36 Years Ago

36 Years Ago, Vienna 1971—A Student Journal

Day 243: Fragments, not sentences

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Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing & friends.



Day 243 — Fragments, not sentences
01-April-1972 (Samstag–Sat.)


TRANSCRIPT

Played a very little. Mostly stayed home. Did a little work on the
patiture [score], and read. Just finished eating a European style meal—cheese. It was my supper.

I’ll go and take in the opera
Daphne by Richard Strauss. A premiere. Excellent. I especially like the music. The singing was, of course, for a premiere, excellent. Very enjoyable. Met two Americans. Had a nice talk. He was studying composition in Julliard extension division.


REFLECTIONS

Grammar on a normal day. Today was a normal day with a lot of activity. In my journal, I have been noticing that my writing is taking the form of short fragments. The idea is there. It makes the reading a bit choppy. Just like these reflections. While I am keeping true to the journal, I sometimes change or omit a word if my meaning gets clouded. Cloud thinking, cloud computing—see, I was ahead of my time. In the journal, I’ll often paste together my fragments with a lot of dashes or sometimes commas. Sort of like, stream of consciousness words and fragments. As always, I wish Grammar Girl could be my editor. Is it ok to write like you think?

Music. Some work on my electronic score and a Richard Strauss opera, Daphne, at night. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, this was not the Vienna premiere of Daphne.

Met an American composition student from Julliard. You normally don’t meet many people in composition. Always interesting.

Links:

Richard Strauss in Wikipedia

Ricarda Merbeth in Daphne – YouTube. Comments are raving about Ricarda’s performance here. Here is a good example of the chromatic and textural complexity of Strauss’ writing.


John

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