A thousand acid alien tears for Giger

Two days ago, in Zürich, R. H. Giger died, he was 74. He was, to me, one of the greatest artists that ever lived. He suffered from chronic night terrors, which means that he had horrible nightmares every time he went to sleep, and he painted them. To me, he was like a window into the dark parts of the soul, into our own suffering, which I think is one of the most important things we need to understand, because that makes us realize our own frailty. His art is really dark and sometimes very disturbing, but also very humand and beautiful. He creates impossible machines, or robots, or aliens which reflect at the same time such deep states of mind. But to me it's also the fact that his art is just so perfect and beautiful and moving in every way. 

Here is an article to the Huffington Post piece on his death.

"My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy. If they like my work they are creative ... or they are crazy."

For all my geek friends over there, you will recognize this... yes? no?

It's part of the concept art for Alien!

And this one is one of my favorites actually...

Now thinking about him and the deep impression his art has always had on me, I think that maybe I should write a piece in his honor, to pay my respects to such a great artist. I don't think anything I do could be up to the task, but I guess he would have appreciated it even if it was modest in its attempt. I decided to change completely the concept for my fortepiano piece and rather make it an in memoriam for him, forgetting a bit about Beethoven.

New pieces in process

I was absent from the blog for quite a while since there was a really big festival organized by the composition department, the Spring Festival, and I had two pieces performed (the accordion pieces and the vocal piece in sanskrit) and played in two other pieces by my friends. It was a great week, with over 12 concerts concentrated in 4 days, but at the end of it I was exhausted, I slept for 4 days in a row barely leaving my house. 

Now I began three new pieces, one of which I think is finished. 

The first one, the one that is finished or almost finished, is a piece that will be performed in the rhijnhof cemetery in June. I already mentioned it before, it's a piece for beer bottles. I decided to make it as free as possible, the score is just a text indicating what kind of sounds can be made from the bottles, what kind of texture should be aimed for and how to end the piece. I hope that with some two or three rehearsals this piece can be ready to be performed. It is by far the most free thing that I have ever written. I wonder what my teachers will think about it, but I didn't do it just for laziness, I genuinely think that this is the only way to obtain the texture that I want, and also the state of mind of the performers.

The second one is a piece for solo fortepiano that a friend asked me to write. The fortepiano is the parent instrument of the modern piano, but it has a very different timbre, and very different sonoric capabilities. It has in general a softer sound than the modern piano, but it compensates by having a very clear lower register, which in the modern piano is in general very muddy. What I decided to to with it is "deconstruct" the Sonata op. 2 no. 1 by Beethoven in different ways for each of the movements. The first movement is almost readyin its first draft form. It basically consists of a mega-extension of the last two bars of the first movement of the Beethoven sonata, which is just the final cadence. For the second movement I have the idea of making a "minimalization" of the second movement of the sonata, adding lots of silences and deleting as many notes from the original as possible, so that the shape is still at least vaguely implied but the texture is completely disappeared. For the third movement, I wanted to write a different dance, now one inspired in the dances from the region north of Chile, south of Bolivia, but still using in some way (that I haven't yet thought about very deeply) the material from the third movement of Beethoven. I still have no ideas for the fourth movement, but it will be very fast, that I know for sure.

I hope I won't make the old man angry with my music.

The third piece is in stand-by mode for the moment. It will be a piece for two harpsichords, accordion and singer. The text is the Tabula Smaragdina, a XII century alchemic text in latin, which deals with the nature of the unvierse and the origin of all matter (the One Thing from which all came, and that kind of stuff). I don't particularly believe in that, but I find it very interesting to use a text in latin that does not relate to the Roman Catholic ritual. Also, latin is one of my favorite languages, and the text is actually quite interesting.

An image inspired by the Tabula Smaragdina, 

it's not less weird and epic than the original text.

Pale Blue Dot

That's the name of a very famous photograph taken by the spaceprobe Voyager 1 at 6 billion kilometers away from Earth. It shows our planet as seen from that distance.

Our planet is that tiny light dot you can see over the yellowish 

stripe closest to the right edge of the picture.

About this photograph, Carl Sagan wrote the following. 

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. 

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. 

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

A short poem

This is a poem by my favorite writer, Jorge Luis Borges. I think I made that clear already but just in case I say it again. Below the original in Spanish and my own translation to English.

LA LUNA
A María Kodama
Hay tanta soledad en ese oro.
La luna de las noches no es la luna
que vio el primer Adán. Los largos siglos
de la vigilia humana la han colmado
de antiguo llanto. Mírala. Es tu espejo.

THE MOON
To María Kodama
There is so much loneliness in that gold.
The moon of the nights is not the moon
that the first Adam saw. The long centuries
of human wakefulness have filled it
with ancient weeping. Look at it. It is your mirror.

The future

I was watching a documentary called Into Eternity, which is about a place called Onkalo that is being built in Finland to store nuclear waste until it stops being dangerous to the environment, which will be in 100.000 years. I haven't yet seen the whole film, but I think one of the great problems the people involved in this project are facing is how to let the future generations, in 10.000, 20.000 or more years that this place is not safe, that they haven't found one of the great marvels of the Ancient World, but one of the most dangerous places in Earth. How to send a message across de millenia? In what language will they speak? Certainly not the one we speak now. How, then, can we communicate with them, if they don't even exist now?

It also made me think that we live in a tiny world, and we don't want to see beyond it. We don't want to understand the vastness, the infinity of time and space, the passing of millenia, the death of stars, the creation and destruction of life in millions of planets around the galaxy and in the most remote parts of the Universe. We live in this tiny, tiny world made of illusions and ghosts, of tiny gods that created the flowers and the blue sky, of tiny laws, our tiny concerns. I am not saying they are not important, we live in this world, we have to deal with it every day. we wake up, we go where we have to go, we do what we have to do, we eat, we cry, we worry about our waistlines, we take the subway, we walk, we walk more, we talk to friends on the phone, we worry, we suffer, we love, we are loved, we pray to our own gods, we sing quietly, we die, we resurrect. All this happens in this tiny tiny tiny tiny speck that floats quietly in the void. 

We hate each other just based of false ideas. We live behind masks because the systems we created have no space for difference, for truth. The systems we created are built to deny the void, to deny meaninglesness, when it is part of everything we do, it is the very essence of our beings. If we have a soul, then it is intimately connected to this void, to this meaninglesness. If there is a life after death, then it is nothing more than a return to this void, a complete embrace of the ultimate oblivion. But we choose to deny this entirely, convincing ourselves that there is, indeed meaning, that "everything happens for a reason," that after death we will be in a "better place, up there." We cling onto the hope that gathering once a week and repeating some ancient formulas (is 1500 years anything compared to the great ocean of 100.000 years that we are facing?) that we hope will bring us closer to some entity, and have it play in our favor. 

What is the pain of one day compared to 100.000 years of nuclear waste? What is the life of Christ? What is the hatred of one man? What is winning the lottery? What is writing an opera? We do the things we do because we hope some kind of recognition form them. We forget that our world is microsopic, that the rest of the universe is completely oblivious to our existence. We earn money because we have fear of dying alone and poor in some corner of a forgotten city. We marry because we want to have children that will populate the Earth and give us the illusion of some sort of immortality of our body. We kill and destroy everything that we don't understand. We spread hatred towards those that play against our own interests, even if they don't do us any harm. Why can't we remember every day of the void? Why can't we realize that the only thing that has any meaning is love? Why can't we realize that the only gesture that will give any meaning to the utter insignificance of our race is a hug, a kiss, an honest gesture, coming from within, from the willingness to connect with one another? Why can't we remember that that which unites us is much stronger than that which divides us? Why can't we remember that we all live crammed in this tiny rock, and that we might as well get along with each other?

100.000 years. The only remain of our civilization will be a cave, a huge cave, full of the most dangerous type of waste ever conceived. Is this the summary of what we are? Will this be our legacy for the future? All the destruction and suffering we have caused on our world will be reduced to this, a single cave full of our excrement.

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

Program notes

It is a very interesting experience to write program notes for one's music. I had to do it yesterday for the accordion pieces. It is always the question of how much to say regarding the intention, the content, etc. of the pieces. The ideal for me is not to say anything, but at the same time it is always nice to throw at least a little bit of rope to the listener, so that s/he can have a more interesting experience. In the end what I wrote is very brief, it says a lot (to me, at least) but it doesn0t say anything at the same time.

This work consists of a cycle of three smaller pieces, each of which explores a simple, concise musical idea.

The emotions we don't understand, the ones we cannot control, are, to me at least, the most honest part of our beings, of our souls.

The second part, for me, is the one that says most. I didn't know how to phrase it without making such a direct reference to the whole story behind the pieces. There is a story, there is something there, but I don't want the audience to know, or at least, I want them to convey their own stories  into the music, or not. I don't want to force anything. This is not late romantic music, this is me. It was my own story, but I think the music says enough, and the titles already say too much.

On another note, it's spring in Europe! I love spring, I love flowers everywhere, the warm wind that finally came after the darkness of winter. I love winter too, don't get me wrong, I love darkness, but I also love the sun, the heat, the flowers. There are so many flowers! I even took pictures during a walk yesterday. There are some trees close to my house that have pink flowers. Here are some of the pictures, sorry for the quality, but my mobile phone has a terrible camera (first world problems...).

This is a beautiful tree right next to my house

A canal in Rijswijk

Same canal

A very weird street on my way back home

The old town in Rijswijk

Some more beautiful trees

And the tree with pink flowers I mentioned, of all the pictures

I took, this one was the only one that came out well unfortunately...