Living Inside The Music

There are just certain pieces of music that stay with you. They work their way under your skin. You live with them and, for better or worse, they become a part of you. There's a lot of music I love and I'm not trying to create a "desert island" list.

I bought John Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music when it was first released on CD in 2002. I bought it on a whim and was immediately taken with it. I had been enamored of Adams' music for quite some time and I'd been buying a lot of it for some time. I liked the piece a lot for a time but I don't think I really "got" it and more-or-less kind of shelved it, listening to it every once in a while.

Then - in 2006 I think - I bought the score. I've been reading it for over four years now and it's slowly revealing itself. Yes, it's a "desert island" piece but for me it's so much more than that. It's a piece that I could just crawl into and live inside for a while. I dare say that this piece might have changed my life. It never gets old, never grows tired. In a way it nurtures me. (It's a little disheartening to know that I'll probably never hear it in my hometown unless it's being played by a touring group.)

There are a handful of other pieces like this but Naive and Sentimental Music is probably the piece that means the most to me in this way.

What do you think? What pieces go beyond being "desert island pieces" for you? What works are a part of you?

Bloggity Blog

I'm beginning to wonder if Facebook has killed our ability to blog. Most of the readers here are Facebook friends (if not friends in real life) and The Warrior Bard and Reed seem to be the only ones blogging with any frequency (and that's nowhere near as much as all of us used to). The Bard has just recently mused on the fact that "life" takes over. This is true, but I'm also nowhere near as angry as I used to be. Well, not angry enough to find the time to post about it. Hell, I'm not even sure that anyone reads this anymore (Though there is movement based on site traffic info. People seem to be interested in the film music posts).

I don't really have much to offer today. I just wanted to post. Life has been bumpy for the last year (year-and-a-half, really) and it doesn't show much in the way of improvement. But I have a beautiful family for which I'm truly grateful and we're not homeless, so I guess that's saying something. But I'm beginning to reach the point where something professional is going to have to go my way. Yes, I had two performances this past year and I'll hopefully have at least one more this year, but that's dangerously close to living on bread and water.

As with last year I plan to write more about music - specifically film music - more. I think I started out doing a better job last year but then the blog started to get away from me again (I have a tendency to overrefine). I still like the medium. There are things here that can't be conveyed through a Facebook post (Or even a Note on FB for that matter because of its length restrictions) and I like the fact that if we get going on a good topic we can have a good conversation.

For those of you that read but never weigh in, now's the time, right?

Happy New Year.

On the interpretation of dreams

I was at the ballet. Except it wasn't the ballet. I was in a theatre. Suddenly I was plucked from the audience with someone else (don't ask me. I don't have a clue). We were each handed a puppet that looked like a fish. And, yeah, it was Nemo and Dory. I have no idea where that came from. Die Frau and I haven't yet attempted watching Finding Nemo with the kiddo. Anyway, these puppet fish were large and appeared to be designed by Julie Taymor - which I'm totally fine with. Then the music began. It was Stravinsky's The Firebird. I don't remember if it was the suite or the complete ballet but it was there. So this other person and I were "swimming" around the stage in a way that seemed to to make total sense with the music.

Then came the weird part.

I was dreaming (Duh. You knew that part, right?). The strange part was that my conscious self knew I was dreaming. I knew both that I was in a dream and that I was lying there in my bed. The strange part is that I knew what was coming next. I awoke on the downbeat of 'The Infernal Dance of all King Kaschei's Subjects."

Even in my dream it was one of the loudest things I've ever heard.

Life and Death

There is a legend about the buddha that one night, on the cusp of attaining enlightenment, he waged a great battle with (Devaputra) Mara, the chief of all demons and master of all human passions. Mara conjured all manner of things to distract Siddhartha. When he fired arrows at Siddhartha they became nothing more than harmless lotus blossoms, showering him. Mara's final test was to ask why he, Siddhartha, deserved enlightenment. Siddhartha said nothing. Still deep in meditation, he stretched out his hand and touched the earth beneath him with the tips of his fingers. The Earth acknowledged Siddhartha and trembled and shook with mighty force, bearing witness to Siddhartha's awakening. Mara had no choice but to abandon his quest and Siddhartha rose that morning the Buddha; the awakened one.

Why is this relevant to the discussion? I'm not sure. But something about the touching of the earth suddenly spoke to me. When we touch the earth beneath us, we touch the edge of the universe figuratively and maybe even literally. Cosmology has recently inferred the existence of dark matter. Nobody is sure why it's there or what it does but one thing is sure: it is the most abundant of all "stuff" in the universe. It can be thought of as an interconnected web that scientists quite literally believe binds the universe together.

I don't know why these thoughts occurred to me while thinking about my recently deceased grandfather (other than the fact that it's a perfectly natural course when someone familiar dies) but, rather than fill me with a sense of dread or existentialism about my own existence, I found it a calming, peaceful thought. In that moment I thought to myself "When I touch the ground beneath me - and know that I am touching the ground beneath me - I am touching the whole of creation. From the big bang fourteen billion years ago to Jesus' walk in Galilee some two millenia ago to a galaxy a trillion trillion miles away; they are all at my fingertips. At that moment, the whole existence of the universe is for me to understand that it is there." This isn't meant to be thought of egocentrically; but merely that in this moment, the entire existence of the universe has - for me - come down to this moment of understanding.

Life doesn't have to have a point or a meaning, just the understanding that it is amazing.

So does this make any sense at all?