Nimble Tread

To be Blount

Roy Blount, Jr.'s made a cameo appearance in the Mail section of this week's New Yorker.  The writer and Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! drawler has taken exception to Lauren Collins' grasp of meter, and has dispatched a note to set her straight.  Blount writes:

"Did we order forks, by the way?" according to Lauren Collins, "could be considered iambic quadrameter" (The Talk of the Town, May 12th).  It could, if changed to this: "Have forks been ordered, by the way?"  As is: no way in hell is it iambic.
Roy Blount, Jr.
Mill River, Mass.

Technically speaking, and not surprisingly, ol' Roy is right: "order" is a trochee, not an iamb.  But that doesn't entirely disqualify the phrase from being classified as an iambic quadrameter.  Exceptions to iambic forms are abundant, and so famous in some cases that they've been used to illustrate the meter.  To wit: "Now is the winter of our discontent," from Richard III.  Or "To be or not to be, that is the question," from Hamlet.  The first begins with a trochee, slips in an iamb, offers up two evenly stressed feet in succession (short, short; long, long), and ends on an iamb.  The second is alright until the fourth foot, which is another inversion, but then concludes with a feminine ending, throwing the whole line into iambic turmoil.  While neither phrase could be classified as iambic pentameter in the strictest sense, they both still belong to the form, and I'd be willing to wager that even the most ardent pedant, if asked to name the guiding structure of the aforementioned lines, would say Iambic pentameter before mounting his soapbox to tuck in to the deviations.  Hell, it's what I would do, and I'm only a mild meter wonk.  That said, it was a good spot by Blount, and I only wish I'd noticed it first!

End to End

Richard Goode and Jonathan Biss were at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night, looking a bit like Abbott and Costello, but playing a wonderful programme of piano for four hands.  They sat shoulder to shoulder for the first number, Schubert's Allegro in A minor for piano duet D. 947 (Lebenssturme), and made it immediately clear to all that they were on the same page, musically speaking.  This notion was reinforced by the second piece played, Schumann's highly pianistic 6 Etudes en forme de canon, Op. 56, arranged for 2 pianos by Debussy, and played with awesome sensitivity by Goode and Biss.  The piece offers wonderful variety, and the two pianists seemed to have had a good time unleashing some bombastic notes and coaxing other shy ones to make a fleeting appearance.  Voices swelled, broiled, soared, and cascaded like sparks, and all before the end of the third etude.  It was a terrific arrangement, and superior in many ways to the next one performed, a four-hand piano version of Beethoven's Große Fuge from his String Quartet Op. 133, which owing to Beethoven's rejection of the publisher's arrangement and his own subsequent effort, bears the opus number 134.  The fugue suffers the absence of strings, particularly in its Overtura, and even though it finds its legs in its middle, tranquil section, and offers some formidable energy and crashing in the recapitulation, it never quite attains the standard of the version for string quartet.  That said, it was damn exciting to watch.  Biss and Goode seemed perfectly calm about the whole thing, but my guts were working their way through the Scout's knot handbook, and I experienced that half-panicked half-sadistic sensation peculiar to watching a juggler toss knives around while feeling his way across a tightrope.  One small slip and he's suddenly in a Looney Tunes film.  Fortunately for everyone, the pianists' counting was true, and all ended well with Beethoven.  Everyone who slipped out for a quick drink at the interval did so with a dotted rhythm guiding their step. 
The second half kicked off with Stravinsky's Agon arranged for 2 pianos, which was nicely played and full of delightful moments that were sadly eclipsed by Beethoven's fugue and then again by the last piece on the programme, Debussy's En blanc et noir.  Biss and Goode brought youth and experience to the piece, which, combined with their respective tonal powers, allowed for an incredibly vast palette.  As if that weren't enough, their coordination was terrific, which I suspect had far more to do with musical compatibility than hours of practice.  In fact, compatibility is the name of the game in duos, especially piano duos, which exude the whiff of home and, perhaps more than any other pairing, make the members of the audience feel as though they're watching the musicians tinker around in a living room.  Biss and Goode know this and opted to leave their dinner jackets and ties at home and play the concert in shirtsleeves.   it was a clever decision -- and a clever performance.