Expect the unexpected

Observe the snow, which fell early last week! It is the first snow I have seen fall in Edinburgh since I arrived. This is the view from my window. I spent the entire week in Edinburgh, which actually hasn’t been the case for a while. I have been out and about traveling around outside the city proper for the past 2 weekends, so it was nice just to stick around “old reeky” and take it easy. The week got off to a good start when American expatriate composer Frederick Rzewski gave a presentation to the university music students. He played a sprawling hour long piece for solo piano which requires the pianist (in this case, Rzewski himself, who is an impressive performer) to play, speak, and occasionally even hit the piano. The texts were also written by Rzewski, and consisted of a series of unrelated quasi – philosophical musings about creativity, art in politics, and war. Rzewski’s well known Leftist politics were made pretty clear by the texts he had written and his responses in the Q&A that followed, but he surprised me on a couple of points. From his reputation, I expected someone resembling musician activitists from the pop world – energetic, full of ideas about changing the world, and trying to get people excited about what they are going to accomplish. Instead, Rzewski declared that he believed that it was highly unlikely that political art would change anything at all. He spoke pessimistically about the role of art in politics, although he said briefly that he felt it was important to try and change things, because one never knows what might happen. I suppose it was his quiet pessimism, lack of flashiness, and nonchalance about the subject that surprised me, coming from a composer who is especially known for works that so often deal with charged political matters. It was as if the whole political element to his music was highly personal, and not much else – that isn’t something I am used to in politically minded art. Rzewski also had some interesting things to say about improvisation vs. composition. He spoke a lot about the immediate disappearance of spontaneity when a piece gets notated, and conversely the need for some sort of organizing principle to improvise effectively. I guess what ended up being most interesting about this was the idea that good music can provide people with something that we seek in our own personal lives – a balance of the expected and familiar and the new and novel. Anyways…enough musical rambling. On Friday Rachel, Cindy and I used our “historic Scotland” passes that Arcadia gave us to go up to Edinburgh Castle, which (again) wasn’t exactly what I had expected. The castle itself is pretty cool – an eclectic mix of buildings dating as far back as the 9th century, but it has been commercialized to the point of losing some of its atmosphere. My favorite example of this was the cheesy informative placards (or whatever they are called) that caps locked and bolded words like MURDERED and PERISHED whenever they needed to be written out for historical explanations. The gift shops and toilets that occupied many of the historic looking buildings didn’t help much either, nor did the pre-recorded lute music they had playing in one of the old castle rooms. Still, castles are pretty cool to begin with, and the view out over the city is impressive. On the way back we got dinner at an odd place called "Chocolate Soup," where the signature dish is - yes - a chocolate soup that resembles some kind of thick hot chocolate. On Saturday Jack, Anna, and I decided to get better acquainted with some parts of Edinburgh that we hadn’t yet visited, so we went down to the old port of the city in a neighborhood called Leith. Yet again, this wasn’t what I had exactly expected – the place actually reminded me a lot of Norfolk, VA. We ended up at a giant shopping mall alongside the waterfront (a grimy commercial shipping port) where there wasn’t too much to see besides shipping cranes and a rotting pier. There weren’t even any fisherman, or at least a burly Scottish longshoreman! Oh well – we walked around the neighborhood for a while, which was shabbier than the area we stay in (I think “Trainspotting” was filmed in Leith), and along the way happened upon the home of a “bagpipe maker,” which was awesome (see picture). That night I went with my friend from high school Mathieu (who I randomly ran into at a pub a few weeks ago, and who attends Edinburgh Uni after moving back to Europe my junior year) to his “second favorite pub in Edinburgh’ (his first favorite was too packed with rugby fans who had just finished watching the Wales vs. Scotland match) where I had a most tasty Steak and Ale pie. Next week I have off for reading week, and this coming weekend I am going to London!

Some shots of Edinburgh Castle and Leith.