some nights, adding toxic gases to the smog that already blankets the city.

As the temperature hit 104 degrees by the end of June, Naples's malodorous predicament let loose an international stink. The European Union Enivornment Commissioner released a statement on June 27. "The television reports we have all seen showing piles of garbage rotting in the streets of Campania or set on fire by angry residents have been truly shocking. I urge the Italian authorities to act urgently to bring waste management facilities in the Campania region up to standard so that waste is collected and disposed of without endangering human health or the environment, as European law requires." The United States embassy in Rome just issued an advisory note warning American travelers of the potential health hazard and public demonstrations. Now, not only is the respiratory health of Neapolitans at stake, but "the image of the country," to quote Italy's President.

Neighboring towns were quickly forced into opening their dumps, and one local landfill technically at capacity was reopened for 20 days. A new incinerator will be completed in the coming weeks.

The garbage is slowly centralizing. Over a week ago, the Neapolitan government reported that only 400 tons of trash remains to be collected, but many of the trash mountains have not yet diminished into molehills, especially in poor areas of town.

Already controlling much of the city's garbage pickup service, organized crime is providing a solution through illegal dumping sites. Although they are a favorable alternative to decomposing streetcorner heaps, the camorra's dumps do not meet high health and environmental standards.

Long-term solutions require the construction of landfills in outlying towns. Unfortunately, the populations of those communities fail to support necessary relief. In one small town a temporary dump was established to alleviate the current emergency. The International Herald Tribune reports that, "Nearly every day, protesters have lain in the road to block garbage trucks. Trash was thrown in the mayor's yard."

Outsourcing offers a secondary solution in addition to the construction of a domestic infrastructure capable of handling Naples's waste. As the crisis escalated in May, the Italian government petitioned Romania to accept Neapolitan garbage. The Romanian Environment Minister submitted a curt reply. "Our stance is clear: We are not allowing Italian waste on Romanian territory. Our infrastructure is not developed enough to handle our own waste. If someone lets garbage into Romania, they will suffer the consequences of Romanian law."

Campania's endemic trash epidemic highlights the backward state of southern Italy. For many centuries, the industrial north has prospered while the agrarian south has languished. National authorities consistently turn a blind eye to the inequity. I hope that this recent humiliation helps spur the Italian government into cleaning up its act.

Music in Magyar

In rememberance of his death last June, I recently explored a selection of music by Gyorgy Ligeti. The second CD in the Ligeti Project series features the Berlin Philharmonic playing five of his orchestral pieces (Teldec, 2002). One of the compositions, Atmospheres, brought the composer widespread attention when it was featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Ligeti was born in a small, predominantly Jewish Transylvanian village in 1923. He and his mother were the only members of his family to survive the Holocaust. Life in Budapest under Communist rule was unbearable for the freethinking Ligeti. In one section of his Romanian Concerto, he writes an F sharp while in the key of F major. This was enough for the authorities to ban the whole piece. Following the Hungarian Revolution, Ligeti and his wife fled across the Iron Curtain into Austria.



Once free of Communist censorship, Ligeti ventured into uncharted musical waters. Virtually abandoning the thematic motive, his pieces from that era are amorphous "masses of sound." The orchestra produces colors and textures instead of melodies and rhythms; tuning is a subjective affair. Atmospheres, Apparitions, and Lontano are three representative compositions. Ligeti describes them as "micropolyphonic," a broad categorization he defines as "consisting of complex interwoven textures." If you recall the end sequence of space-time travel in 2001, the musical accompaniment comes from Atmospheres.

As well as forging a path for modernism, Ligeti built upon the majestic edifice of Hungarian national music. A direct successor of Bela Bartok, Ligeti wrote many tonal works based on traditional dance themes. The BPO includes an excellent recording of Concert romanesc in their disc. Concert romanesc provides temporal grounding for the ethereal explorations of Atmospheres. Unlike so many other modernists, Ligeti composed individualistic music capable of reaching unadventurous audiences.

One of the forefathers of the Hungarian classical tradition was Franz Liszt. In the middle of the 19th century, Liszt wrote 12 symphonic poems (a 13th followed late in his life), of which I listened to four in a recording by the BBC Philharmonic (Chandos, 2005).



Initially dismissed as a frivolous and unimaginative by his countryman Bartok, that great 20th century composer later came to discover "far greater genius" in Liszt than in Wagner or that other famous symphonic poet, Richard Strauss. Although Liszt's symphonic poems are programmatic mainstays of the classical repertoire, the majority of performances only include his most famous, Les Preludes.

Although my favorite, Mazeppa, is the least subtle of the poems I have heard, others, like Orpheus, on this disc, are more contemplative in nature. All symphonic poems use some theme, often taken from literature, to set the mood. Liszt enjoyed condensing the "morals" of his poems into brief narrative statements included at the beginning of the score.

For a foray into one of the most fertile geographic regions of classical music, try a smattering of Ligeti and the symphonic poems of Liszt. The CDs I mentioned are a nice place to start.

Klezmer Spiel

Earlier today, JT and I visited the National Yiddish Book Center at Hampshire College. The Center is home to over 1.5 million volumes written in Yiddish, of which 10% are on view and for sale in the museum area. At the vanguard of the Yiddish-studies revival that began 30 years ago and helped lead to the creation of the center was a resurgence of interest in klezmer.

Evocative of rustic folk dancing and cantorial wailing, klezmer is simultaneously sacrosanct and profane. Derived from the Hebrew words "kli," or instrument, and "zemer," song, klezmer arose in the shtetls of mid-19th century Eastern Europe. When Jewish musicians were drafted into the tzar's military bands, many learned the clarinet, which quickly came to dominate the melodic aspect of klezmer. The famous clarinet glissando at the beginning of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is a commonly heard snippet of klezmer.

One of the earliest klezmorim was Josef Gusikov, a Belorussian who toured Western Europe playing a xylophone-like instrument he invented out of straw and wood. Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt both saw the virtuoso perform. Mendelssohn marvelled at Gusikov, but Liszt wished his genius had been directed toward "inventing an agricultural instrument" instead of producing "nothing but musical inanities." The exotic performer of the neo-marimba was so popular in Paris that a coiffure was invented in imitation of Gusikov's payot, the sidelocks worn by Orthodox Jews.

Along with mass European emigration to the United States at the turn of the century came klezmer. Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein were the premier bandleaders of the interwar golden age of klezmer. They were perfect counterparts, both on the clarinet and temperamentally. Tarras had a sweet and fluid sound; Brandwein knocked the air out of an audience's lungs. Although both knew how to play a variety of instruments, Brandwein never learned how to read music, so that in their early years, Tarras took his job in a band. Famously reliable and hardworking, Tarras played well into 1980s, living into his 90s. Brandwein on the other hand was a notorious drunk. During one performance he wrapped himself in Christmas lights and was nearly electrocuted. Another time, he was almost run down while wandering down an Adirondack road in an inebriated state. To paraphrase a biographical essay of Tarras I once read, if Tarras was a fictional character, Brandwein would have been his foil.

After World War II and the Holocaust, both klezmer and Yiddish quickly fell into obscurity. Not until the late 1970s were the music and language rediscovered. In the early 1980s, Aaron Lansky, a graduate of Hampshire College, began saving every Yiddish-language book he could get his hands on, a collection that transformed into the National Yiddish Book Center. Meanwhile, a small number of Jewish musicians reestablished contact with the few living klezmorim. Andy Statman, one of the new-age pioneers, reestablished contact with Dave Tarras and became his disciple on the clarinet.

Statman is featured in an article in this month's issue of the world music magazine Dirty Linen. Now an Orthodox Jew, Statman has explored a variety of musical genres in his long career. Constantly branching out, Statman is proficient on the mandolin and well-versed in bluegrass. On the CD Avodas ha-Levi, a collection of archival material from the 1990s, the listener can clearly discern jazz in Statman's putative klezmer. Most of the disc evokes a late night cafe free jazz session. Which is disappointing. Statman butchers the classic Brandwein song, Naftule Shpilt far dem Rebb'n, turning it into piano chord laden, soft cymbal brushing, revisionist blues. There is no upbeat freilachs or old country doina. But neither seems to exist in modern klezmer, anyways. Most klezmer bands are diluted with augmented brass sections, ear-blasting percussion, and a variety of saxophones. Their songs mimic the standards of Tarras and Brandwein but are neither melodically pleasing nor authentic. A good example is Statman's mockery of Tarras's "Sha, Sha, di Shviger Kumt" ("Quiet, quiet, the mother-in-law is coming"), which is turned into a rhythmically insecure jazz number titled "Charles and West 4th."

For an excellent compilation of klezmer, turn to Rounder Records's CD, "Naftule Brandwein: King of the Klezmer Clarinet," not the modern parodies akin to Weird Al Yankovic.

Static Change

"Give a savage a complicated instrument like a chronometer or a sextant, and he uses it as a toy or an ornament. In Stalinist Russia, freedom was treated in the same way. Dead freedom became an ornament of the state, but one not without its uses. Dead freedom became the principal figure in a gigantic stage presentation, in a tremendous puppet show on an unbelievable scale."

In the mind of Vasily Grossman, the October Revolution was nothing but the newest stage of a 900 year march of "nonfreedom" in Russia. Centuries of czarist oppression instantaneously collapsed; replacing it was the purest incarnation of serfdom yet known to mankind.

"Implacable suppression of the individual ran continuously throughout Russia's thousand-year history. Slave subjugation of the individual to the state and to the sovereign. ... The shattering of Russian life carried out by Lenin was thoroughgoing. Lenin destroyed the way of life dominated by the outlook of the landed nobles; he destroyed the factory owners and merchants. Yet Lenin himself was a slave of Russian history, and he preserved that link between progress and slavery that has historically been Russia's curse."

As Russia slowly developed to the tune of the West through the 18th and 19th centuries, serfdom slowly intensified--only to be shattered by Alexander II. Into the void flowed a host of revolutionary Western ideas which destabilized and eventually toppled the throne.

But the nation of nonfreedom could not shake off its shackles. At first, the new state was a theoretical means to a utopian end. If liberty was to be sacrificed in the short-term, so be it. Quickly it became apparent that the state was a self-perpetuating end. In 1937, the radicals of 1917 were liquidated. Those who had swept the path of communism had become hindrances, anachronisms. The apparatus was set in motion.

"Lenin laid the foundations. Stalin erected the superstructure. And now the state without freedom has been put into operation."

Grossman was a victim of the third, "automated" stage of the communist succession. Born into a family of emancipated Ukranian Jews, Grossman studied mine engineering and worked in that profession until he devoted his life to writing. He was one of the luckier Soviet authors of the era. Although his father was a Menshevik and his common-law wife fell under the eye of the Great Purge, Grossman's socialist-realist early work was met with approval by the authorities.

Myopic and short in stature, the young writer was overlooked for military service upon the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. Instead, he became a front-line journalist. Grossman's candid reporting for Krasnaya Zvezda, a military periodical, instantaneously won him the admiration of the soldiers of the Red Army. He accompanied that body on its struggle from Stalingrad to Berlin, witnessing most major operations firsthand and becoming one of the first to document the horrors of the Holocaust. An excellent assemblage of writing from his journey can be found in Writer at War.

Although he did not definitively know it at the time, his mother was one of those killed in the Holocaust. Along with almost 30,000 other Jews, she was shot outside the Grossmans' hometown of Berdichev. In a chapter of his greatest novel, Life and Fate, Grossman reconstructs his mother's fate through a letter to his semi-autobiographical main character.

Life and Fate is a searing indictment of the Soviet Union. Pre-dating One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by three years, Grossman's magnum opus demonstrates the congruence between Nazi Fascism and Soviet Communism. Upon presenting the manuscript for publication in 1959, the KGB raided his apartment and confiscated all traces of the book. Although Khrushchev's thaw was under way, the Party's ideological overlord, Mikhail Suslov, declared that the book would not be published for at least 200 years. Only in the 1980s did Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich manage to smuggle photographic film of a hidden copy out of the Soviet Union to be published in the West.

After the unsuccessful publication of Life and Fate, Grossman became a non-entity in his nation. In 1963, one year before his death, Grossman completed his last novel, Forever Flowing. It was not to be published in the Soviet Union until 1989.

Grossman's grand historical narrative of nonfreedom in Russia touched upon at the beginning of this post occupies the last segment of Forever Flowing. It is an observation of Grossman's main character, Ivan Grigoryevich, who has returned to mainstream society after 30 years of torture, imprisonment, and hard labor. Ivan initially travels to Moscow, where he meets his cousin, Nikolai Andreyevich. Possessing false pride in never having abetted the implementation of Stalin's purges, Nikolai wants to confess his guilt through complacency to Ivan, but cannot muster the courage to atone. He and his petty wife are relieved when Ivan soon departs.

Thinking that St. Petersburg might provide an emotional haven, Ivan finds that history has moved on without him. The love of his life, who apparently stopped inquiring about him many years hence, was still alive and free while he suffered in the Gulag; although Ivan does not know it, the old and prosperous university comrade he encounters on the street was his chief denouncer. Longing to retreat into the solace of his childhood, Ivan makes his final peregrination of the book and turns south to a city near his birthplace on the Black Sea.

Grossman's protagonist barely ekes out a living at a factory that employs the handicapped and rents a nook in war widow Anna Sergeyevna's home. She is the only one who understands Ivan's suffering. In one chapter Anna provides a vivid account of her time working in a small Ukrainian Party bureau, when she witnessed the great famine following the liquidation of the kulaks. This story alone, fictional though it may be, discredits communism, autocracy, and indifference.

At two points in the book--once at the beginning in his mind, and once at the end in person--Ivan returns to his childhood home. It is a scar in the earth, like the Circassian villages destroyed by czarist conquest generations before. Soon nature will obliterate its remains forever. Like Ivan, it will leave no mark.