Hank's Blog
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Nadia Boulanger — Teacher of the Century
"One can never train a child carefully enough. If you take general education, one learns to recognize color, to recognize words, but not to recognize sound. So the eyes are trained, but the ears very little. This is not because someone taught me that red is not blue that I pretended to become a painter. But most people hear nothing because their ears have never been trained and many musicians hear very badly and very little."
Boulanger wrote this during an interview for the music journal in 1970. Based on the well-known quotation of Debussy, "The dissonance of today is the consonance of tomorrow." Boulanger was a slave master of sonic precision. She insisted the muscles of the ear and the focus of the mind be so acutely developed that intervals, rhythmic patterns and harmonic progressions be ingrained deeply, not only within the conscious mind, but within deep memories of music heard for throughout a lifetime.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Deconstructing the "Self"
By Reginald Ray
What’s this “thing” we call the “self” really made of? Reggie Ray breaks it down.
In my previous column, we saw that the “self,” the source of all our suffering, arises as a fearful response to the unfathomable, groundless awareness of our inherent essence, our buddhanature. We also saw that our “self” does not arise once and for all, but is radically impermanent, needing to be continually recreated, moment by moment. Our impression that we are or possess a “real” self—meaning an apparently substantial, continuous entity within—is thus a delusion, a false attribution superimposed on our discontinuous experience. There is, in fact, nothing there corresponding to our idea.
more...
By Reginald Ray
What’s this “thing” we call the “self” really made of? Reggie Ray breaks it down.
In my previous column, we saw that the “self,” the source of all our suffering, arises as a fearful response to the unfathomable, groundless awareness of our inherent essence, our buddhanature. We also saw that our “self” does not arise once and for all, but is radically impermanent, needing to be continually recreated, moment by moment. Our impression that we are or possess a “real” self—meaning an apparently substantial, continuous entity within—is thus a delusion, a false attribution superimposed on our discontinuous experience. There is, in fact, nothing there corresponding to our idea.
more...
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
The incredible performance I was a part of with Roswell Rudd's MALIcool and the BBC Scottish Symphony will be broadcast this Thursday on BBC 3 (it's also streaming on the web):
Performance on 3
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
With Roswell Rudd and his band
Thursday 6 October 2005 19:30-21:30 (Radio 3)
Presented by Louise Fryer, recorded at Tramway in Glasgow.
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conductor Ilan Volkov, jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd and his band MALIcool join forces on a unique collaborative journey that fuses classical music with improvisation, jazz and traditional sounds from Mali.
Including music by Gyorgy Ligeti, Kevin Volans, and the first performance of a new work for orchestra and MALIcool composed by Roswell Rudd.
Part of Africa Lives on the BBC.
Duration:
2 hours
Saturday, October 01, 2005
