order isotretinoin online My father’s idea of a good evening was to sit in the half-darkness getting drunk and listening to classical music; he had us kids turn the record or tape over for him. I always had preferences for some of the music above others – when I was five I conceived such a passion for “The […]
Category Archives: Music
Sibelius’s Back Catalog.
29-Aug-12Pszczyna Amazing and weird religious drawings from a band called The Desert Fathers. Amazing.
Yucca, Arizona.
24-Mar-12Along I-40 I had to pull off to the side of the road to get a glimpse of a plant. I was fairly sure it was Yucca brevifolia, a Joshua Tree. It is a signature plant of the Mojave Desert, and is as far as I know naturally absent from the Sonoran Desert area around […]
Road Music.
24-Mar-12Hard not to think of the quiet parts of this song staring out into the desert as the sun begins to slant into the horizon. See the sun rise over her skin Don’t change it. See the sun rise over her skin Dawn changes everything. Mississippi and the cotton wool heat Sixty-six – a highway […]
A very nice poem, part of the play Belshazzar’s Feast, where it gets a beautiful setting from Sibelius. An improvement on the psalm. Original text follows the translation. I sat by the rivers of Babylon And wept with my brothers, day and night. And my sisters were moved by my tears, By my brothers’ deep […]
Camus and The Cure.
10-Sep-11Listening to The Cure recently, I was surprised to discover that their song Killing an Arab – which to my youthful mind seemed merely the intentional offensiveness we are so often told is the proper province of (modern) art – is in fact a fairly close pop-song rendition of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I didn’t […]
“Every Part Must Sing.”
30-Nov-10A friend spoke to me about writing polyphonic music – “It must come together, of course,” he said. “But also individually, every part must sing.” I keep the same principle in mind constantly when writing a novel, with its counterpoint plot lines. Here’s the Rolling Stones song “Shelter”, fascinatingly taken apart track by track. Fabulous […]
A religious leader on music…
06-Aug-10In my last piece I noted quickly that music tends to go with religion, as indicating a life of pure ornament without further purpose, like a wayside shrine or a stained-glass window – indeed like everything treated as holy as opposed to useful. Here’s another perspective.
Tolstoy on Music.
19-Mar-10“They played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata,” he continued. “Do you know the first presto? You do?” he cried. “Ugh! Ugh! It is a terrible thing, that sonata. And especially that part. And in general music is a dreadful thing. What is it? I don’t understand it. What is music? What does it do? And why does […]
Reflections of an Artist.
16-Mar-10“My gift for composition is not the kind which will ever be ‘successful.’ It is far too subjective for that. When I was a boy I thought I would invent an altogether new art (it would be half-sculpture and half-music, I thought). I began with sculpture and as you know that turned out disastrously. But […]