Category: Music
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Wandering the stacks
So: I am finally going through all the books, and then the papers, in my office. My office is being moved soon – rather sooner than I'd expected: repeated insistence on a clear date on my part gave rise to a flurry of emails assuring me that it wouldn't happen until mid-September; but now of…
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Addressed to the passions
(If you don't know that phrase, it is from one of the funniest and most touching of essays by Max Beerbohm, 'A Clergyman.' I suggest you find it and read it.) An intense week… after another intense week, but this one was very different…. Well, for four days, at least: verve, intensity, demands on time…
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Evening, station
Arriving on the evening train home from Sheffield – after a day with emails, meetings, a lecture, a sandwich on the midday train to Sheffield, where my analyst kindly travels to see me weekly. The train is on time, 8:47, or a bit earlier, walking out of the station, everyone bumping along, some suitcases. At…
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Temporal anomalies
(… you know… as in Star Trek, I suppose.) So, several weeks of the stress but not really misery, chaos but not really feeling frantic, the Stäbler book – working on it but not fast enough – and many smaller demands, extra classes coming out of nowhere, paperwork, and so on and so on. With…
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Death in…
I, Aschenbach… Perhaps, partially, because it is November: Scorpio, darkness… the weather has been suddenly, sharply colder the past two weeks; a couple of nights of miserably torrential rain, though more days are sunny than is usual for us here on the North Sea. But Scorpio is always the darkest part of the year for…
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First-world problems
I understand the joke, 'first-world problems' – it's what we say when the refrigerator breaks or our flight is delayed. The sense is that we are rich and expect everything to be easy, and that our biggest problems are details, minor frustrations, compared with those in other parts of the world. Especially when several other…
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Splitting, integration, symbolization
Having passed my remaining propaedeuticum exams in Zürich (which means: I passed the eight theoretical exams that end the first half of study; there will be seven final exams in two or three years, but they will be based more on practical experience), I have been recovering… As we know (you in the back –…
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Rachel’s
Last year sometime I acquired a late album by the pomo/minimalist/post-genre group Rachel's. Over the past few weeks I started buying their remaining recordings; then today I managed to find mp3s of the two remaining ones that couldn't be purchased anywhere any more. Lovely, often sad. Beautifully played. Something a lot of classical and miniimalist…
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Mathis
It is late, so I won't go on long… a really excellent, deeply passionate performance of the Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler here in Zürich. Thomas Hampson as Mathias Grünewald, and Gatti conducting in his last season before leaving, were especially good; but everyone was excellent. For some reason I'd recalled hearing a recording of…
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Gifts
Again, in Zürich/Küsnacht at the Jung-Institut, I keep intermittently experiencing myself as bitter, irritable, critical, unfair. Sigh. It's hard to disentangle or clarify this… as always. It doesn't feel as though it's all quite so maddening this time, though – and, also as usual, a number of people obviously experience me as pleasant, fun, even kindly…
Paul Attinello 