Chapter Four Sample
4. REHEARSING FOR THE REAL THING
It should be clear by now that this isn’t a book on how to write music. It is about how a piece of music comes into being. It's about the ideas, feelings and experiences that lie behind the music and inspire it. The process is of sketching a picture, giving an outline to the composition that I'm undertaking. For now, we need to concentrate on the contours of the big picture, its form. Later I'll fill in the detail, the content, but now the time is right to look at the driving force behind it all and let that guide the way. My aim is to use the principles of alchemy as an inspiration and these principles will be related to our musical expedition. This will involve considering alchemy’s relationship with more contemporary ideas and philosophies and their relevance to making music.
Here is a little of what the medieval alchemy was all about. The old alchemists would have described it as their “Great Work”. Various stages have been identified in an attempt to make sense of the alchemical process but, somewhat annoyingly, the stages can occur in any order and can last for unpredictable lengths of time. Stages can be missed out. Others can dominate the whole process. Clearly this does not make it easy to understand what is going on, nor make it easy to encourage the process in the right direction. Hence, there was a requirement that it all happens in its own good time, according to nature or to “God's will”.
The only way to make sense of alchemy is to interpret it as allegory. For example, the mind is the vessel in which this process takes place, within which the raw material of thoughts, feelings, images, are broken down into a confused mass. This may be accompanied by feelings of depression and a lacking in purpose or direction and the colour black easily associates itself with this for it is a stage lacking in light and understanding. The stages that have been identified for the purpose of forwarding this art generally begin with the nigredo, the blackening, in which all the elements that are to be involved are hermetically sealed and heat applied...
It should be clear by now that this isn’t a book on how to write music. It is about how a piece of music comes into being. It's about the ideas, feelings and experiences that lie behind the music and inspire it. The process is of sketching a picture, giving an outline to the composition that I'm undertaking. For now, we need to concentrate on the contours of the big picture, its form. Later I'll fill in the detail, the content, but now the time is right to look at the driving force behind it all and let that guide the way. My aim is to use the principles of alchemy as an inspiration and these principles will be related to our musical expedition. This will involve considering alchemy’s relationship with more contemporary ideas and philosophies and their relevance to making music.
Here is a little of what the medieval alchemy was all about. The old alchemists would have described it as their “Great Work”. Various stages have been identified in an attempt to make sense of the alchemical process but, somewhat annoyingly, the stages can occur in any order and can last for unpredictable lengths of time. Stages can be missed out. Others can dominate the whole process. Clearly this does not make it easy to understand what is going on, nor make it easy to encourage the process in the right direction. Hence, there was a requirement that it all happens in its own good time, according to nature or to “God's will”.
The only way to make sense of alchemy is to interpret it as allegory. For example, the mind is the vessel in which this process takes place, within which the raw material of thoughts, feelings, images, are broken down into a confused mass. This may be accompanied by feelings of depression and a lacking in purpose or direction and the colour black easily associates itself with this for it is a stage lacking in light and understanding. The stages that have been identified for the purpose of forwarding this art generally begin with the nigredo, the blackening, in which all the elements that are to be involved are hermetically sealed and heat applied...
