Ed Heinzelman – Page 174 – an intuitive perspective

July 20, 2020

American Players Theatre’s Back to the Woods Campaign

One of my biggest disappointments for the summer of 2020 was the cancellation of American Players Theatre’s summer season. This theater has meant a lot to me over the past 18 years or so. I had wanted to attend their theater for years but there were always things that got in the way. But while going through a divorce, I made the time to go. Some very important alone time that let me restructure my life and rediscover the arts that lived in my heart and my soul. At first I attended every Shakespeare play that they were presenting, usually one per month in June, July, and August. I made friends with a couple who ran a Spring Green motel and they always put me in the same room on every visit. But they moved on and I had to find other digs. sigh.

And then I met the love of my life and I was so eager to share my experiences at American Players Theatre with her. And she loves it as much as I…and we expanded our interests in plays and playwrights and also embraced the Touchstone Theater as it came into its own. And we visited my cousin who had a shop in Spring Green…and found favorite restaurants…and cherished our evenings (and matinees…something unusual for us) spent at APT. Magic memorable times. What an exciting period for both of us.

Over the past five years, we have changed our habits and attended a number of plays over a number of contiguous days around my birthday in mid-August. And this was the plan for 2020…and celebrate a milestone birthday as well. So this summer has given me a real sense of loss in any number of ways. But I will endure and look forward to the future of American Players Theatre. And that’s where we are today…let’s insure the future of APT. Read the email below…watch the video from Brenda DeVita…and please donate something! I will be giving them $70 to celebrate my 70th birthday and I intend to have drink at APT in 2021 on my next one!

Last week we celebrated Founders’ Day – the anniversary of APT’s first performance, which took place on July 18, 1980. Since that day more than 40 years ago, APT’s season has been in full swing at this point in the summer. Until now. As soon as we announced the cancellation of our season, we began diligently planning and analyzing how APT is going to come out the other side of this. Here is our plan.
Today, we announce Back to the Woods: A Campaign for American Players Theatre. The campaign will raise the funds APT needs to literally get back to the woods and produce a full season in 2021. In the meantime, it keeps basic operations running and allows us to create a bit more virtual theater along the way (more news on that in the coming weeks and months). The goal is to raise $5 million by the end of 2021. Thanks to the generosity of thousands of you, we are already close to the halfway mark, with a total of $2,290,000 in hand already.
Once again, we ask for your help. And this time, we’d like to take it a step further. We want you to be our partner in reaching an even larger community of people who care about APT’s future.
Please visit our campaign site. There, you’ll find stories from people who love and believe in our theater and the work we do. Stories from people whose lives have been changed by APT. Each of them has volunteered to become a fundraiser. We hope their experiences inspire you to support their effort.
And we invite you to go a step further; to join them and become a fundraiser yourself for APT’s Back to the Woods Campaign. Tell your story. Then share it with friends, and help us get the word out to people who care but may not have given yet. Whether you join a team or fundraise on your own, starting a page is fun and easy, and any amount raised will go a long way in helping us reach our goal.
Above all, we treasure the relationship we have with our supporters, and our audience. We want to strengthen that relationship even further, as we fight for the future of our theater, together. And as always, we hope you’re remaining happy and healthy, and that we’ll see you safe, sound, and as soon as possible.

July 17, 2020July 18, 2020

A Tale Of Two Cities: Notre Dame Cathedral and Hagia Sophia

In the past week or so there have been major announcements that will affect two of the world’s most famous and most popular tourist attractions. One announces the plans to rebuild Notre Dame in Paris and the second to re-convert the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to a mosque.

First the good news about Notre Dame. After a devastating fire that nearly destroyed the cathedral in April of 2019, there were several discussions about restoring the building. Several suggestions include wild new components that would have significantly altered the buildings appearance and some that might have been welcome enhancements.

But French President Emmanuel Macron has declared that the cathedral will be rebuilt exactly as it was…well as of the 19th Century after the restoration completed by Viollet-le-Duc. That would include the spire that we are all familiar with that replaced the aging and deteriorated spire that Viollet-le-Duc replaced during his work on the cathedral.

This on the face of it is good news…but I am wondering what President Macron means by: “the “redesign” will look exactly the same as the original Gothic design.”

Will the roof be reconstructed of wood? Something that isn’t as readily available as it was in the 13th Century. There is no reason that the roof and upper portions can’t be re-created in modern materials to resemble the original materials. After all, the cathedral at Chartres which also suffered damage to its roof by fire and it was replaced with an iron roof without changing its appearance dramatically.

And I would hope that a substitute is found for the lead that was used extensively throughout the roof and spire. After the fire there was serious concern about the amount of lead that was distributed throughout the area by the fire and smoke itself as well as the efforts of the fire fighters. There certainly must be other materials that will serve without compromising the feel and look of Notre Dame.

This fire took on a personal aspect as I was planning a vacation in Paris for May and June of 2019. I had climbed the tower in the past but in January during semester break but was looking forward to doing it again and seeing a lush and green Paris from this bird’s eye view. Instead I was greeted by this (some of the scaffolds in this photo were left from the work teams who may have started the fire):

President Macron’s plan is to have the work completed in time for the 2024 Olympics that are being hosted by Paris. I look forward to visiting it shortly after that.

And now I am just showing off a bit: here is what the under roof and over cathedral space currently looks like at Chartres:

So let’s move on to Istanbul! The Hagia Sophia has a long history as a place of worship. Built originally as a Roman Catholic basilica by the Roman Emperor Justinian I as the centerpiece of Christendom in Constantinople, it later served the Eastern Orthodox Church, and finally became an Islamic Mosque when the city fell to the Ottoman Empire. But in 1934 it re-opened as a museum in the modern secular nation of Turkey.

Now, during its original conversion to a mosque a large number of the Christian mosaics were covered with plaster. Most followers of Islam do not believe that man should create images of living things. But during the conversion to a museum, the surviving mosaics were cleaned and restored and Hagia Sophia showed off the best artistic practices of the Christian and Islamic eras in the region.

But now in 2020, there has been a renewed movement toward nationalism in Turkey as in other nations, and after some controversial legal maneuvering, Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has declared the Hagia Sophia will once again serve as a mosque. This decision has roiled the Catholic and Orthodox worlds as well as UNESCO which has named Hagia Sophia as a world heritage site. President Erdogan has assured the world that the site will be open to visitors from around the world but not during prayers.

Erdogan, who said the first Muslim prayers would begin in Hagia Sofia on July 24, has insisted the building will be open to all, including non-Muslims.
“We will preserve Hagia Sophia’s status as a cultural heritage the same as our ancestors did.”
“There is no obstacle from a religious perspective to Hagia Sophia Mosque being open to visitors outside prayer times,”

President Erdogan isn’t totally insensitive to the issues he is causing but:

“I want to stress that Hagia Sophia turned into a mosque from a museum, not from a church”

So, the site should be open most of the time…but I don’t know exactly what ‘outside’ of prayers will mean in the future. And this may be an example of cutting off one’s nose…as 3.8 million people visit Hagia Sophia each year. That has to be a sizable revenue source for Turkey and if this change discourages tourists….it may be a very expensive decision indeed.

But my biggest concern is the mosaics and other non-Islamic imagery that remains and that was restored when the old version of the mosque became a museum. Currently this is the plan:

Diyanet (Istanbul’s religious authority) said in a statement on Tuesday that the Christian icons in Hagia Sophia were “not an obstacle to the validity of the prayers”.
“The icons should be curtained off and unlit through appropriate means during prayer times,” it said.

That’s today. Last month we didn’t anticipate this renowned museum becoming a mosque. Will the icons and mosaics at some point become a liability and religious leaders or worshipers demand their removal or worse yet destruction? I am not feeling comfortable with this change in status for Hagia Sophia. We’ll just have to wait and see.

June 24, 2020

Michele Dall’Ongaro’s La Primavera

Over the past several seasons, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra has been including pieces by modern composers in many of their regular subscription concerts. And wisely so. Instead of having a modern music weekend that is poorly attended, they are gradually acclimating their audience to new works. Some of this works very well but sometimes not.

Way back in the day when I owned the Milwaukee record store, On Broadway Plays (on Broadway south of Wisconsin Ave), Thursday was classical music day. I only played classical music and had specials on classical albums. During that time I learned about contemporary and modern composers and ran the gamut from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass…with Steve Reich becoming one of my favorites. So I look forward to finding new music during my MSO subscription concerts.

The MSO featuring Orion Weiss on piano played Michele Dall’Ongaro’s La primavera during the last concert that I was able to attend before the season was canceled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to hear. I had never heard anything by Mr. Dall’Ongaro before…so off we went.

Now this short piece (at under six minutes) is set for piano and string orchestra and is part of a four season suite, each season from a different composer. Mr. Dall’Ongaro wrote La primavera : Spring.

The piece opens very softly with single note piano inserts and plucked strings in return. At first I feared this seeming call and response would yield a tedious and drawn out piece but that thought quickly disappeared as the strings took on a resilient forward flow that draws out the piano and pulls it along. And then they each find their own voices and play off each other, sometimes against each other, and sometimes despite each other. It is an amazingly captivating piece…pulling in points and counterpoints and rhythms familiar to us all but with tones and ideas from contemporary serious music as well without disrupting the feeling…that this is familiar but we’ve never experience quite the like before!

In fact after I got over my initial concern, I totally got lost in the music and was just swept along until we reached the end…and I was so involved that I missed that it had ended and I felt lost because I wanted…felt that I needed more.

Maybe because I was there and became so invested in the experience, that I feel Mr. Weiss and the MSO did a better job of this that the recording I included below. But this recording is phenomenal as well and is the version recommended for listening in the MSO program. Give it a listen and only then read the MSO program notes that I have copied in below.

this ‘video’ is just the photo plus audio

OK, I have copied in the program notes for this piece from the MSO. I think that my experience of this piece may have been limited if I had read this before I heard it. I like to experience new art without too many preconceived notions. But when going back after reading them, it gave me something more to think about! And I hope you enjoyed La primavera as much as I did!

La primavera is set for solo piano and string orchestra. At its outset, pizzicato strings and pointillistic interjections from the piano seem to evoke raindrops, which become ever more frequent. The rain stirs nature to awaken, with perpetual motion from the plucked strings and colorful piano chords and figuration across the whole of the keyboard. Streams of 16th notes from both piano and strings ensue, then portamento strings and more pointillistic pianism tell us that the whole of nature is quivering with new life. Before we even realize it, this delightfully exuberant work seems to end before it even began.

I hope that the MSO’s 2020/21 season will be unaffected by COVID-19 and I am looking forward to their new venue!!