Paul Cantrell
Do you like choral music? My friend (and college roommate!) Nick Weininger has a new album out, and it’s so good:
https://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6587/
The marketing text doesn’t half do justice to its ingenuity or its heart. All the text is Hebrew scripture (ironic, since Nick is afaik a steadfast atheist), but here’s the thing: it’s all about the COIVD pandemic.
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Paul Cantrell
There’s the social distancing chorus (“How she sits alone / the city once great with people”)…
…the doomscrolling aria (“For in much wisdom is much worry / and he who adds knowledge adds pain”)
…the fury against COVID disinformation (“They would heal my people’s wound easily saying, ‘All is well, all is well,’ when it was NOT well”)
…and the uncannily appropriate lines that gave it its title: “All is mere breath / and herding the wind.”
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Paul Cantrell
It’s ingenious and, yes, •funny• — also heartbreaking, haunting, gorgeously sad-hopeful. (That final chorale…!)
It’s an important piece, a salve for the unhealed wounds of this moment, this swamp of collective denial into which our society seems to have sunk.
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Paul Cantrell
Have you noticed how COVID is curiously absent from art? For all the outpouring of art made •during• the pandemic, there has been shockingly little •about• the pandemic and the experience of living through it.
It’s as if the whole experience of the pandemic is too big and too close for us to even be willing to look at, so we turn away and shield our eyes.
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Paul Cantrell
With its scriptural language and orchestral sweep, Hakol Hevel transposes our experience of the pandemic into the realm of the mythopoetic, giving us sufficient distance and psychological context to actually •look• at it, and to say, “Yes, we were there, this is what we experienced, this is the weight of our story.”
“Recount it to your children, and to your children’s children.” ← That’s the text of the penultimate movement, but also the message of the whole piece.
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Paul Cantrell
A publicist working on the album’s release said to Nick that they didn’t know exactly what to do with it, COVID is already yesterday’s news.
If you’d like to prove that publicist wrong and answer Nick’s please against forgetting, I hope you’ll give his music a listen:
https://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6587/
/end
Paul Cantrell
@ossobuffo Well, yeah, see post #2 in the thread.
My point is that storytelling has been almost aggressively •avoiding•. Compare, for example, the number of stories about WWI versus the number of stories about (even obliquely about) the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Daniel Johnson
@inthehands Most great art isn’t about what it’s about, though. Hamlet isn’t about Scottish politics. When we see more art about the pandemic, it will be about more than the pandemic. Likewise, I’m sure a lot of art made in the last 3 years •is• about the pandemic, under the hood.
Paul Cantrell
@ossobuffo (Also, Hamlet = Denmark, MacBeth = Scotland…I think?)
Paul Cantrell
@liferstate
Yes. Nick’s album is a step in that direction.
I do hope this is correct. The 1918 Flu remained curiously absent from art more or less indefinitely, but yes, as you say, art figured out how to speak to/about AIDS in time. I haven’t read the Sontag; I must! I love her writing.
liferstate
@inthehands I re-read Sontag's Illness As Metaphor/AIDS and Its Metaphors in spring 2020, and still believe now what I said then: COVID will come to have its own metaphors, its own body of art and literature. But it's too close now, we're still in the thick of it.
Paul Cantrell
@fishidwardrobe 1918. And YES
Fish Id Wardrobe
@inthehands I believe that happened in 1913, too.
Laura G, Sassy 70’s
@inthehands I did a whole series of portraits of people wearing masks. I draw freehand on my iPad Pro, Apple Pencil between my fingers. Here are a couple of examples. #DigitalArt
Paul Cantrell
@LauraJG
These are lovely. It’s great how they capture the intensity of the eyes, so much a part of the pandemic experience.
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