String Quartet no.2 (in progress)
But usually at this stage of a piece – there are now pages and pages of sketches and even finished sections in biro or pencil (nothing on computer though, as yet) – I am getting very concerned about “what is this?” “What is this piece and how do I justify it?” These moments of concern are the source for some of the “subjects” of my pieces. Round about this moment, there is a quite urgent search for something to focus the material on. That was the case with Magritte Weather (1990), for example.
It is a story that I once told in a progamme note……In my apartment in the Hague on the Grote Markt, it was very hot in the summer of 1990. I had hung a dark blue bedsheet at the window, because I had no curtains and I was blocking out the sunlight this way. One day I noticed that some beautiful blue light was falling on to my manuscript. There was a small tear in the sheet and that was the source of a little patch of light – only about the size of a matchbox……
Right after that, I dreamed about Magritte. His eye sockets were completely filled with the same blue light (clearly, also a reference to the “spice” aspect in the novel Dune). I think it was in this same dream that I reached out to shake Magritte’s hand, and he refused it. If so, I should have taken the hint………….for surely Magritte Weather has very little to do with the kind of oneiric surrealism he went in for. The title is extremely charming, but the real title should be something like Chamber Symphony.
Perhaps one day I will write a REAL oneiric piece………………
For the new string quartet, I did not reach out for “subject matter”. But in a quite separate enquiry (a meditation) I got a fleeting and faint (we can do a lot with fleeting and faint) image of a woman crying out, and a long strand of hair. That image was in my memory somewhere and when I searched, I could quickly locate it. It was Rapunzel in her tower, singing, with her long tresses falling down from the window. So, as my quartet was without “subject”, and this meditation was important to me, I decided to marry the two together. Well, what else does one do, but marry and produce………….? It’s normal. We can do that.
So, the working on the music, got a sort of focus. A narrative, a program. Needless to say, several days later, after having taken this turning (oh, what a crooked road this is), I woke up in a state of stress. A voice was saying “you are just doing something 175 years out of date…..what Berlioz did……and how can you justify that?”
Heh-heh……….Shit!
So that’s why I say the work on this piece has been mostly relaxed. I imagined subsequently that dealing with some of these “voices” is like tackling a cliff face – something in one’s nature to explore and to climb, but something that must be tackled without any presumpteousness.
I don’t know what sort of music “I am supposed to be writing”. I didn’t make myself, nor this musical epoch I am in.
In truth, this new piece has just been sprouting energetically all on its own. Even when I lie down for a rest it goes on developing. Like the six cactus plants in my front window. They began as snippets from elsewhere, just as the quartet did (Poulenc was one source and a theory book on jazz, another) and they have been shooting out in all directions. I am in agreement with the cactii. That much I am sure of. Yes, I like them, and it can be that they also like me. Why not?