This May is going so much better for me than last year’s May. In 2011 I over committed myself by saying yes to working the May term at the Ballet Department. They brought in three nationally known high-power teachers to each do a week of classes. It was a fascinating, challenging, rewarding experience to work with each of them, but combined with composing and preparing a piece for the Global Water Dance it left me groping for some time to rest and recuperate. Time which never seemed to materialize for the rest of the summer.
This year I am already beginning to feel much more relaxed. Spending good time practicing and reading.
Convinced myself yesterday that I’m not going to embarrass myself Sunday when I perform Bach’s “Fantasy on Komm heiliger Geist.”
Since a large chunk of the piece is simply a repeat of a beginning chunk, I worked out a reduced score page turn version of it which allows me to play the entire piece without lifting my hands.
This is necessary due to the nature of this piece. When I first heard it performed in its entirety the piece didn’t make much sense to me. Since then I have begun to hear its incessant 16th notes as a combination of the insistence of jazz rhythm with a large dose of a Brandenberg movement.
It’s funny to put so much work in a postlude since it’s kind of treated like the closing credit movie music by most parishioners. That is, they treat it as time to get the heck out of dodge as quickly as possible.
I like to compare postludes to movie credit music because my experience is that the music during the credits is usually buy diazepam next day delivery pretty good.
I have to work on my prelude (Prelude and Fugue in C major WTCII). I’m not satisfied at all with its preparation yet. Some more good thorough work should do the trick this week.
I interlibrary-loaned “We Don’t Know We Know” by Nick Lantz. I went over and picked it up yesterday. Lantz incisively uses Rumsfeld’s famous mangling of language around the awful Iraq war as a frame for some pretty good poetry and bitter observations. He connects Rumsfeld’s obfuscation with Pliny the Elder, “whose astute comments on the limits of human understanding provide a tonic corrective to intellectual pride” (As Linda Gregerson writes in her introduction to the book).
I also found some things online that I bookmarked to read and view soon:
What Makes Countries Rich or Poor? by Jared Diamond | The New York Review of Books
Essay by author I have read and admired.
Link to two embedded TED talks that look worth checking out.
The comical absence of the comical by Kundera
Short essay made available on Google books that Gary Wills refers to in the partisan but insightful essay, Why Is This Man Laughing? by Garry Wills | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books,
which I actually have read.
Here a couple more links which I have also read:
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The Right to Record – NYTimes.com
I can’t believe that police thought it was legal to confiscate and erase people’s videos of them behaving criminally…
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Dimon’s Déjà Vu Debacle – NYTimes.com
I’m a Krugman fan. I especially like his observation that if Romney is supposed to be such a great businessman and will help our economy why when he talks about the subject does he come across “completely clueless.”
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