Gonna fly now.

Still need to get caught up on the blog.

First off, I bought and downloaded the new Lady Gaga album on Monday since it was 99¢ at Amazon.com (and yes, I had to wait a day to get it like everyone else). Pop, especially today’s generation, is not at all my thing, but The Artist Formerly Known as Stefani Germanotta has impressed me, especially when she does the piano-and-voice Sir Elton thing. She’s a lot like me in a lot of ways: she was a child prodigy who was picked on a lot in youth for looking and acting weird, started playing piano at four, wrote songs as a preteen, majored in music in college only to drop out to pursue a different calling. Only she’s the new Madonna and Michael Jackson, and I’m still waiting to be the new Frank Zappa, the new Charles Ives, the new Harry Partch, the new Danny Elfman, etc.

Anyway, being one of those postmodernists (I guess) who mines ideas from anywhere, including pop/dance, I can get a lot from some of the tracks. Catchy tunes anyway.

I’ve also resolved to get into shape. I’ve been suffering from a chronic neurological illness that has made me tired and miserable, and the medications I’ve had to take have made things worse in some ways (mostly weight gain). Physical fitness is indeed inseparably tied to mental fitness. I’m trying a mixture of weightlifting and yoga right now, since I can’t do much running, just walking. The breathing exercises of yoga have not only helped me relax, but they’ve helped me not get cramps after a workout, which I’ve always had trouble with since I also has asthma and allergies that have made it hard to breathe.

Incidentally, one of the first film scores I heard as a kid was Bill Conti’s for Rocky. That’s some good workout music there. Also, you don’t hear enough fugues in movies.

I’m still fighting writer’s block. If inspiration doesn’t come, I can’t force it. I still need to re-record some music using the better SoundFont file and FluidSynth.

The “Symphony apocalyptique” story

My “never-ending symphony” project began in the early 1980s with music I had written in my head. It was originally going to be a four-movement piano sonata in the key of F# minor, but by the end of the decade, it had become a five-movement symphony in C minor. And yet it was still written in my head.

I finally got around to starting to actual writing the thing in 2006 (with one movement adapted from a piano tune I wrote in 1996), and now it has over twenty “movements”, so it's much more a symphonic suite than a symphony, and not exactly centered around the key of C minor, especially the atonal and polytonal parts. But there are a number of leitmotifs for different characters and situations.

The official name of the work is, facetiously, Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, aka Symphony apocalyptique, the soundtrack for an imaginary movie and/or video game called DIES IRÆ, styled in all capital letters with the æ ligature. I am working on the ideas for a sci-fi/horror role-playing game.

The choice to give French titles to many of the pieces is a nod to Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique. One of the leitmotifs (or as Berlioz would’ve called them, idées fixes) is the medieval funeral chant Dies irae, which can be heard in the final “Witches’ Sabbath” movement. Other old themes, obviously in the public domain, are quoted. In “An American in İstanbul”, one can hear a snippet of Mozart’s Rondo alla turca and a very old song of the Levant titled “Ya ein mulayyatein” in Arabic and “Şaşkın” in Turkish. In “Une russe à Nouvelle-Orléans”, “Song of the Volga Boatmen” is used.

Besides “Fantastique”, other major influences include the symphonies of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich’s symphonies, Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, the epic film scores of John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman and the like, and Nobuo Uematsu, composer to most of the Final Fantasy series of games. Also, in many of the pieces, microtonal notes can be found within a 72 equal temperament tuning, both expressing Pendereckian atonality and exotic tonality as an approximation of just intonation (listen to some Harry Partch to get an idea of what I’m talking about).

Finally...

I haven’t intended to write much here on politics, as this is primarly a musical blog, after all--but a major victory has been won. The world’s most wanted terrorist, responsible for the murder of thousands, has been taken out. Almost a decade after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden is dead. President Obama just made the official announcement.

Bin Laden was the spiritual leader of a most extreme expression of a sect (or rather, cult) that interprets Islamic teachings in an ultra-authoritarian, tyrannical manner. Among other, far worse things, they oppose playing, singing and listening and dancing to music, especially by women. They also brutally oppose Sufis, Shi’as, more liberal Sunnis and the many others they consider heretics, apostates and infidels because their beliefs aren’t like theirs.

Of course, al-Qaeda is still around, the new top man in the organization, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is still on the lam, and there will always be terrorism. But a victory is a victory. Let’s not celebrate that a man has been killed (though one who definitely had it coming), but that justice has been done, and the world is a little bit safer now.

And let’s never forget the victims of all the attacks, and never forget to thank the troops for a job well done. The credit is theirs. Hopefully we can bring them all home sooner.