Goodbye August, Hello September

Wow…what a summer.

In two words:  TOO SHORT.  I don’t feel like I have had much of a vacation from school at all.  I won’t bore you with the details of my summer, or what I have done toward being ready for school in September.  If you want to read about that, visit my other blog bandguys.wordpress.com.

It has been a musical reawakening for me this month.  I have been writing a lot of new music lately.  I have been getting into Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 quite a lot lately.  What a marvel of mid-twentieth century fare!  I particularly like the size o fthe group.  It creates such an interesting texture to have such few instruments.  I am finding patterns in his music that intrigue me.  His choice to change meter at certain times is interesting, and his orchestration is awesome.

Enough….my nerd gland almost ruptured…….

I find myself attracted to mid-twentieth composers of all kinds; I always have.  I think my musical psyche is just drawn naturally that way.  Growing up, I was mostly epxposed to earlier styles of music (baroque and renaissance), and the obligitaory romantic standards.  My parents were no lovers of Opera, and mostly listened to sacred music or 1950-1960’s pop music.  Somehow, out of all of that, I ended up with an ear for Schoenberg, Stravinski, Zappa, Copland, and Britten.  Beethoven will always have a special place in my heart, but the other neo-romantics and modernists have always intrigued me.  Not that I’m complaining.

I have been thinking aobut my philosophy of music, music-making, creating music, etc.  I will not share it with you here.  At least, not all at once.  The first thing I discovered about trying to nail down a singular philosophy of music for yourself, is that it is like trying to nail a glass of water to a tree….it is foolish.  **(Interesting analogy I think)**

What I will try and do is give little snippets of what music is to me, and why it holds the place in my life that it does.

Here is one facet of my philosophy:  Music is about speaking a universal emotional language.  Don’t let silly western rules of melody and harmonic progression get in the way.

That may sound funny coming from someone who just declared his enthusiasm for Schoenberg, the master of control and rule-making.  I do not mean to imply that I would like to go the way of John Cage and adopt a completely aleatoric method of music making.  That just isn’t me.  I mean to say that I think one ought to find what rules they are drawn to, and feel free to break them.  Schoenberg rejected the idea of traditional musical rules and theory as being the end all in musical construction and technique.  He knew there was more out there, and new ways of communicating himself to the world.  He found it alright.

I, on the other hand, do not want to invent something new.  I just want to become masterful at using what materials I have at my disposal.

More musings to be told….but too tired to write them down.