Getting Started

Hi Everyone!

College reunion re-inspired me to send out a bi-monthly blog about what I'm creating and what I'm observing in the world as I create.  I'm going to experiment a bit at first and see what format I like, but for now, here are the first and second movements of my symphony.  I recommend listening with headphones or good speakers, the bass makes a big difference and the music changes volume a lot.

The form of the whole 60-minute piece revolves around the idea of traveling into space and facing earth's fragile and beautiful micro-existence within the vastness of the universe.  

FIrst Movement

I was facing Nihilism (basically the idea that nothing matters) when I started this piece as a Senior at Brown, so I started trying to express that struggle in music.  I found the image of a fragile rocket propelling into space a compelling analogy.  The rocket itself is fine despite literally riding a giant explosion!  I imagined the chaos of the explosion and it seemed a good place to start exploring if there is meaning in chaos.  Similarly, in our current world, these giant forces merely move us around, they rarely damage our wellbeing.  It's almost like we're all riding some giant explosion hoping we don't blow up.  

Once in space, our traveler, an adolescent, doesn't quite experience seeing Earth the same way as the astronauts we know tend to.  At first, the Earth is a beautiful and spiritual thing to experience from the outside, and passions bubble into a climax of revelation.  However, beauty matures into fragility and our character finds themselves unsettled, destabilized, needing a transformation.

Listening note: The first three minutes or so are meant to convey chaos, so don't listen for a through-line! Instead, imagine the swirling energies involved and listen for the jump-cuts to a far-away view of the rocket slowly rising.

Second movement

I rewrote the second movement three times from scratch.  The first time I was obsessed with using mathematical number sequences to determine the number of notes in upward and downward scales.  I kept the general idea of dueling scales (pentatonic positive upward and an augmented-2nd scale - purely coincidentally also used in Dune movies - darkly down) but worked to find meaning in it rather than just pure math.  The problem was, during Covid I couldn't imagine slow music.  I had too much stress and too many intense emotions to write anything settled.  The second time, I came up with more fast material that I ended up using in the third movement.  The third time, after emerging from the Covid years and finally settling a bit in Madison, Wisconsin, I could see a way into the slow.  This movement is where I solidified a form I was toying with: two contrasting and yet balancing sections of music that do not share motives or themes.  I tried to make this work by using texture as a theme, only bringing back textures to create a subtle unity.

This movement starts with a journey of nihilistic dismay!  We are lost in the meaninglessness, alone and separated and uncomfortably aware of ourselves.  The music meanders between the cold vastness of space and intimate human emotion.  Eventually exhausted, we sleep and find ourselves in a beautiful dream of what could be.  Unearned, the peace we feel can't last forever, though, requiring the third and fourth movements to find true resolution. 

Listening note:  If you'd like, you can easily stop listening and come back later at _____, the end of the first half.  I recommend listening while watching a sunset or in a dark room or in a contemplative mood. I reuse some themes from the first movement, especially the "Classical" (Mozart-ish sounding) melody from the middle of it, but altered by the "Dune-movie" scale (again, I wrote this before the movie :P).

Third and fourth will be ready by the end of the summer at the latest!  I'll try to get them out to you guys sooner though.  Most of the music is already written, but I have to make sure the AI interpretation sounds half-decent too.  By the way, if it sounds off, you probably just heard an AI hallucination, don't know how to fix it!

Love,

Will