February Notebooks

(Feb 23)

Collective Euphonia, Lenfest Center, WLU, Jan 2023. L-R: Corey Crider, Julia Goudimova, Amy Scurria, Sandra Adans Krueger, SMW, William McCorkle, Asherah Capellaro, Anna Billias
 

January ended beautifully with our most recent Collective Euphonia (CE) outing. It's complicated: Songs and Scenes on Relationships exceeded even our own high expectations. Here is our preview.

It was great to get "the band" back together again. As ever, we had a blast bringing another eclectic and unexpected mosaic of songs and scenes to our audience.

(Mellon Chansonnier, c. 6'x5', 15th c.)

Below are drafts of a few poems I've been working on in the meantime. I'm teaching post-tonal music theory this term, so I'm experimenting with using some of those musical forms like serialism as ordering techniques. We'll see how they sound :)

Boulez Cento

resonant sonorities, abrupt

gestures intense suppleness

dialectic fixity scintillating

arpeggios, resonances and

toccatas.

swans held

flightless. frozen lake repercussions.

dialogue between rule and concentricity

labyrinth play of reflections, Ariadne
 

one and many real-time

sound transformations, themselves arpeggiated

gradually change perspective

horizontal,

vertical again

didactic chords appropriate

psychological cemetery, periodicity

blithely concealing ironed-

out paradoxical etudes.

Caspar David Friedrich, Self Portrait, c. 1812

handsome face edifice

drawn footstep face
 

Furious eyes

artisanal pure

cadaver illusion

horseshoe echoed

wild dream

head child

tip dead

sea knife

granite hangman

solitude pendulum

(after Rodin, National Art Museum, Bucharest, Romania, Feb. 2021)

Autoritratto (an abecedarian)
 

Abased. Belligerent. Caustic. Distraught.

Embarrassed. Fagged. Gutless. Hindered.

Irksome. Jacked. Kept. Malicious.

Numb. Obstinate. Pissed. Queer.

Ravaged. Scattered. Tempered. Used.

Vain. Weak. Xanaxed. Yodeling.

Zero.

(Joan Eardley, Catterline in Winter)

How to ignore exercise equipment
 

First visualize your perfect

shape and second encircle

it with affirmation. Next

run around your room your

space your corner run round and

round your head as if you

were herding steer.

If the siren lure of the

Peloton enchants you,

exorcise the equipment

as you flex your neo-

cortex. Be sure to burn

special offer evidence

your capacious lung

capacity bellowing the dumbbell

box with huff-puff

air until you’ve killed it

like you did this workout.

(Northwest River Park, Chesapeake, VA)

Some of the other ideas currently in sketch form are a tele-script reality drama called "The Khatia Show," featuring the fabulous & controversial celebrity pianist Khatia Buniatishvili and her entourage:

"Meet classical music's Kardashian: featuring live performances & back-stage access. When will she dump Legolas? Now streaming, the worldwide phenomenon, the first season of The Khatia Show!"

Another (script? libretto?) will feature mythic adventurers like Odysseus, Dante, Athena, Circe, Eshu, Isis & co. encountering an artistic entourage with the likes of Virginia Wolfe, Ethyl Smyth, Whitman, Tom Stoppard, etc. Witty cultural banter, romantic comedy & sexual farce, time-travel and fantasy...

Stay tuned. Or feel free to drop a suggestion my way. I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas!