Playlist

Preface

"A Sentence is not emotional a paragraph is." - Gertrude Stein, Sentences and Paragraphs

Texts

Live

May 14, 2016

Donald Byrd

Spectrum Dance Theater in Association with Seattle Repertory Theatre
The Leo Kreielsheimer "Leo K." Theatre - Seattle

A Rap On Race - Created by Anna Deavere Smith & Donald Byrd

A theater of two and more theaters concerning the minds among two and more minds. On a platform above, seated at a table, drinking, actors playing James Baldwin (Donald Byrd) and Margaret Mead (Julie Briskman) hashing out their differences at mid 20th century: liberal humanism being faced down by a desperate existentialism. On the stage below, at intervals, groups of pairs and more of dancers grope into each other's bodies' spaces to selections from Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Minds, talk, and language bodies - face  minds, dance, and music bodies.

May 21, 2016
Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seatle

The Flying Dutchman - Wagner

This is one of those apparently popular works that just doesn't make it for me as a thing, as though Wagner were still trying to figure out how to manage what he wants to accomplish. The music starts in the middle of a storm but never really gets anywhere by it. Instead it waffles into a light comic mode overdosed with pious syrup. The erstwhile hero is a half-baked Manfred and, in a queasy trope of that era, the only faithful woman is a dead one.

Recorded

Arturo Toscanini in excellent hat

May 15, 2016
Symphony in B-flat (#4) Op. 60 - Beethoven - NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini

It spends enormous amounts of time and energy nowhere: befores- betweens- and afters-ville. The scale degree functions are adrift, the meters unmoored to any downbeat. Everything is exactly clear as to where it is as it, but where we are with it, as it, is just out of reach.

Fantaisie in F minor Op. 49 - Chopin - Alfred Cortot

Phrases escape the square. As long as we can keep an eye on the tiniest thread of where we've been we can find our way to a place to land.

Symphony in D minor (#4) Op. 120 - Schumann - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra - Herbert von Karajan

Coming in around upon it again. Tunebits fan out like cards. The second does not follow the first, but occupies the place of the first's centering, within which we find a little story book violin concerto. From then on it is neither clear on which side of the cover we are, nor whether the music is told from in or out as we pass through the quiet fields and woods, along the brook, discovering bit by bit, turret upon turret, a distant glory nearing.

May 17, 2016
Trio für Klavier, Klarinette und Violoncello Op. 114 - Brahms - Christoph Eschenbach, Karl Leister, Georg Donderer

Fronted ideas melt into the back, nothing is here heard whole. The threads of stray variations (they may have been a part of it, had it ever all been there) lift in the wind like battered flags.

Playlist

Live

August 4, 5, 7, and 9, 2013
Der Ring des Nibelungen - Wagner - Seattle Opera
Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle



Hoh Valley, Olympic National Park, 2010

Perhaps only the symphonies of Bruckner are more capable than the Ring of making it clear that hearing a recording, or seeing a film, is no substitute for the real thing, is a fundamentally different experience. As contingent and limiting as any production is (and this, though fine, was no exception) the relative scales of musical time, dramatic time, and real time, and the relative scales of tonal depth and musical dynamics to the dramatic space and to the real space, and of all the other relative scales of things to things to things to things one might posit, ignite together without precedent and without successor.

The world is once again safe for moss and lichen.

From the beginning we are set adrift without bound, illumined from within. the music billows with currents energized from nowhere, pouring from moment to moment and from scene to scene and from act to act and from evening to evening in river-like motions: rushing gliding slipping bending, pooling in lake and cranny, crashing through canyon and plunge  -  mighty and delicate, stagnant and torrent, in turns and at once. From the cartoon of Das Rheingold, painted in broad brush and bright colors, through the collapsing scaffold of Die Walküre and the dragon permeated forests of Siegfried, the leitmotifs and fragments of leitmotifs accumulate inflections and ramified associations to where, by the time we get to Gotterdammerung (sorry - I'm having a devil of a time getting umlauts to show up), where the musical fabric is stretched sheer and hollow, just a few notes sung in mid-dialogue can reverberate back across the entire cycle. Every most intimate tonal hint is a dialogue with the whole.

Recorded

August 8, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 44 - July 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Aaron and I started this session as a sectional, just the two of us watching slides and commenting. Neal was in the neighborhood canvassing for the Democrats and decided he was close enough to canvass me, so a knock on the door produced our third member. In order to get everybody involved he called Anna and she made her audio appearance over the phone.