I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MAX RICHTER-“Dream 3 (In The Midst Of My Life)” from Sleep– NPR’S SOUTH X LULLABY (March 17, 2018).

This piece is remarkable.  And the except provided here (all 8 minutes of it) is but a teeny fraction of the entire 8 hour work.

I had heard about this piece on Echoes a few months ago and was very interested in it, but figured there was no way I’d hear it.  I never imagined anyone would hear it quite like this:

Right at the start of the 2018 SXSW Music Festival, Max Richter’s eight-hour composition Sleep was performed overnight to an audience tucked into 150 beds. They — the audience, not the tireless group of musicians who performed the piece — slept, dreamed and sometimes snored through this trance-inducing experience.

Richter has described this piece: “Really, what I wanted to do is provide a landscape or a musical place where people could fall asleep.”

In the video here, you’ll see Richter himself on keyboards and electronics, along with the ACME string ensemble and soprano vocalist Grace Davidson.

What I loved about the story of this piece is not that it is a piece to sleep to exactly but that it is based around the neuroscience of sleep.  He says, “Sleep is an attempt to see how that space when your conscious mind is on holiday can be a place for music to live.”

It’s wonderful and I would love to sleep to it some night.

[READ: April 13, 2016] “Old Wounds”

I thought that I had read more by Edna O’Brien but it appears that I’ve read hardly anything by her.

This story was an interesting look at Irish stubborness and the way families can hate each other over small things (or even big things).

The narrator explains that her family had a falling out and for several years there was no communication at all between them.  Even when they attended funerals they did not acknowledge each other.

Finally all of the older people had died off and it was just her and her cousin Edward (both past middle age) they met and put aside the hostilities. They even visited the family graveyard together.  The graveyard was on an island a short boat ride from Edward’s house.

They wrote to each other often and she visited him on a regular basis.  Poor Edward’s sight was failing him and his wife was not doing well.

She recalls a time when they were much younger when she and Edward were friendly and he was flirtatious with her and her sister.  And then he married a woman named Grania.  And it was this marriage that caused all of the trouble between the families–for a fascinating reason.

He showed her around on her summer visit and even taught her to shoot.  They had an adventure with a dog and some English hippies.  And then he more or less invited her to consider the special graveyard (which had been in the family for generations and went even further back to pagan times).  And she said she would like that.

But then as stubborn people tend to be, something comes between them and their closeness dissolves away.  Which is quite a shame given how old they both are.  Is reconciliation a possibility?

Despite the brevity of the story I was really sad at how their friendship fell apart.