tragedy or farce?

Joyous Brass Music in a Luscious Park

Nothing like a brass band melody wafting through a sunlit park, to stir memory and desire.  It was a jazzy melody, invigorating but mixed with languorous notes of regret.  I was supposed to get back to the office, having already used up the allotted lunch break time for a book-buying spree ahead of the Easter Weekend.  But the music was irresistible, luring me on, up a little hill, where,  half hidden in the lush spring green, a band was playing. Putting down my  satchel filled with books, I sat down on one of the sun-dappled benches, looking at the podium. 

    

And what a sight it was!  Neatly dressed in their burgundy red uniforms, the band members blended wonderfully into their elegant surroundings:  a splendid  19^th C bandstand, built of  cast iron and wood.  The  conductor, vigorously leading on her troops, stood out visually too – her glaring white shirt contrasting with wavy red hair.

The audience on the benches was an accidental hotchpotch – office workers eating their lunch in the park, tourists consulting maps, elderly people resting, kids plotting their next exploits – but they all looked enchanted, tapping their feet, clapping appreciatively at the end of each tune.

Now, dear blog reader, don’t be fooled by the music and the greenery – rest assured, this blog has not succumbed to the frivolous entertainments of Spring!   To know what’s really on the mind of a Flâneur : look rather to the books she’s carrying... And that satchel, thrown  down so nonchalantly on the bench,  contained  quite some ominous titles: “The War That Ended Peace, How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War”. “The Sleepwalkers, How Europe went to War in 1914”. Literature to complement other recent readings such as “De Groote Oorlog”,  “The Price Of Glory, Verdun 1916”. (1)

 And the above evocation of joyous brass music in a luscious park?  It resonates suspiciously with  Stefan Zweig’s description of a peaceful summer day,  June 29^th 1914, in his desperate autobiography "The World of Yesterday"  :  a happy and carefree crowd is promenading to the sound of music in the Spa park of Baden. The band  abruptly stops playing, a communiqué about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand has just been pinned up on the bandstand...

Ravages and Myths

C. was off sailing for the weekend,  so I could freely indulge in my customary sombre Easter reflections. And with the commemorations of the first World War in full swing, I didn’t lack books nor exhibitions to further nourish my native pessimistic assessment of human nature & history.  

Take for instance the Louvain exhibition, Ravage.  It not only documents the destruction of the historical university town of Louvain by vengeful German soldiers in August 1914: killing civilians, setting fire to  houses and churches, and burning down the world-famous library with 200.000 precious books going up in flames. The exhibition also evokes the fate of other martyred cities, across the ages, both mythical and real: Troy, Dresden, Beirut, ... 

The exhibition further shows how generations of artists tried to make sense of this eternally recurring destruction and suffering.  Versed as our scientific age is in evolutionary biology we know that spiteful behaviour such as harming non-kin is just one of the human strategies to raise the proportion of related genes. 

But we also know it is a costly strategy -  calling forth revenge and counter attacks – a strategy which in the end proves to be non-rational and sub-optimal, harming all those involved. (eg 10 million dead across the belligerent parties  in WWI)

But perhaps our scientific age is not that much better at making sense of war & wanton destruction than previous generations, who took recourse to myths.   Do not those allegories featuring fickle deities tell stories as revealing as the scientific accounts of selfish genes and game theory ?  

Like the allegory (2) of Mars, the God of War - killing, maiming, trampling the arts - being held back (in vain or temporarily at best)  by Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, or by Venus, Goddess of Love.

Or take Charles Le Brun, court painter of Louis IV, who dared to depict his king torn between Mars and Minerva: on the one side a magnificent chariot - the image of  military glory - on the other side a stark desolate landscape with desperate war victims.  Louis IV usually chose Mars (and inter alia reduced Brussels to rubble in 1695). 

And what do myths tell us about coping with the ravages of war? Venerable bible stories tell us to not stand still in horrified stupor, to not look back, to not mourn all that is lost.  Rather they advise us to turn our back to the past, to get drunk, to rejoice and reproduce.  This at least seems to be the message of the bible story about Lot and his daughters (3) who escape the destruction of Sodom and who get merrily drunk while Lot’s wife, on the other hand, is turned into a pillar of salt because  she turned back to watch and grieve over the city being destroyed.

Riding a Tandem Bike in a (previously) Ravaged City

Louvain is a thriving university town now, long rebuilt,  and boasting a prosperous, young population.   One of whose representatives managed to get a brooding flâneur joyously participating in a tandem bike race.  I was indeed approached by a young woman about to get married, who needed help for one of the playful tests invented by her marriage witnesses. She solicited passers-by to help bring seven tandem bikes from point A to B.  It was great fun - try taking a sharp turn with something as unwieldy as a tandem!

But back to July  1914:  “And in Le Coq, the little seaside resort near Ostend [...] the mood was equally carefree. Visitors enjoying their holiday lay on the beach in brightly coloured tents or bathed in the sea , the children flew kites, young people  danced outside the cafés [...].All imaginable nations were gathered companionably there.

After all, we had had these diplomatic conflicts for years, and they were always satisfactorily settled at the last moment before anything really serious happened. So why not this time too?” (4)

Surely our diplomats have learned the lessons of the past? Surely Ukraine will get sorted out? Surely Poetin is merely flexing muscles?  And isn’t  Syria a long way off?  (No photos of ravaged Homs or Aleppo at the Louvain exhibition , but they did get duly mentioned in the catalogue introduction. )

I may well have become too defeatist...  Though I do agree that “optimism is a moral duty”.  And isn’t  humanity advancing towards less violence and suffering?  Well, perhaps. But this advance then is marked by many regressions indeed.

Coda

  “[...] it is a sight quite unfit...even for the most ordinary but honest man to see the human race advancing over a period of time towards virtue, and then quickly relapsing the whole way back into vice and misery. It may perhaps be moving and instructive to watch such a drama for a while ; but the curtain must eventually descend. For in the long run, it becomes a farce. And even if the actors do not tire of it – for they are fools – the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will be of eternal sameness. “ (5)

    

     

Notes shored against the ruins

1   1)   WWI books respectively written by: Margaret MacMillan, Christopher Clark, Sophie DeSchaepdrijver, Alistair Horne

2   2) " Ravage, Kunst en Cultuur in tijden van conflict" – Hoofdstuk “Een Allegorie” – Koenraad Brosens, Goedele Pulinx

3   3)    A shuddering note of bible exegesis about Lot and his daughters, a horrendous tale really : having escaped from the fire, Lot’s wife turned into a column of salt, beholding from a distance Sodom&Gomorra’s hellish demise.  Lot himself and his daughters walked merrily on, accompanied by angels.  At night,  Lot gets drunk and incestuously proposes to  his daughters.  The old testament story quite repulsively presents this  as “blameless  Job being seduced by his scheming daughters” .

4   4)      Stefan Zweig:  “The World of Yesterday”   

5   5)      From Kant’s political writings (as cited in Hannah Arendt Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy) 

From Bandstands to Baudelaire (blogging about "Kiosques à Musique"/"Muziekkiosken")

How I felt let down by the English language, and by Google, and by Wikipedia and by the whole worldwide web. There I sat, longing for images of romantic 19th century summer parks, with elegant cast-iron pavilions sheltering brass bands playing invigorating music... Full of nostalgic expectations I had typed “Music Kiosk” , the literal English transcript of a most charming Dutch word. But ach, Google promptly led me to a horrendous collection of gleaming digital music vending machines. Wikipedia did mention “Kiosks” as open garden pavilions in ancient Persia and India but then brutely switched to kiosks as banal sales booths in more recent times. When trying “Music pavilion” instead, Google threw up some futuristic Arkansas music stage.

An ordinary dictionary brought help : “Bandstand” was the word! “Bandstand” .... what an utterly disappointing word, so entirely without grace.
Just as dull and basic as the stingy page that Wikipedia devotes to bandstands.
So is this then a mainly continental European enchantment? At any rate, not only are the Dutch ("Muziek Kiosk") and French words ("Kiosque à Musique") far nicer – the subject also seems to raise more affectionate interest on the European continent than in Anglosaxon regions. The French Wikipédia page about Kiosques & Kiosques à Musique is as instructive as Wiki comes (1). And I found many Dutch and French webpages testifying of impassioned individual initiatives to save local Kiosques à Musique/Muziekkiosken from sad neglect and disrepair.

Thus, for the briefest of moments I pictured myself, travelling all over Europe, on a exalted mission to photograph and document all those charming 19th century kiosques à musiques / muziekkiosken/ music kiosks (2). But my ailing employer needn’t worry about losing a diligent (albeit disheartened) worker to so frivolous a project. Because the project is no longer needed: a comprehensive kiosk-inventory has already been put on line – please see “kiosques du monde” for a brief history , a bibliography, literary references and many many pictures. On that site I furthermore learned that the ultimate book about kiosques à musique has also already been written, by Marie–Claire Mussat: La Belle Epoque des Kiosques à Musique (3)

Whence this sudden infatuation with “kiosques à musiques / muziekkiosken/ music kiosks” (2), the puzzled reader may ask. Not sudden at all, and obviously much more durable than an infatuation. It is part of my fascination for the 19th Century – so materialistic and positivist and ruthless an age – and yet, how tangible its architectural heritage, how exalted still its reverence for culture, how aesthetically minded its engineers and architects (whether they were building sturdy railway stations, bridges, or rather more frivolous bandstands).

And then, last week, I happened to be moved by an endearing example of such a bandstand, while wandering about in Tournai, a sleepy provincial Walloon town - with however a grandiose past, as witnessed by its formidable Romanesque cathedral, its bulky 19th Century railway station and various other remaining civil buildings and public spaces. Tournai is also home to one of the most charming museums I know (4).
On my way to this museum, I strolled through an austere looking public park, surrounded by dignified though worn-out neo-classical buildings, the whole looking rather desolate with the flowerbeds still empty and the fountains dead. In an adjacent, wooded public garden the trees still looked very wintry, and there, through the bare branches, I caught a first glimpse of it.

This kiosk (2), so rusty and decaying, so abandoned - and yet, by its sheer form and materiality evoking blissful summers past, careless gaiety and frivolous garden pleasures enlivened by arousing brass music ...

« Pour entendre un de ces concerts, riches de cuivre,
Dont les soldats parfois inondent nos jardins,
Et qui, dans ces soirs d'or où l'on se sent revivre,
Versent quelque héroïsme au coeur des citadins. »(5)

B-notes
(1) Britannica: One can only wonder how the formidable Encyclopedia Britannica and Larousse Encyclopédie would treat the subject. Not on-line I mean, but in their heavy weight book version. I bet they’d illuminate the reader with nice little époque drawings of “kiosques à musique” and with cross references to lemma’s about light music and about military music and about “belle époque” leisure habits? But alas, recently a news flashed by on the internet announcing the end of the Brittanica as a book . This is what The Independent writes: “On a sad day for knowledge, metaphors, and door-to-door salespeople, Encyclopaedia Britannica announced last week that it will no longer publish its print edition, and henceforth it will only be available online and as an app.”
(2) Bandstand: The word, alas, is “Bandstand” - OED: “ a covered platform outdoors, where musicians, especially a brass or military band, can stand and play”
(3) Belle Epoque - the hunt is open to find a physical copy of this book - Marie-Claire Mussat: La Belle Epoque des Kiosques à Musique
(4) Beaux Arts : Le Musée des Beaux Arts de Tournai was built early in the 20th Century by the art nouveau architect Horta, displaying a fascinating mix of styles, hesitating between sinuous art nouveau and much sterner and geometric art deco. When you push open the heavy doors of this outwardly rather austere looking building, you cannot but gasp from sheer delight and happiness. There you are welcomed by sheltering spaces, lavish ceiling light and many an enchanting perspective. It’s a museum with a small but beautiful collection ranging from a Madonna by the local painter Roger de la Pasture (aka Rogier van der Weyden) to some famous impressionist paintings.
(5) Baudelaire