{"id":5681,"date":"2019-02-28T16:49:30","date_gmt":"2019-02-28T22:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coffeecantata.co\/?p=5681"},"modified":"2019-10-17T21:40:06","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T02:40:06","slug":"pitchfork-midwinter-and-the-sky-of-timelessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coffeecantata.co\/?p=5681","title":{"rendered":"Pitchfork Midwinter and “the sky of timelessness”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Upon arriving in Chicago earlier this month, I got a text from my good friend Debbie, breezily instructing me to \u201chave an amazing time!!!!!!!\u201d Just 36 hours later, my head was swimming with everything I had seen and heard, and I will always think of the words \u201camazing time\u201d differently going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was my very good fortune to be able to attend a portion of Pitchfork Midwinter, a three-day event celebrating and deepening the intersection of art and music. This felt a lot more like a convention than a festival to me, in that the performances almost felt like symposiums. There was so much thought-provoking work to see and hear in every corner of the Art Institute of Chicago. Given the way that the event was structured, no two people will have had the exact same experience or felt the same things, but for me and for the events and soundscapes I attended, there was an overriding theme: time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Artists of all stripes have been inspired by the concept of time for… well, for probably as long as there have been artists. Art is a chance to experience the vision behind the eyes of another human being \u2013 and you can often also see the toll that the passage of time has taken on really old artifacts. I’m not even going to try and list all the books and poetry and films and songs that pay homage to the passage of time, the ideas of time travel, and the notion of time’s inevitability. Humans, in creating works of art, are frequently striving to record a moment to be able to relive it and to share the moment with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In my work as a flutist, time is a major focus for me \u2013 both in the form of rhythm and tempo, as well as working to perform the music in a historical context (to play the music as it would have been heard in its own time, to the best of my ability). I watch conductors and witness time passing in the movements of their batons; I feel time passing with every page I turn, every measure of rest I count. When listening to digital recordings, I can see the time passing through the status bar as the seconds tick by. I used to, and still do, occasionally think about performing music as time travel; by utilizing the time and skills you have in the present, you can bridge the chasm of years \u2013 centuries \u2013 to bring voice to music that yearns to be heard, that was written to be heard. The one direction we can’t go is forward \u2013 we can’t travel ahead to a time that has not yet occurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The thing about Midwinter, as I was surrounded by art objects rooted in time (when have you not seen a painting or a statue or a piece of pottery not labeled with the year\/era it was made?) and surrounded by music measurable in minutes, I repeatedly experienced an overwhelming sense of being lifted out<\/em> of time. It jarred me physically anytime that I heard someone cough, or heard a door closing, or heard snatches of conversation from another hallway. It was a shock to be reminded that there were people who were experiencing a completely different reality than I was, that their world was continuing on another train track while my world floated skyward and hung suspended in the air. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
When I was seventeen years old and a freshman at USC, I had a formative musical experience in my life, though I wouldn’t fully realize it until later. In October 1997, the late Polish composer Henryk G\u00f3recki had made a trip to southern California and, as part of a five-day residency and celebration of his work called G\u00f3recki Autumn, G\u00f3recki conducted the USC Symphony in his Symphony No. 3, \u201cSymphony of Sorrowful Songs.\u201d It marked the first and only time G\u00f3recki conducted this piece outside of his native Poland. I had never heard or played anything like this piece in my life, and it was bewildering at first to realize how much concentration a piece like this takes. What if I lose my place? What if I lose track of the (many) repeats? What if I get kicked out of the program? What if I’m not good enough to be here? I was green, unsure of myself, and already suffering from impostor syndrome. My memory of G\u00f3recki is hazy (it’s been 22 years), but I do remember there was chatter about his ill health, about how it took a lot of convincing to get him to come all the way to Los Angeles in the first place, and about how he really didn’t want to conduct the piece. We had another conductor on standby right up until the last minute just in case. He spoke no English (he had a translator). He was tentative and apologetic when it came to his conducting, but when he talked about the music, it could not be clearer what he was after. I managed to find a transcript from that rehearsal. Just read what he says about time: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The most important problem for me at the end of the twentieth century is the continual lack of time. We are always in an awful hurry and still we waste an incredible amount of time, for instance in front of the TV or in a car. While I do like some aspects of our \u201cfast\u201d civilization\u2014I love to fly in airplanes, I am fascinated with cosmic adventures, trips to the moon or Mars\u2014and we do live in astounding times, still, here, in this music, we have to surrender ourselves to this other dimension of time. We have to slow down. Only then the sonority will be fantastic: the higher the music will go, the more distinctly it will sound. I dream of writing such tranquil music. I do not want to compose anything that echoes the modern \u201crush\u201d\u2014the cell phones, the telephones and faxes. It has to be calm. Life is too beautiful to be wasted in this way, by rushing things so much. How should I explain it to you? Perhaps you should think about an elevator: you leave behind the basement of everyday life, filled with noises, distractions and anxieties, and you take the elevator up to the tenth floor, or even into the sky of timelessness. When you are in this music, time slows down, it is as if you were in heaven, it is like eternity. Do you understand what I want to achieve there? Total calm. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us play it again. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me it is a very difficult movement because I do not usually engage in conducting and I do not know how to enchant you with my hand movements, but music carries me away and I may at some spots\u2014and please forgive me if I do\u2014make a wrong movement at a certain time, but you know the score and could play on. So then do not look at me, at what I am doing, but listen to each other, listen to what happens around you. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am sorry for these mistakes. But I think that we will be able to communicate soon. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coffeecantata.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/goreckiposter-213x300.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coffeecantata.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/IMG-6215-1020x1020.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"