How many songs are there, in the annals of pop and rock and indie music, about the pathos of the rich man who pays for the artist to create? Commissioning a Symphony in C, by Cake, is the only one I can really think of.

An Austrian nobleman has commissioned a symphony. It is the night of the premiere.

you enter the room with great caution
though no one in the hall is even watching

For the first time, the nobleman is confronted with the thing his money has made. Maybe the composer played a transcription of it for him on the piano, before he approved it… Maybe he heard it in rehearsal. But this is the first time he really MEETS it, really HEARS it, entering the crowded hall, becoming one with this massive audience. Until that moment, he felt like he owned the symphony - it was his, he commissioned it.

with money you squeezed from the peasants
to your nephew you can give it as a present

Not only does he think that the symphony is his, he thinks he can actually give it to his nephew, like a new horse or a piece of land.

And this is the moment where he realizes he doesn’t own it. The nobleman’s pride and ownership evaporates, confronted with the reality of this complex and incredible thing, with the stricken and emotional faces of the crowded theater. He sees it isn’t his. Because no one ever really owns a piece of art.

they are transfixed they are forgetting just to breathe
they are so taken by your symphony in C

I like the phrase “they are forgetting just to breathe;” I assume it means “they are forgetting everything but breathing,” but for me it does a good job of describing that state of awe and rapture to which we are taken by great art - especially non-narrative art like a classical symphony.

Your sitting there thinking your thoughts
they are not about what is but what is not
your sitting there breathing in your breath
you are seldom breathing life, but mostly death

And it’s then, in the moment when the rich and entitled nobleman abandons his ownership of the symphony, that he also accepts his own mortality. In thinking that he could buy immortality, the Austrian nobleman instead realizes, possibly for the first time: He is doomed. He will die. The symphony will not.

It makes me think of T.S. Eliot, in Four Quartets:

…music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

Great art takes us over, replaces our emotions with its own. Reading the Iliad or Macbeth, watching Citizen Kane or the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, we are negated. The emotions and identification that they stir up are eternal. We vanish.

So you`ll be an Austrian nobleman
commissioning a symphony in C
which defies all earthly descriptions
you`ll be commissioning a symphony in C

The last stanza of the song reiterates the first. It focuses again on the symphony itself - the nobleman made of mortal flesh, but the symphony is pure sound, emotion, art, grace, tenderness, ecstasy. Defying all earthly description.

The contemporary analogue to the Austrian nobleman is the record label executive - the guy who puts up the money, who doesn’t have any talent of his own (except the ability to identify and exploit true creativity).

Because the fate of the artist, in the free market, is to vanish. This is a love song about the song and the man who paid for it - and it’s a tragic love song, because the nobleman is going to die, and the symphony will not.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Culture as Resistance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.