A week before Cameron died we were stood in the dark on top of Mayday Rooms - one side St Brides the other Goldman Sachs, with weird floaty grey seagulls. Cameron always complained that he had difficulty with classical singing. He couldnt get on with the vibrato. But hed been listening recently to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Winterreise and was getting into it. There arent so many people who carry with them whole histories of art - not stupid dead things collected in cases and facts, categorisations and assumptions - but histories that rush and rupture, histories that breathe with experience and expression. Something entwined with the kindness and gentleness with which he treated both people and what they made. Im just so sad - I know we all are after the conversations today - not just for having lost what he was but because he will be so missed in an emphatically futural sense - because those conversations with bits of things, generous scattered gifts filled with his enthusiasm, I would otherwise never know wont be there. But also I appreciated so much the effort behind the apparent ease with which all those bits of poetry and music would find their ways into his world. Heres some Winterreise (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with Alfred Brendel accompanying) and a couple of sentences from Adorno on Schubert: youtube/watch?v=jyxMMg6bxrg Schubert’s music brings tears to our eyes, without any questioning of the soul: this is how stark and real is the way that the music strikes us. We cry without knowing why, because we are not yet what this music promises for us. We cry, knowing in untold happiness, that this music is as it is in the promise of what one day we ourselves will be. This is music we cannot decipher, but it holds up to our blurred, over-brimming eyes the secret of reconciliation at long last.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 00:01:24 +0000
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