June 16ths
6/16/1895, Springfield Centre, NY (Letters of William James)
To Mrs. Henry Whitman: "Just reviving from the addled and corrupted condition in which the Cambridge year has left me; just at the portals of that Adirondack wilderness for the breath of which I have sighed for years, unable to escape the cares of domesticity and get there; just about to get a little health into me, a little simplification and solidification and purification and sanification—things which will never come again if this one chance be lost; just filled to satiety with all the simpering conventions and vacuous excitements of so-called civilization; hungering for their opposite, the smell of the spruce, the feel of the moss, the sound of the cataract, the bath in its waters, the divine outlook from the cliff or hill-top over the unbroken forest..."
6/16/2003
An errant quote: "What makes it art is that the artist went further than others had gone before."
[I say ambiguity is one of the more interesting things in art, either aesthetically or in the history of the work].
6/16/2011
Concert at Millennium Park: Alim Qasimov Ensemble. Thoughts: Music arises from devotional stories, not musicianship; call and response; bent seconds and other unique ornaments; notes that pull down; non-western—music floats over drone but not tonic; loud and reedy chest voice—plaintive.
6/16/2022
Looking back, world music gave us a sense of interconnectedness through the music, or at least that's what I felt it did. Pursuant to Iain McGilchrist, this interconnectedness is a facet of the right hemisphere. Music is a way to access the right hemisphere in contrast to the left hemisphere, which is also important, to make the music more solid.