Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Samuel Beckett’s legacy endures, and reaches far beyond the written word. Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett’s work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition, dispensing with conventional plot and the unities of time and place in order to focus on essential components of the human condition.
Internationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s “realist parable film-making” expanded the artistic history of world cinema. Called “an icon of change in Iran,” his death this past Monday has challenged critics to find ways to fully describe the distinctive nature of his cinematic mastery.
Composer/Trumpeter Jon Hassell proposes that Western music (and culture), must simultaneously look forward with technology and innovative forms, while cultivating a relationship to the rich multiplicity of the earth’s tribal musics.
Just Intoned tunings sound off, with a 2009 tribute to slain microtonal guitarist Rod Poole, from SASSAS at the Schindler House, Los Angeles.
Years after the World Trade Center attacks of September 11th, 2001, John Adams’s “On the Transmigration of Souls” is more poignant than ever.
“Dream” (1948) was written for Merce Cunningham’s dance, minimal fixed tones of sustained resonance, influenced by Balinese Gamelan and divinations through the I Ching.