amusements
This time, the game we play is one where I try to tickle her belly, and she tries to block me. When she grows bored with it, she stands under the dining table for a while, her hand on her mom's knee.
apportion
Her younger siblings agree that she should distribute the chocolates. She slices open the box and displays the possibilities. She reads the chocolatey description of each truffle and its contents. As they crowd around, she cuts the truffles into halves and thirds for sampling.
pooled
The candles melt into a pond of rose, purple, and sea green.
reawaken
Good books reinvigorate the conversation you have with yourself and the world.
release
She's abandoning her social media accounts, one by one, to unclutter her mind and free her time.
scales
The soprano warms up her voice in the ringing acoustics of a church.
scorning
It's a grubby work of art. It shows a meanness of character, a cynicism that denies beauty.
Showing posts with label vocal music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vocal music. Show all posts
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
Week in Seven Words #399
bearing
We're eating salads outside in the dark by a bike lane and jogging path in the park. From around the bend, we hear a blues song, and it's getting louder, the hoarse, broken, beautiful voice coming our way. A young girl appears, swinging a portable radio.
coexistence
On the rooftop garden, they've planted marigolds with tomatoes, collard greens, lavender, thyme, cucumbers, dill, Jamaican peppers, and other herbs and vegetables. Bees swoop around (I achieve an uneasy coexistence with them), and white butterflies look like petals sprung to life. A monarch butterfly appears too and lingers.
hoofer
One of the men in the subway car is moved to tell us about his dog. "Her name is Ginger Rogers," he says. He pauses, as if waiting for the dog to spring up from where she's curled up at his feet and start dancing.
pierced
His voice, lofty and sonorous, opens me to my anger and frustration. There are multiple entangled reasons for these emotions at this time.
prepping
In the span of a 12-story elevator ride, he shares his business aspirations and lists some of the books he's been reading to push himself into a mindset of success.
shared
It's cozy and delightful to have a movie theater almost entirely to yourself and the person you're with.
tomatoes
Some of the tomatoes are green and heavy. Others are crinkly and emptied out like candy wrappers.
We're eating salads outside in the dark by a bike lane and jogging path in the park. From around the bend, we hear a blues song, and it's getting louder, the hoarse, broken, beautiful voice coming our way. A young girl appears, swinging a portable radio.
coexistence
On the rooftop garden, they've planted marigolds with tomatoes, collard greens, lavender, thyme, cucumbers, dill, Jamaican peppers, and other herbs and vegetables. Bees swoop around (I achieve an uneasy coexistence with them), and white butterflies look like petals sprung to life. A monarch butterfly appears too and lingers.
hoofer
One of the men in the subway car is moved to tell us about his dog. "Her name is Ginger Rogers," he says. He pauses, as if waiting for the dog to spring up from where she's curled up at his feet and start dancing.
pierced
His voice, lofty and sonorous, opens me to my anger and frustration. There are multiple entangled reasons for these emotions at this time.
prepping
In the span of a 12-story elevator ride, he shares his business aspirations and lists some of the books he's been reading to push himself into a mindset of success.
shared
It's cozy and delightful to have a movie theater almost entirely to yourself and the person you're with.
tomatoes
Some of the tomatoes are green and heavy. Others are crinkly and emptied out like candy wrappers.
Friday, February 17, 2017
Week in Seven Words #330
clarification
What at first sounds like the wind crying resolves into choir music broadcast on a radio in a waiting room down the hall.
hamming
She makes short videos of evil twins leaping out of mirrors and people finding an intruder in the closet as they tour their new home. I'm cast in several roles. My favorite is the one where I get stabbed with a plastic pineapple and deliver a monologue for the ages.
meaty
All of the commuters packed, flesh to flesh, turn the subway car into a sausage link.
median
He continues to be fanatic about how normal he is. His way is the one true way of normality.
reactiveness
Waiting for the elevator, stone-faced as a Buckingham Palace guard, while a neighbor and her child scream at each other a few feet away.
spud
Pleasure from a potato's crinkly gold skin.
sway
In her marriage, she's a courtier. Dressed in elegant fabrics that pool on the floor as she bows and scrapes.
What at first sounds like the wind crying resolves into choir music broadcast on a radio in a waiting room down the hall.
hamming
She makes short videos of evil twins leaping out of mirrors and people finding an intruder in the closet as they tour their new home. I'm cast in several roles. My favorite is the one where I get stabbed with a plastic pineapple and deliver a monologue for the ages.
meaty
All of the commuters packed, flesh to flesh, turn the subway car into a sausage link.
median
He continues to be fanatic about how normal he is. His way is the one true way of normality.
reactiveness
Waiting for the elevator, stone-faced as a Buckingham Palace guard, while a neighbor and her child scream at each other a few feet away.
spud
Pleasure from a potato's crinkly gold skin.
sway
In her marriage, she's a courtier. Dressed in elegant fabrics that pool on the floor as she bows and scrapes.
Friday, December 24, 2010
The sunny side of the week...
It's Friday! All week I've been looking forward to Friday.
I've got some cooking to do before the Sabbath starts, and I can barely see the surface of my desk, but for the next hour or so I'm going to just sit. Sitting is grand. It's cold outside, it's warm in here, my feet are up, the TV is murmuring something unimportant. And when I do some of the housework later, I know who I'll be listening to:
"Life can be so sweet... on the sunny side of the street!"
I hope you've found yourself dancing down a sunny street or two this holiday season.
Warm wishes to you all.
I've got some cooking to do before the Sabbath starts, and I can barely see the surface of my desk, but for the next hour or so I'm going to just sit. Sitting is grand. It's cold outside, it's warm in here, my feet are up, the TV is murmuring something unimportant. And when I do some of the housework later, I know who I'll be listening to:
"Life can be so sweet... on the sunny side of the street!"
I hope you've found yourself dancing down a sunny street or two this holiday season.
Warm wishes to you all.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Week in Seven Words #21
accented
Out in the hall a French woman and a Russian woman speak in English, their voices bright and cordial. Soon after, a Greek woman speaks boisterously on the phone, sometimes in English and other times in her native tongue. In a different time and place, two men from Ireland harmonize together on a stage and banter between songs.
limpid
On a day when heat chokes the air and cars snarl along the road, I listen to limpid music; it spills and flows over all the other sounds - horns, brakes, birds, the stutter of machinery, conversation, the creak of trees in the wind.
loop
We could easily have taken the bus, but why not walk? Without walking we wouldn't have as much time to talk, or see the river at thirty minutes to midnight, or come across that sculpture with the words carved into it from several different languages, French and Greek included.
pluvial
There's a primordial fury to the rain; it mashes up the ground, crackles on the windows, and clots the air.
sundered
In the wake of the storm, trees stretch out leafy and shattered on walkways, cars, and roof corners. Branches lie in all angles on the sidewalks and sometimes dangle in the embrace of other branches that have remained aloft and intact.
tunefulness
Music in a long dark room lit with candles in glass, the illustrations on the walls crowding around to listen in shades of red, white and black. With voices that fit well together the musicians sing about old love, new love, a laughing universe, what it would be like to be a work of art, and how they're traveling around in search of feet; at one point they invite a friend to jam with them on the guitar, and she's in a trance, so happy to be up there playing and part of the music.
wresting
It's a song he once knew by heart; now he wrestles different passages out of the piano. Whenever he comes to a lacuna in his memory, he sits with fingers splayed across his forehead and stares with a puzzled frustration at the keys.
Out in the hall a French woman and a Russian woman speak in English, their voices bright and cordial. Soon after, a Greek woman speaks boisterously on the phone, sometimes in English and other times in her native tongue. In a different time and place, two men from Ireland harmonize together on a stage and banter between songs.
limpid
On a day when heat chokes the air and cars snarl along the road, I listen to limpid music; it spills and flows over all the other sounds - horns, brakes, birds, the stutter of machinery, conversation, the creak of trees in the wind.
loop
We could easily have taken the bus, but why not walk? Without walking we wouldn't have as much time to talk, or see the river at thirty minutes to midnight, or come across that sculpture with the words carved into it from several different languages, French and Greek included.
pluvial
There's a primordial fury to the rain; it mashes up the ground, crackles on the windows, and clots the air.
sundered
In the wake of the storm, trees stretch out leafy and shattered on walkways, cars, and roof corners. Branches lie in all angles on the sidewalks and sometimes dangle in the embrace of other branches that have remained aloft and intact.
tunefulness
Music in a long dark room lit with candles in glass, the illustrations on the walls crowding around to listen in shades of red, white and black. With voices that fit well together the musicians sing about old love, new love, a laughing universe, what it would be like to be a work of art, and how they're traveling around in search of feet; at one point they invite a friend to jam with them on the guitar, and she's in a trance, so happy to be up there playing and part of the music.
wresting
It's a song he once knew by heart; now he wrestles different passages out of the piano. Whenever he comes to a lacuna in his memory, he sits with fingers splayed across his forehead and stares with a puzzled frustration at the keys.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
"I know they were singing those arias out of their own sorrow."
Says Cecilia Bartoli when interviewed about her new album, in which she sings pieces originally written for castrati. The interesting Slate article in which she's interviewed, Nature's Rejects, explores the lives of castrati, male singers forcibly castrated as young boys in the hopes that they would attain fortune and fame, illustrious singing careers. Most did not:
And the famous ones, outside of their brief dazzling triumphs on stage, led lives full of distortion and depression:
I recently became a fan of Andreas Scholl, a countertenor whose vocal range is said to be that of the alto castrato Senesino. Countertenors of course have not gone under the "little knife", a euphemism that only hints at the true horror of what the castrati went through when they were young boys:
Countertenors did exist side by side historically with castrati, with the castrati apparently considered more illustrious and dominating opera especially. And it's reported that the castrati didn't quite sound like anyone else, including the female sopranos they replaced; there also would've been differences with countertenors (whose speaking voices tend to be low; testosterone, different type of vocal cord structure and development).
Countertenor Scholl and mezzo-soprano Bartoli render music with beauty, richness and power. Now after this article I wonder, what were the differences perceived in a castrato singing voice (of whatever range)? It seems the castrati in general were deemed to possess a prized vocal quality entirely their own, beyond individual differences in voice and musical ability; their listeners felt like they were hearing something not quite human.
They weren't viewed as human, not really. They were treated as instruments, cruelly shaped, forcibly carved. If the instrument cracked, you just threw it out; there were new ones to craft and maybe those would give you sounds you'd never heard before.
They were the products of a social, cultural and biological experiment, and a fascinating and disturbing example of how easy it is to adopt skewed and unhealthy cultural norms, and to excuse horrors in the name of (and for the sake of) beauty, art, or any number of other ideals.
These nobodies sang for pennies in the streets, turned to prostitution for male customers, and sooner or later disappeared into the oblivion of the outcast. A great many ended up suicides.
And the famous ones, outside of their brief dazzling triumphs on stage, led lives full of distortion and depression:
Meanwhile, the years of superstardom were limited, because castrati tended to age badly: "Most of them become as big and fat as capons, with round and chubby hips, rumps, arms and throats." Even successful singers were shunned by many, their status as ambiguous as their bodies.
I recently became a fan of Andreas Scholl, a countertenor whose vocal range is said to be that of the alto castrato Senesino. Countertenors of course have not gone under the "little knife", a euphemism that only hints at the true horror of what the castrati went through when they were young boys:
... brought unsuspecting to a nameless place, screaming as he is held down for the operation, the wound cauterized with hot iron.
Countertenors did exist side by side historically with castrati, with the castrati apparently considered more illustrious and dominating opera especially. And it's reported that the castrati didn't quite sound like anyone else, including the female sopranos they replaced; there also would've been differences with countertenors (whose speaking voices tend to be low; testosterone, different type of vocal cord structure and development).
Countertenor Scholl and mezzo-soprano Bartoli render music with beauty, richness and power. Now after this article I wonder, what were the differences perceived in a castrato singing voice (of whatever range)? It seems the castrati in general were deemed to possess a prized vocal quality entirely their own, beyond individual differences in voice and musical ability; their listeners felt like they were hearing something not quite human.
They weren't viewed as human, not really. They were treated as instruments, cruelly shaped, forcibly carved. If the instrument cracked, you just threw it out; there were new ones to craft and maybe those would give you sounds you'd never heard before.
They were the products of a social, cultural and biological experiment, and a fascinating and disturbing example of how easy it is to adopt skewed and unhealthy cultural norms, and to excuse horrors in the name of (and for the sake of) beauty, art, or any number of other ideals.
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