A Highway Shoulder to Cry On: Music for Prague

This is just a random thought I wrote and I'd rather not lose and thought I might as well hide it here. It started as a formspring question and then snowballed into this.

Q: What was the best concert you went to?

A: Music for Prague 1968.
When I was in high school our Symphonic Winds played a piece called Music for Prague 1968.

It was a musical narrative of the spring of 1968 when a new national government swept into Prague and began instituting changes like allowing freedom of the press and freedom speech and a possibility for multiparty government. The leaders of the USSR feared this democratization so they started talks with the government of Czechoslovakia. When talks broke down the USSR and three other nations decided to invade with more than 200,000 troops. The results were bloody and brutal.

The music is designed to reflect the events in very literal ways. Oboes play Morse code. Trombones are meant to be air sirens. The entire third movement is nothing but percussion. In the music you can hear the chaos of the invasion.

Woven into Music for Prague 1968 is a melody of a folk song that is traditionally symbolic of resistance and hope. In the movement describing the chaos of battle and the brutality of the USSR invasion the folk melody is played on the timpani almost as a song of mourning.

It made me cry in a way nothing else had ever made me cry. It was a deep and inexplicable pain that made no sense so I tried to stop the tears and move on.

We all left the concert hall and as I was driving home I ended up in the wrong lane and had to exit and merge on to the highway. I was finally alone in my car and I had to pull over on to the shoulder of the freeway and put on my emergency lights because I was crying so hard I couldn't see or breathe and I didn't know why. The thought of people being shot as they tried to help people, of people being killed for wanting to be free made me physically hurt inside.

That was the first time I ever understood what a really well written and well performed piece of music can do.

The Dots

 Redux. I know I did a post a while back about "The Dots" but I just thought I'd throw a new one out there.

It's been awhile since I dragged this theory out but I think everyone can use a reminder now and again.

There is a school of painting known as pointilism. The idea is that you can create a huge picture using tiny, individual dots of paint. The most famous of these paintings is "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte". Everyone knows it but few people realize that there is not a single brush stroke in the painting. The whole 6ft x 10ft canvass is nothing but a field of tiny dots. It's an amazing thing to see.

What if the whole of existence was a blank canvass full of empty dots, each of these blank dots representing an interaction, action, feeling, or thought? As we live our lives we slowly fill the canvass and create our own picture. Subtle changes in the colors and tones of the dots can change the picture from a Van Gogh to a Bosch.
What if each of us lived our lives trying to make each dot as beautiful as possible?
What if we all tried to create a beautiful picture of our lives and in turn made the pictures of other people's lives more beautiful?

It doesn't take a lot of effort to be compassionate or empathetic so what if we all went ahead and put in that extra bit of effort?

My life is largely dedicated to the pursuit of making each dot as beautiful as it can be and to making the dots in other people's pictures as beautiful as they can be. You can think it's hokey or stupid but I think it's making the world better one dot at a time.

Susan Boyle, the average person, and media cynicism: A blog response

I find it mildly amusing that I'm responding to a blog post from a blog in our class.
Liz posted on her blog, Women with Pants, about YouTube sensation Susan Boyle and her famous Britan's Got Talent audition.

I was planning on commenting directly on her blog but as I was writing it began to get out of hand and I decided to give my response it's own post over here on my blog.


I know we all enjoy the schadenfreude of watching Simon Cowell rip a less than amazing contestant but Piers Morgan can be just as horrible if not worse than Simon. I think that she should be so admired for having such courage and resolve in the face of such ugly cynicism.

Auditions are brutal no matter who you are and the fact that we enjoy the public humiliation of those who aren't wildy successful is somewhat sickening. I've worked in theatre and everyone willing to stand up on the stage and audition is braver than me. I have done some acting in high school but I never had the courage to audition for anything.

I genuinely wish the media would leave her alone in some ways. She strikes me as a particularly simple and practical woman. It drives me nuts that the media is pulling in every direction and wants more from her. They want the next level of awesome or awful. I dread that with so much exposure to the media people will start feeling more comfortable lobbing harsh criticism and outright insult at her.

What is it about our society that we require more and more?

What is it about us that we like The Starry Night better if someone takes a print, punches holes in the sky portion of the painting, and then backlights it so it's like a carnival! (I have seen it but I couldn't find it on the internet)
WTF?!

Why are we not content to just enjoy that people are generally remarkable whether we expect them to be or not and why are we only happy when they are remarkable in very specific ways?



I find it somewhat ironic that she chose to sing "I Dreamed a Dream". To be honest, it was the strongest I've ever heard it sung.