Horses in the Night
from Tuesday, January8th of the year2008.
So last night Aurora and Tom played my new electric violin concerto, called Seeing is Believing, along with two Byrd motets I arranged for them, Ives’s The Unanswered Question, and a lesser-known Debussy piece called La Boîte aux Joujoux. It was great! Rarely have I been to a small ensemble concert where everything went off as well as could be imagined, with no technical glitches, nothing exploded, no missing parts or stand lights. Tom played with total precision but performance-specific expression; this is one of the most interesting things about certain performers versus others. A lot of my friends ““ and myself included ““ are in the school where you attempt to make each rehearsal a slow building block up to the final performance, which should, in a sense, represent a point along a steady line of improvement. Tom, on the other hand, and a lot of violinists I work with (like Dear Lisa), explore various possibilities during the rehearsal process, almost a shopping trip for techniques. Then when the time comes to perform it, they bust out a whole new range of expressive applications for these techniques, adding new extremes to the dynamics, new little tics and gestures. It’s a much more exciting way to play, and a way I wish I had the flexibility to emulate.
So, last night, we all went out after the show, and I got to bed around 2, after an ill-advised bowl of whole wheat pasta with penne. I had a really surreal sequence of dreams and at a certain point could have sworn that I heard horsehooves. In my dream, I got up, went to the window, and saw a man riding a horse down Avenue Road and, with his hand, pushing twenty more horses down the road. Weird. So, then, at 8:30 in the morning when I was on my way to a breakfast date , I looked down and saw Horseshit on the road. Ó, as they say, MG. A quick google search (Horses St. John’s Wood) revealed THIS insanity.
Check out in particular this page about the Farriers. Dag. There are a bunch of completely mystifying and unexplained images on the page, including my favorite, with the caption “summer camp”:
Summer camp.
2 Comments
January 9th, 2008 at 9:16 am
“no technical glitches” . . .
Apart, that is, from the missing chair for the bass trombone!
Exciting music, and a superb performance! Thankyou!
I left at interval, not wishing to risk aural contamination by the music of the second half.
January 9th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
I suppose next you’ll reveal you’re opposed to fox-hunting?! Or squirrel-baiting? Or fish-taunting?