Find out more about the space and the artist behind the camera.
[via Charlie Rubenstein, the guy whose video finds (see: California is a place) always make me wish I had the $s for gear and the training for cinematographic excellence]
Archives for July 2010
No One Feels a Song Coming On?
I sometimes misjudge friends’ musical interests and take them along to an opera I’ve snagged tickets to attend. Whatever masterpiece of the repertoire we’ve camped out in the plush seats to hear, when we compare notes at intermission, I get the distinct impression that the experience of listening to people sing like that to advance basic plot points sounds pretty much like this to them:
Still, considering that we live in an era when television shows like The Bachelor and Jersey Shore are mainstream cultural touchstones, we are clearly not a people who got “too serious” for song and dance routines or who are too jaded to appreciate over-the-top melodrama.
Which makes me wonder: Clearly the operatic masterworks continue to move a select crew, and Disney has done its thing to the American musical. But is there a new “Grand Opera, 21st-century style” idea buried in the zeitgeist somewhere, sitting on a high E flat just waiting to get out?
Extremely Specific and Incredibly Clear
I got the chance to sit in a really nice chair and chat with Augusta Read Thomas at the American Academy of Arts and Letters recently. The conversation was anything but dusty. The edited transcript and video highlights are posted now on NewMusicBox.org.
Integrity. Soulfulness. Beauty. Proportion. Form. Elegance. Grace. Balance. Flexibility. Spontaneity.
When asked what defines her artistic journey, Augusta Read Thomas doesn’t hesitate even for a second. “Those are probably the ten words that leap to my mind about this 30 years of writing music so far,” she says.
Later, I go back and count them. Ten.
I have no idea how she did that, but after a few hours in her company chatting about her life and work and the inspiration that drives it all, this level of attention to detail and clarity of purpose are not surprising in the least. Descriptors like “extremely specific” and “incredibly nuanced” become touchstones as we talk. Like her music, Thomas speaks in clear, concise paragraphs that reveal her voracious appetite for sound, both consuming it and creating it. Perhaps most fascinating are the warring tensions inherent in her own work: she is prolific yet perfectionistic, a composer of carefully notated music but also one seeking the energy of spontaneous creation. Continue to the interview…