Poetry in Life

I think there is a place in one of my compositions where I inserted the simple instruction: poetically. I knew what I wanted, for the player to take more time, to give a bit more expression, to play, well, beautifully. I think most performers would respond in this way. But it makes me realize that these days, asking someone to do something poetically is almost absurd. We don't live in very beautiful times. Here is a clip that talks about how this manifests:

If I were to peel back the layers of the onion, I could mention that the repoeticization of my own life started a few years ago. Realizing that I had spent the last thirty years composing and writing on the computer I decided to make a radical change. Instead of composing with music software I went back to a pencil and eraser. I started writing a journal including poetry. And I did that with fountain pens in a paper journal. I started sketching. Apart from the sketching, I have kept all this up with great enjoyment. Historically, we can go deeper and look at some of the things that are emblematic of a "war on beauty".

Just a note on pronunciation: "Guernica" is not pronounced "gooernica" but "gernica." The "u" is just there to make the "g" hard instead of soft. Julia attributes the profound changes in aesthetics to the world wars, but it is very interesting to note that the change in aesthetics actually began before World War I. Artists have a sort of vague procognition as to where the culture is going. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was the first to write about the mechanization and flattening of aesthetics in works written between the two wars, but we can hear the disquiet, the feeling of an approaching cultural thunderstorm well before World War I in pieces like Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg as well as symphonies by Mahler and Petrushka by Stravinsky. All of these works show the signs of dislocation and dissonance that are characteristic of modernism. And, as I said, all were written before WWI.

But, as Julia points out, we are starting to become fed up with the sterile, grey world that has come to be. No reason we have to put up with it. We can just change things. And that, indeed, seems to be what is happening. And, in fifty or a hundred years or so, we will see how it turned out.

For some reason this makes me think of the last movement of the Symphony No. 4 by Shostakovich, which takes us on a very strange journey.