Whole Notes

Whole Notes by Eddie Ayres
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My remote contact with Emma and Ed Ayres started many years ago.
For many years it was listening to smooth voice of Emma presenting classical music on ABC/Classic - Morning.
At that time I had and opportunity to see her in action - ABC/Classic was broadcasted live from Percy Grainger museum.
I saw Emma and I realised that she is not quite comfortable in her role.
Then she disappeared from radio ABC and I met her on a book shelves - Danger Music - a relation from Emma's work in a music school in Afghanistan.
She explained that she could not cope with serene climate of her job and surrounding as she was tormented with a war inside, she needed to be surrounded by danger to keep some balance.
Then came another book - Cadence - relation from a solo bike travel from England to Hong Kong.
It was good to have such an introduction so I could read Whole Notes in relaxed mode.
Basically the book covers whole life of Ed, all experiences intertwined with music.
Experiences are many -daily life issues, experience of a student, performer, teacher, mature age student.
Separate stream are instruments - Ed writes about them with expertise and with love.
I have to admit, that at that point I often felt lost. Still I believed Ed and the list of suggested music added me some confidence.
My rating reflects this experience of being lost.


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The living Sea of waking Dreams

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Strange book.
After some 3 pages I got feeling of fulfilment, on one hand I felt that the author opens for me a window to strange world, on the other - I did not want to enter it, I found these 3 paged I read as sufficient.
After few days of hesitation I made a step forward.
I was enchanted by the author's language and writing style, I appreciated parallels between vanishing body parts and burnt out forests and animals, but I did not accept the story, it's cruelty and lack of common sense.
After about half of the book I got enough.

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Various ways of Scouting

A few days ago I found out that a Jamboree, a gathering of scouts and girl scouts from all over the world, is taking place in South Korea - CLICK .
These events take place every 4 years, but I don't remember them ever being reported in the media.

This time, however, they have a reason - a weather disaster - CLICK.

England, the country that started scouting, was so concerned about the fate of its scouts that it moved them from a tent city to hotels.

Scouts living in air-conditioned hotels?
Extra teams of cleaners to remove rubbish?
It looks that my idea of scouting is totally obsolete.

And at the same time...

  - International Youth Day, which began week ago in Portugal.

It's also very hot there, for this occasion came not some 45,000 people, but one and a half million believers, many of them on foot, and what?
The media reports that "young pilgrims braved intense heat" - CLICK.
Simple like that.

So,  let me ask - who is a better scout?

And in Poland...
August is a month of pilgrimages to the Shrine of Our Lady in Jasna Góra - CLICK.
It culminates with a celebration of The Assumption of Our Lady on 15th of August.
So currently there are over 200 pilgrimages in Poland walking from 200 to 700 kilometres, braving rain, wind and all aspects of capricious weather.

Have a look - I selected just a few, my suggestion - watch just few seconds to get idea of the climate.
- Folk Pilgrimage of mountain People - CLICK.
- and another one - CLICK.
- and more - CLICK.
- and the last one - CLICK.

Amen.

8 minutes 37 seconds

8'37" - that was a working title of a musical piece composed by K. Penderecki in 1960. 

The title of the piece was not innovative. Eight years earlier, John Cage "composed" a piece called 4'33'' (4 minutes 33 seconds). I wrote the word composed in quotation marks because this piece is absolute silence.

So this is a musical version of the fairy tale The King's New Clothes. However, so far no one has cried during the performance of the song - the king is naked!
Perhaps music soothes manners.

You can watch it HERE.

Krzysztof Penderecki had great appreciation for John Cage and probably agreed with his statement: music is pointless fun, an affirmation of life. It is not an attempt to bring order to chaos or to repair creation. It is simply a way of awakening to the life we live.

In practice, this meant musical experiments, including sonorism - a musical direction invented by Polish composers, in which sound is the essence. There is no rhythm, no melody, only sound, like colourful spots on an abstract painting. 

The piece 8'37'' was supposed to be just such an experiment. Krzysztof Penderecki composed it in a laboratory, on electronic equipment.
Fortunately, in those days (Communist Poland), creative activity was not limited by finances, so Penderecki had the opportunity to listen to his work performed by a symphony orchestra - 52 string instruments.

He listened and was shocked.
He changed the title of the song to Threnody in memory of the victims of Hiroshima.

My Sunday Reflection:
I found Penderecki's experience quite significant. I thought maybe that's what's happening in the universe.
God is experimenting in his heavenly laboratory, and on Earth, an orchestra of over 7 billion artists performs this piece.

The effect is truly shocking.

Let's go back to K. Penderecki.
Threnody in memory of the victims of Hiroshima was first performed in 1960 and marked the beginning of the composer's brilliant career.

I listened to this piece in 1962.
It was my first encounter with avant-garde music and on the one hand it was a shock - is this music?
On the other hand, it touched familiar strings - the bomb alarm, the patter of feet heading for the shelter, the distant sound of an approaching plane. I vaguely remembered the nights spent in the shelter during last months of WWII, I vividly remembered my mother's stories about the bombings.

Why did I choose this topic for Sunday?
Today - August 6 - is the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima - CLICK.

One more thing...
I mentioned that in sonoric music there is no rhythm, no melody. Music notation resembles technical charts.

That's why I'm including the Threnody animation here.
For me, it is not so much associated with the atomic bomb, but with the attack of viruses.
Listen and Watch - CLICK.