'Simplicity, Order, Honesty and Taste'

Some use music as a stimulant, a purpose I have occasionally understood. For others, it’s a relaxant, a sonic Xanax. I’ve also dabbled with that, but rarely. More often – and this will take some explanation – I choose to listen to music that recalls the sensation reading maps gave me when I was boy (and sometimes still). I might look at a map of the Midwest. I lived in Cleveland but that didn’t get in the way of launching a boat on the Ohio River from, say, Cincinnati, and floating (sailing? rowing? motoring?) southwest, past Kentucky and Indiana, and meeting the Mississippi at Cairo, Ill., tracing the route with my finger. Then a rather confused understanding of Twain took over. This has always seemed like more than simple fantasy. Imagination, yes, but peculiarly vivid and spontaneous, without straining. It resembles not daydreaming, which is vague and lacks a solid visual component, but like the real thing at night, with emotional accompaniment.

Something similar happens when I listen to the right sort of music, usually instrumental – Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Copland, Warne Marsh, Bill Evans. The music takes me to another place, parallel to and overlapping the one I already inhabit. If I’m uninterrupted and, usually, alone, the sensation recalls the more pleasant experiences I had with psychedelics. I’m not encouraging anyone to drop acid – it’s a fairly stupid thing to do – and acid rock and related musical genres never had such an impact on me. It tends to be quieter, slower tempo music, often in a minor key, though not always, that best triggers reveries. Nor can I hope to induce them. They just have to happen, unsought. I ought to add that I’m not a musician and that there’s no human capacity I so envy as musical composition and performance.

The prolific and still under-recognized American composer Alec Wilder (1907-1980) is a reliable source of diurnal visions. Take his Octets, thirty-nine short pieces, most of which were recorded in 1939. They are whimsical, catchy and tough to categorize – woodwinds and harpsicord. Jazz? Classical? Pop? Try "Her Old Man was Suspicious." Or a more decidedly classical piece – “Sonata No. 1 for Horn and Piano.” Wilder loves melody, listeners new to his work will be happy to hear. And he wrote songs, some of which have become standards: "I'll Be Around" as performed by Wilder’s friend Frank Sinatra.

Much of Tuesday was spent in waiting rooms. For accompaniment I brought along Wilder’s Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life. It was first published in 1975, and I have the newer, annotated edition brought out in 2005 by the University of Rochester Press. In the first edition, Wilder’s addressees were often left unidentified or given pseudonyms. In the new one, David Demsey, the editor, fills in many of the blanks. I ordered but haven’t yet read Joseph Epstein’s latest book, Charm: The Elusive Enchantment. Wilder, as writer and composer, embodies charm, today a rare quality. In one of the letters to his friend Harry Bouras, Wilder gives a protracted apologia for his music. Here’s an excerpt:

“I am not against experiment. I am against moving out of the sacred grove of art into the anarchistic playpen of newness and nowness for their own sakes.

“I believe in direction, continuity, shape, communication, wit, sophistication, simplicity, order, honesty and taste.”

[Go here and here for more about Wilder and his music.]