Author: paulattinello
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Chaos, visions, flights: Adventures
[A program essay I wrote – on a typewriter, during lunch hours at Mariedi Anders Artists Management, or perhaps when I was supposed to be working for her – about György Ligeti's Aventures/Nouvelles aventures when they were performed by the Berkeley Stage in California sometime between 1980 and 1984. I wrote a lot of program notes…
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Netsuke
I'm not generally very conscious of, or in, museums – I overload quickly, my attention wanders, and crowds of people throw me off a bit. The visual is generally not my strong point – I was reminded of this in teaching a course in performance art this year, as I started to notice that although…
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City, city!
A trip to London: good – the weather was unusually pleasant, I saw wonderful people (Chris, Alfred, Sophie), hung around in bookstores and bought books. Not so good: the usual – transportation (waiting half an hour for an underground train that never came because practically the entire line is cancelled on weekends – London is…
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Resonances
Hearing old popular songs…. Yes, it's true, I didn't identify very much with popular musics when I was younger, especially the best-known for the most part. But they were everywhere, and some were wonderful, mysterious, eerie – the other day when I was lecturing about trends in the late 1960s I mentioned acid rock, and…
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Orff returning
An intelligent documentary on Orff, the Nazis, his vanity and painfully late repentance on the BBC, called 'O Fortuna'… it had a particularly striking ending, where various voices of people who had revered him or been betrayed by him spoke one after another, without comment. A sort of Olympian point of view: I liked its…
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Magus
Avram Davidson, in mid-career, wrote The Phoenix and the Mirror, a beautiful fantasy novel of a complicated, wheels-within-wheels task laid on his character Vergil Magus in the middle of his life. There is a sense that Vergil, the hero of one of Davidson's largest projects that was never finished, was someone with whom he deeply…
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Alternatives
An unusual analysis session today… I had five or six dreams for us to discuss, three fairly substantial and complete, three or four more fragmentary and partially remembered. All the dreams had familiar elements and settings strewn through them – a southern California parking lot and a suburban office building, a southeast Asian grocery with…
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Globes
Working tonight on a program note for an old piece of mine – as it happens the final composition I ever wrote, in 1986 – Seven Last Haiku, which will have its premiere by the students in late March this year. One or two pianists are looking at it, and we have a cellist (Bennett…
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History
Over the past few days, Mubarak's reign in Egypt has finally collapsed; a remarkable video of a song that appeared just before he gave up and left the country. I don't know a translation, but it hardly matters – you see the faces, some of which look tired (it has been a long vigil) and…
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Biochem
Interesting to observe the mild chaos of my body's reactions, chemical and behavioral, as those pills start to drain from my system. I'd forgotten that there are also (brief) side effects to stopping the medications – my biochemistry that has rebalanced to handle the toxic garbage being ingested and injected for the past few months…
Paul Attinello 