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Hello Everyone,
It dawned on me the other day that Staying Awake might better serve its dear readers, and perhaps the soul of this writer, with reminders of the performing arts and their influences in cultures’ cosmologies. ¹
No education that is not founded on art will ever succeed.
~ Margaret Mead (b 1901), cultural anthropologist, focused studies on child rearing, personality, culture
Even for a little while, let’s give ourselves a moment’s breath, reminding ourselves there’s more to being human than the pandemonium clearly designed for taxpaying hirelings just since WORLD WAR TWO, nay for the most recent ten combative millenniums.
For those of us who’ve not given much attention to our nation’s founding history, or to the grand historical scores of fear marketed by our nation’s politic, we can rest assured within any nation’s or indigenous people’s cosmologies…
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), writer, thinker; Senior Editor, Rolling Stone; Editor in Chief, Billboard
If you’ve wondered about civilizations’ patriarchs manipulating imaginations so that humankind’s history keeps repeating over millennia; if you’ve wondered about energetic rhythms of the Sun, and nature’s unavoidable climate cycles indicating landscape changes forthcoming; and, if you’ve wondered about the esoteric Mayan calendar’s forecasted alerts (which I presume so) for 2011, then our cosmology surely predicts one thing…
History is a vast early warning system.
~ Norman Cousins (b 1915), political journalist, author, professor
So, here we are returning to the performing arts, and there’s a feeling this newsletter will be more a poetic composition in itself. Here’s hoping you’ll feel rhythms swaying tranquility into exhilaration and serenity again; hoping you’ll relish feelings as would rose petals unfold with the escort of sunlight, in crystalline instants of opaline delight. A sharp contrast to Shakespeare’s reproach…
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted…
~ Shakespeare; spoken by Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice ²
Beauty in Competition
The beauty in competition blossoms into the beauty of art performed while listeners desire entertainment of the deepest and finest quality. Needless to say, concert goers have been known to miss the last quarter of a football game out of wanting to be prompt for a concert. Let’s steer from football in lieu of the final quarter in a piano competition.
Not only do women walk onto the performance stage to play the most profoundly difficult and showy pieces, they win competitions. In June, 2001, Ms. Olga Kern was awarded the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Gold Medal at the Eleventh Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas USA. In a pianistic world dominated by males, Olga was the first woman to win the Van Cliburn award in more than thirty years.
In three minutes, watch the beauty in competition unfolding in Fort Worth. The grand pianist Van Cliburn embraces the captivating Russian winner in red; later, Olga finishes brilliantly the final seconds of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3. Sometimes it’s necessary to click videos twice to begin.
| After each video, it might be necessary to refresh your screen by pressing the F5 key on your Windows keyboard. |
Beauty is No Garden Party
Many of us, who’ve studied a musical instrument for years, usually don’t count up the hours for training in public performances. Creating beauty is no garden party when a pianist practices alone some 29,200 hours between ages 4 and 24. ³
When piano students get into university, the heat is on for preparing for periodic juries in which the instrumentalist is graded by a group of professors, and interscholastic music competitions interrupt one’s usual text book studies and test preps. The pianist discovers friends are having a life. They’re having parties in gardens minus a pianist!
Such might be the case with Chilean pianist, Patricio Molina (born 1989), who has already played the first two movements of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2 for sixteen minutes of focused concentration. A focus involving coordination between the heart and brain and ten fingers and two eyes; correct posture for the musical phrase being played; the right foot on a pedal that sustains tones; and the left foot to balance the body. That’s not including memorization of the musical score, and having been coached for breathing, style, phrasing, emotional expressions and listening.
In this video, Patricio plays seven more minutes for a total of some twenty-three minutes of pure, focused excellence. The third movement is played presto, which is Italian for amazingly fast. I love this piece, and I played it in competitions during high school—beauty was created, and there wasn’t any time for garden parties for me! The video is actually eight minutes including the audience’s applause at the end; they gawked at Patricio’s stamina.
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Beauty Springs Well
We Earthlings are nothing more than a gawking species. Actually, I think it’s the only thing we do well. Might everything else be in the details? It’s evident that beauty springs well into eyes of beholders observing what they themselves wish they could perform.
At football games, don’t you yell and scream and wave your hands in the air? Is that not gawking? Don’t we gawk at the horrid results of war, sometimes cupping our hand over our mouth remembering discriminations, violence and exterminations are futile? At a moment’s notice, we’ll gawk or even feel stymied by anything from beatific to the horrific.
At concerts, don’t you wonder and gawk as an artist’s human body performs astounding vocal feats while singing opera, or as beauty springs well from a pianist and cellist who together play charming duets? Performing artists don’t even have to remember to surrender their bodies to the rhythms of Universe and Earth out of which they were birthed—it just happens.
When André Watts (b 1946) plays, I listen, and gawk while doing so. Beauty springs well as he plays, yet the effortlessness with which he plays would not happen without years of training and performing. Here, he plays Frédéric Chopin’s three-minute Revolutionary Etude for Mr. Rogers.
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Conspicuous Awareness
Beauty springs well on its own, just like being empathetic: one doesn’t have to decide to be so. So it is with artists who sense their intuitive nature. That nature, an invisible escort of conspicuous awareness, springs effortlessly well—it’s the ‘it,’ or as some artists, performing artists or not, name it ‘zoom.’ The energy that every nanosecond creates the zoom is the same energy creating our bodies; it’s the energy existing between our bodies as we dance, sing and talk with one another; it’s existing between us and other things; it’s the conspicuous awareness existing all at the same time—‘it’ is the physical Universe showing up above, beside, inside, below and beyond our cosmology and imagination.Conspicuous awareness is the energy that stuff glides upon to create our body and brain at every moment so we can experience the expressions of feelings by soprano, Renée Fleming. She sings the role of Louise in an opera of the same name, composed by the French composer, Gustave Charpentier. Renée sings an aria (a solo in an opera) titled Depuis le jour, which is a love song to Louise’s friend, Julien, a young artist.
The popular aria is six minutes, and, not unlike other performing artists, Renée is a creature whose musicality emotes a love song so we listen, understand and feel the loveliness in a lady like Louise. That kind of listening for musicality is neither revealed nor encouraged enough in our nation’s educational system and functional cosmology.
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