When in Rome, Part 3

John Keats died at Rome of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth year, on the [23rd] of [February] 1821; and was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.

Spaghetti Western: Contemporaneous in the Spiegeltent

Contemporaneous in the Spiegeltent, warming up for the concert

It is a measure of the power of music, in the hands of Contemporaneous, that the silly season engulfing us decamped, wholly vanquished, within the first bars of Vicenti Alexim’s adroit arrangement of Ennio Morricone’s Il triello. The occasion was Contemporaneous’s appearance at Bard’s Summer Music Festival, the focus of which this year is “Puccini and His World.”

My Year In Music 2013

This year, I’m even more relieved than last year that I’m not a professional critic assigned to assemble a “top ten” music list for 2013. Instead, here is a year-end offering of highlights from my personal musical journey throughout the year.

I also want to recognize the composer and musicians who participated in This Life in Music profiles during 2013: Maxwell J McKee, Sabrina Tabby, Dávid Adam Nagy, Lucy Dhegrae, and Amy Garapic, as well as composer Dylan Mattingly, for his guest post on his new work, The Bakkhai (a report on the premiere of The Bakkhai is included in this post). It was a pleasure and privilege to present each of them on Prufrock’s Dilemma. Thanks to all!

Try, Try Again (or what do poet William Carlos Williams and composer Andrew Norman have in common?)

Composer Andrew Norman

Having written something that pleases one doesn’t give one instructions on how to do it again.
—John Ashbery

William Carlos Williams’ Portrait of a Lady is a peculiar thing, stuttering along as it does. It begins:

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? . . .