If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. Even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages, those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust. —Italo Calvino

Dear Listeners, onstage and off,

In shaping relationships for Yellow Barn, I feel obligated to go to any length to cultivate independence in those that come to listen, an independence free from information that hints at a hierarchy of “knowing”, or the myth that “expertise” deepens our connection to art. In this way, an audience of individual listeners is created, each of whom brings their inimitable sensibility into the concert hall relationship. The artist and the non-artist are equal in this, for any walk of life can be imbued with artfulness; that is, with a care that is manifested with love and connects us with the most transcendental questions.

The genesis of visual, literary, and musical art, all share the foreshadowing of a transformative process, from the moment the artist confronts an unformed idea, and in their creative process, lifts it to artistic expression. With music, the interpreter takes the “instructions” of that expression and strives to return to the composer’s original impulse, the least performance-like representation of that expression. This is how we must communicate with the listener: in the least performance-like performance possible, so that they too can confront that original creative impulse.

Pianist Artur Schnabel from a series of lectures he notably called “Music and the Line of Most Resistance”: The greater a musical work of art, the more will it include of the total expressive potency of music. This fact explains why persons related to music by grace contemplate, perform, and hear a work familiar to them at the next stage of their development as a work in many respects different from what they believed it to be before.

If we believe this to be true, don’t we all—composer, performer, and listener alike—become more art-full as we grow in our relationship with a work, and by extension made closer to finding the art in ourselves? What we think of as music’s singular disadvantage, the impossibility of any illusion of adequately describing it with words or translating it into reliable visual representation, may in essence be music’s distinct advantage. It is what prevents a work from becoming fixed in our imagination and makes transformation possible.

In welcoming you to Yellow Barn, I wish you a summer filled with Calvino’s “tangents”, “reasonings”, and “fantasies” as you listen, while holding this from Mr. Schnabel close, both inside and outside Big Barn: Art is not an occasional refuge or a holiday, but a perpetual and inexhaustible mandate to our spirit.

—Seth Knopp, Artistic Director