WMV Music Web Log

Art-O-Matic, what a gas! We installed Mar's wall there (at the old abandoned Children's Museum) this morning, and then wandered around to see what the other 699 artists were doing. Only in a place like Washington where art is so suppressed, oppressed, contemned, and feared would a thing like Art-O-Matic happen. Mar says, like the bursting of something under pressure. Even the bad artists look good there, because they are just making art. What would it take to have something like this all the time?

And then we went from there to Jeff Hill's annual Kensington Garage concert - New York has nothing on this! The soulful Maryland pedal steel guitar of Tom Aldridge, and Jeff Hill's crazy guitar and absolutely authentic vocals, Ruthy and the Wranglers, three kinds of chili - all in the Kensington Auto Clinic repair shop down the street from BannerArts. Margaret Paris knows Jeff from having her car repaired there, and suggested that he borrow Music Viva's chairs, which he did. All his friends, relations, and customers come to this unique annual event in the shop, where we heard the best music in a long time.

Just back from four days in NY! Stayed at $75 hotel in Chelsea, saw lots of art, ate NY food, which is art there. Fashion is art, and so is home furnishing. Some new fashions startling. Heard contemporary music in a Lower East Side Club. Best of all, witnessed son Gabe's big triumph Aquos opening in Greenwich Village, 600 beautiful people of all shades drawn from hip-hop, fashion, art, design, business, DJ, marketing, and various other spheres that I am clueless about. Huge bouncers wouldn't let us in, even though Marilyn claimed she was Gabe's mother. Girlfriend Lisa got us in, where we took pictures and squeezed through crowds amidst high volume music. Outside, the moon was being eclipsed in full view. The bouncers stared up over the six floor Wooster Street walkups, as first a bite was removed, and then the whole thing swallowed up. By dinnertime (10pm), there were crowds on Village corners with scopes and cameras, people leaning on each other or lampposts, waiters in aprons staring into the clear Manhattan night sky.

Friend in Chelsea gave us tour of all the newest and bestest in Chelsea - dinner with her in hip quasi asian blue lit place called Hi-Line next to Hi-Line. Friend in Village did same for Village, with exquisite dinner in Italian hole in the wall. Drank far too much intense espresso, and ate several too many almond chocolate croissants in Cafe Bergamote. Manhattan is like very tiny countries, maybe just a few square blocks - just across Bleecker Street neighborliness evaporates, for instance.

Followed Marilyn through one gallery after another, where as usual she touches everything including the curtains. Same curtains in several galleries - she liked the way they filter light without shading it, better than most of the art. Finally in the gallery showing late paintings by Morandi, the "gallerist" assistant told her where to get the material - Janovic Plaza, where we exited the subway in Soho. Bright young woman there priced out curtains for her studio - $125 each. The Morandi's were good, and one of the Louise Bourgeouis shows was exciting- Mar even bought the catalog.

Strangest thing - On the third day I felt sick and had to rest. Too much espresso, too much visual stimulation, too much art. I sat with my eyes closed and visualized the World Trade Center ruins in my stomach. It occurs to me that the city is still in trauma despite appearances.

I am really really pleased with Grace Jean's review of our Ratner Museum concert in the Washington Post (October 7, 2004). She allowed herself to be moved by the music, and reported what that was like in vivid and imaginative language. This kind of arts criticism affords new insights about the music to others, including me. I loved her description of the first movement of the Faure: "Their first movement flowed with such freedom that one couldn't help but imagine standing on a boat's bow, arms outstretched." Yes! I will always see this image when I open the Faure from now on. And her description of Copland's Piano Quartet as snow-covered fields, and children playing in rain - that was a particularly new and wonderful way to experience a work which is often regarded (wrongly) as a forbiddingly stiff exercise in serialism. And she said some very nice things about Gary Poster, who deserves every word of praise.

Altogether I feel good about this concert. It was an ambitious program, so much so that I feared that the strings would mutiny. Yes, it was everything that I wanted to play, and probably one piece too many. But what could I leave out? I didn't want to part with any of them. I wish sometimes that I played more often than once a month, so that I could program more repertoire, or that we performed a given program more than once. But we will work towards these goals.

May I blog about money for a moment? Most audience members have no idea that for us to produce a single ambitious concert like the October 5 program creates a deficit of more than $1000, even with a decent audience. And that does not include any fees for me, as performer, contractor, director, publicist, or gopher. A calculation of the actual cost of producing a typical concert gives a figure of just over $5000. We are thinking about this in preparation for our upcoming fundraising campaign, and amid dreams of my devoting full-time energies to WMV. Realistically, we need to grow the organization considerably just to continue at the present level.

More repertoire ideas, in addition to the Piano Quintets: For the Czech Music Series, Janacek's violin sonata, a really weird piece that I finally have gotten a handle on, Martinu's viola rhapsody, a gorgeous and expansive work which Philippe Chao brought to my attention, a cello piece by Hanus Barton or Pavel Borkovec, and maybe the Dvorak D major Piano Quartet. For the Ratner Museum series: Robert Kahn's Jungbrunnen, for high voice and piano trio, one or two Brahms chamber works, the e minor cello sonata and/or the trio arrangement of the Op. 18 sextet, and either the first Faure violin sonata or the second piano quartet. I don't yet know when or where to program all the chamber music with winds that I am accumulating. But I am determined to finally program Ulf Grahn's Trio for saxophone, viola, and piano (he wrote it a couple of years ago). Anders Lundegard has enthusiastically agreed to perform it this spring. And I am working on the Heiden sonata for saxophone and piano with Rhonda Buckley.

To prompt my thinking, I carried a great stack of paste-ups from the back room and laid them out next to the piano, picking up one after another and playing little bits here and there. It was pretty easy to tell which ones I wanted to perform next - I would get a kind of swooning feeling as I played them, and all kinds of new ideas about how to prepare them for performance, and who best to do them with.