Saturday 23 June 2012

The Art of Direction


Somewhere, there is footage of Leonard Bernstein lecturing an orchestra on the meaning of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. He asks his musicians to remember ‘lying on the ground, in spring or summer; you lie down, face down on the ground, and you want to kiss it. You watch the grass grow and you want it to just enfold you.’

It occurs to me now, that all art might be a seeking out of the sublime. To know what we want, to desire, and yet to allow for a fundamental freedom too, communing with stuff bigger than ourselves. What Simone Weil calls shaking the branch rather than reaching for the fruit.


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