Music - Part 3/4
Earlier tonight I was the semi-official photographer at a piano and cello concert. If there is anything I know less about than football, its classical music. The program was a mix of Schumann, Mendelsohn and Paganini interspersed readings from Oscar Wilde. Classical music. Dead Composers Their lives compressed Into musical notation. algorithm. An outrageous dead Brit Wilde the Wit. Who though long dead Could well be living down the hall Like Dorian Gray immune to time. Last week I asked my friend, the cellist, if he actually reads the algorithms as he plays them. He said, sort of but not all the time. But the time his gets to the stage, his has practice a piece so much that all those dots and squiggles are just occasional reminders of where he has been and where he is going. In his practice his forces himself to play slowly and painfully. He restrains his impulse to let the music run until it is perfect and ready to be set free. What is there in a musical algorithm that a machine cannot reproduce? The melody is static, the cadence specified. There must be a right way to play it. Yet some irrational feeling from Paganini is there encoded. Without a man with a bow in his hand or a keyboard at his fingertips that irrational feeling is just dots on some lines. Even though I don't know enough about these sounds to truly hear the tale they tell, I can see it through the lens of my camera. Their faces glow in the spotlights against the blackness of the curtains. The pianist is calm but rocks slowly forward in place as the music ripples and leans back and upright as it swells. The cellist is always expressive knitting, his brow in concentration then relaxing into a state of dream. >From the ebb and flow of sound and feeling, I snatch moments from the air. As the musicians take static notes and fuel them with emotion and humanity, I stalk synthetic dynamic quality to freeze it with my shutter. Hoping as we all do that somewhere in this process of transduction, someone, somewhere will feel something from these conversions and communions. I long for that kind of transformation of the static and dynamic as much as the next guy. I want to read from a playbook that doesn't need a silver lining. I want my stories to have heroes and heroines that inspire and give hope or I want to throw them through a window and demand my money back. I think words have meaning. They resonate in their denotation and connation but all words have baggage. And if they don't yet, they soon do. Perhaps Dan's right; Quality needs a silver lining and who am I to call that irrational. Yeah, I know it when I see it but sometimes it frightens me. I run from it screaming and wake up in a sweat. I see the bloody knife of Abraham, I smell the mixture of tobacco, flesh and urine. I hear the voice Lila calling out to the dead. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
