9 Ben-Collages & VI Fragments from a Never-Ending Work-In-Progress i__7tn Elaine R. Barkin 9 Ben-Collages and VI Fragments 281 It seems that it is our primal nature to be suspended, permanently for life, %% *#**i#|?-- "m, **..:.^jj_j_to__^^'.l_l3te^?:-'^-w- ,.i ! ^*%-_fe-l_^__i *** ^r^--^^^-?: ---^ 282 PerspectivesofNew Music 9 Ben-Collages and VI Fragments 283 I hove my hov/e. 0 03 6 $7$, Ihave my ontology; -?-^-m not as preconceptions, but as after-facts of evolving consciousness. J = 44 ^-?^ - > -?*?p-f-^-= I hove my hou/e: *T^ *___________________________P_J_^B i 284 PerspectivesofNew Music Fragment I Each of us determines what music is 'ours', whose music will live within us?real inour heads, hearts, minds, lives?neither evanescent nor transient.We recall it, we think it, we experience it. We are the hosts within which music thrives and blossoms. Within us by invitation; cast off at our discretion?although casting off, trying to forget, ismore diffi cult than embracing or inviting.Music, the parasite, the sycophant, the freeloader, the leech that invades us and that, under superbest conditions, enriches us, stimulates our intellect, and keeps us vital, even if we can't say for surewhat it means orwhat it's about; abetting memory and mem 9 Ben-Collages andVI Fragments 285 ories; inciting passion, desire, hope, despair, anxiety, patriotism?you name it?triggered deliberately or inadvertently, anytime anywhere. Biologist Lewis Thomas said: Instead of using what we can guess at about the nature of thought to explain the nature of music . . . begin with music and see what music can tell us about the sensation of thinking.1 A challenge, an intimidation, bombarded as theworld isnowadays, as it always has been, by pervasive, heedless situations that promote the cir cumvention of thinking, but sometimes I thinkwho cares about that stuff that I don't really care about, and sometimes I get pissed off. For me?why care about all those others?, it's their problem isn't it??pur poseful listening to awork ofmusic that requests attention stimulates my consciousness and sensitizes me to those remarkable instantiations I call 'music', to those ideas that another has chosen to express in/as music. Those unnameable, unsayable experiences that I nonetheless desperately try to speak about, despite the likelihood that deep down such experi ences?entering, touching, suffusing, co-habiting?remain unshareable, private, mysterious, clandestine. Fragment II Here's the opening of a poem e. e. cummings wrote in 1926:2 since feeling isfirst who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; When I read the poem aloud, I hear and feelmy lips and tongue and mouth forming: jaunty alliterations?feeling, first;oblique rhymes?who, you; sibilant austerity of syntax, things, the softer since and kiss; and then I think I've been able to get beneath thewords in some way thatmakes sense. But tryingnot to put that sense intowords other than cummings's own isoften a losing battle. As ifbecause it'sword-stuff, it's okay to say it in other words!3 And then I think of Franz Liszt, who got it rightwhen, or so the story goes, having been asked by an audience member to explain awork he'd just played, he turned back to the piano and played it once again. 286 PerspectivesofNew Music cummings was asked by his publisher to explain his poetry; here's a short quote from cummings's Introduction: I can express [my theory of technique] in fifteenwords by quoting The Eternal Question and The Immortal Answer of Burlesque, to wit: The Eternal Question: "Would you hit awoman with a child?" and The Immortal Answer: "No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesque comedian I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.4 Fragment III Sometimes you sit down and be thinking you going to put it this way, according to how you feel about it. You might know how somebody else do it,but you tell yourself, I'm going to do itdiffer ent.When you sit, you don't know how itgoing to come out . . . you just put ityour way. ?Flora Moore, quilt-maker I just taken me some [scrap cloth...