A Reflection on Prague 1970 by Martin Bresnick

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

...thanks to Ethan Iverson's blog for pointing too this

Martin Bresnick is Charles T. Wilson Professor in the Practice of Composition at Yale University. His music has been performed and recorded worldwide. He is the recipient of the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize and others. More of his work can be found and heard at his Web site.

his undergrad piece is taken to bits in a Marxist way by Nono .... in Prague with the Russians ...

[groovydavidii]

Thanks for this contribution Aka, I was in Prague during August 1969, caught in the Jan Palach protest: Precisely at noon traffic stopped, car horns hooted, but it was the whistles which captured the frisson of Wenceslas Square filled with thousands of people, then came the tear gas attacks, it was scary dodging into doorways to escape the militia, eventually I was grabbed by one wielding a baton, and forced to remove my Alexander Dubcek flag–more scary was the previous evening when tanks noisily roared through the city’s famed cobbled streets with Prague citizens cursing the Russians. Regarding Martin Bresnick’s music for “Pour” I find it most accessible, as of the subject of the film–random bronze casting it reminds me of Michael Ayrton’s ‘precise’ casting of a gold honeycomb using the West African ‘lost wax‘ method.