The first bird I searched for was the nightjar, which used to nest in the valley. Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of […]
Author Archives: jonathaneennewton
Wherever we look in nature we are confronted with the sweetness and charms of music. Even in inanimate life we see, feel, and hear evidences of it: the whistling wind as it moves through the trees and rings out its melodies: the musical rhythm of the oceans, rivers, and streams as they perform their proper […]
Black birds break the stillness with a rackety bray, and the wind squalls through the timbers with a chilling drone… It emanates from deep within the woods. Some say it’s the sound of cicadas, but everyone knows they sing in the key of C#. After checking on my harmonica, I put this somewhere between B […]
We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when […]
After two-and-a-half years of work we’ve launched the official website for the Irv Teibel Archive.
Hey, it’s been a while. I recorded some weird cello improvisations. Here they are.
What appeals to us in being near to nature is nature’s music, and nature’s music is more perfect than that of art. It gives us a sense of exaltation to be moving about in the woods, to be looking at the green, to be standing neat the running water which has it’s rhythm, its tone […]
I’m looking forward to this documentary on Minnesota naturalist Sigurd F. Olson. I discovered his work through two beautiful editions of his books The Singing Wilderness (1956) and Listening Point (1958). Olson writes elegantly about nature without romanticizing it–not an easy task!
I recently came across two films worth mentioning here. Transes follows the Moroccan group Nass el Ghiwane during a tour in the early 1980s. Nass performs Moraccan chaabi music influenced by the heavily hypnotic Gnawa genre, hence the titular “trances.” They play with the frenetic energy of early Stones to their rapturous crowds. Director Ahmed El Maanouni captures spectacular live performances […]
Sergei Parajanov made art his way. He balked at socialist realism, the Soviet Union’s sanctioned art form, and lived a flamboyant lifestyle that had him in and out of labor camps for 20 years. I first saw Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in college. The Russian film class I was taking at the time introduced me to great films […]
