Creating something every day for 365 days
From the same photo as the last one, but partial, and enlarged. I’m still not bold enough to start “coloring” in the entire surface.
In other news, I opened an “abortive” second movement to the string/bassoon piece and was revulsed by what I heard. I cannot seem to get my brain to turn the music back on.
I’ve set the Havergal Brian aside for the moment, he’s just not doing it for me, and pulled out another CD from my shopping bag in the van. This one is Lamentate by Arvo Pärt. It is for piano and small orchestra, not exactly a concerto, but a suite of pieces that feature the piano as the “one” with which we identify.
I like it a lot, so went to load it into iTunes, then found out I already had. Clearly I have never paid attention to it.
It was written in response to Anish Kapoor’s gigantic sculpture Marsyas and in fact had its premiere there in the Tate Gallery’s Turbine Hall. I returned to that fact after listening to the piece twice and it makes an interesting difference in hearing it.
The music is very beautiful: stark, powerful, tender, and very sad. Pärt says that, inspired by the staggering vastness of the Kapoor piece, it is a lament for the living, who have to deal with the issues of death and suffering, who have to struggle with the pain and hopelessness of this world.
The large movements, like the first two, marked Minacciando and Spietato (“threatening” and “pitiless”) are awesome, but it is the slow movements that tear at your heart. The fourth, Pregando (“praying”), is a lovely meditation, while the ninth, Lamentabile, is Pärt at his breath-holding best. Using a modal scale, the piano and oboe trade a plaintive lament against a steady ppp ostinato. The upper keys of the piano give out frightened little bird cries while the lower strings sigh and dissolve, all in the enormous echoing cavern of the exhibit hall. I can only imagine what it would be like to sit beneath that gargantuan sculpture and hear this music.
This is music I want to write.
One of the benefits of tripling my hard drive space is that I can now add more of my CD collection to my iTunes. The fact that I long ago exceeded my old iPod’s actual capacity frees me up to add whatever I like, and now I have room to do so.
So until I can get over to the dark and cluttered corner that is my old CD collection and go through to see what I’ve been missing, Handel’s Water Music springs to mind, I simply snatched up a stack of CDs from the floor and transferred them to my van. I figure I need to at least listen to them again before deciding I need them on tap.
I seem to have purchased a great deal of Havergal Brian. I know I got his huge “Gothic” Symphony back in the day, and it begins well. And I think I had a few of his smaller symphonies on LP even, from the estimable Music Heritage Society.
Who is he? He has his own website and his own Wikipedia page: a composer more respected than loved (although his Society seems fairly idolatrous), and whose music tends to exasperate more than clarify.
Anyway, this particular CD is of the “Fantastic Variations on an Old Rhyme” and the Symphonies No. 20 and 25. Performance is by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, conducted by Andrew Penny. So there.
His music is challenging to say the least. It’s nominally tonal, but without a diatonic center. Themes tend to be dark and noodling, and there is nothing like development, just constant exploration, never looking back. Mood swings are precipitous and neverending. Suddenly, we’ll swing round a corner and hit a major chord, and then just dissolve away into the next vista. Movements don’t end, they just stop.
This might be fascinating, but it’s not, at least not so far.
I do have to say that the “Fantastical Variations” is a lot of fun, but it’s easier to hear because it is weaving incredible elaborations on a very familiar tune. (I won’t say what. Ask me to play it for you next time you’re around the fire.) The man had a gift of invention and of orchestration, to be sure.
And one has to admire his doggedness. Almost none of his music was performed, and none of it very often. He lived to be 96, and eight of his 32 symphonies were written after he was 90. None of his symphonies were recorded until he was 95. It is history such as this that makes me wonder whether I should hang it up, like Charles Ives, or keep going, as poor Havergal Brian did.
All right, I’m not promising a new self-portrait every day.
But here are two from Wednesday.
Pretty good portrait of what I hope I look like in another 25 years. Am I vain to think that I don’t really look this old? Several portraits like this seem to me to look more like my late grandmother than me.
Getting all sketchy. In terms of portraiture, I think you can tell it’s me, but it doesn’t look like me. This is my main goal in working on this: verisimilitude.
I came across this.
Should I? I should, shouldn’t I?
My lack of productivity has reached shocking levels, so much so that my concern over it has invaded my brain like a worm and awakened me at 4:00 a.m.
I have not sketched, composed, or blogged in weeks, and I don’t see any such activity in my future, either. The other day I was seriously considering a moratorium on all such endeavors, just being honest about it and saying, “You know what? I don’t have it in me right now, and I’m hanging it up. See you guys later.”
But I can’t be honest about it. I have to delude myself into believing that I will make the time to sit down and work on something. Sometime.
Part of my problem is the old Leaf by Niggle dilemma. I have “responsibilities,” and those tend to multiply. For example, tonight I will have Lacuna (yes, that’s creative; but productive?). Tomorrow is the Newnan Crossing open house. Friday is sort of open and I may get some sketching done. Saturday I am hosting my fellow Lichtenbergians.
Monday is Masterworks. Tuesday… I need to meet about the Masterworks website and publicity. Wednesday, Lacuna. Thursday is open. Then it’s Labor Day weekend, and we’re wanting to travel.
Over on the Lichtenbergian website, we had an assignment to list the five rules for creativity. One of mine was “Defend your time.” I think I have failed at that.
Inertia, inertia, inertia.
Our problem, if you will recall, was that the channels I had cut into the omphalic bowl did not line up precisely with the bricks in the center of the labyrinth. On the advice of Andy, my ceramics guru, I bought a grinder and cut away the unnecessary portions of bowl. (Actually, Andy advised me to find someone with a grinder, including him; I just decided to buy one.)
Here’s the north channel, cut.
It is interesting to me that you can see the original layers of clay from its coil construction back in June. Anyway, I decided to seal the open clay with what was left of the marine epoxy.
Not very pretty, but this is underground so it doesn’t have to be. Here’s the bowl with both cuts made and epoxied:
And here’s the bowl once again in situ. Yes, there’s mud and leaves in there. There are always going to be mud and leaves in there. Despite my best efforts, the bottom curled up as it dried.
However, there will not be water in there. I don’t think you can see it in this photo, but I drilled a hole NNW of the center hole, near the wall of the bowl. Everything drains out now. Of course, there’s a hole of raw clay, but it just has to be.
There was a small problem with the inner bricks sagging downwards, since the bowl does not fit right up under the granite. I suppose it could, but I’ll have to deal with that some other time. For the time being, I propped up the ends of the bricks with small ceramic scarabs that I bought at the King Tut exhibit last spring. I liked the idea of that.
I also used the scraps from the work table to build a mini-me version to hold the sound table.
I discovered that my multi-outlet has little holes on the back for hanging on walls, so my next little project will be to suspend it from the back of one of the legs. Actually, I’m going to get a second one to suspend from the back of the work table as well.
You can see in the background the packaging from the new miter saw I bought. I’m just accumulating power tools right and left. What can I build next?
Here we are, end of GHP and vacation, the beginning of the school year, one of those cusps that seem to demand that I set some goals, to figure out what I want to do next. I don’t know why, especially since these are no-brainers. It’s not as if I’m going to not do these things if I don’t write them down, but writing them seems to give them some legitimacy.
That’s not too much to think about, is it? It does not include routine stuff, like cleaning my study or doing the final reports on GHP, or updating the WordPress software everywhere, or starting back up with Masterworks Chorale and Lacuna Group.
