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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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Paul Attinello 