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Do you like choral music? My friend (and college roommate!) Nick Weininger has a new album out, and it’s so good:
https://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6587/
The marketing text doesn’t half do justice to its ingenuity or its heart. All the text is Hebrew scripture (ironic, since Nick is afaik a steadfast atheist), but here’s the thing: it’s all about the COVID pandemic.
1/
There’s the social distancing chorus (“How she sits alone / the city once great with people”)…
…the doomscrolling aria (“For in much wisdom is much worry / and he who adds knowledge adds pain”)
…the fury against COVID disinformation (“They would heal my people’s wound easily saying, ‘All is well, all is well,’ when it was NOT well”)
…and the uncannily appropriate lines that gave it its title: “All is mere breath / and herding the wind.”
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It’s ingenious and, yes, •funny• — also heartbreaking, haunting, gorgeously sad-hopeful. (That final chorale…!)
It’s an important piece, a salve for the unhealed wounds of this moment, this swamp of collective denial into which our society seems to have sunk.
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Have you noticed how COVID is curiously absent from art? For all the outpouring of art made •during• the pandemic, there has been shockingly little •about• the pandemic and the experience of living through it.
It’s as if the whole experience of the pandemic is too big and too close for us to even be willing to look at, so we turn away and shield our eyes.
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With its scriptural language and orchestral sweep, All Is Mere Breath transposes our experience of the pandemic into the realm of the mythopoetic, giving us sufficient distance and psychological context to actually •look• at it, and to say, “Yes, we were there, this is what we experienced, this is the weight of our story.”
“Recount it to your children, and to your children’s children.” ← That’s the text of the penultimate movement, but also the message of the whole piece.
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A publicist working on the album’s release said to Nick that they didn’t know exactly what to do with it, COVID is already yesterday’s news.
If you’d like to prove that publicist wrong and answer Nick’s plea against forgetting, I hope you’ll give his music a listen:
https://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6587/
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@inthehands Most great art isn’t about what it’s about, though. Macbeth isn’t about Scottish politics. When we see more art about the pandemic, it will be about more than the pandemic. Likewise, I’m sure a lot of art made in the last 3 years •is• about the pandemic, under the hood.
@ossobuffo Well, yeah, see post #2 in the thread.
My point is that storytelling has been almost aggressively •avoiding• the pandemic. True in hindsight as well! Compare, for example, the number of stories about WWI versus the number of stories about (even obliquely about) the 1918 influenza pandemic.
@ossobuffo (Also, Hamlet = Denmark, MacBeth = Scotland…I think?)
@inthehands I believe that happened in 1913, too.
@fishidwardrobe 1918. And YES
@inthehands #BadAtDating
It's weird, though. You would think that it would be because of shared trauma, but if this time around is anything to go by, most people seem to be thinking it's just not important enough? Like it's trivial and/or icky so, don't make art?