Flames and Flowers

I remember when I wrote this I was captivated by the poems of Pablo Neruda:

I.

 

You lit a flame within-

Unaccountable rhythm of my soul,

Moving the tides of my identity

To a land-locked conclusion.

 

Blood of my blood that sings

Like a bird in my skull.

Simple heart that I hold;

My hands are warm with you.

 

II.

 

If words mean nothing, my love,

Then let us talk like mutes;

Writing on windows

Condensation of our love.

Writing on walls

Illustration of our feelings.

 

Walking on pavements,

Listening to pomegranates

And radio symphonies

As orchids bloom in your hair

With the wildness of woodland dreams.

Music criticism

Notes toward an evaluation of music criticism.

01. Every piece of music has an intrinsic value for someone.

02. It is impossible to impose an impartial value system on any performance of music, whether recorded or live.

03. Each one of us has their own value system, based on their own likes and dislikes.

04. Sometimes the individual's value system overlaps with the value system of others.

05. Every value system is shaped by the society we live in and the tools it uses (institutions and media) to empower its ideology.

06. But we have the individual choice of joining cores of enthusiasts (peer groups) outside the ideology of the power structure, where our value systems can overlap with people of similar tastes and preferences.

07. We also have the choice of being open-minded- a floating value system, if you like- of being free not to choose. This, however, denies the selection process essential to logical thought, or places us in the realms of the arbitrary.

08. The value systems we use can either inhibit or liberate us, though, by the nature of the value system being a system, they would tend to inhibit us.

09. A newly adopted or forged value system then CAN initially liberate us but by nature eventually ossifies and inhibits the user. Every value system is inherently entropic.

10. In an ideal world the value of music criticism should be to inform and educate the listener/audient, to widen and stretch their existing value systems.

11. In reality the writings of a music critic say more about the value systems of the writer than about the music.

12. The published observations on a piece of music or a musician by a music critic attach themselves to, and become part of, that music or performance without the consent of the composer or musician. That is the price of positive endeavour, that it attracts a negative or inappropriate opinion.

13. The audient/listener can have their perception of the music coloured (or muddied) by the observations of the music critic. It is very difficult to listen to music with open ears.

14. To be truly receptive to new music (this term also means music unfamiliar to the listener as well as freshly penned music) one has to be disciplined to listen only to the 'voice' of the music, and no other voices can be allowed to intrude.

15. The audient/listener discovers new music either through contact with their peer group, or through the media. This music will then already be encoded with values, some appropriate to the new piece, some inappropriate. The listener may decide to listen or not to listen to new music based on the encoded information. Inevitably this information will colour the listening experience; the degree of t(a)inting depends on whether the listener can follow the 'voice' of the music without the background noise of encoded information.

16. The music itself is already loaded with cultural signifiers, creating a specific set of expectations. The signifiers may be in the instrumental scoring used or in the styles or forms of music adopted. A string quartet, a sitar and tabla, a symphony, a Wurlitzer organ, a waltz, a brass band, an opera, a country & western ballad, a pavane: already we have certain expectations of form, shape, colouring. Already we are making decisions based on our preferences.

17. The composer or performer working within the western musical tradition may feel inhibited by the burden of these cultural signifiers. It is only by looking between the notes and beyond the enclosed resonances of the notes that one can lose the inhibitions and let go.

When music does this, it touches a realm beyond language.

Neil Talbott
(see also Dr David C Wright and 'I hear music...' elsewhere in this blog. Also well worth exploring are the blogs 'On an overgrown path' and 'The rest is noise')

I had a project to paint masks. This acrylic was based on various photos from the Gulf War.

Gentlemen , do you like blondes or redheads? Well, here's the best of both worlds.

You don't have to know

Maybe you don't have to know much about nature to appreciate it. What I mean is that learning all the fancy names of the plants and animals still doesn't capture the way a bird holds its wings to its body and defies gravity for an instant, or the simple miracle of the dandelion which begins life airborne as a seed on a parachute, trusting its destination to the whim of summer winds. If you could only focus on that simplicity, and then retain it; but no, it slips away and the burden of personal knowledge obscures the vision.

Trying to hold fast to a particular view in memory- of hills rolling out to invisibility, or the slant of sunlight through a pine forest, or the comforting roughness of the ground over which insects move oblivious of your intrusion into their world; these are remembered more as windows of stillness through which break the sound of a wood dove soothing the atmosphere, or the remote sound of voices littering forest paths which in turn absorb and leach away all meaning until the voices are as brittle and fragile as paper-thin porcelain.

I am in Leicester sitting under a tree in a park, reading, but I am not in Leicester. The tree I sit under and the immediate area of ground I occupy have been planted into the landscape of the novel, and I look out for someone- a stranger, but someone I know- to come up the rise towards me.

He will point at the book I'm reading as he stands over me and I will show him the title. He will nod in approval and sit near me without asking, without saying a word, because he is in his own world, and I in mine.

His attention is diverted by the view anyway. I clear my throat but still he does not turn. I look at the back of his neck, black hair curling on a blue check shirt, before returning to my book.

The sun goes behind clouds and I look up. I never heard the man move but he has gone. I stand up and look around the tree but he is nowhere in sight.

I shrug, close my book and run down the green slope, skipping when I think no one is looking. A cold beer waits in the fridge, and a phone call from a friend.

A Little Night Music

It was music I had in mind when I wrote this. But it's also about fear, loneliness, hope and perhaps redemption.
-------------

Wired to the centre,
You approach the house
With a certain feeling
Of apprehension.

Dark wings unfolding-
A face shines in the night,
A warm wind snags fretfully
When you open the door.

Elegant music:
A roomful of strangers,
A quartet of tantalising women
Who smile: skull-white roses.

One who approaches
With a glance that robs you
Of the right to be alone,
Thief of your withered soul.

Sound of the knife-edge,
Your emotions are keyed.
The accidentals are random;
A theme soars in anguish.

Wingspan of the milk-flecked sky,
You bank and wheel in the high winds.
Talons of gold, feathers of blood,
The stars that were never there before.

Bird of power and grace ascending,
Turn your face to this wan world;
Remember the dead ones,
And pity the living.

Clouds of midges

They are not oriented to me, the observer. No awareness of me on their paths of perception. There may be a central point round which they spin, hover, cut trajectories; this point could be held by a single midge, but this is not apparent. Or- there may be a knot of cool air molecules, or a static twist of a scent that holds them in its orbit, or a flux in time.