A Prisms aside: My relationship with (the idea of) composingI was quite involved in music up to the end of high school and, after an abortive year spent trying to get going with astrophysics, went back to studying music with the intention of ending up a composer. However, I eventually bailed out of studying music as well, because of two main problems:
Thus, I essentially turned away from thinking I might compose seriously, for around fifteen years or so. I didn't perform too much music during that time, either, and I went through a lot of different music listening phases as well. But a couple of years ago, after life's vicissitudes had interrupted my academic career in anthropology for the foreseeable future, I realized that I'd never really let go of my interest in experimental/twentieth-century art music, and was even able to countenance the idea that perhaps I might have some things to say within that context that would be worth saying. So I started to think of ways to try to address this. One of them was to begin doing Prisms. While I was still teaching introductory cultural anthropology classes, I found I learned much about anthropology (and myself) that I could never have learned just sitting and thinking about those topics on my own, so -- now that I thought I'd crafted the germ of a reasonably coherent perspective about the music in question -- I felt it was possible to let that perspective evolve in the context of presenting it, and of course the music, to others. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to get that forum rather sooner than expected. Of course, Prisms has its own raisons d'être over and above what it does for me; but it also serves the purpose of helping refine my own personal musical aesthetic, and, potentially, building a foundation for my compositional activities. For the opportunity to have this learning experience, I am quite grateful. I have written a few things, and have notes, sketches, and snippets for many more. However, nothing I've written has yet been recorded, and is unlikely to be recorded for some time. I haven't really had the opportunity to fool with electronics as part of the compositional process, and don't even have a piano right now to try out the non-electronic ones -- everything I've done has been on paper. There is a lot of flux in my life as of the time of this writing (February 2001), which doesn't help me to find ways to get anything recorded, and I'm still thinking about whether my creations are worth loosing on the world, anyway. Nevertheless, I am at least starting to create them now -- I suppose I would describe myself as being at the stage where it is now possible to "overcom[e] the first problem by just going ahead and composing whatever as best I [can] until I [get] myself figured out" (cf. above) -- and that's a start. I think I pretty much hear and write the same kinds of musical forms that came to me when I was seventeen, though they are no doubt now better informed by what else is out there, and by an expanded palette of sonic resources (e.g. I hadn't played in gamelans when I was seventeen, but now I have that experience to draw on). If you can imagine a triangle drawn between Scelsi, Ligeti, and Xenakis, the bulk of what I try to create probably lies somewhere inside that triangle, probably closest to the Scelsi end -- though this is only an approximation. The on-air epiphany I had during program #41 grew out of a portion of the playlist that I realized, if "averaged out" between the pieces in question, might also reflect my main compositional predispositions. Much of the rest of what I gravitate toward is a very sparse kind of writing, somewhat in the vein of folks like Thomas DeLio; and once I get back to playing in gamelans, I expect I will begin writing more avant-gamelan material as well. So, stay tuned. Perhaps one of these days, you might actually get a chance (?!) to hear one of my creations added to the Prisms mix! |