Well, for my mom, these are all the equivalent of being in a cover band, as they are all commissions. I doubt that, left to her own devices, this would be her subject matter. Although, Eleanor Roosevelt I think was also a labor of love. So, if someone offered her the proper incentives, Ives might be doable, although at 74, I'm not sure how many more large commissions she will do.
On the intersection of music and art, my mom's father was a contemporary of Copland in the music world, although a composer of a very different style; his harmonic structures were post 12 tone and his compositions were some of the most rhythmically complex I've ever seen; he wrote out all his music paper in alternating bars of 3 and 4 and then proceeded to completely ignore the bar lines. Listening to the music, it just flows, like a stream of consciousness conversation. Coincidentally, he also lived for most of the 60s about 6 blocks away from the Roosevelt monument at the Dakota.
The rest of my family are artists as well. My dad is a print maker (and was chairman of Visual Arts at Boston University- no website yet) and my brother is a painter (
www.adamhurwitz.com warning! there are some images there that are a little challenging) and my wife trained as a painter, including with my dad at BU, and discovered that blending colors translated to blending smells, so she now designs perfume (
www.artscent.com) although she does still paint. I'm hoping she'll get a painting website together one of these days. Finally, my mom's brother is an architect who most architects will recognize-Charles Jencks (
www.charlesjencks.com), who has written some seminal academic volumes and done some very interesting work including the Garden of Cosmic Speculation (which was the inspiration of a symphony of the same name, bringing it full circle back to music!).
I was named after Edwin Dickinson, an early 20th century painter who was a friend of my grandparents and an early mentor of my mom.
So, that's my family, although there are some other interesting characters there as well: my mom's grandfather, Raymond Pearl, was a drinking and jamming buddy of HL Mencken (and the first person to statistically analyze the effect of alcohol on longevity, determining that moderate drinking increases your life and generally created the field of biostatistics-
http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0406web/pearl.html), her aunt was a very eccentric and brilliant woman, who was a psychiatrist in New York and married to Leon Russianoff, a premier clarinet teacher, but also who played the drums and kept getting solicited to do punk gigs at CBGBs in the 70s and 80s. I don't think she ever did do it, though.
I'd also like to point out the importance of art in Alembic history, from Susan W. herself, to Bob Thomas, to Jerry Garcia (an aspiring artist before music took over) and on and on. Although I can barely write my own name, I have a profound respect for visual art. In the last 15 years I have studied photography so I could at least understand the vocabulary of composition, value, etc.
Anyway, thanks for moving the thread, Adriaan, I was concerned about hijacking!
(Message edited by edwin on April 02, 2010)
(Message edited by edwin on April 02, 2010)
