Mezzosoprano & Soprano Cecilia Bartoli (Roma, 4 giugno 1966)
Musiche di: Giulio Caccini, Claudio Monteverdi, Antonio Vivaldi, Riccardo Broschi, Georg Friederic Handel, Xavier Montsalvage
Ensemble "Le Musiche Nove", Claudio Osele direttore
Live recording, Schwetzingen, Rokoko Theater, 27 maggio 2002

Mezzosoprano: Cecilia Bartoli

IMAGE: Climate Breakdown basecamp, the WALLOWAS, OREGON

Photo / text of poem is at bit.ly/f5czpb

WATCH…“i’m too poor in this world, and yet not poor enough…after RILKE” https://vimeo.com/845195766

I’m too poor in this world, and yet not poor enough…after RILKE, a soundpoem

Special thanks to my good friend, Simone de HAAN, Australian new music trombonist extraordinaire…I couldn’t have done this project without his help.

“What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.”

TEXT of Bertrand Russell’s Last letter used here is at http://www.picture-poems.com/pdfs/russells-last-letter.pdf

Feel free to make your own, I am sure, much better performance of the text. The track for the orchestral background (minus voice) is here:  http://picture-poems.com/mp3/russell_no-voice.wav

IMAGE: Bertrand RUSSELL, 1957

RUSSELL’S 1970 LAST LETTER, a call for peace in the Middle East

A set of FIVE METAPHYSICAL MINIATURES...soundscape includes a found gong, walking on crusty snow with snowshoes, powerful snowmachines that circle my winter camp, and most especially, a February love duo of two owls, counter-singing in the middle of the night. Recordings...made in the Wallowas, just outside the Eagle Cap Wilderness, Northeast Oregon.

VIEW a set of 100 MINIATURES at: www.picture-poems.com/100

Freedom - Limit - Right Action - Money - Economy: a set of 5 miniatures

PHOTO: YUM CHENMO--"Great Wisdom Mother" at EWAM, Garden of 1000 Buddhas, Jocko Valley, Arlee, Montana

SEE TEXT at: http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/1000-buddhas_9-29-10_8bw.html

RETWEET #buddhism A QUESTION OF #NONVIOLENCE, OR NON-EXISTENCE—a meditation pdf [140k] http://bit.ly/1nkSlvg mp3 [3.7Mb] http://bit.ly/1nkSjDB

A QUESTION OF NON-VIOLENCE, OR NON-EXISTENCE,  a meditation . . .

Gaia Aloisi - Three clocks (2023) for large ensemble

Ensemble Novecento
Pasquale Corrado, conductor

Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Sala Sinopoli, Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, Rome
October 2023

*****

Three clocks, which by definition mark time, crystallize as equally well-defined images: three brief representations of time but also of interior space, in a linearity that transforms into an instant, giving the listener the possibility of stopping and observing what world can be contained in a single moment.
The piece is thus divided into three movements, understood as subdivisions of the same musical and temporal discourse: the alternation between the glacial stasis and the explosions of sound of the first clock is followed by the melos of the second, which explicitly recalls vocal sounds in an atmosphere tonally nuanced, almost like a distant lament; the frenzy of the third, on the contrary, photographs and expands the obsessive excitement of a repetitive cycle of chaotic thoughts.
These are therefore three dilated snapshots, three moments that become narration. Each of them is framed and explored through its infinite ramifications, in an attempt to investigate the essential and fundamental dimension of our existence: time.

Three clocks | for large ensemble (2023)

UNHOLY LAND

Some governments lie.
Some governments lie about everything.
To find your way around here you have to invert everything they say.


What is security anyway?
Holy. Hale. Whole. Healthy.
This place is none of these. 
So why is it called “Holy Land” anyway.
Bearded tan arrogant muscular aggressive young men in khaki costumes, machine guns strapped to their shoulders and barbedwire for brains, attack dogs conditioned to snap at everything: themselves, each other, and now me.

What would the Buddha do at the checkpoint? 

My driver groans, “Jesus, another road block.” Traffic backed up. Cars running out of gas.  Filthy air. A busload of overweight tourists from Texas hungry for baptism passes right through. 

The guard asks me for my passport. I tell him I forgot it. He looks as if he’s about to bash me in the stomach and then in the face with the butt of his gun. I ask him, “But why?”

“Hier ist kein warum.” 

Warriors of the Devil. Gateway to hell. Who said religion is poison? Not true. It’s worse. It turns us into the walking dead. No camouflage will protect us in this unholy land.

Here is no why. Just the emptiness of senseless violence. Everything’s inverted. 

Not to kill is a sin. 

LISTENING: UNHOLY LAND, a soundpoem “The land where meaning is inverted. The land where not to kill is a sin…” 

mp3[2Mb] http://www.picture-poems.com/mp3/unholy-land.mp3

#Sun2Sound #percussion #slagwerk #Schlagzeug #Todayspoem

UNHOLY LAND, a soundpoem “Where not to kill is a sin”

THIS IS A set of metaphysical MINIATURES from the picture-poems.com 2014/2015 CALENDAR. All b & w photography, pdf [22.9Mb] is at: http://bit.ly/1F9R54K

MUSICAL header & coda is from the STONEPINE SONATA, violin & piano, for the young performer, on Soundcloud at: http://bit.ly/1D7Ni1S score pdf http://bit.ly/1D7NrT9 This is the piece I hope to have played on a fiddle made of whitebark -- or stonepine --wood. [SEE BELOW....]

PHOTO: Old-growth Whitebark pine, or Stonepine, on solid rock, at 2500 m., Eagle Cap #Wilderness, OREGON. I'm working on a photobook project, WHITEBARKS OF THE WALLOWAS. Whitebarks of the polar bears of trees, both the oldest and most important keystone species of the high alpine zone, and also the most endangered of species, threatened on all sides by beetles, and, most especially, a hotter, drier climate. SEE MORE AT: http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/whitebark_on-rock.html



Natural Justice - Freedom & Limit - Dialogue - Religion - Square of False Rationality, 6 MINIATURES

This is the sound track for: Watch “THINK OF A RIVER, a flowform meditation” on #Vimeo https://vimeo.com/841380035 

MAGE: Rolling Thunder Falls, Eagle Cap Wilderness, Northeast #OREGON

I'VE BEEN MEDITATING a lot recently on Thoreau's little 7-beat aphorism, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." We are, after all, marking the 50th anniversary of APOLLO 8 & the great EARTH RISE photograph. Yes, "When we went to Moon, but discovered the Earth." And yet, reactionary forces everywhere continue their mindless attack on our planet home.

"THINK OF A RIVER (as something powerful)" was first composed in preparation of a 56-day double circumambulation of the WALLOWAS I do every year. This is a vast and rugged wilderness area where I work in the US, about 1/6th the size of Switzerland, running from alpine peaks above 3000 m. all the way to the great Hells Canyon and the Snake River at 600 m., where we can almost smell the Pacific Ocean. I do the outer circle on Mt. bike, and the inner circle--all the way round what I sense as the neutral, motionless "hub of the wheel" of the living mandala of Eagle Caps--running all the many rivers on foot.

The idea is simple: If you want to understand a watershed, walk it. And always running parallel, "If you want to understand, to "strike at the root of evil," observe as an intense form of meditation in Nature your own thought and thinking.

The two streams, that of the river, and that of consciousness, are for me one, inseparable. To understand one is to understand both. A revolution of consciousness IS a revolution in the nature of our relationship to water. And a revolution in our relationship with water IS a revolution of consciousness.

The rhythm of the piece is measured i what I call "flowform time." I prefer not to write this down in western musical notation. If you'd like to perform the piece, feel free to simply learn the movement of the text by heart, and play it by ear, from there.

TEXT, in a slightly different version, is at: bit.ly/1JARAEs Another recording, made a few years back, is on Soundcloud at: Cliff-crego – Think-of-a-river-as-something

THINK OF A RIVER, a flowform meditation...

ACHROME ensemble interpreta "Dai calanchi di Sabbiuno" di F. Vacchi
Bergamo, Sala Piatti - Stagione "...e adesso musica!"
Marzo 2019

ACHROME Ensemble interpreta "Dai Calanchi Di Sabbiuno" di F. Vacchi

Minime Variazioni

Composer. Writer. Photographer. Former conductor & founder of the ASKO ensemble.

On a bike/ski/hike trek of the Pacific Northwest studying native plants & climate breakdown 🌲 from sagebrush sea to whitebark pine. Composing off-grid the whole way.

#Sun2Sound 🌕 on X

THINKING LIKE A STONEPINE, a soundpoem manifesto https://vimeo.com/844665859

“LOVE & WATER, three thought poems w/ coda, PHAROS for small orchestra, “Nightwind”” https://vimeo.com/847079690 

CURRENTLY on mt bike/ski/climbing trek through Pacific Northwest, working on a photobook about WHITEBARK PINE COLLAPSE and CLIMATE CRISIS. BASES in the WALLOWAS | AMSTERDAM | ALPS. 

WEEKLY photo/poetry updates at www.picture-poems.com & THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE new music, poetry & dance performance project at www.cs-music.com

ALWAYS ON THE LOOKOUT for progressive, tech-savy, instrumental virtuosi interested in dialogue & collaborative undertakings.

CONTACT cliff@picture-opoems.com
Or on SKYPE or FACETIME @cliffcrego

MUSIC? The one thing humans do,
that makes the rest of nature jealous.

UNHOLY LAND, a soundpoem “Where not to kill is a sin”

Cliff Crego

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