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Showing posts from May, 2009

Concerto: The Dharma of John Adams

I have followed the work of John Adams since my return from India. At that time, minimalism was all the rage in classical music. I can handle most minimalism, similarly with – say – bluegrass music, only for maybe a half hour. Then I want to go screaming down the street, arms flailing, from the repetition and insane sameness of it all. Philip Glass in particular, though he is critically acclaimed , drives me up the wall and strikes me as enormously overrated. But things were always different for me with Adams . The repetitiveness of his minimalist style always had something added. I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was. His early works like Common Tones in Simple Time (1979), Shaker Loops (1983), Short Ride on a Fast Machine (1986) or the Chairman Dances (1987; from his opera Nixon in China ) were ornately rhythmic pieces I wanted to listen to again and again. Even now I enjoy listening to them. Common Tones remains a particular favorite of mine. Ironically being the earl

"So blessed"

We had a typical ‘ Dillo friends gathering at our home Saturday and Sunday. A wide range of topics were discussed along with a healthy dose of my own Neil Young mix. The food was a traditional approach this time. I grilled hamburgers and hot dogs for everyone. Great salads and fixin ’s were supplied by our friends who came chiefly from Atlanta. There was sweet, juicy watermelon. Jennifer supplied the GMC chocolate cake I drool over so much. Jennifer was afraid no one would bring champagne, so she requested everyone bring champagne. Everyone obliged. We drank 8 bottles of champagne (with four left over) along with several outstanding bottles of wine, and coolers of iced beer. There was a vodka tasting that began about 12:30 AM Sunday morning. You get the idea. At one point in the late evening, the gathering inevitably broke up into these little groups that spontaneously form as conversational partners wandered around, changing with the free form of topics from tick bites, to the na

Ad libitum: Witold Lutoslawski

I became a fan of classical music in college thanks to my friend Matt. He and I would often spend evenings playing wargames (which he usually won) and listening to his modest classical record collection. Beethoven and Mozart mostly, but he was a big Wagner fan too. Later on I developed my own tastes and a small collection. After my return from India I began building what has become a classical collection of several hundred CDs. All periods interest me to some extent. I cover everything from Gregorian Chants and lute music of the Renaissance to music by modern composers. As tradition would have it, I have more Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler than anything else. But, recently I have turned my attention to contemporary classical music, the stuff that is often so difficult for even lovers of classical music to listen to. Classical music is not something that happened several centuries ago. It is very much alive, with a surprising diversity of compositional styles. About 1 of every 5 CDs i

Lost: Locke just isn’t himself these days…

Note: This is a follow-up to my post of January 20. It was written after I had a chance to re-watch last Wednesday's Season Five finale to Lost. It is filled with spoilers about the previous five seasons. A man eats fish on the beach, observing a sailing merchant ship as it approaches 2-3 miles off shore. He is dressed in a white hand-made shirt, pants and sandals. The time is a couple of hundred years ago. Another man, dressed in dark hand-made shirt walks up. Man Two: Mind if I join you? Man One: Please. Want some fish? Two: Thank you. I just ate. One: I take it you’re here because of the ship. Two: I am. How did they find the island? One: You’ll have to ask them when they get here. Two: I don’t have to ask. You brought them here. You’re trying to prove me wrong aren ’t you? One: You *are* wrong. Two: Am I? They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same. One: It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress. (Pause. Waves crash on

Overture: Salonen

I’ ve been listening to more classical music lately while reading less. I’m hardly reading anything at all at the moment except for some Nietzsche and the content on various internet sites. My interest has been almost entirely devoted to contemporary classical music, the stuff even most classical lovers find tough to listen to sometimes. Early in the twenty-first century one of the great works of classical music is definitely Helix for Orchestra by Esa - Pekka Salonen . I recently bought a lot of contemporary classical music CDs and my Helix recording is one of the newest - just produced last year. The work itself comes from 2005 which is practically yesterday in terms of the evolution of classical music. Salonen builds Helix meticulously, his use of the string section in rhythmic, almost-Wagnerian, style is bold and often commanding, and their climax in the work makes it a brilliant short orchestral piece. A youtube video of a performance of Helix is here . But, of course, yo

Sweet Intoxication

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Privet near our road. The privet just started blooming in the last ten days or so. It brings with it a rich, sweet smell that permeates the air outside my home. Whereas our wisteria a few weeks ago created clouds of subtle sweetness, privet boldly fills the entire sky of smell. Jennifer doesn ’t enjoy privet because it is so sweet. Mixed with robust honeysuckle and many other flowering things, the air becomes a blended alcohol of strongly scented opulence. Supposedly, smell is the strongest memory and perhaps the last thing to go even though there are some who hope that hearing goes last. Who knows? The aroma of mid-May carries me back to a morning in the mid-90’s. Honeysuckle , young sassafras , kinda misty. Late-afternoon, very humid, swarming with mosquitoes...already. I had just arrived home in the false dawn, my daughter had just been born. We had privet at our back door then. The door most everyone uses to enter our house. I left the windows open and the house was filled with t

India: In the Cave at Arunachala

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Arunachala Another trip away from Shantivanam took me to the sacred mountain of Arunachala . I went there because I had gradually learned that Abhishiktanada had been a student of Sri Ramana Maharshi and I had come to read some transcripts of speeches Maharshi had given in the 1930's. Maharshi is renown in India as a holy man of the advaitic tradition - something that profoundly interested me at the time. This was my journal entry of that trip... At Ramanashram in Tiruvanamalai followers go around the advaitic teacher’s grave chanting. They sit before photos of him and meditate. They speak of his “presence” at the ashram. I wonder if it must have been similar with the followers of Jesus just after his death. Sri Ramana Maharshi has been dead for about 30 years. In the early Christian Church, the oral tradition was just beginning to be written down at this point. Much directness with the actual Jesus had been lost by this time. I imagine it is the same with Maharshi. Though man

India: The Temple at Madurai

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Two towers of the temple at Madurai. This was my journal entry for a short trip I took away from Shantivanam... Madurai is a large pilgrimage center near the southernmost tip of India. Thousands flock there every year to worship at the great temple located in the middle of the city. I spent the last three days there, traveling with an American friend who, like me, has been at the ashram for several months. It took us six hours to get there on the dusty back country roads in a crowded bus. Bus travel is a challenge in this country. The roads are usually rough. The drivers always cram as many passengers into the bus as possible. People sit in the isle. They ride for hours that way, always moving at an excessive speed. Apparently, they consider high-pitched, squeaky female voices to be sensuous. That is what they always play on the bus’s audio system. Also, I assume since the audio idea is relatively new to them, they tend to approach it with an adolescent frame of mind. They play the

India: Pyres by the River

I went to India to stay at the Christian-Hindu ashram of Father Bede Griffiths originally founded by Ahbishiktananda . I kept a journal while I was there. I typed most of the journal into a now lost Wordstar document. But I have a printout. This was one entry… My first night at Shantivanam there was a pyre down by the Kaveri River . An old woman from a nearby village had died. They carried her on a brightly decorated rack down to the river bank. A pit was dug there beside a forest of planted Eucalyptus trees. A breeze was always blowing in from the wide river late in the afternoons. Her body was wrapped in white cloth, placed into a shallow pit on top of some wood, and covered in a concoction of mostly mud and the dung from cattle. It slid over the body, drying quickly to form a kind of shell. Then the wood was set ablaze. All the while a Brahmin chanted. The woman’s oldest son had his head shaved. As the smoke started to thicken people held out parts of their garments to catch the r

India: Distant Rising Suns

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Sunrise on the Kaveri River in January 1986. A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to watching Slumdog Millionaire , the Best Picture for 2008 . It was better than expected though not anything I really want to own. I thought the screenplay was the strongest part of the film. Anyway, as so often with karma, it just so happened I was going through some old photographs a few days before I watched Slumdog . Among them were family pictures from my college graduation, some old trips to Daytona Beach, and a bunch of photos from when I traveled to India in 1985. There were a lot of little things in Slumdog that brough back memories. I spent about 2 weeks in and around Bombay during my visit almost 25 years ago. The photos are all fading with time so I decided to scan them in for future preservation. I spent almost six months in India in 1985-86, mostly staying in at the Shantivanam Ashram in Tamil Nadu studying yoga. But I traveled around a bit too, mostly in southern India. A futur