Furniture exhibit at the civic museums, Castello Sforzesco, Milano
It's not so much that there is a fresco hanging in a gallery near a furniture exhibit in a gallery.
It's that these frescoes are hanging everywhere. I would not be surprised to see frescoes hanging over the toilets and leaning against walls in closets in my apartment.
As I come from a country several centuries younger than most of these frescoes I don't have to explain why this is novel.
The image as microcosm of the city itself:
Italy is littered with 2,000-year-old stones, preserved saints' bodies, most of the wonders of the art world in full restored glory, and boasts an incredibly rich cultural and military history.
Cars whiz past the Colosseo in Rome. People on cell phones or headsets weave through tourists on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.
The subway system in Milano houses several glassed-in ruins they found while digging the tunnels.
It's 1200 and 2009 in Italy right now.
Milano is an incredibly modern city. It's on the very edge of design and fashion, and the Milanesi strive to one-up each other with the latest in this technology, that runway trend, this car, that artist. There is some serious money here, which makes it all possible (there exists the other extreme, unfortunately, and I have yet to really define a middle class). Although like in other great Italian cities, the ancient presides silently over the progress and the velocity and chaos and traffic and noise of modern Milano, there seems to me here a tension between the old and the new.
This is really only speculation, but let's take Rome. It is really, really difficult to ignore the Colosseo and the Foro Romano, and the rocks strewn about the city, and eventually you make peace with the fact that your past will always haunt you, kind of like the old-fashioned stodgy uncle you really hate because he's always talking about how you should be more like he was at 20-whatever but you can't really hate him, because he's family and you can't choose your family.
Milano, on the other hand, has little ancient treasures hiding in unexpected places. I turned a corner yesterday and came face to face with an enormous Baroque church I had never noticed before, because it was obscured by a modern building housing a bank (Milano is the financial seat of Italy... let's call this symbolism).
I was a little shocked but in a pleasant way, as I am discovering the city as an outsider/tourist and everything is a little bit magical. But humour me and imagine I am a Milanese: I am a self-styled Modern European. I am on the cutting edge, always. I can't find the balance between where we came from and where we are, because I move forward, not in circles, contemplating, pondering. I like fast lunches and long work days like they have in America. Sometimes I eat McDonald's. Maybe I have an inferiority complex... maybe that's why I can't stand the backward, old-fashioned south.
It's hard to put a finger on it. But in my opinion, the table wasn't happy about being next to the old-fashioned uncle fresco.
Emanuele Arciuli played a great solo piano program on Monday night. I sat above him in the gallery and watched his hands.
The Liszt and Schumann were played beautifully with a lot of sensitivity. Visually, they make so much sense to our well-conditioned brains. The keyboard is used in the ways we expect -- up and down and up and down go the hands, moving together or away from each other, moving in parallel lines from left to right and making broad strokes in one direction or the next. There is always a linear relationship between them. Tension grows and is resolved. Western music is so satisfyingly predictable.
The Carter he played, Night Fantasies, took linear relationships and said, "This crap is useless." I described Arciuli's hands to a friend as "robot spiders"; not only was the piece full of 64th and 128th notes (I don't know, it just seemed that way), it worked out musical ideas in circular, repetitious patterns that left the listener stewing over them even after the piece was done. There was cadence and discernible shape to the form, to be sure. But in terms of pitch content and for lack of a better word, musical "shapes", it resembled a scatter graph or an Etch-a-Sketch when realized. While Liszt and Schumann seem to muse out loud, Carter seems to need to brood introspectively over musical "problems" in order to develop and resolve them. In fact, I think this says a lot about the sociocultural "mood" in each relevant epoch. Extremely provocative; caused me to realize all over again that I think of music visually and how important that element of it is.
Today I went straight to the practice room following a particularly harrowing reading comprehension lesson with my class from hell.
Some things just don't feel like work. Some things make you forget anything that's bad in your life and obscure stress, worries, insecurity. They clarify priorities and put your life in perspective. Even a passive experience, like being a spectator, instills calm and replenishes what soul has been sucked that day.
Some things are a job that make you money while you pursue more lofty ambitions and don't deserve time or energy off the clock. This is taught to you by the enlightening experiences you have singing Verdi and Massenet, a clandestine locked away in the corner of the conservatory where no caretakers will find you and evict you from your not-booked, totally not-yours practice room, before a concert in which you hear the Brahms string sextet and Verklarte Nacht.
Or... I mean... other enlightening experiences.
(Aside: I see most of the concerts I go to alone and it's during this time I usually have weird abstracted brain experiences. I think it's why I have never been tempted to try drugs. Verklarte Nacht put me on another plane tonight; I had forgotten how much I love it.)
a wee taste.
To finish:
Further proof of Italy's schizophrenia follows in the form of two towns on the same lake (Como).
Colico in the north...
and Lecco in the south.
No comments:
Post a Comment