The Geometry of Musical Rhythm

Six buildings in close proximity with families living one on top of another within a constant melee of sound, including music of all sorts. This is the public housing of Santiago de Cuba, known locally as cuartería. These apartments and their confederation of people and sounds serve as the inspiration to saxophonist and composer Román Filiú’s new musical suite and subsequent recording, Quarteria.

Six buildings in close proximity with families living one on top of another within a constant melee of sound, including music of all sorts. This is the public housing of Santiago de Cuba, known locally as cuartería. These apartments and their confederation of people and sounds serve as the inspiration to saxophonist and composer Román Filiú’s new musical suite and subsequent recording, Quarteria.

Camelot, Jennifer Castle’s extraordinary, moving chronicle of the artist in early middle age, charts a realer place than the legendary Camelot of the British Early Middle Ages, but it too is a space more psychic than physical. In Castle’s Camelot, the fantastic interpenetrates the mundane, and the Grail, if there is one, distills everyday experience into art and art into faith, subliming terrestrial concerns into sublime celestial prayers to Mother Nature, and to the unfolding process of perfecting imperfection in one’s own nature: “Back in Camelot / I really learned a lot / circles in the crops and / sky-high geometry …” Camelot, the legendary seat of King Arthur’s court in Early Middle Ages Britain, was probably not a real place. A corruption of the name of a real Romano-Briton city, the word “Camelot” accumulated symbolic, mythic resonances over centuries, until achieving its present usage as a near-synonym of “utopia.” In the mid-20th century alone, Camelot inspired an explosion of representations and appropriations, among them the violent, affectless Arthurian court of Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot du Lac and the absurdist iteration of Monty Python’s 1975 Holy Grail, both of which feature armored knights erupting into fountains of blood; the mystical Welsh world of novelist John Cowper Powys’s profoundly weird 1951 novel Porius, with its Roman cults, wizards and witches, and wanton giants; and the nationalist nostalgia of President John F. Kennedy’s White House. Unsurprisingly there are fewer Camelots in more recent memory.