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Over the past couple of days, there has been public controversy over the New York Youth Symphony’s decision to cancel the Carnegie Hall premiere of Jonas Tarm’s piece “Marsh u Nebuttya” (“March to Oblivion”). For those of you who do not know the backstory, after an initial performance of the piece at the United Palace Theater in Manhattan, the orchestra received a letter presumably from an audience member (it was sent anonymously, signed only as from “A Nazi Survivor”) complaining that the piece quotes the Nazi anthem “Horst Wessel” and is, therefore, inappropriate for a youth orchestra.

Back in September, I had just started an internship at an artist’s studio in Tribeca. Since the weather was nice, we decided to eat our lunch in the park. Mine, either PB&J or a sandwich of hummus, red peppers, onion, and kale; hers, some sort of salad in a small black tupperware container. The park is about two blocks away from the studio, nestled into a funky little triangle between 6th Ave., Beach, and Walker. We entered the park and walked down the center sidewalk to look for an unoccupied bench.

“And I thought to myself, ‘how beautiful, how magical, how… catastrophic.'”

Thus ends the last monologue of Laurie Anderson’s new collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, “Landfall,” which I went to see at BAM’s Harvey Theater last Saturday evening. According to the program notes, the piece was greatly influenced by Hurricane Sandy, which swept through New York City – where the multimedia performance artist is based – and the surrounding area in the fall of 2012. Poetic descriptions of the hurricane are interspersed throughout the work, alongside verbal and visual meditations on mass extinction, dreams, and the failures of language. After the dimming of the Harvey’s lights and the now all-too-familiar reminder to shut off cell phones and other electronic devices, the musicians filed onto the stage.

A version of this poem was originally published in Music, Memory (2014). Names have been changed to protect individuals' privacy.

Huaraz, Ancash Region, Peru

He holds up three leaves, the green teardrops overlapping like a fan between his thumb and index finger. The first one, he explains, is for that which is outside, the transcendental. The second, sandwiched in the middle, is the surface, the present moment. The last leaf represents that which is inside of everything. The condor, the puma, and the serpent, respectively, are tied to each of these layers, and kintu brings them all together. He tells us we should invoke an entity or energy, for example pachamama, and focus on what it is we are asking.

We entered the workshop through an average door on a residential street, emerging into a long garage-shaft with a ceiling but no rear wall. It almost never rains here, and the cold never exceeds a pervasive, damp chill. The greyish late-afternoon sunlight that is typical of Lima winters filtered in through that opening, reflecting off of instruments completed and not yet begun, everything in between, and the tools and the man that facilitate their metamorphosis. Sawdust marked its choreography in the air, alive with our movement. Luis was wearing a jeans jacket and pants to match, both discolored with embedded signs of woodwork and age. The pants hung loosely over his boney frame and he walked toward us with a deliberate stumble. His glasses were missing one arm and leaned crookedly across his nose, but his smile was warm as we kissed our greeting.