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Back and forth with Tom Rogers |
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From: Tom Rogers Subject: Re: or this… Date: March 22, 2018 at 10:49:16 AM MDT To: "Richard_B. Anderson" Thanks for your rejoinder, Andy. The texts’ warning is provided by my theatrical agent in Maine who prepared both of the printed versions I sent you. He does this routinely with all the works he represents, especially plays, as a reminder to those bent on staging them that they must receive his permission and pay royalties. By all means, feel free to share (and even duplicate) what I sent you with others for reading purposes. Tom |
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On Apr 8, 2018, at 9:44 AM, Richard_B. Anderson wrote:
Dear Tom, Rereading your piece on “bumping”, I felt again the “go, team, go!” sensation remembered from the first time through. Valerie will confirm that I’d remarked earlier on an improbable kinship between Mozart and Isaiah: wherever one treads in the works of each, the next element (word or note) is likely to hit the receiver as improbable, unexpected—emphatically not clichéd, not formulaic, not predictable, unlike a similar snippet from, say, Salieri. Nor, alas, one from our revered President McKay’s favorite versifier, Edgar A. Guest. But in each, as one is drawn back to it, exactly right and, paradoxically, inevitable. I’ve sung and played (on the recorder) enough Mozart that that little startlement is familiar and becomes expected. And that the inevitability of each one makes its immediate context easier to perform, giving the impression that my limited skills are sufficient to a more complex or otherwise difficult piece than they might be to another composer’s analogous piece. Somewhat analogously, neighbors snorted one recent Sunday when, in response to the instructor’s question in Gospel Doctrine, I asserted that I treasure the Old Testament for Isaiah’s incomparable poetry, even, amazingly, in translation.* Any clichés we find in Isaiah, it seems, are now such because he said them first, O poor Anathoth! And then the next improbability is that the “bump” doesn’t wear off, nor is it flattened by repeated traversing, even if its vehicular phrase itself becomes a cliché: “…swords into plowshares…” remains fresh for me, the |
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