It's a Secret: An Excursion into Time Transformed

An extraordinary experiment set sail on Columbus Day at NYU Silver Room 220. The creators describe the event: http://www.itsasecretperformance.com/

“It’s a Secret” is an experimental music theater production. The work is an hour-long composition for 2 singers (soprano and baritone), 4 instrumentalists (flute, violin, trombone and bass clarinet), and live electronics. It is currently in workshop at New York University.
The project deals with our increasing confusion over the relationship between public and private identities. At what point should the private become public? And to what or whose end? This dilemma is presented through a series of encounters within an immersive theater space. Performers and audience members alike inhabit a semi-public, ambiguous space of reflected memories and dreams…
Two narratives run through the show. One witnesses the Alice James, real-life sister to William and Henry, of Susan Sontag’s last play: Alice in Bed, in her painful, mute rejection of her famous family’s public life. Here, enframed, Alice appears and stands forth, casting her gaze like that of a portrait out upon the viewer. Alice fades in and out. As she withdraws, the 19th century bourgeois public sphere begins to crackle with energy of digital technology. The second narrative traces the imprint of technology upon our thoughts and utterances. Private thought now dances along electric circuits like the digital effervescence of memory.

What follows is my own mapping of the performance. Mapping was intensive, a number of members of the company were capturing the moments as multiple video  recordings in constantly shifting points of view as well as still image. We were warned that any imaging or recording we did would become the property of the performing company, so I chose to map the experience by moving constantly and chaining my point of view and mentally recording my experience of the hour as it unfolded.

An excursion...
An experiment...
An indulgence...
Mapping a shared experience
As music theatre
Challenges awareness
On several levels:
Shrouded in the mystery
Of disguised space
Where Time is a capsule
Of the Past,
Performers ring the space
Situated like constellations...
No audience.
Merely onlookers and sharers
Conscious awareness
In a parallel universe,
Watching and avoiding collisions...
A full complement of independent musicians
All performers in a mapped event
Containing calculated spontaneity...
Moments of precision
Captured by multiple cameras
Choreographed by targets and intuition...
We are caught in the deliberate diffusion
Of moments
informing by innuendo...
Collaborating with sounds
And Anguish...
Time suspended~
The past trapped
In agony and despair:
Daughter and Father
Sublimely isolated
In a circumstance of doom and despair.
This is no wonderland...
Alice and her Brothers,
Alice and her Father,
Are trapped in cataclysms
Of the mind...
A creative spirit
Whose inner adventure
Was known early to her
Until decades after her early death.
Her diary revealed an inquiring
And relentless mind,
Resigned to an inner sanctuary
Of imagination,
She vividly recorded
The world she knew.
Alice James reminds us
To remember, revere, and revive
The substance of our interior existence.
What took place on October 12
Was an inward voyage
Setting sail across a vast interior sea
Unknown and unexplored...
Setting sail as a work in progress
Drawing upon past structures
To create an ongoing performance:
A constellation orbiting a galaxy
Recording each changing moment
In constant calibration...
So each rotation is not repetition
But breaking new ground into the unknown...
Cameras documenting their angles,
Their luminosity,
Form part of a new emerging reality.
Actors breaking from rehearsals
Into moments of astonishment.

Nothing watched remains the same.
There is no detachment,
Only entanglement.

Images from:  http://www.itsasecretperformance.com/?page_id=51

Setting Sail

I seem to be starting over
But with less time
Without memory of how
I arrived at this moment...
Poised to cross an Atlantic
Without maps...
Only the stars to guide me.
I have forgotten
How to see stars...
But I suspect in some way
They still see me
Even though they have vanished.
Even now,
I am like stars vanishing...
Absent from myself
In small degrees

Piano Sings from Silent Decades of Neglect (Part III)

 (Readers are encouraged to begin with Part I: 
http://wyzardways.blogspot.com/2014/01/piano-sings-from-silence-of-twenty.html

Months passed.

Subsequent tunings would align strings that had strayed slightly. This went on for several weeks as the piano tuning had be be done slowly when restoring to concert pitch and to also even out the strings that had been abandoned for so long.

When I  improvised at the keyboard, I found myself struggling with the inertia of my own neglect.  And somehow I my guilt and ineptness struck out at the piano for not performing as it had twenty years ago... it seemed slow and sluggish (or was that me?)

But as I searched to find my way over the keys beneath my fingers, the piano seemed to be replying "Where were you all this time? What you are asking me to do is unfair...  I haven't struck these hammers to the keys in so many years... do you think I can be instantly repaired as though those silent years never happened?"

It has not been an easy road to recovery for this wonderful piano that was such a wonderful friend and source of inspiration through its inimitable sonorities.

But the journey back may have been even more tortuous for myself. My encounters have been fitful with slight instances of breakthroughs when  truly new ideas erupt in a multitude of accidents that somehow assumed shape and substance. But do these musical ideas stick in the mind? In the past this was simply a process of sitting down with my friend, fingers poised on the keys... and the adventure resumed often from the previous endpoint.  Now I seem to be trying to rebuild pathways to the continuous improvisation and discovery.  In the past there was never a thought that this musicing would lead to anything outside itself.

Some have suggested I should record these transient episodes with this piano, as though that would serve to replace musical ideas when memory fails me. But this is a more organic process and such recording would never replace the texture and substance of thought and physical connection with my Steinway friend. We both have enormous chasms to bridge within ourselves. It may be true that the reconstruction required may beyond my reach and the rich of my friend who exists only to map the sonorities in exquisite detail in the expectancy of Time unfolding.

And yet there have been such wonderful moments of sonority that touches and resonates somewhere is the deep recesses of consciousness, lingering on the brink of that vast inner domain we call the unconscious.  But the unconscious mind is just a construction, an invention to explain the ineffable domain that we are constantly surfing and mining.

But my Steinway seems to be forgiving me... its resonances coaxing me in new directions. It is a new process and new era.

Piano Sings from Silent Decades of Neglect (Part II)

After meeting with the synthesist who was also now a piano technician, I was alone with the piano in the apartment. It was the first time I had really acknowledged its presence as a piano in years. I wasn't sure if it still had a voice. I also wasn't sure of my feelings... I knew my skills had disappeared and I had some need for spiritual and physical repair.

But there were all kinds of materials on top of the piano, a sculpture called the "Trio" that my mother had given me when I first moved into the apartment, some books, some piles of unopened mail, a pitch pipe, some posters of Dinu Ghezzo, and a candle. I realized I needed to make preparations, so I found a permanent new home for the sculpture and removed all the other paraphernalia.

And I waited...

The tuner came at the agreed time. He put his coat on the couch and looked at the piano, acknowledging his perception of an important instrument that commanded respect. He went to the piano and lifted the keyboard cover and played some notes... hopelessly out of tune. He winced. He tried to lift the piano lid to get at the strings, but it was a missing a pin for the hinge, so we had to use a nail to hold the lid in position.

The tuner used his tuning fork and started to work from the bottom register. I left the room. I knew the tuner needed some space, and I knew that the sounds coming from the piano were painful stretchings... raw and occasional tonal groans that seemed to come from a crippled deformity of sound...

I was gone for some time... and when I came into the room, he looked at me and smiled... "last note." He sat down and started to play a few excerpts... the piano responded, and at times began to ring...

"The tuning is already slipping a little." he said.

I asked about the action.

"Yes, it is a little stiff. But some of that will work out as you play it."

This statement stunned me a bit. It never occurred to me I would have to play the piano. I just had envisioned he would restore the piano and it would be there then for guests and visitors to play. I didn't think that I would be involved.

"I will be back to do another tuning., " he assured me. Next time I will take the action out and explore what we need to do to." He then left.

I was alone with the piano.  The piano stood there, lid raised, waiting...

(to be continued)  See Part I in earlier posting

Piano Sings from Silent Decades of Neglect (Part I)

For now, suspend your disbelief. Suspend your judgment. Suspend your insistence to understand the reason for excessive neglect of such a sensitive persona that had been a life-long companion in several incarnations and was discarded twenty years in response to a different necessity and condition for existence. Two decades ago in a fit of despair, this brilliant instrument of imagination that had served without fail for generations, seeing me through from boyhood to maturity was abused by rejection and neglect---not as a deliberate callous act, but due to circumstances that could have no other outcome.
I was caught in a vortex of contradictions, and as conditions changed when this instrument could be embraced and nurtured, I was was too battered and traumatized to make any gesture of reconciliation.

You wonder how these things begin. How does breaking away from relationships reach such an impasse that there is no way back, no way to repair the damage? Time passes and you forget. You forget all of the tiny pleasures that created such a bond with another...moments creating memories, and memories becoming the substance of who we are and who we are becoming.

And yet I can see vividly how this perfect storm of events that led to conditions of reconcialiation literally exploded in my life on a Saturday afternoon. It was monumental. I arranged to meet a dear friend I had not seen for six months who was under siege in all aspects of health and spirit ... She came into Zuni, radiant, like light filling the dark corners of despair that grew out of the abrupt schism of my life.... And we had such a great inquiry into what could be possible trajectories for future work... And then we connected through a suddenness of need with another friend from whom she had been estranged ...  A few hours later, fresh from this reconciliation, I saw one of the greatest films of my life... Le Grande Bellezza... As though it had been created to reconcile me to life at this precise moment as I recover from a damaged perception... A lost soul wandering empty... alienated from those who had once sustained and nourished me.

I was transformed, renewed and reborn.... And then I stopped at the Mercer Street Bookstore and was drawn directly to a book of poems by Lucas Hunt,  Light on the Concrete, an edition that was signed by the poet... With poems that spoke directly to me ... I might have written them...the first poem was about reconciliation:

          Together at Last
We see the world with shadows all around
and rage to be more alive in the light
of love, thus our hearts, as nimble as  deer,
Pause before leaping the highest fence.

The next morning I had brunch with a former student who is a craftsman and whose passion is making music with analog synthesizers.... I had not seen him for six years, but he came tumbling into my life almost unexpectedly and I could feel the magnetism that aligned us at this particular time.

He was a person that worked with meticulous precision with his synthesizers, at one time having an enormous collection of electronic instruments. Recently he had turned his artistic craftsman skills to piano tuning with an aim not only to tune but to restore.... and as we talked I suddenly knew that I had found someone I could trust to reconcile me with a past that had bruised my sensibility and awareness and cut me off from my expressive companion.

He described how years of tuning oscillators had sharpened his ear so that tuning the piano strings fell into place. As we finished brunch, I told him that I had a piano sitting in my apartment that had not been touched for 20 years. I tried to explain why the piano had been so neglected... but the story is so personal and painful, I could only explain that circumstances in my life and situation conspired in such a way that the piano was blocked from my consciousness. The piano had been my constant connection to the exploration of sound and ideas.  My obsession on the keyboard was to improvise for hours at a time... and the sonority of this piano gave so much feedback to me that original ideas erupted abundantly expressive, powerful, a spontaneous communion as a musical interrogation, uncovering such exquisite constellations of musical ideas.

"I have no idea what you will find," I said, "if you were to take on the project of nursing this instrument back to performance... I am sure it may take four or five tunings, if the pin board will hold. The action will need detailed attention. It is an instrument that was once so proud and now through this neglect is a mere shadow of itself."

I paused.

"Is this something you would be interested in?  Would you like to come and at least take a look and assess the challenge?" I sensed in him a compassion and commitment to quality, the kind of quality manifest in Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In fact I discerned in him the kind of artist mechanic that would be needed for an adventure like this. If he was focused and sincere, he could begin the process of reconciliation that I so desperately needed.

These events led to my increasing awareness of the healing energy that was forming the essence of this new experience, of renewal of friendships, of renewal of commitments, of a creative renaissance flowing from these interactions. I began to see how connecting again with my friends, the experience of the film, the discovery of the poem, and the serendipitous background leading to new skills in this gifted young synthesist had converged into a pivotal moment that  could change my life.

He agreed to give it a try and made an appointment to come visit the piano the next day.