Review by New York Times Review
The life experience of Acker's Washingtonian women is broad: teachers, T.S.A. employees, college applicants, the young and the elderly - but they all share a shrewd understanding of the narrow perceptions they face as black women. When underestimated they're often fiercely, beautifully unyielding. In the excellent "Cicada," Ellery wins a piano competition over richer white girls who assume she doesn't have the chops. When one girl tries to diminish her victory by remarking, "Winning is just for fun," Ellery retorts: "It was fun. How I won." These women are adept code switchers, clear on who to be when courting exclusive organizations or ordering food, but they're not superhuman - they experience failure, loss, doubt. In "Final Draft of College Essay" the narrator asserts, "I am my own kind of black girl," before adding, "However, I do not know if I am the kind you will want or not." In "Mambo Sauce," a sculptor moves into a gentrifying neighborhood with her white boyfriend. When she oversteps boundaries with a local business owner, she's shamed not for her life choices, but for covering them up. The constant self-monitoring drains. "It wasn't just one night of excising the parts of her that didn't create the right picture, a paper doll with cutters in the right places so that when she was strung up, over archways and door frames, everyone would be ever so complimentary. It wasn't just one night." Acker renders families as sanctuaries, abundant with intimacy between parents and children. They're also where accountability to self and community is most sharply questioned. In "The Ropes," a mother won't let her daughter forget that her given name is LaDawn, not Dawn; in "Strong Men," a son struggles with the question of whose dreams he's fulfilling. The pairing of unwavering kindness with high expectations in these spaces suggests that the price of being seen and loved can further complicate the act of making your own way in the world. #+ |9781524731922 |9781524731939 |9780571330164 |9780571330171 ~ In 1890, the 28-year-old Claude Debussy felt forced to write the archetypal starving-artist letter to a friend. "Forgive me, but could you lend me 20 francs until the end of the month." he pleaded. "I'm very ashamed at writing to you, but I'm desperately hungry," Yhgis was teh same Debussy who within the next dozen years would produce some of the most radically original, influential and popular of all European art music. Hungry he may well have been (according to another friend, the composer could afford neither to eat nor to clothe himself), but "desperate" is a word almost impossible to associate with this most fastidious and discriminating of composers. Perhaps, as Stephen Walsh muses in his new biographical study, "Debussy: A Painter in Sound," he was merely resorting to his skills as "an adept borrower." Money and the practical necessities of life would remain a lifelong torment for him, an artist forever locked into his own internal world of sounds and images. His was a creative voice so subtle and so thankfully free of histrionics and emotional excess that he is for us by now the quintessential French composer. Yet in gauging the seismic shifts in the evolution of Western classical music, convention tends to consign him to the much too confining role of "Impressionist." His achievement, especially when one considers the mediocrity into which French music had declined in the years before his birth, was sui generis miraculous. And it is all the more impressive for having been wrought in an era when the imposing figure of Richard Wagner cast an almost suffocating spell not only upon music, but on almost all aspects of European culture. Born in 1862, Debussy came of age around the time of the 1882 premiere of "Parsifal." A superb pianist - "He had a soft, deep touch which evoked full, rich, many-shaded sonorities," according to one friend - Debussy played all the major Wagner operas at the keyboard, and in his 20 s he made a modest income accompanying lectures about "The Ring" for amateur listeners. Eventually he grew to become the anti-Wagner. Where the German master's expressive world is that of titanic wills in collision and of greed, redemption and the agon of scorching human passions, the Frenchman's voice is that of the natural world, of water and wind, of light and shadow, and of the most subtle gradations of sonority and color. "Debussy's music never bullies," Walsh says. Whereas Wagner's default position is loud - not just acoustically loud, but emotionally and psychologically loud - Debussy's is soft. Perhaps because of this natural intimacy of voice and its aversion to theatricality and exhibitionism (think Richard Strauss's "Elektra" or Gustav Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand"), Debussy's importance is easy to overlook. This book reminds us just how astonishing the radicalism of this composer's creations really is. Walsh, whose two-volume biography of Stravinsky brought both human scale and deep musical understanding to that composer's long and complex life, treats Debussy both as a creature of his own time and as a harbinger of 20th-century modernism. His France was the France of la Belle Époque; of the Eiffel Tower, the Folies Bergere and the Dreyfus Affair; of Impressionist painting, Mallarmé's poetry and the novels of Proust. His life story is bracketed on the one end by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and on the other by the Great War. He died, yet again under financial duress, in 1918 just months before the Armistice after suffering years of an excruciating rectal cancer. He was a notoriously stubborn man, a perfectionist indifferent to deadlines. "I write solely for myself, and other people's impatience doesn't concern me," Debussy responded when queried about delivering on time. As a youth he was unwilling to yield to the rigid orthodoxies of French musical education. His teachers scolded him for his willful bucking of the rules while still acknowledging his keen ear and his exceptional sensitivity to sound and musical gesture. A classmate described him seated at the piano when class was over "producing monstrous successions of weird, barbarous chords - that is to say, chords that were not classified in the official treatises of the Conservatoire." These provocations turned out to be much more than mere student hubris. Rather, they were the genesis of his greatest contribution to classical music: the liberation of harmony from the straitjacket of tonic-dominant attraction. Conventional tonal music, whether it's a Bach fugue or a Beatles song, is bound together by the magnetic attraction of chords, which, reduced to their essence, function as question-and-answer, the "grammar" of music, as it were. If we think of the first two phrases of the song "Happy Birthday," we experience the first as the "question," and the second as the "answer." Almost every familiar musical motto obeys that polarity. What Debussy did was to pull apart the epoxy-strength attachment those chords share and allow them to float, not entirely free from each other, but in a more polyvalent, even ambiguous relation to each other. The result, especially when combined with his use of whole-tone scales, produced a music that felt exceptionally free of the angst and highly charged emotionalism of most of the Romantic repertoire. No surprise, then, that so many of his signature pieces embody or evoke nature, and that, as with many of the Impressionist paintings by his contemporaries, there are often no humans in the frame. A Debussy title is more often than not an image of a natural event: a warm sirocco moving across a plain; a seascape at dawn or at noon; dead leaves rustling in the breeze; early morning mists; moonlight reflecting off the surface of an old ruin. Walsh's subtitle, "A Painter in Sound," amplifies those features that Debussy's aesthetic shared with seminal 19thcentury painters, not only his French countrymen, but also the American James McNeill Whistler and the Englishman J. M. W. Türner, who may have had the most in common with his painterly approach to composing. "Lit from behind," Debussy's description of what struck him about the scoring of "Parsifal," is an apt way to understand his delicately luminous treatment of the orchestra in works like "La Mer," "Prelude a lapres-midi dun faune," "Trois Nocturnes" and especially his enigmatic late ballet "Jeux," a work written in 1913 that languished in obscurity until it was championed a half-century later by Pierre Boulez, who found in it an entirely new invention of "irreversible" musical form. The young Debussy's penchant for unorthodox harmonies was given an unexpected shock stimulant when he encountered a Javanese gamelan at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. He described his delight with this strange and wonderful music as containing "every nuance, even those one can no longer name, in which tonic and dominant were no longer anything but empty ghosts for use on naughty little children." He responded to these exotic sounds in evocative piano pieces like "Pagodes," which imitate the sonorous and stately movement of that music from a faraway culture he could only imagine in his mind's eye. Debussy revitalized and radicalized almost every musical form he wrote in. He composed songs to texts by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé and other French poets throughout his life. His one full-length opera, the epochal "Pelléas et Mélisande," that moody chiaroscuro drama of spiritual impotence, made him, at the age of 40, suddenly famous. His catalog of orchestra works is small but canonic. "La Mer" and "Faune" in particular enjoy a popularity that has never diminished. But the true revelation of his imaginative range rests with his piano music. Here, in piece after piece, most no longer than a few minutes, his pictorial and sensorial powers were truly liberated. "It seems that in contact with the piano Debussy could write freely, exploring the implications of his unique idThis iom in a completely uninhibited way," Walsh writes. Two books of "Preludes," each with a cryptic title affixed to the final bar, range from slow, graceful dances to sultry nocturnal serenades to images of footsteps in snow, gardens in the rain, and to the evocation of a mythic underwater cathedral. These alternate with witty, puckish character sketches and the occasional virtuoso breakout piece that explodes like dazzling fireworks in the night sky. It is said of Debussy that he "orchestrated with the pedal down." In other words, he made the orchestra resonate with the same sense of depth and glow that one obtains by playing with the sustain pedal engaged, allowing the tones to decay naturally rather than arbitrarily cutting them off. Hence his sound world echoes and shimmers and vibrates, expanding outward like the rippling waves of a pool when a pebble has been dropped into it, an image that he sought to depict in another piano piece, "Reflets dans l'eau." It is not easy to write meaningfully about music without resorting to technical terminology, and the list of those authors who can find accessible language to convey its subtleties to the nonspecialist is depressingly short. Walsh is a deep reader of Debussy's music with an uncommon ability to translate complex details into words that are precise yet evocative and that are refreshingly free of academic jargon. His discussion of "Pelléas" is exemplary in this sense, focusing on the composer's treatment of text, particularly in his determination to make the vocal lines reflect the contours of everyday speech. How this adoption of extreme simplicity of utterance contrasts with Germanic vocal writing Walsh underscores by wryly quipping, "Only the clinically insane talk in the jagged lines of Parsifal and Kundry ... or of the patently disturbed heroines of Strauss's 'Salome' or Schoenberg's 'Erwartung.'" The women in Debussy's life suffered from his difficult, at times depressive personality. While acknowledging the composer's "unsatisfactory treatment" of them, Walsh is hard put to find reasons any of them are quite deserving of the great composer's (or our) respect, often referring to them in cringeworthy descriptions. One soprano with whom the composer was involved Walsh refers to as "a bird of the air in need of a perch." Gaby Dupont, Debussy's first serious love, had been "a not particularly stylish cocotte." Lilly Texier, Debussy's first wife, is "sexy but intellectually limited," while Maud Allan, the Canadian dancer who commissioned "Khamma," his "dance legend," "was a new kind of fish in Debussy's aquarium": "He had never written music" for a woman "of doubtful reputation." And his second wife, Emma Bardac, who endured unimaginable stress during their years of marriage, was, when they first met, in Walsh's words, "an attractive, well-kept 40-yearold" who "had no qualms about making herself available... to one of France's leading composers." Even worse, he analyzes the composer's behavior by applying the old-school "genius card" myth, to wit, that behind this bad treatment "lay the instinctive feeling - which ordinary men usually manage to suppress - that emotional ties are a nuisance unless kept firmly in the drawer marked 'when I need them.' " Walsh's study is focused on the music, less so on the historical and cultural setting. As an exposition of this unique and original music it does great service to the composer. Nonetheless, a casual classical music fan may find it daunting, as most of it is devoted to analyses of a lifetime of compositions. Reading the discussions of the various works without having the printed music and a recording at hand will limit understanding of the brilliance of Walsh's insights. Nor is this, quite frankly, as entertaining a read as the author's Stravinsky biography. But then, Stravinsky, the ultimate cosmopolitan bon vivant, lived a life outwardly far more exciting and colorful, becoming a virtual superstar celebrity in his old age. Debussy, a nearrecluse who had only a small circle of friends, hated to travel, preferring the solitude of his piano and, as he said only half in jest to a friend, his small "75-centimeter table for writing things that have without fail to revolutionize the world." book reminds us just how astonishing the radicalism of this composer's creations really is. JOHN ADAMS'S newest work, "Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?," will receive its world premiere performed by the pianist Yuja Wang with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudáméi in March 2019.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Acker brings keen observation of black culture, the lives of black women, and the city of Washington, D.C., to her first short story collection. The first section offers stories of young black girls navigating childhood; the second progresses easily into tales of women from youth into middle-age, with the total presenting a tableau of the lives of black women set against the backdrop of the African American social culture of the nation's capital. Among the depictions: a serious young girl stepping out beyond her neighborhood in a piano competition; a teenager who wonders if she is seeing in her beloved brother, like so many others, the tremor of their own defeat. The women navigate social mores, gentrification, and their own insecurities: a teacher who grew up in D.C.'s Southeast neighborhood struggles with her own biases; an adult daughter and her father ride around at night, covering the streets of the city with music and memories as they discover the things they have in common, including infidelity. Beautifully rendered characters struggle to find a sense of themselves in their complex lives.--Vanessa Bush Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This sharp and sensitive collection, Acker's debut, traces the lives of black women and girls in Washington, D.C., across different neighborhoods, socioeconomic statuses, and decades. In "Cicada," young Ellery impresses the crowd and emerges victorious at her piano recital, only to be brought back down to reality afterward, noticing the differences between her family and those of the players around her. "All the Things You'll Never Do" follows a power-obsessed TSA agent-who has never been on an airplane-from her work shift to the bar, where she attempts to feel superior to everyone around her. The heartrending "Now, This" chronicles the daily drudgery of Rae, nearing menopause and haunted by failed relationships, as she decides whether or not to lower her standards for a new romantic possibility. Acker's eye for simple details illuminates: A young girl notices how "[Her mother] always knew how much things cost without looking at price tags," and a game of double Dutch threatens a teacher as she watches-"The ropes would savage you. It was hard to see the escape route and how to land unscathed." Grappling with ideas like gentrification and social-climbing through the fine-tuned eyes of her characters, Acker never oversimplifies or neatens the complexities that make up life. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In her debut collection, Acker pays tribute to Washington, D.C.the Chocolate Cityand the changes it went through during the last years of the 20th century.The 11 stories, each centered on the life of a black woman, depict D.C. life beyond the monuments and government antics outsiders normally associate with the city. In fact, the tourist D.C. is barely background scenery in Acker's milieu, which manages to go more local without alienating readers who are unfamiliar with life inside the Beltway. For instance, in "Mambo Sauce," a sample of that local condiment becomes the catalyst for Constance, who's just moved to D.C. from Brooklyn, to try to stave off gentrification in her new neighborhoodand the reason she begins to reconsider her interracial relationship. And in "Strong Men," a high school graduation becomes the occasion for a D.C. crab bake. Acker is strongest when she's excavating the interiority of her characters. This is especially true in "Cicada," which chronicles a young girl's experience as she participates in her first piano competition, and "Now, This," in which Acker astutely describes the inner thoughts of Rae, a premenopausal woman who has to care for her ailing mother while coming to terms with the reality of her own aging body. Yet the collection is uneven. Sometimes the ancillary figures are more interesting than the main characters; in "Strong Men," the protagonist is 13-year-old Bit, but her older brother, Ronnie, whose alleged drug dealing, obsession with local basketball legend Len Bias, and desire to see the world puts him at odds with their father and jeopardizes his enrollment at Howard University, is quite a bit more interesting than Bit, who has trouble with boys and best friends. Acker's exploration of the inner workings of Washington's black middle class in the title story comes off as heavy-handed, resulting in exaggerated characters that might have been better suited for satire. Nonetheless, the collection ends on a tender and memorable note in "You Can Leave, but It's Going to Cost You," as a father and daughter cruise the city to the accompaniment of the music of its native son Marvin Gaye.Acker shows that the lives of black girls and women are vast and varied, pushing back on the monolithic ways they are often portrayed while giving readers everything but go-go music in a generally lovely ode to D.C. life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
