Here is the tale of a composition, and how it overtook its creator. The song opens with the composer doubting its very existence, "Einmal ist keinmal", meaning "What happens but once might as well never have happened at all". Influences on this piece are various, ranging from the books of Antoine de Saint Exupéry and Milan Kundera, to the music of Eric Whitacre and Béla Bartók.
But most of all, with the inputs and criticism of the entire choir, an idea became a song. By the end of the song, we hope you will feel the thrill with which the composer declares, "Einmal IST!"
[1st public performance IIT Delhi, won 1st in Western Group Song competition, part of Rendezvous '08, 20th September, 2008. Composed May-September, 2008]
Wind, Sand and Stars
Einmal ist keinmal
Once there was a letter
Then there was a word and
Then she wrote a sentence
And one day they heard a
SONG!
(she sang them,
hesitatingly,
hesitatingly)
(Swept away by wind)
"Swept away by the wind
Or should I let the stream take me?
Should I let the wind sweep me off my feet or
Should I let the stream drag me underneath, oh?"
She sang to herself and no one else
Einmal ist keinmal
Under the stars, over mountains of sand
Taken as light as a feather by wind
(Windblown sands and stars all twinkling)
Colours waltzing
Fingering the light
She tasted words
Oh sleepless nights she wasted
Trying to fathom (lands all unexplored)
Biplaned through her mind (driven on by wind)
Spiralled inward (endless poetry)
She was writing
Words come tumbling
And forgotten images
Remembered verses
Then in her ears she heard a multitude of voices
Come tell us all the tale of the dream that made a song
Winds may stall
Sands blow away
Stars disappear in the clouds
Listen for this song
Till the end of TIME!
Einmal
IST!
Showing posts with label Synaesthesia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Synaesthesia. Show all posts
Where association stops and synaesthesia begins
Where does association stop and synaesthesia begin?
While listening to music, something often experienced in isolation (as with headphones on), it seems to me a natural reaction to imagine the video which should go with the song. When I saw American Beauty, I was very young, I don’t remember much more of the film than one scene in which a misfit boy is showing his girl a video he shot. There’s a polythene bag swirling around in a shifting whirlpool on the sidewalk. That’s all. That video was, for years, my definition of the ultimate in cinematography. It was like there was music coming out of it.
A few months ago, I had the good fortune of being able to watch the renowned Maria Pagés and her Flamenco troupe perform in New Delhi dance which was all at once of cobblestoned streets and the furnaces of hell. Maria Pagés dances to unfamiliar beats, I am a musician, but I could not keep time; the language is alien, I do not speak Spanish.
And yet as she danced, words were rushing out of my mouth; no, not words, formless ghosts burst out of me as if my soul would explode. The only form I knew to put them into was word. If I could recall what I thought (if you could call it that), faster than my own mind could process, at the time, I have no doubt that it would have produced some of the best I have ever written.
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata always conjures up in my mind the image of afternoon sun coming in through a window. Nothing to do with moonlight at all, actually. I heard Chopin’s Waltz in A Minor for the first time recently, and that day I listened to it at least thirty times, again and again. To me it sounded like a man in a battered overcoat, in a grey scene, walking at times briskly, almost breaking into a run, and at times shuffling; always hugging himself tight, trying fruitlessly to keep the driving rain from running down his neck and onto his back. I asked my friend S, over the phone, to tell me what it looked like. “Looks like or sounds like?” he checked. But I knew what I meant. Anyhow, what he saw was totally different. It was a man arranging for a birthday party outdoors, in a garden. It’s strange to reconstruct what was described, phone conversations force one to colour them with one’s own perception. But there were sepia flashbacks in his picture. The music lends itself to flashback, going distinctly from minor sounds to major sounds and back. S saw it as a filmmaker would, a structured and bounded view. I saw it as a torturous road; I was like the wildlife cameraman, following my fellow, not knowing what he would see next. He saw children playing. He saw destitution. He saw despair. He saw survivors. But overall the scene was never released from the grey downpour.
Even the distinctions between minor and major chords or scales seems to be questionable. I can certainly feel the sadness of minor notes, but I really wonder what the average non-musical person hears and feels. I tried this with my roommate last year, she has no particular musical inclination except the intermittent interest that all teenagers must have. I played her Romanza on the piano (electric keyboard, actually) and asked her if she could see where the mood changed. She could, it’s a good piece to start out with, very easy to pinpoint the changes (I don’t know if these are what are called movements). Even so, a hundred per cent statistic on a one person test is not exactly a fair sample. I was not convinced.
I really don’t know where normal associations end and synaesthetic ones begin; isn’t, say, BLUE=COLD or RED=HOT? Or are even these associations culture-specific? When you’re decorating a room, you are advised to choose colour schemes wisely, appropriate to the feel of the room. You wouldn’t paint a nursery red, would you?
You feel happy when you see/hear something, sad when something else. But wait, that’s not a synthesis of senses at all. I can’t figure this out, though. Is seeing in the mind’s eye seeing?
Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating. Is it all in my head? Does synaesthesia even exist? Or is it because I have never felt the real thing that I am a sceptic?
It’s tough being a sceptic and also being creative and a romantic. And considering that every synaesthete’s experience may differ vastly in strength and nature from the next, it makes it even harder to explain.
Great. One more to add to the identity crises.
While listening to music, something often experienced in isolation (as with headphones on), it seems to me a natural reaction to imagine the video which should go with the song. When I saw American Beauty, I was very young, I don’t remember much more of the film than one scene in which a misfit boy is showing his girl a video he shot. There’s a polythene bag swirling around in a shifting whirlpool on the sidewalk. That’s all. That video was, for years, my definition of the ultimate in cinematography. It was like there was music coming out of it.
A few months ago, I had the good fortune of being able to watch the renowned Maria Pagés and her Flamenco troupe perform in New Delhi dance which was all at once of cobblestoned streets and the furnaces of hell. Maria Pagés dances to unfamiliar beats, I am a musician, but I could not keep time; the language is alien, I do not speak Spanish.
And yet as she danced, words were rushing out of my mouth; no, not words, formless ghosts burst out of me as if my soul would explode. The only form I knew to put them into was word. If I could recall what I thought (if you could call it that), faster than my own mind could process, at the time, I have no doubt that it would have produced some of the best I have ever written.
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata always conjures up in my mind the image of afternoon sun coming in through a window. Nothing to do with moonlight at all, actually. I heard Chopin’s Waltz in A Minor for the first time recently, and that day I listened to it at least thirty times, again and again. To me it sounded like a man in a battered overcoat, in a grey scene, walking at times briskly, almost breaking into a run, and at times shuffling; always hugging himself tight, trying fruitlessly to keep the driving rain from running down his neck and onto his back. I asked my friend S, over the phone, to tell me what it looked like. “Looks like or sounds like?” he checked. But I knew what I meant. Anyhow, what he saw was totally different. It was a man arranging for a birthday party outdoors, in a garden. It’s strange to reconstruct what was described, phone conversations force one to colour them with one’s own perception. But there were sepia flashbacks in his picture. The music lends itself to flashback, going distinctly from minor sounds to major sounds and back. S saw it as a filmmaker would, a structured and bounded view. I saw it as a torturous road; I was like the wildlife cameraman, following my fellow, not knowing what he would see next. He saw children playing. He saw destitution. He saw despair. He saw survivors. But overall the scene was never released from the grey downpour.
Even the distinctions between minor and major chords or scales seems to be questionable. I can certainly feel the sadness of minor notes, but I really wonder what the average non-musical person hears and feels. I tried this with my roommate last year, she has no particular musical inclination except the intermittent interest that all teenagers must have. I played her Romanza on the piano (electric keyboard, actually) and asked her if she could see where the mood changed. She could, it’s a good piece to start out with, very easy to pinpoint the changes (I don’t know if these are what are called movements). Even so, a hundred per cent statistic on a one person test is not exactly a fair sample. I was not convinced.
I really don’t know where normal associations end and synaesthetic ones begin; isn’t, say, BLUE=COLD or RED=HOT? Or are even these associations culture-specific? When you’re decorating a room, you are advised to choose colour schemes wisely, appropriate to the feel of the room. You wouldn’t paint a nursery red, would you?
You feel happy when you see/hear something, sad when something else. But wait, that’s not a synthesis of senses at all. I can’t figure this out, though. Is seeing in the mind’s eye seeing?
Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating. Is it all in my head? Does synaesthesia even exist? Or is it because I have never felt the real thing that I am a sceptic?
It’s tough being a sceptic and also being creative and a romantic. And considering that every synaesthete’s experience may differ vastly in strength and nature from the next, it makes it even harder to explain.
Great. One more to add to the identity crises.
Strange Attactor
Benoit Mandelbrot, one of the first to conceive of the all-encompassing nature of Chaos theory, was an outsider in his discipline. Which discipline was that? He was an outsider in every field people tried to fit him. He was of what he called the rare nomads-by-choice who are in the end the ones called, in retrospect, pioneers.
I run into some people sometimes who can appreciate the awe that a tyro must inevitably feel when comfronted with the surreal implications of Chaos and its incredible omnipresence. Like Professor Dosch of Heidelberg whom I met last year. When I began to quote Mandelbrot, he nodded and nodded; of course I am by no means the first to be romanced by the poetry so latent in seeing patterns in everything, which is not really a bad description of the beginnings of Chaos; subjective as it may sound, I cannot put out of my mind the sneaking suspicion that maybe even this is not the end. Before Chaos, Newtonian mechanics and Euclidian geometry were the limits to imagination. Now these ideas are slowly becoming obsolete; they no longer define what is allowed, or even what is understood.
Who knows what inspiration is; the borders between art and art hold infinite possibilities. What you think, what you compose, what you see, what you hear are all initial conditions.
I discovered today yet another astonishing example of what the human mind can do. The Strange Attractor that this post is supposed to be about is not what a Physics man would imagine. I'm a student of Literature, after all. Surely I can use poetic license enough to use the words like what they meant before Chaos. I was strangely attracted to one man's work. In computing terms it is not, perhaps, the most intricate of piece of programming, but it is art in a strange way, like the fantastic landscapes of Lorenz's weatherless diagrams.
It's all here, in case you miss the link at the bottom:
This man, Lauri Gröhn, has created the software which I was so sure must exist, it is too small a world for there to be no one else like me who wished to hear the music that was so visible in the multicoloured generated fractals. Generative Art. It's the ultimate in synaesthetic technology, really. What the mind does by accident, this program does by design. It starts with a picture and ends with music.
It does come to mind that if a computer can do this, what use am I? but even for a musician, curiosity and amazement should surely overpower any misgivings. Generative Art is not compu-spew. Far from it. Gröhn says that the difficult part is to find a picture that will sound good.
This making music from a picture is like "inspiration" taken very very literally. I was influenced by Dali and Magritte is now I wrote Dali and Magritte. It's as close as we've got to the mind reading machine that I always thought was the end of all technology, the apex of scientific progress after which anything else would just be redundant.
Which way does it work, though? Does the music sound like we would like the picture to sound? Or is what we hear at the end what we allow ourselves to associate with the picture till we see it as its musical counterpart?
It sounds like an exaggeration even to me, all this praise. But Synaesthesia has long fascinated me, and to find this serendipitously was like learning, for the first time, that radioactive decay turns one element into another. The elemental is as fluid as anything else.
READ ALL ABOUT Lauri Gröhn's PROJECT HERE
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