WEEK OF 080804: SCHUBERT // LUCKY DRAGONS
Schubert: String Quintet (D.956)
Two months have flown by, this summer, and again at the Mission Arts and Performance Project (MAPP) I saw Classical Revolution play some pieces. I again was the only patron to inquire the names of the pieces performed, and a violinist anxiously amended the given explications with some syrup that the next piece that they were about to play was her favorite piece of music. Indeed, it was ferociously good, and it swiftly was selected by me for this week's "record" of the week. The piece is Schubert's final composition, and vascillates between major and minor. A contemporary of my boy, Beethoven, Schubert's work is very similar but without the outbursts. Of course musicologists might scoff at my smearing two different colors together, but what I mean is that both composers are bold enough to inject emotion (and often tortuous ones) amongst the pretty splendor that the world and our silly society performs for us in our cordial feats. This music totters from moment to moment (perhaps even note to note) on the edge of being something to tremble about, but remains measured. There are many repetitive, rhythmic phrases, which I rather liked, when paired with the postrock record reviewed below.
Lucky Dragons: Dream Island Laughing Language
It's important for me, as a dreamer, and a poet, to keep up with post-rock. I once wailed that I would consume only this sort of instrumental music, as it is probably the best and most beautiful sort of our times, which I would characterize as sparkling and defiant of the gloom that looms over us, environmentally and economically. What I mean to say is that, with such a large wealthy class here in America, things are glorious and beautiful. You can see that in the pop music, today, but that sort of frivolity is narrowminded. What really can be acclaimed about an artist is their foresight -- their ability to conjure the future, or the movements of parallel moments in our era.
What this music captures, for me, with its repetitive gongs and hums, clomps and scrapes, taps and hoots, and sundry other pseudo-sino sinewaves, is the sun shining on a hustling earth, too fast to bask in its fleeting splendor. I will always recall, in this music, the memory of awakening from a friend, Brent's, birthday bonfire at the Albany landfill, and heading out back from the artificial peninsula (dream island, indeed... I once saw a free performance of Shakespeare's "the tempest" at the landfill!) towards the mainland, with the recently risen sun sparkling up from the bay at me and the strange wave of dog-walkers peppering my heady morning with their sad ridiculousness, as this music bubbled and gleefully stuttered back, affirming that the world still brews.