Longtime readers know that I'm pretty selective when it comes to popular music, but these two songwriters have been favorites of mine for many decades. Now Bob Dylan is a more well-known artist, but I think that Leonard Cohen is just as interesting and important a musician. Plus, way more dark! Yes, compared to Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan is a happy-go-lucky minstrel. Cohen was once on a Canadian talk show and when questioned about his supposed pessimism he said, "A pessimist is someone who thinks it is going to rain--I'm soaked to the skin."
Let's compare a couple of songs. Here is "Desolation Row" by Bob Dylan:
Ok, that's a bit dark. But let's listen to "Everybody Knows" by Cohen:
And that's not even his darkest song. Here is "Darkness."
I usually miss people's birthdays--once I even missed my own! But I just happened to notice that today is the birthday of Leonard Cohen who turns 80 years old and to celebrate is releasing a new album.
I've posted quite a bit about him over the years; this post is a kind of summation. No more to say today except that I'm glad he is around.
Some celebrities are terrible interview subjects--Marlon Brando comes to mind. But others are both gracious and interesting. Leonard Cohen tends to be in this group. I recall an interview I saw with him on Canadian television many, many years ago in which the interviewer, posing one of those awkward questions that they do, asked Cohen to comment on his reputation for being a pessimist. His reply, and one of my favorite quotes, was, "a pessimist is someone who thinks it is going to rain--I'm soaked to the skin."
I just ran across a fairly recent interview with him in his home in Montréal:
There are not many people that we can listen to and come away with the sense that they are truly wise. I think Leonard Cohen is one of those. You have to love an interview subject who, in answer to one awkward question, just sings a verse of "Je ne regrette rien."
There is a wonderful moment right at the end when the interview is over but the cameras are still rolling. The interviewer confesses that he was asking so much about death because it terrifies him. Cohen just answers as he did before, but what is interesting is that it was probably Cohen's wise presence that led the interviewer to come out and be so candid. Artists of the kind that Leonard Cohen is are rare people and we really do have need of them.
When I say "two songs" I mean one song, by Leonard Cohen, and a cavatina from the opera Norma by Vincenzo Bellini. Each piece is, in its own way, iconic. The cavatina is the height of 19th century bel canto singing. This phrase was used in 1858 by the long-retired Rossini. He talked about the rigorous technical requirements alongside those of taste and style. He also thought that this kind of singing was lost forever saying, "today there is no such school, there are neither models nor interpreters, for which reason not a single voice of the new generation is capable of rendering in bel canto the aria 'Casta diva' [quoted in Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, vol III, p. 40]. Norma was written in 1831 and already, a mere twenty-seven years later, Rossini is lamenting the loss of the ability to sing this music? As promised, let's hear Fleming in a performance of 'Casta diva':
Could Rossini have been correct, that the ability to sing this kind of music had already been lost, even in his time? Or is this perhaps the kind of 'golden age' nostalgia that often seems to permeate the world of opera? Rossini is a very high-quality witness, of course...
Now let's look at another song, 'Hallelujah' from Fleming's recent album project Dark Hope which contains songs from a number of "indie-rock" songwriters and Leonard Cohen. Much as I'm tempted to do a comparison of 'Soul Meets Body' by Death Cab for Cutie (the video reminds me of Brahms' remark when vacationing in Thun about having to be careful where he walked so as not to step on the melodies that seemed to be everywhere), I can't find a version of her performance. Here is the original of the Death Cab for Cutie song:
But let's get back to Leonard Cohen. Here is Fleming performing 'Hallelujah' on BBC1:
Alas, that isn't complete as it runs to over seven minutes on the album. It does give us a bit of an idea though. Now here is Cohen's original:
That was released in 1984, twenty six years before Fleming's version. Should I play the part of Rossini and say that no-one now is capable of singing in the true style of Leonard Cohen? Now that's a silly thought! But there is something interesting here. Regarding the Bellini, Taruskin comments "When this great wave, this surge of melodic and harmonic electricity has at last subsided, one feels that one has been transported and deposited in a different place. One's own consciousness has been altered. That is Romanticism."
Cohen's songs are emphatically not that kind of romanticism, even though just to be a poet is absurdly romantic in this very unpoetic era. Cohen is often accused of being a pessimist. Once, when interviewed on Canadian television he responded to that query by saying "a pessimist is someone who thinks it is going to rain; I'm soaked to the skin." Some of his lyrics to 'Hallelujah' are dark indeed:
Love is not a victory march It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
I did my best, it wasn't much I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you And even though it all went wrong I'll stand before the Lord of Song With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
There is a kind of hard-won hope there perhaps, but it is earned by means of a cold realism. Cohen's singing has the kind of grittiness that conveys this.
I think that we need different things from music at different times. This can change decade by decade. The most successful artists are those who, like Rossini and Bellini, sense what listeners really want to hear and give it to them in spades. Perhaps the contemporary equivalent to them is someone like Lady Gaga, despite the musical differences. But alongside the main stream of music there are always tributaries that offer us glimpses of other aspects: not what everyone wants to hear, but only some want to hear. Leonard Cohen is this kind of composer: he gives us dark truths, perhaps. Fleming's 2010 version of the song lightens and softens it so that the truth is less dark. Perhaps this is more what we need now than what we needed in 1984. On the other hand, unlike in 1858, we still have Leonard Cohen. I did a post on his new album here. He is as dark as ever as shown by the new song 'The Darkness'.
UPDATE: I posted this without getting to the point. Fleming singing Bellini is absolutely fantastic. Cohen singing Cohen really works, expressively. Fleming singing Cohen works, but is less convincing than Cohen singing Cohen. But what we should really be grateful for is that no-one has talked Cohen into singing Bellini. Maybe with a lot of autotune...
Leonard Cohen, age 77, has a new album out and, miracle of miracles, it hit number 1 on Amazon a few days ago. The New York Times has an article on Cohen and the album written in their usual dunderheaded missing-the-point style. I have written about Cohen before in these posts:
Here is a review of the new album Old Ideas that makes a lot of sense.
I have an on-going series of posts entitled "The Case of ..." that are evaluative. Usually they are a look at a composer that I think might be over-rated, such as Bartok. But sometimes I'm asking that a composer be given a closer look because they are more important than is usually thought. This is in that category. I think Leonard Cohen has something unique, something aesthetically significant, perhaps something we need.
Here is a song from the new album:
Here are some of the lyrics:
I caught the darkness
It was drinking from your cup
I got the darkness
From your little golden cup
I said is this contagious?
You said “Just drink it up”
I’ve got no future
I know my days are few
The present’s not so pleasant
Just a lot of things to do
I thought the past would last me
But the darkness got that too
It is passing strange that Leonard Cohen should be Canadian--we have the reputation for being polite, nice optimists. Perhaps Cohen is our Jungian shadow self. Musically there is not a lot to talk about in this song. The basic motif is a falling minor third and the harmony is nothing but a 12-bar blues progression. But bare bones are all he needs to spin out a song. The longest song on the album is "Amen" at over seven minutes:
Leonard Cohen always reminds me of my years living in Montreal, the long dark winter nights, reading a volume of his collected poems. That is what he is, a poet with a guitar. A poet who reminds us, over and over, that existence has a tragic side. The 18th century English writer Horace Walpole once wrote in a letter that "this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel." Cohen reminds us that feeling has certain dangers. If we allow ourselves to look beneath the jolly surface, we may see how sad our existence is. The perplexing irony is that, in so doing, we may feel a catharsis. Listening to Cohen's wise exploration of the difficulties and yes, hopelessness of our lives, we are relieved somehow. Music can be a healing of our sorrows:
Montreal is a town that does not mob its celebrities. Leonard Cohen can visit a coffee shop on The Main--St. Laurent--and not be bothered. But a friend of mine told me of running into him once. They were sitting at a table and noticed Leonard Cohen sitting alone nearby. One woman said, "I just have to go speak to him!" So she got up and went over to his table and said what a huge fan she was. He looked up at her and, gesturing to a chair, quietly said, "would you care for an allongé?" That's an expresso stretched with extra hot water. Perhaps the Darkness can be held at bay with music, courtesy, humility and yes, an allongé...
As a long-time Montrealer myself--11 years total--I've always felt a connection to Leonard Cohen. I've known his music since I was a teenager. In first year university our English professor, probably in an attempt to seem 'relevant', included the lyrics to "Suzanne" in our poetry segment. I think I even used to sing and play that one in my 'folk-singer' phase, along with Bob Dylan, but I can barely remember. He is also the source of one of my favorite quotes. On a Canadian television show, when the interviewer said that Cohen had a reputation for being a pessimist, he replied, "a pessimist is someone who thinks it is going to rain; I'm soaked to the skin." I sometimes say that all the really interesting Canadians come from Montreal: Cohen, Oscar Peterson and William Shatner.
Somehow, in this post, I got talking about Cohen and someone commented:
What makes his Hallelujah so great? (It is great.) I don't consider the original lyrics a big deal - though they rank among his more aenigmatic poems. Is it the melody? Some other musical characteristic that I don't know how to hear? Really. Asking.
Here is "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen:
And here is the Wikipedia article. A great many artists, including Bob Dylan, have performed the song. In the classical world it is perfectly normal for performers to play music by anyone they like because the functions of composer/performer have been largely separated in the last couple of centuries. In the pop world, prior to the Beatles, this was also the case. But since then, popular musicians have tended to write all their own material. The two exceptions are 'covers' of songs for commercial reasons, i.e. sales--"Yesterday" by Paul McCartney is probably the outstanding example with over 2500 cover versions--or simply out of admiration for the song. I think that most of the covers of "Hallelujah" are for the latter reason. So, as my interlocutor asks, what is so great about "Hallelujah"?
I think it is the feeling of inevitability that the song projects. I was arguing about Bach and Beethoven with a violinist a while back and he said that he preferred Bach because of the feeling of inevitability that his music has. Everything happens just as it should. My friend had played the violin for 90 years, so I suspect there is something to that. But there is inevitability and predictability and they seem almost the same. Take this, for example:
That does have the feeling of inevitability about it, but for most musicians it is just a tad too inevitable, i.e. predictable. Same goes for a lot of Vivaldi. But Bach, on the other hand:
Ah, there's that inevitability. But at the same time, we are never quite sure where he is going next, we just know it is going to be the right place.
I'm afraid that I can't answer the question of my commentor. As Cohen himself said, "if I knew where the good songs came from I would go there more often." It has to do with the perfect co-ordination of melody, harmony and rhythm so that they form a whole that is both inevitable and fresh. You can play a piece by Bach a hundred times and it will still seem fresh. This song probably cannot survive that much exposure, but yes, it is a good song. Leonard Cohen has written a lot of good songs.
