Yesterday I showed my teacher the vocal project for the first time. He was really interested in it and made lots of comments. I am very happy that I already have a text, he liked it very much too, and that the music is flowing much more than it usually does with me. The comments he made I can summarize on the following notes.
- Write more of the piece and then come back to the first sections and correct them. The idea is that it is better to correct the beginning of the piece, which as of now is less than satisfactory, when I have a clearer idea of what happens later.
- Do not relay so much on the pedal of the piano. My initial idea was to keep the pedal of the piano throughout the whole piece, which gave it a more murky and dark sound, but my teacher pointed out that this can become a really cheap ad cheesy "horror movie" effect, and that a better solution might be to think about using combinations of sustained and short notes, to give more life to the music.
- Use notes outside the tonality to give more interesting colours to the music. The musical ideas I have for the song are all mainly in C minor, although in a less conventional way than writing a Vienese-style Lied. Nevertheless, my teacher still suggested that it would be more interesting to add "outside" notes to the harmonies, following the layout of the overtone series. In other words, to take advantage of the fact that, when having a C on the bass, I could, for example, add a B natural on a higher octave, without the risk of it interfering with the functional characteristic of the C, but adding a more interesting colour to the chord that is formed.
- Make the piano part follow the voice part. In what I have written up to now, the voice mainly comments on what the piano does harmonically, my teacher suggested that it could also be interesting to try and do the opposite, making the piano do harmonies commenting on what the voice does melodically.
It was a really interesting and intense lesson, I have lots to think about and to write as well. I agreed with mostly everything that my teacher suggested. The piece will be quite long, I plan to use all the 7 minutes we were given as a maximum for it.
Right now I am listening to the 11th Symphony by Shostakovich. I have some mixed feelings about it, beacuse I enjoy it very much. It's really beautiful music, very emotional and appealing, with a strong message and a clear voice. But, on the other hand, I cannot help but feeling that Shostakovich repeats himself so much in his symphonies. There's always these passages with low, long notes on the bass and sad melodies on some wind instrument, or this big orchestral hits with long melodies by the strings in double octaves. Also, I have the impression that, as he got older, he was less and less adventurous with his musical material. You hear, Symphony 1, 4 or 5 and then to 10 and 11 and mostly the same things happen, as if he was forced to write them and didn't have much material to work with, so he decided to recycle. Maybe I am being too harsh with him, and it may sound as if I don't like his music. Nothing could be more false, for me, Shostakovich has been one of my great influences, mainly in terms of expression and how to deal with melodic material to make it sound unique. But I have the impression that he betrays himself in some way.
Siberia, this is what I imagine with the beginning of the Symphony.
I also feel this with Penderecki: that, as he got older, he became "softer" in the sense that he went back to more "tonal" ideas and less adventurous orchestrations, for this you can compare his Symphony No. 7 with any of his earlier pieces like Utrenja or Polymorphia. Maybe this is something that happens to all of us, as we get older, we begin to look back to things that give us more safety, maybe because we fear to look into our future, and so we look back to the past for some comfort. I don't deny that this might also happen to me, I am still 20, so I am very young and I have no idea what it is to have lived for so long, and have more and more the certainty that my death is near. Again, maybe I am being too harsh on them, maybe all this is a lie, but, first of all, I don't condemn them for doing wat they do, both of them are masters in their own way, and second, I think it's a good thing to think about.
What would I do when I know I must be facing the last years of my life? Would I also become afraid and look back into earlier, probably happier or more fulfilling times? Or will I plunge, face forward, into this new, final era of my life and see what is there for me? I always thought being old must be one of the most amazing things in life. To be able to look back to your life, and see all that you have done, all the things that have happened to the world around you and inside you, to see the new generations building their own world, having their own ideas, changing the ideas that your generation had. I think it must be wonderful, but at the same time terribly sad. Sad at the thought of having to leave this world, with no certainty of another world after this one, with maybe an increasing fear of the void, of the possibility that there is nothing else, and that we just extinguish, like candles, leaving no trace but the memories and the things we have done and the people we have loved.
I think much of what we do is guided by our fear of death. The burden of our consciousness is that we are always aware that life is an ephemeral phenomenon, and that we have absolutely no clue of what happens later. We fear anything that would pose a threat to our lives. We fear that which we don't understand because we fear it will harm us and cause us pain. I think this is the reason why we have wars, why we have money, why we have religions, why we develop policies against groups of people, why there are countries, why we build walls, why we accumulate goods, why some starve while I can write comfortably in my computer after having had lunchm why we hate Mondays and birthdays, why we consume drugs, porn, Facebook, newspapers, alcohol. All of this is because we cannot avoid the horror of the void, of the fact that this life is not eternal, that it will end some day and after that there will be nothing of us left, because we know, deep inside ourselves, that there is no ultimate purpose in this world and that anything and everything we do is meaningless for the Universe.
Our planet
Maybe I have too much of a Lovecraftian vision of the Universe, but I think this should not be a dauting idea. I think that, although all our experiences would be meaningless in the universal scale, they are not meaningless to us. We live, we die, we dream, we love, we hate, we create and destroy in this small spec of dust. What we do here affects us, we are destined, whether we want it or not, to live in this planet with each other and with all the other creatures that also inhabit it. I think that this Lovecraftian universal scale, more than overwhelm us and make us become suicidal, should make us see that we cannot pretend to be the masters of the Universe, the guardians of the Sole Absolute Truth, because we are not, we are just an infinitessimal dot in space. I think this should make us realize the meaninglessness of our urge to gather money and power, to destroy our enemies, to hate each other, because in the end, we are the only thing we have, I think the only thing that would make us worthy in the face of some cosmic oblivion, would be our sense of unity and the thought of looking at someone else in the eyes, some unkown news vendor on the street, and feeling that this person is also a part of me, that he is my brother and she is my sister, that we are all one.
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