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Adams
The
world changed
For whom?
Demand a monopoly of the world’s grief and pain
Adams became the composer laureate
One difference is that
it happened on camera
That number of children die everyday from diarrhea because of bad water
Closer to Adams’s El
Nina at the 2002 Adelaide Festival
Fixed on the visuals of the planes hitting the towers and the towers
collapsing
As someone with a television, what struck me was the aural dimension
Of people using their mobiles to leave last words of love on answering
machines
Divided response
Good that both the victim could find the comfort and their loved ones
got the consolation of
their voices. Yet the mechanization of the medium was the message, as
impersonal system
The place of technology in the use of
the aircraft as weaponry and the engineering the towers that aided their
collapse
These
thought as a prelude to hearing John Adams’s On
the Transmigration of Souls
With a filmscape by G. Barrett
Snatches of street noise, rollcalls of the dead, mobile leave-takings
and phrases from missing-persons posters.
Avoid the intentional fallacy in evaluating art. The desire to
commemorate innocence and suffering, like the urge to comfort the
bereaved, is commendable but it is not a guarantee for achievement.
Indeed, those worthiness is likely to
Like T. S. Eliot, I
believe that emotions become art only when mediated through an
‘objective correlative’.
The only way of
expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding … a situation such
that when the external facts … are given, the emotion is immediately
evoked.
Art is mediation of
experience, not its raw expression.
Minimalism has problems
with feelings, and has slumped into a mushy romanticism
The Adams, the Edwards
and the cello recital
Compared with the other items on the symphonic program
Chris Gordon Peace
on Earth
Ross Edwards fourth
symphony Star Chant
with images from
David Malin
Conducted by Antonino Fogliani
With Gondwana Voices, Cantillation and Sydney Children’s Choire
And the compositions for solo cello performed by Maya Beiser
Arvo Part
Frates
Osvaldo Golijov
Mariel 2001
Steve Reich
Cello Counterpoint
Louis Andriessen
La Voce
David Lang
World to Come
Vocals, lighting and interactive video from Irit Batsry
Distract from the music??
Absolute music and tone poems
Colours and pictures and narratives
A political dimension to the two pieces
The
Death of Klinghoffer
Directed by Penny Woolcock
Libretto by Alice Goodman
The Flying Dutchman
Condemned to sail the oceans
Cf Klinghoffer at sea
Senata Lisa Gasteen
The Dutchman Johnathan Summers
Daland Arend Baumann
Erik Jay Hunter Morris
The Steersman Andrew Brunsdon
Mary Kerry Elizabeth Brown
Conducted by George Alexander Albrecht
Australian debut
Memories circling the
globe in a perpetual war against terrorism
To roam in search of a redeeming love
But she must be his forever, possession and domination and not a love of
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