sounds/sights

Thinking a lot about Stravinsky these days, and the Firebird especially, one of the first orchestral pieces that I loved, and especially thought of it yesterday in the downpour. Thinking about how the berceuse movement, the lullaby, always reminds me of a romantic film noir scene, the silhouette of two figures wrapped in each other’s arms, maybe a man in a trench coat and fedora and a woman in a fitted evening gown with hair frozen in time, backlit by the jarringly bright headlights of a car, also frozen in time, in motion, and always in this scene I think of there is the rain falling in a slanted direction, silently, but you could imagine what it’d sound like in real life. I was thinking of the lullaby yesterday morning because it was raining so hard and because it was so dark. In high school I would listen to Firebird driving late on the way home from Sugar Land, where I worked, because the road was so desolate, lit up only by my own headlights. Something about that bassoon solo and the way it sounds like time passing against the harp, something about the sweeping of the strings that reminds you that you are moving. I’ve never cared for the finale as much, it’s too triumphant, but that’s more my fault than Stravinsky’s. You can’t expect the narrative to fit your own psychology with these things. I can’t remember the last time that I didn’t have music in my head but I can’t remember the last time that my fingers could move with the things that I heard either and I am beginning to understand what it means to be that kind of musician, I mean really be it, now that I am moving away from the desire to be such a thing, to be a thread in that tapestry of sound, that kind of heroine. Wondering if this understanding is part of what growing up is, and if that is so then it feels hollow. Is this it? I used to want to be in there, in that utopia of sound, for the way that it felt. A part of me still does, always will when I hear it, and vicariously, feel it. Onward, onward, that word for moving forward, that word people use when they don’t know what else to say for closure.

my mornings, sometimes

“and I felt like I belonged”

…come on boys
please let me taste the clean dirt in my lungs
and moss on my back

redemptive songs for the holy weekend:
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”)
Leonard Cohen, Songs of Love and Hate

what magnitude, what magnitude….

I dream a highway back to you love / a winding ribbon with a band of gold…

Everything about this.