de·scrip·tion

And every word written shall lift off
letter by letter, the backward text
read ever briefer, even more antic
in its effort to insist that nothing
shall be lost.
—Kay Ryan

The first time I read Edmund White’s comment on Rimbaud’s Antique, I wondered what he was on about:

Contemporaneous Rising!

Last night at the Chapel of the Holy Innocents at Bard College, the ensemble Contemporaneous reached a thrilling new milestone in the annals of contemporary music.  The concert, entitled The Roots Run Deep, featured the work of three young composers:  Gabriella Smith and Dylan Mattingly (both b. 1991), and Shawn Jaeger, the elder statesman of the group (b. 1985).  The composers were all on hand to introduce their works.

Dylan Mattingly’s American Vernacular

During intermission at a recital, Dylan Mattingly bounded over to his red and black-trimmed bag and pulled out a huge manuscript.  Its spiral-bound cover mimicked an atlas, and within it was a score-in-progress for the composition he’s been working on for most of the last two years.

“Verlaine? He’s hidden in the grass, Verlaine”

Verlaine ? Il est caché parmi l'herbe, Verlaine
—Stéphane Mallarmé

Long ago, I sat in a circle of fifteen girls as Madame __, her hair brittle with red-orange dye, put us through French conjugations.  I hadn’t much patience for the grammar, but I loved the sound of French words, the epitome of which seemed, at the time, to be Paul Verlaine’s Chanson d’Automne:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
      De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
      Monotone.

Judd Greenstein’s Le Tombeau de Ravel

 

Ravel wrote most of Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1914, before the outbreak of World War I.  His initial intention had been “a set of dances modeled on French baroque dance suites,” most notably the Ordres of François Couperin.  Time caught hold of Ravel’s intention, and he ultimately offered each of the six pieces that comprise Le Tombeau in remembrance of friends and colleagues who died in World War I.

If Stones Could Speak

"The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence."

—Maurice Ravel

Near my house in Dutchess County are several old rural cemeteries.  One of the two closest is the Verbank Rural Cemetery, with a quaint covered entrance and gravestones winding upward to views of Verbank and the surrounding hills.

Maine's Great Clepsydra

“Clepsydra” is really a meditation on how time feels as it is passing.

—John Ashbery

John Ashbery’s poem, Clepsydra, begins with the phrase “Hasn’t the sky?”  The question, opening out to anywhere, lured me into the poem.

Hasn’t the sky?  Returned from moving the other
Authority recently dropped, wrested as much of
That severe sunshine as you need now on the way
You go. . . .

Clepsydra is the Greek word for water clock.  John Steinbeck used it also, to describe the action of the tides:  "Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra."