If you are a little bit creeped out as you trawl through your shiny new Timeline, I sympathise. There’s something unsettling about a chronology of your putative ’life’ as a linear sequence of events, starting with a cheery event marking your birth, that is, your entry into this planet and your subsequent coalescence of consciousness. Thanks for reminding me, Mark.
The interesting thing about all this is that, more or less, all the information displayed in the timeline has already been collected about you.
Alexandre Daudet (clarinet) Catherina Lemoni-O’Doherty (piano) BERNSTEIN, MUCZYNSKI, REICH
June 7th, 2011 - Boydell Recital Room, Trinity College Dublin
In 1886, Camille Saint-Saëns completed the now-popular The Carnival of the Animals, a playful suite for orchestra depicting in sound a noisy menagerie of hens, elephants, tortoises and jackals - amongst others (The flamingos of the animated Disney realisation of the Finale are a later addition of some artistic director or another on Walt Disney’s Fantasia team).
Does analysis spoil an artwork? Does dissecting a piece of theatre destroy its ability to captivate, and often more importantly, to suspend disbelief for a sufficient length of time? Do harmonic and formal analysis of a Beethoven piano sonata deprive it of its powers to evoke emotion in the listener? In the latter case, sitting down with an academic mindset is surely the most dispassionate act, at the time - but the fruits of the labour are invariably an increased appreciation of the skill of the composer, not least in terms of pure musicality, but terms of defining a musical fingerprint - an artistic identity unique to the composing artist.
These are some ideas I have had recently while reading Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, which, among other things, examines the nature of our endemic misconception of our fellow actors in this theatre of the absurd, namely the question of identity.
Given the fact we perceive directly (by sight – in a momentary glimpse or an eternal gaze, by sound, by touch and so on) a tiny proportion of the entire human population of the world, the question arises; where do the other 6 billion people live?
Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a unison rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamour fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax.