Reflections on Atonal Music: A Composer’s Journal Entry: February 20, 2007

Tuesday, February 20

M. returned well after midnight last night; one piece of luggage did not.

Warm today, in the 40's. Errands; mailed Spear the score of Movement III. The icicles are melting, falling from the eaves & windows with an occasional crash. I will miss them. Yesterday, outside the computer room window, an intricate & gnarled sculpture of ice shining rainbows in the sun; today a lone representative.

11 p.m.

Wrote a long introduction to the next Image, Brownies Play in the Setting Sun. It is on the piano rack, in pencil sketch form, some notes without stems, some stems without note heads. I think the pencil sketches are my favorite musical calligraphy. The passage took only a few minutes to write, but in some part of my mind & being I have been writing it all day. It is entirely possible that inwardly I am always writing music - but there are days, even months, when my entire being seems to be writing the music; I am then aware of a certain inner attention & alertness that I am now familiar with, difficult to describe.

But at those times, when I go to the empty page of manuscript paper, suddenly it is covered with ideas, with musical notes & phrases, often entire passages, pages of music. Then I know that I am merely tapping into an inner stream, an inner silent flow of music. Undoubtedly most people experience an inner stream of ideas, of thoughts: I do not. My first language is not words, it is music ...

As I have written earlier in these Journal entries: composing music, for me - is more like opening an inner Door & then walking through the Door.

When the Door is open, the musical ideas are endless, the tones & harmonies infinite, unending. In those times, I am just snatching a few melodies or harmonies as they pass by, putting them on the blank manuscript paper. If I do not catch them & write them down - they are gone forever, traveling into Infinity. For these notes & sounds - are my very essence, they emanate from my very being. And I think this is true of all composers, all artists.

I can take that essence & turn it into either tonality or atonality - I am equally comfortable in both. I am not sure this is true of all composers. But sometimes I wonder if atonality is just when we capture the higher harmonics of tonality, put them into sound. Although, as I have said before, much atonal music I have heard more makes me feel as though I am wandering around in the lower realms, lost. In my experience, one has to write atonal music very, very carefully, with much care & with much integrity. Twelve tone has suited me well because the compositional form, the method, is so strict, so ordered. Atonal music without some sort of strict form or ordering - is mere chaos, in my opinion.

When I think of the potential & possibility of atonal music, I think of that day I stood on Quarry Bridge so many years ago. All the birds were singing, a natural & atonal cacophony - & yet each bird knew its practiced song & sang it beautifully & sweetly, in its designated key & rhythms & pitches. That all the songs overlapped, at random, produced a grand & stunning overall atonality - but it was based on order, the form & order of each individual song. And so it was not chaos, or unpleasing; instead it was Mysterious & Beautiful, something to marvel at & admire. The overall effect, for me, was more like many bells ringing in many towers in many towns, all at once, each in their own separate patterns & pitches & overtones - or the myriad angels singing their various songs to themselves.

I have come to think that each living being, every crystal or snowflake, or any other substance of the universe - emits its own natural song or music. This music is inherent to our universe - & the composers are trying to find & express it. This is equally true in other realms, & the composers often bring these sounds & patterns to earth in their music, or at least a reflection of them.

There is an infinity of tone in each sound, & sometimes I think all music is trying to capture the infinitude of one tone. I think that is why often, after practicing many hours of Chopin or Scriabin or Liszt for a concert, in the silence that followed I would wonder why I had bothered to play all those notes, those physical sounds - when in the silence I could hear an infinitude of sounds and songs and symphonies ....