Category: Music
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Changes and recoveries
A remarkable analysis session today… after feeling stuck for some weeks, rapid inner change and reflection. I walked away thinking of fun house mirrors – how one inevitably looks at oneself and the world through all kinds of distortions; and the power of analysis is the increasing ability to sense the distortions, to become easily…
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Six years; and recent weeks
Blog Anniversary: since 14 May 2006. It is now six years…. How different life is now than it was then: yes, still in Newcastle, same job, same apartment, still living alone. But the inner world, and my memories, expectations, hopes, feel so different… I suppose I feel more… I don't know. More aware of the…
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Issuing a retraction
I find myself uneasy with one of my previous blog posts. A few weeks ago, I was in New York. Frank Oteri wrote a blog entry on our conversation; he was upset that I had given up on composing. I defended myself… but the truth is, although I thought I was clear on my stance and…
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Not so wrong after all…
Trudy, my student and friend from ten years ago, has grown from a Hong Kong pianist into a New York publisher/performer/gourmet chef, and friend to many people across several artistic communities. Her husband Frank, whom I met for the first time a few weeks ago, is a composer/journalist/intellectual – one who can connect to a…
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Passion
After four hours of classes today at the Jung-Institut – a slightly short day, but a good one; lectures by Roth, a psychiatrist who has a deep and powerful commitment to his psychotic and schizoid patients, reaching them and keeping them afloat in a way that few can match – I met Patricia, another analyst…
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Motet
The midst of, well, a lot: my uncle's death (and worrying about my aunt, now left more alone than anyone else of her generation in the family, which seems unfair for so kind and caring a woman); my sister and her son coming to London (and trying to figure out whether it makes sense for…
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Translation
Astoundingly enough, I am actually working on the book about Gerhard's music – a project he first handed me nearly fifteen years ago. I have managed to make this such a neurotic knot of impossibility and failure, a symbol of everything I am not focused or efficient enough to finish, or indeed to do at…
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A Dozen Roses for John
In the spring of 2001, I was planning to move from Hong Kong to Australia. At some point in the previous months – John will remember more exactly, he knows my memories are never very clearly date-stamped – John and I had met at an Australian musicology conference. This astoundingly beautiful, very shy and earnest,…
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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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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…
Paul Attinello 