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