Fall Weather

Autumn has once again arrived, and by happy coincidence my enforced (but unnecessary) bed rest ended yesterday.  If I had to stay recumbent for one more day I likely would have abandoned all pretense at good-humor and destroyed some of the various valuable knick-knacks I have lying around the place.

I can see why they say tiger is an aphrodisiac   

Ed has done his best to be helpful, but the poor man just couldn't figure out the right mix of tea leaves for my daily Himalayan 茶. Also he could never figure out which were my morning slippers and which were my evening slippers, even though there's a clear difference on the tread if you look carefully in the right light.

At any rate, the passage of the seasons never fails to inspire me; not musically, of course -- lesser composers might need clement weather, but my music comes straight to me regardless -- but in a more general sense.  Consider: the beautiful coloration of the leaves we see each year is a manifestation of the individual death of each leaf, multiplied ad infinitum as it were -- a veritable carnage of chlorophyll.

I see dead petioles

You might find it a bit shocking that I find such imagery inspiring, but why wouldn't I?  Why don't you? A true artists respects the real nature of beauty (or beauty of nature) not in spite of its source, but because of it.

Most of what you see is bacteria

One of the many, many reasons that I had no respect for the piano teacher of my childhood, Mrs. Periwinkle, is the fact that she forced on me all kind of awful pieces with titles like "The Nymph's Complaint," and "By The Brook," and "Forest Murmurs."  That last one might be something by Wagner, actually, but the fact that he happened to be a (debatably) great composer is no excuse for such a maudlin title.  Nature loses much of its appeal to me when we stubbornly insist on romanticizing it.

Also, I do not approve of the facial hair

My piece Dessications, written in 1969, I believe, was meant to illustrate this point.  It is scored for string orchestra and a complement of tuned bicycle horns that individually have a somewhat grating sound.  However, the sound of the strings playing sul ponticello fortississimo along with the horns in carefully spaced chords devised according to a meticulously organized serialist structure was said to be quite attractive.  I wouldn't venture to say so myself; I don't hear music in those terms, but someone wrote a monograph about it in a contemporary music journal later that year, so it must have had a positive impact.

Now I will end this posting, and head out of the city for a short while to enjoy the foliage.