April Is The Cruelest Month

First things first. It’s March 31, which means that Bjork has released her new video for “Wanderlust”. It’s 3D…so if you need to get yourself some 3D glasses just take up the offer from Bjork.com. Lovely idea.

The video is by the seemingly omnipresent Encyclopedia Pictura, who is doing pretty much every video on earth these days (so it would seem). I swear that at Mirrorball every other video was courtesy of the E.P. stylings.

And just in case you were thinking to yourself “gosh…I wonder what Bjork has on the old ipod” here’s your big chance. Hint: apparently includes lots of Pärt.

So this afternoon I left my office early to head up to Harvard to hear Lewis Lockwood wax eloquent on the Beethoven string quartets along with the Juilliard String Quartet. Due to bad weather three of the four members of the quartet were not able to attend (which disappointed some people who were there to see the quartet and not Lockwood…exhibit A: overheard a woman saying to her friend, “they gave the old bait and switch” [ what?] ) after all since they were stuck in Cleveland, but for some unexplained reason Joel Smirnoff (1st violin) was able to make it for the event.

I’m glad he could make it. He made some really wonderful observations. Sometimes there is a kind of insight one can only gain by performing the pieces hundreds of times, studying them, living and breathing them, that cannot be replaced or usurped by scholarship, no matter how many hours are clocked with dusty scores in libraries. That is the exact reason I chose to study musicology in a conservatory rather than a university.

Additionally, congratulations are due to my old friend Jacob Bancks (who recently had his compositional skills debuted in Carnegie Hall) for receiving a nice notice in the New York Times (see “New York Youth” fourth paragraph).