Maybe it’s because the pandemic has provided an 11-month exercise in concentrated, compulsory togetherness. Maybe it’s because the “night out” part of “romantic night out” is impossible. Maybe it’s because I’m already eating chocolate all the time.
But this Valentine’s Day, I find myself saying, “Not tonight, I have a headache” to the usual swooning arias and romantic ballads, unmoved by the Romeos and Juliets and Pelléases and Mélisandes of the canon.
I’m still in the mood for love, however, but nothing as pointed as Cupid’s arrow. At this particular point in history, I’m more in the market for the big, mysterious, cosmic, universe-changing variety of love — a.k.a. what the world needs now. Here are five works that, to me, summon love and set it free in unexpected ways. (Please note: I am still accepting chocolates.)
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Mica Levi, 'Love'
If you’ve ever seen filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s “Jackie,” you know that Mica Levi doesn’t so much compose (Oscar-nominated) scores as create entire dimensions. Levi’s music, with its idiosyncratic contours and unexpected gestures, has a way of tinting films with an unearthly light. This is certainly the case throughout Levi’s debut score in 2013 for Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi masterpiece, “Under the Skin,” which deploys long tunnels of white noise, sparse plunks of percussion, shimmering metallics and tentacular strings to evoke everything from “Creation” to “Death,” and lend Glazer’s otherworldly vision of life on Earth an extra-sinister shade. But once our soft-spoken heroine discovers “Love,” the film and the score (and other things) burst open into a tremulous, alien ecstasy. The music becomes a new form of life — its plasticine touch like a chilling embrace from the void itself.
Jaap Vink, 'En Dehors'
“En Dehors” (or “outward,” as in the direction of a dancer’s spin) is my favorite work from a recently issued retrospective of this little-known Dutch electroacoustic composer. Vink (who turned 90 last year) created most of his music out of overlapping layers of luminous feedback generated from tapes and modular synths — pretty standard practice at the Institute of Sonology in the Netherlands, where Vink taught, tinkered with studio processes and tended vast thickets of patch cables from 1967 to 1993. But especially in this 1980 work (which has a more detectable chromatic thrust than his earlier pieces), Vink has an uncanny knack for coaxing out textures that at once evoke the immensity of the galaxy and the intimacy of the body. If we imagine love as a powerful, radiant energy that can be concentrated and cast outward, I imagine it might sound something like this.
Terry Riley, 'Shri Camel'
You are now properly vibed for this. For better or worse, Terry Riley is often pegged as The “In C” Guy for his 1968 monument of what-was-then-nascent minimalism. What many don’t know is that through the 1970s, Riley didn’t just drift into (gasp) other notes, but also into the non-notes between the notes, and the range of colors within. A student of the late Indian classical master singer Pandit Pran Nath — as well as the improvisatory models of traditional raga — Riley’s practice gradually evolved into an intricate overlay of Eastern and Western styles and scales, realized through a similar balance of heart and circuit. You can find a 1980 studio recording of this mesmerizing four-movement meditation for modified organ, but its crystalline sheen lends its surface too much polish for my taste. I prefer a slightly gnarly live recording available on YouTube, a full performance taped three years earlier at the Holland Festival, starring Riley cross-legged on a carpet before his Yamaha, flanked by tape decks and statues of the Buddha. “It’s like a gift of God,” he says in a preconcert interview of his movement from one note to the next. “You’re waiting for the next gift.”
Benjamin Britten, String Quartet No. 1
I’d always heard Britten’s (nominally) first string quartet as a forlorn love letter home. He wrote it in the summer of 1941, in a shed behind the place he stayed during the brief L.A. leg of his self-imposed exile to the States. There’s a dread in this piece, but it manifests as something more like tender urgency — especially in its stunning third movement, which a Los Angeles Times critic suggested could have been titled “In Memoriam for a Lost World.” In 2015, director Yorgos Lanthimos deployed its pining opening notes as a hopeless love theme of sorts in his deeply dystopian rom-com “The Lobster,” and since then I’ve been able to hear it only in the context of love and its endlessly tested tensile strength. Of course, if you do need to hear a fully smitten Britten, there’s always his 1940 song cycle for tenor (and partner) Peter Pears, “Seven Sonnets by Michelangelo” — especially “Sonnet XXX: Veggio co’ bei vostri occhi un dolce lume (With your lovely eyes I see a sweet light),” which makes your box of chocolates look like a box of chocolates.
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Harry Burleigh, 'Til I Wake'
And to assure you that I’m not completely turned off by Valentine’s Day, I close with a straight-ahead love song that’s not really very straight ahead at all. Taken from Burleigh’s 1915 song cycle “Five Songs on Poems by Laurence Hope” (the pseudonym of British writer Adela Florence Cory), it stretches like a sunrise over five spellbinding minutes. Its single quatrain depicts a final kiss goodbye: one that accounts for a life lived among the “yellow roses [that] droop in the wind from the South” as well as for whatever may come next, “if there be an Awakening.” Soprano Cynthia Hayman’s soaring 1992 recording is among the finest I’ve heard. (Baritone Will Liverman’s performance of it last year at the Kennedy Center is a very close second.)
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