Aug 29 2015

The Breakfast Club (Traveling Music)

breakfast beers photo breakfastbeers.jpgOne of the things about traveling is that a lot of your time is taken up by- well, traveling.

If you have a job in a cubicle or on a line and your input is just another unit of labor this is not usually a hardship as your temporary replacement will generally handle the routine minutia and while you may find a big pile of “too difficult” waiting on your return at least it’s not a huge backlog of EVERYTHING!

As a photon artist, particularly one working in the ephemeral field of politics, policy, news, and cultural criticism that I do, for many years I rarely left my desk for more than 12 or 18 hours in a row and all my other ambitions had to be accomplished in that time frame.

The tyrany of deadlines.

Now, upon advice from my therapist and others, I have adopted a more relaxed attitude though each mark missed still evokes torrents of self recrimination.

Yesterday was such a day.  I was up at the crack of dawn (which is still cracking pretty early where I am), wrote 2 pieces, and set up the page.  I spent the rest of the day (all 16 hours or so) traveling and visiting.  Was it fun?  Sure, but last night while I was busy not sleeping all I could think about was the fact I’d forgotten to put up a Cartnoon.

I’ll bet you didn’t even notice.

But that’s my craziness.  It puts me in mind though, that in times not so long ago people would disappear for months (or 10 years in the case of Odysseus) and literally sail off the end of the Earth (did I mention I had no cell service?).

Today’s Art Music is mostly about such a person, Sinbad, who not only did that, but did it repeatedly.  The stories of his travels to distant and fantastic lands make up a large part of 1001 Nights, a collection of Arabian folk tales initially translated by Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) who is also remembered as one of the group searching for the source of the Nile and as the first Westerner to visit Mecca.

The conceit of the Arabian Nights is that some Muckety-Muck has the habit of marrying women, spending the night with them, and then executing them in the morning.  Scheherazade is selected for this dubious distinction but rather than amorously seduce she tells stories whose cliff hanger dawn breaks led the Muckety-Muck to postpone her disposal for 1001 days at the end of which he pretty much gives up and decides to keep her around.

Needless to say this plot is a long time favorite of writers who can only aspire to be as enthralling as Scheherazade.

In 1888 Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a member of ‘The Five’ (most influential mid-Romantic Russian composers) was at work finishing up Prince Igor, an opera by his good friend Alexander Borodin (also a member of ‘The Five’) who had just died.

Perhaps for relief from this grim task he composed Scheherazade as a symphonic poem.  No, I don’t really know the difference a symphonic poem and a symphony except these Romantics were constantly striving for pure emotional effects, structurally they’re virtually the same with 4 movements in different time signatures.

It’s a still a big hit with Figure Skaters and the Santa Clara Vanguard featured it in both their 2004 and 2014 shows.

What?  Not into DCI?  Oh well, here’s the orchestra version- Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival 2005.

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Obligatories

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

–Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

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