an essay on John McCormack

On the fourteenth of June, in the year we called 1984, we observed with too much neglect the birth of the magnificent tenor, John Francis McCormack. We might ask ourselves how best we might have celebrated, and still celebrate, this glorious human and musical milestone.

By listening to his recordings, we would answer.

We are a talky folk, and he was among the chief in poignancy of the great securers of our anglo-american talk, helping to fasten the tongue-uttered portion of our language, much as the written portion of our language was so fastened by that hugely expressive sweet Will, every fellow’s Shakespeare, during the elizabethan times. And John McCormack left a fine legacy (a cenotaph of sorts) in his hundreds of wonderful recordings, hundreds too few.

The style and the substance of McCormack’s vocal persona threads back through the old to Monteverdi and before to those oldest scarcely esthetic mumblings and scratchings and thumpings on pagan drums, and threads forth into a future more obscure than prehistory, and is becoming recognized to be a vital portion of the rooted and substantial new, for it threads our entire human history at every level of mental and emotional development.

His recordings permit us to touch one of the very most intense representations of the potentially transcendent purity and the ineffable grace of our divine human voice. Such influence uplifts. Such recordings will in future be kept and treasured beside recordings as diverse and as fine and as complementary as those by Louis Armstrong and Fritz Kreisler, Mozart, Beethoven, Chaplin, Kubrick, Griffith, Welles.

Some years ago I stumbled on an oldish magazine from London, poorly printed and uncopyrighted, which contained the following humble if amusing sonnet.

        If we would catch the music of ripe gods 

        in their sweet ease of triumph, and listen

        to the clamour ‘round their thrones (as mere men), 

        then Johann Bach is wound back from dark woods. 

 

        If a rarefied ambience appeal of

        ministers coaching from court’s to court’s hearth

        with ladies who spill and mop kingdoms, a dearth 

        may not be found in Handel’s round rich love.

 

        If passionless perfection made warm 

        with delight in sensual mathematics

        please us, and supple magnanimous tricks, 

        then Mozart emotes artistry in a storm.

 

        If we’d catch the sublimest human voice

        yet loosed, then is McCormack’s throat our choice. 

Thus, somebody else who may have been or may not have been a poet, in the thirties, also once was wont to include our commemorate tenor among such notables, rarefied lads.

Somebody else once said that Nature has no nature (although perhaps this fellow stood too close to see well), that Nature possesses no identifiable individual nature because it is too big and therefore too otherly from the comprehension and from the ordinary concern of humanity. A creative personality, a true creative born and bred, an artist supremely gifted and therefore indebted, is a fellow in whose art the mirror is indeed held up to nature, to the mechanical animal nature of all life. Thusly we find displayed the sucking and the flowing and the blowing of the breath passing around life’s maw and nostrils, the juicy urge of the hot liquid maroon blood, the work and the play of muscle and of limb. We find representations in it that thrill us with pleasure and thrill us with disgust, that elate us and that weary us. We become so concerned with what we think we see in the poise and the counterpoise of the mechanical ticking world, that we become silly and romantic and lavish upon it terms of inanity such as Mother Nature, She Who Brings Forth Life.

And with such a pleasant lapse from sense to sentiment we place this whole dark glowing world in a sweet and false and reassuring light, and we go snug with comfort. Surely it is a great triumph to find comfort in a void.

Nature trips and wheezes behind a curtain, and a great artist makes the curtain the show and repopulates our world with representations of ourselves. McCormack’s ditties arc like dramatic and lyrical plays in which he performs or addresses all of the roles and somewhere in each of the roles is described each of ourselves, our collective self and our individual selves, our hiddenly interior and individual communities.

It may be said that the purpose of art is to convey a mood, and that the goal of the artist is to convey the inherent artistry in a way that the inherent artistry itself does not intrude and cloy, but would continue to convey the projected mood upon repetitive exposure.

Some works permit us to be affected by them only if we peruse them briefly and infrequently, and this is because there is an emptiness, a hollow spot at their cores. They are spiritually eviscerate, or soulless. They are superficial, on the surface of time and place and circumstance, and when time and place and circumstance are no more and are different, then they are no more and have no existence in time or place or circumstance.

Other works (the sign of genius grasping beyond the reach of talent, perhaps?) permit us to be affected by them when we peruse them steadily and hard and frequently, and with each new perusal they accompany us layers farther toward some definite infinity of clarity and ascendant scope. In their presence we are constantly awakening.

One’s artistry or one’s style or one’s method or manner is to hide itself, not to shout aloud its presence nor to whisper its presence nor to gesture it, so that the witness to the finished material is rendered unhindered from participating in the projected mood in the smoothest and the cleanest manner possible, so that the talent or the genius of the artist is revealed, rather than the quirks of personality.

In the purest and most perfect sense, it’s to be as if the artist had been supported by a divine hand in wading across the muddling waters of mortality, and our ears, the ears neither of beast nor angel, had been permitted to perceive the notes wafted toward us from the other side.

Thus John is to sing so attemptedly flawlessly that the mood of the whole comes to us as flawlessly as possible. His voice is to slip free of the fetters that condemn our common mortality to drag and shuffle along in roiling bestialism, to slip free like an Ariel released into the lithest element, an ethereal sprite and spirit-critter of the highest nature yet vulnerable, lithe itself and unvexed by any of those mean low coarse brutish pettinesses of this animal existence yet able to ponder them with empathy, sympathy, kindliness, willing to care.

His ability borrows the ditties written by other fellows and revises them, builds them afresh upon his personal and selected foundations, and offers them to the intimate world of women and men within himself (so like those various women and men within ourselves), a world so intimately his that the normal games and wars of social intercourse are suspended and the songs therefore come to us with an uncanny intimacy and accuracy.

Thus we forget easily that anybody else has sung them or would sing them, and our disbelief in their faultlessness is waived, and in his peerless purity the songs feel perfect to us, quite right, and we experience that atmosphere, that crucial ambience which his fluid skill bands us, so that for a time we are content to ride upon his dream, to share something that might otherwise have seemed impossible to be shared because of its very intimacy and its faultless aim and faultless arrival, as its flawlessness conquers and erodes and erases those very limits that seemed to prohibit entrance into another’s dream, another’s most intimate and personal reserves of tranquility and the reach of yearning, of the dark themes and the light themes that float and bluster in the brain’s arena. 

Art has traditionally been preoccupied with death and with love, that darkest and that lightest of human themes which are intertwined almost inextricably in our minds. There is no love where death does not trespass, and so most songs which are songs of love are also songs and speeches of death, and treat of death’s dismissal submissively (without a fist). McCormack’s songs are commonly songs of love and he commonly celebrates love itself, this sweetest and most sorrowful of our joys. 

Woman is man’s wound and man is woman’s, and this curious event is endlessly intriguing. While some of his songs stress the dark theme, most stress the light. This is a strength of McCormack’s repertoire, and is another reason his performances do not cloy. McCormack sings with mention and expression of so many of our human emotions, but clearly this lighter theme is his own, which in his issue of it might be more clearly described as being of the natural and healthy need and affection that exists between a man and a woman, and between adult and child. This, then, is a celebration of life, by life.

Like any other job, the singer’s job is unique. He accepts his limitations willingly and attempts to bend them to his advantage. The most important things in life arc unmentionable, yet may be captured waywardly in a song. Precise communication is a mechanical thing, and reserved for rats in a laboratory, mathematical and mechanical and humorless as the movements of stars and bugs.

In his invocations of mood the singer may hint of these elusive ineffables, and thereby may bruit them about, which causes information to be delivered to the listener simultaneously on a spectrum of levels. A singer with a richer psyche may contribute more information to a fully listening audience, than would be contributed by a slighter singer. The inflection matters more than does the storyline, and when richer and poorer psyches contend, the richer wins.

When McCormack found a song he wanted, he and his pianist (usually the splendid Teddy Schneider) would practise it interminably until they felt they understood it, until they felt they could comply with its needs and that it could comply with theirs. Realizing that each performance of a piece must inevitably be different than any other performance of that piece, they desired to banish the dangers of novelty. Such serious application in privacy was as dogged and deliberate as, say, the struggles that William Yeats must have carried into each new phase and phrase of each new poem, after his first and roughest draft had been scribbled on a pad.

The singer is unlike the lyricist and he is unlike the melodist, and from his position he is to unite their efforts into a seamless fabric like some great lord absorbing two previously divisive petty factions under his own banner. Once in a while, of course, this great lord must himself submit to a greater, must absorb any littler fellows and march under majestic Mozartean banners, or Handelian, and still remove all trace of division. All signs of rivalry or of incapacity must be obliterated. Ideally the singer is to express the lyricist, the melodist, and himself. In performance all attention rivets to the singer, puts the finger on the singer, if he is worthy, so it’s best if he is a gracefully balanced scapegoat. 

His accompaniment being such a background thing, the singer purely may rely on no medium that is not himself: his instrument is a piece of himself and fares well or ill as he does. The creative instrument leaves the world when the man does, and we are left with mere etchings or tracings of it, and with no clearer knowledge of the man himself. Who can say he clearly reads your heart or mind, and not provoke a thin smile?

Each of us peers into the world and sees more clearly, somehow, than our neighbors do, and when we listen to the magnificent Count John we feel we hear his heart trembling so clearly that no medium separates our understanding from the act, because, somehow, he communicates. Surely this is genius.

The singer has the customs of the recorded ages, those finally arbitrary compromises and prejudices of real and supposed authority, to conquer and assimilate and to lean upon, but he cannot hide behind any of it.

Many folks whose careers are devoted to gleaning a comfortable and popular applause have enumerable crannies in their performances to hide, to be relieved of artistic pressure. A singer whose endeavor and whose accomplishment is constantly to excel, an excellent singer has no hidingplace. He is as vulnerable and as exposed as is a lover, and his audience may as easily discover if he dissembles, if they wish. Some audiences prefer to be hoodwinked. 

The novelist, for an example, may hide behind the crash and crunch of circumstance, and the happenstance of action, to catch his breath, and thereby permit occasions to transpire naturally while he nods behind a drape or on a sofa in the next room, using instinct and logic and that good old reliable inertia to hold the dance in motion. Thusly the novelist travels piggyback on his narrator. 

The sculptor and the architect, similarly, may each scurry behind his massy medium to hide and nod a bit, each allowing the witness to his art to be confronted and mollified momentarily by the naked aspect of his medium, as the medium in its own identity as plastic or wood, stone or metal, appeals to the witness on its own and declares itself on its own, and assumes the brunt of attention independently of him who fashioned things. 

The melodist and the lyricist, too, have games to play and places to hide. They may hide behind each other, especially an easy trick if they’d worked together for years and each was familiar with his pal’s intricacies. They may hide behind the singer or behind his accompaniment, using his ability or his audience as a buffer. They may even, alas, hide behind the audience itself and occasionally titillate the wilful folly of normal folks with appeals of benevolent inanity in shams of magniloquence. 

The right singer could even make Moon River or The Impossible Dream sound good, or any other mindless wretched little ditty. Mac was a vigilant fellow and could have done it, had he wished and time allowed. In his lyrical bloom he was unerringly the crystal irish song. The crystal was of the purest and was intentionally so. He sang of the country and of country pursuits perfectly, though he was no blushing rustic. He sang of the city life also, and with honest appreciation, for he was no cultured pearl. 

Too easily we often consider the melodist and the lyricist to be the truer creatives, since they furnish the rough draft which the singer hones into a serviceable structure. But we wonder, is a song so truly different to a singer dedicated with genius, from the wistful musings and inspired hunches which precede a painter’s onslaught on the canvas, or from the stirrings and the nudgings apprehended by a sculptor’s peripheral sight as his unfocussed eye flits past an uncloven block in his darkening studio? His eye narrows back to the block and engages it, and his mind is (though perhaps unknown to himself then) painlessly and welcomely wrenched free from some nagging necessary inward thing, and the wormings in the block hush and compose themselves into stillness to escape the thrust of his quest to open them into the light, and yet the sculptor inches toward the block.

How different is it really?

Some songs are so crummy they stink to the ear, and McCormack uses some of these and makes them pleasant, and he uses songs and arias by Mozart and Handel and that wonderful song by Kramer, Swans, and somehow they all come alive within his voice.

Classic songs become fresh and ripe when he does them, and common material hits the ear in a pleasing and special way.

Few composers and few poets have been able to perform their own creations aloud and well. The sublimest poet might crow and spit his lines, might bark and grunt the sublimest of lines. Beethoven might miss a beat. Tennyson might lunge into a great groan when he should lilt and bob. Mozart might titter, or elbow his glass from the piano and stand blushing. 

But in the careful crucible of an artist of song, a fellow who is equipped by the force that forms humanity to sing and to sing, all portions of a song together express their common if invariably unequal interest, and the delectable pleasure is ours.

Nowadays some folks tend to consider a deliberate and precise manner of singing to be stilted and false, as if sloppiness and an undressed attitude alone could convey empathy and friendliness. And it may be argued mercilessly and foolishly that any stance characterized by poise is but a pose, a political and not a genuine reality.

Somebody once complained to Charles Lamb of the formality everywhere in his narrative technique, perhaps suspecting that a stiltedness was useful in enabling the writer to peer down his nose at the reader. Lamb replied that a semblance of stiffness was for him the only natural posture available, and that any attempt to appear more relaxed would be an affectation, a lie.

Certain intimacies demand a formal courtship. A certain remove guards the essence sometimes, like a barrier of trees that protects the home and family from the sun, winds and rain and cold, and from predatory animals. Sometimes that certain remove is used to give ease and comfort to those whom it protects, enabling them accomplishments otherwise impossible.

McCormack’s manner with song placed his material in a permanent context, affording to each song a mutual identity with a permanent grouping of companions, friends and rivals. He has bundled these pieces together as a sort of Tottel’s Miscellany, or as the ballads were brought together by Francis James Child. 

His level of craft, his ability and capacity, marks him spectacularly for any age. He was the best of recorded singers of his type, and if we would compare him to other singers, we should in realism compare him only to the very greatest, the finest and most capable and most prolifically recorded. It is futile inutility to compare him to Mario and the fabled voices of earlier times, who must forever remain strangers to our ears. 

Tom Edison’s latter-day version of papyrus has only begun to record our human voice. Some voices already captured in our tongue persist in awarding pleasure to generation after generation, and provoke more wonder, amazement, and pleasure, even as more pressure of scrutiny embraces them. Bessie Smith, Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, and Sara Carter, are in this position, and others move into this position, as our generations proceed and as humanity’s perceptions replace humanity’s opinions.

As the opinions of each insubstantial day are peeled away, the substance itself is left revealed to the eyes of our future, and is a naked meat being used.At the essence of artistry, behind the last mask and in the living organism, is a type of timelessness. Ours is a race engrossed by its time and with the proceeds of our surrounding handful of hours. We are wrapped snugly and glibly in time’s babying blanket with nary a toe protruding, and it is perilously hard for us to distinguish between originality and novelty, between the substantial and that which is merely an enviable cleverness.

Time ranges, and scuttles our envy of those true artists who have chosen to be among us, and scuttles our sorry bitter raging indignation and our confusion in the face of the inspired unique. It is an easy thing to forgive the artists of our grandfellows’ day, but requires a bit of guts wholly to forgive those of our own day especially if they challenge our intelligence.

Timelessness is a somewhere nobody can dally in (there are no rooms to rent, moneys to be spent), but at times some people may visit there, may peek into it and survey its wavering forms and perhaps pluck a token from it, this place outside of time, without time, and perhaps we may salute those things that each of us sees alone, if we see them at all, and whether they reply or no.

But then we return to our berth in time, and ramble back amid the pettinesses of our o so important daily travails, the getting and the spending and getting the laundry washed, and the endless cavils, the constant all-pervasive bitch bitch bitch of the nagging necessary outward things.

It is in humanity’s nature that we confront pettinesses daily. While we breathe we cavil about the quality of air. To appreciate anything is to search for its flaw. If we listen to a fiddle, we await the clumsy bow, the unplanned screech, and we often feel a genuine relief akin to a sense of genuine personal accomplishment or vindication, when the feckless musician reveals a human and quite inevitable boo-boo.

In athletics (which singing is a part of) we await alike the fumble, the belly-flop, the backward homer or traitorous touchdown, the warrior’s humiliation. When we listen to a voice of balanced mellifluity, with an ignoble relish we anticipate the sour note, the tongue misplaced. If we may be generous, our sense of relief at another’s display of mortal fallibility deserts us somewhat, and a fine ascendance edges ahead in our psyches: consciously or subconsciously, we realize the singer may err or must err, but we dismiss that realization and take no pleasure from it.

McCormack’s technique is so nearly perfect (perfection being, as permanence is, a relative concept for humans) that in listening to him we seldom encounter too blatant evidence of mortal fallibility. His mentor, Sabbatini, reputedly quibbled sometimes regarding precise instances in John’s presentations, so perhaps it’s forgivable if we quibble sometimes also. Occasionally we may prefer that he would press forth on a point, and elsewhere we may prefer that he would hold back; here we might wish that he would be more earthbound, and there be borne aloft. Such henpecking amounts to a bloated zilch.

Such henpecking doesn’t indicate that we question his ability, his capacity, or his craft. Nor does it impugn the sincerity of our admiration. Such quibbling merely indicates that we accept the presence of nuance, of perception and opinion, and that small folks gratefully tend to strut and swagger in small ways before big folks, if permitted.

Sometimes it seems we hear him in our mind’s ear, since he so thoroughly evades our customary expectation of disappointment, our desire and our need to suspend disbelief. In our mind’s ear it seems as if his voice travels within the boundaries of our innermost mental chambers and caresses those boundaries and those chambers, and is untouched by customary limitation and reserve, by the natural embarrassment essential to our sense of selfhood.

From him, then, we hear unheard melodies, as if the sprinkled shining of a spring day bloomed and each of nature’s cheerful birds swung about the world in unison, singing lovely songs and whistling melancholy numbers too, and some are very lugubrious and ungleeful indeed. It is as if, by handling his very limits so very well, he conquered those limits and transcended them utterly. It is sweet, then, when the full and lazy mind saunters upon fields of the heavenly voice’s melancholy rejoicing.

It is this utter withdrawal from cynicism, and the constant hint or suffusion of the melancholy, that helps to keep the Count’s voice from cloying. A soft insistent insinuation of the melancholy titillates the mental palate but does not weary it. So often, while he sings clearly and audibly as if you, the listener, were yourself a small auditorium, his tone of voice, the tone itself, is but a whisper demanding attention which is so willingly given.

The song then becomes a whisper like a haiku, or like an imagist poem, a mantra. Consider the short whispering poem if you will:

        Hiddenly

        we cherish the

        silent image of your ear, 

        breathlessly listening

        to my sounding heart, 

        and those jealously insinuating 

        tendrils of your hair

        eddying backward

        round my solemn finger, moving.

 

As in the softest of his songs, every nuance is meant to be swept into that silent central part of consciousness, to be felt and measured by our mind’s fingertips.

We listen to the whisper willingly to be removed from the noisy crawling street outside, and from the tumult of our own thoughts.

While we often hear him sing with a tear in his throat, he is welcomely undemonstrative. We may acknowledge the presence of an empathic sadness and rinse our eyelids awhile with him, or we may let it go: we may take it or leave it.

He does not slobber and he does not choke. He does not bounce in the muck nor wallows nor grovels. He swings no fist at the wretchedly miserly inhumanly cowardly gods in challenge, bidding them to leap into the minus land with him. He expresses the depths natural to a feeling humanity. There is nothing in him of the fashionably mysterious. He is no brooding misfit writhing on Olympus, nor on Atlantis.

His poise and his unruffled integrity were everywhere assured. His persona was gracious and affable, emulable, masculine, and courageous. His aim was to comfort and to please. 

for Ira and George Gershwin