Counterpoint - Three films, a book and an old photograph - Book Review

In terms of music, counterpoint is the simultaneous combination of more melodic sense in "horizontal" that is, considering the performance of different voices and melodic intervals in each of these paths. In his short, sharp illustrated pamphlet entitled Counterpoint - Three films, a book and an old photograph, Don DeLillo experiments on the composition of written text overlapping voices, inspired, even making influence, a set of sounds, words, still and moving images. The voices are those of three talented artists active in the second half of last century.

The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982) is the second protagonist of the films mentioned in the subtitle, Thirty short films about Glenn Gould, 32 course as Bach's Goldberg Variations - the king of counterpoint - work on which Gould narrative for all and that life was exemplary in his interpretations. The figure of the pianist is in close resonance with the first film, Atanarjuat, icy vision of ancient Inuit legend set in the Deep North, a geographic area from which inner-Gould was deeply, obsessively attracted (isolation, loneliness, ecstasy), although in life he could never reach the Arctic Canada or his idea of North.

The voice of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is accorded to the notes of the pianist: his book, The Loser, it opens with a suicide that is consumed in listening to the first Goldberg Variations performed by Gould. Not only. Bernhard between Gould and there was a progressive fusion: "The identity of author, narrator and characters blend into one another," says DeLillo. Gould himself in his work "is not limited to re-imagine Bach, but start a sort of corrective dialogue with himself."

The third film, Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser, opens on notes crooked plan Thelonious Monk (1917-1982), jazz icon and tunes like Round Midnight and become immortal heritage character bizarre, indecipherable, and dedicated to excess, until the schizophrenia that has undermined the last years of life. Monk is among the protagonists of the "old photo" taken at the Village in 1953, which portrays him in the company of other saints of bebop: Charlie Mingus, Charlie Parker and Roy Hanes.

While the voices of three virtuosos chase in counterpoint, the player slips in the heart of the melody to address the crucial question. The dark genius bright counterparts are - since the ancient civilizations - the loneliness, distance, introversion, isolation from society, until the inevitable disease. "What happens when introspection reaches an intensity sufficient to break the world around them?" The key question can be answered. Url silent Bernhard Etna, in Gould's fingers moving in imaginary spaces, dancing dervish of Monk is the eternal border, labile, mostly invisible, between genius and madness.