"So Jenny, where have you been?" asked my mother, who is kind enough to read my posts.
"Here in Pasadena, Mom."
"No really, Jen. There haven't been any blogs from you...."
Nailed. Darnit. My mother, of course, was right. I haven't been to Mongolia, nor have I ridden a camel, nor engaged in a Dalian-ce about poetry with any number of English translators. No collages of word or art. No clever sestinas under leaf. I simply--without better excuse--stopped posting when I lost my computer hard drive. Computer Kaput put a crimp (and that, Word Wonks, is litotes, a.k.a. "understatement") in both my will and my ability to blog!
Luckily, I can always make use of extra time, so I dragged my family to Casual Fridays at Walt Disney Concert Hall, for the West Coast premiere of Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Esa Pekka Salonen's own First Piano Concerto.
The Casual Fridays series is a brilliant invention for writers who like their music with a heavy dose of words. After the concert, you can either meet the musicians for a drink at the bar or sit down closer to the stage where the conductor and soloist hang around to answer audience questions. Heaven!
This past Friday, Israeli pianist Yefim Bronfman and composer/conductor Salonen fielded questions on their friendship, composing, and the difference between music and language. Here, slighly-paraphrased, is Salonen's own personal myth on the origin of music....
The Origin of MusicThis may or may not be true, but I like to imagine it is, because it could be. In Prehistoric Times, even before early humans, music and language were the same thing. Then in hunter-gatherer times, in the tribes, words became more precise depictions and they separated. So music has remained the Language of Things We Can't Speak About.
Is poetry then, I wonder, our way of rejoining what was set asunder?
Thank you, Esa Pekka.
-J.F.
