Every group of office workers has its own demographic trends. If you hang out for 40 hours a week with people who are mostly getting married, or getting ready to retire, or parenting teenagers, or going on bad blind dates, you’ll get particular social moments if you stay close to your desk long enough.
In the previous post I offered a possibility, a way of thinking about the concert experience other than “good,” “bad,” “like,” “hate,” “noise.” Perhaps the least interesting question to pose after one has been engaged with a work of art is, “Did you like it?”
“…and yet, and yet, and yet” the wonderful – and sometimes terrible thing – about life and art is that they keep on, resolute in their irresolution.
Our man in Erbil, Marc Thayer, reports from Vienna on the conclusion to the Summer Arts Academy in Northern Iraq:
Our man in Erbil is somewhere out there on the globe between flights or in flight or touching down on the good Earth. Rumor has it he’ll be into the office tomorrow with many stories to tell and much email to catch up on.
Day 7
During rehearsal this morning a film crew came into the hall and most of the Baghdad musicians walked out, some cursing and yelling. The concern is that their faces could get on Iraqi TV and they could be harassed or worse. Cooperating with Americans or anyone else can be seen as traitorous. The Kurds weren't bothered at all and quickly filled in the empty seats. One of the horn players' brothers was kidnapped recently, most have lost someone or had a kidnapping in the family, and most hide their instruments when walking around. Some instruments have been destroyed.
In this installment of the adventures of Marc Thayer at the Summer Arts Academy in Northern Iraq, the SLSO Education and Community Partnerships director finds a Heineken, practices the Marcel Marceau music teaching method, and reviews "The Perfect Storm":
The continuing journal of Marc Thayer, SLSO Education and Community Partnership director, while he’s in Erbil for the Summer Arts Academy in Northern Iraq, giving music workshops and taking part in rehearsals with musicians from throughout the war-torn nation. The Academy is directed by American Voices, an arts agency involved in music diplomacy throughout the world, under the leadership of John Ferguson. Allegra Klein, who Marc mentions in his post, is the director of Musicians for Harmony, an organization of artists formed in the wake of September 11, which works to promote the cause of peace through music with performances, educational activities and cross-cultural exchange.
I haven’t heard from our man in Erbil today. As I mentioned previously, Marc Thayer has 12-hour days scheduled as he participates in the Summer Arts Academy in Northern Iraq, so I suspect his commitment to a daily dispatch lags due to combined exhilaration and exhaustion.
Marc Thayer, director of the Education and Community Partnership Program, is working with American Voices, giving workshops and making music at the Summer Arts Academy in Erbil in northern Iraq. He’s sending in dispatches about his experiences for the SLSO blog.
American Voices is a cultural organization that seeks to provide quality artistic experiences for artists and audiences in those parts of the world newly opened to such experiences. Founded by executive director John Ferguson in 1993, following the end of the Cold War, American Voices began its work in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and Central America, and has since traveled throughout 18 time zones from the Philippines to Peru. The emphasis is on American music and dance from the classical, jazz and Broadway traditions.
The time it took for the Big Screen to ascend into its nook above the stage.
Among the many home improvements that have been going on at Powell Hall this summer (new paint job, new carpet) is the enormous retractable screen that has just been installed above the stage. The screen will be used for Chaplin’s "Modern Times" in December and who knows what else. For example, the retractable screen would have come in handy for Morton Feldman’s “Coptic Light,” when David Robertson called for a very, very, very, very, very slow, advancing closeup onto an image of ancient Egyptian tapestry as the orchestra played, in 2005. Now, rather than the Henchmen installing the screen, they can push a little button and it will descend.
Horn player Tod Bowermaster took some time to offer up his hot picks for 0708 before he heads to Steamboat Springs for the Strings in the Mountains Fest -- which, he admits, sounds like a peculiar place for a brass player to be -- and then to Sun Valley Summer Symphony (or SLSO West):
I have an appreciation for those who toil in the cultural spheres but who were raised in places far out of the orbits of those cultural spheres. Of course, one reason for this is that I was raised in such places, and I know something of the oddball status of being excited about de Kooning or David Bowie or “Last Tango in Paris” in a hardscrabble town where the price of wheat and the summer softball tournament and the all-too-frequent random acts of violence were the paramount topics of discussion around me. I’m always amazed at how a life invested in culture emerges out of such tough soil.
Cally Banham (English horn and oboe), before she heads to the Quartz Mountain Music Fest in Oklahoma, is playing the Grant Park Music Festival, although she doesn’t have the gig with the Decemberists.
In response to my call to musicians for where else they may go in the summer beyond Sun Valley and Boulder:
A number of years ago I had the opportunity to interview one of my writer heroes, Lawrence Weschler (author of “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder,” “Vermeer in Bosnia,” “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees,” among other essential works). At the time, Weschler was concerned about “frenzy,” which he described as "the crisis of duration we're in right now, which is one of the major crises in the culture: the attention-squeezing, peg-driven, niche-slotted -- which I refer to as the ‘frenzy.'"
A friend asked me the other day, So what do the musicians do now? They do lots of things, some stay home and tend to gardens and children, some travel (by car, by plane, by bicycle, to Europe, to Nova Scotia, to Mexico), and some go off and play music elsewhere, quite often in beautiful places.
