Ave Maria

I haven't posted in a long time, mainly because I was too overwhelmed by many things in my life going on at the same time, which I don't think is a very good thing, since I do tend to forget about very important things when I feel overwhelmed. For me, writing in this blog is very important since it is the only place where I can really express my thoughts about many things, without having too much confrontation or questioning. I can just experiment with ideas and write them one and many times until they are fully formed or fully discarded. So now, I decided to continue. 

I am working now on one piece and outlining in my mind another one. The piece I am working on is a setting of the Ave Maria for soprano and piano. It is not a very innovative instrumentation in itself, since many composers before me have done it and I think it is a sort of canonical form (like a piano trio or a string quartet), almost a cliché. But a friend of mine, who is an extremely talented soprano, asked me to write an Ave Maria for her, and she specifically wanted it to be in this cliché-like form. So I accepted, a but over-confident of the ease with which I could accomplish this task. I was so mistaken. I have never struggled so much with writing something. I spent the whole summer banging my head against the desk, trying to understand which harmonies I should use. The most important thing for me now is harmony, it is something I am still discovering and something I feel will be of the utmost importance in my future work. 

***

Ave Maria

gratia plena

dominus tecum

benedicta tu in mulieribus

et benedictus fructus ventris tui

Iesus

Sancta Maria

mater Dei

ora pro nobis peccatoribus

nunc et in hora mortis nostrae

amen

***

During this time I came across Peter Schat's "Tone Clock" system for organizing twelve-tone series by forming triads and I knew I had an answer to my doubts. I had to check it out because two of my teachers mentioned it to me in different occasions, this was too much of a coincidence to be taken lightly. I followed his system and wrote down a series that is basically composed of two "modal" hexachords separated by a semitone. Of course the system is a but more complex than this, but the sound result is mainly this. The rest of the music came very naturally once I had the harmonies figured out, the rhythm extremely simple (there is only one sixteenth note in the whole piece), the melodies long and in general a very sparse sound. I feel very satisfied with the result. 

I will talk about the piece I am developing in my mind in a later post. 

Before I finish this post I just wanted to talk a bit about a composer I just discovered. His name is Walter Zimmermann and he teaches in the Universität der Künste in Berlin. I really loved his music for its very clean sound, very slow, almost cold feeing. It is a very beautiful music, very clear. I want to learn more about it, I think I will investigate my school's library to see if they have some of his scores. Actually, I want to study with him. I am planning to do an ERASMUS in the UdK next year and my intention is to study with him, I hope I can accomplish this. 

For now, I leave you with one of his beautiful pieces, Festina Lente.

  

Writing again after a while

I haven't written for a while because I arrived two weeks ago in The Hague, and I was just trying to get the hang of things again, get used again to my conservatoire-student lifestyle, living alone and all that. Back home I didn't have to worry about so many things as here, like buying food or cleaning the house, or washing my clothes, etc. so here I need to get used to that again after one month of not caring about it at all. So I was in the midst of that and I didn't give myself time to write here.

As anyone who reads this blog may now already, I think a lot about stuff. Maybe my thoughts are not complex, maybe they are very naive, but I can't help but thinking about stuff all the time, maybe even worrying uselessly about things. My main concern these past two months has been the fact that I haven't been able to write a single bar of music that I find worthy of keeping. I don't think it is because I lack the ability to achieve this, but more that I haven't found the right approach to reach what I want in my music. What do I want in music? Speaking for myself today (this might change in the future), I seek the following things in my music:

• That it is well crafted, meaning that there is a logical relationship between all the elements that compose it.
• That it is not over the top. It has to be expressive without being unnecessarily loud or cheesy.
• That it has substance. It has to communicate something, or at least not leave the audience with the feeling that nothing happened.

These three elements are the most important aspects I seek while composing. The first has to do with the process, the second one with the result of this process, and the third one with the perception by the audience of this result. 

I think my main problem is with the first point I specified. To analyze this I need first to know what are the elements I perceive as composing my music as of today. I can say my main interest for now has been mainly in rhythm and timbre (instrumentation mainly, rather than extended techniques in a  particular instrument). This has left me with a huge void in the areas of melody and harmony. Of these two I feel the greatest weakness in harmony. I don't understand how to form a coherent progression of chords, be it in a tonal or atonal context. I mean, in a proper tonal context it is rather easy because the rules are already given, but to make it interesting and "original" has proven almost impossible for me. In the atonal world it is even worse because there I don't feel any control at all. 

So I decided to read a bit and see what other composers have done to face this problem (I don't think I am the only one that has had this problem, for one I know John cage never solved it and was never interested in it, but I am... so I need to find a way of approaching it). I began reading about Peter Schat's Tone Clock (Toonklok), mainly because there is a huge sculpture of it in the main foyer of the conservatoire. I promise a picture of it on my next post (I have to take it myself since there are none in the internet). Below a drawing of it. It is a very interesting serialist technique which gives very interesting results and which he himself encouraged other people to use. I like the idea of going for some time into serialism because I think it gives a strict base to organize ideas, which can later be stretched further and further, given rise to more interesting solutions to the problem of harmony. The other book I am beginning to read is volume 7 of Olivier Messiaen's Traité de rythme, de couleur et d'ornithologie. The reason to read this book is because I have always been fascinated by Messiaen's use of harmony, and the beautiful, strange chords he sometimes finds.

I leave you now with one of my favorite pieces by Messiaen, L'apparition de l'Église eternelle (The Apparition of the Eternal Church).

Problems with my new piece

I have mentioned before my intentions of writing a piece for a friend who is a sopranist. I was fascinated with his voice because he can reach really high notes but he also has a very nice tenor voice, and he can also do weird and very interesting effects with his voice. Together with that, I came across two very interesting texts, which I wanted to use for something. These were the Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina) and the Prophecy of the Seeress (Völuspá). I also had the idea of writing a bigger-scale work than I have written before, for at least 5 musicians, including voice. All these ideas merged into one, but I still have lots of problems with this. 

The first problem is that I am still undecisive about which text to use in the piece. Both texts I chose are very interesting in terms of both content and language. Both are pretty long (the Völuspá is really long, but I intended to make a selection anyway) and both deal in some way with ancient worldviews. I still find myself going from one to the other in my mind, unable to make a choice. I think it is because I feel this would be the only opportunity I have to write a work using either text, which doesn't necessarily have to be so. I could use the unused text in a different occasion. 

The second problem is in terms of harmonic language. I find myself constantly recurring to a kind of film-like, dorian (more like the first church-mode) harmonic context, which I feel very unsure of. It feels somewhat unavoidable for the kind of music I want to write and yet I also have the impression that I shouldn't write it in this style because it would be resorting to cliché. But then again, I can use old techniques and still be myself, can I not? I am not copying anyone, I am using some tools to achieve my aims. I think what stops me most from writing this piece is the constant internal battle I have regarding the harmonic language I want to use and the harmonic language I feel I should use. 

And here I want to extend a bit on this. I think this has been one of my firecest internal battles in terms of the music I write. I have grown to reject the typical Hollywood-action-blockbuster soundtrack with my soul, because I think they always resort to the same kind of sound, the same chords, the same orchestration for the same special effects, the same chase sequences, the same building-destroying shots and so on. That being said, I also feel that my harmonic sensitivities are always on the tonal side. I have colleagues who can write very "modern-sounding" music with the greates naturality. I, on the other hand, love melodies and chords. I don't mean to say I dislike music that doesn't have this; some of my favorite composers couldn't be considered "tonal" by a far stretch, but still I seem to fail at every attempt I take to try this. I think it is simply because of a lack of interest in this, it sounds "ugly" to my ears when I do it, I feel that, to write this music, one has to come up with some sort of system, which I still haven't discovered. Every time I try to write something outside the tonal system or some weird stretch of it, I feel lost and usually the results are less from satisfying.

From this I have come to the conclusion that, in this period of my life, I am either not ready or not willing to leave the tonal area and its surroundings (large as they are, they are not eternal). I need to find a way of making it my own; I need to understand what can I do with it, in which ways I can stretch it to fit my needs of expression, order but also restraint and apparent lack of order.

I leave you to what I consider to be one of the most wonderful solutions to this problem in the history of music: Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (choreography by Pina Bausch)

Being home

A couple of weeks ago, I came back to Chile for the summer vacations. Apart from the fact that I got a really bad cold that has lasted already exactly a week, it has been a very nice, quiet and relaxed time. At first, I must say I had mixed feelings about coming back for the vacations. I mean, there was no choice, the tickets were bought, but still I felt kind of uneasy coming back home after living alone for so long, it is always difficult to get used again to being again under your parents' roof (with all that entails) after you have had so much time making your own decisions and choices.

It was a good time, though. I have rested a lot and slept a lot, both because I have vacations and because my mom cooks (she cooks delicious also) and I also don't have to worry (too much, at least) about cleaning and stuff like that. Also, I don't share the same vacation period as my friends that study here, since here they are already beginning their second semester of classes, so I have a lot of time to myself, and time with my mom. 

This has served me to reflect upon how my previous year in The Hague was, and what can I learn from it in order to have an even better second year starting this September. 

The first thing I realized was that this previous year I was not as focused in my studies as I would have liked to be. This doesn't mean at all that I wasn't focused, just that maybe I got distracted more often than I would have liked and that I could have been more productive in my studies. For this, I need this year to be more organized with the use of my time and also be more strict with myself, not letting myself be lazy (which is one of my biggest problems). This year I will also be having violin lessons, so I need to be organized enough to have time to compose, study and practice violin. 

The second thing is that I didn't manage my living budget very well, so I sometimes spent more than I should have. This overspending was basically due to two things: food and travel. It's not that I ate lots and lots, but that I ate out more than I should (i.e. more than my budget allowed) and I travelled aproximately once every two months, This, of course, meant I spent much more money than I was meant to on a given month. To fix this, I need to travel less and cook my own meals as much as possible. By doing this I will reduce very much my expenses. On top of this, I plan to look for some sort of part-time job to also have a small income to help finance this (my study visa allows for a maximum of 10 hours a week of work, which I think is also the amount of time I will have to work anyway). 

The third thing is that I realized that, despite all my efforts, I gained weight and started developing a belly (oh the horror). This I think is also related to my eating habits, which were a bit too disorganized and also due to the fact that I was not so consistent in my gym-goings. So this year I will try to cook my own meals to eat healthier and also go to the gym at least three times a week, maybe occasionally going out biking long distances on weekends and holidays. 

So this was my little reflection about my last year, and the three points I wanted to improve for next year. I hope I can make it, but even if I make a small progress towards this ideal, I will feel accomplished. It's all about being organized in the end. 

New project

Remember that piece I was planning to write using the text in Latin? Well, in the end I changed the idea a bit. Now I am going to use a different text. It is called the Völuspá (The Prophecy of the Seeress), it comes from Viking mythology, from a collection of epic poems called the Prose Edda. It deals with the creation and the destruction of the Earth, with a subsequent rebirth.

Artistic depiction from one of the final scenes of the Völuspá, when

Thor fights Jörmungandr, the serpent. He is succesful but mortally wounded, 

and is only capable of taking 9 steps before dying.

I like this idea more for several reasons. The first is that the text is much more appealing to me, it is very epic and it deals with themes that have always interested me, such as the Nordic gods, the orgin of life, the end of the world, epic battles, and mythological creatures such as Jörmungandr (the great serpent). Secondly, the text itself has already a kind of rhythm which I can use to give more structure to the music. Third, I can make selections from the text because all the different stanzas are clearly separated. The other text was a very compact whole and I would have to use it entirely for it to make sense. 

The fourth reason is also a main difficulty of using this text, which is the fact that I plan to use the original in Old Norse language. This is very appealing since I love the sound of this language, it is very archaic and perfect for the kind of music I want to write. But it is a major difficulty when trying to explain to the musicians how to pronounce the words correctly, since it has lots of very uncommon sounds and the writing system can be unfamiliar (although it uses the Latin alphabet). To solve this, I have thought of recording myself reading the fragments of the poem I want to use, and give this recording to the musicians, so that they can listen to the pronunciation. I also found a video on YouTube where a man chants part of the Völuspá, so I might also include that. Luckily, there are plenty of resources in the internet regarding the pronunciation of Old Norse, like this, which is I must say a bit daunting. Still, I know it will be a major difficulty of the piece, especially for the singer, since he will have to deal with the text the most, but I have faith in him.

The Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, Iceland. I know, it's a Christian building,

but still it has to me at least the feeling of Nordic epicness.

Also I think it is very interesting the fact that I am going to collaborate with a male singer that has a soprano voice range. This kind of ambiguity is also perfect for what I want, since the poem is narrated by a Völva, a Seeress, a woman who gets into trance and can speak to the gods, see the future or register can and the past and give advice based on that. I think that having very extreme changes in range from a high soprano voice to a tenor voice can add to this sense of being in a trance, of speaking with many voices. 

In terms of instrumentation I am keeping the choices I had for the previous idea, plus some percussion. So the instrumentation in all will be 2 harpsichords, accordion, cello and percussion apart from the singer.

I am very excited about this, I think this idea can have a very ncie result, now I just need to sit down and begin writing, slowly but surely.

I leave you now with a traditional song from Iceland, telling the story of a man that dies because he refused the love of a mermaid to save his soul for Jesus Christ.

I have no idea what this other song is about, but it's really cool. Apparently it's about Siegfried (the one from the Nibelungenlied) portrayed as a dragon slayer.

Final exam tomorrow

In approximately 12 hours I have my final composition exam for my first year. I want to have a moment to reflect on how my year has been, what did I learn, what did I leave behind and what lies ahead (at least in my mind now).

This year was a year of lots of changes and lots of new experiences. It is the first time when I have had so many performances of my pieces. It has been a very enriching experience to work with performers because I learned how to express myself more clearly, which influences the way in which I approach notation. I realized that sometimes all the expression indications are redundant and that the music can speak for itself, only needing maybe an f or p to give the reference of intensity. Before, I used very 19th century-style indications like "moderato cantabile." Now I think this kind of indications are superfluous and a simple metronome mark or concise tempo indication is enough. For the acordion pieces, I wrote short pharses that dictate more the mood of the piece, but in a very abstract way. For other pieces, I just wrote metronome markings. For other pieces, none of these were used bu I recurred to other ways of determining the tempi, such as breath length or just the performers' free choice. 

In a more structural way, I started to focus on more simple material, and trying to develop it as deeply as I can or want, but always focusing on very few elements at a time. This especially happened from the second of the accordion pieces onwards. Oh tiempo tus pirámides was a greakthrough in this sense, where I focused on very simple rhythmic motives that were almost not even developed throughout the piece but were just repeated and recombined with other elements, but always very simply and almost like crystal. I also dared more to explore the world of silence, of the space between the notes. It is a fascinating phenomenon to realize how one can create so many different atmospheres just by insinuating a contour with a few notes and silences. It is also a very counter-intuitive way of performing for most classically trained musicians, who are used ot more 19th century music that is sound all the time. 

I also went away from the kind of faux-romantic style that predominated my school years. I was very influenced by the mid-late romantic composers and I wanted to write music like them. I don't reject this period in my life, I learned a lot from it, but now I am more interested in simplicity, in creating musical structures that are pure and simple and elegant without being pedantic. I like this way because I think music like this creates lots of space for meditation and slef-kowledge. In an ideal or naive expectation, I would like to affect the people that listen to my music in that way, to make them feel at peace with themselves and the world, to have a moment to rest from the noise of the world. 

What lies ahead? Well for now I have 3 projects in mind. The first, which I think I can finish quite soon, is to write a cadenza for the first and second movements of Haydn's Piano Concerto in D Major. My sister is studying it and I offered to write her a cadenza to play with it. I already have some ideas for it. The second is the piece I mentioned before based on the Tabula Smaragdina. The piece will be approximately half an hour long and the instrumentation is singer (sopranist), accordion, cello and two harpsichords. My idea is that using two harpsichords will give more depth and increase the possibility for multiple voices sounding at the same time. And the third piece will be a collection of short pieces for fortepiano inspired on paintings by Giger (I also mentioned this a while ago), to pay him an homage after his death. After that, I have more ideas but they are all still quite blurry (a piece for solo harpsichord, a piece for organ, another for two pianos and one for solo violin, and also I thought of one for solo singing bowl), also, I just prefer to focus on what I have clear now before I begin wandering around mroe and more different ideas. It confuses me.

I am excited and a bit nervous for my exam tomorrow. But at least for me this year has been completely worht it, I am really satisfied with what I have done, I learned a lot and I feel like coming here has been one of the best decisions I have made in my life so far. I feel really fortunate to be here and to have learned so much. 

And I am feeling inspired tonight so I will end this post with a simple mantra.

ॐ शान्ति शान्ति शान्तिः

Recordings!

This week I finally got the recordings from the performance of two of my latest pieces. I've already talked a lot about them here, the first one is the vocal piece with the text in Sanskrit, which was finally titled as Pavamana Abhyaroha; the second one is the piece for accordion, the Trois tableaux.

I feel really satisfied with both performances, all the musicians with whom I worked were really interested and involved in the project and they all gave their best to perform my pieces. Also most of them liked the music very much, which is great at many levels. First, it makes me feel reallu happy that someone likes what I do, then it results in the musicians enjoying to play the pieces, this results in the pieces sounding great, which results in the audiences also liking the music. So, it's a win-win.

I was a bit doubtful with the title of the accordion piece being in French, because I feel that it could sound very pretentious, and the intention of the piece was quite the opposite. But in the end I decided to keep it, because in my mind the accordion sound and the idea of the piece has a kind of Parisian air to it that I thought was highlighted by the titles in French, there is no more reason for it. The thing is that still I don't feel that Trois tableaux is a great title for it, it's a bit bland, so I guess I have to think a bit more about it.

The métro in Paris

The other piece was completely satisfying to me. It was great because the organizers of the concert decided to project on the background the texts of all the pieces that were performed (they were all vocal pieces). I sent mine in the original script (in Devanagari, one of the scripts used for Sanskrit), so the audience (unless there was some person that knew Sanskrit) had no idea what the text meant, which is good because I always felt that the translation of the text sounds to preachy and cheesy.

So, without further ado, here are the links.

Pavamana Abhyaroha, performed by Jasper Leever (voice) and Ivan Pavlov (piano) at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. April 22, 2014.

Trois tableaux, performed by Robbrecht van Cauwenberghe (accordion) at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. April 25, 2014.

A thousand acid alien tears for Giger

Two days ago, in Zürich, R. H. Giger died, he was 74. He was, to me, one of the greatest artists that ever lived. He suffered from chronic night terrors, which means that he had horrible nightmares every time he went to sleep, and he painted them. To me, he was like a window into the dark parts of the soul, into our own suffering, which I think is one of the most important things we need to understand, because that makes us realize our own frailty. His art is really dark and sometimes very disturbing, but also very humand and beautiful. He creates impossible machines, or robots, or aliens which reflect at the same time such deep states of mind. But to me it's also the fact that his art is just so perfect and beautiful and moving in every way. 

Here is an article to the Huffington Post piece on his death.

"My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy. If they like my work they are creative ... or they are crazy."

For all my geek friends over there, you will recognize this... yes? no?

It's part of the concept art for Alien!

And this one is one of my favorites actually...

Now thinking about him and the deep impression his art has always had on me, I think that maybe I should write a piece in his honor, to pay my respects to such a great artist. I don't think anything I do could be up to the task, but I guess he would have appreciated it even if it was modest in its attempt. I decided to change completely the concept for my fortepiano piece and rather make it an in memoriam for him, forgetting a bit about Beethoven.

New pieces in process

I was absent from the blog for quite a while since there was a really big festival organized by the composition department, the Spring Festival, and I had two pieces performed (the accordion pieces and the vocal piece in sanskrit) and played in two other pieces by my friends. It was a great week, with over 12 concerts concentrated in 4 days, but at the end of it I was exhausted, I slept for 4 days in a row barely leaving my house. 

Now I began three new pieces, one of which I think is finished. 

The first one, the one that is finished or almost finished, is a piece that will be performed in the rhijnhof cemetery in June. I already mentioned it before, it's a piece for beer bottles. I decided to make it as free as possible, the score is just a text indicating what kind of sounds can be made from the bottles, what kind of texture should be aimed for and how to end the piece. I hope that with some two or three rehearsals this piece can be ready to be performed. It is by far the most free thing that I have ever written. I wonder what my teachers will think about it, but I didn't do it just for laziness, I genuinely think that this is the only way to obtain the texture that I want, and also the state of mind of the performers.

The second one is a piece for solo fortepiano that a friend asked me to write. The fortepiano is the parent instrument of the modern piano, but it has a very different timbre, and very different sonoric capabilities. It has in general a softer sound than the modern piano, but it compensates by having a very clear lower register, which in the modern piano is in general very muddy. What I decided to to with it is "deconstruct" the Sonata op. 2 no. 1 by Beethoven in different ways for each of the movements. The first movement is almost readyin its first draft form. It basically consists of a mega-extension of the last two bars of the first movement of the Beethoven sonata, which is just the final cadence. For the second movement I have the idea of making a "minimalization" of the second movement of the sonata, adding lots of silences and deleting as many notes from the original as possible, so that the shape is still at least vaguely implied but the texture is completely disappeared. For the third movement, I wanted to write a different dance, now one inspired in the dances from the region north of Chile, south of Bolivia, but still using in some way (that I haven't yet thought about very deeply) the material from the third movement of Beethoven. I still have no ideas for the fourth movement, but it will be very fast, that I know for sure.

I hope I won't make the old man angry with my music.

The third piece is in stand-by mode for the moment. It will be a piece for two harpsichords, accordion and singer. The text is the Tabula Smaragdina, a XII century alchemic text in latin, which deals with the nature of the unvierse and the origin of all matter (the One Thing from which all came, and that kind of stuff). I don't particularly believe in that, but I find it very interesting to use a text in latin that does not relate to the Roman Catholic ritual. Also, latin is one of my favorite languages, and the text is actually quite interesting.

An image inspired by the Tabula Smaragdina, 

it's not less weird and epic than the original text.

Pale Blue Dot

That's the name of a very famous photograph taken by the spaceprobe Voyager 1 at 6 billion kilometers away from Earth. It shows our planet as seen from that distance.

Our planet is that tiny light dot you can see over the yellowish 

stripe closest to the right edge of the picture.

About this photograph, Carl Sagan wrote the following. 

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. 

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. 

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

A short poem

This is a poem by my favorite writer, Jorge Luis Borges. I think I made that clear already but just in case I say it again. Below the original in Spanish and my own translation to English.

LA LUNA
A María Kodama
Hay tanta soledad en ese oro.
La luna de las noches no es la luna
que vio el primer Adán. Los largos siglos
de la vigilia humana la han colmado
de antiguo llanto. Mírala. Es tu espejo.

THE MOON
To María Kodama
There is so much loneliness in that gold.
The moon of the nights is not the moon
that the first Adam saw. The long centuries
of human wakefulness have filled it
with ancient weeping. Look at it. It is your mirror.

The future

I was watching a documentary called Into Eternity, which is about a place called Onkalo that is being built in Finland to store nuclear waste until it stops being dangerous to the environment, which will be in 100.000 years. I haven't yet seen the whole film, but I think one of the great problems the people involved in this project are facing is how to let the future generations, in 10.000, 20.000 or more years that this place is not safe, that they haven't found one of the great marvels of the Ancient World, but one of the most dangerous places in Earth. How to send a message across de millenia? In what language will they speak? Certainly not the one we speak now. How, then, can we communicate with them, if they don't even exist now?

It also made me think that we live in a tiny world, and we don't want to see beyond it. We don't want to understand the vastness, the infinity of time and space, the passing of millenia, the death of stars, the creation and destruction of life in millions of planets around the galaxy and in the most remote parts of the Universe. We live in this tiny, tiny world made of illusions and ghosts, of tiny gods that created the flowers and the blue sky, of tiny laws, our tiny concerns. I am not saying they are not important, we live in this world, we have to deal with it every day. we wake up, we go where we have to go, we do what we have to do, we eat, we cry, we worry about our waistlines, we take the subway, we walk, we walk more, we talk to friends on the phone, we worry, we suffer, we love, we are loved, we pray to our own gods, we sing quietly, we die, we resurrect. All this happens in this tiny tiny tiny tiny speck that floats quietly in the void. 

We hate each other just based of false ideas. We live behind masks because the systems we created have no space for difference, for truth. The systems we created are built to deny the void, to deny meaninglesness, when it is part of everything we do, it is the very essence of our beings. If we have a soul, then it is intimately connected to this void, to this meaninglesness. If there is a life after death, then it is nothing more than a return to this void, a complete embrace of the ultimate oblivion. But we choose to deny this entirely, convincing ourselves that there is, indeed meaning, that "everything happens for a reason," that after death we will be in a "better place, up there." We cling onto the hope that gathering once a week and repeating some ancient formulas (is 1500 years anything compared to the great ocean of 100.000 years that we are facing?) that we hope will bring us closer to some entity, and have it play in our favor. 

What is the pain of one day compared to 100.000 years of nuclear waste? What is the life of Christ? What is the hatred of one man? What is winning the lottery? What is writing an opera? We do the things we do because we hope some kind of recognition form them. We forget that our world is microsopic, that the rest of the universe is completely oblivious to our existence. We earn money because we have fear of dying alone and poor in some corner of a forgotten city. We marry because we want to have children that will populate the Earth and give us the illusion of some sort of immortality of our body. We kill and destroy everything that we don't understand. We spread hatred towards those that play against our own interests, even if they don't do us any harm. Why can't we remember every day of the void? Why can't we realize that the only thing that has any meaning is love? Why can't we realize that the only gesture that will give any meaning to the utter insignificance of our race is a hug, a kiss, an honest gesture, coming from within, from the willingness to connect with one another? Why can't we remember that that which unites us is much stronger than that which divides us? Why can't we remember that we all live crammed in this tiny rock, and that we might as well get along with each other?

100.000 years. The only remain of our civilization will be a cave, a huge cave, full of the most dangerous type of waste ever conceived. Is this the summary of what we are? Will this be our legacy for the future? All the destruction and suffering we have caused on our world will be reduced to this, a single cave full of our excrement.

Beautiful melodies

I am always impressed when I losten to music that has beuaitufl melodies. I really can't understand how that happens, how anybody can be able to write a melody that, with just a simple succession of rhythms and pitches can grab you by the heart and just drag you anywhere, while you just follow, half drooling, half smiling, half crying, in a state of blissful half-consciousness.

It almost seems to me that these melodies are impossible to write, that one does not write them, one discovers them. They are hidden somewhere behind this palpable reality, maybe just taken from the void itself. Maybe we just come accross them casually, as one would meet a good friend in the street, a friend one has not seen in a really long time so one wants to have the longest conversation with this person, afraid to lose her again in the whirpool of the world. Maybe melodies are also like that, once you find one, you have to cling to it with all your might, because if not you will lose it and it will never return to you, but will be lost forever in the void.

I have never been able to write a melody like that. I am still young, though, and just beginning a more dedicated life as a composer, so I might still have my chance. But it seems such an impossible task, when you listen at the music of other, greater composers like Sibelius, or Wagner, or Tchaikovsky or Grieg, composers that just seemed to breathe melodies, to dream melodies, to be melodies, these sweet sweet melodies, that just make you yearn for something unknown, that take you so many different places, to appeal to the last filament of your being.

Jean Sibelius

I have sometimes had the impression that the era of great melodies is over, after the old generation, those that were born still with one toe in the 19th century, died, we were left with a huge vacuum of meaninglessness. We didn't know what to do, we thought everything was lost. After the Great War everything was lost forever, and have had to rebuild everything again. We have had a few prophets since then, there was Stockhausen, there was Cage, there were many others, they opened new doors to new sonic universes.  There is, maybe, no other way but to just continue our own divergent ways, to find our own universes, to create our own sounds, and to look back and up to these great monuments of sound, to these immense abstract creations of light that were left to us from those older days, and be inspired by them, or reject them.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

There have been great moments in our new era after the Great War, after we decided to destroy our planet. we have been granted with beautiful visions of light, which maybe gives us hope of a brighter future. But we are too often too afraid of accepting these visions, of realizing them, and often we choose not to listen to them because the light they show is too blinding, or too incomprehensible for us now. 

Jean Sibelius - Kullervo op. 7

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Inori

Program notes

It is a very interesting experience to write program notes for one's music. I had to do it yesterday for the accordion pieces. It is always the question of how much to say regarding the intention, the content, etc. of the pieces. The ideal for me is not to say anything, but at the same time it is always nice to throw at least a little bit of rope to the listener, so that s/he can have a more interesting experience. In the end what I wrote is very brief, it says a lot (to me, at least) but it doesn0t say anything at the same time.

This work consists of a cycle of three smaller pieces, each of which explores a simple, concise musical idea.

The emotions we don't understand, the ones we cannot control, are, to me at least, the most honest part of our beings, of our souls.

The second part, for me, is the one that says most. I didn't know how to phrase it without making such a direct reference to the whole story behind the pieces. There is a story, there is something there, but I don't want the audience to know, or at least, I want them to convey their own stories  into the music, or not. I don't want to force anything. This is not late romantic music, this is me. It was my own story, but I think the music says enough, and the titles already say too much.

On another note, it's spring in Europe! I love spring, I love flowers everywhere, the warm wind that finally came after the darkness of winter. I love winter too, don't get me wrong, I love darkness, but I also love the sun, the heat, the flowers. There are so many flowers! I even took pictures during a walk yesterday. There are some trees close to my house that have pink flowers. Here are some of the pictures, sorry for the quality, but my mobile phone has a terrible camera (first world problems...).

This is a beautiful tree right next to my house

A canal in Rijswijk

Same canal

A very weird street on my way back home

The old town in Rijswijk

Some more beautiful trees

And the tree with pink flowers I mentioned, of all the pictures

I took, this one was the only one that came out well unfortunately...

Vocal piece finally recorded

Last week I finally recorded my vocal piece... it was an interesting experience to have this opportunity because a lot of things appeared that I didn't expect, some of them good, some of them not so much.

The final title of the piece is Pavamana Abhyaroha (follow thelink for the recording), which is the actual name of the mantra I chose as its text. It means "prayer of purification."

Some observations:

• The singer was most of the time out of tune. This is not because he couldn't sing in tune because he was a bad singer, but because in general he didn't have any reference in the piano. This problem mainly arises, I think, from the fact that I have perfect pitch and, in writing this piece I unconsciously assumed that a potential singer would be as easily in tune as I could be singing the same thing (of course, with the great difference of voice quality). I discovered, though, that the fact that he is singing out of tune is not so annoying, but what is annoying is the fact that he is singing the wrong intervals, or not reaching the right intonation in terms of interval (singing minor ninths too high, or singing the wrong melody at the end). After this I asked him to take this into consideration, to try to sing in tune, but if this is not possible, to at least sing the correct interval.
• The performers wanted to play all the time. This is normal coming from the 19th century-based musical education most performers get at the conservatoires. The idea of not playing at all during a full section of the piece is completely outrageous and out of the question, it is not even an issue I think, it just is not a thing. I wish to change this mentality in them, to make them see that not playing can sometimes be even more powerful.
• There is actually a climax at some point of the piece, which defeats completely the purpose of it. I even wrote what for me was a very clear instruction for this, but apparently it's not so much. 
  As a general performance advice, don’t let yourself be taken away by your emotions. Even though intensity and expressivity are valuable, you should always keep things in perspective. I think maybe it was too philosophical this explanation, and I might need to be more clear. 
  
  
  I forgot the singin bowl with which the piece ends... that was my bad. :( 
  
  
  
  A tibetan singing bowl
  
  
  And I have the greater existential doubt that I really don't know up to what point does the piece work in general, I don't know up to what point it defeats its own purpose, but then again what's its purpose? Did I really have a purpose in mind other than the musical idea? I didn't want to be preachy about the message of the text, I didn't expect anybody to become enlightened by it, I just wanted to write a musical piece that explored a different area, an undiscovered territory for me. 
  
  
  Did I fail? Maybe, I don't deny that the whole piece might be a failure, wanting to do too much. But I did learn a lot of things, in terms of notation, of possibilities of combining materials, of giving more freedom to the performers and all that that entails. In that sense it was not a failure. If the music is unendurable, then be it thus, next time I shall not fail, or maybe I will, maybe I will fail my whole life, but I don't think it will be a worthless journey if by failing constantly I learn more and more about music, about myself, about the world, about the sky, about sound, about humanity. If I must fail, then let me fail again and again.

The internet

I was watching today an interview to Edward Snowden on TED 2014, Vancouver. It is very interesting to hear this man, who is such a controversial figure today, talk about why he did what he did. 

The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article of him gives a nice summary of who he is.

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American computer specialist, former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and former contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA). He came to international attention when he disclosed thousands of classified documents to several media outlets. The leaked documents revealed operational details of global surveillance programs run by the NSA and the other Five Eyes governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with the cooperation of a number of businesses and European governments.

In the interview (which he did from Russia via a telepresence robot which was moving around on stage), he talked about the importance of privacy in the internet era, and how this privacy and this control over what you disclose to others is the basis for personal and group freedom and one of the founding blocks of democracy. 

Edward Snowden

Internet is indeed one of the greates inventions of the second half of the 20th century, it is almost a cry of hope in a world that is constantly divided and shaken by war and hatred. To me, at least, it is a great tool that brings humanity together in ways we couldn't have dreamed of a few years ago. Now, here living in the Netherlands, I can talk to my family on the other side of the planet in (almost) real time, I can see their faces and they can see mine. I can read about things I didn't know existed, I can learn to write in Japanese if I want, or to cook a paella, or share my music with millions of people in countries I have never been to. 

Internet, to me, is the way we have found to finally fulfill our need for connectedness, to finally feel that, despite being such tiny beings in such a big world, we can come together and do something. At least, this, to me, is the ideal of the internet, to have the capability as a species to share information, to share knowledge, to know each other, to become one big family in this forsaken rock that floats around an unfathomable space. 

As I understand it, this is the ideal Snowden and others like him are fighting for: a real interconnected world without fear.

But of course there are always those people that have power and are afraid to lose it. People that have taken what they have unfairly from others, and that know that the power they have over us is only based on fear and lies. They seek to control and to repress humanity in order to keep their positions as leadres of this world. I'm not taking about a secret conspiracy or anything, but about governments of influencial countries, big companies that control huge sectors of the market. Maybe there is no brainwashing, or anything, but there is a surveilance, there is a lack of privacy in the internet that wasn't there before, or at least that shouldn't at all be there. I agree with what Mikko Hypponen says here about surveilance: it is indeed sometimes necessary, but in most of the cases it is not, it just constitutes a violation of my rights as a user of the internet and as a human being. 

As I see it, Edward Snowden has, in a way, become a symbol of this fight for internet rights. He is no longer himself, but the voice of a humanity that is asking the governments to change, to be more aware of the people that elected them, to know that they have no power over us if we don't give it to them, to know that we do have rights and that we are not willing to sacrifice them in the name of some abstract entity like the war on terrorism.

Studium Generale

In two weeks, I need to present at the Studium Generale of the composition department, here at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. The Studium Generale is a weekly meeting where (almost) all the composition students go and listen to others present their works. I find it very interesting to see how we all have such differnet approaches to the creative process of writing a piece of music.

So in two weeks, it will be me presenting. I have mixed feelings about this. While I'm very much looking forward to sharing my work with others, and hearing their comments and answering their questions (which will also allow me to clarify my ideas), I'm also scared of showing what I do, maybe because I know I'm younger and less experienced than most of my colleagues, and maybe my music is more naive than theirs, more immature. But I am myself, I do what I do, and I love what I do. 

I need to know what I will say, though, because I don't want to be just repeating myself for an hour, just saying nonesense and not arriving to any point. 

For me, my whole life until now has been, one way or another, a really long journey of self-discovery, of trying to achieve complete honesty with myself. This is, of course, not something that is finished now, it will continue until I die, I will always discover new things in myself, new situations, new fears, new insecurities, new loves. 

This relates really closely to my process of composing, since I think what every composer does is to understand to the greatest extent possible, the sonic universe that exists in her/his mind. This is the case with me. I still feel there are many interferences that prevent me from seeing the whole landscape more clearly, the biggest one being my own expectations of my own music. This can sound very strange, but I feel there is a great difference between the music I expect to write, and the music I actually write. This difference is because the music I expect is the music I feel I should write, according to the stereotype I have of myself. The music I really want to write lies somewhere hidden below all this, and now I am gradually pulling it out. It is a more simple sound, more pure if I may, more clear, but also more sad and bleak. I don't know very well from where it comes from, but I like it, it has light, it has silence, it reflects me perfectly. 

I saw this for the first time with the piece Another year..., where the whole harmonic structure of the piece is based on three pitches (E-A-F in ascending order, but also invertions of this) and the rhythmic structure is just composed of the simplest subdivisions of a 4/4 time signature. Then, in Pavamana Abhyaroha (the vocal piece that uses the sanskrit text) I just wrote short, simple musical fragments to be freely combined by the performers. Most recently, in the Trois tableaux for accordeon, I wrote three short movements, each using a very simple idea that was kept the same during the duration of the piece. 

It is in this last example that I think I got closer to the main idea, which is basically try to pull out this true music I have buried in my head, buy understanding the little fragments of it that suddenly arise in my head. This is only achieved with great patience and focusing on small details and developing them extensively and intensively. 

In this journey, I discovered a love for dissonances, but dissonances that are subtle and maintained in time, like whispers. Also for slow slow slow music (the last of the accordion pieces has a tempo of quarter note 34), which allows me to have lots of time to enjoy individual sounds, to rejoice in the silences, or in the development of their individual vibrations in time, and how they gradually become part of the space that surrounds us, and also become the fabric of our mids. I love that soothing feeling, that suddenly all the interior monologue is gone, is quieted by the music, by a single chord or a single note even, the rest is just silence, the rest is just engulfed by that only sound. I have been very fearful of exploring this field, since of course it's very easy to get lost there and begin doung music like it has already been done, but at the same time it is a world that fascinates me. 

Now my future projects are two mainly: a ballet piece for piano and percussion, and a piece that will be performed in the Rhijnhof cemetery in Leiden, which will be for 3 trombones. I still haven't began either, but soon I will be able to say more about that.

The Rhijnhof cemetery

Mille regretz

I have been thinking a lot about the accordion piece that I am still writing. I just finished the last touches of the second movement, and now was left with a great feeling of emptiness, since I didn't know exactly what to do next, to finish this triptych. I liked the idea I read somewhere that a triptych is "life, death and everything in between," and I wanted to explore that. For me, this particular triptych works as a love story. The first tableau is the protagonist thinking about his loved one, while wondering around the city. The second one is about things not happening, things that try to happen but never actually occur, trying to accomplish something, but he doesn't dare, and in the end he loses his chance. Following this, I thought the best was for the third tableau to be the logical conclusion: he realizes he has lost all hope in his pursuit of love, he must give up and continue with his life as well as he can.

The music came together with this idea. Last week in the Music History lesson we listened to the song Mille regretz by Josquin des Prés. I really loved the music and the text, which I will copy later, it is such a simple melody, just composed of descending scales, but it is so well worked out with the four part harmonies, very simply based on patterns of parallel thirds and perfect consonances. I fell in love with it right away, I made a reduction for piano of the score and I have been playing it all the time.

Mille regretz de vous abandonner
Et d'eslonger vostre fache amoureuse,
Jay si grand dueil et paine douloureuse,
Quon me verra brief mes jours definer.
**

A thousand regrets at deserting you
and leaving behind your loving face,
I feel so much sadness and such painful distress,
that it seems to me my days will soon dwindle away.

 My idea was to make a variation on this song as the final movement of the piece, "adjusting" it to the general bleak and silent mood of the rest of the music. I wanted to make something that made reference to Mille regretz without actually being it. I am thinking of something really slow and with few notes, with lots of silences and pianissimo chords. I still haven't written anything that pleases me, but I shall continue today in with this.

Simplicity and courage

One great problem that I have encountered during my studies and my musical life in general is a great lack of courage to do things, to do what I really want, to be who I really am. I tend to be very doubtful and scared of doing things that I don't feel comfortable with. If something doesn't go how I expected from the beginning, I quickly discard it and try to begin something else, maybe because I am afraid of all the amount of work it would take to actually make something good from the initial idea. It is a great problem, but not one without solution, and not one that is impossible to overcome. Now, I realized I have it, and it is time to work to improve it. 

It is a problem that also affects many other aspects of my life, I realize. The music is just a symptom of it. when meeting people, I am generally frightful of boring them, because I feel less than them, I feel not as interesting to them, as if I had nothing good or worthy to offer to them. This is of course not true, but a result of many years of bullying at school and being always regarded as the nerd of the class, who had no social life but just served as a kind of walking encyclopedia that could be consulted in case someone needed help to study for an exam at school or a good grade in a group work. Those times are long gone, I graduated 3 years ago already, but I still have this sensation from those days, the sensation that no one really cares about me, beyond the fact that I can be useful for academic purposes, and that, in social situations, I am boring and uninteresting. This is of course not true, it is just a feeling that I need to overcome, because it also relates to my approach to the process of composition. When I write something, I usually have little faith in it, I don't think of all the possibilities it could have as a musical idea because I never think it is good enough. This leads to me trying to look for more complex ideas that usually don't give good results, or I get lost in them and end up frustrated, not writing anything for weeks and feeling miserable and depressed because I supposedly want to be a composer but I cannot write a single bar of music. 

This is kind of like the composition/personal problem that I have encountered, and I think it is time to work on it.

Although I didn't talk about this directly with my teacher, I think he realized it as well, since he now is insisting that I should write music focusing on very few elements at a time. I like very much this approach, and I think it could be very useful to be more focused in the material I write, to be able to explore the possibilities of very simple ideas and turn them into more interesting music. I think this also applies to myself in a way, because I need to begin to see the potential I have to be sociable, to realize that people actually are interested in what I have to say, in my opinions as well. In the end, it is realizing that everything has value, that I am not less than the rest, that the music I write has the potential to become great music, or at least to express what I want to say. I think it will be a very interesting journey, and definitely one that will bring great things with it.

For now, I leave you with one of my favorite percussion pieces of all:

Edgar Varèse, Ionisation

Soloists from the Ensemble intercontemporain
Students from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris
Susanna Mälkki, conductor