What, never? (Hardly ever...)

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My Lovely First Wife and I spent a phenomenal weekend in Atlanta: we saw the Atlanta Opera’s La Belle et la Bête on Saturday night, then Hadestown at the Fox Theatre on Sunday afternoon, and then Nate Bargartze’s wonderful comedy show Sunday night. Each was stunningly well-done. We highly recommend all of them.

boekenpers, By Havang(nl) - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35035969

Then on Monday morning we stopped at an upscale antique/consignment place before heading back home, and that’s where I saw an antique book press similar to the one pictured here, only a lot older than this one. I found myself mulling over the fact that I will never learn how to bind books even though I think it would be really cool to do so.

 

Then I began thinking about other things I would never learn or do in this lifetime:

  • play the cello well

  • pick up my old instrument, the flute, and learn to play it as well as I once did

  • learn to play the piano

  • make my own cocktail bitters

  • go to Burning Man (never say never, but…)

  • direct my deconstructed scripting of King Lear

  • see the Great Wall of China

…and so forth.

Note that this is not the same as a bucket list, i.e., a list things I’d like to be able to see or do at some point. These are things that I know I will never see or do. There’s just not enough time, money, energy, or support to make them happen.

That leads us to the next obvious train of thought: What creative projects will I never finish — or even start?

  1. The Symphony in G: The 3rd movement was the only one I finished; the conductor who asked me to compose it for the GHP orchestra pursued other career goals the following summer.

  2. Seven Dreams of Falling: The opera based on Scott Wilkerson’s published play of the same name. I finished Dream One years ago, but Scott needed to work on his Ph.D. so we set the work aside. We never picked it back up, and unfortunately Scott died unexpectedly this past summer. If I wanted to finish it on my own, I’d need to get permission from Scott’s estate and then hammer out the libretto myself.

  3. Simon’s Dad: A musical based on de Maupassant’s short story, “Simons’ Papa.” I sketched out a couple of songs and some ideas for the plot/staging, but nothing ever got finished.

  4. SUN TRUE FIRE: A massive choral piece using a sprawling spam text that arrived one say in the spam folder (I adapted an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT for the final movement to compose Azure Stone.)

On the Probably Not list:

  • A Day in the Moonlight: Mike Funt’s Marx Bros version of The Romancers, better known as its other musical incarnation, The Fantasticks.

  • unnamed/unidentified suite: This is an orchestral or possibly concert band suite based on one of my favorite literary characters. Since this involves a question of copyright, I’d have to get my composing back on track technology-speaking-wise (I’m looking at you, Dorico) before seeking permission to be as explicitly referential as I’d like to be.

  • see William Blake's Inn produced

Vita brevis, ars longa. Life is short, art is long.

::sigh:: Back to Ten Little Waltzes.