by Allan Greene

I want to say something about that in which musicians are most expert: time.  This is not, however, about tempo, or about rhythm, or about the proper length of a piece of music.  This is about time passing, and how everything that passes becomes part of our collective aesthetic.  This is about the razor’s edge on which we artists struggle to perch.  This is at once sad and happy.

When I was on tour in Japan in 1983, the translator hired for the company, an all-round good guy named Hiro, led a couple dancers and me on a backstreets ramble through Kyoto.  After a few temples, a few gardens and several kilometers of shoe-leather, he took us for refreshment into a dessert shop that specialized in kakigōri.  Kakigōri is a mound of shaved-ice over which a flavored syrup is poured.  The photo here shows how much it looks like volcanic rock, which is a classic motif in Chinese art.  Hiro pushed me in the direction of sweet-bean-flavored kakigōri, and urged the others to order the green-tea flavor and the lemon flavor.

The kakigōri were served piled hill-high in stainless-steel dessert dishes, and when they were placed on the table before us, we were all sure there was too much.  But, ah, were we wrong.

The first spoonful that penetrated the hill caused it to collapse to half its volume.  The spoon filled with the most gossamer of ice-webs, tasting mostly of water with just the slightest tint of flavoring.  In the blink of an eye, the dessert was gone, and cold ice-melt was all that swirled in the dish.  It was, amazing to me, a dessert of negative space.  It was positive expectation and negative fulfillment, a very Eastern essay on want and need.

It’s also the way many of us in the art world live our lives.  We spend years in training, more years creating our repertoires, and when we finally put the final punctuation on the process by presenting ourselves to the public, the whole thing evaporates.  It lives in the memories of those who were witnesses, but otherwise, sayonara.

What brought all these thoughts on?  A week’s vacation with my family, coming home to our beloved Brooklyn, and a letter in the mail informing us that in two days we would be dropped from our health coverage. [Read more…]