Winter Morning Geometry, southside of the Eagle Cap Wilderness . . .
On the road in the American Northwest. (I.26.2009) [click photo for next . . . ]

MUSIC & THE CULTURE OF FRAGMENTATION

Without a doubt, we live in a culture of
near universal fragmentation.

Fragmentation is not diversity, not the rich weave of niches
and differences we see and experience in the natural world.
Fragmentation in this view is always bad; it is the loss of
wholeness, the loss of wildness, when natural networks
and structures are broken apart, and connectedness and
meaning are thereby lost.

Here's an image of fragmentation
that is easy to remember:

If we take a fine violin and smash it to pieces, you do not
get a lot of smaller violins. We get a pile of wooden shards,
good for starting a fire perhaps, but not much else.

Many of my readers / viewers are surprised to find out that
I'm also a composer. This always amazes me, because
Art Music—that is, classical, non-commercial, newly
composed pieces for highly trained, devoted and talented
ensembles of musicians playing for the most part on natural,
non-amplified, instruments in real acoustic spaces, before real
live audiences (all of which nowadays needs to be said with
some emphasis)—is at the very core of what I do, and why
I do it.

Have a look at the score of an OCTET I've featured above.
Just browse the geometry of forms. And then look at the
winter landscape of very similar pure both simple and infinitly
complex geometrical patterns.

For me, they are but different
outward expressions of one world.

Once there is difference, there is complementarity.
Once there is complementarity, there is movement.
Art happens in the balance thereby created.

Sometimes we look for Art where there is intense
activity, either on the performance stage or in the
political arena. But how frequently we come away
disappointed because of the lack of any movement
of a significant kind. Despite the camouflage of all
the noise and commotion, as well as the allure of
the superficial sophistication which comes with
complicatedness and unnecessary difficulty of
every description, we feel somehow cheated
because what is happening makes no real,
that is, relevant—difference.