On Hearing a Musette in a Rameau Opera

Prancing ponies! High-kicking cancan girls! The skip, step and cha-cha of things! The choreography of time. Space furnished like a wardrobe with cumulus clouds, frilly knee-high petticoats and marching boots. Making a fool of distance, which collapses like an accordion dresser screen painted with Chinese landscapes! O landscape of time in a Rameau opera! From whence did you import your measures? And the stamping, sliding, tumbling objects of the earth, silly creatures of the forest, sky and workshop waiting in a long line at the backstage entrance for an audition—how much did you pay those clubfoot jesters, those upstart hooligan extras to portray time intervals in your opera? And the marble nude in the shrubbery showing her derriere: even she seems like a distillation of quotidian time in a moonlit operatic garden. The seldom-revealed, still backside of time. Her stone buttocks make your optical glands throb with the imminence of motion. Frozen in time, commanded into stillness by a poised orchestra conductor’s baton.

The garden of movement. When did movement coarsen, become false? When did it lose its luster and become dingy? Behold motion, new-washed by music. Plunge your body into freshly-laundered space like an arm through the sleeve of a crisp white Sunday linen shirt. I am here. Presto! Now I’m there. It’s as easy as music. Or dancing. The thing in motion is matter daydreaming. Mind made flesh. Wanting without remorse, hungrily, as a petal lunges to the earth, gracefully falling through space as a dancer hurls herself through time from one sequence of movements to another, always falling to a new height which overlooks all the previous history of the dance.

O sound of musettes in a Rameau opera! Sounds I never heard before until now! (Or maybe I heard you in a former life—eighteenth century France, par example, since even my present life feels decidedly ancien régime.) Why has it taken me so long to hear you again, unknown familiar sound? Whose voice are you? To which of these moving things, these gallant moving things stampeding like circus animals through the sky, along the sidewalk, down our department store aisles and tumbling off our desks and out of our kitchen pantries and from the top shelves of our closets, do you belong? Must that thing not stop in its tracks and channel all its energy through its nose in order to make that sound, the sound of a musette? It seems to twist all the diffuse strands of life into a metaphysical circus act. It bristles with obscene chalumeaux. “Some men, when the bagpipe sings in the nose, cannot contain their urine” said the slandered Venetian. It waddles, the vulgar French musette, like a bawdy-looking brown leather duck into the blazing center ring and draws a reedy, whining acrobatic high-wire out of its nose along which an absurd assembly of goofy cartoon characters slide in pompous, stately procession, with heart-breaking precision, solemnity and nonchalance. Like Philippe Petit between the World Trade towers—which no longer exist (like Rameau). Suspended in time like a conductor’s baton,

6/12/2015