DLO 7: DANSE MACABRE/IT'S AN ANGEL, CONWAY

The office receives a grisly letter from the early 20th century about an experimental composer. Conway muses about his past and present.

(CWs: blood, body horror, knuckles cracking, death)

Music:

Purcell - Rondeau From Abdelazer

Vivaldi - Concerto for Two Violins in A Minor

Saint-Saëns - Danse macabre, Op. 40

TRANSCRIPT:

CONWAY: This is Conway, receiving clerk for the Dead Letter Office of ***** Ohio, processing the national dead mail backlog. The following audio recording will serve as an internal memo strictly for archival purposes and should be considered confidential. Need I remind anyone: public release of this or any confidential material from the DLO is a felony. Some names and places have been censored for the protection of the public.

Now this is an old one. I feel like if I’m not careful opening this, the whole thing’s gonna tear. Dead Letter 312. A letter addressed to a Mr. Markos. I’m not entirely sure how it made it into our backlog, given it’s about 100 years old, but there appears to be no address for this Mr. Markos. The letter reads as follows.

EDGAR, NARRATOR: "Malicious. Obscene. Substandard. Most disagreeable and indigestible. The proverbial Dickensian crumb of cheese splattered on the stage by an ill-tempered mind, one assuredly perverted by rhythm and reason hitherto unknown to polite society. A complete aesthetic and moral failure for Monsieur Edgar, and a black spot on all contemporary English works. Perhaps Edgar should have retained his study of internal medicine, whereby he could make messes of the human form as he sees fit, sans audience."

These “kind words” and more you levied at my first premiere in Paris one year ago, Monsieur Markos. Certainly your confidant Madame Stein has long ago heard the tale of my ballet’s misfortune and ensured all the other aesthetes gathered in her gilded salon from Apollinaire to Matisse know my shame.

I can imagine you poring over this text now, after my second premiere, in a frenzied allegro--perhaps accompanied by the horns of bobbies--seeking any news of your daughter’s health, any drop of comfort for your troubled heart. Though my frame shudders with mirth at the mere thought, that revelation must come in due course, monsieur. First I should like to give you a thorough recounting of the creation of my latest, and final, piece.

One evening the 25th of October, 1915. Deep in the trench of a gas-laden graveyard, a medic stood just outside the range of an artillery shell detonation. Three other medics within the radius were torn apart and died instantly, along with several soldiers a touch more slowly, leaving just this lone medic as the frantically bandaging witness. It was in these trenches that the medic saw the true barbarity of our race, the needless suffering we undergo and inflict for the benefit of our supposed betters. We, merely the chess pieces of our modern gods callously tossed off the board for a coin. He saw the very threshold of what man’s body can endure, and what Herr Freud might call the collective psyche of a nation can withstand--or bury. You, Monsieur, championed this war in your paper of record and seem determined to bury its atrocities.

At the time of my release from service, a friend apprised me of the goings-on at a salon in Zurich, of Mr. Hugo Ball and his associates at the Cabaret Voltaire. I was divinely inspired by their destruction and reconfiguration of the old modes into new ones, of the unseen grotesque discovered. The absurdity of our modern condition, in the twisted forms in a Braque, or a Duchamp, were not so dissimilar to the horrors of the Great War, to the bodies out of joint and out of space strewn across Europe. I spent the majority of my cached income to bring these radical new movements to the orchestra, to replicate the impossible bodies in dance, and to never let us forget what they have done to us, and what you and yours encouraged; the grinding of our bodies into dust in the gears of imperial war and industry.

As for Stein and all: I hadn’t the slightest interest in their approval in any case. However, since my premiere, your words had rattled around my mind like a sharp stone in my shoe. I thought I’d be rid of it only to be sorely reminded of its presence by a prick in the heel. I did not seek your approval, yet your critique soured me on my own work. I was driven to rework the piece entirely, to transmogrify it into a ballet that would test the very limits of the form itself. The fruits of this labor you were witness to this very night.

I began the process many months ago. I would spend hours in my parlor with my mandolin, plucking out atonal melodies and discordant passages derived from sources both holy and profane. Dominant sevenths with no tonic, tritones without resolution. I found these enlightening, but not fully to my taste. There was a rhythmic certainty ...