restingmotion

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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.

 

 

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. 

 

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.  

 

 

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.

 

 

Looking at Knoxville Through Visitor’s Eyes

Sometimes it is good to pretend like one is a visitor to one’s own town.  One might note things, previously noticed perhaps, but quickly forgotten.  One might find magic in that which otherwise seems ordinary.

 

I engaged in a little such activity a couple of weekends past, becoming a visitor in my own town during the Big Ears Festival.  

 

Yes I listened to a lot of music.  Although I think that generally I may not have been as adventurous in some of my selections as some years, I also think I heard more performance than at any prior festival. It was the first year I was truly comfortable with the “sampling” mentality, of walking in or out of something that wasn’t grabbing my attention.  It was also the first year that I didn’t worry about what I might be missing, rather just allowing myself to enjoy whatever I was listening to at the time.

And although I walked around town a lot, averaging 7 to 10 miles most days, I also took the new trolley service to some venues, and this proved to be better for my back as well as my stamina.  I think previous years I would walk 14 miles or more a day, if I was able to do so.  An added benefit of the  trolley proved to be the way it allowed me to engage in conversations with other attendees, to meet people, to observe and explore opinions and attitudes other than my own.  

The fact that the trolley was available, as well as other options such as Uber and Joyride Mobile, I was also able to relax more during my walks up and down Gay street and around downtown.  I was able to stop and pay attention.  Hence the collages above, from the three full days I spent at Big Ears.  None of the photos are of anything particularly significant in and of itself, but I am also realizing that is the way I take photos, not necessarily of significant things, but of details that catch my eye.

 

When I left he festival my head was filled with music and a new appreciation for this little city I call home.

 

 

Wonders

There are moments in life when we learn the world is not what it seemed, not what we had previously assumed it to be.  Sometimes those moments are full of discord and upset.  At other times they are miracles of wonder.

I remember one such episode as if it were yesterday, although 38 years have passed.  It was the day I picked up my glasses.  I don't remember much about the actual day, about picking up the glasses, or about walking to back to my dorm from the optician's.  What I specifically remember is walking into my room and looking out the window.  It was spring; the trees were filled with buds and blossoms. I could see individual flowers on the trees, I could see the leaves beginning to unfurl, individual leaves, not just an impression of greenness.  I could see the leaves from a distance, not just from proximity, when I was standing near a tree. I suddenly realized that the world was not meant to look like a late Monet painting, and I was entranced.  Whenever I look back on that day, that same feeling of entrancement floods my memory.

 

I am certain that I had once seen well.  I hadn't needed glasses as a child after all. I did have a tendency to cross my eyes, and it turned out that I had some congenital abnormalities in my vision or the way my brain processed the input from my eyes.  But I am also sure that my eyesight faded so gradually that I never thought it about it, never really recognized what I was missing.  Until it was revealed. 

 

That same sense of wonder returned to my mind this past month, the day I picked up hearing aides, although this time I was awed not with sight, but with sound.  Much as with my glasses, I knew I needed help hearing and I was ready to have the hearing aides.  I have seen too many people who wait too long, whose brains are no longer able to cope with the additional stimulus, who cannot adapt to what was lost.  I was determined that I would not be one of those people, so I went into the appointment knowing I would walk out with hearing aides.

 

Even so, I was not prepared for the symphony that awaited me once I walked outside the door.  The birds were singing and I was enveloped in a cloud of song, sweet sopranos, base rhythms, melody and harmony intertwined.  I have always loved the sounds of the birds, loved even the sounds of the leaves in the wind, finding music surrounding me every day, but I had not realized how much sound I had lost, how enveloped on a cushion of sound I could become, and my first wish was was simply that I not forget, that I not allow this marvelous cacophony to fade into the background, that I not stop paying attention.

 

Yes, at times I was uncomfortably jarred by certain sounds -- the beep of my car telling me I was too close to something, the first time my phone rang, the sounds of traffic in downtown Knoxville while I was at big ears.  But I adapted.  And there were other sounds as well.  The soprano sax was sweeter, soft female voices were easier to interpret, I could hear the chirp of a bird despite the traffic, the splatter of drops of water. The melody of the earth is still present no matter how we try to pave it over.  I could focus upon, and pick out the sounds from specific voices or instruments, much more clearly than I had before, much like the way I hear music in my head when I read a score. I walked around town, I listened to music both in concerts and on the street, and I felt like indeed, I had big ears, big ears that were reveling in all the miraculous sounds, large and small, that surrounded me.

 

I hope I never lose that wonder.  I am sure that there will be more days in which I am preoccupied, in which I don't pay attention to the many wondrous details surrounding me.  But I hope that I recall to stop, to look. to listen, as much as possible. 

 

A Museum Discovery And A Concert Review

I was looking at this painting, Soup, by Miquel Barceló the other day and was reminded that I had not yet written about last Friday's concert by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. 

 

Somehow the idea of soup seemed relevant to me at the time, referencing the idea of art as a soup, as an essential form of nourishment but one that is a melding of all the interests and influences that go into the pot, yielding something that is shaped by and yet not necessarily completely defined by its parts.  Friday's concert, titled "Schumann's Circle of Friends" was in its own way a different soup, each work created by an individual, but also existing within a relationship of creative ideas and influences bubbling through the lives of a group of friends, music of a time and a place and a milieu, and yet, at least for some of that music, something that also transcended the limitations of that very culture which shaped its creation, in short, soup.

 

The concert opened with Felix Mendelssohn's Overture to a Midsummer Night's Dream, written when the composer was 17. It was followed by Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op 7, completed when she was 14.   The piano concerto was beautifully played by Gabriela Martinez.  Clara Schumann was a virtuoso pianist and the piece was written to show off her talents; Martinez seemed to capture this spirit of youthful exuberance beautifully, and the piece was elegantly and harmoniously played, especially in the solo cello passages played by Andy Bryenton.  

 

But I felt the first half of the program was the weaker half.  The Clara Schumann work was lovely, extraordinary really for a 14 year old girl, but although it seemed to capture  and coalesce all the themes of the moment, it struck me as just that, a perfect pulling together but ultimately without anything new to say.  The Mendelssohn overture was also lovely, well-known and beloved by the audience, but the performance felt out of sync at times, and, at least as heard on Friday night, I felt the Mendelssohn did not hold up to the works that followed the intermission.

 

The second half of the program opened with Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel's Notturno in G minor.  Originally written for solo piano, this arrangement was for flute and strings.  I felt the music was truly gorgeous; lyrical, tender at times, but also lush with a great balance of emotion and restraint.  I don't know enough about the music of Fanny Mendelssohn, but this concert led me to wonder what might have been had she lived in a different time, with more opportunities for women, led me to wonder if perhaps she was the more talented composer.  

 

Certainly the Notturno held up against Robert Shumann's Third Symphony, "The Rhenish", a work that could be both grand and solemn, yet also lightly lush and lyrical.  I was impressed with the performance of a beloved piece that I have admittedly not listened to in a very long time.  The guest conductor, Eric Jacobsen, appeared to be adept at balancing this work, which can sometimes feel heavy with conflicting themes, in balance with the mood of the evening.  I felt like I was listening with fresh ears, carried away by the music, a feeling only magnified in the final piece, Brahms' Hungarian Dance #1.  In fact I think the entire audience, or at least a significant portion, was dancing in their hearts and heads by the time the music ended, and the audience rose up in one swell of joyous applause.  Most admirably was how these three pieces, so very different from each other, also were pulled together to create a sense of their own space, of something greater than any single one.  

And so I am back to the idea of soup.   I saw Barceló's painting at a small museum, the Meadows Museum, on the campus of SMU.  I went to see a particular exhibit, which I will write about later, but I was entranced by other pieces in the museum's collection, including this sculpture by Jaume Plensa outside the main entrance.  I was taken by its huge scale, and the way its size and construction play with weight and transparency.  Perhaps this work too, reminds me of how I felt leaving that concert a week ago, thoughts expanding with the music but also with a sense of transparency, of the light of seeing something familiar in a new way.

But let us enter the museum.  Immediately, we proceed up the stairs to the second level, where the main collection and special exhibits are housed. I am as intrigued by the view as I climb, and the glimpse of a twelfth century Spanish painting of The Three Marys, entering the tomb of Jesus.

On the landing are four works, offering a glimpse of the breadth of the museum's holdings.  Opposite that first piece is another twelfth century work, this one of the last supper.  I love the way the art is positioned so that I cannot get a photo of any one piece without partial glimpses of other works, I love the reflections in the mirrored doors.  Alas I was so entranced by the multi-dimensional reflections of he works that I forgot to note anything about the sculpture in the center.  

Representing the 20th Century, and bridging the passageway between the two galleries is this sculpture, titled In Between, by contemporary American artist, James Surls.  I went to the right, where I found 20th century Spanish art, including the painting at the top of this post, and the special exhibit on Dali, which I hope to be able to tell you about soon.

Musings on a Rainy Friday Morning

It is a gray and rainy fall day, but for the moment at least I am enjoying looking out the window at the way the colors fade away in the gray light.  

It would probably be a perfect day for a fire if I were in my house and could have a fire, but I am not, so glancing dreamy-eyed out the window will have to do.  I have a book and a knitting project to finish, and those things should keep me adequately entertained.  

It was also a good morning for a little experimentation in the kitchen.  I had wanted to attempt the Sweet Potato and Squash Parathas from Sumayya Usmani's Summers Under the Tamarind Tree since buying the Pakistani cookbook last year.  This morning seemed like the perfect time, and I hoped that this recipe would be something that would work as a gluten free option, not at all like traditional parathas or stuffed parathas.  Usmani states in the book that these are more like a griddle scone than a traditional paratha, and I hoped the combination of flavors would make something that could be equally comforting even if not at all like its wheaten brethren.  There is a copy of the recipe online here.  Mine aren't as pretty, and can't be folded over.  The gluten-free dough is more friable, and rolling out didn't work as well as patting, making something closer to a Pakistani-spiced scone than a true paratha, but they are good, and I am content. 

 

As I knit, I have been listening to Vivaldi, reminded of how much I adored Vivaldi when I was a young girl by the fabulous chamber concert Wednesday night at the Knoxville Museum of Art, the first performance of this year's concertmaster series.  In fact the entire program focused on music of the baroque period and it was both very well programmed to provide breadth and depth of interest and very well performed as well.  I don't think I could have imagined a more enjoyable and rewarding evening of baroque music. It felt like a rare treat, although admittedly there were also two separate baroque choral performances in Knoxville during the same week, two performances I missed, although I had planned to attend the Choral Society's concert before I pooped out.  It is indeed a treat to live in a place where there is more on offer than I could ever possibly attend.

 

And speaking of treats, Thursday proved to be another evening of musical indulgence.  After doing a bit of Christmas shopping, already light-hearted and bouncy, I proceeded to a concert by the Seraph Brass for another evening of wonderfully programmed and beautifully performed music.  I heard some works by new-to-me composers and some fabulous reworking of familiar pieces; music that was both lovely and thought-provoking in how it shed new light on music I might otherwise assume I knew.  I also enjoyed the musicality and sensitivity of the playing, even subtlety at times, a word I do not always associate with the brass section, although perhaps I should.

Every year I seem to marvel that both concert season and autumn go hand in hand, my favorite season accompanied by some of my favorite things.  I love the fall colors, the cool mornings and evenings, the music, the ability to add layers again, to indulge in softer colors.  In fact, it seems that, having given away half of my already reduced wardrobe I am rediscovering old favorites, even while adding a few new things, like the sparkly gray and blue necklace above.  

 

In fact I've made a couple of discoveries about myself, one of which is that I like a bit of sparkle more than I had thought.  It is not the glitter I object to, but the brightness. I don't like bright sparkle -- too much jangly color or white put me on edge.  Too much bright feels too forward, and therefore more formal and less like myself; even when I am most dressed, I don't like feeling formal if that makes any sense.  Suddenly I know why certain things are never worn, and it not what I had thought.  Through this new sense of understanding I am thinking I may finally be ready to start seriously sewing for myself again, sewing regularly that is, because I may finally be ready to ask a couple of critical questions.  The two questions that have always been at odds in my creative life are:  "Is this something I want to make just to make it?"  and  "Is this something I actually want to wear." Each has their place, but I haven't always been successful in sussing out the distinctions.

 

After all, I am the woman who once, when asked to introduce oneself to a group with a fact about oneself, chose "I love fog". I love rainy days and crisp cool mornings.  Yes I love color too, but I love the way a gray day makes colors shine in a way completely differently from the bright sunshine.  I love color the way I love music, the way the many layers of subtlety and technique and shading make a greater whole.  I don't want to be hit in the face with the obvious, I want to find the subtleties.  It is true.  I love fog.