Rowley Gallery Blog
This short film was made for the exhibition, Littoral: John Hubbard in Context at the Luther Brady Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 2013. “People found it fascinating to learn more about where he lives and how he works. His singing was quite a revelation.” It’s a lovely portrait and a touching memorial to a deeply romantic artist. John Hubbard died on 6th January 2017. He was 85. Continue reading “For John Hubbard”
Polka by Mark Morris. The dance uses a piece for violin and piano by contemporary composer Lou Harrison. Morris was taken by its final movement, called, strangely enough, “polka.”
I always start with a piece of music. I’m not doing, like, a musicological analysis and writing a paper or anything, but I’m figuring out in my mind what makes that particular piece work. So my intention is to say through dancing exactly what I think is being said through music.
Because I heard that “polka,” I said I must choreograph this right now. And to me, it sounds very, very ancient. And so I wanted to make up a dance that was evocative and a little mysterious and seemed like maybe people had been doing it for hundreds or thousands of years. That was my assignment.
John Hurt reciting Jabberwocky, the first poem I learned by heart.
He died on 27 January 2017, Lewis Carroll’s 185th birthday.
If you’ve got an hour he also does a great performance of Krapp’s Last Tape.
The Art Ensemble of Chicago play tonight at Café Oto, but I’m too late to get tickets, they’re all sold out. Instead I remember their performance at The Roundhouse in 1982, as part of the Camden Jazz Festival. They were astonishing and spectacular, unlike any other band, and able to encapsulate the whole history of jazz with wild improvisations and swinging ensemble playing and breathtaking solos. They were sweet and fiery and dynamic and funny and possibly the best band I ever saw. Here are four videos from Polish television of a performance in Warsaw, probably from the same tour, and the closest I can find to my memory of that fantastic night in Camden. Continue reading “Art Ensemble Of Chicago”
Then I stumbled upon this cry for help from Lucinda Williams
and it felt universal, like she’s crying to the trees for all of us.
My twin daughters suggested this video by Ibeyi, a French-Cuban musical duo consisting of twin sisters Lisa-Kaindé Diaz and Naomi Diaz.
They sing in English and Yoruba — a Nigerian language their ancestors spoke before being brought to Cuba by the Spanish to be made slaves in the 1700s — though Lisa’s is the lead voice, Naomi plays traditional Peruvian/Cuban percussion instruments cajón and Batá drum, while Lisa also plays piano. Ibeyi (Ìbejì) is Yoruba for “twins”.
The Tarkovsky Quartet – François Couturier, piano; Anja Lechner, violoncello; Jean-Louis Matinier, accordion; Jean-Marc Larché, soprano saxophone – at the Nostalgia Festival, Poznań in 2013.
Andrei Tarkovsky is my favourite filmmaker. “Andrei Rublev” was a revelation for me. Since then I have seen all his films over and over again… They are long poems, hypnotic in their slowness, and pervaded with spirituality. There is very little music in them. Tarkovsky used to say, “It’s my personal conviction that a film does not need music at all.” Anyway, he was a master of using it.
So I did not seek to make ‘scenic’ music of any kind but have tried, instead, to represent in each piece a specific emotion linked to the universe of this director – to his films, of course, but also to some of his favourite actors (Anotoli Solonitsyn, Erland Josephson) or composers (Bach, Pergolesi). Or even to the very original way he plays with shades of colour (“Crépusculaire”). This is our way of paying tribute to this great artist.
François Couturier
Continue reading “Homage To Andrei Tarkovsky”
And then I found this short homage by Martin Kessler. It’s a collection of well-chosen clips from some of Tarkovsky’s best films, beautifully woven together with music by Beethoven and Bach, to produce a sampler that just leaves me wanting to see more of these memorable moving images.
Open Culture: Andrei Tarkovsky
A couple of days later we discovered another ancient abbey, a counterbalance to the beauty and elegance of Sant’Antimo, the Abbazia di San Galgano stands open to the sky, with all the breathtaking grandeur of a canyon carved out of the rock, its great hulk like a ship run aground. Continue reading “San Galgano”
After visiting San Quirico d’Orcia and Montalcino we headed south looking for Bagno Vignoni, a spa since Roman times, but we got distracted along the way by the Abbazia di Sant’Antimo, a beautiful Benedictine monastery set in a lovely landscape of wooded hills and olive groves. Continue reading “Bagno Vignoni”
