IVAR reflections
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Inspiration
Being alone is the beginning of being open.
And being open is the beginning of music.
Music is the beginning of being not alone.
The Well
I experience myself as being a broad deep well holding clear water and at the bottom something vivid sounds.
Every time I move or just think of it, those sounds raise filling up the water with colours and bubbles.
Silence
Silence is the mother of all music.
Silence isn't heard, isn't held, doesn't vanish.
And in the fullness of time she will call up, embrace, absorb all her offspring.
Everyone ought to work oneself into the ability to do without music for a short or longer space of time!
Music is like flowers
In the world of music the flowers fly for the bees.
Dear musicians!
As to my condition and situation now, I unfortunately can no longer travel around the world. However, thank you so much for the concert photos of yours. Warming my old heart.
But please also add a little about yourself, what you sing or play. When and where! I really appreciate your skill and enthusiasm. I still dream of being able to hear you all live again.
Euterpe
Euterpe has never sought herself.
She has never found herself.
And she is never just Euterpe.
Once again a dream
I bashfully approached Chopin's heart whispering: "Why are you here?"
The heart intimated: "I'm not here, I am music!"
I happily put my ear up to the music.
"We are not here" it sounds, "we are lives you can not live!"
I heavyheartedly went back to my own life.
Why am I here? I'm not here, I am music.
Collocations
Is spring better than autumn?
Is new wine better than old wine?
Are grandchildren better than grandparents?
Are short times better than long times?
Is new music better than old music?
Crossing light
Take the ancient Masters in heavy old chairs facing the photographer!
Dusty lamp, pale papers, black cat, crossing light.
Oh, down the right corner of the picture some small obscurities.
That's wasted quavers! Not wrong only wasted. A few not wasted just missing.
The missing youth
Indeed, I regret that most of my many early compositions have been lost. In the evening of one's life you learn to appreciate the creations from your youth.
That's what it's all about. Humility.
Not yourself, but the music.
Atonatonalities nonsense
Tonality and atonality are not being opposites.
All music has tonalities of its own; even all tones have.
Talking about atonal music is close to nonsense, something like saying black light.
Same way with the foolish term "rhythmical music"
or if it should come to: melodic music, or what about: musical music.
Tone, rhythm, melody all part of the very same musical element.
Offspring of the same microcosm. Having no sharp reciprocal boundaries!
Statement
I'm not against music. Not really. Other things maybe -
- to cut a long story short:
I'm likely an arcane untuned upright piano?
Or a triple reed upright bassoon?
The choral music haunts me! I'm lost in the symphonic world!
Can't say why. Wish I could.
What do you think about this music?
Really, it's not about what we think about the music, but about what the music think about us.
People vanish - music persists.
Ars longa, vita brevis.
Encouragement to a young artist
Look at the migratory bird! Leave yourself! Follow the sun and the moon out to new venues and new art!
Be educated - educated - educated!
Face new challenges. Find kindred souls! Think new thoughts!
Choose your fights, your ways and your future!
However:
Art is always on its way.
Towards you or away from you.
What new music can do
The musical experience is a personal matter,
musical opinion is a social affair.
The music becomes names which can be performed and judged.
Musicians and ensembles depend on
the correlation to their surroundings.
Music do not.
Music isn't just notes, names or works, but an integral part of life.
New music reminds us of that being still only music.
New music takes us closer to the point of creation, lowering the threshold of musical experience to all music.
My song in my place?
My songs convey no introspective or political contents. Those songs are much bigger than I am.
On the other hand, when you hear them I might be gone and you being in my place.
What I am not
No man is an island.
No man is the plural.
I composed
music.
Ulla composed
life.
Composing music?
I have two different ways by composing music.
Like fishing at a brook near the sea. Either going for upcoming fish - or going for down coming fish.
But the composer might mistake himself as being a mere fisherman. He is not!
The best course to compose music is to transform oneself into a gurgling brook searching for the sea.
That would tempt fish in the sea to swim towards the brook.
And tempt fish in the brook to swim down for the sea.
That's my best answer to give if you don't mind.
Community life
We learned to learn for life not for the school.
Thus time ago I learned important things at the school.
Big and small occupants taught me two points to remember.
First: It was their school.
Second: It was not my school.
That's almost all I really learned by school.
Musical deafness
All human beings are somewhat deaf as regards music in the true sense of the word.
Beneath and above music subsist infra- and ultra-music inaudible by the human ear.
Timing in music
That is to say things being present just the very moment they are fitting each other.
Exactly as if several men going to lose their balance by chance run into each other being left standing in that way.
Test your timing by carrying a steel ball on a small tray without a brim!
Serving music
Quality often is synonymous with a mutual excessive desire to please.
Aiming at quality, instead of just serving music and follow it, places the artist in his own past time.
Micro aviation
As a little boy I was taken with aviation. From about 15 I carved and built an amount of boomerangs and ultra light gliders.
I'm in the seventies now but still the 20 gr. micro-rc flights keep me in the air.
I must above the simplicity, heaviness, the mundane ground turbulence.
Every day - just a small silent stroll among the birds, bats, butter- and dragon- flies.
At dawn or evening twilight.
Or a sunny play tag with the wind or falling leaves in the wood.
Where others see a soaring eagle, I imagine the field, the forest and the lake from above.
Art is equivocal
The free art is inopportune for church and community because of its equivocal nature.
It is seldom where you suppose to find it and often where it shouldn't be.
Without asking it raises wonder. Without answering it brings out redemption.
Workshops
Come to think of - how is our time?
What about young composer?
Rising music of today? Tomorrow?
I suggest, independent of the music academies, workshops for gifted composers age 20-30. Joining the scene.
Being taken care of, encouraged, guided and staged with their fantasy and outlook by professional musicians and conductors.
And all not for the sake of their own but truly at service for the music itself.
Offending people
As an artist I'm expressing whatever the Muse tells me to do.
Going strange ways hearing odd things - wrong and beauteous.
It's not for me to make good for it or put it nice. Somehow someone might be hurt or even infringed by my art.
Let me frankly tell you, we all know of that feeling. It is a small subset of art, life and freedom.
But just no more than a subset.
One tone - two places
In the music there are several planes - various dimensions. For instance: A certain tone can be perceived as being a scale tone and at same time as an octave or partial tone.
This means you can be in a room at first floor and in another room at fourth floor at the very same time. If you were that tone of course.
Homeland
Musician and public each have a homeland.
One cannot blame them for believing that music has a homeland as well.
What a poetic mistake! Music has no homeland here.
We did know as much as nothing about whom our children were or from which homeland they came.
How a glorious analogy of humility in art and music.
Those unexpected inconceivable vibrations from an unknown homeland proper.
The rules
When seeing any kind of sport you have the rules at first and the game to follow.
Going into any kind of art you have the play to begin and the rules to follow.
Music Miscue Muzac
To be honest I don't like at all music which pretend to be music.
Drugging nice people out of sense and chance.
Steeling attention, time and money.
Killing genuine music, real peace and honest listening.
Wrap it up and put it a very dark most hot place away from children.
Getting away from oneself
You can be so overcrowded inside your own mind
that you have to step outside yourself to make alone.
The conception of style
There are to be some misunderstandings about the conception of style.
It is not the style or form which ties the music together.
That's a job for substance and timing.
Style doesn't exist as a pure subject itself but rather to be seen as expectations inside us
as important references for our useful navigation through the music.
Music is always nude when flying,
but on the ground it modestly takes on pretty dresses for the opportunity.
A style is just a lady's gown!
Genuine theft
Art and music often take importance of an event,
a situation where it goes between people.
In that particular way money acts similar to those.
Hence illegal copying art or music is like counterfeiting money.
Music is somehow as an encounter in the air
Meet without uniting. Empathy without proximity.
Understanding without reconciliation.
The symphony orchestra!
The Orchestra may be experienced as a sublimation of the choir as a conception.
Every instrument has a personality of its own and originates in its own family.
But also every instrument contributes sides of the human expression.
Not only the human voice. And not only the human features.
The orchestral instruments possibly are much deficient in being as human beings are
but they have happily got other spiritual characters thrown in.
A supernatual life of their own if so.
Those many instruments are deliberately brought together:
The symphony!
They call, greet, hope, complement, chat, guard, insult, expect, bear, push, secure, lift, humiliate,
regret, attract, slander, eat, devote, hate, shield, fear, follow, kill, repel and love each other.
They live, sing, dance, depart, cheer, burn, gain, drive, drudge, ease, laugh, drink, sink, play,
fight, point, tremble, calm, read, pay, loose, fly, abandon, turn, tilt, cry, embrace and triumph together.
The symphony orchestra!
Humble oneself before music
Decrease yourself promoting space for music.
It may grow and eventually move in with you.
We played together
I was 9 years old when I got my first piano lessons. It was with head teacher Emil Christensen at Hvidovre. On the first floor in a square living room stood two good older grand pianos.
We played together a lot of the time.
After three years, we sat one day and played Bach's
piano concerto in f-minor.
My teacher played the orchestra on one grand piano and I played
the piano solo voice on the other.
We played the whole concerto in one
without losing anything.
I will never forget the intense feeling of musical weightlessness!
When the last chord had sounded out, we just sat still
and looked at each other happily without saying anything.
Like two Bedouins who have just uncovered a well.
Time!
Composers of other eras are at a premium.
Busy late composers hurry through our time on their way towards new achievements in big times to come.
How obliging to us they are, affording the time to visit us and our time.
We do owe them so much!
We don't speak like them and don't think their thoughts.
We aren't to be seen wearing their clothes living their lives.
And yet we have their music borrowed which somehow
makes us guests of their time.
We all are, so to speak, guests of each other's time.
Who were we without them?
Sailing the music
People voyage the music.
They don't care much about what's beneath the water.
The composer doesn't care much about what's on top the water.
- at ear level
Rebuild large concert halls into cinemas!
Build new halls for the sake of the music!
Halls where all clearly might be able to hear a blackbird singing on the stage!
What music can't do
Music doesn't make us more benevolent.
Look at the musicians! They aren't better than other people.
Look at the music directors, reviewers, disc jockeys, publishers, conductors
- I beg your pardon very so much thank you!
Have a long lingering look at me! Nothing there? Come on!
The Classical Treasury
You and I both do care very much for this timeless apodictic glass cupboard
with its dearly beloved but steady predictable repertoire.
The ravage of time does not wear pure art indeed but it changes man and world.
Genuine new music cannot be seen as an alternative to classical masterpieces. It is its own.
But contemporary music nonetheless bridges the time between -
Coincidence or Destiny
Once I was playing a friendly game of tennis with three gentlemen in the club.
It was calm but looks like rain coming up. And certainly we got a good shower and great fun of the play.
Our court had its water nice and proper. Nothing odd there.
Nevertheless, no rain on any of the many other courts. Not a single drop!
And not the slightest trace of rain in any neighbourhood of the club. What an uncanny experience.
St. Cuthbert's Church
On Oct. 2nd 2004 Maesbury Singers under CD Nicholas Keyworth
performed The Rear Platform. Meant to be the world first public performance of me as a composer. Took its place at St. Cuthbert’s Church, Wells, Somerset, England.
The Bird-Flying-Room
Life is not a dream but dreams are life. I'm in a huge bird-flying-room with countless big and small flying birds.
I can see the room but not the birds and inexplicably I'm aware how they all look like.
They are singing but I can't hear the sound and yet I know how every bird sings and how they all sing together.
They fly single and flocks many speeds and directions and yet I'm sure they do not intercept each other.
I don't understand how I entered the room but it's clear to me I shall never find the exit.
Writing good music
If I tell myself: "Now I'm going to write some music and it has to be good"
then the music touch down my shoulder whispering in my ear: "Then I shan't intrude your working".
Creativity and quality are related to each other like light and shade.
Launching the baton
If the composer performs his own music it may easily be misconceived as
a comment on the score or a development of his composition.
An edited authorization.
However, it's contrary to the nature of music to dwell
in the same place, to stay at the same individual.
I grant you that it's possible to perform one's own score.
But easily this act would be in the nature of self-fulfilment
or self-fertilization or other suffixes ending the word self-
Composing music is a revelation which emerges in unique present
and at once frozen down into some note crystals.
Blown away with the wind and against odds the crystals meet a warm personality
being revived in another particular moment: the point of musical present time.
Another creditor
I do not forget Ferruccio Busoni (1866 – 1924), who in his best moments carried me to the distant heights that my heart has never since completely left.
The human element
If you remove the human element from music, it sinks to either being an sort of decoration. Or to be nature-descriptive.
It does not mean it is worthless, but it means that it is difficult to identify oneself with parts of it.
Gold digging
Pioneering new-born music takes a good deal selfless care,
hope and patience, - in that order.
No matter who you might be or which potentials you possess. Musician, composer, reviewer you name it - all the same.
Don't ever just think you know what to go for. We almost know nothing about future a whiff about music to come.
Music has no family
The Society of music believes to be one big family.
But the truth is: music has no family - it is music. Music is music!
The underexposed scenery
One fine day I accidentally found myself standing in a big underexposed shop.
Honestly, my intentions had totally left my mind.
The smell of old wood and paper and something like forgotten tea and thoughts flabbergasted little me.
The mouldy odour of yesterdays yesterday. This mazy book business!
Thousand of ancient books piled up the floor or put into huge shelves in some inscrutable order.
Desks with heaps of worn sheets with small labels and
mugs with writing materials and higgledy-piggledy you know what.
Was this scenery really outside me? Was it a trap? A nightmare or entrance to heaven?
I reached as far as that before an investigative creaking took me.
A funny little beige overall went carefully down a long ladder.
Went up to me and smiled, but not to me.
I politely asked for something as customers usually do and tried to look as a question mark.
The man now looked at a distant point higher than himself, which was easily done.
He slowly shook his head and took off his smile saying:
No, I'm so zorry for you! Feel welcome next week. We always bring home new bookz every day.
Expounding poems
Would be nice if one could explain poems. Replacing the poem by the explanation.
Unfortunately the poem is to be the very explanation till then.
However, approaching a poem by expounding its meaning
almost demands creating a new poem holding a meaning of its own - etcetera.
Or just imagine yourself being a plastic bag swallowing a cuttlefish.
Nevertheless the explanation ought to be more easy than its subject.
If talking life the explanation should in spite of everything be more convenient than life itself.
Nor could you expound the mysteries of the antique. If so, they should vanish.
Same way the poem is a mystery. But being a genuine poem it has to be true.
True explanation - true mystery.
Respite?
True music lives its own life. It can be experienced as applicable. You can mirror it a bit. Learn something from it. Living some time with it.
You can't own the soul of music.
. I experience music as an addressing me. I have to respond to. Answer it.
Background muzac is the opposite. A buzzing, sobbing and throbbing wallpaper of cut-out sound figures that is repeated until the next stop.
The freezer, the pedestrian zone, the elevator, the hairdresser the telephone, the toilet. One thousand and one places.
An audio filter against the outside or the inside of us?
You and us?
Give me 5 minutes without something
I should be wrapped up by.
A respite of silence.
Ah!
Couldn't we get a lifeline here!
A button or digit one could press?
Pressing 9 three times?
Press = zero?
Other Composers?
Composers who somehow have had influence on me.
Good or bad. A bit or much more.
Not what - but how.
And I'm not a music critic or music historian. But I've always been curious. Went my own ways. Wrote my own music. Or rather,
the not yet written music borrowed my pencil.
As a young person when I was still living with my parents, I pulled long aerial wires in the house so as to receive long wave signals.
I heard music from distant countries and distant times!
The order of the names - completely random.
For the sake of the other composers here, I've removed two names from the list: the biggest but modest as well as the greatest genius but most misunderstood.
Domenico Scarlatti, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Bohuslav Martinů,
Johann Pachelbel, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Benjamin
Britten, Franz Liszt, Béla Viktor János Bartók, Arvo Pärt, Zoltán
Kodály, Georg Friedrich Händel, Alexander Borodin, Anton Webern,
Christoph Willibald Gluck, Joseph Maurice Ravel, Johannes Brahms,
Erik Satie, John Cage, Georg Philipp Telemann, Modest Musorgskij, Antonio Vivaldi, Franco Evangelisti, Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig
van Beethoven, Luigi Boccherini, César Franck, Witold Lutosławski, Olivier Messiaen, Gaetano Donizetti, Francis Poulenc, IannisXenakis, Charles-Marie Widor, Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Kreisler, Alfred Schnittke, Camille Saint-Saëns, Scott Joplin, Carl Nielsen, Friedrich Kuhlau, Samuel
Osmond Barber, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mihail Andricu, Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini, John Field, Franz Joseph Haydn, Dmitrij Sjostakovitsj, Vagn Holmboe, Hugo Wolf,
Leoš Janáček, Bruno Maderna, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gioacchino Rossini, Richard Wagner, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Charles Ives, John
Philip Sousa, Edvard Grieg, Gábor Darvas, James Cohn, Alban Maria Johannes Berg, Gottfried August Homilius, Claudio Monteverdi, Leopold Godowsky, Pierre Henry, George Enescu, Conlon Nancarrow, Alvin Curran, Darius Milhaud, Philip Glass, Per Nørgård, Luigi Dallapiccola, Niccolò Paganini, Carl Maria von Weber, Irving Berlin, Vitaliy Hodziatsky, Leroy Anderson, Hector Berlioz, Leif Kayser, Georges
Bizet, Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti, Christoph Graupner, Filip Kutev,
Carl Orff, Robert Ashley, Vincenzo Bellini, Niels Wilhelm Gade,
George Botsford, Anton Bruckner, Max Bruch, Arvo Pärt, Naresh
Sohal, Anton Dvorák, Gabriel Fauré, Mikhail Glinka, Pablo de
Sarasate, Nikolaj Rimskij-Korsakov, Ludvig Schytte, Irving Fine, Aleksandr Skrjabin, Missy Mazzoli, Robert Cogan, Paul Hindemith, Bedrich Smetana, Johann Strauss d.y., Igor Stravinskij, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Mihail Jora, Arthur Sullivan, Pjotr Illitsj Tsjajkovskij, Julio Estrada, Giuseppe Verdi, Georgi Arnaoudov, Ferruccio Busoni, Anton Grigorevitj Rubinstein, Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron
Copland, Shirish Korde, Edward Elgar, George Gershwin, Arthur Honegger, Jacques Ibert, Arcangelo Corelli, Franz Lehár, Gustav
Mahler, Rued Langgaard, Harald Sæverud, Cuthbert Harris, François Couperin, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Claude Debussy, Georgi Tutev,
Peter Maxwell Davies, Bo Grønbech, Heitor Villa-Lobos.
Great music
Great music is great.
The first 1200 times you hear it are the greatest.
From that time it goes increasingly small.
Small music is small.
Principles and elements
Some people have certain principles how they step or how they do not step on tiled walks.
Like that some composers have a similar relation to elements of the music.
However, important isn't how you step but where you go.
Competitions
We worldwide see lots of competitions with all sorts music and performances.
Helping the music. Not into the future but into what past time thought was the future.
The Old Masters
These days we are witnessing an increasing technical championship in growing musical poverty.
Performing the old masters is a matter of spirit and knowledge.
Unfortunately you can't buy or exercise spirit, and the how to do
is an oral heritage which fades out a little every new generation.
Only by humbly and diligently serving the music,
we may hope to stretch us a bit through time and space.
In Memoriam
Concert pianist, teacher, and researcher: Tzvetan Konstantinov. His approach and work. His performance and interpretation. His interest in new music. His work for The Leopold Godowsky Institute.
Following the music
No inborn or acquired advantage as so gives access to music.
The only way to fly is to let go of something heavier than oneself.
"h u m i l i t y"
- is your pasword for art and music.
(R)evolution
Imagine a pure glass in a liquid state -
Now blow it high up the air into various shapes suspended in midair, solidifying -
Enjoy the forms, the moment, the peaks, and the orbits through the space
and watch the crashes against the ground.
What do we have? Expression - Formation - Fragmentation
The horizons
Dear professional, why trudging so close your audience's heels?
In expectation of your education, talent, compass oughtn't you go before the procession raising your lamp?
Brighten up narrow ways to wide horizons?
Renovation
Renovation could be entering something at the very first time.
Or renovation could be stepping out of something at the very first time
Art is fleeting
As the invisible radio waves are mysterious so are the world of art with its irrational ways to contact and being.
Art is fleeting but isn't perishable. It's the human being's want to possess and keep that disunites soul and body.
When I tuned my piano
When I tuned my piano, I always started with the note A. That's where you have to start. It's also the one I go for first when I listen to music.
It happens that I hear notes that do not exist on my piano. Or on other instruments, for that matter. Eg. the tone U, or quite often the tone L.
Someone might take a closer look at it?
The long night
A hotel in London. Cannot sleep. Hear a little child crying and a mother as muffled tries to comfort the child. I can not understand the language, but I'm greatly touched by the poor child and the good tireless mother.
A long night I must say.
The next morning I discover that the sound didn't come from any mother or child, but from a large defect pigeon net and a loose ventilator hatch.
I have experienced the same wondering confusion when, during an interval in the middle of a concert, I was standing by the musicians' abandoned instruments with wear marks and minor repairs, music sheets held up with tape or office clips.
Chopin and Liszt!
Chopin and Liszt! Friends, if one can use that word. A kind of spiritual brothers. Protecting and challenging each other at the same time.
One "introvert" the other "extrovert".
We have almost everything they wrote. We also know a lot about their lives. But when it comes to how they read and performed their own scores? There we know far too little.
And it gets smaller and smaller as time goes on.
Most we know about Liszt and how he scooped up his ability and knowledge surrounded by a circle of aspiring students,
patrons and worshipers.
Today it is mostly from that circle we know of Liszt's interpretation. And it is also mostly from the same circle we know how one, that is, Liszt, interpreted Chopin at that time.
Not much do we know from Chopin or his own students.
mostly Karol Mikuli.
A sublime representative of Liszt's amazing interpretive art and Liszt's approach to Chopin's scores is preserved in Moriz Rosenthal's
very captivating recordings of Chopin and Liszt.
Personally, I experience Dinu Lipatti as an artist of genius, an amazing interpreter who was more introverted and genuine.
Rhythm, pulse and timing of another world.
Truly be said to represent a tradition leading back to - Chopin.
Ever the only one - second to none.
Streams
This isn't going to be easy. Imagine the music as a stream. Thank you.
Imagine inside that mainstream a minor stream aiming towards the contrary direction on the very same speed.
Being midair this central stream the time actually appears to stand still.
True music implies many such streams at various speeds and directions.
It might explain how people most different experience time, tempo, and abundance of a specific work.
Being at same time different places in or outside the streaming music.
The laboratory
Astonishingly serial music, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern etc.,
prove to be tonal blossoming, copious melodic and of course rhythmical.
This "compositional method" was by many considered the start of
a new way to do music, the inception of the next era.
Disappointingly it wasn't.
However Schoenberg did very well point out an evaporated element of the compositional process.
Now being a small new bottle in the modern composers laboratory.
A useful solvent fit to do proper stain removal in their scores.
Thank you on you Schoenberg.
The missing lookouts
I'm not asking for pop art! I just call for the steady look out for new authenticity in art and music.
How could we possibly comprehend the grandeur of the great past times
if we didn't take up the challenges the life the music of our own?
The grotto
Once upon a time I was watching the busy baboons at the Zoo.
Someone dropped a red apple down the grotto.
There it lay in the sun among the playing and brawling monkeys.
Big, clean and shiny wow! Nothing happened. Nothing happened again.
Once a young baboon inadvertently run across the apple which slowly rolled some feet some way.
Another snatched it for closer inspection but lost the thing to a third baboon
which made quick off with a train of competitors.
The troop boiled over. The entire scene went ape!
Just until a loud TIME grunt from the father alpha-male:
"Don't ever play with my food!"
En route to music
Music have its own life. A requirement for something being not yet named.
Something between silence, repose, absence.
And then a need for something like germination, penetration, rebirth.
Music is subject to transformation same way as we are.
If we cannot envisage each other as being en route to heaven,
we'll never be capable to understand the nature of music.
Shellac music
My guess is, 9 years old when it happened.
I recognize myself lying on the floor beside my father's radio-gramophone.
It must be said not a slim table import, we talk about a piece of furniture size chest of drawers.
Listening to one of my mother's cold, black, gleaming shellac records with the blue Columbia label,
light grey cardboard cover. Listening is no word!
The august entity estranged some vital parts of me from the rest of my entire life
replacing my heart beat with a 192 bars mazurka in C-sharp minor.
Be happy everyone and be happy together
One can stand on the top of something high, looking down on the planet. Trees, animals and people. And one might think: there are billions of human beings down there, and one of them could be myself!
You can wish them all a good life, but not decide that they will get it: be happy everyone and be happy together - if so. Can't compose them.
Except for a single one or two of them - if so?
In the same way, I can listen to an endless world of nameless music flowing to and from our planet. Fragments, themes, timbre and pulsating rhythms. Floating melodies that call, rise and fall.
One of them could be me, or you?
You can wish them all a good life, but not decide that they will get it: be happy everyone and be happy together - if so. Can't compose them.
Except for a single one or two of them - if so?
Knitting a small jersey
The musical form isn't a frame round the music. Music creates a form of its own.
The pear blossom is just as much pear as is the pear fruit - but looks quite different.
To work out a form and subsequently compose music into that form is nearly as odd
as knitting a small jersey, and then giving birth to a baby who fits the jersey.
Reputation
We are not always remembered for what we would be keen to.
Sometimes we are going to be remembered for what we did not do.
I like them!
It's not true I don't like all creatures. Poor big bears for instance. Since a boy I have been fond of animals.
I watched them and uploaded them very much.
Furthermore I like people. I feel sympathy with human beings.
The closer the more do I like them. Being quite human myself and such close by myself I really like myself even more.
You might name some persons which I honestly can't stand.
However, being as good as that I even think humane thoughts
about people I dislike.
The more distant the more do I like them quite so.
In the same way I really grow sympathy with
rather large and basically starving polar bears
at some increasing distance.
Those two parties should get to know each other much more.
Muzic
Persistent music converts itself into sound. Persistent sound converts itself into noise. Noise is bottled and sold.
Hear vs Listen
Once upon a time we were hunting at night in deep forests.
Vitally depending on our ears. The two of them.
Some sounds meant food. Others danger. Some friends others enemies.
We did not just hear, we were intensely listening. We opened the sound expounding its contents.
Nowadays we see a need for protecting ourselves against useless information and tiresome noise.
Losing our talent for listening?
The musical scene
Performing music for the sake of the music scene is just as idiotic as taking a drive in order to promote the current traffic.
Expressions
I'm often so sparing of dynamic or melodic directions.
Only when something has to be rendered one way only
I put on the slur, dot or whatsoever.
If not heard by me I'm not entitled to write it.
Lack of slurs or dots don't always mean non legato.
It just says: no slur or dot
/ or everything between offering various possibilities of phrases.
Composer end - performer begin. They are both subjected same law,
the gospel of music.
Musician, carefully read the score - listen to the music - not yourself!
Music is never two times the same.
The art uses man
It's common sense to believe that the artist or the poet creates art.
That is not true!
The art uses man for creating itself.
An odd secret indeed.
Dear Reader!
I in person admire you, strolling as far at this shady page with my shabby Anglishsh!
However, I'm curious about your view on the time of our day's music world?
Corps de Ballet
I would like very much to follow up sometime.
A dancer is dancing the listener's part.
Hence a corps de ballet appears to be a sublime vitalization of the very audience.
Time and age
Now we are going into the philosophic room where music has the time and we the age.
It might explain why true music is felt as being growing present time and we truly experience ourselves as older than true music.
Hence all real music is new music and will always be,
no matter what year it was created.
Springtime
Why do we serve the music? In the composer's behalf? For the musicians? For the audience? The critics?
Not really.
You don't take care of your child for the sake of anybody nor your own but the sake of the child indeed.
Nor should we take care of the music for our sake but for the sake of the music of course.
Cheer up! Mind the birds in the spring. The little parents working hard to have the brood of starving curious young birds fledged.
Such care and unselfishness for the new ought to serve as a model for everyone working with music.
Music
Music isn't notes or instruments, nor language, culture or art. Not even sound.
Music is an incomprehensible echo of rising life, an invisible arrow with name of all living, an angel in the room.
Swan Song
2019 the prostate cancer finally found me. And I don't know what time I get. The music will keep calling, but one day I will not answer anymore. We come from the same place.
But all considered, I now "see" my own music with other ears. It's a bit like ships. It's not how beautiful they are, but where they bring us. I'm mostly thinking of the last 10 years of my works not yet approved by me.
We will see about that.
Wish me good luck!
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