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20th century composer Laurie Conrad is a pianist and composer living in Ithaca, NY. Cds of her works "Early Songs" and "Nine Visions for flute and harp" are now available at www.figarobooks.com.
Carolyn couldn’t come yesterday, I spent the day alone working. M. got in around midnight, from Boston. Fell asleep early tonight and woke up around 2 a.m. Wrote more of the quintet. I am working off sketches I wrote a year or two ago for the fast movement - & inwardly I still see a different quintet, very atonal - in Light. Long tones, decrescendoing & crescendoing, made of and surrounded by brilliant Light. It is visually & spatially very very clear and very beautiful - & I can’t tell if it is a new piece entirely - or if it is the inner framework, the inner "Life" of the piece I am now writing, the substratum or "germ" of what I am now writing.
This has never happened to me before when composing. Often, I will visually "see" the entire piece in a flash before I begin - or I will hear melodies in my Heart. This - is an entirely new experience. Almost as though I am seeing the "core" of the music, a template of sorts, and all the notes and phrases of the quintet are manifesting from that.
Or - it is a future piece to later write down.
Perhaps it is both. Both pieces will sound entirely different - and yet be the SAME PIECE. They will each work within their own separate harmonic and melodic structures and tempi - and yet - they will be, on that distant & clairvoyant level - the same piece.
A new way to look at music. Layers of existence, unseen and unheard perhaps - yet the essence of what we hear, & almost opposite in meaning to the overtone series. The overtone series is thrown off, manifests from the bass notes & follows natural, physical laws. What I am seeing now is beyond this physical world, beyond the overtone series.
I am thinking that the true task of the composer is to get the written notes to line up with that vision - & this is the interpreter’s task as well. Suddenly something very basic & true begins to make sense, whether I can accurately express it in words is another thing ...
But without this other realm schema, this template, there is no depth or cohesion to the music - any music. For this template must exist in all music. It is like lining up our personal vision with the soul’s vision in our daily lives. Without that alignment, our lives will have no meaning, no depth, no cohesion ...
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