Black on Black / 13This work consists of a reading with slides of Wallace Stevens’s poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" followed by a slide choreography of Richard Brooks’s "Chorale Variations for Two Horns and String Orchestra." The images of the one become artifacts of the other, and the latter too is made up of thirteen sections. Beyond this, let the pairing of these two works stand as reflections of our feelings about the dizzying, often inexplicable happenings of the last fifty years.
THE SLIDES These are intended to accompany text and music, never to stand alone, and my strategy generally was to complement rather than illustrate the one or the other. All of the slides began as composites that I created in Adobe Photoshop, these generally based on photographs of mine. Where the music was concerned, my strategy generally was to use the visuals of the poem to build mind-pictures. The sequencing of the slides and animation for both text and music was done in Proshow Producer.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLACK ON BLACK/13 This is my second version of this work. It was first presented live on November 11, 2001 on The Lark Ascending program titled American Dream / American Nightmare at The German Evangelical-Lutheran Church of St Paul in New York City. The reader was Off-Broadway director Richard Edelman; the music was presented, as it is here, from the CD Tonus Tomis (Capstone Records, CPS-8627); and the visuals were color slides that I made, like those here, from digital images composited mostly from photos of mine. The same work, now in its original digital form, with recordings of the reading and music adjusted for web presentation with the help of technician Yvian Espejo, was subsequently installed in the Gallery of The Lark Ascending website but, alas, it has since blown away.
