Now: A Retrospective

This is a contradiction in terms, to be sure, but there is no way to talk about "now" unless we do so in retrospect.

I was thinking the other day, while in the bathtub, where my sense of "now" is most active (particularly the moment when I submerge my shoulders and neck), that what we are doing as musicians is making it possible to anticipate, experience, and reflect on material that is happening at a time that we can call "now." We can put everything in place to experience that "now" (or, as composers, allow other people to experience it) by replicating the instrumentation, the horizontal and vertical configuration of pitches, and the dynamics and the textures of the pitches involved.

Yesterday during a consort rehearsal my three friends and I were able to repeat a particular "now" in a piece of Phinot we were playing--a subtle change of mode over three measures that sounded like an opening and closing of a window to the early twentieth century. We did it several times. It was so satisfying.

Phinot, who wrote the piece "then," made that particular "now" possible.

If I were skilled in philosophy I could explain it much better.

When we play a piece of music written by somebody who is no longer alive, we make a musical "now" possible. I'm not talking about authenticity, since there is really no such thing as musical authenticity (unless we are talking about physical objects like instruments or manuscripts). Any performance given at any time is going to be informed by the vast musical experience and vast personal experience of anyone playing or singing, and any performance or reading is going to be different.

I like to think of the huge number of people over time who have shared a thousand musical "nows" with me as I go about my musical life. It is a kind of a community.

I have been obsessed with the idea of "now" on and off for what seems like an eternity. And I tried to depict the idea in musical terms in an opera I wrote based on the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Snow Queen."

I wrote a blogpost about the segment of the opera that concerns the idea of eternity as a "now" back in 2009. Here's a bit from that post:

I have used minimalism, but only in context and for specific purposes. In the case of this moment in my Snow Queen opera, Gerda, while en route to find her friend Kay, is stuck for what might be eternity in a magic garden. The concept of eternity looms large in the opera, and the above excerpt happens in the opera's temporal center. The text comes from a passage in Richard Jefferies' The Story of My Heart, which was published in 1883.

It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now.

The idea here is to make a minute and forty-four seconds seem like a huge amount of time: to mark the moment of now in music that, by its very nature, consists of a series of events that take place over time. This is, of course, distinctly different from the real (or imaginary) moment of actual "now."

Some day I will hear it performed. Here's a computer-generated recording of it as a stand-alone piece for soprano and string quartet, and a link to a PDF.

And I just found out that the thesis I wrote for my master's degree (a full analysis of the opera) is available online here.