“Gentle Emanation”
Some of my pre-sleep protocols include—don’t read news related to China (no twitter, no WeChat, no search engine). I can’t say how frustrated each time I check in what has been happening back in my native land—may I not be killed for saying this.
Other protocols are harder to control, such as to avoid anything irritating, excitable, or ecstatic. What could those activities possibly be?? A Netflix show on South American drug lords? A tragic movie that narrates the inevitable downfalling of roaring youths?
Or a 20th-century symphony?
At the very start of the semester, I unraveled a treasure musician by accident. I thought I had exhausted his discography, but this album pulls me back in:
Vyacheslav Artyomov:
“Gentle Emanation” Symphony
To be honest, this symphony is nothing but an antithesis to its tone-poem title. The music is anything but “gentle.” If it must be “gentle,” it is gentle in the way of staying in the undercurrents, or the underworld—whatever you say, as long as the adjective suggests the secrets beneath the detectable exterior. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to describe the music as the very opposite of “gentle,” such as “explosive,” “apocalyptic,” or “precarious.”
I couldn’t get hold of the score, so I have to attack the auditory sensibility straightforwardly. Imagine the Big Bang of the universe, where everything everywhere comes into being. Is “Gentle Emanation” descriptive of such emergence? In other words, the Big Bang is anything but hectic. It’s quiet in an insidious manner, simmering the universe with its evocations.
If it doesn’t seem foolish to anatomize a musical work via its often-reductive title.
If we tread carefully, it won’t be difficult to relate this symphony intertextually with the infamous Tarkovsky’s films.
Photo dump of the week:
(In a nutshell, I was trying to start this walk before sunset (which is about 5:00pm in Ann Arbor), in order to catch the adorable sky before it gets dark. Unfortunately, I got there too late. Still, I managed to catch the last glimpse of the therapeutic daylight before it gets all dark again. )
