In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Wayne Koestenbaum’s new novel My Lover, the Rabbi is poetic, inventive, and easily one of the year’s most oddly entertaining novels.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“The novel inhabits an insistently queer social universe, largely emptied of heteronormative family structures, where intimacy and authority are rerouted through erotic and spiritual fixation. Grief runs beneath the gleaming prose . . . A brilliant, demanding novel-as-performance that resists pat simplification.”
In his own words, here is Wayne Koestenbaum’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel My Lover, the Rabbi:
Music, as a subject, occurs infrequently in my new novel, My Lover, the Rabbi, but the book’s method is musical: questions of tone, rhythm, pitch, and volume drive the unnamed first-person narrator’s torrential, obsessive voice. The novel’s form resembles the one-movement sonata, a genre pioneered by Franz Liszt in his his B-minor Piano Sonata and his “Dante” Fantasia quasi sonata. Orgasmically, Liszt stuffs all three or four movements into a single container: a gorge festival, a totalizing splurge. The first movement of Schumann’s Fantasie in C major (dedicated to Liszt), obeying a similar impulse, commits itself to the gargantuan, smeary plunge. This urge to maximalize emotions while compressing structure—squeezing several fornicating bodies onto a single bed—represents an impulse familiar to writers who want to turn a first-person lament into a large-scale edifice, as if to construct an unruined Parthenon out of our transitory infatuations. My novel takes the narrator’s fixation on the hirsute, mercurial rabbi as a vehicle—a pretext—for an engorgement experiment performed on language’s body.
1. Oliver Messaien, Catalogues d’Oiseaux, performed by Yvonne Loriod
One of my novel’s characters is obsessed with Messaien, who metamorphosed bird-song into instrumental and vocal music. Messaien’s wish to make music out of avian noise parallels my own desire, as writer, to jam one set of sentiments into a neighboring, perhaps inhospitable container. As Messiaien turned bird chirrups into piano solo, I tried to transpose erotic emotion into syntax, synonym, and synecdoche. Sometimes, prose aims to be an aria, not an explanation.
2. Schubert, Wanderer Fantasy, performed by Maurizio Pollini
This piece, in C major, presages Schumann’s C Major Fantasie as a total environment for one instrument, one performer making “world” out of the rudiments, the simplest key, the most easily parodied, C major, the infantile mode, the beginner’s bassinet. Schubert based the sonata—or at least its second movement’s theme—on his song “The Wanderer.” (I am morally obliged to mention the stereotypical “wandering Jew,” but I can’t pin down the proverb.) Any poet/novelist speaking a plaint as a method of gaining an identity becomes a Romantic wanderer, like Jane Eyre’s narrator, hungering to take a walk on a gloomy day.
Early in my novel, the narrator refers to Schubert’s habit of repeating himself—in particular, repeating, in a certain early sonata, the C major chord, as if we needed further instruction in what C major sounds like: “I’m lying on top of you at a Super 8 motel in New Paltz, our belly-button lints converging like the obviousness of Schubert reiterating the C major chord in a jejune sonata already tediously governed by C major.”
3. Schumann, Fantasie in C major, performed live by Vladimir Horowitz, Carnegie Hall, May 9, 1965
More C major, the key I cinch myself into again and again, like an addictive corset perfumed with lavender: as a teenager, I listened to this LP dozens of times on a Magnavox record player in my bedroom. Everything I’ve tried to do as a writer “boils down” to the impetuosity of this particular performance, its nervously divergent (loud, soft, thundering, whispered) sound-painting. Schumann is trying to make the piano do more than a piano can naturally accomplish; he is pushing the instrument farther away from the limits of its customary body, as if a succubus, asleep inside the piano’s wooden soundboard, had awoken and begun a song strung together by chains of lava—vascular yet vulnerable. That’s what happens when you stick to C major and try, within that key’s digressive outskirts, to squeeze in the entire, detailed history of your nervous system.
4. Liszt, B minor sonata, performed by Vladimir Horowitz, the 1932 recording
I can’t get enough of Vladimir Horowitz, his spitfire style, too fast, too loud, too quiet, making the piano sound like a rumble seat and the passionate activities therein. This difficult piece is celebrated for its innovation of the one-movement sonata form. Everything in the work—every development, every figure—cycles back to the original modules: the reigning leitmotifs govern the entire proceeding, but we don’t feel imprisoned by them. We thank these initiating fragments for giving us the freedom to levitate. I don’t know whether Wagner picked up the leitmotif trick from Liszt, or vice versa; maybe they both borrowed the technique from Beethoven. No matter where the grand illusion of the leitmotif came from, its structural presence gives this sonata a secret spine.
5. Stephen Sondheim, Company, original cast album, 1970
Stephen Sondheim appears fictitiously in my novel as a private client—or patient—of the rabbi, who moonlights, dubiously, as an informal psychotherapist. For my thirteen birthday, I saw Company in San Francisco in 1971, with the original cast, including Elaine Stritch. I’d already schooled myself on the LP, so I was an initiate into the Eleusinian mysteries of “The Ladies Who Lunch.” I didn’t understand “lunch” as a verb; no way had the urbane socialite practice of “lunching,” or Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, entered my juvenile consciousness. But I knew that Elaine Stritch’s combustibility didn’t compute. Her deportment—stance, gait, voice—was ironic, stentorian, gracefully ungainly. The way she turned a potentially awkward gesture into svelte poise shocked my pubescent system into a taste for making loud declarations in public while seeming to be whispering an unheard soliloquy.
6. Max Roach on The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume One
My novel’s narrator describes the rhythmic pattern of the rabbi’s phallic penetrations as “governed by a structure of four beats, thrum-thrum-thrum-thrum, four thrusts, overly persistent and pattering, followed by an interval of rests.”
Thrum-thrum-thrum-thrum could be said to describe any four articulated notes, whether in a melody or a pitch-defying march. The word thrum recalls not a harp or violin or trumpet, but a drum; thrum thrum thrum thrum is a percussive utterance.
Max Roach was the first percussionist to enter my heart and give me a sense that drumming was a holy vocation. One of the recordings that led me to Roach was The Amazing Bud Powell, on Blue Note. I bought the album because of Powell, the pianist with the tender yet destablizing sound, accompanying and diverting the melody, creating song while seeming not to originate it. Max Roach plays drums on most of this album’s numbers. In the first cut, a take of “Un Poco Loco,” listen to the cymbal. I’m not sure it’s actually a cymbal: it sounds like a struck teakettle. It clangs, but then the clang quickly ends. The clang defines where you are as you listen. The safety it provides—you are precisely there, where the clang occurs—is what being on the beat or off the beat can mean to a sometimes veering body.
7. Lionel Hampton on Hamp and Getz, with Stan Getz
Word-choice, or diction, in writing, involves landing on a word, plucking it or perching on it, just that one word, not a neighboring word. Choosing a word is like whacking with a mallet the vibraphone’s key (or tone bar), in the manner, agile and fast, of the great Lionel Hampton, whose vibe style teaches us a way of being nimble, on the ball, alert, never passively waiting for the next beat, always anticipating it. Lionel Hampton, wherever you find him, will give your spirit a level of excitement and adrenalin (combined with finesse and uprightness and accuracy) that you didn’t suspect was possible to maintain, and yet you carry it for the entire length of the song, as long as Lionel is “vibing,” with fleetness and vivacity. Hampton is the frame—the stabilizer—for Getz’s antic sax; but Hampton squeezes solos into every crevice, and his pitches are often higher than the sax’s, so Hampton’s “pings”—the cushioned exclamations of the struck tone bars—fly above Getz’s jagged melodies.
8. Bolero (“Mon doux signor et maître”) from Halévy’s La Juive, sung by Anna Moffo
Not many nineteenth century operas included Jewish characters. And not many nineteenth-century operas were written by Jewish composers. Giacomo Meyerbeer is the big exception, reviled by Wagner, championed by me. Another is Fromental Halévy, of whom the virulent Wagner approved. I saw Halévy’s La Juive performed in Vienna, with the sometimes sobbing Neil Shicoff in shining form as Eléazar. The music can be lachrymose, as if “Jewishness” equaled weeping. In a 1974 highlights album of the opera, my favorite soprano, Anna Moffo, sings the “Bolero.” She makes a cameo or starring appearance in many of my books, including my first collection of poems, Ode to Anna Moffo. If I were to listen now to her recording of the “Bolero,” I might sink into wordless reverie—locked into a plush dream-zone of infinite regress, of sourceless waterfalls—and stop writing. Two words, from within the rapt speechlessness that her metaphor-free voice induces in me, stumble and stutter to the surface: cup, cream. If I’m the goblet, and if she’s the substance pouring into me, then the mere vessel can’t explicate the arriving elixir.
9. Alexandre Tansman, Mazurkas, Book One, performed by Diane Andersen
No longer a well-known composer, Alexandre Tansman, a Polish Jew who emigrated to France, wrote many short mazurkas for solo piano. These miniatures are delicate, strange, dissonant, sometimes verging on atonality, though always recognizably saturated with tonal remnants. Mostly melancholy, sometimes they experience the rainfall of sudden optimism and forced gaiety. That is the nature of a mazurka, as immortalized by Chopin, who reinvented the genre. Tansman’s mazurkas, not as melodically memorable as Chopin’s, have a filial relation to the elder Pole’s; Tansman’s pieces seem to bend and almost break on the bough of their memory of what the mazurka, as a form, holds dear and vows never to abandon. And yet the mazurka, in Tansman’s hands, forgets its promises; the mazurka throws away its borrowed bounty. I love the renunciatory, thoughtless gesture that Tansman’s mazurkas make, discarding their own heritage while cushioning its fall with their open palms.
In my novel, the rabbi takes a brief trip to Poland to perform symbolic healing: “My lover, the rabbi, is in Warsaw now, consulting with the city government on reparative questions, ethical conundrums, local bodies of water and the streets surrounding them. Did I misunderstand or mishear the rabbi when he described the fetid, compromissed condition of these bodies of water?”
My novel is divided into 188 short chapters. Consider each of them to be a mazurka, a morbid, fevered dance in three-quarter time, with a characteristic and always destabilizing accent on the third beat.
10. Barbra Streisand, “Where You Lead,” on her 1971 album Barbra Joan Streisand
The narrator of my novel says, in chapter 69: “Ask the rabbi, my lover, to tell me again the story of how he met Barbra Streisand when he was a kid on a Hebrew school field trip to Los Angeles….” I still get intense physical pleasure from the audacity of Streisand covering the Carole King song “Where You Lead.” Streisand’s ever-present volatility seems contained and organized by the song’s elementary structure and its major-key optimism. Barbra will go where you lead! No ambiguity: you lead, Barbra follows. In fact, this legend leads; she never tags behind. The song’s aphrodisiacal “kick” comes from Streisand reversing her characterological truth; she denies, for the space of the song, her divine tendency to lead. And when she breaks out with the words “New York City,” and “honey” (“If you want to live in New York City, honey….”), my rapture exceeds measure, because Barbra has the right to say “New York City” and “honey” with exactly those nearly raunchy vernacular inflections. Instead of “City,” she sings, “Sit eh eh.” Power informs her “sit eh eh,” and the force is entirely hers, a vector of vocal strength she rides to a summit beyond the descriptive power of any earnest commentator who tries to annex the undulation’s limit-defying shape.
Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of six collections of poetry including Model Homes, published by BOA in 2004. Koestenbaum writes frequently for periodicals, including The New York Times Magazine, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and the London Review of Books. He is also an art critic, participating in panels at the Whitney Museum of American Art, contributing regularly to Artforum. He is a tenured professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.