considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

This is my favorite time of year. In class you're making pictures that couldn't have been predicted even a few short weeks ago. I'm enthralled by the process, this convergence, this transmutation of one thing into another thing, idea into material, image into body. I don't know how it happens, even as it unfolds right in front of me. Last Sunday afternoon at the Brooklyn Central Library we heard Trio Solisti perform chamber music from several different eras. As always, the comfortable elegance of the Dweck Center was the perfect setting for a quiet reprieve from the rush of the end of the term. (I've written about the Library's concert program here , and I still recommend it strongly.) The end of the afternoon brought Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition . You've probably heard it before; I'd heard it many times but never knew what it was called. (Click the 'play' button to hear the Promenade opening.) The story behind this comp...

pictures often sound for me. i hear the tone and contrast, the shape. sometimes i perform the score while teaching, playing pictures with gusto, with bravado. sometimes i don't. last sunday the BPL Chamber Players wowed us at the Brooklyn Central Library - part of their terrific series of afternoon music sessions: wonderfully soothing, invigorating. along with selections from Rossini and Dvorak, they gave us a composition from Corigliano, a contemporary, titled Snapshot Circa 1909, in which he interprets a photograph of his father at eight years old. in the snapshot there's a young boy standing in bright sun, a violin tucked into his chin. He's wearing a white shirt, black trousers narrowed at the ankles, his hair parted in the center, and next to him is a man, seated, in a black jacket and narrow necktie, with a large guitar in his lap. Corigliano writes that he mused about the thoughts and expectations of his young father as he prepared to play with his uncle on that su...