In classical music work thought impossible becomes conservatory fodder for
the next generation. Often with a loss of the excitement generated by
terrified musicians holding on for dear life, which appears to have
sometimes been the composer's intent.
"It" stopped happening with the advent of awareness of AIDS. There was a
decade--the only one in human history so far-- when sex and death were
truly separate, at least in the industrialized world, which meant that the
consequences of a failed experiment weren't all that dire. And the
awareness of death that the war provided added a sense of desperation.
Anyone who wasn't a total blockhead suspected it couldn't last forever.
Which doesn't mean that some of us aren't aging beneath the shadow of a
hoped-for return while we can still enjoy it.
Father Mark
At 04:57 PM 11/15/2005, you wrote:
>Bliss it was that dawn to be alive, I don't doubt. I wonder where it's
>all happening now. *Is* it all happening now? The "it" that's
>happening now is probably a different "it". I used to know some
>people, through whom I used to get to hear about some things, that had
>the feel of being part of "it". But in suburban Northampton? Forget
>"it".
>
>A note on Ferneyhough, not that I know all that much about him really:
>his "Etudes transcendentales" are meant to be near-as-dammit
>physically unplayable, although musicians still very gamely try to
>play them - the performance is then almost guaranteed to be different
>from what's in the score, to have ad hoc, "live", holes, elisions and
>mis-keys "added" to the score by the technical limitations of human
>players and their instruments.
>
>But technique catches up. The fusion guitar prodigy Shawn Lane
>recorded one piece with a passage that was assembled, note-by-note, by
>digital means from recordings of other performances. It was assumed by
>him to be unplayable; but the guitarist Buckethead painstakingly
>worked sections of it out, and found ways to play them (using some
>quite exotic techniques). Lane himself used to talk about
>"transcendental technique" - this is a reference to Liszt, in the
>first instance, whom Lane loved and studied very deeply - meaning the
>kind of thing you can't figure out how to play slow, then practice up
>until you can do it fast - you just have to throw yourself into it,
>and see what comes out. But even Lane's fastest and wildest excursions
>have been notated, are reproducible with effort; the next generation
>makes a creole from the experimenter's alien pidgin.
>
>I wrote a poem for Lane, who died young of suffocation due to lung
>disease, which touches on this:
>
>--
>
>NOTES LIKE RAIN outpouring from overwhelmed
>guttering during a deluge - "transcendental
>technique", now taught in magazines.
>
>Numberless books on lepidoptery
>an evening's study. The mind's uncageable
>papillon, fluttering through the fingers.
>
>"Some kind of spirit" as convected warmth,
>as sonic youth, as torrents remotely
>seeded, propagating to the last breath.
>
>--
>
>One of the published obituaries for Lane includes an anecdote about
>someone visiting and finding a stack of books on butterflies on his
>desk. The visitor assumed they were for a school project for Lane's
>daughter; they weren't; Lane had just taken an interest in butterflies
>and in his usual intellectually voracious fashion set out to discover
>as much as he could about them. So the idea that there are some things
>you have to reach for without having a solid base of knowledge or
>technique to help you get there is quite compatible with the greatest
>love and respect for knowledge, for self-study: "each man is his own
>academy" indeed.
>
>Mr Bircumshaw, prodigious autodidact that he is, should appreciate
>this especially...
>
>Dominic
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