In earlier museum practice, shards of ancient decorated pottery were pieced back together with missing sections reconstructed and plausible designs painted in. Missing parts of an image were supplied by restorers. As exhibited, those restored vessels had complete surface decoration. Some fragments were antique; the rest, the painted-in parts, made a whole pot look as it might have before it was broken. Today, it's more likely that the missing … [Read more...]
Extempore
In the Classical music world, it is as if most musicians have forgotten how to talk -- or never learned. They can't communicate with easy ordinary extemporaneous speech. Can't express themselves in daily conversation. Instead, only scripts -- the detailed record, the detailed notation, the traces of music. We are always reading, never speaking for ourselves. Never communicating just what's on our minds or in our hearts. We are mute, unless the … [Read more...]