An Advent Calendar

Music, along with film, is often spoken of as the art of sculpting in time (Andrei Tarkovsky’s book of the same title is beautiful and essential reading for anyone interested) and exists only in the given moment and in memory. You cannot approach a piece of music the way you would a painting, sculpture, or piece of literature, mediums in which the mind may linger on a given line, texture, or phrase indefinitely. Music must be listened to again and again, with focus and love and intention, and it must be remembered. How to listen, then, in a world moving ever-faster and therefore with ever-less time, in which attention spans are shrinking and our ability to remember-and, as such, to create ourselves-is in precipitous decline?

In short: I don’t know, but we must try. One of the ways in which I’ve been trying is by cultivating something of an obsession with musical miniatures, by which I mean pieces of (recorded) music lasting only ninety seconds or less. I began to awake to their power and significance while studying the early works of Webern-quiet and eerie diamonds whose emotional content is compressed to the point of near-explosion-when I realized I had in my collection a whole trove of other miniatures of similar gem-like beauty. It was some comfort to create links between and observe patterns within these pieces, to note their beauty, and to feel that they were altogether different from the hook-y, attention-grabbing, often nostalgia-baiting music of our social media age.

Somewhat paradoxically, I find that these shorter pieces actually encourage greater intention in listening: not only do their short durations demand intense listening, they also facilitate it. When you know something will be over in a minute, just a minute, you become aware of the passage of seconds, of the feeling and significance of every single event or change. This is a way of being alive. Blink and you’ll miss it. And if you do, in recorded music as opposed to life you have a choice: you can choose to start it all over again. What a privilege.

Life, like music, like film, is also a kind of sculpting in time. Listening takes work, creating a life takes work, often exhausting, tedious work, but what could possibly be more worth doing?

With this in mind, and as an aid to said work I’ve curated a playlist of twenty-five of my favorite miniatures, an advent calendar of sorts, for your (and my) listening pleasure and practice. This playlist is designed to be listened to either from start to finish in a way that invites, I think, some interesting contrasts between pieces, or in piecemeal fashion, with an intense focus on and many repetitions of each piece. Sculpt your time however you choose.

Happy holidays and more writing soon.

Tracklist:

One Minute – Ryoji Ikeda
Memory Opening – Oliver Coates
For Children, Book II No. 26 – Béla Bartók {Dezsö Ranki}
A la manière de Borodine – Maurice Ravel {Jean-Yves Thibaudet}
Dutch Wax – E L U C I D
September – David Sylvian
Arabeske in C Major, Op. 18: No.4 ‘Zum Schluss’ – Robert Schumann {Maria João Pires}
Eleven Thousand Six Hundred And Sixty-Nine Died Of Natural Causes – Jóhann Jóhannsson
When The Roll Is Called In Heaven – The Stargazers
the end – Ichiko Aoba
The Races – Grouper
Horn – Nick Drake
Out – Laurel Halo
Playing Around Before the Party Starts – Childish Gambino
Hunger -MIKE
Murder’s Home – Henry Jimpson Wallace {recorded by Alan Lomax}
3 Pieces for Cello and Piano, Op. 11: III. Äußerst ruhig – Anton Webern {Charles Rosen and Gregor Piatigorsky}
7 Papillons: No. 2 – Kaija Saariaho {Anssi Karttunen}
And the Permanence of Smoke or Stars – Akira Rabelais
long time – Rei Harakami
Good Guy – Frank Ocean
Dreams Come True – billy woods
Who’d You Kill Now? – Frightened Rabbit
Mouth of the Cave – Typhoon
Riot! – Earl Sweatshirt

An addendum: a good friend of mine kindly read this piece and was inspired to make his own playlist of miniatures. Some of them don’t exist on one or the other streaming platform but I’ve done my best to make them available here. If anyone else gets interested and makes one they’d like to share, please get in touch and I’d love to put a link up here.

Sean’s Advent Calendar – Youtube | Spotify

Mr Magpie