The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

production preparation, Palmyra

http://www.alansondheim.org/survive5.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/eguitclar.mp3
  -> -> electric guitar + Bb clarinet

preparation of production
production of preparation

1. I don't have names for the pieces at this point.
2. Pieces are 4' or under.
3. Pieces are the Shorter Discourses of the Buddha.
4. Production of production and preparation of preparation.
5. Instrument names are not names.
6. I don't have the order down at all.
7. My nails are strong and my fingers supple.
8. "Yet my nails are strong and my fingers supple."
9. The qin, at any moment, out of tune.
10. Viola bowing leaves a lot to be desired.
11. Alpine zither and electric guitar = rough on fingers.
12. Risky gamble of maverick clarinet.
13. Balance Azure singing with embedding and clarity.
14. Cords, chords, and braid = sonic sheaves.
15. Sound remaining, for a moment, after I die.
16. The unclarity of the sound remaining.
17. Today I practice jinashi shakuhachi, alto clarinet,
clarinet, electric guitar, viola, anything to keep myself
moving. These are the best for the fingers and lungs.
Tomorrow the sazs, pipa, oud, Alpine zither, qin, others
that building on the simpler architectures of the western
lands. I read myself into a state of forgetting. How to
name the pieces, order them, keep them to the assigned
limits as if they were born to the length of a shorter
older singing. How to ignore the screams outside the
window here, now, as if what mattered only were internal
resonances, murmurings of the worlds, skies elsewhere,
and my thinking all through this, summed up in one word,
Palmyra.