- 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.
