Getting Into Things

A while back i noticed that Nicki would stand quietly nearby while i was taking a picture.  I hadn't told him to  sit; he just figured out that we weren't walking and that i was standing still doing something.  So he waited.  I thought this was pretty neat.

Today, as Nicki was zig-zagging across the trail with his orange ball in his mouth, i stopped to take a picture of Spring's first shoots.  I was testing out a yet another new old camera and so was taking the picture both in film and in digital.  Almost as soon as he saw me take my gear out of the bag, Nicki ran in front, stood in the  middle of the scene and stared into the camera.  He did this very deliberately and except for a little shifting in place was unmistakably getting into the middle of whatever i was doing. 

About three weeks ago, i pulled out a disc of sacred music by Juan Gutierrez Padilla, a 17th century Mexican composer.  Padilla was something of a retro composer in a new musical age.  The jacket blurb explains that his a capella missa Ego Flos Campi  uses the harmonics of the late Rennaisance typically identified with Palestrina.  But Padilla also employed the dynamic counterpoint of the Early Baroque and the mass is technically classed as being of that period.  In addition Padilla intersperses  dissonances, and sudden pauses and beats favoured by the Indian ear.  The result is music which is both harmonically strong layered and lit with shimmering highlights.   

It is symptomatic of our generally rushed pace of living as well as my relative musical ineptness that it has taken about three separate listening for the colours of the music to be distinctly heard like Michaelangelo's frescoes being cleansed of veneer and grime and into their original brightness.  

As I fell into the cascading waters of sound, my mind drifted to places like Yanuitlán and Teposcolula, Oaxaca and to the immense cathedrals in the now middle of nowhere that the Spaniards erected within the first 70 years of the Conquest.  Padilla was chapel master at the Puebla cathedral but i have little doubt that in that vibrant first two centuries his music made it down to Oaxaca.  

Nicki likes the music too.  He sits by very quietly, and thankfully doesn't try to get into the sonic picture. :) 

And yes, it's still raining....

.