since last week i have corresponded with mr feigin regarding the contents, etc, of disc 2 of this set, a vexed question which i have been (gradually) trying to investigate since last year. briefly, act "two" of trillium dialogues m , i.e. track 2 on the disc, is actually a duplication of the concluding passages of act one. on this occasion it wasn't even me that picked that up: i had played the cd more than once, but never in a state when i was even trying to give it my full attention, or not for more than a few seconds at a time... and in any case the repetition only added to my confusion over whether or not material was being replicated during the performance. (at the back of my mind, warning bells had been going off - but because i couldn't be sure without making a detailed check, and didn't quite feel like doing that at the time, i just didn't mention it at all during the write-up and then forgot about it altogether, pretty much... until jon-a added a comment to the post, which prompted some further investigation.
for a while that just consisted of waiting for an answer which didn't come... the one avenue open to me was not leading anywhere... but i got there in the end. sort of... getting a bit closer, anyway..! and the story (*1) goes: this was an unusually hard cd to produce, apparently, the project was dogged by ill-fortune from the start - not the performances, but the efforts to release (some of?) the results; back in the days when most people did not have superfast broadband, powerful computers etc etc the back-and-forth with liners, diagrams, and so forth was a lot of work - which basically turned out to be wasted, when some of the members of the ensemble began asking for more money. haha, they are said to have reasoned that the shibboleth braxton would guarantee big sales (!) and held out... until the project was completely shelved at the "reality" end.
it was only years later that clearance finally came through, said musicans having taken (it seems) a very long time to accept that creative music = commercial leprosy [in this piss-awful excuse for a society we have been stuck with all this long time... here's the deal by the way people: SLOWING DOWN is the key to this, they have the whole of "civilisation" set at far too high a mental speed, preventing any sort of self-awareness in all but the most dogged, cussed or disciplined individuals... more than ever before, everyone is encouraged to form "opinions" very very fast no matter how complex the subject...WE CAN STILL CHANGE THIS]... so, finally the choral concert project is green-lit again and it duly comes out, and with all that spent effort (and staggeringly naive, avaricious careerism) in the background, it's perhaps not entirely surprising if the music itself is not given as much attention as might be desirable, under the circumstances... which is unfortunate, because as we know, etc.
well, mr feigin has said that he will try and listen again to the music when he has time (to be fair he does maintain a very busy publishing schedule)... and i've asked him to keep me posted. but yeah, pending those further reports i think it's just a mistake, something which crept in through sheer bad luck perhaps, at who knows which stage of the proceedings. as my ecstatic, possibly unreadable ramblings indicate (i'd calmed down a bit by the time the morning concluded!), the duplication may cause a bit of disorientation or confusion but does not actually ruin the listening pleasure - or, indeed, the spiritual and vibrational value to be obtained from sharing the same energetic space as the music... since, after all, these qualities are precisely the ones which b's music - among others' - has that so much other music lacks... vibrational qualities... the maestro has been talking about this stuff for a long time without many (outside the circle of musicians) understanding what the hell he was on about (indeed, i didn't always know what he was talking about either), but he didn't invent any of the theory, it was all understood in times gone by and it still holds very much true. so, no, don't think that the music cannot still be of great value: you just might want to programme the player so that it only plays act one, which makes up the lion's share of the disc anyway. (all four acts would have required a further disc and a higher price to begin with, so we were presumably never likely to get the whole thing anyway. was all of it even performed/recorded? hmmm.)
... and then again, maybe the message in the libretto for the repeated section is so important that everyone might just as well cherish the error and play the whole thing regardless. twice the message, twice the impact, twice (it can be hoped) the likelihood of retention by the memory... it seems oddly appropriate when considered from that angle. (speaking of odd angles, this post was partly (*2) brought to you by way of the syntactical ghost trance choir. did everyone get that yet?)
* see comments
1 comment:
1. i didn't ask leo's permission to quote directly from what was after all private correspondence. so i didn't... paraphrased instead.
2. and partly by something totally different, one of my favourite headphone spins at present, the last album by canadian grind/technical death metal band fuck the facts. not that i'm expecting anyone here to have even heard of them, but the music, oddly enough, is very carefully written and thought-out, and the execution is extremely demanding... not so unlike, really...
... and yes, "dogged" in the second para is one syllable whereas by the time of the third para, it's two (and neither of them has anything to do with the infamous british practice of "dogging", thank goodness)
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