PERFORMANCE NOTES
LISTEN
Some thoughts on performance Saturday, August
16th, 2003, Austin, Texas:
I don't know what I'm going to play tonight, and I won't know until I hear the first note or make the first sound, though at times I think that any note or sound is merely the reflection already played out of that first note that began our universe.
Recently I have been working on an album inspired by music of the Chilean Nueva Cancion, so some of that may come out -- the music of Violeta Parra, Victor Jara, Inti-Illimani, and Illapu; and the musical universe of the Mapuche, the Inca, and the Araucan. I will probably also perform one or two of my own compositions. "Twin Beams" which begins with a B note (for those of you with your harmonicas) is a song I wrote last year for the Chris Cutler Project. "Broken Obelisk" was inspired by a small antiwar vigil which took place in March near Barnett Newman's statue at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.
Violeta Parra wrote that the song is a bird without a flight plan who never flies in a straight line. Eschewing mathematics, it soars through the swirls and eddies of moving air. Tonight I will play songs or perhaps pieces of songs with a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order.
Blurry the distinction and uneven the border
between notes and sound. Music has so much to say and so little time to say it. For this reason, I often feel that music should be more shamanic ritual in nature and less recital for each note is a god or goddess, and they live with others of their kind in the primordial space under the fingers, between the strings and surrounding the twelve notes that humans have delineated. And in this community of countless
notes surrounded by sounds and noise, each has a story to tell if it is properly beckoned and if our ears will hear it. This is the nature of music. It is this beauty, the depth and the heart of sound formed from this community of notes and from the original sound that I hope to touch lightly, to bring forth, and to share with you in this time and space tonight.
