Thursday, November 13, 2014

Rendezvous With a Comet - and Music...

A veritable miracle in our time took  place  just hours ago, with Man's first encounter in distant space.
Ten years ago, an object about the size of an electric clothes dryer was sent skyward, headed for a comet about the size of Central Park, many millions of miles from Europe, where our clothes dryer named Rosetta started its multi billion mile journey.
This process presumably began with what we call numbers, which created the language or languages needed to ultimately give us Rosetta; or a man on the Moon; or Galileo; or, say,  music.
When, as an analyzer of music, or a sometimes-composer, I am, at times,  assailed (lovingly, of course!)  by that Thing we call The Number:
The staff has 5 lines and 4 spaces.
"G" is the 5th note of the "C" major scale, and is on the 2nd line of the treble clef.
There are 3 beats in the measure. Or 4. Or 6.
A sharp is one half step above the given note.
There is Binary; or Ternary form in musical structure.
And so forth.
And in recently analyzing some of the most riveting aspects of Chopin's harmonic language at its highest forms in the two great C# minor Mazurkas; language culled from numerical elements which give us the language we call Music, and the power of both Enharmonic Design and Chromaticism emanating from numerical positions given the composer in the tempered scale, and the genius of creating previously unheard -of sounds at a level given to a Chopin- well, these creations give us Chopin at his best; a world outside of the cascading beauty we hear so much in his music, which may not necessarily possess the true core of where this man was headed, which can be found  in the quieter, more contemplative sections of these two mazurkas.
So to wind this up:
The landing on a comet untold millions of miles away - the beginning of a new wave of Realization about who we are?
Like Chopin? The likes of whom opened the book to the next page for the next musical explorers...

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home