"What did you think of the movie?" my roommates asked as we rode the subway home from seeing The Hunger Games. "I thought it was very dark. I'll probably blog about it," I answered. I had not read the books, but from my roommates, I knew that the story involved children fighting and that the cast… Continue reading Savage Spectators, Killing Machines, and Other Atrocities
Author: Ars Arvole
composer-pianist, teacher, poet
Lost in Space-Time
On Wednesday night, I donated some of my hearing to Mario Diaz de Leon and Jeremiah Cymerman in a concert curated by Tim Byrnes at Vaudeville Park. Yes, it was detrimentally loud in some sections, but I consciously decided to stay in their dimension-bending soundscape. From the timbral variety of their soundcheck, I could tell… Continue reading Lost in Space-Time
Stirred by Spoken, not Sung
I would not call the event on February 2nd at the Jewish Community Center (JCC) in Manhattan an open rehearsal. There were no live instruments except an autobiographic violin solo, a sample melody on the piano, and a speaking part played by the composer. It was more of a conversation, an extension of a conversation… Continue reading Stirred by Spoken, not Sung
Crossovers and Departures
If I do not get to see The Gershwin's Porgy and Bess on Broadway, I will not be completely disappointed, thanks to John Schaefer. Today, I heard him live for the second time at The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space. (The first time was at the 30th anniversary celebration of New Sounds.) In this afternoon's… Continue reading Crossovers and Departures
Pelican Show-and-Tell
Most graduate school classes would consider show-and-tell a bygone exercise, but my scavenging through Amazon for the cheapest possible copy of Raymond Williams' Culture and Society 1780-1950 resulted in a revival of that practice. When I ordered this text along with others for Raiford Guins' course on the history of the field of cultural studies,… Continue reading Pelican Show-and-Tell
Figaro and the Filthy Rich/Hippies
In my music appreciation class, I remarked on a section of the movie Amadeus by saying that the stirrings before the French Revolution were something like Occupy Wall Street. It was an on-the-fly comparison for the sake of relevance in the context of lecturing about Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and the socioeconomic status of… Continue reading Figaro and the Filthy Rich/Hippies
Dostoevsky Dive
As I ride the fence between lower and middle class with my all-but-dissertation resume while police pepper-spray protesters and Sylvia Nasar critiques Marx, I realize that I have been reading Dostoevsky's intersections of social strata for two months. Like my dive into Kittler a couple of years ago, my summer reading was compelled by an… Continue reading Dostoevsky Dive
Deserts of Bed-Stuy
"Bedford-Stuyvesant is a food desert," someone from Radical Living told me. The closest fresh produce is about a half mile away, an unfair disadvantage for disabled or elderly people desiring this essential fare. For six weeks of my summer sublet on Long Island, I walked half a mile to a farm where I bought locally-grown… Continue reading Deserts of Bed-Stuy
Deep Talking
"If we are going to spend all this time making music, it should not be divorced from our reality." Leigh Landy, June 2011, in "Art for Goodness(') Sake," his keynote speech for the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network/Electronic Music Foundation Conference In the title of Landy's speech, the word "goodness(')" addressed not only the quality of… Continue reading Deep Talking
Magnum Opus
I did not remember Charlotte's magnum opus, although I learned this word from her when I was a child reading E. B. White's Charlotte's Web. I thought her great work was her love for Wilbur expressed in the words she spun ("RADIANT," "HUMBLE," and others) that protected him from being slaughtered. Today, I aspire to… Continue reading Magnum Opus
Ars Arvole 