I have been very delinquent lately re: Social Media + Blogging + Newsletter-ing.
There have been lots of reasons for resistance about this, including an internal debate between “Is anybody listening/Does anybody care?” to “What do I know about anything…?”
I’ve also been finding it challenging because lots of my colleagues in the yoga universe sustain or even create a huge presence for themselves via endless photos of themselves in yoga poses.
YES––I do my yearly dropback photographs and I love that ritual deeply.
(More about that in my essay [popup url=”http://localhost/testing/dropping-back/” height=”600″ width=”600″ scrollbars=”yes” alt=”popup”]HERE[/popup].)
But I just don’t get why I’d be motivated to photograph myself repeatedly in a pose I’ve been doing for twenty + years.
(And, forgive me for stating the obvious, but I’m definitely not one of those bikini yoga ladies either––not that that isn’t a noble profession.)
Anyway, I started listening to an extremely exciting pianist named James Rhodes this week and after immediately admiring his playing––particularly one of my Go To pieces (the Bach-Busoni Toccata in C Major)–– I was astonished to hear various tracks where he SPOKE DIRECTLY TO THE AUDIENCE!
For those of you not in the classical music world that just NEVER happens.
No one ever at a classical concert ever talks about why they’re playing a particular piece or offers some intriguing backstory about the composition or the composer and certainly never says anything particularly funny.
Classical music is––if it is anything–SERIOUS!
James Rhodes shattered this fourth wall / stereotype brilliantly in his riffs on composers and compositions.
I love this bit about Bach especially:
“In the few portraits of Bach that exist he looks like this very dour, stuck-up, unemotional, cold Lutheran, incapable of romance. But then you dig a bit deeper and you see that by the age of four his closest siblings had died. At nine his mum dies. At ten his father dies. He falls in love with this incredible woman. She dies. Eleven of his 20 children die in infancy or childbirth. This guy was just soaked through with grief. And at the same time, he was a massive drinker, was having sex non-stop and getting arrested for dueling. He’s kind of like a Baroque Keith Richards.”
Basically, he showed me a model for someone who was sharing (yet not in a bikini) via INFORMATION that was of VALUE (although with being extremely playful and personal).
Thank you, James Rhodes!
[And, once again, by the way––he’s a really awesome pianist.]
