An Object Incapable of Development

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 6 April 2015.

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones

We've recognized the importance of making some careful choices regarding instruments.

Were money no object, we would just buy all the era-specific gear and bring it out for the appropriate performances. But there are plenty of reasons for embracing the swaddled/crucified existence instead. The main one is that I don't want to conjure comparisons to all the people who played those organs: Frank Rodriguez, Alan Price, Garth Hudson, Steve Winwood, Matthew Fisher, or even Father for that matter.

Instead of this, I might want to deliberately choose the cheaper route: getting the most basic, MIDI-ready, serviceable late 90's keyboard available. While this might at first seem to our audience a puzzling anachronism, it is ultimately the better choice on a few different levels.

Firstly, it's way more practical. I can record in MIDI, which creates sheet music so I don't forget the songs. Plus, it's portable and doesn't break on the way to shows.

Secondly, it's a commentary on the elitism that has permeated this genre or scene in music. One, we're not going to win that arms race; two, who wants to impress those a-holes anyway?

Thirdly, it allows the idea of Arthur White to flourish more fully. I've been reading a lot about King Arthur (you should expect a deluge of ideas from Arthurian legend and scholarship soon). An essay I read last night was "The Image of Arthur and the Idea of King" wherein the author, Mark Allen, explains that Arthur's majesty and mystery and the grandeur of his court creates "a sense of extension--a presence that embraces all of these figures [individual members of his court and their adventures] and is greater than their sum." Allen writes, "One of the curiosities of [Arthur's] tradition is that the romances have, in relative terms, little to do with Arthur himself, concentrating on his knights instead. We get the strong sense that the king is not one who does, but one who has others do for him."

I've talked about this before: the idea that Arthur's diminution is paradoxically the key to his greatness. Obviously, this has a slightly different, more royal flavor. In order to be exalted as having the great symbolic significance that others seem to see in him, he needs to never be fully attached to, grounded in, or associated with any mundane reality, including any of the many stories that continually accrue to him. Arguably, it is Arthur's ambiguity itself that encourages the proliferation and accumulation of stories. It is the sine qua non of his ongoing splendor and majesty. Ground him in too many specifics, too many measurables, too many details that place him in a certain place or time or tradition, and that all goes away.

Additionally, the MIDI concept is interesting in a similar way. It creates a track that has all the basic information but which will ideally be buried by better instruments at some point and resurrected in a "glorified" form.

So, I'm not saying here that the humbled state is the final word. What I'm saying is that it encourages this phenomenon of development, proliferation, accumulation, grandeur, and majesty. I say that just as Richard the Lionhearted has too much known about him to become the iconic legend Arthur is, so too does grounding Arthur White's identity in mundane actions, conditions, ingredients, possessions, and/or paraphernalia paradoxically turn him into an object incapable of development.

So what might a later, more developed state look like? Well, maybe later Arthur White performances do have him surrounded by a band that does have all those expensive, era-specific instruments and outfits. The thing is, the stories of his knights can be safely developed to whatever extent! We can have a Vox Continental or B3 organ player, a Rickenbacker or Fender Precision bass player, so on and so forth.

But I say that we can't have many of these things adhere to Arthur without endangering his transcendence.