Music is the eye of the ear.
- Thomas Draxe
The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.
- George Steiner
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
- Red Auerbach
Topic:
THE HARMONY OF THE SPHERES
What kind of listener are you?
As a composer-performer, I desire to create music and multi-media productions that "resonate" with the energy of the inner landscape of the human psyche. I want my music and art to inspire and move people and reconnect them with the very essence of the universe...the so-called harmony of the spheres. Because sound is produced by the combined efforts of noise-energy and the structural quality of instruments that resonate with vibrations, when I perform my compositions, I express myself through the medium of subtle interactions of pitched frequencies that enable the formation of harmony overtones within my chosen frame of observation. When an objective composition is replaced by subjective composition of perception, the organization of reflected sounds relates to the matrix of the cultural and cognitive associations of the listener. The listener is no longer a passive consumer but an increasingly active creator of his or her own experience. As a composer I take into account, not only the rigid relations of conceptual notes but also the high-energy interactional phenomena of tones in sound patterns of resonance, beat, combination tones and phase - shifts. I supplement consonance with dissonance as the sounds I create are in the process of developing their full psycho-acoustic effects within the vast range of electromagnetic radiation, even above or below (or outside) of the range of human perception.
Sounds are not judged by the pseudo-objective value of their static hierarchic relations, but by the psychosomatic effects of the dynamic/cybernetical processes that they release. The sound effect is transformative and cannot be standardized. The first phase of a transformative process requires the acquisition of energy by disintegration; i.e. the deconditioning of the reflex associations and the dissolution of the self limitations of ego-definition, including dissolution that disperses into a whole. This integrating process is associated with the harmony of the spheres, and my goal as a composer is to carry the listener, by adjusting attitudes and emotions in the listening process, towards a more direct experience of that esoteric state of experience.
And it is also on the basis of this subjective experience, along with reflective and surrounding environmental properties, that the noise-orientation of transformative music may be explained. New Music is --(in the first instance)-- nothing but "noise" when we first listen to it. Each experience of the same music after that, lessens the "noise" quotient and alters the character of the listening experience. It becomes a more memorable or catchy tune after that, and along the changes of cultural listening patterns, one may observe how the originally senseless noise, slowly changes into sensitive signals and is finally accepted as music (in an analogy to a cultural process in which dissonant intervals insert themselves into an enlarged notion of harmony). Human listening patterns are well defined and deeply imprinted (which is what causes those songs that go around and around in your head after hearing them) and usually occur after the breaking-up of the social eggshell (puberty) accompanied by hormonal developments and metabolic changes.
