Blog
Monthly Archive: Febuary 2008
Birds and Dates
Posted on Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Rehearsals are now well underway for my opera/oratorio/dramatic cantata A Bird in your Ear at Bard College. [ Read the Bard Press Release here ]
Melissa Wegner (who premiered Piosenki, and who is one of the narrators in the piece) kindly recorded some of the on-going vocal rehearsals - it's a very curious feeling to hear a recording of an as-yet-unheard composition which took place without you on the other side of the Atlantic! But it all sounds like it's shaping up very nicely and its comforting to be reminded of the fantastic standard of musicianship they have at Bard.
Meanwhile, off tonight to another bout of Opera Speed Dating with Tete a Tete
Borges Quotes
Posted on Monday, February 18, 2008
I'm just reading a book of interviews with Borges, from throughout his life and, as much to aid my own appaling memory as anything else, I'm going to write down some of the best quotes from this fascinating fellow. Make of them what you will.
"I don't believe that any writer should search for themes or choose them, it's convenient that the themes look for him and find him"
"If there's one moral defect that's usually obvious in a work, it is vanity...The reader ought never to feel that the writer is skillful. A writer ought to be skillful but in an unobtrusive way."
"I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have rather a low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work."
