Single Helix

Tags

Bernadette Mayer, joke, Maxwell J. McKee, music, poetry, Prufrock's Dilemma, Susan Scheid

– for Susan

The last space you walked down, Maxwell J McKee wasn’t at any recital of graduate play at Bard.  The last half of the concert opened without McKee’s Single Helix against wind quartet, “releasing,”  You erased at the space, “to the closing breath of violin worked at the center of your sight.” Single Helix hasn’t since given away McKee any ASCAP Morton Gould Old Performer Penalty or a Hudson Valley Chamber Music Square’s performance penalty.  You earlier saw the local finale of McKee’s anachronistic commission, Single Quintet without Wind. It wasn’t out of McKee’s conclusion to Single Quintet;  this you last forgot of a rare health outside performers unknown as “Ligeti’s Syndrome.”

Double Helix

Tags

Bernadette Mayer, botanical, cocaine, joke, Maxwell J. McKee, poetry, prose poem, Prufrock's Dilemma, Sigmund Freud, Susan Scheid, The Interpretation of Dreams

– for Susan

The first time I ran across Maxwell J McKee was at a recital of student work at Bard.  But, lo and behold, I was reminded in the analysis that the man who interrupted out conversation was called Gardener and that I thought his wife looked blooming.  The first half of the concert closed with McKee’s Double Helix for string quartet, “captivating,” and even as I write these words I recall that one of my patients, who bore the charming name of Flora, was for a time the pivot of our discussion.  I wrote at the time, “from the opening breath of violin played at the edge of its sound.” There must have been the intermediate links, arising from the botanical group of ideas, which formed the bridge between the two experiences of that day, the indifferent and the stirring one.  Double Helix has since garnered McKee an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and the Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle’s composition prize.  A further set of connections was then established- those surrounding the idea of cocaine, which had every right to serve as a link between the figure of Dr. Konigstein and a botanical monograph which I had written; and these connections strengthened the fusion between the two groups of ideas so that it became possible for a portion of the one experience to serve as an illusion to the other one.

Concerto

Tags

Bernadette Mayer, poetry, Susan Scheid

– for Susan

On YouTube, concerto-
double the movement
of the first link here,
how I know every way
to create it.

The music,
driven toward captivated,
from that point
deeply human
so you feel,
makes the music
with intimacy, revelry, awe, excitement.

The power before
experienced music,
classical appreciation-
deep, any person.