This week I got laid low by the COVID! It rather snuck up on me and took me by surprise. It started with a loss of appetite followed by an inability to sleep. After five or six days of this I was in rough shape. There weren't many other symptoms. No sniffles and apart from a dry throat, no other symptoms. Except for just feeling like crap. I went to my doctor and after reviewing all the symptoms she said, sure looks like COVID and put me on several pills. As of today, my sleeping is pretty much back to normal and I actually ate most of a meal yesterday--the first one in a week. So looks like I'm on the mend.
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I mentioned the Berlin Philharmonic performance of John Cage's 4'33 the other day, but one critic has found ways to wax eloquent about it: Found Eloquence: 4’33” Of A Thing In Overabundance
Petrenko defined each of the three movements in 4’33” with a particular affect. In the first movement, he seemed to be conducting a conventional piece that wasn’t there. In the second movement, his hands were positioned near his face, as if asking for quiet or like a priest pronouncing a benediction. In the third movement, his hands stretched toward the orchestra, fingers splayed in one hand, with a searching facial expression.
He was near tears with sorrow and grief. “What is this? What is happening?” he seemed to ask. “I don’t understand!” The veins on his forehead stood out. His arms slowly moved across the orchestra. In the background, musicians could be seen communing with him intently or meditating with eyes closed. Then his arms came down in apparent resignation. The end.
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The New York Times has a lengthy piece on John Luther Adams "Become" trilogy: Musical Travel Companions for a Year of Going Nowhere.
Their underlying logic follows nature. In the memoir, Mr. Adams relates his fascination with fractals — complexly involuted forms that we find buried in the shape of things like trees, coastlines and lightning bolts. Flying from Fairbanks to Anchorage one day, he looked down at Denali and Mount Foraker and devised what would become the compositional structure for several pieces, including “Become Ocean.” He sketched four undulating lines on top of each other, the first with seven waves, the next five, then three, then a single large wave. In practice, this concept resulted in sonic worlds of engulfing, constantly shifting movement.
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Here is Become Desert from the trilogy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VN9TBfWAEo
And finally some psaltery music from Provence:
7 comments:
So sorry to hear about your illness. Best wishes for a full and speedy recovery.
Thanks, David, I have a good doctor which helps!
Too bad! I am glad you're feeling 'recovering'. I don't at all want to minimize your experience of being sick but by the sound of it I'd rather have five or fix days of that rather than the three days of fever, nausea, and vomiting that is what my last 'flu experience' was-- two or three years ago at this point.
That essay by David Stearns was more interesting than the paragraphs reading KP's facial expressions led me to expect. I watched 'em and remember thinking that he needed to take a... whatever the current 'downer' is; Xanax, perhaps.
In case you or any of your esteemed readers care to take a chance, the Oregon Bach Festival has commissioned a set of fifteen miniatures for the piano from Richard Danielpour ('An American Mosaic') that will have its premiere this afternoon, performed by Simone Dinnerstein, who will also play "an array of accompanying Bach works". I believe that the link to the livestream will materialize at this OBF page some minutes before the 2:00pm Pacific start time. Each of the fifteen pieces 'celebrates' a group or identity (I don't recall very precisely the marketing verbiage) affected by the plague. I'm guessing that 'middle-aged white Canadian ex-patriate composers' isn't one of them but we can hope.
Take care Bryan!
Thanks for your well-wishes! At this point I would like more than anything else to just get back to a healthy amount of blogging. I don't seem to have the energy for it yet, though.
Hope your recovery continues! What music does one listen to when confined by one's illness?
Am listening to the concerts from the Actus Humanus Festival in Gdansk that I missed as they were happening. This one features a woman named Maria Pomianowska playing the suka, which I'd never heard of before; looking about online there is an entire range of stringed instruments native (?) to the countries stretching from the Black Sea north through the Tatras Mountains into Poland. The video is here; anyway, Mme Pomianowska is credited with championing the instrument that had disappeared, so the story goes, and "was known only from drawings of a single specimen displayed at an exhibition in 1888". While I am perhaps a bit incredulous about that bit, she is quite the artist.
I'm recovering though still under quarantine. That is a lovely sounding instrument, Marc, thanks for the link!
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