an improvised piano nonsense with bookcase

I used to be good at improvising then I lost my nerve and stopped for a few years, and now I never like what comes out. I like some things in here.

sitting down to fuck around at this new piano 9 years ago with my new iPod touch and the voice memo function is what made me realise I wanted to compose. it’s special to get back into it, even if I suck at it for a good long while yet.

https://youtu.be/JBpY4h2psLI

(edit - I wasn’t going to post anything today bc it got too late for me to use brain for good word think, then I remembered I did this! was going to film myself on a whim rather than record it, the camera was flipped and I decided I liked it)

xx

actual music? in MY month of music??

I mean only a small undeveloped snippet but still!

https://soundcloud.com/jmgibson/piano-voice-soft-light/s-uTgHSdnrs7g

beginnings of a piece for leichhardt espresso chorus. something about..

soft icicle stillness
soft haze    of sharp colours
soft neons beseeching
immutable lights and
irrepressible warmth amidst
the cold


o r  s o m e t  h i n g 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

something else, about sexuality

I have long periodic dips in the asexual world and I feel like I’m there now so whelp

this isn’t finished yet but I’m falling asleep trying to write it

she’s switched it off again,

stone cold stuck and stayed,

deader than a frayed bunch

of wires. no warning signs,

no courtesy notices, no letters

of intent or lack thereof, no

post-it notes left to remind

us or tell us don’t wait up,

signed with two kisses. it’s 

not like she’ll be missed 

terribly much, too fussy and

insistent on her being heard

and answered for and indulged

like she’s the only one of us 

who lives for bliss and craves

whole-hearted love. 

too much trouble too much

devastation, worlds ended, 

hearts broken like a child

disappointed on a playdate.

Part II

the slant of the sunlight hits different when I think about you

warms me upwards from the root of my body and I

can’t contain it

sometimes it bursts careless and catastrophic,

spilling champagne and confetti smashing glass

candy-pink explosion

neon floodlights and screaming...

_

who are you again? the day changed like your face

and I can’t recognise you anymore

I can hear the way you made me feel, but now I don’t know if it was ever

 really you at all

I can hear soft pulsating beats of neon harmony

I can hear them through to my fingertips down to my core, quietening down until they 

reach my feet

and I do not move

I think that if I listen closer I will understand something better

I can always hear this, and I always think this

I don’t know what it means

Tree and Sky page 1

I'm only going to put page one up here, the second page sounds a bit too much like debussy for my personal comfort so I'm going to work on it tomorrow.

just some reflection really

I played some piano today - took some chords from a piece whose writing was difficult and whose premiere went terribly and scarred every relationship I had with everyone involved.. and yet people I trust have told me that music was still worth something. it was meant to be hopeful and empowering, but everything about it feels like a big painful mopey failure for me. i can’t reconcile that just yet, but I played some very vindictive and broody arpeggiated passages based on that chord progression. I didn’t record it, but I might notate it one day.

I don’t think talking down about what I’m feeling is actually very helpful, but idk what else to do about it. shame’s hard, huh.

Unless I practice actually getting notes out there, I think I’m always going to be pulling teeth trying to write music that matters to me - really any music at all. I want to write some more notes soon - the routine of these days has grown over the music writing time I had hoped for, so I’ll have to cleave some space in again.

Hope you’re all doing okay. xx

A Moment - and a start of a new song cycle

Given that it's the last seven days, I thought I'd give myself a project to push through to the end. A new song cycle, starting with this dark stormy poem:

arrangement of a piece from the original MoM

Duet for Horn and Bassoon

Transposed

Untransposed

guess this is month of weird poems for me

i don’t know what to add yet? too tired to add more now, will add edits here

the slant of the sunlight hits different when I think about you

warms me upwards from the root of my body and I

can’t contain it

sometimes it bursts careless and catastrophic,

spilling champagne and confetti smashing glass

candy-pink explosion

neon floodlights and screamkng...

tbc

a little sax piece

Lake Lines 7 - for voices

I'm going to try and turn Lake Lines into a little album, some atmospheric soundscape recordings mixed in. This one I'm thinking of as a bit of a virtual choir situation, and there's a lot of sound design to do after the fact!

Lake Lines 6

I'm going to try out some processing on this one, yet again no dynamics and yet again this one's SLOW

this is for an assignment due next week

I want to think more but I left it too late and now I’m tired. Sorry I’m not writing music, and that this is bad - beginnings of something I will update soon


Beautiful words, like beautiful jewels, catch the light
Interpreters set them in rings for socialites and dilettantes to wear
about and opine and share
eventually the jewel is forgotten for the ring

hmmm??

Lake Lines 5 - Violin

I finally remembered to add a tempo to this one

Lake Lines 4 - Harp

lucretius on the notion that ‘death is nothing to us’

I didn’t write music today, I wrote 900 words about death for uni. Please enjoy/do not read some mediocre academic philosophy about Lucretius and the fear of death.

uploaded bc Andrew told me he may or may be uploading a short story so I thought FUCKIT gonna submit gonna do that sweet sweet content

_________________________

In Book III of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius expands on an argument from Epicurus’ Principal Doctrines that ‘death is nothing to us’ by couching the argument in terms of Epicurean natural science. The argument can be reframed as follows: death marks the end of existence, and therefore of sensation. The soul does not exist during death because it is mortal, and as such cannot experience any sensation at all, let alone any distressing sensation of being dead. Therefore, ‘there is nothing to fear in death.’ (877) Crucial to Lucretius’ argument is the notion that while the soul (or mind, or ‘nature of the mind’) and the body are understood to be separate and separable entities, the soul itself is taken to be mortal just like the body; and being mortal, it is bound to the confines of existence, which we can take to mean the finite duration of one’s life. Beyond existence is merely nothing, and wholly nothing; neither any content to fear, nor any content to experience at all.

‘Fear of death’ is both universal and personal, and it is difficult as such to state definitively whether Lucretius totally relieves fear of death with this argument – for example, from a religious perspective, it might be horrifying to hear argued the absence of some heavenly afterlife. It is clear to see how this argument might be reassuring – as there is no sensation in death, there is some peace to conceiving of an indisputable and irreversible end to all fear, pain and suffering. However, whether or not Lucretius’ argument relieves fear of death seems to depend on whether the question that it is unreasonable to fear death is answered.

One objection might be that while death itself has no content and no rational reason for fear, dying itself is something that can be rationally feared, if only for the mode of it. Lucretius describes death in terms of ‘undisturbed rest’ and ‘deepest sleep’, seemingly taking for granted the process of dying being akin to simply fading from consciousness. However, there is the prospect of a more turbulent death, for example from illness, natural disasters, torture and murder; all of these for seem reasonably feared, even if the end result, being an end to sensation and any aforementioned suffering, is in and of itself not to be feared.

Lucretius’ possible response to this objection might be found in his discussion of the ‘abysm of Acheron’ or horrors of traditional conceptions of the underworld (979). The closest response seems to frame these fears of illness, torture and natural disasters not as fear of death, but fear that what happens in life is somehow worsened in the event of death; or as a torturous ‘fear of punishment’ and ‘atonement for ...offenses.’ (1013-1015) In other words, these fears are not a fear of death, but fear of suffering and pain in death, or more simply, a fear of dying badly; and on Lucretius’ conception there seems to be a substantial enough difference between ‘dying’ and ‘death’ itself that one may be reasonably feared to be bad, while the other is not to be feared at all. Thus the argument that ‘death is nothing to us’ wherein death refers to the eternal end of experience seems convincing. However, in needing this caveat, it does not seem that ‘death’ and ‘dying’ are sufficiently separable as folk concepts that this argument is ultimately convincing.

Another objection to Lucretius’ argument is that it focuses solely on death in terms of the individual. One thing he does not fully address in this argument is the fear of another person’s death; rather, he only questions how one might respond by ‘[pining] away in undying grief’ at the ‘return to sleep and repose’ (911-912) of another. Again, this seems to rely on a conceptual separation of dying and death; ‘death’ itself being the peaceful cessation of experience; ‘dying’ being everything else surrounding death that might be reasonably feared, such as grief, the potential physical pain of their death, having to live without this person, the loss of their potential. One might similarly fear ‘dying’ in this way in times of war or natural disaster for the lives of masses of people they do not know. Importantly, Lucretius acknowledges that the soul is ‘visited by feelings that torment it about the future, fret it with fear, and vex it with anxious cares’ (825-826), without any statement that these are rational or irrational emotions. With this in mind, having to make a distinction between ‘dying’ and ‘death’ itself does little to strengthen Lucretius’ argument itself. While this distinction may provide clarity to the terms themselves, and make some statement about what is rational and irrational in our conception, on this reading it lessens the emotional potency of the argument; and while it might be reassuring on the ‘death’ portion, the ‘dying’ portion still seems under-addressed, and very reasonably to be feared.

But finally, given the concept of death is both universal and personal, this reading of Lucretius’ argument might be totally convincing for someone. If what comes after death is nothing, and ‘nothing’ is not a fraught concept for them, then they may very well have their fear of death relieved. On a personal level, there is enough that is distressing about ‘dying’, which Lucretius does not discuss, that the argument is not ultimately relieving; even if, again, there is some poetic reassurance in the idea of those of ‘today’s light’ falling into tomorrow’s ‘peaceful ... [and] deepest sleep’ (1092, 977).

Lake Lines 3 - for the solo piano collab

There's no tempo marking, but I'd write 'very slowly'

Lake Lines 2 - Erhu

druid's fury (beginning of a score)

i recorded this on c flute bc im not so good at bass flute just yet but it ended up being 30s so im gonna add to it another day :)

anyway so yeah im totally obsessed with bass flute now

Lake Lines 1

I'm living near a lake, so I went for a walk and came up with these short lines. I'm going to make it a regular thing!