Oscar Ortega
The Artist Description of Oscar Ortega
Aug 3, 2007
Here is a musician who, more than any other musician, is a master at discovering the tones out of the realm of suffering, depressed, tormented souls and at giving speech even to dumb animals. Nobody equals him in the colors of late fall, the indescribably moving happiness of the last, very last, very briefest enjoyment; he finds sounds for those secret and uncanny midnights of the soul in which cause and effect appear to be unhinged and any moment something can come into being "out of nothing." More happily than anyone else, he draws from the very bottom of human happiness--as it were, from its drained cup, where the bitterest and most repulsive drops have merged in the end, for better or for worse, with the sweetest. He knows how souls drag themselves along when they can no longer leap and fly, nor even walk; his is the shy glance of concealed pain, of understanding without comfort, of farewells without confessions. As the Orpheus of all secret misery he is greater than anyone, and he has incorporated in art somethings that had previously seemed to be inexpressible and even unworth of art, as if words could only frighten them away, not grasp them--very small, microscopic features of the : yes, he is the master of the very small.
But that is not what he wants to be. His character prefers large walls and audacious frescoes. He fails to see that his spirit has a different taste and urge and likes best of all to sit quietly in the nooks of houses that have collapsed; there, concealed, concealed from himself, he paints his real masterpieces all of which are very short, often only a single measure in length; there he becomes wholly good, great, and perfect--perhaps only there. --But he does not know it. He is to vain to know it.
*Scott*
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