Category: Music
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Making oneself crazy
… or should that be: making one’s self crazy?… In the interstices of watching these films, and scanning Joyce’s thesis so I can report on it (the airplane and hotel for her defense in Paris are already organized – which reminds me: I also need to buy a flight to Washington to attend my eldest…
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Jarman
In the midst of watching all these AIDS films, a left turn, sort of: before sitting through Derek Jarman’s Blue (I’ve never actually seen it with the blue screen throughout – which may hardly be necessary – but perhaps it’s a good idea to do it), I thought I would see something that didn’t require…
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Ringing
Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music for piano (1975?) is playing. It’s one of those vast, ringing minimalist works that makes the piano sound like an endless carillon: or not exactly – it’s difficult to describe, because you’d want to show how it is different from Reich’s Six Pianos (a favorite piece of mine, but very much…
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Density
With Strauss’ Metamorphosen playing: a long, dense contrapuntal work, complex and final – one of his last. Coward used to complain that critics called his work ‘thin’ – he would make fun of them, as though the adjective was meaningless; but of course in most of his work one can easily understand the criticism –…
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Vexed
Satie’s Vexations is a famous piano piece, posthumously discovered and frequently mentioned, but rarely actually performed. It’s a small piece, less than two minutes long if played slowly – except that, as everyone knows, it has instructions to be played 840 times, thus making it the first example of minimalism. I’ve seen the score, even…
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Wassail
After a sleepy day, recovering from yesterday’s late visit from Bennett and Merrie, I put myself together to walk down through the northeastern suburbs, between the universities, down through the center of a practically deserted Sunday-night town, and over the river to the Sage Gateshead (our dazzling new-ish local concert hall) for a work by…
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Oppressive traditions
Last Thursday, I gave a lecture supposedly about defining research to our postgraduates – academic, composing, performing and what all. I got my feet a bit tangled around the whole question of why a creative or performing artist should know about history, tradition, the music that has gone before (always a tricky issue, and one…
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chemical bodies
[A draft of a short panel presentation for a Los Angeles symposium on musicals. Rather on the speculative/bonkers side – in the tradition of Adorno and the post-structuralists – but then I like that kind of thing….] Here we sit, in the unnamed capitol, or at least the largest marketplace, of accelerating physical transformation: from…
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Gimmicks
I’m reading a PhD dissertation for tomorrow’s defense (okay, those are my American terms for it – for you Brits: a thesis for tomorrow’s viva) on Busoni (not Bussotti – I work on Bussotti, and am in fact one of the few people writing in English to do so – and incidentally people often seem…
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How to save a life
It is perhaps less than impressive that I should be so enamored with The Fray’s ‘How to Save a Life’. It is, after all, a current big quasi-alternative hit, by a Coldplay clone; and Rolling Stone considered it yet another expression of rather self-indulgent teen angst (the truth is, I did hear it for the…
Paul Attinello 