As if summarising my attitude to creating music, as a teenager reading Marquez’s ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’, I found the quote ‘el amor es el motor que nos mueve (‘love is the engine that moves us’) rattling around my brain. So much so that in revisiting old Spanish vocabulary lists on my iPhone’s ’Notes’ section, I found the words at the top of one! The music I’ve been writing for my next album with Kalpadruma is centred around different ideals of devotion. I believe popular culture and consumerism constantly force-feed us unrealistic romantic ideals packaged in experiences; from package holidays in exotic locations to Rihanna’s three minute banger ‘Only Girl in the World’ demanding a partner to worship her. An expectation of a blissful, cinematic intoxication has replaced the transcendental experience of true love that asks nothing other than, as Bell Hooks puts it ‘the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth’ . As society generally moves towards ideological extremes, God continues to be treated as an anthropomorphised social trophy or weapon, rather than a wonderful life-giving force that exists beyond interaction.
Some years ago, I came across the Sufi idea of the ‘nafs’. The word relates to a sense of self; in its unrefined state, it is attached to the ego until an inner awakening enables a psyche to be at peace, no longer seeking to feed the forever ravenous ego. Tolstoy’s last novel ‘Resurrection’ explores the idea of awakening rarely being linear with a nobleman seeking redemption.
‘Then he had been an honest and unselfish lad, ready to devote himself to any good cause; now he was a dissolute accomplished egoist, caring only for his own enjoyment. Then he had seen God’s world as a mystery which with excitement and delight he strove to penetrate; now everything in life was simple and clear and depended on the circumstances in which he happened to be… Then he had regarded his spiritual being as his real self; now his healthy virile animal self was the real I. And all this terrible change had come about simply because he had ceased to put his faith in his own conscience and had taken to trusting others’
There is a part of all of us that sits quietly, observing the world around us. The more we grow into a sense of social self, the less easy it becomes to return home to the observer. Then our ‘habitus’- the way we respond to our social world (our language, our class, our religion, our nationality) forces us out of the spectator seat to join the world’s stage set. The formation of this adult self is integral to human life, but too often in the process, we lose touch with the vital force that appreciates beauty, nature and love for what they are.
I used to feel a great sense of heroism listening to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture as a child knowing nothing about the political context; not even considering Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s genius as per the great man theory. On the contrary, at the sound of triumphant timpani, brass and cymbal crashes, I imagined another narrative I was far more familiar with: Hansel and Gretal pushing a cannibalistic witch into a scorching hot oven. My seven-year-old brain overlooked the work’s place in history and the creator’s genius. At the same age, I was beginning to adopt my social self, passionately deciding that there was in fact one imaginary genius who had the power to keep his prying eye on me at all times, sternly regarding me with a wild beard in a Michelangelo painting. I also realised how it must feel to be God when I performed music, entertained my peers with elaborate anecdotes and people were fascinated with me as a result. It was addictive to constantly strive to be different and make people laugh, while in reality, I also craved time on my own to reflecting on how I could make the world more loving.
When I began composing seriously in my mid-teens, I found a way to combine my love of communicating with my love of reflecting. The order of sound, as a composer, is something I have control over- where I can create my own universe. There is a mysterious part of the process, much like improvising, where I allow my conception to be moved by a willpower that is external to me.
‘Between the conception
And the creation,
Between the emotion
And the response,
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long’
T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
I could never learn harmony through labels initially, finding I would just arrive at sound worlds without knowing their names. I would only absorb sounds unintentionally, making musical decisions impulsive so that when asked by teachers about my ‘intention’ I would just say ‘I felt it’. Even now, with all my formal methods of piano reduction scores, counterpoint, orchestration, a lot of my decisions come from a place that is not ‘me’ in any socialised sense. So when confronted with this era’s questions of how my identity as a bisexual middle-class white woman is reflected in my work, I find myself at a bit of a loss for words. I never wanted to use any adjective to describe myself in a concrete way, but my ‘habitus’ has forced me to do so, in order for other humans to understand me. For me, what I write is what I care about, what I imagine and what I perceive.
