The Remarkable Accomplishments Of Artists Over 70
Leonard Cohen Bows (Photograph: Aaron Harris/AP)
Fashionably Late, an essay by Mark Lawson published in the August 26, 2008 Guardian, is an impressively thoughtful and insightful consideration of artists, including Leonard Cohen (73), PD James (88), Stanley Middleton (89), and a youngster, Neil Diamond (67), whose performances in old age are genuine triumphs.
This is worth reading by anyone interested in Leonard Cohen, PD James, Stanley Middleton, Neil Diamond, the nature of artists, aging, popular culture, … or anyone sentient and curious about life.
The Art That Results From Old Age Without Problem Resolution
These two excerpts, the first a general statement that includes the quote that comprises the second half of this post’s title, and the second a reflection on Leonard Cohen that strikes me as being dead-on, explicate the main premise of the article.
These conventional expectations of late work – the serenity of seniority, the perfection of a philosophy – have been challenged by the literary critic Edward Said in his influential book On Late Style (2002). Said, a dedicated contrarian, argued that what made autumnal culture most interesting was not that the writer had come to some kind of final understanding of their world and their work, but that they had failed to do so. Career codas such as Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge or Missa Solemnis – dark, dense, dragged out of deafness – were a statement, he argued, of “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction“. (Emphasis mine)
The usual objection to singers in the final phase of their careers has been that their voices go. During the final tours of Frank Sinatra and Nina Simone, audiences had to fight an instinct to shout out for an ear, nose or throat surgeon in the house. But what’s fascinating about Cohen in particular is that, if his voice has gone, it has simply gone to another place – and, probably, a better one. Listening to Cohen’s 1970s and 80s recordings after seeing him perform in Dublin and London this year, I was surprised to find that what had once seemed definitive recordings of Hallelujah and Suzanne felt somehow light and trivial. Now that he has taken the sensible precautions of giving up smoking and taking up yoga, there is a remarkable combination of gravity and clarity in Cohen’s tones.
There is much more to be read and considered, including the significance of undeniably old, undeniably extraordinary artists in fields such as pop music that reward youthfulness.
This unusually provocative and accessible essay can be found at Fashionably Late.
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