The Music That Named the Distance

The Music That Named the Distance

London, October 1982There is a club on Meard Street in Soho that opened this year. The Batcave. I have been three times now, standing in the back where the sound is slightly less total, watching something happen that I recognize from other moments in other centuries:...
The Audience Understood Before the Curtain Fell

The Audience Understood Before the Curtain Fell

Prague, October 29, 1787I have heard music that stopped me before. Bach in Leipzig. Certain late Monteverdi. But what happened in the Nostitz Theatre tonight is something I am still attempting to locate in my memory for comparison and finding nothing adequate.Don...
The Forms That Bearing Witness Takes

The Forms That Bearing Witness Takes

Present Day, March 2026For centuries I documented in journals. The journals from my early years in Florence are careful and specific: names, dates, conversations, the details of events that I suspected would be significant before I could be certain they were. The...
The Testimony Prepared

The Testimony Prepared

Present Day, March 2026The album is called The Geometry of Ruin. It is not a pleasant title. It was not designed to be pleasant. It was designed to be accurate.I have been watching the geometry for five centuries. The geometry is not the collapse itself: it is the...