the snail and the cuckoo / the stjepan and the luka

It came time for me to sight-read. Olya's daughters were joyfully and unquietly jumping on the trampoline; she rose from her stool and strode over to the sliding glass door to shush them. I turned to today's piece, called "The Snail and the Cuckoo," and took note of the usual suspects: key and time signature, tempo,  dynamics and accidentals (I love sight-reading, you see, because the first time is always the freshest).

Live stream (requiring excess ellipses): Time to deliver! 1-2-3, 1-2-3, nice and walky. Peculiar choice of notes, though, and wonky meter shifts... Oi, a tie! Forgot to hold it. A stifled stumble, and a giggle... from Olya. A giggle? My stoic teacher never lets slip a stray sound... No matter, proceed. Here's a crescendo... Grow, grow, carry it to the edge of doom... A snort, from Olya. Do I really sound that awful??

I bear the snail and cuckoo out to the end, enduring the poorly stifled shouts of laughter from over my shoulder. At times, I join in, my titters swelling to forte as well. Olya dabs her eyes with a tissue as I slump on the bench, mystified.

"What was so funny?" 

"Ha, uh hah! F-f-floating about w-without any form, hee hee, like gormless... Globs!" 

"Oh, so... the snail and the cuckoo." 

"Hee hee! I can't take it! I haven't laughed like this all year!" 

True, the notes plodded along pointlessly, and were scattered across the staff like spilt rice. This made my teacher laugh like a maniac. She went on to describe a concert from her youth, during which she laughed so hard that she had to leave. Until today, I only knew of music's power to move. Now I know of its power to move dignified matrons onto the carpet, where they roll. One day I'll get the joke.  

Now, on another, far cooler note, I share with you two treats from the 2Cellos: their newest upload, and an old gem that Julianne showed me :). These sorts of sounds spill off of the stage.

   

pallindrome

 cracks in the plaster don't solve themselves.

Her glasses rest on a bed of burst veins. Her eyes, too, are framed by red wreaths. Her cheeks, ruddy as apples, porous as winter pears, fold into neatly sectioned curtains. They rest beneath a sheer veneer of powder. Her lucky nose is shaped like ancient currency, falsely indicative of prosperity. She looks upward, and I see cross-stitches of crimson. Still, she makes a smile for me.

Her sponsor says she'll burst, soon -- a wrathful grape grown heavy. The vessels in her brain will pop and seep; erasing attachments to us, self, God. Like her tormentor, she'll live on a mattress, unfruitful and irritable, trapped in a tiresome cycle, watching the toilet leak and irritate the paint downstairs. But she protests. She shouts back to her critic-confidant, then takes a pill, the same ones prescribed to her centanarian father.

It's the weight of fifteen years that rolls her shoulders forward, leaving a thick boulder where neck should be. Knobbed fingers reach for the crack in the paint. Back arches, boulder cracks. Then she hangs from to the deep indent of the life-line cut into her palms.

Rewind. She hangs onto the deep indent of the life-line cut into her palms.

The canister of diuretics flies into the waste-bin. She seeks a plumber for the leaky pipes in her body, nimble needles to knit them back together, a seamstress to smooth over crimson cross-stitches: he who knit her in her mother's womb.

Volatility dwindles so swiftly that she feels emboldened to approach him. She kneels by the mattress, brushes some hair out of way. A whisper, a nod. A vow to wake, after a moment's more rest. Now, she argues, and tears the crier from the crypt. The pair plunges once again into a sea of code and connections, special skills and speculation. While the grapes are young, they guard; at the peak of ripeness, they reap. The cycle reverses.

Her lips are limber and limpid; her glance glows white. Time tastefully fulfills her nose's prophecy, never granting excess, but heeding her need. There's a glow, matte and steady, that inflates the cheeks. Her eyes tuck away the yuletide laurels gules, and peer through patient lenses. Those eyes that watched the paint peel and broke free from trance.       

pastiche

Poetry: the premeditated overflowing of questionable emotions recollected in test-induced haste. Listen as you read :)

Ode to the Fugue
from the author's hearing Vivian play Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue in d minor.

I dreamt of an Abyssinian maid,
who on a clavichord played
a chromatic fantasy by Bach.

All that's best of loud and soft
Met in its tempo and its form;
A venerable fugue which with every turn
Denied attention to Keats' precious urn.

Over arpeggiated mountains and figured bass*
Pulsed a song of mellow grace,
as steadily as my darling's chest palpates.

Each note, precisely placed
to provoke contrapuntal motion,
A sunless sea of sonorous sounds --
Abluted by priests into a mellifluous ocean.

The subject** wandered lonely as a cloud
momently stumbling upon a host of golden cadences!
Softly I sank into this bed of cadential joy.

The swell of every mighty chord
struck my heart like Bruce Lee's foot a board;
As consecutive notes ascend,
urging in the end --
I tugged the fugue from Time!

But alas, after three minutes' war
The maid re-folded her hands
And the music slipped beneath fleeting dream-sands.

*characteristic of Baroque music -- the clear notation of harmonic progression over which a soloist improvises.
**In a fugue, the main melodic figure is called the subject.