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

Just a short quote

I just found this quite in the internet, reading about Zen Buddhism, something that has been interesting me for a while now.

It is not the pointing finger.
It is the direction.
It is not the Path.
It is the Walking.
There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.
Buddha

And together with that, I leave you with what, to me, is one of the most amazing pieces of music ever written, the Well Tempered Clavier by J. S. Bach (here performed by Ottavio Dantone). every time I listen to it I just feel a huge peace that invades my whole body. I love how everything fits in the music, how every chord progression, every melody seems to fit perfectly, as if it was meant to be like this since the beginning of the universe. I think it is this sense of mathematical perfection what gives me so much peace when I listen to it.

Sex, Love and Porn

I don't know if I mentioned it already before, but I really love watching TEDx talks. So today surfing in YouTube I found the following TEDxJaffa talk by Ran Gavrieli. 

The talk got me thinking a lot what I think is one of the greatest issues in our contemporary society, which is the eternal confusion between Love and Sex, and the predominance of the latter over the former. It may seem like a very unimportant problem, and it is certainly not a problem that worries many people, but I think that solving it can change radically our society, the way in which we relate to each other and to ourselves even.

Amsterdam is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been in, with its canals, its ancient houses, the smell of marihuana in the air (especially near the center), the tulips, the windmills, the Concertgebouw. It is also a city that is famous for all its business around sexuality, which ranges from sex shops and XXX cinemas to the Red Lights District, where I understand you can pay €50 for 15 minutes with a prostitute. 

Walking around this neighborhood and seeing so many women there, behind glass windows, siting down, barely dressed, texting someone on their phones, without a smile on their faces (why should there be one, anyway?), and then all the men outside, smoking, looking at them, choosing, choosing, as if they were pieces of meat or apples or something like that, but not women, I thought how is it possible that we can just reduce other human beings to less than objects, just tools for our own gratification. 

 

The prostitutes in Amsterdam

The whole idea of paying for sex is, to me, a brutality, because it is reducing sexual desire to the level of the other bodily needs, like defecating, when, in my opinion at least, sexual desire is one of the driving forces of humanity. Sexual desire in this way is very closely related to romantic love, although I wouldn't go so far as to call them the same thing. It is what makes us approach another person, and want to be with them the rest of our lives, it is like an arrow that points from us to a person in particular. This is one of the deepest and most honest feelings we can have, when we feel attracted sexually to someone, we cannot fake it, we cannot help it either, it just happens. And, usually, when we feel sexually attracted to someone, we also begin to feel emotionally attracted to them as well, we feel happiness when being close to them, we want to know everything about them, we want to make them smile, we want to love them and feel loved by them. The sex is, in a way, the logical conclusion to all this, a fulfillment of what was being built since the first encounter.

What, unfortunately, happens many times, is that we seek sex, we seek pleasure, just for itself, or as a way to feel power over someone or over ourselves. The idea of sex as a kind of economic transaction comes to mind, having sex with someone in order to obtain some kind of benefit from them. This is completely the opposite of what I previously described, and when the first leads to happiness and fulfillment, the second one leads to suffering and death in every way. Porn and prostitution derive from this search for empty pleasure, because they turn sex into a product, something that you can quantify, that you can attach a value to. If you pay €50 you can have sex with me for 15 minutes and we will do this and this, if I like it (which is very unlikely) I might make you a discount. For €15 you can buy a DVD of a 15-year-old girl having sex with an older guy. There is variety, there is a wide selection of products that you can buy. This is the great brutality, this is what is unnatural: to turn sex into a mere transaction, into a product, into something you can control and quantify.

In the end, I think the problem is fear as well, as it always is. When experiencing strong sexual feelings, we realize that we cannot be alone, we, in a way, see the void of our loneliness in space, in the world, because sexual desire is not intended, originally, to be satisfied by masturbation (this does not mean that I think it is a bad thing), but shared with someone else, so that both can be satisfied together. When we feel this desire, very deep inside ourselves we are afraid of loneliness, because we realize our own frailty, we realize how much we need this other human being in our lives. we cannot cope with this fear, so we recur to substitutes for it, we pay other to satisfy us, or we look for anonymous encounters, or we deny it altogether and profess chastity. As a race, I think we are very good in inventing excuses and half-solutions to our problems, because we cannot be bothered to go through all the work of actually finding the solution that will end them.  We are also very good in condemning that which we do not understand, and we certainly know very little about sex.

I think the solution is very simple, although it is sometimes very difficult to realize because of this mindset that I just described, that leads us to either avoid the problem or seek stupid easy solutions. We just need to be honest with ourselves, to always remember that what you feel is the most important thing, that in the end what we desire is not a satisfaction of some bodily need but a deep and fulfilling connection with another human being, a relationship that will make us forget that we die, that our lives are meaningless and that our planet is less than a speck of dust in the universe. What we need is not sex, in the end, but love, a love that makes us immortal.

I leave you with this really cute short that I saw a while ago and came back to my mind while writing this:

More information on Venezuela

A great friend of mine wrote yesterday a very interesting post describing very precisely the situation that has been going on in Venezuela. Here is the link to his blog:

http://blogalagua.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/civil-protests-government-violent-repression-and-killings-in-venezuela-february-2014/

I also copy here a fragment of a comment his wife (my own cousin) left me yesterday on my last post:

We feel utterly powerless… this time fear has prevented us from marching. Here in Mérida the situation is extremely dangerous due to the continuous circulation throughout the city of armed motorized groups supported by the government that not only “defend the revolution” attacking the masses of gathered people, to the total consent of the police, but also rob and hit people in the streets, even if they are not doing anything (trying to get somewhere, for example).

It is terrible… I write to you today Saturday, and I haven’t been able to leave my apartment since last Monday, except to walk my dog or go to the nearest bakery, which every day has less items to sell. I don’t know how sustainable this situation is for the Government, if the answer we will have will be worse – more repressive, more annulling by force and injustice –, if changes occur for better or worse, or if the worst occurs… we get used to it, we bow our heads and renounce once again. This last thing is what has been happening with the most recent presidential elections, with the scarcity of the most basic goods, with the acceptance of the loss of our rights but also our health and life.

This hurts me very deeply, because Venezuela has always been for me an ideal land... the country of great weather, beautiful music, passion, love, happiness. Now all that is gone, sold to the greed of men, destroyed by them in search of lies and more lies. People are trying to fight back this darkness that approaches, but evil always seems to be more resourceful, especially when it is in control of one of the biggest oil reservoirs in the world. Why are we like this? Why can we produce so much hatred just to win this little stupid game we ourselves created, this game of "money" and "power"? Why do we still believe in these ghosts? 

To all the people in Venezuela, I am really sorry not to be with you there, not to be also fighting with you. I feel greatly for you, my brothers and sisters. The night is dark now, the fire and the smoke are filling the air, but let's hope that the future will be brighter, let us hope that we will earn our freedom, a real independence from the Empire, not the European or the North American Empires, they do not exist, they are the same as us: human beings that love and suffer and pay taxes and worry about how they will pay for the groceries next week, but from the Empire of lies, of money, of greed. We are a wealthy nation, we have enough for everybody and more. Let us use this, let us share this, let us make our wealth the building blocks to our freedom. Let us not fall again into the lies of Fidel Castro, of Hugo Chavez, who lied to us in the most horrible way, because they did it in our own language, through our own souls, using our hopes and dreams to manipulate us into becoming hordes of ignorant slaves that only live to serve the machinery of money. There is no love in their words, there is no compassion, no humanity. They are dead, they always were.

Protests in Venezuela

I'm watching the news now. A Colombian channel because all the news from Venezuela are blocked, apparently. What I understand of what is happening is the following:

Public insecurity is so high in Venezuela, that even the students inside their classrooms at the universities were being robbed and threatened. This caused them to start making protests a week ago or so, demanding more safety and improved living conditions from the Government. The National Guard stepped in to try to stop the manifestations, which led to violent confrontations between them and the students.

Today, there was some kind of manifestation organized by the Government to celebrate the national youth day or something like that, so some people went to that. Most people, though, went to a pacific march organized by the opposition. I'm not sure but I suppose that in most cities around the country (I'm guessing the major cities) the manifestations organized by the opposition were much more popular. This again led to the unleashing of the National Guard and the beginning of the violence once again. 

 I don't know much else because the information NTN24 (another link... apparently the first one is blocked by the Government) is receiving is also very vague, since there is a huge media blockade surrounding this. 

 

This picture is not from today, but from another, earlier, manifestation in Venezuela.

Why is this happening? Well, Venezuela historically has been a country that suffered under leech-governments. Governments that came and took as much as they could and they left. But this one has been different, this one has lasted. 15 years ago, more or less, Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela after a failed military coup and some years of imprisonment which, of course, rose him to the image of some martyr of Justice. He continued to create a political system under the disguise of socialism and centered on his own charismatic persona, together with the images of the Gods Fidel Castro (Father of the Revolution) and Simon Bolivar (Eternal Father of Venezuela), which systematically led to the decay of the whole economic, social and political systems of Venezuela. After his death, he was succeeded by Nicolás Maduro, who more or less continued the same idea, but now with the added value of his necrophilic view of the legacy of Chavez (there is not a single speech where the Holy Corpse is not mentioned).

Ok, let's face it. You can deny all this, you can deny the injustice, you can deny the inflation, you can justify it, you can soften it, but what you cannot deny is the fact that the country is divided into two very clear sections that hate each other to death. I declare myself incapable of approving of any government that has this effect on the people. Of course, you can be against the government, you can disagree with it, but to be declared enemy of the State for just expressing you opinion, or to risk being assaulted on the streets, or to risk losing your job for not liking the government, that to me is intolerable. There are more injustices than this, of course, but to me this is the main source of concern, since it predates the society and its workings in every way imaginable. 

But the use of hatred is, of course, understandable from a strategic point of view. We are led to it all the time by different groups that seek to control us. By saying, "look at them, see how different they are from us, they are bad because they are not how we are so we must destroy them," they make us feel afraid (fear again), feel that our safety and our lives are at stake because of this other group that threatens us, so we unite and follow these individuals that only seek power. It all begins with the distinction "us and them" (Pink Floyd comes to mind), which then leads to the false idea of threat, which then leads to, hatred, violence, and death. All their power rests upon the idea of hatred towards some "other," just because that other is different. This necessarily means that there is nothing of true value in what they offer, if there was, then they wouldn't have to recur to such devices. We need to question ourselves, is this person in front of me essentially different from me? If the answer is inevitably yes then, is this a bad thing? Should I hate this person just because of them being different from me? Does her/his otherness interfere in some way with the normal proceedings of my life? Will it at some point? Will this interference constitute a threat to my safety? You will realize that, in most cases, the answer to all these questions is "no." You will also realize that this ideas are not your own at all, they are most likely planted in your brain by some great organization or another, just so that you will be attached and dependent on them and they can have more and more power over you.

 

Talking about stupid hatred... is it anybody's fault to have dark skin?

The only response is love, unconditional, undying love. We are one, we are not different, we are all sisters and brothers. There is no reason to hate each other, there is absolutely no justification for it. In this unforgiving universe, that does not care a single bit for us - we are not even a dot, not even the infinitesimal fraction of a dot -, we must realize that we only have each other, that we are the ones that give meaning to the void, that there is nothing else but us. Wars, money, greed, violence, fire arms, boundaries are all unnecessary, ridiculous, childish, if not downright stupid. 

No more lies, please, no more hatred, no more empty words. 

Venezuela, I love you, you are my mother. I don't want to see you die, you deserve much better than this. Let us be worthy of you.

 

There are so many simple things that can make us happy and express our love...

The French accordion pieces

Last year, around November, a friend approached me and asked me to write something for him. He plays the accordion. I was a bit scared because I have never written anything for that instrument, and I felt also that I was a great responsibility to write something on commission, especially for a friend. I could not let him down. But I must also confess that I let the rest of the year pass, without writing a single note for this project. 

Then, walking around the Hague, on a really cloudy day that suddenly became sunny, thinking about a friend that lived not far from where I was, I had a vision of a melody. I thought this whole situation was so ridiculous, so terribly cheesy, that I immediately thought of some Jean-Pierre Jeunet film (if the name doesn't ring any bells, maybe the film Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulenc does, at least for the music), so I decided to write the piece, but to give it a title in French. The piece was called Paysage de la ville où tu habites aussi (landscape of the city where you also live). 

 

 

The city where you also live

 

After I finished it I decided to make it a part of a collection of pieces, so I decided to write three more. Now I am beginning to write the second one, I hope. Yesterday I threw away everything that I had written about it, because I thought it didn't work, but then I showed it to my friend and he played it a bit differently and it worked! so I think today I'll continue along those lines. I already have some ideas for the titles of the pieces.

• Je n'ai pas imaginé les montagnes, les oceans
• Se laisser porter par la fleuve ou le sommeil

The second one I took from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a short story by Borges (of course). I like that they are so abstract, because that gives me the freedom to work completely outside of their meaning, and even make the music unrelated to them. I just keep them because they sound nice. Also I wanted to avoid the impressionist-like title of Les jardins sous la pluie or something of that kind. I prefer the more Takemitsu-like title A flock descends on the pentagonal garden.

In terms of structure, the pieces are very short, not more that 2 minutes each, and each work around one idea only (at least that's the initial plan). I want them to have a more naive sound, but with a dark or weird side as well.