idea.

So the way it seems to work is some night late always I stumble over to the Bechstein and blurt out some random idea that comes to me out of nowhere. It is always an enormous idea in my head but translated to two hands on a piano recorded in Logic to hold onto and rework and assemble seems at times to me lame in comparison. But I remember this idea. It is fragmented and torn and there are notes misplayed (many notes misplayed) and mistimed (much of it mistimed) but I do not edit these first attempts at an idea in case something never intended (as in the whole of it the playing completely unintentional) might be erased and better left kept. And always a voice in my head even when the lyrics are not written always trying to rise above the piano and the orchestra and the band everything colliding in my head. Sometimes it seems there is no piano large enough and surely I am not nearly good enough to express it all. I have no idea what I was thinking as I played this. I have no idea if the final song will sound anything like this original idea but I will always have it to remember. I have no idea but am done now.





File linked here if the player does not work.

escape velocity [recorded].

Well, finally, just the idea of it. Hammered away on the Bechstein, then back to the keyboard (still need an interface and a pair of mics to record the piano for real) to lay it out. Know exactly what I want to say but unable yet to really say it. Julian came by wondering what I was up to, so I showed him around Logic a bit – creating objects, sends and effects. Editing a few mis-played notes. Adjusting levels and so on. He looked at me and said when I get everything together it is going to be awesome. I guess I am on the right track.

The more I listen to the playback and play it myself (different still every time as I have yet to really nail down how exactly it goes) and the more I read about the Apollo missions and the Voyager missions I get this enormous sense of optimism that cannot be contained and I want to find a way to put that into lyrics for music that is huge and larger than almost anything I have ever written trying to make the analogy to our ever-so-short-lived quest – triumphs and tragedies and all – to reach the stars. The idea of hope beckons with this image in my mind of an enormous Saturn V rocket – a triumph of the humankind – lifting off and in an instant out of sight, hurtling away from Earth and everything we know out into a vastness we cannot comprehend, but with so much promise and mystery.

I have tried in the past (feebly at best) to describe places here on Earth through which I have traveled and become a part of if even short-lived, but it is that much more difficult I am finding to write about experiences I cannot imagine – of looking back at this tiny world on which we find ourselves for now from an unimaginable distance in some attempt to understand our fragility, our isolation and loneliness, our dependence on one another, our need to respect all that we have. It is quite simple to say, on one hand, how this fascination of mine with the stars and my zealousness to study them and the sciences to which they relate has given me this notion that we can indeed overcome our odds and prove our potential to all those generations before us and all those yet to come. Impossible on the other to find a way to say how.

Maybe I should just leave it at that for now. Try to get some sleep. Think about it some more. Maybe one day I will be able to write what I want to say.

obliquity of the ecliptic.

The axial tilt may equivalently be expressed in terms of the planet's orbital plane and a plane perpendicular to its axis. In our solar system, the Earth's orbital plane is known as the ecliptic, thus the Earth's axial tilt is officially called the obliquity of the ecliptic. The ecliptic is not a fixed quantity but changing over time in a cycle with a period of a hundred million years. It is a very slow effect known as nutation, but even at the level of accuracy at which astronomers work needs to be taken into account in daily calculations. The obliquity and the precession of the equinoxes are calculated from the same theory and are thus related to each other. Without one there would not be the other.

and as I stand here fixed in time
I spin around to mesmerize and hold my Fate
to stem the tide I choose to wait
a fixed point in space I have held and now release
towards the distant pale point of light I gravitate
as time stands still but all the while I cannot find
the orbit is lost and so anew I must create

There is of course an enormous piano the chords huge. It starts out with a full-blown orchestration the piano accompanying and the lyrics above (only partially scrawled out at the moment but close to the idea). The tempo is slow in common time each syllable held out nearly until the lyrics are over and then the tempo doubles and the piano begins furious arpeggiated triplets up and down the registers as the orchestra matches the tempo and then after several repetitions of the arpeggiated chord progression, the lyrics come back to reiterate the last point as the song crescendos beyond belief cymbals crashing the piano enormous and unbearable before ending in a furious wash of sound and samples. What is quite fun in Logic is to actually go into the sample editor and manipulate each individual note to tweak the overall performance as I will have to do on most of the bars I have recorded as they are somewhat sloppy but captured the idea for now. And yes I love the word 'furious' as it relates to music.

theory.

"What's most personal is universal."

~ Carl Rogers

final exploration of space.

I was overwhelmed with this song that was in my head that I started writing a few months ago. I knew all of the chords (the key of D-flat major) and the idea of it but never all of the lyrics.

I imagine leaving the lyrics speak for themselves metaphors and all but will quickly say I think there is a quality and sereneness to being alone, and not to be so cynical as to say or think indefinitely but at least for a moment where I think humbly that is an important component to defining if at least to ourselves who we are and just why we are here all the while a pair of spacecraft are hurtling through interstellar space soon too distant for even the lightspeed of radio waves programmed to find a hint of life without promises or guarantees and in all likelihood destined to wander forever alone through a vast empty space but always, always with the intent of finding something ... someone.

I have traveled four billion miles to find I'm alone
I sit silent and stare through time
and darkness only I can know
through all these miles I've tried to find a way to say
I have seen a glimpse through time
drawn to know the strains
as light reflects and bends the line
I'm crushed against the grain
through all these miles I've tried to radio back home
from where I am I find the strength to finally say I'm alone

It is just piano and a synth (actually, an orchestra but performed live would be multiple samplers and a tone generator accompanying the piano) that I cannot really describe, but with a deep low-end that subsists the piano in all its elegance simple someone or something on a path of discovery the final sampled chords immense and crushing sustained for many, many bars the piano long having faded out until a final mute of them all.

pale.

The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: on the scale of worlds – to say nothing of stars or galaxies – humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

It struck Carl Sagan that if a new image were taken, one from a hundred thousand times farther away, this might help in the continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstance and condition. And so – finally, after waiting eight years – the time came to turn the cameras on Voyager around after it passed beyond the orbits of Neptune and Uranus back to photograph six of our solar system's planets, including Earth.

Apparently, due to the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth appears to be hovering in a beam of light. What was just a matter of timing perhaps gave the notion of some special significance to this small and distant world, rather than the accident of geometry and physics for which it was. But really, from this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest – a slightly brighter star in a vast, cosmic sea of stars.

Nothing has struck me as more profound. Ever.

He then goes on to write about a time perhaps when we have reached beyond the pale blue dot and colonized other worlds and – looking back through the heavens and the stars – says of us ~

"They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way."

And one sunny afternoon back in February after reading this I stumbled over to the Bechstein, sat down and out of nowhere came up with what I've since thought is what I've been meaning to write all these years just this sunny day happened to use metaphors of a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam in the key of G# minor ~

I awake with pale blue eyes in pale blue skies

I'm surprised

to find my way to stand and strain

to the skies that seem to say I am wise

I am frail but I have tried

to find my way to see through time

and glimpse through veils that hide my Fate

but of stars that fade away fragile and torn

in distant galaxies I am born

four billion miles away I can say

I am alone

all these light years away

alone all these light years away

It is an enormous song. Perhaps more so than any I have ever written or will ever write. The orchestra and the piano lines impossible. The vocal line soaring. And the end–to the crash of cymbals and fortissimo chords the singer strains to reach the crescendo of the lyrics rising over it all. And then four successive downbeats one after another crashing and crashing to the end then silence as the cymbals and piano and orchestra fades out.

escape velocity.

I know there are months – years – when writing is impossible so this I guess is why I'm seized by the need to work work work. I am still pouring over formulas and calculations of the square of the gravitational constant multiplied by the mass of the body trying to escape divided by the radius of the distance between the escaping body and the center of the gravitational force acting upon it and the idea that this all relies on the conservation of energy with respect to a gravitational potential energy at any given position and to somehow put this into words this idea of trying to defy Fate and somehow find a way to escape knowing full well it is unlikely if not impossible but regardless the idea of being able to overcome anything against any odds even gravity itself each of our own enormous potential the key this time seeming to be the relationship between the chord of E-flat minor and B major (in the key of E-flat minor, oddly enough it's the sixth so I haven't been able to figure out why the sequence is so powerful but through inversion the only note that needs to change is from B-flat to B so that could be part of it) here just pounding away on this old grand piano (as David Helfgott's professor would shout as he pounded Rachmaninov 'don't you just love those big fat chords David!?') slightly out of tune (I need to get on that) in the corner of my living room one tiny light on the lid open the neighbors no doubt rolling their eyes wondering what's gotten into that guy pounding away it all exploding anyway.

I hear it beginning with a muffled sample of a voice heard over the radiowaves from a command center to a spacecraft and more and more samples begin to layer on each other and then out of nowhere the enormous sounds of the piano playing fortissimo chords on the low register the key of E-flat minor and eventually finding its way to this heartbeaking melody on the two chords mentioned above until an enormous crescendo again and a cycling sample of that muffled voice decades past talking to a spacecraft having freed itself from Earth's gravity fades away.

All I've been able to come up with is for the end where I'm banging those two chords and thinking to myself ~

gravity fails and I'm surprised to find myself floating away

through infinite space on a constant force floating away

floating away

away

away

away

new horizons.

Key of F# minor (although the key is the G# diminished chord). All of a sudden and out of nowhere now just right there in front of me. No idea where this stuff comes from. But it's there now totally in my head and no way I can just fall asleep even though I'm dead tired from way too little sleep all week so far cos it's exploding.

I fly away scattered and absorbed

violet and blue atmospheres and hues

As Carl Sagan writes ~

"When we look up on a cloudless day and admire the blue sky, we are witnessing the preferential scattering of the short waves in sunlight. This is called Raleigh scattering ....

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works – that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red?"