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.