Imbolc Valentine Moon
Woke up. Turned on the phone. Nothing. Frozen. Onto the internet. Tried several fixes. Nothing. Over to Verizon. No joy there either. I’d had my HTC Thunderbolt for four years, so I opted to get a new phone, an HTC DNA. Another Android phone, in the same lineage as the Thunderbolt so I already understood its basic use. Not cheap, not outrageously expensive. Did add one feature to the plan, text messaging. Yes, after four years of owning a smartphone I’m catching up with today’s elementary school kids.
Later on Kate and I went into the McPhail Center, a place for music learning and performance, now located very near the new Guthrie and the Mill City Museum. We were there for a performance by the Bakken Trio featuring the gamelan. The gamelan is an Indonesian instrument, a percussion instrument played by several people. It includes gongs, zithers, xylophones and upside down bronze pots that each have a tone and are struck with a mallet.
The gamelan’s music organizes around rhythm and melody, having as a particular feature density of tone achieved by the layering of one rhythm on top of another simultaneously. There are no harmonics.
Joko, an Indonesian gamelan artist who teaches gamelan, has lived in the Twin Cities now for 18 years. He said that a full gamelan orchestra is the largest percussive ensemble in the world. (see image above for an Indonesian setting). Gamelan concerts typically run 8 hours and gamelan musicians in Indonesia may play 8 hours during the day and another 8 at night. Geez.
I wanted to see this because I’m fascinated by how other people do things. In this case, music.
The concert itself featured quartet pieces by Ravel and Debussy, both influenced by a traveling program focused on Javanese culture, plus a work by a contemporary composer, Louis Harrison. Impressed with the gamelan music and its difference from the Western tradition Debussy and Ravel both incorporated it. Especially in pizzicato and in movements with narrow tonal ranges.
(Ravel)
Both Debussy and Ravel are in the romantic tradition and, for some reason I can’t explain, I don’t like romantic classical music. I say for some reason because in painting and literature I find myself a romantic by nature and inclination. There were some beautiful melodies, especially in the Ravel, his String Quartet in F Major.
The Harrison piece, though, Philemon and Baukis (for violin and gamelan), was wonderful. It was airy and spacious, filled with the rapid changing of tempos typical of gamelan music. Harrison builds and plays the gamelan himself. Philemon and Baukis, btw, is a story found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It was the only piece in which the gamelan played.
Following the concert we ate at Sea Change. We had a miserable experience there a few years back, but tonight was pleasant. Then back home to the burbs.
Over the meal Kate and I discussed a possible (probable) move into the city at some point before infirmity strikes us so we can enjoy the city life again. I’m hesitant about it, having spent 19 years adapting myself and my life to the exurbs, but aging has its own relentless pressures.