work is love made audible
an unfinished sketch for a portrait of my father
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Story behind the song
for as long as i can remember, my father has worked hard. a well respected doctor, he always woke up before the sun rose and came home long after it had set, tired both in body and emotion. when i was a teenager, my told me something his father had told him. "Work is love made visible." when i first heard that phrase, i didn't understand it. i really rejected the idea, it sounds terrible. love was love, and work was work. you can't just legitimize your addiction to work with a stupid saying. now i get it. he isn't working just to make himself better, he's working because he wants to show me, not just tell me, what he would do for me. he still works long hours and has taken up working nights as well. he heads a practice of pulminary specialists and is extremely well respected. and all he asks of me is that i learn to do what i love to do, and learn how to survive in the process. sweet. my music has always been an alienating factor for my familiy. nobody seems to understand it. they just want me to play jazz piano standards all day. which i do, and i love the traditions dearly and on my best days i keep those sentimental things with me so i sing my way through the world. but they never understood the things i would make. i've been composing electronic music for almost as long as i've been playing the piano, since age five, and it is just as much a source of power and energy as the latter. i want my whole family to understand this work i do, and the only way i know to do that is to make it relevant to each one of them on a personal level. to say that something is a portrait means that one has to find the likeness of ones self within the work, to come to terms with a perspective of ones own life. this is my intention with this project.
the piece itself will be a palindrome, where the first half is a reversal of the last, but each individual piece is forward, so only the musical structures larger than an eight note are backwards. i used granular synthesis to achieve this, although many processes could be substituted with similar results. the original cell, presented as the last half of the piece, drifts from ordered metric material to dense chaotic material, using wavesets as its main currency. i was thinking about concepts of inherritance. the piece establishes the kind of symmetry i see in heredety, where each new generation is both a reaction to that which spawned it, filtered through a set of axioms or conditions. it is not finished, and will debut in my concert on april 24th, which i hope all who read this can come see. it's my dad's birthday.
