c e l l o d r e a m s

"Music is a state of mind which is unbelievable; it is so beautiful. It is an ecstasy that cannot be explained. Often tears come to my eyes; it is a beautiful pain. It is the pain of trying to reach out. You feel that someone is there... You are trying your best to reach out but you cannot reach. So it is a pain which makes you so sad but that sadness has such beauty in it that it is like a happiness at the same time....That is the real spirit of music."
- Ravi Shankar

toward an impure poetry

pablo neruda - sent to me by sheila packa

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things - all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denial and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigals, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding-willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy's abandonment-moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's concern, essential and absolute.

Those who shun the "bad taste" of things will fall flat on the ice.

only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things
- edgar degas

having lots of thoughts about the idea of a muse or creative obsession or inspired possesion or painful ecstacy lately--

from: a conversation with edward hirsch (triquarterly)
EH: Lorca wrote an essay that had a huge impact on me when I was in my early twenties. It's called "Play and Theory of the Duende," and it's actually a lecture that he gave in Buenos Aires, and I begin by saying I wish I had been at that lecture because it seems that on that occasion the spirit of artistic mystery, an electric force, entered the room. This is duende. It's curious that there is no exact equivalent for duende in English. All over Latin America and Spain, the duende is understood as something like a trickster figure, like the Yiddish dybbuk, a sprite, someone who causes trouble. But in Andalusia, where Lorca is from, duende is used a little differently. It refers to something equivalent to soul, as some sort of artistic inspiration, so that you'd say that a singer has duende, meaning that the singer has this ineffable force, this dark and potent quality.
For my part, I'm trying to account for something that seems to me ineffable in our experience of art when we are taken over by a kind of mysterious power. We recognize that it's happening, but we don't know how to name it. Lorca gives a name to that experience, and so I want to import the notion of duende into our vocabulary, into the way we think about art. Lorca says that it's a mysterious power which everyone recognizes and no philosopher explains. So I attempt to locate it, and talk about what it is as precisely as possible, to explain, for instance, that Billie Holiday has it, and why.
DS: Your language is so rich and beautiful. I'm particularly taken with a phrase you use to describe duende, "a joyful darkness."
EH: I wanted to account for something that is demonic but also joyful, and so I came up with the idea of "dark joy" because I think this force is life-giving, and life-enhancing, and yet it's also tied to death. What Lorca means by duende, when he says that a singer has it, or a that a flamenco dancer has it, or that a poet has it, or that a particular performance has it, he means that something else takes over, some kind of haunting or possession. Something lifts off in the process of creating the work that leads an artist to the summit of the work, to somewhere that he or she hasn't been before. And so it's a kind of demonic enthusiasm, a kind of dark force.
For Lorca, and this is the Hispanic part of the idea, it's tied to death, to being, metaphorically speaking, in the presence of death. In other words, Lorca recognizes that in many great works of art there's an element of mortal panic and fear. There's some sense of our humanness, some sense of our strangeness, and some sense of our mortality. And he thinks that great works of art take their risks by being in the presence of this dark force, which, for Lorca, is tied to the spirit of the earth. Lorca was, let's say, weak on the idea of the muse and the idea of the angel, but those concepts are very much related, I think, to what he's talking about, that is, about possession. He didn't like the idea of the muse or angel because you call the muse down from above, and angels fly overhead. The duende he was sure about came from the very earth; it was an earthly force.
DS: What's so fascinating is how very ancient that perception is. For millennia the earth was seen as sacred, as the source of spirituality. The sky was too abstract, too distant, too cold.
EH: Yes, there is something archaic in this idea, and primal. I think Lorca sought ancient roots in Spain and Spanish culture, in bull cults that reach back to Mesopotamia and beyond. And I like the idea of a dark artistic connection to our earthly origins.

general thoughts

I am influenced by 12-tone music, chance, free jazz & old blues. I also am inspired by the rhythms of human speech. My usual approach to composing / improvising is to have a general sense of a tonal pallette (whether it be the notes in a scale, part of a scale, an ostinato pattern, or a tone row), & perhaps a mood I want to explore or textures that I want to use. I then let myself wander in that space (let the element of chance inhabit the room). Sometimes I like to explore a single line & sometimes I like to play in mutiple layers; to build sound sculptures. I would say that I start with ingredients (sort of like found objects) & then I weave them together in real time.

scales

tone rows (my version anyway)

I like the work of some of the serial composers (see 12-tone music). I like to sometimes start with the loose idea behind 12-tone composition & then I like to transgress & explore the tentative appearance of tonal pulls.

c e l l o d r e a m s

journal

having lots of thoughts about the idea of a muse or creative obsession or inspired possesion or painful ecstacy lately--

general thoughts

scales

tone rows (my version anyway)

scores