Here’s the view from my front door in Warwick, NY, after the snowstorm today:
It’s peaceful here; silent; hardly any cars on our road. (Which you can’t see from our front door; our house faces away from the road, toward woods and a field.) This is a rare moment of peace for me. I’ve been buried in work and travel for the past few weeks. Each Thursday I’ve been flying from New York to Rochester, to teach a course on the future of classical music at the Eastman School of Music. On Wednesdays I teach the same course at Juilliard. I flew to England for the Association of British Orchestras conference, and have been sitting home obsessively writing marketing copy for four American orchestras…plus more, including some consulting and project work with the Cleveland Orchestra. It’s hard to explain exactly why all this is so strenuous, though part of it comes from taking these courses I’m teaching very seriously, and rethinking each year how I’m going to teach them.
And then there’s also the book I’ve been writing here on ArtsJournal, in installments. That takes a lot out of me every other weekend. I’m not complaining, you understand. These all are loads I’m willing to carry. But it adds up to a lot.
And on top of everything else I’ve been composing, most recently a slightly crazy piece for cello and piano which was premiered last Wednesday. I’ll have more to say about that in a bit. All this, as I’ve said, adds up. Some days I’ll have work in several categories piled up, including maybe two hours of polishing the cello and piano score (maybe just correcting the inevitable mistakes that find their way into the notation; even that can take a long time). Teaching in Rochester is a full day’s effort — up at 6 to catch a morning flight, lunch at a terrific Chinese place around the corner from Eastman, then teach, then back to the airport for a 5 PM flight back to New York, then a cab ride through rush hour traffic from the airport back home. No complaints here — and in fact the students in the class are terrific, as are my Juilliard students, so that teaching this semester is a real joy. If anyone’s curious, you can see the class and assignment schedules for the Juilliard and Eastman courses, and even read some of the assignments. The Eastman course meets just seven times, the Juilliard course a lot more than that. But they cover the same ground.
And in the middle of all this, some great pleasures from films I’ve watched on my flights — Godard’s Masculin Féminin, and Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046. Godard’s film, besides being a lot of fun and very touching, is a modernist landmark, self-referential to the max, and full of moments when the actors break through the screen to speak for themselves. To say this seems more lively and, really, more lasting than the modernist music from the same period (the film came out in 1966) would be the understatement of the month. That’s because the movie touches both everyday life and crucial social concerns of its time, which modernist music back then generally didn’t.
2046 is a quiet treasure, a look at buried passion (a big subject for Wong, as I understand his films), beautiful and heart-rending. Tony Leung, in the leading role, has the charm and charisma of a 1940s film star (to me he seems like a Chinese Clark Gable), and in fact one wonderful thing about this film is the way all the cast has that special quality film stars used to have, but now gnerally don’t. “Beautifully sad,” is the way one viewer on the IMDb film site describes the film, and I agree; that’s exactly right.
And as night falls, the snow is still mostly untouched…