Warsaw After a Week

It’s been a week now since we’ve arrived in Warsaw. Slowly getting to know the city, at least where things are, but the whyof city I think will take quite some time… It’s a curious place, ugly in many ways, yet that ugliness is also its beauty as well. We were having lunch and Lisa mentioned “caricature” and I think that touches on it, but there’s also more to it…

I was listening to George Crumb’s music while walking today and felt while walking and looking out at the city it started to make sense, but that it was bez sensu, without sense. That the logic of the city is it is without logic. The history of Warsaw is rich with highs and abject lows, so many different streams of historical events touching on many different aspects of life, and so much of that is present all at this very time it seems. A place where many difficult questions must have been asked…

I have been completely engaged by “Morton Feldman Says”. Reading felman’s conversations always brings out serious thinking, even in the laughter. Some things I read today touched on and brought out many thoughts I had been wanting to write about for some time.

One aspect of modern day music which is rather curious is the hiding of how one creates their work(at least in the computer music world this seems to be a trend), as if revealing the technique would unlock some mystery of the music, that the quality of the music is a result of the technique and not anything else. With older published music you can see everything, all the notes, notation, everything. One can analyze and see how it was all made and then you get to the point of “why does this work?”, or “why these choices?”. Then it gets interesting…

Technique in itself isn’t so interesting I think, it’s seems to be more a matter of the choices made.

There was another interview where Feldman is talking about Cage (I think it’s the “Here Comes Everybody” interview) and how much focus and energy he spent in making his pieces. Feldman often talks to about focus and how important it is. For me, I’ve had the thought lately that what you bring to the table when you do your work, your seriousness, focus, character, everything, when you go to do your work it all shows through, and that sometimes that matters more to the work than any technical concerns…

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