The Book of the White Road

The Book of the White Road is an interior monologue that grew out of my notes on Cezanne, Degas, Rodin and other artists of their period. It both refers to and mirrors their discoveries which marked the beginning of an entirely new century of artistic concerns: the rejection of the careful arrangement of continuous lines, for example; work with multiple points of view, deliberate fragmentation, techniques for activating the surfaces of the work. 
Mentioned in the text: (1) Quinson, a village northeast of Cezanne’s home and studio in Aix-en-Provence.(2) Cezanne’s painting, The Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), made toward the end of the artist’s life-- an important inspiration for Cubism. (3) Hortense, Cezanne’s wife, whose portrait is here at the Phillips Collection.
Thanks to T Begley for recognizing the character who arrived in my notes--and for devising “truncations,” a method of taking text and alternately omitting words in the initial (subject), medial (verb) and final (object) positions of the the sentences. 

An earlier version of The Book of the White Road was performed in collaboration with classical pianist Carl Banner, using selections from Chopin, Milhaud, Debussy, Schubert and others. The recording may be found at http://dcmusicaviva.org/recordings/recordings.htm