The Red Shoes is on television – a good way of recovering from an excellent but overwhelming long Christmas lunch. I know that there are many things in the film to focus on, but I'm always especially struck by the opening, where a bunch of frantically energetic, highly educated arts students (musicians and dancers) push their way up to the balcony seats and bicker over the impending performance. Then the early scenes, a chaotic, lively landscape of dancers, singers, composers, producers – and of course egos – scattered around Covent Garden....
I always want to be there, among the busy, smart people who work away on what they care about – I know: in 1948, when the film was made, a clever Oxbridge or Ivy League education was embedded in an elitist, aristocratic structure of rich people's sons and daughters that I never would have gotten into anyway; and, of course, all that was processed through structures of conformity and hierarchy that I would have rebelled against (and if I hadn't, that would have been a mistake).
But it would have been great to be involved with young people who were excited about their work and studies, passionate about them. My undergraduate studies were at the 'wrong' school, as far as I was concerned – I blasted through the whole in foreshortened span of time with poor grades, not caring because I thought it had all already gone hopelessly wrong (and thinking so was my first big mistake, the one that set up all the rest).
Then, after years singing in bars and preening my way through ensemble rehearsals, I went to UCLA, although I wanted to go to Berkeley. Their differences ran deep – many UCLA students were pragmatists, aimed at money and jobs, while Berkeley students seemed considerably nerdier and more introverted – but also considerably more dedicated to their chosen subjects. I was always probably too flaky and undependable to be a successful part of their more elevated world, but it would have been so much more satisfying....
•••
and later in the film: all those Stravinskian passages (I know: Milhaud, Tippett, etc. – but, from a certain distance, anything worthwhile in early modernism that wasn't dodecaphonic sounds Stravinskian) – I used to be a perfect Stravinskyite, ever since I first heard the Rite of Spring when I was 13 (I still have a score in my office covered with pencil markings, where I was trying to figure out how it worked – a vain endeavor, as the score is almost impossible to reduce to any theoretical basis that makes any sense).
It's exciting to hear it as a style again, rather than as particular canonic works; it makes you want to compose, sort of... though not quite like that of course.
Comments