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)