Thursday, March 13, 2008

Notes on Modest Mussorgsky

each visitor brings her own notes
to the pictures at an exhibition
each has her musical depiction
if a novice to the state of art
will forthwith just jump start
if an expert to the avant-garde
will enjoy the l'art pour l'art:
one by one decides on her vision
a truly personal musical precision
each will have her double-quotes

thinking of Mussorgsky and the Hubble Space pictures among Renaissance Art
The ten pictures Mussorgsky depicts are: a gnome-shaped nutcracker; a troubadour plaintively singing outside an ancient castle; children vigorously playing and quarrelling in a park; a lumbering wooden Polish ox-cart; a ballet of peeping chicks as they hatch from their shells; an argument between two Warsaw Jews, one haughty and vain, the other poor and garrulous; shrill women and vendors in a crowded marketplace; the eerie, echoing gloom of catacombs beneath Paris; the hut of a grotesque bone-chomping witch of Russian folk-lore; and a design for an entrance gate to Kiev.

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