Book Review: An Incomplete History of The Art of Funerary Violin
Frédérik Sisa
A Curious Little Footnote:
Some time ago, “Professor” Peter Schickele of the “University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople” wrote the definitive biography of P.D.Q. Bach. Even today, it remains the literary counterpart to a musical career spanning over forty years in which Schickele, in addition to composing his own works, also “discovers” pieces from the last, least, and unarguably oddest of Johann Sebastian Bach’s children. Of course, the whole P.D.Q. Bach thing is an open-air hoax and a brilliant example of musical comedy. Schickele is not only verbally very funny, offering up fictional P.D.Q. Bach pieces (with titles such as Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle, and Balloons and The Seasonings, an oratorio encompassing such gems as “Tarragon of Virtue is Full” and “Bide thy Thyme”), but musically hysterical as well.
A P.D.Q. offering demonstrates a singular compositional and comedic virtuosity on Schickele’s part, while the book extends his affectionate pastiche of everything from classical music to country into the realm of the fictional biography of a fictional person. Of course, there’s nothing educational about learning such things as:
“At the end of January 1756, P.D.Q. showed up in Salzburg, carrying with him a letter of introduction to the first violinist and leader of the court orchestra, Leopold Mozart. The significance of this letter, it goes without saying, cannot be underestimated for it led to the historic meeting between P.D.Q., approaching his fourteenth birthday, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, already three days old and just beginning to talk. P.D.Q. immediately sensed a great talent in the lad, and recommended to his father that be given rigorous training from an early age saying that if this were done the boy would undoubtedly become one of the greatest billiards players of all time.”
But it sure is more fun and laugh-inducing than allowed by law.
If An Incomplete History of The Art of Funerary Violin by Rowan Kriwaczek brings the Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach to mind, it’s because it also sets out to put forth a fictional history of fictional people – in this case, the Guild of Funerary Violinists. But a penchant for alternate history is all that the books have in common.
Schikele’s was created for comedic purposes, while Kriwaczek’s is caught in something of a dilemma. On the one hand, it’s not a funny book filled with gags, puns, witticisms, and the like. The fictional history of a musical guild once applauded for providing spiritually attuned violin solos at funerals but since driven into hiding thanks to religious persecution and Vatican-driven purges is, pardon the pun, dead serious in its content. The same applies to the sketching of loose biographies for notable composers of funerary violin music such as H. Gratchenfleiss, Charles Sudbury, and Pierre Dubuisson, along with a few technical discussions on the nature of funerary violin.
Yet the style and tone of the book, with its cultivated air of academia (and all the dry stuffiness that comes with it) suggests otherwise. While not funny in and of itself, the fact that Kriwaczek would choose to write that way seems satirical in its own right. Hence, the dilemma: a book that is too serious to be a satire yet so self-consciously deadpan that it could very well be too satirical to be taken seriously.
However, it may simply be that Kriwaczek aimed, not for satire, but for the kind of worldly detail that propelled Tolkien to invent entire languages and histories for the Lord of the Rings. Kriwaczek’s attention to detail, replete with photographs, scores, and quoted letters, is certainly remarkable. While there comes a point where the suspicion that that the book is a work of fiction gives way to certainty – the whole motivation for the Vatican’s persecution of funerary violinists is a stretch, and some of the book’s details just don’t fit into real history – it says something that the New York Times felt obligated to expose the book as a hoax. But one can at least appreciate how neatly (and conveniently) Kriwaczek fosters ambiguity about his project’s historicity by sidestepping the lack of any real historical documentation. He attributes the loss and destruction of key documents and artifacts to the zealous doings of Vatican agents. Everything else gets swept under the pretense that, for the sake of ensuring their art’s survival, the Guild had to transform itself into a secret society of sorts.
But setting aside the fact that, like Schickele’s book, An Incomplete History of The Art of Funerary Violin actually imparts no real or useful knowledge, Kriwaczek does offer some interesting ideas. In setting forth, for example, the notion of a funerary suite consisting of seven movements (march, introduction and march, dream, panic, flight, eulogy, and march) Kriwaczek creates a blueprint of sorts for his music. And, unsurprisingly, this entire exercise really is about music as demonstrated by a collection of recordings – most notably a CD also called The Art of Funerary Violin, which would have been a logical inclusion with the book as opposed to an added expense.
If anything, the book serves to flesh out recordings proposing to be scratchy archival performances by fictional violinists and contemporary performances by the Guild. So we get a musical project of grand aspirations, a fictional feat of imagination that, however much it doesn’t live up to its ambitions, nonetheless fills in a gap in gothic music. If one considers how classical music is underrepresented in gothic music, Kriwaczek can at least be said to boldly venture into new directions.
One could also go further, at the risk of overinterpreting, and see in the Guild of Funerary Violinists a parallel for goths. For example, in describing the students and followers of the master Funerary Violinist Hieronymous Gratchenfleiss as “all bewigged and with their faces painted white,” we get a loose impression of the familiar pale-skinned goths. The analogy is that just as goths today are a minority subculture with barely any acknowledgement, let alone respect, from the culture at large, Funerary Violinists were a minority persecuted and forced into hiding by the power institutions surrounding them.
Unfortunately, the merry illusion of a history that never was, and a hypothetical metaphor for the gothic subculture, is marred by delusions of grandeur:
“...yet another example of history being written by the victors; in this case the classical music tradition, which is today presented as if it were the only music being composed and performed before the birth of jazz in the early twentieth century. It is therefore no surprise that the funeral march itself has also been hijacked by the classical tradition, and today it is Beethoven, Chopin, Grieg, and Mahler who are credited with the most masterful demonstrations of the form whilst the true composers of the works they shamelessly plagiarized have by now been long forgotten.”
If picking on the great composers is a bit much, Kriwaczek takes it a step further:
“...the venerable tradition of Funerary Violin were doomed to fade into obscurity, amidst the decadence and self-indulgence that Romanticism soon descended into. It is indeed hard to see what role a musician of Sudbury’s spiritually pure (though perhaps deluded) vision could play when competing against Mahler’s monstrously overdone symphonic follies, which ooze with contrived tragedies and intemperate sentimentality.”
While we could carry the goth analogy further and see in this an attempt to reflect how goth music tends to look down on most mainstream music, the result is still unpleasantly snobbish and unjustified – regardless of whether Kriwaczek’s intentions are satirical or serious.
To make matters worse, the music on the aforementioned CD actually doesn’t live up to Kriwaczek’s lofty praise. The scratchy recordings are barely endurable due to a sound quality that erases any emotion or tone. “Modern” recordings sound clean, but reveal an unfortunate tendency for Kriwaczek to fiddle flatly rather than make the violin “sing.” It would be easier to surrender to the music’s occasional charm if the book didn’t put on such an unseemly show of arrogance. But since it is does, it’s much easier to join the amen chorus when Kriwaczek writes that Funeral Violin eschews “all displays of virtuosity, in terms of both performance and compositional artistry.” That it allegedly does so for purposes of spiritual purity hardly matters.
An Incomplete History of The Art of Funerary Violin, despite its wonderfully gothic concept and the musical project it proposes, ultimately possesses the esoteric appeal of an obscure history book. Is it interesting? Yes. Engrossing? Not so much. What could have been a grand fictional history ends up, unfortunately, being merely a curious little footnote.
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