WTF?

Last night Rachel and I went to a concert with Micheal Calmes and D’Anna Fortunata and the Esterhazy quartet. They did really weird music. The second selection, a song cycle for mezzo and tenor was, as the composer himself put it, “About homoerotic love.”

With text by Whitman, and a lesbian poet Lowell, it was to say the least disturbing. It was so disjunctive, atonal, and foreign I didn’t know what to think about it. Modern music either seems to me to be absolute genius or complete shit…and sometimes the audience can’t really tell. And we weren’t helped by the singers, who for half an hour, didn’t express one concrete emotion. “I taste for white currants…I could have had gems from India, but with the wind circling around our house…shall we call it white currants?”

And although Whitman was very gay, all of his writing about men can be thought of as benevolent humanism rather than explicit eroticism; just another reason we were all a little disturbed/confused.

One thing I did like was that the composers were actually alive. God, if I have to hear any more Schumann or Haydn I will cut out my own ears.

So I sang in a master class this morning and was told by D’Anna that I may have some gender issues when I told her that I thought the song I was singing was a ‘woman’s song’. And then she told me that she felt that I wanted to look at the accompanist (my girlfriend Rachel) which was a little scary (for someone to pick up on the sexual tension between us).

Anyway, today is the day of the show ‘yall! Our U-singers concert is tonight and I have two solos in Handel’s Te Deum…which I am totally freaking out about. Probably if I crash and burn the audience won’t be able to tell, the orchestra is frickin’ loud. Anyway, updates later.