” He is going blind
The phone was dead this Christmas….
Bach´s organ very still ”
kind of thing to be writing with trembly ink and the moat-water ducks rescuing their webbed winter -feet from sneaky death by frozen flip-flops.
Any the wiser, any the sicker, the more pained, fascinated, ecstatic than a very full biographed year back , well ?
Does so much anti-freeze behove ? Apparently there isn´t a plural for ” Haiku” . Paddle on, cold fowl, in our castle park`s snow-dampened acoustic. Who is, after all, to measure, after all, our progress, after all ? Do not throw the first snow-ball. Nor the second, all those who live in an igloo. Irish Writing is alive and secreting well in such temperatures before attempting any Ode On the Morn Of Christ´s Nativity, Part the Second.
The new EIGHT HAIKUS , this October well crafted. First of all I mean the texts, ” My young love, Buddha” etc., and all the “u”s and ” o” s and good plosives and autumnal sibilants and wintry labials. The double-choir ( well, not entirely; not at all, in fact – they are less cori spezzati that eight real voices of shading and brilliant light and the odd solo singer pitted against tutti kind-of-polyphonics. I l am delighted with the chordal ” Deep-purple twilight / In the bay lie three islands….”
Last Christmas would I have been able thus to set, I wonder, that throwaway ” Asleep like children ” ? Or take the last haiku, symphonically flash-backing ? Would I, ducks ?
This summer´s “SONGS OF TERROR AND LOVE” I had long longed to compose; looking back , I do see that I had to trap the bottled-up fury and high anger and ecstatic dancing of Jacopone, the chained feet clanking and clinking their holy dance-music in his papal latrine/prison . I did hammer a vocal/instrumental fine job on ” O Papa Bonifazio”, a holy scream really.
The beginning of April was still cold in Old Lazio as I began the Clarinet Quintet, an R.T.E. commission for the Vanbrugh String Quartet in 2010. That dark chalumeau music for solo clarinet which I have opening the slow movement and a Central Italian Spring getting unforgettably going.
So, yes, three strong 2009 compositions. Good. Good and lonely, four seasons below and then up here with the safe ducks and not yet quite saved winter-geese. No bad thing our nip of cold after the solar largesse down below , I must say. Plus little things like our snake-story; our trembly-powerful or thermonuclear-watery sunsets. Our first autumn lightening. Grateful to who , ducklings? A progress in the writing, the grain or quantity or perceptible ” Late Style”, is it perceptible from this metereological stand-point? How define this stand-point? This duck or duck-egg vantage-point? Where best start to top the egg ? eg. Music as considered sculpture or as ecstatic rush ? When the thaw comes ? How set my Second Christmas Haiku:
“I´ve got Parkinson´s…. ”
His organist´s white knuckles
Cran in blue snow-clouds .
Myth is with us, and not just in this mellow season of starving robins and white drifting ugly ducklings. Could life have bifurcated differently ( – sure it could ) ? The other musical roads not taken – a Cello Concerto, my yellowing “Gilgamesh” opera-score ? Oh come , all ye faithful and triumphantly cran ” The Wran, the wran ,” and want for nothing. So there is no snow really there at all excepted when it is being perceived as real ? How keep my feeble flame alive in the cold ? ” My young love, Buddha, / Came to us softly sleeping / And his sap rising” is all very well ; you have to be tough . Save a little ecstasy , would you, for critical January.