After meeting Phil Nimmons and David Braid this week and watching them play I feel possibly more inspired than ever. They have this way about them and you can tell that they are entirely in tune with the soul of the universe. It is the groove, our heartbeat, I believe that everyone's heart beats in sync. There is rubato of course but overall we are all connected by this universal groove. I feel like my next piece should have a sort of free, jazzy feel to it because it's meant to represent the character's existence after they realize the soul of the universe (the timeless clockwork) and how upon this realization they are able to be in the moment and ride that colossal wave, the same way Nimmons and Braid do. It's actually amazingly convenient how they came to town at this time because they sort of unconsciously put the final piece of my puzzle in and now I feel like I can explain what I'm trying to get at now.
The timeless clockwork is another word for the soul of the universe, which is the thing that we are all a part of that connects us all. It's based on consequences, an interconncted web of action and reaction, one thing in the beginning of time caused something else to happen, which caused something else and so on until the world we know was cultivated. The realization of this web helps us to accept things as they happen and be in the moment. This is the realization that the character has over the course of the first two pieces. In the third one he has realized the timeless clockwork, he is in the moment, hence the free jazzy feel. He's in the universal groove that Phil was talking about, and nowhere else. I guess it's sort of like Buddhism from a musician's perspective. Riding that colossal groove.
I hope I did an ok job explaining myself.
One of the great privileges of reading class members' blogs is that you get a glimpse of the way in which they think and relate to the world, something that doesn't always emerge very clearly during regular class interactions.
ReplyDeleteYou have a philosophical bent, something I can definitely relate to, and I encourage you to continue exploring these issues of larger significance. I'm not exactly sure how these explorations improve one's skills as a composer, but I think it's certainly possible that they might.
That said, most people in an intro composition course find that their intellectual reach exceeds their technical grasp, so just keep in mind the need to develop compositional technique, such as motivic unity, motivic development, playing with time, differing degrees of harmonic complexity, etc.
Great blog entry! Keep it up.