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Category: Music

Through the Window

I have been fascinated lately by views of the world as seen through windows. It is an odd fascination in many ways. The world I see through my windows is the same world I go out in daily: my yard; my neighborhood; the people I see walking, whom I too pass when I am out walking. I am not a prisoner in the house, the world through the windows is not a forbidden world. If it is not raining, I drink my morning coffee outside while I listen to birdsong and watch my fellow inhabitants of this world frolic, play, find their own breakfasts.

So why the fascination? It is really not that surprising, is it? In many ways we live in a world where we are separated, we live in boxes even if they are boxes without solid physical boundaries, they are boxes nonetheless. After the better part of a year spent with COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing, we yearn for something different, yearn for what once was, chafe at our restrictions, mourn the sense of touch, connection, of community. Yes we have friends. Yes, zoom has brought us together, even sometimes deepened connections, and yet we are in boxes still.

I can’t say it is at all bad. Where I live people can go out, can gather to some extent, although I tend to only gather and see friends who also observe social distancing and mask rules. In fact I am fortunate to have spent much of Sunday afternoon with a friend just this past weekend.

We gathered for a concert, a fund raiser for a local organization, ACE, which supports students who are interested in the creative arts and their teachers. The concert was in a spacious yard, seating was widely scattered, and a good safe distance was maintained between musicians and audience. It was a beautiful afternoon. We listened to young people joyfully performing their own music. It was an afternoon of respectful sharing and community.

Afterwards my friend and I sat across from each other on her patio chatting, mostly because I had one more glass of champagne than I should have and was not yet to ready to drive home. As much as I am grateful for the telephone and zoom, an in-person conversation, even at a distance still bears a different weight. After a couple of hours, we adjourned to a patio overlooking the Tennessee River to continue our conversation over dinner. It was in many ways a perfect day, music, community, friendship. It was a day that I might once have taken for granted, and which now seems all the more precious.

And so it seems strange to me that, following this precious break from my isolation, that yesterday I should find myself trudging painfully through the slough of despond, mired in mud deep enough that I struggled to extricate myself. That sense of being inside looking out felt heavy. I felt as if I was pounding at the window crying to be released, metaphorically at least, because I knew I could get in my car and drive anywhere I wanted.

Perhaps it was simply because I had spent time with a friend. Perhaps it was because I had spent a few happy hours with family a couple of days later, again outside, again distanced, this time around a fire-pit. Perhaps it was simply this reminder of all that is missed. Perhaps it was just as I hope that we will come to treasure these times spent with loved ones and community, the darker forces of our world were also too much on my mind. Cynicism battled optimism. I feared that our human default response to fear and uncertainty, the fight for me and mine, often no matter the cost, would win out over our better natures.

There are times when I struggle, times when we all struggle, even as, if we are honest with ourselves, we can acknowledge that it could be far worse. But the heart wants what it wants. We all yearn for comfort, the familiar, safety, and this is always at odds with our equal need for creativity and creation, for something new. But the birth of something new always comes with the loss of something familiar. We don’t know what the future will bring, but we know that as much as we yearn for what was, we can never go back. The world changes. We change in the world. And sometime the dark overwhelms. The point is not to stay in the darkness, not to stay inside, but to step into that world, hard as it is. When the darkness overwhelms I have to remember to take a step outside, through the window and into the world, away from whatever walls I myself have constructed.

It is raining, although at the moment only lightly. Through the window I see my neighbors walking. I need to step outside and join them.

October 29, 2020
Delaney and Baldwin, Redux

This morning I awoke to find my brain filled with images of this painting by Beauford Delaney:

Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, 1968. Delaney had never met Fitzgerald, explaining that he “just painted something I saw in my mind” and that, exactly, is the beauty of this painting, one of a few paintings that has jostled about in my thoughts since I last saw the Delaney Exhibit in the Knoxville Museum of Art in February. I always thought I would go back and see more of that exhibit, felt that I only had only managed to just begin to plumb the depths, when everything shut down. I wrote about those first impressions in a blog post on February 22nd, over three months ago now. And then the world changed. I didn’t forget, but somehow in this whole slowing down, this worldwide introversion, my thoughts have meandered only slowly back into place.

As I wrote in February, one of the aspects of Delaney’s portraits was his abstraction and modernism, and his use of light and color to explore something deeper than just the image of a person. Delaney’s portraits of Baldwin’s for example explore human relationship and each painting feels simultaneously like a complete conversation but also a part of an ongoing and open-ended relationship. This is also what I see captured in this portrait of Fitzgerald, although it is admittedly difficult to get the sense of the painting itself from a photographic image.

At the time, I experimented with attempting to take pictures of the physicality of the paint, the brushstrokes, the layers, the addition and subtraction of color. I am not convinced that it was successful, but the images remind me of the sense of rhythm that seemed to emanate from the painting, as if Delaney had managed to visually render something essential about music. Yes, one sees Fitzgerald’s face in the center, but not clearly, more of a memory of the person as it is interwoven with her music. I heard the music as soon as I saw the painting, felt its harmonic vibration, felt Fitzgerald even before I knew the subject matter — a visual representation of Jazz and Blues, melody and harmony, tragedy and joy. This is the thing we cannot capture, cannot explain, and the reason art is so elemental, universal, and necessary to human experience. It has always been so.

Admittedly. I don’t exactly get that sense from these photos. They serve as reminders, visual cues that my brain can link to specific experiences. But that is much the way memory and experience work. The more literate we are, the more we experience art, music, literature, philosophy, science, the more we explore the complex emotional and physical makeup of humanity, the more we are able to see and experience the world with depth and consideration and even conscience. Literacy is more than book-learning. The more we know, the more we experience, the more we can see that the seeming contradictions that define our human experiences aren’t always so much oppositional as they are representative of our inability to express complexity in a straightforward manner. These things all speak to very real aspects of our lives and our beings; they speak to expereiences and feelings that we cannot easily put into words, but which are no less valid, if not more so, than that which is easily explained away.

Delaney has also resurfaced in my thoughts this week because Marble City Opera is hosting a watch party tomorrow night, Friday May 29th, at 7PM on Facebook live where they are showing Shadowlight, an opera by Larry Delinger and Emily Anderson about Beauford Delaney, which premiered here in February. Above is a preview, and I hope you will be enchanted and encouraged to watch with me.

I saw the opening night performance of Shadowlight, and it was one of the most beautiful and emotionally powerful opera experiences I can currently recall. Everything seemed to come together: Anderson’s poetic libretto, Delinger’s score, alternating between dissonance and soothing jazz riffs, the exploration of art and madness as Delaney, confined to St. Anne’s Hospital in Paris, sings of longing, of light, but also of lifelong struggles with internal demons and schizophrenia. Delaney’s random, sometimes erratic and jerked movements, sometimes alternating between softness and turmoil are offset by the sparely geometric and angular movements of the chorus, a spareness that is often emphasized by the angles created by images of paintings projected onto the set, highlighting and obscuring facial features. Order, erraticism, tragedy and love, yes, love, in James Baldwin’s words as he delivers the eulogy for his friend. The magic of this piece was how it captured and transmitted emotion, of love, of art, even of madness, in a way that made it all palpably real. One left stunned, perhaps transformed. I never reviewed this piece, feeling emotionally overwhelmed until well after my thoughts had settled into other grooves.

The actual experience of this performance felt like audience and artists were all of a piece, much the same way I feel that Delaney’s art vibrates, blurring the lines between music, art, literature, and experience. I do not think I was the only person in that audience who felt emotionally pulled into the vortex of that experience. I also do not believe the experience of the video will carry that same sense of envelopment, but I do believe it will still be a powerful experience, and I am highly looking forward to it. I hope you will join me.,

May 28, 2020
Monday Miscellaney
1. Candles lit at the end of the Celtic Service last night at Church of the Ascension.
2. I am still reading Churchill. Nothing else at the moment. Still impressed at the genius, the impetuousness, the naïveté. We forget this, that no one is brilliant at everything, that one can be wise and still a child, at any age. But then who is not complex? Brilliant people as much as the rest of us, except that perhaps their complexities seem more glaring simply because we fear what we do not understand. This is, was, and probably always will be true — this tendency of humans to judge “as through a glass darkly” without seeing or understanding what they are judging.

3. I went to a concert Wednesday night, not so much a formal concert, but a working-through of a piece the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra is commissioning from composer Michael Schachter, titled Cycle of Life The piece will premier in May and is based on a large scale work of the same title by Richard Jolley. This concert was very much a working through and it was fascinating. I sat very close, in the front row between the cello and bass and I loved being in the middle of the flow of the music, the working through. The musicians would play fragments of a work still very much in progress, with alternate selections, and one could hear the differences in the ways the music would take shape, hear and feel the difference in the playing between the musicians, a give and take, sometimes joyous, sometimes reserved, some things working for one musician but not for others, coming together and pulling apart.

I have no real musical ability or talent, merely ears, so this kind of experience was new to me. I had never been in anything quite like it, well except for that Phillip Glass premier nearly two years ago, that rehearsal and working-through of the final piece with composer and musicians. I wrote about that here. I loved it but it was also different than this as this work is still at least partially nebulous. I could hear and feel the tensions in the playing, and of course this is so because even though I do not play, one can hear, and sitting so closely, even feel at times the vibrations of the music, hear the difference in playing with passion or reserve. And of course this very give and take of conversation, of communion almost — meaning a communal sharing — combined with an antagonism, not meaning that in a negative way, this, this sound of coming together and pulling apart is what I always look for in chamber music concerts, this melding of the music with the person playing the music, structure, abstraction and humanity intertwined. It is an indescribable thing that one knows when one hears it, and misses when it is absent.

The entire evening took on the atmosphere of a great and exciting conversation, with moments of coalescence, and where even those elements that did not work added to the sense of excited tension in the room, the growing of something new and beautiful. I am very much looking forward to this work, filled with eager anticipation and excitement, like a good mystery, I do not know what is going to happen. But snippets remain dancing in my head, adding to that sense of fulfillment to come. Above the composer and KSO Music Director Aram Demirjian conferring about a section, the musicians briefly pausing.

4. From the sublime to the mundane. I have a large second-cut piece of brisket in the fridge which I hope to start curing/brining this afternoon with hopes of having a lovely piece of corned beef in a few weeks.

5. And now I am running, this post unedited, as the day is about to run away without me.
February 3, 2020
Monday Miscellaney

Life seems to have been quiet so far this January, but I do in fact grow weary of simply reporting on books past. Here is a round up of small things, alas with few pictures. It seems, in my general contentment, I have been remiss in snapping photographs.

1. Although it turned chill while I was in Texas early last week, they too had been having unseasonably warm weather. These roses were still in bloom in my mother’s garden.

2. Two concerts this week, both focusing on Beethoven. I missed my normal night at the Concertmaster Series as my flight was delayed returning from Dallas, but I managed tickets for the second night, which combined Haydn and Beethoven trios, a beautiful performance of the Violin Sonata #7, and Mason Bates’ Ford’s Farm for Violin and Piano. Then, yesterday, an all-Beethoven program, which concluded with a stunningly fabulous performance of Symphony 1; a performance which both acknowledged the classical legacy of Haydn, while also highlighting Beethoven’s own restless modernity. Beginning with that slightly off-center opening chord, the music danced and playing with expectation, shining light in corners sometimes forgotten in the fog of familiarity. I was particularly taken with the incredibly playful Scherzo, which could only make me smile, kittenish as it was: flirting, happy, withdrawing and coming forward again; but also almost kitten-like with its tumbling, rolling, falling, and leaping.

Sunday’s concert also featured the two Romances: one played in a classically European style, with a surface reserve that did not hide the depths within but revealed them subtly; the other in a lushly and emotionally melodic performance, that flowed straight to the heart, but also captured the head, subtly shining light on the mathematics of the inner structure. The two together provided the perfect counterpoint to the lushness, depth and complexity of the music, to its utter and complex humanity.

3. Saturday was the first time in 2020 that I made it to the winter Farmer’s market. I went in thinking I would pick up only a few things, but January warmth has led to a flowering of produce and I came home heavily laden. I have been happily cooking. Tiny carrots were roasted and their tender fluffy greens, young enough not to have the typical tinge of bitterness have danced through salads, and have been washed and saved for a future soup. Many baby greens came home with me, as did beets, although they were purchased mostly for their lush greens. Once I finish this post, and after I head to the gym, those beets will be transformed into Monday brunch in the form of red flannel hash.

4. Knoxville Symphony Music Director Aram Demirjian’s talk before the concert had me making new connections, perhaps a stretch, perhaps not. As Demirjian talked about the young Beethoven and his really rather revolutionary musical explorations I was struck by a similarity to the young Winston Churchill. Perhaps this is a stretch, but perhaps not. I am still working my way slowly through the first volume of William Manchester’s life of Churchill, and young Winston also happens to be much in mind of late. After the concert I spent time alternating knitting with more reading about young Churchill, his own process of thinking and reshaping that which came before and his own path. Probably not the most efficient way to either read or knit, especially as my mind kept wandering to questions about the nature of creativity and genius. Oh, and I also finished the front of my cardigan, something that had been neglected of late. Now onto the sleeves.

5. Listening. Inspired partly by this week’s bonanza of Beethoven, a jazz concert I missed because I was away, and the necessities of travel (there is no longer a tv at my mom’s house so I listened to music in the evening), it seems there is always time for music. Recordings are not the same as live music, but I cannot imagine a life completely devoid of either. In fact, live music inspires me to listen more at home. These three albums (two new, one not) have been in pretty heavy rotation this week:

Maciej Obara Quartet: Three Crowns

Bill Fay: Countless Branches

Jupiter Trio: Beethoven “Ghost” Trio and Shostakovich Trio #2

There may be a theme there, between the occasionally naked emotionality of Obara’s saxophone, Bill Fay’s liltingly vulnerable songs offset by spare piano, and the dynamic passion of the Jupiter trio’s performance on this album. I would love to hear all three live.

6. I am reminded of a book I read earlier in the month, a book that has been in my mind this week, as it addresses so much, including yearnings, both the yearnings for a future combined its impatience of childhood, and the yearnings and occasional regrets of adults, combined beautiful evocations of place and the struggle between mind and heart that makes art, or genius. The book is Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro. And I am reminded of a quote from fairly early in the novel, in the opening pages, where the Maestro is describing the hand, specifically the hand of a pianist, but also employing it as a metaphor about the struggle between mind and muse, head and heart, the relationship that makes art. Specifically he is talking about the fingers, but his description also reminds me of the way a great quartet works (or perhaps a trio, see above)

”They are great friends. A circle of friends. But also great rivals.”

Strong-willed, compassionate, occasionally struggling, at times vulnerable, emotional, at others reserved. The give and take, the release and the holding back. This is what makes life, and art, what we yearn for, but also, sometimes, what we fear.

January 27, 2020
Musical Musings and Meanderings

There was a brief burst of spring-like warmth last week, followed by a return to more seasonal temperatures. The sunshine-yellow of forsythia acts as a beacon of promise throughout my neighborhood, the bulbs are beginning to shoot skyward, and the hellebores are blooming. I am not worried about them, they are all tough, and it is a joyous thing, always to see that little burst of spring promise, especially in my own garden which is remains filled more with hope and dreams rather than actual plants.

I have been suffering through a bit of rotator cuff tendinitis. This has limited my ability to do a surprising variety of things, not just take advantage of the warmth to dig in the garden, but also to type, write, and knit for more than very short stretches. I suppose I could have pushed through, but am rather hoping that enforced rest will result in healing and another kind of blossoming.

During this period of forced repose, I attended my first symphony concert of the new year, following a week of excited anticipation. My heightened expectations were at least partially fed by the experience of attending at least part of a rehearsal for the performance on Tuesday. Friday night the music filled me with joy.

The part of the rehearsal that I had attended was for the first half of the concert, the Mozart Piano concerto #23 played by the exciting new young pianist Aristo Sham. During the rehearsal I had felt that Sham was almost ethereally calm, the music flowed with speed and grace, although I wasn’t yet sure what I thought. Friday night, I was delighted. Sham’s performance was fascinating, outwardly still and calm, and yet the music flowed with a kind of sunny light sparkle. This was a young man’s mozart, filled with grace but also a kind of bubbling enthusiasm. Sham’s performance was quick and light, not at all ostentatious, skipping along like a conversation between vibrant young people who grew up together, almost instinctually anticipating each other’s moods and reactions. Sham provided a new insight to a familiar piece, making me realize that my favorite performers of the Mozart concertos, although quite different from each other share a more mature reflective sense, and that perhaps, although I too am inclined to more mature reflection, I also need to hear the light brought by music from new perspectives.

The Mozart was followed by Mahler’s first symphony. Although I adore Mozart, Mahler is particularly close to my heart and it was for the Mahler that my heart was yearning. It was fabulously done, with a tightly focused point of view — necessary in such a sprawling, overwhelmingly human work. The soft opening was breathtaking, evolving slowly into the lush theme of the first movement. The effervescence of the dance, the sadness of the slow movement, of familiarity tinged with despair and absurdity, and the thunderous ending. From the audience as well, that thunderous ending.

I have missed hearing Mahler in Knoxville. I do not think a Mahler symphony has been performed here since I moved to this city, whereas I heard at least one every year in New York. Judging from the excitement and applause surrounding me in the concert hall, i do not believe I am alone in wishing for more.

Admittedly, I came home wired and electrified, wishing to discuss the performance and the depth of the music. instead, I opted to hear it again. I watched the wonderful DVD of Claudio Abaddo leading the Lucerne Festival orchestra, (available on Amazon Prime Video) before collapsing into music filled dreams, comparing, contrasting, reveling. This is not a bad thing. Each performance brings its own particularly clarity of vision, its own point of view. A good thing in humanity and music, reminding me at least of both the complexity and the commonality of human experience.

Truthfully, the music still runs through my head, and I want to keep listening. Each of the 4 or 5 recordings i own of this work brings its own unique perspective and exploration, and right now my brain is too full to absorb even more voices; at the moment I want to just savor the memory of this performance, so close to home, and also close to my heart.

But of course nothing remains pure in memory, new experiences barge in, altering our perspective, and other, seemingly unrelated memories also wend their way through the thoughts. In my case this means that Mahler and Mozart are somehow picking their way through my thoughts joined by the musical musings of R. B. Morris, whose songs have also been in my mind and heart since hearing him perform the previous Friday. I somehow don’t think either one of them would mind; they were both, after fully aware of the musical idioms and traditions of their own times and cultures. And although I found the Morris concert to exert slightly less of a lightening-rod like shock to the easily bored and distracted nature of my own peripatetic brain, the songs themselves are no less satisfying, filled with the kind of wisdom and poetry and intelligence that haunts the memory, much like their forebears.

January 20, 2020
Weekend Update: Socks, Playing with Clay, Music

I ripped the sock back on Saturday, ripped it back to about an inch and a half from the ribbing at the top. I knew I had dropped a stitch, and was holding it with a marker. But at some point after the heel I discovered that I had dropped another stitch on the foot, and a I tinked back I also discovered that there were other errors. I am not a perfectionist. One error I can live with, but this was too many.

The sock is not done. But I will be much happier with it, having accepted my mistakes and started over.

Saturday night I went to a “Pottery Indulgence” party/workshop at Arrowmont School of Craft in nearby Gatlinburg. I had never made anything out of clay before, I was a bit nervous, and my bowl is a bit rough, but I had a lot of fun.

First we played with texture on a sample slab, then we applied the texture and cut out our bowl shape, refining the edges, smoothing and beveling, and finally folding it up and forming it into a bowl. I had a little trouble with the seams, but I got them together. My thumb, index and middle fingers are the ones most plagued by arthritis, but I managed. Somehow, while I was trying to form my bowl without simultaneously deform it, I was reminded of childhood, of making mud pies with my friend Ginny, and the perfect little turkeys she would mold from the mud.

Perhaps I am not a natural at clay. But I would like to play some more. The “handles” on my bowl were a last-minute whim. I had planned to leave the top plain, but then started drawing free-form leaf shapes in my practice clay. They may be the best thing I did. They may prove to be a disaster. As you can tell, it was time to walk away.

Friday night was symphony night, and I took the family. Grandson O is very interested in percussion, and one of the works on the program was a fabulous percussion concerto, Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! by Avner Dorman. The percussionists were two members of Nief Norf, a contemporary music group based in Knoxville (which I adore), Andrew Bliss and Mike Truesdell. The performance was energetic and dynamic, a conversation really between these fabulous musicians and the orchestra itself, almost a marathon given the huge number of percussion instruments the two men played, including marimbas, vibraphones, tom-toms, bells, bongos, drum sets and things I can’t identify. They brought both power and subtlety to the performance: from the complex tapestry of sounds that was the first movement (spices), through the often delicate lyricism of the middle section and into the dynamic combativeness and melding together of the closing, feeling very redolent of the complexities of modern life. I was awed, amazed and enlightened.

The concert ended with Beethoven’s 7th symphony, a piece that revolves more around rhythmic passages than around complex melodies, and it was heavenly, perhaps the finest Beethoven I have heard this orchestra perform. It seems that I am becoming boringly repetitive in that I keep saying that the orchestra has never sounded better, and they haven’t. It is true. The performance was held lightly, buoyant even, the orchestra seeming to achieve a kind of relational nuance that I tend to associate with fine chamber groups, even if on a larger scale. The music was crisp, conversational, happy even, as tensions that arose and resolved, like an evening spent with the best of friends. As I sat listening, my fingers and toes dancing to the music, O’s head resting on my shoulder, I could think of few things more magical.

November 25, 2019
Puttering on a Friday Afternoon

I’ve been an absentee blogger of late.

I have been settling in however, feeling this need to finish nesting, to spend time in the final bits of getting my space in order, broken up, of course, by long bouts playing with yarn or thread, or completely new to me, pastels. Really I can think of little nicer in life at the moment than not having to account for my time.

Today, I am working on garden plans. There are areas that I cannot plant yet, areas waiting for trees, or fences. Alas these are the areas of the yard for which I also have the clearest vision. That leaves me playing with ideas on paper for the remaining areas. A task that is both important, and somewhat fruitless as well. I am the kind of person who likes to start with a plan, but I also realize that with gardening, if not all of life, those plans are always built on partial information…

So we will see how it all turns out.

As I play with paper and colored pens and pencils I am also listening to the string quartets of Grazyna Bacewicz, which I am finding fabulously beautiful and powerful. I am listening to the recording by the Silesian Quartet on Chandos, which is also available as a series of videos on YouTube. If you have any patience for mid-twentieth century string quartets, I highly recommend these, and perhaps even if they are bit of a stretch but you want to expand your horizons with something by a gifted female composer.

There is also another YouTube video here, of the Syzmanski Quartet playing the Quartet #4, from a performance in 2015. The two groups bring different insights to the piece, which is new enough to me that I am still in the process of discovery.

Hoping you all have a wonderful weekend, filled with fun and relaxation as well as a touch of discovery, perhaps.

November 1, 2019
Music, Memory, Art(?): Where are We Now?

Last night I attended an incredibly beautiful chamber music concert, the first of the Knoxville Symphony's Concertmaster series for this year and was stunned by the skill, harmony, and emotional weight of the performance. I also allowed my mind to wander, as the minds of humans are won't to do, enjoying the music, experiencing the place, and allowing my thoughts to attempt to integrate the feelings of the now with the history that has led up to the now. It became a tangled mass of branching thoughts, which also seems to me to be a very human phenomenon. It is only when we cling too tightly to simplicity that we can be led astray.

The program consisted mostly of music of the baroque era, and mostly music of great emotional depth and weight. The exceptions are important here, as was the layout of the program, as the contrast added necessary tension, a tension that served to expand the listeners response, inspite of, or perhaps because of, the interruption in flow. This is harder to do than one might assume, this contrasting of what I will call style and substance, in a way that actually enhances all of the components, making something that felt whole out of disparate, but thematically related, pieces.

The basic format was along these lines: style, substance, style, substance.

But how did that take shape? First there was Corelli, with "La Folia for Violin, Harpsichord, and Continuo", a light vibrant piece that set the tone, a musical amuse-bouche of sorts. Corelli is important for shaping the tone of the baroque, but also because he insisted on a consistency in technique that changed the way music was performed, opening the way, perhaps, for modern orchestral performance. Corelli also, at least to this listener, seems to be incredibly balanced, lyrical, crisp, happy music, but a music of surfaces only, the depth held tightly at bay. The Corelli was followed by a longer work by Handel, the Sonata #4 in D Major for Violin and Harpsichord, which was richly resonant, imbued with an emotional sense that played harmoniously with the setting in the Knoxville museum of art. The lighter movements seeming to bounce playfully off the glass sculpture overhead, to dance through the texture of the cloud-filled sky seen just beyond the musicians, the contrast of baroque music and modern city in the moments before dusk. And then just that, dusk and the passion of the Scherzando, eternal, and yet also extremely specific to this communal experience in this time and space.

Then we began the second style-substance rotation. The Handel was followed by Martinu, by the "Promenades for Flute Violin and Harpsichord". It seems like an interesting choice on the surface, Martinu a very 20th-Century composer, a composer whose music seems perfectly in tune to his milieu between the wars that eternally changed human consciousness concerning who and what humans are and could become. Martinu was also attracted to the baroque, an interesting choice, but perhaps not surprising, an attempt to find a path forward while looking backward, looking for something in human history that softened the weight of the emotional moment. In this sense Martinu reminded me of Corelli — perhaps less formally polished and reserved, but also all style — except this was music for the jazz age, music of the 20's, music that was intentionally avoiding the inescapable emotional weight of the recent past.

I suspect that many in the audience did not love the Martinu as much as the Handel. I could say that I too might prefer to drift into Handel than Martinu, although I found it both shocking, and it is strange to say that about music that is over 80 years old, and charming in a way that had me considering Martinu differently than I had previously, probably mostly because I am only familiar with his symphonic output. But the Martinu also served to pull my thoughts together in a way that would have been different had the music not been included. I think placement was critical here, just before the intermission. If I were to maintain the food analogy, I would say it was a bit of a tart sorbet or palate cleanser, allowing our ears and minds to reset between two too-rich courses.

And the second half was rich. We were treated to two of the Brandenburg Concerti, and due to the considerations of the space, the audience and the larger group of musicians, the space itself began to feel as if we were all participating cells in a single body as the music unfolded, musicians and listeners as one. There was a very relational sense to this performance, one that is not always captured both between the musicians, and between the musicians and the audience, one where the listeners feel as if they are a part of the music surrounding them. It was a powerful and beautiful evening.

But this leads me to the other part of this performance, the places the music led my mind to wander, and my own questioning of history, experience, and humanity. These thoughts are my own, of course, and yet, much as we like to think ourselves unique, this is but a shadow truth. I am but a speck after all, and music reminds us of this, of the way we are transported into some common place even though our individual experiences of that place are different. We are all just cells in one giant living tree, twisted and overgrown perhaps, but an inexorably connected piece of the whole. It seems interesting, therefore, that though we live in a time when we prefer to think of ourselves as unique, we still thrill to music written in a time when the uniqueness of the individual was not a priority. This very dichotomy seems to connect us even more deeply. Even though we cannot experience anything in the same way as that previous cell did, its existence informs our existence.

As I listened to the Corelli, I was transported back to my 17- and 18- year old self, to the girl who loved Corelli, the girl would sit in her dorm room and lose herself in this music. I wondered what a young girl saw in Corelli and I am not surprised: the joy of it, yes, but also the harmony and cohesiveness. Perhaps it was that very lack of emotional weight that drew me in. At that age all I wanted was an escape from the burden of emotional strife, and as I listened to the music again, I reconnected with that sense last night, the was reminded of the way we yearn for peace today, yearn for escape from the sense of strife hammered into us every time we look at the news.

Corelli and Martinu, Handel and Bach. Baroque music connects us to some essential yearning. But we cannot have it, not in the way we think anyway. The way we listen to this music today is shaped by the way the world has been altered over the course of the last 120 years. It is in our DNA. The music we heard last night was unique to a particular time and place. We the listeners, and the musicians playing the music, are each completely who we are, and we are products world entirely different from the one in which Handel lived. That Handel could write music that transcended time and place is art. That is something unique to us, we humans, art and awareness — not just that we are aware, but that we are aware that we are aware, and this awareness changes us throughout subsequent generations, even, and oh the injustice of it, without our being aware that we are changed.

The music by Martinu reminded me of this, of my adolescent self loving Corelli, of the way we, the collective audience, loved the Handel, and that sense of universal yearning. The Martinu struck me because it made me think about the way many audiences of classical music today struggle with this period, struggle more I think with this "modern" period that occurred between the wars, the music where one world, one social structure, had been torn asunder and yet there was no stability, where another war was going to change our very understanding of humanity. We struggle because we cannot recapture that feeling experienced by generations before us, by people who were transformed into a different kind of awareness following WWII. We are inheritors of a different kind of world, but, in a way, like Martinu, we seek a more distant history, one less imbedded in our more recent DNA. Perhaps we too attempt to integrate old with new, dreams with the reality of the world in which we live, yearnings with experience.

I don't think we think of music, or art, in this way very often, and perhaps my own meandering reflections are shaped by new understandings, or misunderstandings, from recent readings. But it seems like something worth exploring. Or not.

This perhaps is just a beginning, an incoherent beginning at that.

October 10, 2019
Monday Miscellany

A few highlights, diversions and meandering thoughts from last week…

Radish Greens Soup

I had purchased radishes, as much for their beautiful greens as for the radishes themselves at the farmer's market the Saturday before I burned my hand, and since I did not want those gorgeous greens to go to waste I managed to make soup, despite the burn, although it was a more time-consuming process than I might usually expect. I was using Béatrice Peltre's recipe from My French Family Table, which I had used a year and half ago, before the book was packed away. That first time I had noted that the soup was too redolent of potato for me, and needed more onion and so this time I halved the potato and added a leek to the shallot that was called for in the recipe, mostly because I had a leek on hand. I also sweated the leek, shallot, and celery slowly over very low heat, rather than sautéing them over medium heat as directed. Although I probably did not need to, I used homemade chicken stock in the soup, and given that I tend to make a rich bone-broth-type of stock, my final soup is really more of a green chicken soup than was intended. I probably didn't need the chicken stock at all, of perhaps only one cup of stock and three cups of water. The soup was delicious though, and a good thing to have on hand.

Downton Abbey

It will come as no surprise that I loved Downton Abbey and am ready to see it again anytime. I loved the series after all. Perhaps my mom would like to go see it, although I've had difficulty getting her out to movies in the recent past. At the same time perhaps my affection is surprising given that, aside from British literature, I am not an anglophile and care not a flip for the hoopla over royal weddings and babies, but there you are. I am nothing if not inconsistent, and although I love the costumes, I also love the story lines, and the idea of fine acting around smaller themes, the idea that one can float ideas without blowing things up, that one can participate in a system even while knowing it is doomed. Perhaps I just grow tired of darkness and harshness. Perhaps I too just want to look at a pretty dress and smile, relish the witty asides and 15-second references to all too human foibles, perhaps even a hint of nostalgia for something I am well aware was never really the way we imagine it have been.

Garden

General planting and landscaping is delayed by the continued heat and drought, the good news being that although I am surrounded by clay and dirt, at least I am not surrounded by mud. Nonetheless I was thrilled to look outside and see the that the two remaining lace cap hydrangeas are showing signs of budding. I shall enjoy the flowers and hope that this is not an all-out last ditch attempt at replicating themselves before giving up the ghost. Perhaps it is part of my concerted effort to water the existing shrubs, running slow trickles around the few surviving specimens, for long hours, hoping that the water will be absorbed rather than running off. I wonder that even this may not be enough, wonder if my attempts at watering are actually helping or prolonging the agony, although I take comfort in the fact that the plants that once looked peaked and weary seem to have perked up a good bit. Perhaps this is all worth the call from KUB informing me that my water usage has been high… yes, I know. If I had to give up showering in order to water the plants I would do so. I am tired of losing things, not that my own feelings will affect the outcome in any way. I only hope it is enough to keep everything going while I run off to Texas. I will have contractors in the house, but I can't expect them to water the garden.

The Planets

The symphony season opened Thursday with a performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets, which was accompanied by a video presentation of images compiled and collated from NASA. Admittedly I had mixed feelings going in, but felt it worked beautifully, the powerful images mostly playing well with the music and riffing off cultural references (such as Star Wars) that probably 80% of the audience, if not more, was simultaneously running through their heads. The concert hall was almost full on Thursday, when I went, and apparently sold out on Friday, and the music was powerfully and beautifully performed.

And despite all that, perhaps as much because of the pictures as due to the fact that I know the music so well, my mind did wander a little bit. Mostly I was thinking of the music and it's cultural associations, and not just because of Star Wars, and other film and television references. Themes and ideas from the Planets show up in religious music, school songs, popular music, so many places. And of course this is not unique to Holst. I always think that there is a world of educational opportunity out there, that although we have lost a certain degree of musical literacy, much of this strong tradition exists in our cultural memory, although it may be hidden and not overtly recognized. Much the same can be said for Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, early polyphony…. but during the performance of the Holst, I was thrilling to the music and imagining the possibilities of uniting the world, the music of Holst, and Star Wars, Christian Hymns, Frank Zappa, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath all running through my head. The music has its own weight and presence, but all experience builds on previous experience, and a performance is never just itself, but always this fusion of all that has come before it with al that is happening in the present. A fine evening.

Science in Motion

The same evening that I attended the symphony I also went to an opening reception for a new exhibit at the McClung museum of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, Berenice Abbot and Harold Edgerton. The exhibit was lovely and well worth attending. I was already familiar with most of the work by Muybridge and Abbot, less familiar with Edgerton, although some of the images are very well known. I found myself as fascinated by reading about the techniques and processes as in viewing the images themselves, thinking about the intersection of art and science, and the radical changes that the world has seen in the past 100 to 150 years. I was also taken with the camera cookies, even though I couldn't eat a one of them.

September 23, 2019
Listening

Bard Music Festival. Is it 1999? or 2004? Are we listening to Shostakovich or Schoenberg? I don't remember. I simply remember being asked "but can you hum it?". Whatever it was that we had been listening to on that particular afternoon, the answer was "probably not". I wanted to respond that "you can't really hum Beethoven's 5th Symphony either" or at least I can't, at least not large parts of it. But I worried that perhaps that was just me. Perhaps I still worry, worry about whether I am forgetting, or if I truly never paid attention.

This memory comes to mind because my friend Patti asked me a question over dinner, before we attended a recital featuring Paul Barnes at Roosevelt University, a recital featuring the music of Philip Glass, including the new (2018) Piano Quintet. Patti asked me if I could describe the quintet, and I am embarrassed to say I could not. I could not describe the Beethoven either although I know it intimately, almost as if it resides in my bones. I knew I wrote about the Piano Quintet last April, and although I may have described the work, at least partially, I probably mostly referred to its emotional weight and resonance simply because this is what draws me into music. I am more interested in the way listening to music feels, the way the experience of listening shapes and alters space and perception and the emotional resonance of the conversation between musician and artist. And because it seems to me that each experience is unique, I am reluctant to read that blog post before writing this post as I fear it will alter my memory and understanding of what I heard.

Nonetheless, I was startled by my simple inability to describe the music itself. I felt I had fallen short, and I wondered why I bother writing about music at all, if I cannot remember it, or describe it, or hum it. I wondered if my memory has become so flawed, or if it was always thus. I wonder if it matters. I admit I've intentionally been trying to let go of the critical aspects of memory, the critically-comparative way of "so and so played x in a particular way, and since you do not you are not good enough" side of listening with my head instead of my heart. I wonder then, if I've lost something, and if so, if I have gained something else in return?

Then, later that same evening, with the opening notes of the quintet, memory came flooding in and I remembered the entire piece, as if I had just stepped into a deeply familiar well. All my memories descended and filled me up. I could hear the entire piece swirling around me, before it was played on stage and as it was played on stage, like a familiar old friend. And the music, this music, this performance, pulled me into its own space, the same sense of being enveloped in a space that was both simultaneously inclusive and expansive, the same feeling I had during those first two performances. Of course even as my head acknowledged that the music was the same, the conversation was different. Nothing, certainly not performance, is ever the same twice, and this performance, in this hall, with a different group of musicians, was not the same as my first experience of the piece. Yet it was equally satisfying. I heard the music and felt lifted and engulfed in open arms. And yet, in this hall, which was smaller than the Lied Center, the work took on a more brooding and meditative feel, similar to the feelings evoked listening to the rehearsal before the concert in Nebraska, and yet somehow more rounded, more comfortable with its own edges. The strings of the Chiara Quartet had sounded lighter and brighter to me, more airy, as if I was being lifted on wings, whereas in this performance the music felt closer. Once again I felt enveloped and carried upward, wrapped in cashmere and released into the light rather than carried on wings of air.

Barnes' playing was at once familiar and new, as it should be in a different setting, and I was once again entranced. All these things were running through my mind and my heart, but my thoughts were also at least partially shaded by a painting I had seen earlier in the afternoon, a painting by Jay DeFeo, a painting titled "The Annunciation" just as Glass's Piano Quintet is titled "Annunciation". During the brief intermission, I sat in the concert hall, reveling in the memory of the music, and thinking how wonderful it was that here I was in a concert hall on the first night of Passover, on Good Friday, the opposite end of the Christian calendar from the event called the Annunciation, and yet experiencing this confluence of art and music. I am sure that my reaction to the painting influenced my reaction to the music, just as I am sure that the way the first notes of the quintet resurrected my memory, wrapping me in its own cloud-like layer, also influenced my reaction to music I was hearing. I am not sure we can separate these things out of our experiences, nor that we should even try, every performance is a complexly layered conversation between artist and listener, of art, impulse, understanding, and experience, and it is this very layering that makes music, well, art.

So I suppose I no longer feel bad about not being able to describe the music. My ability to describe things may be poor. But my interest seems to remain solidly in the realm of feelings evoked, rather than the details of the thing itself, and apparently my head has limited capacity for things. Until I started writing this piece the music that most came to mind was the song of the birds when I stepped outside my door this morning. That Friday in Chicago, the music that filled my soul before the visit to the concert hall, before the museum, was the lilting sounds of high school students in the hotel restaurant and the sound of the street: wind and cars, tenor and bass, whispering altos, and the ringing high call of the wind. It is enough. I continue to be more interested in the conversation with the music, the bubble of space-time that music creates, than in the actual notes themselves. Ah yes, you may say, I am obviously not a musician.

The rest of the concert was wonderful as well. I had not heard any of the other pieces before, or at least if I had I did not remember them. But I think I had not. This has always been a struggle, describing something I have only heard once, and this time is no different. Through repetition my initial reactions are revealed and I become more invested in the music. In that sense, listening is like writing. I don't really know what I think until I write it down. I don't really understand what I heard until I hear it again, until I find a pattern in which to organize my own understanding.

Even though I thoroughly enjoyed the entire concert, the only other part of the concert about which I can really say anything was a piece from 2008, Four Movements for Two Pianos, the last piece. Perhaps I recall it as much because I was fascinated by the musicians, the intstruments, and the way these three aspects — music, artists, instrument — combined in distinct ways to produce something that seemed satisfyingly whole and beautiful. As for the music itself, once again I can't describe exactly what I heard, only that the music felt very introspective and personal to me, not so much music inspired by an idea, as in the Annunciation Quintet, but as music simply for its own sake. The two pianists, Winston Choi and Paul Barnes were completely different in the method, style, and temperament of their playing, and simply watching them play was fascinating. The instruments also were quite different: The piano played by Barnes was bright, sharp and clear, and he made the piano sing with a dancing lyricism. The other piano had a softer timbre, a more rounded and rolling sound to its tones and Choi elevated its sound into an alternating dance of harmony and melody with Barnes. It seemed like music of opposites, of contrast merging into one single voice. Old and new, soft and sharp, round and jagged. Harmony.

April 26, 2019