Dream, Dream, Dream

Note: This is a post written June 1, that, for some reason, I didn't publish. Just found it among my notes.

Falling asleep, I have some great dreams. Things become associated with other things, qualities from one item of my life become part another, forming monstrous complexes of identities.

Yesterday's involved the hollow sound of octaves in an atonal texture. They stick out like a sore thumb--like parallels in tonal 4-part harmony. The same effect. Without proper planning in a free atonal environment, nasty octaves invariably appear, like ants at a picnic.

And there they were, in my dream, octaves everywhere. Each pair of octaves were also the wheels of race cars and comparative rates in dollar amounts for some service which I don't now recall. Difficult, all these, trying to move one pitch of each octave to get a more pleasing interval while not creating another octave, not wrecking the speeding car and still getting the best deal for my money. Very complicated.

In all seriousness, though, this psychological experience is where the origin of musical expression is located for me: the in-between world where borders become blurry, where meanings bleed into one another. As a college student, I would often fall asleep listening to music (usually Josquin) and as I nodded off, I would be aware that the music had become blended into speech patterns and characters stored somewhere in my head, an expression of the internal drama of relationships--the incredibly minute details that we pick up from one another and amass into our understanding of one another. I would hear the music--see the music, experience the music--as a rendering of real human interaction, including dialog and physical activity. My two greatest preoccupations of those days--music and social relationships--would become the same thing.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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