Category: Music
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Seeing stars
Diamanda Galás is here for two days, performing and giving an interview. Last night’s concert was amazing, with astounding piano licks and a ventriloquist’s array of voices – but also almost parodic at points, with an edge of blackly camp satire I’ve rarely seen in her work before. I went backstage to talk to her…
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Exquise
The French Baroque: a favorite period of mine. Although the German Baroque, in its transition from chaotic to orderly, is always impressive; and the Italian, though widely admired by good and intelligent friends, bores me; it is the quirky, unfinished but quaint English Baroque, and the fantastically ornate, seductive French, that I most enjoy. Lully,…
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Idle thought
‘Thirty-Two Variations on Mambo Italiano, in the style of Johann Pachelbel.’ Should be the hit of 2008….
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Ecstatic
As George says in Sunday in the Park with George – simply but with feeling, when he turns away from his painting, after a huge burst of climactic music dies away – “It’s going well.” I’m writing this article, having finished several insistent chunks of administration; it won’t be done tonight or tomorrow morning, but…
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On the second day of Christmas…
December 26, 1995 – San Francisco This evening something rather unexpected happened… I had been exchanging gifts at the largest department store in San Francisco (you’d think Lars would know that I wear a medium shirt by now), and dragged home, fairly tired, on the subway. My regular train didn’t come, so I took one…
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Monk!
Meredith, I mean. Although I have complained several times about the presentation I’m doing in half an hour – silly timing to do any presentation at all, thrown together out of scraps of previous work, doesn’t even fit the Theme Word of the seminar (which they picked after I volunteered, thanks much) – the truth…
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Birds of Dawn
A beautiful track by Stephan Micus, from his 2002 album Towards the Wind: shimmering, cracked-crystal kalimba accompaniments, with some kind of shawm-like instrument in the foreground. Although I’m sitting on the couch, vaguely wishing I could sit around or snooze and skip today’s meetings and working luncheons, this is cheering – sinuous beauty, moving forms,…
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Old Songs
[Los Angeles, 1991] Late again, and the woman at the desk is pleasant about it, but I will lose time from my appointment. The tanning salon is an increasingly important convenience for me, it clears up, however temporarily, the waves of red lesions across my arms and torso. And I look rather dashing with a…
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The Shape of What It Means
[Los Angeles, 1991] I am in the waiting room, going through my outline and list of readings for the degree exam in musical aesthetics. First is Cooke: naïve, but he made a good shot at figuring out the basic problems. If only he weren’t such a dilettante – he works his arguments right up to…
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Xiguerit-pocquerit (Sitges VI)
Tonight was the final night of the Festa Major de Sant Barthomeu, which involved a lot of people in large circles doing the Catalan national dance… which is actually quite peculiar. It’s sort of ametrical (are there about nine, or twelve, steps in irregular groupings?) and extremely restrained, to say the least – frankly it’s…
Paul Attinello 