I used to have a recording of Gieseking playing Debussy's Preludes. Each Prelude was brief, intense, exploring a single possibility in a short space. Any Prelude by Debussy, of course, is quite different from any song by Nirvana, which is different again from any song by Baden-Powell (I'm really just pulling random examples out of the air). Stories offer the chance of doing radically different things briefly; it's hard for them to go as far as they should, though, if they're put through the machinery of the house style of a magazine. So I thought I'd publish a few stories on my website.
I'm posting the first page of two stories below. The rest is available through PayPal for $5.
I've also provided the the stories as Word documents for download. If you have a preference for a particular font you can reformat the text; you will in any case have a permanent copy for easy reference.
(For those new to PayPal, this is simply a way to make a credit card payment to someone who has no facility to take credit card payments; you click through to PayPal, provide your credit card details, and are then put through to a web page with the rest of the stories. You don't have to provide your bank details, but if you don't have a credit card you can also set up a PayPal account to pay through your bank.)
© Helen DeWitt
In 1970 they had their one and only legendary US tour.
The Breaks played 100 gigs in 110 days. They played their five hits the way the hits sounded on the record. They played their six other songs so they sounded like their five hits. They were in America, which was where they had all dreamed of going, except they didn’t see it. They saw hotel rooms and stages and the inside of a bus.
The tour was not going well, because before they left their manager had brought out their new LP. The last time they had talked about the cover Pete had had some Op Art-like ideas and their manager had said it was interesting and now here it was.
The artwork was a rip-off of Yellow Submarine with cartoons of the lads in bell-bottoms and boots and it was called Groovin On Down. There was an unpleasant scene because Pete said he was not going to America to be associated with an album called Groovin On Down. His manager said he did not see and Pete said bitterly that they should call themselves the Berks and a bystanding American asked enlightenment and was told that a berk was the kind of person who thought it was groovy to call an album Groovin On Down. Wee Willie Wanker and His Wallies he said, and he said Well at least they can’t do anything to
There was something about the way Steve’s expression stayed exactly the same so smiling and friendly there was something in the way he said agreeing Exactly, it’s the music the fans care about, slipping in the word “fans”.
Pete said Well let’s hear it, and there was something about the way he was too eager. He slipped the silky black disk from its sleeve and put it on the turntable.
Some of the record was old material and some was new material going in a different direction from the old material which now sounded exactly like the old material.
The three other Breaks jumped him before he could kill their manager and their manager explained that they had just made some very minor adjustments because you didn’t want to disappoint your fans.
For a while it seemed that Pete would not go but someone had the bright idea of calling his father who made an uplifting speech about Shirley Temple, that little girl had more spunk in her little finger was the general tenor of the argument, look at Julie Andrews he went on to say, do you think Miss Andrews found it easy to work with a man who imagined he had mastered Cockney? These people are professionals, he explained, it’s not all glamour, it’s a tough life but the show must go on.
Pete hung up and relayed the comment about Shirley Temple to the rest of the band.
© Helen DeWitt
He was a pianist. He was born on the island of Shikoku, where his father had some kind of post in the administration of the prefecture of Tokushima. His mother was from Tokyo. When she married his father she had her piano brought down on the ferry to her new home. He was taught from the age of two by his mother, and from the age of eight by a woman who had studied in Paris with Koslowski until the mid-40s, when she had cut short a promising career to keep house for her widowed father.
Koslowski had said
Of all my pupils the one who showed the finest sensibility in the interpretation of Chopin was Mlle Matsumoto. To praise her technique is to say nothing. The simplicity and ease with which she executed even the most difficult passages, the absence of any kind of affectation or showmanship in pieces where it is too common to see talent on display, while the pianist plays the virtuoso, all this gave one some notion of the style of performance favored by the composer himself. We know for example on the authority of de Bertha that Chopin obtained his effects by methods very different from those of today, relying not on brute force but on gradations achieved through an infinite extension of the piano. This was to have the nuances, the expressive shading of the human voice or of that instrument which comes closest to the voice, the violin. His masters were a Paganini, a Bellini, a Catalani. What was remarkable was Mlle Matsumoto’s ability to realize the impossible, to transform a percussive instrument into one which had the fluidity of the voice.
Her retirement has robbed music of a precious ornament but it is impossible to regret it, for it springs from the very thing which made her playing incomparable – I refer to the complete absence of self...
This was not the opinion of the pupil of Koslowski’s who achieved the greatest renown. He did not hesitate to express his views on the Automaton in the most intemperate language.
Morhange said later
All sorts of contemptible things were done during the War and even later, and they did not stop at the door of the Conservatoire. One of these was old Koslowski’s retention of Mlle Matsumoto, undoubtedly to curry favor with the Nazis, while at the same time washing his hands of anyone with any sort of Jewish connection –
Elle avait du talent, oui, mais elle jouait d’une façon tout à fait machinale, there was a tiresome perfection about her performance –
Koslowski said later that he had been obliged to cut back on his teaching and that M. Morhange had always shown himself so absolutely indifferent, if not positively hostile, to all suggestions on his own part that he had not supposed it would be a hardship to the young man to be deprived of them.
Morhange said that after the War it was of course even more necessary for him to present his actions under the guise of a simple pedagogical decision, one could naturally not admit that anyone had been excluded on account of the Semitic factor, it was therefore necessary to insist on the lack of talent, on aesthetic defects, which by coincidence happened to be found in Jewish persons.