Composing for Piano

For most of this week I've been working on some piano music, initially for a performance at Chester Cathedral on September 23rd 2016. My first public performance of any sort was in July 2015, at an art preview. Myself with artist Sabine Kussmaul had been asked to do "something" at the opening of an exhibition then, and I asked an artist friend, the enigmatic "Escargot" to help too. I largely improvised music to accompany Snail's automatic stories for that; no pressure, as the result was destined to be "avant-garde" and should merely be expressive, which is simple. Falling over can be expressive, and for an artist always is. An artist doing anything is art. Honest expression is the root of art and the duty of the artist, so to act this way is simple.

Here is a photo from that event a year ago...

The music then evolved, and that performance, named The Anatomy of Emotions, became a series of six piano tunes of about 4 minutes. These tunes grew independently. The last one was a simple single chord melody. The second tune was an improvisation around A minor and E minor, those two tunes were present at that first performance. The others were written for the second performance, and were very simple melodies and arpeggios, each amounting to about two minutes which then repeated with a bit of variation. Earlier this year I released the set as an album, lengthened a few tracks and added a few more in a similar style, some live improvisations.

Now I'm tasked with new music with a similar layout, again to accompany videos by Sabine.

This time I had to write everything from a starting point, and I wanted to create something unified, like a six movement sonata. My self-taught piano playing is far from performance standard, yet I knew that I could improve by inserting a few parts that would train me by virtue of having to play them, but I still felt very lacking in the performance skills that I needed to truly compose the music I'd like. Thus, I must create something with a rough outline but an artistic heart.

The six parts represent different ideas related to architecture; Organic Flow, Old Versus New, Perpetual Change, Death/Collapse, The Night/Healing, Rebirth Connections.

I began with a simple cycling tune that reminded me of perpetual change because it created in my mind the image of a perpetual motion machine. This melody was in D minor and made up of a group of four notes with the emphasis on the last note. I thought of expanding this idea, and made an outline of the "death/collapse" tune use the same melody. For the rest though, something new was needed, so I inverted the melody a bit, making it climb up in D minor, using slightly different notes. Then I created a positive version of the same melody in C major, a happy version. This eventually became the main melody in the final part.

In drama or music, one trick is to create a cresendo, or single moment that summarises the whole, then build towards it. In a limerick it's best to write the first line, then the last, and so in music too, creating the start and then the ending, then make everything pull towards the ending. This is the key. The end is always a destination that should be longed for. Alfred Hitchcock said that he wishes he'd not had the climax in his films, to keep his famously tense audience, tense. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony essentially begins with the famous Ode to Joy, yet the music doesn't start with it, instead lighting a touch paper that drops hints towards it all over the place, such that the audience expects it, unconsciously.

I fear that my conclusion is a little more overt! The seeds of my first piece "Organic Flow" are sad and searching. Old Versus New will be largely improvised on this theme, thus bridging the gaps between it and the slightly different (yet related) perpetual change, the only part in 3/4 time.

I'm still working on a lot of this, and learning apace to read music. A thousand curses that I didn't do this earlier, but we can't change the past. I'd not played a piano at all until 2008 at a friend's house, and only started playing "seriously" last autumn, just as I only started painting "seriously" in January 2007. Memorising the 30 minutes of new music requires a few mental tricks, hindered a little by a performance of The Anatomy of Emotions the week before the premiere of this music, but we can't fail, if we are expressive.

Meanwhile here is a poster for the accompanying art exhibition, which I'll also be submitting some sculptural work to.

MIDI Variable Length Value Code

I added a Type 1 MIDI export function to my sequencer software today, so I thought I'd post the MIDI delta time code I used as I couldn't find any other code snippets online.

lword tempstore[4], tempstorecounter, i, deltatime, trackbuffersize;
char trackbuffer[];
.
.
.
// This will convert a long word time variable in deltatime into variable bit rate MIDI delta time
// format, storing it as a string of chars in "trackbuffer"
// tempstore is used to invert the significance of the bits, as the MBS's need to come first

for (tempstorecounter=0; deltatime>127; deltatime=(deltatime>>7))
tempstore[tempstorecounter++]=(char)(deltatime&0x7f);
tempstore[tempstorecounter++]=deltatime;
for (i=0; i<tempstorecounter; i++)
{
if (i<tempstorecounter-1)
trackbuffer[trackbuffersize++]=(char)(0x80|tempstore[tempstorecounter-1-i]);
else
trackbuffer[trackbuffersize++]=(char)tempstore[tempstorecounter-1-i];
}


A Free Will of Infinite Possibility

Free will is our ability to imagine any possible future, even though we are destined to enact only the one that was always fated. It is the barrier between these states that causes all of our agonies.

The mind-body gap, the gap between the real world and our thoughts, is the gap between the certainty of the universe and fate and the uncertainty, the infinite possibility of the imagination. If time is a dimension then the future is necessarily as firm as the past, and destiny is certain, but we can think anything that we do not enact. It is this very freedom, akin to a quantum state of flux that gives us the illusion of freewill.

The very moment when our thoughts are read by our perception then, those thoughts snap into reality, but before this our thoughts are free to conceptualise anything. This is pure freedom versus containment on one level. Perhaps at that point, the ball is already rolling and fate will create a pattern of thought and argument that will end with an inevitable action on the world, but crucially, there is a point where infinite possibility exists, or at least a fluid potential that is not a definite and certain action. This is freedom, and the barrier between this free state and a future certain state marks the boundary between free-will and fate.

In emotional terms, I suspect that wrestling with this barrier, which much surely be an organic, evolving and fluid, psychological membrane, is the root of human distress.

Blame

People blame politicians for their misfortunes, or the past, or the stupid, or the rich, or their enemies, or politicians of the past, or witches, or immigrants, or technocrats, revolutionaries, bankers, religious zealots, be they alive, dead, or written about in holy books, which are also blamed, for the misfortunes of the world and of our lives. People also blame themselves.

People have an innate desire to blame someone or something else for misfortune. It's part of being self-aware to believe that the actions of selves matter. If actions of selves matter then praise and blame are logical, but if we are not self-aware then our actions are not ours, and we can't be responsible for them. To blame or praise things that are not self-aware makes no sense. We can't blame the Earth for quaking, even when it causes great destruction. We can blame a warmonger for an act with similar results.

Can an unconscious being, a dog (if dogs have no self-awareness) be blamed for an action that starts a war or kills someone? Dogs do kill and are blamed, but this is largely anthropomorphism by the justice system. We find it easy to blame a savage dog, treating the animal like a brutal person, yet don't treat chickens in a battery farm as more than automatons.

Can the stupid be blamed for acting stupidly? No, for their actions were always destined, given their knowledge and experience up that point. Similarly, the actions of the intelligent were always destined in the same way. Can they be blamed for the outcome of their actions either?

Once the illusion of self-control is released, feelings of blame are irrational. What has been has been, and was always to be, and to attach blame, or praise to the actions of others is a futile waste of mental energy, as futile as blaming the sun for rising and burning us, or the Earth for quaking.

Art as Emotional Communication

People's answer to the question of "What is art?" varies, but for me art is emotional communication. Intellectual communication is not art, merely information. Du Champ's urinal was art originally because it was shocking, but it is not art now because it is no longer shocking, so what art is varies in time with the emotional flow of the observer, and of society.

This also means that art and its meaning is deeply tied to humanity and society, as all emotions step from social interactions, and also of it time, having different meanings and power at different times, and in different societies. The scribbled characters on a receipt may be simple commerce at one time, but in thousands of years, as the last mark of a dead civilisation, may gain new emotional significance and become an artwork. By the same token, a meaningful portrait of a saint or revolutionary leader may, in distant years, fade in feeling to become a mere factual image.

Tiger Moving Nowhere At All

Here's a newly framed print of my Tiger Moving Nowhere At All painting. The size is unusual so each of these prints has a unique hand made frame with a different design. This one is number 3 of 50 and is for sale for £295, you can email me if you want to buy it and are able to collect it from Cheshire.

The painting is about the impending extinction of the tiger, an animal on the brink of oblivion. I wanted the shape of the picture itself to mimic the shape of a tiger's head.

Love and Death

We experience death as loss. We can't feel loss individually, only socially as a recognition of something missing. When we die, we will feel nothing ourselves. So feeling loss is an integral part of our life, it can't exist without it and decay itself is a fundamental part of existence.

Love is attachment and death is disattachment, which is only noticed relative to the prior attachment, so experience is a constant flow of change from states of attachment and states of disattachment, and it is these changes of state that define existence. This can even occur at atomic levels, the bubbles of the universe, a flow of attachment and disattachment.

To be totally disattached, to be invisible and unconsidered by anyone, is the same as being dead, and to re-attach is to spontaneously live, but only in the minds of others, as our death can only be measured by others. Thus, our relationships and how others think of us defines our existence.

As existence is defined by the flow of attachment and disattachment, then change and disruption is at its heart. To fit in, to rest, to stand still, these things are decadent, and passion, disruption, energetic change, creativity, define the brightness of life.

Gone

I still love you completely.
I still miss you each day.
My heart is still broken and fallen away.

I still see your face
in my dreams as I strive
to forget every memory,
and crush every hope.

In my soul you're alive,
in my life you live on,
while I'm dead inside,
as I cope,
with you gone.