The Girl, The Book, and the Butterfly

It was a late summer day when Washington Square Park was shimmering like a fairytale. For August, the day was surprisingly cool with a hint of September in the air. The water spraying in the fountain was glistening in the sun as the streams arched over the pool and shattered into glistening beads plummeting to the basin. The water churning in the basin was an obstinato punctuating the sounds of birds, conversations, and strands of music permeating the most remote places. Washington Square Arch stood like a radiant entrance to a land of dreams.

For Sylvia, the park was an inspiring terrain where she could wander at will and find adventures unfolding among the day's population,  animated and engaged in playing music, dancing, performing, or lying about the the lush green lawns in the sun or sitting on shaded benches. Washington Square was Sylvia's retreat where she could become anyone or remain anonymous.

With her smartphone, Sylvia took many images in the park often posting them on FaceBook or sharing with her friends on the Internet. She had an eye for noticing things that often went neglected or remained obscure. One would think of her as an artist had they spent time with her, but she was content to masquerade as a different person everyday, blending in with the panorama that was the daily menu of a park populated by people who came from all over the world to celebrate life in that tiny patch of land in the heart of Greenwich Village.

Sylvia understood Washington Square, and although her life was often in a hurry, she disciplined herself to slow down and enjoy the moment. Washington Square was a haven that she sought out whenever she visited New York. She had lived in NewYork City adopting it as her second homeland when she was an international student. In those days she had been too busy to interrupt her almost frantic pace.

So even though Sylvia pursued a crowded schedule, she found time for the park. She loved to go there with a book and immerse herself in the fading summer splendor.  All too soon the days were growing short, and soon she would leave New York to return to a different life, a different pace. She was reluctant to leave because there was something different about her place in the world, her place in the city, but she was looking for some clue to understanding a new feeling that had emerged during her visit.

Years earlier some negative experiences had taken her out of herself and out of her trajectory. Even though she thought she had made peace with that part of her life, she realized she had returned because she knew she had left something behind. She didn't know what, but she felt drawn to its mystery.

For Sylvia, books were a different way to noticing the world through other eyes and ears, through other tastes and boundaries. Books were a haven just as much as the park. Today she went with a book she had known before, but wanted to revisit. This book was comfortable and a loving description of a way of life about music and how we inhabit the world. She found a spot beneath a tree and lifted the book for a moment as though to christen it to its new surroundings. She raised it toward the sun.

Suddenly a butterfly appeared, almost as though it had materialized from her imagination. It flew above her and then circled around, lowering toward the book and then fluttering upwards in an elusive maneuver.

Sylvia was transfixed. Somehow this beautiful creature was sharing her personal journey. She watched the path of the butterfly almost as though there was some hidden code in its trajectory that defined her presence in the world. True to her experience of documenting her being in the world, she captured an image of her companion as it seemingly found the trust to settle comfortably on the book in her lap. Later she would discover that this butterfly was a Red Admiral, looking very regal as it briefly shared her time and space.

Sylvia realized her life was filled with chance encounters that as she looked back were maybe not so much by chance, but a series of discoveries in which noticing the smallest moments created a tapestry that shaped meaningful times in her life. It was as though all the negative energy of the past was drained away on this idyllic summer day... with a butterfly reminding her that beauty was always at hand in trusting and living in the immediacy of the moment.

Fantasy # 1

He couldn't remember what had diverted his path and taken him to a different destination. But suddenly he found himself in a new place and wondering why he was there. There, in a crowd of strangers, he sensed someone was there for him. This was no ordinary moment. He felt a sense of strong anticipation... something was about to happen.

He stood silently waiting, connected to an energy he had known before, but that often eluded him, especially in recent times. Everyone in the room was engaged in conversation or activity. He scanned each person. Most were facing away from him, intent on their reasons for being in that space. He couldn't figure out what was going on, or why he was there.

It had something to do with the date. It was August first. August had always been an ending for him and a new beginning. But recently it seemed he had been asleep for decades. He couldn't seem to wake up to his life. He had thought many times of the Hemingway solution. It was always an option. He thought determining an exit strategy from life might be an noble, existential act, a measure of personal control in a world of dimensions that inexorably shaped every moment. His friends had remarked that such a choice seemed rather selfish and arrogant.

Then he caught a glimpse of someone he had seen before, enigmatic, a dark and mysterious presence. Even so there was a radiance, an ambience defining an energy he sensed as eminant.  She rose and turned to leave, an aura surrounded her face, everything was surreal... ...Ingrid Bergman and her first appearance in Casablanca... the enchanted stranger across a crowded room... stunning...

She passed by him, and he managed to say he would like to see her. She seemed surprised, agreed they might meet... and as he watched her disappear, he stood there stunned. He mused that perhaps he overused stunning in his fantasies. Her aura lingered.

He stood silent and speechless and alone.

Renaissance?

In The Fantastics The Narrator muses "You wonder how these things begin..." because each occurrence appears seamless, a chain connecting moments so intimately that experience is uninterrupted until the tyranny of mechanical time creates the illusion of minutes and seconds, ripping the flow of being into millions of little bits of time as though they were the true measure of who we are.

And yet, something does occur, often monumental, and we are never the same, we are changed in the flow of being. The something might be a person, people, happenings, cataclysms... all articulating Time, Being, and Experience. We write millions of words, probably billions, trying to understand these occurrences, with great titles like Being and Time, Flow, As Time Goes By, and so on. Time is relentless, but it flows and ripples, and there are deep eddies, rapid currents, and still waters. It is much more complex than the mechanical measurement of intervals. Time is Space, and Space is Time. Flowing.

Some days ago, I encountered a moment that transformed my awareness... and now I write in an attempt to pursue languaging as inquiry, as a tool of discovery, attempting to understand the moment. Even as I write, this moment measures time and becomes a fixture in reality.

Words falling on the page... Time captured as inquiry... trying to penetrate the mystery...noticing Now, but remembering, retrieving the fragments, trying to penetrate the essence. The moment is red hot in my mind, erupting like a quasar... enigmatic...something happening, an interaction... sparks fly, and consciousness attempts to attend the moment, to notice intensely, and to save the essence so that meaning might be extracted. In a moment I feel a sea change. I struggle to find the meaning...as though understanding somehow might make the past tangible. The past has tentacles to the present... entanglement connects eternity, reaches across the infinite stretch of time/space, and I know that somehow I am changed.

Here as I write, I am searching for words, for gestures that might help me understand the how an apparently simple diversion can account for such seismic change in the direction of my life. Having lived many years, I have experienced several such changes. I regarded such changes as renaissances, but I had concluded I would not be called again to such a rebirth.

How many renaissances . . .
How many times
Will the silence invite me
To the feast?
I toast to festivals of years. . .
Here's to the painful isolation,
Here's to the innocence
Now lost. . .
Here's to the quiet wonder
Here's to the mystery of awe
To chaos on the edge of order . . .
Too soon
The days of opportunity dissolve,
The inward possibilities remain inert,
And all that might be and might have been
Is gone.

MAKING A MULTIMEDIA SONG CYCLE

Photo by Dr. Youngmi Ha

If Time Remembers exists only as a song cycle because of Rick Hartung. He even suggested the title, which was a solo piano piece composed about 30 years ago for our current Chair, Dr. Ron Sadoff, when he joined the faculty as Director of Piano Studies.  He played its premiere at Merkin Hall. It was based on my experiences of growing up during World War II and the songs that inhabited those years, especially one that has always been a favorite, As Time Goes By.  We had thought we might use the piece as an overture, to this cycle, but it is much too long to serve such a purpose.

The songs of this cycle came into being as a private journal in which I wrote the lyrics and then improvised the song. They were never intended for an audience and I seldom performed them exactly the same way twice. It was a way of reflecting upon my experiences. There are three exceptions. The Way They Ought To Be and I Never Knew are from a musical I composed years ago and that had several incarnations. I was fortunate to find Rick Hartung who played the leading role based on Don Quixote. Whatever Happened to Might Have Been is from a musical The Marvelous Multicolored Maze that received a stunning performance at Texas Tech University as commissioned by the Texas State Council on the Arts.  It never had another production, perhaps deservedly so as it was ephemeral and fleetingly embedded in the 70s.

The other journal songs existed as lyrics on a page, which lived only when I sang them while improvising at the piano. The songs in this cycle are selected from songs spanning more than thirty years.  Must You Go? was composed for my jazz quartet in college. I remember when I finished the song in the practice room, the lead tenor came in and listened. He was so excited, and said we needed to get the “other guys” and try it out.  We sang the song over and over in a car, driving around Lubbock, Texas until about 5 a.m., where we went in to a Toddle House for pancakes, and started remembering portions and saying to each other that although we had stopped singing, it was still sounding in our heads, and we were still drunk from the music. The Four Freshman heard the song and wanted to buy it, but I was young and foolish and the deal never happened. It wasn’t until about 20 years later that I thought it would make a good solo piece, and I began improvising it as a journal song. I discovered that this song was not just about losing a girlfriend, but it was about my family and my close friends. Inevitably we are on a journey where we lose all of our loved ones. The haunting phrase of “must you go” affected me profoundly, and as a solo, the work ends with an E-flat augmented triad. Leaving the answer open, but inevitably we are always saying goodbye to those we love.

The final song of the cycle, Where is the Music? was composed or “resurrected” two weeks ago. In 1998, I suffered a stroke in which many of my journal songs were lost from my memory. I slowly began to recover that song and the form that is in the cycle is still emerging and growing, but was especially created for this cycle.

The journey between dissonance and resolution underlies all the songs. And in the final song Where is the Music?, the cycle comes to a close with a struggle for resolution between E-flat and A-Flat Augmented triads.  It ends not really resolved, but possibly intent on some future quest, “somewhere”.

My life has always been a quest for beauty, spontaneity, and excellence. Affecting the video stream of the Poet is the Italian film, The Great Beauty.  I call the main character of the cycle, the poet.  This name was derived from a madrigal cycle I published in 1969 called The Loves of a Poet.  I never published another thing, and my life has always been creating and moving on to the next thing… and noticing. For me one of my purposes in living is to notice and have reverence for all I notice. That is why I love to teach, because I strive to notice the sheer beauty and potential of all those that I am lucky enough to encounter. Noticing becomes a way of creating spontaneity, but also a way of documenting our experience of our world.

The Great Beauty is about a writer who publishes one of the greatest books of Italian literature when he was twenty-five and never published again.  Always the question from everyone he met was “Why did you never publish again?” He couldn’t find the answer. But in the film, one sees his quest for beauty, always inspired by his muse who was also his first love. The film is about the quest for beauty and excellence. He never had an answer to the question. But after a profound series of events, all about the essence of beauty and excellence, he discovers his answer in remembering his muse. 

In this performance, the left screen is the Poet’s stream of conscious and the right screen is the stream of consciousness of the The Woman. The center screen is the live action that has the power to enter into the streams of consciousness. This is determined by an artist at the technology console making decisions that interact with the stage action.

In starting an opera project several years ago called A Song for Second Avenue, I developed, through dialoging with friends, a concept of the MoviOp.  The MoviOp involved the creation of streams of consciousness of characters in prepared videos and projected with the live action on the stage, coordinated, but not meant to connect directly to the live action. In addition, live video is captured in the moment on action on the stage, and such action can be manipulated and invade the streams of consciousness. This meant to be a live and improvised experience

I abandoned A Song for Second Avenue two years ago. It seems as though I am veering on returning to the libretto and resuming a revision of the text and writing the music. For me the question is slightly different than that of the writer in The Great Beauty. I have wondered if I can go into the isolation required to do such a work. I enjoy the act of noticing being in the moment with those I know and encounter.
On the other hand, I always have admired Rossini. The great composer was a friend with Balzac and both had become addicted to coffee. In those days coffee was considered a drug and both Rossini and Balzac had become addicts. Balzac wrote:

Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." 

Without Rick’s encouragement and friendship this song cycle would not exist. Working on it has opened the door to completing the opera. I’m no Rossini, so the idea of finishing A Song for Second Avenue in about 20 days is an inspiring challenge. If I could do it, I could get back to noticing the beauty around me much sooner.