A Lurking Manifesto

[Crystalion]

luckally nobody has ever figured out where my current sig comes from....

Well, whether it has anything to do with your sig or not (as opposed to a Disney movie) the following is interesting (and rather obscure)...

My initial idea for "Sleeping Muse Study" was to write quiet, peaceful music like the compassionate face of the Buddha. However, now I wonder if I can say that the face of the Buddha is compassionate. Maybe it's an illusion in which I myself am looking for this compassion. A composer needs to follow these initial ideas in many different directions until a piece of music is born. I think of my 1999 piece "The Wind Has No Destination" (for kayageum solo) which has parallels Zbigniew Herbert's poem "A Journey". The poem has seven stanzas, the first of which is:

If you set out on a journey let it be long

Wandering that seems to have no aim groping your way blindly

So you learn the roughness of the earth not only with your eyes

But by touch

So you confront the world with your skin

In a traditional setting, a kayageum player, in contrast to other instrumentalists, will re-tune the instrument frequently in the course of the performance, correcting subtle changes of pitch that tend to occur as the bridges shift their position slightly; in this piece the player is asked to refrain from re-tuning during the piece, and also to pluck the strings on both sides of the bridges (the tradition is to pluck only on the right side). Consequently, at the end of the piece, the tuning of the kayageum (which is a very fragile instrument) is quite different from the one it had at the beginning. This seems only natural in the process of making a piece of music and is just the way one lives a life.