Happy Transfiguration Sunday

When you call to the Lord
God will listen
When you cry out
God will say
"Here I am."

(fresco by Fra Angelico, 1436-45, Monastery of San Marco, Florence)

A Musical Interlude for My Piano Teachers

In praise of my own piano teachers and piano teachers everywhere, and to my sister (please stop lurking and comment about your effusive love for Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Gershwin!) The painting below is Renoir's "Jeunes filles au piano", 1892, and clearly is not my sister and I.


Piano teachers, I realize now, have it really rough in some ways. Over and over again, they have to start at the beginning, teaching kids the very basics of playing the piano: how to hold wrists, curve fingers over the keys and keep your back straight (below are the great Rachmaninoff's hands), how keys in front of them match up to notes on the page and how to “play” those strange symbols, time signatures, scales, chords, the circle of fifths, all those Italian words that indicate speed and dynamics….They have to deal with kids who are only taking lessons because their parents make them, kids who are not prodigies, kids who are never going to grow up to be virtuosos, and yet they must show the patience of Job, trying to instill whatever the kid can learn. They take the time to pick out pieces that will challenge and match likes and abilities, only to have kids not practice – I was one of these kids, although now I have no idea what made me so busy in the afternoons that I didn’t feel I had time to practice. And they have to deal with kids stumbling through and mutilating some of the most beautiful music ever written.

It was my sister, inspired after hearing Natalie Cole’s Our Love, who wanted to learn to tickle and caress the ebonies and ivories herself. After showing sufficient dedication to asking my parents for piano lessons, she got them, and my family got a piano. Thus my fate was sealed: I too was going to have piano lessons one day. I may have wanted them initially, but by the time I started, around the age of 7, I wasn’t as enthused. But my mom never let me quit, partially because we had a piano and someone had to play it, and she was convinced that it would make us better at math. Ha! (My mom gets the last laugh – both my sister and I excel at math and have engineering degrees.)

I took piano lessons for 11 years, reaching the level of beginner’s advanced or so – I had enough knowledge of technique to play any piece of music, but still had lots of work to do on certain skills. But besides exposing me to beautiful music, my piano teachers accomplished something greater. They exposed me to the beauty of the Western classical tradition. They ended any intimidation I felt about classical art, any insecurity that such wasn’t “my heritage.” Indeed, it is probably largely through their indirect efforts that I’m able to speak fairly confidently about all sorts of art and my opinions of it. When you’re looking at music for the first time and picking your way through a Beethoven sonata, Mozart sonatina, or a Bach fugue, you see the bones of a piece and how a composer chose to add the flesh and blood, the dynamics, and as you can see the patterns for each composer, the process of art becomes a little less intimidating. No less remarkable a gift of the composer, you become tied to them in some ways – “Come on Chopin, let’s hold hands and you help me get through this Etude.” See, you can communicate with dead white males. Learning to play the piano was one of the most important experiences of my life.

Thank you, Mrs. Cherry and Mrs. Seagrave, for your dedication.

Now some highlights and lowlights:

I was never comfortable playing very fast – I wish all the pieces I played had been allegro or slower - andante was perfect, but nothing as slow as Satie’s ridiculous numbered Gymnopedie. I spent a year playing the Czerny (Czerny taught Liszt!) etudes, those awful torture devices that make a student work on articulation and fingering to increase speed and require proper placement and use of fingers, wrist, shoulder, and back. But I was never comfortable when the really fast parts came, and this included the ornamentation that composers decide to stick in here and there.

Thus, I hate you Chopin’s Minute Waltz! (Think about playing the above in an interval of about a second.) It was a year of exquisite torture to learn to play you with modest success, and my dear piano teacher would clock the time it took me to play you. To this day, I can’t hear you on the radio without my right hand starting to tremor from all the “rotate your forearm and loosen your wrist to play the trills, don’t try to do it from your fingers!”

I hate every last one of your silly sonatas, Scarlatti!

I love you Mozart, but I could never love playing your works for piano. I spent four months learning your Turkish March, and almost a year learning your twelves variations of "Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman," ("Twinkle, Twinkle) and though I love these pieces when I hear them, you and I are of such different temperaments that I could never really get into interpreting them. Mea culpa.

I love you with a love that’s pure and true, Debussy’s Le fille aux cheveux de lin. I loved mastering your chromatics and playing all the black keys. I also loved your dynamics: playing you was like taking a beautiful stroll in the afternoon of a dream world.

I love you, Bach’s Prelude No. 1 (from the Well-Tempered Clavier). Used in Gounod’s Ave Maria, you are like a lullaby and you were my own favorite to end my practicing sessions. And for your Preludes, Mr. J.S. Bach, I forgive you all your Inventions, played with speed and deliberation in all sorts of keys. I'll even forgive your son.

You and I have a love-hate relationship, Mr. Chopin. I never enjoyed playing any of your Preludes or Polonaises, but I do love your Nocturnes (even though my sister way overplayed Op 37 No 1 and Op 55 No 2). Slightly melancholy, even at their greatest difficulty I felt the caress of a great pianist. I especially loved Nocturne in E minor, Op 72 No 1, with its 12/8 time in the left hand and 4/4 in the right, and none of your typical flourishes. Just beats within beats, like lovers who are parting. I always looked forward to meeting you again.

I’m sorry we didn’t get more time together, Mr. Liszt. I do love your Hungarian Rhapsodies, though I was intimidated beyond belief when learning how to play one. You’re bombastic and proud and showy, and I wish we’d had enough time together for you to bring those qualities out of me. Maybe we’ll date again in the future.

I must also give a shout out to Gershwin, Bartok, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, and other composers whose work I may have slaughtered, though I loved them. I see you trying to sneak in, Mr. Scarlatti. Go sit in the corner!

Black holes, anyone?

Empire of the Stars: Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes by Arthur I. Miller (2005)

This largely boringly written book – the best parts are the footnotes that discuss the findings dully presented in the text – chronicles the career of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who first proposed and calculated that there was an upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf: any white dwarf with a mass of over 1.4 times the solar mass would began a process of collapse that would lead to a singularity, a point of infinite density and zero volume. Chandra presented his findings in 1935, only to be met with harsh resistance, particularly from Arthur Stanley Eddington, then the pre-eminent astrophysicist in the world.

Miller tries to make a case that racism played a part in the professional response to Chandra’s calculation; certainly the professional goals of other prominent scientists led to the ignoring of Chandra’s findings, as did presuppositions from well-regarded scientists, like Eddington and Einstein, that the universe would not yield an infinite result. But to me, the story sounds all too typical of academia – the group in power wants results and conclusions that match up to their own way of thinking and are resistant to novelty. What else is new?

Although Chandra undoubtedly felt the condemnation from Eddington and the slighting of his work by his peers for the rest of his life (he was angry that he didn’t win the Nobel Prize twenty years earlier than he did), he went on to make significant findings in other fields away from astronomy, and did not seem to be professionally crippled by the experience, no matter how it wounded him personally.

Of greater interest in the book is the intellectual evolution towards the acceptance of black holes: from the 1935 negative reaction to the 1960s theorizing that indeed, black holes must exist, although evidence of their existence had not been found to date. There’s some cool stuff in this book about the nuclear arms race, hydrogen bombs, and the death of stars, but I really would never have finished this book if I hadn’t been stuck in an airport for 4 hours and wanted to avoid digging through my luggage for another book. It’s not the content, which could be fascinating. It’s the writing, dull as dishwater.

One fine example (pg 178): “Chandra had a keen eye for lurking stability problems; his forte was identifying the exact point at which a star is likely to collapse. He spotted a flaw in Gamow’s argument. The challenge was irresistible, and he decided to turn his attention to white dwarfs one last time.” Absorbing mystery yarn? Action-adventure for the teen-boy crowd? Cliched phrases, Alex, for $600!

Anytime reading the footnotes becomes more engrossing than the actual text, something is wrong. (One of the gems of the footnotes is that there may be white dwarfs that are diamonds, composed entirely of compressed carbon. Another is the story of Fuchs’ espionage.)

So unless anyone wants to know more from me about this book, I’ll put a black hole tutorial in this space.

(Abbreviated in parts from Stuart J. Robbins' site)

Classifications of black holes: mass, spin, and magnetic field

Stellar black holes: have a mass of 10-100 times the solar mass.

Supermassive black holes: have a mass of millions to even billions of solar masses.

Schwarzschild black holes: no spin and no magnetic field. It has two main components - a singularity and an event horizon. The singularity is what is left of the collapsed star, and is theoretically a point of 0 dimension with infinite density but finite mass. The event horizon is a region of space that is the "boundary" of the black hole. Within it, the escape velocity is faster than light, so it is past this point that nothing can escape.

Reissner-Nordstrøm Black Holes: no spin and a magnetic field. It has a singularity and two event horizons. The outer event horizon is a boundary where time and space flip. This means that the singularity is no longer a point in space, but one in time. The inner event horizon flips space-time back to normal.

Kerr Black Holes: spin and magnetic field. A Kerr black hole adds another feature to the anatomy - an ergosphere. The ergosphere resides in an ellipsoidal region outside the outer event horizon. The ergosphere represents the last stable orbit, and the outer boundary is called the static limit. Outside of it, a hypothetical spaceship could maneuver freely. Inside, space-time is warped in such a way that a spaceship would be drawn along by its rotation.

An interesting point that comes up in the case of a spinning black hole is that of the naked singularity. The faster the black hole rotates, the larger the inner event horizon becomes, while the outer event horizon remains the same size. They become the same size when the rotational energy equals the mass energy of the black hole. If the rotational energy were to become more than the mass energy, the event horizons would vanish and what would be left is a "naked singularity" - a black hole whose only part is the singularity.

Yet another distinguishing feature of the Kerr black hole is that, since it rotates, the 0-D point that is the singularity in the Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstrøm black hole is spun into a ring of 0 thickness. Interesting theoretical physics can take place around this ring singularity. One consequence is that nothing can actually fall into it unless it approaches along a trajectory along the ring's side. Any other angle and the ring actually produces an antigravity field that repels matter.

NOTE: The only physical part of a black hole is the singularity. The other parts mentioned are mathematical boundaries. There is no physical barrier called an event horizon, but it marks the boundaries between types of space under the influences of the singularity.

Two other features can characterize a black hole: accretion disk and jets.

An accretion disk is matter that is drawn to the black hole. In rotating black holes and/or ones with a magnetic field, the matter forms a disk due to the mechanical forces present. In a Schwarzschild black hole, the matter would be drawn in equally from all directions, and thus would form an omni-directional accretion cloud rather than disk.

The matter in accretion disks is gradually pulled into the black hole. As it gets closer, its speed increases, and it also gains energy. Accretion disks can be heated due to internal friction to temperatures as high as 3 billion K, and emit energetic radiation such as gamma rays. This radiation can be used to "weigh" the black hole. By using the doppler effect astronomers can determine how fast the material is revolving around the black hole, and thus can infer its mass.

Jets form in Kerr black holes that have an accretion disk. The matter is funneled into a disk-shaped torus by the hole's spin and magnetic fields, but in the very narrow regions over the black hole's poles, matter can be energized to extremely high temperatures and speeds, escaping the black hole in the form of high-speed jet.

Where do black holes come from?

Current theory holds that black holes form in three main ways. The first is that if a star has more than nine solar masses when it goes supernova, then it will collapse into a black hole. The reason that a neutron star stops collapsing is the strong nuclear force, the fundamental force that keeps the center of an atom from collapsing. However, once a star is this big, the gravitational force is so strong that it overwhelms the strong nuclear and collapses the atom completely. Now there is nothing to hold back collapse of the star, and it collapses into a point (or, in theory, a ring) of infinite density.

A second way for black holes to form is that, in some rare instances, two neutron stars will be locked in a binary relationship. Because of energy lost through gravitational radiation, they will slowly spiral in towards each other, and merge. When they merge, they will almost always form a black hole.

Finally, a third way was proposed by quantum cosmologist Stephen Hawking. He theorized that trillions of black holes were produced in the Big Bang, with some still existing today. This theory is not as widely accepted as the other two.

AG again, providing cool facts about black holes (see Hawking's Brief History of Time or Greene's The Elegant Universe for more):

Black holes aren’t really black. As proposed by Stephen Hawking, black holes emit a type of radiation due to escaping particles. The intense gravitational field near the event horizon of a black hole can briefly split a pair of photons apart. If one falls through the event horizon, the other particle, which would have been annihilated by its partner when they came into contact, is now left outside the black hole; indeed the energy from the fall of the one partner of the pair over the event horizon will give the other partner energy to move further away from the event horizon. The particles emitted from a black hole in this way are called Hawking radiation. Which leads to…

Black holes may evaporate. Although not yet observed, if blacks holes leak energy (through the Hawking radiation) we know from Einstein’s famous E = mc² that the black hole will also lose mass. However, for a typical black hole, the evaporation time would amount to more than 10⁶⁷ years (the age of the universe is around 10⁹ years). But lightweight black holes formed in the first few moments of the Big Bang (according to Hawking’s calculations, less mass means higher temperature and hence more radiation) may exist and may be on the verge of evaporation, emitting Hawking radiation and gamma rays that could be picked up by observatories. Even more fascinating: as a black hole emits radiation, its mass shrinks and the distance between its center and the even horizon diminishes. As this happens, does the space that was previously in the black hole still contain its old information? Hawking has bet that black holes destroy the information.

Black holes have entropy. This was actually one of the starting problems that lead to the two solutions described above, formulated in 1974 by Hawking. Starting from these theoretical observations/calculations: the area of the event horizon increases in physical interactions (calculated by Hawking), and black holes must have entropy (Jacob Beckenstein), and with a whole lotta intuition and math, Hawking arrived at the above conclusions.

There may be massless black holes. Formed from a black hole that has lost its mass; these black holes would lack an event horizon. In string theory, the loss of mass is attributable to the shrinking of a piece of the Calabi-Yau portion of space to a point. (Calabi-Yau spaces are where the extra dimensions required by string theory can be curled up.)

And of course, this sci-fi question remains: at the singularity, where space-time is infinitely curved and time ends, could it be possible for another universe to be attached? String theory provides possible solutions, but that’s another discussion.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

Self-Portrait, 1893-4

I first discovered Gauguin's work in college and he became a favorite. A post-Impressionist, Gauguin's use of curving, distinct lines with bold colors (Cloisonnism) creates a strong visual impact, as does his use of exaggerated proportions. And because I have to bring everything back to ballet, Gauguin became a proponent of primitivism in art, with the ballet "Le Sacre du printemps" being a primary work of this artistic movement. If one ever gets to see the original 1913 choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky with recreations of the sets and costumes of Nicholas Roerich (The Joffrey Ballet has a revival every decade or so), to the famous pounding Stravinsky score, one can see how the shapes of the bodies, the movements (strong lines, turned in, bent arms and legs) and the earthy colors used on the costumes contrasting with the post-impressionist pastoral scenes of the sets reflects this artistic period.

Vision After the Sermon, 1888

(From two letters to Vincent Van Gogh, Pont-Aven, September 1888)
...Yes, you are right to want painting to have a coloring evocative of poetic ideas, and in that sense I agree with you, although with one difference. I am not acquainted with any poetic ideas - I'm probably missing a sense. I find everything poetic, and it is in the deepest recesses of my heart, that are sometimes mysterious, that I glimpse poetry. Forms and color brought into harmony produce poetry by themselves. Without allowing myself to be distracted by the subject, contemplation of a painting by another artist induces in me a feeling, a poetical state that becomes more intense the more the painter's intellectual powers emanate from it....

...I have just painted a religious picture, very badly done but it interested me and I like it. I wanted to give it to the church of Pont-Aven. Naturally they don't want it.

A group of Breton women are praying, their costumes very intense black. The coifs very luminous yellowy-white. The two coifs to the right are like monstrous helmets. An apple tree cuts across the canvas, dark purple with its foliage drawn in masses like emerald green clouds with patches of green and sun yellow. The ground (pure vermilion). In the church it darkens and becomes a browny red.

The angel is dressed in ultramarine blue and Jacob in bottle green. The angel's wings pure chrome yellow 1. The angel's hair chrome 2 and the feet flesh orange. I think I have achieved in the figures a great simplicity, rustic and superstitious. The whole thing very severe....

The Green Christ/Breton Calvary, 1889

(From a letter to Vincent Van Gogh, Le Pouldu, October 1889)
...Seeing this every day fills me with a sensation of struggle for survival, of melancholy and acquiesence in implacable laws. I am attempting to put this sensation down on canvas, not by chance, but quite deliberately, perhaps by exaggerating certain rigidities of posture, certain dark colors, etc...All this is perhaps mannered but what is natural in art? Ever since the most distant times, everything in art has been completely deliberate, a product of convention...in art, truth is what a person feels in the state of mind he happens to be in. Those who wish to or are able to can dream. Let those who wish to or are able to abandon themselves to their dreams. And dreams always come from the reality of nature. A savage will never see in his dreams a man dressed like a Parisian - etc....

(From a letter to Theo Van Gogh, Le Pouldu, November 1889)
...I'm seeking to express a general state rather than a single thought, and at the same time to make another person's eye experience an indefinite, never-ending impression. To suggest suffering does not mean to specify what sort of suffering; purity in general is what I am seeking to express, not a particular kind of purity. Literature is one (and painting another). In consequence, the thought is suggested but not explained...

It's the same with the painting of the 3 stone women holding Christ. Brittany, simple superstition and desolation. The hill is guarded by a line of cows arranged in the form of the calvary. I've tried to make everything in this picture express belief and passive suffering in the traditional religious style, as well as the power of nature with its great scream. I am wrong not to be good enough to express it better - but I am not wrong to conceive it...

You know that I have Indian blood, Inca blood in me, and it's reflected in everything I do. It's the basis of my personality; I try to confront rotten civilization with something more natural, based on savagery...

D'où venons nous? Que sommes nous? Où allons nous?/Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897-98

(From a letter to Andre Fontainas, Tahiti, March 1899)
Color, which is vibration just as music is, is able to attain what is most universal yet at the same time most elusive in nature: its inner force.

Here near my cabin, in complete silence, amid the intoxicating perfumes of nature, I dream of violent harmonies. A delight enhanced by I know not what sacred horror I divine in the infinite. An aroma of long-vanquished joy that I breathe in the present. Animal figures rigid as statues, with something indescribably solemn and religious in the rhythm of their pose, in their strange immobility. In eyes that dream, the troubled surface of an unfathomable enigma.
...In praise of certain pictures that I considered unimportant you exclaim, 'If only Gauguin were always like that!' But I don't want to be always like that.
...To go back to the panel [Where do we come from]: the idol is there not as a literary symbol, but as a statue, yet perhaps less of a statue than the animal figures, less animal also, an integral part, in my dream before my cabin, of the whole of nature, dominating our primitive soul, the unearthly consolation of our sufferings to the extent that they are vague and incomprehensible before the mystery of our origin and of our future.

And all this sings with sadness in my soul and in my design while I paint and dream at the same time with no tangible allegory within my reach - due perhaps to a lack of literary education.

Awakening with my work finished, I ask myself 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?' A thought which no longer has anything to do with the canvas, expressed in words quite apart on the wall that surround it. Not a title but a signature.

Mahana No Atua/ The Day of the God, 1894

(From a letter to Charles Morice, Atuona, Hiva-Oa, 1903)

...You were mistaken one day when you said I was wrong to say that I am a savage. For it is true: I am a savage. And civilized people suspect this, for in my works there is nothing so surprising and baffling as this 'savage in spite of myself' aspect. That is why it is initimable....In art we have just undergone a very long period of aberration due to physics, mechanical chemistry, and the study of nature. Artists have lost all their savagery, all their instincts, one might say their imagination, and so they have wandered down every kind of path in order to find the undisciplined crowds and feel frightened, lost as it were, when they are alone. That is why solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone. Everything I learned from other people merely stood in my way. Thus I can say: no one taught me anything. On the other hand, it is true that I know so little! But I prefer that little, which is of my own creation. And who knows whether that little, when put to use by others, will not become something big?...

(Letters in "Gauguin by Himself" edited by Belinda Thomson, 2001)

Reflections

On a few ballet moments

In MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet (music by Prokofiev), at the end of the famous balcony scene where Romeo and Juliet have declared their love, Rudolf Nureyev plants his left foot and stretches his back leg in a long line (fourth position), and from the small of his back, stretches his chest upwards towards Juliet (Margot Fonteyn), giving her his heart. This is the purest demonstration I’ve seen that turnout, one of the hallmarks of Western classical dance, is not just about turning out at the hips so that the feet form a 180 degree line. Turnout is instead a physical and moral commitment to open outwards and upwards from the major vertical axis of the body, straight through one’s head and heart, and reveal the soul. The soul of Nureyev’s Romeo is about two inches outside of his body, drawn towards Juliet as Fonteyn crosses her hands over her heart.

Violette Verdy’s Eurydice and Francisco Moncion’s Orpheus (Balanchine’s Orpheus, music by Stravinsky) move around an identical axis after he’s rescued her from Hades. They do tango steps, legs entwined, and she surrounds him to plead with him to look at her. She wraps her legs entirely around his body – around his waists and thighs, and in a back bend begs. He removes his blindfold, eyes lifted towards heaven, and she collapses dead on the stage.

Spurned by her lover Solor, Altynai Asylmuratova as Nikiya (in La Bayadere, original choreography by Petipa and music by Minkus) turns her back to him, goes on to her knees, extends her left leg behind her, arches her back and cries to the gods, hands clasped above her head.

In Balanchine’s Diamonds pas de deux (music by Tchaikovsky), Suzanne Farrell releases Peter Martins’ hand and balances for a moment on her left leg with her right leg held high (developpe a la seconde). She drops her leg in an arc like the swing of a pendulum, bourrees towards Martins (those tiny steps on pointe – Farrell’s here look like moving ripples in water), does a double inside-out pirouette which blinds her to where Martins actually is, establishing their trusting relationship; she kicks and pauses, her torso bent over an extended leg, creating an image of a unicorn, and instantly tosses her torso and extended leg backwards. Suddenly she is the image of a vulnerable woman, neck and breast exposed, arm behind her in submission, and her leg (in attitude) recreates the lines that form the conch shell, the golden mean. Farrell is the hunted, the hunter (“on the scent of her own mystery” as Croce wrote), and the archetypal woman.

Allegra Kent, in her idiosyncratic reading of the second movement of Balanchine’s Symphony in C (music by Bizet), releases her arms from a circle above her head into the space in front of her as she is spun around – she releases her energy, draws it into herself again, then gives it away once more.

Near the end of Suzanne Farrell’s solo in Der Rosenkavalier Waltz (music by R. Strauss from Balanchine’s Vienna Waltzes), on a dark, empty stage where her imaginary lover has once again disappeared, she rushes to go off stage, pauses, and as she does the famous backbend of supplication, she disappears in the brightness of all the stage lights coming on at once.

In the Darkness: Un-knowing and Becoming

A Lenten Reflection

In the second week of Lent, I’m sitting here writing about art, while many, more spiritually-minded, are staying away from these types of self-reflections or reviews. But in my weakness, I need the distraction, the time to pause, from a few other obligations. (Or maybe I’m establishing that I’m really the worst-type of Novus ordo Catholic: Lent, schment.) Excuse my self-justification for indulging this behavior, and you are of course free to stop reading now.

I have loved two particular stories about darkness and mistaken identity since pre-teen days. The first is the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, as first encountered in Edith Hamilton’s classic school text Mythology. I was baffled as to how Psyche could not know that Cupid, her husband and lover who came to her only in the darkness, was not some awful serpent who would devour her. After Psyche has betrayed him by gazing upon him as he slept, Cupid delivers a parting line that I loved: “Love cannot live where there is no trust.”

The other story is of that deceiver, Jacob, who uses Isaac’s blindness to receive the blessing meant for his brother, is himself tricked in the dark when he mistakes Leah for Rachel, and wrestles with an angel in the dark. By sunrise he has a new identity as Israel.

Of course, darkness has always held great significance – God separates darkness from light; Christ enters a darkened world. The world again darkens at Christ’s death. The womb and the tomb are in darkness. All manner of scary stories are told “in the dark.” To be in the dark is to be uncertain and vulnerable, in a state where people can make and re-make themselves, as with Jacob and Leah and all our legends and fairy tales of people who can shape-shift once the sun goes down. In the dark, one can lose one’s identity, one can be tricked, and one can emerge in the daylight changed.

Far from being in the dark, I’ve always thought of our modern world as glaringly in the light – we may have bad vision, but we certainly have a lot of brightness. There’s almost nothing that can’t be uncovered and dissected and discussed – we hate mystery. Everything needs to be explained and put up for public discussion.

I grew up during the time that sex, at its most technical and mechanical, began to be discussed on shows that even children (such as myself) would commonly watch. This development was at least partly the response to HIV and AIDS, but certain elements of popular culture also took advantage and began to further endorse a hyper-masculine American culture where hyperactive male sexual expression was the only type allowed. Thus, even the most intimate of activities was put under blinding bright light.

An aside: I’ve always thought that the relationship between the main characters, Paul and Jeanne, in Last Tango in Paris would have at least possibly had a chance if they had engaged in at least some of their sexcapades in the dark. Of course, that it seems they never did has its own meaning.

When we look at our culture, it’s like looking in a mirror – not seeing yourself as you are, but seeing yourself looking at yourself. The great thing about art, when it works, is that you don’t experience self-reflection, but a kind of re-making. For purely practical reasons, of course, we usually experience the arts in semi-darkness (except for sculpture and architecture, of course). But in the darkness of a theatre or concert hall or a museum (except for the modern art sections of the museum, haha), where no one can really see you, you have an opportunity for a type of self-emptying to be filled back up with the beauty and mystery that the artist invites you to participate in. In the dark you can’t see your own reflection. You can only experience, and maybe be inspired. Train yourself to do this in the arts enough, and you may find yourself more easily doing it before God.

If I Were President...by George Balanchine (1904-1983)

If I were president, I would devote at least one speech to a very large section of our population which is not usually thought of or addressed as a separate unit by people in the government - I refer to the intellectuals and artists of the United States and to people who are interested in the intellectual and artistic life of our country, in other words in the spiritual and not just the material values of our existence.

There are a great many of us: writers, painters, sculptors, actors, composers, instrumentalists, and dancers. And there are uncounted millions of those for whom their interest in our creative efforts is as important and sometimes more important than all the other ordinary details of their lives. That is why we would like the president to show an interest in and speak to us about that other half of our life - the nonmaterialistic part of life, which we represent. Actually this very large group of citizens of whom I am speaking has never made any very great demands. None of us is especially interested in money or power, but all of us want to be recognized and given the possibility to create and to enjoy art. Certain forms of art have received wonderful support from the public itself, from private citizens and groups of interested people, who have created libraries and museums and supported symphony orchestras, and we owe them a great debt of gratitude. But writers and artists have never been fully accorded full recognition by a government body or official - and the person who first gives us this recognition will earn our wholehearted gratitude and support.

I firmly believe that woman is appointed by destiny to inspire and bring beauty to our existence. Woman herself is the reason for life to be beautiful, and men should be busy serving her. That is why I feel that if the woman will take into her hands the task of restoring the true purpose and values of life, then the man who in our civilization is caught like a squirrel in the wheel of fortune, will find the strength to escape out of it and bring all his highest qualities to this purpose.

This brings us to the important problem of our children who are our future. Their taste for art should be developed from early childhood. They should learn to love the beautiful and impractical as well as the useful and practical. One should give them fairy tales, music, dance, theater. This is real magic for children, and it is strong enough to overcome many dangers that threaten them, mainly because their minds are unoccupied and their imaginations unfed. Developing these qualities in our children is the first step to promoting peace in the world - by giving them true standards of what is most important in human life. Inner nobility will safeguard them from the cynicism of utilitarianism. Some twenty thousand young children saw special performances given for them by New York City Ballet. It was absolutely extraordinary to see how avidly they devoured these performances. The children must be reached before they are corrupted by life.

In conclusion I would like t osay a few words about my special field of art - the ballet. American people have a special affinity to movement in general and to ballet in particular. They are superb dancers, and their interest in this art deserves to be encouraged and channeled in the right way.

In ballet, woman is all-important. She is the queen of the performance, and the men surround her like courtiers. This is perhaps why I have thought so much about the woman's role and enormous possibility in real life as well as on the stage. (1961)

George Balanchine became an American citizen in the 50s and was the first official visitor to the Kennedy White House. He was also in the first class of honorees for the Kennedy Center Honors (1978), and received the Congressional Medal of Freedom from Reagan in 1983; it was accepted on his behalf by Suzanne Farrell.

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty - if you're vairy lucky and have said your prayers. - Balanchine

I mean here only to encourage people to go out and see dance. Dance is extraordinary in that it is the only occasion I know of, outside of a church service, where people gather to participate in an activity that's been passed down from body to body over generations, where the most important aspect of the performance is that the participants believe in what they are doing, first and foremost, and there is no disconnect between what is thought in the mind and expressed through the body in gesture and form. Dance, ideally, is a seamless coming together of the human body, sound, space, and time. My own favorite dance form, as should be obvious, is ballet. Ballet's realm is above the earth, in the real world of the spirit, not the material world under our feet. It exists in another world of ideal behaviors and attitudes; more than any other Western dance form the goal is to achieve something that the human eye and soul recognize as beauty. The beauty that can be achieved conceals the physical strain and effort of the participants. Ballet movement is unnatural, and yet spiritually it shows how we should be. As Balanchine once said to a woman who asked him if he thought her daughter could be a great ballerina: "Madame, la danse - c'est une question morale."

Or, as Balanchine would say, just go to listen to the music. Balanchine was a huge proponent of 20th century music, and if you go to see a Balanchine ballet, you have a chance of listening to music by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Weill, Ives, Webern, Pierre Henry, Xenakis, and Schoenberg (actually, Schoenberg's arrangment for orchestra of Brahms' Piano Quartet No.1 in G minor). Just this past season, NYCB was performing Jerome Robbins' ballet In Memory Of... to Berg's violin concerto "To the Memory of an Angel." Robbins, Eliot Feld, Laura Dean, and Lar Lubovitch have all choreographed dances to Steve Reich's music; both Graham and Agnes de Mille used Copland's music. Merce Cunningham has had a long creative association with John Cage; Paul Taylor has choreographed Piazzolla Caldera, many (too many) contemporary choreographers use the music of Arvo Part. Robbins' Glass Pieces and Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room were recently performed in NY; those are among several ballets choreographed to Philip Glass's music. And I'm only mentioning the use of Bach, Mozart, Gluck, Glazunov, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Delibes and so on. Sheesh, Leonid Massine even choreographed ballets to Mahler and Beethoven symphonies. Get a music education and a dance eduction - two for the price of one! Just go, and bring your friends and your children! And you can ask me questions afterwards....

It is not too much to consider a well-performed ballet a rite, executed and followed with intense devotion, that shares in some sort of moral figuration. The response of the audience to good dancing is a release of body and breath, a thanksgiving that is selfless, generous, complete, and leaves the spectator corroborated in the hope that, despite the world and its horrors, here somehow is a paradigm of perfection. - Lincoln Kirstein (1983)