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

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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!

bunch of text about sad things

TW for child abuse, suicide, and drowning
I've been watching Revelation on ABC. and Bruce Dawe died yesterday, and one of the first poems I remember reading and thinking I want to set to music was his Elegy for Drowned Children. I might soon. but words first
this is a messy poem and I mostly just made myself cry, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

my mind is melancholy filled with drowned kids

I don't know how to touch it

there's fear and rage all impotent and small

and sad soft thoughts lilting like branches

as gentle as I feel they should have felt

were it not, had it not, had they not

if you have any philosophy

that touches on the metaethical nature of 

morality relating to consequence

and if you tell me that destroying a child

whiteanting their soul with your obscene power

and the things you did with your obscene power

was, morally speaking, better somehow than the 

destruction of a city, beautiful and ancient, 

bursting with stories, full with its future

or that it was better to let this child suffer, suffer and die

than to let the towering religious edifice fall and crumble

that the good of the Power took precedence, that it somehow

at its hands could bear the collapse of just one it was charged to protect;

what Power is so sure that it could carry the corpse

of a desolated child

and cast it sack-like into the ocean

with the rest of them?

tide byed (recording!)

here is the audio for the little bass flute solo from yesterday (intonation on this instrument is yet-to-be-explored territory sorry >.< and also the low singing bits i hecked up because i forgot i was a soprano)

https://soundcloud.com/greytonguelizzed/tide-byed


i'll attach the photo of the score again too :)

today was the last lesson with my HSC students before their full draft submission on the coming monday. it was pretty stressful but four of them finally reached around the 1min 55s mark, and the last student is not too far off. i'm keen to see how the compositions change and become refined from now, during the second half of the school year.

quartet mvt 2 attempt

Had a long day today, reflected a little on this musical idea but it didn't really go anywhere. I'm going to give it another go tomorrow

one of my erhu compositions from last year :)

here's a piece i composed last year for two erhus and one zhonghu (like an alto erhu) for any composers who would like a reference to some non-graphic contemporary piece or just out of curiosity

i can't find my original program notes so here are a few sentences i just wrote:

a trio in three movements, each depicting a different motion of unfurling. the first, a sort of blooming, akin to the blossoming of tea leaves in hot water. the second, a more explosive rendition, not unlike fireworks. and the third, a conceptual growing of something seemingly elusive, like the unfurling of a rumour, or even the truth. performers are Dr Nicholas Ng (erhu), Luke Zhang (erhu), and me (zhonghu)!

https://soundcloud.com/greytonguelizzed/unfurl - a rehearsal recording :D

aaa haven't written in days!

which is a lovely change from "aaa haven't written in months/years!"

i welcomed a new instrument into my family today, and here is a short postlude for it that i will try to play (and record, if playing it goes well) tomorrow:

now i can write myself flute quartets and record all SATB parts! well technically PCAB (picc, C, alto, bass) but pcab sounds like it could be a cuss word lmao so i better not call it that. i've already got a piccolo quintet (5 piccs), loads of C flute ensemble stuff, and a couple of duets involving 1-2 alto flutes (2 altos, 1 alto 1 voice narration, 1 alto 1 dizi). it's bass time y'all !!!!!!!!!!!!!
💫

String Quartet 1st movement, complete for now...

Posted a bit of this earlier today, finished it tonight so I removed the earlier post. Not sure how many movements this piece will be in, but I'm sure the next one will be fast.

 

 

in honour of april fools

the best trick of them all is optimism

the regular set-up of things getting better

like clockwork, kicks in on the hour

the punchline, every thing always is worse

classic, gets me every time

pessimism is the worst trick

pessimism is all premise, no punchline

it doesn't work if it all just keeps

getting worse

String Quartet movement

My string quartet writing tends to be pretty focussed on the quartet aspect, rather than on the individuality of the musicians, so I wanted to try and write a quartet that highlighted this more. This is in the spirit of a slow movement within that quartet, although I might be trying to reframe the movement structure and haven't quite figured that out yet. If you know of any works that might be what I'm going for, please throw them my way~ ty ty

Same thing as yesterday, plus piano

shō excerpt

hello Henry and everyone! my brain has been slow but here are several bars of music i wrote for the shō. i had a few ideas but it was really difficult to put them down on paper. maybe sometime in the future i will continue the piece but for now here is what i've got: