The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe - Gothic Horror Classic Book - Perfect for Halloween Reading & Literature Study

If you're reading this, I am assuming you are interested in the story of how this extraordinary piece came to be. Rather than discussing the work or offering some description made irrelevant by merely inserting the CD into a CD player and pressing "play", my purpose here is to tell how it came to be rather than to assert what you're supposed to make of it, although I reveal, later and with abundant immodesty, that I want it to transform you. But that revelation abides only near my simpler project of recounting it's advent, a project to which I return now without further digression from my purpose. Tracing the origins of the piece on this recording forces us to return to when I first met Christian Asplund. I was serving on a faculty search committee at the University of Oklahoma, a fine institution of higher learning located on a singularly dreary tract of country, for a new composition professor. We asked for scores up front from all applicants, for I rather subversively sought a boon companion and felt that scores revealed companionability more readily than vitae or transcripts. Among the small mountain of carefully bound scores made using various computer programs like Finale and Sibelius, were a handful by Christian Asplund that were notated free hand. Something about handmade scores suggested that this was a composer proud to reveal himself to potential colleagues as disconnected from the conventions and manners of his times. Our institution possessed drastic need of precisely such an unconventional personage, or so my fevered thinking ran. An artisanal quality marked not only the scores, but the music hidden within them. This music revealed itself the product of some by-gone practices difficult to ascertain on examination, but present in the sometimes shaky handwriting. Later, on meeting Asplund at the Will Rogers World Airport (possibly America's only airport named for a man who died in a plane crash and one marked with the shame of having lost it's only international flight and therefore the coveted designation "international" so thus inventing for itself the meaningless designation "world"), he wore a white suit, vintage clothing from the 80s and therefore unfashionable for being too recent for the full measure implied by vintage yet too far removed from then contemporary notions of the fashionable to avoid notice. A man out of his time walked out of the airport with me that day, confirming in part my instincts on peering upon those basilisk eyes that comprised the note heads of his handwritten scores. Soon, the nature of his by-gone compositional practices unfolded before my eyes during the roughly three years Christian called Oklahoma home. Christian's music is the unapologetic product of such quaint practices as sincerity (difficult to discern for materialists caught up in an age of irony, but easy to see for souls trapped outside their times), purely musical intuition, and-perhaps most controversially-divine intervention. I learned a good deal about such matters working with Christian over the next few years. Then BYU summoned Christian away from Oklahoma to teach Music Theory at their distinguished school of music. I was disconsolate, but made as many excuses as a faltering state budget could afford to bring him back. On one of his returns, I had a problem. The University of Oklahoma's Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, an improbably good museum housed in a knockout building imagined by architect Hugh Jacobson, asked me to do a concert in the museum celebrating the museum's new collection of works by Robert Rauschenberg. I needed Christian to provide a signature piece to anchor the concert. Toward that end he created "The Goat, No Weeds" for speaker, percussion, violin, viola, cello and bass. The piece was a happy success and both composer and speaker found themselves the recipients of warm praise and good will. Later, I wanted to put on a self-serving festival of music by people I like called "Love Feast." I asked Christian to write a piece, and he wanted to follow up "The Goat, No Weeds" with a similar work tapping my efforts as a speaker joined by colleagues at the University of Oklahoma who are kind enough to participate in the sort of shows I put on. The resulting ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, bass, piano and percussion stemmed from the formation of a "coalition of the willing", which is to say friends who make the time to lend their artistry to the cause of new music and to whom both the composer and present author are deeply grateful. Now Christian had a problem. While he had found the text for "The Goat, No Weeds" from the writings of Rauschenberg's friend John Cage's essay on Rauschenberg, he didn't have a text in mind for the "Love Feast." I made two suggestions. The first was the manifesto found in the first issue of "Source Magazine: Music of the Avant-Garde." In it, the editors opined that for most readers the contents of their magazine would be either a mere intellectual curiosity or an unseemly celebration of non-music, but for those who admire this music as music, "this magazine will be a LOVE FEAST." Indeed this passage prompted the name of my festival and therefore struck me a supreme text for Christian's use. Christian mulled over this text, but it did not speak to him musically. Next I suggested my absolute favorite piece of literature, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", for this was a self-indulgent enterprise on my part. Poe's tale has inspired some really great music, most notably by Claude Debussy, and also some really interesting literature. Charles Baudelaire, for example, translated it into French and declared it central to understanding the entire Symbolist Movement. The most remarkable feature of the story is how the narrator manages to outline in a few paragraphs the urgent need for an interrogation of the so-called Enlightenment. The story opens with the narrator reaching Usher's house. He finds that he cannot enter, so unnerving was the impression the house made upon his senses. He attempts an amazing experiment, which he dismisses as childish, but which launched the Symbolist Movement, he looks at the house reflected in the black and lurid tarn surrounding it that this re-arrangement of it's physical structure within the waters of the tarn might make it possible for him to enter. So much of our society's efforts over the years since the philosophes first proposed that Man recourse to his senses to order his world has been focused on the arrangement of things. Material things must be arranged for expedience and efficiency. Immaterial things classified, interrogated and made somehow material that they too might be so arranged. Even the compositional software mentioned previously, Finale and Sibelius, seek orderly arrangement of notes in a score as their high and only goal. Poe lends the blueprint for a counter-strategy. He demonstrates how imagination, here symbolized by the waters of the tarn and the reflections thereon, can derange the material world into the immaterial that a man, not Man, might move about more freely. His work bucks the dominant intellectual order of things in favor of the irrational, the childlike, the imaginative. His words don a white suit of by-gone style, to risk making rhetoric of what initially promised to be a mere recounting of a tale. Christian read the story and came to impressions distinct yet comparable to my own. He next set about deranging the story such-wise as to extract from it's pages all that might pass for mundane narrative and drab character development. There's precious little of each in this story wherein Poe allows descriptive fancy to overwhelm the slender storyline in an avalanche of obscure references, lexical felicities, and raw description untrammelled by any literary convention. Christian's cuts removed the tale from the tale that the descriptive energies Poe exerted might sing more clearly. Something in this rather recent work of Chri