Slices of Time

Years ago, when somehow I had the energy to cut time into slices small enough to divide between many interests, I was studying classical music, particularly chamber music. One composer of the modern group of atonal composers seemed to be at the vanguard of dissonance, Schoenberg. His 12 tone composing restriction resulted in some of harshest and most challenging music. However, as I listened to the entire catalogue of Schoenberg, I was awestruck by one piece of hugely melodic music that spoke of family and fireplace, Verklarte Nacht. Now the mystery and beauty of this passionately haunting composition is being explicated by a young man, Rob Kapilow and you can watch it happen on PBS this Thursday night. I know that everyone is crazy busy, I think I will be dancing at 730 on Thursday, but record or find an alternative showing time or maybe just go to iTunes and download some of Kapilow's "What makes it great" podcasts. I suspect that you won't be disappointed and maybe you will find one more bit of the wonder of life to explore in your spare time.

Music is simply time sliced and modulated. Sometimes moments are 1/4 notes, sometimes staccato 1/16th. Put your time together into a beautiful song.

From the Wall Street Journal

"For a decade, Rob Kapilow, a composer and conductor, has been unraveling the mysteries of music for listeners at concert halls across the U.S. On "Live From Lincoln Center: I Can't Believe It's Schoenberg," Mr. Kapilow will take a national TV audience through Arnold Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht," an 1899 chamber-music piece. To help explain it, Mr. Kapilow has musicians play themes over, or slowly, to illustrate how they are developed. Mr. Kapilow got the idea for showing listeners how music works when he attended art-history classes in college. "I learned to see art," Mr. Kapilow says. "I can teach people how to hear it." The program airs Thursday at 7:30 p.m. EST on PBS stations around the country.

http://www.pbs.org/livefromlincolncenter/"

The Last Great Place

Butte, Montana - "The Hill"
Once this hill provided most of the copper which wired the world for its first watts of electricity. By 1904, this was the most Irish city in the world outside of Ireland.........

Traveling to Montana is not a physical trip, it is a journey of the mind. I sit this morning in a hotel in Denver, Colorado, having made a presentation yesterday to my business associates that surely will delay my physical travel to the last great place (TLGP) by many years. I have made promises of accomplishment in the business that gives them all hope for financial success beyond their wildest dreams. Keeping those promises will be a difficult task.

So I sit back in the comfortable desk chair of the hotel, close my eyes and once again I can see the big sky across the horizon as I head west. Motana certainly is a beautiful place, the rolling hills of the eastern plains gradually giving way to the sharply cut peaks along the southern border. Those mountains to the south, the Absarokas (http://www.forwolves.org/ralph/wpages/beartooth.htm), often referred to as the Bear Teeth for their sharp contour, are of critical importance to the ecology of the state. The narrow valleys between these mountains are the collection areas for the melting snow from the higher elevations. The small rivulets of water merge to become streams and collect to become the rivers. This is the life blood of the state. It sustains the fields of wild flowers, provides sustaining moisture to deer and bears and sheep and man, and it is along the banks of those rivers that I sit in my mind's eye, listening to the water flow over the boulders which have tumbled into the the river. There are no cell phones, no blackberrys, no laptops, no emails, no business plans or appointments. The soft wind from across the plains brings me the scent of spring's fresh growth and I lay back and stare at the clouds that drift across the horizon.

On the table next to my laptop the blackberry clatters with the morning alarm. It is 6:25 am again and I reach over and turn the scroll wheel down and press the switch above turning it off. The day has begun. Breakfast with my partners at 7:00, meeting at 8:00 on health coverages, taxi at 11:00, plane at 12:35, dinner in Washington, D.C. at 7:00 pm, seminar in Philadelphia tomorrow at 2:00 pm. The powerpoint will be finished during the plane flight........

I will return to the river bank soon.

The Beginning

Today, Sunday, October 30, 2005, in mid-afternoon, I begin my journey to Montana.