fog and moon

forgive me if i go all golly-gee-whiz on you, but it is an amazing thing to me to be here at my home waiting for people i never heard of to post their home movies.

in general when i hear about a thing happening in the world, i just go to youtube and start searching for video of it, which is a stunning concept in itself if you care to think about it.

but specifically, i was waiting for anything about the performance of the foghorn requiem at souter light.

i'm a musician and a composer, so performances and public art are of general interest to me, but a thing on such large scale that it has to be directed by use of GPS technology and computer sequencing is such and amazing thing to me.

there are some who believe musical performances need to be held in controlled little indoor spaces where every nuance of every note comes out, but i was spoiled for that view by having read all the works of john cage early in my college career.

in his theory, the performance of music includes whatever else happens during it. coughing, fire sirens, uncomfortable silences, all of it.

and with this foghorn piece, it is designed for the sound of it to reach the crowd on the shore, which means taking into account WIND SPEEDS and oh, my! what a collection of instruments: brass bands, single soloists, horns on ships out in the water, and the huge and powerful foghorn.

and the crowd! you do a thing like that and there's no even pretending to put people in seats and call it a concert, so you have a free range audience and they shout and laugh and check their guidebooks and cover their ears and i have been watching clip after clip of this thing to try to get some concept of what it was like because of course a performance like that is not only never replicated, but it is probably never going to be approximated and no amount of careful recording will tell you what it was like to be there.

i have waded through every clip i can find on this incredible thing and here are some of my favorites.

in other news, here at home, the moon was full. the best view of the moon from anywhere near my house is right here from my desk, but because of the mountain, the moon is pretty high in the sky before it clears my horizon, which means the moon never appears as huge here as it does places where you can look at a moonrise against a low and distant horizon.