Arts – Page 7 – An Echo That's Reversing

Suite for Orchestra, “Figures in a Landscape”–Beginning research

I finished the book by Barry England, Figures in a Landscape, maybe a year ago and it tore me apart.

It, and it’s ideas, came back to me recently for no particular reason, but the story immediately felt like a primal source of expression for something current in me. As inspiration, you look for the internal emotions–those that are the wordless–that you hope to express to others so that They Can See the Importance of those subjective ideations. More to the point: I look for those aspects of what’s in me to be important out of me… but I think it’s uncontroversial that this concept is universal w/r/t artists in general.

That’s a sloppy way of pointing out that: you say what you want to, and have to, say, and hope others enjoy it.

My visit to the land of romance

The Twitter account @PulpLibrarian–when not posting covers of the absolutely baffling history of Nazi BDSM fantasy magazines of the 70s or the less baffling 50s/60s/70s sci-fi magazines–periodically posts covers from romance novels. One thread had focused on the covers of a specific, named, artist; another on those covers that shared similar landscapes and poses (e.g. that of a frightened woman, fleeing a Victorian castle, across the forbidding moors). I was surprised when in the first artist-focused thread, many readers commented on how much they appreciated the artist and knew their name, referencing other books whose covers they were responsible for. Seldom in other genres are artists so recognizable. (Although, admittedly, I have done my own research on pulp sci-fi covers, and it’s likely this is a common venture. I can now spot in the wilds the hand of several of the more productive artists.)

String Quartet No. 2 “heat death”

Cover: Suzan Woodruff, *Monsoon I*, acrylic on panel, 2003

String Quartet No. 2–Starting the 2nd movement

Superposition is the ability of a quantum system to be in multiple states at the same time until it is measured.
–from WhatIs.com

measures 58-69 of the first movement, the end of the *1st state* and beginning of the *2nd state*

Documenting the available recordings of Ussachevsky and Luening’s 1952 concert

Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening performed a concert of new electronic music on 28 Oct 1952 at the Museum of Modern Art. From Paul Griffiths’ Modern Music and After:

The Russian-born Vladimir Ussachevsky (b. 1911), who taught at Columbia University, gave a demonstration of the new medium’s potential in 1952, and he was soon joined in his endeavours by Otto Luening (b. 1900), who had studied with Busoni. They presented the first concert of electronic music in America, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on 28 October 1952: representative of the pieces then heard are Ussachevsky’s Sonic Contours and Luening’s Fantasy in Space, based on the sounds of piano and flute respectively. Out of their efforts grew the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, which was formally founded in 1960.
Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After