Contemporary Music: A Composer’s Journal Entries December 3 & 4, 2004

Friday December 3
3:30 a.m.

There are only a few pages of the score to copy out now, two or three at most. The score, in all, will be over sixty pages long. I am making changes as I go, today I added a few new pages to fill out my sketch. I might add a few pages more tomorrow, so that the piece doesn’t end half unfinished, in haste. Some haste, that suits the music. A delicate balance always, the form. The last measures, those sounds - this is where too many ideas can be a problem. I could easily think of fifty different endings - unlike Life, which holds its own Destiny and Plan. That is where the artist or the thinker - the human creator - is paltry & even flippant compared to a rock or even a roll of scotch tape which is manifesting the Divine Ideas directly, without human thought or perception. At least in the case of the rock. The roll of scotch tape, true, humans conceived and fashioned it. But there it sits, now held in the Divine Mind, so that all beings can perceive it. Everyone I know would agree that it is, in fact, a roll of scotch tape. But the creation in my head is transparent & fluid & only in my mind, my personal mind & experience. And I will decide where the notes will go & in what order & time/space frame. Once the piece is written onto the page, then it too will be held in the Divine Mind for all to perceive. But just now, it is entirely individual, changing, personal.

I am trying to see through to other realms, the music there, the patterns, the colors - to bring them to earth. However, most often, the music there IS those realms, unlike earth where music is "created" & then written down on paper. And then learned & performed by musicians.

Perhaps the closest we come to that here on earth is in the art form of ballet, where the dancers mime or dance stories & are surrounded by the music which tells the story for them. Or even movies, when music comes in as background, enhancing the meaning, surrounding the events & people & dialogue of the story. In the higher realms, this music is not always in solid sounds & notes - it is more often the sounds of the souls & sounds of the Divine essence of those realms vibrating, being. Here, on earth, the materiality surrounding us masks this natural "music". There, the sounds are more like wind chimes activated by the wind, only it is the soul that is activated.

Nothing we could write here on earth could match the Beauty of those other realms, or the Beauty of the soul itself. And so the artist is never satisfied.

So we try again to write or paint or sculpt. We artists are so prolific & driven because we are striving to catch something that cannot be caught.

Saturday, December 4 5:40 p.m.

Done. The last note has been copied into the quintet score. Will e-mail Bob later tonight, when the metronome markings have been put in.

Mt. III. - the dance - was not written for earthly mortals. Sprites, angels perhaps. I felt these dances & fragments of dance somehow arising & then disappearing throughout the last movement, like floating islands ... Until the increasing & relentless intensity of the final pages.

The question always is, when creating new forms, changing existing forms - will it work.

I certainly hope so.