Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1406261638270.4997@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Atavistic Virtuosity, Pleynt of
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 16:43:13 -0400 (EDT)
Atavistic Virtuosity, Pleynt of */On the other hand, another great review of Avatar Woman - http://aural-innovations.com/blog/2014/06/azure-carter-alan-sondheim-avatar-women-public-eyesore-2014-pe123-cd/ /* Recently I've realized that what I do musically - playing varied acoustic instruments (mainly bowed/plucked strings, etc.) - is a useless skill; it's not even a question of whether the music is 'good' or not, however defined. I have to constantly repair things, practice daily, record almost daily, put the results online (or no one will hear them), etc. The instruments creak at night; humidity and temperature get to them. No one is really interested in the stuff and I'm working, I realized, from an older model of music/sound production where virtuosity (think Bird, Segovia, Bailey) was rewarded or admired, where this sort of music mattered, at least to a small audience. Now I sit here in my room (in much the same position that my hateful father sat, reading away), playing music without purpose; for me, an audience has always been critical, part of a sonic community (to borrow from Jackson Moore) that cared about these things, that embedded these things in a living and vibrant culture. Obviously that's no longer the case. I keep thinking for example I should get rid of my instruments, except for a guitar, qin, and oud, and let what I've considered 'the practice' go. What else is there to do? Working in a discarded medium places me on the edge of sanity, as if I found it valuable to work on trigonometic proofs - within a field or domain already closed. Now I have to think, how to trade these in? For what? What to do? None of this is valued in Providence of course; it's valued in NY, which brings up the interesting situation what I'd have to be able to move back to the city for a kind of semantics to right itself, albeit at the mercy of a class we can't afford to buy into. Already I have gigabytes of music/sound up at the ESPdisk site, as well as my own website - the latter is commercial and will of course disappear, and the former will probably not last that long as well. Then what? The air burns, the instruments are silent. I'd return them to their native countries, if I could; in the meantime it feels as if my own talent, such as it is or isn't, burns as well.