Those American officers and diplomats came from a world of stunning technical sophistication and global reach barely imaginable amid the unchanging rhythms and beliefs of life in Hadhramaut.
The work begins with a nasal, almost medieval burst of intertwining lines and pleading chords from the oboes, to set the mood for the first excerpt from the text, which extols the virtues of unchanging rhythms and harmonies.
A long, rolling stream, of words no one would ever use, to endless monotonous, polysyllabic, unchanging rhythms, in which rhymes went unmeaningly by like the telegraph posts, every 50 yards, of a railway journey".
And so one of Schlink's characters is "suddenly overwhelmed with a powerful longing for another life, a life with winter in the city by the sea and summer in the village in the mountains, a life with its own unchanging, reliable rhythm, in which one always drove the same routes, slept in the same bed, met the same people".
Such versatility is remarkable, especially for a composer who is accused, over and over, of repeating himself by writing works presumably built upon unchanging harmonies and rhythms and by changing so little from piece to piece.
He sounded strong in "Don't Stop the Carnival," the set's calypso, but his swing rhythms -- with unchanging patterns on the ride cymbal -- were leaden on jazz tunes like "They Say It's Wonderful," and not helped by Bob Crenshaw's plodding walks on electric bass.
You can hear the inevitable rhythm of the spinning wheel – cold, unchanging – with the voice of Gretchen's anxious lost soul on top.
More real is the repetitive rhythm of his daily life in the unchanging landscape of the Vaucluse, 20 miles east of Avignon.
