Lake Diffractions

It has been a little while since I posted, much has happened, good and bad! The Identity and the Artist 2024 performance is a wrap at the Rockwell Museum, the masks and poems were quite incredible this year. It’s always fascinating to work with the students to create music out of nowhere that amplifies their thought processes. This is our 21st year of doing this (it used to be called Masks, Movement, Music and Monologues), great to work with so many wonderful creative people! There’s a video here that can give you an idea of what can happen and who all is doing it!

For this piece, I realized what I was playing was sort of like surf guitar, so I leaned into that. A rhythm guitar put down the chordal structure and my darabuka (played with felt mallets) set the rhythym, and the lead guitar comes surfing in, propelling the music forward.

Re the video, the first part is what looks like a sine wave rolling down the lake, seemingly unrelated but caused by the wave action on the lake. I jumped up to record it and caught the end of it, it only lasted a few minutes. Then I kept recording as the sunset did its magic to the waters, and the thousands of little waves on the surface, as they bounce across our long lake.