Art Song

Her voice in the chanson so that I'm in that evening orchard,

in that peach odor, at silk, the soft plush lipid layering, too,

the savory of her in my ear, body gone to mind,

the experience of her, the reason for her, clear

voiced in the chamber of the SUV, she, and me

embarking for Cythera, still living in the idyll

hearing the night fiddle of crickets from the fields.

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Art Means Work. Yes, Work.

This should open your eyes and interest you.  

What to those of us who are 'just plain folks', who believe in 'democratic arts', who may recognize that being called a 'philistine' is a slur, but simply show our social equality in return (Back at ya!) -- what to us appears as an elitist enterprise, ballet, really produces more sweat in a day than a lifetime of backyard barbecues and lawn-mowings.

This clip doesn't show it all:  the blisters and infected corns, the slipped discs, the exhaustion, the struggle just to be able to get a chance to suffer that way!  The schooling, the disciplined adolescence, the foregone 'outside' life, the forced 'early retirement' at 30 or -- if you're truly strong -- 40.  

The sheer physicality of it.

The mental grit needed for it.

Nils Tavernier's film of a decade ago, Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, honors the institution it views.

It should also raise the question:  How much guts do I have -- how much have I given?

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Post-Modern Rhapsody

The sedan, its sound system at medium-high volume catching the diamond tosses and pearl droplets of Donizetti bel canto, stops before a business intersection at a long light.

Across the way, dressed in a long smock, wearing a rubbery tiara spiked like the Statue of Liberty, dances a bearded man waving a sign promising 50 dollars if we do your taxes.  Boogaloo, his 50-year-old lip twist seems to say.  Get with the rhythm, gesture his fingers and fists.

His highs hit Donizetti highs

His hip-pivots, orchestral swoops.

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To Think Of This Is To Be Part Of This

Sleep trembles in its throat-sound off a bear-cave wall, women

wandering in cloak-long dream coats back at the white glaze of past time

Night blackens except for the fixated speckle of TV and the township's occasional street lamp

The odd father garage opens for a last table saw

All's tinkering last minute, as in the sound of a hairbrush fluffing out a parrot's hot feathers, water being shot off into the rank fishmouth of the bay

Inside the best head of us, Mozart quietens, the intimacy works at the knees of the cellist, at the breath lips of the flute, and fingers bring order to the violin, light wondering at itself

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Small Car, Big Sound

Listening to Idomeneo not caring about the plot.  

No costumes, an audience of one.

I get it.

Quotidian

 

The government's metal box, ordinanced

A house away from the woman's garage, and the woman

Herself underneath an overhang, standing at ease

In the task of her junk, to disencumber her life,

Her stare my way, the way toward a strange neighbor

In the drizzle with his mail scurried to the post,

His car door just ajar for quick re-entry,

The radio just being heard on a movement -- 

Andante cantabile --

At peace with this light rain no one thought

Would come this day like any day

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How Enlightenments Work

In Amadeus, 

Where Emperor J's bureaucrats

Insist opera can show no ballet,

This being The Marriage of F,

Mozart has them dance to no sound

(Choreographed by Twyla Tharp),

Their steps go thunk to a musicless beat --

So irrational (They're like waxworks)! --

And the E must rescind his own law.


Artists must always work in the cracks

For the greatness of art to proceed.

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The Measure Of All Things

On my way to coffee, a segment of lecture, Aristotle.  

On mature, self-disinterested friendship being the fullest

On friendship as the basis for polis,  polis for family, even.

On reaching a pause, going to a classical FM, a guess at Haydn

On later finding that correct per online playlist

On taking an extra ten to drive the neighborhood here, high

On the hill, on the alpine horn, string tremolo, and fresh Fall air

On shutting it off, the car, the sound, the responsive eyes and ears

On figuring, then, the shortfall from the best -- how far we are.

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Retro-Neo-Post-Nostalgia

Years ago at a job that played music softly throughout the office, I asked my boss What is that they're playing?  

(I think I'd heard it on a movie soundtrack, a 'standard', popular before my birth).

He pondered and listened and said Moonlight Serenade.  I think he was right.

Cut to years later, same movie whose soundtrack did indeed include Moonlight Serenade.

But.  It also had this other song, this other tune.  Probably not the one my boss and I were hearing, but another one I'd confused then and kept on confusing for decades.

This morning, Starbucks.  Ella's singing it, the 'big screen' showing its name:

I'm Getting Sentimental Over You

In the head, it's a trombone melody, a Tommy Dorsey sound.

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Et. Al.

Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms.

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner.

Rothko, Pollock.

Pound.

All 'irregulars'.  None without 'issues'.  

A list that could go on, if I had the breath and breadth.

Is it that they're 'like us', frail?  Is it that we're like them, capacious?

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What Does Fair, Is Fair

Approaching music like a simple animal

catching the body English with the same eye

that picks up flame, yet knowing this is not random

that this is intentional, a fire on purpose

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Artistic Concentration

New York Times Critic Anthony Thomassini on Mozart:

"Though he lived through the French Revolution you search his letters in vain for anything other than the most oblique references to this continental cataclysm.  He had no feeling for nature and no interest in the visual arts.   In his letters home during his wide-ranging travels he describes everything he heard and nothing he saw."


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This Song Is You

Small talk's not to be avoided.

It's its inflatable nature that's its genius.

It's the motive for the melody, the sonata's two themes,

The two parts that grow into duet.

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One Touch

Berlioz

Bizet

Chabrier

Chausson

D'Indy

Dukas

Fauré

Franck

Gounod

Massenet

Saint-Saëns

...

Clear Moon

Fascinating.

Pianist unfamiliar, a very skilled contestant at a high-level competition.

I'm watching her technique.  I'm taking-in her orange dress, her smooth arms, her arched wrists and fingers.

The occasional audience foot-shift.  Jerry-built background curtain.  Cut-up stage.  Compartmentalized room.

Low coughs.  Dead Debussy.  Human, all-too-human, context.

Gorgeous music.

What makes me hear something 'better' in what man composes than what I see of him moment by moment?

I want the transcendence.  We do transcend.  I do insist so hard.

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Midnight At The Oasis

In reaching for the last heart pill,

Mozart instead

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Moving Feet, Bobbing Head, Toga

A frivolous wish:

To live life with the joy of a continuing loop of 'Louie-Louie', 3 beers to the wind.

(. . . Uh . . . and 'babes'?)

Having An Appointment In Samarra

Listening to portions of Boris Godunov, his children's doom.

Listening to its own plaints, hunched on its towel inside the carrier, the cat.


Appointments with The Doctor.


...

Chord To Cord

Following time-honored advice, a slow-down. Why not listen to parts of musical compositions instead of gourmandizing on a great table of it? Classical pieces, if begun to be understood, need careful attention.

One movement at a time. Either conversation between, like a palate-cleanser, or unpunctuatable snacks of street noise, television two rooms away, stratospheric airplanes growing more and more indistinct, wind that knocks an upright rake down.

Third Movement

Allegretto

I am very happy

I am a little happy

Yes. I must show happy