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Saturday, 3. March 2007

Few Elsewhere Fragments



Banff Canada, March 1-2, 2007

Ben Zander, the Boston Symphony conductor-demon, addresses the backbenchers, and in the same spirit in which government invites us to pay taxes, asks them to come up and fill the empty front rows

Tells us a story about working with “failing” schools in the Docklands area of London, with black unruly kids, about how to live on one buttock, and touching them with the flame of music

Draws what he calls the radiating circle of possibility, and reminds me of St. Augustine's definition of God, a sphere with the center everywhere and the edge nowhere

Is death the "final solution" to the voice in our head? Perhaps it is.

You can't play music until you have had a broken heart. The "how fascinating" of all great musicians

Neckups are people who by virtue of sitting in front of the computer have lost track of the body that lies below

Fritzchrysler in London's fish market remembers a forgotten concert on seeing a split up tuna

Before a Mozart's piece plays - the story of the great cellist, Jacqueline Dupre at 5, running down the corridor in joy even before she has played.

As Mozart plays, the mind takes off into the surrounding mountain country - Ted Hughes's hawk-like, the spine shivers and sweats, and eyes tear up. This is he closest he has come to a satori in days

Weeping...crying...deeduldoo doodleding, the only and most basic motif of life

Bach's final words at the end of every piece he composed were "for the glory of God"; And Flaming Leaf Quartet took me into that glory

And as the fever is about to subside, Brahms comes on.

Must read “The Ancient Mariner” again, and learn to sing “Ode to Joy” in German.

...

Do you dream in your sleep? Do you live happily ever after? In sleep, does your skeleton fall through a box of lit matches?

Where is your home? I have no photos of that place which was once home. Memory is a gelatin plate left exposed to the sun

Do you remember the tower that kept watch over that bridge of assignations over the rails? I will wait for you there as you make your way to the appropriate circle of hell.

Electricity has the made angels of us all.

Two or three millennia after the Fall and Banishment, Catherine Robb marries the Peter Whyte, a painter and mountain man, under an apple tree in Boston. And then in the mountains they recreate a good life, a paradise, in a house full of letters, paintings, books, curios collected on voyages, and a local community of like minded friends. Now if I am questioned, once more, whether I am married, or why I am not here with a woman, I will reply, I am waiting for a Catherine, to meet under a apple tree, bent under the weight of fruit.

Stoney minstrel bones in a glass cage, and the voice of an young beggar girl, blind and bird-like, set to the beat of two stone clappers, on a train to Bombay, are all connected in his mind

At the bank of a river, he reads this by Kipling: "The Bow doesn't rustle or slide like the prairie rivers but brawls across bars of blue pebbles, and a greenish tinge in its waters hints of snows." He looks at the river along whose banks he has just walked, with new eyes.

At an “elegant dinner”, ambient world music and wine. And at the back of his head a word of Hindustani tapping its foot: dil, dil, dil.

They then play "Sweet Home Alabama", and he misses that city, which sits in the middle of a forest, the city where after a fashion he has become the man he is today.

They then play the song with that refrain "nothing else matters". He is drunk enough to believe that this is so already.




Travel Notes

... comment

 

Blue

www.prettybluesalwar.blogspot.com

Oh, Ben


I do like Mr. Zander. He's one of my favorite conductors. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live like him -- his philosophies and stories seem to waver between the sublime and the corporate-style ridiculous, and I wonder sometimes just what goes on in his mind. ^__^

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Did you hear him talk?


Because I agree with what you said: Ben's talk tends to get a little "new-agey" and "lingo-heavy" - perhaps it is to be expected for he is paid by firms, like the one I work for, scads of money to talk, and most firms tend to be, let's say, flexible with language and meaning. But what was inspirational to me here was to see Ben coax and exhort this young quartet into a new level of performance, which even the philistines like me, with no formal classical music other than a deep love for it, could notice right away the man's passion and delight.

... link  

 

"Stoney minstrel bones in a glass cage, and the voice of an young beggar girl, blind and bird-like, set to the beat of two stone clappers, on a train to Bombay, are all connected in his mind"

stoney minstrel bones reminds me of poets who have failed to live life and sing of things unreal and plasticity. a young beggar girl singing in a bombay train (or in my case madras train) reminds me of the vividity, sorrow and despair in life. of what i have and why fate is such a cruel thing. of the things i can dream about, wind in my hair as i look out of the window, no thought for the next mouth of food and this girl who, i think, can only look on those dreams as utterly unreal.

"The Bow doesn't rustle or slide like the prairie rivers but brawls across bars of blue pebbles, and a greenish tinge in its waters hints of snows." This is lovely. Kipling has an eye for observation of nature that is remarkable in its simplicity and its variety.

... link  


... comment











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