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Theatre Project Performances at High Zero 2003 High
Zero poems, McShea 2003 This
is some writing I did while listening to the festival. A couple of the
pieces were written later from lo-fi recordings I made when I was too
distracted to write. Three of them were in the last Shattered Wig Review. When
I was typing all of this up, I wrote out a few of the characteristics
of this music writing I've done that could be construed as problems: 1.
I rarely comment on the music of individual players.
We're used to music writing giving credit where credit is due,
especially in the jazz tradition.
In the oft-hailed tradition of Baltimore, that of non-competition
and what that affords us, I ask the players forgiveness for my lack
of individual attributions. 2.
Because the writings were made live, during performances, it seemed
beside the point to do much re-writing.
The players don't get a chance to change their sounds, and changing
my words would be in response to something other than the music, so
I mostly didn't. What I did do was drop words I simply stumbled around on to
no evocative effect. 3. It begins to feel like an exquisite corpse, writing from music. If I passed these words back to the musicians to play, it would not produce the same set, but something else again. I like to think that it would be more fun for them to play from my poetic approximations than from that thing I'm not doing called "music writing." |