Listening Response (4/2)

In what has turned out to be a quite hectic couple of weeks since my last post, I’ve made a lot of progress on various things. Because Luther has graciously loaned a laptop to me over break, I can now use Reaper at my home, which will make future projects much easier. Unfortunately, after moving back home, I realized I had not properly saved my sound files on my portable drive and as a result could not continue the composition project had begun in the past several weeks. Due to the nature of my original plans, I realized it would be impossible to get the sounds I would need from my home, in which I am presently on lockdown, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I instead chose to start a completely new project, using what sounds were available to me in my home and recording them on my phone.

As you may have seen, my new planetarium composition traces the experience of a person being awoken multiple times by his alarm clock, and quickly drifting back into sleep time and time again, with each dream having its own sonic environment. Considering the challenges I faced, I’m very pleased with how my piece turned out; it even feels like a clear story exists—something I’m especially proud of. I’m really curious to hear about others’ experiences listening to my piece.

Of course, the highlight of my electronic composition endeavors in the past several days has to be hearing everyone’s planetarium compositions. I was truly impressed by the wide variety, and I feel all the more disappointed that we couldn’t experience this concert together with quality speakers and in a space where we could watch the projections of stars dance along with our music. Although I really enjoyed and admire all of the pieces, I have chosen to focus on Nolan Mancl’s for my review this week.

The piece utilizes verbal language and arranges it with musical ideas to create a density of meaning which neither music nor words alone could communicate. The people is a collage of the answers people gave him on being asked about the meaning of life and the nature of happiness. Remarkably, some participants gave answers that directly depended on the other question. For example, the meaning of life is to find happiness, and happiness of achieved through finding meaning. The bridge between ideas was so smooth, in fact, that I couldn’t tell the first and second movements apart on my first listening. Nolan’s piece also demonstrates a beautiful overarching aesthetic idea—namely, that the diversity of experiences and beliefs people have can create a beautiful whole. Our differences actually create music, in the most literal sense of the word.

It is for this reason that I can’t help but compare Nolan’s “Alive…Awake” to the choral finale of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, a piece which famously celebrates the rich diversity of our world through a set of variations on the “Ode to Joy” theme through different settings—a Turkish military march, a double fugue, etc. In some sense, Beethoven’s d-minor symphony is also a work of philosophy with a distinct argument, and a celebration of the journey towards meaning, as is Nolan’s work. Both works create this beautiful and musical journey with the help of many voices working together.