THOMAS LARSON

(Quillette December 30, 2024)

I.

Over the restless course of Bob Dylan’s six-decade-plus career, the 83-year-old singer-songwriter has adopted a different narrative persona for each successive stage of his personal and musical journey. There was the young protest singer of the early 1960s who wrote “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are a-Changing”; this was followed by the period of surreal lyrics and an electrified rock band, resulting in three groundbreaking records; then the pastoral period when he retreated to Woodstock with his family and jammed with The Band at Big Pink; the subsequent mid-decade records chronicling emotional turmoil and divorce; the born-again records of the late 1970s and early ’80s; the directionless decade after that when his muse seemed to have deserted him; and finally, the creative renaissance that began with the Time Out of Mind album and persists to this day.

(Times of San Diego, October 9, 2024)

When it comes to musical humor, one thing’s for sure: To be funny in sound is not like a joke in language whose weird setup (a priest, a lawyer, and a jackass walk into a bar) is upended by a punchline and a bellylaugh. Instead, amusing music follows its own rules.

It’s imitative, say, the trumpet whinnying like a horse in Leroy Andersen’s “Sleigh Ride.” It’s deliberate such as Mozart adding wrong notes to a string piece to lampoon “the work of incompetent composers.” It’s outlandish as with Haydn in Symphony 94, subtitled “Surprise,” when he follows a simple pianissimo melody with a roof-raising double forte chord, intended, legend has it, to wake up a slumbering audience.

(San Diego Reader November 20, 2024)

Life guards

At the top of the Grandview stairway sits a bench, dedicated to the memory of the three women who died under the weight of a 50-ton blockfall in 2019. In a late-July meetup, Dr. Pat Davis, one of the survivors who has fought hard to avenge their deaths, posed in front of the bench for my camera. Behind him is a chain-link fence walling off the condo colony of Seabluffe, many of its units seasonally occupied. As the cliff has weathered and retracted, the community, built in 1974 and numbering 255 units, has crept closer to the edge. Between the ocean-view condos and that edge is a brow ditch for rain runoff; it’s cracked and broken in spots, allowing rain to seep into the bluff.

(San Diego Reader November 13, 2024)

The cliff collapse

On August 2, 2019, at around 1 pm, Dr. J. Patrick Davis, his wife, Julie Davis, Julie’s sister, Elizabeth Charles Cox, and Pat and Julie’s daughter, Annie Davis Clave — all three of them mothers — accompanied by Pat and Julie’s adult daughter, Elizabeth McCullagh, a dozen wave-tagging kids and several neighbor moms, 20 in all, descended a four-sectioned, rickety stairway to picnic on Grandview Beach at the north end of Encinitas. The Davis, Cox, and Clave families were in high spirits. They were celebrating a milestone: Elizabeth Cox’s breast cancer, following a long stressful treatment, was in remission.

(Times of San Diego, October 9, 2024)

After four years of waiting, the Copley Symphony Hall has been remade to enhance the San Diego Symphony sound, its musicians, and their audience response as the Jacobs Music Center. Vacated by COVID and judged acoustically repairable, the venue placed its uneven tone and barnlike feel in the hands of musically-minded engineers.

I remember many concerts at Copley: It wasn’t that bad — nothing like the unwelcome Mandeville at UCSD or the cavernous sepulture of the Civic Center where any theatrical intimacy of, say, a Broadway show, expires about row 12, the balcony patrons listening in from another county. The symphony board agreed. Copley could be overhauled — what with $125 million and computer-driven and ear-tested redesigns.

Fittingly, conductor Rafael Payare, after a donor-showcase first night, Sept. 28, chose Gustav Mahler’s colossus, the “Resurrection” Symphony, his Second, this past weekend to christen its equally colossal retrofit.

(Where Meadows Reside Issue 2.2 September 2, 2024)

1 / It’s the thump of his body hitting the floor. The boards beneath him thud, jostle briefly, and echo. The fading away stills. I’m listening, as I always do, wondering whether his twenty-month-old daughter hears the shaky thud of her father gone down, whether she wakes and feels frightened or soothed by his form nearby and sleeps on. By early afternoon, she should be in deep slumber, following a lunch of brown-sugared oatmeal. I’ve lived in their shadow too long, and the dark speaks to my irresolute nature, namely, that I’ve not fully listened, not fully heard the story of my loss my brother’s been telling me for years, lying there.

That April 1989, Steve, my older brother, was a high-school shop teacher in northern Wisconsin, recently married with two stepsons and a new daughter. That year he was 42; our father predeceased him, as they say, fourteen years earlier, at 61. My dad’s second heart attack (massive is the go-to word) did him in while on a sales junket with Mom in their hotel room.

(Bridge Eight August 25, 2024)

Oh, the sonic pleasures of the 2023 film Tár: casting Cate (body, voice, face: her elasticity, her fearlessness) as the first-ever female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic; Mahler’s most revelatory symphony, the Fifth; the musician Sophie Kauer who acts and plays the Elgar Cello Concerto; a catalog of ominous sounds, musical and not, bedeviling Lydia and us with its undertow; and the eclectic score, which is both “in” the film and “accompanies” it and, in turn, enchants and destabilizes the ouroboros of making a movie about a musical subject musically. Another oh for the film's diabolical pleasures: Blanchett’s ferocious musical talent and her equally astute bedding skills as she sets up a scholarship program for young women conductors to manipulate them and, in the process, betray her wife, her personal assistant, her assistant conductor who “questions her integrity,” and a protégé who commits suicide.