The 36th annual Five Boro Bike Tour, the largest cycling event in America, kicked off Sunday in Lower Manhattan.
Starting in Battery Park, cyclists from across the tri-state area (and around the world) pedalled a 40-mile trek around New York City--hitting every borough from Manhattan to the Bronx to Queens to Brooklyn, and finally, Staten Island.
In the light of last month's Boston Marathon Explosion, security was at an all-time high for the 32,000 cyclists.
Backpacks, saddle bags and hydration systems were all banned from the car-free ride.
And save for a 51-year-old Almont, Mich. man named Michael Boren who died after suffering a heart attack while crossing the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, no one else was killed or maimed.
That said, our thoughts are with Mr. Boren and his family, all the same.
Always keen to make any cycling-slash-music connection, we here at Classicalite couldn't be bigger fans of the late composer Mauricio Kagel--especially his more theatrical, perhaps even impish work.
So, when we stumbled upon this video uploaded by Los Angeles' Monday Evening Concerts, we thought it might take a little sting out of Boren's sudden cardiac arrest (as well as those banned saddle bags).
Mauricio Kagel's Eine Brise: A Transient Action for 111 Cyclists is pretty much exactly what it sounds like--a set of sound actions for any peloton of 111 riders.
(N.B. Eine Brise translates as "A Breeze.")
In fact, here's the instructions page from the Edition Peters score:
According to Rick Schultz of The Los Angeles Times, Kagel got to see a few performances of Eine Brise before his own death in 2008, but "never with the full complement of 111 cyclists."
"The closest he got was 109," Schultz wrote in his review of Monday Evening Concerts' L.A. premiere. "At the last minute, two participants got flat tires."
Talk about your VeloBeats, indeed.
Here's hoping, then, that whatever corporate entity shells out enough funds to sponsor the Five Boro Bike Tour of 2014 will find a way to honor the spirits of both Michael Boren and Mauricio Kagel.
