Marking the Passage of Time
Credit: Midjourney
I sat down this afternoon to record a quick video for Karla, a poet/artist friend Ted just introduced me to, who is interested in having me play for her poetry reading. After improvising a bit, I thought it might be nice for her to hear a bit of lute music that is more song-like and could very easily be set to words. I decided to play Dowland’s setting of Fortune, and later remembered that I had actually recorded myself playing the same piece of music some time ago - one year, eight months, and eight days ago, to be exact. I was able to dig up the old recording, and so got the idea to present a little glimpse into the progress I've made with the lute against the backdrop of my life.
At the time I was living with my grandma in Queens, New York. I intended to move to either Manhattan or Brooklyn, but was still hunting for an apartment, and I remember feeling extraordinarily exhausted by the isolation of COVID - indeed, I believe lockdown was being enforced. I had been dealing with depression, anger, and frustration ever since the disaster that was my ‘graduation’ from Conservatory (and sure as hell before that too), but November 2021 I just felt tired and over it. My plans to travel to Europe had been waylaid, and the excitement of moving to New York for the first time was dampened by most everything being closed, and the fact that going outside wasn't even really advisable in the first place, and I DEFINITELY didn’t want to get my grandma sick. Even though the numbers indicated COVID was waning, there seemed to be no end in sight.
But music has always been a touchstone for me, and I felt emboldened by the progress I was making on the Lute, as well as the research I was doing into Vicente Lusitano and the Renaissance improvised counterpoint tradition. Transitioning from Classical Guitar to Lute has been one of the most profoundly positive things to happen in my life. Everything about the Lute - its powerfully touching sound that can reach right into your soul, its extraordinarily diverse repertoire spanning from jaunty dances to intricately crafted Fantasias to soaring English Pavans, the personalities and mystique of those who played it, wrote for it, and mastered it - everything about it speaks to me on a level that I was unfortunately never able to access with the Guitar.
So it wasn’t all bad, because I had my Lute and I had Dowland and Terzi and Bakfark and all the wonderful bits of counterpoint they’ve set down for me to learn from and feed my soul with.
I also had my family: Gma T and I holding down the fort, and everyone else just a dial away, and luckily the physical laws of our universe allow emotional support to be felt long-distance. So no matter how alone I felt, or how much I felt like just retreating inside myself completely, I knew my family would always be there to love and support and encourage me. I can’t overstate how important it was just to know that.
Happily, the new year brought with it a change of the winds. After living in Brooklyn for some time, teaching at Greenwich House and running my improvised counterpoint workshops, I decided it was time to fully rejoin the world, and so I set out to attend the Lute Society of America’s bi-annual festival in Cleveland. I reconnected with an old friend who was also in a much better place in their life, and I enjoyed being surrounded by an unpretentious and welcoming community of amateur and professional lutenists alike. In a show of universal accord, even the legendary Jean-Yves Haymoz, flag-bearer of the improvised counterpoint revival, was in attendance.
Over the week I got to know Eduardo Eguez, who invited me to come live and study with him and his family in a small village outside of Torino, as a sort of lutemans-apprentice, and so after a few more months I parted ways with New York and finally made my long-delayed voyage, setting out across the sea once more.
Two months of intensive practice, pizza, and more kindness and generosity than I could ever imagine from my host family later, I set off to London to suss out the three conservatories I intended to apply for a PhD. To make a long story short, The Royal College of Music wound up accepting me, but I wound up deferring that program to instead move to Los Angeles to train AI models for my brother’s creative technology studio. Funny how life goes sometimes.
Anyways, that more or less brings us to today, August 7th, 2023, sitting in my new LA apartment recording a video of Dowland’s heart-ached setting of the English ballad tune Fortune My Foe, to the sound of A/C and street traffic. I hope you enjoy the video, and I hope that you are in a better place than you were one year, eight months, and eight days ago - I certainly am, and I think that speaks through the music.