Maintenance

“The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.”
― Joan Miró

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Cuernavaca

Cuernavaca (Cuauhnāhuac "near the woods"). Cuernavaca is recognized as the "Beverly Hills of Mexico". The city is known for its perfect weather and that from any elevation in the city one can see that many of the homes have swimming pools. It was established at the archaeological site of Gualupita I by the Olmec, "the mother culture" of Mesoamerica, approximately 3200 years ago. The city also is located about 85 km (53 mi) south of Mexico City on the D-95 freeway.

The city was nicknamed the "City of Eternal Spring" by Alexander von Humboldt in the nineteenth century. It has long been a favorite escape for Mexico City and foreign visitors because of this warm, stable climate and abundant vegetation. Aztec emperors had summer residences there, and even today, many famous people as well as Mexico City residents maintain homes there. Considering its location of just a 30 minutes drive from Mexico City, Cuernavaca traditionally has been a center of Mexican society and glamour, with many of the country's wealthy citizens owning sprawling mansions and haciendas in this cultural haven. Cuernavaca is also host to a large foreign resident population, including large numbers of students who come to study the Spanish language. [Wiki]

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Condemned

Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Lovers Point

“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.” – John Burroughs

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About the Music:

New York Times. May 17, 2013. 

Ritual Reaches: Playing the Backside of a Violin, Using a Guitar Like a Cello.

By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim.

The woman onstage appears to be struggling. The sounds that are coming out of her are wordless, labored and worrying. A wheezing inhalation. A whispered scream. Choking, gagging, strangled croaks. A high-pitched whine that remains trapped behind her closed lips and masklike face.

Many composers today explore the border between music and sound. But the work of Julio Estrada, the subject of the last Composer Portrait of the season at the Miller Theater on Thursday evening, teeters on the threshold between sound and something else.

In works like “miqi’cihuatl,” for female voice, which here received a mesmerizing performance by Tony Arnold, the thing on the other side of sound is not silence but a primordial state of consciousness, in which emotions manifest themselves in a physical form that is viscerally understood long before it is expressed.

On paper, Mr. Estrada, a Mexican composer and mathematician who recently turned 70, cuts a forbidding figure. His Modernist credentials include studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, a residence at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany and theoretical treatises on the relationship of rhythm and pitch. Because of the tortured complexity of his obsessively notated scores (partituras in Spanish), some musicians refer to them as parti-torturas. But Thursday’s survey proved that while Mr. Estrada’s music is undeniably difficult to play and listen to, it is also wildly entertaining to observe.

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