I suppose the idea for Nightvision germinated more than a few decades ago when I frst ran across the poem Night Crow, by Theodore Roethke:


When I saw that clumsy crow
Flap from a wasted tree
A shape in the mind rose up:
Over the gulfs of dream
Flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black,
Deep in the brain, far back.

Anyway, that poem has been percolating in my head for a long time. It's one of the poems I actually memorized, which I'm usually too lazy to do, so it will be there when I need to think on it. I like the way I sink into the last line.

What do you see in the night? The dark? The stars? Your nightmares? The desert? Death? Mourning? A bit of hope? A bit of despair? Or do really see, as Roethke says, Into a moonless black/ deep in the brain far back.(?)

Each cut on Nightvision is about the 'gulfs of dream', waking or unconcious, real or contrived.

The Cuts:

1- 6 viii 03 It rains a lot in Seattle. This piece came about after a Nightmare on a Rainy Anniversary of the Hiroshima A bomb.

My dad was an Architect, and one way he made a living in the 50's and into the mid 60's was designing nuclear bomb shelters for the backyards, wheatfields, and orchards of Eastern Washington. He usually had his office in our garage, so he could step outside to our backyard and paint when design got too much for him. This meant that civil defense manuals on the technical aspects of bombshelter design were laying around on his drafting table for my brother and me to look at whenever we wanted. The most interesting manual, at least to me, was the one on blast zones, which was important, because clients had to make a decision about how much blast (that is, how close to the center of the blast) you wanted the shelter to take. And since we were near Moses Lake Airforce Base, and H bombs were the flavor of the moment, it was something real to ponder. At any rate, looking at the different blast zones, which were more or less rated on whether you would be incinerated, cooked, or left with really nasty radiation burns made a big impression on me, and I've tried to incorporate some of that emotion into the piece, especially by the use of silence and environmental noise (rain). Rain fell after Hiroshima was bombed. I hope it makes a useful metaphor.

Cello/Environmental Noise

JapaneseFolk/Noh/Bunraku/Rain/AgonyHyperRomantic)/Restraint/Meditation

2-Nightvision. What do you see in the MidEast Desert at night? What did the Romans see? What did Jesus See? What
did they hear? Who might we hear? Peter the Great? Catherine the Great? Lord Wellesley? Teumjin? Tsar Paul I? The Forward School?? John Malcolm? Charles Christie? Henry Pottinger? Charles Stoddard? Arthur Connolly? It is a place of broken dreams, romantic mysticism, death, death, death, and bleached skeletons.

Starlight/Citylights/Tracers/Fires/GreenNightvision/InfraRedNightvision/Flocks/Prayers/Orders/Music/Shouts/Weeping

Cello/DigitallyDesignedSound

The Singer of Tales/Mideastern/The Slaughter of Men

3-Suite for Solo Cello D min., J.S. Bach. This is the second of the Six Cello Suites. Although I've never been able to find an Officially Difinitive Timeline on the Cello Suite (vis Bach's life), I think that this piece is about loss- his wife? Unbearably sad and reflective, the Suite is distinctive in that it is very ancient in it's form and harmonies. So I've recorded it in a tempo that I hope brings the Intimate Sadness of the Dances- Totentanze: Dances of Memory, Intense Dreams of a Destroyed Past. One of the Nights of Bach's soul.

Prelude
Allemande
Courant
Sarabande
Minuets
Gigue

Cello Only.

EuroCourt/Traditional/Baroque/Dance

4- Urban Minotaur. We are surrounded by Urban Minotaurs; in the media, in politics, school, work, play.

The Minotaur, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "A fabulous monster, the son of Pasiphae, wife of Minos king of Crete, and a bull, represented as having the body of a man and the head of a bull. He was confined in the Cretan Labyrinth and fed with human flesh. He was slain by Theseus, who thus freed Athens from her annual tribute of 7 youths and 7 maidens to be devoured by the monster. Hence used allusively; "there minotaurs and ugly treasons lurke. (Shakespeare I Henry IV v. iii.)" (Sounds like some public figures we all know, doesn't it?) "All those who were the hope and future strength of the country were devoured by the Imperial Minotaur in pursuit of (the) dream of universal domination". (United Service Magazine) (I won't even go there.) "Home to your promiscuous pastures where the minotaur of authority is just a rolypoly ruminent and nothing is at stake. (Auden - Sea & Mirror)." Now, the Minotaur also demanded Virgins, in some of the Stories, and it seems to me that we are all Virgins at some point, relative to our media, and in some sense to our culture, so the perveyors of the half truth, and the innuendo all come to mind; just scroll across your AM radio dial some sunny afternoon and ask yourself if your sense of truth or fair play is the same as it used to be? We are all wandering the maze of our 21st C. media & political jungle. The Minotuars Lurk Everywhere. You can probably name a few Urban Minotaurs yourself.

digitally synthesized piano, analogue cello

bebop, 20C. Modern, Henry Cowell, Paul Hindemith, Charles Ives, Ruggles, serialism, The Medium Is The Message/Trance
The Maze, The Cry, technoPop