Fine Tune

Last evening I went to the music tent at the Aspen Music Festival and saw Deborah Voight sing some of Mahlers later compositions. It was music that I am not familiar with, but I loved it. I probably loved it more because I really had no expectation of how it should be played, or can be played at its best. Perhaps the music was extraordinary. It was a true "ignorance is bliss" situation. Dumb and happy was I but, more importantly, inspired.

I really find that music and paintings do more to cultivate creativity than anything. Listen to something foreign and beautiful and you are traveling. I might as well have been in Vienna. It makes me want to make beautiful things. At those  moments the life-goal becomes leaving jewelry behind that charms for generations.  The pursit of money is lost, fame, transient and what remains is a desire to make beautiful things. I get a strange high when a piece of jewelry is finished correctly. I am very rarely impressed  by modern jewelry for a multitude of reasons. The same can be said about my feelings for opera. I have seen more operas and listened to more soundtracks of great recordings then is good for me. I anticipate moments in specific pieces of music and judge the piece based on my former feelings and knowlege of it. When the delivery is great it makes magic. Truly great moments at the opera are never forgotten.

I will never forget one preformance of Eugene Onegin sung by Neil Shicoff and Dimityri Horotovsky. The nuance and delicacy in the fabric make an ephemeral yet indelible impression. Is that possible? I can't really decide if having raised the bar is good, but I will assume it is because I can always go listen to unfamiliar music and be charmed. Jewelry is not the same. There are hallmarks of great jewelry that are too obvious to ignore. Long has there been a differentiation between Gems and Jewelery. Gems are for the most part extraordinary stones, or singular pearls, those that define a mistake in nature that manifested itself in a unique way. For example, a 45-carat D-flawless diamond or a Burmese pidgeon blood ruby or a Kashmir sapphire in royal blue shimmering silk. These are the obvious ones.  They are also rarely set in anything but classic settings that garner no attention. Why distract from something so beautiful? Jewelery is what we see in the stores, average stones, often pretty settings in different ways that designers find attractive and saleable. For the record, neither of these categories are close in beauty, significance or rarity compaired to a gem being put in a singular extraordinay setting. A gem in a wonderful piece of jewelry is Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma in his prime, with Puccini in the audience. Today we rarely see trained hands, born of the apprentice system, phrase the great stones into masterpieces. I wish it happened more often.

I try at every opportunity to turn a piece of jewelry over and explain the importance of an ajoure (a window cut behind stones set in pave), and how it allows light to play within a stone. I also always include grill work on pieces that can afford the extra weight. (I will include images of fine repierce above). Workmanship is the rarity in jewelry, as well as its integrity; with or without gems included. I may see fifty diamonds over ten-carats on women's fingers to every truly beautifully made piece of jewelry. I get so geared up when I hear or see beautiful things, it's the most important thing to me. I think pretty is the most underrated part of being alive today. Art class was the blow-off class to most, to me it was the most important. Making things truly beautiful requires considertion  of the finest details and putting your heart before your head. I like it that way.