Music on A Well-Lit-Path

Convava l'ou de la mort blanca

Sun, 08 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I was drawn to the spirit of Brazil before I knew two words of the language, through the open-hearted music of Milton Nascimento, playing over the vegetable fields in Glencoe, Minnesota. Similarly drawn by the music of Silvia Pérez Cruz, I wanted to translate this rendition of a poem by Maria Mercè Marçal, a Catalan poet who lived and taught in Barcelona.

A few days ago we learned that Catalina’s cousin in Sevilla had passed away from cancer; that afternoon I began this translation, only to discover with a chill and a cry that it was Marçal’s poem about her own impending death, from breast cancer, in 1998 at the age of 45.

The Map of the World - II

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The lines connecting this landmark to that begin to fill in. I am the spider who, having cast a first thread into the wind, having that thread carried by the wind to a neighboring tree limb or ledge, adds with patience effort those radial spokes that construct his web. Then the outward spiral begins, and the zig-zag connection of this strand to that. Welcome to my lair! (don’t get stuck)

Canção Amiga

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The year is 1990, and I am standing in a field in Glencoe, Minnesota. The horizon is wide here; the trees that rush from the east to greet the Mighty Mississippi seem hesitant to venture far from her safe waters, into the wide, wide prairies, and huddle here and there around farmsteads, brought two or three generations ago by the sodbusters who begged shelter from the merciless Alberta winds, even partially, even for a moment, that sped unimpeded from the Rockies to the Great Lakes.

A song for sailing

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Multi-instrumentalists Round Mountain deserve more visibility. What fine music, with references and calls out to all parts of the world. It is amazing how much two brothers can do with what they inherently possess.

This track from their album The Goat has as many faces of travel in it as do my next few days – acknowledging their authorship and musicianship, here’s St. Joseph, for your listening enjoyment:

St. Joseph - Robbie and Char Rothschild

Looking for Angels

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

An indeterminate date before the turn of the millennium: we both live on our own by now, but find ourselves together that night (a holiday? a vacation from school?) in the basement of my parents’ last family-sized house: the one down the hill from the church, whose grand oaks shaded the back lot until wilt took every one; across the road from a square mile of meadow and marsh, where we would walk our errant husky, waiting an hour until she was ready to return home; a modern design for the pastor and the nurse, dark brown panels accented beautifully (almost nordically) by three graceful birch near the front door.

Os sinos da manhã

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

What is the source of songs? I would think it arrives from somewhere deep within, and is related to your birth, your education, your mother tongue. In short: your music begins with your roots. I would think that.

But then, a song like this arrives. We lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, far from the Midwestern farms and towns and kindnesses and communities, and further from the complicated, vital Brazilian noises from the south of that country. Isabela was just of school age, Nicolas a few years her senior. We walked to their classes each morning.

collision

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There are points in the career of an artist, whatever his or her art, where the collision of beautiful forces – the fluency of artistic technique, the fullness of life experience, the vibrancy of physical form, and the collaboration with artistic equals – like the splitting of atoms, crash together to release pure and nearly-perfect light.

It is the brilliance of beginnings. No: it is the brilliance of what follows just after, when the uncertainty of a beginning falls away, and there is a comfortable happiness and ease in creating something together. As an audience for that art, you hope that as your favorite performers mature their skill increases, their stamina holds out, and beauty continues to flow from their hands or mouths or minds: like Joni Mitchell or Paul Simon; like the best works of Woody Allen; like Bob Dylan or Georgia O’Keefe, like the dancers and composers and writers and painters that have decorated your generation.

the day I went away

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Caetano Veloso is one of the founders of the Tropicália movement in 70s Brazil, a great songwriter, an amazing voice, a remarkable and unique spirit. This early song shares traces of the rural roots of that country, and for me at least reflects the generational and geographic distances between the small-town “campo” families and their urban and world-hungry children.

Elis Regina was the most-loved Brazilian singer prior to her death by unnatural and self-induced causes. Check out her cover of Aguas de março by Tom Jobim, available on YouTube.

The Book of Love

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

- Thought 1 -

Spring has come as a surprise, as winter was a surprise, and the rains of the past few days have cured the branches of their buds, the leaves unfurling themselves, gladly, green skin to the warm sun that followed when the clouds fled.

Leaves whispers to me: the garden is late. I could turn the soil… but then, it would be an empty bed. With you, it would be a harvest plan. I could sow seeds… but then, only plants would come up. If you were here, there’d be fruit instead.

Choro Bandido

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

What was the greatest gift I received, through my years living in Brazil? Was it perspective on our own nation, and my place in it? Was it the sights and sounds and flavors of the Other, of another portion of our planet, one physically quite as large as the continental United States? Was it the friendships, the loves, my children born there (as if to two mothers), the great efforts, the greater successes, the greatness of the failures?

The Line of the Tide

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Isabela has always been early.

At our favorite Italian restaurant, on the main road between Menino Deus and Cidade Baixo – the former, a lower-middle-class neighborhood where we had first lived when we arrived in the city; the latter, an area of town which was like urban foothills to the buzzing downtown peaks – Júlia and I had conspired to have a Last Dinner, a little planned celebration before the next morning’s planned arrival, via c-section, of our daughter.

evening prayer

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Some years ago – after the months in Indonesia, after working with the small publishing house, after co-managing the restaurant; before Brazil, before children, before hi-tech consulting – I helped start a small organic vegetable farm in Glencoe, Minnesota. It was the most trying and most wonderful experience. Hours of labor in the prairie sun that at once broke my body and built it up, found me falling into bed as though stunned, waking refreshed as though called out by the fields and the birds. Distant from neighbors and from community, close to life and spirit.

To Bring You Home

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Then there was a little light, burned away what remained of the night colored the fields - the clarity of air - my world, unveiled then there was a sound, I turned around, there was someone coming my way…

there was, there was there was, there was

Then there was a name came so lightly to the tongue then there was a face couldn’t be erased when the day was done then there was a touch - it doesn’t take much to bring you home

my reflection in the photograph

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Several years ago I was “improving” my photo collection, which had become a wobbling tower of Kodachrome, balanced precariously and in no particular order in a hidden corner of my closet. Every time I saw it, I felt a vague intolerance; and each time I saw it, I felt that intolerance grow, until finally the intolerance was itself intolerable, and I furiously shoveled the concealing junk out of the way, and hooked those boxes and stacks out into the middle of my bedroom floor.

Our Sound

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It’s not who she is that begs the lyric; not what he wants that’s the melody’s thread. Instead: when something stirs and merges one and one; makes failing math, is short two by a half; when boundaries gently blur; when bodies move without one saying stay, one saying go…

There is Music’s spring, if not the spring of everything.

Or, what I mean: it’s where the spirits meet that fuels the fire; it’s where they part that puts it out.

Sambamaré

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

O coração baía aberto ao maré as águas vêm as águas vão prá onde eu não sei

Chegam de tempestade ao suspiro elas vão escrevem nomes na areia que as ondas apagarão

… instrumental

Correnteza agridoce pôs tesouros à beira-mar que beleza me traz sorriso despedida me faz chorar

Correnteza agridoce faz tesouros aterrisar que beleza ao alcance dos olhos mas nas mãos é que nem luar

Beleza ao alcance dos olhos desagua das mãos que nem luar

Jazz

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Recently someone asked me about the form of dance I practice – the form I aspire to, really; and like all good forms it is small enough for me to wrap my arms around, large enough to contain my curiosity, lean enough that an evening costs a few dollars and yields a fortune, full enough that I think I will never find the end of it.

I talked about the improvisational “jam”, the coalescence of a couple of dozen movement artists, with no talking, no music, only the sound of sliding or shuffling, running or slowing feet, deep breath… sometimes spontaneous laughter, sometimes spontaneous stillness, deeper because it is shared. My friend tried to imagine that space for a moment, as much as one can really imagine it, foreign as it is, and asked “How can you dance without music?”

Our Daily Dance: An Intention

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I returned late last night from the annual Dance New England summer camp near Lake Ossipee in New Hampshire, and woke this morning with dancing tape still on a couple of toes, the echo of taut and trained muscle still in the sinews, and the ache of separation from that vibrant and affectionate community of dancers already wringing out some sighs.

A beautiful family event that has been going on for some 30 years, DNE Camp attracts top-quality teachers and chefs and musicians from all over, offering the best of what they have to upwards of 800 participants. The cost of classes, food and lodging is all part of the modest fee. This year, like most years, there were community elders in attendance, and adults who at one time were babies born to this once-a-year village; there were newly-inspired youth from all over the States and abroad; and toddlers to teens who arrived with their parents for this summertime camp.

certas canções

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Certas canções - Milton Nascimento

Certas canções que ouço cabem tão dentro de mim que perguntar carece como não fui eu que fiz?

Certa emoção me alcança corta-me a alma sem dor certas canções me chegam como se fosse o amor

Contos da água e do fogo cacos de vidas no chão cartas do sonho do povo é o coração do cantor

Vida e mais vida oferida chuva, outono, ou mar carvão e giz, abrigo gesto molhado no olhar

Cio da Terra

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Spring has arrived with its signature flourish. I enjoy the recognition. It began years ago with delight

The snow’s crust hardened then softened, then became lace through which the roadside stream could be seen, happily (did my happiness make that water happy?) spilling and tumbling downhill past our home. A small stick in a small hand makes the hole wider, tests the depth and speed of water, light infiltrates, the sparkle falls into and back out of the little river. Raise your eyes: follow the stream through its tunnel as it gathers contributions and finally bursts through the ice and crystallizing snow, spreads into the street. Follow your sight, stand and look downstream, then follow it… you must, you must… uninsulated boots, waterproof except for the pinhole in the right toe, through which the cold drips in, spring, spring. Walk downhill where the river leads. Where will it lead? Beyond your small horizon, certainly. The trees arch overhead. They are elms, you later learn. Somewhere sun has found leaf loam and heated it until its fertile fragrance is all around you, then whispered away with a breeze. The trickle becomes a stream and flows into the field where the skating rink has dissolved into slush; stream slows, soaks into the marsh, into reeds, into trees, away toward the lake. Where has curiosity carried you?

strings

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When you bring a guitar into tune, there is a sound beneath the sound that rises as each string begins to play its neighbor; as the combined harmonics of low and high notes begin to ring together and sustain each other; until the joined voices have filled the body of the instrument, and the whole is in vibration, in chorus.

If what fills me fills the guitar, then that harmony must be joy.

your son out there

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I offered to be part of our community “Solstice Sing”* when it was a small offering among ourselves and local musicians… nice venue to sing a little song, among friends.

Then more folks got wind of it, and suddenly there were top-notch professional performers and singers and sound healers surfing in! It made for a fine event… and left me shy of my often-ragged voice (raggeder than I would like, if I am unable to avoid comparisons). Whenever the rain in my brain got too heavy, I took deep breaths, and got down off my need to achieve, remembering I was just offering what I had to whomever came to hear it. And hey, no one was getting paid for this: easier to find humility when everything is free.

1 Begun

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Raise Your Voice and Your Spirit Rises With It

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When, despite the gales and throes of the day, there is a spark of beauty…

There is a kind of strength which cannot be culled, when you are able to lift your voice in a song. Tonight there were a few old standards of mine, which I revisited in a few free minutes; the heart softened more than ever by life found new corners to fill and dark spaces to illuminate. And as a chord progression changed, and the dynamics of a certain passage smoothed out – the voice, in a line made more poignant by recent events, filled with more humanity, and the fingers on the strings followed that lead – so that the song once rich was somehow richer, the melody somehow deeper.

White Sugar

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Of course, the reason all those beverages and treats are such a hit (in terms of popularity) is that they are really are a hit (in terms of physiology). So the veins and the various systems of the body open their mouths wide to suck it in, the charge is lit, the buzz is immediate… and like any such rush, the fall is equally precipitous, the crash as hard as the flight was high, the ugly feeling and the desire not to live with it trigger a search for a quick fix, and back we are again with the promised, instant high.

through which it sings

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

It is nine in the morning.

With those first words, I have given you the freshness, the low rays of the sun, the clear skies of so many mornings. It is Saturday: I have given you some stillness and freedom from Purpose. There is the faintest breeze, in fact, which plays around the drying field grasses and late-summer flowers, and an untainted blue sky. My daughter is whistling in the living room. Outside, the crickets – who love the fact that I haven’t mowed the upper field in weeks – have set up a cadence, a syncopated cricket-waltz, three to a second; or perhaps their syncopation is a studied lack of rhythm, dancers who don’t know the steps, and so hes…itatethenstep then hes…itate and another until Schubert or Brahms would measure them incompetent, or brilliant, failed student or master…

A Word on the Wind

Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight I was sitting in a pile of wood shavings, they fell like heavy flakes of snow as I carved away layers of beech, until I was adrift. A seated Buddha is concealed within what was originally a modest 6" block of roughcut. The Buddha’s always within… I know that… you just need the patience and the skill to find it.

Meanwhile, I almost lopped off the Buddha’s nose last week, having angled my gouge slightly too deeply along the grain, with the pressure of my desire to find Buddha, the fibers released all at once, and a large wedge of wood pulled up right at the middle way where his face might have been. Justin, a master carver and this group’s guide, said “Well… maybe the Buddha in there is smaller than you thought…”

Gota de luz

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some words seem to be born of an inner and shared light…

For me they may arrive after the stillness of meditation; but just as often the softest and most human words are accompanied or are led by a melody. All creation is frequency, is a movement of waves, from the highest vibrations of quasars or atomic particles to the lowest throbbing of stars in their orbits.

Or, in our daily rounds, from the bluest light to the reddest, those frequencies of creation which our eyes perceive; from the whistle of a kettle or the hum of a bee to the drone of a bowed bass or the rumble of thunder, in frequencies which our ears perceive; to the cycles of ocean waves, whose interstices we hear as they crash to the sands, while their slow pulse, like the breath of the planet, moves through our bodies noticed, unnoticed; to the celestial hum of the earth spinning on its poles; to the year-long wave of a planet around its sun; to the millennial arc of a sun around our galaxy’s core, a music so slow that only the Spirit can listen, leaving ourselves to intuit from our cruder senses.

Why sing?

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There is one line you cannot trace with your finger, and which you cannot follow with your eye. A melody, with words, describes the heart. And as the thread of notes is drawn out from the lips, drawn out like the finest line of silk, it is taken by the wind, it coils around a finger, it settles into residence in other lives, it is colored by sunlight and hidden by nightfall, it is raised up with a baby’s cry and deflated by lament for the departed…

The Best of Intentions

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A word from the wind at the window pane the winter’s come to stay awhile the heart longs for heaven the heart looks for sun but this song is sung alone

That’s all right there’s a sad kind of sweetness in a song or a sweet kind of sadness that carries you along from the best of intentions that gently go wrong to saying sorry as though they owed you something

A short hiatus

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of good energy was directed to other pursuits for a few days. Our intentional Community, Odonata, offered it’s first evening in the Sacred Music Series, concerts with musicians whose art is devoted to the spirit through music. Sitartist David Pontbriand and tabla player Amos Libby entertained some sixty people at the Yoga Center of Newburyport, an inspired evening which took all in and sent them home with good grace.

Your Son Out There

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The boys are taking numbers
to stand in line again
born with an open hand
which of them will be men today
and draw a card that wins?

They’re looking for a future
looking for their rising star
to shine above the fields
a voice shouts from the doorway
“C’mon in, boy, you’re hired.”

They say that in my country
when the market’s weak there’s war
and our coin is thin, my friend
dig a grave for the bravest ones
in endless waves of sand

Water of Life

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The beauty of the subtropics – as I experienced them for years in Brazil, and on other journeys far and away…

… and now I understand that I was making a home of the Earth, not a home of

- Spencer, New York, where I was born at the foot of a minor tree-crowned mountain;
- or Ironwood, Michigan, where the winter snows drifted to the eaves of our house;
- or friendly Saint Paul, Minnesota, whose lakes were diamonds in the summer sun;
- or tiny Souris, North Dakota, an islet adrift in a sea of green;
- or jazzy Chicago, Illinois, its colors and its black and its white;
- or halus Yogayakarta, Java, its ancient gods and modern desires;
- or Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, where my adulthood was born;
- or Boston or Byfield, Massachusetts, where my affluence came and went;
- or Auroville, Tamil Nadu, whose galaxy of energies called as if by gravity…

A litany of grounds that received my footprint, but were places on a larger map, one with fewer constraints on patterns of thought, and which tries to cover a globe of human understanding, human reaching, and human almost-attaining…

Water of Sorrow

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a song for the water of sorrow
and a song for the fire of pain
a song for the love that you’ll meet tomorrow
and one for the touch of skin
ah, life gives us songs to sing

Can you count how many times
you’ve held pleasure in your hands?
Open your fingers in the evening light
watch the water disappear in the sand

A breath is a wave you can drown in
it can whisper you out to sea
rock you up and down in its arms
like a mother sings her baby to sleep
ah, life is a song to sing

All part of the same melody

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I expect that, having passed my bedtime by several hours now, I am exempt from morning yoga. There are some things you really must not allow to be pushed, though – the least effort is spent maintaining a ritual, then the ritual helps maintain everything else (such as reasonable sleeping hours and subsequent mental and physical health…).

However, having played one of the songs written in Auroville for Aurelio and Charles, and having unfortunately missed doing the same for Bhavana, who really deserved to be in on the farewell recital, I promised to record it and send it along. So, in retrospect… what amounted to a fairly quick recording session, rocky start to weary finish, using Garage Band on the Mac, several takes, several tweaks and some technical wiggling got it all up on the web and mailed off to friends abroad.

Journey Be Your Friend

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Arrival follows departure and, unless you work tirelessly to avoid them, solitary travel invariably collects companions. One week at Verité Community in Auroville was in depth and breadth closer to a month, or months; so, since departure follows arrival, this leave-taking was sweeter and more heart-tugging than I would have expected from a visit of days. Imagine the hidden places our love lives, when we say goodbye to affections we nurtured for years?

A little more music

Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The experience of the sitar performance was moving – to close your eyes in that resounding space and hear the passage of melody and the underlying drone beneath, as though, like any music, you were being carried along on a river of sound. It is a great protective space, music masterfully played, even if the mastery should be of human feeling and not technical proficiency with an instrument.

In this case it was both. What played in the heart, however, also played in the mind, and it was fascinating to look into the grammar of this musical language. It has phrases which do not begin or end as our western phrases do, with strikes and strums which are unpredictably and beautifully placed. The flow of sound seemed intellectual, seemed to wind around from heart to mind to hands, but was at the same time anti-intellect: and the interjection of deep tones or calls of the resonant strings followed a sensibility completely consistent with place and culture… highly controlled with how many generations of artistic development behind it, yet in some way unchained. Beautiful.

Music

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Every night at the ashram, after an evening chant and before dinner, there are fifteen minutes of music. And every night, after dinner, one or two hours. The musicians play as a devotion, an offering to the sanctuary and to those who come here as their church.

The sanctuary is rather large; the floor is granite, the walls stone, and the ceiling vaulted; there are no chairs, those who come to worship or participate or attend sit on the floor or against the walls. Everyone is silent, but you feel them there – imagine the full emptiness of orchestra hall – and then the single instrument begins to play. The sound of a sitar was made for this type of hall; the musician is a master, and we follow his movements, both physical and musical, from a distance of 10 feet. A sitar has resonance strings and body, and sometimes a gourd attached to carry the vibrations further or longer. In this room they were not needed, and the voice sounded and resounded around the hall. An echoing silence followed each pause and each break. Astounding fortune, yet another call for gratitude, to be witness to both the grace and simplicity of this spiritual community, and the arts which are inspired by their master, Ramana Maharshi.