So my neighbor had a deliciously full plate of Nepalese cuisine, all prepared for him by his girlfriend – all he had to do was microwave the multi-course meal, and voila! And it smelled scrumptious, too. He spotted me, sitting there in the lounge, stabbing at stewed tomatoes in a can (by choice, thank you very much) and uttered, “Straight out of the can?” It took me a few moments to realize that he had on that expression that you only wear when you pity someone with that “bleeding heart.” It was rather amusing, really, as if he were saying, “Oh, you poor thing, living that desperate life. I was like that, too, before I met my girlfriend.” He offered me some of his meal, but I politely declined. I had already eaten dinner, and I was just craving stewed tomatoes. So what?!
But he really can save the pity, because there’s nothing about me to pity. Like most people out there who have found someone who could be a partner for life, I feel like the most blessed person on Earth. It doesn’t matter if my girlfriend can cook or not; what’s important to me is already a part of her, and that’s what really counts. I enjoy food as much as the next person, but the true feast and delicacy exists somewhere higher. There is a splendid, intimate banquet that she lays out just for me, and everyone in love can attest that that banquet, unlike real food, leaves you full and happy forever.
Archive for October, 2007
I am in the midst of writing a new violin concerto, hopefully one that I will be satisfied enough with to actually finish. But as I write, I am now faced with a whole new demon that I never really thought about before: am I a tonal or atonal composer? I have never considered myself an atonal composer, actually, but as my works incorporate more and more tangents and forays into new harmonic territory, I feel that I may end up losing the ears of those who might enjoy pieces in the style of say my 61st Concerto or 22nd Symphony. At the same time, I have such an ingrained sense of tonal language and conventions that some semblance of tonal center is always persistent in my music, even when engaging in non-diatonic languages.
One of the big questions is this duality of tonal and atonal music. People divide themselves into camps, championing one or the other, but rarely both. Yet the relationship of tonality to atonality is not like a cat and a dog, or a tissue and a paper towel. Tonality is a child, a subset, of atonality: atonality encompasses the full aural experience and possibility, both “harmonious” and “discordant.”
One may consider, then, the organization of sound possibilities in a manner similar to food. Thai cuisine is centered on particular spices, lime, coconut, chiles, and the like. That gives it a particular unifying flavor and richness. It is a subset of every food you could possibly make. No culture in the world dabbles in all possible food, and similarly, no native musical language dabbles in all possible music – it is too vast and “flat” in terms of topology to make sense to human ears. Humans long for a certain organization, a regular system, be it scales, chords, range, or timbre.
Then, every composer is working with a “rule set.” Forget the term “tonality” for now, because that is too contentious. A “rule set” may be a defining scale, such as octatonic or Klezmer or Japanese pentatonic, or it could be a method, such as serialism or pointilism. Every culture came up with a different sensibility in rule sets, but every culture has one. And every composer, tonal or atonal, writes with a particular “rule set” in mind.
In this way, I can understand my music: it is just like tonality, and just like so-called “atonality,” which is not really atonality at all because it always involves a particular understanding of tones. My music focuses on lyricism and shapes in the tones, even when the chords are dissonant or the melodic line is twelve-tone. That is my “rule set,” and it is so because that is what I find provocative and agreeable to hear.
I woke up this morning (~5:30) after two hours of semi-conscious meditation. I felt very sad and demotivated, and I knew it was because of something someone had said to me during a phone conversation — one that I could hardly remember at all. Oh well? What one says when one is extremely tired (or drunk, I suppose) tends to reveal one’s true feelings.
I practiced violin for awhile, rekindling my spirits with Bartok, then writing a page of a possible concerto idea, the B theme of which is a pair of tone rows that blasphemously are harmonized with a tonal jazz vamp. During the course of practicing, I realized that the reason my middle finger was swollen and hurting was because a small object beneath several layers of skin, what appeared to be a short clipping of hair from shaving, or something of that sort. To remove it, I dug up my art supplies from a box in my closet and picked out a short needle. I disinfected it and started poking around and slicing through several layers of the overgrowth (the skin likely grew over it to try to engulf it – I made sure to only cut through upper layers without blood vessels). But the lighting in my room is awful – it’s very, very dim, so I ended up having to go right next to the fluorescent light over the sink, which is many times brighter (if only because it illuminates such a small area). I successfully removed the hair, wiped the fingertip down with alcohol, and tried to reseal the skin. I still wonder what acupuncture would feel like.