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A bird

I came across a sparrow yesterday on the busy corner near B&A’s daycare on the way to pick them up. It looked like a tiny pile of leaves on the concrete, and people kept coming *this close* to stepping on it by accident. I realized what it was in exactly the same moment as a dad and his kid three steps ahead of me, the little boy started whispering worriedly. I picked it up gently and put it in the nearest reasonable spot, a very tall planter with a lot of greenery. It was like nothing, a little mound of trembling lint with claws. I know you’re not supposed to move stunned birds but I figured there was no way it wasn’t going to get flattened like a pancake otherwise. And it made sense, I was literally seconds away from daycare where they had a bathroom right by the door and I could wash my hands.

In the few remaining steps to daycare, I was instantly overwhelmed by a huge wave of deja vu and dread. I suddenly thought, “bird flu…” and was mentally thrown back in to the earliest days of the pandemic when everything was dire and nothing was certain, when we were wiping our groceries down with bleach wipes, wearing masks when passing someone on a trail in the woods, living with a permanent empty lump lodged somewhere between our throats and the base of our skulls and thinking, “Surely this isn’t right? Am I doing something wrong? Is this what I’m supposed to do to stay safe, to keep everyone safe, to make this go away?”

I washed my hands for 40 seconds and tried to stop thinking about it, but the feeling lingered the rest of the night, this existential what-if-I-just-seriously-fucked-up feeling, and it’s still sort of present now. I know it’s extreme but also, life feels pretty extreme right now.

I picked up AB and BB, and told BB about the bird. We walked up to the planter and found it still there, but under a few more leaves. It was gone by the same time the next day.

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Hello again

Red dragonfly on a wooden rail in the sun

It’s been a while! My site has fallen majorly by the wayside which both feels appropriate (see first point below) and makes me a bit sad. There’s a lot I’ve already forgotten. I want to analyze a bit more why I haven’t been posting… but that’s something I need to think a bit more about first.

A few notes to catch up on major points, and then hopefully back to posting semi-regularly.

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Bell ringing as abstraction, exercise, and communion

Can’t remember how we got talking about it, but another member of the Brooklyn Conservatory Chorale told me that she’s very in to English Change Ringing.

I thought I hadn’t heard of it before, but I have heard it, many times since I lived over there for 10 years. Listen to an example from St Paul’s on YouTube. I didn’t know it had a name, guess I always assumed it was sort of random.

If you listen to it closely you can start to recognize patterns. And if you live in the US, you might realize how this sound feels somewhat historical, not something that we hear frequently even in places with lots of churches. It is somewhat-to-very rare in the US depending upon where you live (see map of North American bell towers).

I started poking around online. For a concise description of English Change Ringing, you can’t beat the one on the New York Trinity Ringers website. Would love to go hear their bells some time.

But for a wonderfully in-depth presentation, it’s worth reading the article “Campanologomania” by Katherine Hunt published in issue 53 of Cabinet magazine in spring 2014.

(Incidentally, how have I never come across Cabinet before? “We believe that curiosity is the very basis of ethics insofar as a deeper understanding of our social and material cultures encourages us both to be better custodians of the world and at the same time allows us to imagine it otherwise.” Spot on. I hope they’re not done for… The last issue was winter ‘21 / spring ‘22, and the last event was in late 2020 as far as I can tell.)

In the article, Hunt goes through the origins of English Change Ringing as almost a drunken group pastime on idle bells, to a sort of obsession by folks – men, really – of many classes, to something that was seen as somewhat lowly due to the physical exertion it required, to the qualities it shares with modern twelve-tone music and the invention of the dumbbell (quite literally a dumb bell).

It’s hard to describe how physically in-tune the bell ringers must be to achieve the many permutations in a multi-hour peal. Hunt says:

While change ringers must understand the shape of the particular method they are ringing, they do not follow written notation for each and every change. Nor do they memorize the individual changes. Rather, the practice relies on the ringers internalizing the patterns of the method, perhaps by looking at notation that shorthands the whole method, showing only the key moments at which the permutations change course in order to exhaust all the possible orders. Ringers know principally by doing: they anticipate when two bells will have to swap places in the following round, and they feel their way as a group through the ringing of all the orders of the rows. Change ringing’s linguistic potential may have been exploited by Stedman and Mundy, but in the bell-tower it is a sweaty, communal, and profoundly corporeal activity.

That reliance on communality reminds me of many Musarc performances, though those are of course much more contemporary and experimental (and choral, not bells!).

Anyways, clearly there is something very attractive about this to me… The trouble is the meeting lengths and frequency, it would be really tough to get involved at this point in my life. Maybe something for when I’m 50+.

***

Side note: I was about to post a link to Outhwaites of Hawes, a traditional ropemaking business that started before 1840. The building is their workshop and also effectively houses a museum. It was lovely to walk through there and see the rope being made, including the incredible ropes required for change ringing. But sadly, it looks like they closed almost exactly a year ago.

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“When the blazing sun is gone”

I just remembered… Another one of my favorites from the Kronos Quartet anniversary concert was Laurie Anderson’s piece “Nothing Left but Their Names”. I knew I would like it, but I didn’t expect to also learn another verse of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

I wish I’d written it down because the way she introduced it made me laugh, something about it being rather apocalyptic for a lullaby. But I thought I’d be able to look it up afterward, so I didn’t. It doesn’t seem to be part of her original lyrics, so take my word for it.

I do remember that she sang “where” instead of “what”, which I liked.

Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder where you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder where you are!

When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder where you are!

Turns out there are five verses in total. B will be happy to hear that, it’s all he asks for at night.

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“an example of how wonder and humility can build up in the same way as toxins in nature and in ourselves”

I was delighted to accompany DB last-minute to Kronos Quartet’s 50th anniversary gig at Carnegie Hall on Friday night.

This was the set.

  • Severiano Briseño, “El Sinaloense (The Man from Sinaloa)” (2001; arr. Osvaldo Golijov)
  • Gabriella Smith, “Keep Going” (2023, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall; New York Premiere)
  • Peni Gandra Rini, “Movement 1” from Segara Gunung (2023, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall; arr. Jacob Garchik and Andy McGraw; New York Premiere)
  • Laurie Anderson, “Nothing Left But Their Names”, from Landfall (2012)
  • Tanya Tagaq, “Sivunittinni” (2015, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall; arr. Jacob Garchik)
  • Tanya Tagaq, “Colonizer (Remix)” (2021; arr Tanya Tagaq, Kronos Quartet, and Joel Tarman)
  • Ariel Aberg-Riger / Hamza El Din, “Swimming with Rachel Carson” (2023; World Premiere) / Escalay (1989; real. Tour Ueda)
  • Traditional, “We’re Stole and Sold from Africa” (arr. Jake Blount and Jacob Garchik)
  • Michael Gordon, gfedcba (2023, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall; New York Premiere)
  • Wu Man, “Silk” and “Bamboo”, from Two Chinese Paintings (2015, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall; real. Danny Clay)
  • Moondog, “Choo Choo Lullaby” (1977; arr. Brian Carpenter)
  • Rahul Dev Burman, “Mehbooba Mehbooba (Beloved, O Beloved)” (1975; arr. Stephen Prutsman and Kronos Quartet)
  • Terry Riley, “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector” (1981)

The performance included collaborators from throughout their career, and the Terry Riley piece brought all of the performers from earlier pieces and many more together in one huge jam. This included the Aizuri Quartet, Attacca Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, PUBLIQuartet, Sō Percussion, Laurie Anderson, Gregg August, Jake Blount, Peni Sandra Rini, Brian Carpenter, Jacob Garchik, Iwo Jedynecki, Ayana Kozasa, Reshena Liao, Son Leon Lyuh, Tanya Tagaq, Wu Man, and more. Terry Riley gave a very endearing recorded introduction before his piece.

It’s super hard to decide… But I think I was most enchanted by Hamza El Din’s Escalay with Ariel Aberg-Riger’s spoken word and visual art. It was an incredible combination, and unexpected.

I knew very little about Rachel Carson, and about the forcible relocation of so many Nubians when the Aswan Dam was constructed. (To be honest, I know embarrassingly little about Nubia in general.) The program noted that the water wheel was the oldest mechanical device used for farmland irrigation in Nubia, and “Escalay is a representation of how to start the waterwheel and let it run.” El Din was introduced to Kronos by Terry Riley, and this is the piece he wrote for them.

Towards the end of Aberg-Riger’s “Swimming with Rachel Carson”, she said something about how Carson set “an example of how wonder and humility can build up in the same way as toxins in nature and in ourselves”. (That is not a perfect quote since I couldn’t write it down fast enough, forgive me.)

Something to strive for.