My musical life up to now

Already 5 months have past since I begun studying at the royal conservatoire. I can say that this is almost exactly halfway in the academic year (although apparently it's already the second semester), and I think it is a good time to reflect a bit on how my life has changed during this time, especially regarding what I came here to do, which is write music. 

I would like first to begin mentioning what, to me, has been the bad side of it. Since I have never lived in the Netherlands before (or in Western Europe, for that matter), and certainly not alone anywhere, the process of adapting, of creating my own lifestyle, my own routine, has been very slow and I can say that I haven't used my time in the best way possible. I have maybe been too lazy, or too comfortable since I have such a relaxed schedule (I never have lessons before 9.30 am, and never more than 3 lessons a day, sometimes even less). That being said, I do think it is just a matter of adjusting to this new life, and I already feel more organized, and more in control with what I do and when do I do it. 

 

Art by Veri Apriyatno

I also feel that I have learned a lot, not only at school, but also from sharing with other students. The polyphony workshop, although I was one of the people that felt it was a useless subject, actually taught me something really important: that the best effects, the best sounds, most of the time come from extremely simple techniques. In other words, that most of the time I, personally, think too much about the notes, without focusing on the actual music, and thus become too absorbed by the abstract part of it, losing the perspective and thus not seeing that the answer is right there in front of me.

I have also learned to be much more critical with my own work, but critical in a useful way. Through my teachers comments I have learned, that it is really important to try to understand why something works or doesn't work, but also to be free and follow the intuition. This relates to what I wrote yesterday, which is also one of the greatest things I learned, that is to not be afraid of expressing myself in the most honest way, since that is only what counts in the end. 

One of the most interesting experiences that I have had was to write the vocal piece and be advised by my teachers to write the music in a way that is different to what I would normally do (i.e. a graphic score as opposed to a traditional score). I think the process of writing this piece was a landmark for me, even if I don't do this kind of thing again in my life, it gave me the opportunity to think about music in a completely different way. 

For this semester, in terms of projects there are 3 big objectives for me:

A piece or set of pieces for accordion, commissioned by a friend of mine who also studies at the Conservatoire.

A 10-minute piece for violin, cello and piano that will accompany a dance choreography by a Chilean dancer whom I met through a pianist friend in Santiago. 

A piece for the "Rijnhof Project," which basically consists of writing a piece that will be performed at a cemetery in June. Up to now, the idea is writing a piece for 3 trombones that will be based on some Gregorian melody, also utilizing some medieval polyphonic techniques. I still need to think more about it, though.

I also haven't forgotten about the set of piano pieces inspired by the William Blake paintings, but I first want to finish one of these projects before beginning that.

And, as always, more Brahms: op. 119 performed by Sviatoslav Richter

Fear

It is interesting to think about the influence of fear in the creative (and even personal) life of a composer. I don't mean to say that it does not affect the lives of other people, actually, I think it is an essential part of human behavior, but today I want to focus on the musician, on the creator of music, or the organizer of sounds, however you want to see it. 

To begin with, I don't think there would be any composers, of musicians, if human beings didn't have in them a great fear of the void, of the nothingness that surrounds our existence. The act of producing music, was in the beginning, closely related to the spiritual realm. It is still used, in many contexts, to induce us into superior states of mind, where we are not able to distinguish the physical from the non-physical. Think of a shaman in a state of trance, dancing to some fast and vertiginous rhythm of drums, think of a techno party, all the people half drunk dancing to the repetitive and loud music that surrounds them and fills the space. All this gives us a sense of immortality, it makes us, in a way, forget our immanence. Music my or may not be the language of the soul, but it certainly gives us the illusion that we have one. Through music, we feel that we can reach deeper and more subtle levels of meaning. Whether this actually happens or not is almost irrelevant, I think the illusion is enough. 

Nevertheless, I do think this actually happens, I think that music helps us reach deeper within ourselves and see who we really are. Primarily, music is about feelings, about sensations, whether it is the delight of perfect consonance (as in a pythagorean sense, thinking of the parallel fifths sounding in some forgotten cathedral in the midst of the 9th century) or the despair of an unresolved triton during a 4-hour Wagner opera, and feelings are the most honest product of our minds. You can deny a feeling, you can hide it, but you cannot not feel it. This is also our most vulnerable side, which leads to the second idea.

I think another important aspect of the musician's mind is the fear of being vulnerable in front of the world, that is, the fear of revealing our deepest emotions in front of an audience. As someone that grew up in a more Western-styled society (I wouldn't call South American culture "Western" without wincing a bit), I was always taught, albeit implicitly, not to show my feelings all the time, not to speak of them, especially if they were negative, because this means revealing your weaknesses to the world. If someone knows that you have some sort of soft spot, they might use it against you. 

As a musician, the aim is exactly the opposite: to be as expressive as possible, but also to be able to understand and manage your emotions. But here is where the two worlds collapse, because when you compose a piece of music, some of this inner world is revealed in it, whether you want it or not, whether this was your intention or not. The fear then comes from this conditioning to hide our feelings from other people, which leads to a fear of going "too far" with intuition, since that would be revealing too much of oneself. The aim, then, I think, is to  gain confidence in oneself, so that the expression of the inner world will not be blocked or determined by how the audience will perceive it, but more by what do I really want to say here. Self knowledge in the deepest way is clue here, because it helps to realize what do I really feel, and what comes from this social conditioning.

I will continue this when I have more ideas, for now I leave you with the Deutches Requiem, by  Johannes Brahms.

New piece

Yesterday I finished the piece for singer and piano, the one based on the text in Sanskrit I posted some weeks ago. I ended up making a graphic score, which I think is better for the kind of free music I heard in this piece. It is a little bit scary, though, since I feel I don't control what is going to happen musically, since there can be a great number of different versions of the piece. The whole idea is based on the superposition of small fragments of music, which can be repeated with slight changes during a time span, so there can be a huge number of musical results. What I fear is that the result will be dull and boring. But, then again, it all depends on the performers, which is what scares me. 

Of course, if we get more psychological about it, what I fear is judgement. What I fear is being exposed to the audience, in one of my weakest sides, which comes out when I try new things. The only reason why I don't feel so sure about this piece is because I have never tried something like this before. This doesn't mean that it will be a mess, it only means that I cannot expect anything from it, because the whole idea of what I did is that the end product is very unpredictable. This is a really interesting idea, because it relates to how life actually is.

We think we know what is going to happen tomorrow, we make plans, we organize, we decide what do we want to do next year, next month, next week, tomorrow, but still we really have no idea of what will really happen. Maybe there is an earthquake and the city we live in is completely destroyed, or maybe someone we love dearly just dies during the night, or maybe we win the lottery without having participated in it, or maybe we die, or maybe not, or maybe we wake up and decide to just escape from our lives and go live in the middle of a forest. Anything and everything could happen in the next second, your crush from high school may call you and speak about their love to you, or not, or maybe you will walk into a supermarket and you will find a really ripe avocado, like you've never found in Europe (the only good avocados I've found are Chilean avocados, of course) and you will remember about that other love, when you were even younger, and you went to their house after school and eat bread with mashed avocado and salt, and then go upstairs to play, or swim in the pool if it was summer. The possibilities of life are really infinite, or at least they seem like that, since "any instant is as deep and varied as the sea," as Borges wrote.

So my actual fear is more related to the fact that I realize that we actually don't have any control on the events that guide our lives (I say we, because I think this is a universal fact, or at least a human fact), we cannot control the fact that it gets cold in winter, or that our lives invariably come to an end. But this idea is so daunting (there is no way of actually planning your life, of knowing who you will be tomorrow, let alone in 20 years) that it's almost impossible to accept. Likewise, the idea that I cannot foretell how my piece will sound is almost unbearable since I cannot form an idea of it in my head that is less than vague, at best, and nonexistent at worst. The problem, then, in the end is my fear of what I don't know. As Lovecraft wrote “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (Supernatural Horror in Literature).

 

Art by John Kenn Mortensen (more here)

William Blake

Some weeks ago I watched the movie Red Dragon, with Anthony Hopkins (one of my favorite actors). The actual plot of the film is not very interesting (it is better to watch The Silence of the Lambs, which in my opinion is much more interesting and the plot is almost identical, plus it's also with Hopkins), but in it one of the main characters is obsessed with one particular painting by William Blake, which is The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun, which is the one below.

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun

by William Blake

I knew of William Blake before, but this made me look more into his art, and I was absolutely fascinated by it. The paintings are so mysterious, depicting very spiritual situations, with mythical characters, or ceremonies, or prayer. Here is a little selection I made.

Angel of the Revelation

Jacob's Ladder

Satan in His Original Glory

The Ancient of Days

Illustration from Song of Los

Nebuchadnezzar

Isaac Newton

I was really interested, intrigued and shocked by these images, and thought that maybe it could be a nice idea to write small pieces inspired by each one of them, a little like what Modest Mussorgsky did. I still need to think more about this, but I already have some small ideas for some of the paintings. 

And I leave you with an interesting, but equally puzzling quote by William Blake from A Vision of the Last Judgement.

Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed and governd their Passions or have No Passions but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion but Realities of Intellect from which All the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. (E564)

Composition lesson today

Today I had a composition lesson, the second one since classes began again this semester after the vacations. I showed him what I had done with my harpsichord piece. The comments were in relation to two main things in particular.

• Exploit more the polyphonic capabilities of the instrument. Most of the work just spun around monophonic musical ideas, which was in part the intention, but it is also true that this is not the sole intention of the piece.
• In relation to the previous remark, a richer harmonic language could be of much use. throughout the whole piece I stick to the same mode, one which I composed that is a D minor harmonic scale with G flat. Following a more Messiaen-like idea, my teacher suggested that I should combine different "modes," (pentatonic, hexatonic, octatonic, major, minor, etc.) to give more harmonic "and even melodic) variety to the piece. This is a very interesting idea, which I think will solve the main problem of the piece, which I shall discuss now.

 A harpsichord, because why not.

The main problem I found with the piece is that most of it seems to be a prelude to something that never comes, as if there was no real music going on, just insinuations of something that might be. This, as a concept, is not wrong or bad. What worries me is that it comes not from a conscious decision but rather from careless and sloppy writing. I saw the process of writing this almost as a bureaucratic paperwork, just filling in the space with notes that seemed right. I don't want to mean that it was all unintentional or that I didn't think of the music. I had a very clear rhythmic idea, and the harmonic mode I chose has been in my mind for months, but the music was very raw, unrefined in the worst sense. 

The problem is that I tend to forget that composing is, in itself, both means and end. Just as performing, when you compose there should be nothing left at random, nothing should be unjustified. At least this is how I see it for my own music. I hate having notes that are there just because I happened to put my pencil on that spot and I might as well draw a note here instead of there, it looks nicer on the paper. Such music should be burned and destroyed, if it ever comes from my hand. It is worthless. I need to focus more on spending time in front of the blank page, just thinking. Organizing my ideas, developing them, making them my own, even bleeding them. I need to work harder on them, that's all. 

I leave you now with what I am listening, in case you are interested. 

Johannes Brahms (yeah, still with him) - Symphony No. 2 op. 73

Brahms

Today I heard a friend of mine play op. 118 (here by Murray Perahia) by Johannes Brahms. It was mainly excerpts form it, since he was still working on it. I love Brahms, he is among my favorite composers, but I didn't know this opus. As my friend told me, it seems op. 118 and 119 are the last pieces he wrote for piano, and they were dedicated to Clara Schumann (I haven't checked this out precisely, I'm just going with what my friend said). They are so beautiful, so painful.

Brahms did know about loneliness, about love, about the pain of loving, about the heart of the world. In his music in general, I feel the great epic search for truth, for the ultimate meaning, but also the great sorrow of humanity. Our own incompleteness, which we seek to fill with the presence of another human being, with another person whom we may never find, whom we seek all our lives. We seek desperately, as Brahms sought, with anguish, with pain, but also with hope. We hope that, in the end, the world will make sense to us, that time will forgive us and grant us eternity.

 Johannes Brahms

We try to make our best of this world, to get as much as we can from it, to live life, but there are always obstacles to this. In the music of Brahms, I see this despair, this hopelessness, but I also see some undeniable hope, or some hope for hope, some deep deep yearning for light among a world of darkness.

A poem, by Jorge Luis Borges (this is the second part, full version in Spanish here)

1964

II

I shall never be happy. Maybe it doesn't matter.
There are so many other things in the world;
any single instant is deeper
and more diverse than the sea. Life is short

and even if the hours are so long, one
dark marvel stalks us,
death, that other sea, that other arrow
that frees us from the sun and the moon

and from love. The joy that you gave me
and took away from me must be erased;
what was everything must be nothing.

Only the faint pleasure of sorrow remains,
that vain custom that draws me
to the South, to a certain door, to a certain corner.

---



A little extra gift, my favorite orchestral piece by him:
Johannes Brahms - Tragic Overture op. 81
 

Waar ben je, mijn vriend?

I saw the message on the last day of 2013. It was 17.00 (in Chile it is four hours earlier than here), and I was just checking my email as I usually do when I'm bored. There it was, the message. I couldn't believe it, I looked at the screen for the longest time, without moving. 

Where are you now? 

I remember the last day I saw you. I didn't speak so much with you because I was in a hurry to go in, and you were outside smoking. In a hurry, as if the world was about to end because I was late to something I didn't even need to do. 

Should I have stayed? Should I have talked to you more? 

I didn't know, Bart, I didn't know. I didn't see the darkness, I didn't imagine the oceans, the mountains. 

I am listening to your music now, are you here with me? Am I listening to what you saw?

What did you see Bart? Have I seen it too? I must have. I have sailed those oceans too, although I've come back many times. One is never the same after being there. The world is never the same. 

Why did you stay, Bart? Why did you not come back? 

I am not judging you, I am just trying to understand, I am just trying to go on with my life. You were all of us, in a way, and we were all you. On man is all men, Bart, and all men are one man. 

Did you cry Bart? Were you afraid? Did you see it, the void?

Now I must go, I must try to go back to my normal life. How can I laugh again? I have laughed, but it doesn't seem right. Once you dream of the sea, happiness does not seem possible anymore.

Follow the lights, Bart, follow them, you deserve it. And sleep, sleep calmly, close your eyes and, for once, forget about everything.