This is a little sound poem meditation on wholeness & corruption. Wholeness & corruption in especially Art and Science. In a way, this might be reflected or expressed purely orchestrally, perhaps, entirely without words. But I’ll leave that for now to the listener’s imagination.
For now, just let me say that our use of the orchestra reflects the impoverished nature of our current dominant map of the reality of living sound. There are, in my view, countless tacit “false and confused concepts.”
The first of these which I might mention is that we are deeply habituated to thinking in terms of the Procrustean bed of the pianoforte — a prison really — with all its limitations in terms of intonation, dynamics, and the more subtle vocal inflections of sound, to mention but a few. (Now, even worse, is the computer programmed to think and notate like a piano...)
But much more generally, we also fail to see that what is primary in music is not even sound itself, but rather, in my view, MOVEMENT, movements of energy, of meaning.
I also like to say, that once we learn to think in terms of not just sound but rather movement, it instantly becomes obvious why Music & Dance lost their way after the great rouge wave of energy that manifested in the Paris of Rilke, Nijinsky and Stravinsky, and crested already around 1913.
For example, one concept which we urgently need to get rid of is that of simple-minded tonality. (And, of course, its inverse, ‘atonality.’ I like to say rhetorically that ATONAL MUSIC is not possible, which infuriates a lot of my diehard Schönberg conducting friends, many of whom have, like myself, worked decades to learn to hear and sing the unsingable.) In its place, I think, and hear, and compose in terms of a cyclic back and forth of simple to complex and back again, a kind of Simplexity cycle, if you will. This is of course in no way original, but was discovered intuitively by the great French/American composer, Edgar Varèse, some 80 years ago.
This generates a movement of sounds within sounds within sounds, which, like Nature herself, is constantly in a state of rich, ever-new flux. These sounds are always centered in some kind of space. This space I call the qualitative temporal and spatial ground, or qualitative ground for short.
This is how the sounds that we make — both in Poetry & Music — resonate with the physical-emotional body, and with the vastly wider circles or contexts of the living Earth and the Universe as a whole.
One of the first things, the first habitual ways of hearing and seeing, we have to give up, or at least become aware of, is the dominance of what I call ‘eye culture.’ This is why I am in no way interested in how other people write things down whether in poetry or music. The notations of the present era I simply find worse than out of date. So I don’t give them much attention. Instead, I devote myself to listening, and most especially to the meditation practice — a kind of combination of Yoga and the Alexander technique — that helps one become aware of the contradictions, like notation or books or script or musical scores, that are in the way, or merely blocks or dams in the freeflow of creativity.
IMAGE: The miracle of mountain spring snowmelt.
