Midnight Feast at the Temple of Springtime

So here it is, and as always I shall provide a commentary as to why I felt the need to bring it into existence.

I began to work on it on 1 March 2008 in the afternoon and evening after two events had taken place. First, I received in the mail a letter explaining that I had been accepted to attend the Conservatory upon the coming of autumn. This was a very happy bit of information. Second, I was left all alone at home for several hours, and I decided to spend those hours playing with music. During that time I conceived a number of ideas for a very short piano piece about triumph and festival, which turned out to be less short than I had thought.

The next day, being Sunday, I continued my work for a short while, making progress, and I did the same on Monday morning. Monday morning, as I recall, allowed for the opening of the house's sliding doors, and the smell of springtime came in, and so I began to associate the music with the coming of Springtime. This is good, for all Artists love the coming of Springtime.* For years (also four years) I have tried to write a successful Frühlingslied, but no good. As far as I am concerned, this is it. Monday, though, did not last, as I had to return to Oxnard in the early afternoon.

I worked further on Wednesday 5 March, transcribing my incomplete handwritten copy into the computer until I ran out of notes. Wednesday was another Springtime day, and I did this with the window open. I also began to realize the inevitability of including Springtime in the title.

My next spurt of productivity came on Friday 7 March afternoon after I found out that not only had the snow (otherwise welcome) put a stop to my glorious weekend plans, but also it was going to trap me in Oxnard for a full week. This made me very melancholy, as I very much love to see my friends and family on the weekends. Thus I worked on the music, specifically page three and the first half of page four, to take my mind someplace else, and that worked fairly well. Over the weekend I would continue to edit these notes and proceed through page five. I did this largely in the dead of night, making my sleep transition with the time change even more difficult. Also, in this section, can you hear the chiming bells?

With the beginning of a new academic week on Monday 10 March, I found that I had very little time to muse and compose, but fortunately I had made that very little time able to exist at all by reading over an excessive reading assignment (100 pages of Dead Sea Scrolls and scholarship thereupon, interestingly enough) on Sunday. On Monday and Tuesday, then I was able to ponder greatly upon and write a bit of the concluding section, but on Wednesday 12 March I took up my pens (five of them) and finished, at the expense of certain other tasks. Technically speaking, I finished at about 12:30 am after that Wednesday, but my days shift at 6:00 am, so in my world it was still Wednesday 12 March, the twelfth day of the third month in the vicinity of midnight. We can observe now in the music thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, making it philosophically sound Art.



On Thursday, I announced that I would have the music up by the afternoon, and I was wrong. I spent most of that Thursday being very busy (Thursdays are eleven hour days, and that Thursday was a thirteen hour day), and all my free time was devoted to transcribing into the computer and editing the music I had finished the night before. I did finish this before Thursday ended, but then my scanner for whatever reason did not care for pages three and seven, so I put off the task further. Now all is in line, and here it is.

Now, as any responsible musicologist will tell you, it is terrifically unwise to think that events in a composer's (or in my case, bard-minstrel's) life in any way correlate to his music, and that is very sagacious advice. This, however, is an exception, because it pretty well correlates exactly to the goings-on in my world around me and even more the goings-on in my head in more ways than I have discussed here today. In our next installment, I will be providing the handwritten original and (if all goes according to plan) a method for listening to this and other musics of mine within the bounds of these internets. Blessings upon you, O noble friends.

By the way, page three will print without any trouble or colossal waste of ink, as should page seven. I tested three, anyway, and upon seven I have merely assumed, but, as always, we know what that will do.


































Note
*These are instances of Springtime music:
Vivaldi, The Four Seasons
Beethoven, "Pastoral" Symphony (no. 6)
Grieg, "Last Spring," "To Springtime," "To Spring"
Sinding, "The Rustle of Spring" (Sinding was a friend of Grieg's, by the way.)
...to name all the ones I can think of right now.