Sunday, March 01, 2009
Music for a Postcoital Afternoon
In hunting for music that makes it possible to grade essays at the same time, I have discovered more of Anouar Brahem, particularly Le Pas Du Chat Noir . It’s such a beautiful album. While typing up my student comments, I find myself imagining that this music is meant for those postcoital afternoons in spring and summer when it’s warm enough to remain outside of the blankets.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
One Resolution for the New Year
One thing I have resolved to accomplish this year is to write more often; in fact, I have decided that I will write a poem at least once a month. Although I wrote a draft of a poem one evening while waiting in the car for my son to return from his music lesson, that draft remains unfinished. I haven’t written and polished a new poem in several years now. This period of silence comes after once having a more regular writing habit and after having completed a creative dissertation. More than ten years have now passed since I completed my degree. Whatever baggage I have carried with me as a result of my education has since been discarded, I believe. It seems as though I can now write without hearing the voices of my teachers in my head and without articulating their prejudices. Whatever they once had to say about my writing no longer matters anymore.
When I was teaching in the classroom and commuting, I thought about poetry more often and often composed poems in my head while driving to classes, writing them down once I reached my classroom. Once I finished teaching during any one day, I was usually too exhausted to return to those creative thoughts; most of my efforts were initially spent reviewing my classes, at least during the first twenty minutes of the commute; afterwards, during the remaining twenty minutes or so, it took all of my effort to remain awake. Extreme sleep deprivation made driving a struggle.
Teaching online has made it more difficult to compose poems in my head. I only have to walk down the hall to reach my home office, to switch on my computer, and to call up the Internet. Somehow I need to find the discipline that will let me focus on a poem when it is most quiet in my house—either before I start working on my classes or after completing that task. Writing, I decided, will prevent me from idling away my time surfing the Internet as a way of postponing having to look at my classes. I have been teaching the same classes for so long and have been teaching so many sections year after year that I approach the grading of essays with dread, often delaying the task much too long. It seems that fulfilling that creative impulse to write for myself will allow me to return to the demands of my job with a more positive outlook.
My wife thinks that these feelings regarding the grading of essays mean that it’s time to put teaching aside. Sometimes I wish I had fulfilled my original idea to gain secondary certification after completing my MA. If I had secured a teaching job afterwards, I would be at a point now where I could think about retiring, having completed twenty years of service.
My immediate goal now is to put together a full-length collection of poems and to get it published. There are about thirty poems of mine from the dissertation that I am happy with. I now need to write more so that I can put together a complete collection, possibly eliminating all of the poems that I wrote so long ago.
Only a week remains of January, and I have not yet fulfilled my quota for this month. I need to get busy. I cannot delay putting this resolution into play. The grading begins in February.
When I was teaching in the classroom and commuting, I thought about poetry more often and often composed poems in my head while driving to classes, writing them down once I reached my classroom. Once I finished teaching during any one day, I was usually too exhausted to return to those creative thoughts; most of my efforts were initially spent reviewing my classes, at least during the first twenty minutes of the commute; afterwards, during the remaining twenty minutes or so, it took all of my effort to remain awake. Extreme sleep deprivation made driving a struggle.
Teaching online has made it more difficult to compose poems in my head. I only have to walk down the hall to reach my home office, to switch on my computer, and to call up the Internet. Somehow I need to find the discipline that will let me focus on a poem when it is most quiet in my house—either before I start working on my classes or after completing that task. Writing, I decided, will prevent me from idling away my time surfing the Internet as a way of postponing having to look at my classes. I have been teaching the same classes for so long and have been teaching so many sections year after year that I approach the grading of essays with dread, often delaying the task much too long. It seems that fulfilling that creative impulse to write for myself will allow me to return to the demands of my job with a more positive outlook.
My wife thinks that these feelings regarding the grading of essays mean that it’s time to put teaching aside. Sometimes I wish I had fulfilled my original idea to gain secondary certification after completing my MA. If I had secured a teaching job afterwards, I would be at a point now where I could think about retiring, having completed twenty years of service.
My immediate goal now is to put together a full-length collection of poems and to get it published. There are about thirty poems of mine from the dissertation that I am happy with. I now need to write more so that I can put together a complete collection, possibly eliminating all of the poems that I wrote so long ago.
Only a week remains of January, and I have not yet fulfilled my quota for this month. I need to get busy. I cannot delay putting this resolution into play. The grading begins in February.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Jan Garbarek & Dis
One person who stumbled upon my blog recently had been looking for information on Jan Garbarek’s Dis (1977), an album that I include as a desert island pick in an earlier posting . This person apparently had doubts about the album and wondered whether other people find the album boring.
Often, the American critics discount the merits of Jan Garbarek, the majority of whom equate Garbarek with the so-called ECM sound, believing that this sound is characteristically lacking in emotion and representative of the stark arctic regions of Scandinavia. When exploring jazz, particularly European jazz, it’s best to compare the critical evaluations in a discography like the American All Music Guide to Jazz to the ones in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, a discography created in Britain. Richard Cook and Brian Morton, authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, believe that Garbarek’s Dis is a “beautiful album,” one composed of “spells and riddles on soprano saxophone (and wood flute) and a deep, mourning tone that floats and drifts over the rhythm.” The All Music Guide to Jazz, on the other hand, doesn’t devote any attention to Dis and simply awards it two stars out of five.
Dis is unique because it combines Garbarek’s saxophone with the recorded sound of a windharp, one that was positioned to record the gusts coming off the North Sea. Like the Aeolian harp in Romantic literature, this windharp, according to the information that accompanies the album, is “an instrument with strings that are brought to vibrate by the wind, thereby creating tones and overtones, which, in turn, are enhanced in a resonant body.” While the windharp isn’t present on the entire album, it does appear on three of the six songs.
This music makes it possible to approach poems like Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and “Dejection: An Ode” with a greater understanding of what the speaker was hearing while he wrote those poems.
Garbarek’s music interests me partly because of its innovation. Dis includes the music of a windharp; Photo with Blue Sky, White Cloud, Wires, Windows, and a Red Roof (1979) contains songs giving voice to the images and sounds associated with those objects in a photograph; It’s Okay to Listen to the Gray Voice (1985) interprets lines from the poems of Tomas Transtromer; Madar (1994) pairs Garbarek’s saxophone with Brahem’s oud; In Praise of Dreams (2004) pairs Garbarek’s saxophone with Kashkashian’s viola; Ragas and Sagas (1992) combines Garbarek’s saxophone with the traditional music of Pakistan and India; and albums like Legend of the Seven Dreams (1988), Twelve Moons (1993), and Visible World (1995) incorporate Norwegian folk tales and landscape. What these albums reveal is a musician who remains committed to exploration.
Lately, I have been sharing some of Jan Garbarek’s CD’s with my son’s saxophone teacher who has been wondering why he hasn’t heard more of this person. At the same time, my son’s teacher has been sharing music by people like Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, people that have been unknown to me until now.
Often, the American critics discount the merits of Jan Garbarek, the majority of whom equate Garbarek with the so-called ECM sound, believing that this sound is characteristically lacking in emotion and representative of the stark arctic regions of Scandinavia. When exploring jazz, particularly European jazz, it’s best to compare the critical evaluations in a discography like the American All Music Guide to Jazz to the ones in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, a discography created in Britain. Richard Cook and Brian Morton, authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, believe that Garbarek’s Dis is a “beautiful album,” one composed of “spells and riddles on soprano saxophone (and wood flute) and a deep, mourning tone that floats and drifts over the rhythm.” The All Music Guide to Jazz, on the other hand, doesn’t devote any attention to Dis and simply awards it two stars out of five.
Dis is unique because it combines Garbarek’s saxophone with the recorded sound of a windharp, one that was positioned to record the gusts coming off the North Sea. Like the Aeolian harp in Romantic literature, this windharp, according to the information that accompanies the album, is “an instrument with strings that are brought to vibrate by the wind, thereby creating tones and overtones, which, in turn, are enhanced in a resonant body.” While the windharp isn’t present on the entire album, it does appear on three of the six songs.
This music makes it possible to approach poems like Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and “Dejection: An Ode” with a greater understanding of what the speaker was hearing while he wrote those poems.
Garbarek’s music interests me partly because of its innovation. Dis includes the music of a windharp; Photo with Blue Sky, White Cloud, Wires, Windows, and a Red Roof (1979) contains songs giving voice to the images and sounds associated with those objects in a photograph; It’s Okay to Listen to the Gray Voice (1985) interprets lines from the poems of Tomas Transtromer; Madar (1994) pairs Garbarek’s saxophone with Brahem’s oud; In Praise of Dreams (2004) pairs Garbarek’s saxophone with Kashkashian’s viola; Ragas and Sagas (1992) combines Garbarek’s saxophone with the traditional music of Pakistan and India; and albums like Legend of the Seven Dreams (1988), Twelve Moons (1993), and Visible World (1995) incorporate Norwegian folk tales and landscape. What these albums reveal is a musician who remains committed to exploration.
Lately, I have been sharing some of Jan Garbarek’s CD’s with my son’s saxophone teacher who has been wondering why he hasn’t heard more of this person. At the same time, my son’s teacher has been sharing music by people like Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, people that have been unknown to me until now.
Ice Sliding Down River
Other parts of the country have been experiencing much more severe cold and more significant amounts of snow than what we have known here in northeastern Kansas. One local weather forecaster says that we have come to an end of one twenty-five day period of active weather, with the next round of severe weather, spread out over a twenty-five day period, not set to arrive until late January. One feature of our weather this winter season has been the rapid changes in temperatures, with sudden drops of thirty degrees or so in a matter of hours. It takes a sustained period of warmth for the ice to completely disappear from the Missouri River.
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