Sunday, January 22, 2012

Music in the tropics

I hear there is snow in Venice, I could not be any more removed from it. Here the biggest difference in weather is if it completely sunny or partially cloudy. Sometimes the wind varies a bit. I bought myself a kite and a board and have been taking kitesurfing lessons. This sport seems a lot of fun but its extremely dangerous as the kite has so much force it can lift you up many feet in the air and it can be fun when its controlled but it terrifying when you dont expect it and get catapulted into the air with razor sharp kite lines cutting through the air and anything they encounter. There are safety fuses to disconnect you but usually everything happens so fast you don't have time to engage them. Windsurfing feels a lot safer though here as well you can get stranded a couple of miles off shore with the wind blowing into the ocean. All this is a very adrenaline and serotonin producing experience so I feel super tired every day and can barely walk home from the beach but at the same time I have a sense of accomplishing something super difficult and highly satisfying. Each day I feel I lived to die another day. I suppose I could be better at both of these sports and have less dramatic experience and but its all about learning and these sports teach you how not to give up. As I am writing this I am rocking in a hammock listening to crickets and Schostakovitch, who's last fuge (d minor, 4 voice double fuge), from the 24 preludes and fuges finally yesterday dawned on me and I felt I understood its meaning and function in the cycle. It took me a year I suppose to get it but I finally understood that the secret lies in a path that you have to walk with him thought the last 10 preludes and fuges and only if you manage to let yourself go and be manipulated by them, the ever-changing roller coaster arrives a this final train stop through a path that needed to be discovered. And then in the end you get a present from him in form of a kind of katharsis that happens at the culmination of that fuge. I read a whole bunch about it because i could not get inside this last fuge. Development, structure and subject seemed odd and not very musical to me. But neither reading or repetitive listening to it detached from the cycle would do the trick. And the yesterday it happened when I followed the path. Still I can understand many comments I read about it being inaccessible as the cycle is long and to listen to it and stay focused till the end required learning by hearth many of the earlier fragments so your brail is not completely tired by the time you arrive at this grand ending. I assume I listened to this cycle over a year and a half at least a thousand times. Some days must have been several times. How's that for music that never gets boring!

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