Karen Kohler’s blog posts and musings about life, art, love, nature, the universe and everything. You in the key of mastery.
I really didn't know much about Philip Seymour Hoffman until he died. I hadn't seen most of his films and none of his plays. Yet I've been moved to read about him. His unexpected death struck a chord and prompted people to weigh in on not only how he died but how lived. I found it fascinating that people [...]
You've got to find some way of saying it, without saying it. - Duke Ellington In cabaret, I've experienced enormous freedom. I've lived moment-to-moment for an hour at a time, using anything that comes up in myself and offering that to my musicians and my audience. The result of my dipping into my own emotional palette is that others dip into [...]
"Nature is a glorious school for the heart! I shall be a scholar in this school and bring an eager heart to her instruction. Here I shall learn wisdom, the only wisdom that is free from disgust; here I shall learn to know God and find a foretaste of heaven in His knowledge. Among these occupations my earthly days [...]
Let's face it: some music is really hard on the ears! I don't mean the noise that's out there, I mean the real and serious music. What makes music rough is this beautiful, unstable and highly useful thing called dissonance. In a dissonant chord, the notes aren't aligned harmonically and so the sound is tense and unpleasant. But dissonance [...]
Within us all there is a seed of resplendent life force. We artists feel it especially. This seed lies in its casing, a hard exterior shell. We have to let the flowering take place. For an artist this is always a necessity...this having to bloom. We cannot help it. We can hinder it, prevent it, stifle it, go another way. It does not go [...]
The towering figure called Nelson Mandela has died. This is the poem that got him through prison: Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of [...]
I attended a screening of the new film, Nebraska, with my Canadian actor and pal Jean Brassard. What a truthful bit of film-making it is and what amazing casting! In the live chat with Bruce Dern that followed, he shared some of his wisdom: 1. Don't push. Don't perform. Don't show us anything. Let us find it. 2. Always [...]
My life happens first and my art imitates it. That's the usual way. What I experience becomes my authority in what I bring across on stage, in a scene, a song, a mood, emotion, sentiment, argument. I admit I'm an adventurer, happier on the edge than in the center. Yet anchored in the center with at least one foot, [...]
I witnessed something beautiful the other night in an intimate room here in Manhattan...an error so seamlessly handled as to go almost unnoticed. The singer was turned slightly away from her audience, looking off stage left and sharing a duet with her bassist at the opening of a tune. Their dialogue was sparse and sensual and then, nearly a [...]
Emptiness is the void. Silence is the void. The place of origin from which all comes and to which all returns. Silence is key. Without it there is no music. Claude Debussy said, “Music is the silence between the notes." Think about that. Music is the silence between the notes. Silence is space, space is physical – the earth, [...]
