PART II VI.Shimmering Ontology / (Laugh) Struck by the apparition, she burst out laughing. The laughter of childbirth.—Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils Kundry’s primal scene—the instant of her transformation into the figure of the eternal feminine pariah—takes place at the base of the cross: having laughed at the body of Christ, she endures as […]
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Gap Trap Laugh
for Seth Brodsky PART I: STRANGE THINGS I. getting it just right Every act of reading is a difficult transaction between the competence of the reader (the reader’s world knowledge) and the kind of competence that a given text postulates in order to be read in an economic way.—Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation All artists play […]
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The Disappearing Monument
It is easy to believe in the permanence of sound. Now every recording can be streamed and repeated on demand without degradation; files replicate flawlessly; loops repeat without wear; digital archives expand infinitely. Music appears inexhaustible as technology promises security against erosion—like nothing goes away. William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops,” receiving a deluxe reissue in […]
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Thin Fire
Not long ago, I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. One line stayed with me: “Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—‘Chloe liked Olivia. . .’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes […]
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Two Siegmunds, Two Wälses
After writing 9,000 words on the “Ring” cycle, I thought that maybe I’d finally be done thinking about it. For a while, I was. Then, after what would be a two-month break in my obsession, I decided to return to something I wanted to write about at the time but never got to. During the […]
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Unwind, Unwound
Taken to orchestral concerts as a child, I was restless. The complexity and vast architectures of a typical Romantic symphony made me think of the music as some fractal maze, wholly illegible in its ever-shifting textures and bombastic pronouncements of brass-laden grandeur. It felt like sound and fury signifying nothing. Then came the slow movement. […]
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They Toll For Thee
Bells call people to pray, to mourn, to marry. They pass them news of war, peace, fire, and flood. On a sweltering August afternoon in London, they summoned me to the Royal Albert Hall. That night’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 from The Hallé at the BBC Proms was partly special because it was […]
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A Feast of Symbols
Lighting up mid-conversation, Murat Erginol sat at a coffee shop in the breezy, open-air halls of Atatürk Culture Center, Istanbul’s premier performing arts complex. Erginol, wispily bearded and quick to smile, is, among other accolades, first violinist of the Gedik Philharmonic Orchestra, one of Turkey’s many privately sponsored ensembles. Then rehearsing “The Four Seasons” by […]
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Democracy of Dreams
Earlier this year, my piano teacher—by my side through the years I spent inching through “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” treating Bach’s counterpoint like moral instruction—sent me a lullaby she had composed for my daughter, who was not yet born. The audio arrived by text message one morning. She wrote that she had been thinking about the […]
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The Long and Winding Road
It didn’t take long for a planning fail to become a planning win. As an American who’s lived in the UK for almost 13 years, booking trips to visit family should have been second nature, but I’d screwed up my return flight booking between Austin and Glasgow, and had no choice but to rebook entirely, […]